Richard, you make a good point. But I have a feeling Fox News would have been quite happy to have Ralph Nader on in 2004, when they felt he was helping divide the Dems so the GOP could conquer them. And based on his pattern of behavior, I’d say they had no problem having someone on hawking a book that could make the owner a bit more coin. Keep in mind that Murdoch was giving him publishing money specifically so that Nader could throw mud at the Dems. Once he’d served that purpose, Murdoch had no more use for him.

Joseph, you also raise a good point both about Ralph Nader and progressives. Many of them are NOT fans of President Obama. Amy Goodman has made it her career to challenge EVERYONE in office, most notably when she pinned Bill Clinton in a combative 30 minute interview on Election Day 2000. It’s one of the things I admire about her. Larry Bensky has similarly challenged every elected official in his lifetime for any conservative or right wing action they’ve inflicted. Nader is essentially a gadfly at this point, and you’re correct that he’d say a bunch of things about how timid he believes President Obama is about dealing with corporate crime. But Nader would also present a worldview that is literally 180 degrees apart from someone like Neil Cavuto. He’s probably forgotten more about government’s role in a private economy in his lifetime than Cavuto has ever read talking points about. And that’s why they wouldn’t have him on. He’s too unpredictable for them. Much safer to have a Juan Williams or a Dennis Kucinich, where you know they won’t rock the boat all that much.

Again, I’d love to see Bill O’Reilly actually have a real discussion with someone from the left – like Amy Goodman or Larry Bensky. They’d wipe the floor with him on every subject. But it’s clear this kind of thing is NOT what Fox News wants. They want to preach to the choir, not challenge anyone’s expectations. And frankly, it’s clear that Fox News and O’Reilly are simply frightened of being confronted with a real debate. If they truly were “fair and balanced”, they’d have no problem with one.

Hannity was also spending some time backpedaling tonight. Although he wasn’t exactly backpedaling. Instead, he spent his time repeatedly trying to get Dana Perino to agree with him that President Obama SHOULD be impeached, whether or not it would happen at this moment. Hannity’s only objection to this was that it’s clearly helping the Dems raise a lot of funds. Come to think of it, that was also Perino’s objection.

But we should keep something rather serious in mind here. Let’s say that the GOP actually gets a majority in the Senate in November, which is something they’re clearly salivating over. We know they’ll keep a majority in the House. If they actually have majorities in both houses, and a rabid far-right group in their base that irrationally hates this President, what would stop them from pursuing impeachment proceedings? In other words, if the GOP gets their way this November, we could be looking at moves toward impeachment in early 2015.

Of course, the GOP and their promoters wouldn’t want anyone to think they’re REALLY going to do that, would they? Because that’s the sort of thing that would fire up the base of the Dems and get people to vote in a midterm election where they wouldn’t otherwise do so. So it makes sense that Roger Ailes is telling his on-air personalities to downplay that whole idea until after the election.

Has Ed Klein already appeared on Hannity to promote his stuff this time, or is that just pending? Hannity had no qualms about this last tie.

I find the value of this website to be the immediate and historical corrective it places on the desperate spin Fox News regularly applies to current affairs. The intent of Fox News by Roger Ailes is to create a narrative that reinforces the right wing beliefs of its core audience. In this narrative, there’s almost nothing a right wing official can do wrong and almost nothing a non-right wing official can do correctly.

If you were to listen to the Fox News version of history, you would conclude that Ronald Reagan led the greatest presidency the world has ever known, that George HW Bush was a beloved president, and that George W Bush was a great and strong president. If you listened to Fox News, you would conclude that the only events of the Bill Clinton presidency were Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky and Newt Gingrich’s rise to power.

If you were to rely on Fox News, you would conclude that the presidency of Barack Obama was one of unmitigated disaster and failure. You would conclude that only unabashed far-right libertarian approaches would address any problems anyone might face.

Fox News is an important part of the right wing’s attempt to rewrite both current and past history in its own image.

