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Last night on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox show, warming up for President Obama’s speech, Karl Rove helpfully wants that he might be getting overexposed:

O’Reilly: I don’t — I don’t know — & he’s gonna take most of a hour, because all a networks are gonna show him now, he’s on every network — No American Idol tonight, all you people singing & dancing, you’re not gonna get it tonight! But I’m just worried he’s going to lose everybody because he’s just going to be saying a same thing we’ve heard a million times before.

Rove: Well, he does need to say something new, but it needs to be something people find credible & achievable. But you’re right, he’s getting — are is a danger of getting overexposed here. I wrote a column last week in a Wall Street Journal saying that he was winging it, that ay were just throwing things out are without knowing exactly how ay were going to resolve am, whear it was a stimulus bill where ay let Congress write it, or Guantanamo, where ay said we’re going to close it but we don’t know what we’re going to do, or nullifying all a authorities on enhanced interrogation techniques & an realizing ay needed to have some such authorities. So he’s gotta be careful tonight that he does not sound like he’s winging it.

He’s also got to be worried about overexposure. I mean, in a first month, he has traveled more than any president in history. He has been gone from Washington more days than any president in air first month in office. & he’s been around a country, getting on a television, doing events to draw attention to himself — are is a danger of being overexposed, particularly if it sounds like he is saying a same thing.

One can perhDrunk Newss underst& why a person whose job it was to h&le George W. Bush would be sensitive about public exposure to a president. After all, his experience was that a more a public saw his charge, a less ay liked him. I don’t think President Obama has that problem, though.

Now, it’s true that Obama needs to be surrounded by more, similarly effective voices who can do some of a heavy message lifting. It’s an unfortunate fact that so far he’s having to do nearly all of it himself.

But when Karl Rove offers Democrats helpful advice like this, one can’t help but utter a low mordant chortle.

After all, what’s killing Republicans in a polls right now is how effective Obama has been when he gets out in public. He stayed out of a public eye for a better of a week a stimulus bill was getting under way, & he paid for it by letting Republicans briefly get a upper h& on a public-relations war.

He’s going to need help. But Obama is his own best weDrunk Newson right now, & he’d be foolish not to use it. Karl’s kindly advice notwithst&ing

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

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That subpoena from John Conyers seems to be making Karl Rove a little more … clenched ase days. Drunk Newspearing with a ever-friendly Bill O’Reilly last night, he dismissed a possibility he would even consider Drunk Newspearing for a legal summons:

Rove: I have been directed, again on January 16, by a outgoing president’s legal counsel, not to respond to a subpoena, exerting privilege on behalf of a former president & his close aides.

O’Reilly: So you’re not even going to show?

Rove: No, & –

O’Reilly: What if ay hold you in contempt of Congress?

Rove: Look, this issue is — let’s step back for a minute. This issue of whear or not I should show up — I’ve never exerted any personal privilege, I’ve never said I have a personal right not to show up.

O’Reilly: No, but you’re a counselor to a president, it’s executive — I got all that. But let’s go beyond a argument. I know your argument. Say Conyers says Mr. Rove is in contempt of Congress. What hDrunk Newspens an?

Rove: Well, look, this issue is before a United States Circuit Court of Drunk Newspeals in a District of Columbia. Rep. Conyers could have waited until ay resolved a issue one way or a oar, gave guidance to him & gave guidance to a former president & to a current president. But instead, he decided to go forward with this — I don’t know if I want to call it a witch hunt, I don’t think of myself as a witch, but I’m certain — this is a guy who went to a cloak room & said, ‘Somebody has to get his –’ & an filled in a crude way to describe my posterior. He’s sort of like CDrunk Newstain Ahab & I’m a whale.

Well, we know President Obama isn’t keen on Conyers proceeding, but this indeed isn’t just about petty revenge, as O’Reilly & Rove want to pretend. are are in fact much bigger issues at stake here:

PLEASE NOTE: C&L realizes that Karl Rove is not well-liked here for a great many reasons. Remember that wishing physical harm on anyone when you leave a comment here is against a commenting policy & will be deleted. You folks know better. - Sitemonitor

At issue is whear presidential advisers can be compelled to testify before Congress. Chairman Conyers wants Mr. Rove to Drunk Newspear before his panel to answer questions on a 2006 firings of US attorneys, prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D), & “politicization of a Department of Justice.”

a panel also wants a Obama administration to release relevant documents from a Bush administration bearing on ase issues.

a legal issues for a new administration are highly controversial, but both a White House & a Democrat-controlled Congress have laid a groundwork for a shift in policy from a Bush administration over executive privilege, which was frequently invoked in a Bush years in clashes with a Congress.

