Why does Chris Matthews still have a job?

He’s always been this way: unpleasant, obnoxious, poorly informed, and just generally been a grating presence on the news. I don’t know what segment of the population he’s supposed to appeal to — I don’t think he’s liked by either the right or the left — and Matthews has a serious misogyny issue.

This tendency to objectify women in his orbit has bled into his treatment of female politicians and candidates. He has repeatedly lusted over women in politics on air, including remarking in 2011 that there’s “something electric” and “very attractive” about the way former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin walks and moves, and noting in 2017 that acting attorney general Sally Yates is “attractive, obviously.” But he has reserved a particular contempt for the woman who made it closest to ascending the heights of American political power, Hillary Clinton, calling her “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “She-Devil.” The Cut obtained footage of him joking in early 2016, just before a live interview with then candidate Clinton, “where’s that Bill Cosby pill,” referring to the date-rape drug. In 2005, he openly wondered whether the troops would “take the orders” from a female president; after another interview, he pinched Clinton’s cheek; and in another, he suggested that she had only had so much political success because her husband had “messed around.” This evening anchor, in addition to everything else, has repeatedly challenged whether women are legitimate politicians or could be president at all. “I was thinking how hard it is for a woman to take on a job that’s always been held by men,” he said of Clinton in 2006.

When MSNBC was constantly being labeled as a left-leaning news channel, I just had to look at Chris Matthews to wonder what they were smoking.

I guess he’s been yanked from all of MSNBC’s election coverage, at last. Now they just need to fire him.

The media have lost the plot

Last week, Donald Trump gave a couple of press conferences that were the apotheosis of Trumpian incoherence and inanity — he rambled on in his usual stream-of-consciousness style, exposing the fact that he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and announced that the person who was in charge of the COVID-19 response was Mike Pence, who is the opposite of a responsible, informed choice (put him in charge of the Prayer Team, OK?), and later took direct action by announcing a crackdown on Mexican border crossings (our cases of COVID-19 are not coming from Mexico). Yet at the same time, our media blandly treats this as routine.

Wednesday’s briefing was arguably the most abnormal moment yet in a profoundly abnormal presidency.

But top news organizations, rather than accurately representing Trump’s alarming behavior, made it sound like nothing untoward happened at all.

They made it sound like some real news was made: That Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus; that the president urged calm.

But even the Pence “news” appears to be a sham, and a clusterfuck: In addition to being basically a fuck-you to the medical community — given Pence’s proud defiance of scientific truths — it was apparently a last-minute decision based on political optics that blindsided Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who at the same time insisted that he was still in charge.

This one really wasn’t hard. It was obvious to anyone listening to Trump’s rambling, often incoherent, self-centered, stream-of-consciousness ad-libbing – much of it straight out of his political rallies — that:

  • Trump had no real understanding of what he was talking about.
  • He had no sense of what was required of him as president.
  • He sees this as being all about him.
  • There are only so many things that can come out of his head.

    • No, the New York Times is not pointing out the idiocy of this president.

    But at the New York Times, Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland and Katie Rogers engaged in something even worse than stenography: The cherrypicking of quotes that weren’t incoherent, that in no way whatsoever indicated the true nature of the briefing. They led off:

    President Trump named Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday to coordinate the government’s response to the coronavirus, even as he repeatedly played down the danger to the United States of a widespread domestic outbreak.

    Nothing in that story told readers what they most needed to know.

    Even in a sidebar on Trump’s credibility, Annie Karni, Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman simply called Trump’s briefing “casual”. Then they punted:

    Mr. Trump could face a moment of reckoning. Maintaining a calm and orderly response during an epidemic, in which countless lives could be at stake, requires that the president be a reliable public messenger.

    There was also a cutesy sidebar by Katie Rogers about Trump’s self-declared germophobia.

    Inexcusable.

    It’s maddening. The more serious the media outlet, the more likely they are to pretend the drooling clown at the top of the country as a serious thinker, because the Newspaper of Record would find it beneath their dignity to expose a madman.

    Although I will say that I watched a little bit of CNN on Friday night, and they were discussing the reasons we should be concerned about a COVID-19 pandemic, and they did come right out and say that one of the exacerbating factors for this disease is “incompetent leadership”. That ought to be the lead story in every newspaper every day. “THE PRESIDENT IS INCOMPETENT”, 72 point bold font, all the time until he’s run out of town on a rail.

    P.S. The president also put Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s new wife, in charge of all coronavirus communications. He’s not only incompetent, he’s corrupt and handing out jobs to cronies. No one will care.

    My representative is in Cracked

    Cracked identified The 5 Most Garbage Democrats In Congress, and I knew upon reading just the title that my rep, Collin Peterson, would be on the list. He is. He’s #2.

    It sure seems like the climate crisis has split American politics straight down party lines, with Democrats with the 99% of scientists who’ve declared it a global crisis and Republicans, as always, with the 1%. But whoever believes that hasn’t met Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who would set the world on fire himself if it would get his farmers a warmer harvest season.

