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Well I hope teabagger Ginni Thomas is proud of herself for her phone call to Anita Hill asking her to apologize for her testimony about her husband during his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court 19 years ago, because it seems she's brought some other women out of the woodwork to defend Anita Hill. I can only hope that McEwen isn't the last of them.

One of Clarence Thomas's ex-girlfriends, Lillian McEwen appeared on Larry King Live and pretty much threw Thomas under the bus and backed over him a few times. Here are some of the more devastating portions of the interview and you can read the entire transcript here.

LARRY KING: Good evening. In 1991, Anita Hill leveled some explosive charges during the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas who ultimately became an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Those accusations resurfaced recently, when one of Thomas' former girlfriends spoke out about them. Lillian McEwen is that person. She is a former federal prosecutor, administrative judge, and council to the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is her first and only network, prime-time interview.

Silent all these years, Lillian, you could have been a valuable edition to those hearings, why not?

LILLIAN MCEWEN: I was not subpoenaed by either side.

KING: Did they know about you?

MCEWEN: Yes.

KING: Both sides?

MCEWEN: Yes.

KING: Well, obviously, Judge Thomas 's side wasn't going to subpoena you to appear, right? That would not have been in their best interests?

MCEWEN: I don't know.

KING: Joe Biden was head of the Senate Committee, right?

MCEWEN: Yes.

KING: What was the reason for not hearing your story?

MCEWEN: I don't know.

KING: Well, what happened, they just rejected it?

MCEWEN: What I asked Clarence about was, what position should I take in reference to any reporters who wanted to talk to me, or anything that he wanted to emphasize as far as my relationship with him was concerned. His response to me was the position his first wife had taken, Kathy, was fine with him, which said to me that his wishes were that I would say nothing to the press. So I acceded to his wishes as far as my -- making myself available to the press.

KING: But you did write to Senator Biden then, right?

MCEWEN: I did write a note to Senator Biden's staff saying that- reminding them that Clarence and I had a very close relationship, and reminding them also, that he used to come frequently to the office space. And was friendly with much of the staff there, on Biden's staff, in the Russell Senate Office Building, just in case they had forgotten.

KING: You were not going to accede to his wishes about saying nothing, if Biden had called you, you would have appeared?

MCEWEN: Of course, if I had been subpoenaed, I would have appeared. And if the Senator had asked me questions, I certainly would have answered them. But that didn't occur either.

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Larry King spent the hour with Comedy Central's Jon Stewart on his show Wednesday night and Stewart was asked what he thought about CNN's Rick Sanchez being fired after calling Jon Stewart a "bigot" and saying that CNN and other news networks are run by Jewish people. Stewart did not think that Sanchez should have been fired just for his statements on Pete Dominick's radio show and that CNN was just looking for an excuse to fire him anyway.

When asked by King why Stewart picks on CNN so much Stewart replied "You're terrible!" and went on to chastise the network for squandering the opportunity "to be a real arbiter" of the news rather than running so many of their fake balance segments that they're so fond of.

Stewart also had some praise for Fox News, but not because he agrees with them or thinks that they are a news organization. He is absolutely correct that they are not a news organization, but an extremely effective political organization.

KING: Jon Stewart. We have several Tweets to Kings Things.

STEWART: This is a problem. News people shouldn't be going, we've got some Tweets. It's like you walked out in the middle of this and said, I was in the bathroom and a guy mentioned to me, you know --

KING: These are human beings and they're Tweeting us. Do you have no respect for them?

STEWART: No.

KING: OK.

STEWART: I don't know who they are. They could be anybody. They could be pretending to be -- who the hell knows who they are?

KING: They're asking this: what you thought about CNN, us, firing Rick Sanchez after he called you a bigot?

STEWART: Is that 140 characters, because that sounded a lot more than 140 characters. It sounded like somebody sent you a double or triple Tweet.

KING: May have been a double Tweet.

STEWART: We're on a news program and you're saying to me, so there's a Tweet. Isn't that a question you probably could have thought of yourself?

KING: We like to involve the audience. It's a gimmick.

STEWART: All right.

KING: Well, what do you think?

STEWART: Should they have fired him for that? No.

KING: You think they made a mistake?

STEWART: With the crap you guys have put on over the last ten years. What, are you kidding me? Fire somebody if you don't think they're doing a good job as a news person. This whole idea that people -- you know, they fired a woman for Tweeting something on her thing on her blog. They fired Sanchez for saying what he said.

I think it's absolute insanity. I think this idea that people have to be held to account for everything that comes out of their mouths as far as their livelihoods is concerned -- does he do a good job? Were you pleased with his job? Or was it an excuse to -- you know, to get rid of him?

