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Just hours after MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews calls Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., the "Mata Hari of Minnesota" and Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi says "a guy huffing glue out of a paper bag" was making more sense the Bachmann, MSNBC "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann comes in for clean-up duties. On the March 27 broadcast "Countdown," Olbermann confirms that Michele Bachmann Derangement Syndrome is alive and well at MSNBC. Dedicating the top of his show to Bachmann, Olbermann accuses the Minnesota congresswoman of breaking "several serious laws," for suggesting the American people should rise up against some of the liberal...

How could anyone take a principled stand against the $789 billion economic stimulus bill? Any opposition to this massive expansion of the federal government must be sheer political posturing. Or so said Newsweek magazine's Jonathan Alter. Alter said on MSNBC's Feb. 11 "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" that congressional Republicans oppose the stimulus bill based on an ill-conceived, low-percentage bet that the proposal would fail. "Well, they're betting on the 30 percent chance, as Joe Biden put it, that it's not going to work," Alter said. "Then they can say, ‘I told you so, it didn't do any good.'" ..more (w/video)..

On Thursday night's "Hardball," Chris Matthews played several clips from documentarian John Zeigler's interview with Sarah Palin, in which the former GOP VP candidate criticized Katie Couric and the press as a whole for bias against her but his guest, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, dismissed Palin's charges as "So lame," and called her "a Nixonian Nanook of the North." The following exchanges were aired on the January 8, edition of "Hardball": First up, after Matthews aired a clip of Palin criticizing the McCain campaign for forcing her to conduct continuing interviews with Couric, Alter called the Alaskan governor: "So lame."...

Parade features Governor Sarah Palin on it's cover for it's Best and Worst of the Year edition. Unfortunately , there isn't much about her there, other than this debunked story: LOW- People shouting, “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” when Obama’s name was mentioned at some John Mc-Cain-Sarah Palin rallies. While this was neither Mc-Cain’s nor Palin’s fault, it revealed the thin membrane separating civility from mob rule in politics today. —Jonathan Alter, NBC News analyst and author of “Between the Lines” Cover:http://www.parade.com/table_of_content/tableOfContent.html Home:http://www.parade.com/

The conventional wisdom, which I share, is that Barack Obama will win this election, perhaps by a healthy margin. But Democrats are nervous wrecks; they're having nightmares that defeat will be snatched from the jaws of victory. To add to their misery (and guard against complacency), here's how that horror film could play out: In the end, the problem was the LIVs. That's short for "low-information voters," the three fifths of the electorate that show up once every four years to vote for president but mostly hate politics. These are the 75 million folks who didn't vote in the primaries....

The conventional wisdom, which I share, is that Barack Obama will win this election, perhaps by a healthy margin. But Democrats are nervous wrecks; they're having nightmares that defeat will be snatched from the jaws of victory. To add to their misery (and guard against complacency), here's how that horror film could play out: In the end, the problem was the LIVs. That's short for "low-information voters," the three fifths of the electorate that shows up once every four years to vote for president but mostly hates politics. These are the 75 million folks who didn't vote in the primaries....

The test for the next president is whether he can use the powers of government to act on behalf of Americans. That's a liberal idea. John McCain's "Joe the Plumber" would no doubt like to have a beer with Sarah Palin's "Joe Six-Pack." In truth, Joe Wurzelbacher isn't a licensed plumber and Joe Six-Pack is a horrible cliché, but no matter. They're cultural kin to the iconic "Average Joe" who was part of Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority" in the early 1970s and Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1980s. But conservative majorities come and go. If the polls are to...

Congratulations to Jonathan Alter, he wins the Lighten Up Francis award for the week: Jonathan Alter: “Unleashing the furies of the dark side of American politics, perhaps risking some peoples lives if things get out of control. All of that is out the window in the service of winning an election.”Tried to embed the video, perhaps someone can do it, video at the link.

Happy birthday, Johnny Mac! You're 72 now, a cancer survivor, and a presidential candidate who has said on many occasions that the most important criteria for picking a vice president is whether he or she could immediately step in if something happened to the president. Your campaign against Barack Obama is based on the simple idea that he is unready to be president. So you've picked a running mate who a year and a half ago was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town of 8,500 people. You've selected a potential leader of the free world who knows little or...

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he told potential investors that it was not edited for "the little old lady from Dubuque." This is still true, as the flap over the latest cover suggests. Publishing an illustration of Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim fist-bumping his wife Michelle (with a semi-automatic over her shoulder) may have been meant as a parody of the dopey Internet rumor-mongering that has dogged the campaign for close to two years. But it is indisputably harmful to the Obama campaign, which is why, though Obama himself wouldn't comment, his spokesman called the...

