You never hear any Senators and Blue Dogs asking or debating if Viagra should be covered by health care while woman's reproductive rights are always being attacked, especially if it's in the public option. Chris Wallace brought it up on FNS even though it's a right guaranteed by our laws. Why should this even come up in the discussion?

WALLACE: Are you prepared to say that in a government public-funded, taxpayer-funded public health insurance plan that no taxpayer money will go to pay for abortions?

ORSZAG: I think that that will wind up being part of the debate. I am not prepared to say explicitly that right now. It's obviously a controversial issue, and it's one of the questions that is playing out in this debate.

WALLACE: So you're not prepared to rule out...

ORSZAG: I'm not prepared to rule it out.

How about we start demanding that Viagra should no longer be covered. Let's see how the men of Congress react to that news.

Once again women draw the short stick here. Men try to control their bodies, but want freedom to do what they will. Have you noticed how all the Sunday shows take such a negative view of the health care reform debate? Every question is framed at defeating it and it's like they are trying to tank reform so they can cover a defeat for Obama's presidency regardless on how it affects the American people. But when you see the Villagers talk about, oh, I don't know, holding hearing on torture they all freak out and say it'll make DC such a toxic place and that should never happen.

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If you're watching FOXNews, you know you're going to run into Karl "I belong in front of a War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague" Rove. Naturally, a man who is synonymous with the nasty, divisive partisan politics that the voters overwhelmingly rejected in 2008 is the go-to guy for answers on the direction of the Republican Party.

Host Chris Wallace asks Rove, who remains strangely sure of his vision of the Republican Party despite the fact that fewer people identify themselves as Republicans now than ever before, whether the Republican Party has room in it for someone like former Secretary of State Colin Powell who was guilty of being quoted by the National Journal as saying that Americans are looking for something that current GOP appears to not understand.

WALLACE: Finally, Colin Powell is answering his Republican critics today. Powell said -- and we’re going to put it up on the screen -- this earlier this month. “Americans do want to pay taxes for services. Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less.”

Rove, to his credit (and it kills me to write that), says that the market should decide what works for the Republican Party. Powell should find a candidate he supports and see which candidate resonates with the party. Asked if he, like Dick Cheney, chose the Rush Limbaugh version over the Colin Powell version, good ol' Turdblossom predictably chooses the Fat Bastard of the GOP:

WALLACE: Dick Cheney said if it’s a battle between or a choice between Rush Limbaugh and Colin Powell, he sides with Limbaugh. You?

ROVE: I -- yes, if I had to pick between the two. But you know what? That’s -- neither one of those are candidates. Neither one of those are going to be people who are offering themselves for office.

It seems to me that Rove's ideas have already lost in the marketplace of ideas in the GOP (such as it is). Mr. "Permanent Republican Majority" not only lost big in the election, but is losing membership more and more as they continue to try to keep it business as usual. What's more telling to me is the part of the National Journal article on Powell that Wallace didn't bring up and that shows just that Rove and his brethren just don't get it:

Powell described the 2008 GOP candidate, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, as "a beloved friend" but said he told him last summer that the party had developed a reputation for being mean-spirited and driven more by social conservatism than the economic problems that Americans faced.

Powell also criticized other GOP leaders, for bowing too much to the right.

He blasted radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, saying he does not believe that Limbaugh or conservative icon Ann Coulter serve the party well. He said the party lacks a "positive" spokesperson. "I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without," Powell said.

Hmm....where did that negative mean-spiritedness come from, Karl? At least I'm confident that Powell won't bow down to the altar of Rushbo, begging forgiveness.

Transcripts (courtesy of CQ Politics) below the fold

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Bill Kristol is upset that the release of the CIA torture memos will open up the potential for criminal prosecutions of Bush officials. William "the Bloody" Kristol wants to release all the CIA memos and have Dick Cheney testify about them. Wow, he even admits that torture is a crime, but brings up another right-wing canard: that releasing the CIA memos and more photographs of abuse hurts our national security.

