Apparently, Blago and Rahm Emmanuel thought they could appoint someone to Rahm's Congressional seat, or at least they thought it enough to have a conversation about it. And Chris Matthews is fit to be tied.

"There's never," says Matthews, ready to leap through the screen and ring Blago's neck, "never in the history of this country, since the republic was formed, anyone ever appointed to the House!" Governors, you know, don't appoint to the House only to the Senate. Blago, clearly not knowing where to go with this and unable to reveal the contents of the now-under-investigation phone call, stumbles and says, more or less, yeah, well we sorta just talked. You know, it was a couple guys, and we were talking.

Which drives Matthews even crazier. Were you stupid? Are you saying Rahm Emmanuel is stupid? Is he stupid? If he is stupid, what does that make me?

Finally, pushed into a corner, Matthews is given no choice but to take out his handy Constitution and make that darn Blago listen to every word.

• What is Demi Moore's problem? She and her husband Ashton Kutcher did everything to publicize their Twitter presence. But now that she's queen bee, she's becoming more picky and totally dissed Sarah Brown, wife to Britain's prime minister. The nerve! [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Victoria Beckham arrived to New York for Fashion Week, but finds it unfashionable to discuss whether she had her chest reduced: "We should just not talk about each other's boobs." Why? We always have to see yours. [Just Jared]
  
  
• Oh no! Chef Mario Batali and his business partner are being sued for nearly $75,000 after failing to pay their rent. [Page Six]
  
  
• Could Anna Wintour's "Fashion's Night Out" be costing people their jobs? Rumor has it that modeling agencies are threatening to blacklist their models unless said models work for their company's events this evening. That business is ugly! [Page Six]
  
  
• Chris Matthews had to miss Obama's big speech because he fell ill after some diabetes tests. He'll be out for the rest of the week, thanks to American health care. [TVNewser]
  
  
• Former New York City mayor and alleged homosexual Ed Koch knows the word "fuck." Pass it on. [Page Six]
  
  
• Katherine Heigl and her nameless husband are adopting a child. Because that woman needs to be influencing another living thing. [ET]
  
  
• A Prairie Home Companion star Garrison Keillor remains in the hospital after suffering a minor stroke. That's too bad. [MSNBC]
  
  
• Speaking of potty mouths, Kate Moss didn't appreciate when comedian James Nesbitt poked fun at her sex life during GQ's Men of the Year Awards. Her reply to his joke that they had screwed: ""He's so fucking rude. I'll never come to one of these fucking awards ceremonies again!" Oh, also, she totally got drunk and had zits. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Playboy mogul High Hefner has filed for divorce after his wife allegedly cheated on him. Here's a lesson, ladies: don't cheat on Hugh. It's simply not done. [Reuters]

Not long ago, a Cambridge police officer named James Crowley arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates for the crime of being rude to a police officer who wouldn't get off his porch. Then, Barack Obama, who is friends with Gates, said the Cambridge Police Department acted stupidly. This touched off a national conversation on race, which means a bunch of dudes on TV shouting at each other.

So Barack Obama invited Crowley and Gates over to the White House to have beers and talk about shit. And the press was invited to watch, briefly, but not to listen in. And so the world will never know how Racism Got Solved.

But we can certainly guess a lot of things! Crowley probably said "tastes great" and Gates said "less filling" and then Gates got arrested, again, maybe.

"I feel like we're watching Britain's Got Talent," Chris Matthews says. "Biden's probably the only one who drank the beer," Bill O'Reilly says, perhaps unaware that Biden was the only one drinking near beer.

Oh, look, the Post called a body-language expert! That is always the sign of a really good news story, when a body-language expert has been called. Obama was comfortable, and Crowley was not, and Biden is ridiculous. Thanks, body-language expert.

Even Gates' daughter (guess what online media outlet she writes for) got in on the action, with a column about how she watched them talk from some windows inside the White House and What It Means About Race. (Also she has already been accused of "taking the low road" by The New Republic for mentioning that Crowley's 14-year-old daughter applied her eyeliner inexpertly, which Gates found "charming," which is apparently evidence of condescension from someone uppity enough to have graduated from The New School. No, seriously, we're not seeing it, TNR, and this just looks like Corner-style shit-stirring for the hell of it.)

