Talking Points Memo reports that Nancy Pelosi is drawing a line in the sand on what cuts the upcoming debt ceiling commission can make:

At a pre-recess press conference Tuesday afternoon, TPM asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) whether the people she appoints to the committee will make the same stand she made during the debt limit fight -- that entitlement benefits -- as opposed to provider payments, waste and other Medicare spending -- should be off limits.

In short, yes.

"That is a priority for us," Pelosi said. "But let me say it is more than a priority - it is a value... it's an ethic for the American people. It is one that all of the members of our caucus share. So that I know that whoever's at that table will be someone who will fight to protect those benefits."

The question now becomes, "Will Harry Reid follow suit"? If he does then Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be protected. If even one of his selections, as TPM author Brian Beutler points out, doesn't hold firm to the same standard as Pelosi, then cuts are almost certain to come.

Oh my! Sounds like someone needs to hold hearings and issue some subpoenas to get to the bottom of this scandal. Yoo hoo, Congressman Waxman:

During the last 18 months, Congressman Darrell Issa has made a name for himself: “Obama’s Chief Antagonist.”

At least, that’s what the Washington Post recently dubbed the U.S. representative from Vista. Politico.com has called him a “conservative firebrand” whose “daily denunciations draw cheers from partisans and booking from TV producers.” Talking Points Memo described Issa’s first 18 months as ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as a “tireless quest for scandal.”

His investigations have included Toyota, ACORN, the Environmental Protection Agency and whether the Obama administration offered U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak a job to keep him out of the Pennsylvania Senate race.

“He’s throwing a lot of mud and seeing what will stick,” says Melanie Sloan, executive director of the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “I think he’s always looking for an issue that he can use to hurt the White House. That doesn’t mean he’s always wrong. I just question his motives.”

Issa has made it clear that, should the Republicans gain a House majority in November, he plans to double his staff and begin issuing subpoenas.

These investigators may want to start with Issa himself. A CityBeat analysis of Issa’s 2010 financial disclosure statementan annual report of his financial holdings revealed several conflicts of interest and a real-estate deal that benefited Issa to the tune of $3 million.

Issa filed his form on June 15, 2010, and, at 17 pages, it’s significantly longer than most of his congressional colleagues (Rep. Brian Bilbray, for example, turned in an eight-page form). That’s because Issa, who founded the company behind the Viper car-alarm system, is among the wealthiest members of Congress -- if not the richest.

[...] Last summer, Issa went on a property-buying spree. In the span of two months, he bought industrial complexes in Oceanside and Carlsbad and a condo overlooking Oceanside Bay. Even his son picked up a home in Vista.
The Carlsbad complex, however, is at the center of a lawsuit playing out in Los Angeles County Superior Court. A bank lender in Ventura County is accusing a bank of selling Issa the building for at least $3 million less than it should have.

The property is a series of five brand-new buildings near McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad. Currently, all but one unit is empty, but they can be rented through Greene Properties, a company that employs Issa’s wife and son. The project was dreamed up by Orange County “new urbanism” developer David Dirienzo, who defaulted on a $36-million construction loan in January 2009.

The main lender, East West Bank, put the property up for auction but decided not to sell, instead filing a $12-million “credit bid” to hang onto it. Two weeks later, the bank sold the property to Issa’s company, DEI LLC, for $8.5 million.

In the complaint, Ventura County Business Bank, a secondary lender with an 8.3-percent interest in the original loan, accuses East West of negligence and “breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.” The complaint alleges that East West did not properly market the property and that the bank declined offers to buy the property and loan that were “significantly in excess” of what Issa paid. It specifically states that East West “discouraged” a potential buyer from making an $11.5-million bid on the property, which could have resulted in a $3-million discount for Issa.

This sort of real-estate deal may be familiar to San Diegans. In 2005, Randall “Duke” Cunningham, a former member of Congress representing San Diego County, was caught in a bribery scandal that centered around property bought and sold at abnormal prices.

