Former Sen. Tom Daschle might have been forced to withdraw his name as President Obama's Health and Human Services secretary last week, but his tax problems were far less egregious than Timothy Geithner's, the man just confirmed as the Secretary of the Treasury.

In fact, according to Pulitzer Prize winning Vanity Fair contributing editors James Steele and Donald Barlett, Geithner's offenses were significantly worse because he "not only signed a paper acknowledging he owed taxes, he collected money to pay the taxes and then didn’t."

The pair were interviewed by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman Friday, and told their liberal host things about this matter few in the media would dare as it would be another embarrassment for Obama (video embedded below the fold with rush transcript):

There is one famous journalist who’s unafraid to denounce Barack Obama’s agenda. Legendary left-wing journalist Helen Thomas appeared on Tuesday’s Democracy Now on radical Pacifica Radio, and denounced Obama’s acceptance of pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy: "I think that Obama, during the campaign, made many promises, as every president, potential president does to Israel, that they seem somehow bounded by their promises, promises to uphold all Israeli goals. I don't see how the U.S. can provide F-16s, gunships, Apache gunships, phosphorus, possibly phosphorus, and cluster bombs and so forth to kill helpless people, children who are starving to death."

Thomas also denounced the White House press corps for bowing to Bush yesterday at his final press conference, offering a "platform of self-defense and self-delusion," and then compared the Israelis to the Nazis: "I remember the rabbi who spoke at the Martin Luther King march on Washington. [Rabbi Abraham] Heschel had a cameo appearance, and he said, ‘The greatest sin of all in the Nazi era was silence.’ When you remain silent to the suffering and the incredible aggression against a people, then you are culpable."

It was a hot night of hard-left talk on PBS’s Tavis Smiley show on Thursday night, when Smiley’s guest was radical Pacifica Radio anchorwoman Amy Goodman. The host of the daily Democracy Now program was decrying how American liberties have disappeared under George W. Bush, and Smiley wasn’t asking hostile questions, but softballs: "How do you explain how this Patriot Act has, in fact, crushed so many people? Crushed people, threatened people, put people at all types of unease?" Smiley never named one.

Goodman played up how awful it was, with Big Bad Bush crushing librarians and booksellers: "It is a very big problem. It was written before 9/11; it was just passed after 9/11, and that's the big problem. I travel around the country and we support independent bookstores all over. It's not only the librarians; it's the independent booksellers who also fall under the purview of the Patriot Act. It says that they and the librarians have to hand over information."

The hard-left hootenanny known as the "National Conference on Media Reform," -- usually ahem, distinguished by a long Bill Moyers rant about the media being saps for the neoconservative war machine -- has a new star this year: Dan Rather. The former CBS anchor will join Moyers, Arianna Huffington, Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Pacifica's Amy Goodman in calling for courageous, independent (read: radical left) journalism, free of corporate cowardice, from June 6 to 8 in Minneapolis.

Former UPI reporter Helen Thomas is also hitting the left-wing hustings, this very weekend, in fact. She is a keynote speaker at the Women, Action & Media (WAM!) Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sponsored by a group called the Center for New Words and the Women's Studies program at MIT. Leftist sponsors also include the sites Alternet, Feminist.com, the Feministing blog, and the magazines Bitch, Dollars and Sense, and In These Times.

If you were a former president of the United States of America, would you be doing an interview on a liberal, independent news program that airs on, amongst other things, public access and college radio stations?

Should be able to get a better gig having once occupied the White House, dontcha think?

Well, if your name is Jimmy Carter, and you had already sold your soul by giving an interview to the terrorist television network Al-Jazeera back in January, how much lower could you go? (Update: Please see Charles Johnson's answer!)

Such must have been the presidential thinking on September 10th when Carter sat down with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman to continue his anti-Israel rants unfettered by an impartial journalist who might challenge his disgraceful views. Here are some of the lowlights (h/t Tim Graham):