President Obama sat down for an interview with Larry King last night to talk about the situation in the Gulf and being President. I didn't realize today was the 500th day of his presidency, but some astute producer at CNN evidently did.

Here's an excerpt for Maureen Dowd:

KING: Some -- I know you -- you appear so calm.

Are you angry at BP?

OBAMA: You know, I am furious at this entire situation, because this is an example of where somebody didn't think through the consequences of their actions. And it is imperiling not just a handful of people, this is -- this is imperiling an entire way of life and an entire region for, potentially, years. So...

KING: Has the company felt your anger?

OBAMA: Well, they have felt the anger. But what I haven't seen as much as I'd like is the kind of rapid response.

Now, they want to solve the problem, too, because this is cost -- costing them a lot of money. And the one thing that I think is important to underscore is that I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people. But that's not the job I was hired to do. My job is to solve this problem. And, ultimately, this isn't about me and how angry I am. Ultimately, this is about the people down in the Gulf who are being impacted and what am I doing to make sure that they're able to salvage their way of life?

And that's going to be the main focus that I've got in the weeks and months ahead.

Perspective is worth something.

On Israel, Gaza, and condemnation:

I think what's important right now is, is that we break out of the current impasse, use this tragedy as an opportunity so that we figure out how can we meet Israel's security concerns, but at the same time start opening up opportunity for Palestinians, work with all parties concerned -- the Palestinian Authority, the Israelis, the Egyptians and others -- and -- and I think Turkey can have a positive voice in this whole process once we've worked through this tragedy -- and bring everybody together to figure out how can we get a two-state solution, where Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in peace and security.

On being President:

KING: A couple of other quick things, because I know we have a little bit of a time limit.

First, do you still like this job?

OBAMA: Well, this is the best job on earth. I mean it's a -- it's an extraordinary privilege to be able to wake up every day and know that you have the opportunity to serve the American people and -- and make their lives a little bit better or maybe it's the next generation's lives a little bit better. And...

I'm not sure there was a particularly good answer to that last question. What's he going to say, after all? Every morning he wonders what crisis is going to leap up and smack him upside the head today? Or does he wonder which nutcase will be out there with some new non-issue yammering about it on FOX News? As far as I'm concerned, I give him credit for getting up every morning and dealing with the constant drumbeat of a crisis here and a disaster there.

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I recently attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in D.C., with video camera in hand, to report on the attendees. I was particularly interested in interviewing James O'Keefe, the miscreant (and accused felon) responsible for the ACORN video media hoax that The BRAD BLOG has been meticulously detailing for several weeks, including the important focus on how the mainstream corporate media (the old-media) has been had by the scam.

O'Keefe's phony "pimp" story has been debunked, but, as Brad Friedman has shown, the old-media remains remarkably reticent to admit their errors, and the publisher of the videos, O'Keefe's employer and promoter, Andrew Breitbart has been unwilling to help them off the hook. Witness the outrageous email responses from the NYTimes' Senior Editor for Standards Greg Brock and then from their Public Editor Clark Hoyt, when it was shown to them that "the paper of record" had been had -- that O'Keefe had never "visited Acorn offices...dressed so outlandishly" in the now-infamous "pimp" costume as the paper had reported, as O'Keefe had represented, and as Breitbart himself had claimed in his own column, to the public.

While I didn't get the chance to speak with O'Keefe, I did catch up with his partner in fraud, Hannah Giles. Alas, she was surrounded by a protective coterie and fled without answering any questions when one of her entourage recognized me.

But then my luck turned. I trekked to the basement to cover the "XPAC" party and found myself standing shoulder to shoulder with Breitbart, O'Keefe's promoter, publisher and employer, and owner of the website which launched the infamously damaging, misleading, deceptive and highly doctored video tapes. I had previously questioned Breitbart at a press conference at the National Press Club press last October. He's had a pretty easy ride of it since then, facing questioning only from a largely adulatory press.

Though old-media, as Brad has shown, have been remarkably reluctant to demand answers to hard questions from Breitbart -- or any of the players involved in the ACORN secret video scheme -- I felt it important to do so for a number of reasons. The results were revealing, both in Breitbart's insanely manic demeanor, and in the substantive content of his answers to my questions.

Ultimately, as I believe you'll find in the video, he reveals a lot about his own editorial judgment, professionalism and reliability -- none of it is good…

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[Warning: Naked self-promotion ahead.]

My book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right continues to attract a lot of interest, partly because it so clearly anticipated the current descent into madness of mainstream conservatives, currently drowning in a lake of right-wing extremism. I didn't predict tea parties, but I did warn that '90s-style militia wingnuttery was about to swamp the Republican Party, and I do explain how this is happening.

So this week I was the featured interview at Amanda Marcotte's podcast at RH Reality Check. We specifically focused on the way right-wing domestic terrorists have had a profound impact on women's reproductive rights. This is a brief interview; it starts at about the 8-minute mark and continues to the 24-minute mark.

