Tonight, Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes did a segment about the supposed “fall out” over Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) minister’s connections to Rev. Louis Farrakhan. During an interview with Rev. Al Sharpton, Sean Hannity argued that Obama should distance himself from his minister and denounce his associations with Farrakhan.

But when Sharpton challenged Hannity to similarly condemn the anti-Semitic statements of Rev. Billy Graham, Hannity claimed to have no knowledge of Graham’s anti-Semitic past and warmly praised the minister.

Despite Hannity’s ignorance, Graham’s anti-Semitic comments were widely publicized in 2002, after the National Archives released transcripts of conversations between Graham and President Richard Nixon. Graham, who has since publically apologized for his remarks, made the following statements during a 1972 meeting in the Oval Office:

GRAHAM: This [Jewish] stranglehold [on the media] has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.

NIXON: You believe that?

GRAHAM: Yes, sir.

NIXON: Oh, boy. So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.

GRAHAM: No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something.

[…]

GRAHAM: A lot of Jews are great friends of mine, but they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.

Hannity’s selective disgust with anti-Semitism exposes his true motives. His charges are part of an orchestrated conservative smear campaign designed to portray Obama as a radical. In reality, Obama has repeatedly denounced Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic remarks and has said that he sometimes disagreed with his minister.

Even Dick Morris, who appeared after Sharpton, criticized Hannity for trying to smear Obama with “guilt by association.” But Hannity remained undeterred, arguing that his attacks against Obama would allow the McCain campaign to focus on the issues and “stay away from this other stuff.”

During tonight’s State of the Union address, President Bush said that the “the people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks.”

Last year, I asked you to voluntarily cut the number and cost of earmarks in half. I also asked you to stop slipping earmarks into committee reports that never even come to a vote. Unfortunately, neither goal was met. So this time, if you send me an appropriations bill that does not cut the number and cost of earmarks in half, I will send it back to you with my veto. And tomorrow, I will issue an Executive Order that directs Federal agencies to ignore any future earmark that is not voted on by the Congress. If these items are truly worth funding, the Congress should debate them in the open and hold a public vote.

In fact, under Democratic control, earmarks “are down more than 40 percent from the last budget passed by Republicans .” President Bush’s executive order, however, “won’t apply to the thousands of earmarks that accompanied a massive spending bill he signed last month,” leaving in place “11,735 earmarks — totaling $16.9 billion under White House estimates — that were contained in the just-completed 2008 spending bills.”

During a 2004 interview with Canadian television, president Bill Clinton criticized the Bush administration for shifting resources from the hunt for Bin Laden to Iraq and subcontracting the search to the Pakistanis.

Why did we put our number 1 security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis with us playing a supporting role and put all of our military resources into Iraq, which was, I think, at best, our number 5 security threat. After the absence of a peace process in the Middle East, after the conflict between India and Pakistan and all the ties they had to Taliban, after North Korea and their nuclear program…But we basically are dependant on him to find bin Laden, to find al-Zawahiri, to break in and find the computer people and give it to us because we got all our resources somewhere else in Iraq.

After failing to capture bin Laden during the battle for Tora Bora in 2002, the administration is still depending on Pakistan to bring bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, his top deputy, to justice. But yesterday, during talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf suggested that Pakistani troops are no longer hunting for bin Laden and Zawahri:

The 100,000 troops that we are using … are not going around trying to locate Osama bin Laden and Zawahri, frankly. They are operating against terrorists, and in the process, if we get them, we will deal with them certainly.

While Bush has argued that catching bin Laden is “not a top priority use of American resources,” bin Laden continues to seek nuclear weapons and inspire jihadists. Unfortunately, by outsourcing the hunt for bin Laden to a reluctant ally and starting a war that has recruited and inspired jihadists, the Bush administration continues to undermine America’s security.