Give credit where it's due: Hillary Clinton has shown grit and determination in finishing out the race. She has proved herself a strong campaigner. And in the week since West Virginia, she has stopped the cheap shots that had marred her campaign this year. But Clinton has continued with one claim that could have a pernicious effect on the Democrats' chances in November. While she knows that the nomination is determined by delegates, Hillary insists on saying at every opportunity that she is winning the popular vote. And she has now taken to touting the new HBO movie "Recount," which...

Some Democrats terrified that their bloody primary campaign will doom them in November are floating a consolation prize for Hillary Clinton: governor of New York. The travails of New York Gov. David Paterson have opened up a new potential career path for Clinton, according to well-informed Democratic Party insiders who refused to allow their names to be used when discussing contingencies. They want her to consider the option if she concludes after the April 22 Pennsylvania primary that she cannot overtake Barack Obama for the party's presidential nomination. Hillary Clinton, while fully committed to continuing her presidential campaign, was said...

We know why politicians lie when they get in trouble: they think the consequences of telling the truth are too severe to bear. That's why Richard Nixon lied about Watergate, and Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky. The more complicated question is why they fib—why politicians insist on stretching unimportant stories in ways that are easy to check and refute. Hillary Clinton's oft-told yarn about ducking sniper fire on the tarmac in Tuzla, Bosnia, in 1996 has gotten a lot of publicity, maybe too much. Her misrepresentation of her role in the Northern Ireland peace talks was more serious but less...

Some Dems float the New York Statehouse as an option. Some Democrats terrified that their bloody primary campaign will doom them in November are floating a consolation prize for Hillary Clinton: governor of New York. The travails of New York Gov. David Paterson have opened up a new potential career path for Clinton, according to well-informed Democratic Party insiders who refused to allow their names to be used when discussing contingencies. They want her to consider the option if she concludes after the April 22 Pennsylvania primary that she cannot overtake Barack Obama for the party's presidential nomination. Hillary Clinton,...

A generational struggle is underway. What's so unusual is it's taking place within a single generation [Obama] represents a new generation of leadership, even though technically he's part of the same generation as Hillary, the baby boomers. Here's where it gets a bit complicated. This tussle pits an Early Boomer vs. a Late Boomer, and the two cohorts have little in common... In the case of boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—the whole frame is wrong. It's based on birthrates, not common cultural and political affinities... Worse, the Early Boomer sensibility gets all the attention. Five decades of newsmagazine boomer...

LAS VEGAS - A last-minute federal court battle over caucus rules demonstrates just how important a tight three-way Democratic presidential contest in Nevada has become in the battle for momentum headed into Super Tuesday's votes. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are in a statistical dead heat in polling here before Saturday's caucuses. And Nevada's sizable blocs of Hispanic, union and urban voters could provide an indicator of where the race is headed on Feb. 5, when hundreds of delegates will be awarded in states with significant minority populations. By contrast, Republican candidates have stayed away from the...

For right-wing conspiracy theorists, this is the belly of the beast—a dinner at the Four Seasons in New York for the 20th anniversary of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Portentous Ivy League professors, Upper East Side gazillionaires, Precambrian media pooh-bahs; Dan Rather and Al Franken and Paul Pelosi, spouse of the Speaker-elect. Almost all in attendance cheer the results of the midterms while bemoaning the demise of old media. Suddenly, shimmering over the tabletops, comes a vision of what was and might yet be again: in full plumage, arriving and departing separately per their...

The GOP is in a deep hole and keeps digging. Even after Mike Huckabee won big among attendees at last week's "Values Voters Convention," many evangelicals have been telling the former Arkansas governor—and onetime Baptist minister—that they like him but won't back him because he can't beat Hillary Clinton. They have it exactly backward. He may be the only Republican candidate with a decent chance to beat the Democrats next November. Huckabee? Yes, Huckabee. To explain why, let's look at the shortcomings of the other Republican candidates first. Rudy Giuliani's performance so far has turned the conventional wisdom about him...

One of the more absurd complaints leveled against President Bush during his tumultuous tenure in office is that, in combating terrorism, he's eviscerated the Constitution. This hysteria is not confined to critics in the blogosphere or strident left-wing magazines such as the Nation but is found, as well, in mass-market newspapers and magazines. A citizen who reads, in a vacuum, editorials and oped columnists in the New York Times, say, might believe that since September 11 America, led by the Bush administration, has become a police state. The latest round of hyperbolic arguments offered by anti-administration partisans concerns the acquiescence...

