Telling It Like It Is

Jon Stewart lets FOX News and Chris Wallace have it right between the eyes.

"Honestly, I think you want to be a political player," Wallace insisted.

"You can't understand because of world you live in that there is not a designed ideological agenda on my part to affect partisan change. Because that's the soup you swim in. I appreciate that. I understand that. It reminds me of, you know, you know, ideological regimes. They can't understand that there is free media other places. Because they receive marching orders."

"I don't think the viewers are the least bit disappointed with us," Wallace said. "Our viewers think finally we're getting somebody to tell the other side of the story."

"Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?" Stewart asked. "The most consistently misinformed? Fox viewers. Consistently. Every poll."

"I'm just trying to understand you," Wallace claimed.

"Is that really true? Here is the thing that surprises me about that. I've existed in this country forever. There have been people like this who satirized the political process," Stewart explained.

"I'm sitting here talking to Jon Stewart. I'm trying to get it. Understand you and what I believe to be true: there is as much bias on the other side as you subscribe to Fox and why you go easy on that."

"I think there is, probably a liberal bias that exists in the media because of the medium in which it exists. The majority of people working in it probably hold liberal view points, but I don't think they are as relentlessly activist as the conservative movement that has risen up over the last 40 years," Stewart said. "Do you get me?"

"Well, you know what? When you come back we can explore this some more," Wallace concluded.

Do watch the whole thing, it's fascinating.  Wallace has no clue what to do here, he's completely stunned by the fact that Stewart wasn't totally shut down by the mere mention that Stewart might have a liberal viewpoint.  Anyone else in the Village would have gone out of their way to prove that "for the love of God you can't call me a liberal!" and would have spent the entire interview kissing Wallace's ass.

And it's a devastating critique of our journalism in 2011 that the best explanation of the modern media moment and how it is nothing more than ideological propaganda is coming from the mouth of a goddamn late-night comedian.

We deserve what we get, apparently.  Steve Benen by the way backs up Stewart's claim that FOX viewers are the most "consistently misinformed" here.

So How's Clarence Thomas Doing?

You know, while Anthony Weiner was busy getting drilled out of Congress, at the time he was asking uncomfortable questions about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his massive conflict of interest problems.  Now, finally, the Village may be starting to pay attention to the Thomas story and his continuing ethical challenges with folks like Harlan Crow.

Mr. Crow, 61, manages the real estate and investment businesses founded by his late father, Trammell Crow, once the largest landlord in the United States. The Crow family portfolio is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and includes investments in hotels, medical facilities, public equities and hedge funds.

A friend of the Bush family, Mr. Crow is a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and has donated close to $5 million to Republican campaigns and conservative groups. Among his contributions were $100,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group formed to attack the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, and $500,000 to an organization that ran advertisements urging the confirmation of President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Crow has not personally been a party to Supreme Court litigation, but his companies have been involved in federal court cases, including four that went to the appellate level. And he has served on the boards of two conservative organizations involved in filing supporting briefs in cases before the Supreme Court. One of them, the American Enterprise Institute, with Mr. Crow as a trustee, gave Justice Thomas a bust of Lincoln valued at $15,000 and praised his jurisprudence at an awards gala in 2001.

The institute’s Project on Fair Representation later filed briefs in several cases, and in 2006 the project brought a lawsuit challenging federal voting rights laws, a case in which Justice Thomas filed a lone dissent, embracing the project’s arguments. The project director, an institute fellow named Edward Blum, said the institute supported his research but did not finance the brief filings or the Texas suit, which was litigated pro bono by a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s. 

It gets worse from there.   Harlan Crow has made an awful lot of donations to Clarence Thomas's pet projects, and in turn Thomas has just happened to side with Crow and his friends on more than a few occasions.

But the real problem is how the Supreme Court is exempt from many of the same ethics rules that apply to federal judges.

The justices are not bound by the federal judiciary’s conduct code, because it is enforced by a committee of judges who rank below the justices. Even so, Justices Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy said in testimony before Congress in April that the justices followed the code.

Beyond the code, the justices must comply with laws applying to all federal officials that prohibit conflicts of interest and require disclosure of gifts. Justice Thomas’s gift acceptances drew attention in 2004, when The Los Angeles Times reported that he had accumulated gifts totaling $42,200 in the previous six years — far more than any of the other justices.

