RELATED: Caption Contest: Mitt Romney Does His Own Laundry Edition

“Mitt Romney winning in New Hampshire was a foregone conclusion,” Maddow explained, because “the guy from Massachusetts always wins New Hampshire.” The more damning evidence against Romney was not that he one, but the only two exceptions to the “guy from Massachusetts always wins” rule: Ted Kennedy losing to President Carter in 1980, and… Mitt Romney losing to Sen. John McCain in 2008. Kennedy had the incumbency excuse. What was Romney’s?

“It is true that Mitt Romney is the default nominee,” Maddow admitted, but noted that, while “yesterday [Thursday] was a disastrous day for Mitt Romney, today was worse,” because he actually admitted, in an interview with Laura Ingraham, that President Obama had improved the economy. His entire claim to being worthy of the nomination in stump speeches, Maddow noted, was that President Obama didn’t start the problem, but he made it worse. “The economy had essentially been thrown out a 30-story building and was lying dead on the ground when Obama assumed the presidency,” Maddow argued, and the “state of Mitt Romney’s core argument” was him admitting that things are somewhat better, while questions circulate about his time at Bain Capital. To chime in the disastrous admission, Maddow simply played the clip over photos of Romney: “Even Mitt Romney agrees that President Obama is turning the economy and things are getting better… so vote for Mitt Romney despite that?” Maddow noted. The campaign ad writes itself.

The segment via MSNBC below:

“Really?” Morgan exclaimed as Carter spoke, later adding, “That’s a pretty serious charge to level at Newt Gingrich, that he’s being racist.”

“I’m not saying he’s racist, but he knows the subtle words to use to appeal to a racist group,” Carter responded.

“Same thing, isn’t it?” Morgan interjected.

“Not quite,” President Carter replied, adding “Newt Gingrich is probably as enlightened as I am about being gratified that we’re in the desegregation years in the South,” but “when you emphasize, over and over, welfare, food stamps, and ‘why don’t the black people get jobs,’ and if I’m president, I’ll make sure they turn toward a work ethic, rather than an ethic of welfare and food stamps, that’s appealing to the wrong element in South Carolina.”

Given the South Carolina debate crowd’s reaction to Gingrich, they may be, as Carter says, the “wrong crowd,” but they’re a big one.

You can see the rest of Piers Morgan’s interview with former President Jimmy Carter tonight at 9pm, on CNN.

Here’s the clip, from CNN:

Bob Schieffer suggested to Barbour that in the United States, cutting aid to Israel is just as big a political vice as cutting Social Security or Medicare. Barbour defended Perry by noting that under the Texas governor’s plan, every country would have to make their case for foreign aid, and given Perry’s understanding of the special relationship between the two nations, it is unlikely he would withhold foreign aid from Israel for long anyway. Barbour also noted that the concept of “zero-based budgeting” was not just a Republican idea, it was proposed by Jimmy Carter during his presidency.

O’Malley took a different view, arguing Perry’s position was merely part of a larger pander on the part of Republicans to the “Tea Party extremes” and suggested the more right-wing positions the party has taken do not fit in with the Republican party platform as it was years ago.

Watch the video below, courtesy of CBS:

The emphasis of both speeches used in the clip is on convincing Americans to scrimp, save and sacrifice during tough economic times. It’s like they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Depressing. I was really looking forward to blowing a lot of cash on Vegas.

Have a listen, courtesy of The Laura Ingraham Show:

Mitt Romney

Speaking to the group on the quality of life in the nation during the Obama administration, Romney recalled President Ronald Reagan‘s “misery index,” a metric which he used to attack President Jimmy Carter‘s administration and point to the detriment the nation suffered under him. “He hung that around Jimmy Carter’s neck and that had a lot to do with Jimmy Carter losing,” Romney noted. So far, so good– the “hanging around the neck” idiom goes back to the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” But then he tried to reapply the saying and got woefully lost: “We’re going to have to hang the Obama misery index around his neck… we’re going to hang him with that.” Fortunately, Romney caught himself midsentence and switched gears: “–so to speak, hang him metaphorically… you have to be careful these days.” He tried to laugh it off, and many most certainly will, but it’s the sort of soundbite that makes for great campaign ad fodder.

Romney’s comments at the dinner below:



[h/t]

What troubles Dershowitz most is that recently he found higher levels of intolerance on university campuses “directed against Jewish students and faculty who support Israel.” Dershowitz concludes that the line between attacking Israel and attacking Jewish people as a whole has been blurred:

By thus blurring the line between legitimate political criticism and illegitimate bigotry, widely admired people like Tutu and Carter legitimize the kind of anti-Semitic attitudes that manifest themselves in the rants of celebrities like [John] Galliano, [Charlie] Sheen and [Mel] Gibson.

Just as disagreeing with President Obama’s policies does not warrant calling his political opponents “racist,” neither should those who disagree with American policies to support Israel instantly be branded “anti-semitic.” Dershowitz though makes a convincing argument that anti-Israel rhetoric, often with anti-semitic undertones, has slowly paved the way for the deep-seated beliefs of many to be revealed today without as much hesitation. However, despite Dershowitz’s noble effort to explain “Why the Jews” are targeted for such hatred, since no good answer could possibly ever exist, the sad truth is that attempting to explain irrational thoughts unfortunately seems to be a futile exercise.

Check out Dershowitz’s full op-ed.

Reagan is a film that may disappoint viewers who have already formed strong opinions about Ronald Reagan, pro or con, but for the broader audience, it’s as good a doorway into an important life as 104 minutes will allow. The film is well-paced, and strikes a balance between archival footage and talking head interviews (with the likes of Ron Reagan, Grover Norquist, and Thomas Franks) that eludes many political documentaries, and avoids pitfalls like an over-reliance on period music to evoke the various Eras that Reagan’s life spanned.

