Bill Maher blasts Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney over their Gulf oil disaster comments

On "Real Time" this week, host Bill Maher took on the right wingers for dismissing the Gulf oil spill and the climate change movement.

"Rick Perry says it was an act of God. I think it was an act of Dick Cheney," Maher said, referring to the Bush administration's energy task force. "And it shows the disastrous results of having lobbyists write laws."

He also blasted Rush Limbaugh for dismissing the oil spill as "natural."

The Real Time Host said about Rush, “Here's his quote about the oil spill ‘The ocean will take care of this. It's as natural, the oil] as the ocean water is.’ That's right, a petrochemical stew is very natural to wetlands. You know what, you dipshit? Mercury's natural too -- you don't put it in your Cheerios.”

Finally, he revisited the debate he had with George Will over oil on "This Week".

"Why haven't we actually gotten off the oil? One reason is global warming deniers like George Will. He knows better."

Maher also discussed the failed car bomb attack in Times Square and criticized the war in Afghanistan:

Let's compare Bush to Obama in a more serious way. Bush always used to say "We're fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here." And we would all go "Oh, you moron." But that's basically the policy Obama is doing. Obama may call it something different, but doubling down in Afghanistan and sending more troops in there is fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them here. But I'd like to say, "Memo to the administration: They're already here." So what is the point of us being in Afghanistan?

Mr. Maher’s comments about Dick Cheney, Gov. Perry, and Rush Limbaugh start at about the 2:40 mark , the remaining time the discussion centers on the Times Square attack and Afganistan war in the video: http://videos.mediaite.com/video/Bill-Maher-Panel-050710

Retired US General says Republicans are undermining our national security

Since the arrest of alleged terrorist Faisal Shahzad in New York, a number of Republican politicians have expressed outrage that the naturalized American citizen is being afforded the constitutional rights of citizenship.

Major General (ret.) Paul Eaton told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday, "I am a little surprised that we're here to defend our Constitution against a Republican senator and a Republican representative's attack on it."

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Representative Peter King (R-NY) have both suggested that it was an error to read Shahzad his Miranda rights and to keep him in the civilian justice system rather than immediately handing him over to the military.

"From a national security perspective, it's damaging," Eaton said of their statements. "Right now, the FBI and our police forces are looking over their shoulder every time they hear a Republican come off with a remark like that. ... Since January of 2009, we have seen a relentless attack on our FBI, on our armed services, on our policemen by the Republican Party. Any opportunity that they can find ... they have pursued. ... I want them to cut it out."

"It's a purely partisan approach," Easton said of the Republican criticisms. "They're after trying to frustrate the president in his role as providing for the national security. And in so doing, they're actually attacking the viability of the national security of the United States.”

Similarly, Republicans have been politicizing national security issues in numerous other instances. Last fall, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins testified before Congress that after eight years of constant assault, al Qaeda has been reduced to "a strategy of weakness," which "envisions an army of autonomous terrorist operatives, united in a common cause, but not connected organizationally."

In a recent article Jenkins later cautioned that his warnings to Congress were misappropriated by Republicans to criticize the Obama administration and call for harsher measures. 

Jenkins wrote, "The past decade also saw an unprecedented assertion of presidential authority, electronic surveillance without warrants, the detention of individuals solely on the basis of their having been declared enemy combatants, secret and indefinite imprisonment without trial, and the use of coercive interrogation techniques that before 9/11 would readily have been labeled torture. These were the greatest dangers posed by terror: that it would erode our own democracy, our traditional respect for human rights, our commitment to the law itself. Fortunately, these excesses were challenged in the courts, in Congress and by the electorate, and they are now being corrected."

The Glen Beck Show loses one third of its audience in 3 months

The latest Nielsen ratings show that Fox’s Glenn Beck show just posted another ratings low for this year. The new mark was set last Thursday when the show attracted 1.82 million viewers. The host's previous low for 2010 had been 1.97 million viewers on April 9.

In the world of cable news his numbers are still very good, and most hosts would be very pleased to have them. But look how far Glenn Beck has fallen recently.

In late January the program was averaging 3 million viewers each week. Late last year the show spent month after month hovering around that figure. Today, the viewership is trending around 2 million, which means that in a span of just three months, Glenn Beck’s show has lost nearly one-third of its television audience.