So we have to simply take their word for it.  And Clarence Thomas keeps taking gifts.  Soon after Anthony Weiner started raising a stink about this, his career ended precipitously.  It seems somebody finally senses a real story here.

Maybe.

Greek Fire, Part 34

We're not quite in full panic mode in Europe yet, but we're close.

A year after European officials bailed out Greece, investors say the region’s banks haven’t raised sufficient capital or cut loans enough to withstand the contagion that may follow a default.

While European lenders reduced their risk tied to Greece by 30 percent to $136.3 billion last year by not renewing loans, writing down the value of debt and shifting it off their books, they still have almost $2 trillion linked to Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy, figures from the Bank for International Settlements show, leaving them vulnerable if the crisis spreads.

“The Greek debt situation certainly has the potential to create havoc with the European banking system,” said Neil Phillips, a fund manager at BlueBay Asset Management Plc in London, which oversees about $45 billion. “A Greek default and the ramifications of that would be too ghastly for Europe and the European banking system to contemplate right now.” 

It's gotten to the point where the ECB is now considering halfway measures just to buy time.

European governments weighed withholding half of Greece’s next 12 billion-euro ($17.2 billion) aid payment, seeking to keep the country solvent while maintaining pressure on the government to slash the debt that pitched the euro area into crisis.

Euro-area finance ministers may authorize only a 6 billion- euro loan to tide Greece through bond redemptions in July, while further aid hinges on Greek budget cuts, Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders said.

“We will in any case try to release the necessary funds for the short term,” Reynders told reporters before a meeting of euro-area finance ministers in Luxembourg that began late yesterday. 

Greece's government is on the brink and the Greek people aren't going to be the ones that and left with the bag, looks like.  That means European banks are on the hook, and that's going to cause some rather interesting chain reactions down the road.

I can't get over the distinct feeling that nobody in Euroland seems to have any idea how to fix this disaster, either.

StupidiNews!

• Japanese nuclear workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant will open the airlock in Reactor #2 in order to assess the damage and lower the core temperature.
• Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets in Madrid, Barcelona, and all over Spain to protest austerity cuts.
• Disgraced former Sen. John Edwards won a reprieve in the deposition of his sex tape made with mistress Rielle Hunter until after the federal case against him is decided.
• Greek PM George Papandreou faces yet another vote of no confidence in the Greek Parliament as he struggles to reshuffle his cabinet.
• Microsoft claims digital copyright laws effectively allow the company to disable all third-party Xbox 360 accessories.

Last Call

Looks like the Obama administration is moving on bringing troops home from Afghanistan, but even McClatchy is warning that any drawdowns come with a metric crapton of caveats:

President Barack Obama is expected to unveil his U.S. troop reduction plan for Afghanistan next week, buoyed by assessments by senior defense officials that the U.S. war strategy is headed in the right direction and has weakened the Taliban-led insurgency.


But some U.S. officials in Washington and in Afghanistan are concerned that many of the gains aren't sustainable, and conditions are too fragile to allow for the "significant" troop drawdown that Obama is being pressured to begin next month by some top aides and growing numbers of lawmakers of both parties.

Violence is worse, many Taliban appear to have moved elsewhere rather than fight U.S. forces surged into the south, the Afghan government and security forces remain far from capable, and counter-insurgency cooperation with Pakistan is all but frozen, these U.S. officials said.

"The situation is terrible. Has there been a qualitative change that disadvantages the opposition and advantages the (U.S.-led) coalition? I don't buy it," said a U.S. official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue publicly. "The Taliban remains a clever, adaptive enemy."

Not even "White House officials" or "Pentagon officials" but the all-purpose "US officials" which basically means "This is so far off the record that it smells like dead fish."   Somebody's hell-bent on raining on the "let's bring them home" parade, even with bin Laden dead.

It'll be interesting to see where this all shakes out.  This makes me question just how bi-partisan the effort by Republicans really is about bringing troops home, too.  In fact, this seems like a concerted effort to both minimize the success of bin Laden's death, and to pin the "continued failure in Afghanistan" on Obama, something right up the Republicans' alley for 2012.