(rough transcript)

Kristol: Torture is a crime, that is agreed upon. If these memos are so crazy, so ridiculous in their legal analysis ... three people being waterboarded, a few instances of waterboarding might not qualify as torture under certain circumstances, which is what the memos argued, then he (Obama) opened the door, and once he opened the door they're going down that road...

It's the Bush administration who authorized these things, they're still running against the Bush administration. Let's stipulate that the Bush administration did a lot for things wrong. How does that legitimize do something now that will damage our national security?

Williams: How does it damage out national security? I think when you have President Obama say somewhere we have lost our moral bearings. I don't think there's any doubt about that...

Kristol: There's a lot of doubt...

Williams: You said a moment ago that torture is illegal. You gotta remember President Reagan was out there signing the UN convention, we will not participate in torture as an American people. So something went wrong there.

Mara Liasson then argues about the Justice Department officials involved, and Brit Hume (as usual) just thinks it's all a farce. Yeah, torturing people is soooo comical, so inconsequential.

Mara: You might think that the lawyers of the Bush justice Department came out with a decision that was wrong, legally wrong and morally repugnant, but it doesn't mean that they committed a crime. That they said, ohhh we know this is torture, we're just going ot cook this up. The question is whether they did this in good faith or not. and if...

Hume: I predict Mara, based on what you're saying that any prosecution which will come out of this will be a total farce.

There will be a series of show trials with "grand inquisitions' and all the kinds of things we've been associated with. It's possible that those lawyers will get hauled before Congress and do to any investigation there Oliver North did to the e9/11 commission, which was to render it the farce that it always was from the beginning, that would be a good outcome, but this whole area ... what should be a closed chapter -- I don't see any national benefit to it...

Kristol:... I think now that the door is open, I say "bring it on." Let's have a big national debate on this. Let's have Steve Bradbury confront his accusers, who are one tenth the lawyers he is, and we're not under the pressure he was under and not a real threat. Let's have George Tenet testify. Let's have Mick Hagen testify. Let's have a serious debate, let's have Dick Cheney take on anyone that the left wants to produce about whether we were responsible, whether it was a dark chapter in our history that we have to be ashamed of or whether the US government behaved in a very fine way and I think a very impressive way...

Bloody Bill thinks Bush and Cheney's torturing of people is a very impressive way to handle prisoners.

I always love when right-wing hacks use the word "serious." It's only they who are the "serious" people, and therefore the world is only properly ruled by their hand. And he's confident that the propaganda that would be spewed by Cheney and his ilk will muddy up the waters enough to fool the American people.

Me, I'd like to see Cheney have to get in front of Henry Waxman.

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It didn't take long for Barack Obama's bipartisan buddies to obstruct his first big plan to help our desperate country. On FNS this morning, John McCain said that he would not vote for the stimulus package that would try to breath life into our suffocating economy which is suffering because of the conservatives that just lost the election.

WALLACE: Let's talk about the economy. We'll get to national security in a moment. The president is pushing an economic stimulus package of $825 billion that raises some of the issues that were at the heart of your campaign against Barack Obama. $275 billion in tax breaks, including money for people who don't pay income taxes. $550 billion in spending, including $200 million to resod the national mall, $360 million to fight sexually transmitted disease. As that package now stands, can john McCain vote for it?

McCAIN: No. We need to make tax cuts permanent and need to make a commitment that they'll be no new taxes. We need to cut payroll taxes. We need to cut business taxes. We need to have a commitment that after a couple of quarters of GDP growth that we will embark on a path to reduce spending to get our budget in balance. We're going to lay an additional $2 trillion of debt on future Americans. Is there going to be a point where foreign countries such as the Chinese stop buying our debt? Look, we've got to eliminate the unnecessary spending. There's got to be some kind of litmus as to whether it will really stimulate the economy and whether it will in the short term. Some of the stimulus in this package is excellent. Some of it has nothing to do -- those projects and others you mentioned -- six billion for broadband Internet access. That will take years. There should be an end point to all of this spending as well. Say two years. If we need to stimulate the economy in a short period of time, let's enact those provisions --

WALLACE: You're talking about a major rewrite as it now stands.

