Every Monday morning, C&L's own Nicole Belle joins with Nicole Sandler at RadioOrNot.com to discuss the Sunday talking head shows in a segment they call "Fools on the Hill." This morning, they couldn't resist a bit of Oscar talk too...

Here's what Nicole Belle brought us this week:

Welcome to “The media is everything wrong with this country” Part the infinity.
You know, the media that inadvertently admits that they are impugning Chuck Hagel’s competence…er, I mean, questioning his competence.

Or lets Sen. Tom Coburn say that rather than strengthen background checks (which is universally more popular among the left and the right), Congress should just ‘eliminate recordkeeping’ on guns in the US.

Or lets Grampy McCain (who is on for the third Sunday in a row) say that he loves his townhall meetings and not bring up that he called an attendee a “jerk”.

Or whine about not knowing about the President playing golf because it’s all about their access.

And then there’s the Oscars. Which conservatives love to scoff at, although they still watch it. George Will actually believed that absent any evidence, Zero Dark Thirty would win Best Picture, to teach those Democrats like Levin and Feinstein a lesson. Because that’s exactly how the Academy thinks.

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I think I'm supposed to take something away from this segment. Something like the idea that poor people shouldn't eat pie. Or cookies. At least, not if they're made by this lady, who stomped her tiny little hoof and forbade those food stamp baddies from eating her nummy pies.

Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf sums it up rather well:

This is odd: in a four-minute segment on our hero baker lady who simply does not care to sell her sticky treats to those gross food stamp families, fully two separate people bring up the Civil Rights Act and how shop owners may not discriminate against entire classes of people! Huh. Weird. But never fear, others step into the breach to remind us that shop owners have a right of association (as, of course, does the farmer’s market that wanted the baker lady to participate in their EBT-accepting token system in the first place), and that sometimes people on welfare buy cigarettes and tattoos, and that states are looking into that … somehow. (Obviously, Poors are not buying tattoos or cigarettes with their food stamps, but somehow the state will ensure that they never use Money to purchase legal products that the state finds gauche.) Anyway, the whole thing ends as it should, with some man person intoning, “What a shame that we’ve erased ‘shame’ from society. Why can’t we make someone embarrassed for living off others?”

Someone tell that guy about farm subsidies, okay? Also oil subsidies?

But no, instead they rise up, shouting "Let them eat pickles!" No pie for the little government-teat sucking poor, no. Pickles. And shame. Those are okay.

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Yes, I'm once again watching the most soul-sucking channel on earth. Fox News. Take note of this brief segment with Megyn Kelly clone Martha McCallum where they breathlessly report a Tea Party revolt to strip John Boehner of his speakership.

See that "rally"? The one with the spiffy signs and stuff?

Here's a photo taken in real time:

Yeah. And Fox has it as some major revolt. MoveOn.org, on the other hand, had turnouts at congressional offices all over the country yesterday, and is planning a rally on the Capitol steps Thursday at noon. Will it be covered by any media at all?

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Kirk Lippold is running against Sharron Angle for Heller's Congressional seat in Nevada. If his remarks on Fox & Friends Sunday are any indication, he's at least as nuts as she is. He appeared to make a case for why torture should be used, why keeping Guantanamo open is a good thing, and in the process, embodied everything see as evil about the Bush administration.

As the former commander of the USS Cole, I'm certain he has resentment and anger about being attacked by Bin Laden. I understand that. But the answer to resentment and anger is NOT losing our humanity, at least not in my opinion.

HOST: This is your first political race, and you actually helped the Bush administration create the detainee policies that are in place still today. We know that Guantanamo Bay is still open. Do you believe that politics is at play here?

LIPPOLD: Absolutely. When you look at what the president has done and the policies he's put in place especially with his attorney general, he has not made use of all the tools that are available to him. His quest -- misguided quest -- to try and shut Guantanamo Bay is the clearest example.

The American people have spent almost three hundred million dollars to put that facility down there as an intelligence collection and analysis center. He wants to close it because of the opinions of others.

