Quote of the day: We hope Bill Moyers is chuckling as the man who tried to smear filth on his reputation gets caught red-handed again

"I believe it will become clear that this investigation was inspired by partisan divisions."
--far-right-wing pond scum Kenneth Tomlinson, responding to the eye-popping charges leveled at him in his latest investigative smackdown

Once again, I can't help thinking that there should be a "bonus" penalty for the ideological hooligans who get caught red-handed and bluff and bluster their protestations of innocence, and brazenly try to tarnish their accusers with the filth they themselves wallow in. (My bottom line here remains the same: At a very minimum, when these thugs' respective jigs are finally up and they've cut their deals with prosecutors, I want to see each of them drowning publicly in what I think of as "Duke Cunningham tears.") What's more, as more and more of the ultra-right-wing ideologues turn out to be shameless self-enriching crooks, it becomes harder to pretend that the association of ultra-right-wing ideology and criminality is casual or accidental.

Tomlinson is a brain-dead intellectual thug whose apparently lofty value to the loony right seems to reside entirely in his far-right-wing "ideological purity"--well, that and his utter shamelessness about the lengths to which he will go to impose his diseased values on the public. He was, of course, the hit man brought in to "right" the alleged ideological bias of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (Yes, he was the man who set about purging Bill Moyers.) As he quickly demonstrated, from a professional standpoint he makes the patron saint of propagandists, the late, great Joseph Goebbels, look fair and balanced--and I mean "fair and balanced" in the actual sense of the words, not the phonified right-wing-propaganda version.

In case you missed either part of the Tomlinson story, here's how Paul Farhi started his report in today's Washington Post:

A year-long State Department investigation has found that the chairman of the agency that oversees Voice of America and other government broadcasting operations improperly used his office, putting a friend on the payroll and running a "horse-racing operation" with government resources.

The report, released yesterday, marks the second time in less than a year that an internal investigation has found evidence of rules violations by Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

In November, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting inspector general found that Tomlinson had made improper hires, had tried to tamper with PBS's TV programming and appeared to show political favoritism in selecting CPB's president while he was chairman, Tomlinson resigned his CPB post that same month.

The new allegations against Tomlinson, 62, stem from his chairmanship of the BBG, which oversees the federal government's array of international broadcasting services, including VOA, Radio and TV Marti in Cuba and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.