This must be sending up all kinds of red flags inside Fox News, which already struggles to find any big-name advertisers to fill out the commercials on his controversial show. Corporate America, Beck’s much-loved free marketplace, wants nothing to do with him.

There are more than 200 companies that have gone on the record as saying they will not buy ad time on Glenn Beck's show. They include Applebee's, AT&T, Bank of America, Best Buy, Campbell Soup, CVS, Ditech, Farmers Insurance Group, GEICO, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Lowe's, Nutrisystem, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, RadioShack, Sprint, State Farm Insurance, The UPS Store, Travelers Insurance, Verizon Wireless, Vonage, and Wal-Mart.

What's so bewildering about his huge decline in viewership is that the political landscape has not changed during that time. The Tea Bagger movement that Beck is so closely aligned with is supposedly in the midst of a surge in momentum. President Barack Obama is still doing his best, according to Beck, to ruin America. Democrats are still in charge of Congress and are, in the Beck worldview, ripping up the Constitution. Beck's bogeymen are still in place, yet one-third of his audience has lost interest and tuned out.

Maybe his demented ‘wow factor’ is gone, which might have had viewers tuning in regularly just to see what he'd say and do next. But today sitting through one of Beck’s unbearable, redundant shows feels like sitting through detention. The wow factor is long gone. Whatever originality the show might have once had has been replaced with a suffocating sense of sameness that has completely taken control of the operation.

The precipitous Glenn Beck ratings drop is an astonishing turn of events for a show that's supposed to be at the forefront of a political revolution.

Tea Baggers bash financial reform. Are they an astroturf contrived Wall Street dream-come-true?

Given how much news coverage the tea baggers receive it’s surprising that not many in the mainstream media noticed that the Tea Bagger Party is bashing the financial reform bill. This is the same rabble that claims to be incensed over the hundreds and hundreds of $ Billions in bailouts given to Wall Street by the Bush administration.

Even though the Frank Luntz polled and approved distortion ‘Permanent Wall Street Bailout’ jargon parroted by republican leaders in any discussion about financial reform has been thoroughly debunked, the tea baggers accept this emotionally charged but phony jargon  as gospel.

The baggers assert that with its’ passage the government will take over the remaining 5/6 of the economy. Given their outrageous and laughable claims that the government took over 1/6 of the economy with the health care reform law, it’s not very hard to understand that with their twisted logic they would imagine that placing sensible rules on banks to prevent another financial melt-down might equal taking over the remainder of the economy.

Maybe they think the bill could be better, but they’re not offering constructive alternative solutions. The tea baggers are not rallying against Wall Street. They only protest against with what President Obama and Democrats try to do.

The contradiction is rather glaring, and appears to confirm that the tea bagger horde isn’t an independent or issue-based movement, but in reality an astroturf faction formed and paid for by right wing corporate titans. It doesn’t really stand for anything other than electoral defeat of Democrats and electoral victory for Republicans.

This has to be Wall Street’s dream-come-true: a group of easily manipulated simpletons that have seized control of the Republican Party, fooled the media into portraying them as a populist movement; but perversely support only those policies that benefit the wealthiest few, at the expense of the middle-class who are the ones that do all the work in America.

Federal Reserve warned of looming housing bubble and its probable economic impact as early as 2004, chose to do nothing

As early as March of 2004 top Federal Reserve officials debated whether there was a housing bubble and what to do about it. Then Chairman Alan Greenspan argued that dissent should be kept secret so that the Fed wouldn't lose control of the debate to people less well-informed than themselves.

"We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand," Greenspan said, according to the transcripts of a March 2004 meeting.

Atlanta Federal Reserve bank president Jack Guynn warned that "a number of folks are expressing growing concern about potential overbuilding and worrisome speculation in the real estate markets, especially in Florida. Entire condo projects and upscale residential lots are being pre-sold before any construction, with buyers freely admitting that they have no intention of occupying the units or building on the land but rather are counting on 'flipping' the properties, selling them quickly at higher prices."

"The substantial run-up in house prices, which we have followed in Florida and also see in the populous Northeast and West Coast of the United States, may be at least partially attributable to unusually low mortgage rates influenced by our very accommodative policy," Guynn warned.