The reality of it is you look at the intelligence that started us down the path that eventually led to the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. It started at Guantanamo Bay, there were other threads that were built from Guantanamo Bay over the years and to not use that as a resource does put our nation at risk.

Lie #1: Waterboarding was done at Guantanamo.

Truth: As far as I know, the waterboarding was done at black sites by the CIA and other actors in order to maintain plausible deniability, not at Guantanamo, nor did taxpayers understand that Guantanamo was anything other than a detention center to hold detainees who were considered a threat to national security.

Lie #2: Waterboarding yielded information that led to Bin Laden. I swear, we've beaten this horse to death, but just look at all the different posts here on C&L about how much it did NOT yield that information. If there is still any doubt left, have a look at the voluminous evidence Marcy Wheeler has compiled on the topic, starting with this post.

Nevertheless, Candidate Lippold wastes no time condemning and bear-hugging torture in the same breath.

HOST: Well, the president was met with reality at Guantanamo Bay. It's clearly still open, it looks like it's going to be open for it looks like at least the next couple of years. Give us a sense of how stopping the enhanced interrogation techniques have hurt, have jeopardized our country in the past couple of years.

LIPPOLD: Well, first and foremost, I do not support torture, but I think the president needs to give himself and others the flexibility that should there be a time and a place where enhanced interrogation may be necessary to be used in the war on terror, he needs to be able to provide that authorization. To not do that does endanger us because while in fact enhanced interrogation techniques may have worked to get us those threads they should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances.

But to unilaterally say we will never use them is not a responsible action.

HOST: President Barack Obama has said he is against these enhanced interrogation techniques and yet CIA director Leon Panetta did not deny that waterboarding or these techniques may have been used to help bring Usama Bin Laden to justice. Do you think it's an important part of what leads to a domino effect, leading from one piece of information to another?

LIPPOLD: It could have very well. I'm not sure of the exact specifics. I frankly believe that the only reason the administration right now is even telling us they used enhanced interrogation techniques is a political calculation going into the 2012 elections because they want to say "Look, even though we got vital information as a result of those enhanced interrogation techniques we don't use them any more. And look at what the great intelligence is that we have. "

I think it's a political calculation that we're being told about this and has nothing to do with the reality of fighting the war. And we need to preserve every option available to us in order to keep this nation safe.

What bothers me about this segment (even though it's likely that only about 3 people saw it), is how glibly a candidate for the United States Congress just lies about the facts in order to make a case for something that is evil. It's not just immoral. It's evil. That is all. Evil.

Really, Fox Business? You irresponsible idiots. That's right, let's just all make a joke out of torture, shall we? As if it's not bad enough that you jerks make a concerted effort to convince your viewers that immoral, unethical, violent behavior is perfectly fine, now you joke about it?

Yes, Fox Business asked their twitter buddies who should be waterboarded next. And their Twitter buddies responded. Among their choices: President Obama, Alan Colmes, Rachel Maddow, Joy Behar and Keith Olbermann. There were more, but isn't this enough?

Perhaps the only light moment came when Monica Crowley said waterboarding Eric Bolling wouldn't help because he has no "actionable intelligence."

Neither, evidently, do the idiots who program this show. What an incredible waste of bandwidth.

Transcript of list-reading:

BOLLING: I wanted to know who else at home who you thought should be waterboarded.

So, Louise says, waterboard "Joy Behar." Patti says "Senate Dems... and then Obama... and then the kooks on The View, starting with Joy." Jerry says he wants to see Alan Colmes get waterboarded. "The secrets of the left wing cabal will come pouring out of that boy." This guy's a bit more sentimental, go ahead, waterboard "my ex-wife." Denise says Keith Olbermann and Rachael Maddow. And Mike says "Waterboard the Westboro Baptists Church." I agree with them.

Did Bolling agree with all of the suggestions, or just the Westboro suggestion? It's not clear to me...and it's hard to want to give him the benefit of the doubt given his obvious glee at asking the question and receiving the answers he did.

[h/t Media Matters]

This story's from the New York Post, so I kind of figured an important piece of the story was missing. (For one thing, there are several videos of the ROTC Town Hall on YouTube, but nothing like the incident that's described. In fact, I found this video of another vet who spoke at the same town hall in favor of ROTC, and nothing unusual happened when he spoke.)