I'm moderately surprised McClatchy is playing ball with this, but there you are.

Cain Unable

Herman Cain is still stuck in an endless loop pattern where he keeps telling the tea party that he would never appoint a dirty, filthy enemy Muslim to his Cabinet, and then tells the Village he was misconstrued and taken out of context.  He's done it before (several times in fact) and this weekend he tried it again.

At a press conference following his speech at the RightOnline conference here Saturday night, Cain expressed frustration that the quote he gave ThinkProgress about not appointing Muslims to his administration is still haunting him.

Cain said the first thing that came to his mind when he got the question was violent Muslims. Cain made it clear that he would treat applicants for his administration differently if they were from the Muslim faith, based on the fact that they could, in fact, be terrorists.

"I am not anti-Muslim," he said. "I am anti-terrorist. And so my statement has been misconstrued several times, I've even been called a bigot because I expressed a desire to be cautious if I were to consider a Muslim for my administration. That was the intent of [the answer to ThinkProgress]." 

Sorry Herman.   You believe all Muslims are potential terrorists who deserve extra scrutiny and must prove they are innocent because they are presumed guilty by default, ergo you are anti-Muslim.

"So, no, I'm not going to play nicey nice and say that I'm not going to take extra precautions in order to be able that make sure that we can do our job," Cain said.

Then, under questioning from TPM, he walked all of that back. TPM asked what the special precautions might be, specifically.

"If you're trying to make me lose my cool, you are succeeding," Cain said, his voice rising. "I never said I would use any special precautions!"

OK, then, TPM followed up: "So a Muslim applies to be in the administration, he gets in like anybody else?" 

"Yes," Cain said.

So he just contradicted himself in the space of the same conversation with TPM.  And this guy wants to be President?  In what universe, the one where we make Muslims wear neon signs?

Please.  If he spun any faster, we'd have to attach copper wires and a magnet to him just to see if he could power a city block or two.

Firing Up The Base

Remember when John McCain was the "non-crazy Republican"?  I kind of miss those days too, because the current iteration of Senator Angry is just as bad as some of his tea party colleagues...in fact he's worse, because he knows better than to make dangerous and irresponsible claims like this, he just once again chooses to lie to score points with the crazies.

U.S. Sen. John McCain is blaming illegal immigrants for starting some of the wildfires that have scorched hundreds of thousands of acres in Arizona.


"There is substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally," McCain, R-Arizona, said Saturday at a press conference. "The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border."

The Arizona senator, however, did not say what the evidence is, prompting a swift rebuke from Latino civil rights advocates.

"It's easier to fan the flames of intolerance, especially in Arizona," said Randy Parraz, a civil rights advocate who ran unsuccessfully against McCain as a Democratic candidate in 2010.

But that slander is out there, and now Arizonans will be gunning for Latinos in that state...possibly quite literally.  If he has the evidence, then let's see and hear it.  My guess is he has nothing but racist bullshit.

More from Capt. Fogg over at The Reaction.

Your Political Cartoon Of The Moment

Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courier:



But remember, the GOP has a jobs plan. Somewhere.

I'll Have The Fish, Thanks

Somehow this feels like a Vonnegut plotline: population boom equals food shortage. Solution? Synthesize food from human waste matter. Absurd yes, but Japanese scientists have actually discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces.

Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama Laboratory, has developed steaks based on proteins from human excrement. Tokyo Sewage approached the scientist because of an overabundance of sewage mud. They asked him to explore the possible uses of the sewage and Ikeda found that the mud contained a great deal of protein because of all the bacteria.

The researchers then extracted those proteins, combined them with a reaction enhancer and put it in an exploder which created the artificial steak. The “meat” is 63% proteins, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals. The researchers color the poop meat red with food coloring and enhance the flavor with soy protein. Initial tests have people saying it even tastes like beef.

The Hamburger Helper punchlines are crowding out deeper analysis.  I'm really curious, what do you guys think about resorting to such levels to feed the people?  Don't get me wrong, I see the benefit in theory, but at that time I think the Ew factor would make me go vegan.

A Man And His Best Friend

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – A community came together to grant a homeless man his last wish. That dying wish was to see his dog one more time. It was a simple request, but one that meant the world to him in his final days.