Newsweek is reporting that Rudy Giuliani, who until recently was “well ahead of the pack in Florida,” is taking advantage of Florida’s flex voting laws (Florida voters don’t have to wait until primary day to cast their ballots) and “hoping he can convince voters to get to the polls before they have time to test drive other candidates.”

At a rally in New Smyrna Beach, Giuliani asked to see hands of audience members who had already voted. When only a few went up, Giuliani said, “I’ll tell you what–before they even get here to campaign, how about you go out and vote for me?”

The audience laughed. What they didn’t seem to recognize was that Giuliani was only half joking: No, really, he adds, “If I were living here, I’d just go out and vote now.”

Later that evening, he told another audience, “You should go vote for me tomorrow.”

While “thirteen million toys have been recalled in the last two months due to unsafe levels of lead,” Nancy Nord, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) — the agency responsible for protecting Americans from faulty products– has “taken dozens of trips at the expense of the toy, appliance and children’s furniture industries” and other industries regulated by the CPSC.

“This is a blatant violation of the ethics code,” said Craig Holman, an expert on governmental ethics law for the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. The rules allow nonfederal sources to pay for trips, “but not if you’re a private party with business pending before the agency,” he said.

Rather than regulate industry, Nancy Nord has allowed herself to be coddled by it. The agency, operating under a “budget [that] is half of what it was in the 1970s,” has resorted to encouraging businesses to voluntarily recall lead-laced products and currently employs “exactly one full-time toy inspector and only 15 inspectors who oversee all of the imports under the agency’s jurisdiction — a $614 billion market.”

While President Bush’s FY 2008 budget proposal cuts CPSC’s funding and reduces the number of staff from 420 to 401, Nord has resisted Congressional proposals to expand the CPSC. Calling such efforts “unnecessarily burdensome,” Nord sent two letters to Congress opposing legislation to double CPSC’s budget to $141 million, increase its staff by 20 percent, “require pre-market testing for children’s products,”protect industry whistle-blowers and help prosecute companies that violate safety regulations.”

Earlier this week, the Campaign for America’s Future, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Sherrod Brown and Congresswoman Rosa DeLaura called for Nord to step down. Pelosi:

Any commission chair who [says] … we don’t need any more authority or any more resources to do our job, does not understand the gravity of the situation. I call on the president of the United States to ask for the resignation.

UPDATE: But as Steve Benen points out, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel put it best: “Now we know why Nancy Nord opposes efforts to give the Consumer Product Safety Commission more resources: Who needs more resources when the industries you regulate will pay your expenses for you? After taking dozens of trips on the industry dime, it is now time for Mrs. Nord to take a permanent vacation from her post.”

Today, the Bush administration announced new sanctions against Iran and accused “the entire Revolutionary Guard Corps, a part of Iran’s military, of proliferating weapons of mass destruction.” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson put it succinctly:

Iran also funnels hundreds of millions of dollars each year through the international financial system to terrorists…It is plain and simple: reputable institutions do not want to be bankers to this dangerous regime.

But ironically, Halliburton, the company headed by Vice President Dick Cheney between 1995 and 2000, along with General Electric and Conoco-Phillips, has acted in such a manner. CBS News reported in 2004 that Halliburton Products and Services exploited a loophole in American law and established offshore subsidiaries to do business with Iran. Since setting up shop in Iran during Cheney’s tenure, the company has sold “about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian government,” earning “most of their revenues through their oil industry.”

In 2005, Halliburton “opened an unmarked office on the 10th floor of a Tehran office building” and is expected “to remain in Iran through 2009.”

During today’s address to the Value Voters Summit, the year’s largest gathering of religious right activists, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani “tried to find peace with a restless bloc of the Republican Party…telling religious conservatives not to fear him for his stand on issues such as abortion or expect he would change purely for political advantage.”

“We may not always agree,” he said. “I don’t always agree with myself. But I will give you reason to trust me.”

