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A 39-year-old Muslim cab driver who served in the Iraq war says that an executive from an aviation company accused him of being a jihadist and broke his jaw in what activists are calling a hate crime.

Mohamed A. Salim told The Washington Post that Emerald Aviation President Ed Dahlberg attacked him after he picked him up at Country Club of Fairfax in Northern Virginia at around 2 a.m. on Friday. Dahlberg had been drinking and was told that he would have to finish his open beer before getting into the cab.

Salim recorded audio of the encounter on his cell phone.

Dahlberg can be heard asking Salim, who emigrated from Somalia, to define "jihad" and then lumping him in with "radical fucking Muslims blowing people up all over the world."

"Denounce those motherfuckers now!" Dahlberg demands. "If you're a fucking Muslim flying jets into the fucking World Trade Center then fuck you. I will slice your fucking throat right now."

After Salim threatens to call 911, Dahlberg can be seen grabbing for the cell phone.

Salim said that Dahlberg left the cab, but then returned and broke his jaw before running into the woods.

Dahlberg was charged with misdemeanor assault and police are determining if charges should be elevated to a felony hate crime. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Monday said that medical records and the 11-minute cell phone recording were being used as evidence in the case.

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CNN media critic Howard Kurtz on Sunday pushed back against a Fox News pundit who slammed the "deafening silence of too much of the media" over coverage of a Philadelphia doctor accused of killing seven babies and one woman while performing late-term abortions.

In a USA Today column last week, Fox News political analyst Kirsten Powers pointed to former Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell as evidence that Planned Parenthood has been wrong to claim that it's "highly unusual" that infants survive late-term abortions.

Powers said that there was a double standard because conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh had received front page coverage after he called Sandra Fluke a "slut" over her advocacy of contraception coverage for students, but Gosnell had not gotten the same attention.

"You don't have to oppose abortion rights to find late-term abortion abhorrent or to find the Gosnell trial eminently newsworthy," the Fox News pundit wrote. "The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace."

In his "Media Monitor" segment on Sunday, Kurtz agreed that the Gosnell case had not gotten enough national coverage, but suggested that conservatives had oversimplified the argument to attack the "liberal media."

"Some conservatives are saying this amounts to blackout by the so-called liberal media, but it's more complicated that that," he explained. "First, the Gosnell case has drawn some coverage since the FBI first raided that clinic back in 2010, in such outlets as Time, NPR, the AP, The New York Times, Slate and The Daily Beast. Now since Gosnell's trial began, CNN has done a half dozen segments, including one by Jake Tapper back on March 21 and Fox News did a story that same day."

"MSNBC, like Fox, has done a few stories," Kurtz continued. "CBS and ABC carried evening news segments back in January, but there hasn't been nearly enough on the trial. Almost nothing in The Washington Post, not enough in The New York Times. Perhaps the mainstream press is less attuned to a story that cast a shadow on abortion, but the conservative media didn't do much either."

"And it's not like even the staunchest pro-choice advocate would defend what Gosnell is alleged to have done. This is a gruesome case that journalists on both sides of the abortion question have told me is hard to stomach."

The Philly Post's Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote last week that the media should cover the Gosnell case, but it was wrong to use it as a tool to fight against abortion rights.

"Powers is a liberal and an evangelical Christian; she criticizes the right on women’s rights, the left on abortion," he observed. "Powers’s aim is to draw attention to the fact that the Gosnell murder charges should make us consider whether there’s really a difference between killing a baby inside the womb, or outside, as he so horrifically did. But this is misleading."

"The moral to be drawn from the Gosnell trial is not that current abortion laws are screwed up. Indeed, Gosnell broke them, which is why he’s on trial. Rather, it’s that as individual states increasingly restrict abortion rights, more and more illegal clinics, like Gosnell’s may crop up."

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) says that he would like to weaken existing gun control laws with any new legislation by decreasing the number of background checks required for people who apply for concealed carry permits in multiple states.

During an interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Rubio if his filibuster of a bill to expand background checks to include gun shows and Internet sales meant that he would also vote against the final bipartisan legislation.

"Well to be fair, I haven't read it in its totality, but I can tell you this, I am very skeptical of any plan that deals with the Second Amendment because invariably these gun laws end up impeding on the rights of people to bear arms who are law abiding and do nothing to keep criminals from buying them," the Florida Republican opined. "Criminals don't care what the law is."

"You have supported background checks in the Florida legislature," Wallace pointed out.

"Yeah," Rubio replied. "But those background checks in Florida are for people who have concealed weapons permits. If you have a concealed weapons permit, you do background check. I have no problem with that."