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Bill O'Reilly was all worked up last night on his Fox News show, claiming that the "liberal media" are waving the bloody shirt again, using the violence and extremism and racism of a handful of joiners to smear an otherwise entirely innocent movement.

First, his Talking Points Memo segment was devoted to the notion that "the Tea Party as a whole is not responsible for the loons who may lurk among them."

Which is, you know, pretty much true. Unless, of course, the movement seems to attract a high percentage of loons, and especially if the movement itself employs loons as their speakers and representatives.

Which is the case with the Tea Parties.

This is pretty funny, really, coming from the guy -- as Matt Corley at ThinkProgress notes -- who only a couple of years ago was culling off comments at DailyKos to smear the entire liberal blogosphere as the equivalent of Nazis.

O'Reilly brought on Rev. Al Sharpton, who seems to have figured out how not to let O'Reilly make him into a punching bag, because he pretty effectively rebutted most of O'Reilly's points. Nonetheless, Monsieur Falafeloofah managed to assert that the "liberal media smear" of the Tea Parties by blaming them for their kooks is "unfair!"

This was followed by a segment with Mary Katherine Ham and Juan Williams. And Williams set off O'Reilly by pointing out that the Tea Parties are fundamentally a rebirth of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s:

WILLIAMS: You know, people who's have a lot of hateful attitudes towards President Bush and then somebody who is extremist on the fringe, yes. And if that was also to be then the case with the Tea Party, yes, that's too much and unfair. But, when you start to see militia groups start to associate with the Tea Party --

O'REILLY: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me stop you there. I haven't seen militia groups associating with the Tea Party.

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It's hard to tell sometimes whether Bill O'Reilly is a dumbass or a liar.

F'r instance, here's his Talking Points Memo from last night, discussing John Brennan's retort to Republican critics:

Well that statement has caused major controversy. But there is no question Mr. Brennan is comparing criminal recidivism like robbers to Al Qaeda.

That's where "Talking Points" has a problem. We are in a war with the jihadists. The Obama administration does not say that, with the exception of the State of the Union, but it's the truth. And I believe truth is a powerful weapon in defeating the Islamic killers who are trying to destroy us.

Actually, President Obama himself has said it numerous times in the past several months well beyond the State of the Union address -- for instance, in his January 7 press conference on the Underwear Bomber, reproduced in the video above:

We are at war. We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again. And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.

He also referenced it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and his January 2 radio address, and in a March 2009 address.

And Obama's far from the only one. Here's John Brennan, on August 9, 2009, explaining exactly what the administration's terminology is and why they use it:

As many have noted, the president does not describe this as a 'war on terrorism.' ... Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy. These are the extremists we will defeat.

It's tempting to think that O'Reilly just spewed out this line, assumed it was true, and was too arrogant to have someone on his oft-touted research staff fact-check it. Because if they had, of course, they'd have found out the Obama administration quite regularly references the fact that we are at war with the "jihadists".

Of course, the fact that he has such a staff and he said it anyway kinda makes you suspect he's just lying through his teeth, doesn't it?

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Bill O'Reilly devoted his leadoff Talking Points Memo segment and the following conversation with Dick "The Troll Who Lives Under the Bridge" Morris to the notion that, if another terrorist attack occurs on President Obama's watch, he's gonna be all washed up.

Nevermind that, of course, no one has yet died from a terrorist attack on Obama's watch. (O'Reilly's counting the Fort Hood shootings as a "terrorist attack," though of course there isn't much evidence that it actually was.)

Still, you have to wonder where O'Reilly and Morris and all these other right-wing blame-meisters were back in 2001 and 2002, in the wake of an actual terrorist event that actually killed 3,000 people.

Oh, that's right -- they were busy proclaiming that any blame-laying against Bush was beyond the realm of acceptable discourse. If you suggested back then that Bush had been asleep at the wheel on terrorism on 9/11, you were accused of being a traitor who hated America.

