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David Shuster reporting that David Vitter is refusing to comment on the justice who refused to marry an interracial couple in Louisiana. Shuster wonders if the Senator is worried about losing support from his base.

From Think Progress- Vitter dodges question about interracial marriage in Louisiana.:

Although both Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) have publicly condemned Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell for refusing to issue marriage licenses to interracial couples, Sen. David Vitter (R) has stayed noticeably silent. (ThinkProgress contacted his office, but we did not receive a response.) Blogger-activist Mike Stark caught up with Vitter and asked him about his position. “Have you commented? What did you have to say about it?” asked Stark. Vitter simply smiled, stepped into the elevator, and allowed the doors to close.

Update: Greg Sargent finally received a response from Vitter's spokesman, but the senator still refuses to condemn Bardwell's actions: "First, Sen. Vitter thinks that all judges should follow the law as written and not make it up as they go along. Second, it would be amazing for anyone to do a story based on this fringe, left-wing political hack’s blog — he’s been handcuffed and detained in the past over his guerrilla tactics."

Shuster said MSNBC called Vitter's office three times asking if the Senator supported the statements by the justice and that they would still not comment.

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This has to be one of the more infuriating things to come out of one of these Conserva-Dems mouths in a long time. Do you think you could be a little more insulting to the American public Sen. Landrieu? Of course both David Shuster and Tamryn Hall waited until after Landrieu got off the air to question whether what she was saying was complete B.S. or not. That's not included in the above clip but here's my beef with the two of them. While they still had her there, they should have asked her how lining the pockets of insurance industry CEO's and their stock holders is doing anything to help small business or the general public that isn't fortunate enough to have her health care plan paid for by our tax dollars.

And nobody thinks that having a public option is going to be "free". Landrieu apparently pulled that talking point out of the land called her butt, since that's the first time I've heard someone use it. That or some health insurance lobbyist fed it to her and we're going to hear more of the same from Landrieu and the rest of her fellow Corporate-crats as this debate goes on.

Hall: I want to talk about the public option. You just heard Gov. Dean and he said “What’s the point in having a sixty vote majority in the Senate if you can’t get the public option passed?” “That is health care reform, not insurance reform and that is what the American people want.” Where do you stand? I know that you’ve been under a lot of pressure about your opinions on public option, but where do you stand now after we saw new numbers come out and it passed in the Senate Finance Committee yesterday, without the public option in that committee?

Landrieu: Well first of all Gov. Dean has been a wonderful leader and he is a great guy and a wonderful American, seriously. I just don’t agree with him on his statement that unless you have a public option you can’t have real reform. And I don’t agree that if you’re not for a public option you’re for insurance companies, you know, scamming tax payers…um…or consumers. I’m not for either. I wish it was as simple, but it’s not.

The bottom line is we want choice and competition and a reformed market place. I don’t believe as a Democrat and I’m proud to say this as a Democrat, I believe in the private sector. I don’t believe in the government running every program and for everybody. I believe in public/private partnerships.

Hall: Do you believe in the polling that says that the American people want a public option? Do you believe in that desire from the folks that you and all of the others represent that say that they want a public option to happen to help offset these costs?

Landrieu: I think when people hear public option they hear free health care. Everybody wants free health care. Everybody wants health care they don’t have to pay for. The problem is that we as governments and business have to pick up the tab and as individuals. So I’m not at all surprised that the public option has been sold as free health care, but there is no free lunch and it’s costing us 16% of the gross national product and it’s driving businesses out of business.

So I wish it was as simple as saying you can have a public option and everything’s going to be great or not. The fact it’s more complicated than that and it’s been a very I think unfortunate debate between public option and not public. We should be thinking about public/private partnerships and cost containment.

Sen. Landrieu, cost containment would mean putting a stop to your campaign donors taking 30% for moving our money around and making the bankers happy while they deny their customers the coverage they thought they paid for.

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David Shuster subbing for Keith Olbermann gives us a lovely dose of the hate mongering and openly racist protests that were Glenn Beck's 9-12 rally in Washington DC, and some clips of Republican politicians who thought fomenting this hatred by participating was a good idea.

