“The president’s series of speeches on Iraq over the past two weeks hasn’t convinced Americans that he has a plan for victory: 38% say he has one, 58% say he doesn’t.”

The caucus “asked for a meeting with Alito last month but never got a response. … ‘We never heard back from anyone in Alito’s office,’” said CBC spokeswoman Myra Dandridge.

AirAmerica’s Sam Seder appeared today on CNN to debate the “war on Christmas” with Bob Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute. (Seder is pictured below holding up an ad for the “holiday party” thrown by Fox News parent company, News Corp.).

It was quite a performance. Watch the video:

(Quicktime)

Transcript:

SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it’s almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

PHILLIPS: Is it a war on Christmas, a war on Christians, a war on over-political correctness or just a lot of people with way too much time on their hands?

SEDER: I would say probably, if I was to be serious about it, too much time on their hands, but I’d like to get back to the operational ties between Santa Claus and al Qaeda.

Read more

Today on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) taught Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) a lesson in constitutional law. At Byrd’s insistence, Frist was forced to admit that the so-called “right” to an up-or-down vote — what Frist calls the “Constitutional Option” — is “not in the Constitution.” Watch it:

(QuickTime)

On Fox News this Sunday, Frist argued the opposite:

I think it would be against the intent of the founding fathers and our Constitution to deny Sam Alito an up or down vote on the floor of the United States Senate.

Full transcript below: Read more

During last month’s street riots in France, Fox News ran a banner during a news segment, reading: “Muslim riots.” Billionaire Saudi Prince al-Walid bin Talal, who owns 5.5% of Fox News, was unhappy with the tagline:

I picked up the phone and called Murdoch… (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty. Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots.

Talal gained notoriety after 9/11 when he blamed U.S. policies for the terrorist attacks.

Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti refused to confirm or deny that the call took place but “acknowledged the network changed the banner after receiving complaints.”

On November 6, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace interviewed his father, CBS reporter Mike Wallace, about the elder Wallace’s new memoir. It was a real tear-jerker:

C. WALLACE: Well, it’s a great book. It is a great life. I couldn’t be prouder of both. And I love you.

M. WALLACE: I love you. And I’m proud of you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

C. WALLACE: After that, I had to remind myself there’s no crying in Sunday morning talk shows.

But in an interview a month later with the Boston Globe, Mike Wallace made some comments critical of President Bush. Chris Wallace quickly changed his tune. From a NewsMax article via Americablog:

“Fox News Sunday” anchorman Chris Wallace says father Mike Wallace has “lost it”…

“He’s lost it. The man has lost it. What can I say,” the younger Wallace lamented to WRKO Boston radio host Howie Carr on Friday.

“He’s 87-years old and things have set in,” the Fox anchor continued. “I mean, we’re going to have a competence hearing pretty soon.”

At Fox News, blood may be thicker than water, but nothing, it seems, trumps loyalty to the Bush administration.

According to this Justice Dept. memo, chances aren’t good. The memo states that the “plan failed to pass muster under each and every factor the Supreme Court has established for gauging whether or not a redistricting plan will reduce minority electoral opportunity.” (Via Kos)

Over the weekend, Pope Benedict warned that “rampant materialism” was “polluting the spirit of Christmas.”

Apparently, the conservatives in charge of the federal government don’t agree. This morning on CNN, Time reporter Mike Allen reported that President Bush and his allies will be “doing all kinds of things…reminding people the economy is good.” (For what it’s worth, the people don’t agree. Sixty-three percent of Americans view the economy as either “bad,” “very bad,” or “terrible.”) The Speaker of the House will be joining in the charade:

The Speaker of the House — Dennis Hastert of Illinois — will be out Christmas shopping on camera, so you’ll see [conservatives] reminding people of the good news “” if there was inflation, things like that.

Of course, perhaps the Pope is wrong. According to Florida Rev. Tim Bumgardner, during his Dec. 1 appearance on the O’Reilly Factor, shopping is the reason for the season.

Rev. Tim Bumgardner: Be American. Celebrate Christmas. People spend more money. Jesus makes people want to spend money!

O’Reilly: I agree. I’m with you.

What does the Pope know about Christmas anyway?

A day before President Bush accepted Harriet Miers’ withdrawal from her nomination to the Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) gave White House chief of staff Andy Card a “frank assessment of the situation in the committee and in the full Senate.” Frist’s “frank assessment” represented the culmination of the right-wing’s efforts to stop Miers from receiving a single hearing, let alone an up-or-down-vote in the full Senate.

After Miers’ nomination was pulled, the Washington Post’s David Broder said that “there is no plausible way the White House can insist that every major judicial nominee deserves such a vote.”

Frist seems to have found a way – just forget the Miers debacle ever happened. On Fox News Sunday, Frist trotted out the pre-Miers talking points:

So I think it would be unconscionable “” I think it would be wrong “” I think it would be against the intent of the founding fathers and our Constitution to deny Sam Alito an up or down vote on the floor of the United States Senate. I have stood from day one on principle that these Supreme Court justices “” nominees deserve an up-or-down-vote, and it would be absolutely wrong to deny him that.

Our video diagnosis of Frist: selective amnesia.

Chris Horner is counsel at the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received more than $1.3 million in funding from oil giant ExxonMobil. Horner “is also part of the Cooler Heads Coalition, “a group set up ‘to dispel the myth of global warming.’”

But when Horner attended last week’s U.N. Climate Change conference, he appeared not as a lobbyist, but as a journalist.

Horner attended the State Department’s Dec. 7 briefing with press credentials from the right-wing Washington Times. ThinkProgress spoke with Andrew Buncombe of London’s Independent, who confirmed that Horner was at the press-only briefing without even a notebook in hand. In a Jeff Gannon-style presentation, Horner promoted the Bush administration position, suggesting the U.S. position be portrayed as leading a “new consensus.”

In fact, the United States position is neither new, nor does it resemble anything like a consensus. More than 150 countries, including nearly every industrialized nation except the United States and Australia, agreed “to engage in talks aimed at producing a new set of binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions that would take effect beginning in 2012.”

Horner is not a journalist. He has published just a single op-ed in the Washington Times since 2003, and has never written a hard news article for the paper, according to a database search.

But he is quite experienced at underhanded tactics. He drew up plans, funded by ExxonMobil, to destroy Europe’s support for the Kyoto treaty on climate change.” The plan hoped to emulate the White Houses’s “success” in stalling progress on climate change: “In the US an informal coalition has helped successfully to avert adoption of a Kyoto-style program. This model should be emulated, as appropriate, to guide similar efforts in Europe.”