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Martin Bashir has dared go where even most congressional Dems won't: praising Britain's National Health Service and by implication the socialization of medicine it represents. On today's Morning Joe, Bashir said the National Health Service is "a wonderful idea."   For good measure, the British-born Bashir, who hosts a regular afternoon slot in the MSNBC line-up, also vastly overstated the…

Ed Schultz's pattern of accusing Republicans of lying moments before lying himself continued Tuesday evening. Just moments after calling House Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.) and Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) liars, the host of MSNBC's "Ed Show" misinformed his viewers about Medicare (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In an effort to put an end to the conspiracy theories over the president's place of birth, the White House on Wednesday released Barack Obama's long form birth certificate. You can see it embedded below the break. "The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country," the White House said in a post on its website.

Picking up from flustered colleague Bob Schieffer, who on the April 17 Face the Nation demanded of Congressman Paul Ryan, “Why do these rich people need another tax cut? I mean, they're already rich,” CBS reporter Nancy Cordes on Tuesday night asked him: “Do you think that you would be getting more support out there if you didn't include this big tax cut for the wealthy?” Cordes insisted “…

The front of the New York Times Sunday Week in Review features a think-piece by the paper’s foreign policy maven David Sanger, “Halfway In With Obama.” The subhead: “In Libya, America lets others command. By letting allies pick up the burden, is its credibility on the line?” Sanger was a harsh critic of Bush’s foreign policy philosophy, mocking the  president as an incurious George overseas…

Smugglers are heroes of sorts. The essence of what a smuggler offers is: "Government tyrants want to either prevent or interfere with peaceable voluntary exchange among individuals. I can reduce the impact of that interference." Let's look at smuggling, keeping in mind that not everything illegal is immoral and not everything legal is moral. Leading up to our War of Independence, the British…

It's always a bit of risk saying that a bunch of supposedly smart folks are wrong, but the economists Jeannine Aversa at the Associated Press consulted for a Tuesday afternoon report on the economic outlook must be taking a double dose of sunshine pills every day. If we are to believe these folks, the only thing that can stop the economy now is oil -- not the $112 a barrel accompanied by $4…

A few hours after PBS's Tavis Smiley predicted on MSNBC that the upcoming presidential race will be the most racist in American history, Ed Schultz said the Republican Party stands for racism. The host of the "Ed Show" also proclaimed, "I think Donald Trump is a racist" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Tavis Smiley on Tuesday said the upcoming presidential race is "going to be the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this republic." When MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell asked his guest on "The Last Word" why he thought so, the PBS host predictably blamed it all on the Tea Party and Donald Trump (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In the Bush years, poll results that showed the American people losing confidence in their president were featured routinely on the front page of major newspapers like The Washington Post. But when the Post discovers Obama’s ratings collapsing, you need a search party to find where inside the paper they’re buried. On April 26, the Post offered three stories on polls, each with bad news for…

For weeks MSNBC's Chris Matthews has been complaining about the lack of declared GOP presidential candidates. On Tuesday's "Hardball," former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele exposed Matthews' hypocrisy concerning this matter marvelously demonstrating that once any of the possible candidates formally enters the race, the avowed liberal commentator is just going to trash…

A British media outlet's profile of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is generating considerable buzz for a specific remark she made, though another is equally curious. In response to a question from The Guardian's Hadley Freeman, Maddow said gays in the media whom she did not identify should come out of the closet. Here's how it was reported by Freeman --

The New York Times announced its first quarter 2010 results on Thursday. As is the case with most companies when they would rather not talk about the bottom line, the Times instead concentrated on its "operating profit." A detailed look at the release reveals a group of contracting, money-losing journalistic endeavors propped up by an also-shrinking Internet enterprise. Here are the first…

A new poll finds one out of 10 Egyptians are sympathetic to Islamic "fundamentalists," 75 percent have a positive view of the Muslim Brotherhood, and 79 percent have a "very" or "somewhat unfavorable" view of the United States. But Washington Post's Michael Birnbaum seems to portray this data as of little concern (emphasis mine):