    Peterson is one of the last members of the “Blue Dog Coalition,” which sounds like a D.C. garage band made up entirely of dudes in Birkenstocks, but is actually a faction of Dems who are fiscally conservative and socially apathetic — the kind of Democrats whom Republicans vote for when they want their bi daughter to show up for Thanksgiving. And never having a progressive thought in his head is exactly how Collins manages to stay in office as a Democrat while representing one of the thickest parts of Minnesota’s Trump-friendly farm belt. In fact, Collins leans more Republican than some Republicans, being one of only three Democrats who voted against impeachment and one of two who put their names under a letter asking the Supreme Court to pretty please reconsider revoking abortion rights.

    But Peterson’s blackest mark is a sooty one, as he’s the only establishment Democrat still firmly in the climate denial camp, the kind of guy who doesn’t believe in global warming because “we’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had.” As the House Agriculture Chairman, Collins is constantly pushing green deals onto the back burner (the coal one he leaves running all day), pretending farmers are being victimized by green activists and running a scorched-earth policy on climate legislation. No really, his solution for solving the wildfire crisis is to destroy every inch of wilderness to protect his precious farms.

    And if you’re wondering how many bridges Peterson is willing to flood for his constituents, this is a man who helped pass a bill to cut aid for starving Yemeni children so he could get his hands on farming funds quicker. Real salt of the earth, this guy.

    At every election I’m told to do the expedient thing and vote for this jerk to empower the other, real Democrats. I’m not going to fall for that line anymore. If Peterson is a Democrat, then the Democratic party stands for nothing.

    The Anti-Greta

    The right wing authoritarians recently looked around and noticed that they have a girl gap. While the reality-based community has Greta Thunberg, they had nothing — so they cast about desperately, found Naomi Seibt, and the Heartland Institute elevated her to be their Anti-Greta spokesperson. Only they tried a little too hard, and got someone who is the antithesis of Greta in all things.

    Where Greta’s consistent message is, “Listen to the scientists”, the Anti-Greta says the scientists are all wrong.

    Where Greta is painfully, passionately honest, the Anti-Greta is a carefully groomed liar. Here’s a perfect example of an obvious lie.

    The teenager, from Münster in western Germany, claims she is “without an agenda, without an ideology”. But she was pushed into the limelight by leading figures on the German far right and her mother, a lawyer, has represented politicians from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in court.

    Seibt had her first essay published by the “anti-Islamisation” blog Philosophia Perennis and was championed by Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, who has been denied entry to the UK and US because of his political activism.

    Anybody who claims to be without an agenda or an ideology is lying. That she also supports right-wing bigotry is more evidence that she lies.

    Also, the Heartland Institute is paying her, and they are an evil and ethically bankrupt institution. Good grief, they lobby for the tobacco industry and fracking, as well as against climate change. The Anti-Greta is their puppet.

    I think I’d rather be on the side of the genuinely good, like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai. That’s my agenda, my ideology, and I’m proud to say it.

    Don’t you make me vote for Elizabeth Warren, Ann!

    My wife has been edging me into the Bernie Sanders camp over the last few months, and I should be listening to her, but Ann Coulter sings a siren song for Warren.


    Sen. Warren has convinced me that Bernie isn’t that worrisome. He’ll never get anything done. SHE’S the freak who will show up with 17 idiotic plans every day and keep everyone up until it gets done.

    Now I’m confused again. Is she trying to use reverse psychology to steer us away from the candidate she really fears, Sanders, or is she accidentally revealing that she recognizes who the real powerhouse is, Warren?

    At least she isn’t trying to trick us into voting for Bloomberg. Mike must have forgotten to send her a check.

    The child in the oval office

    Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor, is running for congress in Kansas (poor Kansas, haven’t they suffered enough?), so of course the NY Times has to write a puff piece for him. Jackson has the endorsement of the Trump crime family, which ought to be sufficient to round up the support of the far right, but to make sure the centrist propaganda organ of the nation has to weigh in, too.

    The only thing interesting is the closing paragraphs.

    During his infamous news conference, Mr. Jackson said his goal was to help Mr. Trump lose 10 to 15 pounds and that he planned to bring an exercise bike or elliptical machine into the White House residence.

    Mr. Jackson said those plans never came to pass. (Mr. Trump had gained four pounds by his following physical.) “The exercise stuff never took off as much as I wanted it to,” he said. “But we were working on his diet. We were making the ice cream less accessible, we were putting cauliflower into the mashed potatoes.”

    Good grief. Trump really is a creature of impulsive appetites, isn’t he? He has a doctor on call, which sounds like a wonderful idea to me, but Trump ignores his advice altogether to the point that they have to resort to subterfuge to get him to do anything, like a child.

    Maybe they could strap his phone to his exercise bike, so he has to sit on the bike to use it? Power the phone with a generator so he has to pedal to use Twitter? Nah, far easier to just have Ben Garrison draw him as slim and muscular.

    Weinstein GUILTY!

    Harvey Weinstein is now a convicted rapist.

    Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of sexual assault in a New York court Monday, the first conviction to emerge from the dozens of misconduct allegations against the once-powerful movie producer.

    The jury determined that Weinstein forced a sex act on former production assistant Mimi Haleyi at his apartment in July 2006 and raped former aspiring actress Jessica Mann at a hotel in 2013.