What’s left, then, is an honest overview of a man who looms too large in our history, one which attempts to take the measure of the man with a surprisingly cool temperature. It’s not necessarily the kind of film you would expect from Eugene Jarecki, the filmmaker behind 2006 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner Why We Fight. In an exclusive interview, Jarecki explains why he made this film, what Reagan left out, and what Reagan means to today’s polarized media landscape.

Mediaite: Some who watch this film will say you went to easy on Reagan, others will say you were too hard on him. Do you think you erred on one side or the other, and why?

Eugene Jarecki: I think we get both reactions, and I think when you’re dealing with a subject as controversial as Ronald Reagan, if you’re leaving everybody feeling a measure of frustration, it means you’re not satisfying their side of a very polarized discourse, and I don’t want to perpetuate the polarization. On the one hand, it’s puzzling, because there are certain elements of Reagan’s career that I passionately feel are in need of real, deep rethinking. There’s no question that, from that standpoint, there are aspects of me that are very much a critic of Reagan. At the same time, I think that, for far too long, Reagan has been the stuff of extremism on both sides, and that extremism doesn’t shed light on the real lessons that should be drawn from his career, so I have to take that frustration as part of an exercise to try to restore sanity to this.

I made a very careful choice in the way I went about exploring his strengths and weaknesses, because if I were to have only explored his strengths, a whole audience would have found just another hagiography in the film, there’s been enough of that, and if, by contrast, I had just made an attack on Reagan, and there hasn’t been much of that, that would speak to one audience, and alienate another. I don’t think there’s any great benefit in that, people are already so polarized by the mainstream news cycle that I don’t think there’s any purpose in a documentary sort of deepening that polarization, calcifying it.

Mediaite: Were there things that you thought about including, but didn’t, and can you explain why?

Eugene Jarecki: Sure. There were certain anecdotes that I thought were very compelling when we were editing the film that, in the interests of time, fell away. And also, in the interest of striking the right balance of where were the features to his broader career. This is a film that was going to cover his whole life, so sometimes, an episode that was very poetic, or suggestive of an area of Reagan’s personality, which I had once very much wanted to have in the film, would suddenly, just as a matter of screen time, would give it disproportionate significance alongside other larger chapters in his life. So part of the challenge of capturing the whole life of someone is that sometimes, the most beautiful stuff is in the details, and in a film that is covering that much time and reach, there just isn’t room for that kind of thing.

There were a few things of those, but in general, in terms of broad areas, domestic policies, foreign policy, the rise of his anti-communism, the birth of his skills as a salesman, and the evolution of those skills across the decades, and into the White House, there were certain areas that I knew I could show, but at the end of the day, I wanted to make sure there was time to address the contemporary role in which Reagan is so used, and abused, by so many as a kind of an instrument for the selling of their privately held programs. And that was something I knew the film would have to preserve some time to deal with, because you can’t experience America today without noticing the phenomenon of Reagan mythology that dominates so much of our public discourse. Today’s his birthday, and it’s the culmination of decades of turning Reagan into something he wasn’t for the political convenience of people in America who use Reagan for their own purposes.

Mediaite: A few examples of things I was surprised were not in the film, the Born in the USA episode, and the larger subject of jingoism, which you touched on more broadly…

Eugene Jarecki: I thought the Born in the USA episode in general, is a very poetic example of Reagan’s own misuse of Springsteen’s music, and more broadly, certain sort of folksy American ideas which were used to package what were otherwise programs that would be unattractive to the public. For him to use Born in the USA for his candidacy was something that was quite the opposite of the song’s intent is very typical and demonstrative of the very concerns I have about Reagan.

Having said that, I thought the only way to tell that story would be to include Bruce Springsteen himself in the film. We did reach out to Bruce Springsteen through his management office, and we didn’t get anywhere in encouraging him to participate. Without that, I felt it would be an undertold story that could, perhaps, be told better in another way.

Mediaite: Having lived through the Reagan Era, there were a lot of these weird, scary episodes like the one where he said on the radio “We launch in 5 minutes,” and while you spoke more broadly about the Cold War, there wasn’t much about those.

Eugene Jarecki: Over time, Reagan’s life is a million of those, for every joke he makes on the radio about launching bombs, there’s also a “There you go again” quote, or a “Go ahead, make my day” quote, and I felt like all of that has been covered very heavily in this media which, today, makes us either marvel or laugh at Reagan, and I don’t think either of those is politically constructive. I don’t think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don’t think he’s primarily marvelous, he’s complicated. I wanted to do something that hasn’t been done before, which is to take the Reagan years, of his life and presidency very seriously, as something that needed to be looked at critically, and with an eye to real learning about how we should be moving forward as a country, today, in the shadow of those ideas, those that were good, and those that were bad.

That was undoubtedly a quizzical and baffling moment to see a public figure make light of nuclear weapons dangers, and to do so in a way that could’ve proven risky, but that’s not a larger point that I was looking to make about Reagan. We all make jokes, so what’s the message, that he’s not supposed to make jokes? I mean, there’s no message in it, even though I understand that it underscores a certain macabre reality about the Cold War, that an offhand remark could have launched Armageddon, but that’s true of nuclear weapons, per se, and not specific to Ronald Reagan. It’s not as if he’s the only President who made a joke about the football, or made a joke of the nuclear danger, it’s a gallows humor that everyone engages in, so I don’t have a real point to make with it.

…He is supposed to be able to make jokes. Is he supposed to make jokes on a microphone by accident? Nobody’s perfect. Is it terrible that we live in a world where an offhanded joke by an entertainment-oriented President could cause a war? Yeah, that’s bad, but that’s not the point of this film, and that’s not the primary battle, intellectually, that I was hoping people would come away with about Ronald Reagan.

I also would have loved to have made a longer film, but I recognize that people only have a certain attention span, so I was always cognizant of the length.

