NB Extra

The email announcing the supposedly momentous occasion of another column by the Politico's Glenn Thrush arrived in my mailbox with the following headline and subhead: "Obama: Hey guys, I'm still here -- The president's press conference brimmed with frustration and was filled with tantalizing promise."

On clickthrough, I learned that the online website's massagers-in-chief changed those items (but not the underlying URL, which reflects the email) to the following in the published article: "President Obama: I’m still relevant -- Obama finds himself hemmed in by the familiar constraints of partisanship and world events." Thrush's text identifed another problem supposedly hemming Obama in, complete with a slavery analogy: "the shackles of his own commitments." Poor guy; he has to deal with the world as it is, not how he'd like it to be, and those darned things he promised to do to get elected and reelected. Gosh, life is just so unfair, isn't it? Excerpts following Thrush's theme follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Have any of the liberal journalists who have bellyached over the sequester's supposedly draconian cuts -- which amount to a mere $44 billion -- considered that it pales in comparison to the amount of money that Medicare fraud costs the taxpayer every year?

That would be as much as $300 billion a year, or three times what the U.S. government spends on education, as Chris Parker of the Houston Press noted in an April 25 story:

Given how often such blatant thievery goes undetected, no one's sure how much fraud there really is. Conservative estimates place the bill at $100 billion annually. The more adventurous peg the figure closer to $300 billion — three times what the feds spend on education.

It has left federal health care little more than an unlocked home, where street punks and gangsters, doctors and even states walk right in and help themselves to whatever's inside.

Parker also observed that some people who were involved in Medicare fraud look mighty familiar, like Democratic Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee of Texas.  Houston Riverside General Hospital, the medical center she vouched for after it was hit with cuts, was found to have committed $116 million dollars in Medicare fraud – and her husband, Elwyn Lee, was once on the board.  

Medicare malfeasance is, alas, a bipartisan fiasco. Florida Governor Rick Scott (R), you may recall, was CEO of a hospital company that also has engaged in felonious Medicare transactions.

While liberal journalists like E.J. Dionne have been squawking about how disastrous the sequester cuts -- in truth they are actually reductions in the rate of spending --are, the fact of the matter is they are a drop in the federal budget bucket, and are significantly less than money we as taxpayers lose every year thanks to fraud in Medicare, a program which needs fundamental reform to prevent insolvency in a few decades time.

CNN senior political analyst David Gergen made a statement on CBS's Face the Nation Sunday that was rather hawkish for a former Clinton adviser.

"If [President Obama] doesn't respect his own red line on Syria, there is no question that Israel and Iran will look at that and say, 'Well, we can't trust the guy. He’s not going to be tough.'"

At the Daily Kos, one blogger was angry that the Tsarnaev brothers were guilty of "Mindless terrorism." They didn’t accomplish a “positive political consequence” in killing four people and wounding more than 200. Milton Mankoff, a former college professor of sociology writing as “Mankoff,” argued the acts are “indefensible” for targeting innocent civilians, but “for other reasons as well.”

Then, he added, Osama bin Laden was a much more idealistic and constructive terrorist by demanding changes in U.S. policy. Violence to accomplish “reform” in American policy is more defensible:

Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi said something on Fox News's Special Report Friday that will make conservatives swell with pride and many liberals cringe.

"I often say in my speeches around the world that when I see the American flag flying, I don't think of it as an American flag. I think of it as a universal symbol of democracy and liberty."

Reports have already surfaced that CNN plans to resurrect the debate show Crossfire. Now the network is reportedly talking to Newt Gingrich and former Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter to be two of the co-hosts.     

Crossfire was canceled in 2005 after running for 23 years. In 2010 CNN drew from a similar debate formula and paired columnist Kathleen Parker with disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for the ill-fated Parker-Spitzer, which fizzled out in less than five months.

Melanie Hunter of CNSNews.com reports that on HuffPost Live on Wednesday, liberal actress Susan Sarandon called the war on drugs  “completely racist,” arguing that somehow only lower level drug defendants get locked up – “mostly people of color.”

“The war on drugs is ridiculous, because you’re only getting—you’re spending a huge amount of money. It’s completely racist. You’re picking up everybody at the lower level because mandatory minimum drug laws let you trade in to get off, so if you don’t have anyone to trade in, if you’re at the bottom, you’re going to jail," she said.

The Huffington Post is promoting a positive review of Colm Toibin’s blasphemous play “The Testament of Mary” by Religion News Service reporter Charles Austin, who bizarrely claimed the bitterly anti-Catholic Irish writer is just like a preacher in imagining how “biblical heroes” acted between the lines.

“Preachers do it every Sunday in their sermons.” Which preachers echo Toibin in suggesting the Apostles were disreputable frauds, and that Jesus was not God? And if Mary is a bitter, hateful woman who hates the Apostles, how is she still a “biblical hero”? Austin claimed:

An angry and violent jihadist who also loves rap -- gee, who could see that one coming?

As part of MSNBC's ardent efforts over the weekend to downplay any possible connection between the religion that can't be named and the Boston Marathon bombings, Rachel Maddow spoke with Georgetown University professor Charles King, author of "The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus." (Video after page break)