Our way of electing presidents has always been fertile ground for mischief. But there's sensible mischief—toying with existing laws and the Constitution to reflect popular will—and then there's the other kind, which tries to rig admission to the Electoral College for strictly partisan purposes. Mischief-makers in California (Republicans) and North Carolina (Democrats) are at work on changes that would subvert the system for momentary advantage and—in ways the political world is only beginning to understand—dramatically increase the odds that a Republican will be elected president in 2008. Right now, every state except Nebraska and Maine awards all of its electoral...

Newsweek Editor Advises Dems on Surrendering While Saving Face Posted by Matthew Sheffield on June 18, 2007 - 10:23. With congressional Democrats' approval ratings in the basement (lower than President Bush's), some in the media are attributing this to the fact that the Dems have not succeeded in cutting off the war in Iraq. Trouble is, while that strategy may be beneficial in the short run, it makes Democrats play to their stereotype of being soft when it comes to foreign policy.To help his fellow liberals out, Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter offers Democrats a way to surrender, "without looking like...

by Mark Finkelstein October 17, 2006 - 08:26 "General Pelosi, I'm Matt Lauer, and I'm reporting for duty!" OK, Matt didn't quite say that as 'Today' kicked off its 'The War at Home' three-part series this morning on the lives of American veterans once they return home from war. But judging from the opening episode and the tease of what's to come tomorrow, he might just as well. NBC is clearly doing its part to tend the Dems' Victory Garden. Of all the reporters in the NBC News stable, 'Today' tapped for this segment Jonathan Alter, a regular guest on...

WASHINGTON -- It may take decades to change anti-American feelings around the world that have been aggravated by war in Iraq, U.S. policy toward Israel and America's "sex and violence" culture, the State Department official in charge of dealing with the U.S. image abroad said Thursday. "The anti-Americanism, the concern around the world ... this ideological struggle, it's not going to change" quickly, Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's going to be the work of years and maybe decades." Hughes, a longtime adviser to President Bush, has worked for more than a...

WASHINGTON - With the demise of charismatic terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida will be looking for a new sales approach in its worldwide fundraising campaigns. Al-Zarqawi had become a key part of al-Qaida's marketing: He was a terror operator who stole headlines with jarring, gruesome attacks carried out by a network of foreign and Iraqi fighters. For more than three years, he evaded an international manhunt. Counterterrorism officials have said al-Zarqawi served as a worldwide jihadist rallying point and a fundraising icon. "The terrorist celeb, if you will," said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., a former FBI agent who serves...

Two bills that could shake up presidential politics by giving California one of the earliest primaries in the nation and undercutting the Electoral College were approved Tuesday by the Assembly elections committee. The bills' author, committee chairman Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana, said the measures were designed to increase California's clout in determining who sits in the Oval Office. "It's an effort to make California relevant again in presidential elections," he said. One of the bills would put California in competition with New Hampshire to have the earliest presidential primary elections in the nation. It would require the secretary of state...

Cheney has simultaneously expanded the power of the vice presidency and reduced its accountability. Because his health made him the first veep since ancient Alben Barkley (under Harry Truman) with no realistic chance of moving up, he felt he could change the rules. Fears of terrorism made his decision to go to an "undisclosed location" understandable, but he has taken secrecy about his whereabouts to inexplicable lengths. News organizations went along with this partly to save money by not sending reporters to cover his trips. They rationalized it by explaining that Cheney never said anything to reporters anyway.

7000 year-old sacrificial altar found in Hunan www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-29 11:23:54 BEIJING, Jan. 29 (Xinhuanet) -- A sacrificial altar, dating back about 7,000 years, has been discovered in central China's Hunan Province, according to Chinese archaeologists. The altar is the earliest sacrificial site so far found in China, said He Gang, a researcher with the Hunan Institute of Archaeology. "Ancients prayed to the gods of nature, such as the gods of the earth, river and heaven," said He at a archaeological forum held by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently in Beijing. Archaeologists have found China's oldest white pottery specimens...

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY By Jonathan Alter Newsweek Updated: 6:17 p.m. ET Dec. 19, 2005 Dec. 19, 2005 - Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham...

HH: Very pleased to welcome Jonathan Alter to the Hugh Hewitt Show for the first time. We've had his colleague, Howard Fineman, on a number of times. But Jonathan Alter is of course a senior writer and reporter for Newsweek. You see him a lot of MSNBC and other cable channels, and yesterday authored a column on the Newsweek website, Bush's Snoopgate, which has become probably the most controversial thing written about the NSA surveillance of al Qaeda communicating with American citizens controversy. Jonathan Alter, welcome to the program. JA: Thanks very much, Hugh. HH: Were you on the Crimson...

