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Very sad and tragic news on Michael Hastings passing:

BuzzFeed is saddened to report that Michael Hastings died in a car accident early this morning in Los Angeles. He was 33.

Ben Smith, BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief, said in a statement:
We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone. Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians. He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold. Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague, a joy to work with and a lover of corgis — especially his Bobby Sneakers. Our thoughts are with Elise and and the rest of his family and we are going to miss him.

Here's more from Rolling Stone: Michael Hastings, 'Rolling Stone' Contributor, Dead at 33:

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I guess HuckaJesus thinks that the best way to honor our troops over this Memorial Day weekend was to make sure he threw in a little bit of right-wing scandal-mongering and attacking that uppity president of ours for heaven forbid having a Marine hold an umbrella over his head during at press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, along with the revival of Benghazi-gate while giving a tribute to those "real heroes" of ours who aren't being taken care of properly at the V.A.

I'd be willing to take Huckabee's feigned concern for our troops that he expressed here a bit more seriously if he and his fellow Republicans were not doing their best to either make excuses for the Bush administration invading Iraq and Afghanistan while refusing to pay for their wars, and passing tax cuts instead, and if they weren't still pushing for our country to be involved in more military conflicts to this day.

Huckabee and his party of austerity that doesn't want to see the richest among us have their taxes raised one penny don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing anyone about how our troops are taken care of. We've got some huge problems with the V.A. but President Obama is not the one that created the mess where the outdated system was overloaded. He's the one who inherited the mess that George W. Bush helped to create. Now people like Huckabee are bitching that he hasn't fixed it quickly enough.

I'm not happy it hasn't been fixed either, but unless you've got some more constructive criticism about how to fix it, other than bringing up Umbrella-gate, or this fake Benghazi outrage we've been seeing from the right for months on end now, you need to either shut the hell up or decide to actually do something to make the situation better.

If Huckabee or anyone in the media actually cares about this issue, they should be doing things like bringing in computer experts to look at the system we have now, the systems being considered by the V.A., asking questions about the man hours to get the paper records converted and what the most efficient way to do that would be. And if it looked like the V.A. is not going to be using the most up to date technology and most efficient way to fix this mess, ask, "Why not?"

Mike Huckabee doesn't care about that. He cares about blowing the dog-whistles for the far right of his party that we heard here. What's really telling about the mentality of the people who actually take this guy seriously, is the loudest applause from his audience was when he was talking about President Obama and the umbrella being held up for him: Huckabee: Honoring America's Real Heroes:

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Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) on Thursday warned his colleagues in the Senate that people who were "wearing some form of turban" were illegally immigrating into the United States by crossing the Southern border.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to consider amendments to the bipartisan immigration reform bill, Cornyn asserted that he had "anecdotal" evidence that only 25 percent of undocumented immigrants crossing the border were caught by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

"In fact, anecdotally, the border patrol last -- on Sunday and Monday were telling me, they think they maybe catch one out of every four people coming across the border," he declared. "Maybe one out of every three. And that's a problem."

The Texas senator argued that this made the case for an amendment offered by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), which establishes "triggers" that prohibits legalizing undocumented immigrants until the Department of Homeland Security has established "effective control" of the border for six months.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), however, pointed out that a 2012 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the Border Patrol had a 82 percent effectiveness rate at catching illegal border crossings.

"I would love to see that report because I don't believe that's the case," Cornyn replied. "The problem is the effectiveness rate you referred to doesn't take into account the people that cross illegally and the department is not tracking. In other words, it doesn't take into account the people that get away, which could, according to the anecdotal reports, be two out of every three, three out of every four."

Cornyn added that he had also been told during his recent visit to the southern border in Texas that "we're not just seeing the border penetrated by people from Mexico or Central America."

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Former President George W. Bush openly wept while talking about some of the biggest disasters of his tenure at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on Thursday.

At the conclusion of his speech, Bush mentioned "the people of New Orleans who made homemade boats to rescue their neighbors during the floods" caused by Hurricane Katrina and "the servicemembers who laid down their lives to keep our country safe" during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"I dedicate this library with an unshakable faith in the future of our country," he said. "It was the honor of a lifetime to lead a country as brave and as noble as the United States."