Which is why the efforts of News Hounds are so important. Because it’s necessary to continually point out where Fox News is either leaving out important facts or inventing its own material in the process of rewriting that history. Left unchecked, the right wing would simply assert that its assumptions were in fact true historical facts. By constantly correcting these attempts, News Hounds clarifies not only the underhanded methods Fox News and GOP pundits in general are using but also what the actual historical facts are.

Because of News Hounds, in twenty years it will be possible to immediately counter and correct the attempts of the Bill O’Reillys and the Greg Gutfelds to play their assumptions as historical truth. It will be possible to publicly question these people as they try to act as elder statesmen/women, and it will be possible to reveal their biases for what they are.

This is a service that will be necessary and useful long after Fox News has faded from memory.

Shapiro is a smug, angry guy who got his start writing hit pieces for Breitbart. He has no credibility. The only reason Fox News gives him airtime is because he guarantees at least one outrageous statement each time he comes on.

Shapiro’s latest nonsense – that President Obama should be impeached and prosecuted – is laughable on its face. And it’s following a far right meme of trying to find equivalences in the Obama administration with the very real criminality seen in the Bush Administration. The problem for Shapiro is that there’s a difference between what happened in the Bush years and the current atmosphere of poisonous extreme partisanship being blasted at any and every action taken by President Obama and the Democrats.

Shapiro and his ilk hope that they can put their mark into the history books with all these nasty smears, so that when the official history is written, they can say that this was somehow a “corrupt” presidency. Sadly for Shapiro, too many people have been paying attention, and too many resources exist, for such myths to get much purchase. Other than at Fox News, where most of the viewers already believe that kind of material.

Doors is correct. And the Fox News mess with Griff Jenkins was actually worse than that. Jenkins and his producer were actually caught on camera trying to “pep up” a Tea Party rally so that Jenkins could say on camera that he was in the middle of a huge, energetic protest of the grassroots against the policies of Barack Obama. When the video of the producer went viral, Fox News did the understandable thing. Instead of admitting that they’d been caught playing games, they simply attacked the producer – as if she would have just done this on her own.

The reality of Eric Cantor’s humiliating loss this week has partly to do with the GOP base moving so far to the right that it’s difficult to see how they think they’ll win a national election again. If the GOP goes through another painful primary season in 2016, one has to wonder WHO they think they could nominate as a party. Here in California, we just had the spectacle of Tim Donnelly vs Neel Kashkari, with Kashkari winning as simply a right wing GOP candidate and former Bush Administration staffer. Donnelly is a far right wing ideologue, and he had hoped the “Tea Party” would allow him a statewide berth to spout nonsense at Jerry Brown. Didn’t work out for him, and I don’t see how it will work out on a national scale in 2016.

The other part of Cantor’s fall is that he was known for really enjoying his position in the House and for his obvious thinking that he could challenge the leadership of not only John Boehner but also President Obama. Even his own constituents look like they’d had enough of his behavior. It’s telling that even Bill O’Reilly is mentioning the stat about Cantor’s dinners adding up to most of the announced entire campaign budget of Dave Brat. Of course, they’re also not mentioning that Brat was heavily supported by the right wing radio hosts in his area as well as names like Ann Coulter and Mark Levin.

It is indeed interesting that Cantor is not being interviewed by the Fox News machine. Instead, he’s clearly being treated as yesterday’s news. Adding to his humiliation was the mandate that he step down from his power position as soon as possible, so as to allow the GOP to have an existing Majority Leader through the fall that can most likely hang on to the position next January. I had expected Cantor to try to run at Boehner’s position. Instead, he’ll be looking for private sector right wing think tank positions. (This is similar to what happened when Newt Gingrich was forced to leave the House in disgrace.)

In the end, I believe history will show that it wasn’t immigration reform that ended Eric Cantor’s career. It was Eric Cantor that ended his own career.