Mediaite: You also didn’t touch on the issue of reagan and race-baiting, in particular the “welfare queen” business, but also more broadly.

Eugene Jarecki: I thought Reagan’s handling of race was part of the argument I made about his handling of class, of poverty, and of everyday Americans, and the struggles that they were increasingly having under his ecpolicies. When his son, Ron, talks about his blind spot, and you see the lines of poor people, black and white together, struggling under the sort of soup kitchen reality that he put forward, I felt that sort of spoke for itself.

Making a specific agenda out of Reagan’s treatment of race is something that I feel strongly, I feel that Reagan did have a blind spot about race, like many older white men who run this country in repeated cycles, but we tried to cover that by dealing broadly with his inability to have shown what I think would’ve been the necessary sensitivity to the concerns of the poor, broadly.

I’ve watched Reagan, in archival footage, interact comfortably with African American people, he didn’t seem to have much of a problem with it. As his son, Ron, and others have pointed out, he seemed to have a particular difficulty with groups, and particularly with groups that represent classes, like the poor.

One of the things I took out of the film, it will be on the DVD, is of a vignette that we had in the film about Reagan’s pen-pal relationship with a young African-American kid in Washington who he reached out to, and adopted as a pen-pal, and spent seven years writing to, back-and-forth, very personal, intimate letters. They’re wonderful, they’re exemplary, they were heartfelt, they’re real, they were not a PR stunt, the press barely ever heard about it.

We came into possession of the footage quite by surprise. And so, I could’ve included that as well, and it would have painted the picture of a man who didn’t have a problem with race on an individual level, but on a group level. But I thought it would have skewed the balance, again, in the wrong direction, saying, “Well, yes, he might have been pretty bad for black people as a group, but he did have this one black friend,” and that’s the downfall of sny proper political analysis about race, so we avoided that.

But it means that there are things the movie had to dance around. I have to fashion something in an imperfect world of running times, people’s expectations, the degree to which people have been propagandized about this stuff, and do the very best I can not to see my movie as an end in itself, but as a means to a better discourse.

It’s hard, I would love to make the movie that’s the last word on something. Who wouldn’t? But if you make something that’s the last word on something, you’re by definition saying there are no more words after it. I would like to change the discourse, not end it.

Mediaite: I understand, even as someone who only writes about 500 words at a time, there’s always someone saying, “Well, why didn’t you include this, or that,” so it is a frustrating kind of criticism…

Eugene Jarecki: Yeah, but I don;t mind you making it, because I get to answer some of the areas that I would like to see more dialog about. I’d love for you to write about his issues with race, I’d love to see you write about his slip with nuclear saber-rattling on the radio, and the enormous danger that that underscores, and the misguidedness of some of the policies, those are al very valuable things that I hope others will pick up and run with.

In a way, maybe we’re making up for some of the shortcomings of the movie, and that’s okay. My goal is to promote better dialog. If it means that that happens because people feel the need to go farther than I went, that feels good to me.

Mediaite: Reagan was called the first “made for TV” President. How do you think he would do in today’s new media environment?

Eugene Jarecki: Well, I think it’s like asking how Jesse Owens would do in a race today, or how the tennis players from the Golden Age of tennis in the 60s and 70s would fare against Nidal. Basically, these people contribute to the evolution of a game that then grows further in the direction that they started, than they could ever have, and so to imagine them now would be to ask how would a horse and buggy do against a Ferrari?

These qualities in the american landscape grew from the initiation of Reagan, and I think Reagan would seem far less, for good and for bad, he would fall away from this currency, because I think it’s an over-exaggeration to imagine this has all come from him. He was present at the creation of a lot of all of this.

I think the landscape is far more analytical now, in that every little word is parsed and studied by a myriad of sites and avenues, but there’s also a lot more propaganda and circus in the mix, in large measure due to things like Reagan having gotten rid of the Fairness Doctrine, so we now have airwaves that have totally run amok. There is so much circuit-jamming propaganda in the system that it would be hard to imagine him, or anyone, getting a coherent message across as once was possible. I think he did a great deal to undermine the power and cleanliness of our airwaves, and as a result, he, too, would suffer from that.

Mediaite: Given what you’ve said here, do you think that if there hadn’t been a Ronald Reagan, that we would still have a Sarah Palin?

Eugene Jarecki: I think Ronald Reagan, incorrectly interpreted, is a figure who legitimizes the politics of ignorance, but to think that that’s who he really was is to misunderstand that he was a very smart person, who really did know where places were on a map, who really did understand political dynamics in the world, and spent a great deal of his life devoted to learning about that and trying to do his best to act on it. I have criticisms of Ronald Reagan, but he lives in another universe from the kind of political theater that is represented by people, like Sarah Palin, who aren’t really public servants.

These are people that are pursuing a very private agenda that includes very high speaking fees, and book deals, and tremendous amounts of resources muscle behind them for their own aggrandizement. I learned recently that Palin is trying to patent her own name. So, we’re dealing with a different breed of person. Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.

I think there are many people you see today who are not public servants, they don’t have public service as their primary goal, but they want to use him to legitimize themselves. Would they have been possible without Ronald Reagan? They would not have been possible were it not for their mistaken interpretation of him, but I don’t want to lay that at his feet. That lays more at the feet of those who have mythologized him, and corrupted our understanding of him.

Mediaite: What do you think Reagan would make of the Tea Party, and they of him if he was a candidate today?

Eugene Jarecki: I can’t answer for Reagan, but I can tell you that he was a very serious thinker in matters of the public interest, and I think he would see the political theater of the Tea Party as largely theater. Many people I’ve spoken to who knew him, who have a stronger view of him than I can possibly have, made clear that though there was a theatrical dimension to his time in office, that he was very good at photo-ops and things like that, that is a far cry from this theater of enforced stupidity that the Tea Party implies. The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.

