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Someone needs to tell Fox regular Charles Krauthammer that the picture he's demanding to see of President Obama on the night of the attack in Benghazi, Libya has been available on the White House Flickr page since at least January:

Via Media Matters: Krauthammer Still Hasn't Seen This Photo Of Obama From Night Of Benghazi Attack:

Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer continued to hype the right-wing myth that President Obama was missing on the night of the September 11, 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

During a May 14 panel discussion on the Benghazi investigation during Fox News' Special Report, Krauthammer requested photographic evidence of President Obama's whereabouts on the night of the Benghazi attack:

KRAUTHAMMER: And where was the president on that night? We've all seen the video and the pictures--well the picture of the situation room--of Obama on the night of the Osama raid. And everybody looks at that, oh yeah he was really involved in that. Show me a picture of where he was on the night of the attack in Libya.

The claim that Obama was absent the night of the Benghazi attack has been repeatedly debunked, both by former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey.

Some of Krauthammer's other tales he was telling in the segment have been debunked here and here as well.

House Republican leadership today responded to their session with President Obama in a press conference.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) condemned the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal on Wednesday, demanding that the administration hold someone responsible.

"The IRS admitted to targeting conservatives, even if the White House continues to be stuck on the word 'if,'" he told reporters at a weekly briefing. "My question isn't about who is going to resign. My question is who's going to jail over this scandal?"

Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday he had ordered the FBI to open a criminal probe in a growing scandal over the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative political groups for extra tax scrutiny.

Speaker Boehner made no mention of jobs during the Republican press conference today, nor did any of the other GOP House "leaders."

On January 7, 200--two weeks before Barack Obama took the oath of office--the Congressional Budget Office forecast the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 at $1.2 trillion. Now, the CBO is projecting the deficit will be only $642 billion for FY 2013, $200 billion less than the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper estimated as recently as February.

For policymakers in Washington, the implications couldn't be clearer. For starters, the counterproductive Beltway fixation on immediate debt reduction, which economists have warned is slowing U.S. economic growth and costing millions of jobs, should be jettisoned ASAP. And to be sure, the Republicans' next round of debt ceiling hostage-taking should be condemned as the economic sabotage it is.

The CBO explained why the U.S. fiscal picture is improving so dramatically:

If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion, CBO estimates, the smallest shortfall since 2008. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit this year--at 4.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)--will be less than half as large as the shortfall in 2009, which was 10.1 percent of GDP...

CBO's estimate of the deficit for this year is about $200 billion below the estimate that it produced in February 2013, mostly as a result of higher-than-expected revenues and an increase in payments to the Treasury by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For the 2014-2023 period, CBO now projects a cumulative deficit that is $618 billion less than it projected in February. That reduction results mostly from lower projections of spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the public debt.

By 2015, the annual deficit is now projected to just 2.1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, well below the 40-year historical average of 3.1 percent. The gap is expected to grow to 3.5 percent by 2023, "because of the pressures of an aging population, rising health care costs, an expansion of federal subsidies for health insurance, and growing interest payments on federal debt."

The new CBO numbers are just the latest confirmation of House Speaker John Boehner's admission that "we have no immediate debt crisis." Coming on the heels of an analysis by the Hamilton Project estimating that austerity at the federal, state and local level has cost up to 2.2 million American jobs, the CBO report should help put to lie that more budget cutting is needed in Washington. As the New York Times explained just last week:

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As Esquire's Charlie Pierce relayed to Stephanie Miller this Tuesday morning, between Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI!, the IRS and now the Associated Press phone records, get ready for a really long summer of scandal mongering from Republicans the the beltway Villagers.

We're going to be in for one hearing after another and as Pierce wrote in his column, none of this is going away any time soon: Washington's Political Circus Is Not An Accident:

Want to know why the Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! mummery isn't going away, and why the marginally more serious accusations concerning the IRS aren't going away, either? Read what Howard Fineman, a very reasonable fellow, writes today about the singularly futile press conference the president held. [...]

We are now entering the we're-all-just-feathers-in-the-wind period of scandal coverage in Washington. The courtier press has decided that Washington "has turned into" a political circus, as if the process were a passing thunderstorm or an implacable seismic event. [...]