Fox News is desperately trying to tie this kind of coverage to Eric Cantor’s humiliating loss this week. It’s obviously another manufactured “crisis”, meant to fire up the right wing base about how all these dangerous people are somehow swarming over the border from Mexico. Bill O’Reilly took it a step further last night by openly asking why they couldn’t take all the refugees that make it to Texas from wherever in Central America, put them on buses and dump them back in Mexico. When his interviewee replied “Bill, they’re not from Mexico”, O’Reilly sagely responded “So what? They’re getting in through Mexico – let Mexico deal with them!”

Same thing actually happened with Ron Silver after 9/11. It was as if he became a completely different person.

We don’t know that Bergdahl was a deserter. We also really don’t know that anyone died just because they were looking for him. Both of these are right wing memes designed to smear him and President Obama.

Even those soldiers don’t know the full story. They know what they heard at the time, and what their opinion was of Bergdahl before he was captured.

This is just another right wing attack on Obama disguised as phony concern.

And I note again that nobody asked these soldiers what they thought of Ronald Reagan knowingly sending 1500 TOW missiles to Iran in 1986 so he could say he’d freed a bunch of hostages just in time for the 1986 midterms.

As soon as I heard the name Dewey Clarridge, I knew this was a mostly unreliable report. It sounds like a mess of some eyewitness accounts mixed with a lot of hearsay and opinion. Which frankly has been the basis for almost all of Fox News’ material on this matter.

For example, we keep hearing two other nonsensical stories trumpeted as fact.

One is the notion that Bergdahl was supposedly out looking to join the Taliban, based on rumors and what are said to be the accounts of a couple of local Afghanis who encountered a wandering Caucasian man and tried to warn him. Of course, we don’t know what actually happened in that interaction or if Bergdahl understood or trusted anything he was being told.

Another is the more noxious idea that somehow Bergdahl was the cause of multiple soldiers dying in some effort to search for or rescue him. The facts actually line up with Chuck Hegel’s statement that we have no indication that anyone died specifically because they were on a mission to look for Bergdahl. Multiple soldiers were killed around the time that Bergdahl was taken captive, but there are many other potential reasons – including the facts that we had an offensive surge going on, that there were multiple other dangerous operations going on that these soldiers were involved in at the time, that this was a period where there were statistically more casualties (these numbers go up and down, going through their own lulls and surges), etc.. To blame those deaths on Bergdahl alone is to not understand what was happening on the ground at the time, and Fox News’ military analysts should know this.

There’s also the matter where they want to label Bergdahl as a “deserter” before any military hearing is conducted. As Carville pointed out last night, this is something that the military will deal with in their own way. It is not up to Hannity, O’Reilly or any of the others at Fox News to unilaterally declare this to be the case before a military court rules about it. And just because his fellow soldiers were angry with him and have let that fester during his captivity does not automatically mean that they’re right about the situation either.

Even Clarridge’s bizarre concoction includes the notes that Bergdahl repeatedly attempted to escape. Any of these accounts of him in captivity could easily be him trying multiple ways to lull his captors into dropping their guard so he could escape again.

None of this will make a difference to Fox News, since they’ve already made up their mind what the narrative here is. And I note that a non-Fox reporter who appeared on Hannity last night did repeatedly try to explain this to him without success.

Stewart is making an important point here, and it’s one that really needs to be underscored.

Republican politicians and pundits are screaming about the hostage swap for Bergdahl, saying that this somehow makes us “weak” and “unsafe”. Riiight.

Let’s take a minute and look back at the attempted “arms for hostages” trade of 1986. Keep in mind that at first it was just supposed to be a sale of TOW missiles to Israel who would in turn sell them to Iran for use against Iraq. President Reagan was warned at the time that this was illegal, and that washing the missiles through Israel wouldn’t be illegal. Reagan famously answered his cabinet by saying that he could deal with the legal matter but couldn’t deal with the notion of Ronald Reagan refusing to take an opportunity to get hostages out. To which Cap Weinberger famously answered “visiting hours are on Thursdays”. And the purpose of that arms/hostages swap was to allow Reagan to stand in the Rose Garden with multiple freed hostages, just in time for the 1986 midterms.

