Progressive News Feeds

Victoria Toensing and her husband and legal partner Joseph diGenova are pushing claims that anonymous State Department and CIA “whistleblowers” have been blocked and threatened by the Obama administration to prevent their testifying on the September 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. Toensing and diGenova are longtime Republican activists, and Toensing has a history of pushing dubious claims and falsehoods into the media

Tags: articles, author, director, economy, education, history, huffington-post, intelligence, media, media matters, politics, video

So, Very Serious People are re-evaluating George W. Bush on the occasion of the opening of his  Presidential Library . For instance, did you know that “ George W.

Tags: author, climate, climate progress, global-warming, health, history, politics, thinkprogress, war

Fox News ignored economic history to forward the absurd claim that former President George W. Bush exercised “fiscal discipline.” On the April 25 edition of Fox & Friends , former Bush White House Chief of Staff Andy Card claimed that President Bush “probably has the best track record of any modern president in terms of fiscal discipline,” a statement that went unchallenged by the Fox & Friends co-hosts: But facts undermine Card’s claim. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the drivers of current and future public debt are policies from the Bush presidency: A recent study from Harvard researcher Linda J

Tags: afghanistan, america, articles, breaking news, bush, elections, feeds, history, politics, progressive news, war, white house

Fox News host Andrea Tantaros stepped into  well-debunked territory about President Obama purportedly having once been a Muslim. Tantaros said on her radio program that Muslims view ex-Muslims poorly, and “some have said that’s President Obama, who even writes in his own book that he went to a Muslim school, he had a Muslim stepfather, he was educated in the Muslim faith, and now we have an effort by so many on the left and many in the media to ignore radical Islam.” In reality, as his  website notes , President Obama “has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.”  Conservative media  have  spent years  promoting the claim that Obama is or was a Muslim  to attack  him and  his policies . Fox News and its commentators  have repeatedly questioned the president’s faith  and promoted falsehoods about Obama’s religious background, including the false claim that he  attended a “madrassa.” From the April 25 edition of Talk Radio Network’s  The Andrea Tantaros Show : BILL MAHER (CLIP): There’s only one faith that kills you, or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith.

Tags: articles, author, christian, economy, education, elections, foreign-policy, history, science

National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent will reportedly appear  tonight on CNN’s  Erin Burnett   OutFront   to discuss firearm policy, despite his history of inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation about gun violence. In February,  OutFront   featured an interview  with Nugent where he suggested the government could confiscate firearms, a conspiracy theory that host Erin Burnett and CNN reporter Deb Feyerick later treated as a serious argument. Nugent’s appearance comes just days after he  doubled down  on his infamous comments that he would be “dead or in jail” because of President Obama’s gun policies.

Tags: al-qaeda, cnn, education, feeds, history, media matters, president, science

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), like Republican governors all across the country , aims to implement a regressive tax plan that involves cutting income taxes for the rich while, in his case, maintaining a sales tax hike that primarily hurts the poor. The sales tax increase was supposed to be temporary when it was adopted in 2010, but Brownback now wants to make permanent

Tags: archives, congress, economy, government, governor, health, history, immigration, kansas, progressive news, security, taxes

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) Sen.

Tags: action, author, feeds, history, politics, progressive news, richard burr, security, torture, yahoo

CNN host Erin Burnett and reporter Deb Feyerick gave serious treatment to National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent’s baseless claim that President Obama will attempt to confiscate firearms, even discussing what would happen if the government tried to “take all the guns away tomorrow.” Significantly, none of the proposals  to reduce gun violence supported by the Obama administration in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school massacre involve firearm confiscation. Even though Nugent, who in part blamed the Newtown massacre on an “embarrassing, politically correct culture,” is not a credible figure in the gun policy debate, Feyerick repeated his wild-eyed conspiracy theories on Erin Burnett OutFront : BURNETT: President Obama has said he doesn’t have any intention of confiscating guns, that that is not his goal, he’s not trying to attack the Second Amendment. Nugent, though, doesn’t believe him, why

Tags: author, children, economy, environment, history, jobs, lgbt, media, obama, science

Legislation aimed at reducing gun violence is “a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society,” according to an article published in the leading conservative opinion journal National Review. The author, David French, interprets the Christian Bible as granting everyone a right to self-defense. He suggests that this, if true, means that God’s will is that people have access to guns , as they are the means for self defense: In fact, Jesus’s disciples carried swords, and Jesus even said in some contexts the unarmed should arm themselves …What does all this mean?

Tags: climate, conservative, feeds, florida, guns, health, history, house speaker, lgbt, media, peace, progressive news

Opine away! Note: Climate Progress will largely be on vacation this coming week at Walt Disney World and points North. So we will mostly be running cross-posts and favorite CP posts (and some more open threads for those who want to post news). Suggestions are welcome.

Tags: climate progress, global-warming, health, history, mountains, politics, science, university