Oh, and let's just remember exactly what George W. Bush's record on terrorism was:

Afterward, of course, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the press: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." (As a matter of fact, just such a scenario had been foreseen by intelligence officials in 1998, as Rice later admitted.)

Then there was the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US," which concluded:

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Bad enough when terrorists bluff about their intent to obtain nuclear weapons to frighten the general populace - now we have Republican politicians doing the terrorists' work for them. From Talking Points Memo:

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) was troubled by what might happen when waterboarding and the American right to a fair trial met in a U.S. courtroom. She worried what might happen if terror suspects argued they'd been given "cruel and unusual" punishment at Gitmo.

"This is what scares me because they're in a U.S. court now and the rights are different," she said. "What will they say [about their detention] and what could happen and could they be out among the people again? It's very frightening."

How frightening? Mushroom cloud frightening, according to [Rep. Trent] Franks [R-AZ]. He said that a federal trial would give the suspects "a megaphone to speak to the planet," which he said "only hastens the danger" of, literally, a nuclear terrorist attack.

Yes, we certainly don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, do we? The only thing we need to fear are the fearmongers themselves. Better to dig a nice deep hole at Gitmo, and throw all these Republicans terrorists into it and forget about them. Also present at the Dec 10 event were Rep. Michelle "Kill the Socialists" Bachman (R-MN) and Frank "Crazy Eyes" Gaffney (Center for Security Policy).

I'm going to create a new variant of Godwin's Law.

• Sigger's Law: "As any discussion on terrorism grows longer, the probability of attributing terrorists with nuclear weapons (or similar destructive capabilities) approaches 1."
• Corrolary to Sigger's Law: "Once such an observation is made, the discussion is finished and whoever mentioned terrorist possession of nuclear weapons has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress."

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The meme had been brewing for a few days among some of the Fox News guests -- particularly Michelle Malkin -- brought on to talk about the Fort Hood shootings, but it was Bill Sammon, during the broadcast of the memorial for the slain soldiers, who apparently made it official at Fox: The Fort Hood shootings were a terrorist attack -- comparable to 9/11 and Oklahoma City -- by a radical Islamist engaged in Muslim "jihad."

Now, it's not only the conventional wisdom at Fox News, it's one of their major attack points -- they're claiming that because President Obama and the rest of the media aren't adopting their presumptuous and hysterical meme, they're being "soft" on terrorism.

The meme gained momentum when Glenn picked up Sammon's ball and ran with it the next day, declaring: "If you don't call [Hasan] a terrorist, it clears a path for ... an extremist terrorist plan." That night, Sean Hannity explored the question at length with Michelle Malkin, as you can see from the video atop this post.

For Malkin and Hannity, "political correctness" -- which they blame for the military's failure to stop Hasan -- is actually code for "the refusal to engage in ethnic and religious profiling". Because such profiling, it's clear, is what they think the military (and the government generally) should do to prevent future such shootings.

The worst offender, though, has been Bill O'Reilly, who -- as you can see below -- not only harangued Sally Quinn for her reluctance to declare Nidal Hasan a "terrorist," but then devoted his leadoff Talking Points Memo segment last night to chastising the president and the rest of the media for their reluctance to embrace the meme.

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This exchange with Quinn was especially revealing:

O'Reilly: But you have a hard time saying the words "Muslim terrorist," and so does Obama. He has a hard time saying it. I don't know why you guys aren't saying it. You know, why, why?

Quinn: Well, I think, first of all, there are different kinds of terrorists. As I said, Timothy McVeigh --

O'Reilly: He's a Muslim terrorist! What do you mean, different kinds of terrorist? He killed people under the banner of jihad! That's who he is! What do you -- look, what do you want, him to come to your house with a strap-on bomb? The guy did it for jihadist reasons! "Allah Akbar!" That's the slogan! He mails Al Qaeda! Miss Quinn, you're a brilliant woman, and I'm not saying that facetiously. You are. A third-grader gets this, and you're resisting it! I wanna know why!

