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h/t Bob Cesca:

Joe Scarborough thinks the $3 trillion Iraq war that was accompanied by tax cuts didn't balloon the deficit more than the current healthcare bill. You know, the healthcare bill that's entirely paid for -- and will actually reduce the deficit.

Guest Joe Conason made the mistake of pointing this out, stirring Scarborough into one of his little freakouts. Of course he denied supporting the combination of wars and tax cuts, which, if you watched any cable news during that time, is total horseshit.

Nothing like pointing out a few facts to make Scarborough's head explode. I don't know how Conason manages to suffer through being a guest on that show.

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I really don’t know how Joe Conason can manage to sit through these panel segments on Lou Dobbs’ show, but it’s nice to see him on there to dispel some of the right-wing talking points being thrown around by Dobbs and the other guests. He does a good job countering KellyAnne Conway on the Republicans' newfound love of Medicare, and Dobbs for downplaying some of the profits of the larger insurance companies.

He may not have known that Dobbs was parroting Glenn Beck at the end of the segment. Dobbs needs to just move on over to ClusterFox and get it over with.

CONWAY: The opt out is a canard because if you really want people—if you really want to provide an opt out, allow small business owners to opt out. This administration's policies have been an assault on small business owners, believe me, and or allow seniors to opt out of the cuts in Medicare which are currently on the table.

CONASON: Cuts in the private Medicare.

CONWAY: But Joe it's huge. When people hear it, they think it’s mostly a bad idea.

CONASON: We should discuss what that really is.

CONWAY: Go ahead because, again—explain the differences.

CONASON: It's the $500 billion in cuts. It’s to cut something called Medicare Advantage…

CONWAY: Right, which a lot of seniors rely on.

CONASON: No, it’s a subsidy to private insurance companies to try to compete with Medicare because they can't compete with Medicare. When people complain about a government-run health care program Lou, they're complaining about a program that is very like Medicare which the Republicans now claim to be defending. So it's a very interesting contradiction in their positions. On the one hand, they're trying to save Medicare, that government run program. On the other hand, they don't want anyone else to have it…

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Hey what do you know... Lou Dobbs lying on the air again. Hard to belive, right? This time at least Joe Conason was there to correct him. And he cites Media Matters to do it. That had to get under Dobbs skin since I'm sure he loves Media Matters about as much as Bill-O does. It's pretty pathetic when you've got a network debunking lies about Jennings on one show, and one of their anchors spreading them on another.

DOBBS: Let's turn to, very quickly, another czar issue, Kevin Jennings. The Safe School czar, charges that he mishandled a homosexual relationship between a young man, 15-year-old, and an older man in which Jennings did not report it. Is there sufficient pressure that he'll be forced to resign and should he be forced to resign?

CONASON: I think we should start with the known facts, at least as I understand them about this case, which is that this is something that happened, I believe, 20 years ago. So, that's a pretty long time ago. George W. Bush, when he was running for president, did not want to be held accountable for things he had done 21 years before he ran for president and yet, a lot of people voted for him and everyone said that he should be absolved.

(CROSSTALK)

DOBBS: You seem to look at politics in a rather binary fashion, Joe...

CONASON: No, I mean, I'm just trying to make some valid comparisons.

DOBBS: Oh, I understand. And they are valid.

CONASON: Your favorite Web site, Lou, Media Matters for America has a statement, I believe, tonight on...

DOBBS: You're one of four people who reads that.

CONASON: Well, then that's why I'm telling you about it. From the young man who was allegedly involved in this incident, absolving Kevin Jennings of any responsibility, saying he was of age when this happened, so this may turn out to be nothing. I don't know. But so far it's a mixed story.

DOBBS: Well, nothing we know it won't turn out to be, because it is already something.

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Glenn Beck says the rest of the media -- what he calls "the fringe media," which makes sense only if you live on Planet Beck -- should be covering what he's covering: Which is to say, his thesis that the Obama White House is a secret conspiracy to overthrow American capitalism and replace it with communism.

It's a refrain we're hearing from Fox a lot these days. They've been running ads attacking the other networks for not covering "the ACORN scandal" that they largely created out of whole cloth. There is, of course, a perfectly good reason they haven't: the shoddy journalistic standards Fox has adopted in these stories, ably limned by Joe Conason and Media Matters.

With Beck the problem is even more obvious: His entire "Tree of Revolution" is the kind of guilt-by-association conspiracist wingnuttery that heretofore had been almost solely the province of John Birch Society filmstrips. Now this kind of extremism is being broadcast daily to an audience of millions.

I mean, look at the thing. Right at its root, he has Woodrow Wilson -- one of the more authoritarian presidents in our history. In fact, he was most noted for his implementation of the Sedition Act of 1918, which was later repealed after Wilson-era abuses.

What was the purpose of the Sedition Act? Why, to outlaw revolutionaries and put them in jail.

That's some root of the "Tree of Revolution" there.

But then, there's nothing particularly coherent about Beck's guilt-by-association game here. It's just whatever names he can throw up around Barack Obama's name to make the president appear like he's surrounded by a bunch of communist radicals, rather than the Wall Street Establishmentarians he in reality is surrounded by.

