Good for him:

Newsweek columnist (and Newsweek International editor) and CNN host Fareed Zakaria announced he would return a prize from the Anti-Defamation League because he was upset by the group's decision to oppose the mosque proposed for Lower Manhattan. Zakaria said last night on his CNN show, "I have to say I was personally and deeply saddened by the ADL’s stand because five years ago, the organization honored me with its Hubert Humphrey Award for First Amendment Freedoms. Given the position that they have taken on a core issue of religious freedom in America, I cannot in good conscience keep that award."

The mosque, whose planned location two blocks from the World Trade Center site has ignited a national debate ripe for election year posturing and maybe even a discussion of religious tolerance. Zakaria elaborated in his Newsweek column in which he called the ADL's decision to criticize the mosque's location as "bizarre":

The ADL’s mission statement says it seeks “to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.” But Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, explained that we must all respect the feelings of the 9/11 families, even if they are prejudiced feelings. “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted,” he said. First, the 9/11 families have mixed views on this mosque. There were, after all, dozens of Muslims killed at the World Trade Center. Do their feelings count? But more important, does Foxman believe that bigotry is OK if people think they’re victims? Does the anguish of Palestinians, then, entitle them to be anti-Semitic?

Five years ago, the ADL honored me with its Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. I was thrilled to get the award from an organization that I had long admired. But I cannot in good conscience keep it anymore. I have returned both the handsome plaque and the $10,000 honorarium that came with it. I urge the ADL to reverse its decision. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain a reputation.

For their part, the ADL says they are “saddened, stunned and somewhat speechless” at the move.

And the ultimate for the "Et tu, Brute?" files, The Simon Wiesenthal Center also opposes the Cordoba House, saying it's a good idea, but a bad location. However, they have no problem building a Museum of Tolerance on a...wait for it...Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.

You know, for a party that likes to wrap themselves in the Constitution, they sure do seem to want to obliterate it. We had the "Tenthers" screaming about state sovereignty. And the Tea Parties have called for the repeal of the 16th and 17th Amendment and a new 13th Amendment.

Now, the Republicans have decided the key to electoral success this year is to take aim against the 14th Amendment. Let's just call them The Dred Scott Republicans:

First Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), then Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), now Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is calling for congressional hearings on rescinding part of the 14th amendment to prevent anyone who is born in the U.S. from automatically becoming a U.S. citizen. The intention of such a radical move is to block the American-born children of undocumented immigrants from becoming citizens.

Mitch McConnell initially openly supported this hearing and then backtracked:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell sought today to characterize his push for hearings on birthright citizenship as an educational exercise aimed solely at a small subset of wealy parents who enter the United States for the express purpose of having a child -- a practice known as birth tourism.

In an interview with The Hill yesterday, McConnell said that a 14th Amendment provision granting citizenship to all infants born in the United States should be reviewed. "I haven't made a final decision about it, but that's something that we clearly need to look at," he said. "Regardless of how you feel about the various aspects of immigration reform, I don't think anybody thinks that's something they're comfortable with." An aide to McConnell confirmed this with the Huffington Post. But today, McConnell denied that he was talking about all children born in the United States.

Today, McConnell told reporters at his weekly press conference that his comments were interpreted too broadly. "I read an article in the, I think, the Washington Post just about the business that's been created overseas to acquire citizenship for newborns," he said. "And I think having a hearing on that would be a good idea. I don't know what the potential solution to it is. Obviously it's a rather unseemly business and I think we ought to...take a look at it."

Sure, Mitch. There's a huge, unchecked industry of "birth tourism" that's killing the country. Yeah, and if you believe that, I got a bridge to sell you.

Make no mistake, this is just more of the Republican tactic of pointing to some other victimized subset of the population as the reason why your life isn't all that it could be. Now those wicked little anchor babies--and not the Republican policies of corporatism, favoring the top 5% of the population, dismantling social safety nets, deregulated markets and union busting--are keeping you from magically being one of those elites who actually stand to gain from the elimination of estate and capital gains taxes. They are not just saying we need a re-examination of the fundamental idea of birthright - but a repeal of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution which includes our right to due process and equal protection. They truly do want to take us back to 1868.

And when Lou Dobbs thinks you've gone too far in your hate and suspicion against the Other to still be within the law, you have to know you're in real trouble.

UPDATED: Chuck Grassley of Iowa adds his name to the list of old white guys afraid of babies. And Alan Keyes says some things about the Republican Party are too crazy even for him.

