Progressive News Feeds

Chris Matthews tore into RNC Chairman Reince Priebus during an appearance on Morning Joe on Monday, accusing the Romney campaign of “playing that little ethnic card” in its false attacks against welfare reform and jokes about birtherism. “You can play your games and giggle about it….[but] Obama being a foreigner is the thing your party has been pushing. [Campaign co-chair John] Sununu pushed it, everyone is pushing it in your party,” Matthews declared.

Tags: author, congress, european, facebook, health, lgbt, msnbc, progressive news, science

From: Leslie Savan Leslie Savan It depends on which cable news channel you glanced at this morning. 

Tags: arizona, cnn, hospitality, msnbc, script, supreme-court, the constitution, var-oldonload

Sarah Arnold Our readers sound off on the NBA Finals, the student protests in Quebec and our Islamophobia issue.

Tags: chris-hayes, columbia, editor, elementary school, entertainment, harvard, human interest, islamophobia, msnbc, quebec, script, typeof-window-onload

From: Allison Kilkenny Allison Kilkenny Thousands of activists in Mexico continue to protest the G20 while certain US media pundits blather away about trivialities. 

Tags: activism, function-load, los cabos, mexico, msnbc, script, technology, war

An annual survey of Americans on the civility of our national life is out, and once again, the media’s high up on the list of folks people apparently blame. 55 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed said they thought that the country was getting less civilized. And of those people, 50 percent said the media was a contributor, just behind Kids These Days at 55 percent, and above celebrities at 42 percent. (Only 29 percent of respondents said they thought sports figures were helping make America less civil.) 65 percent of overall respondents said that the tone of American popular culture was generally uncivil, while 62 percent said that the tone of the media was generally uncivil. Fox News was perceived to be less civil than MSNBC by a narrow margin: 35 percent of respondents said the former was generally uncivil in tone, while 31 percent said the same about the latter. There’s no question that people perceive some level of incivility to be a negative: in the 2012 study, 81 percent of respondents told the folks who conducted the survey said they thought incivility in government was a danger to the country’s future, and 72 percent said incivility was turning potential public servants away from government. And they self-report tuning out political advertising at a rate of 66 percent, election coverage at a rate of 54 percent, and opinion journalism at a rate or 49 percent and reported news at a rate of 45 percent, though that doesn’t mean those numbers are an accurate depiction of their actual behavior. But when it comes to media and popular culture, I tend to think that we find incivility exciting. Conflict is a great driver of narrative, whether it’s the kind of nastiness that leads people on the same side of a war to try to off each other in the midst of a battle in Game of Thrones or high school meanness to be overcome through song in Glee . Tyrion Lannister and Coach Sylvester are fan favorites (or were, prior to their gross overuse) in part because they’re good with zingers. In Tyrion’s case, his verbal slaps are generally aimed at worthy targets, but that doesn’t make him a paragon of sweetness and light. We love mean people on reality television as long as they seem smart rather than delusional. And when it comes to celebrity gossip, our consumptive habits suggest we’re giant hypocrites: we adore nothing more than to destroy someone and then cheer their rise so we can do it all over again. It’s fun to condemn incivility in principal, but everything about our choices suggests that a lot of the time, we have an enormous amount of fun with it.

Tags: action, economy, feeds, health, msnbc, tweets, war

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) unwilling admitted to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Friday afternoon that he believed women who receive abortions should face criminal charges. “I think the punishment should certainly be very serious,” he said. “It should be more than a civil case. It should be something very serious”: MATTHEWS: So it should be a criminal matter for the woman as well as the doctor? STEARNS: I think so . You are killing an embryo and in some cases you are killing an embryo that is four or five months into gestation. Watch it: Stearns was appearing on the program to talk about the GOP’s recent effort to ban sex-selective abortions. That bill, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act or PRENDA, failed earlier this week and would have fined and imprisoned doctors who knowingly aborted fetuses based on racial or gender discrimination. The congressman sought to defend the measure by arguing that “if all of Europe and most of Asia has this same rule, that you cannot have sex selection as an abortion, why can’t we in the united states pass the same bill?” But Matthews responded succinctly, saying, “it’s always amazing when you guys on the right want to import the values of other countries. Any time we do it, any time a liberal tries to do it, you say they’re bringing foreign values into this country.”

Tags: chris matthews, cliff-stearns, climate, economy, facebook, home page, msnbc, science, thinkprogress

From: Katie Halper Katie Halper A few bad men. 

Tags: election-2012, function-load, jesus-christ, msnbc, saul alinksy, south carolina, var-addtl, var-oldonload

Conservative contributor Pat Buchanan’s tenure at MSNBC may have finally come to an end. AP reports that MSNBC president Phil Griffin has indicated the controversial former presidential candidate will not be allowed back on the network after the release of his latest book. “Suicide of a Superpower” has been roundly condemned for its racially-charged content, including chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” Griffin said , “When Pat was on his book tour, because of the content of the book, I didn’t think it should be part of the national dialogue much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.” As ThinkProgress has reported, Buchanan has a long history of bigotry and has made many offensive statements while in the network’s employ. 275,000 people signed a petition calling on MSNBC to fire him.

Tags: author, buchanan-over, economy, feeds, lgbt, msnbc, newt gingrich, pat-buchanan, security, the nation, thinkprogress

From: Greg Mitchell Greg Mitchell

Tags: annie appel, australia, function-load, msnbc, social issues, tim pool, typeof-window-onload, var-oldonload

From: Nation in the News Nation in the News How bad will the supercommittee’s failure be for America?

Tags: economy, editor, function-load, government, msnbc, the new york daily news, us politics, var-oldonload