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It was Bill O'Reilly and Jim DeMint's turn to pretend like no one has ever cut a Senator's time on the floor short tonight on the O'Reilly Factor. Bill-O and 'PrayerCast' member Jim DeMint do a little bit of history revision and pretend like Grandpa McCain hasn't done the exact same thing himself. So nice of them to show such concern for Joe Lie-berman while ignoring that McCain himself has acted a whole lot worse. Little wonder that O'Reilly would lash out at Franken since he's been mocking Bill-O since his days at Air America Radio.

Franken's spot where he panned O'Reilly for pretending like he served in battle on his radio show and his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them had to have gotten under O'Reilly's skin. If anyone out there has the recording of that segment on Air America, let the site know. I'd love to post it if I could find it.

As Think Progress noted, McCain was more than happy to cut off a Democratic Senator's time during the Iraq war debate. Now he's got memory lapse. Apparently it's too much to ask O'Reilly or DeMint to tell the truth about that in this segment. Fox News... unfair and unbalanced.

I'm still trying to figure out why the staff at Hardball could find footage of John McCain from back in 2002 cutting off another member of the Senate when the Rachel Maddow Show said they couldn't find it in the C-SPAN archives. Very strange.

UPDATE: My mistake on the Hardball/Rachel Maddow show segments. Matthews showed a different clip and not the one Rachel's staff could not find. At least both of those shows, unlike O'Reilly, bothered to point out that McCain is a huge hypocrite with his feigned outrage towards Franken "picking on" his buddy Lieberman when all Al was doing is following the directions given to him by Harry Reid.

h/t to David who sent on the O'Reilly in combat segment. I had thought this might have been Mike Stark but it wasn't. The one thing this is missing is the Franken show's mockery of it, not that it needs it to be funny as hell. Enjoy.

David also sent on what looks to be some of Franken's show footage and where to find it. I'll check that out as well and thank you for the tip.

There's only a few hours left. I love all the contestants, but if you have a minute please vote for Digby to win the Air America Cruise contest. She's my friend and a great thinker for the progressive movement.

She's behind by a lot of votes because she has never written anything about the contest, so click on through and vote.

Schoolhouse Rock - Three is a Magic Number

Okay, maybe not three, but would you believe that when it comes to Afghanistan, 30 is the magic number? As Moon of Alabama notes, each time a battle in Afghanistan is described, the losses are always around 30. Megan Carpentier of Air America suggests that it may be that the Pentagon's cold calculus is that 30 civilian deaths is the maximum we Americans will tolerate without questioning the wisdom of the battles:

In other words, the Pentagon determined that 30 casualties, even if they were civilian, were too few to matter politically or to attract the attention of the press for more than a few words. If commanders expected more civilian casualties than that, political leaders had to sign off on the attack in advance to make sure they were prepared for the PR fall-out.

That PR calculus of how many deaths matter to the average American has apparently carried over from the Bush Administration to the Obama Adminstration, at least insofar as ground commanders are concerned. But the American people deserve the truth about how many Afghans--civilian and otherwise--are being killed by our forces. Just because senior officials at the Pentagon think that killing 30 people doesn't warrant their attention doesn't mean they're right.

Dubbed "the biggest untold story of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election," by Free Republic, Larry Sinclair's absurd claims popped up during the 2008 presidential campaign, and were never taken seriously. Normally, this clown wouldn't be worth mentioning, but now that he's decided to run for office in Florida's 24th district, he's fair game. More from Dan Carter at Air America:

Larry Sinclair, the man who claimed that he "took drugs [and] had homo sex with Obama" is now running for Congress in Florida’s 24th district. His slogan: "I have served my time, now it's time I serve my Country."

Sinclair, author of Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder? and convicted felon, was reportedly offered $10,000 to verify his claims of illicit sex and drug use with then candidate Obama via a polygraph test, which he promptly failed. But deceit is nothing new for Sinclair. Politico did a bit of digging into his background and found a pattern:

The record includes forgery charges in two states, one of which drew Sinclair a 16-year jail sentence. The Pueblo County, Colo., Sheriff's Office also has an outstanding warrant for Sinclair's arrest for forging an acquaintance's signature and stealing her tax refunds.

But should we even be calling him “Larry Sinclair?” According to Colorado records, he has 13 aliases including "LA Rye Vizcarra Avila" and "Mohammed Gahanan." Read on...