    Lock him up, I never want to hear about him again.

    A new contender for fake university has arisen!

    For years, we laughed at Kent Hovind for his Ph.D. from a degree mill, the absurd Patriot University, a cheap house in Colorado. This “university”:

    It looks like they spent more money on landscaping than on their faculty.

    But now, a new ridiculous “university” has emerged, and a new photo of a joke institution. Hello, Reagan National University!

    Impressive. It is matched only by their elaborate web presence, which if you followed that link, is this:

    It apparently has no faculty and no students, but it is accredited, for real. This story broke because pesky journalists started poking around revelations about dodgy accreditation practices.

    Twice, on Jan. 29 and Feb. 12, a reporter visited the listed addresses for Reagan National University in Sioux Falls. In one location, the doors were locked, and the office suite was dark. Both had signs bearing the school’s name. At another location, the suite was mostly empty, save for some insulation scattered on the floor and a shop vacuum.

    In case you didn’t know, you shouldn’t be able to put up a shingle and call yourself a university. There is a regular accreditation process in which teams of experts descend upon your university and check over the facts: how many students do you have, how many faculty, what are the available expertise and facilities, how is assessment done, how are students faring after their degree…it’s a massive amount of work. We just went through this here at UMM — I contributed tiny bits of information in my faculty role, but we also had a committee that had to put together a fat report, and the accreditors will tell us what needs to be improved, and we will take their recommendations very, very seriously and struggle to implement them before they fall upon us again. Accreditation is about standards and maintaining quality of education.

    Except when it isn’t.

    The accreditation agency is central to the process, and there are some of those around that aren’t quite as rigorous. Morris is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. Every good university will make it clear how they are accredited.

    Patriot University is ‘accredited’ by Accrediting Commission International, a religious organization based in Florida that puts their seal of approval on Bible colleges. They do not have any affiliation with the US Department of Education or the government, and are proud of that fact. Patriot University is likewise proud of not accepting those secular standards of accreditation.

    Reagan National University is accredited by ACICS, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools. They claim to have some rigor, with site visits and evaluations, but somehow they missed the fact that RNU doesn’t have any faculty or students. That’s not a good sign.

    At first glance, the ACICS correspondence with Reagan appears to be a purposeful response to a struggling school, said Antoinette Flores, an accreditation expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

    But the correspondence doesn’t address the apparent absence of faculty and students that USA TODAY uncovered this winter.

    “You accredited this institution. How did you miss this?” Flores said.

    That Reagan sought ACICS approval in 2017, when its future as an accreditor was unclear, should also raise questions, she said. The Department of Education recognizes many groups that can accredit colleges, and universities sometimes have multiple options to choose from. Some groups may have higher standards than others.

    “I don’t think this bodes well for them,” she said of ACICS. “They had said that they’re turning themselves around.”

    When the accrediting body faced closure in 2016, some of its colleges found new accreditors.

    The ones that were left with ACICS, said Michael Itzkowitz, a senior fellow who studies higher education at Third Way, a left-leaning think tank, probably couldn’t find accreditation elsewhere.

    “They’re the bottom of the barrel,” he said.

    ACICS seems to be mainly in the business of collecting fees to rubber stamp college accreditation requests. They’ve been slapped down before, and have risen again thanks to…can you guess?

    The agency in question, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools, has a history of approving questionable colleges, with devastating consequences. It accredited ITT Tech, Corinthian Colleges and Brightwood College, massive for-profit universities whose sudden closures last decade left thousands of students without degrees and undermined the value of the education of those who did graduate. Those closures led President Barack Obama’s Education Department to strip ACICS’ powers in 2016.

    After a federal court decision, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and President Donald Trump’s administration reinstated the accrediting agency. By that point, it had lost dozens of colleges and their membership fees. It needed new members, and fast.

    The decision in 2017 to approve Reagan National University as a viable college – one that today lacks the discernible hallmarks of higher learning – calls into question ACICS’ ability to hold colleges accountable for the education they’re supposed to provide.

    So now in addition to diploma mills that gouge students for worthless degrees, we have accreditation mills that gouge diploma mills for fake seals of approval. Sitting atop the scammer’s food chain is Betsy DeVos’s department of education. It’s yet another thing Donald Trump has corrupted.

    At least it’s fitting that the ‘university’ is named after Ronald Reagan.

    Cruel, incoherent “activism”

    I read the story a few times — it’s short — and I still don’t know what these “activists” were trying to accomplish. At the time of the Nevada Democratic debate, a group calling themselves P.U.T.I.N. (“Pigeons United To Interfere Now”) glued little red MAGA hats on the heads of pigeons and released them in Las Vegas. Why? I don’t know. Was it to protest Russian interference, to mock the Republicans, or to ridicule Democrats? I have no idea. It just seems to be a petty exercise in animal cruelty with no point.

    It’s not even funny or clever, only ineffective and confusing. It’s a good demonstration that, while it’s good to be motivated to do something, some thought needs to be put into your plans and you must have specific goals that are served by your actions. Whoever pulled this stunt was heedless of the animals they were coercing.