Howard Kurtz knows what side his bread is buttered on.

He knows which pundits are idiots, who are compromised, and he's having cocktails with them all. So it's no surprise that Howie has his smelling salts out over Joe Muto, the so-called "Fox Mole". Because Joe Muto broke the code of Omerta and revealed that the Fox News Channel plays to the lizard brains of its viewers.

Was that a surprise to any of us? How many studies have to come out that say that Fox News Viewers are the least informed news consumers in the US? Give me something I didn't know.

Really, what Muto revealed so far as the Fox Mole on Gawker is no big deal. Bill O'Reilly on a vacation where women are topless? Go to any beach in Europe and you're going to see topless women. Sean Hannity doesn't think teleprompters are that bad? Did anyone not know that was a manufactured insult?

So far, I haven't been all that impressed with the revelations of Joe Muto. Frankly, I think he could have been a little smarter. He was picked off within 24 hours because he didn't even think to disguise the digital trail pointing to his office computer when he downloaded the "scandalous" videos. If you're going to be that careless, give us a blockbuster, man.

But Howie Kurtz sees it as an incredible betrayal to the nice people that gave Joe Muto a paycheck. There's no ethics or higher calling for Kurtz, no sense of fairness and balance. He simply can't understand someone wanting to escape the hypocrisy.

And he's the guy reporting on the reporters. What does that tell you?

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Kirk Cameron, the man who believes the banana legitimizes creationism continues his assault on the Gay community during a Piers Morgan interview on CNN:

During a new interview with Piers Morgan the "Growing Pains" heartthrob who transitioned from a "teen-idol-atheist in Hollywood and became a devoted follower of Jesus Christ in the middle of [his] career" explained that he believes homosexuality is "unnatural... I think that it's detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization."

On the issue of marriage equality Cameron remarked, "Marriage was defined by God a long time ago. Marriage is almost as old as dirt, and it was defined in the garden between Adam and Eve -- one man, one woman for life till death do you part. So I would never attempt to try to redefine marriage. And I don't think anyone else should either. So do I support the idea of gay marriage? No, I don't."

When asked what he would do if one of his six kids told him, "Dad, bad news, I'm gay," Cameron responded, "I'd sit down and I'd have a heart to heart with them, just like you'd do with your kids."

Morgan shot back, "I'd say, 'That's great, son! As long as you're happy.' What would you say?"

Cameron offered, "I wouldn't say 'That's great, son, as long as you're happy.' There are all sorts of issues we need to wrestle through in our life... Just because you feel one way doesn't mean we should act on everything we feel."

What great advice by Kirk. Hey there, son. For all things in life just act on what I tell you and what I believe in, OK? Thank the stars that recent polling shows fighting against gay marriage is a big time loser. Kirk really plays nasty with a smile on his face.

This came out a couple of days ago, but since Super Tuesday is upon us I was wondering if any cracker jack reporter has asked Mitt Romney lately if he supported the amounts of his own money the Mormon Church spent in California alone, trying to defeat gay marriage? I think it's pretty relevant considering he gives so much money to the Mormon Church and he's always attacking what the government spends. I won't even get into their polygamist marriage history and how that ties into this debate.

(h/t Heather at Video Cafe for the video. Don't forget to check VC all day long for all their awesome videos.)

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George Stepanopoulos of ABC News ran a piece Sunday after George Will appeared on This Week saying: George Will: Republican Leaders Are Afraid of Rush Limbaugh

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has been inundated with criticism after calling Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University student who testified before a House committee about contraception, a “slut” and a “prostitute.” But while Democrats have fiercely condemned the comments, Republicans’ ire has been significantly more muted. ABC’s George Will told me Sunday on “This Week” that GOP leaders have steered clear of harshly denouncing Limbaugh’s comments because “Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. ”“[House Speaker John] Boehner comes out and says Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entrée, that’s inappropriate. Not this stuff,” Will said. “And it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”

ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd said the Republicans’ apprehension to say anything negative about the conservative big hitter is based on the “myth” that Limbaugh influences a large number of Republican voters.“I think the problem is the Republican leaders, Mitt Romney and the other candidates, don’t have the courage to say what they say in quiet, which, they think Rush Limbaugh is a buffoon,” Dowd said. ”They think he is like a clown coming out of a small car at a circus. It’s great he is entertaining and all that. But nobody takes him seriously.”

