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At an event for bloggers at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday night, tea party-backed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-SC) toasted the late conservative activist Andrew Breitbart as a "great and fearless leader."

Following a confrontation with Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) over guns at a Senate Judiciary Committee, Cruz met up with conservative bloggers at the 4th annual Blog Bash, which bills itself as "the largest gathering of right-of-center bloggers."

"Let me tell you, the men and women in this room, you represent power and you represent democracy," Cruz told the crowd. "Let me tell you, each of you, you scare the hell out of Washington... Y'all are on front lines of taking this country back."

The Texas Republican ended his pep talk by holding up a beer in Breitbart's memory.

"I want to collectively remember our friend. And a toast to Andrew Breitbart," he said, turning up the bottle. "A great and fearless leader, and we all carry on with his unshakable, fearless spirit to speak the truth to power. And the more they quiver, the better job we're doing. God bless."

Cruz' speech sent the conservative blog Weasel Zippers into a state of giddiness.

"Must stop swooning… must stop swooning… I’m trying as hard as I can," blogger Zip wrote.

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If anyone didn't think this guy was quite insufferable enough during his interview on Piers Morgan last month, you're in luck. You can be treated to almost an entire hour of his whining about how liberals are keeping the poor conservative white man down.

This was a talk he gave at Jim DeMint's wingnut Heritage Foundation a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, Breitbart protege Ben Shapiro has got a book to sell, so naturally he's being promoted by the likes of C-SPAN, which sadly leans way, way to the right with their Book TV series. They ended up treating their viewers to what was one long exercise in projection, claiming that liberals just want to silence conservatives, making ridiculous claims that conservatives are somehow shut out of the political debate in the United States, and are being oppressed by some secret liberal cabal out there who makes sure no one can hear their message.

[Insert laughter here.]

In Shapiro's world, Media Matters has a whole lot more influence than I'd give them credit for. Plus, there's some grand conspiracy to keep conservatives out of Hollywood and our educational institutions. And you can't dare call a conservative a racist ever... never, ever... and don't dare call voter suppression racist or mention anything about their policies being racist, because then you're just pandering and trying to pick on them and YOU JUST BETTER SHUT UP.

And heaven forbid someone picked on poor ALEC and forced them to run away from the "stand your ground" laws. Yes, and Al Sharpton is a big bad meanie who, along with the rest of the "liberal media," tried to frame George Zimmerman.

I don't know if anyone's got the stomach for the rest of his pity party, but you can watch the entire event here. I'll leave everyone with a quote from one of my fellow contributors here at C&L, Mugsy, who relayed his feelings on this pity party of Shapiro's by email:

As noted, classic "projection". I've been saying for years that "if a conservative accuses you of something, it's only because they either did the same thing themselves or would if they were in your shoes."

Ding, ding, ding, ding... give that man a medal. That's exactly what we had here -- in such blatant form that it's almost laughable, or it would be, if not for the fact that there are still people who consider this guy some kind of "serious" conservative thinker.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new fresh face of the Republican party -- which, oddly enough, looks just like the old face of the Republican party.

If they need any help with their "rebranding" effort, I sincerely hope they give this guy a call. I'm sure it will work out just as well for them as the recent efforts by Eric Cantor and Bobby Jindal.

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A Republican official in Pennsylvania says that he doesn't regret hanging at least three American flags upside down to protest President Barack Obama's second inauguration because "our nation is in a horrible place."

WPXI's Julie Fine took a news crew to party headquarters in McKeesport to speak to Mon Valley Republican Party Chair Brent Kovac after the station began receiving complaints that the official signal of distress was over the line on a day that most Americans put partisanship aside.

"Sometimes people need a strong statement," Kovac explained to Fine. "The nation is in distress, and this isn't the first time this has been done, whether you agree with the sentiment or not."

Outside the committee offices, Kovac hung one upside-down flag beneath a sign supporting former nominee Mitt Romney that read, "Ambassador murdered in Libya by terrorists. Obama is running Big Bird TV ads against Romney. Vote for an adult for president..."

"Military people fight for that flag everyday," the WPXI reporter noted. "What do you say to them?"

"Some of them might be flying their flag upside down too," Kovac insisted.