But then I found this audio file of Maschek's comments, and what I heard wasn't anywhere near what I would call "heckling." There's incredulous laughter after he warns the other students there are "bad men out there plotting to kill you," and you can hear someone say "racist" at one point. But the moderator quickly rebuked them and warned them against any more outbreaks.

The students laughed because like many of us, they've grown so skeptical of the justifications for these wars, and the "bad men" remark was treated as just another excuse. Someone did call Maschek a racist, presumably because to them, it sounded like he was lumping all Muslims together as terrorists. (It didn't sound that way to me.)

So no, I don't think anything unusual happened here. Just college kids being smartasses.

The wingnut blogs, of course, are turning this into an full-blown assault on God and the flag, and encouraging readers to apologize to him. I'm not going to apologize -- not because I don't care, but because it sounds like the normal give and take of a college class, and a soldier who took 11 bullets can probably handle it just fine. If he's smart enough to get into Columbia, Sgt. Maschek can also handle a couple of smart alecks.

Of course, the New York Post would rather exaggerate and inflame because it's more useful to portray all anti-war progressives as hating soldiers.

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

"Racist!" some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

Maschek, 28, had bravely stepped up to the mike Tuesday at the meeting to issue an impassioned challenge to fellow students on their perceptions of the military.

"It doesn't matter how you feel about the war. It doesn't matter how you feel about fighting," said Maschek. "There are bad men out there plotting to kill you."

Several students laughed and jeered the Idaho native, a 10th Mountain Division infantryman who spent two years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington recovering from grievous wounds.

Maschek, who is studying economics, miraculously survived the insurgent attack in Kirkuk. In the hail of gunfire, he broke both legs and suffered wounds to his abdomen, arm and chest.

He enrolled last August at the Ivy League school, where an increasingly ugly battle is unfolding over the 42-year military ban there.

More than half of the students who spoke at the meeting -- the second of three hearings on the subject -- expressed opposition to ROTC's return. Many of the 200 students in the audience held anti-military placards with slogans such as, "1 in 3 female soldiers experiences sexual assault in the military."

The university has created a task force polling 10,000 students on the issue, but would not release the vote tally of the 1,300 who have already responded.

In 2005, when the university last voted to reject ROTC's return, it cited the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

That policy was overturned in December, but resistance remains.

And right on cue, here's Fox's Megyn Kelly and and wingnut talk show host Mike Gallagher piling on.

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At the very end of Fox and Friends yesterday, Brian Kilmeade and Fox "legal analyst" Peter Johnson Jr. go ballistic over funding public television and radio, saying it should be "privatized", calling it "welfare for broadcasting" and suggesting in their not-so-subtle way that public broadcasting is a government propaganda channel.

Why does this not surprise me in the least? After all, why would we possibly need public broadcasting when we have such stellar, unbiased sources as Fox News? Who would be there to tell us how the Muslims are going to impose Sharia Law on us (without explaining exactly what that is), or inflict Glenn Beck on the planet daily?

James Fallows wrote a terrific column on why NPR matters and should matter to everyone. After extolling Fox News' excellence (hey, he said it, not me) at what they do, he says this:

"News" in the normal sense is a means for Fox's personalities, not an end in itself. It provides occasions for the ongoing development of its political narrative -- the war on American values, the out-of-touchness of Democrats -- much as current events give preachers material for sermons. This is why Fox's emphasis goes to its star interpreters -- Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, the "Fox and Friends" crew -- more than to expanding bureaus around the country or the world, investing in scientific, economic, or international expertise, or generally trying harder to place primary observers wherever it can.**

Isn't NPR just the same thing, from an different political perspective? No, and the difference matters.

NPR, whatever its failings, is one of the few current inheritors of the tradition of the ambitious, first-rate news organization. When people talk about the "decline of the press," in practice they mean that fewer and fewer newspapers, news magazine, and broadcast networks can afford to try to gather information. The LA Times, the Washington Post, CBS News -- they once had people stationed all around the world. Now they work mainly from headquarters -- last year the Post closed all its domestic bureaus outside Washington -- and let's not even think about poor Newsweek and US News.