Who knew that Ollie North would think it a “neat idea” to take the proceeds of the TOW sales and then give the money to the Contras? Who knew that Bob McFarlane would find himself in Tehran with a bible and a cake trying to play “Let’s Make a Deal”? Who knew the whole thing would blow up when Eugene Hasenfus’ plane got shot down as a Contra resupply operation went bad?

It’s entirely possible that Bergdahl was trying to walk away from the Army. It’s entirely possible that the 5 people released from Gitmo may try to participate in further mayhem now. The former will be established in military court. The latter may never be known – and in fact may never happen since these guys have been out of commission for 13 years and may no longer be of much use to their buddies. But these are debatable matters that the right wing is desperately trying to inflame, just as they have every other thing that’s happened during the Obama presidency.

It’s not debatable whether the sale of missiles to Iran in the 1980s absolutely presented a danger to the US in every way imaginable. It’s not debatable whether Ronald Reagan knew how serious this matter was – he absolutely did. If Andrew Napolitano is concerned about President Obama somehow giving “aid and comfort to America’s enemies”, how does he deal with Reagan’s presentation of TOW missiles to a known hostile state harboring terrorists?

If George W. Bush had made a deal to release a US soldier being held captive, Fox News would be trumpeting this as a sign of Bush’s dedication to the troops and never leaving a man behind. Since it’s Obama taking this action, Fox News wants to find a way to attack it – and to attack the soldier and his family. I think Paul Begala put it best – if President Obama found a way to cure cancer, Fox News would immediately attack him for putting all those oncologists out of work.

What would Hannity have said if someone had run a segment like this about George W. Bush? Would he have accused such a person of committing treason?

I’m sorry this guy is stuck dealing with the Mexican legal system, just I was sorry to see the last guy go through this problem after bringing firearms into a foreign country.

But I have to ask why Fox News isn’t addressing the other parts of this case. They note their opinions that he was apparently chained to his bed and supposedly was beaten by guards. We don’t know these to be facts, and frankly they sound like conjecture designed to garner support for him.

We do know that in his earlier hearings, he lied in court, telling the Mexican officials that he had never been to Tijuana before. This was of course quickly shown to be untrue by photos of him having been across the border at an earlier time. We also know that he attempted to escape his first prison and was then transferred. If his conditions were more restricted at the second prison, one could presume that this was due to his having tried to break out of the first one.

It sounds likely that the Mexican authorities will let him return to the US after these hearings are done, provided that the judge agrees to do so. He’ll likely be told not to come back any time soon. But this isn’t a matter of “victory” for Bill O’Reilly or even for this man. It’s a situation where he should never have been bringing guns across the border, and following that, he should never have lied in court and tried to break out of prison. None of these ideas tend to work out so well.

I have a different point of view on this.

While I agree that you can see a connection between Elliot Rodger’s participation in misogynistic websites and his later behavior, including the planning and execution of his massacre, I wouldn’t say that the websites necessarily caused that behavior. I would say that part of Rodger’s acting out is demonstrated by his participation in these sites, which of course encouraged him in that point of view. I would agree that Rodger’s perspective is a chilling one – and it’s a nasty magnification of one of the more unpleasant areas of misogynism in our culture. At the same time, other cultures are also replete with misogynism without having the regular massacres we keep seeing here.

For me, it’s the same thing as Fox News trying to tie violence to video games like Grand Theft Auto, or to WWE matches on television, or even Bill O’Reilly’s unfortunate obsession with Beyoncé. Just because someone watches a violent movie does not mean that they will automatically commit a crime as a result of it. The argument, to me, is similar to the one presented in the Washington Post, where the reader is meant to think that Elliot Rodger had misogynistic thoughts because he watched too many Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen movies.

