"The Most Interesting Man in the World" re: his opposite.

Open thread below....

Summer is officially here and a lot of us will be doing some travelling in the next few months. This song always gets me in the mood to hit the road. What's your favorite song about a city or place?

From Raw Story -- Chris Hayes: Breitbart ‘a serial manipulator of the media’

On MSNBC’s The Last Word Tuesday night, Chris Hayes questioned why conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart was allowed to “spout off” on CNN about Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). Breitbart implied Tuesday that Weiner had been engaged in inappropriate relationships with multiple young women.

“Am I wrong in my level of outrage that this person who has been so discredited, so many times, is such a serial manipulator of the media is allowed to just come on and spout off like this?” he asked.

“Andrew Breitbart is not known to be the most self-reflective, remorseful person,” his guest, Huffington Post’s Alex Wagner added. “I think in that same interview he talked about the Shirley Sherrod story being a liberal attack on him.”

As they also noted, Wagner didn't think Rep. Weiner did himself any favors by refusing to answer direct questions during his press conference today and I agree. That said, it was pretty astounding to see CNN going after him the way they did on the word of a known liar like Breitbart and allowing Breitbart on the air earlier today to attack him, where even their legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin called out his own network for their behavior.

Following Breitbart’s interview, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told host Randi Kaye that he regretted the network allowed Breitbart to make those claims.

“What Andrew Breitbart was insinuating about [Weiner] with young girls and stuff is outrageous,” Toobin said. “And frankly, it’s too bad that he got to say that stuff on CNN.”

Media Matters has more on CNN's hackery here -- One Year After Debunking Breitbart's "Slander," CNN Welcomes Him Back As Newsmaker.

Kind of a mess on this particular May 31st in 1978. The world was distracted with finances and violence. On the domestic front it was disclosed that Consumer Prices had hit an all-time high for everything from beef to lettuce. Inflation was skyrocketing and homeowners were taking the worst of the drubbing. Internationally, the NATO summit concluded with stinging denunciations of Communist involvement in Africa, the Soviets and Cubans being singled out. In return, Soviet Premier Brezhnev condemned the action by taking to the airwaves and offering a long and lengthy dirty laundry list of Imperialist contretemps as rebuttal. Meanwhile, the Civil War in the former Belgian Congo, now renamed Zaire (and since re-renamed Congo) got the ire of the French and Belgians who sent in troops to quash the uprising, but not without wholesale massacres of Europeans still living there. On this day Morocco sent in its first contingent of troops to act as peacekeepers while French and Belgian forces withdrew. The UN decided to extend its peacekeeping mission in the Golan Heights, since it was deemed a success. Egyptian President Sadat pledged to keep Middle East peace negotiations alive, despite qualms and rejections from the Israelis.

On Capitol Hill a proposal was put forth by Congress to offer Tuition Tax Credits to students and Senator William Proxmire concluded the all-volunteer Army wasn't going to be a success if it didn't encourage recruitment and training of more females.

For scandals, it was Italy's turn and specifically the Italian Opera Houses, as a financial scandal triggered the arrests of over 29 people, mostly prominent figures from such institutions as the La Scala, Turin and Naples Operas. And the age-old Sicilian tradition of knee-capping finally went international with the first such case reported from the streets of Berlin.

What a day, as reported on The CBS World News Roundup for May 31, 1978.

You and what army? Surely President Karzai understands the rules of the game by now. Anything we do while "saving" his country from the scourge of terrorism is a mere "oops" and he really should be too polite to mention these things. Via Raw Story:

KABUL (AFP) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on the US military on Sunday to avoid operations that kill civilians, saying it was his "last warning" to Washington after 14 people allegedly died in an air strike.

Reacting to the alleged deaths of 10 children, two women and two men in an air strike on Saturday in the southern province of Helmand, Karzai said such incidents were "murdering of Afghanistan's children and women."

