By David Swanson

As someone who believes the producers of Fox News should be behind bars for promoting illegal wars and instigating domestic violence, and as someone who advocates never watching it, I feel compelled to speak up against the notion that Fox News is not a news outlet.

Now, Fox News does little investigative reporting. Mostly it chitters and chatters and re-processes. Nor does it stick with reliable information. It intentionally lies and distorts. It also screams and yells, demonizes and infantilizes. But these behaviors just make Fox News a small-time and untrustworthy news outlet that degrades the content and the form of our public discourse. These are not the reasons being widely offered for the declaration that Fox is not a news outlet at all.

George Bush and Karl Rove welcomed $200/hr man-whore Jeff Gannon into several White House press conferences to ask idiotic rightwing questions that only made sense to wackos.

Progressive bloggers exposed (heh) Gannon's past, but his "legacy" is kept alive by White House reporters who continue to ask idiotic rightwing questions. Is there something we can do to put Gannon's legacy to rest?

One strategy that often works is shame. So tonight we will start offering an "award" to the "reporter" who asks the stupidest rightwing question. And what better name could we give this award than The Gannon?

David Gregory recently began tweeting his Daily Reads, and I quickly noticed his overwhelming bias towards neocons, paleocons, and so-called "liberals" who supported Bush's criminal invasion of Iraq and the rest of his disastrous right-wing policies.

Conspicuously absent from Gregory's Daily Reads were progressives who opposed Bush's war and the rest of his policies. He ignores all of us who were right about Iraq when it counted, who marched in the streets by the millions but were blacked out by the Corporate Media, including MSNBC, which fired its only progressive (Phil Donahue) because he dared to even question the mad neocon rush to war.

On Saturday, the Pentagon Post decided to "double down" on the failed Republican smear of Nancy Pelosi, as Marcy Wheeler describes:

Here's the WaPo's math, then, if I'm reading the sourcing correctly here: Two Democratic members of Congress, one Republican member of Congress, one Republican staffer, and one of the intelligence briefers (and Graham's meticulous notebooks, plus another former intelligence official who was familiar with the intent of the briefing), all supporting an argument that they weren't briefed that torture was already used. Those five or six people, against Richard Shelby's story, which was at first quite wishy-washy. According to the WaPo, it did that math and decided it would write a story about irresolvable conflict.

So the Pentagon Post is staking its entire credibility on Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL). How credible is Shelby? Here's what he told John King this morning:

KING: Vice President Cheney wants other memos released. Should we just have full disclosure on all fronts here, transparency, let the American people decide?

SHELBY: Well, that's a tough road to go down. What we are basically doing is weakening our intelligence agencies and we will pay dearly for that. I was in that meeting, Senator Graham, Congressman Goss, Congresswoman Pelosi at that time, four of us were in the meeting.

Really? All the others - Graham, Goss, Pelosi, and even the CIA! - agree Shelby (and Graham) were not at the briefing for Pelosi and Goss on 9/4/02. Marcy gives Shelby the "respect" he richly deserves:

Uh, if four of you were in the meeting, then the CIA's records are wrong, which means we shouldn't trust their version of that briefing. And if not--as seems to be the case--then Shelby's wrong even about the basic circumstances of the briefing.  Shelby's follow-on, "they are the ones that were there. It has been seven years" seems like a giant hedge. Or maybe a confession on Shelby's part that even when he's "there," he's not all there. 

ROTFL! And once again the Pentagon Post got punk'd when it staked its credibility on a Republican.

Republicans (led by Dick Cheney) are fighting every effort to expose the Torture Scandal, with one glaring exception: they are moving at warp speed to "prove" Nancy Pelosi approved waterboarding.

Only she didn't. So they're lying. And so is the Corporate Media.

Abu Zubaydah was the first prisoner waterboarded by the CIA. He was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. Pelosi received her first briefing on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EIT) on September 4, 2002. But the CIA didn't tell her they had just waterboarded Abu Zubaydah!

Here's what Pelosi said on April 23:

Hardball just emailed this:

Next up - what's the story with these anti-tax "tea party" protests? They're popping up across the country but what exactly do they stand for and does it make any sense? That's what we'll ask radio talk show host Michael Smerconish and the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore.

For more on the "tea party" protests, go to:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/09/tea-party-taxes-opinions-columnists-bartlett.html

Is Chris Matthews just a rightwing stooge? He doesn't even mention Saturday's anti-bailout protests by A New Way Forward. Send your protests to hardball@msnbc.com

Chris Matthews smacked Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) for using the idiotic rightwing phrase "Democrat Party." Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) tweaked Issa by saying "Republicanistical Party," but it would be much simpler for Democrats (and pundits) to just ask Republicans if they belong to the "Republic Party"?

On MSNBC's Morning Joe, CNBC's Maria Bartiromo lied about tax increases for small business, and MediaMatters busted her:

small businesses, you know, are putting $250,000 in revenue out there, and they're going to get impacted -- and this is the single largest creator of jobs.

So Bartiromo says small business taxes will be raised if the business grosses over $250,000 in revenue. But that's a lie.

First, a small business that is not a personal business is taxed at corporate tax rates, which will not change under Obama's plan.

Second, a small business that is a personal business will only see higher taxes on the profit (i.e. personal income) that exceeds $250,000, not the gross revenue.

Craig Crawford thinks our near-Depression will kill the newspaper industry.

This is a business that was already in free fall before this recession hit. Readership and advertising revenue had been on the decline for some time. Make no mistake about it: For newspapers, this is a full blown depression.

Without decent ad revenues, newspapers cannot survive. 

The newspaper business model is usually described as a function of total readership because that attracts the biggest advertisers. But the essential ingredient to newspaper success is quality readership. USA Today has more readers than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but trails both in the quality of their readers. 

It's great that Meet The Press host David Gregory has a blog and a twitter feed - so those of us outside the Beltway Bubble can see how completely divorced he is from reality.