McCAIN: The plan was written by a Democratic majority in the house primarily. So, yeah, I think there has to be major rewrites if we want to stimulate the economy.

WALLACE as it stands, you'd vote against it?

McCAIN: Look, I am opposed to most of the provisions in the bill. As it stands now, I would not support it.

The Republican fetish for tax cuts is astounding. Doesn't McCain remember that the American people rejected his "tax cut" mentality when he lost the election? I'm actually glad that Republicans are acting this way. The more they obstruct him the better it is because hopefully it will push him to be less inclusive with the people that have almost destroyed this country. The American people will not stand for it this early in his term. I've written many times that Obama should not appease them to get things done. They may pay lip service to Obama because he won, but they want him to fail.

But they underestimate the power of his bully pulpit. If he goes on air and tells the country he tried to work with the Republicans but they refused to do the things he deems necessary to kick start this economy, it will resonate and they will pay another huge price. So, keep at it boys and girls. Obstruct away.

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Bill Kristol surprisingly backed up the UAW and the Democratic Party's plan of trying to offer a bridge loan to the Big 3 and not try to be "union busters." It's not out of any love for unions, but all about politics. As we saw with the AutoGate Memo, the Republican leadership decided to kill the rescue plan/bridge loan to the Big 3 purely for political reasons. Those reasons are to destroy the UAW and try to make them the scapegoats. Kristol -- who as you know is not on my team -- believes that the Southern Strategy of attacking workers is a huge political mistake.

Kristol: I don't think it's very smart for a bunch of Southern Republicans to decide that the future of the Republican party is to beat up working class union members in states like Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. The UAW is in a lot of trouble, they've shrunk by 2/3's in the last years...

An average automobile, 10% of the cost comes from wages and they were going to cut wages by ten or twenty percent, so it's one or two percent of the cost of the automobile. To have a huge fight for that. I think it was a mistake for the Republicans,

He's thinking of this in political terms for Republicans, and actually gets honest when he says that it's not the union workers or their wages at fault here. I was not in favor of a Car Czar because I don't trust Bush to make the choice based on the interests of the working class, but at least they see the problem this could cause our entire economy if the Republicans in Congress bankrupt the auto industry.

On the other hand, if Republicans want to immolate themselves into even further irrelevancy, I'm inclined to let them. The trick is to keep them from taking the whole country down along with them.

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Chris Wallace starts FOX News Sunday off by asking Holy Joe why McCain attacking Obama's character so vehemently now. There was a time when McCain was above all that.

Wallace: Gov. Palin did just that yesterday. Let's take a look.(Palin. Obama pals around with terrorists) Sen Lieberman, is all that fair game, an attack on Barack Obama's character?

Lieberman: Well it is fair game. And I want to get back to that in a minute. The McCain campaign hasn't announced that it's going to spend the next four weeks then negative campaigning....

Wallace: Senator, Senator, if I may on the front page of the Washington Post and the NY Times yesterday, a top McCain strategist, his name Greg Strimple was quoted as saying we want to turn the page on the economy and start talking about Obama being and out and out liberal, we want to talk about his character, so the McCain is on the record as saying exactly that.

Lieberman: Well I must say I don't know Greg, but I do know John McCain...

Spin it Joe. The McCain campaign did announce it. McCain is desperate and has resorted to the Sean Hannity school of politics. That's not anything really much different than they've been doing anyway. Let's take a stroll down memory lane when John McCain said he would run a respectful campaign:

"It is critical, as we prepare to face off with whomever the Democrats select as their nominee, that we all follow John's lead and run a respectful campaign focused on the issues and values that are important to the American people," Davis wrote. "Throughout the primary election we saw John McCain reject the type of politics that degrade our civics, and this will not change as he prepares to run head-to-head against the Democratic nominee."

