If Fox News triggers a mistrial in this case, that would be one heck of a black mark on their record. And that’s the sort of thing that would be worth covering by the mainstream media – “Right Wing Media Outlet Generates Mistrial in Gosnell Trial While Complaining About Coverage”.

Debbie and Lisa, that was an impressive bit of trolling.

But neither of your comments make any sense. What do your comments have to do with Fox News’ misrepresentation of the facts around the Gosnell matter?

I actually don’t have a problem with Perino doing this interview or expressing her affection for Bush. She was a member of his staff and has never pretended to be an impartial commenter. Given that, I can see why she would do this. And it’s obvious why Fox News, in the midst of trying to rehab Bush’s image, would pick her to do the interview.

That said, I agree that if MSNBC had an Obama staffer interview him in 2020, say, Fox News would scream at the top of their lungs about it.

Yes, that’s the same John Sununu. The same Sununu who spent the 2012 campaign insulting President Obama and calling him lazy. The same Sununu who has never apologized for those insults and seems to be on a special retainer with Fox News to regularly come up with new ones.

On the other hand, it’s the same John Sununu who bumbled his way through his tenure as George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff. It was during that time that Sununu accidentally gave us David Souter as a Supreme Court Justice. Sununu famously assumed that Souter was a secretly hard right judge, only to get a big surprise when it turned out that Souter was an independent who tended to vote from a liberal perspective. The hard right never forgave Sununu for that one (witness all their judicial appointments since then – all of them are openly hard right). The left never forgot it – had Sununu not made this mistake, the right wing would have had a 6-3 majority on the Court as of 1991, which would have stood for nearly 20 years and done untold amounts of damage. We have Sununu’s ineptitude to thank for sparing us from that.

Regarding Kortez’s comments, I agree with part of them. It’s absolutely true that Fox News and the right wing really don’t care about what happened at Benghazi, for all their postured “outrage.” There were repeated attacks on embassies and consulates during the George W. Bush presidency that never got a GOP witch hunt thrown at them. The fact is that the GOP tried this as a “Hail Mary” to prop up Romney’s campaign, only to see it blow up in their faces during the second debate. Rather than admit failure, they doubled down.

So now we have this attempted spectacle of a new hearing with “whistleblowers” this week. Really? Three State Department/Intelligence officials who have already been criticizing the lack of response on the night in question, coming out again to discuss the matter at one of Darrell Issa’s infamous hearings? That’s what the GOP thinks “whistleblowers” are? What about the very real whistleblowers that Fox News sneered about throughout the Bush presidency when they discussed things like the warrantless wiretaps and the other shenanigans? And for the new Issa hearing, we now hear from the “whistleblowers” attorney, Victoria Toensing. That’s the funniest touch of all. Toensing? The GOP advocate who tried to make a career for herself in attacking Bill Clinton and playing up the Lewinsky scandal? That Victoria Toensing? The Victoria Toensing who attacked Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame in public after the Bush people outed Plame? The Victoria Toensing who tried to say that David Petraeus was resigning over Benghazi rather than his own scandal? Who in the world would be gullible enough to think of her as a person of any integrity, particularly in this area?

So yes, it’s pretty obvious that the GOP and Fox News would like to keep bringing up Benghazi, not to get at any truths but to try to embarass the President and hopefully stir people up for the 2014 midterms. I agree that the GOP would love for this to be a campaign talking point in case Hillary Clinton runs again in 2016. I agree that the GOP would love to find some way to twist Benghazi into finding some reason, any reason, to impeach President Obama. But then they’ve been trying that canard over and over again, practically since he took the oath of office in 2009. How many times can they play the same tune about impeachment? How many fake scandals can they try to stir up? Fast & Furious? Joe Sestak? Solyndra? What’s the next one going to be? The reality is that the GOP’s best shot at taking the Senate was in 2012, and they shot themselves in the foot. I don’t see them suddenly sweeping both houses, but you never know. Anything could happen. I tend to believe that we’ll just see a continuation of the current gridlock – a Democrat-majority Senate and a GOP-majority House, albeit with a shrinking number of GOP/Tea Party folk holding seats as more of their constituents get fed up with their intransigence.

