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George Stephanopoulos just had to give Liz Cheney some more air time on his bobblehead show in another of his "fair and balanced" panels. Sorry Liz but what's "inexcusable" is your daddy helping to get us into this quagmire in the first place. I still want to know when she's signing up for the military if she wants to keep beating those war drums.

WILL: The danger is that the president is going to be seen as escalating this war. He’ll do it half-heartedly with his heart not in it, he will lose his party, and he’ll be supported by Republicans of the stripe of Liz Cheney, and that’s not a sustainable path.

CHENEY: Well, let me just say that what I will support is the strategy that actually will win in Afghanistan, a strategy that’s the one that was laid out by General McChrystal, and I think it’s just completely inexcusable that we’ve now had month after month after month of photo-op out of the White House and no decision.

The president is very fond of saying, “Before I commit troops, I’m going to think very carefully about it.” Somebody in the White House needs to remind him: He’s already committed troops. We’ve got American men and women in Afghanistan today, because we’ve got to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for Al Qaida. The cost of walking away, the cost of defeat, the cost of retreat is huge. They’re fighting there today, and they’re fighting without the kind of resources and reinforcements that he needs -- that they need.

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Columnist David Brooks is a conservative that isn't blindly devoted to former Gov. Sarah Palin. "She's a joke. I can't take her seriously," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos Sunday. "The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are not going to elect a talk show host," said Brooks.

But the other conservative on the panel with Brooks wasn't buying into the Palin frenzy either. George Will thinks Republicans can do better. "Some conservatives think they have found in Sarah Palin a Republican William Jennings Bryan. Now, Why would they want someone who lost the presidency three times?" asked Will.

John Amato: David Brooks has never been much of a fan of Palin. This is from a piece in Oct, 2008:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.
--
But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

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Via Raw Story, the heartwarming news that bankers aren't getting to celebrate in peace at their annual conference:

The annual American Bankers Association meeting in Chicago is not going as planned.

Besieged by activists from the Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO and Americans for Financial Reform, the leaders of America's financial sector were interrupted Sunday night as a throng of protesters poured into the conference area and began to chant.

The meeting, scheduled to continue through Tuesday, will feature "[exceptional] speakers like FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and political commentator George Will," the ABA's site announced.

"All we wanted to do was deliver a letter to the Wall Street bankers to let them know how much they've hurt our communities - and what they need to do to clean up their act," the SEIU's blog declared. "They wouldn't listen to us. They kicked us out. But the bad news for them is that we'll be back.

Instead of delivering a letter, they shouted their message. "Bust up big banks!" activists chanted. When police confronted a senior who was damning the ABA over a loudspeaker, the crowd shifted into cries of "Shame on you! Shame on you!"

When police finally got around to pushing them out, cheers of "We'll be back" shook the hotel's lobby.

"Our demand is simple: stop taking our tax dollars and squandering them away on billion dollar bonuses and massive lobbying campaigns against financial reform," the SEIU said.

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George Will is either lying, or he doesn't have any idea how to use the Internet. During the panel discussion on This Week, Will says this about the Baucus bill that came out of the Senate Finance Committee.

Stephanopoulos: And if he does is that the last hurdle? Or are we in for more twists here before the end?

Will: I think there could be more twists and there are going to be a lot of amendments put on the floor. And they're going to have to decide whether or not they're going to allow amendments and to what extent they're going to allow extensive debate.

Stephanopoulos: Nancy Pelosi suggested this week that there might not be any amendments on the House floor.

Will: Of course not for the same reason--although they could put this on the internet in 10 minutes, they haven’t put it on the internet, this 1502 pages, because people might discover what’s in there.

As our reader and tipster Stephen noted today, the bill has been on line since Oct. 19th. Anyone can go read all 1504 pages here and here. I guess it's asking too much of George Stephanopoulos to have pointed that out to George Will.

Andy Cobb and Josh Funk have a bit of fun with the Washington Post and their America's Next Great Pundit contest.