Only on Planet Beck.

Thank God for Joe Conason, who's a consistent champion of the poor and working class. He writes about the trumped-up hysteria about ACORN - and says Republicans who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones:

[...] ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished. No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a "pimp and ho," but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). And while the idea of getting housing assistance for a brothel was clever, what ACORN really does, every day, is help those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Perhaps the congressional investigation now demanded by some Republican politicians would be a useful exercise, if conducted impartially. A fair investigation might begin to dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by right-wing media outlets.

Among the most popular canards on the right, repeated constantly by conservative pundits and politicians, is that ACORN has been found guilty of engaging in deliberate voter fraud, using federal funds. In reality, ACORN has registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the country over the past five years -- a laudable record with a very low incidence of fraud of any kind.

Over the past several years, a handful of ACORN employees have admitted falsifying names and signatures on registration cards, in order to boost the pay they received. When ACORN officials discovered those cases, they informed the state authorities and turned in the miscreants. (That was why the Bush Justice Department's blatant attempt to smear ACORN with rushed, election-timed indictments became a national scandal for Republicans rather than Democrats.) The proportion of fraud is infinitesimal. For example, a half-dozen ACORN workers were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election. They had completed fewer than two dozen false registrations -- out of more than a million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. The mythology that suggests that thousands or even millions of illegal registrants voted is itself a fraud.

If only the Republicans who have worked up a frenzy over ACORN's alleged crimes were so indignant about real and damaging voter fraud -- such as the amazing case of Young Political Majors, the firm that ran GOP registration efforts in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere before the authorities in Orange County, Calif., busted its president, Mark Anthony Jacoby, and sent him to jail last year. He had built a lucrative partisan career by teaching his minions to deceive thousands of voters into registering as Republicans rather than Democrats, among other scams. Of course, the only on-air mention of the Young Political Majors scandal on Fox News was made by blogger Brad Friedman -- and the national media, mainstream and conservative, generally ignored it. They were too busy generating "controversy" over ACORN.

So now the overhyped voting registration tales are metastasizing into wild accusations about ACORN's finances and programs, including claims that the group will receive billions in federal bailout funding and that it is a hotbed of corruption, perhaps even murder. In fact, ACORN affiliates -- those not involved with voter registration -- have received a few million dollars annually in federal funding. The group is not scheduled to receive any bailout money (although working people would probably benefit more from subsidizing ACORN than greasing AIG and Goldman Sachs).

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From Lou Dobbs Tonight, in what looks like another potential hit piece on ACORN, Joe Conason and Keith Richburg point out a few problems with the conservative filmmakers' "reporting". Of course Dick Cheney sychophant Ron Christie disagrees with them, and as usual pulls the Republican stunt when debating anyone on television. Never stop talking if the host lets you get away with it, feign being insulted when you're interrupted by the other guest who would like to get a word in and is sick of your lying, and then filibuster until the times runs out for the segment.

PILGRIM: We are back with our panel, and on this note, why don't we start with this controversy, Keith, of what do you make of this discussion?

RICHBURG: You know, it's another embarrassment for ACORN. It's another embarrassment, you know. And the only reason they're on the radar screen is because they became well known -- most people, they've never heard of ACORN two years ago.

They became well known because they were helping "Get Out the Vote" efforts for the Obama campaign. You know, so it's an embarrassment for ACORN. I don't know if it's going to go beyond that and I'd be interested if that is true, what the spokesman said, that these conservative filmmaker went around to three or four offices and basically got thrown out with this ruse, and they found one office where there were two people stupid enough to sit down and give them this kind of silly advice.

And it sounds to me like that's just entrapment. You know? Let's go around various offices until we can finally trick somebody into...

CONASON: It's not journalism unless they report everything that happened. It's propaganda. If you're a reporter and you're doing something this, then you would report, yes, we went to the four offices and one said, you know, fell for -- took the bait.

If you don't report that, if you act as if you went into one office and they did it, then that's dishonest. The other thing is, Bill mentioned that it's a two-party state. The filmmakers could be liable to civil or criminal action, in fact, for taping people without telling them in the state of Maryland. I have a reporter who works in the capital district that knows about this. It came up during the Linda Tripp affair whether Tripp could be prosecuted in Maryland for recording Monica Lewinsky unlawfully. So that could be an interesting sideline, and may be why the filmmaker did not show up to be on television to discuss this tonight.

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While discussing the magnificent come back the GOP is about to make during the mid-term elections in Pat's mind, Pat Buchanan compares Al Gore's views on climate change to the birthers. Thankfully Joe Conason was there to remind us just how bad it is for the Republican party to be listening to the likes of Pat Buchanan when Tweety would let him get a word in edgewise.

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Joe Conason warned me that people were going to have a hard time saying the title of my book. I guess he was right -- Don Lemon had a rough time of it last night when he hosted me and Fran Townsend, a former Bush administration Homeland Security official, on CNN Newsroom.

The discussion did give me a chance to talk about that Homeland Security bulletin and how accurate it was. I did try to see if Townsend could shed some light on when it was commissioned, but we ran out of time.

In any event, let me know how I did.