Sinclair is running as an Independent, which makes him a teabagger's dream! Perhaps he'll be supported by the Club For Growth? (ok, that was Amato's joke) Be prepared when clicking the above link to Sinclair's site, it auto-plays Barbara Streisand's "Someday." Yes, really.

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Tonight on Air America: Greg Palast joins Crooks and Liars' John Amato, guest host of "Clout!" on your local progressive station or streaming live on AirAmericaRadio.com at 9pm Eastern.

This week, special for Crooks and Liars readers, download for free, Palast's film for Democracy Now!, "Big Easy to Big Empty: How the White House Drowned New Orleans."

There's another floater. Four years on, there's another victim face down in the waters of Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Ivor van Heerden.

I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. The Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, it was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:

"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breached. Nobody."

On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the State Police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.

What they did not know was that the levees had cracked. For crucial hours, the White House knew, but withheld the information that the levees of New Orleans had broken and that the city was about to drown. Bush's boys did not notify the State of the flood to come, which would have allowed police to launch an emergency hunt for the thousands who remained stranded.

"Fifteen hundred people drowned. That's the bottom line," said von Heerden. He shouldn't have told me that. The professor was already in trouble for saying, publicly, that the levees around New Orleans were no good, too short, by 18". They couldn't stand up to a storm like Katrina. He said it months before Katrina hit -- in a call to the White House, and later in the press.

So, even before Katrina, even before our interview, the professor was in hot water. Van Heerden was told by LSU officials that his complaints jeopardized funding from the Bush Administration. They tried to gag him. He didn't care: he ripped off the gag and spoke out.

It didn't matter to Bush, to the state, to the university, that van Heerden was right -- devastatingly right. Exactly as van Heerden predicted, the levees could not stand up to the storm surge.

In 2006, I met van Heerden in his office at the university's hurricane center; a cubby filled with charts of the city under water. He's a soft-spoken, even-tempered man, given to understatement and academic reserve. But his words were hand grenades: the Bush White House did nothing about the levees, despite warning after warning.

Why? A hurricane is an Act of God. But a levee failure is an Act of Bush -- of the federal government. Under the Flood Control Act of 1928, once the levees break, it's Washington's responsibility to save lives -- and to compensate the victims for lost homes and lost loved ones.

By telling me this, the professor had to know he was putting his job on the line. This week marks the fourth anniversary of the drowning of New Orleans.

Shakoor Aljuwani of the Rebuilding Lives Coalition reminds me it is also the fourth year of exile for more than half of the low-income black residents who once lived in the Crescent City. In the Lower Ninth Ward, 81% have yet to return.

And it marks the end of Dr. van Heerden's career at LSU. They got him. Once the network cameras were turned away from New Orleans, as America and Anderson Cooper shifted attention to Brad and Angelina and other news, the University put an end to Dr. van Heerden. "In 2006 they started the nonsense - they stopped me from teaching. They tried last year to get faculty to vote me out."

His contract was not renewed; he was forced out too, dumped along with the chief of the Hurricane Center who led the academics who supported van Heerden's research. The Man Who Was Right was fired.

Continue reading »

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Al Franken doesn't have to crack another joke for the rest of his life, and he'll still be providing us with a bottomless parade of high comedy -- inadvertently, as it were, in the form of right-wing pundits pitching themselves into a downright frenzy over his election to the Senate.

Especially Bill O'Reilly.

He was on vacation last week when the news came down, so last night he had the chance to finally weigh in, and he did:

O'Reilly: Check one: In a sad day for America, Al Franken is now a U.S. senator. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled he won the election by about 300 votes. Franken is a blatantly dishonest individual, a far-left zealot who is not qualified to hold any office, a man who trafficked in hate on his failed Air America radio program. If you want proof, check out Page 96 in my book Culture Warrior. With people like Franken on the Hill, this country is in deep trouble.

Stephen Colbert needn't parodize this one. It's already self-parody.

Of course, all this stirs up fond memories. Like the 2003 BookWorld Expo in Los Angeles:

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And who can forget Fox v. Franken? Ah, good times, good times.

Warning: Shameless self-promotion to follow ...

Digby's hosting a salon at Firedoglake today for my new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. Come and join us!

In the meantime, the reviews are starting to roll in, too. Elbert Ventura wrote a very positive piece in The American Prospect. (Eric Boehlert gave it a shout-out too.) And a couple of weeks ago, SusanG at DailyKos gave it a big thumbs-up too. (You might want to read my conversation with Susan too.) And then there were the thoughtful reviews from Tristero at Hullabaloo.

I was also on Air America last week with Jon Elliott. You can listen to the show below:

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