But Guynn's comments were kept secret until April 30^th 2010, when the Federal Reserve finally released transcripts of Federal Open Market Committee meetings for 2004. When the Fed had previously released minutes of the meeting, the bank downplayed Guynn's concerns. The committee meeting transcripts from 2005 to present are still secret.

Cathy Minehan, the Boston Federal Reserve Bank president, also voiced concerns. "New England's rate of inflation, as measured by the Boston CPI, is rising much faster than the nation's, largely because of a 6.3 percent increase in shelter costs versus a year ago. The high price of housing worries many in the region who find that hiring the skilled workers they need in health care, for example, is made even more difficult by high housing costs," she said. While conceding that raising interest rates could come with its own risks, she argued: "I think the costs to us in terms of credibility would be greater if the situation got out of hand on the upside."

Even Tim Geithner, then president of the New York Fed, raised concerns. "The issue has been raised by Federal Open Market Committee Vice Chairman Geithner and others that our current policy stance may contribute to potential financial imbalances down the road according to the transcript.

Three months later, participants at the June meeting were still concerned. Stephen Oliner, the Fed's associate research director, showed the committee a chart of the growing disparity between home and rent prices, the most obvious indication of a housing bubble.

Had Atlanta Federal Reserve bank president Guynn's warnings been heeded and the housing market cooled, the financial collapse of 2008 may well have been avoided.

House Speaker Pelosi claims the Bush Administration prohibited its own officials from briefing Congress until the September 2008 financial collapse was only hours away.

Nearly two years after the Wall Street meltdown drove the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse, and forced the U.S. government to bail it out with hundreds of billions of dollars of TARP money, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now claims that the Bush Administration prohibited its own top officials who were handling the emerging crisis from briefing Congress until a complete financial collapse was only hours away.

In under-reported comments to journalists at a weekly press conference back in April, Pelosi claimed that the Bush administration knew well in advance that the September 2008 financial crisis would hit, and that Congress would need to authorize a unprecedented and unpopular bailout, but that top officials, including then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, told her that they had been barred from briefing Congress about true extent of the crisis.

House Speaker Pelosi said on September 18th just after Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Presidential nomination, Lehman Brothers had just filed for bankruptcy, and the Federal Reserve had authorized the New York Fed to lend up to $85 billion to insurance giant AIG, that she called Paulson to ask for a full briefing the next morning.

Pelosi recalled, "Paulson said 'that will be too late. That will be too late. Tomorrow morning, 9 o'clock will be too late.' "I asked why am I calling you, why didn't you call me?’ Paulson then said 'We were not allowed to tell Congress, but since you called, we're going to answer your questions.”

Because former Treasury-Secretary Paulson and others would not respond to Pelosi’s comments it is not clear if the Bush Administration's alleged decision not to brief Congress earlier was a calculated strategy to avoid spooking the already shaky financial markets thus worsening the crisis or, try to run out the clock past the 2008 presidential elections and blame the economic collapse on the next administration, or a combination of the two.

On ABC’s 'This Week' HBO host Bill Maher says not all Republicans are racists but racists are more than likely to be Republicans

ABC’s This Week roundtable discussion on Sunday included dialogue on immigration and Arizona’s recently enacted law requiring law enforcement officials to demand identification of all persons suspected of being illegal.

The roundtable panel included George Will of the Washington Post, the Reverend Al Sharpton, HBO host Bill Maher, former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd, and Katrina vanden Heuvel from The Nation magazine.

When the subject of the new Arizona law came up, This Week’s host Jake Tapper asked Bill Maher for his thoughts. Maher said, “The government intrusion, you know, government power is something that really bothers conservatives, unless it's directed toward people who aren't white. You know, I mean, it does seem like there's some of that going on there. I mean... Not all Republicans are racists but racists are more than likely to be Republicans.”

Conservative columnist George Will appeared to be upset by Maher's words. "Mr. Maher, just said, if I heard him right, that conservatives basically are racists and like government intrusion only against people that aren't white," said Will.

"Let me defend myself," responded Maher. "I would never say and I have never said, because it's not true that Republicans, all republicans are racists. That would be silly and wrong. But now days, if you are racist, you're probably a Republican. And that is quite different," explained Maher.

Apparently that wasn't a subject The ABC’s This Week host was willing to cover, and Tapper promptly changed the topic.

Watch the discussion here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSWSbF-HqJw