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This ain't ever going away as long as the Republicans think there's a snowball's chance in hell that Hillary Clinton is going to run for president. Sen. John McCain appeared on Neil Cavuto's show this Wednesday, after calling for a select committee on Benghazi, because lord knows they haven't quite beaten this horse to death yet: GOP senators want Obama to release Benghazi names:

A trio of Republican senators are calling on President Obama to release the names of Benghazi survivors to Congress after the White House said it was unaware anyone was blocked from testifying.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) wrote to Obama on Wednesday asking that names be released of the survivors of last year’s attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, for interviews with Congress.

“In light of your comments yesterday about the Benghazi attacks, we again request your administration immediately provide the names of the Benghazi survivors to Congress so we can conduct interviews to gain a clearer understanding of what happened before, during, and after the attack,” the senators wrote. [...]

The Obama administration has pushed back this week against allegations that a State Department employee has been prevented from testifying about the terrorist attack, in which four Americans were killed.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and one-time Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Fox News earlier this week that a State Department employee she represented was threatened by superiors if he cooperated with the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into Benghazi.

If anyone thinks those names sound familiar, here's a reminder of who they are from Media Matters: Who Are The Right-Wing Media's Benghazi Lawyers Victoria Toensing And Joseph diGenova?.

And I highly recommend reading both Digby and Charlie Pierce's take on this debacle, which you can read here:

What's really going on with this Benghazi obsession?

and here:

Getting The Band Back Together and I'll share a bit from Pierce's article:

Continue reading »

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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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Marco Rubio claims he doesn't like or want to be racially profiling anyone, but he might be willing to make an exception for Muslim students. Nothing like watching him buy into the fearmongering and Islamophobia that's gone into high gear over at Faux "News" since the bombing attack last week.

After Boston, Rubio Entertains The Idea Of Not Granting Visas To Muslim Students:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Wednesday suggested that, given the attack on Boston carried out by two immigrants, he would consider barring young foreign Muslims from getting student visas to come the United States.

Prompted by host Neil Cavuto to address how the attack by the Tsarnaev brothers — neither of whom came to the country on student visas — had influenced immigration reform, Rubio said that he was willing to consider Fox News Host Bob Beckel’s suggestion that anyone who observes Islam should not get a student visa:

CAVUTO: Senator, there are some getting leery of all the Muslim students in America. Bob Beckel is among those saying stop grants visas, others speaking about slowing down the number getting into the country. What do you think?

RUBIO: We need to be open to changes that provide more security. I don’t like profiling anybody or singling or generally leading, on the other hand student visas are something this country does because it’s in our national interest but you don’t have a right to a student visa. I’m not prepared to take a firm position on restriction. I want to learn about what might have worked to prevent past attacks.

Islamophobia has been pervasive in the responses to last week’s attack on Boston. Read on...

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Another Saturday, another segment on Faux News where they're attacking the poor and food stamp recipients, which, other than attacking union members, seems to be one of their favorite pastimes during their so-called "business block," From Cavuto on Business, after Cavuto opens the segment dismayed about all of the people "on the dole" still receiving food stamps and guest Dagen McDowell carrying on about how this is proof that "big government" is out of control, we got this bit of nastiness out of regular, Charles Payne:

CAVUTO: The argument, Charles Payne, is that once you get them, it's hard to stop them, so the benefit is there and it's hard to take the benefit of it away and the more people that are getting them, then it's just exponentially grows.

PAYNE: Yeah, well there's absolutely no doubt about that, that there's this idea that, you know, between the food stamps and the welfare and the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit and the local programs, you know, it gets a little comfortable to be in poverty, you know... and I know people are going to.... listen. No. Listen, I've lived it first hand. I've seen where people don't go to work because they get everything paid for them. The incentive is not there.

Yeah, all of those lucky ducky poor people who are just living the high life out there. Charlie Gasparino attempted to assert himself as somewhat of the voice of reason in the segment and a number of the members of the panel admitted that unemployment numbers are still terrible and people are hurting out there, but it really didn't get much better from there. Ben Stein made the ridiculous remark that "the war on hunger" appears to have been won, ignoring the fact that we've got millions of children in this country who don't know where their next meal is coming from -- and ignoring that lack of access to nutritious food and eating cheap junk that is bad for you instead is contributing to the problem with obesity, not that poor people out there have too much money to spend on food.

What we were treated to here is yet another example of Fox and their war on anti-poverty measures:

Not content to shame food stamps recipients and bully them into silence, Fox News is now targeting efforts to raise awareness of poverty and food insecurity.