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I meant to get this post up on Sunday, but I went down a rabbit hole of research of the guest of this Hannity episode, Brigitte Gabriel and her organization, American Congress for Truth. She and her organization truly frightened me in its scope of irrational hatred of Islam. What can you say about a woman so self-loathing that even as a teen she refused to speak Arabic in her native Lebanon and still refers to herself as a "Phoenician" instead of acknowledging her Arab blood? A "terrorism expert" who has been quoted as saying “every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.” So obviously, who better to comment on the ongoing upheaval in Egypt on Fox News than a woman who has created a cottage industry sowing the seeds of hatred against the one billion Muslims in the world?

There's no question that the official Fox News memo came down from on Ailes demanding that the hosts spend as much time as possible focusing the "scary terrists" taking over Egypt and turning everything into an Islamicist threat. Democracy? Nah...this is the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the entire country.

HANNITY: Brigitte, you know as I'm watching this here, it seems to me that the Muslim Brotherhood has pretty much taken this over. Seems to me that radical groups now see this as an opportunity and they're weighing in and offering their support. You know, I was thinking about this earlier today. I can't think of any democratic revolution that's taken hold in Arab countries. The only real democracy I can think of is in Iraq now.

GABRIEL: That's right. And the radicals are smelling blood basically. This is their opportunity. They have seen what Hamas did in Gaza and by the way, Hamas was a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas was democratically elected for the Palestinian people, by the Palestinian people. Look at Hezbollah in Lebanon. They practically elected themselves into the government and now took over the government. The Egyptians are smelling the same thing. This is their opportunity.

Uh yeah. I'm going to pass on commenting about Hannity's ridiculous notion that Iraq is the only real democracy in the Middle East because that's just part and parcel of the disinformation that Fox is known for and frankly, I'm not sure that Hannity would know a functioning democracy if it smacked him upside the head. But the fear-mongering over the Muslim Brotherhood? Would you be surprised to hear that there's not one "iota of reality" to it? In the words of El Baradei:

This is a myth that was sold by the Mabarak regime, that it’s either us — the ruthless dictators — or a Muslim al-Qaeda type. The Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with the Iranian movement, has nothing to do with extremism as we have seen it in Afghanistan and other places. The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously conservative group. They are a minority in Egypt. They are not a majority of the Egyptian people, but they have a lot of credibility because of liberal parties have been a struggle for thirty years. They are in favor of a secular state. they are of –they are in favor of an institution that have bread lines, they are in favor that every Egyptian have the same rights, that the state is in no way a state based on religion. And I have been reaching out to them. We need to include them. They are as much a part of society as the markets that started here. I think this is a myth that has been perpetuated and sold by the regime and has no iota of reality.

But hey, let's not let little things like facts and tolerance get in the way of a good Muslim fear-monger session.

Partial transcripts below the fold

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Neil Cavuto has had enough, and doggone it, we should just quit the introspection and blame the crazy. Because you know, John Wilkes Booth didn't have talk radio, or chalkboards, or Fox News, or MSNBC, but he still shot Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, he really said that, which means to me that he also hasn't cracked a history book in a long, long time.

Forget Cavuto's effort to make us think insanity happens in a bubble outside the world we live in. His John Wilkes Booth analogy falls on its face right out of the gate, because John Wilkes Booth may not have had talk radio, but he did have access to the Secret Service, and the high echelons of the Confederacy.

John Wilkes Booth was a spy for the Confederate cause. As an actor, he had access to people and places others might not have and used his skills to shuttle information back to Confederate generals throughout the war. He wasn't crazy; he was a traitor.

This was what he believed:

"This country was formed for the white not for the black man. And looking upon African slavery from the same stand-point, as held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one, have ever considered it, one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation."

Not all that far off from some things we've heard in the past two years, is it?