"But are they going to honor that in all 50 states? If someone goes to another state to buy a gun, do I have to undergo another background check or will my concealed weapons permit be de facto proof that I am not a criminal? These are the sorts of things that I hope we'll talk about."

According to The Washington Post, gun rights lobbyists and pro-gun lawmakers are hoping to weaken existing gun laws by amending a background checks bill in the Senate.

"Most worrisome to those who advocate new gun limits is an expected amendment that would achieve one of the National Rifle Association’s biggest goals: a 'national reciprocity' arrangement, in which a gun owner who receives a permit to carry a concealed weapon in any one state would then be allowed to do that anywhere in the country," the Post's Karen Tumulty and Ed O’Keefe wrote on Friday.

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Thom Hartmann takes our corporate media and the cheerleaders for war with Iraq to task and ten years after our invasion, asks 'Where are the apologies?'

Via Truthout: How the Media Fueled the War in Iraq:

Yesterday, the U.S. marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. And, over the course of the past ten years, we've learned more and more about how the war with Iraq actually started.

It's incredibly easy to blame the Bush administration for its lies that led us into Iraq. But Cheney, Rumsfeld and company weren't the only ones who played an integral role in convincing this nation that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and that WMD's were a forgone conclusion.

In the days and weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, corporate media – and even NPR and PBS - were abuzz with the talking points of the Bush Administration, echoing claims that Iraq had its hands on "yellow cake uranium" and that it had a massive arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction."

Thanks to the media's repeated claims that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were immediate threats to our nation, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, nearly three-quarters of Americans believed the lie promoted by Donald Rumsfeld that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the attacks of 9/11.

One of the biggest proponents of the Iraq War was Bill O'Reilly.

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Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) on Sunday said that Republicans would block any effort to extend background checks to include private firearms sales unless Congress agreed to "eliminate the recordkeeping" on guns in the United States.

Coburn, who is one of four senators working for a bipartisan bill to expand background checks, recently refused to comment to The Washington Post about his position on keeping records on private sales, saying that "I don’t negotiate through the press."

But on Sunday, the Oklahoma senator drew a line in the sand.

"I don't think we're that close to a deal, and there absolutely will not be recordkeeping on legitimate law-abiding gun owners in this country," Coburn insisted. "And if they want to eliminate the benefits of trying to prevent the sales to people who are actually mentally ill and the criminals, all they have to do is create a recordkeeping. And that will kill this bill."

"So if you really want to improve it, you have to eliminate the recordkeeping and give people the right and the responsibility to do the right thing. And that's check on the [National Instant Criminal Background Check System] NICS list to make sure you're not selling a gun to somebody who's in one of those two categories."

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Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday said that she would be willing force a "thoughtful" shutdown of parts of the United States government if President Barack Obama did not agree to deep spending cuts.

"What we want to make certain is that this president, this administration, this bureaucracy realizes that kicking the can must stop," she told MSNBC's Chris Jansing. "It is spending cuts and it is imperative that we reduce the size of the federal government, that we get in on a mega-diet, that we end this out-of-control spending."

"There is the option of government shutdown," the Tennessee Republican continued. "There is an option of raising the debt ceiling in short-term increments... There's also the plan of three dollars in cuts for every one dollar of debt limit increase. So, the healthy thing is this, we are having a good discussion on it."

Jansing pointed to a study by the Bipartisan Policy Center which found that the government could continue to fund interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps during a shutdown -- but it would mean that almost every other federal program would grind to a halt.

"[B]ut doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else," The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote last week. "The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease."

"I think that there is a way to avoid default," Blackburn insisted. "If it requires shutting down certain portions of the government, let's look at that. Let's put these option on the table, be very thoughtful, but get this spending pattern broken. We cannot afford a $4 billion a day deficit and trillion dollar plus deficits every single year."

"So, it requires thoughtfulness and it requires that we are going to have a plan to work through this. I think that's where we as Republicans are headed."

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A spokesperson for the Department of State recently seemed to be really enjoying his job as called out Fox News correspondent Justin Fishel for asking an "asinine" question that suggested Secretary Hillary Clinton had faked her illness to avoid testifying about September attacks in Benghazi.

Officials revealed last month that Clinton's testimony would be postponed after she became sick, fainted and suffered a concussion. Just two days later, Fishel showed up at a State Department press briefing and seemed to question the official story.

"Toria, can you expand on why Secretary Clinton can’t testify on Thursday about this?" the Fox News correspondent asked department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, according to a transcript. "It seems that she has not been available to testify on the Benghazi situation on some very key dates, including the Sunday after 9/11 and now this Thursday."