Giuliani’s quote may be more revealing than he hoped. As The Body Politik has previously noted, Giuliani has “changed purely for political advantage.” Since announcing his candidacy for president, Giuliani has shifted his positions and outlook on immigration and the threat of terrorism to reflect the views of GOP primary voters.

While mayor, Giuliani sued the federal government over a provision in a welfare reform bill which he believed would lead to “inhumane” treatment of illegal immigrants. He defended immigrants “as valuable contributors to the city’s economy and culture” and acknowledged that “we’re never going to be able to totally control immigration to a country that is as large as ours.”

Now, Giuliani is certain that we can. In a recent speech Giuliani promised that “we can end illegal immigration” with “stricter border control, tamper-proof identification cards for noncitizens and the deportation of foreign-born criminals.”

Giuliani’s rhetoric on terror also contrasts with his record. These days, Giuliani says that he understands terrorism “better than anyone else running for President,” and portrays himself as “deeply engaged with the Islamic extremist threat long before planes hit the World Trade Center.”

“But for most of Giuliani’s career as a Department of Justice official, prosecutor and New York’s chief executive, terrorism was a narrow aspect of his broader crime-fighting agenda…Giuliani expressed confidence that Islamic extremism could be contained through vigorous investigation by law enforcement agencies and prosecution in the court system — the same approach he now condemns.”

In fact, Giuliani framed “terrorism in the language of crime” in the weeks after September 11th and “as mayor, Giuliani made decisions that seemed to discount the gravity of the terrorist threat, such as placing his emergency command center at the World Trade Center a few years after the 1993 bombing attack there, against the wishes of top advisers.”

World events and shifting political realities can surely cause politicians’ views and positions to evolve. But Giuliani’s disingenuous attempts to portray himself as a consistent, tough and even visionary candidate only highlight the contradictions of his image.

The former lead prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay has alleged that “politically motivated officials at the Pentagon have pushed for convictions of high-profile detainees ahead of the 2008 elections…adding that the pressure played a part in his decision to resign earlier this month.” Air Force Col. Morris Davis felt “pressure to pursue cases that were deemed “sexy” over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go.”

Davis said his resignation was also prompted by newly appointed senior officials seeking to use classified evidence in what would be closed sessions of court, and by almost all elements of the military commissions process being put under the Defense Department general counsel’s command, something he believes could present serious conflicts of interest.

“There was a big concern that the election of 2008 is coming up,” Davis said. “People wanted to get the cases going. There was a rush to get high-interest cases into court at the expense of openness.”

Unfortunately this isn’t the first time the Bush administration has manipulated terrorism prosecutions to score political points. In September 2002, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that the prosecution of ‘the twentieth hijacker’ Zacarias Moussaoui, “has also contributed to discontent within the F.B.I. over what some see as a politicized Justice Department more eager to have splashy court victories than to protect intelligence resources.”

One senior F.B.I. official noted, with obvious disdain, that the Justice Department attorneys wanted to use raw intelligence from sensitive, ongoing investigations to bolster otherwise flagging counterintelligence or counterterrorism criminal cases. “You’d make one case but lose thirty others,” the official said.

The prosecution of Jose Padilla suffered a similar fate. According to Harpers Magazine’s Scott Horton, the administration orchestrated a show trial.

The Attorney General had gone way out on a limb in the accusations he made. In fact, Ashcroft had done this. It had happened while he was in Moscow—and I was there at the same time, working on a deal, and remembering my amazement over the spectacle of a U.S. Attorney General making these sorts of accusations at a hastily convened Moscow press conference. It was simply bizarre. […]

From the outset it was handled in a way that undermines the public’s confidence in the integrity and fairness of our law enforcement system, and was, in important ways, simply stupid.