That was made clear when, earlier this year, there was an effort by some of these contemporary so-called acolytes of Reagan to create a purity test based on their false interpretation of Reagan, meaning that they decided they were going to define 10 or so characteristics they thought were Reagan-esque. Well, it turns out Ronald reagan failed that test, which really underscores the giant gulf between the reality of Ronald Reagan, and their delusions about Ronald Reagan, the myths that they have promoted of him. I think at that point, these people lost their legitimacy as messengers about Ronald Reagan. Now, I think they’re just grasping at what brand they can attach themselves to, whether it’s a reality show, or patenting your own name, or the next splashy book you can release, because Reagan is failing, Reagan is a very different breed than they are.

Mediaite: One surprise in the film is the fact that there’s an actual organization dedicated to naming things after Ronald Reagan. Is there any other President who has such an organization or effort devoted to something like that?

Eugene Jarecki: Not that I’ve heard of, I think the level of organization and resources that are being deployed to try to Reaganize the American landscape in a way that is contrived, that I think is new and different. I think in other cases, people just saw presidents who retained relevance to the American people naturally, finding their way to statues and engravings on buildings, and other memorabilia.

I think in Reagan’s case, what’s so telling is that the people who are trying to this actively, obviously doubt that, left to his own devices, he would find his way to that relevance. They feel the need to artificially promote this kind of phenomenon, and that speaks volumes. Frankly, I think Reagan, left to his own devices, would do a far better job of representing himself than these people by taking their own ideas, fraudulently packaging them in Reagan’s image, and then mounting statues to their own ideas. These are just people trying to promote their own political agenda, and they found a clever way of doing so, and unfortunately, Reagan undermines them.

Mediaite: You’ve effectively laid out the conflict between myth and reality regarding Reagan. Now, we have a President, Barack Obama, who’s fighting that same battle, for good and for bad, in real-time. How do you think that’s going to play out for him?

Eugene Jarecki: I think that Ronald Reagan came into office at a time when America was struggling, as we are now, and I think that Jimmy Carter tried, clumsily, tried to warn America that what we were experiencing was an internal crisis, in our definition of freedom, that our definition of freedom had come to be materialism, and that implicit in materialism is an over-reliance on foreign oil, and implicit in that is a loss of the very freedom we hold most dear, self-determination. That being addicted to foreign oil will cause us to lose our true freedom as Americans. He tried to warn Americans about it, it’s a frightening warning, it would’ve required a great deal of sacrifice and internal change.

Ronald Reagan came along and said “Pay no attention, he is depressing you, and blaming his shortcomings on you. Instead, you can move on, we can shop our way to victory, and there is an unlimited supply of oil. Have no fear.”

The problem is that I think America really needed the kind of tough love that Jimmy Carter, however clumsily, tried to show. Instead, Reagan came along…It’s like an addict. America had an addiction, she needed a friend to show her the tough love to say “you need real therapy to get to the next place as a country, to get past this unpleasantness,” and Reagan, instead, came along and said “Have another drink, and forget. We’ll be fine.”

I don’t think we were going to be fine, and in many ways, Reagan, by making us forget, caused us to be unprepared, and then with his policies, deepened the problems.

So Barack Obama, who also faces challenges that he must address, I think would be very well served to be willing to be as unpopular as Jimmy Carter was willing to be, because I think he is a far better communicator, who could take the same kind of message about sacrifice, the same kind of message about real change, change we can believe in, and stick to it. Instead, what he has done, having the State of the Union address, and not mentioning climate change.

This is the classic technique of trying to avoid upsetting the public, to avoid suffering short-term political losses that I would argue Obama, whose approval rating is much higher than Reagan’s right now, could do with telling the truth, even if it means taking a hit in his popularity. I think the courage to take the hit in your short-term popularity can pay great dividends in the long run, and conversely, trying to shore up your short-term popularity will undermine you, and the country, in the long run. I think that Reagan teaches us that.

Watch the trailer below, courtesy of HBO:

Carter says the response to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have done a lot to melt the resistance to non-straight-white-guys in the White House:

Step-by-step, we have realized that this issue of homosexuality has the same adverse and progressive elements as when we dealt with the race issue 50 years ago, or 40 years ago. So I would say that the country is getting acclimated to a president who might be female, who might, obviously, now, be Black, and who might be as well a gay person.

Watch the interview here, from Big Think:

Carter has been criticized by gay rights groups for failing to do more while he was in the White House, and even giving gay rights merely a paragraph in his most recent memoir, where he mentioned the “gay rights business.”

(h/t Towleroad)

Carter is out there every day yapping . . . I mean the guy never shuts up, we just have to hood him like a falcon so we can get some sleep.  Bush shuts up about the new President, I admire that about him, I think he’s an honorable man.

From there Miller, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama, surprisingly did not jump on the bandwagon of critics on the left and the right who labeled Obama as weak for compromising on the tax issue.  Instead, Miller was eager to give Obama credit for bending, although concluded he did not have much choice:

The fact is over the last two years Pelosi, Reid, [Obama], et al., all the Dems have built . . . they built a jenga tower out of BS.  When that 9.8% unemployment came in last week, that was the last piece that tipped the jenga tower.

Although Miller thinks this move to the center is what might end up getting Obama re-elected, many others still smell blood in the Democratic primary waters.  Overall, with O’Reilly agreeing that Obama’s compromise was the right decision for the folks, it almost seems, strangely enough, as if Miller and O’Reilly might be Obama’s two strongest cable news defenders.

Watch the clip from FOX News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor below:

The conversation sprung from comments made by former president Jimmy Carter, who once again recently denounced Beck by name as an example of how the media can be counterproductive. Beck didn’t really seem to mind Carter’s comments, though he did take the time to note that “no one listens to Jimmy Carter” and no one ever did, “not even when he was President.” After laughing a bit at the former president’s expense (O’Reilly also mocked him for having “a book out every three weeks… more than [Beck], which I didn’t think was possible), the duo discussed several on-air errors they made and corrected them once again, in the interest of fairness. These included O’Reilly’s premature condemnation of Shirley Sherrod and Beck erroneously labeling former White House Green Jobs Czar Van Jones a “convicted felon.”

