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President Barack Obama is telling the nation in a prime-time Oval Office address that the U.S. is officially ending its combat role in Iraq, a final turning point in one of the country’s longest wars. He said Tuesday night, in his words, “I am mindful that the Iraq war has been a contentious issue at

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Confronted by an especially tenacious protester in Alaska recently, former governor Sarah Palin tried to put on a good show for the lone camera present. Tried, that is, until learning the woman so adamantly criticizing her works was a teacher. Her reaction is best described as an eye roll. Naturally, the video sparked a tidal wave of blog posts and embeds, ultimately bothering Sarah so much she saw fit to issue a puzzling clarification on Facebook that seemingly invents a new use for the toxic beauty product Botox. In other words, it would appear this protester really pushed Sarah’s buttons. To be fair to Palin, the teacher, one Kathleen Gustafson, had unfurled a banner that read “WORST GOVERNOR EVER,” and she was adamantly criticizing her for quitting the job of governor to become a “celebrity.” Story continues below… And that was all before Palin asked about her profession. Their conversation, as transcribed by Think Progress , went like this: GUSTAFSON: You swore on your precious Bible that you would uphold the interests of this state, and then when cash was waved in front of your face, you quit. PALIN: OH, you wanted me to be your governor! I’m honored! Thank you! GUSTAFSON: I wanted you to honor your responsibilities. That is what I wanted. I wanted you to be part of the political process instead of becoming a celebrity so that you could (inaudible). And if that’s the best you could do, then good for you. If that’s the best you could do. PALIN: Here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. That’s what I’m out there fightin’ for Americans to be able to have a Constitution protected so that we can have free speech…And also there… GUSTAFSON: In what way are you fighting for that? PALIN: Oh my goodness! GUSTAFSON: In what way? PALIN: To elect candidates who understand the Constitution, to protect our military interests so that we can keep on fightin’ for our constitution that will protect some of the freedoms that evidently are important to you too. GUSTAFSON: By using your celebrity status, certainly not by political status. Politico outlines what happened next : Palin’s daughter Bristol, standing next to the former governor, then tried to explain that her mother is now “representing the United States” rather than just the state of Alaska. “Yes, I know, you belong to America now,” Gustafson said, redirecting the conversation back to the ex-governor. After watching her daughter jump in, Palin seemed to try to cool tensions. “What do you do here?” Palin asked. “I’m a teacher,” Gustafson responded, to which Palin appears to roll her eyes. During the conversation, Palin’s security appeared to be jostling for position in front of the camera, constantly flanking the videographer in the first moment of the clip, then backing off. Around 1:11, Palin asks what the woman does for a living. Watch: After the media picked up that YouTube clip, Palin took to Facebook to explain away her exasperated expression. She essentially names a list of all the teachers in her family and insists she wasn’t mocking teachers. But before she gets to that, she casts a bizarrely different die: They claim I – wait for it – “appear to roll my eyes” when the lady tells me she’s a teacher. Yes, it’s come to this: the media is now trying to turn my eyebrow movements into story lines. (Maybe that’s why Botox is all the rage – if you can’t move your eyebrows, your “eye rolling” can’t be misinterpreted!) Palin has never admitted to having Botox injections but some experts believe that she has undergone some minimally invasive cosmetic work. Of course, the line certainly isn’t the first time Palin has mentioned Botox injections: she opened a Tonight Show monologue with a joke about it. Speculation on whether Palin gets Botox injections has flared a number of times since her emergence on the national stage during the 2008 presidential campaign, when it was Sen. John McCain who was outed for his own frequent Botox injections , only to later find himself in a minor fracas of his own after an eye-roll during a debate with then-Sen. Barack Obama. Watch: McCain, like Palin, has never publicly acknowledged using Botox. However, if Palin is really curious about the unintentional uses of the product, she could just ask Kate Gosselin of Jon and Kate Plus 8 , who suffered the ill-effects of a botched Botox job just earlier this year. Gosselin is confirmed to be making an appearance on Palin’s television show , after she was spotted vacationing in Alaska. The TLC network’s president commented that the Palin family “graciously shared their Alaska” with the Gosselins. And, cue the eye-rolling.

