President Obama’s first prime-time press conference resulted in a veritable Maddowpalooza last night, with Rachel making a post-conference appearance on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and then doing two live shows.

On Countdown, Rachel noted that the President didn’t seem as aggressive as he has been in the past few days of stimulus wrangling. Rachel can also be described as less aggressive in comparison to Olbermann and fellow MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, which means that when all three are on the air she often doesn’t say much until she gets an opening.

She did finally jump in with the point that, though she seems to quietly join in the giddy new joy of having a President who can think in paragraphs, she thought Mr. Obama might need to work on whipping up catchy sound bites.

If that seems like an upsetting thought to have come from the unapologetically smart Ms. Maddow, you needn’t fret for long. It was the last time she was on the side of political expediency for the rest of the night.

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On to Monday night’s first live broadcast of The Rachel Maddow Show.

The show was live! Live! Without a net! Any crazy thing in the whole wide world could happen!

…Unless the show is hosted by a cheerful grind who spends all day researching and preparing, in which case it all comes off without a hitch. While I’m glad everything went well, I was kind of secretly hoping for a guest to go completely batpuckey or something. Darn.

Rachel described Obama’s press conference as a “wonky sermon,” which is by no means an insult in her book.

She then moved on to the continuing fight over the stimulus bill, and noted that you could see it in terms of politics or of policy.

To underscore the urgency of the policy side, she put up a Bureau of Labor Statistics graph on job losses that made me write “HOLY CRAP” in my notes so big that later I could actually read it from across the room.

Do not watch the next clip without doing some deep breathing and stretching exercises first. You may also want to have some soothing guided imagery meditations cued up on your iPod for right after.

(Be especially careful if you’re still tensed-up from Friday’s segment with Madeline Albright, after which I, for one, had to take what small comfort I could in remembering that those of us who live in major target areas of the coming nuclear holocaust are the lucky ones, because the survivors will be spending the rest of their scavenging lives being gnawed by mutants.)

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After a little talk with David Axelrod on the need for greater economic literacy, Rachel segued to a case in point: New RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who came out with the brilliant statement that the stimulus bill is bad because it will create work, but not jobs. I have to hand it to him: I thought he was going to win his chairmanship and then fade into the background, but no. He’s really shaping up into something special.

We also checked in with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who claims that FDR’s New Deal didn’t actually help the economy. Unfortunately for Mr. McConnell’s argument, Rachel had a Handy Embarrassing Graphic showing the Gross Domestic Product from 1929–41, which makes a pretty compelling case that the New Deal actually did a whole bunch. Oopsie.

You can see both those gents on a triple bill with Senator Ben Nelson of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who helped engineer a compromise amendment to the stimulus bill that Rachel really, really, really seems to hate.

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While she cordially perforated Senator Nelson with questions like “Why did you push to cut more than $15 billion of school construction money?” Rachel and her staff served up Death By 10,000 Cuts of the Rotating Tagline, including “Nelson-Collins Amendment Cuts $5.8 Billion for Public Health Efforts.”

The best part of the interview is the split screen portion, because you can watch Rachel’s face and see the inner battle between her inherent politeness and a what looks like profound desire to scream “Are you kidding me?!” Only maybe with an extra interjectory verb thrown in there.

On “Scrub. Rinse. Repeat.” Rachel noted that Senator Patrick Leahy would like to start an impartial Truth Commission to investigate the Bush Administration, and enticingly dangled the offer of airtime to discuss that further. With luck, this will be the first of many stories on the Truth Commission.

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One short hour to settle down and text friends in the hopes that you missed the part where she said that job loss graphic was some sort of vicious chart-based prank, and then we were on to the night’s second live broadcast of The Rachel Maddow Show.

OK, it wasn’t an all-new live broadcast, more a mix of live footage and slightly truncated versions of the previous interviews, but in a way it was just as exciting if you imagined everyone running around with edited-on-the-fly video clips and sliding on their knees like in Broadcast News.

Plus for most of the show you could try to catch the little variations and wonder if there was really a second live broadcast at all, or if it was actually the exact same show and you were just going all Gaslight on yourself.

OK, maybe that was just me.

My faith in the reality of the second broadcast was restored when Rachel looked up from an unusually paper-strewn desk for a new segment on the “Financial Predator Protest Tour,” which led us into TARP, populist rage being all the rage, and a visit from Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz.

Turns out we have not even begun to plumb the depths of how depressing the foreclosure crisis can get. Oh, goody.

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On that note, I’m worried that the unemployment chart/illustration of Mount Doom will be keeping us all awake again. In the interest of our national REM count, I’ll leave you with the following trick:

If you need an image powerful enough to drive the horrible scary graph out of your head for a few hours, just think about that appalling commercial MSNBC keeps running during TRMS in which all the women seem to be considering workplace sex with a teddy bear.

You’re welcome.