Jon Hamm Showed a Lot of Skin on 'SNL'

. . . especially when he played U.S. Senator-elect Scott Brown -- you know, the guy from Massachusetts who has taken the media by storm with his truck and his Cosmo model background -- in a skit where Brown kept busting into a meeting of congressional leaders. (Hamm/Brown to Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "I want to introduce something to the floor, it's called your panties.") Poor Boston/Mass. accent though, Mr. Hamm.



However that digital short where Hamm played a chest-baring sax player named Sergio who haunted a cursed businessman and later emerged from his wife's womb was uber-creepy.

Politics, Tough on Families in Real Life and on TV

While politics dominated the national news last week in the wake of the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race -- and now the victor's family is experiencing the tabloidish spotlight, even as the candidate's TV journalist spouse intentionally and purposefully sought to keep her distance from her husband's campaign with the exception of appearing with him on election night -- I devoted my Pop Culture and Politics column this week to TV dramas which are delving into the political arena and dramatizing the impact of running for office on a family with kids.

I looked at The Good Wife and how Julianna Margulies' character's family has been ravaged by the political enemies made by her incarcerated, unfaithful politician of a husband.

On Brothers & Sisters, Kitty Walker, former TV talking head and a new mom whose cancer recently went into remission, is thinking of running for either Congress or her husband's U.S. Senate seat, which he's just announced he's not running for again.

As for Big Love, polygamist Bill Henrickson -- who's got three wives and ties to a polygamist compound -- thinks he can hide two of his wives (and their six kids) until he wins a State Senate campaign. This week, he spent the whole episode running around Washington, D.C. trying to meet with a Utah congressman in order to secure his endorsement, getting blown off by a powerful lobbyist (whom he ticked off by assuming that she was a secretary) and then crashed a fundraiser in order to get a word in with the congressman. Then his second wife, who accompanied him on his D.C. trip, got briefly detained by authorities because she was carrying a gun in her purse. Oh, and his wife's daughter (not his) was still wearing distinctly out-of-place polygamist compound-wear. Yeah, politics are going to be a piece of cake for the Henrickson family.

Image credit: CBS.

Notes on Politics: Mass. Senate Election Ends Obama's Freshman Year with a Whimper

I don't totally buy into the notion that a major reason Republican Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race was because Bay State voters are ticked off at President Barack Obama. Other than Brown's declaration that he doesn't like the current health care reform legislation -- being negotiated in secret as pricey goodies are doled out -- and wants to start fresh with a new reform bill, I think this Senate race was about Massachusetts politics more than it was about the president, but the president's going to pay the price, perception-wise.

With a state mired in political scandal after political scandal, Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi said if Coakley lost, Democrats could point fingers at their own performance in the State House. Look at what's happened in Massachusetts state government in the past few years: Democratic House speakers have resigned their post in disgrace including one who's facing federal corruption charges and another who was stripped of his law license last week after he'd pleading guilty to obstruction of justice charges, a Democratic state legislator is awaiting trial on charges that she allegedly stuffed bribe money into a bra and the first-term Democratic governor has an anemic 39 percent approval rating. Vennochi wrote:

"The epic battle between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha Coakley is drawing national attention as a referendum on President Obama. But Brown is also tapping into that special brand of anger that helps Republicans beat Democrats in otherwise solidly blue Massachusetts.

When the party in power gets too arrogant -- as often, it does -- the people get mad. Over the past two decades, they sent their message by electing three successive Republican governors."

However when President Obama made a last-minute trip to Boston on Sunday to try to revive the Coakley campaign, he unwisely injected himself into the Senate race. The Brown victory will now add to the perception that Obama is not only weakening, as he suffers from plunging approval numbers nationwide -- went from a high of 61 percent to the current 47, according to the Chicago Tribune -- but is also being dissed by one of the bluest state's in the country, one that gave him a 26-point margin of victory in 2008.

While watching MSNBC's review of Obama's freshman year on Morning Joe, it's clear that what started off on such a triumphant and positive note on a cold inauguration day in Washington, D.C. in 2009 has gone downhill quickly for the president. Hopefully year two will prove to be a better one.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

CBS has a comprehensive, number-crunching summary of Obama's first year including how many foreign trips he made, how many bills signed, pardons issued and rounds of golf.

Notes on Politics: 'Game Change' Caricatures the Women in the 2008 Presidential Election

While the nation's political chattering classes are busy buzzing about Republican Scott Brown's "epic upset" (I've seen this phrase in many news stories) over Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race to fill the remaining term of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, it's worth taking a step back from the day's news (and the woefully inept Coakley campaign which blew a substantial lead and had once been considered a lock) and looking at how women in and around national politics are treated by the media.

