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During what was otherwise a week of really good news when it comes to the LGBT community gaining acceptance and equal rights in states across the country, Rachel Maddow took another shot at PolitiFact during the final segment of her show this Tuesday evening -- for once again ruining the term "fact-checking."

Tennis star Martina Navratilova appeared on Face the Nation this Sunday and discussed the fact that twenty nine states still allow someone to be fired just for being gay, or if their employer believes they are gay, which is true, but PolitiFact decided to rate her claim as only half-true due to other protections or some "exceptions to the rule" as they called them.

As Rachel pointed out in her rant, that doesn't make what Navratilova said "half-true."

MADDOW: And this is why the very important concept of fact-checking has become pointless at a time in our country when we really need it to mean something. Because PolitiFact exists and has branded themselves the generic arbiter of facts and the paragon of fact-checking, and they are terrible at it.

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South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham can't seem to make up his mind on whether the United States ought to be sending ground troops into Syria, since he just contradicted himself from the statements he made to Foreign Policy last month during an interview with Bob Schieffer on CBS this Sunday. He has, however, been consistent with beating the war drums and giving dire warnings about the consequences of the United States failing to insert ourselves into the middle of their civil war.

Graham continued the fearmongering on this Sunday's Face the Nation, telling the audience they should be concerned about everything from more terrorist attacks in the United States, to extremists taking over the country and getting a hold of weapons of mass destruction.

Graham also claimed he's really worried about "all hell breaking loose" in the region if the United States fails to intervene. I hate to break it to you Lindsey, but you're a whole lot of years and a dollar short on that one. That ship sailed a long time ago.

I've got a proposal for Graham and his fellow warmongering buddy John McCain -- you first. If the two of you want to lead the charge inserting yourselves into another country's civil war without the support of the international community, you go lead the troops over there and take a spot on the front lines of the battlefield. Let us know how that works out for you.

Full transcript below the fold via CBS.

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In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, Sen. Lindsey Graham told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer that “We need to revisit our laws" and potentially give the FBI more power to track terrorism suspects, because lord knows we haven't shredded quite enough of our civil rights already.

No amount of deaths are ever enough for Graham to want to infringe on the Constitutional rights of gun owning Americans, but as soon as the word terrorism is involved, all bets are out the window.

Graham warns intel agencies ‘going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping’:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said “information sharing failed” ahead of the Boston Marathon bombings and warned that stove-piping between intelligence agencies remained a problem.

“This is a failure to share information and missing obvious warning signs,” said Graham Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We are going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping,” he warned.

Graham called for a “post-mortem” to examine the intelligence failures and see if such missteps could be prevented in the future, citing reports that the FBI failed to interview suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev after a trip to Russia, where authorities believe he was partly radicalized and the failure of the agency to notify agents in Boston to watch him more closely.

“How could you miss that the guy you were informed about by a foreign intelligence service, you got a radical in your midst, we can’t track him to Russia, we lose him going to Russia and coming back,” asked Graham. “And when he goes on the internet for the whole world to see, to interact with a radical Islamic websites how do we miss that?

“We’re going to have to up our game,” said the South Carolina senator. [...]

Graham’s comments are the latest from GOP lawmakers frustrated that intelligence system reforms made after the September 11, 2001 attacks have failed to work. Lawmakers fear that the same intelligence sharing issues before that incident are again playing a role in the Boston attack.

Graham last week suggested that the FBI may need more powers to track terror suspects.

“We need to revisit our laws,” he said.

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Even though host Bob Schieffer admitted that he has not read conservative author and columnist Amity Shlaes' recent book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, he and his producers were more than willing to allow her to come on Face the Nation this Sunday and give their viewers a big heaping helping of the right-wing revisionist version of just what Coolidge's economic policies brought to the country.

It's shameful that someone like this right wing hack is still being allowed time on our airways, but not surprising, since I'm sure the bile she's spewing here, dressed up as an intellectual, high-minded conversation about political biographies, fits in perfectly with the economic policies favored by the 1 percent running the network she's appearing on. They don't seem to be concerned one iota if there's nothing but rich and poor left in America, and as long as their pockets continue to be lined.

Here's more on Coolidge that Shlaes and her ilk are doing their best to make sure never makes its way into the history books: What the right forgets about labor history:

Busting unions gave Calvin Coolidge the White House, but it gave America the Great Depression

For years, American workers’ wages have stagnated, even as they produced more. Since 2008, they have been socked with staggering new bills for bank bailouts and hammered by a Great Recession brought on by the very same banks. Now public sector workers are confronted by a new crop of Republican governors who want to put an end to unions. Union workers in Wisconsin have already conceded all of Governor Walker’s draconian demands. But they want to hold onto their right to bargain so that they won’t be at the mercy of the whims of political appointees or rogue school boards. Tens of thousands have swarmed Madison to show their support for the working people of Wisconsin.