Oh, and White House photographer Pete Souza had his official photo of the toast uploaded to Flickr before the beers even got warm. We can't wait for Peggy Noonan to write a column on the ghosts of Ferdinand de Sassure and Roland Barthes discussing the studium and punctum of the image on Fox & Friends.

Over the last few days and weeks, as the Birther movement has slowly crept up into the national conversation, many people have wondered, "Just what exactly would satisfy these freaks?" Well, here's the answer that many have suspected, compliments of G. Gordon Liddy—nothing! Matthews serves Liddy a virtual buffet of evidence here that would seemingly cause any reasonable human being in possession of the capacity for abstract thought to concede this ridiculous argument, but it's beyond obvious that even if Matthews had produced a video of Barack Obama getting leied by a Hawaiian nurse shortly after exiting his mother's womb in 1961, G. Gordon Liddy was going to walk off of the Hardball set tonight holding fast to his imbecilic position, muttering indecipherable horseshit about "Kenya" and "illegal aliens" on his way out the door.

Matthews took the opportunity to do so not on his own Hardball but on Olbermann's Countdown tonight. Matthews was an ideal guest to talk about Specter: He recently considered returning to politics to run for senate from Pennsylvania, against the 29-year Pennsylvania senator. Had he gone through with that plan, he'd have ended up taking on Specter not in the general election but in the primary, since Specter just switched to the Democratic primary.

Plus, as he told Olbermann, he'd have had to engage in filthy politics, swallowing his ego and true feelings to be part of a larger team effort. Good thing he doesn't have to do that at MSNBC. Ahem.

The NBC cable network refused to share salary details with the New York Times, save for the most humiliating one: Matthews is still making more or less $5 million per year. In October that would have been 25 percent more than Olbermann made. Now it's roughly 33 percent less.

One executive involved in the negotiations said, “Whether he took a slight cut or got a slight raise, it’s nobody’s business.”

It is apparently everyone's business that Matthews will be around through the next presidential election, so that his famously accurate leg can call the results, months in advance.

Matthews' flirtation with running for the U.S. Senate didn't help him at all in salary talks. That much has been apparent since at least December, when the Hardball host announced he would definitely not run for office, thus losing any leverage he might have once had.

At least his ratings are up. Not Rachel Maddow "up," mind you, or Keith's Very Special Once In A Lifetime Comment "up," but up.

[NY Times]

The CNN anchor and Vanderbilt family golden child went on DeGeneres' show today. Having seen Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer play along with the daytime talk show host's "dance with me" routine, he knew better: "No one really wants to see a middle-aged guy with silver hair, wriggling.

"I was raised to supress all my emotions — I can't be publicly expressing things."

You don't say!

Ari calls Chris "shameful" and says "how dare you" and then they talk over each other for a few minutes and Chris mentions how Bush is the least popular president ever and says "don't call me shameful," and then says, "Ari, Ari...." It went on for what felt like another half-hour or so of crosstalk.

God, Ari Fleischer. He really looks like shit these days! Retirement, like Chris Matthews, is not agreeing with him.

Though who on earth needs an explanation? When he said "oh, god" to the hilariously tone-deaf introduction of Bobby Jindal to America, what he meant was "oh, god." It's pretty simple, right? Well he spent a couple minutes of Hardball expanding on that thought anyway.

Matthews had been staring down the barrel of a rumored 4/5ths pay cut. But his ratings have improved since then!

“Hardball” has bounced back in the ratings, especially during the presidential election season, and NBC News executives have expressed much more interest in retaining Mr. Matthews.

So Matthews will get to keep more of his current salary, but still make way less than Keith Olberman, who will continue to taunt him, eternally.

We're shocked. America elected Barack Obama for one reason and one reason only: it was impossible to place his name in a list of names of disreputable people, without context, and get away with it. It turns out, though, that is is very possible to just rattle off a list of scary and bad names of people and pretend they all have relevant connections to our president-elect that we should be concerned about! That's not change you can believe in! That's change you can make insinuations about without having to provide any evidence of wrongdoing! So please enjoy this video of Chris Matthews, Ann Coulter, what's-her-head from The View, Rudy Giuliani, Hannity's neck, and others.

Now you try: Obama, Khalidi, Richardson, Burris, Wright, Ayers, Blagojevich, Kraven the Hunter, Hussein, Malia, Pelosi, Bush, Mxyzptlk, Shmoo Snook.