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“Missouri voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a key provision of President Barack Obama’s health care law, sending a clear message of discontent to Washington and Democrats less than 100 days before the midterm elections,” the Associated Press reports . The AP’s David A. Lieb adds, About 71 percent of Missouri voters backed a ballot measure, Proposition C, that would prohibit the government from requiring people to have health insurance or from penalizing them for not having it. The Missouri law conflicts with a federal requirement that most people have health insurance or face penalties starting in 2014. Tuesday’s vote was seen as largely symbolic because federal law generally trumps state law. But it was also seen as a sign of growing voter disillusionment with federal policies and a show of strength by conservatives and the tea party movement. Story continues below… “Republicans eyeing more momentum for the mid-term elections interpreted Missouri’s passage of Proposition C as a backlash against the White House and bigger government,” Bill Lambrecht reports for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . Republican National Chairman Michael Steele called Missouri’s rejection of the federal mandate to purchase health insurance “a significant blow to the Obama administration.” Steele called the Missouri vote “another reason why Republicans will win back the majority in November” in congressional elections. “By rejecting ObamaCare with nearly three-quarters of the vote in a critical swing state, Missouri sent a clear message to Democrats and the Obama administration that government-run health care is a gross overreach of the federal government that needs to be repealed and replaced,” Steele said in a statement. “Democrats, who did little to combat Proposition C, were largely quiet about the Missouri results as the returns from Tueday’s elections circulated this morning,” Lambrecht adds. A CBS News article adds , Republicans are this morning hailing the vote as evidence of “the steadfast opposition of the American people to out-of-touch Washington Democrats’ plan,” in the words of House Republican leader John Boehner. “The more the American people know about the Democrats’ new law – with its job-killing mandates, tax hikes, and Medicare cuts to set up a new federal entitlement and massive new bureaucracies – the more they oppose it,” he added. “How long will Washington Democrats ignore the will of the American people? What will it take for them to work with Republicans to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with commonsense reforms to lower costs?” However, Brian Montopoli notes at the CBS Political Hotsheet blog , “While Republicans are pointing to the ease with which the measure passed as evidence that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to the Democrats’ health care plans – Proposition C got 71 percent of the vote – opposition to the plan is not quite that high (though there is still more opposition than support). In a CBS News poll last month , 36 percent of Americans said they approve of the health care reform law, while 49 percent opposed it.” At pollster.com , nearly every recent national poll indicates that — for whatever reasons — more and more Americans are continuing to change their minds on the health care plan. A year ago, most polls showed the opposite: wide support for health reform. In June of 2009 the New York Times reported , “Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the health care system and are strongly behind one of the most contentious proposals Congress is considering, a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.” When asked which party was more likely to improve health care, only 18 percent of respondents said the Republicans, compared with 57 percent who picked the Democrats. Even one of four Republicans said the Democrats would do better. The Washington Post recently reported , “Opposition to the landmark health care overhaul declined over the past month, to 35 percent from 41 percent, according to the latest results of a tracking poll, reported Thursday.” But that poll appears to be an anomaly. According to the Associated Press polling , the debate is going up and down, but stands in stark contrast to where it was a year ago. The last AP poll showed 49 percent totally approved of Obama’s handling of health care, with 46 totally disapproving. Disapproving led the month before with 51 to 45, and the month before that by 52 to 44, but Obama had approval of 49 in March with 46 opposed. In April of 2009, approval for handling of health care by Obama in the AP poll was 53 percent, with only 28 percent totally disapproving. Of course, some of that disapproval comes from liberals unhappy with the abandonment of the public option. And while they most probably won’t be changing parties, there’s a chance that disappointed Democrats may feel unenthusiastic about voting this November, and perhaps beyond.