I spent the bulk of last week plowing through the lengthy and riveting expose of the 2008 presidential election, the best selling Game Change, written by two journalists who declined to reveal who they interviewed for their book and who gave them what pieces of information. (That, to me, is problematic from a journalism ethics point of view, but that's grist for another rant on another day.) When I was done reading the book, I was so steamed about how the women were treated that I dedicated my Pop Culture and Politics column to it. With the exception of Michelle Obama, the female spouses of the candidates and the two female candidates -- Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin -- were described in an abysmal, sexist fashion. One had her reactions to bad news stories about her family labeled "hysterical" and another was dismissed as being a "beauty queen" who "flounced" back home after a disagreement with her husband, that's when she wasn't said to be weeping. One woman was depicted as having "hissy fits" and "conniptions," while another was maligned (guess which woman) as "Napoleon in a navy pantsuit and gumball-sized fake pearls."

Adding to my irritation were the cartoonish illustrations which accompanied a Game Change excerpt published in New York Magazine which portrayed Elizabeth Edwards as a monster (in one image, one of her hands was curled up so that her fingers looked like claws as spit came out her mouth), John Edwards' mistress was a smitten flirt and John Edwards himself was shown shouting and then sweating as news of his affair broke. Elizabeth Edwards, by far, came out looking the worst.

After taking this all in, I had to wonder: Were the authors simply relating the viewpoints of the blabber-mouth, disloyal former campaign aides who dished about these women, or were these words selected independently by the reporters and reflect their own opinions? Or, frighteningly, both?

Image credit: Nathan Fox/New York Magazine.

Jon Stewart Skewers Democrats, Mass. Senate Race

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart is ticked . . . totally ticked, angry, really, with the Democrats for bungling the Massachusetts race for U.S. Senate, a race that was, just a month ago, purported to be a lock for the Democratic candidate.

Noting that the president on Sunday injected himself (and by extension the fate of the health care bill) into the race which is perceived to be going down in flames for the Democrats, the left-leaning Stewart went ballistic last night and asked how "a naked guy who drives a truck" could be poised to win the seat formerly held by Senator Ted Kennedy, adding, "It's not that the Democrats are playing checkers and the Republicans are playing chess, it's that the Republicans are playing chess and the Democrats are in the nurse's office because once again they glued their balls to their thighs."

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Notes on Politics: In Snow & Sleet, Mass. Senate Race is Scalding Hot

With the exception of a few years of living in the Washington, D.C. area in the 1990s, I've lived in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the rest of the time. In all that time, I cannot recall a general election for the U.S. Senate or Congress being this close. It's Massachusetts for God's sake, one of the bluest states in the union. Sure, there was a lot of national attention paid to GOP Gov. Bill Weld's 1996 attempt to unseat U.S. Senator John Kerry (Kerry prevailed with 52 percent), as there was when Republican Mitt Romney took on Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1994 (Kennedy won 58 percent of the vote). But those races weren't nearly as close as is this current contest between Democrat Martha Coakley, the state's attorney general, and Republican Scott Brown, a state senator.

Amid all manner of nasty political ads which air once every five seconds on radio and TV (I adore politics and even I'm sick of them, never want to hear the word "lockstep" again) and the tongue-clucking about Coakley's assertion that Brown supporter Curt Schilling is a Yankees fan (in Red Sox Nation of all places!), this once sleepy campaign where the Democrat (any Democrat, didn't matter who) was considered a shoe-in, so much so that Coakley didn't really campaign much last month, is now too close to call. And it's serving as a proxy for all things Obama and is considered to hold the key to the health care vote. If Coakley, once the presumptive favorite, doesn't prevail, pundits everywhere are saying this is bad news for the president who visited Boston yesterday to try to help boost the campaign.

I still can't believe it. Take a gander at the political reporters from all the big media outlets on TV who have to do live stand-ups outside in this New England January chill, in front of cars coated in salt and sand. They seem surprised and almost giddy, to have something this volatile to report. I was astounded to see the front page of the New York Times today feature a woman who'd been holding a Brown sign in Marlborough, MA who I drove by twice on Saturday while driving my youngest kid to hockey.

Here are the covers of the two biggest papers in Massachusetts, indicating that the stakes are indeed high for tomorrow's vote from the Boston Herald (where I used to work and for whom I used to blog) and the Boston Globe.