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Dodd-Frank, the 2,300-page financial "reform" monstrosity spearheaded by Capitol Hill corruptocrats, turned 1 this week. It made too-big banks bigger. It made too-risky incentives riskier. It made a lousy economy lousier. Billed as a "consumer protection" act, Dodd-Frank has succeeded phenomenally — in protecting and stimulating the business-stifling business of government. Dodd-Frank is a…

Former Newsweek editor Howard Fineman on Monday berated Tea Partiers for engineering a "slow motion succession" in relation to the budget impasse in Congress. Appearing with Hardball host Chris Matthews, Fineman summarized the conservative position this way: "This is an ending of the social compact. This is two, three generations worth of agreement about Social Security, about Medicare,…

In an interview, MSNBC president Phil Griffin made some rather strange characterizations of his network, insisting that it "come[s] from a progressive stance" while it is simultaneously "not ideologically driven." Those two concepts would seem contradictory in the minds of most people--but not to Griffin, who seems to believe that his staff of "smart people" who "do their research" is up to…

Quoting a British politician who claimed "right-wing nutters" pose the most serious threat to the international financial system, MSNBC's Martin Bashir asked his conservative guest on Monday: "He's right, isn't he?" The MSNBC anchor posed this question at the end of a contentious interview with Tea Party Nation Founder Judson Phillips, after asking Phillips four times whether he wanted the U.…

Frank Schaeffer -- the embittered liberal progeny of the late evangelical Christian scholar Francis Schaeffer -- appeared on MSNBC's "Martin Bashir" program this afternoon where he availed himself the opportunity to spew forth more venom against American evangelicals, who tend to vote for conservative Republicans. Schaeffer was ostensibly brought on to react to new polling data that show 56…

Once again, Tea Party-critic John Avlon took aim at "hyper-partisanship" in Congress but focused the blame squarely on House Republicans while saving a tiny bit of blame for Democrats. In a July 25 op-ed for CNN.com, he hit Republicans for walking away from a generous deal by President Obama to settle the debt ceiling debate. "We are learning that activists and ideologues pushing anti-tax…

You can already see the apologia coming on this one -- Rachel Maddow never actually said that seven towns in Wisconsin are named Union in homage to labor unions. Which is true, she didn't. Instead, it could not be more obvious that Maddow implied this, with trademark smarm, and more than once at that. Maddow did so for the first time on her MSNBC show back in February, during the battle…

Appearing on Saturday's NBC Today, CNBC's John Harwood solely blamed House Republicans for the ongoing debt ceiling gridlock: "Speaker Boehner and President Obama, were negotiating in good faith. They wanted a deal....the House Republican caucus...would not accept what President Obama needed to make a deal, and that is real and significant tax hikes as a component."   Harwood argued…

New York Times international columnist Roger Cohen smeared Sarah Palin and Republicans in general in a politically opportunistic hit piece, ostensibly about the massacre in Norway, posted to nytimes.com on Monday, “Breivik and His Enablers.” On one level Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian responsible for the biggest massacre by a single gunman in modern times, is just a particularly…

You can't make this up. You might excuse the Associated Press for engaging in a bit of hyperbole in a Friday item headlined "Northeast braces for temps near boiling point." After all, it has been miserably hot in many parts of the country, including here in Greater Cincinnati. But, as readers will see after the jump, the unbylined AP item's writer clearly doesn't understand the point at…

In the midst of a showdown over how the government will increase the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, President Barack Obama blamed a splintered news media for lack of compromise between the parties and stressed that President Abraham Lincoln believed in compromise. Obama spoke to a packed Ritchie Coliseum at the University of Maryland Friday as part of a town hall meeting promoting what he called a “…

As more details about Norwegian mass murder suspect Anders Behring Breivik emerged over the weekend, some prominent voices who warn about the dangers Islamist extremism poses to the West found themselves under fire. Breivik has confessed to killing 93 people, mostly children, in Friday’s bombing and shooting rampage. He was described by a top Norwegian police officer as a “Christian…

President Barack Obama said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) – the president best known for establishing a welfare and regulatory state in America – was “fiscally conservative,” in response to a question about how to keep the economy going. Obama was referring to spending-cut measures Roosevelt took in the middle of the New Deal that lasted from 1933 to 1940.

Front page article examines "Shared Sacrifice,'D.C.-Style'"