The the conversation veered toward Sen. Rockefeller and the impending Comcast/GE deal. Beck perceived the attacks on MSNBC from liberals as a sign of doom for the network given the new corporate proceedings, and suggested that the intent on the left was to make MSNBC a “sacrificial lamb” and hope that the right follows suit with Fox News. O’Reilly found the theory innovative and lended his support: “You’re very perceptive!” he cheered.

The dialogue on spelling doom for MSNBC as a corporation seems hyperbolic and immature at this point in the Comcast proceedings, though perfect bait for the anchors on the other side to bite.

The segment from this evening’s O’Reilly Factor via Fox News below:

One caveat about this list: the Beast elected to use Nielsen BookScan’s publishing sales information, which meant that they had to limit their list to “elected officials who have either landed on a New York Times bestsellers list or published more than one book since 2001.” BookScan sales data also only represents 75% of book sales, since it doesn’t track copies sold at Sam’s Club or Walmart.

Perhaps that’s why this list skews Democrat. Obama is followed by Jimmy Carter (2,218,000 books sold; man, that guy has written a lot of books), Bill Clinton (1,899,000 copies of four books sold), Al Franken (1,777,000 copies of books including You’re Good Enough, You’re Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like You! sold), and Hillary Clinton (1,491,000 copies of four books sold).

Unsurprisingly, the first Republican to make the list is Sarah Palin at number six. Her memoir, Going Rogue, has sold 1,455,000 copies. Palin’s showing is especially impressive considering she’s written just one book. Then again, Obama blew the competition away despite having penned only two volumes (his third, a picture book, will be released November 16). It’ll be fun to see how George W. stacks up to these heavy hitters.

Read the Beast’s full list here.

Stating definitively that he sees in President Obama the ability to become a two-term president, he challenged the way the president attempted to handle communication with voters, citing a palpable lack of empathy. “The American people,” he explained, “have to feel that the president senses the suffering they’re going through and wants to be a part of the solution.” Blitzer made the Bill Clinton “feel your pain” analogy, and Mondale agreed that much more of that was necessary to keep the president’s approval ratings up. The way President Obama is functioning now, he continued, indicated that connectivity was “something he needs to work on”:

“Well, I’ve seen places when he’s done it. The Milwaukee speech, I thought was — was terrific. I think some of these backyard events are terrific. But I — but I think he — he’s very bright — as a matter of fact, brilliant. And I think he tends to — and he uses these idiot boards to read speeches in television and I think he loses the connection that he needs emotionally with American voters [...]
Yes, I think that — you know, if you’re looking at the teleprompter, you’re here, you’re here, you’re here and you’re — your audience is right there. And I think he needs to do more of that.”

Sounds like Mondale is on board the Sarah Palin express towards hand scribbles, though no word how Mondale managed to deliver his impassioned campaign speeches without modern technology. “A fair point,” replied Blitzer.

Mondale also discussed the Tea Party (he’s not worried about them), racism towards the president (possible, but he doesn’t see it), and, once again, the President’s prospects for 2012.

The interview from tonight’s Situation Room via CNN below:

NPR is now reporting that Carter fell victim to airsickness while on a flight and was taken to a hospital as a precautionary measure. The former president is now said to be resting comfortably.

Stewart asked Carter if, looking over his old diary entries, he felt hope in the direction the country was going. Carter responded with a quick “no,” citing the polarization of the nation which he partly blamed on Fox News. However, he then made a point of comparing himself as a candidate to the Tea Party of today, saying he “occupied the same position,” that of being a “fresh face” going up against the establishment. Still, though, he made an important differentiation between himself and the movement; he’s never dabbled in witchcraft.

If that wasn’t enough, Carter then told Stewart he had “one more confession to make.” Looking the host in the eye, Carter told him that, as a young man, he was not “100% against…” Stewart silenced him before he could finish the sentence.

No matter what you feel about Jimmy Carter, how many other 85 year old former presidents are going to go on comedy shows and discuss their personal histories with…being personal? I mean, sure, Rutherford B. Hayes would have if television had been invented (legend has it that the hair on his palms were as bushy as his beard), but that’s about it. So kudos to you, Jimmy Carter!

Check out the pretty darn hilarious interview below:

But according to former President Jimmy Carter, Kennedy himself is to blame for Americans’ lack of coverage. In a new interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, Carter claims that Kennedy deliberately blocked health care legislation the then-President proposed in the late ’70s.

“The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed,” he says. “It was his fault. Ted Kennedy killed the bill.”

Carter and Kennedy were political rivals; Stahl even calls Kennedy Carter’s “nemesis.” In the diary he kept while in the White House—which Carter has adapted into a new book that’s being released on Monday—Carter made frequent, disparaging mentions of Kennedy, writing sentences like this one: “Kennedy, continuing his irresponsible and abusing attitude, immediately condemned our health plan. He couldn’t get five votes for his plan.”

Carter believes Kennedy shot down his health care bill simply out of spite: “He did not want to see me have a major success in that realm,” he tells Stahl.

The full interview will air on CBS this Sunday, September 19, at 7pm. In it, Carter also discusses his energy conservation program—”Unfortunately, now we’re probably importing 12 million barrels a day, since part of my energy policies were abandoned,” he says—and the mistakes he made as president.