And I was also featured as the live guest on Second Life for this week's episode of Virtually Speaking on BlogTalkRadio.

This is an hourlong session and fairly broad-ranging. It was fun for me because I've known Jay Ackroyd for over 10 years -- online (we useta post at the old Slate forum The Fray back in the day), but we only finally met in person this summer at Netroots Nation. We talk about posting at Crooks and Liars, among other things. I also get to talk about my favorite moment of the past year: Having been the guy who made Sarah Palin crazy enough to try to have McCain lie, thereby cementing her rep as a diva among the McCain campaign.

It's now been a full year since I've been at C&L. I think I'll celebrate by running the video that made Palin crazy, which occurred my first week here:

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Meanwhile, John Amato and I are ensconced in the writing process this weekend for our upcoming book from PoliPoint Press: Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. (Due out next spring.) We'll have more details as we get closer.

In the meantime, I'd like to say thanks to the community of readers and commenters here at C&L for welcoming me so warmly and making me feel right at home from the start. It's been a blast, with lots more to come.

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We've been hearing a lot from the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck that President Obama and the Democrats are imposing "socialism" on America.

Which tends to make anyone who knows much about socialism -- beyond, that is, the bumper-sticker political awareness of a 13-year-old -- wonder what the hell they're talking about. It's pretty obvious by now that these are unrepentant capitalists in the Obama Administration -- just not laissez-faire capitalists. Socialism? Please.

Bill Moyers wondered the same thing. So he went out and found an unrepentant socialist -- a Cal-Riverside prof named Mike Davis -- and interviewed him. As Moyers put it in the interview:

Moyers: You know, Mike, there's so much talk from that side of the spectrum raising the specter of Socialism. And I thought I might as well talk to a real Socialist about what the term means. I mean, I cannot find anyone in this country advocating the abolition of private markets and the wage systems or nationalizing all the major industries, I mean, no one's arguing for supplanting capitalism, are they?

Davis: I am.

But Davis, as he makes clear, stands in contradistinction to Barack Obama, as well as to most Democrats. Like most actual socialists, he considers Keynesian economic measures like this administration's to be half-solutions at best.

The real heart of the interview, though, came when they discussed what all this talk about "socialism" is really about:

BILL MOYERS: And yet, Obama's only been in office two months now. And there's this chorus of voices, the "Wall Street Journal" editorial page, conservative talk radio, Fox News, Lou Dobbs, CNBC's Cramer and Kudlow, all blaming Obama for the bad economy. Are those attacks sticking out where you live in California?

MIKE DAVIS: Well, I mean you know, what could be more absurd than the, you know, the people who brought this country to its knees now being the chorus of dissenters, now representing themselves as the populace? The fact that they're the ones who have erected the antenna, the lightning rod for popular anger is worrisome because if these bailouts and stimulus fail, if the country sinks deeper into what could be a very long period of stagnation if popular anger is monopolized by the demagogues on the Right, I think you could see a real resurgence of the Republican Party or at least of its most anti-immigrant economic nationalist wing.

This is something maybe not very visible on the national screen. But when you live near the border like I do in Southern California, the southern cities, areas of the Midwest, this has really invigorated what you once would have refereed to as the John Birch Society wing of the Republican Party. The vacuum left by the fall of the Soviet Union has been filled by, you know, good old-fashioned Nativism immigrant bashing.

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Harry Shearer is a renaissance kind of guy. Actor, writer, radio host, satirist and recent awardee of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, you've seen his work in everything from Saturday Night Live to This is Spinal Tap (one of my all time favorite movies) to The Simpsons to the political novel Not Enough Indians.

And now, he's come out with the satirical album, Songs of the Bushmen, which lampoons the you-couldn't-make-this-stuff-up headlines that is the Bush Administration. He offers songs like 935 Lies, which we've featured here at C&L before. And the album has been the cause of its own controversy as well, when Clear Channel banned Harry's songs and any ads for the album because they objected to the cover you see above:

Comedian and actor Harry Shearer's new album, Songs of the Bushmen, pays comedic "homage" to current and former Bush administration officials like Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. But media giant Clear Channel doesn't want people to buy it. The New York Post reports today that the "notoriously conservative" company's outdoor advertising arm has banned signs for the album "because the cover depicts the president with a bone through his nose."

You gotta be kidding me. Rendition, torture, millions of Iraqi and Afghani civilian deaths, more than 4,000 troop fatalities for a war of choice and they're offended by a Photoshopped bone. I don't know about you, but I find their sensibilities offensive.

To show that we're not going to let Clear Channel determine what's appropriate, we've asked Harry to join us to discuss Songs of the Bushmen and I'm so happy that he's agreed to.

So, please, join me in welcoming Harry Shearer to C&L. As with all chats, we ask that you keep your comments respectful to our guest and limit your questions to the topic.

