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Fox Defends ‘Muslim Hater’ Michael Savage, Says He Is ‘Very Supportive’ Of ‘Muslims And Islam’

By Matt Corley on Dec 4, 2007 at 4:01 pm

On Fox News this morning, host Megyn Kelly offered a full-throated defense of right-wing talker Michael Savage, who is suing the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) after it encouraged a boycott against him over a recent anti-Muslim tirade on his show. Amongst other things, Savage called the Quran a “book of hate.”

Kelly and her guests — attorney Trish Deangelis and defense attorney David Wohl — all spoke in support of Savage, who they said is being “targeted” “intentionally” and “maliciously” in “a brutal battle” with an “organization” that took him “out of context” and “sues just about anybody”:

Deangelis: They “said that he’s a Muslim hater. If you watch Michael Savage, you know that is absolutely, that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Wohl: “They take a snippet of it, and they take it out of context unlawfully and they use it to interfere with Michael Savage’s prospective business, that is actionable.”

Kelly: “Should these advertisers want to be seen as caving to CAIR? An organization that is very controversial.”

Deangelis: “Putting misrepresentations in a letter. That’s exactly what they were doing, using fear to harm Michael Savage.”

At the close of the segment, Kelly took a moment to give “one quick final word” and attack CAIR, saying that “CAIR does sue just about anyone who says anything derogatory about it, refusing to acknowledge people’s right to their own opinions about CAIR.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/12/FoxDefendsSavage.320.240.flv]

It’s not surprising, however, that Fox News would rush to his defense. Just as they did with Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” comment, Fox almost always circles the wagons around conservative talkers who get into trouble with offensive comments:

- In August, when right-wing rocker Ted Nugent said he wanted Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to “suck on my machine gun,” Fox’s Sean Hannity refused to “disavow” his “friend and frequent guest.” Other Fox hosts dismissed it as a “joke” from “a man who likes to speak his mind.”

- In September, after Bill O’Reilly made casually racist comments about a Harlem restaurant, Fox defended him, running chyrons on their shows saying: “CNN gets suckered by website” and “Distorting the truth: O’Reilly gets taken out of context.”

- In October, when Rush Limbaugh said troops who opposed the war are “phony soldiers,” phony battle and total mischaracterization of Rush Limbaugh’s comments” and another host saying “the transcript backs [Rush] up.”

Savage has a long record of bigoted attacks on Muslims and the Islamic faith. In April 2006, he even suggested that Americans should “kill 100 million” of “these psychotics in the Muslim world.”

Politics

White House knew of NIE’s judgments for months.

By Faiz Shakir on Dec 4, 2007 at 3:30 pm

Harper’s Scott Horton interviewed an intelligence community official who casts doubt on the White House’s claim that they only recent learned of the NIE’s judgments:

But one highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after Hadley spoke answered my question this way: “This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment.” So what, I asked, if not an intelligence breakthrough, what caused the last-minute change and the sudden issuance of the summary of the NIE? My source had no idea.

Horton’s source adds that though it appears Vice President Cheney “and his team” had “to fold their cards” on “plans for an air war in Iran,” Cheney’s “a tenacious son-of-a-bitch. He may very well be back at it tomorrow.”

Politics

Lou Dobbs gets three-hour daily radio show.

By Amanda Terkel on Dec 4, 2007 at 3:10 pm

TVNewser reports that CNN’s Lou Dobbs is “entering into a deal with United Stations Radio Networks to host a three-hour daily radio show. The show is expected to launch in March and air from 3pmET to 6pmET.” USRN CEO Nick Verbitsky on the announcement:

lou-dobbs.jpg United Stations is incredibly proud to be the radio partner for the new Lou Dobbs Show. Lou is a broadcaster of integrity and quality and plenty of charisma. Lou is also currently voicing exactly what most Americans are feeling, and when you combine that with his ability to entertain and engage listeners, in our medium, that’s a bulls-eye.

Dobbs has repeatedly claimed that undocumented immigrants are causing a leprosy outbreak in the United States.