At that point, the 43rd president began to get choked up.

"Whatever challenges come before us, I will always believe our nation's best days lie ahead," Bush concluded, struggling to add, "God bless."

With a wink and a tear, the former president exited the stage. And then in response to the audience's standing ovation, Bush wiped his eyes, cocked his head to the side, smiled and waved.

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Bill Maher had a warning for North Korea's Kim Jong-un, who seems all too willing to push his luck with the United States given the fact that our country has been addicted to war for far too long. Maher also told his audience that it's time that we "start defining peace as strength" instead:

In the last part of his weekly “New Rules” segment, Maher lambasted “Kim Jong Pugsley of North Korea” for his threats of war with the U.S. and the West.

“Have you seen a North Korean rocket test?” he asked. “They don’t even look like real rockets. They look more like that thing the Russian kosmonauts were in when they crashed on to ‘Gilligan’s Island.’”

No, he said, the real threat here is the war-mongering Americans who are looking for “any excuse to ramp up the war machine again.” [...]

“Just like we’re the gun country,” he said. “Come on, we’re the war people. We don’t need a lot of encouragement. Have you ever met John McCain? Offering to go to war with the U.S. is like offering to go out to drinks with Lindsay Lohan. We’re already in the car.”

“Just in my lifetime, we’ve invaded Vietnam, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Granada, Panama, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq again,” he said. “That’s when you know you’re war-mongers, when some countries are coming up twice.”

“At some point, don’t you have to look in the mirror,” he asked, “and say ‘Maybe it’s me?’”

“America needs to start defining peace as strength,” he said. “Do you know who the role model for every president should be? Jimmy Carter. He was the one out of all of them who figured out how to sit in office for four years and never fire a shot.”

“And every president’s negative example,” he concluded, “should be Dick Cheney, who even shot his friends in the face.”

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A Republican congressman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan on Sunday looked back at the Iraq war and declared that it was a "just and noble war."

During an interview on CNN, host Candy Crowley asked Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) for his views on the war 10 years after the U.S. invaded.

"The Iraq war noble and just war," the Arkansas Republican declared. "I would say it was worth it, but it's also a little too soon to tell because there's nothing ever certain in human affairs."

"But if you look at the accomplishments of our troops in Iraq, they deposed an evil tyrant who was an aggressive international dictator," Cotton continued. "He'd invaded across two boundaries. He had demonstrated the ability and the will to use weapons of mass destruction. He was believed by every Western government -- including senior high-ranking officials in President Obama's cabinet right now -- to be developing new weapons, who was in violation of numerous United Nations resolutions."

"But under those conditions, I think as I said, it was a just and noble war."

Many in Congress, however, now look back at the Iraq war as a mistake because President George W. Bush's administration used false information about weapons of mass destruction as a "pretext" to invade.

"You remember World War II, Korea, all the major wars of this nation," Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said recently. "This is one that slips into the background, and people are comfortable with it slipping into the background. I think the legacy of this is always going to be that it was a mistake, that it was pre-emptive, that it wasn't based on real information, and that the whole struggle could have been handled differently."

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The host of Fox & Friends on Thursday decided to find out once and for all if the "War on Christmas" was real by asking a mythical figure who listens to the fantasies of children.

"I like to think that I'm a Santa for boys and girls of all ages," Santa Claus impersonator Sal Lizard told Fox News host Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson.

"What do you make of the political correctness part of our culture?" Carlson wondered. "Have you seen it change over time?"

"There was a time a few years back when suddenly I started showing up at Christmas parties and was told that they were having holiday parties, so therefore, they didn't need a Santa anymore," Lizard explained. "And that was the time that the Surgeon General said that Santa should lay off the cookies and start picking up more carrots and broccoli. And I heard that Santas in Australia had to say 'Ha, ha, ha!' so as not to offend certain gals. And that Santas in England weren't weren't allowed to have children on their laps anymore, so as not to create an image of impropriety."