(Video: Brian Colgan)

A reasonable New York Congressman (Gregory Meeks) said something credibly sensible about how we should bail out the incompetent American auto industry, but only for the sake of the workers, and we should basically nuke the management.

Matthews proceeded to basically scream "HA! BUT DON'T YOU DRIVE A HONDA Y/N?!?," even though Meeks just got done saying American car companies suck, so owning a Honda (probably made in Alabama) in no way makes him a hypocrite.

Then Matthews does the same gotcha thing to a Republican Congressman, which makes even less sense, since that guy (former far-right California attorney general Dan Lungren) wants to let U.S. car companies go bankrupt.

We'd speculate Matthews is doing this to score points with blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, where he wants to be a senator, but that gives the shouting head too much credit; "catching" people is the new way Chris Matthews gets a thrill up his leg and he's going to keep hammering on it until MSNBC finally fires him or something else works better at making him feel relevant in Keith Olbermann's shadow.

(He tried to do something similar to Robert Reich last month, by the way, and similarly failed to have a point. He also called the Chevy Volt the "Ford Volt" and later the "GM Volt.")

Matthews makes $5 million a year, but Keith Olbermann makes $7.5 million (and just got renewed through 2012 with guaranteed regular spots on the broadcast NBC nightly news). Matthews will probably not get such a lovely new contract next summer. So this is maybe just contract renegotiating stuntery.

There's no doubt that Chris wants to be a Senator—it's been his dream since he was a little boy, to join that undemocratic and increasingly deadlocked and feeble deliberative body—but the guy is also smart about the realities of politics, if not the realities of reality. Running against a five-term senior Senator would be tough for any Democrat, but "any Democrat" would probably have better luck against Specter than a man who's been on the world's craziest cable news network saying some of the craziest things on that network for years.

If Specter retires at the end of his term (a possibility), we think Chris might go through with it. But that is also assuming that the makes a rational decision, and doesn't just quit his show and go for it when he wakes up bored one day.

Wolff wrote a biography of Fox owner and tyrant Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch has cozied up a bit to Barack Obama and has been focusing, lately, on turning the Wall Street Journal into a serious competitor of the New York Times. So Fox's cartoonish liberal-bashing is a bit embarrassing to him, according to the book.

“It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator,” Wolff wrote, “but [Fox News chief executive] Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other."

“The embarrassment can no longer be missed,” Wolff wrote, in another section of the book. “He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”

It's all because Murdoch's wife and children are limousine liberals now, and in this new Obama era, we are all out-of-touch cultural elites, aren't we? But O'Reilly, and Fox, still make money, so Murdoch will not be changing anything about them until they stop making money. He is a capitalist, not an ideologue.

Oh, but what was that about Chris Matthews? He is going to run for the Senate! Against maybe Arlen Specter, the ancient Republican?

FiveThirtyEight has been hearing for some time that Matthews is serious about running for the United States Senate, but it took a trip to Georgia among the Georgia-runoff-congregated and well-connected Obama organizer throng to confirm.

According to multiple sources, who confirmed the Tip O'Neill staffer-cum-MSNBC host has negotiated with veteran Obama staffers to enlist in his campaign, Chris Matthews is likely to run for United States Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010. Matthews, 62, would run as a Democrat. Arlen Specter, the aging Republican incumbent, will be 80 if he chooses to run for re-election.

It is Chris' life-long dream to be a Senator, and that is a sad dream, but still. If Specter retires, and his health suggests he might, the Democrats would be fools to hand an easy Democratic seat pickup to a liberal broadcaster with a long history of ignorant sexist comments, but, you know, they're the Democratic Party. They nominated Al Franken to run in Minnesota, didn't they?

Though Matthews is a frequent guest on Leno, his fall to the show's least enviable quarter-hour comes at a touchy time. Fellow host Keith Olbermann shot past him in the MSNBC pecking order and then had the nerve to mock him on national television. Some feminists accused him not only of sexism toward Hillary Clinton but also promoting domestic violence. At least Matthews had the good humor to start laughing at his situation at the end of the clip above. He may lack the polish of career TV journalists like Olbermann and Cooper, but the longtime Democratic political aide probably has the grit to make it through the minor humiliations of the moment without further loss of temper.