Who wants to wager that Crowley will be on Hannity tonight for a bit of rehab. Hannity will try to spin this that Crowley was asking a reasonable question blah blah blah. Crowley will insist that she had no idea she could have offended anyone. And everyone will forget to mention the whole Hillary Rosen flap, since it’s not convenient now…

Watters’ account of what happened at the event sounded a bit fishy, particularly as there was missing footage to show what got him tossed out. He admitted that he immediately went after Van Jones with no success, and that when he was challenged as to what he was doing there, he tried throwing gotcha questions about Solyndra and Obama at the Greens until they threw him out.

But no footage was really shown of this. I’d be curious if the Greens have their own footage of Watters being obnoxious and annoying people to the point that the event organizers figured out he was there to disrupt and obstruct.

OTOH all of this was really just a childish affair. A more serious matter came before this segment, when O’Reilly interviewed Sara Carter as though she was a legitimate journalist about border issues, rather than a gossip monger about right wing talking points on the border. He never mentioned her championing the Ramos and Compean story, which has resulted in her credibility being ruined among anyone actually paying attention to the real issues happening on our borders.

Bizarre typo in my sentence – here’s the proper read: “The strange part about it is that his then-newfound moral purity did not compel him to simply come forward about what he had been doing for Nixon under the cloak of the presidency.”

I’ll give O’Reilly a bit of the benefit of the doubt here. Yes, he clearly leans toward the GOP, and yes, he has done multiple interviews and opinion segments where he’s said and done inappropriate things.

However, he has also challenged GOP guests in multiple ways – including his obvious disdain for both Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann’s talking points, and his acknowledgment that the Fast & Furious witchhunt really hasn’t gained any traction.

He’s not the fire breather he used to be ten or fifteen years ago. His friendship with Jon Stewart is an indication of this. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t say ridiculous things – but he also does acknowledge some basic facts when he’s pushed. (None of this excuses his buddying up to Glenn Beck or his refusal to admit Beck’s obvious push to help the GOP and obstruct the Dems)

If anything, both Bernie Goldberg and Mike Wallace pegged him correctly – he’s about promoting himself above all else. And Fox News has given him a great perch to do so. Of course, part of that perch is using the GOP line of the day in every broadcast…

As for Julie Mason, her comments are pretty clear – she was saying that Fox can’t claim to be a “Fair and Balanced”, unbiased network when it had Glenn Beck raving on the air, and has the opinion block of O’Reilly, Hannity and Van Susteren regularly repeating GOP talking points as news stories.

I believe that the sanest of Hannity’s skewed panel last night brought this up, but Hannity dodged it.

Here’s a question: Has Nugent ever donated to the GOP or directly to their presidential candidates? And if so, will Fox News trumpet the idea that the GOP should give the money back?

Muto was not the only one approached to be a mole. He was the only one who agreed to do it. There are plenty of other disgruntled ex-Fox employees out there. Some of them have participated in things like Robert Greenwald’s expose, but usually under a cloak of anonymity.

I think this may be a bit more serious. This is the sort of thing that the upper level people at Fox don’t take lightly. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Beckel at least get suspended for this.

His reaction was actually defensive at first for not knowing they were live, and then he became increasingly morose. Near the end of the segment, after saying he was “going silent”, he muttered “goddamn” to cap things off.

Doocy raising the canard about the Romneys’ old apartment is yet another red herring.

According to the interviews they gave in 1994 in Boston, Mitt and Ann did indeed live in a basement apartment for $62 per month while they were studying together at BYU. It wasn’t fancy, and they had to make do with less. But here’s the key: Neither of them was holding a job. The $62 and all their expenses were covered by Mitt selling stock he had been given by his father. The stock was worth the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars today.

So yes, they did try to live the life of someone who doesn’t have that level of income, particularly since they wanted to show their parents that they weren’t just waiting for their inheritances. But they never really had to make the seriously tough choices most of us make on a daily basis. They could have easily lived in a more expensive place, as they chose to do when they moved into a house in Boston with a loan from Mitt’s father. They also would have had the assistance of their parents had they really needed it – they simply chose to show that they didn’t. Which is admirable, but does not make the case that they truly understand what the less well-off think about the economy.

I agree with the NBA foul play call. This is absolutely a flop play by the right.

Hilary Rosen was not attacking mothers. She was making the accurate point that Mitt Romney’s gender appeal problem is not helped by him saying that his wife is the source of his information about women’s economic issues today. She was pointing out that Ann Romney wouldn’t know much about this area, since she’s never dealt with the economic challenges most women must handle on a daily basis.