"You're telling me you think somebody in the military is flying their flag upside down today?" Fine pressed.

"I didn't say that I know that," Kovac admitted. "I think I've created a little bit of dialog."

Allegheny County Republican Party Chair Jim Roddey told WPXI that he disagreed with Kovac's actions.

"We are disappointed in the outcome of the election but we would do nothing to disrespect the Office of the President of the United States," Roddey said in a statement.

In a letter posted on the Mon Valley Republican Party website prior to the Nov. 6 election, Kovac had suggested that the president may not be a U.S. citizen and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart may have been murdered as part of a liberal conspiracy.

"[C]onveniently the most ferocious and effective conservative activists Andrew Brietbart, dies of a heart attack at 42 years old, just seven months from the Presidential election, followed by the coroner that performed his autopsy from poisoning," he wrote. "Yea.. I’m just a paranoid right winger.. however, before I became one.. I didn’t believe in coincidences, .. I definitely don’t believe in that kind of coincidence."

"As if that wasn’t cause for inquiry alone, our President hasn’t proven himself a natural-born citizen, satisfactorily to anyone yet, and is thumbing his nose at us by producing the laughable birth certificate that he came up with... the media.. gives him a total pass. While chasing down a story about what Mitt Romney was doing in high school."

He concluded: "What we’ve lost, was lost long before Barack Obama took office. He is here to finish a job that was started years ago.. but the level of disrespect and disdain for the average American that President Obama has shown is insulting and it is obvious that the powers that be are confident that they barely need to disguise their efforts to turn us into a socialist country."

(h/t: Think Progress)

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Suspended Politico reporter Joe Williams on Monday accused conservative publications like the late Andrew Breitbart's Big Media and Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller of acting like a "schoolyard bully" by deliberately targeting him after he said GOP hopeful Mitt Romney was more comfortable around "white folks."

Speaking out for the first time since Politico suspended him indefinitely, Williams told Current TV's Bill Press that Big Media used "selective evidence" from comments about Romney on MSNBC and his Twitter account because they were in the business of "gathering scalps" from the so-called liberal media.

"It became about me and not about what I said," he explained. "And that was something that was common to a lot of what you talked about earlier: Chris Hayes, David Shuster, the list goes on. And, you know, now my name is on that list. But the problem I see here is it's not going to stop there."

"Part of the issue here is the fact that we have an organization -- we have a couple of organizations that have very clear agendas," Williams continued. "They're funded -- we don't quite exactly know how, but, certainly, they get their money to do what they do. Their agenda is quite clear. Their agenda is to make enough noise, to push back hard enough that organizations -- independent organizations, independent news organizations that have foundations, that have credibility to their name -- fold."

"Basically it's the schoolyard bully concept where if you make enough noise, if you push back hard enough, people are not going to fight back. ... They're in the business of gathering scalps."

When it comes to the comments about Romney, Williams did not seem eager to apologize.

"If I apologize for that, there are going to be many other people who have to as well because this is not a new sentiment," he pointed out, noting that the phrase "white folks" had been like waving a red flag in front of bull. "To me in my personal opinion at this point, those two words were the ones that set people off. You know, 'white folks,' 'Mitt Romney.' It's a match to a tender keg to certain segments of people who decided they want to push back on what they believe is the liberal media."

Williams also wouldn't say if he wanted to stay on at Politico.

"That's a question that we're working on," he told Press.

The Daily Caller on Monday revealed a March 30 tweet where Williams had accused Politico of an "overlay of blatant racism," calling it the "secret sauce in the Politico shitburger."

"Certainly at that point I was venting, I was spouting, I had frustrations at work, there were frustrations in some of the things that I saw that was going on on the Politico landscape," he recalled. "And I vented and in error and I vented in a public place and that was a huge mistake."

"There are a lot of frustrations in Washington, a lot of things that have racist kind of aura," Williams added. "Politico, by and large, has a lot of things to deal with, questions as far as that's concerned. Well, [minority] representation. Diversity is a problem for the entire D.C. press corps and I don't think Politico is an exception in that regard."

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At this year's Right Online conference, Sarah Palin was more than happy to prop up Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart's Big Government sites as bastions of new media that's cutting through the traditional media outlets... like say... her employer at Fox. Somehow that was missing from her speech to the right wingers that attended this weekend.