The Nation:

Added Cindy McCain in May: "What you're going to see is a great debate. Which is what the American public deserves. None of this negative stuff, though. You won't see it come out of our side at all.

"

  Condi Rice went on the Sunday talk shows this morning to send out a little propaganda to the peoples on the Russia/Georgian front and she had the usual help from everyone. There wasn't much background on the US involvement that has fueled Russia's anger.

Kevin Drum and JPM has some thoughts on what actually happened. The Sunday Shows backed up McCain's position as much as they could and gave no context to Putin's response that I saw. (Please let me know in the comment section if anyone did)  I heard Gregory read Condi a NY Times quote and it seemed like he was going to include real background on the issue, but that didn't happen.

As PublEuS says: Since when does the Bush Admin think international "reputation" matters a lick?

Download | play   Download | play (rough transcript)

 Condi: ...this forward leaning modern Russia, well, you know, that reputation is frankly in tatters and so, that in itself is a significant consequence...

Yes, Europe grabbed a newspaper and hit Russia on the nose with it and said: Bad Russia, you're a very bad Russia. Stop making messes in Georgia...

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves. On FNS, Bill Kristol was furious that President Bush went to the Beijing Olympics instead of watching it on TV because of the propaganda value that Bush gave to China against the pro-democracy agenda.

Download | play Download | play   (h/t Heather)

Kristol:  You can talk to human rights and pro democracy activists both in exile and over here and those over there. They did not want him to go and to legitimize what is a giant propaganda festival for Beijing.My wife told me I shouldn't say that I disapprove of Bush going, I disapprove of the dictatorship in Beijing. I disapprove of the totalitarian propaganda spectacle on Friday night. She said this would make me look "crotchety" ...

Kristol is the Minister of Propaganda at FOX so for him to complain about it really is high comedy. And I'll throw in the fact that his wife called him---errrr--crotchety. Yea, that too...

Tom Ridge takes up the usual discredited conservative talking point that if our troops leave Iraq, al-Qaeda and Iran will control everything there---including all the oil fields on FOX News Sunday. Man, there certainly are a lot of terrorists running around in Iraq now. Didn't the administration tell us that al-Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq already? Oh, right ---so now it's Iran. Iran is running around in Iraq now...

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Wallace: ...as part of your answer, at what point does Sen McCain say we do have to turn it over to the Iraqis.

Ridge: Well I think again, it depends on the situation on the ground as the NY Times is reporting...blah, blah, blah..it is a central venue in this war against terror...blah, blah. blah..the lind of support we provided Germany and South Korea....(sorry, I couldn't transcribe it all. I just couldn't get myself to do it.)

The old situation on the ground trick with a dash of Germany and South Korea. How did that line work for McCain? There's greater and greater control, but watch out. It could fall apart as soon as we leave! He really wants to say the word "never." Just say it Ridge. You can do it. So can McCain and Kristol and Bush and Cheney. I don't know why they just don't get honest and say something like:

Ridge: We never want to turn Iraq back over to the Iraqis because we want their oil, Chris. Is that plain enough for you?

Wallace: Certainly Gov. Ridge, thanks for being so candid with us. You heard it right here folks on FNS. McCain never wants to leave Iraq. Back after the break.

I guess terrorists reconstitute like bunnies--or something...The Iraqi people will not let Iran have control over their land. Hey, Tom---the American people aren't buying that line. It's so 2004.

(h/t Heather. She really helped big time on Sunday.)

If there was a website for warmongering porn, Kristol would be the webmaster. He's fantasizing about this a great deal I'm sure. He must spend hours upon hours with sweaty palms and tired fingers surfing the net for hot---new--nekkid---bomb Iran porn. Is it free, Bill?

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

Kristol. I think honestly, if the president felt John McCain were going to be the next president he would think it more appropriate to let the next president make that decision than do it on his way out. I do wonder with Sen. Obama, if president Bush thinks Sen, Obama win does he somehow think that, does he worry that Obama won't follow through on the policy...

