I clicked on my bookmark for the Rachel Maddow Blog. Some Japanese site came up.
Did Rachel fail to pay the power bill? Is the site hacked? Kind of a strange thing to happen.
Site comes up in English for me in Firefox. I have Chrome set to render page content in Japanese though, although the translation is not the most accurate in the world.
Works for me. 
Sounds like you are the victim of a redirector malware.
Now it works for me. Probably the machines are just shutting down communications before they attack. Nothing to worry about.