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MSNBC needs to give Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks his own show. It might help make up for them getting rid of David Shuster. Dylan Ratigan has taken a shine to Cenk and he let Ratigan fill in while he was away on his radio show and then Uygur subbed for Ratigan for part of the week on MSNBC while he was on vacation. This week they're letting him sub for the 3pm eastern spot while one of their other hosts is on vaction.

They're doing a big push over at FDL for marijuana legalization and Jon Walker has more on Cenk's interview with Bruce Fein.

Bruce Fein on Marijuana Legalization: “If It Is Broken, Then You Need to Fix It”

Ronald Reagan’s former associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein, a member of the Just Say Now advisory board, appeared earlier today on MSNBC to make the conservative argument in support of allowing states to legalize and regulate marijuana.

When Cenk Uygur asked why Fein is supporting efforts to legalize marijuana, Fein’s response was simply that the current policy has proved to be a costly failure and needs to be re-examined.

There is an obverse to the proverb “if it’s not broken don’t fix it,” but if it is broken than you need to try to fix it. And I think at best you can describe the last 40 years and trillion dollars as an incomplete success. We see the marijuana trade fueling the drug cartels in Mexico, the incidence of drugs has really not been dented.

Read on...

Cenk came back on the air during the following hour on Ratigan's show and gave this rant on gay marriage. He's right. How can allowing gay people to get married ever do as much harm to marriage as Larry King and Elizabeth Taylor? The religious right love to have someone to demonize and fear monger about how "the gays" are going to destroy marriage but they never talk about banning divorce. And as Cenk points out there's a whole lot of other stuff that's in the Bible that they gladly ignore as well.

Here's MSNBC's contact page if you want to drop them a line.

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Steve Benen asks the correct question about Liz Cheney's latest attack on President Obama over him daring to point out on Larry King's show this week that maybe people dying is not such a good thing, Can't Deaths be "Tragic"? Liz Cheney is really a piece of work. I would really love to see Markos get a chance to lay into her on the panel of This Week but I'm not getting my hopes up. Cheney has the art of filibuster and just plain mean down well enough that I'll be surprised if he gets some shots in without being talked over by her or not given a chance to respond or cut off by the host if he tries.

On CNN last night, Larry King asked President Obama about the Israeli raid on the flotilla intended for Gaza. The president responded by calling it a "tragic situation," adding, "You've got loss of life that was unnecessary."

According to Liz Cheney, this was a terrible thing to say. Greg Sargent flags her latest complaint:

Yesterday, President Obama said the Israeli action to stop the flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip was "tragic." What is truly tragic is that President Obama is perpetuating Israel's enemies' version of events. The Israeli government has imposed a blockade around Gaza because Hamas remains committed to Israel's destruction...

President Obama is contributing to the isolation of Israel, and sending a clear signal to the Turkish-Syrian-Iranian axis that their methods for ostracizing Israel will succeed, and will be met by no resistance from America....

Yes, for Liz Cheney, we've reached the point at which characterizing violence and death as "tragic" is somehow offensive to delicate right-wing sensibilities.

It's quite a conservative discourse we have.

As Steve noted, President Obama did express concerns for the security of Israel with rockets raining down on cities on their border and called those concerns "legitimate" and asked how this is "perpetuating Israel's enemies' version of events"?

Steve's right but it doesn't matter how pro-Israeli a line President Obama takes, it's never going to be enough for the likes of Cheney.

Transcript of the segment from Larry King that got Cheney worked into a lather below the fold.

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Larry King talked to Robert Kennedy Jr. who is representing the fishermen in Louisiana in a class action law suit against British Petroleum and James Carville about the incident at the Deepwater Horizon rig. Besides the problems with Halliburton and their faulty work with the cementing process and the lack of and the lack of an acoustic switch, Kennedy said they were also violating their permit by drilling too deeply. Although they were only permitted to drill down 18,000 ft., Kennedy said they now have evidence that they were drilling as deeply as 25,000 ft.

As Kennedy noted and Susie already wrote about here, it seems all they're worried about now is limiting their liability although the company is now trying to walk that back after the bad publicity.

The Democrats are introducing a bill to raise the liability cap that Kennedy also cited as a problem with their litigation. I think we're going to be lucky to ever get a penny back from BP or any of the companies involved but if BP violated their drilling permit as Kennedy claims here, it's going to make it harder for them to avoid responsibility for the disaster instead of pawning it off on the subcontractors.

