From The Ed Schultz Show:

Ed Schultz talks with Stephen Lerner of the Service Employees International Union about who’s looking out for the workers in the fight over the Employees Free Choice Act.

Ed Schultz takes "centrist" Democrats to task for back peddling on this important issue. They need to just call them what they are. They're not centrists. They're corporate DINO's.

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Keith talks to Jonathan Turley about the Obama administrations decision to make the claim of state secrets to block a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From Turley's post Obama Administration Invokes State Secrets To Kill Lawsuit Over Unlawful Surveillance Program:

In yet another break with its campaign promise to fight to restore civil liberties and privacy, the Obama Administration has made a breathtaking claim of state secrets to block a public interest organization from suing the government for illegal surveillance. There is not a scintilla of difference in the legal position of President Obama and the position of President Bush in trying to quash any effort to challenge unlawful surveillance by the government. It appears the “yes we can” means “yes we can do most anything that we want” when it comes to unlawful programs. I will be discussing this story (and the new disclosures on torture) tonight on MSNBC Countdown.

The Administration is moving to kill a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of AT&T customers who were unlawfully intercepted by the government. Not only is the Administration making an extreme argument under the military and state secrets doctrine but it is claimed that citizens cannot sue, even if the government engages in unlawful surveillance, under the Patriot Act. Due to changes put through with Democratic support, the statute is being used to block any lawsuit unless the citizens can show that there was “willful disclosure’” of the communications by the government.

As Jonathan noted in his interview with Keith, there are plenty of reasons to be supportive of the Obama administration but this is not one of them. Politics should not come before following the law, whether it is a Democratic or Republican administration in charge.

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Countdown's Worst Person April 7, 2009 with winners Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

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From the premier of the Ed Show on MSNBC. Ed Schultz talks to United Steel Worker's president Leo Gerard about the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and what the loss of our auto industry would mean to other sectors as well. Gerard stressed the need to reform health care in the United States and fix our trade policies with China.

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As Digby pointed out yesterday on CNN's Your Money, Ari Velshi decided to let everyone know just how "lucky" an 84 year old woman was who is still waiting tables. I'll let Digby take it from here.

It's shocking that in the richest most powerful nation in the world, an 84 year old woman has to be grateful that she still has a job and a paid-for roof over her head. The CNN correspondents must have been shocked, as I was, to see this woman, bent over with osteoporosis, carrying plates and taking orders ar her age and wondered what had gone wrong in our society that such a thing could be necessary, right?

Well, not exactly:

Ali Velshi: That woman who you had in your story, the woman who'd been a waitress, I almost wonder whether people who live close to the edge, but don't carry a lot of debt are not as affected by this recession. They've sort of been living in that state for a while. There's not a lot of room they've had to fall.

Guttierez: Ali, you're absolutely right. I think that's the lesson here. You look at somebody like Mildred, she's 84 years old. She's still waiting tables, but she's doing it to supplement her social security income. The most important thing here is that she has no mortgage..

Ali: right ..

Guttierez: She doesn't have the monkey on her back that we all have and so she doesn't have to worry. She feels that she can move through this crisis because she lives simply, she was able to pay off her house, and she doesn't have the big worry so many people out there have, which is mortgage.

Velshi: We hear a lot of people talking about their grandparents who experienced the recession, or the depression and how they learned the value of a dollar. That might be the silver lining to this thing. We might have a new generation who knows how to stretch a dollar and how to stay clear of as much debt as we've gotten ourselves into.

Guttierez: Absolutely. And that's Mildred's point. You have to learn from this crisis. You have to take it to the future, you have to learn to live within your means, and make sure that you pay off that house and that you buy a house you can afford. She says that that's really the way that she's able to sleep at night.

Lucky, lucky Mildred. After all, she could be out of a job and then where would she be? I guess if we all play our cards right we too can be waiting tables when we're 84. As long as we live prudently, of course, and make sure we don't have any housing expenses at that age. Otherwise, it could get dicey --- and we'd only have ourselves to blame.

