MSNBC is going away. But don’t shed a tear (not that you would, anyway), it’s turning into MS NOW. Or, as the New York Times put it, "Goodbye, MSNBC. Hello, MS NOW." The far-left network lost its tie to the newsy term "NBC" and looks more like some feminist retread site.

Or, as MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler put it, "While our name will be changing, who we are and what we do will not." So, maybe my viewership assessment is correct. It’s like rebranding the Titanic. Sure, the ship might have made a career of hitting icebergs, but it’s got a new name. 

The fallout from the change was swift. The Times even took a swipe with the follow-up headline: "MSNBC’s Rebrand Invites Bemusement and Ridicule."  

MSNBC TO CHANGE NAME TO 'MS NOW' IN COMCAST SPINOFF DEAL

The name switch reflects marketing nonsense as part of the corporate split. It also eliminates the long-standing comparison to MSDNC. The rationalization for the new name is: "My Source for News, Opinion, and the World." CNBC is going to keep its name, according to the Wall Street Journal, but the initials mean something else – "Consumer News and Business Channel," another marketing nuance. 

The new company will include, "NBCUniversal’s cable television networks, including USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel" along with a few other properties, including the formerly useful Rotten Tomatoes movie site. Just no NBC peacocks.

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But here’s what all that means. Nobody sane wants MSNBC/MS NOW connected in any way to NBC. It’s been a corporate embarrassment for years. They’re OK with it looking like the rational folks at CNBC are still connected, but the lunacy of MSNBC gets rebranded. It removes the stain for NBC. For MSNBC, that's impossible.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. 

This is the same network where they repeatedly compare President Donald Trump to monsters like Hitler and Stalin. Hosts regularly throw around charges of dictatorship like we are living in 1930s Germany – although somehow they are allowed to say it. Host Tiffany Cross recently claimed the government was grabbing people and "transporting them to concentration camps." And the face of the franchise, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, told viewers, "We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country."

Remember, "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough made the most-embarrassing quote of the entire failed Joe Biden presidency: "I've said it for years now, he's cogent. But I undersold it when I said he was cogent, he's far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he's better than he's ever been, intellectually, analytically, because he's been around for 50 years," Scarborough said. "Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And f--- you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever."

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MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace even just cursed about President Donald Trump for trying to arrange a peace deal in Ukraine, calling him, "an American president who just doesn’t give a s--- about democracy," she whined. That claim that the right is attacking "democracy" is another MSNBC standard.

Make no mistake, this isn’t some new, Trump-era insanity at the THEN network. Several insane MSNBC quotes made a NewsBusters list (Hint: My old place of work) for their list of the "The Most Absurd and Obnoxious Outbursts" of the past 20 years. Really, MSNBC has a starring role. 

Here’s a 2009 quote from the late Ed Schultz raving on MSNBC’s "The Ed Show," "The Republicans lie! They want to see you dead! They’d rather make money off your dead corpse! They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for her." If anything, the network has only gotten worse.

It's not like the old MSNBC was kicking butt with ratings. Ad Week reported on August 13, "MSNBC, in primetime, averaged 821,000 total viewers." That's better than CNN, but the German shopping cart championships could beat them. (Yes, those really exist. Shoving a cart/buggy into the corral from a distance.) For those who forget, MSNBC started as a partnership between Microsoft and NBC. The MS used to mean a tech company, not someone who demanded to know your pronouns. The network has reportedly been on a hiring spree of late. So, expect even worse once the split occurs. 

Now, ahem, MS NOW, we have a new network that vows to be exactly the same but to build a new brand. Perhaps they should try, MiS TAKE. Or just buy titanic.com. It would be appropriate.

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President Trump told Brian Glenn of the conservative Real America’s Voice that he didn’t want to answer his question because it was "off-topic" as he stood there with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders.

Then he proceeded to answer it at great length.

The idea, it turns out, began with Vladimir Putin, who has a bit of experience at keeping himself in power, which isn’t all that hard if you’re a dictator.

My source? Donald Trump.

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He said Putin told him that "it's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections," in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity. He said Putin told him he won the 2020 election "by so much," as Trump has long claimed, "and you lost it because of mail-in voting. It was a rigged election."

Music to the president’s ears.

So Trump was ready when a friendly reporter asked the question.

"Mail-in ballots are corrupt," he declared. "Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt."

He was just warming up.

And, you know, that we're the only country in the world, I believe I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses [mail-in ballots] because of what's happened, massive fraud all over the place. The other thing we want, change of the machines. For all of the money they spend, it's approximately 10 times more expensive than paper ballots. And paper ballots are very sophisticated with the watermark paper and everything else, we would get secure elections. We get much faster results, the machines, I mean, they say we're going to have the results in two weeks with paper ballots. You have the results that night. Most people almost have, but most people in many countries use paper ballots. It's the most secure form."

A little fact-checking is in order.

As Axios points out, many countries around the world have some form of mail-in voting. And millions of Americans who live overseas, such as military families, are eligible for mailing in their ballots.

Trump actually doesn’t have the power to do this. While he says the states are an "agent" of the feds, the Constitution says the mechanics of holding elections "shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof." But Congress can change those requirements. Could the president get this through the narrow majorities in both chambers?

"It’s a fraud," Trump said, adding: "It's time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it, it's the only way they can get elected."

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Trump even invoked Jimmy Carter. In 2004, a commission set up by the former president and ex-Reagan aide James Baker III concluded that "absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud."

In 2020, Trump went all-out in favor of mail-in ballots, arguing that they would help Republicans. Of course, he may just have been trying to make the best of the tools already in place. No party believes in unilateral disarmament.

But his enthusiasm for mail-in ballots in that election stands in stark contrast to his current stance that they are corrupt and should be banned.

Trump wound up telling Brian Glenn, who is dating Marjorie Taylor Greene, "I’m glad you asked that question."

The president doesn’t let himself be tied down by the rules of consistency that most conventional politicians have to obey. Until last Friday, he was insisting on a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine as a precondition for any peace agreement. After the Alaska summit, he dropped the cease-fire idea that Zelensky had been demanding, given that his country is being bombarded every day, with significant civilian casualties, and adopted the Putin stance of allowing the war to continue to further freeze his military gains in the crucial Donbas region.

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But that flexibility – what critics call flip-flopping – has put the president in the position where he has a shot at hammering out a peace agreement, though major obstacles remain.

So I expect we’ll hear a lot more about how mail-in ballots are horrible and evil in the coming months, though whether he can get his Hill allies to go along is very much an open question.