As a leading Republican Party propagandist, Bill O’Reilly often holds himself up as an arbiter of “family values.” In 2004, of course, O’Reilly and his employer settled a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a former Fox employee for an undisclosed sum. Now Gawker is reporting that O’Reilly is involved in what ultimately may become a much bigger scandal:

Last summer, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly came to believe that his wife was romantically involved with another man. Not just any man, but a police detective in the Long Island community they call home. So O’Reilly did what any concerned husband would do: He pulled strings to get the police department’s internal affairs unit to investigate one of their own for messing with the wrong man’s lady.

On “Countdown” last night, Keith Olbermann and Markos Moulistsas rightly savaged the National Geographic Channel for producing a Fox News style interview with George Bush on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Olbermann noted that while Bush refers to 9/11 as a “monumental” and “significant” event but he never uses word like “tragic” or “sad.” Moulitsas suggested that the reason Bush did not describe the attacks as “tragic” is because he and his party did not view the attack as a tragedy but rather as an opportunity to install a more authoritarian regime inside the government.

The Bush interview and the release of Dick Cheney’s memoir were strategically timed to come out around the tenth anniversary of the terror attacks next month.

MSNBC:

Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson lay in a coffin, draped in an American flag, in front of a tearful audience mourning his death in Afghanistan. Soon an old friend appeared, and like a fellow soldier on a battlefield, his loyal dog refused to leave him behind.

Tumilson’s Labrador retriever, Hawkeye, was photographed lying by Tumilson’s casket in a heart-wrenching image taken at the funeral service in Tumilson’s hometown of Rockford, Iowa, earlier this week. Hawkeye walked up to the casket at the beginning of the service and then dropped down with a heaving sigh as about 1,500 mourners witnessed a dog accompanying his master until the end, reported CBS.

GOP Rep. Dan Lungren, a member of the House Leadership, encountered hostility from his constituents at a second town hall over the weekend. But, unlike an event earlier this month in which a young woman in the audience who challenged him on the issues was forcibly removed, this time it was Lungren who threatened to leave, eliciting a chorus of “boos.”

Think Progress:

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After the corporate media ignored his narrow loss to Michele Bachmann in the Ames Straw Poll earlier this month, Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, the Big Government libertarian presidential candidate, and his supporters have been desperately seeking attention — primarily in the form of the same sort of claims of victimhood we hear from the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Sean Hannity and other self-righteous fringe dwellers.

In an interview with MSNBC on Friday, however, Ron Paul attempted to insert himself into upcoming coverage of Hurricane Irene over the weekend by saying provocative things about FEMA.

In the interview, Paul, 76, lambasted FEMA and yearned for the olden days when Americans and their local governments were left to fend for themselves in the wake of natural disasters:

Scott's lips are sealed

From the moment Floridians heard that the penalties for Gov. Rick Scott (Tea/GOP) “losing” emails sent to and from his transition team ranged from a $500 fine to IMPEACHMENT (yeah, baby!), the story grabbed our attention in the way a big, juicy, limping mouse claims the attention of a cat on a diet.

Now Florida Democrats are starting to have fun with that mouse, launching the Rick Scott Email Recovery Fund to help track down the missing missives.

Here’s what happened. Scott, as is his wont, privatized communication handling during the two months after he bought the election and before he was inaugurated. During this time, he was assembling his cabinet and staff, and determining his administration’s agenda. Almost of these emails concerning the public’s business were deleted in mid-January, immediately after Scott took office.

That’s the short version. The long version has us smelling a rat.

Source: David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam via RMS/MSNBC

Over the past week or so, there has been considerable coverage of the results of new study on the tea party that tracked the rise of the “movement” from 2006.

The first news that came out of the study, which was introduced by its authors — David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, who are also the co-authors of the book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us” — in a New York Times’ piece titled, “Crashing the Tea Party,” was that they found yet more evidence that the most durable myth about the phenomenon — that it is a grassroots uprising of what Profs. Campbell and Putnam called “nonpartisan political neophytes” — is patently false.

To the contrary, their research underscored what many observers have long-suspected — that the tea party is really nothing more than the same racist social conservatives who have been seeking dominion over American politics since the Reagan era.

But there was another finding from the study that is even more damning of the fake grassroots tea party phenomenon — a factor that makes the tea party’s total domination over Republican Party leaders in Congress even more puzzling:

Last summer, as a public service to our right-wing Christian friends, particularly those who live in the South, we asked, “Why is God Smiting the Deep South?”

The article was intended as a wake-up call, because Republicans need to realize that God is punishing them for their hatefulness, warmongering, prideful ignorance and selfishness. He wants them to turn away from their hatred and fear of blacks, Latinos, gays, Arabs, Muslims and the billions of other people on the planet who are not old white Republicans. He wants them to renounce their evil ways and put their time and their tithes toward good works — like feeding the hungry, healing the sick and housing the homeless.

Last summer, the South was being punished in the form of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which primarily affected red and purple states along the Gulf Coast — a region that was still struggling to recover from the wrath of hurricanes Katrina and Ivan. We also pointed to the Exxon Valdez spill that smited red queen Sarah Palin’s Alaska in 1989.

First-time visitors to California often notice that there are very few brick-faced buildings. If you watch the video above, taken outside a building that was apparently under construction in Virginia presumably quite close to the epicenter of the 5.8 earthquake that occurred there today, the reason for this will become instantly clear.

Building codes in earthquake country discourage the use of masonry facings, including East Coast style brick and stone-facings, because, during quakes the bricks or stones shake loose and fall on your car or, worse, your head.

Stucco is the preferred facing because it tends to hold together in the shaking, or if it shakes off, it falls in big sheets that are less dangerous than the raining down of dozens of bricks or stones.

Just nine months ago, Texas Gov. Rick Perry published a book titled, “Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Republican Party’s premiere propaganda broadsheet, in the book, Perry asserted that Social Security and other safety net programs were unconstitutional:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry used to be pretty frank when it came to the country’s Social Security system. In his fiery anti-Washington book, “Fed Up!”, published last fall when he had no plans to run for president, Mr. Perry called the program, which turned 76 on Monday, “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.”

He suggested the program’s creation violated the Constitution. The program was put in place, “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government,” he wrote, comparing the program to a “bad disease” that has continued to spread. Instead of “a retirement system that is no longer set up like an illegal Ponzi scheme,” he wrote, he would prefer a system that “will allow individuals to own and control their own retirement.”

Now, a week into his presidential campaign, Perry has had a “come to Jesus” moment and recanted the book he published just last year: