Think Progress

RADICAL RIGHT -- LIMBAUGH MOCKS RECESSION DURING SPEECH TO WEALTHY RIGHT-WING DONORS: On Monday night, Rush Limbaugh came to Washington, D.C. to address the President's Club Dinner, a meeting of wealthy donors and supporters of the conservative Heritage Foundation. The audience included Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), as well as various millionaire Heritage Foundation trustees, like Thomas Saunders. After more or less reprising his radio show routine, Limbaugh went on to brag about his $400 million contract with Clear Channel Communications. As he continued to gloat about his program's success, Limbaugh mocked the idea that Americans are suffering. "I've never had financially a down year. There's supposedly a recession, but we've got -- what is this May? Back in February we already had 102 percent of 2008 overbooked for 2009. So I always believed that if we're going to have a recession, just don't participate," Limbaugh said. Limbaugh is no stranger to belittling the poor and dismissing the economic troubles of others. In March, Limbaugh scoffed at a question on homeless children, asking, "Would somebody tell me the last time you saw a kid sleeping under a bridge?" As Media Matters reported, even Limbaugh's employer Clear Channel is struggling under the weight of the recession. Already this year, Clear Channel has "shed nearly 3,000 employees, or 12 percent of its workforce." While Limbaugh jets around the country in his $54 million Gulfstream G550, laughing off the recession, does he realize that his own bloated contract is contributing to the rising unemployment rate?

ENVIRONMENT -- PENCE ACCUSES MIT ECONOMIST OF PLAYING POLITICS WITH STUDY ON GREEN ECONOMY: For over a month, various Republican lawmakers have been advancing a false claim that cap-and-trade legislation before Congress would cost families more than $3,000 a year in new taxes, basing their analysis on a 2007 MIT study. Even though economist John Reilly, a co-author of the study, has sent multiple letters to GOP lawmakers telling them their distortion is "just wrong" and asking them to stop misrepresenting his work, they have ignored his requests. Yesterday, The Progress Report asked Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) about the GOP's false portrayals of Reilly's study. But instead of coming clean, Pence dug in, claiming that Reilly is the one playing politics. "What he's doing, he's not making a mathematical conclusion, he's making a public policy or political conclusion. He believes the other side's analysis that there'll going to be a rebate of these revenues and job growth," Pence said. Aside from the GOP distorting his study, Reilly has explained that it shouldn't be used to analyze the current cap-and-trade bill at all. Even "apart from the misrepresentation of the costs" by the GOP, Reilly told Climate Progress last week, "it is inappropriate to draw conclusions on the costs" of the bill from a study published two years ago that doesn't model key cost-containment provisions, such as the use of offsets.

TORTURE --  DODD SAYS TORTURE INVESTIGATIONS MAY HAVE TO GO AS HIGH AS CHENEY'S OFFICE: In a new interview with Connecticut bloggers, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) unequivocally stated that he believes waterboarding is torture and came out in support of Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-VT) Commission of Inquiry into a "comprehensive, nonpartisan, independent review of what happened." "In a sense, not to prosecute people or pursue them when these acts have occurred is, in a sense, to invite it again in some future administration," Dodd said. When someone then pointed out that "a lot of this stuff seems to point toward Cheney's office," Dodd replied, "You gotta go where you gotta go." Indeed, Cheney's office was centrally involved in approving torture. In 2002, former Cheney aide David Addington traveled to Guantanamo Bay along with then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's lawyer Jim Haynes. The trio witnessed an interrogation and sent approval back to Washington. The "driving individual was Mr. Addington, who was obviously the man in control," international lawyer Philippe Sands has said. Earlier this week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wrote an op-ed in the National Law Journal asking President Obama not to rule out prosecutions on torture.

Though an internal Justice Department inquiry concluded that the Bush administration lawyers who authored the torture memos "committed serious lapses of judgment," a draft of the report says "that they should not be prosecuted." Instead, the report, which has yet to be approved by Attorney General Eric Holder, is likely to "ask state bar associations to consider possible disciplinary action," such as disbarment.

For the "first time in memory," "rebel members" of the RNC's national governing body have successfully taken on the party's powerful chairman. RNC Chairman Michael Steele "has signed a secret pact agreeing to controls and restraints on how he spends" party funds and contracts. Last week, Steele accused the resolution's proponents of a power grab "scheme."

At least one U.S. diplomat and a number of international relations experts believe that, should Israel decide to attack Iran, the country would "seek forgiveness, not permission" by only notifying the U.S. after any such mission got underway. Israel would likely notify the U.S to ensure that "its jets would not be shot down by accident if overflying U.S.-occupied Iraq."

Asked in a recent New York Times magazine interview whether he cared about a shortage of Jewish Republicans in the Senate, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) replied: "I sure do. There's still time for the Minnesota courts to do justice and declare Norm Coleman the winner." Yesterday, however, he clarified his remarks. "In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates," Specter said. "I conclusively misspoke."

The British government yesterday banned 22 people from entering the country for "fostering extreme hatred." American hate radio host Michael Savage (real name Michael Alan Weiner), who has called the Quran "a book of hate" and questioned autism cases, is one of them. Now Savage is suing the British government for defamation.