Kortez’s final comments don’t make much sense, however. The jab about jobs doesn’t line up with the jobs report we just got, showing the unemployment rate dropping again while upwardly revising the numbers of jobs created over the last few months. So the gloomier numbers we saw earlier now look much better. But we haven’t seen Hannity extolling the new numbers, have we? Nor will we. Fox News has taken great pains to talk DOWN any employment or economic numbers for the past four years. Earlier, this was about creating “facts” with which to attack President Obama in 2012 and run him out of office. Now that tactic seems to be running out of pure spite. These guys seem to want to just make as much of a mess as they can.

I do wish that governance was “easy to do”, but in the real world, it’s actually a lot of work. And you have to have both sides talking to accomplish it. What we’ve now repeatedly seen is the President calling for bipartisan work and making repeated offers, including approaches that are friendlier to GOP politicians. This may well result in an immigration reform bill finally passing the Congress this year. But on almost every front, we’ve seen constant, solid obstruction by the GOP. The strategy since early 2009 has been simple – say “I hope he fails”, vote against everything he proposes and then accuse him of having failed. Repeat as often as possible. I’ll give the GOP points for consistency on this, but that’s not how government work gets done. It’s a shame they havn’t learned that lesson yet.

I think this may have been a little peek under the hood. I don’t think Imus was joking at all, and neither was Beckel. Their point was to praise O’Reilly as a showman while trashing him personally. I didn’t see affection in their discussion of his ego. Their point was to say that O’Reilly is so impressed with himself that he thinks he’s found a new wrinkle on the death of Christ.

Some of this is to be expected, in that I believe O’Reilly is the highest paid entertainer at Fox News and there’s bound to be some sniping at him by the other personalities there. But this went a little farther than the usual gripes – there was a real edge in this.

Ellen, you may be on to something there. Given his ego and his position at Fox News, he’s certainly built up an ego that’s fueled a temper even bigger than the notorious “We’ll do it live!” clip. He’s still never thrown that stuff at Beck.

And it’s interesting to me that Beckel would say such things about O’Reilly who tries to come across more even-handed on the air, but not about Hannity. One has to wonder what Hannity is like off the air – is he really that angry and hateful toward anyone not on the far right, or is this just a pose for the viewers and listeners?

Regardless of the Duke case, the primary thrust of this special report is built on a false premise. The Gosnell case isn’t about the media ignoring an outrage. It’s about the fact that he was taking advantage of poor women who didn’t understand what their options were.

There was no “media blackout” of this story and nobody would have thought there was one until Fox News and AM radio pundits began creating that talking point. The story was well-covered in 2011, and particularly from the point of view that Maia describes. Several Pennsylvania officials lost their jobs over their failure to oversee what was going on. There is absolutely no evidence to say that Planned Parenthood approved of what Gosnell was doing or that they thought his procedures as we understand them now were acceptable. The only reason the right wing is trying to get away with that falsehood is to tar PP with the same brush. Further, what Gosnell was doing would not be considered appopriate or even sane in a typical abortion clinic.

I agree with Maia that the best result to come out of the Gosnell matter would be more education for people to know what their reproductive options are. It’s obvious that the women who Gosnell bilked had no understanding of this. I also agree with Maia that it would be better to have more real clinics available to poor women – not just for abortion but for general health in the first place. Had they had such options open to them, people like Gosnell would not be able to take advantage of them.

The point of this case isn’t to attack abortion, and it never was. The point of this case is that poor women have far less options open to them than women who are more affluent. That’s an obvious statement on its face, but in this case, it resulted in death. That’s the real issue that needed to be dealt with here, which was the point of the real coverage that was done on this case in 2011.