Mark Finkelstein December 20, 2005 - 19:40 Chris Matthews might be off tonight, but with Andrea Mitchell sitting in, the hysterical anti-Bush beat goes on at Hardball. Mitchell interviewed a panel in which far-left Jonathan Alter was 'balanced' by the politically-androgynous David Gergen. When Alter surmised that the impeachment of President Bush is a real possibility in light of the NSA surveillance matter, Mitchell, rather than bursting into laughter, asked Gergen with a straight face: "Are we headed toward a constitutional crisis?" Gergen didn't seem to think so, but, ever the suck-up, later bent over backwards to congratulate Alter on...

Jonathan Alter provides a classic liberal misreading of the political dynamics at play in the leaked story on the NSA’s covert spy program. Alter reports that President Bush called in both the publisher and the executive editor of the New York Times on December 6 in a “futile attempt to talk them out of running the story…..one can only imagine the president’s desperation.” Alter ridicules the idea that Bush’s concern in seeing the story published was U.S. national security. No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story…..because he knew that it would reveal him as...

Presidential Kneepad Award (for Best Lewinsky Impression) First Place "The ironies for a President not given to irony are endless. Consider this: the best chance for Clinton to shine in history might be for Congress to force him to pay the price for lying about sex. In the unlikely event he is pushed from office, it would take only weeks, maybe just days, before a vast national remorse set in. We destroyed our lovable rogue prince of prosperity over this? Clinton would become a martyr to a legal system run amok. His defeat would mean victory over not just...

Dec. 19, 2005 - Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

In the New York Times Sunday book review, Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter checks out "Truth and Duty," the apologia from Mary Mapes, the disgraced former CBS News producer of "Memogate" infamy, in which she blames right-wing bloggers and everyone but herself for how her "expose" of Bush's National Guard duty blew up in the face of her network. The liberal Alter is highly critical of Mapes and CBS, but makes a rather paranoid and over-the-top claim about "Buckhead," the Atlanta attorney who originally questioned the fake documents used by CBS's "60 Minutes II" to attack President Bush's Texas Air...

Newsweek’s senior editor Jonathan Alter wrote an article for this week’s issue entitled “The Real Price of Propaganda” wherein he came down strongly against recent revelations that the Pentagon might be “buying” articles to be placed in Iraqi newspapers. On the one hand, there is some delicious irony in seeing an anti-propaganda column in an American periodical that is periodically so full of it. Yet, maybe more curious is how Alter seemed mostly disgusted by the amount of money the Pentagon might be paying for such an exercise without recognizing how inexpensive this is compared to the cost of waging...

I REALIZED Mary Mapes had not told the whole story of the CBS-National Guard fiasco when I looked in the index to her book for a reference to The Boston Globe. It wasn't there. Why is this such a telltale omission? In an article published in February 2004, seven months before CBS News imploded, The Globe, under the headline "Doubts Raised on Bush Accuser," essentially destroyed the credibility of a man named Bill Burkett, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard. Burkett claimed to have stumbled upon some of George W. Bush's Guard records in a trash can...

Paul Schroeder says that well-meaning people offer their condolences over Augie, "then they whisper to us, 'We oppose the war, too.' Why do they whisper?" Why? Because until now, the Bush White House has successfully peddled the idea that dissent is somehow unpatriotic. Paul and his wife, Rosemary, take a different view. "I think it's more patriotic to speak up," Rosemary says. "If the emperor has no clothes, or the president has no plan—then you have to speak out. Otherwise, you're putting all these lives in danger for no good cause." The good news about the president's bad week is...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill Friday that would have given special education students a reprieve from the state's high-stakes exit exam. The bill would have implemented a legal settlement between the California Department of Education and the Oakland-based Disability Rights Advocates, which filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of special education students. The bill sent to the governor by the Legislature differed from the settlement, however, and drew objections from the state's school superintendent. Schwarzenegger also vetoed a bill that would have eased the exit exam rules by allowing high school students to graduate without passing...

The "unConstitutional" Transfer of Powerand the Nullification Party an American Patriot July 30, 2005       On July 28, 2005 in "A "Treaty" by any other name is still a "TREATY," I questioned the constitutionality of the President entering an "agreement" without the 2/3rds vote of the Senate under Article II or the power of the President to introduce legislation to "regulate commerce" to Congress under Article I which vests that power to Congress.       I have since learned that CAFTA "legislation" was introduced under the Presidents "fast track authority." Since 1974, Presidents have used "fast-track authority" to negotiate foreign...