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Countdown's Worst Persons segment for Oct. 5, 2009 with winner Rep. Paul Broun. Runners up George Will and Rush Limbaugh.

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Out numbered as usual like any actual liberal on the Sunday bobble head shows, Katrina Vanden Heuvel makes some great points about why job creation is so important right now for some actual economic recovery to take place, and she's right about the so called health care reform.

VANDEN HEUVEL: You know, John Kenneth Galbraith once said that astrology -- that economic forecasting exists to make astrology look good. In these conditions, Matt, it’s very hard to have predicted what we would see. And don’t forget, the danger of the health care reform is that is it weakened and diluted in the way that the recovery package was so as to address Republicans’ concerns.

That could have been a stronger recovery -- but not strong enough to do what you rightly suggest, which is, parks, bridges, tunnels, an industrial policy, which may make George go berserk because it sounds like socialism, which it isn’t, every advanced industrialized country has an industrial policy which would address the auto industry. Build light rail, buses.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Gee George, it's a good thing no one could have ever said that about our last president, isn't it? I can't imagine those words coming out of Will's mouth if he was referring to George Bush or St. Ronnie.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And George, I guess this is the question. I mean, you saw some overheated criticism, perhaps, there of the president. But a real question, was it the right thing to do to put the prestige of the White House on the line? The White House says, “Hey, you never go wrong fighting for your country.”

WILL: Well, they were fighting for a city, and a city divided about whether or not this will be a good thing to have the Olympics there.

What’s alarming is whether it indicates a belief on the part of the president, which is that there’s no problem that will not melt before the sunshine of his charm. And this is evidence again that it’s not so. The president and first lady went to Copenhagen and gave little speeches about themselves. She, Mrs. Obama, used the first person singular pronoun, in some form or other, “I” or “me,” 16 -- 34 times in 16 paragraphs. He used it 23 times in 13 paragraphs It was all about them.

And the danger is, an adjective sooner or later attaches to presidents. Honest Abe, Tricky Dick Nixon. All kind of adjectives. The danger to the president is that vain is going to attach to him.

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George Will thinks that daring to point out the racism at these tea parties amounts to "liberals' McCarthyism. If anyone's playing the role of Joe McCarthy, it's Glenn Beck, not "liberals" who are pointing out the racist element to these protests, and all the "table pounding" on your part isn't going to change that.

CARTER: An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.

BECK: We have a former president who says, if you’re opposed to the president’s health care, you’re a racist.

LIMBAUGH: The left looks at everything through a racial prism. I’m just -- I’m just -- hey, they hit us, we hit back twice as hard.

PELOSI: In the late ‘70s in San Francisco, this kind of -- of rhetoric was very frightening. And it gave -- it created a climate in which we -- violence took place.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: The debate not coming down as President Obama called for. Let me bring the roundtable back in. I’m joined by George Will, Peggy Noonan, Bob Reich, Ed Gillespie, and Donna Brazile.

And, George, as we -- as we get to this, let me show two magazine covers from this week. First, Time magazine, Glenn Beck, mad man, and the angry style of American politics. And then in the New York magazine coming out tomorrow, there’s the tattooed face of Barack Obama , big headline, “Hate.”

We -- we heard President Obama say he thinks that a lot of anti- government feeling, the idea that the government can’t do anything right, is behind all this. What’s your theory?

WILL: The president’s right about that. What we’re hearing is the liberals’ McCarthyism, which is, when in doubt, blame people for racism. Litigators have an old argument: When the law’s on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither’s on your side, pound the table. This amounts to pounding the table.

I have yet to see evidence, is there -- does evidence even intrude in this conversation? Is there any evidence that these people are racists? I think not.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Donna?

BRAZILE: Well, George, there’s some evidence that -- not an overwhelming amount of evidence -- that some of -- a small fringe of this movement, clearly there’s some racism. And you don’t have to know the motives of someone’s heart to understand when you see signs, incendiary signs that basically compares him to a witch doctor, an African heathen. We know racism; we don’t have to be told or taught that. That -- that much we do know.

