Charles & Eddie -- Would I Lie To You? (1992)

There are 436 representatives and 100 senators in Congress today. The Washington press corps is comprised of several dozens of reporters. And I'm not sure we could get a complete accounting of think tank members, specialists and activists, leaving literally hundreds and hundreds of people within the Washington DC environs potentially available for the Sunday news shows.

So why on earth is John McCain on my screen again, for the tenth time this year?

What the hell is that? Lack of imagination? Lack of creativity? Or is it more likely a lack of interest in having any kind of real conversation or discussion of the issues?

My vote is the latter.

Would that there was a liberal as popular with the producers as McCain to be able to provide a little bit of sanity and fact-based discussion. Hey, a girl can dream...

Happy Mother's Day to all my fellow moms. May your Sunday be filled with pancake syrup kisses and the recognition you deserve.

ABC's "This Week" -- Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Jack Reed, D-R.I. Foreign Policy panel: ABC News’ George Will; former Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chair Gen. James Cartwright (USMC, Ret.); Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus; and ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl. "Powerhouse" panel: Will, Donna Brazile, Matthew Dowd, and Jonathan Karl, plus former Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., and Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash.

NBC's "Meet the Press" -- Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; former diplomat Thomas Pickering, who helped lead the State Department's review of the attack against the U.S. in Benghazi, Libya. Panel: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) who is a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan; New York Times columnist David Brooks; the BBC’s Katty Kay; and Afghanistan veteran and author Wes Moore.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" -- Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post; S. E. Cupp, MSNBC Host of "The Cycle"; Joe Klein, TIME Magazine; Kelly O'Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent.

CBS' "Face the Nation" -- Pickering; former Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H. Maya Angelou.

MSNBC's "UP with Steve Kornacki" -- Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Executive Director, CEO and Co-Founder; Celinda Lake, Democratic Pollster, President, Lake Research Partners; State Sen. David Haley (D-KS); Fmr. Sen. Sheila Frahm (R-KS); Thomas Frank, Author, “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” Columnist, Harper’s Magazine; Urvashi Vaid, currently Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School; Pat Brady, Former Chairman, Illinois Republican Party; Rachel Stassen-Berger, Political Reporter, The Star Tribune; State Sen. Kelvin Atkinson (D-NV)

MSNBC's "Melissa Harris-Perry" -- Marian Chilton, Associate Professor at Drexel University / Director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities; Mauricio Lim Miller, Founder of Family Independence Initiative; Michael Tanner, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute; Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta; James Perry, New Orleans Housing Lawyer; Jeremy Rosen, Policy Director at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty; Diana Furchgott-Roth, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Rev. Vivian Nixon, Executive Director of the College and Community Fellowship / Co-Founder of the Education Inside Out Coalition.

CNN's "State of the Union" -- Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine; former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chairman of the State Department's accountability review; Reps. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii. Panel: Republican Consultant Alex Castellanos, Democratic Strategist Mo Elleithee, and The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" -- Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, and former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Robert Grenier.

CNN's "Reliable Sources" -- popular culture commentator Lola Ogunnaike, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post and Jim Warren of The New York Daily News; Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Connie Schultz; Bloomberg View columnist Margaret Carlson, The Hill’s Bob Cusack, and the National Review’s Jim Geraghty.

"Fox News Sunday" -- Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Adam Smith, D-Wash.; Rep.-elect Mark Sanford, R-S.C. Panel: Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard; Dennis Kucinich, Fmr Rep (D-OH); Kimberley Strassel, Author, Member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board; Juan Williams, Fox News Political Analyst.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

On April 25 - Thursday evening - American icon and humble hero George W Bush took one small step for man, one slip-and-fall for humanity - as he re-entered a spotlight until-recently blissful to have been abandoned by him, for the dedication of his presidential library. Put aside for the moment that having an actual structure that houses things you read dedicated to him is like honouring Chris Christie with a gluten-free restaurant or naming a Bar Mitzvah after Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Hell, I half expected him to don his trusty flight suit and declare "all major combat operations over in Iraq", you know, just for the memories.

But really, he did not have to do anything of the sort. For it was perfect timing for the My Pet Goat Athenaeum to emerge from the steamy Sun Belt hydrofluorocarbons just as one disaster after another befell the country, a helpful reminder of the eight torturous (in more ways than one) years he and his corrupted West Texas ideology made the rest of the United States resemble, well, West, Texas.

