Steve Kornacki

Is it MSNBC or MSDNC?  Andrew Kirell of Mediaite reported today that the left-wing commentary network has hired the Democratic National Committee’s director of video production, Anne Thompson, to produce the network’s newest weekend show Up with Steve Kornacki.  Yet, this is just another episode in the annals of MSNBC’s revolving door of hiring Obamaites.  MSNBC has already hired David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, two high-level Obama campaign advisors. On top of that, other Obama acolytes Like Ben LaBolt are recurring guests on shows like Now with Alex Wagner.

If MSNBC’s president, Phil Griffin, was really trying to distance himself from the Democratic Party, this was a poor decision.  Griffin has been trying to dispel the fledgling narrative that his network is nothing more than a communications outlet for the DNC.

To give you an idea of how much you have to be in the tank for President Obama in order to be the typical host on an MSNBC program, on Tuesday, Krystal Ball and Toure Neblett - two far, far-left commentators! - actually came out in support of the just-released Justice Department memo that made the legal case for drone strikes against Americans.

Be sure to strap yourselves in tightly before you enter the bumpy ride in this bizarre parallel universe (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Barbara Walters is known for asking ridiculous questions during her famous interviews, but this time it appears she has gone too far, annoying even the liberal co-hosts of MSNBC’s The Cycle.

The day after Barbara Walters’ annual Most Fascinating People Special Wednesday night, the cast of The Cycle, most notably co-host Toure, savaged Ms. Walters for her “embarrassing, dereliction of duty” interviews with Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie.  [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.]

With the election over and President Obama handily winning reelection -- including in photo ID states like Michigan and Florida -- you'd think MSNBC would go silent about voter ID laws, which clearly did not disenfranchise millions of seniors, students, or black voters nor did it turn the election in favor of Romney.

But no, the network will still flog the issue for the forseeable future. Witness Tuesday’s Now with Alex Wagner, which featured a discussion of the Supreme Court’s decision to review Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.   [See video below break.  MP3 audio here.]

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, leaving nothing but devastation behind in its wake and with just days until the election. So it's not that surprising that MSNBC is spinning New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's gratitude to the president for, well, doing his job as some sort of campaign gold for Team Obama. 

Take Tuesday night's edition of The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, as guest contributors Joy-Ann Reid of The Grio and Steve Kornacki of MSNBC's The Cycle were brought on to comment on the compilation footage of a weary Christie, speaking warmly of the president. Without hesitation, they scoffed at the idea Gov. Romney could win the election now;  politicizing a tragedy in the process. [video & transcript below]

Like ambulance-chasing lawyers, the heavy-handed liberal activists who populate much of the media raced to exploit Hurricane Sandy even as the storm was lashing the East Coast last night, citing it as proof of “climate change” and a reason to oppose Mitt Romney.

Yesterday afternoon, MSNBC’s Martin Bashir started a panel discussion by claiming that “people are wondering today if the current hurricane has anything to do with global change, climate change, global warming,” and then mentioned the “right-wing nut jobs” supporting Romney.

The liberal panelists of MSNBC's The Cycle did their level best to help University of Pennsylvania religion professor Anthea Butler defend her now infamous tweet that the filmmaker behind the "Innocence of Muslims" video trailer on YouTube should be throw in jail. Co-host Toure Neblett went so far as to denounce the Twitter "mob" that deluged Butler's Twitter account with critical tweets. Only conservative S.E. Cupp pushed back against Butler by insisting that the YouTube video was a fig leaf justification by Islamists for violence.

"We think of this [free speech] as like an absolute right, but in fact there are limits.... So in this global world where a video clip can get spread around like wildfire, is it in fact going too far, is that beyond our constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech?" co-host Krystal Ball asked Butler. [MP3 audio here]

The day before the Supreme Court ruled ObamaCare's individual mandate constitutional -- as a tax, not as an exercise of the commerce clause -- the mostly-liberal panel at the brand-new 3 p.m. program The Cycle explored the question of what, in the view of the panelists, that government should consider making Americans do against their will.

For her part, panelist Krystal Ball insisted that America should be more like Australia, which forces its citizens to vote in it federal elections or else to pay a fine. Unsurprisingly, Ball's fellow liberal panelists Toure Neblett, and Steve Kornacki were sympathetic to the proposal, with only conservative panelist S.E. Cupp denouncing it as antithetical to the notion of political liberty.

Liberal hosts on MSNBC can’t get their talking points in order when it comes to how liberals should react to the Supreme Court.  On Tuesday’s The Cycle, co-host Steve Kornacki insisted that “if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate, that does not mean it's unconstitutional.”   To the Salon.com writer, just because the Court would have spoken thus doesn't make it final.

Such open and partisan comments are a stark contrast to those made by MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry today. On MSNBC Live following the Supreme Court upholding ObamaCare, Harris-Perry rebuked Kentucky Republican Rand Paul for his attack on the Supreme Court, saying he should respect the Court's word as final.  [Video follows page break;  MP3 audio here.]

One of the biggest pet peeves of your humble correspondent is so-called journalists who continue to absurdly claim that there is no evidence that one of the purposes for gunwalking in Operation Fast and Furious was to advance a gun control agenda. Last week the culprit was Jillian Rayfield of Rolling Stone and now Steve Kornacki of Salon and MSNBC is the latest liberal to display his reality challenged assertion on this subject:

Steve Kornacki, who will debut as a new MSNBC host on Monday, appeared on Hardball, Thursday, to smear conservative opposition to Eric Holder and Barack Obama as racist. Asked why some on the right oppose the attorney general, Kornacki derided the "caricature of Obama" as a "secret black radical" who is trying to "take away rights or...money from, you know, from white people."