The right wing really doesn’t care about that point, and they’ve made that feeling very clear. They just want to make a case that Gosnell is somehow a typical abortion provider so they can scare and shame women away from having an abortion. It sounds like this special report is taking the opportunity to get away with calling women who have abortions murderers. Which should tell you how far over to the right Fox News has been tilting. It’s a shame that the pundits who’ve been pushing this story have so little understanding of the real issues here, and so little empathy for the women who have to deal with them.

I think that’s slayer…

Tom Sea clearly has no idea what the reality is regarding Planned Parenthood and women’s health. His description of a late-term abortion comes from a right wing talking point that ignores why such a procedure would need to be performed. Seems clear he has no experience dealing with medical issues and is just trying to stir people up with some angry comments. Unless he were to provide some factual materials, there really is no way to respond to such a poster.

I’m finding a tremendous irony in the discussion by Fox of the furloughs. Weren’t they saying two months ago that the sequester cuts wouldn’t make any difference? Weren’t they accusing the President of wildly overstating their impact? Hasn’t Fox News been regularly saying that the cuts are minimal and no big deal?

Granted, Fox News went on the warpath about White House Tours being curbed, never acknowledging that cuts had to come from somewhere. But they always pretended that the cuts just didn’t matter. Now that we see that there really are impacts from the cuts, isn’t it interesting to see the Fox pundits complaining about them? Shouldn’t they be admitting on camera that they misrepresented the situation? Wouldn’t an on-air apology be a better approach?

This is just the latest attempt to smear Planned Parenthood, following the failed ideas of tying Kermit Gosnell to them and trying to gotcha their spokesperson at the Florida State House last month.

And regarding the Tsarnaevs’ proclivities, we could also mention that Tamerlan was a fan of Alex Jones. Does that mean that Alex Jones is a jihadist as well?

This is, at its core, Fox News’ attempt to stir up its base on an issue where they know they can’t really do anything. Undoubtedly, we’ll see further swipes like this over the next year as we brace for the midterms.

And here’s the Glenn Beck “WTF?” moment of the week. Frankly, the segment was jaw-dropping.

The reality is you have a young student who was injured along with many other people, and who was questioned about the situation. And he was very cooperative and nobody had a problem. After which, Homeland Security takes the caution label off, since there’s nothing to see here and they do have real suspects with whom to deal. Literally a case of “nothing to see here”.

And here comes Glenn Beck, who’s POSITIVE that there must be a conspiracy or a pony in here somewhere.

I personally enjoyed his comment about how he has ten sources feeding him this information. Really? Would he care to say where any of these people actually work? Are there really 10 people? Or are there maybe two disgruntled employees with a few sock puppet email accounts? Or do any of these people really exist? Of course, I’m not saying that Beck would present imaginary people to buttress his bogus claims. I’m just asking questions…

O’Reilly’s rant somehow forgot that Muslims are not responsible for many of the outrageous murders and attacks we’ve seen over the past ten years. The DC snipers were not Muslims, but their situation was similar to the Tsarnaevs. The guy who murdered the kids in Norway was actually anti-Muslim and stated his position as such. Jared Loughner, James Holmes and Adam Lanza weren’t Muslims. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols weren’t Muslims. But Bill O’Reilly would have us believe that the real threat is from the Muslims. Go figure.

Even stranger was the inclusion midway through the show of Glenn Beck’s odd consipiracy theories. Beck is of course still obsessed with the Saudi student who was questioned and released. Beck doesn’t seem to understand that Homeland Security could show him as a person of interest while questioning him and then drop the status after determining he wasn’t involved with anything. I wonder if this was the big reveal that Beck was threatening last week – when he demanded that President Obama obey him OR ELSE by this past Monday…

Oh boy. Just when you think that the latest Fox News game of “Whack a Mole” was done, here we go again.

