This Tuesday night on The Daily Show, it was round two for guest host John Oliver taking on the recent leaks on the NSA's surveillance programs. Oliver did a great job going after Fox blowhard, Bill O'Reilly, BFF's John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul and their reactions to the story over the last week.
Bill-O was a little too concerned about the spying potentially being used to exploit a Republican senator with a prostitute problem. Sounds like a whole lot of projection going on to me.
Then we had technology expert and "cantankerous old man" John McCain asking why we can't act the same way we did on Sept. 12, 2001 - an argument Oliver quickly made a complete mockery of.
Next up, Rand Paul, who has suddenly found a new respect for Supreme Court decisions -- now that he wants them to overturn something he doesn't like.
And last but not least, Miss Lindsey, who could care less if the government is scooping up all of our phone conversations, but don't dare put gun owners' information into a database.
Oliver wrapped things up by reminding everyone which amendment looks like it "has won the Bill of Rights." I don't think anyone here will have any trouble guessing which one that is.
Former Fox News contributor Jane Hall says that her ex-colleagues at the conservative network have been "waging a campaign" to link the words "radical" and "Islam" following the bombings at the Boston Marathon earlier this month.
In a Sunday discussion on CNN, host Howard Kurtz noted that after briefly coming together in the aftermath of the tragedy in Boston, the media had returned to its "ideological sniping."
Current TV host Cenk Uygur told Kurtz that Fox News had led the charge in making the airwaves more vitriolic by "talking about Muslims, which is ironic because this is the same Bill O'Reilly who kept calling Dr. Tiller, "Dr. Tiller The Baby Killer," until Scott Roeder shot him."
"So here's a fundamentalist who's Christian worrying about fundamentalists who are Muslims, and driving people to violence," Uygur said.
Fox did not renew Glenn Beck's contract, but that hasn't stopped the network from continuing to bring him on the air as an occasional guest. Apparently they still like using him to rile up the wingnuts, even if they don't want him on every night.
Beck told O'Reilly that he's got "multiple sources" in the Obama administration who were providing him with documents, and now there's some grand cover up going on. Yeah, when pigs fly Glenn.
Gee, where would anyone get the idea that Fox and Bill O'Reilly would like for their Obama-hating viewers to get the impression that he just might be a secret Muslim? I can't imagine. Apparently Bill-O is very upset that MSNBC's Alex Wagner said something bad about him, so now he's going on his own "jihad" to get even.
Good luck with that tough guy. What are you going to do? Screech like a banshee even louder than you normally do every night?
Apparently Bill-O doesn't believe that something can be both a tragedy and and act of terrorism, because he decided to spend his opening segment on this Monday's The Factor, attacking President Obama for calling the Boston Marathon bombings a tragedy and not using the word terrorism during his brief press conference this afternoon.
Note to Bill-O -- the President may not have used the word "terrorism" during his presser, but it was clearly implied and what he said was we should wait and find out more information before we jump to conclusions about what happened.
Which is exactly what O'Reilly and his guest Rep. Peter King did here. And pardon me if I'm not in the mood to hear from hypocrite Peter King given his record on terrorism. He doesn't seem to mind it so much if he supports the cause in question.
Fox's Bill O'Reilly opened up his show this Tuesday evening by using the death of former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello to opine over whether America was somehow "a better country" back in those days when, as Media Matters noted, white America was "kind of unified" and if that "made it easier for society to function."
I'm fairly sure that it did make it "easier for society to function" if you were a white male, like Bill-O. If you were a woman, or a minority... well... maybe not so much.
O'Reilly was also opining during the segment for the days back when America was "more wholesome." Pardon me if I have a little bit of trouble hearing from someone who is apparently in the middle of a divorce right now and can't control his temper because of it on that topic.
I don't want to hear about the "need to be more wholesome" from someone who is capable of visiting Sylvia's restaurant with the Rev. Al and making the ridiculous statement he did about the patrons and their so-called m-f**king iced tea.
Sadly, we're not likely to see O'Reilly off the air any time soon, along with his fellow Nixon-loving cheerleader here, Monica Crowley who was ready to take up his cause and argue with Alan Colmes. It's sad that the two of them here just literally proved what many of us have known all along about Fox and that is, they'd be more than happy to take most of the country back to the '50's socially and rolling back civil rights. Just don't bring back those tax rates. That would be treasonous!
Stephen Colbert opened Wednesday's "Colbert Report" with a declaration of something that disturbed him even more than what appears to be the imminent embrace of gay marriage by the Supreme Court: Bill O'Reilly's flip-flop on the issue, which he announced on his show Tuesday.
"I am shaken to the core," the faux conservative pundit said. "Last night, even Papa Bear let me down." [...]
But he was particularly offended that O'Reilly took a noncommittal stance about gay marriage, saying on "The O'Reilly Factor" that he does not "feel that strongly about it one way or the other."