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Larry King decides to do a bit of turd polishing for Alberto Gonzales and has him weigh in on Arizona's new "show me your papers" law. I'd like to know why King thought it was a better idea to bring Gonzo on to talk about this instead of his actions as Attorney General.

We've done a great deal of reporting on Gonzo which you can check out here. The list is absolutely too long to rehash with what he did to the Department of Justice, the Attorney General's scandal and with his defense of torture. As Jon Perr noted, Gonzo has taken to playing the victim card of late -- Alberto Gonzales: Bush DOJ Was Not Political Enough:

For most people, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is a national embarrassment, a pimple on the ass of American history. But to hear him tell it, the man George W. Bush called "Fredo" is a victim of partisan warfare. And the lesson he apparently learned in Washington is not that he politicized the Bush Justice Department, but that he didn't politicize it enough.

Those are among the head-shaking takeaways in a brief but revealing interview in Esquire titled, "Alberto Gonzales: What I've Learned." The man who repeatedly lied to Congress about the U.S. prosecutors purge, President Bush's illegal program of domestic surveillance and regime of detainee torture was just an innocent bystander caught in the political crossfire.

...But as he acknowledged to Esquire this week, Gonzales' real lament about the U.S. attorneys firings is that the Bush White House wasn't political enough. After the Republican losses in the 2006 midterm elections, Gonzales suggested, the Bush administration's error was that it simply couldn't get away it.

Now Larry King thinks he should be a political commentator. This is what happens when administrations decide to let the crimes of the previous administration go unpunished. They wind up with their ass on TV being a political commentator instead of in jail. Of course in the case of ClusterFox they can be convicted and still get air time. Sadly even if in some fantasy world Alberto Gonzales were ever put on trial and convicted, he'd likely end up like North and never serve any jail time.

CNN, the network that has been trying to paint itself as centrist and non-political seems to have more than its fair share of Bushies on their network. Whether it be Fran Townsend, Michael Chertoff, David Frum Torie Clark or Ed Gillespie among others, they're more than willing to give these mouth pieces from the failed Bush administration credibility at every turn.

And speaking of cases that nothing's been done about since the Obama DOJ took charge, I'd also love to know why the Obama administration hasn't done anything to rectify the Don Seigelman case.

I have to say this was one of the more interesting Larry King shows I've watched in a while if for nothing else seeing what a cable news program looks like when two Libertarians and two Democrats out number the one Republican strategist Andrea Tantaros and instead of what usually happens when she's a guest on one of these bobble head shows. She ends up being cut off and out numbered when she tries spouting her usual Republican talking points instead of being allowed to filibuster a show. Imagine that.

While I don't consider the corrupt Rod Blagojevich anyone that should be considered a good representative of the Democratic Party, watching this show did make me wonder what it would look like if more of the panels on cable news were representative of where the American public is in regard to their political leanings. I would say this came a lot closer than what's fed to us on a daily dose by our media where conservatives generally outnumber anyone that strays too far from the Republican Party's talking points of the day. If nothing else having someone who's not your typical cable bobble head like Ventura was a breath of fresh air on this show.

Part one above and parts two through five below the fold.

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John Amato:

Bill Donohue seemed very proud of the fact that most child molesting priests weren't actually pedophiles in his words, but only guilty of abusing children who had achieved puberty. Doesn't that make you feel better about the Catholic Church scandals? Facts are facts. And he was very concerned that the Pope had been libeled because he said there was no proof in the case in Wisconsin that the Pope knew anything. Here's a good story about the case.

You be the judge. Either Cardinal Bertrone is covering up for the Pope or Ratzinger just couldn't be bothered knowing the what was going on around him. That seems to be the story the Vatican is sticking with. Everywhere the Pope served he really didn't like to be bothered by the small stuff.

As archbishop, Benedict expended more energy pursuing theological dissidents than sexual predators. Already in the early 1980s, one could catch a glimpse of a future pope preoccupied with combating any movement away from church tradition. Vatican experts say there is little evidence that Benedict spent much time investigating more than 200 cases of “problem priests” in the diocese, with issues including alcohol abuse, adultery and, now under the microscope, pedophilia.

Earlier in the show Donohue proclaimed that everybody could learn something good from the Catholic Church now that they are all cleaned up. Hey, they look like all those handsome priests from the Legion of Christ now. Nice and young with their hair parted just right. Larry King's panel was dumbfounded by Donohue's statements as any normal person would be.

Roberts: Bill is good but you cannot link homosexuality to a pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church.