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While discussing the recently released torture memos, Michael Smerconish tries to dismiss the torture as rare and isolated incidents and gets his talking points shot down from both Chris Matthews and Joe Conason. Matthews tries to explain the relationship him between those two prisons to him and argues that the underlings at those prisons did not come up with those policies on their own. He's right of course, but if he really wanted to drive that point home he should have asked Smerconish if he'd read Janis Karpinski's book. From part of her interview on Democracy Now explaining how Abu Ghraib was "Gitmo-ized":

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is the former Commanding General of Abu Ghraib. Her name is Janis Karpinski. She was a Brigadier General. She has been demoted to Colonel. She is the only one of the Generals who has been demoted at this point. And she has written a book about her experience. It’s called One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story. We’re talking about General Miller, General Geoffrey Miller, coming from Guantanamo to Iraq, to the Abu Ghraib prison, the biggest of the prison facilities. You were in charge of it and all of the prison facilities in Iraq.

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: And he said he was there to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib. We have heard the stories out of Guantanamo. We now certainly know what happened at—some of what has happened at Abu Ghraib, in Cell Blocks 1A and 1B, only because soldiers themselves took photographs, not clear what has been happening throughout Iraq.

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there any reason to believe this hasn’t happened in the other facilities that you oversaw?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Well, there were only—interrogation operations were only taking place—at prisons under my control, interrogations were only being conducted at Abu Ghraib, and they were only being conducted in interrogation facilities built specifically for interrogations at Abu Ghraib. There was what they called “Interrogation Facility Wood” and “Interrogation Facility Steel.” The pictures, although they were—when they were released, it was widely reported that this was during interrogation operations. In fact, it was not during interrogation operations. These pictures were being staged and set up at the direction of contract interrogators, civilian contract interrogators, for the use in future interrogations.

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Chris Matthews brings on Cliff May and Joe Conason to discuss Sy Hersh's recent allegations that Dick Cheney told the Israelis that President Obama was "pro-Palestinian" and described him as someone who would "never make it in the major leagues" while the incoming administration was trying to broker a cease fire.

The best May can muster to defend Cheney? Well maybe Sy Hersh's reporting is wrong. Cliff May has been an apologist for everything done by any of his fellow neo-cons at every turn. Let's see how long it takes him to do a one eighty on this one if he's proven wrong and take to defending Cheney's actions instead.

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From 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. March 26, 2009.

Shuster: The outrage over AIG's bonuses has been justifiable but the $165 million dollars pales in comparison to another abuse which has been going on for much longer and involves a whole lot more money. We're talking about offshore tax havens. Many of the same companies that have received tax payer bailout money have also done business in these so called tax havens for years.

.....

And Joe what kind of money are we talking about with all of this?

Conason: Well David the last time this, anybody made a serious estimate of these numbers it came to something like $12 trillion sheltered in offshore tax havens world wide and an estimate of about $100 billion in lost revenues to the IRS. People avoiding taxes illegally in those same tax havens. And as you mentioned it's in fact all of the companies that have received tax payer bailouts, have some sort of tax haven subsidiaries, many of them with lot of them.

I mean you could imagine there's some reason to have I guess a branch in the Cayman Islands because people might want to do some banking there but why you would need ninety subsidiaries there is really an interesting question.

Considerably more than those bonuses indeed that have everyone's tail feathers in an uproar in the Congress. Joe Conason has more in his article at Salon AIG is chump change -- let's find corporate America's hidden billions. From the article.

But what reason other than evasion could there be for Goldman Sachs Group to set up three subsidiaries in Bermuda, five in Mauritius, and 15 in the Cayman Islands? Why did Countrywide Financial need two subsidiaries in Guernsey? Why did Wachovia need 18 subsidiaries in Bermuda, three in the British Virgin Islands, and 16 in the Caymans? Why did Lehman Brothers need 31 subsidiaries in the Caymans? What do Bank of America's 59 subsidiaries in the Caymans actually do? Why does Citigroup need 427 separate subsidiaries in tax havens, including 12 in the Channel Islands, 21 in Jersey, 91 in Luxembourg, 19 in Bermuda and 90 in the Caymans? What exactly is going on at Morgan Stanley's 19 subs in Jersey, 29 subs in Luxembourg, 14 subs in the Marshall Islands, and its amazing 158 subs in the Caymans? And speaking of AIG, why does it have 18 subs in tax-haven countries? (Don't expect to find out from Fox News Channel or the New York Post, because News Corp. has its own constellation of strange subsidiaries, including 33 in the Caymans alone.)

When the cost of these shenanigans was last estimated two years ago, the U.S. government's annual loss in revenue due to tax avoidance by major corporations and super-rich individuals was pegged at about $100 billion -- considerably more than a rounding error, even today. But of course that is only a rough assessment, as is the estimate of $12 trillion in untaxed assets hidden around the world. Nobody will know for certain until the books are opened and transparency is established.

So I assume that means it could be even higher. The Obama administration is looking into closing these loopholes but they've got a huge fight on their hands with this one. Conason is right though and these companies should not be allowed to be taking tax payer dollars and then potentially illegally avoiding paying their own taxes in the United States.