Meanwhile, we learned that the most fortunate people in this recession are those who had nothing to begin with because they didn't have so far to fall. (The real victims of the recession are Thelma and Ali who have jobs and the "monkey on the back" of mortgage payments.) These people at the low end of the economic scale like Mildred are used to being "close to the edge" and are actually much better off than everyone else because being poor is acceptable for them. They can sleep at night. Lucky duckies all.

Ali Velshi, by the way, was wearing what appeared to be at least a five thousand dollar suit as he piously lectured America about learning the value of a dollar.

Full transcript below the fold.

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From Headzup the Week in Cartoons.

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David Axelrod responded to Dick Cheney's recent criticism of President Obama Sunday on CNN's State of the Union. "[President Bush] has behaved like a statesman," Axelrod told John King.

Axelrod disagreed with Cheney's assertion that Obama's terrorism policies were failing. "I find it supremely ironic, on a day when we were meeting with NATO, to talk about the continued threat from al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they're still plotting against us eight years -- or seven years later," he said. "I think the question for Mr. Cheney is, how could that be? How could this have gone so long? Why are they still in business?"

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Newt Gingrich told Fox's Chris Wallace that he would have disabled North Korea's missile before it could have launched.

"There are three or four techniques that could have been used, from unconventional forces to standoff capabilities, to say: 'We're not going to tolerate a North Korean missile launch, period.' I mean, the world's either got to decide that North Korea is utterly dangerous -- I'd recommend, look at electromagnetic pulse, which changes every equation about how risky these weapons are," explained Gingrich.

John Amato:

That Newt sure is a card. Let's just attack another country once again. Isn't that considered an act of war? In wingnut world, George Bush was a genius when he made a deal with Kim Jong Il. And GW even boasted about taking them off his terror list: I am notifying Congress of my intent to rescind North Korean's designation as a state sponsor of terror in 45 days.

Yet the same wingnuts are now attacking President Obama with a clip from the Team America movie that features Kim Jong Il because he criticized NK./blockquote>

That stern finger wagging by President Obama didn't seem to deter them much, did it?

And Bush's part in the six-nation talks worked like a charm. I really liked 'Team America' by the way.

( JA-I corrected the headline of the post because I misread the Gingrich comments)

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"If the Republicans can't break out of being the right wing party of big government, then I think you would see a third party movement in 2012," Newt Gingrich said during a Wednesday speech in Missouri.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the former Speaker of the House expanded on why conservatives might turn away from the Republican Party. "Republicans need to understand that there's a country which did not like the big spending of the last administration, didn't like the interventionist policies of the last administration and the country at large would like to see a genuine alternative to the Obama strategy of basical trying to run the entire economy from the white house and basically trying to increase government, I think, by 36% this year, which is the largest single increase outside of war in American history," said Gingrich.

Gingrich indicated that he wouldn't participate in a third party movement. "No, look, I lived through watching Ross Perot run in 1992 and split the conservative movement in two," he said.

John Amato:

Yea, Newt wants nothing to do with a "third party," he's just making the case for one. Nice going Newt. Gingrich started a new party in 1994 with his Contract with America, that began to kick out all moderate Republicans using the Southern Strategy and now the entire Republican party is made up of conservatives just like him. Of course he was booted out of his own party very quickly. Since his ideals have failed so miserably now---he's saying they may need another party for conservatives to express themselves and be heard.

I love the the sweet smell of revisionism in the morning.

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From Bill Moyers Journal:

Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald are the first recipients of the Park Center for Independent Media Izzy Award (named for I.F. Stone) — named "Pillars of independent media, chosen for the award, because of their journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom and official deception."

"I think the way the media works is they show the spectrum of opinion between the Democrats and the Republicans in Washington. Often that is very narrow. But the fact is, the majority of Americans fall outside of that opinion." -Amy Goodman

"It's not even some sort of Machiavellian or conspiratorial effort, sometimes, to exclude certain opinions. It's actually the fact that reporters — and media stars — and corporate and establishment journalists are so embedded into the establishment...That they're so completely insular and out of touch from what public opinion actually is. And polls show that huge numbers of issues and positions that are held by large numbers of Americans are ones that are virtually never heard in our media discussions." - Glenn Greenwald

Transcript below the fold.

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