A Media Matters analysis recently determined that culture warrior Bill O'Reilly, who is leading the charge on the "War on Christmas" for Fox News, had spent three times more airtime on the manufactured war as on actual wars for the second straight year. Between Dec. 1 and Dec. 18, O'Reilly spent over 55 minutes talking about the "War on Christmas," while spending only 15 minutes covering Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Gaza combined.

(h/t: Think Progress)

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There were a great number of thing wrong with this interview on MSNBC, one being the fact that host Thomas Roberts and his producers thought that the public needed to hear from the corrupt former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert about the need for bipartisanship during these fiscal negotiations. Another is Hastert being allowed to get away with this statement:

ROBERTS: But sir, if you were able to hold the line on spending limits, then why would you go ahead to oversee two unfunded wars?

HASTERT: Look... the wars happened. I don't know if you were around at 9-11 but we lost 3000 people, but we ended up in Afghanistan. We also ended up in Iraq. You know, we can go back. History will tell us whether we should have been in Iraq, but at the time, we thought that was the right decision. We were not going to expose this country to that type of threat and we haven't had it since then.

Roberts just completely let Hastert off the hook here without an ounce of follow up. First off, he didn't answer the question about why they didn't see the need to pay for the two wars that they didn't want to put on the books to show the hole they were blowing in the budget. And second, it's just shameful that a politician is still being allowed to use 9-11 to justify invading Iraq.

And as far as Hastert and anyone wanting his advice on how someone should govern now, here's more from our archives on him, and he received the honor of being listed by Rolling Stone as one of the The Ten Worst Members of the Worst Congress Ever in Tim Dickinson's article which was originally posted in their Nov. 2006 issue. Here's a portion of that report:

The Highway Robber: Dennis Hastert (R-Ill)

Hastert could well be the weakest House speaker in history. Tapped by Tom DeLay to serve as the mild-mannered frontman for the GOP leadership, the former wrestling coach ceded most of his power to the now-disgraced majority leader, allowing Republicans to treat the Capitol as their private piggy bank. Last year, Hastert got in on the action himself, secretly inserting $207 million into the budget for the "Prairie Parkway" – a highway that will speed development of 210 acres he owns in Illinois. Before the year was out, Hastert sold part of his land – soon to be the site of a sprawling subdivision – for a profit of $2 million.

"Here's a guy who saw a chance to profit from his official acts and took it," says Bill Allison, who uncovered the late-night earmark as a senior analyst for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "Most of us aren't speaker of the House, and most of us don't have a $200 million earmark running through our back yard. Hastert does, and he made a fortune from it."

The speaker at least functions as a bipartisan defender of congressional corruption. In February 2005, he purged the chairman of the House Ethics Committee for daring to admonish DeLay. And after Rep. William Jefferson's offices were raided by the FBI last spring, it was Hastert who lodged the strongest protest on the Louisiana Democrat's behalf.

Bipartisanship! Ain't it grand?

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I would imagine that Piers Morgan and the producers at CNN were expecting BuzzFeed's Michael Hastings to be pretty harsh on the now scandal ridden Gen. David Petraeus, because I find it hard to believe they would have invited him on the air without reading his recent article here -- The Sins Of General David Petraeus.

What they probably didn't expect was for him to go after the other guest, their own Barbara Starr for taking dictation from the Pentagon and the media in general for their worship of Petraeus. Whatever the case, it was well worth the time watching the segment just to see Piers Morgan squirm in discomfort with his response to Hastings.

MORGAN: Paula Broadwell calling David Petraeus a role model. How things have changed. Joining me now is General Mark Kimmitt who has known General Petraeus for 25 years, also Michael Hastings, Buzzfeed reporter and writing for "Rolling Stone." He says America should have never trusted Petraeus in the first place. And Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona, a former Defense Intelligence officer who also served with the CIA. Welcome to you all.

General Kimmitt, let me start with you. You've known General Petraeus for 25 years. Do you recognize the man that you've been reading about for the last 24 hours?

GEN. GEORGE KIMMITT, FMR. DIRECTOR, PLANS & STRATEGIES, CENTRAL COMMAND: Well, in many ways, I do, because with this one exception of this incident that he had with Paula Broadwell, I think the fact that this was a guy that stood up when the facts became known, did the honorable thing and resigned. That's the David Petraeus that I know.

