video As the efforts to reform health care come to its end, the evidence on both sides of the debate is being used - and disabused - of its value (depending on where one sides on this controversial issue.) Case in point, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently reported that the current bill would cut the U.S. budget deficit by $1.3 trillion over 20 years, all while covering 95%. Good news for the White House, but in an interview with CNN's Rick Sanchez, RNC chairman Michael Steele has a simple explanation: "That's a lie," he said of the CBO report. (more...)

video It may be a bit early to predict what the impact of the recently-consolidated Tea Party movement will be on future elections (both this fall and in 2012), but as their relevance grows on the national political scene, their views carry increasingly more weight. To that end, Politico set out to find what tea partiers think of some of the conservative movement's top leaders. While most results were predictable-- their love of Glenn Beck and suspicion towards John McCain, for starters-- Politico also found some surprises in the attitudes towards some of their biggest supporters. (more...)

video RNC chairman Michael Steele was called to account for the RNC presentation Politico got their hands on yesterday that featured images of President Obama as the Joker, compared Nancy Pelosi to Cruella Devil, and Harry Reid to Scooby Doo. Steele started out rather humbled telling Megyn Kelly: "You don't defend it, it was unfortunate." Before noting that the RNC didn't create these images: "Those were images that were pulled off the Internet and been out in the public domain for a while." At which point he reverted to 'we did not throw the first stone' defense: "I didn't like those images of me that characterized me as a Sambo or an Uncle Tom, either" and later "there's a pretty long track record of folks on the left playing this ugly game." (more...)

Politico got its hands on a confidential party fundraising presentation from the Republican National Committee: Is Glenn Beck secretly running the RNC? From Ben Smith: (more...)

Larry King has been on a roll lately. Between confirming David Paterson’s blindness to calling Johnny Weir “fierce” and getting Toyota President Akio Toyoda to admit his fears of not being considered compassionate enough, Larry King Live has made for some must-see TV. Yesterday was no exception, with DNC Chair Tim Kaine and RNC Chair Michael Steele meeting for the first time in quite a while after circling each other on the cable news rounds for months to discuss the health care reform, Jim Bunning’s pseudo-filibuster and business as usual in Washington. (more...)

Besides throwing almost every applicable political buzzword into his assessment of President Barack Obama's recent health care summit, RNC Chairman Michael Steele managed to offend nearly every left-wing viewer of The Situation Room today when he called the recent Capitol Hill discussion a "death panel" for the Democrats' health care proposal. Not that he doesn't make some good points. But still...yikes.
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video Okay, we recognize that this might be a little misleading: although RNC Chairman Michael Steele did say tonight on MSNBC that he didn't see health care insurance be a fundamental right guaranteed in the Constitution, he also notes that the question itself ("Do you believe health care is a right or a privilege?") is the wrong way to look at our nation's current health coverage crisis. Unfortunately, he's already shot himself in the foot. (more...)

video Earlier this week, RNC chairman Michael Steele met with various leaders of the Tea Party movement. Last night, Hardball host Chris Matthews had on one such leader, former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, for a spirited/heated discussion on corruption, congress and adhering to the constitution. The highlight of the back and forth, however, may have been when Matthews asked Mack to comment on Sarah Palin's mention of Texas secession from the United States. Perhaps not surprisingly, Sheriff Mack defended a state's right to secede. (more...)

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To commemorate the first anniversary of the signing on Obama's stimulus bill, DNC chair and former Virginia governor Tim Kaine made more television appearances in one 24-hour cycle than it felt like he had during the entirety of his tenure before today. On occasion, Kaine had been showing up on MSNBC to remind everyone that someone was, indeed, in charge of the party despite the growing tide of Republican (and general right-wing) opposition, but his appearances were always overshadowed by Michael Steele telling someone to shut up, calling someone "baby" or, worse, winning an election. After waiting for so long, what did Kaine bring to the table at Fox and Friends, Morning Joe, and American Morning? The gameplan for victory Rachel Maddow gave him the night before. (more...)

"Both Steele and Palin claim to be devotees of the tea party movement. 'I’m a tea partier, I’m a town-haller, I’m a grass-roots-er' is how Steele put it in a recent radio interview, wet-kissing a market he hopes will buy his book. Palin has far more grandiose ambitions."

Game Change, the book out today by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, is  making waves in NY and DC with its sensational revelations about the 2008 presidential campaign. One of those excerpts, posted by The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, struck me as just a bit hypocritical. It concerns Cindy McCain and a previously discredited rumor, resurrected in Halperin's book.

Here's the passage, as posted by Marc Ambinder:

McCain aides confront Cindy McCain over reports that she had an extramarital affair (page 281):

"The man was said to be her long-term boyfriend; the pair had been sighted all over town in the last few years. Members of McCain's senior staff discussed the unsettling news, and their growing concerns that Cindy's behavior had been increasingly erratic of late. Weaver and others suspected that the Cindy rumor was rooted in truth. It was upsetting, Weaver believed, but not a threat."

This is exactly the kind of thing that a vociferous media critic pointed out, in the wake of the 2008 election, as an example of "extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage," and a "disgusting failure" by the media. In fact, the exact thing:

"The (New York Times) story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it cast her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."

That defender of Cindy McCain's virtue was...Mark Halperin.

I haven't read the book yet, but unless Ambinder left out the part where Halperin has ironclad sourcing and actual facts, Game Change seems to do little more than repeat a rumor, and add to it a rumor that a McCain adviser believed the rumor.

Also interesting, given Halperin's November 2008 j'accuse to the rest of the media (while he was already writing the book with Heilemann), is the fact that Marc Ambinder has released excerpts that devastate McCain, Harry Reid, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin, but describes the parts of the book about Obama thusly:

About Obama himself the book includes plenty of observations about his manner and temperament, many astute and some original, though no earth-shattering revelations.