This 2004 interview should be required viewing for every journalism student. I admit that I had not seen this video until today, but apparently over a million people already have and I hope that millions more will watch it as well. If the American press corps and our corporate media had asked tough questions like this of President Bush and his administration during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, there isn't a doubt in my mind that public support for it would have plummeted. This interview was done in '04, but was never aired in the U.S., and it's quite possible that it could have affected the outcome of the presidential election that year. Imagine the outcome if a journalist dared to interview John McCain in this way today.

The Huffington Post:

While surfing the net on 'Stumble', I came across an interview with President Bush on Irish television that caused a bit of a storm in 2004. The interview conducted by the tenacious Carol Coleman of Radio Television Ireland was not aired on American television, and Bush's press officers apparently complained vociferously about the rigorous questioning.

The video shows Bush at the absolute peak of his arrogance -- convinced of his own rhetoric about Iraq, flooded with confidence from international subservience to American power, and high off a crushing military victory that reinforced his childish fantasies of American power and preeminence.

The problem was, Coleman was having none of it, and what transpired was a unique insight into the warped brain of the least respected and most hated president in the history of the United States. Read on...

Last week Bill Moyers sat down with Leila Fadel while she was stateside to receive a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. In this interview she bluntly lays bare all the spin on Iraq and Iran in a way that is all too rare these days.

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I can't say enough good things about this brave woman, but I would echo all of what Spencer and Matthew have written about her and then some. McClatchy, one of the few sane voices on Iraq since before the invasion (when they were still known as Knight-Ridder) continues to impress.

Watch the full interview on Moyers' PBS website, and you can check out Leila Fadel's McClatchy blog, Baghdad Observer and her team's Inside Iraq.

Transcript after the jump.

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On 60 Minutes Sunday Lara Logan interviewed Pakistan's President dictator Pervez Musharraf about accusations that he may be to blame for the assassination of his chief political rival, Benazir Bhutto, and what exactly he is doing to combat the resurgence of the Taliban and al Qaeda, whom his government claims was behind her killing, and whether his government is even trying to find Osama bin Laden.

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On all counts, Musharraf's answers were lacking. He repeatedly denies that he was to blame for anything at all and points fingers elsewhere, callously blaming Bhutto for her own death by saying that "it was she to blame alone. Nobody else. Responsibility is hers." Apparently, in his mind, the man who climbed up on the back of the car and shot her in the back of the head and the suicide bomber who blew himself up and everyone else around had nothing to do with it.

Now I don't know whether or not all of the rumors are true that Musharraf or his government actually had a part in Bhutto's death or whether he should be held accountable for denying her repeated requests for more security, but he certainly did himself no favors in this interview to convince anyone otherwise. It's simply ridiculous to blame her "alone" for her death, and his refusal to accept blame for anything, his claims of successes in combating extremists in his country despite all the evidence to the contrary and his apathy towards whether or not his government is even looking for Osama bin Laden was - well - eerily Bush-like.

UPDATE: (Nicole) Some scary drumbeats being heard as far as Pakistan. According to the NY Times, the US is considering covert push in Pakistan (how covert it can be when it's in the NYT is another story), which Tom Hayden at HuffPo also weighs in on as well with a warning to Barack Obama to ratchet back the rhetoric. Moreover, given the news coming out in international circles (because you'll never hear about it in the US media) from Sibel Edmonds about our own actions in allowing Pakistan to develop their nuclear program, can we afford to take such an aggressive stance against Pakistan without risking any lingering goodwill we still hold on the global stage?

(full transcript after the jump)

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This is what passes for news on Fox's top ranked show?

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We have two foreign occupations costing American lives daily with no end in sight, the economy is teetering, we're about a month out from the first Presidential primaries, there's even a war on Christmas for Pete's sake.

Okay, that last one's a total bunch of BS, but even that would have been better than interviewing a PUPPET!!!!

On Thursday's Countdown Keith Olbermann interviewed Sen. Hillary Clinton, covering a wide number of issues including the swift boating of Graeme Frost and SCHIP, Iran, the pending FISA legislation and even the movement to draft Al Gore. Clinton calls out the right for stalking and smearing a 12 year old boy -- and we now know that the lies behind this hate-fest from the right came in the form of an e-mail to reporters from Republican Senator Mitch McConnell's Communications Director, Don Stewart. Stewart should be condemned and fired for putting the Frost family in such danger.

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Senator Clinton defended her vote on the Lieberman/Kyl amendment, saying it was misunderstood by some and misrepresented by others, and that it in no way gives the president authorization to invade Iran. Hillary also touts the Iran amendment she co-sponsored with Senator Jim Webb and sees it as an opportunity to use diplomatic means to deal with Iran instead of President Bush's cowboy diplomacy. As for a possible Nobel Prize and White House run by Al Gore? You'll have to watch the clip...