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Richard Wolffe returned to Countdown this week, absent from MSNBC airwaves for only a month after Glenn Greenwald pointed out that his full time employer was no longer Newsweek, but a lobbying firm:

Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program -- or serving as an almost daily "political analyst" -- is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist. Wolffe's role in life is to advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including corporations with substantial interests in virtually every political issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover. Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a guest-host and "political analyst" on one of its prime-time political shows. What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted, neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this.

This is a conflict so severe that it's incurable by disclosure: who wouldn't realize that you can't present paid corporate hacks as objective political commentators? But the fact that they don't even bother to disclose that just serves to illustrate how non-existent is the line between corporate interests and "news reporting" in the United States. Then again, Wolffe himself -- when it was previously revealed that he was exploiting his position as a Newsweek reporter covering the Obama campaign to leverage access to Obama in order to write a glowing book about him -- said this:

And [Wolffe] suggested he’s not that different from other reporters in an era in which the business and the profession of journalism have gotten closer and closer.

"The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on. Every conversation with journalists is about business models and advertisers," he said, recalling that, on the day after the 2008 election, Newsweek sent him to Detroit to deliver a speech to advertisers.

"You tell me where the line is between business and journalism," he said.

And yet, he's back...with nary a word about his absence, still as an MSNBC political analyst.

Don't get me wrong, I like Richard Wolffe in general, and appreciated his appearances on Countdown in the past, but to name him as a "Senior Strategist at Public Strategies" is truly the sparest way to describe him as a lobbyist and really blurs the lines between journalism and promotion/propaganda beyond what should be acceptable. How can we ever know if Wolffe's analysis is truly what he believes or if it's what he's been paid to promote by a client?

And frankly, I'm tired of the insular nature of these broadcasts, when the same predictable people show up day after day after day. To be fair to Keith, Olbermann is not the only news anchor with a retinue of guests they stick with over and over. They all do it. Even Rachel Maddow brings on "Uncle Pat" Buchanan, whose views are generally factually wrong or so far outside the mainstream, you can't but wonder why he's still on television. Wolffe isn't like that. But as I've documented before on media balance and biases, so much critical information is withheld from we viewers already that we generally don't get a fair view of the issues of the day, I really do have to ask if there are no other voices that Olbermann can turn to that he has to bring back a DC lobbyist?

What Gives?

Time and Newsweek both registered massive bounces for Bush during the Republican National Convention. Rasmussen says he would be showing Bush with a five point bounce (and, therefore, a four point lead) except his Saturday sample was terrible for Bush, giving him a slight 1.2 percent lead in the three day moving average. Now Gallup is showing a two point bounce based on a weekend poll that's moved Bush from one point behind to one point ahead (and now we're in the territory where sampling error matters, so it's not entirely clear than anything changed at all). Obviously, something a bit nutty is going on with polls taken on, say, Friday showing dramatically different results from polls taken over the weekend. Is this "faster public opinion" where people love Bush after seeing his speak and then forget all about it after 36 hours of hurricane coverage? As I recall something similarly screwy happened with Kerry -- he got a big bounce on Friday and then by the following Monday it was gone.

It's hard for me to understand the psychology of folks who would let their votes be swung by a speech -- we've had four years to watch Bush and his performance in office seems like an infinitely better guide to what you should do than is a speech -- so from my point of view there's really no telling.

This is just an odd story all the way round, but made odder by the notion that the failing Newsweek is actually being read at all. On a web-exclusive op-ed on April 26th, entertainment writer Ramin Setoodeh opined that while straight men could convincingly pass for gay in various entertainment projects, gay men are not convincing playing straight.

For decades, Hollywood has kept gay actors—Tab Hunter, Van Johnson, Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, etc.—in the closet, to their own personal detriment. The fear was, if people knew your sexual orientation, you could never work again. Thankfully, this seems ridiculous in the era of Portia de Rossi and Neil Patrick Harris. But the truth is, openly gay actors still have reason to be scared. While it's OK for straight actors to play gay (as Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger did in Brokeback Mountain), it's rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse. De Rossi and Harris do that on TV, but they also inhabit broad caricatures, not realistic characters likes the ones in Up in the Air or even The Proposal. Last year, Rupert Everett caused a ruckus when he told the Guardian that gay actors should stay in the closet. "The fact is," he said, "that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the ... film business." Is he just bitter or honest? Maybe both.