People involved with the man’s last wish describe it as something they’ll never forget. Now that he’s gone, they’ll always cherish the memories of the man and his best friend. 

It gets better.  Enjoy. 

Flying The Colors

Even Sen. Al Franken is saying President Obama needs to obtain a vote from Congress authorizing the use of force in Libya, and given the NY Times story that the DoJ and DoD advised the President to do just that but that he ignored their advice, I'm having serious trouble seeing how the President can go on with the status quo here.

"We're going to have to vote," Franken said shortly after his speech to the Netroots Nation crowd gathered here in his home state Saturday.

In an explosive article Friday, the New York Times reported that Obama overruled Justice Department advice that continuing the war in Libya without congressional authority was illegal. Asked about the story, Franken said he rejected the president's reported reasoning behind overruling his own legal team.

"I disagree with his take on it," Franken said. "I understand what his take is, which is that we don't have any troops on the ground, we are -- you know, whatever it is, I don't agree with it."

In the long term, Franken said, Congress must give Obama authorization to continue the war.

"The War Powers Act should be enforced," Franken said.

As if there wasn't enough on President Obama's plate right now, a healthy chunk of Congress, both left and right, feel like Obama is stepping all over their authority, and frankly he is.  The President's going to have to go hat in hand to Capitol Hill at some point very soon, or the House will make good on its threat to defund Libya at the very least.

Obama is on the wrong side of this one.

A Conference Of Dunces

News from the Republican Leadership Conference this weekend in New Orleans is pretty grim if you think reason and logic will prevail in the 2012 GOP nominee for the White House.  Via BooMan, we find as President, Michele Bachmann would basically take the Department of Education out of the picture, give states block grants and let them teach whatever they want, but she wants schools to teach intelligent design.

"I support intelligent design," Bachmann told reporters in New Orleans following her speech to the Republican Leadership Conference. "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don't think it's a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides."


Intelligent design suggests that the complexity of the universe cannot be explained by evolution alone, and must also be attributed to a creator or supernatural being.

"I would prefer that students have the ability to learn all aspects of an issue," Bachmann said. "And that's why I believe the federal government should not be involved in local education to the most minimal possible process."

So she wants minimal federal government involvement in schools, but wants to force schools to teach evolution and intelligent design because they're two "competing theories" and the government "shouldn't take sides" by saying evolution is OK.  That makes logical sense, right?  We should have the government make schools teach alternatives to other "unproven scientific theories" like gravity.

Meanwhile, this conference is where the GOP hired an Obama impersonator to tell some pretty offensive jokes.



Aren't Republicans great?

It's About Suppression, Part 2

Democrat Jay Nixon of Missouri vetoed the efforts of Missouri Republicans to put yet another battleground state under GOP voter suppression rules.

“This [photo ID] mandate would disproportionately impact senior citizens and persons with disabilities, among others, who are qualified to vote and have been lawfully voting since becoming eligible to do so, but are less likely to have a driver’s license or government-issued photo ID,” Nixon said in a letter explaining his veto. “Disenfranchising certain classes of persons is not acceptable.”

A bold and smart move by Nixon.  Missouri Republicans have already gotten in trouble before with Voter ID laws that the courts found to have been clear efforts to disenfranchise poor and minority voters.  They tried again with clever new language and by trading a nine-day early voting period to get Democratic support, but Nixon didn't bite.

“Placing a cloud of uncertainty over ballots cast by qualified voters is inconsistent with an individual’s right to vote and have that vote counted,” Nixon said, later adding that it was “unacceptable to impede or discourage citizens from voting who have lawfully cast ballots their entire adult lives.”

In 2006, Republicans pushed through a photo ID bill that was later struck down by the Missouri Supreme Court. The court ruled that the law amounted to a "heavy and substantial burden on Missourians' free exercise of the right of suffrage."

In Missouri, voters are already required to provide some form of ID before casting a ballot, but the list includes some without a photo, such as a utility bill, bank statement or paycheck.

A 2009 study by the secretary of state's office estimated around 230,000 Missourians are registered to vote but lack a government-issued photo ID. A 2007 study by Washington University found that among blacks, the young and low-income residents -- historically among the most loyal Democratic voters -- about 80 percent of registered voters had access to a government-issued photo ID. This compares to around 90 percent of whites, middle class and middle-aged voters.