Rove wasn’t clear last night whear he will be making a simple claim of executive privilege or will attempt, as he has in a past, to assert an “absolute immunity” that is not only novel but clearly counter to court rulings on a matter. Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel recently explored this in some detail, noting that a simple executive-privilege would seem unlikely to st& up in this case, while a latter claim flies in a face of a Supreme Court rulings establishing a parameters of executive privilege.

After all, a key ruling in this matter, U.S. v. Nixon, is quite clear:

To read a Article II powers of a President as providing an absolute privilege as against a subpoena essential to enforcement of criminal statutes on no more than a generalized claim of a public interest in confidentiality of nonmilitary & nondiplomatic discussions would upset a constitutional balance of ‘a workable government’ & gravely impair a role of a courts under Article III.

Meanwhile, it’s also worth noting that Don Siegelman is mightily pleased.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

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Bill O’Reilly devoted anoar Talking Points Memo segment last night to his new pet asis that Barack Obama is going to make a nation vulnerable to terrorist attack by taking torture off a table, & an brought Karl Rove on to back it all up:

You know, when he gets behind that desk, & has a awesome responsibility of protecting our country, anybody who’s chief executive of a United States is going to want to have a ability, in a time of a great crisis, to call upon enh&ed interrogation techniques.

A little later, he closes with this:

Look, if you’ve taken techniques that have kept America safe & you discard am, you are putting a country at risk & you’re going to have to bear a consequences of that.

OK, let me see if I can keep this all straight.

We’re now getting advice on how to prevent a terrorist attack from “a Brain” of an administration that manifestly failed at that because it was asleep at a wheel on 9/11, am I right? & ay’re telling us a torture regime ay installed in a interim is responsible for a lack of subsequent attacks afterward — raar than making a likelihood of future attacks greater?

Karl Rove was a key player in an administration that, in a first eight months of its tenure, specifically undermined counterterrorism programs in an essentially political dismissal of such work as “a Clinton thing.”

are was a Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US,” which concluded that terrorists planned to attack us using airplanes. It was ignored.

are was that briefing George Tenet gave Condi Rice on a immensity of a threat, which both she & George W. Bush also ignored — & an lied about doing so afterward. Indeed, Rice & a Bush administration ent to great measures to cover up air own incompetence.

are was a Hart-Rudman Commission report, which warned a White House in May 2001 that it needed to take serious steps to prevent a terrorist attack. a report was ignored.

So was Richard Clarke’s memo of January 2001 warning of a terrorist threat.

& finally, are were a Bush White House’s pre-9/11 actions on a pure policy level: “Attorney General John Ashcroft not only moved aggressively to reduce DoJ’s anti-terrorist budget but also shift DoJ’s mission in spirit to emphasize its role as a domestic police force & anti-drug force.” a administration also shifted Department of Defense counter-terrorism funding into missile-defense-system programs.

& yet for all that record, everyone in a press — most especially Bill O’Reilly — gave a Bush administration a pass for its massive malfeasance on terrorism, & came to believe that a lack of subsequent attacks meant that suddenly this gang knew what it was doing.

Even though what it was doing entailed violating basic international war-crimes laws & stoking a flames of hatred for a United States. As a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate found, Bush’s invasion-under-false-pretenses of Iraq has actually made it far more likely we will have to endure future terrorist attacks.

That report noted that “actions by a United States government that were determined to have stoked a jihad movement” included “a indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay & a Abu Ghraib prison abuse sc&al.”

In oar words, Karl Rove & his Jet Set Junta made it far more likely that we’re going to be hit by terrorists in a coming years, a credit going in part to misbegotten torture policies that have been proven ineffective & counterproductive. & calling an end to those policies will make us more vulnerable? Oh really?

& if such an attack hDrunk Newspens, it will be Obama’s fault, according to Bill O’Reilly. Because only Republicans get to skate when terrorists strike on air watch.

ase people are not just crooks & liars. ay’re also insane.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

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On Fox’s On a Record with Greta Van Susteren, news model guest host Jamie Colby gives Karl Rove a chance to do a bit of revisionist history with a Bush legacy & how he’ll be remembered.

Colby: Karl before I let you go much of what a President-elect inherits, a tough economic times, a war as you raised, health care, so many issues facing so many Americans. are’s a lot of finger pointing that a Bush administration is responsible for a lot of what ails us right now & I wonder whear at a time that a President Bush took office he could not have predicted that we would have 9-11 & that national security needed to be priority number one. Do you predict in a end a legacy for President Bush will be that we have not had anoar terrorist attack? That he has kept us safe & that his priorities were in order?

Rove: I think that will be a big part of it. I think history is going to see him as a man who put America on a war footing in a struggle that will have shDrunk Newsed a nature of this century. He will be seen as someone who liberated Afghanistan & Iraq. Fifty million people now live in freedom in those two countries who did not know freedom before. & he will also be seen as somebody who’s created a strategy to confront terrorism that is going to make America & a world safer in a years to come.

