“Okay, that makes absolutely no sense…”

Lawrence O’Donnell: 

[I]f the Super Committee is deadlocked and cannot make recommendations to Congress or if the Super Committee’s recommendations are voted down by Congress, automatic spending cuts will be triggered. 50% from domestic spending and 50% from defense spending.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: 

If it fails, either to produce something or if Congress fails to act on it, you can be sure that the President will honor his promise to veto any legislation that would extend the Bush high income tax cuts beyond 2012, which would, of course, create nearly $1 trillion in revenue raisers when that happens.

Lawrence O’Donnell: 

Okay, that makes absolutely no sense… What the White House and the media so far seem to not understand about that is the President will never, ever have a chance to veto legislation that would extend only the Bush top tax bracket. no Democrat or Republican has offered or will ever offer a bill that extends only the Bush top tax rate. if such a bill were offered and passed in both bodies, which will never happen, yeah, the President would veto it. But the President’s firm veto threat you just heard is for a mythological tax bill that no one has ever suggested and no one will be in favor of. Republicans want to maintain all of the Bush tax rates, including the bottom one. not just the top tax rate. Democrats and the President want to maintain all of the Bush tax rates except the top Bush tax bracket.

That is what the President campaigned on in his Presidential campaign, that is what he tried to achieve last December and the game of chicken on the tax breaks the Republicans have won come down to this, if Republicans take no action, all the Bush tax breaks will expire and all the tax brackets, including the bottom tax bracket, currently at 10%, that will go up to 15%. they’ll all go up. so far the President and the Democrats are more in favor of preserving the lower Bush tax brackets than they are in favor of raising the top tax bracket. that, and only that, is why the President didn’t raise the top tax bracket back in December and that is why legislatively he will never be offered a stand-alone opportunity to do nothing but raise the top Bush tax bracket. Until the President decides that, if necessary, in order to get the top income tax bracket raised, he is willing to see every tax bracket go up, then the Republicans will always, always win the fight to extend the Bush tax rates.

Watch

“In 2005, the Bush CIA actually closed its unit whose mission had been to hunt Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants. We don‘t know where Osama bin Laden was until 2005. But we do know that the home, that he was found in, was built for him in 2005. That same year that the CIA closed the unit that was hunting bin Laden.

Somehow that year, bin Laden got the feeling that he could settle down comfortably in a walled fortress in a Pakistan suburb.”

Lawrence O’Donnell

Watch

“There are viewers of this program that wish I would never mention the name Donald Trump.  They‘ve had enough.  So have I.  I wish May 16th  [when NBC announces Trumps position in next season‘s prime time schedule]  was coming tomorrow.  But as long as Trump continues to try to influence our thinking about American politics and the presidency, I believe his lies must be fought.

Because Trump‘s position in our culture now is sadly no longer simply a television entertainer who lies about nothing more important than how much money he has.  When Donald Trump said, quote, “I have a great relationship with the blacks.  I‘ve always had a great relationship with the blacks,” end quote, a black friend of mine e-mailed me saying, “one clue that you might not have a great relationship with the blacks is that you call them the blacks.” 

No, Trump is not just an entertainer any more.  He is now a very dangerous man who must be stopped from doing the damage to this country he may or may not know that he‘s doing.  Donald Trump has become America‘s front man for the legitimizing of hatred and racism.” - Lawrence O’Donnell

“Ratings for the host who replaced Mr. Olbermann, Lawrence O’Donnell, are down about 10 percent from Mr. Olbermann’s results from the same period a year ago, and, more significantly, down about 22 percent from Mr. Olbermann’s performance in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Those figures are all in the category of viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, the group that television news organizations sell to advertisers, which makes it the all-important one.

(…)

A big concern among MSNBC executives was potential mass defections from Mr. Olbermann’s most loyal viewers. Some of those younger viewers seem to have defected –- at least for now — from MSNBC at 8 p.m. But so far that has not affected the channel’s 9 p.m. host, Rachel Maddow. Her ratings are essentially the same as they were before Mr. Olbermann left.

For his part, Mr. O’Donnell has been showing an aggressive side in recent commentaries that seem to take a page directly out of Mr. Olbermann’s playbook. The most noticeable play: take a whack at Bill O’Reilly.

That was a tack that Mr. Olbermann famously took in the early days of his MSNBC show: He started mentioning Mr. O’Reilly, the Fox News host who commands by far the biggest audience among the news networks, in his “Worst Person in the World” segment. Soon after, Mr. Olbermann saw his ratings pick up.”

Bill Carter, NYTimes

Lawrence’s challenge to Bill O’Reilly - The Last Word

The Fox News faux tough guy has a long history of fictionalizing things. Bill O’Reilly did it on Wednesday night when he called this network “anti-American.” Lawrence issued a personal challenge to “Billy” in the Rewrite.