Howard Fineman weighed in and said that there are a lot of Republicans who don't like what's going on because it's going to lose them independent voters that they need to win elections, but are afraid to say so in public. So much for any of them standing up for the courage of their convictions.

Shuster: Howard, the Republicans are not merely condoning the behavior of the fringe element of their party but embracing it. A message of intolerance helps the Republican Party how exactly?

Fineman: Well it doesn’t help them. And they’re not all embracing it but I’m sorry to say they’re afraid to say so on the record. I talked to numerous Republicans today. A lot of them are very upset that for example Joe Wilson, the Congressman from South Carolina, a lot of them don’t think someone like Glenn Beck is doing the Republican Party any good. The Republicans need not just their core voters to thrive in the 2010 elections, which they indeed may. They need independent voters in the middle and there’s a tug of war going on David between the desire of independents to support the Republicans over issues like the debt and the deficit and the way some of the Republicans are behaving that repels those very independents.

Shuster: Well speaking of Sen. DeMint told the crowd on Saturday and repeated today that the protesters were informed. Given what some of those signs had to say about the President, wouldn’t that be fomenting hatred, if not violence?

Fineman: Well, at the very least it’s looking the other way and they’re looking at the glass of tolerance half full when in many cases there isn’t even a glass David. But what the Republicans I talked to today said was this. These people are there because of big government. They’re there because of fears about the debt and the deficit. And I think to some extent that’s true. I’ve been to Tea Parties. I’ve been to town hall meetings. I can sense that.

But there’s something deeper and darker that’s also there and we may as well look straight at it. There are racial fears. There are religious fears. There are regional fears. There are ethnic fears. These are coming to the surface. Like depth charges our politics has now brought all this to the surface and that’s also what we saw out there on the Mall. There’s no question about it. And there are not enough Republicans who are willing to say that on the record.

Shuster: Glenn Beck’s stated goal of wanting to move this country back to where it was on 9-12-2001 when the country was united, how did that work out for him?

Fineman: Well, he can pretend to cry all he wants on the stage and call himself a televangelist. He’s not into uniting the country from everything I’ve seen. He’s making a boatload of money dividing the country. When you say with no real evidence whatsoever that the President of the United States hates white people, you aren’t behaving in the spirit of 9-12. You’re behaving in a spirit that we thought we gotten rid of in the end of the Civil War and at the end of the second Civil Rights movement. So, you know, he can cry crocodile tears all he wants. That doesn’t seem to be what he’s actually doing.

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Olympia Snowe says she urged the President to take the public option off the table during his speech tonight "so it could provide, I think, a momentum of a different kind in moving this issue forward overall." Snowe is still insisting that the President wants a "bipartisan" agreement.

A watered down version of health care "reform" which ends up being a give away to the insurance industry isn't going to solve our problem with the health care and it isn't going to get any "broad support" as Snowe claims the President is looking for.

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David Shuster asks Rep. Anthony Weiner what he thinks about this latest talk of a deal being struck on a "trigger" being used if the insurance companies don't behave. As Rep. Weiner points out, the law would not go into effect until 2013 and then there's five year grace period, so there's already a ten year trigger in the existing bill.

He's right. It's already too late to be finally getting some reform passed and there is no reason to believe the insurance companies will do the right thing now because they always say "trust us" and then show they can't be trusted.

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David Shuster shoots down Republican strategist Lenny Alcivar's statement that Nancy Pelosi called the protesters at these town hall meetings un-American.

Media Matters has more debunking both the lies surrounding Nancy Pelosi's statement, and Blanche Lincoln has retracted her statement.

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I'll start by saying that I really do like David Shuster, I don't like the way the network chases after celebrity stories like Michael Jackson's death when there are more serious topics being ignored, but I've got no quibbles with the bulk of his reporting on MSNBC.

I can't say that about his interview with Charles Pierce while filling in on Countdown for Keith Olbermann. I think David pulled the equivalent of why we never see the likes of Pat Buchanan or Joe Scarborough on Keith's Worst Person list for the night, as they would be regularly if they worked for Fox News and were saying the exact same things they did on MSNBC. He circled the wagons around his network and took offense to someone who was rightfully criticizing them, and didn't do his job.