Yglesias

Hyping Iran

By ThinkProgress on Dec 4, 2007 at 2:28 pm

It should be kept in mind, of course, that George Bush and Dick Cheney weren’t the only ones running around hyping the Iranian nuclear threat all out of proportion to reality. I recall, for example, the March 13, 2007 “New Dem Dispatch” scolding those of us who were too enthusiastic about the idea of diplomacy with Iran:

But let’s not get carried away. Iran still poses a major threat to global stability, regional peace, and U.S. interests. Tehran’s serial defiance of U.N. mandates to stop developing nuclear weapons capabilities is a major challenge to the world’s nonproliferation system. And its strong financial and material support for Hezbollah and Hamas makes it the number one state sponsor of Middle East terrorism.

Oh, well. And of course there were Ken Baer’s antics over the summer.

Politics

Podhoretz’s ‘Dark Suspicion’: Intel Community Trying To Sabotage Bush With NIE

By Ali Frick on Dec 4, 2007 at 2:22 pm

Norman Podhoretz, widely reputed to be the “godfather” of neoconservatism, has been one of the most aggressive hawks clamoring for war with Iran. Podhoretz laid out the “The Case For Bombing Iran” in a June cover story in the right-wing Commentary Magazine. He insisted that the Iranians were very close to developing a nuclear weapon:

[Iran's] effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all. [...]

“[A]ll this negotiating has had the same result as Munich had with Hitler. That is, it has bought the Iranians more time in which they have moved closer and closer to developing nuclear weapons.”

Yesterday’s NIE proved Podhoretz’s claims were false. Rather than modify his views on Iran, Podhoretz — who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 — aired a nasty conspiracy theory yesterday, attacking the authors of the NIE and accusing the intelligence community of deliberately “leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush:”

I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. [...]

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.

After insisting that Iran was “only a small step away from producing nuclear weapons,” and after pushing for military strikes against Iran for months, Podhoretz is apparently determined not to let facts get in the way of his prayers for an Iran war.

UPDATE: Podhoretz isn’t the only conservative desperately spinning the NIE to buttress his hawkish positions. Some other examples from conservative blogs: Read more

Climate Progress

NYT’s Tom Friedman is wrong: We are NOT (yet) the people we have been waiting for to solve global ‘weirding’

By Joe Romm on Dec 4, 2007 at 2:13 pm

In general, I am a big fan of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, one of the few national columnists who writes regularly & intelligently on energy and climate matters. But his recent column, “The People We Have Been Waiting For,” goes off track — twice. First, he writes:

… sweet-sounding “global warming” doesn’t really capture what’s likely to happen. I prefer the term “global weirding,” coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places.

Well, half credit. Yes, “global warming” is inadequate to describe the coming nightmare — but “global weirding” simply isn’t a serious enough term — it could just as easily be used to describe the world’s growing fascination with reality TV (or videos of piano-playing cats and skateboarding dogs).

Also, the word “weird” strongly implies something either supernatural or bizarrely unexpected. What’s happening to the planet is pure science and has been predicted for decades — nothing weird about that except maybe it’s happening faster than most scientists projected. Climate Progress readers know I prefer the term “Hell and High Water” — since at least it does accurately describe what is coming. [Note to self: It didn't catch on. Let it go.] My guess is we’re stuck with “global warming.”

[As an aside, Hunter probably didn't coin the term "global weirding" (see here), and, of course, she's not at RMI any more. I am a big fan of hers since we worked together at RMI, but those seeking her wise counsel on sustainability should go to Natural Capitalism, Inc (for profit) or Natural Capitalism Solutions (non-profit).]

