Lawyers, Guns & Money: "Traitor-in-Defense-of-Slavery-American" would be fine

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The Impolitic: Republicans say "hell no" to civility

alicublog: The Pantload and The Perfesser Do America

BAGnewsNotes: Obama on Offense: Taking off the Mitts (and the Karls)

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David and I scanned through Fox News last night and surprisingly, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren didn't mention the very controversial and pro-corporatist Citizens Untied ruling by the Supreme court. Not a word. It reminds me of how they pretty much ignored the Haiti earthquake.

Bret Baier's "All Star Panel" discussed it with Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes loving it, while Mara Liaisson admitted that the ruling would benefit Republicans in 2010 and 2012 because corporations have much more money than the labor unions.

Shepard Smith had a short report on it that just recapped the decision and added a few sound bites from Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell.

But it's really clear that while the big opinionators loved the ruling off air -- because now corporations are being viewed as individuals who have the freedom to pour tons of money into the political system, a fact that will heavily favor conservatives -- they must understand that Americans will not love this ruling, because it gives Big Corp an even more unfair advantage in our election process. Americans are fed up with the influence these money-changers and powermongers have on the process.

How can they defend this ruling when they have been promoting a phony right-wing populism? If the teabaggers are truly as opposed to corporate power as they claim, they logically would hate this ruling. Or will their producerism overwhelm them?

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Robert Novak died today of brain cancer.

Novak will perhaps be best remembered -- if at all -- as one of the most compulsive professional liars to have wormed his way inside the Beltway, and that's saying something. And when it came to the interference he ran to protect the Bush-Cheney administration -- culminating in his central role in the Valerie Plame affair -- and his resulting efforts to cover his tracks, it even had historic proportions. Novak himself had constantly lied about this role, and was fond of accusing the people uncovering his tracks of lying. (See Marcy's authoritative work on Novak for more.)

Unsurprisingly, his friends are now eager to make us all forget this. Tim Carney's remembrance omits any mention of it whatsoever. And then there was Fred Barnes on Fox this morning, who simply followed in his friend's footsteps and flatly lied about the Plame case:

Barnes: Bob -- you know, Bob was unruffled by the whole thing. He had to get a lawyer, but, ah, you know, it was no problem to him.

Of course, it turned out that he was the first one to hear from anybody in the Bush administration about Valerie Plame, uhm, being a part, and her husband, you know, helping her husband get this, go to this trip to Africa, and then say that President Bush had -- what President Bush had said about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium in Africa was wrong.

They're still discussing it. It turns out that President Bush was right.

But anyway, Bob was caught up in this scandal, he'd heard about it first, and reported it in his column, and then was perfectly comfortable being the center of attention in a legal case that went on for years and years.

WTF? It's long been an established fact that Novak's reportage was wrong, and in fact was just a propaganda-driven smear on behalf of the Bush administration, since Plame in fact had nothing to do with Joe Wilson getting the Niger assignment. (George Tenet himself explained: "Mid-level officials in CPD [The CIA’s Directorate of Operations Counterproliferation Division] decided on their own initiative to [ask Joe Wilson to look into the Niger issue because] he'd helped them on a project once before, and he'd be easy to contact because his wife worked in CPD.")

And since when has it "turned out" that "Bush was right" about the Niger yellowcake? Not only was the report on which he based the claim he made in the State of the Union built from set of hoax documents, but the White House ignored warnings that this was likely the case. Moreover, there has been no subsequent evidence to suggest that Saddam indeed sought yellowcake from Niger.

Ah, but such things as facts and truthfulness matter little to people like Robert Novak and Fred Barnes. All they care about is covering their tracks. Lying is what they do, right up to their final breaths.

FOX News star Fred Barnes called Nancy Pelosi a liar over the issue of what she knew or didn't know about waterboarding. The CIA has not been persuasive with their smears of Pelosi because they haven't released the facts, just innuendo, to muddy up the water regarding torture. If they have the goods, well, then release it and we can talk about Nancy.

Barnes launches on a psycho-babble rant that is nonsensical and outright repulsive. He puts forth evidence of the success of torture when there isn't any, and describes Pelosi's motives like she wrote them in an op-ed. Maybe she talked to him off the record like all the Democratic sources Robert Novak always claimed to have. And let's not forget. Nancy Pelosi was not part of the torture discussion that the Bush Administration had when they decided torturing people was fine for America to be involved with. They implemented it before she was ever supposedly briefed about it. They committed crimes without her knowledge. It's all a smoke screen to take the heat of of them.

Shame on Barnes.

Glenn Greenwald wrote this a few days ago:

I'm truly amazed to watch the eruption of "controversy" today over the fact that Nancy Pelosi was briefed in 2002 on various aspects of the CIA's interrogation program, as though (a) this is some sort of new revelation and (b) it has any bearing on whether there should be investigations and prosecutions into Bush crimes. As many of us have long pointed out, the extent to which Democratic leaders in Congress were complicit in Bush lawbreaking -- including torture -- is a major issue that needs resolution, and is almost certainly a key reason why there have been no investigations thus far. There are real disputes still about what these Democrats were and were not told -- how complete the briefings were, the extent to which they obfuscated rather than illuminated what the CIA was doing -- though they were obviously told enough to have warranted further action on their part, to say the least.

