Video from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s press conference this afternoon: Read More

TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro was at Tom Vilsack’s press conference this afternoon and managed to get a question in — and a follow-up. Watch.

One of Glenn Beck’s favorite whipping boys — the Tides Foundation — was allegedly a target of that anti-government gunman in Oakland who was stopped by police in a shootout.

From the New York Times:

A 20-year-old Virginia man who had made threatening statements about the television show “South Park” was arrested on Wednesday and charged with supporting the Shabab, a Somalia-based terrorist group, after he allegedly tried to board a flight to Africa with his infant son.

Howard Kurtz swallows Fox’s continuing claims that the cable network maintains a news v. opinion distinction internally.

If you want to read only one thing today about Shirley Sherrod and USDA, make it this piece by Rachel Slajda, which puts this entire sordid episode in the context of the right-wing’s vehement opposition to USDA’s settlement of long-standing discrimination claims from black farmers, including from Sherrod herself. Some very interesting and relevant background here.

I’ve lost track of the number of readers who have asked, Why doesn’t Shirley Sherrod sue Breitbart for defamation?

As a journalist, I’m naturally wary of defamation claims. As a lawyer part of my job was counseling clients that a lawsuit is a terrible, awful, no-good way to resolve almost any dispute. That is doubly true of libel suits. So to my way of thinking there is no such thing as a slam-dunk defamation claim.

But for those eager to see Sherrod get her pound of flesh, she says she is considering it.

I don’t post every stupid thing Newt Gingrich says (it is after all at least his 16th consecutive year of claiming to be considering a run for President), but every once in a while Newt outdoes even Newt: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”

Forty-eight hours ago the story was another bad apple found on Obama’s cart. By yesterday morning it was another black eye for Obama and Tom Vilsack for rushing to dump a blameless woman on no good evidence and cravenly or cowardly or pusillanimously running for cover because Breitbart, Roger Ailes and whatever other gods of The Crazy said boo! For progressives mad at their president, at some level, that’s understandable. They have no relationship with and expect only the worst from the Breitbarts and Fox Newses of the world. But with Obama they expect more. And it’s personal.

Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack’s first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene. It’s like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn’t catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as ‘right wing media’ (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode. Read More

The correction now appended to Andrew Breitbart’s original post at Big Government introducing the edited Shirley Sherrod video:

Correction: While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.

All good otherwise.