From what I’ve seen of his writing, etc, Rodger was an extremely disturbed kid who had routinely been rejected by his peers as a teenager. He recounts multiple instances of trying to ask someone out and being humiliated in the process. Now, most of us would just say “Grow up. Life isn’t fair.” and move on. In Rodger’s case, he clearly developed a deep seated thought that he was entitled to some girl being nicer to him, and when this didn’t happen, his resentment festered. And to be fair overall, we only have HIS version of what happened in these cases – for all we know, he acted so inappropriately that the people he was talking to found him repellent. In many of the cases, what he was doing was repellent even in his own descriptions.

The nature of Rodger’s approach to his killings wasn’t just something that he got from a website. He carefully planned this massacre. He knew that he would need two guns rather than one, because he never intended to be captured alive. He knew that he would actually need THREE guns rather than two because one might jam. He knew that he would need plenty of ammunition and the ability to quickly reload. He also knew that he couldn’t just shoot his roommates, since the sound of the gunfire would have alerted everyone in the area and gotten him arrested before he could get out the door. It also sounds like he wanted to cause more suffering to his roommates by the manner in which he murdered them. But he actually spent months THINKING ALL OF THIS THROUGH. That’s extremely chilling. The tone of his entire approach is made even creepier by the calmness with which he delivered his statements.

I do think you could make an argument that Rodger’s massacre is something out of Grand Theft Auto – only played out with real people, with Rodger not seeing any difference. I don’t know that he ever played these games, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had. And, again, I don’t blame the games. Plenty of other people have played Grand Theft Auto without going on murder-suicide sprees.

The place where I think we can make some progress here is looking at the fact that Elliot Rodger was known to be disturbed, was supposedly on medication to help with his problems, and yet was still able to buy not one, not two, but THREE guns and plenty of ammo and clips to load them. And nobody thought for two seconds about this until after he’d gone on his rampage. I’ve heard the argument from the gun boosters about how they have the right to own a gun if they wish. That’s fine. How about the right of the public to walk down the street without living in fear of some heavily armed and crazed person randomly opening fire on us? The individual absolutely has rights in our society, and those rights must be protected. But we have collective rights as a society, and this is one that the right wing seems to ignore.

A few things people should know in relation to this incident as relates to the Plame/Wilson affair.

Right off the bat, we should take a look at the full interview done with Valerie Plame on this subject. Ed Henry is being knowingly deceptive when he says she “went after the Obama Administration” and was putting pressure on them. Plame noted that what happened was, frankly, a stupid mistake, but was specific when she pointed out that this was not something done to target anyone. Her feeling is that right wingers are trying to draw, in her words, “a false equivalency” to what Cheney and Rove did to her and her husband.

What happened with the press release this weekend was an error, and has been acknowledged as such. We should keep in mind that this was not a covert agent but rather a person known to foreign intelligence in the area as a CIA official. I’m not sure if he was known as the station chief, but he certainly was known as CIA.

What happened with Valerie Plame, as she herself has reminded everyone today, was a deliberate act of retaliation, planned and executed by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney as punishment against Joe Wilson for having publicly criticized the Bush misstatements about some of the reasons given to attack Iraq. The intent was to have several administration people leak Plame’s cover as a NOC agent in their discussions with the media, thus exposing her and reminding Wilson what life could be like without any protection. According to multiple parties, the first person to actually talk to anyone in the media, Richard Armitage, didn’t actually know Plame was a NOC. But the others, including Rove and Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, DID.

When the matter was investigated, Armitage immediately cooperated and publicly apologized once he realized what he’d done. Scooter Libby, on the other hand, blatantly lied and obfuscated in order to protect Cheney and Rove from exposure. When Patrick Fitzgerald realized Libby had stymied the whole investigation, he brought charges against Libby. The whole matter derailed into a prosecution of Libby for lying, and Libby wound up being convicted. But he’d served his purpose – he’d drawn the fire of the investigation onto himself and away from the bigger fish, and he’d shielded those fish from properly being fileted. Libby was sentenced to a jail term and a 250K fine. Before he served a day, Bush commuted his sentence. Libby seemed to disappear from public life after that point, although it was noted that his voting rights were restored a few years ago, in spite of his status as a convicted felon. Given how quiet things have been about Libby since then, I’d frankly venture a guess that he’s been a silent member of various right wing think tanks – functioning as a well-paid “consultant” – meaning that he doesn’t work as a practicing lawyer since he’s been disbarred, but he can effectively serve in the same capacity. He took a big hit for the guys above him and kept his mouth shut – it would make sense that they took care of him afterward. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that fine was effectively covered by friends in high places in the private sector…