Carter has decided to make the trip and is slated to leave for the Hermit Kingdom within days, possibly bringing his wife and daughter along for the journey. His goal is to bring back Aijalon Mahli Gomes, a 30-year-old man from Boston who was sentenced to 8 years in prison in April, about three months after he was arrested crossing into North Korea via China. In July, North Korea’s official media organ reported that Gomes had tried to commit suicide. Earlier this month, the State Department secretly sent a four-man team to Pyongyang to visit Gomes, but was unable to secure his release.

There will be no U.S. government officials on the trip and Carter is traveling in his capacity as a private citizen, our sources report.

Sounds like President George W. Bush better brush up on his North Korean should another American accidentally wander across it appears he may be on deck.

The bloggers were allowed to list up to 20 “Worst Americans,” with rank “determined simply by the number of votes received.” Since the list contains no commentary, we’re not going to reproduce it here, which would deny RWN the clicks they deserve.

This list speaks volumes about those who selected it, displaying a lack of perspective worthy of Mr. Magoo and Don Quixote‘s love child. 18 of the top 25 are liberal figures, 11 of whom are still alive. In all of American history, 11 of the worst 25 villains are still alive?

It is in the few spots reserved for non-liberals, though,that the list fails on its own terms. Placing Timothy McVeigh at #9 is bad enough, but if you’re going to include traitors like Benedict Arnold, while concentrating mostly on 21st century red meat, how do you leave off John Walker Lindh? How about Anwar al-Awlaki? Perhaps they’re awaiting the outcome of Major Nidal Malik Hasan‘s trial for the Fort Hood shootings before they put him on the list. Presumption of innocence, and all that.

You could go on for days with the glaring omissions. There are no organized crime figures on the list (perhaps a nod to their spirit of entrepreneurship?), nor several high-profile assassins (like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray), not a single Confederate figure, not even contemporary über-villain Bernie Madoff.

While not all serial killers fit this list’s premise, there are some who certainly do. Charles Starkweather and Charles Manson each broke new ground in producing terror among Americans that far exceeded the actual reach of their crimes, and more recently, the DC snipers pierced whatever thin bubble of safety we all still felt.

Compounding the makeup of this list is the fact that, like their previous effort, it contains exactly zero analysis or commentary. Why is Hillary Clinton worse than Al Capone, or John Wayne Gacy? While the answer might be absurd, it would be a lot more fun to read.

Of course, not all conservatives are myopic hyper-partisans. A few years back, my friend Ed Morrissey made such a list, and while he still included Jimmy Carter (at #10), the balance of it was well thought out, and supported with fairly detailed commentary. Additionally, conservative libertarian Doug Mataconis has spent the better part of this morning picking apart RWN’s list.

Having said all of that, I am curious to see what the results of such a list would look like from the left. If last year’s list is any indication, though, they see to have a much broader historical memory, and a stronger case to make. Their list contained only one living politician, George W. Bush.

President Obama

This speech is actually emblematic of the entire Obama presidency, a study in unrealistic expectations that sometimes go unmet. It reminds me of a passage from Jim Bouton‘s iconic baseball diary, Ball Four. Bouton rolls off a list of advice that coaches shout at a pitcher during a single batter, and notes that the combined wisdom would result in a pitch that you couldn’t make with a sniper rifle.

Most ridiculous is the criticism that there wasn’t enough detail in the speech. It seems Keith Olbermann is convinced that the American people are incapable of digesting any information that isn’t delivered to them from the Oval Office. Maybe the President should also read off the Lotto numbers, so we don’t all throw away our winning tickets. Since day one, we  have been inundated with detail on the administration’s response to the disaster, while it took the media weeks to give a crap about it. Presumably, anyone tuning in to the speech has also seen the ad nauseum computer graphics of the “Top Cap” on every TV show from Real Time with Bill Maher to Yo Gabba Gabba.

Maybe Keith wanted the President to rattle off a list of not-yet-invented energy breakthroughs, and why shouldn’t he? He’s Barack Obama! Give him a grease pencil and those big-ass windows in the Oval Office, and he ought to be able to knock out a cold fusion formula midway through paragraph 3.

Chris Matthews hit the nail on the head when it comes to renewable energy investment. “that’s the hardest thing in the world to do!… that broke Jimmy Carter.”

If America had taken renewable energy seriously then, who knows how far along we would be right now? The natural conclusion to be drawn from our failure to act then is, of course, that we should fail to act now. If it’s anger people want, they should be prepared to take their fair share, for enabling the oil and coal industries with their unwillingness to support renewable energy.

But the biggest problem facing President Obama, and the rest of us, is the inconvenient truth that he’s stuck with BP, but unlike Huey Lewis, he’s not happy about it. The Clean Water Act says that the government has to give BP a shot at fixing this, and once this effort was started, it became nearly impossible to switch horses in midstream. Can you imagine the challenge, for example, of pulling BP off of the recovery, and sending in one or more US oil companies? Have you ever tried to get a Big Mac at shift change?

The President needs to stand on BP’s neck, but not so hard that they choke to death. If BP’s stock continues to tank, and the cost of the spill continues to rise, what are they supposed to pay for it with?  This is why the escrow account is a good first step, but the total cost of this thing could easily outstrip BP’s future ability to pay.

What if BP decides that they’re better off pulling up stakes and doing a Roman Polanski, what do we do then? Do we really want to entrust the livelihoods of all those gulf residents, and the non-toxicity of our coastal waters, to the British court system? Right now, BP is manning the oars on this recovery, and we can only beat them so hard before they just jump overboard. They’re not really fighting us now, but heaven help us if they do.

Then, there’s the issue of the sheer enormity of this disaster. The President is trying to reassure us by not pointing out that we don’t even know if the relief wells will work, or if the “Top Cap” will actually capture 90% of the oil in the interim. This is a problem that no one knows how to fix, and we need a little luck, or at least a break in the bad luck. If not, this Oilpocalypse could kill the whole freakin’ ocean.

Finally, the President is not our mommy. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need a leader who’s going to construct some oil spill “cat heaven” so I can sleep better at night. This is a f**ked up situation, worse than anyone is saying right now, and this is as reassuring as it’s gonna get.