"The president called this incident a great mistake and the murdering of Afghanistan's children and women, and on behalf of the Afghan people gives his last warning to the US troops and US officials in this regard," his office said, adding that he "strongly condemned" the killings.

Citing initial "reports and heartrending pictures published on media" Karzai's office said 10 children, two women and two men were killed in the raid.

Adopting an unusually angry tone, Karzai said the US-led operations were "arbitrary" and unnecessary".

"The president said that US and NATO troops have been repeatedly told that their arbitrary and unnecessary operations cause the deaths of innocent Afghans and such operations violate human and moral values but it appears that (we) are not listened to," the statement said..

Summer is officially here and a lot of us will be doing some travelling in the next few months. This song always gets me in the mood to hit the road. What's your favorite song about a city or place?

Tonight it's a folk/rock/shoegaze band from Switzerland. Of course, you wouldn't know that if I didn't already tell you, because The Deadline Experience do not sing in French or German, and their English is rock n' roll perfect.

Seems to be a lot of that going around lately. Time was you were practically ordered to legally sing in your native tongue unless you faced banishment from the airwaves and most nightclubs and public venues, which effectively poisoned your career (unless you packed it in and went to England or the States). Not so anymore. In fact, it's becoming increasingly difficult to figure out just where a band is from unless they tell you. And even then, you're not so sure.

So The Deadline Experience are a Swiss duo (augmented by several friends with electronics) who hail from Nyon. They are more or less starting out, having come from different bands and settling into this new venture. They are scheduled to play the JVAL Festival in (I think) Lausanne this August and Face Down is one the tracks from their MySpace page.

Always something new to discover when you hit "browse". Do it at least once a week and you will never be bored.

Rolling Stone has done a great piece about Fox News and its impact on this country. I love this excerpt:

The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.

“What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame,” says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”

Much of the article is similar to what John and Dave wrote about in "Over the Cliff", but the Rolling Stone article reaches even farther. For example, Fox News has created a "fundraising juggernaut" for Republicans, which is what enabled Republicans to bounce back so hard after being trounced in 2008:

But Ailes has not simply been content to shift the nature of journalism and direct the GOP’s message war. He has also turned Fox News into a political fundraising juggernaut. During her Senate race in Delaware, Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell bragged, “I’ve got Sean Hannity in my back pocket, and I can go on his show and raise money.” Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate who tried to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada, praised Fox for letting her say on-air, “I need $25 from a million people – go to SharronAngle.com and send money.” Completing the Fox-GOP axis, Karl Rove has used his pulpit as a Fox News commentator to promote American Crossroads, a shadowy political group he founded, promising that the money it raised would be put “to good use to defeat Democrats who have supported the president’s agenda.”

Just this morning, Fox and Friends ran four separate segments over their 3-hour time slot about Sarah Palin. They didn't stop there, though. There were 3 segments on Chris Christie, and an interview with Michele Bachmann where she got to play coy about her upcoming "major announcement" in Waterloo, Iowa. Then they pivoted to a Palin vs. Bachmann narrative for the last hour.

Anyone with half a brain knows Sarah Palin isn't going to run for President. She is just the next Donald Trump lined up to keep wingnut engagement high while the candidates jockey for funding and position.

Kaili Joy Gray at Daily Kos has it right:

So you can all hop off the Palin Paparazzi Tour of 2011, go back to your air-conditioned offices, sit back, and let her show off her savvy "new social media" skills on Twitter and Facebook—and Fox "News"—and then mock the holy hell out of her for being a fucking idiot. That's all. That is the sum total of the amount and kind of attention she deserves. You don't have to treat her like a serious presidential candidate, or even a serious person. Despite her protestations that she doesn't want media attention, she's starving for it. Hell, she quit her job as governor just so she could devote herself full-time to getting you to give her attention in the pages of your Very Serious papers.

