Last Tuesday, Bill O’Reilly encouraged terrorists to target San Francisco because he was upset that the city voted to ban military recruiters from high-school and college campuses. O’Reilly said “if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco.”

At first, O’Reilly defended his comments as “not controversial.” That didn’t seem to work, so tonight he claimed the whole thing was a “satirical riff.”

In O’Reilly’s view the only real problem is the “internet smear sites” drawing attention to his comments:

Some far left internet smear sites have launched a campaign to get me fired over my point of view. I believe they do this on a daily basis. This time the theme is O’Reilly is encouraging terrorist attacks. Unbelievably stupid. Not unusual with these guttersnipes.

Fairly typical comments from O’Reilly. But he added an unusual twist. O’Reilly promised to publish the names of everyone who supported these “internet smear sites” on his website:

I’m glad the smear sites made a big deal out of it. Now we can all know who was with the anti-military internet crowd. We’ll post the names of all who support the smear merchants on billoreilly.com. So check with us.

It’s unclear where O’Reilly would find such a list. But since he has labeled everyone who supports websites like MediaMatters.org and ThinkProgress.org as “anti-military” it seems to be an effort to intimidate and shame our readers.

At the time this post was published, the promised list doesn’t appear on billoreilly.com. Stay tuned for updates.

UPDATE: Crooks and Liars has the video.

Sens. Bingaman (D-NM) and Graham (R-SC) trying “to iron out language that would be accepted by Graham and would mollify the human-rights activists, as well as other critics.” The shift followed “a flurry of letters from retired military officers” opposing Graham’s provision to suspend habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo detainees.

The Associated Press is reporting that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld met today with Ahmad Chalabi, the discredited neocon darling currently under FBI investigation for allegedly passing U.S. secrets to Iran:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld discussed Iraqi security and political developments on Monday with Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile tainted by the since-discredited claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. [...]

Chalabi met later with Vice President Dick Cheney, and he also had talks with Robert Zoellick, the deputy secretary of state.

Not surprisingly, Cheney and Rumsfeld preferred to have their meetings stay under the radar. Here’s Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank from MSNBC’s Hardball [transcript updated]:

Chalabi’s group, in particularly, had to do with, remember, the [intelligence claims over] mobile biological weapons laboratories and restarting the nuclear program. So he certainly has a key role in this. He is not exactly getting the full red carpet state dinner treatment here. They spirited him in to talk to the Vice President today without allowing any photos, any public coverage of it, wouldn’t even allow him to go to a stake-out afterwards. So, they are giving him some of that treatment, but they also don’t want it to be observed. You’re not going to get that photo of the handshake.

“We take on the orchestrated campaign organized by left wing critics who have whipped up controversy about his satirical riff on the city of San Francisco.” “Satirical riff“?

Sunday’s Washington Post reported that Bush’s political appointments in the DOJ’s civil rights division have pushed “out those who did not share the administration’s conservative views on civil rights laws.”

A quick review of the previous Bush administration civil rights chiefs shows why the department has been driven apart.

Ralph Boyd (2001-2003):

“Perversely enough, [Boyd did not have] much, if any, background in civil rights law or practice.” [Detroit Free Press, 1/27/03]

“[C]areer lawyers, congressional sources and civil rights groups have taken issue with the hiring of two conservative operatives as career lawyers and the reassignment of two top career officials in the Employment Litigation Section. Of the two political operatives hired [under Boyd], one…ran the disputed …sharply critical of preferential affirmative action policies.” [Washington Post, 3/15/02]

“His experience in civil rights is very limited.” [The Nation, 7/23/01]

Alexander Acosta (2003-2005):

“In a speech delivered to the City Club of Cleveland in April 2005, Acosta claimed that the civil rights era was over and a better era has begun””construed by some as the end of a proactive civil rights agenda within the Department of Justice.” [Watching Justice, 6/27/05, Speech to The Cleveland City Club, 4/1/05]

So, nominees with little qualification and experience for the job, and an unwillingness to do perform the functions for which you’ve been called upon. Where have we seen that before?

trying to “downplay and shrug off” new documents showing Alito’s personal belief that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

says 9/11 Commission: “Although President George W. Bush has called weapons proliferation the country’s most serious threat and al Qaeda has sought nuclear arms for a decade, ‘the most striking thing to us is that the size of the problem still totally dwarfs the policy response,’ said commission chairman Thomas Kean.”

Bingaman amendment to restore habeas corpus rights live now on C-SPAN 2. Watch here.

The GAO has just released a long-awaited report documenting the politicized process that led the Food & Drug Administration to block over-the-counter (OTC) access to Plan B, the “morning-after pill,” in 2003.

The blockbuster finding of the report is that then-FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford (a close ally of anti-choice groups) reportedly decided to reject the Plan B application months before the FDA’s study of the drug was completed.

FDA officials, including the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of New Drugs and the Directors of the Offices of Drug Evaluation III and V, told us that they were told by high-level management that the Plan B OTC switch application would be denied months before staff had completed their reviews of the application. The Director and Deputy Director of the Office of New Drugs told us that they were told by the Acting Deputy Commissioner for Operations43 and the Acting Director of CDER, after the Plan B public meeting in December 2003, that the decision on the Plan B application would be not-approvable. They informed us that they were also told that the direction for this decision came from the Office of the Commissioner. … Both office reviews were not completed until April 2004.

Of course, times haven’t really changed. President Bush’s FDA is still putting politics over science, women’s health, and responsible abortion prevention, and Plan B still isn’t available over-the-counter.