Dylan Ratigan with the single most sane, coherent political diatribe about terrorism ever

Sure Dylan loses his mind every once in a while, but this is a series of brilliant observations about the nature of the war on terror and cognitive dissonance.

Mor lik dis plz.

What's going on? The media is actually fact-checking and calling out wingnuts.

OK, no surprise here... Dylan Ratigan lays into Rep. Kevin Brady (R_TX) who refuses to answer Dylan's questions and tries to obfuscate and change the subject several times.

HuffPost

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) looked uncomfortable when MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan introduced him Tuesday afternoon to talk about unemployment benefits and Wall Street greed. Brady's discomfort proved well-founded.

Ratigan tore into the Texas Republican, who voted against the extension of unemployment benefits but for the Wall Street bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Brady repeatedly attempted to deflect Ratigan's harsh line of questioning on the nature of Wall Street by arguing that potential -- not actual -- tax increases are stifling capital investment and thus job creation, but the MSNBC host didn't let up.

"I know you have an issue with the government, but I've got an issue with a private industry that's using the government to rape my country of its money, and I'd like to try to put a stop to that," Ratigan said.

"We are facing higher taxes in energy and income and capital and dividends," Brady argued, not for the last time. "All those tax proposals are what's keeping our recovery from gaining steam--"

"That's a lie. That's a lie," Ratigan shot back. "What's keeping our recovery from gaining steam is the fact that the financial industry is stealing America's money, depriving this country of any investment whatsoever, and that is the entire basis of our system, and the government has converted it from an investment vehicle into a vehicle for it to steal money for its rich friends."

The MSNBC host ended the segment on a frustrated note, complaining that Brady simply retreated to his talking points. "I'm done with you," Ratigan said, after he challenged Brady to answer his questions and his guest resumed talking about possible future taxes.

Here's Mark Haines of CNBC with Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Bader is trying to flog the right-wing talking point that the Gulf Oil Spill isn't cleaned up because the President has refused foreign help because of a piece of legislation called the Jones Act — a 1920 law stipulating that commerce between U.S. ports needs to occur on U.S. ships. The claim is that Obama is citing the Jones Act at the command of his Big Union overlords.

ThinkProgress

Haines noted that 68 different offers of foreign cleanup help have been accepted, and then challenged Bader to cite examples of the Jones Act causing a problem:

HAINES: How many rejections under the Jones Act?

BADER: I don’t know how many.

HAINES: Excuse me, Senator McCarthy, you can’t tell us how many there are? I want the facts, give us hard facts, give us evidence, not innuendo, not baseless accusations, okay? It’s offensive to intelligence. The fact is sir, you have told us there are examples of rejections and you can not name a single one.

Lehman meltdown, accounting gimmick "like a drug"

Dylan Ratigan's easy to follow primer into what went wrong, with former Governor Elliott Spitzer:



Also read an excellent compilation of sources from Huff Post

Dylan Ratigan calls out Joe Wilson on health care

WILSON: I'll take you to the poorest county in South Carolina, Allendale, a very nice hospital. I'll take you to another county which is very depressed.

RATIGAN: South Carolina has the 33rd worst health care in America, according to The Commonwealth Fund. America has the most expensive health care in the world and the 37th highest quality. We pay more than any country in the world. We have huge amounts of money going to special interests. Our budget is dominated by health care and people don't have coverage.

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Full segment here

Combat television on MSNBC

In the past week, there have been several interesting sparring matches on MSNBC as it seems that liberals are trying to grow a set of balls.

First was Joe Scarborough and Max Bluementhal. Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah argues that the Republican party has been hijacked by right-wing evangelical Christians. Scarborough began pressing Blumenthal on why he feels that evangelical Christians have no right to participate in politics, but the conversation quickly shifted to a discussion on extremism.

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Then there's the Dylan Ratigan/Betsy McCaughey feud. Betsy McCaughey is a liar (famously exposed by Jon Stewart over the summer) whom the media keep inviting on their programs to continue to lie about health care. And so, today she ended up on Dylan Ratigan's Morning Meeting with Representative Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). There was a brief, mad moment where I thought that this might end well, but it didn't.

The tactics McCaughey deploys in situations like this are a heavy-duty pretense that she supports health care reform, the Palin-esque answer-a-question-with-an-answer-to-a-question-of-her-liking technique, the ability to quickly provide information and opinion that's completely beside the point, et cetera. Unfortunately, Ratigan wanted to have a discussion on health care competition and cost containment, and that didn't dovetail too well with what McCaughey prefers to do in such a debate: set aside all substantive issues so that she can fearmonger about seniors being killed by the government.

And so, McCaughey unleashed her SENIOR CITIZEN HEALTH CARE APOCALYPSE nonsense, accusing Weiner of being ignorant and telling Ratigan that he wasn't a "fair moderator," to which Ratigan replied, "Well, you're not a fair answerer." Ratigan gamely attempted to get McCaughey to reconcile how she'd continue to provide the current level of unsustainable funding to Medicare without updating the system to address its inefficiencies, to no avail.

McCAUGHEY: This will go down in history as one of the most browbeating interviews in television history.

RATIGAN: I hope that it does, and maybe you'll learn to go on television to answer questions as opposed to casting accusations.

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