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South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham can't seem to make up his mind on whether the United States ought to be sending ground troops into Syria, since he just contradicted himself from the statements he made to Foreign Policy last month during an interview with Bob Schieffer on CBS this Sunday. He has, however, been consistent with beating the war drums and giving dire warnings about the consequences of the United States failing to insert ourselves into the middle of their civil war.

Graham continued the fearmongering on this Sunday's Face the Nation, telling the audience they should be concerned about everything from more terrorist attacks in the United States, to extremists taking over the country and getting a hold of weapons of mass destruction.

Graham also claimed he's really worried about "all hell breaking loose" in the region if the United States fails to intervene. I hate to break it to you Lindsey, but you're a whole lot of years and a dollar short on that one. That ship sailed a long time ago.

I've got a proposal for Graham and his fellow warmongering buddy John McCain -- you first. If the two of you want to lead the charge inserting yourselves into another country's civil war without the support of the international community, you go lead the troops over there and take a spot on the front lines of the battlefield. Let us know how that works out for you.

Full transcript below the fold via CBS.

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Here we go again. Another Sunday, another week with Bloody Bill Kristol pushing for more military intervention: Fox News Sunday Beats Syria War Drums:

Subhed: Fox Analysts Urge "Irresponsible" Obama To Do "Something," But Won't Say What

William Kristol wants to go to war in Syria, but he won't say what that war should look like. Appearing on Fox News Sunday to discuss reports of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the Weekly Standard editor (and noted Iraq war hawk) attacked President Obama as "totally irresponsible" for indicating that he doesn't want "to start another war," saying: "You've got to do what you've got to do."

When host Chris Wallace pointed out to him that there are "no good choices" for intervening in the Syrian conflict and asked, "so what do you do?," Kristol brushed it off without indicating how he thought the president should respond: "You do what you think is best. You're commander in chief, you've got an awful lot of options."

They were all happy to use this as en excuse to amp up the rhetoric on Iran as well. Kristol didn't want to give specifics himself, but the one thing you can be sure of is, it won't matter how President Obama responds, they'll attack him later if things don't go well. Never mind that Wallace admitted there are no good options.

Full transcript below the fold.

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In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, Sen. Lindsey Graham told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer that “We need to revisit our laws" and potentially give the FBI more power to track terrorism suspects, because lord knows we haven't shredded quite enough of our civil rights already.

No amount of deaths are ever enough for Graham to want to infringe on the Constitutional rights of gun owning Americans, but as soon as the word terrorism is involved, all bets are out the window.

Graham warns intel agencies ‘going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping’:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said “information sharing failed” ahead of the Boston Marathon bombings and warned that stove-piping between intelligence agencies remained a problem.

“This is a failure to share information and missing obvious warning signs,” said Graham Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We are going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping,” he warned.

Graham called for a “post-mortem” to examine the intelligence failures and see if such missteps could be prevented in the future, citing reports that the FBI failed to interview suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev after a trip to Russia, where authorities believe he was partly radicalized and the failure of the agency to notify agents in Boston to watch him more closely.

“How could you miss that the guy you were informed about by a foreign intelligence service, you got a radical in your midst, we can’t track him to Russia, we lose him going to Russia and coming back,” asked Graham. “And when he goes on the internet for the whole world to see, to interact with a radical Islamic websites how do we miss that?

“We’re going to have to up our game,” said the South Carolina senator. [...]

Graham’s comments are the latest from GOP lawmakers frustrated that intelligence system reforms made after the September 11, 2001 attacks have failed to work. Lawmakers fear that the same intelligence sharing issues before that incident are again playing a role in the Boston attack.

Graham last week suggested that the FBI may need more powers to track terror suspects.

“We need to revisit our laws,” he said.

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On this Sunday's Meet the Press, Sen. John McCain continued to prove the point Chris Hayes made on his show this Friday about just who Congress is responsive to, and it's not your average citizen out there. McCain thinks we have "our priorities a little bit skewed" on these sequestration cuts, but of course there's only one area he's concerned about, and that's defense spending.

MCCAIN: Well I say with all due respect to my friends, it's a little bit hypocritical, the same day when all the focus was on the delays that we have in getting through airports, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army was saying that we're... if we don't reverse this, we're going to have a hollow army. We'll be unable to defend the nation and it would take us ten or fifteen years to recover.

I think we have our priorities a little bit skewed here. Look, I'm for giving the FAA flexibility, but I also want to give the military flexibility and I don't want these sequestration cuts to be as deep as they are on the issue of defense. We've got a lot of savings we can make in national security, but right now we are, in the words of the Secretary of Defense and our uniformed service chiefs, we're putting the security of this nation at risk.

McCain was basically repeating what he said in a press release from this Friday.

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I caught this segment on Friday and thought it was awful enough just for the pure race-baiting involved, but after reading this post over at Media Matters, I discovered that it was even worse than it appeared at first blush. Not only were Neil Cavuto and his guest Crystal Wright doing their best to falsely demonize the Obama administration as wanting to promote a welfare state of lazy moocher "illegal immigrants," the program was started under their hero, George W. Bush.

