Fresh off his humiliating defeat on Jeopardy! Monday night, MSNBC's Chris Matthews actually introduced a pair of guests Tuesday as "two of the most smartest people."

Almost as funny, "two of the most smartest people" in the Hardball host's opinion are Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Coming up, JPMorgan lost a whopping two billion bucks just in the last couple of days. That’s got a lot of people saying, “Told you so.” Barney Frank’s coming here along with Robert Reich, two of the most smartest people in the progressive side to talk about why we need more regulation on banks so taxpayers don’t have to bail them out. They’re both coming here, Reich and Frank. And this is Hardball, the place for politics.

And you wonder why this guy thought the six-letter capital of Russia was Istanbul.

Even worse, despite his intellectual challenges, Matthews is still one of the most intelligent people on MSNBC.

There's a joke in there if you ignore how sad a statement it is about this so-called "news network."

New York Times columnist (and former White House correspondent for the paper) Frank Bruni gets nasty and personal again in his Tuesday column "The Right's Righteous Fraud," picking on 21-year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah, for blogging about gay marriage, even throwing out a date rape reference. Judging by the time stamps at Bristol's blog, Bruni has stirred up another round of hateful lefty comments to Palin's original May 10 blog post, some of them simply regurgitating Bruni's bile.

In March, Bruni devoted a column to a former classmate providing a pat liberal morality lesson that seemed a lot like an invasion of doctor-patient privacy, then attacked Newt Gingrich and insulted Gingrich's wife. Today Bruni, who is openly gay, goes after Palin's oldest daughter for hypocrisy and being a bad mother, after Bristol had the audacity to blog her opinion on gay marriage (she's against it):

Say what you will about Bristol Palin, she’s a quick study. It didn’t take her long to master the ways of her elders on the censorious right and decide that personal circumstance and past error needn’t prevent someone from claiming righteous leadership. Uncle Rush must be proud.

Soon after President Obama stated support for same-sex marriage, Bristol publicly weighed in. Because, you know, the world was on tenterhooks.

In a blog post she focused on the reference that Obama made to his daughters — and to the same-sex parents of some of the girls’ friends.

“It would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends (sic) parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage,” wrote Bristol, making her heady debut as the new Dr. Spock for a nascent millennium. She added that “in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.”

Fathers like…Levi Johnston? It’s with him that she conceived her child — out of wedlock, at the age of 17 — and by most accounts, his relationship with her and the Palin family isn’t any warmer than Juneau in January. A mother/father home is not what he and Bristol have succeeded in creating.

What’s more, she has made sure that their son, Tripp, will at some point be treated to a worldview-shaping image of Dad as something akin to a date rapist. That’s the description of him immortalized in her memoir, one of her many efforts to monetize her surname. It recounts the loss of her virginity as a result of getting drunk and blacking out in the company of Levi, who pounced. What a gift that narrative is to Tripp, now being hauled into a TV reality show, “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp,” already in production. Little children are known to thrive in such environments.

I hesitated before picking on Bristol because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.

But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.

….

Within its uppermost ranks are many champions of small government who squirm at the small-mindedness of the scowling theocrats in an increasingly uneasy coalition. These fiscal conservatives take advantage of the religious right’s political muscle but have reservations about its hectoring piety, and their own views on social issues are often moderate or somewhat liberal. Recall that Republican money played a pivotal role in the successful campaign for same-sex marriage in New York.

In his latest column, Jonah Goldberg argues that the Cranbrook-bullying “scoop” at The Washington Post may not have been the right occasion, but that Mitt Romney needs to get “very angry” soon with the pro-Obama news media. After all, “the mainstream media are so deep in the bunker for Obama, they could ride out a nuclear war without having their Jenga tower fall over.”

"The Post's decision to play up the [haircut] story as if it were major news — front page, thousands of drably dull self-serious words piled high to elevate and justify the one buzzy nugget — is an embarrassment," he wrote. "It was clearly intended to link Romney to the new progressive cause: fighting anti-gay bullying, in the context of President Obama's "sudden" support for gay marriage. It was naked advocacy gussied up as journalistic due diligence."

I'm not sure Romney will go all Spiro Agnew on the media. George W. Bush never did. In a strange way, attacking the media is probably seen as something that makes you look more "ultraconservative." But it's true that a Republican cannot simply accept the tilted templates the media employ. But often, a Republican has to choose which way to be attacked. Romney would have been attacked if he had directly admitted the haircut incident, and attacked for his don't-really-remember answer. Pick (a) or pick (b). They'll slam you either way.

Goldberg also mocked the whole gush over Obama’s gay-marriage proclamation, starting with the "First Gay President" cover of Newsweek:

Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, may be a genius. No doubt it has gotten boring saying Obama's opponents are racist. Now the press can treat his critics as homophobes, even the ones holding the same position on gay marriage that Obama (publicly) held for the last decade — until last week.

The Obama campaign's rationalization for the president's decision to drop what most knew was a calculated political lie is that it would "fire up" his base among rich liberal donors and college students. It did that.

But it also fired up his base in the press corps, enabling writers to rekindle their obsession with the "historic" nature of the Obama presidency.

As the London Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley writes, everything the president does is cast as part of history. The president could go "seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. 'Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,' the New York Times would proudly report."

The hard copy periodical industry is dying and about the only way they can boost sales is with incredibly controversial magazine covers. We saw a good example of this during the past week with Time featuring a mother breast feeding her son on the cover versus Newsweek declaring Obama, wearing a rainbow halo, as "The First Gay President." Have these magazines gone too far in their desperation for sales? This situation is analyzed in an incredibly humorous manner by the notorious Taiwanese animators who have developed quite a cult following with their funny take on the news.