Second, the entire point of the piece is that what gives Friedman hope is a bunch of smart people working on clean energy technology, who he claims are the “people we have been waiting for.” I hate to break the news to Tom, but

  • We’ve had a bunch of smart people working on clean energy technology for about 30 years — and, of course, we’d have a lot more if Reagan and Gingrich hadn’t gutted key applied energy technology programs or if conservatives didn’t block efforts to create a carbon dioxide market.
  • People working on technology are the people global warming Delayers like Luntz, Bush, Lomborg, and Gingrich have been waiting for. The people the rest of us are — or should be — waiting for are political leaders with the wisdom and guts needed to pass laws limiting carbon emissions and accelerating into the marketplace the technologies we developed in the last 30 years.
  • It is way, way premature to say “we” or any group are the people we have been waiting for. Only future generations can say that. If we buck up and start now with the large-scale multi-decade actions needed to avoid catastrophic global warming, we might, come 2050, be viewed as the Greatest Generation of the 21st century. If not, we will surely be viewed as the Greediest Generation of all time, stealing the future well-being of the next 50 or more generations.

That said, I am a very big fan of all the clean energy folks Friedman names:

Read more

Politics

Cheney’s office advocated for Iran attacks ‘on a daily basis.’

By Amanda Terkel on Dec 4, 2007 at 1:40 pm

The BBC reports:

[T]he new NIE will make it harder for proponents of military action against Iran to argue their case.

One source, who has close links to US intelligence, said that members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff continued to call for military strikes against Iran “on a daily basis”.

Atrios adds: “It must be understood that since our intelligence agencies don’t believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program, it also means that they don’t know where such a program would be physically located if it did exist. This means that any desires of Dick Cheney and his people to bomb Iran simply involve… bombing the shit out of Iran.”

Security

Bush On Saudi Rape Case: I ‘Don’t Remember’ If I Brought It Up With King Abdullah

By Amanda Terkel on Dec 4, 2007 at 12:50 pm

This morning, CNN’s Ed Henry pointedly asked President Bush why he hasn’t used his “influence” to “do something” about the 19-year old Saudi woman who was the victim of a brutal gang rape and later sentenced to 200 lashes. The Saudi court blamed her for being an “adulteress who invited the attack.”

Bush refused to answer Henry’s question, simply stating that King Abdullah “knows our position loud and clear.” He said he recently spoke to King Abdullah “about the Middle Eastern peace,” but isn’t sure if he mentioned the Saudi case. “I don’t remember if that subject came up.”

When asked what went through his mind when he first heard about the case, Bush brushed aside his role as head of state, instead saying he would have been “very emotional” if it had happened to his daughter.

BUSH: My first thoughts were these.

What happens if this happened to my daughter? How would I react?

And I would have been — I would have been — I’d had — I would have been very emotional, of course.

I’d have been angry at those who committed the crime. And I would be angry at the state that didn’t support the victim.

And our opinions were expressed by Dana Perino from the pulpit — from the podium.

Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/12/bushsaudiedcnn.320.240.flv]

Despite the President’s strident rhetoric supporting global human rights, the administration has so far refused to condemn the Saudi government and push it to lift the sentence. When asked about the case last month, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said only that the situation is “very discouraging and outrageous. There is an appeals process and we hope that the verdict changes.” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that the administration was “astonished,” but had “nothing else to offer.”

Looks like human rights aren’t as important as old “family friends.”

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Nannies: They’re Good at Taking Care of Kids

By ThinkProgress on Dec 4, 2007 at 12:36 pm

I’m going to have to agree with Ezra that I find Andrew’s opposition to congressional efforts to get healthier foods in public school snack machines a bit puzzling.

Andrew headlines his item “Nanny-State Watch,” and is citing a post from Cato’s Daniel Mitchell called “More Nanny-State Foolishness.”

Think about that language for a minute. Nobody likes a nanny state because nannies are people appointed to take care of children while their parents are busy. Andrew and Daniel Mitchell and Ezra and I, however, are grownups so to have the state step in and act like our nanny is offensive and annoying: we’re being treated like children.

But guess who should be treated like children? Children! Parents, nannies, and — yes! — school officials are supposed to place paternalistic rules on children’s behavior to prevent them from doing things (like eating too much junk food) that seems appealing in the short run but that they’ll come to regret.

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