The attorney general’s dramatic press conference in Moscow, for instance, is now regularly acknowledged by Justice Department officials (off-the-record) as a colossal mistake. They justify it by saying that it provided proof of the Department’s zealous work to protect the country from terrorism. That is a suspiciously political calculus. An attorney general should not be concerned about the monthly fluctuation of public opinion polls. He should be focused on justice. And that press conference and the relentless hype that followed it obstructed the pursuit of justice in the Padilla case. It showed a failure to adhere to basic rules of prosecutorial ethics. And beyond that, it was simply unwise.

Point well taken. Rather than using terrorist prosecutions to boost sagging poll numbers, the administration should, as Davis has asked, “leave prosecuting cases to prosecutors.”

The ACLU is reporting that the Department of Defense improperly collaborated with the FBI and issued “hundreds of national security letters (NSLs) to obtain private and sensitive records of people within the United States without court approval.” According to ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero

The Department of Defense may have secretly and illegally conducted surveillance beyond the powers it was granted by Congress. It also appears as if the FBI is serving as a lackey for the DoD in misusing the Patriot Act powers. At the very least, it certainly looks like the FBI and DoD are conspiring to evade limits placed on the Department of Defense’s surveillance powers.

But in a January 2007 interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Vice President Dick Cheney described the practice of issuing national security letters as a “perfectly legitimate activity.”

There’s nothing wrong with it or illegal. It doesn’t violate people’s civil rights. And if an institution that receives one of these national security letters disagrees with it, they’re free to go to court to try to stop its execution.”

The ACLU documents seem to contradict Cheney’s assertions. “Although compliance with Defense Department-issued NSLs is voluntary, the coercive language found in these letters would lead a reader to believe compliance was mandatory.” Moreover, while “the Defense Department told Congress that it seeks NSL assistance from the FBI only in joint investigations… an internal program review shows that the military asks the FBI to issue NSLs in strictly Defense Department investigations.”

UPDATE: The Washington Post reminds us that “earlier this year, the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI may have improperly obtained phone, bank and other records of thousands of people inside the United States since 2003 by using national security letters and exigent letters, or emergency demands for records. “

SITE, a private intelligence company, is claiming that intelligence officials within the Bush administration jeopardized national security by leaking a classified bin Laden tape to the Fox News Channel. “Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past.”

Ironically, during the summer of 2006, “numerous conservative commentators joined the Bush administration in arguing that, in detailing a secret Treasury Department program designed to monitor terrorists’ international financial transactions, a June 23 New York Times article tipped off terrorists to the U.S. government’s ability to track their financial activities — some going so far as to accuse the newspaper of treason.” Media Matters has the run down:

- Vice President Dick Cheney asserted that the article “made it more difficult for us to prevent attacks in the future” and “will enable the terrorists to look for ways to defeat our efforts.”

- President Bush commented, “If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror.”

- White House press secretary Tony Snow said the newspaper “ought to think long and hard about whether a public’s right to know in some cases might override somebody’s right to live” and suggested that the article “could place in jeopardy the safety of fellow Americans.”

- Michelle Malkin, syndicated columnist: “The New York Times (proudly publishing all the secrets unfit to spill since 9/11) and their reckless anonymous sources (come out, come out, you cowards) tipped off terrorists to America’s efforts to track their financial activities.” [”The terrorist-tipping Times,” 6/28/06]

- Brit Hume, Fox News Washington managing editor: “[N]ow they [the terrorists] know it. That’s the problem. Now they know it. … The objective is to find out what channels they are using, who’s got the money and where it’s coming from. … You don’t want to drive this stuff further underground because it undermines your ability to track it and to stop it.” [Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, 6/25/06]

But as Media Matters noted at the time, these charges were unfounded. “The Times report was hardly the first indication of U.S. efforts to monitor terrorists’ financial transactions: President Bush himself repeatedly touted the government’s capability to track and shut down terrorists’ international financial networks.”

Yet conservatives still exploited the story for political purposes. Since the “selective moral outrage crowd” denounced the allegedly “liberal New York Times” for undermining American interests and aiding the terrorists, shouldn’t one expect even harsher condemnation for the Bush administration?