There’s a culture of extremism that has gained mainstream acceptance. And I think the president is absolutely right. When you see it, you have to call it. You shouldn’t duck it. But, on the other hand, you shouldn’t exaggerate it.

This is why we need responsible leaders to denounce it, but more importantly, we need to find a way to have an honest and good dialogue whenever race is a topic so that the president of the United States, which is very busy, does not have to have beer summits all the time.

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On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Matthew Dowd tries to equate the left's hatred for George Bush with the over the top attack by the right wing about Obama's speech to school children. I'm sorry Matt, but it's not the same thing.

As Digby pointed out in her post where she talks about the media fueling this nonsense, there is a difference.

I know how she feels. I had the same reaction when George W. Bush was on television every five minute launching invasions of other countries for no good reason and yammering on about how oceans once protected us and now drone planes with biological weapons were coming to kill us all in our beds. It's easy to understand why this woman would be equally freaked out by the president trying to make sure everyone can go to a doctor when they get sick. It's scary stuff.

There's a part of all this that's simply a matter of the right riding the existing zeitgeist. For years liberals loudly denounced the neocons for their megalomania, warning about the ramifications of an America that has become a rogue superpower, torturing, invading and spying on its own citizens. It was a violent, frightening time with some real world consequences that are still not fully understood or absorbed.

The right, with their pretense of assuming the moral positions of their opposition, twisting their rhetoric to suit their own needs and basically use the other sides' own methods against them, have simply jumped on the bandwagon now that their boy is gone. These people are posing as civil libertarians afraid of an authoritarian take-over,something we all have felt recently. Because they've absorbed all the fear and concern of the past years, even as they rejected it, they are now able to emotionally apply it to the president they hate and it has the same emotional resonance, even if it is completely ludicrous.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel does a pretty good job of talking about how all of this is being fanned by "a right wing media that wants to cripple or take down Obama's presidency" and how we didn't see this when President's Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke to school children, and then Dowd follows with this.

Dowd: Well it reminds me, to be honest it reminds me of exactly what the left was doing to George W. Bush in this time. There was no way no matter what he said, how he did, whatever he talked about that they would accept, react to well at all, no matter what he did. And the same is happening to Barack Obama.

In Matthew Dowd's world, the left being upset about being lied into war, the spying, the torture, stolen elections, using 9-11 to scare the crap out of the American public, tax breaks for the rich who don't need it, using the Department of Justice as a political arm of the White House and getting a Governor thrown into jail, outing a CIA agent because her husband dared to speak out against Dick Cheney, putting industry hacks in charge of every government oversight agency, and I could go on but I'll stop... being upset about those things is exactly the same as the right wing freaking out over a speech given to school children by President Obama. I don't think so.

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Two political pundits on opposite sides of the aisle found themselves agreeing Sunday on ABC's "This Week." Both George Will and Katrina Vanden Heuvel favor a withdrawal from Afghanistan. In his Washington Post column, George Will said it was time to get out of Afghanistan. In another column, Will said that that US work in Iraq is done.

Vanden Heuvel agreed. "I think there's a coalition, George. We can go on the road. A coalition for realistic foreign policy. But for these neocons attack you, these people should not be in our political life. They have no credibility. They should be held accountable for the Iraq debacle."

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Conservative columnist George Will has joined many who are calling for a commission to investigate the use of enhanced interrogation techiniques. "We ought to have a commission. Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post suggests this morning, Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter, bring them down, set it up and answer some factual questions," said Will.

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Paul Krugman and Robert Reich both made some really great points during the panel discussion on This Week on the reasons for some real reform of the insurance industry, the mistakes made by the President in negotiating with the Senate, and the notion that there is a need for bipartisanship when the Republican party has moved so far out of the mainstream. And this statement by Krugman bears noting:

Krugman: Well, the public option again, this is something, that, there’s a question whether they're for it, or whether, are they willing to actually vote against cloture to stop this really quite modest but helpful piece of the reform being in there? (crosstalk) They have no intellectual basis to stand on, right? The argument against the public option is sheer nonsense. We know that. It's nothing except the insurance lobby.