Booth's association with the Confederacy was not recent, either. He had functioned as a double agent at the hanging of John Brown. He donned a militia uniform and assumed the role of guard, to make sure there were no attempts to rescue Brown ahead of the hanging. That was in 1859. Throughout the war, he was an ardent sympathizer and spy, and when he saw an opportunity, he aimed his gun and assassinated the President of the United States because he (violently) did not agree with him.

Not because he was "nutcase." This wasn't an "isolated incident."

What an unfortunate analogy for Cavuto to make. I can't think of one more inappropriate than that one, given Booth's role and attitude toward Lincoln. Booth was as sane as the rest of us. He was simply angry that the North had prevailed -- so angry he plotted and succeeded at assassinating Lincoln.

And why did he choose Booth? Because there was talk radio and hate talk when JFK and RFK were assassinated? Because there is talk radio and hate talk now? Because there are many, many similarities between the toxicity of today's airwaves and those of the 1960's?

But no. Instead he chooses one of the most sane and rational assassins in American history to argue his case that Saturday's shooting was just another lunatic gone crazy.

Fox News is all out on their allegations of voter fraud this morning, claiming that, among other things, Harry Reid is bribing college students with free pizza. Yes, seriously.

Via kolotv.com:

Republican goons staring down minority voters at polling sites. Teachers buying Democrats with Starbucks gift cards. Election workers doctoring records. The Senate majority leader bribing college students with free pizza.

Allegations of dirty politics are being flung from both sides in the final days of Nevada's U.S. Senate race between incumbent Democrat Harry Reid and Republican Sharron Angle.

So far, the complaints of voter fraud or voter intimidation add up to little more than unsubstantiated rumors that Nevada's secretary of state called "wildly irresponsible," but they could help motivate voters worried that their ballot will be miscast in a tight race.

Secretary of State Ross Miller is investigating possible early voting irregularities in Clark and Washoe counties after the Nevada GOP filed a 44-page complaint this week. "Obviously, I am suspicious of any allegations just a week before the election where rumors are perpetuated by political parties or candidates without any substantiated evidence," he said.

Undeterred by the truth however, expect O'Reilly and Beck to jump on the voter fraud train hard today in advance of Sharron Angle's defeat. As long as they can claim the election was stolen, they don't have to address the truth: Nevada voters will reject Sharron Angle because she's batsh*t crazy.

The other ugly truth

Angle's electoral demise isn't the only thing motivating Fox. This is the same tactic they took in 2008 with ACORN, and of course, we saw post-election what happened with that. Expect similar efforts in 2011 when Harry Reid steps back onto the Senate floor. As usual, the target will be unions and minorities, ACORN or no ACORN. But the other motivation is to cover for what the Republican party always does, which is to commit voter fraud while accusing everyone else of committing it.

Koch-funded American Majority has rolled out a Voter Fraud app for the iPhone allowing users to anonymously report instances of voter fraud via geotagged reports and camera images.

(cue sarcasm) There's nothing too intimidating about having someone standing there with their iPhone at the ready, prepared to take pictures of you and send them in to the Republican party if you're a minority voter who also votes Democrat is there? Why would that be a problem?

Meanwhile, the Republicans continue their practice of vote caging, a practice where they send a mailing out in advance of the voting, then challenge any voters who match addresses where a mailer has been returned.

Mother Jones:

In Wisconsin, the state Republican Party had been accused of plotting with local tea party groups to disenfranchise voters whose ballots were returned because of a wrong address—an illegal technique known as "vote-caging." Given the polarized political climate, overzealous activists working the polls could end up overstepping the bounds, intentionally or not. Referring to the GOP and tea party efforts to recruit poll watchers and workers, Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice says, "We haven't sent this degree of heightened activity for years. It's just a higher risk situation for voters."

In Wisconsin this is particularly troubling since many students will probably not have the same address as they did six months ago, but are still eligible to vote and may be disenfranchised as a result of Tea Party efforts.

Whatever the outcome of these elections, you can all rest assured that Fox will do their level best to continue the Republican time-honored tradition of screaming voter fraud. The only exception will be states where teabaggers win.

Bonus: DOJ says, we've got this. Chill out, everyone.