There aren’t too many people who I’d be really that impressed to meet. To be perfectly honest/obnoxious I’ve already met most of the people who I ever wanted to meet, or else they’re dead. Just three people come to mind who I’d be humbled to find myself face to face with and all are women: Oprah Winfrey, Patti Smith and Rachel Maddow.

In the above clip, Rachel Maddow shows why she’s such an important, even necessary, figure in the American media. Although David Letterman is obviously throwing her well-intentioned, and respectful softballs, she says here what more sane and responsible people who have an audience should be saying about Fox News, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart: “Scaring white people is good politics on the conservative side of the spectrum.” Bravo, Ms. Maddow, keep it up!!

Oh man, I’ve been in Maddow’s hopelessly swooning harem since I started listening to her 5 yrs ago on Air America. She’s pretty much the only media girlfriend that me & my wife can share in Imaginationland.

smart broads with glasses turn me on.

Rachel is a phenomenon - as I watch her over the course of evolving news cycles I see an effect on the outside world…how the “world” reacts or responds to her reporting, almost like a TV series that comes to life. Yes, this is what FOX does too, but I’ve never seen the Yin to that Yang in this way.  Rachel is a hero!

This is one sad, sorry web site. Dangerous minds? You’re neither. More like Entertainment Tonight. You people think you are so smart and clever with your juvenile mashups and celeb slobs and yet you are utter pawns, fan eunuchs, cyphers.

You truly have no idea not only why you will never have any power in this country—but why you are part of the problem.

Madcow,

your moniker says it all.

I really love it when cynical, preachy people show up to complain about something yet offer very little in the way of useful information.

I think Dangerous Minds could still grow to be a very useful and “powerful” (what does this mean anymore anyway?) presence in the spreading of strange and interesting ideas… One website won’t change the world, obviously… But being an established and visible part of the media patchwork of can’t possibly hurt, as “Madcow” claims it apparently is. “Part of the problem” or whatever.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the easiest way to become established is to find an audience by putting the most saccharine-like shit all up front. Things like the “juvenile mash ups”. Funny, odd or experimental videos (I was actually really impressed with the “PHONOVIDEO” post). These are fairly innocuous things to be passed around, but I’m sure a few curious people eventually wander over to the DM interviews and find Doug Rushkoff or Joe Bageant or someone who may ever-so-gently peel their TV-zombified brains open to slightly funnier ideas. Are they all part of the problem too, Madcow? What exactly is “the problem” anyway? I equate all this quasi-frivolous stuff with something like a band’s “hit single”... Like-minded people need to find each other before they can ..uh.. do anything about anything.

Personally, I wish Dangerous Minds would more interviews. Why not seek out people like Amy Goodman, or “Pinky” of the Pinky Show? Maybe even Julian Assange via skype or something? Use this fucking thing to make some real noise… you know?

Anyway, Maddow seems more intelligent than most of the talking heads on TV, and she also seems to truly have some sense of decency, which is rare. For what she is and is doing, I like her. But I’m sure I’m just part of the problem too. Who the fuck isn’t.

Ms Maddow has a calm sense of clarity, an inclusive sort of intelligence and a rabid persistence of the truth…qualities that are very much in short supply in this Idiocracy we call the USofA

As someone who’s not a conservative or a liberal, she seems to me as nutty as any pundit on the right. She’s not as bad as Keith Olbermann but she’ll get there eventually. Honestly, I really don’t see the difference. Sweeping generalizations, fearmongering, etc. It makes her some money though.

Oh Mom, I knew you were keeping track of DM. Stop with the Madcow postings and start yr own blog.

It’s odd that anyone would consider her in the same ilk as O’Reilly or Olberman—she is neither hyperbolic nor hysterical, but calm and clear, and willing to offer facts and examples rather than conjecture.  I think her rebuttal to O’Reilly’s claim about how “his ratings were bigger than hers” was the most dead-on dissection of Fox News: there are fishing shows that get bigger ratings than either O’Reilly or Maddow—so what?  The news is supposed to be about facts, not ratings.

The great irony of the whole NAACP/Breitbart/Sharrod case is that now Breitbart and the Tea Partiers ARE trying to distance themselves from racism just like the NAACP requested, by holding “Uni-Tea” parties to showcase their diversity (though arguably they aren’t succeeding to any great degree.)