This is a completely ridiculous red herring. I’ll give Ludwig props for departing the accepted right wing talking points and coming up with a whole new spin. All the other right wingers have been taking this time to defend gun rights, saying that Rodger killed an equal number of people with a knife as he did with his guns. Which is kooky enough as it is. The point is that he was trying to kill as many people as he could, and he carefully selected weapons that would allow him to accomplish that task.

Looking at his writings about what he was planning, it’s clear that this was an extremely disturbed and extremely intelligent person. He didn’t just grab a gun and run outside. He spent years planning revenge against all the other kids, and he had clearly worked out a system of how he intended to do this. There’s a twisted logic to the way he put this plot into motion – he made sure he had multiple weapons and plenty of ammo, just in case one of them jammed. He made sure that he had two working weapons so that he could kill himself more efficiently rather than go to jail. And he was extremely calm about how he went about this plan – which is probably the creepiest part of the whole thing.

The lesson of what happened here is that we live in a society where someone as disturbed and paranoid as he was can easily obtain and conceal the guns and ammunition that would allow him to commit mass murder without anyone stopping him. He even gave warnings in advance that he intended to do this. And nothing really happened until he finally went through on his threats.

What the right wing is once again fearing with this story is that people will say, as the angry father of one of Rodger’s victims has done, that we really have to do something about gun control. They DO NOT WANT gun control, and they’ve now repeatedly made clear that they’d rather see massacres like this one get repeated than do anything about it. This isn’t a matter of infringing on people’s 2nd Amendment rights. It’s a matter of society needing to take responsibility for this kind of danger within itself.

D’Souza broke the law and got busted. He can try to pass it off any way he likes, but that’s the short and simple version of the story. I’ve enjoyed how his people have tried to minimize his guilty plea, and to minimize the criminality of what he was doing.

But the fact is that he knowingly committed multiple FELONIES. According to prosecutors, they have audio testimony from his associates that he in fact intended to play out his trial like this if he was caught – to initially say “Not Guilty” and try to plead his case on Fox News, and then recant with a “Guilty” statement in court to try to get a reduced sentence. In one way, this strategy has worked. He will now only be sentenced for the single felony of giving 20K to the campaign of a GOP Senate candidate in 2012 via friends of his. (He told his friends to give her money up to the legal limit, and then reimbursed them. This is called “straw man” financing and it’s illegal for obvious reasons.)

I note that the judge in this case has chastised D’Souza in court for telling people this prosecution is somehow political retribution. And D’Souza has now admitted publicly in court that he broke the law and that he knows what he did was wrong.

This isn’t a small matter for D’Souza. He could be looking at 2 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. We’ll know in September, but making appearances like he’s been doing, proclaiming how the prosecution had no case and that sort of thing will only hurt him at that time. Frankly, I believe he’ll get a heavier fine and a year in prison. And Fox News will attack everyone it can when he goes in to serve his time.

By the way, if D’Souza is such an unimpeachably honest and courageous man, how do his supporters explain the whole mess where he had to step down as President of King’s College? You know, the situation where he was caught cheating on his wife with a married woman? (And that woman, Denise Joseph, was going to testify against him in court had he not pled out last week.) Where are the right wing pundits who screamed about Clinton’s infidelities when it comes to this material?

Just because he’s a surgeon doesn’t mean that he knows much about politics. As his public statements have proven.

This isn’t a matter of conspiracies. It’s a matter of Carson trying to smear people he doesn’t like, as he has done in the past with this President. He doesn’t get to throw smears and untrue statements around, and then hide behind Fox News.