In any case, let's make that one stick, like "Friedman unit" et al.  It becomes a daily reminder of what these guys are really like.

BTD: "Speaking for me only."

Not on this one, you aren't. You speak for me, too.

Howard Fineman, to put it bluntly, is a political weathervane, as was (is?) most of his colleagues at MSNBC. Such people will always err on the side of whomever they currently perceive as the powers-that-be.

Look at MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who for years on Hardball couldn't praise the GOP enough when they held the reins of power, and who on May 3, 2003 practically stained his drawers on the air when President George W. Bush alighted from that jet onto the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to proclaim "Mission Accomplished" to a "grateful" nation:

"And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?" ...

"He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him -- I mean, he seems like -- he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does." ...

"He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. We're proud of our President. Americans love having a guy as President, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits. We don't want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president." ... (Emphasis mine.)

"You know, it's funny. I shouldn't talk about ratings. I don't always pay attention to them, but last night was a riot because, at the very time Henry Waxman was on -- and I do respect him on legislative issues -- he was on blasting away, and these pictures were showing last night, and everybody's tuning in to see these pictures again."

Contrast Matthews' fawning and drooling back then to the vitriole he belched at us only two short months ago, on the same day Bush delivered his valedictory to an "ungrateful" nation that collectively could not care any less about the guy, except as a sorry punchline to some very black humor:

"He was a rich kid driving his father's car. He got to be President because of his father, let's face it, the same way he got into school and everything else, the same way he got his car probably. But the scary thing about Bush is somewhere he came to meet people like Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz and Feith and the rest of them." ...

"The scary thing about Bush is he picked up on --- almost in the way that a hermit crab does --- another identity in becoming President. ... He became this new scholar of freedom, and he's going to spend the rest of his life selling this stuff. This stuff cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqis, it cost the lives of 4,000 U.S. service people." ...

"The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that's going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he's still selling it, and that's the tragedy of the last eight years." ...

There needs to be a reckoning with these ki$$-a$$, finger-wagging denizens of the Beltway's media establishment, of which the good Mr. Fineman and Mr. Matthews are clearly a part, and also their corporate owners / benefactors.

When you compare their median income with their resultant work product, and toss in all those numbers strongly suggesting that more people now trust cable TV's Comedy Central for actual news than the mainstream news media, and it is eminently clear that something is very, very wrong here. We should not tolerate being repeatedly misled so badly by the Beltway elite of the Fourth Estate.

What an odd view of reality.....

Because the Palestinians do not have as powerful a lobby, it is ok for Israel to confiscate their land.

But my real feeling is that the dems may have won the congress - but they still were completely intimidated by Bush and remained so until the end of his second term. So when Fineman said, "They can't stand Bush, but didn't have much faith in their own party's prospects", I can understand it because the dems were republican lite. They still haven't come out of it - although now and then there is a glimmer of light - but just a glimmer.

Fineman is just another stuffed shirt with an opinion. I don't know how these people are chosen to spew their half-baked offerings. They are like someone's pompous uncle at a family gathering spouting their views on politics.

There were those who suffered from ODS