Tonight, Democrat Congressman John Murtha stuck his foot in his mouth, again, in an interview on John Kasich's program, "Heartland," on Fox News. As part of his argument that American troops should be withdrawn, starting now, he said,

"The US military is not good at nation-building. President Bush said, when he ran the first time, We're not going to get into nation-building."

Source: No transcript is yet available, but this was TiVo'ed and the quote is accurate.

What President Bush said when he was first running, before 9/11, before Congress authorized "all necessary military force" in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere is irrelevant. It does not control what should/must be done, today.

Seems like Al Franken knows Bill Clintons "war on terror" record better than Bill Clinton does.

Frankenlies.com recently exposed Franken's fantasy version of the Duelfer Report, suggesting that Bill Clinton's random bombing of Iraq in 1998, destroyed all of Husseins WMD capabilities.

Of course, the Duelfer Report made no such claim.

But this is not the first time Al Franken has concocted some story to enhance Bill Clinton's inept war on terror.

As Alan Skorski has written in his recent expose on Al Franken, Pants on Fire: How Al Franken Lies, Smears, and Deceives, Franken had the temerity to site a Washington Post report prepared by Barton Gellman, stating, "By any measure available, Clinton left office having given greater priority to terrorism than any president before him."

Phillips made the same ridiculous comment last week.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg declared on this weekend’s Inside Washington that the House vote to extend the current tax rates on dividends and capital gains was “immoral” as she ridiculously claimed, in the face of ever-soaring entitlement spending, that Congress is cutting aid to the poor. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas backed her up, asserting that “we need to raise taxes...and who better to raise them on than the super-rich?" Totenberg argued of the tax rate extension vote: “I just think it's immoral to do that, not to mention fiscally irresponsible, when you're cutting people who have nothing -- from children off of Medicaid and mothers who depend on childcare losing the childcare and can't work. And then what do they do? Go back on welfare? I mean, it is, it's, I just think it's immoral." Columnist Charles Krauthammer tried to insert some rationality into the tax hike advocacy of Totenberg, Thomas and columnist Mark Shields, as he pointed ot that if the House position does not prevail and "you abolish" the current rate "you are essentially raising" taxes when that current rate expires in two years. (Transcript follows.)

At the Huffington Post yesterday, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell stated that President Bush, who is rumored to watch reruns of the television program O’Donnell is the executive producer for, should be watching recent episodes of NBC's “The West Wing” to learn how to deal with problems in his own administration:

“In episode four this season, Toby confessed to the chief of staff that he did it. In episode five, Toby offered his letter of resignation to the president, who refused to accept it and fired Toby on the spot. Toby marched out of the White House on his way to being indicted. By flipping over to ‘The West Wing’ after ‘60 Minutes,’ Bush could have learned that the right thing for West Wing staffers to do is quit/get fired before getting indicted -- that the violation of the president's trust and the public trust is more than enough reason to leave the White House. That is something Karl Rove is never going to tell him.”

Recently, Hardball with Chris Matthews has done a nightly segment called "Ending the War". The segment usually features one Republican and one left-wing Democrat to discuss how the war is going, the intelligence leading up to the War, and how the US can get out. On Thursday night's Hardball, Matthews said the following:

MATTHEWS: Did you—when you look back on the Vietnam War, if you remember—they used to have votes all the time in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House. They‘d have the Cooper-Church Amendment, there would be another amendment being offered at different times. You know, Mark Hathid (ph) always had an amendment to try to return the troops. How come we‘re not saying these test votes? I don‘t understand it. If there‘s a dispute over whether to come relatively soon, like Murtha said so, and the president says, “stay until the job gets done,” how come we don‘t see this coming to a vote ever?

Perhaps it was a slip of the mind, but there was a "test vote" last month. On Novemeber 17, House Republicans entered a resolution that would pull US troops out of Iraq. The bill failed miserably.

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A front page New York Times story on the global warming talks in Montreal chose to place all the blame for America’s refusal to move forward with the highly controversial Kyoto Protocol on the Bush administration. In doing so, the Times didn’t inform its readers about the history of this accord, and, in particular, that the Senate in July 1997 voted 95-0 against it. In addition, the Times completely ignored any of the obvious economic consequences to America if it entered into a global warming treaty that did not include China.

Yet, that didn’t deter the Times from identifying a culprit: “In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration had come under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations' 1992 treaty on climate change.”

No DNA evidence, no execution of Tookie Williams. That's the standard Fox & Friends Weekend host Julian Phillips established this morning. As he put it:

"The issue for me is, is he guilty or is he not? He still maintains his innocence. If they can prove through DNA and other stuff, fine."

To bolster his case, Phillips asserted:

"There have been a number of cases where people on death row have been executed and it's later found out through DNA evidence that they are innocent."

Oh, really? It's not surprising that Phillips didn't cite any examples to support his contention. Even avid death-penalty opponents have been unable to point to a single unequivocal case of a man being executed who was later proved innocent by DNA.

E! Online (via Yahoo) reports that the upcoming second season of ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" will feature "original 'Access Hollywood' host" Giselle Fernandez, better known inside the MRC as a former CBS News and NBC News reporter. (She's not the only journalist tapping toes: ESPN anchor Kenny Mayne is also in the cast.) The story features the TV writer's academic omnipresence, professor of pop culture Robert J. Thompson, cracking on ABC's lack of star power.

But ah, Giselle! She was rather unforgettable a decade ago, when she was hosting the weekend "Today" show. On May 20, 1995, she sounded like she was at a Young Democrats meeting when she asked Labor Secretary Robert Reich: "Why are we leaving such critical decisions up to the Republicans? Why didn't we come up with another more, perhaps, realistic deficit reduction budget plan?"