MOSUL, Iraq -- Jennifer Guay went to war to be a grunt. And the 170-pound former bartender from Leeds, Maine, with cropped red hair and a penchant for the bench press, has come pretty close. It was mid-February and Guay, 26, an Army specialist who was the first woman to be assigned as an infantry combat medic, was spending 10 hours a day on missions with the 82nd Airborne Division, dodging rockets and grenades in the crowded streets of Mosul. "Break-break-break: U.S. soldier down!" a hard-edged voice came over the radio. A gun battle had just broken out. In less...

But it does allow Obama to use what his Harvard Law School classmate Ken Mehlman, soon to be chairman of the Republican Party, calls his "star power" to work with the GOP on bridging Red-Blue divisions and getting some things done. The son of a black economist from Kenya and a white teacher from Kansas might be uniquely qualified to nudge the country toward the color purple. "One party seems to be defending a moribund status quo, and the other is defending an oligarchy," he says coolly. "It's not a very attractive choice." Obama's a Blue State Democrat, all right,...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

This gets my goat. Drudge had this first. If you go to the Link: USA Article hereUSA Today PictureYou will see a cropped picture attributed to Tim Sloan of AFP. Only One problem with that, Tim Sloans original Picture is contained here, which contains the message not cropped: Yahoo PictureIn the USA Today's article, the letters, R A G E can be seen if one puts them together. RAGE Just another example of someone at USA Today, which had the story bylined as staff instead of an actual person... Hmm I wonder why?, anyway, just another example like brokaw's ILied...

After Labor Day, the political calendar goes into a time warp. Everything speeds up. [Bob Shrum] figured that with most voters believing the country is on the "wrong track," all that Kerry had to do was establish his credibility as a potential commander in chief and he would win—hence the "bio" convention. No need to discredit Bush at all, because he was already thoroughly discredited. The Shrum strategy was the product of short-term thinking (the assumption that Bush's unpopularity in the period of the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal would last until fall) and was reinforced by the sealed and often...

Kerry and Shrum got it backward. If they'd sliced up Bush this summer, they could have used the debates to seem presidential. After Labor Day, the political calendar goes into a time warp. Everything speeds up. With voters finally starting to pay attention, a week is about the equivalent of a normal month in political time. In late October the intensity can be so great that creative campaigns sometimes accomplish in a single day what it might once have taken three months to imprint on the minds of the voters. We don't know yet if we'll see such inventiveness this...

In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine; Howard...

I'm in a rental car with Al Franken, and we're driving across New Hampshire on the Sunday before the nation's first primary, heading to a John Edwards rally. The Democrats are in a kooky mood following the sudden collapse of Howard Dean in Iowa, and Franken -- comedian, celebrity, scourge -- is spending two days in the state not in any official capacity but as a sort of good-will representative from the party's satiric wing. He is not, as you might think from the outrageous trappings of his comedy, an extreme lefty but rather a devout party man, one who...

Listening to Imus this morning and Jonathon Alter was his guest. Usually I turn him Alter off because he is such an insipid liberal, but Bill Bennett was in commercial so I left him on. Towards the end Imus asked him, "So how are things with you?" and Alter hesitated for a moment before giving a generic "Okay." Imus, sensing some comic opportunity, started asking about the state of his marriage, etc., before Alter finally revealed that he is undergoing chemotherapy. Imus was taken aback a bit. Alter didn't indicate what kind of cancer he had but clearly implied it...

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- A major taxpayer group is urging likely Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry to stop collaborating with the European Union (EU) to impose damaging tariffs on U.S. products being exported from key swing states in the upcoming presidential election. Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist noted that Kerry has been touting his popularity among foreign leaders in recent weeks. However, Norquist said he was shocked to learn the extent some foreign leaders will go to remove President George W. Bush from the White House in November. Norquist points to direct evidence of election tampering by...

The Smell of a Real Scandal The run-up to the Iraq war was more hype than lie. Medicare is a clearer example of dishonesty and corruption at high levelsBy Jonathan Alter NewsweekMarch 29 issue - The democrats are over the top. Last week the democratic National Committee was once again trying to close the propaganda gap with the GOP, which has a much surer instinct for the jugular. The DNC risked a lawsuit from Burger King with what the party calls its daily "Home of the Whopper" blast e-mail. This time the supposed Republican "lie" was that certain items for...