MORGAN: Should a general in his position, who has moved on to run the CIA, have to resign his post over an affair, which is really what this seems to have been about?

KIMMITT: My opinion, yes. Any commander of an organization who is caught in that kind of compromising behavior, someone who is supposed to set the standards and enforce the standards for that organization, when he is caught in a compromising position, he's got to do the honorable thing and step down. I think Attorney General Mukasey mentioned that as well. And I stand behind those comments as well.

Any commander that has lost the trust and confidence of his unit has to stand down. MORGAN: Michael Hastings, in your Buzzfeed article, "The Sins of General David Petraeus," you argue that Petraeus was a master of deception. Do you think he should have resigned?

MICHAEL HASTINGS, "ROLLING STONE": I think there's many other reasons Petraeus should have resigned besides who he's sleeping with that's not his wife. But I just want to make a point here. The larger point that I've been making is that essentially the media has played a role in protecting David Petraeus and promoting David Petraeus and mythologizing David Petraeus.

We saw it here tonight. General Kimmitt, who was a spokesperson in Baghdad, who was a roommate of Petraeus, who was involved in one of the biggest debacles in recent foreign policy history, is on TV defending David Petraeus without actually addressing the real problems with David Petraeus' record.

Those are the fact that he manipulated the White House into escalating Afghanistan. He ran a campaign in Iraq that was brutally savage, included arming the worst of the worst, Shiite death squads, Sunni militiamen. And then you go back to the training of the Iraqi army program that also had similar problems.

So for me, all the while, he's going around the country talking about honor and integrity. So for me the questions of honor and integrity -- I was raising those earlier. A number of other journalists who were actually covering David Petraeus were raising those concerns. You might not get that from someone like Barbara Starr at CNN, who essentially is a spokesperson for the Pentagon in many ways.

So I think I just want to step back and have my piece, because this -- even the way the scandal is being covered is so different than how usual sex scandals are being covered, where they hammer the guy mercilessly. Now everyone is saying oh, my God, he just went to the CIA; how could he be -- you know, he was susceptible to being seduced by this woman.

Give me a break. Petraeus now has all his allies coming out to defend him, where Paula Broadwell is there yet again -- where are her protectors?

MORGAN: Barbara is not a spokesperson for him, obviously. Let's move to --

HASTINGS: Not too obviously. I have followed her coverage pretty closely as she has covered my work before, too.

MORGAN: Just because she's written naughty things about you doesn't make her a spokesperson.

HASTINGS: No. What makes her a spokesperson is repeating without question a lot of Pentagon claims.

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The woman who married former House Speaker Newt Gingrich after cheating wuth him while he was married to his second wife says that former CIA Director David Petraeus' extramarital affair is "sad" and "painful" for his family.

"I think it's personally very sad for he and his family," Callista Gingrich told ABC's Barbara Walters on Monday. "I think he did the right thing by resigning. But this is painful and they'll have to work together through this as a family. And that will take some time."

The former House Speaker pointed out that Petraeus would have been in an "impossible situation" if he had tried to stay on as director of the CIA.

"This man served 37 years," he pointed out. "We need to remember, he was the key to winning in Iraq. If he had not turned around the surge, we would have literally lost the war. He was the key to giving a fighting chance in Afghanistan. He is a brilliant, very hard-working person. And I hope he and his family can work through this."

Newt Gingrich's second wife, Marianne, revealed to Esquire in 2010 how the former speaker had presented his first wife with the terms of their divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery for uterine cancer in 1980.

Rumors about Gingrich’s fondness for oral sex with other women have circulated for some time. A 1995 Vanity Fair profile explained how Anne Manning had claimed she had been intimate with him.

In 1999, over the Mother’s Day weekend and on the same day his second wife had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Gingrich informed her he had found someone else.

In fact, he had reportedly been having an affair with Callista Bisek for six years.

Gingrich divorced his second wife in 2000 and married Callista that same year.

In 2011, the then-Republican presidential candidate suggested to CBN's David Brody that he had strayed from his marriages because he felt so "passionately" about the country.

"There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate," he explained.