They have produced an hilarious animation video about this situation called "Time vs Newsweek: provocative covers stir controversy." You can see the video below the fold but please be warned that it is somewhat risque. Oh, and another warning, the video is so burst out laughing funny that you risk soaking your computer monitor if you happen to be drinking coffee so please put your mug down before viewing.

Here is an analysis of this controversy from the Taiwanese animators:

Last week Time magazine's cover brought the breastfeeding and attachment parenting debate into the national spotlight. This week it was Newsweek's turn to stir up controversy, with its cover on the First Gay President.

Time magazine not only brought attention to the attachment parenting movement, it also inspired conversation on using provocative images and copy to revive the ailing print industry. Many critics are calling this issue a "stroke of genius" and "an example of print well done," including magazine expert Samir Husni.

Newsweek came out with its controversial copy and image combo just a few days later, with similar results. The cover featured a tight shot of President Obama with a rainbow-colored halo above his head.

Newsweek discussed Obama's "evolution" when it came to his support of same-sex marriage. It also raised the question of whether or not controversy overpowers quality.

Actually my only question is WHO are those two incredibly cute young Taiwanese women at the end of the video?

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's Conan show on TBS, HBO comedian Bill Maher absurdly suggested that recent allegations that Mitt Romney engaged in "bullying" in high school are worse than being molested by Michael Jackson, and asserted that he would be willing trade being beat up in grade school for being "gently masturbated by a pop star."

Maher also again attacked Mormonism and religion generally, using uncensored vulgarity, and seemed to hold Romney responsible for the polygamy of his grandfather.

The Real Time host brought up Michael Jackson to suggest that Romney had behaved worse than a child molester:

But as far as this bullying, you know, this made me think of the Michael Jackson situation. Because, you know, he was accused of being a child molester. We'll never know because he's gone, but even his worst accuser never said that he did anything like actually have sex with them. It was grabby, grabby under the covers. Which is terribly wrong.

Maher continued:

However, when I was 12 years old, I was beaten on the playground. Just like the Mitt Romney thing, I was held down and somebody just punched me in the face while other kids watched. And if I could go back to 1968 and trade that experience for being gently masturbated by a pop star- (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) -I would do it in a second. Frankie Valli could jerk me off. Gary Puckett of the Union Gap. The Allman Brothers, if we could go back in time. Marvin Gaye.

A bit earlier in the segment, while trashing Republicans for opposing same-sex marriage, Maher singled out Romney's Mormon faith for particular ridicule:

Of all the people to be making this claim that marriage is between one man and one – a Mormon? Between one man and – except for my (Romney's) grandfather, who went to Mexico specifically to get away from a country that said you have to have a marriage that's only one – they went to Mexico, the Romneys.

He added:

I mean, Mormonism, I don't want to get off on Mormonism, you know how I feel about religion, it's all bat****. (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) But, I mean, this is, this is a religion, this is a religion that is so stupid that Tom Cruise would not join it. (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) And Glenn Beck did.
 

As NewsBusters reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews totally struck out on Jeopardy! Monday night after repeatedly mocking former Alaska governor Sarah Palin for how she would do if she ever went on the show.

For your entertainment pleasure, the following is a video of conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck and his sidekicks excoriating the Hardball host for his delicious bout with instant karma:

On Tuesday morning at 8:30 a.m. ET, the Commerce Department reported that seasonally adjusted U.S. retail sales in April rose by 0.1%. In an 11:12 a.m. report via the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, carried at the Detroit News ("U.S. consumers hold back retail sales, even as gas prices fall"), Martin Crutsinger was appropriately not impressed: "Lower gas prices in April weren't enough to embolden U.S. consumers to spend much more elsewhere. The Commerce Department said retail sales rose only 0.1 percent last month."

Look how things changed in a late afternoon AP report currently carried at its national site co-authored by Crutsinger and Christopher Rugaber, reworked in time to go into most newspapers' print editions Wednesday morning:

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Americans spending a bit more as gas prices fall

Americans are starting to see some relief from higher gas prices, a change that could revive the economy in the months ahead.

Consumer prices were flat in April, largely because of a decline in gas prices. Lower prices at the pump may be combining with steady job growth to power more spending on big purchases.

Sales of autos, furniture and electronics all rose in April. And Americans spent more at restaurants and bars – generally a sign of confidence in the economy.

"Consumer spending looks to have started the second quarter on a solid footing," said Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics.

Despite the strength in key areas, overall retail sales increased just 0.1 percent last month, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. That modest gain followed two stronger months in February and March.

Crutsinger and Rugaber even came up with what I believe may be a new measurement (if it's not new, it's seldom used, and it wasn't specifically identified using the term the pair employed in reports at Reuters or Bloomberg, both of which were decidedly less upbeat): "Excluding autos, gas station sales and spending on building materials, so-called core retail sales increased 0.4 percent, a modest gain."

Huh? By the way, building materials had a terrible month (down 1.8%), likely indicating that the new home construction numbers and the home improvement metrics will continue to be weak. And no, I don't find the argument that good weather in February and March would have caused such a steep drop — not if there were a strong recovery in progress.

This isn't the first time AP has brought out the spin machine to improve the look of lackluster economic data. Two noteworthy previous examples are here ("From 'Falls' to 'Rosy': Headlines at AP's Coverage of Consumer Confidence Report Improve As Day Wears On") and here ("Channeling Orwell: AP's Kravitz Celebrates Allegedly Recovering Housing Market, Flushes Bad Starts Data Down Memory Hole").

It also almost certainly won't be the last.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.