The latest front in the Fox News war on anti-poverty measures takes aim at chef Mario Batali as he highlights the difficulties of living on food stamps -- problems that are routinely dismissed on Fox while the network pushes for drastic cuts to nutritional aid and other anti-poverty measures.

h/t Media Matters

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After last week's appearance at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference, where he told the audience, “There is nothing on this green earth that a liberal fears more than a black American who wants a better life and a smaller government," Fox's Neil Cavuto and his producers decided to bring the disgraced Congressman Allen West on his show. Cavuto immediately asked West if he was possibly going to throw his hat in the ring and run for president, because Lord knows we don't have enough wingnut grifters running that racket already.

There's nothing like seeing a former House member, who the voters of his district had to be insane to elect in the first place, lost his race despite outspending his opponent by about 4 to 1 and then finally conceding in the least gracious manner possible, being asked to weigh in on foreign policy and the economy. Even worse, being asked with a straight face for advice on the future of the Republican party and whether he's going to run for president.

CAVUTO: Real quickly, those who are urging you to run for president at CPAC, and I talked to a lot of them, are you saying you're not?

WEST: Look, Neil, the most important thing is that I'm always in a position that I'll serve my country however they wish me to. If they want a really good dogcatcher I'll be willing to do that. So we don't know what happens, you know, as we go forth for 2013, but maybe I'll have you as my economic advisor.

CAVUTO: Okay, that's already a doomed campaign right there.

Hey, what do you know.? Cavuto actually said something I agree with for once on Fox.

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No matter how many times this "death panel" myth gets debunked, you can count on Fox to do their best to continue to resuscitate it, as Fox's Neil Cavuto and one of their team of crackpot doctors, Manny Alvarez did this Thursday afternoon.

Leave it to Fox to take what otherwise looks like a pretty benign study by the University of California, San Francisco and turn it on its head as the new "death panels" in "Obamacare." Alvarez wrote an op-ed for the Fox News web site which you can read here which I'm quite sure was the basis for his appearance here with Cavuto: Dr. Manny: I am completely against this new medical ‘death test’:

Let me be very clear: I did not go into medicine to decide who lives and who dies.

I went into health care because I wanted to heal, to comfort, to educate and to study the illnesses that afflict my patients. And I don’t need a crystal ball to know when a patient is extremely safe or when he or she is going to die.

So I am somewhat confused as to the purpose of this new ‘mortality index.’ A new study from the University of California, San Francisco with funding from the federal government revealed 12 specific items physicians can use to help them determine whether costly screenings or medical procedures are worth the risk for patients unlikely to live 10 years or more.

Continue reading »

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The Last Word's Lawrence O'Donnell got his shots in at Fox and their joke of a business channel and the likes of Stuart Varney, who was previously claiming that the election of President Obama was responsible for the dip in the stock market the day after the election. With the markets reaching a record high this week, as O'Donnell rightfully noted here, those talking heads are just as clueless now about why the market went up as they were when it went down last year.

I'm not sure who actually watches the Fox Business Channel, but sometimes I wonder if they exist solely as an attempt to make CNBC look respectable in comparison.

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Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer was terribly upset with the news that this sequester battle is going to end up cutting into the profits of her buddies in the private prison industry: Jan Brewer: Freeing Immigrant Detainees Is ‘Height Of Absurdity’:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) is not at all happy with immigration officials for releasing hundreds of detainees in anticipation of coming sequester cuts.

“I’m appalled to learn the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has begun to release hundreds of illegal aliens from custody, the first of potentially thousands to soon be freed under the guise of federal budget cuts,” Brewer told the Arizona Republic in a statement. “This is pure political posturing and the height of absurdity given that the releases are being granted before the federal sequestration cuts have even gone into effect.”

In an interview with FOX News' Neil Cavuto on Wednesday, Brewer also attacked the White House over their claim that they had no involvement with the decision, saying they were in "duck and cover mode."

Maggie's Farm at Kos has more on what really has Brewer upset: Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer 'appalled' DHS is releasing immigrants. Blow to prison industry profits:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's quest to imprison as many aliens as possible was steered in part by the state's powerful private prison lobby, since the "papers please" law and other tough anti-immigrant policies bring more customers to their jails. Most stories about the Department of Homeland Security releasing inmates this week have overlooked the blow to the prison industry's bottom line. It costs, for instance, about $164 a day to incarcerate one immigrant. Multiply that by tens of thousands. Day after day. [...]

Jan Brewer's been an esteemed member of the Crazy Republican Governors Club—joining lugheads like Scott Walker, Sam Brownback and Rick Scott who've embraced the tea party's "cut the deficit" gibberish, seemingly unaware of the effects in their state. Now Brewer and her looney tunes ideologues are getting a taste of Norquist's bathtub politics. She's finding out what GOP obstructionism is going to cost Arizona, and it began this week with her state's former governor, Janet Napolitano, releasing immigrants.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer says she's appalled to hear that the Department of Homeland Security has begun releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants from custody. It's the first of potentially thousands of immigrants to soon be freed before mandatory federal budget cuts go into effect.