So, to review, the President should have made everyone feel better, while simultaneously delivering detailed statistical breakdowns, policy proposals, and Dilithium Crystal Battery schematics, while also leveling with us that the 90% oil capture and the relief wells will happen if we’re lucky, and telling us that he’s going to command BP to set up an escrow account, and if they don’t feel like it, we can sue them, so those shrimpers might get some money during Sarah Palin‘s first term, and what the hell, Ken Salazar probably should have shut down all 128 deep water rigs as soon as he was confirmed so he could instantly fix decades of lax enforcement, because that would have gone over so much better before the oil disaster, finishing by saying “I know we need to get off of oil, but I don’t think now’s the time to think about that, and besides, I don’t think we can do it. The moon landing was totally a fluke.”

Feel better now?

“It’s like my grandfather said in 1968, he was going to be tested in the fires of the primary,” Cox told the AP when trying to describe his own New York primary, where the local Republican Party decided to let all the primary candidates run against each other until a September 14th primary, with various Republican organizations in the area taking their pick. Meanwhile, Carter, whose grandfather has been deeply involved in the campaign, even doing door-to-door canvassing, is quick to downplay his family history– and Carter already won his election yesterday. “I read in the paper the other day that my greatest political asset was my name, but I don’t think that’s true,” he told supporters in his victory speech.

Part of this may be the fact that President Carter is still around to speak for himself and help his grandson out– a luxury which, for obvious reasons, Cox does not have. President Carter, beaming after his grandson’s election, pointed out that he, too “got started 48 years ago in a special election for the Georgia State Senate.” Cox, on the other hand, needs a bit more help reminding people that he is the grandson of a former president. His grandfather makes the first line of his “About Me” on his campaign website and is quick to roll off the tongue in media appearances.

Part of this may also be the nature of the constituencies they are trying to represent (and in Carter’s case, succeeded in wooing). New York’s First Congressional District is by nature a swing district, though– not the type of place where, as Cox claims, being the grandson of Richard Nixon would be an asset. That said, he tells the AP that “wherever we go people say that my grandfather was their favorite president.” In a swing district, it seems anything can happen. As for Carter’s Georgia district, the New York Times notes that “the Carter name is both an advantage and a potential liability in Georgia. Jimmy Carter, a one-term governor, is the only president elected from the state, but he is widely viewed as far more liberal than its current voters.” In today’s political climate, where Republicans are the opposition party and thus have a much wider field of attack, comparisons to Jimmy Carter– especially from Tea Party sympathizers– could be much more detrimental than a reference to Nixon. Carter references in the media have increased plenty since the right took to comparing Barack Obama‘s tenure to his, and Carter even made it onto one of the mysterious small-businessmen funded “Miss Me Yet?” billboards, so the name is much fresher to constituents’ minds.

That said, Having a presidential grandparent didn’t seem to hurt Jason Carter very much, and Chris Cox’s problems seem to extend far beyond his family name to the fact that his district is hotly contested on the Republican side. Given their respective reputations, the campaigns’ proximity to their family histories is strangely reversed, though the media seems to love a famiy business story enough to give both candidates’ extraordinary media coverage, anyway. After all, since when is a Georgia State Senate race worthy of the pages of the New York Times, and how often does the Associated Press go out of their way to profile a Congressional candidate running to represent the Hamptons? Apparently having a relative in the nation’s top office, no matter what the circumstances of their departure, can suddenly make your campaign much more appealing to write about.

NPR is also confirming that the Jimmy Carter version of “Miss Me Yet?”, which seems to be another conservative parody conveying the exact opposite of what the Bush billboard did, is not a Photoshop job, but an actual billboard looping over I-45 outside of Dallas. The sign, according to the president of billboard company KEM Outdoor Paul Covey, confirms that the sign went up Monday, and the broker who arranged the deal, Steve Cosio, confirms the conservative intentions. Speaking for the anonymous patron, he told NPR “it was basically to build on the message from the billboard in Minnesota ‘and as a result of the health care bill that was (just) passed.’” We can only hope that every time Congress passes any legislation, it will prompt a new billboard.

This isn’t the first time Carter appears in the great advertisements in the sky, however. This little gem– while not as funny– appeared over Grand Junction, Colorado sometimes last week. That time, Carter was just relieved someone did a better job than he did. Major comedy points for adding “paid for by a small business owner” to the bottom of that one, which makes it completely unclear whether it’s an attack from the left or the right.

So it looks like at this point the name of the game is to fund giant billboards across highways featuring the politician most likely to cause the residents of that area to pop a blood vessel. Bush in Al Franken land, Reagan in the one state that didn’t give him electoral votes, and now Carter in the conservative heartland makes me wonder who could possibly pop up next, and where? I, for one, have been missing Richard Nixon for some time, so if any small business owner has a few extra thousands to spare in Times Square, they’d be greatly appreciated.

[photo via CriticalBias]

The star studded cast includes current “Not Ready for Prime Time” players Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph as Barack and Michelle Obama; as well as past players Will Ferrell as George W. Bush, Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton, Dan Aykroyd as Jimmy Carter, and Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford (in addition to Carrey and Carvey as Reagan and Bush respectively.)

Writing for Huffington Post, Ryan Grim reports:

Hollywood isn’t generally known for precisely timed or well-defined campaigns aimed at specific legislative language as bills move through Congress. But the clip, directed by Ron Howard and written by Adam McKay and Al Jean, was produced in coordination with Americans for Financial Reform, a major pro-reform coalition based in Washington, and it hits just as Senate negotiators work toward a compromise on the CFPA in the Banking Committee.

The most recent compromise proposal being discussed by Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and two Republicans — Sens. Richard Shelby of Alabama and Bob Corker of Tennessee — would house the consumer protection agency inside the Federal Reserve and limit its authority.