But what's the point of all of this? Secretly telling Nancy Pelosi that you're committing crimes doesn't mean that you have the right to do so. And the profound failures of the other institutions that are supposed to check executive lawbreaking during the Bush era -- principally Congress and the "opposition party" -- is a vital issue that demands serious examination. This dispute over what Pelosi (and Jay Rockefeller and others) knew highlights, rather than negates, the need for a meaningful investigation into what took place.

Although FOX News is crawling with them, it's pretty hard to find a bigger right-wing hack than Fred Barnes. Thursday on FOX News' "Special Report," Barnes called Gramm's insensitive and bone-headed remarks about struggling Americans "straight-talk," and reiterated Gramm's view that Americans are whiners because they acknowledge how poorly the economy is doing.

Download | play Download | play

Transcript via Think Progress:

BARNES: He wasn’t wrong to say that. You know what this was? This was straight talk that McCain always says he’s giving it, and this is exactly what Phil Gramm did. He gave straight talk…They claim about how bad the economy is–and it’s weak, no question about that. …They’re whining all the way through it.

Talk about "elitism." Last night while discussing "downscale voters," salt-of-the-earth FOX News contributor (and Weekly Standard editor) Fred Barnes ridiculed and demeaned working class Americans by making the distinction that they aren't "lower income," but rather "lower class."

Download | play Download | play (h/t Bill W.)

Look at the smug look on his face as he demeans the majority of Americans. Apparently to Barnes union workers and, indeed, anyone who actually labors for a living, is not as good as him. Kudos to the panel who, for reasons you can decide yourselves, distances themselves from his insensitive and bone-headed remarks.

Something tells me we're looking at Duncan's "Wanker of the day."

TPM has more and Faiz sums it up nicely:

Hume opened the segment by asking Barnes to elaborate on his view that many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters are “downscale.” Barnes could hardly contain his laughter as he explained that the term “working class” is a euphemism because “it’s kind of mean to say ‘lower class.’ It’s as simple as that.” He explained that the “lower class” are people of low “social class.”

Boston Globe:

Mitt Romney declared last night that he would jump at the chance to be vice president if Republican John McCain offered the number two slot.

"I think any Republican leader in this country would be honored to be asked to serve as the vice presidential nominee, myself included," Romney said on Fox News Channel.

Oy. As Fred Barnes says, Not Bloody Likely

Going along with my contention that Congress needs a big outside-the-Beltway tidal wave to smack some sense into them, one of my favorites, David Sirota, is finding it difficult to get credentialing to get around the halls of the Capitol.

Sirotablog:

Since the congressional press corps' efforts to prevent me from accessing the U.S. Capitol hit the Washington Post last week, the editors of In These Times magazine have submitted formal paperwork to the Periodicals Press Gallery once again requesting a media credential for me and for the magazine's staff. This is especially pressing, since I will be in Washington from April 12 to April 24 to once again try to report my story for the magazine about progressive lawmakers in the new Congress.[..]

This is not a partisan issue, and it's really not about me as an individual. Conservatives like Fred Barnes agree that it is outrageous for Washington reporters to try to deny other reporters access to the U.S. Capitol. It is anti-democratic behavior brought on by traditional journalists trying to create a monopoly in the face of new media threats to their dominance/relevance. And, as some top Hill staffers have noted, the media gatekeepers have doled out far more credentials to right-wing commentators/activists than they have to progressive ones.
You can email the House Periodicals Press Gallery and email the Senate Periodicals Gallery with your opinion on whether they should approve In These Times' request for credentials.

You knew it was only a matter of time before a Republican pundit would hope for a catastrophe that would help Bush in the upcoming election.

Arthur Silber via Fred Barnes:

The problem here is that national security isn't the leading campaign issue. And saying it should be won't make it so. What's needed is an event--a big event--to crystallize the issue in a way that highlights Republican strength and Democratic weakness. It was two events--the foiled British terrorist plot and the need to comply with a Supreme Court decision on handling captured terrorists--that led to the Republican mini-rally in September.

Of course there's little time left for a major event to occur. The North Korean bomb test wasn't big enough to change the course of the campaign. So Republicans may have to rely on their two remaining assets: They have more money than the Democrats and a voter turnout operation second to none...read on

There's still time to attack attack Iran, Freddy.

(for those of you who don't know how to click through. Fred Barnes wrote the article)

Bush used Osama's words as an excuse to keep us in Iraq during his 9/11 Iraq War speech, I find this news very disturbing. From saying he doesn't think about him, to saying he thinks about him all the time--to saying...

Steve:

Thankfully, the president explained his philosophy to the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes this week during a White House interview.

We now know why the Bush administration hasn't made the capture of Osama bin Laden a paramount goal of the war on terror. Emphasis on bin Laden doesn't fit with the administration's strategy for combating terrorism. Here's how President Bush explained this Tuesday: "This thing about . . . let's put 100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work."

Rather, Bush says there's a better way to stay on offense against terrorists. "The way you win the war on terror," Bush said, "is to find people [who are terrorists] and get them to give you information about what their buddies are fixing to do.

Why does Tora Bora comes to mind? I think Osama is a terrorist and deserves to be captured, don't you?

TP has more...