Shuster attempts to focus the segment on Liz Cheney promoting the birthers craziness, and ends up finding his network being criticized by Pierce for how they treated Bill Clinton instead. Pierce went after our "main stream media" hard for their journalistic malpractice.

Pierce: Well, it's funny because I was listening to Chuck Todd on Hardball earlier tonight and when Chris asked him about how, you know this thing gets airborned he immediately jumped in and said the Internet. Well, it wasn't the Internet in 1992 that invented White Water that brought us all the way down the rabbit hole. It was the New York Times. It wasn't the Internet in 1999 that put Kathleen Willey on TV to slander somebody and put Jennifer Flowers on TV to talk about the Clinton body count. It was Chris Matthews and CNBC. It wasn't the Internet that were involved with the prolonged act of journalistic malpractice that was the coverage of the Al Gore in 2000. It was the main stream media.

Why wouldn't these people think this would work again?

Pierce is exactly right that there has been little or no political price to pay for the GOP to float the nudge, nudge, wink, wink lines of attack on anyone they think they can get away with it on. He's also right that Shuster should not be allowed to defend bringing on the likes of Liz Cheney on Morning Joe to spew her bile for a better part of that three hour show, and just because Countdown or Shuster's couple of hours on MSNBC criticizes her, that gives the network a pass for his cohorts' behavior and giving her a big, unrebutted megaphone during the morning. It doesn't.

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David Shuster and Harper's Scott Horton break down John Yoo's poorly written op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, defending his part in allowing the Bush administration to spy on millions of Americans under the guise of keeping us safe from terrorists.

From The Anonymous Liberal--John Yoo: Still Lying:

In this morning's Wall Street Journal, John Yoo has an op-ed defending himself from the malpractice charges set forth in the recent Inspecter General's report. As with the opinions themselves, the op-ed is deeply disingenuous and misstates the law repeatedly.

Not surprisingly, Yoo begins the op-ed with a collosal straw man. He points out how important it is to intercept al Qaeda communications and writes: "Evidently, none of the inspectors general of the five leading national security agencies would approve." Of course, the issue is not whether intercepting communications is a good idea, but whether the program violated the law. Yoo was not a policy maker. He was a lawyer. His job was to state what the law was, not what it should be.

Continue reading.....

From Think Progress-- In Op-Ed Attacking IG Report, John Yoo Never Mentions That He Refused To Cooperate With The Investigation:

Last week, the Inspectors General of five separate intelligence agencies released a congressionally-mandated report on the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance programs. The report focuses much of its criticism on John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote “legal memos undergirding the policy.”

In the Wall Street Journal today, Yoo responded to the report, claiming that the inspectors general are ignoring history and are simply “responding to the media-stoked politics of recrimination.” But in his attack on the report, Yoo neither responded to the specific criticisms of his legal reasoning nor mentioned that he refused to cooperate with the investigation.

Instead, Yoo persisted in pushing the flaws in his legal argument, such as the claim that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act did not take war into consideration.

Continue reading....

Scott Horton has more at The Daily Beast--Torture Prosecution Turnaround?:

The attorney general is leaning toward appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Bush-era torture policy, sources tell Scott Horton. Inside the logic driving Eric Holder’s possible conversion.

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Media Matters' Karl Frisch takes us through just how the right wing noise machine works, and a photo that starts out being criticized on Free Republic ends up making its way into the main stream media.

A classic example of how the right-wing noise machine works was unfolding before the American people. A non-story starts on a right-wing website and works its way into the mainstream. It usually involves Drudge, the fedora-wearing boy who cries wolf (almost daily) on the Internet, and mainstream news outlets follow his lead, offering up under-researched and factually inaccurate story lines.

Had the mainstream media done their job -- you know, checking the video to get the context from which the photo was taken -- they would have clearly seen that Obama was attempting to navigate high steps, while reaching back to help someone behind him do so as well. As Fox News host Greta Van Susteren said after airing video of the event, "Yes, a still picture can lie. And this one does."

Of course, the next morning after Van Susteren's show, the Fox & Friends crew went right back to trashing the president with lascivious speculation that was contradicted by easily accessible fact.

