jon stewart

The big story last week, of course, was the elections: Republicans take back the House! Nearly $5 billion spent on campaigns across the country--most of it from faceless corporate donors! Yet instead, by the weekend we were left with a different story, when Keith Olbermann was suspended from MSNBC for donating money to three Democratic candidates. Not a peep, of course, about the amount that MSNBC's parent company, GE, gave. And then, of course, George W. Bush started his book tour, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace joked with Jon Stewart about Fox's employing the Republican candidates for 2012, and our friends at The Nation were profiled in today's New York Times. Greg Mitchell, media blogger at The Nation, joins us to discuss. Distributed by Tubemogul.

We air parts of Jon Stewart’s keynote speech on fearmongering and the corporate mediaat the Rally to Restore Sanity, as well as an exchange with basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Islamophobia. Actor Sam Waterston also reads a poem by Stephen Colbert. A prominent leader of the Tea Party movement recently said he was working to unseat Minnesota Democrat Rep. Keith Ellison in part because he is a Muslim. Judson Phillips, the founder of the Tea Party Nation, urged Minnesota voters to elect Ellison’s independent challenger, Lynn Torgerson, on Tuesday. "A majority of Tea Party members, I suspect, are not fans of Islam," Phillips said. Rep. Ellison, the first Muslim congressman, responds to these comments and ongoing attacks against Muslim and Arab communities.On Tuesday, voters in thirty-seven states will confront 160 ballot initiatives on issues ranging from healthcare reform to reproductive rights, to rights to unionize, to climate change legislation. For a summary of these initiatives, we talk with Justine Sarver, the executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. We talk with Michael Fox, an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker based outside Porto Alegre. "She’s a fighter," Fox says of newly elected President Dilma Rousseff. Democracy Now!, a daily independent newshour.

Barack Obama hit the Daily Show on Wednesday night, and made the unfortunate comment that Larry Summers had done a "heckuva job" running the economy. Robert Scheer of Truthdig notes that Summers was the chief architect of Clinton-era policies that created the economic crisis in the first place, and that Obama's appointment of him to get us out of it was never going to result in anything but more money being thrown at Wall Street.Scheer visited the GRITtv studios to talk about Summers, Bill Clinton, Obama, and why there are a few Tea Party candidates he wouldn't mind seeing win this election cycle."It's a bizarre idea to fix a global capitalist crisis by breaking a long-term promise," notes Richard Wolff, economist and author of Capitalism Hits the Fan of the "austerity" measures rocking Europe's social democracies at the moment. Governments across Europe are implementing drastic cuts to social safety nets, raising retirement ages, all in the name of fiscal responsibility, and people have taken to the streets--in France, between 1.3 and 2.9 million people have come out in protest, a percentage that Wolff notes would be equivalent to between 6.5 and 14.4 million.So what's going on in Europe, and what are the lessons we can learn from the European left? Wolff joins us along with Inez McCormack, Chair of the Participation and the Practice of Rights Project in Ireland, to talk us through the crisis, the lessons, and the ongoing struggle.Finally, Laura remembers former president Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, who fought banks, the IMF, and the remains of the military dictatorship to return his country to prosperity.

What's up with all these arguments over feminism these days, anyway? The Daily Show and Gawker blog Jezebel have an argument over its representation of women; meanwhile, Sarah Palin is a feminist! Except when she's not! And the Atlantic has declared "The End of Men." What's it all about? Who better to discuss all this than blogger and author Amanda Marcotte, who joins us in studio to talk about The Daily Show's hiring Olivia Munn, Sarah Palin's fundraising skills (or lack thereof) and the latest battle over reproductive choice, as well as her new book, Get Opinionated: A Progressive's Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking a Little Action).