Physician, get thyself out of the tank.

video This morning on Fox News Sunday, Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele called for the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid based on the racially insensitive remarks coming out of the press blitz for the upcoming 2008 election book Game Change. Just as we suspected. (more...)

video The weekend news dump probably will not save Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, after leaks from the upcoming book Game Change revealed racially insensitive comments, charging Obama's success to his "light-skinned appearance and speaking patterns with no negro dialect." This is a story you wouldn't think Republicans would let die quietly, despite the president's accepting of Reid's apology. But chairman of the RNC Michael Steele appeared with Geraldo Rivera last night, calling Reid's comments an "unfortunate situation," but failing to twist the knife more. (more...)

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On Hardball this evening, Chris Matthews had a good old time with RNC Chairman Michael Steele, asking Steele why his book, "Right Now," contains mentions of Pacino and Prejean, but not "the big P from Alaska." He goes on to accuse Steele of having a Voldemort complex, saying he's afraid to speak Sarah Palin's name. Did Steele overcome his fear of she-who-must-not-be-named?

Almost as entertaining as Matthews' schoolyard challenge was Steele's willingness to prove that he could physically form the word "Palin." As you'll see, though, he never comes close to explaining how he wrote a game plan for the Republican Party that didn't contain a single mention of its most famous, arguably most powerful, leader.

What really takes this clip to 11, though, is Matthews' gloating about having "nailed" Steele by getting him to agree to an inconsistent position on the trials of terrorism suspects. Granted, he starts his endzone dance before giving Steele a chance to actually answer the question, but it's fun to watch anyway.

video Lawrence O'Donnell was subbing for Countdown host Keith Olbermann last night, and dedicated part of the program to Alabama freshman congressman Parker Griffith, who announced on Tuesday that he was leaving the Democrats to join House Republicans. Not only did O'Donnell take shots at the GOP's inclusion of "that dwindling category of Republican, the moderate Republican," he posited the real reason behind Griffith's party switch: to get booked on Fox News. Transcript of the segment:

O'Donnell: After 12 months in congress, Alabama freshman congressman Parker Griffith announced yesterday morning that he was leaving the Democrats to join House Republicans. The move was reportedly in the works for some time, though it came as a surprise to Alabama Democratic party chair Joe Turnham who called Griffith "one of the most liberal people I have known." Just like the failed moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava In New York, Griffith earned RNC chair Michael Steele's stamp of approval, probably a temporary stamp. As to the reasons for the defection, Griffith today realized one of the fringe benefits of being a Republican, getting booked on Fox News. Griffith: I have found that the far left tilt of the Democratic Party no longer welcomed me or my ideas and so I made the decision. O'Donnell: Of course Griffith immediately slots into that dwindling category of Republican, the moderate Republican. The category that so many in the GOP are trying to purge. Erick Erickson, of the blog Red State, spoke for the conservative fringe yesterday, writing quote, "Griffith was an extremely endangered Democrat, we should now hope him to be an extremely endangered Republican in a primary. We can pick this guy off and get a real Republican in that seat."

video On last night's show Rachel Maddow, looking back at 2009, called the attempted reinvention of the Republican party after the last year's election the "the greatest show in American politics over the past year." So what will that reinvention produce? Maddow taps the Tea Partiers as a the strongest sign of what's to come. (more...)

video At today's White House briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs displayed the kind of wit that has made him the most popular White House staffer, but not before nearly getting his skull burned through by Norah O'Donnell's eye-lasers. (more...)

2009 definitely won't be remembered as the year that the GOP triumphantly entered social media. After launching a website that featured an animated GIF of Michael Steele and a blog by Steele originally called "What Up," a blank "future leaders" section, and a user-submitted Facebook photo page that soon got flooded with racist pictures, they've given it another crack, and launched ... GOP.am, a URL shortener. How could that possibly go wrong? Plenty of ways, as it turns out. (more...)

video Here's a great way to get people to change their minds about you: pen a smash-hit memoir, sell out your national, campaign-like book tour, and flood the media with big interviews and soundbites. It's hard to argue with that kind of success. Or at least it's hard to argue against it. (more...)

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"Sunday shows are usually a little more boring than that, that was like a testosterone overload yesterday morning. Part of it is you just can't understand what they're saying because they're talking over each other, which I actually think is what turns off Independents and women when they try to watch these shows and it makes them more frustrated with Washington."

The hits just keep on coming. The Republican National Committee flubbed the roll out of their new web identity in glorious, grand ole, fashion on their own yesterday. Today the dark underbelly of the internet decided to help them finish the job. What's a conservative to do?

Twenty-four hours into the life of the RNC's new web site and parodies of the Faces of GOP web banner were circulating on the internet. Some are apt, some are funny and naturally, most are offensive. (more...)

Yesterday, left-wing bloggers, right-wing bloggers, no-wing bloggers, social media junkies, and old media types all banded together for one purpose: to make fun of the GOP's brand-new website. How did GOP.com, which RNC Chairman Michael Steele touted as a "new platform" for the party, go wrong? Let us count the ways: (more...)

Women's Wear Daily reports that Us Weekly had a fine first week under Michael Steele, who filled in as the magazine's acting editor-in-chief after Janice Min's departure in July. Steele's first issue as acting EIC, which featured a cover story on Bachelorette cheating drama, "sold 1.1 million copies, outpacing Us Weekly’s single-copy sales by an average of 843,470 for the first half of 2009." One issue does not make a mandate: it remains to be seen how the gossip mag will do in the post-Janice era and whether Steele will be tapped for the position permanently. Still, it looks like Jann Wenner may have been right when he wagered that Us Weekly could flourish without Min. (more...)