It is an embarrassing fact for the GOP, but it's no surprise. I know this might seem like news to the MSM, but come, on. I actually don't believe they believe it's news, but since George Will said it, ABC ran with it. Let's just go back to March of 2009 when a couple of Republicans challenged Rush after he attacked their leadership.

Rush Limbaugh attacks Michael Steele and then Steele apologizes to RushBo.

Rush Limbaugh came out firing against the RNC's new leader Michael Steele after Steele criticised him on CNN. And as usual, the Republican bows down to the altar of Limbaugh and begs forgiveness. Limbaugh spanks Steele and tells him exactly what Steele's job is and what he should do and how he should do it.

STEELE: So let’s put it into context here. Let’s put it into context here. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it’s incendiary. Yes, it’s ugly.

Rush replies:

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Remember when Tony Snow said this in 2003?

Snow: "Here's the unmentionable secret," Snow said on an October 2003 edition of Fox News Sunday, "racism isn't that big a deal anymore." Snow argued that "no sensible person supports" racism, arguing that the problem is "quickly becoming an ugly memory."

Conservatives have been arguing for decades that they aren't racists and if there were a few, they're gone now. Then the tea party squad was created by FOX News and racist signs showed up everywhere. Even top ten lists were created, but we were told they weren't representative of their movement. OK, so why do we constantly see stories like this?

Montana judge admits sending racist email about Obama

Reporting from Seattle— Montana’s chief federal judge Wednesday admitted forwarding an email to friends about President Obama that appears to equate African Americans with dogs and raises questions about the president’s mixed racial ancestry.

“Normally I don’t send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine,” Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull wrote before forwarding the email, a copy of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

The email was sent from the judge’s court email account and immediately ignited a firestorm in Montana, where there were calls on social media sites for his resignation.

“We really feel that by circulating an email like this it really flies in the face of maintaining the honor and dignity of the position,” Travis McAdam, executive director of the Montana Human Rights Network, said in an interview. He said the organization had not yet decided on an official response to the issue.

Cebull, who has been Montana’s chief federal judge in Billings since 2008, was appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush and took his seat in 2001. He is a graduate of the University of Montana School of Law and a former tribal court judge.

What racism? I'm sure Pat Buchanan is trying to book a TV show appearance so he can go and defend the judge. After all, it gave him tingly feeling and touched his heart. Now, can that be racism? And I'm sure he'll be very fair in his rulings.

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Rick Santorum's attack of JFK's great speech about the separation of church and state in 1960 caused a stir around pundit-land. It was so off the wall it led to Billo's opening segment on Monday night called JFK, Ronald Reagan and Rick Santorum. When in a pickle Conservatives always turn to Ronnie. Billo tried to find a way to soften the blow against Rick as much as possible since Rick loves the Catholic church as much as he does. After the Talking Points Memo, Brit Hume comes on to do his usual pundit duties. But as Brit Hume was offering up analysis on the two candidates and their religious beliefs, Billo shut down Hume's commentary of Romney's Mormon faith very, very quickly. It was quite a revealing moment if you didn't miss it.

Hume: (Romney) ...as far as we know hews very much to his own fate. He ties a huge amount of money to his church, there's been no indication that he's not a man who lives his faith. And yet, he's not discussing that all the time.

O'Reilly: Well, he can't. Mormonism is so controversial that he just couldn't, but Santorum...

Hume: I understand that, I understand that but remember there used to be...

O'Reilly: Let's look at Santorum from another light. Santorum's big challenge to Romney is now on the backs of the evangelical..

Frank Bruni of the NY Times asked why Rommey never mentions his Mormon faith and got attacked for it. Well, O'Reilly reveals what many of his viewers believe: Mormonism is a problem for Mitt to openly discuss because of some of its controversial practices and many from the religious right are not fans so he avoids it at all times and Bill wouldn't even let Brit Hume broach the topic on his show. It explains in part why Santorum has been rising in the national polls for the GOP.