The reality chicken has come home to roost in the guise of nearly 31,000 immigrants held in jails nationwide. That's an expensive undertaking, and the sequester will wallop DHS upside the head, necessitating huge cuts. Rather than $164 a day to incarcerate one inmate, the "supervised release" planned for prisoners who pose no serious threat costs less than $14 per day—a blow to prison profits, even if only some inmates are held in private facilities.

Gillian Christensen, an [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] spokeswoman, said ICE has reviewed "several hundred cases" of immigrants being held in jails around the country and released them in the last week. They have been "placed on an appropriate, more cost-effective form of supervised release," she said.

Of course if you watch the clip above with Brewer on Cavuto's show, you'd get the impression the opposite was true and that it was more expensive to monitor the prisoners than jail them.

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It looks like Mike Huckabee isn't too happy about all the grief he got for his comments the previous day on Fox, about the tragic shooting at the elementary school in Connecticut, because he came back on the next morning on Fox & Friends and tried to walk them back, at least in part.

Huckabee Tries To Walk Back Comments On God And School Shootings:

On Fox & Friends Saturday, he attempted to clarify his comments, saying, "Yesterday, I was on Neil Cavuto. He asked me, you know, where was God? I said, you know, we've systematically removed him from our culture, from our schools. Well, I've been barraged by people who have said that I said, well, if we just have prayer in schools, this wouldn't happen. That's not my point."

Huckabee continued:

HUCKABEE: No, my point is a larger point -- that we have as a culture decided that we don't want to have values, that we don't want to say that some things are always right, some things are always wrong. When we divorce ourselves from a basic sense of what we would call, I would say, collective morality where we agree on certain principles to be true always, then we create a culture -- not that it specifically creates this crime. It doesn't. But it creates an atmosphere in which evil and violence are removed from our sense of responsibility.

Yet while Huckabee now claims that his initial point wasn't that "if we just have prayer in schools, this wouldn't happen," Huckabee told Cavuto on Friday, "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" Huckabee concluded his remarks by saying, "Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end."

As Huckabee acknowledged on Fox & Friends Saturday, his remarks have drawn much attention from the media.

I don't think he did himself any favors here. And of course, he's insisting that now isn't the time to talk about gun control... or tomorrow.... or any time this week. We'll do that later, which means never. But of course it's not too soon for him to spend his entire upcoming show this Saturday night talking about the tragedy and how to talk to your children about it.

UPDATE: And if anyone didn't think HuckaJesus could amp the amount of crazy up any higher, here he is on his Saturday show on Fox, first attacking the liberals for daring to point out that he did indeed say lack of prayer in schools was responsible for this shooting, and then going into some bizarre rant about their fake war on Christmas and those supposed abortion loving liberals.

Then he brings in Geraldo who gives the viewers a disgusting blow by blow of how many times those poor children were shot, agrees with Huckabee that it's "evil" as opposed to say, mental illness that's responsible for what happened, and then compares the tragedy to the Holocaust.

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What's really frightening is that Huckabee has been discussed by our media as someone to take seriously as a contender for the presidency. He'd be getting way too much air time if he was only allowed to pollute our airways on late night infomercials at 3am on channels almost no one watches.

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Leave it to Fox's Mike Huckabee to use this tragic shooting in Connecticut to blame those who would like to maintain the separation of church and state as somehow being responsible for the actions of this shooter. Here he is on Cavuto's show on Fox, first pushing the NRA's talking points that there aren't any laws that could be passed to prevent something like this from happening, and then this hackery:

Huckabee: Schools "Become A Place Of Carnage" When "We Systematically Remove God":

HUCKABEE: Ultimately, you can take away every gun in America and somebody will use a bomb. When somebody has an intent to do incredible damage, they’re going to find a way to do it… People will want to pass new laws, but unless you change people’s hearts, they’re our transition to the pastor side. This is a heart issue, it’s not something, laws don’t change this kind of thing.

CAVUTO: You know, invariably, people ask after tragedies like this, "How could God let this happen?"

HUCKABEE: Well, you know, it's an interesting thing. We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Because we've made it a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability -- that we're not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment. If we don't believe that, then we don't fear that. And so I sometimes, when people say, why did God let it happen. You know, God wasn't armed. He didn't go to the school. But God will be there in the form of a lot people with hugs and with therapy and a whole lot of ways in which I think he will be involved in the aftermath. Maybe we ought to let him in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end.