Mediaite’s own Tommy Christopher popped up on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann yesterday to discuss the controversy surrounding Cory Booker’s instantly critiqued, walked back, and manipulated comments condemning the Obama campaigns attacks on Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital. While Hartmann wanted to begin by discussing the revelation that Booker had accepted thousands of dollars of support from Bain Capital over the years, Christopher argued that he didn’t believe campaign donations factored in Booker’s comments.. However, he decried Democrats like Booker who were complaining about Obama’s Bain attacks since, after all, they’re true.

Over the years, reporter David Shuster has achieved a certain level of notoriety/celebrity by virtue of some high-voltage dustups with the likes of John Ziegler, the late Andrew Breitbart, James O’Keefe, and Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign. Now a linchpin at Current TV, Shuster is also lending his high profile to progressive Washington DC radio station We Act Radio (1480AM), a labor of love that is off to a better start than its creators could ever have expected.

As if this presidential campaign hasn’t already been ruff enough (sorry) on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, his opponents have begun to exploit the tail (sorry) that has dogged (okay, I’m not really sorry) the candidate for years: Seamus The Dog’s wild ride. However, despite multiple references to the incident by Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod and Santorum adviser/latter-day Robert DeNiro look-alike John Brabender, a new poll suggests that Seamus isn’t costing Romney votes…yet.

This week has been marked mostly by a debate on how far the federal government can go in mandating some forms of health care. But beyond the actual controversy surrounding the birth control issue lies all the rhetoric surrounding it– particularly some of the more incendiary comments Rick Santorum made this week that this sort of thinking led to dangers such as “what’s left in France… the guillotine” (?). On The Big Picture this week, Mediaite’s own Tommy Christopher sat down with host Thom Hartmann to discuss whether this is a religious issue or a health care one, and what the rhetoric surrounding it can say.

One overlooked effect of Politifact’s naming “Republicans Voted To End Medicare” their “Lie Of The Year” is that it gives the false impression that Paul Ryan‘s original plan to end Medicare as we know it was nothing to worry about, and paves the way for acceptance of the newer Ryan-Wyden Medicare “reform” plan. In an interview with Fox Business’s David Asman, liberal radio and TV host Thom Hartmann slammed Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Politifact for their assault on Medicare.

Just in time to help shill for the ill-conceived Ryan-Wyden Medicare “reform” plan, fact-checking website Politifact.com has nominated Democratic claims about Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicare-destroying budget for its “Lie of the Year” award. Liberal radio and TV host Thom Hartmann called the Pulitzer Prize-winning site out over the move, applying a blowtorch to the site’s trousers on Wednesday’s The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann.

This past weekend, as with any normal weekend, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination said several stupid things that deserved mockery and outrage. In this case, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told a Harvard crowd, on Friday, that the solution to income inequality involves replacing adult janitors in poor neighborhoods with nine year-olds. On Saturday, he told Occupy protesters to take a bath. Guess which quote the media picked up and ran with?

Liberal radio and TV host Thom Hartmann took President Obama‘s homework assignment at last week’s press conference to heart, scouring the country for a Republican jobs plan. He found one in Florida’s HB 4063, a law that would repeal a longstanding ban on dwarf-tossing. State Rep. Ritch Workman (R-FL30) says, “All we really did by passing that law was take away some employment from some little people,” calling it an example of “Big Brother government.”

Hartmann uses the law to illustrate how little the Republicans in congress have done to create jobs since they took the House in November.

Earlier today, Mediaite Managing Editor Colby Hall gleefully reported that ESPN had pulled Hank Williams Jr.’s iconic “Are You Ready For Some Football” song from last night’s Monday Night Football broadcast, in response to remarks that Hank made, on Fox and Friends, in which he compared President Obama’s golf outing with Speaker John Boehner to an outing [...]

On the heels of CurrentTV’s announcement that The Young Turks will join Keith Olbermann at the network as Countdown‘s lead-in, host Cenk Uygur and Current president Al Gore held a tele-press conference Tuesday afternoon. Gore talked about expanding Current’s lineup even more, and Uygur assured current Young Turks fans that he would be bringing the [...]

Liberal radio and TV host Thom Hartmann took on the gang at Fox & Friends this week over the stimulative properties of food stamps and unemployment benefits. Fox & Friends, along with other conservative media, criticized Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack‘s remarks that food stamps are “the most direct stimulus you can get in the economy during these tough times.”

Hartmann responded with the usual bag of tricks: facts and logic.

The political world is still reeling from the intense Congressional debate that pushed America to the brink of default, and trying to find just who to blame to make sure it doesn’t happen again. On last night’s The Big Picture, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher took on the subject with host Thom Hartmann, arguing that the Democrats were “cute” in their naivete and could never pull off such a stunt because, with Republicans, “there’s nothing you can threaten them with.”