I knew there was too much time after the South Carolina primary before Michigan held their primary for Santorum's lead to last. I didn't think he'd talk in tongues for over a week, but if Mitt needed to he would have had his SuperPAC smear the heck out of him much more than the above video. However, is there a sliver of hope that Santorum will take Michigan after all? Nate SIlver's latest tries to give us a little comfort food:

Michigan Forecast Update: Romney’s Lead Looks More Tenuous

Since we ran the Michigan numbers early Monday morning, three new polls are out that make the state look more like a true toss-up and less like one that favors Mr. Romney.Two of the surveys, from Mitchell Research and American Research Group, in fact give Rick Santorum a nominal lead in Michigan, by 2 and 1 percentage points respectively. The third, from Rasmussen Reports, gives Mr. Romney a 2-point advantage.We also added a hard-to-track down survey from Baydoun Consulting, which gave Mr. Romney an 8-point advantage. However, it is less recent than the others, having been conducted on Thursday night rather than over the weekend.Among the five polls that were conducted over the weekend — including those that had been included with the previous update — three give Mr. Romney a small lead while two show an edge for Mr. Santorum.Mr. Romney still has the advantage in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, but it is more tenuous than the one we released overnight. The model gives him a 64 percent chance of winning the state, down from 77 percent in the previous forecast.

Rick Santorum does still have a slight chance in Michigan from Nate's POV. I fall into the category that the religious right found a topic it can scream about with the contraception issue even though most women of any faith are repelled by this discussion. Initially it's a win for President Obama. But remember, they are patient and willing to wait decades to turn public opinion to their side of the issue. I doubt Santorum will win Michigan, but it's still possible to keep this clown show going.

Here's a typical example of the violent rhetoric that has emanated from the GOP for decades now. David Neiwert often refers to it as eliminationism and outlines what it means here. An apology came out as soon as TPM reported the story because it was such an outrageous thing to publicly say.

Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK) sent TPM a public apology Thursday after we obtained audio of the five-term Republican telling constituents at a town hall this week that he’d have to personally shoot members of the U.S. Senate to get a budget passed through the chamber.

Sullivan, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma’s First District, was at a town hall meeting in Bixby, Okla., Wednesday when he lamented that the Paul Ryan Budget which the House passed in 2011 had no chance of passage in the Senate:

Like I said, after this last election, the first order of business is pass a budget. Now, I believe that. I supported the Paul Ryan budget and sent it over to the Senate. Now I live with some Senators, I yell at them all the time, I grabbed one of them the other day and shook him and I’d love to get them to vote for it — boy I’d love that. You know but other than me going over there with a gun and holding it to their head and maybe killing a couple of them, I don’t think they’re going to listen unless they get beat.

MSBC's Kelly O'Donnell offered a bizarre defense to Martin Bashir for Sullivan by saying that these things can happen in off-the-cuff settings. Is she serious? He's a five-termer talking to a town hall. Bashir rebukes her by pointing out that he watched her moving description of Gabby Giffords return to the House because she was indeed shot.

In other words...WTF, Kelly? Sullivan is not a rookie at speaking to people at public settings.

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(h/t Video Cafe)

Since the tea party took over the HOUSE they have targeted abortion and woman's health care in bill after bill after bill.

First, congressional Republicans attempted to deny statutory rape victims access to Medicaid-funded abortions (twice). Then GOP-dominated state legislatures pushed record numbers of laws limiting abortion rights, including proposals that could have treated killing abortion providers as "justifiable homicide." Yet in the past six months, social conservatives have widened their offensive, and their new target is clear: Not satisfied with making it harder to obtain legal abortions, they want to limit access to birth control, too.
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The first sign of the new assault came last October, when Mississippi activists and congressional Republicans pushed legislation on the state and federal level, respectively, that would have treated zygotes—a.k.a. fertilized human eggs—as legal "persons." If the definition of legal personhood is changed so that it begins when sperm meets an egg, hormonal birth control or barrier devices that prevent zygotes from implanting in the uterine wall could become illegal, making using an IUD tantamount to murder. Yet some 40 percent of House Republicans and a quarter of their allies in the Senate back bills that would do just that.

Then came Virgina's draconian vaginal ultrasound bill that even Gov. Bob McDonnell walked back on some. But obviously he's still talking nonsense on the issue because ultrasounds have always been one of the leading tools for the anti-abortion movement to wield . And Marco Rubio's bill is really appalling.

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h/t Video Cafe for the video)

Frank Bruni of the NY Times wrote a piece called 'Mitt’s Muffled Soul,' which discussed Romney's campaign and the lengths he has gone to to avoid discussing his Mormon religion.

When Romney first ran for president in 2008, there was so much discussion about the potential impact of his Mormonism, and his own concern about it was deep enough, that he delivered a set-piece speech designed to rebut any lingering impression of the religion as an exotic, even loopy sect. In that painstakingly calibrated address, he said the word Mormon all of once. Christ or Christianity came up repeatedly.