Exactly. If these conserva-Dems want to block health care reform and getting the insurance industries in check, make them actually have to stand up and filibuster it along with the Republicans and show their true colors.

Transcript below the fold.

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Paul Krugman calls out John McCain for his double talk on controlling Medicare costs during this panel discussion with George Stephanopoulos on This Week. As Krugman notes, the Republicans and John McCain are trying to have it both ways and one one hand saying Medicare's costs need to be kept in check, and on the other hand scaring seniors into thinking that the President wants to cut their Medicare benefits, and refusing to have a rational debate on how those costs end up being controlled.

David Frum tries to defend the Medicare Advantage program which is one of the things the Obama administration wants to go after to control costs, and Krugman shoots a hole straight through his arguments and reminds him that wasteful spending is what Republicans are supposed to be against. George Will wraps things up with showing his love for the pharmaceutical industry and their profits.

WILL: We’ve been talking about this for about five minutes and the subject of cost, which is tiresome and depressing, has not come up.

REICH: I just mentioned it.

WILL: When we began this debate a few months ago, the costs were going to be paid primarily by two things. One, the proceeds from selling under cap and trade, the permits to emit carbon. And “B,” Medicare cuts. “B” is never going to happen. And we’ve given away what should have been sold, or so we say, the rights to emit carbon. Where are we going to pay for this?

KRUGMAN: Medicare stuff, I think, will, in fact, happen if anything passes. If you want to think about the utter, utter hypocrisy of the Republicans on this. We just heard John McCain . And early on in your conversation, he said basically Sarah Palin was right in saying death panels because the Democrats want Medicare to take into account the actual medical effectiveness --

STEPHANOPOULOS: They weren’t in support of the policy.

KRUGMAN: Right. And then later in the same conversation, he said, we have a terrible problem with entitlements with Medicare. We really need to do something to cut Medicare spending. And what possible way -- we should cut Medicare spending without any regard for the medical effectiveness of what it’s paying for? So, this is, you know, we have the Republicans actually standing fully against any sort of rational control of costs.

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Okay, I admit for being a sucker for Fourth of July shows. Stirring songs and fireworks wend their way into my cynical soul and I shake free those constraints to really, really love celebrating our independence. I grew up with a family tradition of a picnic under the stars and the fireworks show at the Hollywood Bowl. At least, that's what I used to do. Last night, I had to content myself with the Boston Pops on TV while comforting my frightened puppy; my husband got to take the kids to a bluff not far from our home where they could watch three different fireworks shows along the bay.

This morning, it's me cowering, wishing I could hide under the sofa at the prospect of the Sunday shows. It's safe to say that Sarah Palin's inexplicable "I'm saving Alaska by quitting early" move will be at the forefront of the conversation, especially on FoxNews Sunday, having bagged successor Lt. Gov. Parnell. VP Joe Biden will be on This Week, but he'll be followed by the intolerable roundtable featuring Tony Blankley and George Will, opining on Iraq, Palin and Franken. The only saving grace? We are spared David Gregory and Meet the Press, which is pre-empted for Wimbledon coverage.

ABC's "This Week" - Vice President Joe Biden.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Pre-empted by coverage of Wimbledon tennis.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Gloria Borger, Bob Woodward, Joe Klein, Tina Brown. (repeat)

CNN's "State of the Union" - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell; Mullen; Queen Noor of Jordan.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Fareed speaks to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband about why Iran is so angry at Great Britain. Plus, a discussion on aid in Africa -- are celebrities throwing money at the problems or making an actual difference?

"Fox News Sunday" - Mullen; Reps. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and John Boehner, R-Ohio; Alaska Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell; former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark.; and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?