Fox Accuses Obama Of Creating Dependency With Bush-Era Program:

Fox News accused President Obama of promoting dependency and illegal immigration with a food stamp program that started under the Bush administration.

On the April 26 edition of Your World, Cavuto attacked a partnership that educates Spanish-speaking populations about Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility. Wright claimed that "the Obama administration wants to encourage government dependency and, it looks like, illegal immigration" with the program. Cavuto agreed with Wright and added "it looks like we are doing a beeline to help folks who should not be here in the first place."

But the partnership was created under President George W. Bush in 2004. Salon reported that it "doesn't actually provide food stamps to immigrants," only information on benefits that are already available to those who had been in the country legally for five years: [...]

Fox News continues to falsely claim that Obama is creating a "culture of dependency" for anti-poverty programs put in place before his presidency and exacerbated by the recession. In reality many SNAP recipients work and only stay on the program a short time.

Cavuto continually qualified his statements during this interview with him saying he really didn't want to see anyone out there starving... but... hey... we can't have someone asking for his taxes to be going up to feed all of those lazy brown people just dying to live off of the public dole because they don't want to work for a living... or not.

And it was so nice to hear his guest, Crystal Wright say that she doesn't want the "neediest of the poor" to have to go without being helped. Just what the hell does that mean? Nothing like Fox deciding to have someone on who will define what the rest of us consider poverty down a notch, as if the standard definition isn't quite low enough.

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I don't think we're ever going to top the Donald getting roasted a few years ago, or Stephen Colbert and his appearance back in 2006, but for anyone who missed it and wants to watch, here's President Obama at this year's White House Correspondents Dinner.

He managed to get in a few good zingers aimed at Fox, CNN, the conspiracy theorists, birthers and Maureen Dowd among others.

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After only four members of Congress even bothered to show up for a hearing this week on what should be the most important issue of our time -- getting Americans back to work -- MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry let them know what she thought about it on this Saturday's show.

If only Congress considered unemployment as urgent as flight delays:

Dear Members of the Joint Economic Committee:

It’s me, Melissa. Mind if I call ya J.E.C.?

I get it. A legislator’s work is never done. Days filled with dozens of hearings, back and forth to the Capitol for debates and votes, the obligatory press conferences. You can’t be everywhere at once. Inevitably some balls are going to get dropped. You’ve gotta prioritize, right?

After all, immigration reform is imminent, there’s a terrorist attack to be responded to–and can’t forget those flight delays!

Yes, you are there when it matters. Which can only leave me with one conclusion when I look at this photo, and see testimony about how to get the long term unemployed back to work, given before a room of empty chairs.

To you, this crisis confronting our country simply doesn’t matter. And make no mistake this is a crisis–not just for those who’ve fallen into chronic joblessness, but also for the U.S. economy. It’s what the National Employment Law Project has called “the real cliff that threatens our economy.”

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Fox's Eric Bolling and Bob Beckel were not happy about the fact that The Daily Show's Jon Stewart went after them on his show this Wednesday night, where he took the two of them to task along with a lot of the other bed-wetters on Faux "News" for being more than willing to completely shred our Constitution and Bill of Rights when it comes to terrorism, while at the same time not wanting do a single thing about gun control in the United States.

To no one's surprise, they addressed just about everything Stewart said about them, other than the main point of his segment.

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While thousands of low-income Americans are suffering under sequestration, our Congress somehow managed to rush through a fix for the FAA cuts that were delaying their their flights. Imagine that! As Chris Hayes discussed in the opening of his show this Friday, it's so nice to see that those members of Congress have got their priorities in order.

HAYES: But we begin tonight with the big flashing headline breaking news of the day, from the least popular branch of government, the branch of government widely seen as the most dysfunctional branch of government, the one that contains the right-wing Republican House caucus committed to obstruction above all else. In that branch of government today, today we saw a remarkable display of urgency and pragmatic bipartisan problem solving come together in a matter of hours to fix the most pressing trouble facing America today.

And that very pressing problem is extended travel delays for frequent flyers and members of Congress. Yes, it was a long and tortured path to triumph on this issue. but today in a 361 to 41 vote, a resounding margin, House of Representatives overwhelmingly agreed to tackle the scourge of flight delays being caused by the furlough of federal aviation workers.

Sadly the first piece of legislation that members of Congress saw fit to pass will make those lines at the airports shorter, and as Hayes reminded his audience, here's who will not be getting relief from the bill passed this Friday.

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Bill Maher answered his own question while discussing the political prospects for Anthony Weiner and whether he is able to make a comeback in New York, compared to Mr. Appalachian trail, Mark Sanford, who has already been forgiven and won his party's primary for the upcoming House race in South Carolina.

As Maher explained during his New Rules segment this Friday, the Republicans are the Christian party and "there's nothing Evangelicals eat up like a redemption story," but when it comes to the Jewish guy from New York, "no Jesus mulligan for him."