Sorry, Patrick. Zimmerman has repeatedly changed his story in interviews he gave to reporters, to law enforcement and to attorneys. But you are correct, that if he continues the lying at trial, the consequences could be quite severe. He could wind up being convicted of perjury as well as 2nd Degree Murder.

It’s interesting that nobody other than Zimmerman has made the argument that Trayvon Martin was “slamming his head into the concrete”, as Zimmerman tried to allege. Even Fuhrman has admitted that this is a false statement by Zimmerman.

The witness testimony today confirms what we’ve already heard from multiple witnesses over the last year – that after Zimmerman started the fight, he wound up losing it, with Martin on top of him. Zimmerman’s response to losing the fight he had instigated, was to pull a gun and kill Martin. I agree with you that the collective testimony about this will likely seal the deal. But I don’t think you may realize what deal is being sealed here…

This bizarre comparison was continued by Laura Ingraham in the evening while she sat in for O’Reilly. In the middle of her usual pattern of interrupting her guests and making snide comments to anyone not as hard-right as herself, she had a representative of Planned Parenthood on, leading to a scenario you could probably write in advance. In addition to asking a series of “gotcha” questions and trying to repeatedly throw the guest off her stride, she brought up the idea that Gosnell was somehow an example of how awful abortion is, and she went on to say that “this is why the country is really becoming more pro-life”. The guest, of course, was stuck trying to extract the irrelevant comments about Gosnell while trying to make the point she had started. (It’s a pity the guest wasn’t ready for this – she could have pointed out that situations like Gosnell’s clinic are indicators of why we need to have safe clinics and options available for women.)

It’s interesting that the Davis filibuster got the treatment it did from Fox News, given that they pretty much ignored it while it was happening, and that they actually played up the idea that it was unsuccessful when the Texas GOP tried to say that she had broken the rules and that they’d passed their bill anyway. This is in direct contrast not only to the bizarre tea party disruptions of various town halls in 2009 and 2010, but to Fox News coverage of the Rand Paul filibuster earlier this year. Except that, of course, Fox News supported the Rand Paul action and they certainly didn’t support this action. When Ingraham got to discussing this filibuster in her interview, she initially sounded supportive of Davis, but it quickly became clear she was being extremely sarcastic.

This segment was the far right talking to itself, as it were. What Cruz was describing was his attempts to throw in poison pills to kill this idea before it can get out of the Senate. Unfortunately for Cruz and Hannity, there are plenty of other senators, including GOP ones, who are experienced enough to be able to deflect Cruz’s wish to obstruct the bill.

The end of Cruz’s comments was once again revealing of the far right strategy. As with the ACA, their intent is to try to obstruct and delay this idea as much as possible in the hope that they can keep anything from being passed. Since the GOP does have the majority in the House, they can use that as a fallback for when the bill passes the Senate. Last week, Hannity was discussing strategy about this with his guests, opining that the GOP in the House should just pass NOTHING or keep it off the floor, thus refusing it to even get a hearing.

They will equate this with the Senate’s refusal to bring up the umpteen House GOP political budget bills – but there’s a difference. The Senate didn’t take up those bills, which were all usually just GOP propaganda moves to defund or repeal “Obamacare”, because those were never intended as serious governance. In the present case, there’s a bipartisan push to get something finally done in this area. But some GOP’ers simply want to continue the stonewalling of any Obama or Democrat initiatives.

In truth, there is an interesting alliance of obstruction here between three factions of the right wing. One faction is the business owners who make good money from keeping the current situation with undocumented workers as is. One faction is the AM radio crowd, who want to play on the xenophobia of their hard right constituents with the thought of building an impregnable wall to keep the Other People out. And one faction is, again, the group that just wants to say NO to anything the Dems try to accomplish, purely out of spite. Together, these factions are clearly growing more desperate, as some of the rhetoric from people like Laura Ingraham is revealing when she began to openly threaten GOP moderates yesterday.

Regardless of this, it’s clear that the GOP leadership does want to see something get done, just out of tactical necessity. They know that if they’re seen obstructing this, they’ll pay for it in upcoming elections as the Chicano/Latino voting base becomes larger and more influential. Murdoch certainly recognizes this – he’s thinking both of the GOP base and of what could happen to Fox News as its viewer pool constricts with time. I believe the GOP establishment hopes to win some Chicano votes, particularly from more traditionally minded Chicano families, who actually do tend to be more conservative. And I find it interesting that the hard right response from Limbaugh and his ilk is “well, they’ll never vote for us anyway so why try”.