Rosen was combining the two areas where Romney is in serious trouble: 1. GOP actions over the past couple of years have driven women away, particularly in recent times with the Limbaugh attack on Sandra Fluke and the reprehensible state legislation around the country designed to attack womens’ rights. The GOP has an even bigger skeleton that the Dems are exploiting – their refusal to support the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Romney’s own inability to appeal to women is exacerbated by these facts, and his trotting out of his wife like this is a sign to Rosen and most women that he’s way too old fashioned in his thinking. 2. Romney and his wife are quite out of touch with how lower income people than themselves deal with things. Romney has already demonstrated this numerous times, with the 10K bet, with the comment about firing people, and with his general sense of entitlement. Romney’s new refusal to publish his tax info is another sign of this – it looks like he’ll have another embarassingly low number for what he actually paid. (Obama by contrast paid 20+ percent, and also donated 22 percent to charity. Add that up and Obama is paying a respectable amount – and he’s willing to pay more.) Romney citing his wife as a source of info on women’s economic issues makes no sense, since she’s never had to do without the amenities the Romneys can easily afford.

Ann Romney would be a fine source of information if you wanted to know about the issues of raising multiple children in a household with a frequently absent husband and father. She would be a fine source of information if you wanted to know about what women go through when fighting diseases like cancer and MS. She would be a fine source of information about how the wealthy try to perform public service. But she is a poor choice if you’re looking to find out what working women in this country are thinking.

I’m sorry but this entire hooplah has been extremely offensive to me. Hilary Rosen’s comments, that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life, were actually quite accurate. Particularly when understood in the context with which they were stated – that Mitt Romney has a serious problem understanding the economic issues working women face and just asking his wife about them does not alleviate the problem. Mitt Romney’s statement that his wife is his source of information on women’s economic woes is itself quite offensive if you think about it for more than a moment.

Rosen wasn’t denigrating stay at home mothers, or even stay at home mothers who have a lot of money and household help, as the Romneys did and do. Rosen was saying that Ann Romney has no frame of reference to talk about what it’s like to work a full time job and also have to take care of your children, who your job is feeding. Romney has never had to work a full time job while supporting multiple children. She has never had to figure out how to stretch a paycheck to accomodate the needs of several people to eat and have a roof over their heads.

My mother worked full time to take care of my brother and myself, and would still come home to cook a meal almost every night of the week. She did not have any nannies, maids or any other help. (If anything, my brother and I were the ones cleaning the home and taking care of everything we could while my mother paid the bills.) This is a life experience Ann Romney never had – it’s something that on its face would be foreign to the Romneys.

Telling Hilary Rosen to apologize for a slight she did not make is one of the most craven and shameful acts I have seen liberal pundits commit.

Gingrich will be back in his berth at Fox News after the convention, assuming that he doesn’t drop out of the race earlier. I expect that Santorum will similarly get a position at Fox as a commentator.

After this year, they’ll be looking to freshen up their commentating – I have a feeling they will drop Sarah Palin by the end of the year in favor of Santorum and other faces.

This has been a hard year for them, and we’re only in early April now. It’s still possible that Romney could win the election – if the economy completely tanks, or if there’s some kind of major incident where they can paint Obama in a bad light. But however the Supreme Court decides on Health Care, it doesn’t seem to be something that will really affect the election.

What is sad for the GOP is that they are once again getting a candidate that most of them don’t even want. Had any of the harder right candidates acted less selfishly, they might have been able to pull together a coalition that would have stopped Romney by now. Instead, they all tried to knock each other out. There’s a great line from the 1983 comedy SCARFACE: “Never underestimate the OTHER GUY’S GREED!”

Michael, the Joe Arpaio scenario is particularly strange, given that he has no business mucking about in this, other than to further his notoriety. The facts are that the birth certificate put forward by Obama, both the long and the short forms, have been substantiated.

There were some loons on the internet who attempted to “prove” that the document was generated on a computer, but this was totally debunked by people who understand what happens when you create a PDF document via scanning software. (Meaning that the computer program broke down the image information into several layers when scanning the hard copy)

As for this entire silliness about Obama’s comments, all he did was opine that the Supreme Court would do well to observe its own history and not just make a political ruling to help the right wing. His point was clear to anyone paying attention and not trying to make hay out of it – he was cautioning them against another Bush v Gore or Plessy v Ferguson ruling. Such a ruling would be a black eye on the honor and integrity of the court.

One can argue that Obama was a bit presumptuous to make the statement, or that he should have waited until AFTER the Court had ruled before wading into it. But there’s nothing sinister about his statement.

On the other hand, the Republican judge who threw the tantrum and demanded the Justice Department give him a 3 page memo about Obama’s statement was clearly doing so for the publicity. Obama never said that the court does not have the right to review laws or to override Congress. He talked instead about watching out for legislating from the bench and judicial activism – two frequent talking points for the right wing that they would be violating by overturning the Affordable Health Care Act. (Of course the same right wing pundits that constantly talk about judicial activism on the left are trying to say that this wouldn’t be so – since it would benefit their cause.)