Conservatives are tasked with coming up with a narrative that makes villains out of these working folks and heroes out of the powerful people who aim to squeeze them for what’s left of their economic security.

This is not easy. And you have to admire their ingenuity. Amity Shlaes, ever the eager revisionist, has whipped up a widely parroted narrative that contains just enough truth to give it the ring of plausibility.

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The chairman of the Republican Party on Sunday explained that he had a plan to turn around his party's recent losing streak by having less debates, earlier conventions, "hackathons" and more "marketing" -- cosmetic changes that give candidates fewer chances to damage themselves without any serious policy changes.

In an interview with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus on Face the Nation, CBS host Bob Schieffer noted that the GOP had recently completed a study after conducting focus groups and polling thousands of people about Republican losses in 2012.

"What did the focus groups -- what did they tell you about what people think about the Republican Party?" the CBS host wondered.

"They told us what you would think that they would think," Priebus sighed. "Number one, we're a little too math focused and not focused on people's hearts, so that we don't relate to average Americans more than we should -- stuffy old guys too much."

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To this day, I cannot honestly tell if President Obama has been offering up things like chained CPI to Republicans because he is hoping to put them in a box and make them look completely unreasonable, knowing full well they're never going to go along with tax increases in exchange, or if he is cynical enough to think that going after the benefits of the elderly and the poor are going to go unnoticed by voters if they are willing to negotiate with Republicans, destroy the Democratic brand on New Deal social safety nets and marginalize the progressive base of the Democratic party.

The most generous read is that he's playing a dangerous game of politics and forcing Republicans to defend policies which are extremely unpopular with the public and putting himself out there as the "reasonable" middle in the hopes that most voters aren't watching the Kabuki theatre well enough to follow along. The worst is that he actually believes cutting benefits to seniors is some "balanced" approach to reducing our deficit when we've got record income disparity in America.

I am equally as perplexed and as irritated that Rep. Chris Van Hollen didn't give former Bush OMB director Sen. Rob Portman some pushback on this Sunday's Face the Nation when he played the Social Security-is-insolvent game, pretended that it adds to the deficit, when it doesn't, and conflated Social Security with Medicare and Medicaid.

They have their own set of problems that have nothing to do with Social Security, but everything to do with the fact that America has a healthcare crisis (whether it's government programs or private insurance) that Portman and his ilk in the Republican party refuse to do anything to remedy.

If Portman would like to "educate" the public, how about we start by not allowing him to lie to them?

It's also really disheartening to watch someone like Portman come on the air and fear-monger over deficits when the administration he worked for is largely responsible for the one we have now and not have that brought up to them. Every time one of them complains about that "Obama deficit," these charts should be shown on the air to rebut them.

Sadly, we're putting up with not just the media, but the Democratic leadership that isn't interested in challenging most of the GOP's lies when they come on the air. If anyone would like to contact Rep. Van Hollen's office to ask him why he's not willing to challenge Republicans when they lie about Social Security, here is his office's contact information.

Full transcript below the fold.

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I don't know if Jeb Bush is going to run for president in 2016 or if he's just out there hawking his book, but if he is running, as Digby noted, it appears he's a little out of practice, or overrated to begin with, in part due to the contrast with his brother. If he is running, he's doing his best to give Mittens some competition in the flip-flopping department right out of the gate.

TPM's Benjy Sarlin has been keeping track for us here: TIMELINE: How Jeb Bush Pulled A 360 On Immigration Reform:

Jeb Bush completed a whirlwind one-week journey on immigration on Sunday, praising a Senate proposal to grant eventual citizenship for undocumented immigrants after attacking the idea in a newly released book he co-authored that was itself a reversal of his past position.

Bush’s experimental turn as a border hawk was so quick you could blink and miss it. Here’s a quick timeline of how the flip-flop-flip went down.

June 12, 2012
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Jeb Bush explains his support for eventual citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.

“You have to deal with this issue. You can’t ignore it,” Bush said. “And so, either a path to citizenship, which I would support and that does put me probably out of the mainstream of most conservatives; Or a path to legalization, a path to residency of some kind, which now hopefully will become — I would accept that in a heartbeat as well if that’s the path to get us to where we need to be which is on a positive basis using immigration to create sustained growth.”

Go read the rest but here's more just from this Sunday where Bush was out there doing a full Ginsburg.