This was a strange segment for Fox News, and particularly for Hannity. It sounded like Hannity was trying to serve up an easy ball for Fuhrman and the other guest to spike, and instead he got something he wasn’t expecting. Which is the very definition of a lawyer rule – don’t ever ask a question that you don’t know the answer to…

To be fair, even while Fuhrman’s comments have been deplorable and his record is itself deplorable, he did note several facts that Hannity has been misrepresenting. He admitted that Zimmerman exaggerated his injuries and likely overcompensated for being on the losing end of this fight. The other guest then went on to note what we’ve been repeatedly saying here – that Zimmerman’s instigation of the situation takes away his ability to say that he was just defending himself.

The one thing that everyone seems to agree on, on all sides of this case, is that the Defense Attorney may have just won the WTF Moment award for the whole trial with his opening statement.

The only part of their comments that I agreed with here was that the Defense Attorney’s opening statement was embarrassing. I’m not sure what the point was of making a “Knock Knock” joke as an opening statement in a murder trial.

I had forgotten about Fuhrman’s perjury conviction, and I appreciate the reminder here. If this is the person that Fox News is using as their legal expert, one can only say “Wow”.

Fuhrman’s attempt to dismiss the prosecution by saying they’re “groping at straws” is a bit of projection. The prosecution has a solid case against Zimmerman, not only from the physical evidence and the photos but also from Zimmerman’s contradictory statements.

It’s on the website front page now, but buried in the middle of the cluster of stories.

People should be very careful with the critiquing here. What’s happening here isn’t anything about Bill O’Reilly saying anything moderate or being a RINO or whatever the hard right wing thinks. Bill is presenting a typical GOP leadership position, as he regularly does on his show.

The GOP leadership is painfully aware that the “send em all home!” crowd has been causing them a lot of trouble in elections. As the Chicano/Latino population in this country grows, the GOP’s chances of winning many votes from that ethnic group continue to be low. Continuing to bang the drum of absolute obstinance only tells that group that the GOP doesn’t want them here and really doesn’t want their votes.

O’Reilly’s latest gentle note to the far right just said that the GOP knows it needs to help pass SOMETHING and cannot just fold its arms and yell “NO!” like they’ve been doing for the past 15 years on this issue. There wasn’t anything harsher than that in O’Reilly’s statement, but the far right seems to want to blow it up just as they did when O’Reilly agreed with them about abortion and contraception but told them they needed to have a better debate tactic than thumping the bible.

In this case, O’Reilly took a fairly right wing line by saying that he wanted to see the Border secured first (a usual right wing meme) and that it was the GOP who would need to see to this since the Dems would just vote for “amnesty” (which is the other usual right wing meme for this issue). I believe that both O’Reilly and Hannity have given the right wing warning that they think that after the Senate and House Bills go to a joint committee, the result will be a watered down version of the Senate bill. This may actually be true, but it points out the political game the right wingers are playing here.

The difference between O’Reilly making a fairly polite comment about how “difficult” this issue will be for the GOP and Hannity’s behavior is that O’Reilly wasn’t trying to throw the whole thing out. Hannity actually advocated for the House to pass NOTHING, which would thus allow the GOP to stop this bill from going anywhere. In other words, Hannity and the far right congressmen he had laughing and agreeing with him were saying that they’d rather see the Senate pass its measure and then stonewall the matter by refusing to let anything come up for a vote in the House. No House bill means no joint committee and thus no immigration reform law. (And I’m sure the right wing will see this as revenge for the dozens of times the House has sent political bomb bills to the Senate but never saw them get to the floor, such as their regular attempts to repeal the ACA or gut the budget of programs they don’t like.)

I agree that this latest silliness will allow O’Reilly to refer to himself as an independent and give him another fake scar to wave about how the right wing doesn’t like him any more than the left wing does.

BTW the most interesting part of O’Reilly’s discussion was his attempt to deny that he’s been having serious policy discussions about this issue with various GOP Senators. But as he put it, “I NEVER collude”…

This was a fairly shocking clip, even for the nastiness I’ve seen lately on Hannity. Cunningham got the ball rolling with a pile of name-calling and attempts to intimidate Holder. Holder then unfortunately dropped to his level by telling him to shut up. He then took it to even lower levels with the further comments he made.