Sarah Palin gives a pep talk to conservative bloggers at the Right Online conference:

It was a rousing pep talk for a ballroom full of conservative bloggers, and a tribute to a fallen compadre Friday evening, as Sarah Palin honored the memory of the late Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart and told an annual gathering of conservative new media that they fill a vital role in the nation’s political discourse.

In some ways, Palin’s 35-minute speech was also a vintage performance, her sing-song voice rising and falling as she also castigated and mocked the “lamestream media,” accusing it of failing to vet then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and of promulgating rumors about her personal life, which still seem to get under her skin.

“You do what the old media can’t or won’t do, and that’s tell the truth,” said Palin, who remains a hero of the tea-party right despite her withdrawal from the arena of electoral office. “I have learned in the last four years or so, it doesn’t do any good to personally complain about the untruths told by the old media. I might as well save my breath…. Shoot, by now I should have been divorced how many times? Under FBI investigation. Living in the Hamptons. It still is a great mystery who really is Trig Paxon Van Palin’s real mother.”

Speaking in a ballroom of the Venetian Hotel, owned by heavyweight Republican contributor Sheldon Adelson, Palin did not mention this morning’s announcement by President Obama that he would stop deporting young adults brought to the United States as children. In a brief conversation with Politico after her speech, she accused Obama of “pandering to a specific demographic.”

You've gotta' love it when this woman can be both part of and what she's complaining about with that "lamestream" media. Someone should have reminded her after this speech that Uncle Rupert is still signing her paychecks and that if there's some hole that needs to be filled with the lack of real or honest media coverage about anything, she can thank her boss for not filling that hole, or for allowing Palin ilk to fill their airtime with lies, propaganda and nonsense.

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Steve Benen, who once upon a time was a contributor here at C&L before being hired by the Washington Monthly is no longer a regular guest on Rachel Maddow's show, probably because because he's working for her now, both as a producer and writing for her blog. And you can definitely see his influence when she does segments like this one, because he's been writing about Mitt Romney and his constant lying on the campaign trail for some time now.

He's been keeping a running list and doing weekly installments documenting Romney's lies in a series that comes out on Fridays, the latest of which from last week you can read here: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XIX. I'm sure Romney's latest which Maddow reported on in the clip above will make this Friday's post as well.

As Rachel noted, on a crazy news day when most of the media was reporting on George W. Bush at the White House having his portrait unveiled, Romney openly admitting to sending hecklers out to scream over Obama adviser David Axelrod and the trial of John Edwards finally coming to an end, Mitt Romney appeared for a campaign stop at the failed energy company Solyndra, and besides the crazy conspiracy theories the Romney campaign was throwing out there that Dave wrote about this Thursday and the fact that Romney has a Solyndra type problem of his own from his time as Governor in Massachusetts, there's also the problem that Mitt Romney just straight up lied about the Obama administration supposedly steering contracts to "friends and family."

Here's more on that from the Time article she quoted in the segment: Mitt Romney’s Ads: Still Wrong on the Stimulus:

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Gotta' love it -- Right Wing Journalism Fail: Breitbart.com Interviews ‘Bono’:

This is just classic. Last night, the geniuses at Breitbart.com were trumpeting a HUGE EXCLUSIVE STORY, in which their ambush specialist Jason Mattera scored an EXCLUSIVE interview with U2 singer Bono.

Only problem with this BOMBSHELL: it wasn’t Bono. Apparently, Mattera encountered a guy with an Irish accent wearing sunglasses who looked sort of like Bono, and conducted an EXCLUSIVE BOMBSHELL INTERVIEW that blew up in his face: ‘DC’s Bad Boy Reporter’ Ambushes Bono Impersonator by Accident:

When the mini-Breits realized that they had been bamboozled, they just 404ed the page, with no retraction or statement of any kind, and marked the video “private” at YouTube to hide the evidence of their hilarious screw-up. But of course, the Internet never forgets, and now the heirs of Andrew are stuck in a moment they can’t get out of.