President Obama’s remarks today at Planned Parenthood directly addressed the bad behavior we’ve been noting here. He stated in more diplomatic terms that the anti-choice crowd pretty clearly wants to find any way they can to take us back to the 1950s, sending women who need abortions to back alley “doctors” like Kermit Gosnell. And he’s right. These guys have never been happy with the fact that abortion is legal and is protected as a right by Supreme Court rulings.

I agree with Priscilla that it’s outrageous to try to somehow tie Planned Parenthood to Kermit Gosnell. But that’s been the intent all along of the coverage the right wing has been giving the Gosnell case. The whole “outrage” silliness about networks not covering the trial was really intended by the right wing to promote the gory accounts of Gosnell’s crimes as typical of abortion clinics and of Planned Parenthood. No matter that Gosnell has been acknowledged as being a very rare case, one that was full of criminality under existing law, and one that tells a different story than the right wing is trying to spin. No, these guys just want to get the whole idea lumped in together.

And the continuing attempts to tie in the testimony of Alisa LaPolt Snow in Florida can’t be allowed to stand either. Snow was dealing with a Florida House bill (759) that GOP legislators crafted as an attempted public gotcha about fetuses born alive during a botched abortion. Except that 759 doesn’t establish anything not already covered by existing laws, including a federal law. (Aren’t right wingers supposed to not like adding more and more superfluous laws to the books?) The only difference was that 759 had a clause in it forcing the mother to surrender any baby born in this extremely unlikely situation and making it criminal for the doctor not to succeed in saving the life of that baby. Planned Parenthood opposed both of those bits of language, as the former was intended to publicly shame women who have abortions and the latter was intended to scare doctors away from their patients. The Florida GOP caved and dropped at least the former part of the language while softening the latter. At which point, Planned Parenthood dropped its opposition while noting the law is still superfluous.

So what does this have to do with President Obama speaking at PP today? Nothing, other than Fox trying to play the gotcha footage of Snow avoiding the pitfalls being thrown at her by no less than 3 Florida GOP state legislators. As I noted in the past, had she gone along with the semantics the GOP was using, the Fox News headline would have screamed that Planned Parenthood was admitting to infanticide. (The GOP legislators were trying to trick her into saying that the fetus was an infant.)

And Priscilla’s done a good job of showing that the Illinois state legislation was another gotcha attempt, which was sidestepped as usual by the Dems in that house, including President Obama.

Frankly, it’s disturbing how many times the GOP keeps trying this semantic game – proposing laws that are intended only to rile up their base but which have very little real effect in the end. They propose laws that are obviously objectionable and offensive to women, and then act morally outraged when they are called on their behavior. Or they act morally outraged when their political targets don’t take their bait.

In the end, the real purpose here winds up not being to get anything done but to do what Fox News does best – try to score some cheap political points at the expense of anyone they don’t like. In this case, it’s women who have abortions and politicians who protect womens’ rights. The GOP (and Fox News) knows that if they were to ever succeed in somehow banning abortion, the backlash against the GOP would be catastrophic. Women on all sides would oppose GOP candidates until the right to choose was restored, and the GOP brand would be tarnished for decades. They’d essentially be throwing away any chance at the Presidency or any voice in Congress for the rest of our lifetimes. And they know it. But if they bang the drum about it and chip away at the edges of it, they can rile up their base without ever having to take the big step that would finish them. Of course, some of the wackier GOP folk think they can get away with somehow banning it, but those guys are not taken seriously even by Fox News.

The saddest part about this segment is that Dennis Miller was once a relevant and funny comedian. From 1986 to 1990, he did some really funny and pointed material on SNL, dealing with the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, usually starting with the line, “Good evening and what can I tell you?” And then going off into some good material about the stories of the week.

Somewhere around the 1992 campaign, a switch got thrown in his head. I still remember one of his stand-up appearances as shown on HBO in early 1993, during which he stood up for Admiral Stockdale (Ross Perot’s chosen running mate) and became openly furious about Stockdale’s injuries. Over the next few years, his HBO show continued to show signs of him drifting farther and farther to the right. He probably simply went the libertarian route at first – the familiar “Why am I paying so much taxes?” idea. After 9/11, he really went the rest of the way over the side and became pretty openly right wing.