Most actors would tell you that the biographical details of their lives are beside the point. Except when they're not. As viewers, we are molded by a society obsessed with dissecting sexuality, starting with the locker-room torture in junior high school. Which is why it's a little hard to know what to make of the latest fabulous player to join Glee: Jonathan Groff, the openly gay Broadway star.[Nicole: shown in the video above dancing with co-star Lea Michele] In Spring Awakening, he showed us that he was a knockout singer and a heartthrob. But on TV, as the shifty glee captain from another school who steals Rachel's heart, there's something about his performance that feels off. In half his scenes, he scowls—is that a substitute for being straight? When he smiles or giggles, he seems more like your average theater queen, a better romantic match for Kurt than Rachel. It doesn't help that he tried to bed his girlfriend while singing (and writhing to) Madonna's Like a Virgin. He is so distracting, I'm starting to wonder if Groff's character on the show is supposed to be secretly gay.

Setoodeh also had some bitchy things to say about the newly openly out Sean Hayes in his turn as the male lead in Promises, Promises on Broadway, something his co-star, Kristin Chenoweth, took great umbrage at and wrote a slamming letter about. Ironically, Setoodeh is gay himself, which adds a particularly self-loathing aspect to the article. Understandably, people were upset at Setoodeh's article and wrote in vociferously, to which Setoodeh responded somewhat disingenuously:

Over the weekend, I became the subject of a lot of vicious attacks. I received e-mails that said I will be fired, anonymous phone calls on my cell phone and a creepy letter at my home. Several blogs posted my picture, along with a link to my Twitter feed. People commented about my haircut, and that was only the beginning. I was compared to Ann Coulter and called an Uncle Tom. Someone described me as a "self-hating Arab" that should be writing about terrorism (I'm an American, born in Texas, of Iranian descent).

But what all this scrutiny seemed to miss was my essay's point: if an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet today, would we still accept him as a heterosexual leading man? It's hard to say, because no actor like that exists. I meant to open a debate—why is that? And what does it say about our notions about sexuality? For all the talk about progress in the gay community in Hollywood, has enough really changed? The answer seems obvious to me: no, it has not.

Call me sensitive, but slamming gay actors for being "queeny" and "unconvincing" doesn't lend itself to a in-depth or enlightened discussion Setoodeh claims he wanted. Now Glee creator Ryan Murphy has called for a boycott:

The most recent addition to the carnage is from Glee creator Ryan Murphy, who has written an open letter calling for the boycott of Newsweek until an apology is issued. In it, Murphy says, “This article is as misguided as it is shocking and hurtful.” He condemns Newsweek as well for their publishing the article in the first place saying, “Would the magazine have published an article where the author makes a thesis statement that minority actors should only be allowed and encouraged to play domestics? I think not.” Murphy then extended an invitation to Setoodah to visit Glee’s writers room, see how they do things, and to take home a copy of Glee covering Madonna’s Open Your Heart , calling it “a song you should play in your house and car on repeat.”

Well, given that Newsweek's readership has fallen considerably, I'm not thinking the boycott will be a problem.

This is really heating up. Stay tuned for further developments as Congress is emboldened by the SEC civil fraud charges:

Washington is suddenly looking very unkind to the firm that used to be known as "Government Sachs." Now the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, is planning to focus hearings scheduled for next week at least in part on Goldman Sachs's role in the financial disaster.

Levin's staff has uncovered new documents "that link certain actions to specific people" at Goldman, according to a senior legislative official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official would not divulge the nature of the allegation but said that Levin believes it amounts to "another big shoe to drop on Goldman."

Spokespeople for Levin said they were not prepared to discuss the nature of the probe, but his committee has been conducting several weeks of hearings and one is planned for April 27 on "the role of the investment banks." "We expect to have some information tomorrow," spokesman Bryan Thomas said Monday.

Keep in mind that a win in the SEC case is by no means a slam dunk:

To a layperson, the case against Goldman may seem clear cut. After all, investors did not know some information about the product that they might have considered vital, and they lost $1 billion in the end. But the rules that govern these kinds of transactions are not so plain.

Several experts on securities law said fraud cases like this one, which focuses on context rather than content, are generally more difficult to win, because it can be hard to persuade a jury that the missing information might have led buyers to walk away.

They added, however, that the strength of the S.E.C.’s case is impossible to gauge until the agency discloses more of the evidence it has assembled. So far it has provided only a sketch.

The Villagers' favorite politician is making them all go back to their computers and rewrite their own stories that they've run for years, because in a Newsweek article about his recent campaign, he now refutes the idea that he was ever a Maverick at all.

Many of the GOP's most faithful, the kind who vote in primaries despite 115-degree heat, tired long ago of McCain the Maverick, the man who had crossed the aisle to work with Democrats on issues like immigration reform, global warming, and restricting campaign contributions. "Maverick" is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. "I never considered myself a maverick," he told me. "I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities." Yet here was Palin, urging her fans four times in 15 minutes to send McCain the Maverick back to Washington.