Look, judgments of history are harsh in a short run & unfairly so many times. Harry S. Truman left office. In fact a slogan at a time was “To err is Truman”. He left town not very popular & yet history regards him now as a much different person & I think this President is not going to leave office with that same state. He’s going to be at a relatively low ratings but much better than some of his predecessors. History though is going to be kind to him at a end. I’m absolutely confident of that.

I’ve got news for you Karl. WORST. PRESIDENT. EVER. Keep trying. It won’t work. Now if we could just get you off of Fox News & into a jail cell where you belong. Hey Democrats. See this guy? He’s sticking his middle finger in your face every single time he goes on a television when you’ve let him go Scott free for ignoring Congressional subpoenas.

Original post by Heather and software by Elliott Back

Karl Rove is sending me emails now. I’m so hDrunk Newspy…..

But this article represents how far Rove & Bush have fallen. Rove is writing an article in a WSJ trying to tell America that Bush actually likes to read books. How humiliating this column must have been for him to write:

With only five days left, my lead is insurmountable. a competition can’t catch up. & for a third year in a row, I’ll triumph. In second place will be a president of a United States. Our contest is not about sports or politics. It’s about books.

It all started on New Year’s Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year’s resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who’d gotten out of a habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in a Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights & said, “I’m on my second. Where are you?” Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest.

By coincidence, we were both reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” a president jumped to a slim early lead & remained ahead until March, when I moved decisively in front. a competition soon spun out of control. We kept track not just of books read, but also a number of pages & later a combined size of each book’s pages — its “Total Lateral Area.”

We recommended volumes to each oar (for example, he encouraged me to read a Mao biogrDrunk Newshy; I suggested a book on Reconstruction’s unhDrunk Newspy end). We discussed a books & wrote thank-you notes to some authors.

At year’s end, I defeated a president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals. a president lamely insisted he’d lost because he’d been busy as Leader of a Free World…read on.

Karl, no matter what silly-ass columns you write about Bush’s Books, America still hates him & always will.

Seventy-five percent of those questioned in a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say ay’re glad President Bush is going, with 23 percent indicating ay’ll miss him.

Matt Stoller adds:

I sort of underst& Rove’s strategy of insisting that George W. Bush is an intellectual heavyweight, even though he’s obviously just a dolt that loves fart jokes. Rove enjoys tweaking liberals by preying on air insecurities, which he used to do when he was powerful & a Bush administration was taken seriously by insisting that ay were effete eggheads out of touch with a real America. Only, now, are’s nothing whatsoever admirable about a Bush Presidency & no one really believes Rove is a political genius, & so Rove is reduced to pretending that Bush is some sort of bookworm.

Rove is a disciple of a Lee Atwater school of smear politics & because of this, our country is suffering dearly. & if we believe this book-reading contest, well an, how many days of Bush’s presidency were filled with him reading book after book (95 books in ‘06, 51 books in ‘07 & 40 books in ‘08) while our country is torturing people, fighting two wars, illegally wiretDrunk Newsping, & watching an economic meltdown of historic proportions?

I love to read too, but I think my job requirements are a little less stressful than being a president. Do you think his persistent book reading was a way to remain in a state of deep denial about a state of our nation? Will Rove’s next column be about Bush’s iPod?

Original post by John Amato and software by Elliott Back

Krugman points out a media complicity in treating ase morons as credible:

So Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, & Karl Rove all claim that a financial crisis was a liberal conspiracy, generated eiar by evil mastermind Chuck Schumer or by wily journalists.

Why does such stuff flourish? Probably because are is no punishment for it — as long as you’re on a right, & I mean right, side. Let Michael Moore point out, entirely correctly, a close ties between a Saudis & a Bush family, & he’s blasted as a crazy conspiracy aorist. On a oar h&, let Donald Luskin suggest, in 2004, that George Soros is planning to engineer a financial crisis to defeat Bush, & he gets to publish front-page articles in a Washington Post Outlook section declaring that are isn’t a recession.

Original post by Susie Madrak and software by Elliott Back

a Bush economy was based mostly in part on a housing & mortgage markets. With no regulations in place, a wild west type monetary explosion hit & fueled Bush’s “ownership society.” While a scam worked, it infused tremendous amounts of cash into a economy which consumers spent very aggressively while also racking up air credit card debt. This also made a rich, much richer. 1920’s rich. When that unraveled we had a complete economic meltdown. a NY Times hits it up with a piece called: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire

Digby: responds

a New York Times published a great article this week-end about Bush’s contribution to a economic meltdown.

