On the Brian and the Judge radio show today, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade presented his sunshine-filled vision of Iraq, declaring that “the Green Zone could come down in 6 months” and praising a new hotel to be built in Baghdad. His view was so optimistic he declared that there were “just as many convoy attacks” in the streets of America as there are now in Iraq:

KILMEADE: Do you think one of those people could have said, Barack, now that you’re sitting down here in a wonderful summer day, now that we understand that the green zone could come down in 6 months, they’re building– a five-star hotel’s been cleared to be built inside Baghdad, now that you understand that convoy attacks are down to 1 percent — that’s the same percentage that’s in America! I think there’s just as many convoy attacks in America as there are in Iraq–

JUDGE: Now let’s not get carried away. When’s the last time there was a convoy attack in America?

KILMEADE: Okay, fine. Can you roll with me for second?

Listen here:

Apparently in Kilmeade’s America, he wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this in downtown Columbus, OH:

It was no surprise that during today’s Senate hearing on the Bush administration’s manipulation of global warming science, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) — a notorious global warming denier — defended the White House. Yet in his opening statement, Inhofe took that defense to the extreme, praising the “Unitary Executive Concept” and claiming it “enhances democratic accountability.” He declared that, since Bush has the right to tell his “subordinates” at the EPA to do whatever he wishes, Bush’s “censorship” of the EPA is “a nonissue”:

INHOFE: It can be argued that the “unitary Executive concept” promotes more effective rulemaking by bringing a broader perspective to bear on important regulatory decisions. It also enhances democratic accountability for regulatory decision-making by pinning responsibility on the President to answer to the public for the regulatory actions taken by his Administration. Therefore, I consider this debate over censorship within the Administration to be a nonissue.

Bush’s “unitary concept” — an effective stranglehold over the EPA — has empowered his administration to trample science in the name of promoting his own partisan, anti-environment agenda:

– At the behest of Dick Cheney, the White House eviscerated testimony on global warming by a CDC official, stripping all reference to the health problems associated with a boiling climate.

– By simply refusing to open an e-mail from the EPA on climate change, the White House effectively forced the EPA to reverse its position that global warming emissions constituted pollution that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

– Bush personally intervened to weaken EPA regulations on ozone levels, directly overruling the unanimous consensus of the EPA scientific advisory committee.

– The White House directly pushed EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to deny a state waiver to regulate auto emissions, in direct contradiction of the advice of EPA’s career staffers.

Though it may be a “nonissue” to Inhofe, it’s clear that under Bush, the EPA has morphed into the “Environmental Politicization Agency.”

On Friday at the Netroots Nation conference, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman spoke on a panel about “How the media learned to bend over backwards to please the right.” Krugman discussed the right wing’s success at pressuring the media and how some of that filtered down to him:

KRUGMAN: I could see a little bit of the effects. I was never told to stop writing what I was writing. It was, however, made known to me that I was making management nervous. There were occasional, “Couldn’t you do more straight economics writing?” Pretty much the last time I heard that was in 2005, when I was sort of urged to lay off a bit. The words that stuck in my mind were, “The election settled some of these things.” Basically that all stopped with Katrina, actually.

Watch it (approx. 19:00):

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Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is introducing the The Advance America’s Priorities Act, which is “a package of about 40 bills that have in many cases been single-handedly stalled by one of the Senate’s more conservative members,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). But Coburn and other conservatives are not happy about Reid’s efforts to pass the bundle of popular, bipartisan legislation. Coburn took to the Senate floor last night to “protest” the upcoming bill “for more than an hour.” Bitter about Reid’s tactics, some conservatives have taken to referring to the bill as the “Reid vengeance bill.”