The situation in Egypt has reached a boiling point. There have been reports of protesters storming government buildings in Cairo and setting them on fire. The goverment is cracking down and has virtually shut down the country's Internet access. You can find a live feed of events in Cairo below the fold, courtesy of CNNi.

Let's use this thread to share updates as folks hear them. Thanks to our friends at Breitbart.tv for the feed.

In picking Mark Whitaker, Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News, as its new Executive Vice President and Managing Editor (TVNewser post), CNN has selected someone with a liberal outlook who presumes not raising taxes can be blamed for an increase in the deficit.

On election night last year, Whitaker channeled a liberal argument in favor of hiking taxes, declaring during live NBC News coverage: “The fact is right now the Republican numbers do not add up” since House Republicans want to roll back “spending to 2008 levels, which gets you about a $100 billion, but extending all the tax cuts. And the Congressional Budget Office has said that ends up adding $270 billion, at least, to the deficit.”

Earlier last year, in the midst of the Andrew Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod kerfuffle, Whitaker fretted on the NBC Nightly News over lies on the Internet:

Mark Twain said, a century ago, that a lie can get make its way half way around the world before the truth has its shoes on. That's just been intensified, both in term of the viral nature of these stories, but also, as we've seen, the potential to edit them and distort them before they get out there. 

Before jumping to NBC News, Whitaker was the top editor at Newsweek from 1998 to 2006, where he was forced to retract a report in the magazine (a “lie”?) that a Koran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo, though he buried his mea culpa, as recounted in a 2005 MRC CyberAlert item:

Newsweek may have admitted Sunday that its sloppy reporting, about how a U.S. soldier at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down a toilet, led to riots in Afghanistan which killed at least 15 people, but they hardly made their concession prominent in the May 23 edition of the magazine, especially online where, on the magazine's home page, you'd have to guess that this headline, "The Islamic World: How a Fire Broke Out," had something to do with a retraction.

And to read Editor Mark Whitaker's message, you'd have to know to click on "Letters and Live Talk" in a left side column, then, under "More," choose "The Editors' Desk." And even then, whether online or in the hard copy, Whitaker didn't approach an apology until the last sentence of his last paragraph: "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst."

From the 1:00 AM EST hour on election night/Wednesday morning November 3, 2010:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: We've heard guest after guest tonight, and winner after winner, saying we're going to go to Washington and cut spending. What's the problem with that?

MARK WHITAKER: Well, you know, we've been talking about the role of independents and independents, after the economy and after jobs, the thing that they really care about is the deficit and debt and the fact is right now the Republican numbers do not add up on this. The Pledge to America that Boehner and the Young Guns ran on basically calls for rolling back spending to 2008 levels, which gets you about a $100 billion, but extending all the tax cuts. And the Congressional Budget Office has said that ends up adding $270 billion, at least, to the deficit.

So, I think what we're going to see, starting with the press conference tomorrow that President Obama's going to give, is challenging the Republicans to say what are you going cut not only in terms of programs, but what else are you going to put on the table? Are you cutting further than you're talking about? Are you talking about Social Security? Are you talking about Medicare? Put the ball in their court and I think that's where the battle begins.

— Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.

NBC's Today show never covered Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen comparing Republicans to Nazis, but on Friday co-anchor Meredith Vieira determined Sarah Palin's mocking of Barack Obama's Winning the Future slogan as the precise moment when the new era of "civility" in Washington, came to an end. After Vieira opened this morning's show announcing: "End of civility? Sarah Palin takes a shot at President Obama's call for winning the future…is the new tone of togetherness in Washington already over?" she brought on MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell to chastise Palin and Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann:

"[Palin] really struggles with that sounding presidential thing. It's a real challenge for her. And you know, look it's, it's as weird as it gets. But really if you are looking for a lack of civility or the argumentative stuff…this week you really have to go to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. No one else is doing it."

In a segment entitled "Remember Civility? Why Are Palin & GOP Stepping Up Criticism?" O'Donnell and Vieira took turns bashing the former Alaska Governor and Minnesota Congresswoman as seen in the follow January 28 exchange:

(video, audio and transcript after the jump)

(MP3 audio)

MEREDITH VIEIRA: Okay I want to move on to Sarah Palin. As Savannah mentioned, she's been going around basically bad mouthing the President. She said the acronym for his stated goal of Winning The Future, W.T.F, actually stands for "What the?" and you can fill in the blank there.

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: Are you gonna finish that? Because I-

VIEIRA: I'm not gonna finish it. I'm something – you know I was scared to even bring it up.

(Laughter in the studio)

O'DONNELL: We, yeah we're not allowed to finish that on MSNBC. So, okay. She's- yeah.

VIEIRA: No we're not allowed to here either. But you know what it, what it stands for.

O'DONNELL: Yeah.

VIEIRA: What does she accomplish by saying something like this? What's she trying to do?

O'DONNELL: She is – really struggles with that sounding presidential thing. It's a real challenge for her. And you know, look it's, it's as weird as it gets. But really if you are looking for a lack of civility or the argumentative stuff, you, this week you really have to go to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. No one else is doing it. And, in fact, yesterday in the Senate the bipartisan agreement about how to make things work a little bit more smoothly in the Senate. And so those two are out of tune with what everyone else is doing, at least for now.