Quinn: Bill, you're making a very good case. I mean, he's Muslim, and he may well end up being a terrorist. We don't know for sure --

O'Reilly: I know for sure! Ninety percent of the people watching me know for sure! I don't know why you don't know for sure! What else do you need?

Quinn: I mean, you can call the guy who blew up -- you know, who shot up the Holocaust Museum a terrorist --

O'Reilly: Did he yell "Allah Akbar?" If he yelled "Allah Akbar," and he e-mailed Al Qaeda in Yemen, I'd call him that, Miss Quinn!

Quinn: OK, he's a Muslim terrorist.

O'Reilly: Thank you.

O'Reilly seems to have a peculiar idea of what constitutes "terrorism." His definition of the word seems to be "any act of violence by devout Muslims", or something along those lines.

That, of course, is quite a distance from the the legal definition of terrorism (from U.S. Code Title 22, Ch.38, Para. 2656f(d)):

(2) the term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents;

This term, in fact, perfectly describes Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn, who was, beyond any serious doubt, a classic right-wing "lone wolf" terrorist.

It is in fact still not clear, however, whether the description fits Nidal Hasan's motives in shooting 13 people to death. It is true that all kinds of evidence is emerging showing that Hasan was increasingly becoming politically radicalized.

What that evidence doesn't establish, though, is that he engaged in this horrendous act on behalf of those radical beliefs, or whether those beliefs simply formed part of the context in which he acted. There certainly haven't been any organizational ties established. We probably won't have any idea until Hasan himself starts talking, or at least his attorneys begin preparing his defense.

It's important to remember what mass-murder profiler Pat Brown told Fox's Brian Kilmeade:

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Talking Points Memo notes that former SecState Condi Rice and former NSA Stephen Hadley are joining forces to create a" strategic consulting" firm. May I suggest that this is probably an even bigger farce than former FEMA Director Michael Brown's decision to start a consulting firm on disaster preparedness following his stellar performance during Katrina?

I really want to know what clients these two take on, so that I can relentlessly mock their stupidity for hiring the dynamic duo who brought us into the adventures of invading Iraq and Afghanistan without any idea of the resources required or any form of an exit strategy.

UPDATE: In the comments, jenne corrects me:

I think the Cheney "Keep America Safe" Institute is a bigger farce than both Brown and Condi's thingies put together.

OUCH. And touche'

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Bill O'Reilly was helping lead the chorus of whining that erupted on Fox News yesterday in response to Anita Dunn speaking the truth about their right-wing propaganda operation.

He opened with a Talking Points Memo segment attacking Dunn and the White House. He wrapped it up with a series of claims that could only have been uttered by someone who's pathologically delusional:

Finally, Ms. Dunn is seeing the world through the prism of the other media, like NBC News and CNN. By all accounts, those networks favored Barack Obama over John McCain, and NBC actually promoted the president's candidacy and continues to give him excellent coverage.

So by that measure, Fox News is indeed troublesome to the White House. But our hard news coverage is fair and balanced. Again, if somebody doesn't believe that, let's see the evidence because bloviating walks.

Oy. Where to begin. Over the years, there's been a mountain of evidence amassed -- both here at C&L as well as such sites as Media Matters and ThinkProgress -- demonstrating Fox News' extraordinary right-wing bias, and its utter lack of anything approaching fairness or balance. Indeed, Fox's adoption of the phrase "fair and balanced" has transformed it into a popular reference to up-is-down Newspeak.

The fact that O'Reilly blithely dismisses this mountain as the product of a "far left bias" by those groups is itself clear evidence of his own bias: It's clear he a priori dismisses any facts produced by such groups, regardless of their actual validity.