"As we put out on Saturday, she is still under the weather," Nuland calmly explained. "She was diagnosed as having suffered a concussion, and her doctors have urged her to stay home this week. So it’s on that basis that she’s asked for the committees’ understanding... But it was her intention to be there. If she had not been ill, she would be there."

In an email obtained by The Washington Post and published on Wednesday, Clinton Senior Advisor Philippe Reines took a much snarkier tone with Fishel.

"We owe you an apology," Reines wrote. "I’m almost embarrassed to even admit this – but somehow your question at today’s Daily Press Briefing was somehow completely mauled and transcribed in the release."

"I just called them and read them the riot act for putting such misleading, accusatory, and absolutely asinine words in your mouth. Because after what we and her doctors explained over the weekend regarding her health, you couldn’t possibly have been insinuating the ulterior motives that question implies. No way. No credible journalist would do that without any basis whatsoever."

Reines continued by pointing out that there was no way "an informed reporter" would compare testifying before Congress with appearing an Sunday morning talk shows as Fishel seemed to do by asking why Clinton had "not been available to testify" in an interview on Fox News on the Sunday after the attacks instead of United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice.

"I don’t know Chris Wallace all that well, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t place his television show on par with one of the three branches of our government," Reines insisted. "And therefore, saying that this has happened on multiple ‘key dates’ is simply a blatant lie and grossly misleading to the public."

"Anyway, our sincere apologies," he concluded. "If you send us what you really said, I’ll make sure it’s properly reflected."

Last year, Reines had taken a less-subtle approach with BuzzFeed correspondent Michael Hastings, telling him to "fuck off" and "have a good life."

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MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Friday recommended that Republicans "walk out" of talks completely because President Barack Obama's first budget offer was "loaded with Democratic priorities," citing an imperfect memory of the way President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) harmoniously "worked together" to reach a deal in 1995.

On Thursday, Republicans aides circulated what they said was the first White House budget offer. It reportedly included $1.6 trillion in taxes, $400 billion in entitlement spending cuts and $200 billion in new stimulus of payroll tax cuts and an efforts to encourage homeowners to refinance. The White House also wants a debt limit increase as part of the deal to avoid the crisis that ended with U.S. credit being downgraded in 2011.

On MSNBC Friday morning, Scarborough said that he would have laughed out loud if he had been in the room when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was making the offer.

"I would have said, 'We're all busy people, this is a critical time, if you're going to come over here and insult us and intentionally try to provoke us, you can do that but I'm going back to work now,'" Scarborough explained. "And I'd walk out."

"Was it necessary for the president to be so proactive with something even The New York Times said was -- quote -- 'loaded with Democratic priorities' and really gave Republicans nothing?" the conservative MSNBC host wondered. "I think they were awfully reckless yesterday with this first offer."

"Look at the other side that they're dealing with," co-host Mika Brzezinski pointed out. "Look at who they're dealing with, many of the same people as the last four years. So, what would you do if you knew who you were up against? Would you come out there with something that was incredibly giving from the get-go?"

"My response to [House Speaker] John Boehner would be very simple, just stop talking to them," Scarborough opined. "Don't talk to them until they make a serious offer... I've got to say that I'm really stunned by what happened yesterday."

"I can tell you, it's not a hard ask, it's a partnership," he added. "And actually as much as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich loathed each other at times, they worked together to deal with Republicans like myself on balancing the budget on the first time in a generation, balancing it four years for for the first time since the 1920s, paying down the national debt. And you know what? Newt Gingrich always had to fight us on his right flank and he and Bill Clinton sat in the White House and strategized."

In fact, the budget negotiations between Clinton and Gingrich were no where near as smooth and cordial as Scarborough remembers. After Clinton passed his 1993 budget (and tax increases) with no Republicans votes, Gingrich led a 1993 effort to impeach the 42nd president of the United States in the House of Representatives. Clinton later was forced to shut down government for a total of 28 days in 1995 and 1996 over drastic cuts to spending on Medicare, education, public health and the environment. In the end, the parties did work together to create four consecutive balanced budgets for the first time since the 1920s. Forcing the government shutdown, however, marked the beginning of the end of Gingrich's career as Speaker.

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein noted on Thursday that the first White House budget proposal was a signal that President Barack Obama would no longer begin negotiations by conceding to Republican demands as he had done so many times during his first term.