Hannity was off camera for a lot of this, but it sounded like he was making faces at Holder when she was talking (She said “You’re looking at me like I’m crazy and I’m not crazy”). So she was being completely ganged up on, which is par for the course for her appearances on Hannity, sadly. She wound up in the end trying to not have the segment go any further into the sewer but it’s obvious she had no intention of shaking Cunningham’s hand. Instead, she threw one last shot at him, calling him a troll.

Frankly, I’ve seen Michelle Malkin get away with much nastier and more hateful statements on Hannity. Yet, she doesn’t get called on them. Cunningham will get called on this one because what he said was pretty openly sexist. Malkin’s statements are simply hateful, without getting into a male-female thing.

There is another aspect to Cunningham telling her to “know her place”. He’s also referring to her position on the network as a resident liberal commentator. Fox News does not employ liberals who will challenge them, at least not on a regular basis. Holder’s place on this program is to offer a soft, non-confrontational sort-of support for Democrats while dignifying the most ridiculous claims made by angry hard right pundits. She’s not about to just say that what Cunningham and Hannity are doing is peddling complete lies. She’s there to say “Well, I support the President (or the AG or the Secretary of State or take your pick) but I agree with you Sean that there’s a problem here…” I personally think that Cunningham thought he was snapping her back into line.

Unfortunately for Cunningham, he may have made himself the story in this case. The impression I got from the other clip is that other female anchors at Fox News were not pleased at his conduct here. We’ll see how this plays out today.

I agree this will be settled quickly. But I don’t see malice here. Shepard Smith was embarrassed and outraged that this happened and he made it pretty clear at the time. He never intended for something like that to get on the air. Granted, neither he nor the other networks should be salivating over these police chases anyway. But he clearly didn’t expect that moment to go over the airwaves.

I have plenty of issues with many of the on-air personalities at Fox News. And occasionally I’ve found Smith to be a bit full of himself and overly defensive. But I’ve also found him to be a straight shooter much more than not. It’s ironic that his show is the one that gets sued for infliction of emotional distress.

Here’s an example of how far off the rails this particular political game has gone.

As of today (Tuesday), there was an important breakthrough in the IRS matter, probably trumping everything that Congressman Issa has tried to drum up about it. Congressman Cummings, after having warned Issa about releasing only a few cherry-picked quotes from the transcripts of his interviews, finally released a single transcript at 205 pages. This transcript shows very clearly that Issa’s cherry picking was intentionally deceptive and in direct contravention of what the interview subjects were saying. Cummings chose to only release one of the transcripts as a gesture of bipartisanship toward Issa, who had erupted last week when Cummings threated to release ALL of the transcripts.

Issa has been regularly stating, as has Gowdy and Chafetz, that there is some kind of dark conspiracy behind this whole matter. Except that the actual transcript we’ve seen shows that this was exactly what the IRS has said it was. It was a situation of IRS bureaucrats dealing with a flood of new tax exemption applications and choosing the wrong way to take care of it. Nothing more complicated than that. But if you listen to Trey Gowdy in this article, or if you listen to the bizarre statements of Issa and Chafetz, you’d think that President Obama was directly supervising the sorting of the exemption applications in the Cincinnati office. Which we can now show was completely false.

So how did Fox News deal with this bombshell? Remember, they’re supposed to be the “fair and balanced” network. So if there’s something that won’t prove the case of the GOP spin machine, they should be open to admitting it. Did they? Of course not. Bill O’Reilly’s show and Hannity’s show completely ignored the transcript release – pretending that it never happened. Except that both of those shows were perfectly happy to cite Issa’s selections when they helped support the GOP agenda.

Greta’s show did mention Cummings’ release, but did so in a really sleazy manner. Greta brought the matter up over halfway through her show, buried in the back end. She quickly discussed the release with GOP-friendly guest Rick Klein and she even held up the transcript in question. She admitted that Issa had been misleading in his selections. But then she took the “a plague on both your houses” approach and accused Cummings of the same thing. Somehow, she would have us believe that Elijah Cummings is trying to spin the situation because he didn’t release every single transcript of every IRS interview. And of course Klein totally agreed with that idea. Except that nobody talked to Cummings about it. Cummings was interviewed by other media, including by Chris Matthews, and I’m sure he would have been happy to discuss this with Van Susteren. But nobody asked him. And Van Susteren, after quickly dismissing the importance of this release, went back to the canard of “just asking” why the IRS planted the question in a presser that put the story on the national map in the first place.