Bill Donohue: It’s not a pedophilia… most of the victims were post pubescent…

Roberts: You know…

Donohue: You’ve got to get your facts straight. I’m sorry. If I’m the only one that’s going to deal with facts tonight so be it. The vast majority of the victims are post pubescent. That’s not pedophilia buddy. That’s homosexuality.

Roberts: Bill, I don’t think as a person of faith that you really know what you’re talking about when it comes to a victim and a survivor. (crosstalk)

Donohue: It’s not of my opinion. Take a look at the social science data. I never said that most homosexuals are that way.

Roberts: No you just said that cut down homosexuals… (crosstalk).

Donohue: Yes! Practicing homosexuals.

--

O’Conner: Sorry Larry, at what age does somebody become, you know, post pubescent in America as a matter of ages?

King: What is the age?

Thomas: Ah… I don’t know. Let’s ask Bill. He seems to be the authority on post pubescency.

Donohue: 12, 13 years of age. Look, all I’m saying (crosstalk).

King: We’re out of time. We’ve just touched the surface. Now we’ve got Anderson Cooper coming on.

Heather: Good grief. Larry King really has been a worse wasteland than usual these last couple of nights. Tonight's show ended with Larry King allowing Bill Donohue to get away with saying this to a man who was molested by a priest as a teenager.

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Larry King allows former speechwriter for George Bush, former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani and former spokesperson for George Bush Scott McClellan come on and pretend there's anything left of the Republican Party that anyone could describe as "centrist". Just because a politician isn't acting like these screaming banshees from this Tea Party movement doesn't mean their policies are not far right.

David Frum who just got fired from his job at AEI apparently isn't done with making false equivalencies for Republicans yet. He and former speechwriter for Rudy-a-noun-a-verb-and-9-11 Avlon both agree that Rudy was the "center of gravity of American politics". Ah yes... the guy who decided to scare the crap out of everyone about the possibility of another terrorist attack and use that fear for his own financial gain with his "national security" consulting firm was a "centrist". Yeah right. Why? Because he only decided to pretend he hated gay people after he found it politically expedient?

And he's "strong on national security" because of what exactly? Putting the Emergency Command Center in the basement of the World Trade Center? He represented the "center" of the Republican Party's reelection strategy we've watched for the last nine years or so. Fear, fear, fear, fear and more fear (and tax cuts). Be afraid and daddy is going to keep you safe from the mean terrorists. Although he does seem to be having trouble keeping his fear mongering talking points straight any more.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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This was about as bad as Chris Matthews letting this wingnut Tea Partier Loesch come on his show as well and talk over Melissa Harris-Lacewell in one of the more horrid interview segments I've watched in a long time. Loesch was obviously extremely uninformed and rude and I'm really surprised Matthews didn't shut her down since she was talking over him as well.

Larry King apparently thinks Loesch and fellow Tea Partier and Libertarian Wayne Allyn Root deserved two segments on his show. The only good thing I can say about this interview is that talking about getting rid of Social Security didn't exactly endear these two with the 87 year old caller who managed to get in. He wasn't too happy with the Tea Party movement for looking like they'd be happy to see our government overthrown either.

Even Larry King looked a bit shocked at some of their rhetoric and tried to get them to admit that Social Security was put there because you're supposed to be your "brother's keeper" and asked if the Tea Partiers might "turn it back" (fat chance Larry). Loesch apparently has no care for how Social Security has evolved since it was first enacted and why with her arguments; and Root uses the excuse that the funds have been raided to say it should be privatized.

Of course it would never occur to either of these two nitwits that if you changed our tax laws and made this a less regressive tax you could fix some of the long term problems with it, that getting rid of it would immediately throw millions of senior citizens into abject poverty which might not go over so well with the general electorate even if you don't care about what that says about us as a society and your care for your fellow American, which these two obviously have no care for, and that if we had listened to genius George Bush who wanted to privatize it, the fund would have taken the same hit our stock market did due to Wall Street's deregulation and the games they were playing with the derivatives market. So maybe Mr. Root would not have done so well with his own $15,000. (Update: I should have also noted, the most anyone is paying right now in Social Security taxes is $6600 a year due to the $106,800 income cap. So Root pulled the $15,000 a year number out of his butt.) I know my 401K didn't look too good after the market crashed.

King said he'd definitely have both of them on again. Why don't you do us all a favor Larry and pass on that... please. Don't put them on again unless you're going to have someone credible on with them as well to rebut their nonsense. Given that CNN thinks Erick Erickson should be considered part of their "best political team on television" now I don't have much hope of that happening. They're content to be Fox-lite. Bringing these two on is just more proof they're doing their best to dumb down their viewers right along with ClusterFox and sadly the better part of our corporate media as well.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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