Talk about political hackery. This ranks up there with the best of the best. Will the media start calling him Keating 5 McCain and be done with it?

The S&L scandal (The Keating 5) that he was involved with forced McCain to reinvent himself so he went the Mavericky route.

Steve Benen says it was a rebranding of McCain's image to the public because of how bad conservatives were viewed and I agree, but I believe he did this to survive politically in the eyes of the media after so many people lost their money and the government bailed out Lincoln's Savings to the tune of $2.8 billion.

Jonathan Alter made this point on Countdown during the general election:

ALTER: [Y]ou remember the Keating Five scandal that he was a part of, which, by the way, it's crazy but there's been very little about it in the press in the last few weeks. And McCain thinks he's getting a hard time, he's really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country.

John "Keating 5" McCain is been kicked around by JD Hayworth and it's shown the depths politicians will sink in order to keep their power. But you know the media will keep booking him on their Sunday Talk Shows. They're addicted to the Maverick. They think they are being "balanced." Oy.

Sally Quinn's column got the axe over her idiotic column, but she has no regrets.

Sally Quinn, whose first novel was titled “Regrets Only,” doesn’t have any second thoughts about writing of her “dysfunctional family” drama in The Washington Post last week.

“I have absolutely no regrets at all,” Quinn told POLITICO.

While Quinn isn’t sorry about writing it, others — from family members to online critics to the paper’s top editor — are.

Quinn said Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told her that if he’d seen it first, he wouldn’t have run the column explaining the “dueling weddings” of her son and stepson’s daughter and squabbles among family members. And now Brauchli has decided “The Party” — her irregularly appearing print column launched in November — is over.

But Quinn says she’s glad, because it was never intended to be a permanent column but, rather, to focus on holiday entertaining and “generosity of spirit” — the sort of spiritually inspired get-together that would also work in “On Faith,” the WashingtonPost.com site she co-moderates with Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham.

OK, sure. I'm sure nobody will miss it.

[Richard Mack at a Bellevue, WA, militia organizing meeting in February 1995. Photo by David Neiwert.]

The more we learn about the Tea Party movement as it evolves, the more disturbing a portrait emerges: One of a right-wing populist movement animated by cultural resentments and paranoia that previously were the domain of fringe conspiracy theorists and militiamen.

There were a number of important reports on the Tea Party movement this week that underscored and confirmed something we've been reporting at C&L (similarly confirmed in that report for Newsweek) for some time: That the Tea Party movement has been overtaken by right-wing extremists of the Patriot movement.

The most important of these was David Barstow's report in the New York Times describing the movement's evolution into a revival of the Patriots:

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

Loose alliances like Friends for Liberty are popping up in many cities, forming hybrid entities of Tea Parties and groups rooted in the Patriot ethos. These coalitions are not content with simply making the Republican Party more conservative. They have a larger goal — a political reordering that would drastically shrink the federal government and sweep away not just Mr. Obama, but much of the Republican establishment, starting with Senator John McCain.

One of the key figures in this takeover, as this story describes, has been Richard Mack, the '90s militia figure who has become a fixture on the Tea Party circuit, as we reported previously. Indeed, his December appearance in Spokane was one of the signal events in the NYT piece.

Mack, who I photographed in February 1995 while addressing a militia-organizing session in Bellevue, Washington, has been a key figure for the Patriot movement in "transmitting" its talking points and beliefs into the mainstream for a long time. But he is hardly the only Patriot figure heavily involved in the Tea Parties, as the NYT piece describes.

One of the people who sometimes accompanied me in the 1990s when I attended militia gatherings, Devin Burghart, now works for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, and he was at the National Tea Party Convention and attended its seminar. and speeches. He filed a detailed -- and revealing -- report for IREHR:

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Audio of John Yoo on what the president can do from 2005.

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

This is f*&ked up. We need an explanation from David Margolis as to why he changed the original findings on Bybee and Yoo:

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect. Now the left is going to be upset: an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry...read on

There's plenty more to be disturbed about in this report.

Digby has more:

Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.

After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

That's excellent news. Now we know that all the president ever has to do is call in a legal functionary and have him write a memo legalizing whatever he wants to do and he's good to go. I feel safer already.

You know how I feel about Judge Bybee already and Margolis should have done the right thing. Did anyone order him to make these changes? And it sure pays to stack the OLC with your own flunkies for personal gain. Look what Bush and Cheney are getting away with because of these cronies.