Msnbc

Your phrase "irate tea party protesters regard federal civilian employees as enemies of the people" is just unbelievable ("Help for the jobless?" Feb. 20). Is this a phrase of the day from Media Matters or Moveon.org? It is so spurious that I find it hard to believe a sane person would put it in anything sent out for a million people to read. I stopped watching MSNBC due to their continuous attacks on people rather than ideas, and you are more and more doing the same thing. The U.S. cannot continuously borrow 40 cents on every dollar it spends and last very much longer (see Greece)

Conservative analyst Pat Buchanan Thursday night confirmed what some in the worlds of politics and cable TV believed to be true for months: He hadn't just been suspended by MSNBC in the wake of his latest controversial book, he was through and would never be back on the cable channel again. “My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end,” Buchanan wrote Thursday in a post at The American Conservative. “After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.” Buchanan had been suspended since shortly after the October publication of his book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

With a caucus vote so close that the cable channels had to wait until all the votes were finally tallied at 2:34 a.m. Wednesday to declare a winner, Iowa was no place to be Tuesday night for media amateurs and ideologues. Which is to say there was only one TV place to be: CNN. Forget all the technological razzle-dazzle of "the flick" and a new and improved Magic Wall. Ignore the utterly confusing social-media map and the silliness of virtual "Weebles" to try and explain how caucuses work.

What ever happened to paying your dues? Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? Rags to riches? Those quintessential elements of the American dream have been replaced by a "child of" meritocracy in which your birth certificate means more than your resume. Chelsea Clinton has been added to NBC's stable of reporters, and the sound you hear is that of thousands of unemployed journalists weeping over their Starbucks applications. She is the latest in a growing list of children famous because their parents are famous becoming high profile broadcasters.

If you weren't watching MSNBC Tuesday night, you missed not only a great night of American politics, but also a glimpse of some of the forces that will shape the big war of 2012 that's heating up. First of all, thanks and much praise to MSNBC for putting so many resources into covering the effort by Wisconsin Democrats to take back the state senate through a recall vote of six Republican senators. The effort was a long shot given that one of the districts in which the recall took place had been GOP for over a 100 years.

I disagree with the one-sided approach Ed Schultz and MSNBC have taken in covering today's recall vote of state legislators in Wisconsin, but I praise the cable channel and its host for going out to the Midwest and covering this bellwether political and economic vote today. And while I have criticized Schultz's partisan rabblerousing, I also praise him for his ability to craft a coherent (and even brilliant if overstated) narrative to help his viewers make sense of life-changing events that are being spun like crazy by both sides and several players.

If nothing else, Monday night's dueling prime-time addresses to the nation by President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner hopefully woke more Americans up to the fact that we are at an epic moment in the nation's history. The narcissists and emotional adolescents in Congress and the White House have finally walked us to the edge of the cliff of international disgrace -- the brink of doing something shameful that this nation has never done. And at this crucial moment when we need the down-the-middle, keen analysis that CNN usually provides, what does the cable channel give us instead?

MSNBC is built on a lie, and it's one that the cable channel is never going to be able escape as long as sticks to its leftist ideological guns. That's what I kept thinking as I watched Keith Olbermann's strange, coded, wink-wink interview with Cenk Uygur last week on the new version of "Countdown. " (That's the nightly show that is doing so well that Olbermann and Current TV  have not released any ratings since the first week of July -- and those showed a 30 percent drop for Olbermann from his premiere week.)

After almost a week of speculation, it looks as if the Rev. Al Sharpton is going to be a new weeknight host on cable channel MSNBC. Sharpton, who has been filling in recent weeks on MSNBC, will reportedly be taking over the 6 p.m. timeslot that has been in play since Keith Olbermann  left the channel and Ed Schultz's "The Ed Show" was moved from 6 to 10 p.m. Cenk Uygur had been serving as host of the 6 p.m. hour. The speculation that Sharpton, a civil rights leader and radio talk show  host, would get the job was first reported in TVNewser on July 16. Read that here . Citing anonymous sources, The New York Times is now reporting it as "imminent.

Mark Halperin, editor-at-large of Time magazine and  senior political analyst for MSNBC, said on live TV Thursday morning that he thought President Barack Obama had been acting like a "dick. " Hours later, MSNBC suspended him, saying, "Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.