Cable news ratings; Anderson Cooper accepts Kari Lake's challenge; an unhinged warning from Michael Beschloss

Anderson Cooper blasted Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake after she joked about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi suffered a fractured skull when a suspect broke into the Pelosis’ San Francisco residence and allegedly struck him in the head with a hammer, fracturing his skull. The speaker was not home at the time.
“It is not impossible to protect our kids at school,” Lake told a crowd in Scottsdale, Arizona on Monday.
“They act like it is. Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. Apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.”
On Wednesday, Cooper spoke with CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, who reported that Lake now claims that she “never made light of the attack.”
He added that Lake claimed the video was the result of “a lot of creative editing.”
“I went back and watched that full video,” Dale said. “It changes absolutely nothing.”
CNN aired the clip of Lake making light of the incident. Her comments prompted laughter from the audience and the man interviewing her.
“This is her shtik,” Cooper said of Lake. “Who’s the guy interviewing her who covers this face like this is actually something funny?
"I mean, when did human beings become–when did we become like this?" he added. "Who is guffawing in the audience as if it’s actually funny? I don’t understand. There’s just nothing funny about anybody being hurt.”
Props to Cooper for holding Lake accountable and airing the full clip of her interview, especially after she accused media figures of "creative editing" in an attempt to make her "look bad."

MSNBC presidential historian Michael Beschloss warned that if Republican candidates win their races next week, American democracy and the free press could end and “our children” could all die at the hands of a “brutal authoritarian system.”
Perhaps a tad dramatic to suggest the election of Republican officials could lead to a brutal, child-murdering authoritarian dictatorship.
The presidential historian made the remark on All In with Chris Hayes following President Joe Biden's Wednesday night speech, in which he warned that democracy itself is "at stake" in the upcoming midterms.
Beschloss joined Hayes to analyze that speech, declaring, “We could be six days away from losing our rule of law."
“A historian 50 years from now, if historians are allowed to write in this country and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press, which I’m not certain of,” he said. “But if that is true, a historian will say, what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”
He pointed to the potential of certain GOP candidates crying fraud -- a fair point to make in light of Donald Trump's incessant denial of the 2020 election. But the historian took it a step further, suggesting that "fraudulent election officers" could cause a Democratic loss -- mirroring those he criticized.
Partisan pundits have, since the dawn of elections, warned that a victory for their opponents means the end of the world.
That kind of sensationalist nonsense is to be expected — but not from someone who claims to be a serious historian.And especially not the claim that GOP officials will install a child-murdering-regime. That is fully unhinged.