VIEIRA: You bring up Michele Bachmann. On your show you had on John McCain's daughter, Megan McCain and she went after Bachmann saying that she is, quote, "No better than a poor man's Sarah Palin." But you know her dad ran with Palin for the presidency. So now she's bringing up Bachmann and Palin. What's going on there?

O'DONNELL: Megan's been on my show three times. And it's interesting to watch her progress. She is moving much more in the direction of being critical of these people. And- but she's not the only one. David Frum, former speech writer for George Bush. Palin now, criticizing Palin has now become a mainstream view within the Republican Party. You don't get criticized, as a Republican, for criticizing Sarah Palin.

VIEIRA: Why not?

O'DONNELL: Once that happens it's, it's a dangerous time for Palin. Her stock cannot go up. And we've seen it in polls lately. She keeps going, going down and down and down. This W.T.F week is not gonna help.

VIEIRA: Not good for her.

Incidentally, before the Palin and Bachmann criticisms, both Vieira and O'Donnell warmed up by trashing the Tea Party as already irrelevant in Washington:

VIEIRA: There's been a lot of talk about the Tea Party. Yesterday the Tea Party caucus, Senate Tea Party caucus held its first meeting without three key senators who came to office, in large part, because of that movement. Are they in trouble if they start to lose some of their rising stars so early?

O'DONNELL: Yeah they are. I mean they – half of them were no-shows. And, and one of them who didn't show up said, "You know I really don't want to coopt the Tea Party. It's a, it's a Main Street movement, you know, not a Washington movement." Well by that theory zero senators should have shown up. That would have been a successful Tea Party meeting in the Senate. So it was very disappointing and they tried to cover that up.

—Geoffrey Dickens is the Senior News Analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here

Bill Maher has for years bragged about his love for marijuana and his desire for drugs to be legalized.

On HBO's "Real Time" Friday, the sometimes comedian linked our nation's education problems to drugs claiming, "The kids are dumb asses and their parents are dumb asses and they’re taking drugs and f–king and not learning" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

BILL MAHER: [President Obama] seemed to be saying in this speech if I get it right that education is where we have to start. That if we're going to reclaim our place in the world — because we're not doing too well — we're going to have to spend money to educate our kids. I mean, the most recent nationwide science tests, a third of fourth graders and only a fifth of high school seniors are at the proficiency level. Allen Friedman, who's on the board who administers, says, “I was rather dismayed at the relative lackluster performance at the top of the achievement tests.” Well, it’s not your fault, Allen. Just watch that "Skins" show on MTV and you'll see what the problem is. The kids are dumb asses and their parents are dumb asses and they’re taking drugs and fucking and not learning.

In reality, I agree with Maher that this is a huge part of the problem. But last week, he admitted – as he often does on his show – that he’s a frequent pot user that advocates the legalization of drugs:

MAHER: Look, I have never made a secret of the fact that I have tried marijuana.

UNKNOWN PANELIST: Shocking.

[Cheers and applause]

MAHER: About 50,000 times. The jury is still out. You know, I'm gathering evidence.

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: Testing.

MAHER: But, you know, this is a picture from High Times. They have the, now I like High Times. You know, they do this every, they actually have a center fold like this. I never understood this, because, like, even if you like pot, well why, what do you, okay, that’s enough of it. Do you, do you, I mean, what do you masturbate to it? Okay.

DAVID STOCKMAN: The two are related, alright. The number one source of gun violence in America is the fact that illegal drugs drive this massive culture of violence. And if we want to deal with gun violence, then let's legalize illegal drugs.

STEPHEN MOORE, WALL STREET JOURNAL: I agree with that.

[Cheers and applause]

MOORE: In fact, just to punctuate that point, the murder rate…

MAHER: Right on.

MOORE: …the murder rate in the United States dropped every year for ten years after we eliminated prohibition. So, this is a good, you’re exactly right, this is a good way to fight crime. I think we may even have a consensus.

MADDOW: I have learned when two Republicans are talking about legalizing drugs to shut up.

[Cheers and applause]

Of course, no one will forget the October 29, 2010, installment of "Real Time" when Maher said he supported California's Prop 19 – which would have legalized marijuana in the Golden State if it had passed – leading guest Zach Galifianakis to light up a joint on the set passing it around to other panelists.

So which is it, Bill?

Are drugs harming America's youth making it impossible for them to learn science and other subjects in school thereby harming our public education system, or should drugs be legalized so that you and your adult friends like Zach can smoke whatever and wherever you want?

If the answer is the former, then stop glorifying drug use every chance you get bragging about it like some insecure child on the playground pretending he's cool to his friends.

If it's the latter, then stop complaining about kids taking drugs and doing poorly in school for it is you and all your hip friends in Hollywood that are setting this pathetically poor example encouraging Amerca's youth to light up whenever the urge strikes them.

If Maher wasn't so stoned all the time, he'd realize his hypocrisy is so thick you need Glenn Beck's chainsaw to cut it.

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