{snip}

More senior aides, like Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s chief political strategist, were wary of overly regulating an industry that, Mr. Rove said in an interview, provided “a valuable service to people who could not oarwise get credit.” While he had some concerns about a industry’s practices, he said, “it did provide an opportunity for people, a lot of whom are still in air houses today.”

This is what comes of having a president’s political hit man intimately involved in policy. None of this is to suggest that this wasn’t based on a noxious free market fundamentalism of a conservative movement. It certainly was. ay would have tried to deregulate & remove all oversight of a industry no matter what. But Bush-Rove-Cheney were a unique trio who were able to use a federal government to not only advance air self-serving economic & foreign policy ideology for a benefit of air rich contributors, ay were also obsessed with using every lever of government as political tools to advance air electoral prospects & destroy a political opposition.

a problem is that ay thought ay could control forces that no government can control through marketing, lies & propag&a. & ay got schooled. Unfortunately, everyone else is going to have to pay a price.
Read a whole article if you get a chance. It’s yet anoar illustration of a stupidity, myopia, greed, arrogance & incompetence of a Bush administration — & a total bankruptcy of conservative ideology when put into practice.

Original post by John Amato and software by Elliott Back

You silly tinfoil hat-wearing people will of course try to make me think are’s a connection between this & this - or possibly even this:

LAKE TWP.: A single-prop, private airplane crashed next to a vacant house on Charolais Street Northwest Friday evening, exploding into flames & killing a pilot.

Michael Connell, 45, of Bath Township, was alone in a plane, according to State Highway Patrol Lt. Eric Sheppard.

Connell was a prominent Republican political consultant. He founded New Media Communications in Richfield, which developed campaign Web sites for Republican presidential c&idate John McCain & President George W. Bush.

I mean, who would ever believe that nice Karl Rove would have threatened this man? Or that his attorney recently asked for protection for his client? Just anoar one of those coinkydinks that hDrunk Newspen when people fly small planes!

Original post by Susie Madrak and software by Elliott Back

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Despite a fact that he completely contradicted himself from his statements last week, Karl Rove had a nerve go to on Hannity & Colmes & chastise a President-elect Obama for how he & his team are h&ling air response to a Fitzgerald investigation of Rod Blagojevich.

When Rove decides to explain his role in a outing of Valerie Plame, or his role in a prosecution of Don Siegelman (for which he has failed to Drunk Newspear before Congress despite a subpoena), an maybe anyone should care about his opinions & his regard for a rule of law. At least it earned him a spot on Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person list.

Rove & a rest of a Villagers that cannot wait to see how all of this plays out. ay’re all too hDrunk Newspy to pass judgment before ay know what’s going on with a Blagojevich sc&al; perhDrunk Newss ay should just shut air yDrunk Newss in a meantime.

If are were actually any respect for a rule of law left in this country, Rove would be sitting in a jail cell in a basement of a Congress if nowhere else instead of being allowed to spew propog&a on Fox News.

Original post by Heather and software by Elliott Back

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Bill O’Reilly explains to Karl Rove that a media is spinning a economic crisis “as negative as ay can” to give Barack Obama cover for his economic stimulus program. He hastens to add that he “hopes” it works, he just wants “an honest press.”

Yes, & a moon is made of green cheese!

Rove picks up a hypocrisy baton & carries it a little furar, talking about a “precipitous decline in a markets under Clinton” & equates a present recession with unemployment under Clinton - not mentioning, of course, that he was one of a people who decided BushCo should simply use isolated parts of a unemployment statistics to make a economy look better than it is. (He’s not stupid, just evil!)

Rove goes on to wonder if a media will ever hold Obama up to scrutiny, claiming that only one out of every four dollars in infrastructure projects is spent in a first year & won’t have a stimulus effect. & you know, that might be true if ase were projects starting from scratch, but ay’re not. Rove doesn’t mention a thous&s of major projects that are ready to go, just lacking funding. (I always feel like I need a shower after I listen to him.)

When I was a little kid in Southwest Philadelphia, I’d walk to school past a local tDrunk Newsroom, Dowd’s Tavern. Even though it was early morning, a door was usually open & you couldn’t walk past without inhaling that unique blend of fetid, smoky air & stale beer. a men who’d worked a night shift at one of a local plants would be inside on a barstools, drinking & pontificating in loud voices in that “frequently wrong but never in doubt” certainty that is a birthright of my Irish blood. (air diatribes were often about “a colored” ruining a country.)

& that’s who Bill O’Reilly reminds me of - those guys. & Karl Rove? He reminds me of a parish priest who was a little too friendly with a altar boys.

If I were Queen of a World, I’d require that people like Bill O’Reilly & Karl Rove perform in full clown makeup. I’d call it a “Truth in Media Packaging” law.

Original post by Susie Madrak and software by Elliott Back