"Previously, Obama’s pattern had been to offer plans that roughly tracked where he thought the compromise should end up," Klein wrote. "Perhaps the key lesson the White House took from the last couple of years is this: Don’t negotiate with yourself. If Republicans want to cut Medicare, let them propose the cuts. If they want to raise revenue through tax reform, let them identify the deductions. If they want deeper cuts in discretionary spending, let them settle on a number. And, above all, if they don’t like the White House’s preferred policies, let them propose their own."

"The GOP is right: This isn’t a serious proposal. But it’s not evidence that Obama isn’t serious. He’s very serious about not negotiating with himself, and his opening bid proves it."

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Tara McKelvey, who writes about national security for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, told CNN on Sunday that former CIA Director David Petraeus flirted with both men in women in the media to get favorable press coverage.

Following his resignation earlier this month, McKelvey recalled her experience with Petraeus and his mistress, Paula Broadwell, in a piece for the The Atlantic.

"Like many successful people in Washington, Petraeus was a flirt, with both men and women," she wrote. "Ebullient, energetic, even bubbly, he had cultivated relationships with male journalists for years, selling them on controversial programs such as counterinsurgency, as well as on his own 'super-human, perfect-warrior image,' as one military officer puts it. ... In short, Petraeus was good at his job, as a military man, as head of the CIA, and as director of a media charm campaign in Washington."

The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran explained to Kurtz on Sunday that the access Petraeus provided "could be intoxicating for journalists."

"You get to zip around the battlefield on a Black Hawk helicopter popping into frontline bases, it's a thrill traveling with a four star [general]," Chandrasekaran said, adding that "Petraeus was an assiduous emailer."

"At one point it did sort of prompt a thought in my head, 'Boy, don't you have a war to run here?'"

"He was really fun to be around," McKelvey agreed. "I met him at a party and he was just a lot of fun to talk to and I can see how intoxicating it would be. ... He was a total flirt, both with men and with women. You know, people respond to it. They like to be flattered and he was good at it."

McKelvey had also noted that "classified information is used as a pickup line" in Washington, but would not give Kurtz any specifics.

"I really can't reveal anything more than that," she chuckled.

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Conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, who has a reputation for reflexively defending Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, falsely claimed on Sunday that President Barack Obama had not mentioned the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans in the same paragraph with the phrase "acts of terror."

During last week's second 2012 presidential debate, moderator Candy Crowley’s instant fact check had briefly stunned the GOP hopeful by undermining his claim that President Barack Obama had not initially referred to the recent attacks in Libya as “acts of terror" during his Rose Garden speech.

Speaking to CNN's Howard Kurtz on Sunday, Rubin said that Crowley "blew it" by correcting Romney.

"The substance of the question was not whether or not [Obama] said 'act of terror' or 'acts of terror,' but whether he specifically identified this attack as terrorism," Rubin opined. "He did not."

"In the last two paragraphs, he reviewed all of the acts of terrorism that we've gone through, and at the end he said, 'acts of terror' -- not in the same paragraph with Benghazi, never said Benghazi is a terrorist attack," she insisted. "For her to take sides -- and my interpretation may be wrong, I'll grant you that -- for her to take sides and intervene went well beyond [her duties as moderator]."

In fact, the president did refer to the attacks in Benghazi that left U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead in the same paragraph with the phrase "acts of terror," according to the official White House transcript:

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.

"I have no idea what you are talking about," Current TV's David Shuster told Rubin as he read Obama's words. "I'm reading from the transcript!"

"No, it wasn't that," Rubin said, shaking her head. "And by the way, I don't think this hurt Mitt Romney whatsoever. His campaign doesn't think it hurt Mitt Romney whatsoever. They're delighted to have this issue front and center."

"For you of all people to criticize Candy Crowley when she didn't get the precise language when everybody knew what the president was talking about," Shuster shot back. "I mean, it wasn't some sort of mistake like [you] suggesting the Norway attacks were some specific jihadist connection."

"He's the Joe Biden of Reliable Sources!" Rubin exclaimed, referring to a recent debate where Vice President Joe Biden interrupted Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

Media Matters' Simon Maloy on Sunday questioned why Rubin was "so blatantly lying and mischaracterizing the president's words" when she had nearly a week to read the official transcript.

"The answer can be gleaned from a comment she made towards the end of the video above about the 'acts of terror' flap: 'I don't think this hurt Mitt Romney whatsoever. His campaign doesn't think it hurt Mitt Romney whatsoever.' That lock-step synchronicity with the Romney campaign crystallizes the broadly held opinion of Rubin's increasingly embarrassing work for the Washington Post," Maloy wrote.