Four years later, he still avoids the word, trumpeting his faithfulness without specifying the faith. What’s surprising is that no one around him — not reporters, not rivals — talks about it all that much, either. The Romney-Gingrich showdowns in South Carolina and Florida got plenty nasty: at one point the Gingrich camp, flashing back to Romney’s term as Massachusetts governor, falsely accused him of pretty much wresting kosher food from the mouths of Holocaust survivors. But neither Gingrich nor his allies played the Mormon card, even though nearly 20 percent of the Republicans and independents surveyed by Gallup last year said they wouldn’t support a Mormon presidential candidate.

It's a very neutral piece and asks some good questions. The GOP has put religion smack in the middle of their presidential primary as soon as it began and in recent weeks it has been ramped up. Reporters are obviously more afraid than usual of being labeled anti-religion since the new dog whistle coming out of the GOP camp is called "religious freedom" so I doubt they will go near this topic unless events really force them to. I was surprised to see this opening for CNN's Reliable Sources. Check out Howard Kurtz' first question to Bruni in the segment called Pressing Romney on Religion:

KURTZ: "New York Times" columnist Frank Bruni says that's precisely why the Mormon question is fair game. "There are valid reasons," he writes, "for the rest of us to hone in on Romney's religion, not in terms of its historical eccentricities but in terms of its cultural, psychological, and emotional imprint on him. His aloofness, guardedness, and sporadic defensiveness: are these entwined with the experience of belonging to a minority tribe that has often been maligned and has operated in secret?"

But should the media be setting those boundaries? Joining us now in New York is Frank Bruni of "The Times"; and here in Washington, Jennifer Rubin, who writes "The Right Turn" blog for "The Washington Post"; and Scott Conroy, national political reporter for "Real Clear Politics" and CBS News. Frank Bruni, start with you.

So why is Romney's faith or why should it be any of the media's business?

Right from the start of the interview Howard attaches negative connotations to the idea that Americans would want to know anything about the Mormon faith and reporters have no business bringing it up. Bruni handles it quite deftly:

FRANK BRUNI, NEW YORK TIMES: Well, I think when you're running for president, the public, the media -- we have a right to know as much as we can about you. I mean, we want to take your full measure as a human being. And if a big part of your biography, if a big part of who you are is your religious faith, then I think that needs to be discussed. I think it's wise for the candidate himself to discuss it. And I think it's entirely fair game for us to ask questions about it. We -- you're running for president of the United States, highest office there is. We need to know who you are, where you're coming from, what animates you, what's important to you

.

Exactly so why is Kurtz so bothered by his column? It's the truth. Before I published my post on Romney's great--grand father's polygamist past and exodus to Mexico in the 1880's on 01/04/12, the media refused to even gaze into Romney's family history or religion this election cycle and he's running for the highest office in our country. Now at least a few media outfits have started to tackle the topic. I find the story of Mormonism, which was founded in America, Joseph Smith and the Romney's ties to it a fascinating story and my writing has been about that information on C&L Just recently a huge article hit the LA Times because the LDS Church apologized to the Jewish community for their continued practice of Baptisms of The Dead on Holocaust survivors after they had promised not to do that anymore.

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The Young Turks - December 19, 2011

I watch a lot of BBC TV and shows like MI-5 which use Britain's CCTV coverage to find criminals and covert operatives all the time. It's kind of cool because they only use footage of the bad guys trying to blow things up in London, so seeing cameras in NYC wasn't so troubling to me when I was there. But using drones on U.S. soil is repulsive and should terrify people because we know where it will lead.

Digby writes: Drones and military industrial complex

Lee Fang at Republic Report has uncovered a very intriguing document showing that the drone plane manufacturing industry is writing the legislation that governs their use in the United States. They openly brag about it:

Drones are mainly associated with the Predator airships that patrol the Afghanistan sky. But thanks to a bipartisan vote last week, the public can expect 30,000 domestic drones flying over the United States in the next eight years...

Yesterday, we reported how the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVS), a drone trade group, actually doubled its recent lobbying expenses. Today, we report on a PowerPoint presentation put together by top AUVS lobbyists Michael Toscano, Mario Mairena, and Ben Gielow. The lobby group — which maintains an official partnership in Congress with Reps. Buck McKeon (R-CA), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), and dozens of other lawmakers — was the driving force behind the domestic drone decision passed last week. In the presentation obtained by Republic Report, there are several fascinating concerns raised by the lobbyists.

The report lists a few items, but this one has to be the most chilling:

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