Senate liberals reacted coolly to the proposal. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) went so far as to say he’d introduce his own version as an amendment on the Senate floor if Dodd doesn’t come through with a strong, independent agency.

This is the second notable reunion video on Funny or Die directed by Ron Howard with political impact. You may recall pro-Obama video in which he reprised his roles as Opie Taylor and Ron Cunningham in an effort to help Obama become president.

The most reliable lesson of recent American politics is that movements dependent on that level of heat eventually — or, actually, quite quickly — burn themselves out. The tea-party movement cannot be sustained at the level of anger that’s currently fueling it. It may leave a permanent impact on the Republican Party, giving it some new faces and new language, and most important, allowing the party to divorce itself from the legacy of that squishy moderate, George W. Bush. But regardless of the economic times or the political mood, hot populism of both the left and right varieties has never had a very long run.

Schmitt goes on the explain that, just like the Contract with America movement of 1994 and Cold War-era McCarthyism, so too the Tea Parties will fall out of style. In other words, because similar movements have ended, the Tea Party movement not only will end, but is already in its dying phases. This sort of alternative reality construction isn’t new to liberals (it spawned the television series The West Wing when they could no longer bear the reality of the Clinton era ending), but is horribly misguiding for their cause. The Tea Party movement, for better or worse, is stronger than ever, and, like all movements, of course it will eventually wane. Yet giving as evidence the constant presence of a similar right wing populist movement in America undermines the entire point. Politics is an ebb and flow of power; of course the right has given in on occassion, but so too has the left. It is just as easy to claim that left-wing movements are not sustainable based on the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter and the monumental congressional triumph that followed for Republicans after Bill Clinton‘s election.

In fact, the right has been more consistent in remaining, if not in power, at least in the spotlight throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was followed by Richard Nixon‘s landslide victory and, even after Watergate, the right was able to rebound with a decade of Reagan revolution. The success of Bill Clinton is curbed by the success of Newt Gingrich, and even after eight years of George W. Bush, America has held on to its conservative roots.

While the left accuses radical right-wing publications (often correctly) of hyperbole and fear-mongering, here it has fallen prey to its own wishful thinking. If the Tea Party movement fails, it will be because it falls into incompetent, doodled-on hands– it has not yet reached that point. Try again next time, Prospect.

Carter’s actual statement?

I resent Mead’s use of such phrases as “in the worst scenario, turn him [Obama] into a new Jimmy Carter,” “weakness and indecision,” and “incoherence and reversals” to describe my service.

Nothing in there about finding fault with Obama’s policies themselves.

A doll found hanging off of a building in Plains is causing controversy.

Controversial enough to get the United States Secret Service involved.

Witnesses say it was an image of President Barack Obama with a rope around his neck and the display was found hanging in one of the city’s most recognizable sites dedicated to former President Jimmy Carter.

Sigh. Let’s hope between the extra flight retrictions, the heightened terror alert, and this sort of scary idiotic behavior the year (the decade?) can only get better from here.

Is this a sign that Carter is planning on going after Glenn Beck? (One imagines the White House is very much hoping otherwise.) The presence of the Obama/Kennedy signs at last weekend’s 9/12 rally were well documented, and last month Beck made headlines for comparing aspects of Obama’s health care plan, to the Nazi’s eugenics program during WWII. The Obama as Hitler signs, meanwhile, made their appearance during some of the more rowdy town halls this summer. It’s hard to miss Carter’s insinuation here.

Regardless of what Carter’s long-term goal is with these sorts of remarks, President Obama wants nothing to do with it. From today’s New York Times:

But this time the White House has made clear that it does not want to engage on the topic, which beyond threatening to distract attention from the health care push could also put further strain on Mr. Obama’s broad but tenuous electoral coalition of liberals and moderates, Democrats and independents. Signaling that he had no intention of lending his voice to Mr. Carter’s accusation, the president declined to answer a reporter’s question on the subject in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Whether or not that’s realistic remains to be seen. Carters full remarks below.

You see, I really know next to nothing about Walter Cronkite.  He means nothing at all to me. Hearing that he’s dead was like a looking at a well-painted apartment wall. You get the feeling that a good job might have been done but that’s the limit of the emotional or intellectual reaction.

So why does this make me feel young? Well, let’s face it. Cronkite was important to the kind of people whose memories of our public life is full of Kennedy and King assassinations, the hippies fighting cops at Democratic convention in 1968, the ’60s culture wars, Watergate, Gerald Ford, Vietnam, the oil crises, Elvis’s death and Lennon’s murder, Three Mile Island, and Jimmy Carter’s 1979 summer meltdown.

I care about that stuff the way a guy storming the beach at Normandy cared about the Spanish American war. It’s more well-painted walls.

Now, I don’t speak ill of the dead. But I’ll make an exception: I’m pretty sure that if I did care about Cronkite, I wouldn’t like him very much. No good contrarian can like anyone known as “The Most Trusted Man In America.” Also, I have no admiration for the anchor-as-guide to the world version of television news, and I’m glad it’s a dying form. If, as someone on the television said today, we never see anyone like him again, I’d say that this state of affairs couldn’t have come too soon.

Reading a bit here and there about him has made me suspect I’d dislike him even more than that. From what I can tell in Peter Feld’s write up, he seems to have disdained the lives actually lived by most of his countrymen. I guess it’s not surprising to discover an aversion to the lives of ordinary people in someone who spent his life performing a job that put his face in the living rooms of millions of strangers.

I’m sure his family and friends will miss him, and if I knew any of them I’d be sorry for their loss. And maybe I’d tell them to say thanks to Walter for me. Like I said, it’s rare that the death of a public figure makes me suddenly feel young.

John Carney is Managing Editor of Clusterstock. This piece was originally published at Rise If You Must, his personal website.