WALLACE: So, you're suggesting that he might in fact, if Obama's going to win the election, either before or after the election---launch a military strike?

Kristol: I don't know. I think he would worry about it. On the other hand, you can't, it's hard to make foreign policy based on guesses about election results...

As usual he's ridiculous. Obama will be strong on National security and the fact that these discredited conservative punkits still get to voice an opinion is frustrating all by itself. We should ask William the Bloody where that WarPorn chat room is... A bunch of warmongers have been speculating on Bush's plans to attack Iran for quite sometime.

Think Progress:

The claim that Obama's potential election could force Bush's hand also isn't new. Earlier this month, far-right pseudo scholar Daniel Pipes told National Review Online that "President Bush will do something" if the Democratic nominee won. "Should it be Mr. McCain that wins, he'll punt," said Pipes.

Both Kristol and Pipes apparently agree with President Bush's claim in March that McCain's "not going to change" his foreign policy.

McCain once again demonstrates that he's no straightalker when it comes to the issues that are most important to this country. He makes sure to get the whole Basra/ceasefire incident completely backwards which only undermines his credibility as a foreign policy man. Is he even following the fighting in Iraq? It was Maliki that went to Iran and then asked Sadr to broker a ceasefire.

Olbermann: ...that Sadr had only called for the ceasefire after members of Maliki’s government asked Sadr to do so in a during a secret trip to meet with Sadr in Iran.—making McCain wrong about the facts on his signature issue, making Sadr not Maliki the victor in this conflict by McCain’s own reasoning. And making Iran and not McCain and not the US the mediator of choice for Iraq’s two top Shi’a factions. The Maliki government and the Sadrists.

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Think Progress has the transcript and more:

McCain: It was al-Sadr that declared the ceasefire, not Maliki. … With respect, I don’t think Sadr would have declared the ceasefire if he thought he was winning. Most times in history, military engagements, the winning side doesn’t declare the ceasefire. The second point is, overall, the Iraqi military performed pretty well. … The military is functioning very effectively.

Finally, the New York Times reported Friday that at least 1,000 Iraqi national soldiers deserted or refused to fight in Basra.

 The insane fascination with the show "24," and how it suddenly defines the issue of torture for these warmongering and very serious Kristol hawks is ludicrous. And the secret documents are....still secret and even Jay Rockefeller says that he hasn't seen them.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

William the Bloody thinks that certain torture is "reasonable." "Serious people at the Justice department are trying to figure out what is torture, what is acceptable to certain circumstances....I think the Bush administration has been much more serious and conscientious about this than the NY Times reporting gives it credit for."

Memo to the warmongers: It's not hard to figure out what is torture. As long as Bush "surges on" in Iraq, William will be there sticking up for his boy. Just ask these WWII Nazi interrogators their feelings on BushCo's torture tactics.

Nancy Pelosi went on FOX News Sunday today to talk aboout the SCHIP/Bush veto. And here's example # ___ (fill in the blank) of the ridiculous questions that come from a FNC host...Only on FOX would Chris Wallace actually ask this of a Democratic leader:

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Wallace: You said the other day that you pray for President Bush to change his mind about vetoing SCHIP...Ahhh, do you pray for our soldiers to win in Iraq?

Pelosi: Of, course I do.

Wallace: To win?

Pelosi: Of, course. What a question....

At least she called him out on it....If I was Pelosi, I would have added, "jackass." And you wonder why C&L has had so much success highlighting the biased coverage at FOX. His second "to win?" gives it just the added touch of Malkinite that really shows he cares. "We know you might possibly pray for the troops, Mrs. Satan, but what kinds of prayers are they really? Hmmmm? The question implies that Nancy and the Democratic party really, really, really hate the troops. Rove would be pleased. Wallace was "wanknificent" this morning.

Actually Chris, I'm praying for a rise in the already horrific PTSD injuries the troops are sustaining for Christmas, so how is your family? I know it's Sunday morning and your coffee is in your hand, but give us a list of questions Chris Wallace would really like to ask....