Charles has the transcript posted as well and the original video which I've posted above. Media Matters has more and I'm not holding my breath for us to get any kind of retraction from Sean Hannity, who was pushing this on his radio show -- Jason Mattera Still Hasn't Found What He's Looking For:

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Ed Schultz spoke to the late Prof. Derrick Bell's widow, Janet Dewart Bell about the recent racist attacks on her husband and President Obama from the right wing and talking heads over at Fox. Schultz asked Bell what her reaction was to the treatment of her husband and if she was angry about all of it.

BELL: I am angry and I'm sad. I'm sad that they could be so dishonest and it's just really part of that radical right wing and the right wing media's patterns of distortion and misinformation. But you know, I'm smiling because I want to lift up the memory of Derrick Bell. Derrick Bell left a great legacy, ot just to me and our family, but my husband was... if he were here today, he would be standing up for Sandra Fluke. You know Gloria Steinem once named him an honorary woman, because he was a feminist before feminism was cool and that's the Derrick Bell that I know; a man of courage, of conviction and he was always standing up for justice. It didn't matter who it was, he accepted people as they were.

Bell expressed her concern over the “drumbeat” of negativity coming from Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and their ilk and asked when the Republicans were going to speak out about what they were doing. In response to the attempt to paint her husband as a radical and someone who didn't love America, Bell continued:

BELL: My husband was a war veteran and he was a patriot and what he tried to do was make this country stand up to the ideals that he believed in. He believed it with his whole heart. Derrick thought the ideal, fair play, social justice, equality, opportunity, those are things that should be shared. Everybody should get a shot at the American dream. That's what Derrick Bell was about.

I await Janet Bell being attacked on Fox in 10... 9.... 8....

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Melissa Harris-Perry deconstructed quite nicely just what is behind the recent attacks by the right instigated by the Breitbart lackeys over President Obama hugging the late Prof. Derrick Bell. Sadly, it's the 1940's all over again, indeed, because that is where it looks like they're trying to take us back to.

If what's left of Breitbart's site and Hannity and the rest of them want to try to convince anyone besides the racists in the Republican base that were already running around with pictures of the president as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose that this is proof that he's somehow a "radical", they're going to have to do better than this. It's nice to see someone like Perry taking the time to explain some of the man's actual history and what he stood for to try to counter the hyperbolic attacks on him coming from the right.

Rough transcript to follow from this Saturday's show on MSNBC:

HARRIS-PERRY: This week, a manufactured controversy erupted around an extraordinary legal scholar, who used self-sacrifice as an agenda change of his own. This week, this twenty two year old video surfaced of then student Barack Obama at a protest rally, introducing Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell. Now Prof. Bell spent his career questioning and critiquing the institutional racism that infects America's legal structures.

This week, conservative media outlets offered up the video as proof by association that President Obama is adhering to a radical, anti-American agenda. Derrick Bell died in October of last year, so he's not here to correct the lies circulating about him. Thankfully, he left behind a rich legacy of legal activism and scholarship that speaks for itself.

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Jon Stewart took a shot at Sean Hannity after his ridiculous hackery the previous night promoting the latest debacle to come out of the Breitbart lackeys, trying to paint President Obama as a "radical." Stewart opened the show promising to show viewers a tape which would reveal the "real" Sean Hannity that he didn't want you to see.

He followed with making a mockery of the latest non-scandal which Hannity is making a fool out of himself pushing with the "newly"... or not so new it turns out "secret" tapes of President Obama that Karoli already wrote about here.

Gotta' love the Clockwork Orange screen shot with what's required to force anyone to actually have to watch Hannity's show followed by Stewart calling out Hannity for hanging around with "an admitted perjurer" (Oliver North), "a convicted Watergate murderer (G. Gordon Liddy), or "a man who stomped another man to death in Cleveland" (Don King), or "whatever this is." Cut to Ted Nugent which C&L covered here -- Ted Nugent curses out Hillary, Obama, Feinstein and issues threats with Machine Guns.

Stewart wrapped things up saying if Hannity really wanted to go after President Obama for his "radical" associations or for "damaging Obama footage" he might consider his hiring of Larry Summers to fix the financial crisis he helped cause, his claim that he'll close Gitmo, or maybe he should look into that foreign Portuguese Water Dog they've got living in the White House. That last one would not be all that much more ridiculous than Hannity's latest attack sadly.