What she and her guest failed to acknowledge is that the IRS clearly knew this was a bombshell and they were trying to get ahead of it. Not the first time or the last time that this has happened with any governmental agency and it’s more than a little disingenuous to hear Greta van Susteren claiming ignorance of it. Following this, Darrell Issa has gone on yet another unsubstantiated witch hunt of anyone he could, hoping that some of the mud he was throwing around would stick to the White House. Unfortunately for Issa, this is only the latest example of the emptiness of that political strategy.

Granted, President Obama’s poll numbers have dropped as a predictable result of the accumulated “scandals” of the last month. And those numbers will slowly come back up over the summer as the various matters are shown to be of little consequence. Benghazi is already off the radar again after Issa’s latest failure to substantiate his charges. The AP matter was acknowledged to be a non-issue. The James Rosen matter has dropped away as there was very little substance to it – and the more anyone dug into it, the more clear it was that this was bad practices by Rosen which may have had disastrous consequences in Korea. The NSA matter is one that may be celebrated by the left and by far-right government/Obama haters, but even Fox News is having trouble hanging on to the story. (It’s obvious that they’re only doing so to see if it can help gin up animosity toward Obama) And now the IRS matter is shown to be just another matter of Darrel Issa wildly overplaying something.

Here we go again with personal attacks on the victim in this case, regardless of their irrelevancy. And the latest poster not only attacks the victim but takes a moment to slap the victim’s mother too. Is this what we are meant to understand as “optimistic, positive conservative discourse”?

For the record, it doesn’t matter if Trayvon Martin was a straight A student or if he was suspended from school. It doesn’t matter if he had a tattoo. It doesn’t matter why he was staying his father. Because the facts are that he was staying with his father, at the residence in the neighborhood in question. He had every right to be there and was violating no laws when he went to the store, picked up some snacks and walked back to watch a ball game at home. This is what was relevant at the moment that George Zimmerman profiled him, stalked him, confronted him and then killed him. It is not a question of whether Zimmerman killed him – it’s a fact. It is not a question of whether Zimmerman had some kind of probable cause for his actions – he was told to back off and let the real police handle the situation. Zimmerman’s insistence on taking the law into his own hands and aggressively enforcing his ideas about neighborhood watch matters resulted in the death of a teenager. Viciously attacking the words of a mother who just lost her son in this manner will not change the fact that she lost her son, nor will it remove the offensive nature of such an attack. And attacking Trayvon Martin for having the temerity to be killed for walking home from the store is a bizarre approach, to say the least.

Cavuto’s on-air explosion and subsequent defensive regroup can only be seen as a sad reflection that his hopes for some kind of general attack on the Obama Presidency aren’t turning out the way he hoped. He clearly was thinking he could somehow get the moral “high ground” by claiming he was above politics, but this belies the fact that he was specifically playing all these stories FOR politics. He can’t have it both ways.

This was one of those manufactured “gotcha” scenarios that Fox News has trotted out about once a year in their regular attacks on Eric Holder. We should remember this is also the case that had Megyn Kelly and Kirsten Powers loudly confronting each other on the air.

As the evidence shows, there’s nothing of substance to this. What the NBBP guys were doing was ridiculous, and it was dealt with. What the GOP guys were doing was clearly intended as a setup, and even after it’s been proven to be such, here comes Hannity trying to throw it back up again in the hope that nobody noticed.

And this was only one of the silly moments in an entire evening of “Let’s attack Eric Holder and then speculate on whether he should resign”. We had all the greatest hits in here, including a bunch of untrue statements about Fast & Furious. (And for the record, the people there trying to blame the death of Agent Brian Terry on F&F and Holder are showing their ignorance on that topic.)

The real purpose behind all of this was revenge for what happened with Alberto Gonzales, whose unfortunate record as AG under Bush (let’s see, politically motivated firings, warrantless wiretaps, repeated non-true statements to Congress, etc, etc) led to his resignation in disgrace. The GOP and Fox News have been hunting for Holder’s scalp ever since the day his appointment was announced. The difference between Gonzales and Holder is that Gonzales really was doing corrupt things, while Holder has been trying to do his job. Darrell Issa has repeatedly tried to smear Holder and at this point the attempts seem to be getting more desperate. Not coincidentally, this entire “special” had a feeling of desperation to it…

I wonder if anyone remembers Hannity’s reactions when celebrities and athletes refused invitations to the Bush White House. Did Hannity support their decision with the same respect for their rights that he’s showing here? Or did he perhaps make comments about them being unpatriotic? Just asking…

Cruz is deliberately being outrageous and Fox News is encouraging the behavior. I have a feeling you’ll see him following Allen West onto the airwaves after his short Senate career is over. If you think about it, he’s taking a pretty smart approach – get some visibility riling up the right wing base while doing nothing in Congress, and then parlay that notoriety into millions on the media and personal appearance train. Hasn’t been a bad thing for Sarah Palin, no reason it can’t work for Cruz.