On Thursday night’s The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, the liberal host continued his lonely effort to challenge the myth that wealthy individuals and corporations are “job creators,” arguing that the real job creators are working Americans who spend money and create demand. Hartmann and AlterNet’s Joshua Holland discussed the results of a recent ABC/WaPo poll which shows that large majorities of Americans are in on the secret that a free ride for the wealthy hasn’t helped, and won’t help, “create jobs.”

With a national debt default teetering dangerously near, the spirit of compromise seems to elude both parties, both within and without Congress. On The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann this week, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher joined host Thom Hartmann and his panel to debate how the President was handling the debt crisis, whether News Corporation will survive the hacking scandal, and what’s going on with those “porno” scanners the TSA uses at airports.

On Friday, we reported that Economist and Rutgers associate business professor Susan Feinberg busted Rep. Paul Ryan’s chops over his dinner tab at Washington’s Bistro Bis, confronting the Congressman after his meal for partaking in $350-a-bottle wine, while his party seeks painful cuts to government programs for senior citizens and the poor. On Monday, liberal radio and TV host Thom Hartmann interviewed Ms. Feinberg about her wine-sleuthing, meal-interrupting ways.

The immediate media reaction to the “not guilty” verdict presented to Casey Anthony yesterday has been one of utter disbelief– how could the jury and the media not see eye-to-eye from the same evidence? On today’s Thom Hartmann Radio Show, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher argued the disconnect lay in what evidence was permissible in a court of law versus the court of public opinion, but that a responsible media cannot be expected to shield potential jurors from their own reporting.

Radio and TV host Thom Hartmann cut against the popular misconception that liberals are “godless” by taking on Rick Wingrove, Virginia State Director for American Atheists, on Tuesday’s edition of The Big Picture. At issue was a 4th of July campaign that involved airplane banners that said “God-less America” and “Atheism is Patriotic,” a campaign which Hartmann sees as “evangelical,” and part of a pattern that, he argues, is no different than any other religion.

Liberal radio and TV host Thom Hartmann has been engaged in a bit of a feud with Glenn Beck’s The Blaze website over comments Hartmann made on his cable show The Big Picture. A few weeks ago, Hartmann suggested that President Obama retaliate against GOP opposition to raising the debt ceiling by having Tim Geithner [...]

Obama impersonator Reggie Brown‘s appearance at the Republican Leadership Conference reignited concerns about what constitutes appropriate racial humor and whether there is a double standard over what cannot be said on the left and the right. On last night’s The Big Picture on RT America, Mediaite Political Editor Tommy Christopher chatted with host Thom Hartmann about Brown’s performance, racial humor, and the difference between Eric Bolling and Bill Maher.

It was always an obvious reality that Keith Olbermann‘s Current TV show would experience some degree of crossover with MSNBC’s prime-time programming, but any hope of a peaceful rivalry have evaporated, as Olbermann has made it clear he intends to go after his former employer’s audience by going after his former employer. The fact that Olbermann has opted to “go negative” so early (his show hasn’t even premiered yet) portends a bloody battle for the hearts and minds of liberal viewers.

The establishment of Current TV as a destination for liberal news programming doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing for MSNBC. There are, apparently, millions of liberals who aren’t watching cable news, and this represents an opportunity for both channels to attract a new audience.

While we were all enthralled by the epic Weinergate saga, a different tale of unsecured weaponry went virtually unnoticed. On Thursday’s The Big Picture, liberal radio and TV host Thom Hartmann discussed a recent call by Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn for aspiring terrorists to exploit weak US gun control laws. Hartmann debated the topic with The Weekly Standard‘s Daniel Halper and Jamie Weinstein of The Daily Caller, who didn’t object to closing the loophole, but weren’t that fired up about it, either.

Liberal radio and TV host Thom Hartmann isn’t taking Fox Business Network’s weeklong series of “Makers vs. Takers” segments lying down, branding the theme an extension of the Republican “war on the middle class.” On his TV show, The Big Picture, Hartmann calls out the meme, “a war that pits the rich – or the makers – against the poor – the takers,” but his most revelatory insight is his debunking of the myth that wealthy individuals and corporations “create jobs.”

Although conservatives like Rush Limbaugh currently dominate talk radio, there are a few liberals, like Bill Press, and Ed Schultz, who have managed to break that stranglehold and maintain a beachhead in the format. Perhaps the best kept secret in progressive talk radio, though, is that Thom Hartmann sits atop the pack, and he does it with a minimum of the antagonism that is de rigeur in today’s political media. With a recent move to Washington, DC, and a move into television, is Hartmann poised to break out?

Bill Press is a member of an increasingly endangered species: the successful progressive radio host. With his new book, Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right Has Poisoned America’s Airwaves, my White House press colleague aims to diagnose, and treat, the left’s deficit on the dial. While it lives up to its title, Toxic Talk is much more than a catalog of crass conservative cacophony. Breezy and full of insights for left, right, and in between, Press’ book is essential reading for political media junkies.