This left Colbert aghast. "Bill O'Reilly doesn't feel that strongly about something? What's happening?! You're Bill O'Reilly! Read your f*cking contract!"
He rolled several clips of O'Reilly proclaiming his distaste for gay marriage over the years, including clips where O'Reilly compared gay marriage to "plural marriage" and the right to get married to ducks and goats.
But if O'Reilly is a man of consistent philosophy, Colbert's logic dictates, then his comparison of gay marriage to marrying a goat must have been a tacit endorsement of goat marriage, given his current feelings on gay marriage. And far be it from Stephen to get in the way of O'Reilly marrying a goat.
From this Monday's Democracy Now, economist Richard Wolff is asked about Bill O'Reilly's remarks last week where he told his audience on Fox that Cyprus and other European countries are facing economic hardships because they’re so-called "nanny states." Wolff responded with a lesson in economics 101 for Bill-O:
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Wolff, before we end, I want to turn back to the crisis in Cyprus and relate it to what’s happening here. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News warned his audience last week that Cyprus and other European countries are facing economic hardships because they’re so-called "nanny states."
BILL O’REILLY: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, now Cyprus, all broke. And other European nations are close. Why? Because they’re nanny states, and there are not enough workers to support all the entitlements these progressive paradises are handing out.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Richard?
RICHARD WOLFF: You know, he gets away with saying things which no undergraduate in the United States with a responsible economic professor could ever get away with. If you want to refer to things as nanny states, then the place you go in Europe is not the southern tier—Portugal, Spain and Italy; the place you go are Germany and Scandinavia, because they provide more social services to their people than anybody else. And guess what: Not only are they not in trouble economically, they are the winners of the current situation. The unemployment rate in Germany is now below 5 percent. Ours is pushing between 7 and 8 percent. So, please, get your facts right, Mr. O’Reilly.
The nanny state, you call it, the program of countries like Germany and Scandinavia, who tax their people heavily, by all means, but who provide them with social services that would be the envy of the United States—a national health program that takes care of you, whether you’re employed or not, and gives you proper healthcare. In France, for example, the law says when you go to work, you get five weeks’ paid vacation. That’s not an option; that’s the law. You get support when you’re a new parent for your child care and so forth. They provide services. And they are successful in Germany and Scandinavia, much more than we are in the United States and much more than those countries in the south.
So they’re not broken, the south, because they’re nanny states, since the nanny states, par excellence, are doing better than everyone. The actual truth of Mr. O’Reilly is the opposite of what he says. The more you do nanny state, the better off you are during a crisis and to minimize the cost of the crisis. That’s what the European economic situation actually teaches. He’s just making it up as he goes along to conform to an ideological position that is harder and harder for folks like him to sustain, so he has to reach further and further into fantasy.
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?'
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.
It looks like Bill O'Reilly still isn't finished spreading the same lies he was telling when he had his meltdown on air with Alan Colmes last week, because he decided to devote his Talking Points Memo and the opening segment of his show this Monday to defending and repeating those same lies -- and as Media Matters noted, despite getting his facts wrong again, O'Reilly claimed his "righteous anger" elevated the conversation about the debt.
The only thing we see Bill-O "elevating" in this segment is his ego. We've already been through the litany of B.S. O'Reilly was shoveling in the previous post here, so I'm not going to rehash that, but my fellow contributor here at C&L, Ellen at NewsHounds took the time to break down the segment above and I'll share just a bit of that here: O’Reilly Justifes His Meltdown With Alan Colmes: I’m Looking Out For You:
You don’t need to be a psychologist or a body expert to figure out that Bill O’Reilly’s justifications tonight for his bullying attack on Alan Colmes last week are a lot of hooey. In fact, there was so much hooey, I’m not sure I can catch it all in one post. But for starters, there was the hooey that O’Reilly likened Colmes’ “lie” about federal spending cuts to the danger posed by Al Qaeda (which included the hooey that Colmes had his facts wrong in the first place), plus the hooey that O’Reilly attacked Colmes out of a public-spirited desire to draw attention to this big danger, plus O’Reilly’s "admission" that he shouldn’t have called Colmes a liar – even though he immediately afterward described Colmes as lying. And my favorite hooey: O’Reilly said he’s not in his job for money or fame, but to look out for us.
Sure he is. How could anyone ever get the idea that O'Reilly was just all about the money or fame? Go read the rest for more of Bill-O's hackery and the back and forth during the panel segment, and as she noted, Mary Katharine Ham and Juan Williams did nothing but suck up to O'Reilly and reassure his poor bruised ego that he's really just a nice guy, no matter how badly he treated Colmes the previous week. I don't know about anyone else, but watching those two during this segment reminded me of a couple of battered wives telling their abusive husband that they still love him.