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The man who was vice president during the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001 says that last year's attack in Benghazi was "one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career."

In an interview on Fox News on Monday, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama and his administration of lying about the attack in Benghazi and then staging a cover up to hide the lies.

"They lied," Cheney said. "They claimed it was because of a demonstration video so that they wouldn’t have to admit it was really all about their incompetence."

"I think it’s one of the worst incidents, frankly, that I can recall in my career," he insisted. "If they told the truth about Benghazi, that it was a terrorist attack by an Al-Qaeda-led group, it would destroy the confidence that was the basis of his campaign for reelection."

"They were trying to perpetuate this fiction that there was no terrorist threat because they got bin Laden and that's a lie."

Informed Comment - guess who went to Baghdad?

Lawyers, Guns & Money - physics professors want to take your guns!

Obsidian Wings - the IRS kerfuffle analyzed, explained;

Oliver Willis - GOP busily rewriting Nixon narrative, again;

Rumproast - you'd think the GOP would realize that scandals only make her stronger.

blogenfreude blogs at stinque.com and, if you thought those Russian ambulance riders were bad, directs you here. Send tips to MBRU [AT] crooksandliars [DOT] com.

Why WOULDN'T the IRS pay closer scrutiny to a flood of tax-exemption requests from groups named variations of "Taxed Enough Already"?

Open thread below...

If you haven't seen this video by Canadian astronaut Chris Hatfield, you're in for a treat. Performed and filmed entirely on the International Space Station, it's definitely the most literal interpretation of the Bowie classic.

So on a daily basis, I find myself interacting with people (mostly on Facebook) who don’t understand racism, sexism, homophobia and other similar concepts. They aren’t really that difficult to understand, I don’t think, but I’ve made it a career choice and a personal interest to understand people who are different from me and the history that has led to the present state of discrimination, prejudice and negativity that affects those groups. I know not everyone has the time to minor in women’s studies or learn the material sufficient to teach black history classes like I did, so I’m going to give you a handy guide to how to avoid being racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and other things that you might want to avoid being if you want to have a productive life in a modern society.

So here you go, if you do any of these things below in connection with your interactions with or discussion of a particular group of people based on their demographic characteristics (race, gender, age, religion, sexual identity, ethnicity, national origin, etc.), then you are entering into territory where you are being offensive and morally wrong. This doesn’t make you a racist, sexist, etc., automatically, but it does push you in that direction and you should examine your actions, words, etc.

1. Directing physical or emotional harm or wishing harm upon the group

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If you've spent any time on Twitter, you've inevitably bumped up against someone who is hateful. If you tweet about politics on Twitter, racist and homophobic tweets are as common as falling leaves on an autumn day. They come from many different sources, as you've seen just from our Stupid Right-Wing Tweets feature.

Geographically, though, they emanate from a concentrated area of the South and Midwest, as shown on the map above, as analyzed by FloatingSheep.org:

The prominence of debates around online bullying and the censorship of hate speech prompted us to examine how social media has become an important conduit for hate speech, and how particular terminology used to degrade a given minority group is expressed geographically. As we’ve documented in a variety of cases, the virtual spaces of social media are intensely tied to particular socio-spatial contexts in the offline world, and as this work shows, the geography of online hate speech is no different.

Rather than focusing just on hate directed towards a single individual at a single point in time, we wanted to analyze a broader swath of discriminatory speech in social media, including the usage of racist, homophobic and ableist slurs.

Using DOLLY to search for all geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, we discovered 41,306 tweets containing the word ‘nigger’, 95,123 referenced ‘homo’, among other terms. In order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama, students at Humboldt State manually read and coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral manner. This allowed us to avoid using any algorithmic sentiment analysis or natural language processing, as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. For example the phrase ‘dyke’, while often negative when referring to an individual person, was also used in positive ways (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride”). The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive. Only those tweets used in an explicitly negative way are included in the map.

That last paragraph describes how important this study really is. By actually analyzing the context and meaning contained in the individual tweets, students were able to cull out those tweets which may have used their key terms but not in an intended negative manner.

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