I’ve been amused by the $16 muffin canard for a while. I noted that O’Reilly has had to adjust his position to admit that it wasn’t just the muffin, although he’s done so far more quietly than when he trumpeted the other idea.

As for the $820,000 for the Vegas conference, I have to admit he has a point. Which is why some people have been resigning about it – it really looks bad to have an agency spending that kind of money just to “scout” the conference. The $4 shrimp is a silly figure, but the other numbers do speak to government waste.

The part that I believe Karl Rove was off on was where he opined that the hotel driving up the costs for the food to pay for the preferential rates on the hotel rooms and conference rooms was somehow illegal. It isn’t, if the payer is willing to pony up the money. The payer is just as able to say “No, this is too much money.”

And the cost for that $16 continental breakfast, as well as for the $4 shrimp hides a few things. The biggest one is that there are a bunch of servers working the room and maintaining the dishes. And there is a kitchen full of people working all day preparing food for all the people at the conference. The cost of the food pays for the chefs and the servers and the other hotel staff who are essentially being turned over to the conference, which is getting free conference rooms and deeply discounted hotel rooms. Winds up being a good deal for the government, which pays way under the market value for the overall package, and a good deal for the hotel, which still brings in a good number for itself. And it fits within the budget the government agency has. But that’s parsing numbers O’Reilly either doesn’t know or doesn’t understand.

This is beyond silly. I went to UC Berkeley – there were multiple classes in, for example, Shakespearean studies. From a literary, historical and dramaturgical persepective.

And apparently as news to Rick Santorum, the University of California and Cal State campuses have many, many classes offered on US History, including a wide variety of perspectives. I believe there may be a few specialty campuses – like a Med School, that don’t feature those classes, but these are campuses you’d attend for grad level medical work – where you wouldn’t be taking classes in anything but that area.

This canard gets brought up time and time again, and each time we hear it, it’s like playing Whack-A-Mole. Again.

I find it interesting that this is the same network that has repeatedly rushed to judgment on any issue where it can take a partisan stand against either Democrats or left-leaners, or both.

Even sillier is the attack on NBC for the editing of the 911 recording of George Zimmerman. I agree that an NBC employee editing this material was unprofessional and inflammatory, and should be properly dealt with. However, if Fox wants to go down this road, I’m delighted. It means that they are ready to openly condemn the works of Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, whose deceptively edited material have caused a tremendous amount of confusion and misery.

I’ve been more intrigued by Hannity’s desperation to see the Supreme Court rule the way he wants on the Affordable Health Care Act. It’s interesting that he also thinks he knows in advance what the High Court will rule, even when nobody else does.

There was also a strange moment in the Juan Williams/Mary Katherine Ham discussion, where O’Reilly opined that Zimmerman was the “Neighborhood Watch Patrol guy” so that to O’Reilly’s view, he was “just doing his job” when he called 911 about Martin. Nobody called him on this. The reality is that Zimmerman appointed himself to do that – and that’s crucial to understanding the situation.

It seems clear that Zimmerman’s chasing of Martin led to a fight between the two guys – one that Zimmerman was losing when he pulled his gun and killed Martin. The only confusion seems to be who initiated the fight – from the cellphone call of Martin to his girlfriend, it sounds like Zimmerman initiated it. But there’s no way to know for sure. Zimmerman’s voice is highly pitched enough that it could well have been him yelling for help. We’ll have to see if further investigation illuminates anything.

Bill, are you still trying to present your opinion about Professor Ogletree’s sarcastic commentary from a while back? I thought you had issued your final comment on this subject and moved on. Does this mean that you’re interested in getting involved in a serious discussion of real issues, and not just a reiteration of Sean Hannity’s desperate attacks on President Obama?

There’s one part of this that is confusing me. What’s the story about the fight between Zimmerman and Martin? Did Zimmerman attack Martin, or did Martin, thinking he was being stalked, jump on Zimmerman?

From what I read, it sounds like Zimmerman initiated the problem by stalking and chasing Martin even after being told to back off. It sounds like a fight then happened between the guys and that Zimmerman then shot Martin in the chest during the fight. Is that essentially what happened here?

The consistent pattern with both O’Reilly and Hannity is that they are vulnerable when the guests actually have a strong set of facts and figures in front of them. It is a usual O’Reilly “gotcha” to a liberal guest to immediately challenge them with a “Yeah? Name ONE example of that!” It is a usual Hannity “gotcha” to immediately challenge any materials if he thinks he can discredit the source of a poll or study.

Unfortunately, the liberal guests, like Alan Colmes when he was Hannity’s regular co-host, usually back down and don’t have all the facts for the debate at hand. It can be very depressing to watch one of them wither in front of obvious mistruths being spoken. But at the same time, these guests are clearly aware that they are only being brought on to be knocked down – since the show is really about O’Reilly or Hannity getting their moment to put them down rather than being about a real examination of the issues.