From the explosion at the fertiliser plant due to flagrant flouting of environmental regulations to the attack in Boston, the rejection of common sense gun safety to the square dance around sequestration; this was shaping up to be a Bush Legacy week whether he stayed home to paint nude portraits of Jeb or chose to step out and try to defend a presidency many Americans must be still convinced was just one long phantasm brought on by a bad batch of Peyote.

Michael Lind points out in, Made In Texas, that we have had conservative presidents over the past century and southern presidents. We have not had the combination. And it is an important distinction. As Lind put it in an interview with BuzzFlash (2002), "His [Bush's] political values - ranging from aggressive militarism in foreign policy to small-government ideology and fervent support for laissez-faire economics" have come to define much of our political culture in Washington - hence last week.

First, we had the Festrunk Brothers launch an attack on the Boston Marathon two weeks ago, and just about everything involved had Bush's West Texas political culture written all over it. Because of the NRA, which "worked out of his White House", there is no way to track where gun powder was bought as there is with plastic explosives. Because... freedom! (And defence contractor profits!).

There was the fact that these two clowns apparently committed these atrocities because of anger over Iraq - for which I hope the younger brother (I refuse to give them attention by using their names) spends a nice, long, pain-enveloped life carving rocks into chess pieces at Shawshank. Ahh yes, Iraq. Remember that war? The one that George W Bush lied us into with tales of yellowcake and "curveball", that has now cost up to about $2 trillion?

It is because of this war, unpaid for tax cuts and Big Pharma boondoggles that we apparently have to eliminate Medicare, according to the Pied Piper of granny starving, Congressman and former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. But let us eliminate, post haste, the part of our silly self-created "sequestration" - flight delays! - that causes inconveniences to wealthy members of the Congress on their way to the next Ladybank-single-malt-festooned, campaign contributor bribe-fests.

We were also recently treated to the West Texas answer to allowing weapons of war on our streets to blow apart toddlers in schools. Nothing. Unless you count Congress' finding ways to allow itself to insider trade again. Because... freedom!

Finally, there is the tragedy in West, Texas. A fertiliser-plant explosion near Waco (just like the Crawford pseudo-ranch!) that engulfed the neighbourhood, due to an understaffed and barely functioning Chemical Safety Board (by Congressional design), a lack of common-sense zoning requirements and the no-follow-ups rule we like to impose on the Environmental Protection Agency when they find that a plant like say, this one, had no risk management plan in 2006. But hey, the plant self-reported (is that like self-deporting?) that it posed "no risk" of fire, and why would they lie?

You may remember that a certain convict-Congressman named Tom DeLay - of West Texas - compared the EPA to the "Gestapo" and current lunkhead Texas Governor Rick Perry attacks the very same EPA for its "misguided and job-killing policies", as opposed to his people-killing ones. And then there is, once again, George W Bush. The Decider decided as President that, as dictated by his West Texas ideology, he would assault the EPA by any means necessary, short of naming the former Arabian Horse Association guy to run it (he saved that for FEMA... phew!).

So, in a way, it was fitting to see the George W Bush library opening this past week. It is his West Texas world. We are just stuck living in it.

This syndicated column first appeared at Al Jazeera English

Follow me on Twitter: @CliffSchecter

Happy Saturday night, folks! It's Blue Gal from The Professional Left Podcast, bringing you this week's podcast round up. Be aware that these podcasts are also available on i-Tunes, and may not be safe for work.

Kagro in the Morning: You can convert frustrated WalMart shoppers into anti-WalMart evangelists.

Bob and Chez: Nobody Expects the Benghazi Inquisition!

KCRW's This...Is Interesting: [New Podcast!] Treating "property ownership for lower classes" as a basic economic right.

Clearing the FOG Radio: Yes, there's racism inside governmental and nongovernmental institutions.

Open Thread below....

Have you noticed how many right-wingers are decrying the "tyranny" of the Obama administration these days?

It's particularly rife on the Tea Partying far right, where it's extremely common to hear Obama being portrayed as a "tyrant," particularly regarding his recent attempts to promote gun-control measures. (See Ben Shapiro whining thus in the video above.) So you'll often find crap like this floating about on their Facebook pages.

But it's becoming common among mainstream right-wingers, particularly after the president dismissed these characterizations during a speech at Ohio State. Sure enough, everyone from Jonah Goldberg to Michelle Malkin piled on with the "yeah, whatever you say, dude" retorts.

But I was reminded the other day, rereading Stephen Budiansky's marvelous book about Reconstruction, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, just where the right-wing fetish about "tyranny" comes from. It's a highly selective fetish, after all; none of these "libertarians" seemed even remotely concerned when George W. Bush launched the whole "enemy combatants" enterprise back in 2001.

