…and Chris Matthews was visibly unhappy with his producers. At one point, the audio feed from Kay Henderson, of Radio Iowa News, wasn’t reaching Matthews’ ears at his remote New Hampshire location, so when he asked her questions, he couldn’t hear when her responses ended. After noting that he couldn’t hear her, he trudged on with the segment, seemingly winging what she was saying based on what producers would feed him off screen. Definitely not helping matters at all were his orange and gray striped sweater.

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The NY Times is reporting that Tammy Haddad is leaving MSNBC and joining Newsweek. The move, which Haddad is claiming she’s happy about, comes just a couple of months after she was removed as the top producer on Chris Matthews‘ Hardball. She and Matthews had a much publicized falling out over the summer after Matthews was caught again swearing on-air. After she left Hardball, she said she was happy to be taking on a managerial role over all political projects at MSNBC.

Today we’re hearing that her contentious relationship with Matthews and others at the network led to the move to lower profile position at Newsweek, which is a partner of MSNBC.

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We learned only a few short months ago on Big Head DC that Chris Matthews is probably a drunk….now, we’ve discovered he’s a copycat, too.

Beginning this week, the MSNBC host introduced a new segment called “Power Rankings”….as he described on his show this past Friday, “all next week, by the way, we’ve got something big coming up on Hardball. Every night, starting Monday, for five nights, we’re going to have the Hardball power rankings. We’re going to tell you as best I can who’s got the best chance now to win the Democratic nomination. On Tuesday we`ll do the same thing for the Republicans. Then we’re going to run and show who the major contenders are, just like a sports show. We’ll deal with politics.”

That’s all fine and dandy until you realize that FOX Business Network’s America’s Nightly Scorecard has already featured “Power Rankings” a few times a week every night as one of their signature segments. It’s a pretty pathetic sign when an 11-year old network copies an idea from a network, which launched only a few weeks ago, when they had quite a headstart to generate their own material. But, then again, it would have been even more desperate if sister network, CNBC, stole the idea…oh, right, they already succeeded with Happy Hour.

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A video from the mysterious YouTube vlogger abrad2345 made an appearance on Hardball recently, reports Inside Cable News. We, along with ABC News, the NY Times and others, have been trying to figure out his identity for longer than we care to remember, and now he’s getting MSM attention. How much longer can he keep up the ruse before the jig is up? Not too much longer, our Magic 8 Ball says. (Some signs point to the Rudy camp.)

Related: abrad2345: Watch Your Back!

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After a ho-hum interview by his wife Kathleen Matthews on Thursday night’s show, some D.C. media insiders were wondering privately if the Chris Matthews 10th anniversary Hardball bash would live up to all the hype (Patrick Gavin, after all, has been peeing his pants over this one).

Well, we were there, and can answer definitively: yes AND no. Some big politico “names” did not show, which was disappointing for Chris, but lots of people, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, told him they simply adore his new book Life’s a Campaign, copies of which were readily available for purchase at the decked-out Decatur House (which was kinda crass, if you ask us). Several TV types also told Chris that they thought Jon Stewart was much too hard on him during his recent Daily Show debacle, but just as many were whispering that the clobbering was just what the doctor ordered to tame his ever-growing ego.

The biggest question of the evening was what exactly the somewhat grumpy Chris was drinking. Read more…

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