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Jane Hamsher takes on Townhall wingnut Jillian Bandes on MSNBC over health care reform. The argument got personal when Jane talked about what she's had to put up with as a sixteen year cancer survivor.

Hamsher: Seventy six percent of the American public want a public plan, and as a sixteen year cancer survivor myself, I really find it offensive that people try and drag others into this and say that somehow our system that we have right now represents the fifty million people who are uninsured, or that it does anything..

Bandes: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa...

Hamsher:...superior for people like me, for people like me who've had to be at the mercy of bureaucrats....

Bandes: I'm sorry I'm not a cancer survivor, but that doesn't mean I can't criticize the public plan.

Hamsher:...and insurance companies that won't pay your bills. Yeah, well I suppose you are, but you don't know what you're talking about.

[.....]

Hamsher: The people in this country who have to go and face bureaucrats who will not pay their bills and have to face financial ruin in order to get themselves treated, is criminal. Basic health care access should be a basic human right in America. We spend two trillion dollars on the banks last year....

Bandes: Should food be a basic human right?

Hamsher:....and now we're talking about that we cannot... Do you have any, do you have any pride whatsoever? Do you have any shame when you go out there and you say this kind of stuff, and when you interrupt people when they're trying to talk about their own personal experience?

Obviously Jane, she doesn't or she wouldn't be shilling for the insurance companies.

Jane's got more over at Firedoglake's Campaign Silo: Health Care: It’s Time To Get Mad and as Think Progress noted, for most of the world, food is considered a basic human right.

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David Shuster and Tamryn Hall bring in J.P. Freire and Matthew Slutsky to "debate" whether the stimulus package is working or not. While I like David Shuster and think he does as good of a job as he's allowed to on MSNBC, this entire exercise struck me as just another example of why more people need to watch programs like Democracy Now and Bill Moyers Journal.

How the hell do you have an honest debate on this topic in five minutes? And cut the guests off at the end for some B.S. not important "breaking news" at the end of the segment to boot?

If MSNBC really cared about this topic, one, they'd be bringing in actual, respected economists to debate it from all sides of the aisle. Two, they'd not be limiting the debate to a few minutes. And three, they'd not be using the latest Republican talking point du jour as their guiding light for their "news" stories. Just because the Republicans decided to throw their latest hissy fit for the day doesn't mean they need to be taken seriously.

It's really tiresome to watch our "news" cycle being driven off the RNC fax machines talking points memo day after day.

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July 06, 2009 MSNBC

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David Shuster and Tamryn Hall with an appropriate reaction to Rush Limbaugh saying this:

Michael Jackson "flourished under Reagan," "languished under Clinton and Bush," "died under Obama".

Somebody needs to check if Rush is back on the hillbilly heroine again.

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David Shuster talks to Sen. Bernie Sanders about his demand that the Democrats in the Senate commit to stopping a filibuster on health care reform. Sanders reiterated his earlier statements as reported by Sam Stein at the HuffPo:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called on the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress to ensure that party members agree unanimously to support cloture on legislation that would revamp the nation's health care system. Democratic senators on the fence, he added, could still oppose the bill. But at the very least they should be required to let the legislation come to an up-or-down vote.

"I think that with Al Franken coming on board, you have effectively 60 Democrats in the caucus, 58 and two Independents," Sanders said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "I think the strategy should be to say, it doesn't take 60 votes to pass a piece of legislation. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster. I think the strategy should be that every Democrat, no matter whether or not they ultimately end up voting for the final bill, is to say we are going to vote together to stop a Republican filibuster. And if somebody who votes for that ends up saying, 'I'm not gonna vote for this bill, it's too radical, blah, blah, blah, that's fine.'"

"I think the idea of going to conservative Republicans, who are essentially representing the insurance companies and the drug companies, and watering down this bill substantially, rather than demanding we get 60 votes to stop the filibuster, I think that is a very wrong political strategy," Sanders added.

If we only had a few more Bernie Sanders in the Senate, the United States would be a better place to live in. I hope he keeps the pressure on the Democrats to do the right thing.