O'Reilly wants evidence of an utter lack of "fairness and balance"? OK, let's try a single sample out of that mountain: Griff Jenkins' reportage from the "Tea Party Express" in which he not only blatantly led the teabaggers in their anti-Obama chants, but where a Fox producer was caught exhorting the crowds to cheer.

Of course, O'Reilly will never accept such evidence simply because it disproves his claim. Yeh, that's the Fox brand of "fair and balanced."

But O'Reilly really severed any tie with reality in the following part of the segment, where he talked over the White House meanies with fellow Foxite Brit Hume. Reaching his apotheosis when the subject of Fox's treatment of George W. Bush came up, O'Reilly claimed:

O'Reilly: And I have to say that when President Bush was in trouble in Iraq, this network and this program, and your program as well, routinely, routinely hammered President Bush. On Iraq.

Hume: Well, we certainly -- we, we were very faithful about covering all the bad news that came out of Iraq for a very long period of time. The criticisms that were made of him were reported and discussed at length on Fox News. Um, now, he had his defenders, the war had its defenders, there was commentary on Fox --

O'Reilly: But there was no cheerleading -- There was no cheerleading of President Bush on this network when his administration ran into trouble. There was no cheerleading, you know -- it was skeptical coverage, Iraq's going south, when the economy started to wobble last September, we were right on that.

OK, done with that long belly laugh? Good. Because we all remember how Fox not only fawned over every move made by the Bush administration, but how it viciously attacked anyone who dared criticize Bush or Dick Cheney or their incompetent gang of cronies.

Recall how it attacked war critics as the situation worsened in Iraq? (It also transformed proponents of the war into "critics" when it became convenient to do so.) How it openly cheerled for Gen. Petraeus?

Remember how O'Reilly routinely attacked anyone who criticized the Bush torture regime?

Then there was the way O'Reilly consistently dismissed the Abu Ghraib scandal as unimportant.

Remember how it routinely attacked Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, and sturdily defended Scooter Libby?

And those are just a few examples of how Fox didn't merely cheerlead for the Bush administration, but also acted as its propaganda arm by viciously attacking its critics. And there's no shortage of evidence of that reality at all.

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On The O'Reilly Factor last night, the Falafel Master devoted his Talking Points Memo segment to the notion that President Obama is "a secular guy" -- and as proof held up the recent foofara over the Air Force's decision to deny a military-plane flyover at a "God and Country" festival in Idaho.

O'Reilly: But to diminish spirituality by denying the good folks in Idaho a flyover is simply stupid. There is no specific religion in play at that festival. This is another example of secularists being disrespectful to people of faith.

Later, in a discussion of the case with Warren Ballentine -- who laughs at O'Reilly for even making this argument -- O'Reilly repeats the claim:

Ballentine: What I'm saying is this: This president has purposely taken the position that he is not going to be connected to any religion, because he doesn't --

O'Reilly: What religion is in Idaho at the festival, Warren? What religion is there? Tell me what religion is there.

Well, Bill, according to the festival's organizers, the Christian religion is there:

Organizers don't deny the explicitly Christian nature of the annual patriotic rally.

"Yes, it's about as Christian as you can get — we believe in promoting Christianity," Syme said. "And we have no plans to change that."

It's not open to Jews, nor to Muslims. Not even Mormons were welcome at this festival.

Of course, this has all been reported previously, so these facts were available to O'Reilly and his producers. But they had a narrative to sell, so why let facts get in the way of a good story?

Another fact that goes unmentioned (but which we already explored in depth): The Obama administration is in fact simply enforcing longstanding U.S. military policy that has gone ignored for the past 50 years and more. And it is only doing so because it faces likely lawsuits from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation for failing to uphold those policies.

In other words, the administration isn't pushing secularism here. It's just doing the right thing, and making its military adhere to its own policies.

But don't tell Bill O'Reilly because he isn't interested. And he'll just yell at you if you do.