According to Budiansky, it -- like the phrase "waving the bloody shirt," as well as the whole conservative adoption of that rhetorical ruse as an aggressive form of defense -- has its origins in the years during and immediately following the Civil War, when it was common for Southerners to sneer at Abraham Lincoln (alive or dead) as a "tyrant":

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being subjected.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

Indeed, it's common to hear neo-Confederate agitators -- those folks who are still pushing for modern secession by the South -- describe Lincoln to this day as a "tyrant."

The idea of being governed by a black president? To many of these people even today, that is itself the essence of tyranny.

[Cross-posted at Orcinus.]

Susie Sampson interviews people about gay marriage. How do you expect it to destroy your relationship?

Gregory Hicks giving emotional testimony earlier this week

Gregory Hicks has been characterized as a whistleblower and a hero by the right wing for bravely stepping forward and telling "the truth" about September 11, 2012 and the Benghazi attacks. To listen to him, you wonder how he managed to survive it all, but somehow he did only to claim he was demoted in retribution for speaking out.

Not so much, it seems. Other embassy personnel in Libya at the time spoke to ThinkProgress Friday, and their story is quite different from Hicks'.

A second State Department employee present in Libya before and during the Benghazi attacks confirmed the meetings occurred. Assistant Secretary Jones’ meetings with the staff prior to Oct. 2 were “entirely” focused on Hicks’ performance, according to this second employee, who also believed that Hicks should be removed from his position. “The group of us who were here during the attacks, we sat here two nights ago and watched [the hearing] with our jaws dropped,” the staffer said, referring to Hicks’ claim that he was demoted out of retribution for speaking out.

“He was removed from here because he was a disaster as a manager,” the second employee went on to say, expressing the belief that Hicks’ reassignment had “nothing to do with him being a whistleblower, it had everything to do with his management capacity or lack thereof.” This statement contradicts the narrative promoted onconservative media outlets that Hicks was being forced to remain silent and being punished for speaking out.

Well, maybe he was a crummy manager but a hero anyway, right? Even incompetent people can rise to an occasion. Once again, it appears not to be so.

When speaking about the night of the attacks, the employees ThinkProgress spoke with described Hicks as being in a daze while other senior Embassy officials organized the evacuation from Tripoli to Germany. “At one point [Hicks] wandered past the huddled State evacuees, muttering to himself, and just sank into a couch,” the first employee relayed to ThinkProgress.

Hmmmm. It seems the Great Hero of Benghazi, to conservatives at least, is no hero at all. Why doesn't this surprise me?

As the Bay City Rollers once said,
"I-I-I-I I just can't wait,
I-I-I I got a date
S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y NIGHT!"

Stinque has no words for the Bangladesh disaster and shows us why.

Constant Commoner wants to know if it is spring or global climate change?

Tbogg shows us the grift that keeps on grifting.

Bonus track: Sick Horses tells us about Texas Rep. Steve Stockman.

Round-up by Tengrain of Mock, Paper, Scissors who also blogs at Dependable Renegade. Send tips to: mbru AT crooksandliars DOT com

Open Thread below....

1. “The Prairie State Energy Campus is also projected to produce 3.6 million to 4.8 million tons of toxic ash, which must be disposed.”

2. “The 1,600 MW plant would generate thousands of tons of coal ash, which includes toxins like arsenic, mercury, and cadmium…
[the ash landfill will ] ultimately contain a 250-foot high pile of coal ash sitting on flat farmland… ‘We’ve heard complaints from people up to a mile away about ash hitting the side of the house and respiratory irritation.’”

Continue reading »

That's Rush Limbaugh defending the Heritage Foundation's immigration study written by a white supremacist for white supremacist Republicans. In his tirade, he claims there is "no question [Richwine] is right" which means critics can only trash the messenger rather than challenge the message. Oh, there's more. Much, much more.

In light of the way Rush Limbaugh has been bankrupting Clear Channel and the local radio stations that still carry his show, it shouldn't surprise anyone to discover he has yet another wingnut welfare benefactor in addition to FreedomWorks.

If you guessed the Heritage Foundation, you win the jackpot!

They just don't make sponsors like they used to. Limbaugh only has two national advertisers who will spend money on ads. In local markets, nearly 3,000 advertisers have pulled their advertising from Limbaugh's show, which means it's wingnut welfare time:

Continue reading »