Kornacki saw an "aspect of race and culture" to the conservative disdain. In a discussion of the Fast and Furious scandal, Kornacki simplified, "...You take, you know, prominent, you know, black lawyer and you put him in charge of the Obama Justice Department and I think that's, to you know, to people who sort of traffic in that sort of thing, you know, it really is kind of a lightening rod." [UPDATED with video below. MP3 audio here.]

A new economic report from the Federal Reserve doesn't offer much hope. On the front page of The Washington Post,  Ylan Q. Mui underlined "the Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992."   

Furthermore, "the data represent[s] one of the most detailed looks at how the economic downturn altered the landscape of family finance. Over a span of three years, Americans watched progress that took almost a generation to accumulate evaporate. The promise of retirement built on the inevitable rise of the stock market proved illusory for most. Homeownership, once heralded as a pathway to wealth, became an albatross."  What's more interesting is that Mui's article doesn't mention Obama once  -- in a front page piece during an election year -- right after he told reporters the private sector is "doing fine."

Sure, there is really "no way, theoretically or otherwise" that yesterday's school shooting in Chardon, Ohio, could have been prevented, self-confessed Second Amendment opponent MSNBC's Alex Wagner noted in a closing commentary on her eponymous program this afternoon. She then immediately delving into a gripe that America's fruited plain is riddled with incredibly lax gun laws thanks to that most evil of evil bogeymen, the "gun lobby" [video follows page break; MP3 audio here]:

MSNBC resident Victorian gent Rachel Maddow must have felt so dutiful for correcting an inaccurate statement by one of her guests.

Which made it all the more amusing that Maddow during the same show perpetuated a hoary media myth created two decades ago. (video after page break)

With the usual self-satisfied smirk, as she karate-chopped the air in front of the word "SHAMPAIGN," MSNBC host Rachel Maddow mocked the idea of a Newt Gingrich surge by picking up on her fellow gay activist Dan Savage's smear of Rick Santorum: the one which insures that a Google search of Santorum leads to Savage's comparison of the religious conservative to semen and fecal matter. Don't ever let them tell you MSNBC is classy.

"They’ve gone through this with Donald Trump now and Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry, and Herman Cain. We sort of expect them to do this with everybody in the field -- I mean, except for Rick Santorum. Nobody’s going to vote for Rick Santorum, come on," Maddow sneered. "But the idea of a Newt Gingrich surge is almost as absurd as people – uh, you know, Googling Rick Santorum and saying, 'I like what I found here, I`m going to vote for this guy.'" Then came the Springtime for Hitler references.

With insightful backwards logic like this, the new CNN show “Parker Spitzer” is certain to be a runaway hit – if just for the comedic value alone.

On CNN’s Oct. 8 broadcast of “Parker Spitzer,” disgraced former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the co-host of this program, trotted out a theory that seems so peculiar one might think he was pre-excusing what many feel is the eventual Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives. (h/t Greg Pollowitz)

“Let's switch gears for a second,” Spitzer said. “Earlier today or a couple days ago, Newt Gingrich said 60 seats would be the Republican pick-up. I've got a crazy theory for you. I think the White House wants to lose the House. It needs a foil. It needs an enemy. Agree or disagree?”

On her CNN Headline News show Thursday night, Joy Behar thought the "Obama's Katrina" language from Republicans was odd, since the "Bush/Cheney administration" is responsible for both disasters. Steve Kornacki of Salon.com insisted "all of the insults, all of the criticisms that were hurled at the Bush right after Katrina, they are just dying to throw back at the Democrats."

Behar replied: "But isn't this sort of like the same problem, the Bush/Cheney administration started it and now this poor guy has to mop it up. I mean, they deregulated the oil industry, right? And is it ever a good idea to deregulate such a huge corporation like that? That's a bad idea."

Behar proclaimed that it bothered her that this could hurt Obama politically when he had nothing at all to do with it and deregulation was all Bush's fault:

CNN’s Roland Martin on Wednesday’s “No Bias, No Bull” program featured another panel which leaned overwhelmingly to the left, during a discussion about the California Supreme Court upholding Proposition 8. Four of the five participants -- CNN correspondent Erica Hill, Lisa Bloom of TruTv, New York Observer columnist Steve Kornacki, and the Reverend Byron Williams of Resurrection Community Church in Oakland, California all sided with advocates of same-sex “marriage.”

Rev. Williams, who is affiliated with the liberal People for the American Way, argued that the decision “seems to go against our democratic values.” Hill asked the pastor, “Should that decision on marriage be left up to different religions, different faiths to make, and leave this to be more of a civil matter? And if that’s the case, why should God enter it at all?” Kornacki argued that there was an “inevitability” to the legalization of same-sex “marriage,” explaining that “you’ve got four states legalizing it. You’ve got people under 35 supporting it overwhelmingly. I mean, isn’t this just really a question of time, and we shouldn’t be that exercised about it?” Bloom thought that it was a “huge civil rights issue, and this is the first court ruling that I’m aware of that says that a majority vote -- a bare majority vote, can take away the constitutional rights of a protected minority group.”