Yesterday, ThinkProgress noted that on the 10/23 edition of his Fox News show, Bill O’Reilly accused Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling of being a “provocateur” for “the gay agenda” of “indoctrination” after she outed one of her main characters. O’Reilly continued his broadside against Rowling on his show last night, saying the real problem is that she is teaching “tolerance” and “parity for homosexuals with heterosexuals”:

O’REILLY: Here’s — you can talk about this on your radio show tomorrow. There are millions of Americans who feel that the media and the educational system is trying to indoctrinate their children to a certain way of life, and that includes parity for homosexuals with heterosexuals.

And that’s what this Rowling thing is all about, because she sells so many books. So many kids read it, that she comes out and says, “Oh, Dumbledore is gay, and that’s great.” And this — it’s another in the indoctrination thing. That’s what the belief system is among some Americans.

MILLER: I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think you can indoctrinate a kid into being gay. You might indoctrinate him into trying it once and him going, “I guess I’m not gay.”

[crosstalk]

O’REILLY: No, but tolerance. It’s — you know, he’s not going to be gay, but it’s tolerance of it.

Media Matters has the video.

Scientists and public and environmental health experts today “overwhelmingly denounced” the White House’s editing of CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding’s congressional testimony on global warming. They called the edits “frustrating,” “terrible” and “appalling,” and acknowledged that the White House is denying widely accepted scientific conclusions:

“What was removed was an uncontroversial report of what is currently known and believed about the fact of climate change, its health effects and its likely impacts on the United States.” — Dale Jamieson, director of environmental studies at New York University

“All of these [topics] are routinely mentioned in public health coursework across the nation. Each can be found in the pages of leading journals, such as Science and Nature. If anything, they understate the problem.” — Dr. Alan Ducatman, a professor of community medicine at the West Virginia University School of Medicine

“We talk of the politicization of science. In the politicization of this topic — the science wasn’t changed, it was deleted.” — Dr. Linda Rosenstock, dean of the UCLA School of Public Health

DeSmogBlog has more on the White House’s politicization of science.

Via Marc Ambinder, Ron Brownstein runs down the new source of Hillary Clinton’s strength — a surge in support from college educated women, previously a block that was split about evenly between her and Obama. What’s more, hot on the heels of this morning’s Mark Penn-bashing it seems to me that Penn’s explanation for the surge adds up:

Penn argues that Clinton’s upscale support has grown mostly because the campaign debate has shifted this fall from experience to the candidates’ issue agendas, such as the universal health care plan that Clinton unveiled last month.

Indeed. Generalizing from the first person case, I was very skeptical of Clinton initially, then went on to not really buy the “experience” argument that by all accounts non-college voters find persuasive, but was very pleasantly surprised by her health care proposal. And given that her plan is as good or better than her rivals’ offering, now the experience argument plays as more compelling. I will say, though, that I keep being surprised that she doesn’t seem to have a climate change policy and as I guess is typical of male college educated Democrats I still find myself more drawn to Obama, but I definitely think better of the prospect of a Clinton administration than I once did.

UPDATE: Since publishing this post, ThinkProgress has been in contact with the Pentagon, and they have agreed to allow us to participate in the bloggers roundtables.

Today, Glenn Greenwald observes that the military has become “rapidly politicized, fully incorporated into…the model of the Republican right-wing noise machine.” Since January, the Pentagon has sought advice from “political hacks” like Bush/Cheney ’04 aide Steve Schmidt who recently “went over to Iraq to look at the communications capabilities” of the military.

Another aspect of this politicization is the budding ties between the right-wing blogosphere and the military. Last October, the Pentagon announced that it was “starting an operation akin to a political campaign war room” in order to “set the record straight” on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New teams were to “develop messages” focusing “on newer media, such as blogs.”

In February, the Pentagon began holding Bloggers Roundtables to “provide source material for stories in the blogosphere concerning the DoD and the Global War on Terrorism.” But at these roundtables, the Pentagon has reserved space almost exclusively for conservatives and military bloggers. Some examples of the bloggers on the roundtables just this month:

Wizbang
Weekly Standard
Threats Watch
Qando.net
U.S. Cavalry On Point
Griff Jenkins (Fox News anchor)
Air Force Pundit
Military.com
Defense Technology International
Austin Bay

When the program was started in February, the calls occurred approximately once a week; since September, the Defense Department PR team has surged the roundtables’ frequency to nearly every day. Many of these conservative bloggers regularly appear on the calls, receiving unfettered access to military strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. One military official explained the real intent:

[W]e’re trying to do as many of these type of blogger calls as possible to let folks know what is really going on out there and to provide the opportunity for people to hear and write about it.

Despite the regular frequency of the “Blogger Roundtables,” progressive bloggers or anti-war military bloggers are rarely featured. Furthermore, small blogs like that of Fox News anchor Griff Jenkins are featured on the calls while more prominent progressive blogs are not.

On MSNBC’s Hardball today, Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) said that his colleagues, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who introduced a hawkish Iran resolution in the Senate, are “carrying water for the administration, for the hawks inside the administration” by amping up rhetoric in the Senate against Iran. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” said Webb. He then added, “the Cheney element of the administration is well represented in the Senate.” Watch it:

UPDATE: Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) offered a non-binding resolution today “affirming that any offensive military action taken against Iran must be explicitly approved by Congress before such action may be initiated.”

The House just voted 265-142 to approve revised SCHIP expansion legislation, but fell short of the two-thirds needed to uphold a veto by President Bush. Twenty-seven members didn’t vote. The bill would “add $35 billion to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program” and “addressed critics’ concerns about participation by adults, illegal immigrants and families able to afford health insurance.”

Roll call HERE.