Cavuto’s scream about cutting the mike belies the entire “fair and balanced” myth, doesn’t it? He can’t have it both ways. He can’t scream at his guest, talk over him and then cut his microphone, and also say that he’s been listening. Cavuto clearly only wanted to hear a pre-programmed answer that would fit his already-formed opinion. It’s a shame that he is unable to listen to the guests he invites onto his program.

The entire exchange was titled by Kelly with the repeated references to the “good Americans” who were complaining about not getting their tax exempt status. Kelly had no answer to the facts McDermott brought up, particularly to the fact that the only group that didn’t get the exemption was a liberal group.

Woodward certainly knows better than this. Frankly, I can only think that he’s just leaning farther and farther over to the right as he gets older.

As Woodward should have been able to respond, Watergate was but one example of many of outright criminality going on in the Nixon Administration. This wasn’t a matter of bureaucrats, policy differences or paperwork. Nixon’s people were grafting, stealing, moving money and pulling all kinds of dirty tricks. Breaking into the office at the Watergate Hotel was just the tip of the iceberg, and it was part of a much broader set of behavior. Woodward knows this, since he and Bernstein broke most of that story at the time. And not only was the behavior illegal, but Nixon was personally involved in it, as his own office tapes confirmed. When the heat got to be too much, he did the infamous “I am not a crook” talk – but even this was a lie. Nixon was absolutely a crook, and so were many of the people in his employ.

We faced this again with the Iran/Contra matter, which was arguably more serious than Watergate in that you had a bunch of people inside the Reagan White House violating not only the Congress but also several pre-existing laws in order to achieve their own agenda. As Caspar Weinberger pointed out at the time, it was illegal for Reagan and his people to sell weapons to Iran, even if he washed them through Israel. (The infamous exchange was preserved by the National Security Archive – wherein Weinberger told Reagan at a cabinet briefing in 1985 that this was illegal. Reagan answered “I can handle the illegality, Cap. But I don’t think the American people can handle that Ronald Reagan didn’t do anything to get the hostages out.” To which Weinberger famously answered: “Visiting hours are on Thursdays, Mr. President.”) Compounding the criminality was the decision to then take the money from these illegal sales and send it to the Contras in Nicaragua, in direct violation of the Congress and the Boland Amendment. As before, the record wound up showing a serious amount of blatant criminality, which frankly should have resulted in Reagan’s impeachment or resignation. People forget this in all the hagiography about how great the Reagan presidency was. As it was, Reagan was able to weather the storm long enough to get out of office without having to endure the disgrace Nixon did.
But this was not what the Reagan people tried to call the “criminalization of policy differences”. It was the pursuit of a criminal policy via criminal means.

The current matters facing President Obama really pale in comparison. You have Benghazi, which was already investigated and found to be a matter of State Department people getting caught flatfooted in the middle of a region-wide riot. You have the IRS matter, which is mostly a situation of filing and sorting that the right wing would like people to think is some kind of sinister plot. (Except for the fact that nobody was prevented from running their political ads, least of all in Ohio, which was inundated with Tea Party materials for the whole time from 2010 through 2012) And you have the press matter, which is sadly legal under the Patriot Act and the Espionage Act, the former of which was loudly supported by AM radio and Fox News under Bush. So I am forced to ask in looking for the deadly scandal that Fox News insists is here: “Where’s the beef?”

This is a case of projection by Fox News. I would agree that Fox News desperately needs stories like this on an emotional level, and that they are hoping to parlay this. The whole idea is to repeat trivial questions and assertions and then tie them together into a seemingly organic whole. Done enough times, they can pretend that they’ve established a “history” of “corruption” and/or “sinister behavior”. Thankfully, there are sites like this one to correct the record and rebut these guys every time they do it. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, but it’s necessary.

If Fox News really thinks it’s being persecuted, someone should think about researching the very real issues that social justice and protest groups faced with Hoover’s FBI back in the day.