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Who would ever think we'd see this scenario happen again -- Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham appearing on a Sunday show talking about their fake Benghazi scandal. What are the odds? I was waiting for Bob Schieffer to give both of them a big wet kiss, he was so thrilled at the very beginning of this interview to have both of them on there together with him.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have concerns over the appointment of John Brennan to CIA, the torture issue which was mentioned in passing here being one of them, but their fake Benghazi outrage and Susan Rice's press releases are not among them.

Demanding Benghazi documents, McCain, Graham will delay Brennan nomination:

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. will not move forward President Obama's nominee to head the CIA until they receive additional documents detailing the White House's handling of the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the pair said today on "Face the Nation."

"John and I are hell-bent on making sure the American people understand this debacle called Benghazi," Graham said, vowing to "stop" John Brennan's confirmation until further information is released about the attack that left four Americans dead. A Tuesday vote is currently scheduled in the Senate Intelligence Committee. [...]

"Her story has completely collapsed under scrutiny," Graham said. "I said this to the president: I want FBI interviews of the survivors. They were turned over to the intelligence committee and everything was blacked out. ...The e-mail about who changed the talking points - there's a big gap. I want to know who the survivors are so we can interview them.

"The transmissions from Benghazi to Washington, in real time, on the night of the attack," he continued. "What were people asking for? What were they saying?"

Using a Cabinet nomination as leverage is a classic "give-and-take," a "time-honored tradition" among lawmakers, Graham said. "And I'm going to insist on that," he continued. "I'm not going to vote on a new CIA director until I find out what the CIA did in Benghazi."

McCain said he hates to say he's threatening to hold Brennan's nomination because "the story tomorrow will be, 'McCain and Graham threaten to...'

Sorry Johnny, but if the shoe fits....

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As Dave already noted, Sen. Lindsey Graham was back on the air this Sunday, still flogging their latest Benghazi "scandal" that somehow President Obama was disengaged during the embassy attacks on the anniversary of 9/11. I'm not sure just how much more hateful and nasty this man can manage to be before he starts getting called out for his behavior by members of the media, but Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer seemed pretty shocked and exhausted by the time Graham finished his rant here.

Sadly, however, he did not ask Graham what the hell was wrong with him or why the public should care about this drummed up non-scandal that he refuses to let die.

Lindsey Graham To Place Hold On National Security Nominees Over Benghazi Attacks:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is threatening to place a hold on key administration national security nominations unless President Obama explains how the White House reacted to the Benghazi attacks and who “changed” the talking points used by U.N. ambassador Susan Rice during back-to-back appearances on the Sunday political talk shows in September. Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation, Graham insisted that Republicans shouldn’t “allow Brennan to go forward for the CIA directorship, Hagel to be confirmed to Secretary of Defense, until the White House gives us an accounting.” “Did the president ever pick up the pohne and call anyone in the Libyan government to help these folks,” Graham asked. “What did the president do?”

Since Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey testified before Congress last week, conservatives have seized on a portion of the testimony to argue that President Obama went “AWOL” the night of the Benghazi attack.

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As Sarah Jones at Politicususa rightfully noted, this is pretty rich coming from today's Republican party: The Party of Hotheads Cheney and McCain is Concerned About Hagel’s Temperament:

On ABC’s This Week, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) concern trolled about the ‘temperament’ of Republican former Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NB), whom Obama has nominated as Secretary of Defense. To back up his concern, Corker referenced possible issues with staffers, “I think there are numbers of staffers who are coming forth now just talking about the way he has dealt with them.” [...]

What staffers? Can he name one of them? Does Corker “think” they are coming forth or have they come forth? And since Hagel’s staffers would have most likely been Republican, it’s possible that such a desperate move might stink to high heaven of a Republican Party agenda, if in fact they ever do “come forth.” But really, since when do staffers weigh in on nominations?

Corker is worried about temperament, and he’s proving that by spreading unfounded rumors from alleged anonymous staffers that may or may not be a figament of his imagination. [...]

The real issue Republicans have with Hagel is that not only has he been to war, unlike most in the chicken hawk party, but he is a two-time recipient of the Purple Heart and he is against a war-first strategy. Hagel warned us before invading Iraq that it is very easy to start a war, and not so easy to end one. Republicans were outraged at Hagel for suggesting such a fact.

I never thought I’d see the day when a modern day Republican suggested that temperament should be an issue. After all, this is the party of distemper. This is the party that allegedly can’t control its members from shouting insults during a State of the Union address. This is the party that lied us into war and ran Sarah Palin as a Vice President.

It’s ironic that the party of irascible hotheads Dick Cheney and John McCain is concerned about Hagel’s temperament, because if they had listened to him, we never would have invaded Iraq. Hagel’s temperament is actually an argument for his confirmation.

I'm wondering when Corker has ever expressed any concern for this guy's temperament?

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Transcript via below the fold.

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