This is our Very Serious Political Media. The Beltway Boys. Today's hot stories include more Breitbart mania, Palin, Bachmann and Christie. This is because they do not really want anyone to think about how Republicans are trying to force a financial crisis on this country by holding a faux debt ceiling vote today which will fail without Very Serious Spending Cuts, or how cynical it is to cry wolf over the national debt while refusing to raise revenues to cover it. They don't want us to keep talking about the Paul Ryan plan to destroy Medicare, or how they'd love to kill Social Security and Medicare with one smooth debt ceiling stone. So instead we get Palin, Bachmann, and a world turned upside down over absolutely...nothing.

Rush Limbaugh wonders if riots aren't part of the Obama administration's "Grand Plan" for the US economy, since he says they are trying to kill the economy. Does that remind you of someone who's leaving Fox?

Limbaugh: inaudible Whadda ya got riots and things happening out there with poets and other people. Long hot summer schedule, and I'm not sure that's not part of the grand plan. The more unrest and chaos there is out there the more the government will be called on to fix it. Same old thing.

I seem to remember a certain summer that had near riots, violence, hate and unrest during the health care town halls and not a peep out of Rush Limbaugh that that was in fact Obama's plan all along or for the government to stop it.

Wisconsin's response to Gov. Scott Walker's anti-union legislation has the right wing nervous because other states are also experiencing buyers' remorse over who they elected, as we've been covering on C&L. Polling is coming out every day backing up those concerns.

Matt Yglesias:

ThinkProgress has done a lot of coverage of controversial policy measures being inaugurated around the country by the new breed of Republican governors elected last fall due to the recession. And according to survey data from Margie Omero at Public Policy Polling, the voters in most of these states (though not all, Nevada’s an exception) aren’t liking the cocktail of budget cuts, union-busting, anti-abortion laws, etc.

Polls show voters in battleground states regret having voted for their new Republican Governors. Since February, Democratic firm PPP released surveys in eight states asking voters “if you could do last fall’s election for Governor over again, how would you vote?” In seven of the eight, the Democrat now would win, with all seven showing double-digit improvements in their margin. (Only Rory Reid in Nevada still trails.) The chart below shows both the actual 2010 margin and the new margin, sorted by the shift.

John Kasich, one of the first Fox News pundits to get a job from the Roger Ailes-led Tea Party movement, has the worst showing of all the new Governors at this moment in time. As MM notes, Limbaugh's having a Beck moment.

Is this just plain incompetence, or is Gov. Soylent Green making yet another one of his wingnutty libertarian points? Whatever the explanation, I'm sure it's just fine. It's not as if there are any sick or elderly people in Florida anyway!

In March, Gov. Rick Scott’s staff said he would accept a $35.7 million “Money Follows the Person” federal health grant.

But the Legislature appears to have decided otherwise. In the 2011-12 budget Scott just signed, lawmakers failed to give the Agency for Health Care Administration budget authority to draw down and spend the money.

Patient advocates were dismayed at the omission, because the money was to have been spent on home- and community-care programs that let disabled and elderly people move out of nursing homes or avoid them in the first place.

The likely reason seems to be that Scott wants to throw a monkey wrench into the implementation of the Patient Protections and Affordable Care Act:

Questions sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services press office today drew an unusually cryptic response: "We continue working closely with states to ensure the benefits of more affordable, quality health care choices are available to all consumers."

Patient advocates say the grant money would have served the interests of both taxpayers and patients by keeping patients in the community and out of nursing homes – and letting some who are already in nursing homes be released to less-confining, less-expensive residential care.

“You end up spending a ton of money…in long-term care” that could be avoided, said Dave Bruns, communications manager for Florida AARP.

McRay and Bruns said they weren't sure whether the omission was an oversight or a deliberate cut for a program that was re-authorized under the 2010 health law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Florida is leading a multistate challenge of the law in federal court, saying that it's unconstitutional because it requires all Americans to obtain health coverage or pay a penalty.