On his Fox News show today, comedian Glenn Beck interviewed Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) to mock the danger of global warming. In what he billed as an “Inconvenient Segment,” Beck argued that a “smoking gun” memo proves that the proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding on the threat of global warming pollution is based on politics instead of science.

“It turns out, the truth that’s inconvenient is that it’s not like any of this stuff is based on, you know, science. It’s all politics,” Beck said of the danger of carbon pollution. He concluded:

By the way, just so you know, this show has won so many science awards, sometimes we get talking about high-falutin science things like this, and people are like, “What are you talkin’ about?” So let me break it down. Carbon dioxide is basically this. (Exhales.) Look at how much pollution I just put out.

Watch it:

Unless you eat fossil fuels, spewing hot air from one’s mouth is not a major source for pollution…except for Glenn Beck.

Barrasso told Beck that the Obama administration is using the threat of EPA regulation of carbon dioxide “as a club to force cap-and-trade taxes,” but that he is using this memo to say, “Hey look, the science isn’t behind you.”

As Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag explained, however, the White House agreed that the “proposed finding is carefully rooted in both law and science,” and the “OMB simply collated and collected disparate comments from various agencies during the inter-agency review process of the proposed finding.” The author of the skeptical comments forwarded by the OMB was Joseph M. Johnson, a Bush administration holdover in the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. In 2005, Johnson joined the SBA from the Mercatus Center, an anti-regulatory think tank founded by right-wing pollution giant Koch Industries.

In March, Vice President Cheney famously claimed that the country is less safe under President Obama and has since become the right’s fiercest critic of the Obama administration. Today, while campaigning for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, President Clinton “laughed off” Cheney’s attacks:

“I wish him well,” Clinton told CNN while greeting voters after a campaign stop with Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. “It’s over,” he added, apparently a reference to the Bush administration. “But I do hope he gets some more target practice before he goes out again,” Clinton said with a grin before moving along the ropeline.

Watch it:

Last month, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) invited Judge Jay Bybee to testify in front of a subcommittee about his “views” regarding torture and his “role” in drafting the torture memos. The Los Angeles Times subsequently reported that Bybee had chosen to ignore Leahy’s request. Today, however, in a statement during the hearing, Leahy said that Bybee had specifically refused to appear:

Since Judge Bybee, through his lawyers, has declined to testify before the Committee at this time about his role in the drafting and authorization of memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel that permitted torture, I can only presume that he has no exonerating information to provide. Judge Bybee must know that the presumption in our civil law is that when a person fails to come forward with information in his possession that is relevant to a matter, it is presumed to be because the information is negative and not helpful to his cause.

Testifying voluntary before the Judiciary Committee about these now-public memoranda is one way in which Judge Bybee could have helped complete the record of what happened and why but he refused. This is especially inappropriate given that Judge Bybee has hardly maintained silence about these matters.

ThinkProgress asked Leahy’s office if Bybee’s lawyers informed the committee of his decision after the Times’s report. “I have to be vague,” an aide said, declining to give any specifics as to when Bybee refused the request.

Last week, GOP wordsmith Frank Luntz authored a new messaging memo defining the Republican rhetoric on health care reform, in which he argued that his poll-tested words “should be used by everyone” in order to hijack the health care debate. ThinkProgress noted that Luntz’s suggested talking points were quickly embraced by congressional Republicans.

On Bill Bennett’s radio show today, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) followed Luntz’s framing exactly. Here’s how Cantor’s rhetoric today lines up with Luntz’s suggestions:

LUNTZ: “Acknowledge the ‘crisis’ or suffer the consequences. … A better approach is to define the crisis in your terms. ‘If you’re one of the millions who can’t afford healthcare, it is a crisis.’”
CANTOR: “Listen Bill, there’s a health crisis. You know when you have, don’t have coverage, that’s a crisis for you and your family. We need to address it.”

LUNTZ: “The arguments against the Democrats’ healthcare plan must center around ‘politicians,’ ‘bureaucrats,’ and ‘Washington.’”
CANTOR: “But the answer is not to lay it on Washington, to pump up what Washington‘s role in this.”

LUNTZ: “You’ll notice we recommend the phrase ‘government takeover’ rather than ‘government run’ or ‘government controlled.’”
CANTOR: “We all need to be standing up and saying no to a government takeover of our system.”

Listen to Cantor here:

As the Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky has detailed, Luntz’s strategy is to “obstruct health reform by ignoring what Obama is actually offering.” But Luntz is very candid about his strategy of misdirection. Since Republicans currently have absolutely no plan for reforming health care, Luntz advises that it is best to avoid projecting a policy plan and instead focus on language that “captures not just what Americans want to see but exactly what they want to hear.”

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, Luntz also provides his polling and language advice to a plethora of health insurance companies.

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On May 1, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer conceded in a column that waterboarding is torture. Krauthammer argued that torture is justifiable “under two circumstances” and that in those cases “you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding.” But in an interview on Dennis Miller’s radio show today, Krauthammer said that he didn’t mean it when he wrote that waterboarding is torture:

MILLER: And I’m going to move beyond that and say the pertinent question to me is, is it necessary. Where do you stand on this?

KRAUTHAMMER: You know, I’m in the midst of writing a column for this week, which is exactly on that point. Some people on the right have faulted me because in that column that you cite I conceded that waterboarding is torture. Actually, I personally don’t think it is cause it’s an absurdity to have to say the United States of America has tortured over 10,000 of its own soldiers because its, you know, it’s had them waterboarded as a part of their training. That’s an absurd sentence. So, I personally don’t think it is but I was willing to concede it in the column without argument exactly as you say to get away from the semantic argument, which is a waste of time and to simply say call it whatever you want. We know what it is. We know what actually happened. Should it have been done and did it work? Those are the only important questions.

Listen here:

No where in Krauthammer’s original article did he say that he was making the concession for the sake of argument. Given his comments to Miller, it seems that Krauthammer feels comfortable asserting claims in his Washington Post column that he doesn’t actually believe to be true. Responding to falsehoods in a previous Krauthammer column, Yglesias once wrote that “the only question is why The Washington Post thinks it’s a good idea to publish columns that are designed to mislead its audience rather than to inform its audience.” It’s still a good question.