A coalition of groups -- including the NAACP, AARP, League of Women Voters and ACLU -- had called for Nixon to veto photo ID legislation. Claims that a voter ID law is needed to stave off voter fraud are ridiculous, critics argued, since there have been no instances of the type of voter fraud this bill aimed to prevent ever occurring in Missouri.

And that's the dead giveaway.  When you hear Republicans say "we need to stop rampant voter fraud with these measures" they can never, ever seemingly name a single case where a voter ID law would have stopped fraud.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of thing Republicans do when they think nobody is watching.

Two aides to former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich (R) have been indicted for ordering what officials claim were deceptive robocalls intended to suppress Democratic turnout during Ehrlich's second run for the office last November.

Voters in Maryland started getting mysterious phone calls on election day last year, that told them to "relax" and not bother going to the polls because President Barack Obama and Gov. Martin O'Malley "have been successful."

"Everything is fine. The only thing left is to watch on TV tonight," the robocalls said.

Telling people to stay home and not vote.  Because that's the kind of "freedom" Republicans think you should have.  The GOP argument by the way?  Telling people to stay home and not vote is "protected free speech".

It's good to see Democrats in the position to fight back on the rash of GOP measures for voter suppression nonsense are doing so.  We'll need a lot more before this one dies.

Know When To Holder 'Em

Now that the right has claimed Anthony Weiner's head, the next target appears to be Attorney General Eric Holder.  Naturally, it's the far-right Washington Examiner calling for Holder's head over...well, nobody's really sure, but it involves Darrel Issa's boys and Mexicans.

The ATF put out marked guns into the system to see where and by what routes they were going to the Mexican drug cartels, the equivalent of dye packs in bank robbery money.  The problem is two of the guns in the operation were used to kill a US Border Patrol agent.  Naturally, the Washington Examiner is demanding Holder's immediate resignation.  The right wing noise machine is demanding a lot worse.

What bothers me is that if you mention gun control laws to the right, they screech about the Second Amendment and lie about Obama coming to take Americans' guns from them.  But when the ATF tries to deal with the fact that America has lax gun control laws and guns are pouring over the border into the hands of Mexican cartels, sold to them by US dealers, it's Eric Holder's fault and he's the one who has to be fired.

So no, this is a massive smoke cloud, but there's no fire.  What we need are much stricter controls on firearms, and to stop them from going to the cartels and to US criminals as well.  But try getting that past the Republicans and the gun lobbyists that own them lock, stock, and two smoking barrels.

Smoke Em If You Got Em

Republicans in the House have decided that having the FDA protect children from cigarettes is too much government interference and want to strip the agency of the power to regulate tobacco.  Also, the $290,000 in lobbying money didn't hurt either as GOP Rep Denny Rehberg of Montana is leading the charge:

Among other things, the Rehberg amendment would restrict the FDA’s ability to regulate the use of menthol in cigarettes. The FDA’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee in March 2011 issued an exhaustive report that concluded menthol increases the number of kids who start to smoke and reduces the number of smokers who quit. … [And] the addition of menthol is just one example in the tobacco industry’s long history of designing their products to make them more attractive to children and minorities, or more addictive and difficult to quit using. … The tobacco companies add sugars, flavorings and other substances that make their products easier to use and attractive to children. While there may not be evidence that these additives increase the risk of cancer or other diseases, the FDA should be able to stop such actions that make cigarettes more appealing to children and increase the number of kids who smoke.

But hey, who cares about that when the tobacco industry is throwing tens of thousands of dollars at Republican lawmakers?   It's so profitable that in fact Republicans are willing to stab each other in the back over the honor of who gets to please Big Tobacco.

The amendment, whose supporters in the Appropriations Committee accepted almost $290,000 in campaign contributions from the tobacco industry, may fall due to a turf war among Republican committee chairs. House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) is expected to succeed in an attempt to kill the amendment because it attempts to “legislate on an appropriations bill” in violation of the House rules. Such a procedural objection, however, does little to prevent Rehberg’s gift to the tobacco industry from being repackaged in another bill.

Yep, they're fighting over who gets this bill...because they get the money, you see.   That's how Washington works.