Throughout his career, he’s been known for making pop culture references. Back in the late 80s, this was pretty funny stuff. It didn’t go so well on Monday Night Football. And it sounds especially strange coming out of him now.

Looking at him today, it can be hard to reconcile the angry, bitter man featured on O’Reilly with the angry young comic of the 1980s. You can see the line connecting the two people, but it’s just sad to see this as the result. (It’s a lot easier to understand how Victoria Jackson fell down the rabbit hole.) And it’s strange that O’Reilly seems to be relying on Miller to provide instant humor for his show (usually accompanied by the sounds of guys in his crew laughing at how funny they think Miller is each week).

I appreciate that this article notes the obvious point about Fox News. When it comes to interviewing GOP presidents and cabinet folk, they’re as deferential as can be. When it comes to interviewing Clinton and President Obama, they’re as confrontational as possible. And yet they want us to believe that they’re fair-minded. Right. They’re fair-minded for the most partisan viewers they have.

Fox News is tipping its hand a bit more than usual by giving Pavone this platform.

He, like Fox News, is trying to use this trial to generate publicity for anti-choice memes. The clear intention isn’t to do justice for Gosnell’s victims – that’s already happening in court. The intention is to try to portray Gosnell’s operation as a typical abortion clinic. Fox News just tried that again last night on O’Reilly when he interviewed a right wing GOP congresswoman who signed on to a letter to the various news networks.

BTW O’Reilly has threatened to inflict a special on this subject next Monday. Any chance that he might include people like Katha Pollitt or a proper representative of Planned Parenthood in the show?

What made this segment more frustrating than anything was that while Cunningham was allowed to spew hatred about President Obama without interruption, Joe Trippi was not allowed to finish even one sentence.

Granted that Trippi is not a very strong commentor much of the time. He hems and haws and usually appears to be willingly subservient to whatever Hannity wants to say about Democrats. (In his way, he’s similar to the Alan Colmes of 1996-2008.) But sometimes he does actually try to say something with a point.

And Trippi was trying to respond to Cunningham’s hatred. But before he could say more than a few words, Hannity shouted over him to cut him off, and Cunningham joined in, knowing he could get away with it. Trippi tried to call Hannity on what he was doing, but Hannity continued interrupting him and apparently never heard Trippi’s responses. So Trippi was left to stumble through maybe a third or half of a response to an extremely leading question that had nothing to do with the statement he had been trying to make – a statement that was intended to rebut Cunningham’s hatred. With Trippi derailed, Hannity happily ended the first part of the segment. They returned for a second part, but it didn’t get any better. Frankly, this was one of the more distateful Hannity segments I’ve seen in some time, and that’s saying something.

Brokaw’s point, and the point of the journalist who asked the barbed question of Jay Carney, was to note that when we kill civilians in the Middle East, we engender a lot of understandable outrage. The correct response to that outrage is not to kill civilians. The O’Reilly/Fox News response seems to be to bring on pro-military people and compliant pundits who will talk about how we don’t target civilians on purpose. But that’s a dodge.

The issue isn’t whether someone aimed a drone at a civilian group on purpose. It’s about viewing the civilians that get killed as “collateral damage”. They aren’t just numbers on a sheet, as their families will attest.

The wildest part about this is that Tom Brokaw is by no means a left-wing reporter. He just isn’t toeing a hard enough right wing line for O’Reilly. His comments above are actually quite mild, which is typical for him. I think Ellen is on to something about O’Reilly being upset that Brokaw won’t likely be coming on his show to be yelled at in person. O’Reilly’s ego seems unsuited to admitting that he is not a legitimate journalist or an authority figure that other news figures need to answer to. O’Reilly has every right to pontificate – but he crosses the line when he expects everyone else to kowtow to him.