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MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann made a brief return from a two-week vacation Wednesday to deliver a “special comment” on how a selectively edited videotape that the conservative media ran with cost a USDA worker her job this week. Olbermann compared Shirley Sherrod to the story of an innocent French infantryman that was unfairly convicted and sent to prison in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus was later released and reinstated. Like Dreyfus, selectively edited evidence led to a presumption of guilt instead of innocence, Olbermann essentially argued. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked Sherrod to resign and the NAACP condemned her before the unedited video tape had been seen. After seeing the full video, the NAACP, Vilsack and the White House apologized and she was offered a new job with the Department of Agriculture. “Well we need to congratulate ourselves,” said Olbermann. “How far we have come! We can pull a Dreyfus faster than the French could in 1894. Eighty-two days until they sent him to Devil’s Island? We did it to Shirley Sherrod in 48 hours.” Story continues below… Olbermann believes there’s plenty of blame to go around for the quick condemnation of Sherrod. “We — the howling fools of the far right, the stand-aside pathetic bureaucrats of the Department of Agriculture, the whole of the cowering media, this network included, the whole of the government, this self-defeatingly above-it-all president, included,” he said. But clearly he thinks the bulk of fault lies with Andrew Breitbart and Fox News. “Shirley Sherrod has been to her own Devil’s Island, and thanks to the perpetual fraud machine that is Fox News, and the scum that is this assassin Breitbart, there will be a portion of this country – the mindless, the hateful, the reactionary, the racist – to whom she is forever convicted and ever imprisoned,” said Olbermann. “And today the proof lies in front of you, bleeding: the reputation of Shirley Sherrod, a woman who 24 years ago saw and overcame the vengeance in her own heart and achieved the kind of true greatness the rest of us can only hope we might express for one moment in the whole of our lives. Assassinated by Fox News! Assassinated by that scum Breitbart! Assassinated by all their meager-brained imitators on other channels and other sites, their limp fellow travelers who never asked questions first, but simply shot, and shot, and shot, and shot and laughed!” Olbermann continued to assail the conservative news network. “Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist — even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so.” His own network shares in the culpability for allowing Breitbart airtime, explained Olbermann. “The legitimate media didn’t first look at the whole videotape. We didn’t first ask if the doctored clip perverted by the scum Breitbart didn’t seem to be leading up to a ‘however.’ We didn’t, even today, when even this network let this pornographer of propaganda Breitbart come on and spew his lies and his venom and his fraudulent self-defense like a quack doctor attending a life-or-death surgery, we didn’t once… consider the source,” he said. This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown , broadcast July 21, 2010. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy

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CEO’s family calls police account ‘blatant lie’ The ACLU and gay rights groups in New Jersey are calling for an independent investigation into the shooting death of an Atlanta bank CEO during a raid of a New Jersey park last Friday. The police say the shooting was a lone officer’s response to being physically threatened; the CEO’s family dispute that claim, and civil liberties groups suspect anti-gay sentiment may have played a factor in the police raid. DeFarra Gaymon, described in the press as a 48-year-old father of four and the CEO of the Credit Union of Atlanta, was shot and killed by an unnamed police officer in Newark’s Branch Brook Park during an undercover police raid of “public sex” in the park on July 17. Gaymon was shot once in the chest and died in a nearby hospital. He had been attending his 30th high school reunion at nearby Montclair High. Now the Essex County prosecutor’s office has released the police officer’s account of the events that led up to Gaymon’s death, and the CEO’s family says they’re not buying it. Story continues below… According to the account, the undercover officer had returned to the park to look for a missing pair of handcuffs he had evidently left there during an earlier raid, when he allegedly encountered Gaymon, who the officer says was openly masturbating. The New York Times reports : “The plainclothes officer was bending down to retrieve his handcuffs,” Mr. Laurino said, “when he was approached by Mr. Gaymon, who was engaged in a sexual act at the time.” Words were exchanged that the prosecutor said “would lead one to believe that” Mr. Gaymon was propositioning the officer. “The officer pulled out his badge, identified himself as a police officer and informed Mr. Gaymon that he was under arrest,” Mr. Laurino said. Then, he said, Mr. Gaymon shoved the officer to the ground and ran, ignored the officer’s demands to stop, and repeatedly threatened to kill the officer if he approached. The officer cornered Mr. Gaymon beside a pond and tried to handcuff him, Mr. Laurino said, but again Mr. Gaymon resisted. “Mr. Gaymon reached into his pocket and lunged at the officer in an attempt to disarm the officer,” Mr. Laurino said. The officer, “fearing for his life,” the prosecutor said, shot Mr. Gaymon once, and he died at the hospital three hours later. Gaymon’s family is disputing that account. “The statement is a blatant lie concocted after four days of unexplained silence,” the family said in a statement sent to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . “Dean Gaymon was a nonviolent, non-aggressive and nonthreatening person his entire life,” the statement said. “It would have been completely and totally against his nature to ‘tussle’ with a police officer, to resist authority, to assault a police officer … Words such as ‘I am going to kill you’ would not be uttered from him. “Essex County has wrongfully taken Dean Gaymon’s life and with him not being here to present his side of the story, they are now attempting to defame him in death and to kill his name and reputation in addition to his body. Our family will not stand by and allow this to occur.” Now the Newark Star-Ledger reports that the ACLU and several gay-rights groups in New Jersey have joined forces to call for an independent investigation into Gaymon’s death. Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, said: “We make no assumption as to the sexual orientation of the victim. Nor do we condone lewdness, but any sting operation targeting gay men or LGBT people specifically, or anyone perceived as such, is unconscionable — and as we strongly believe, illegal.” “What we have here is a situation where an unarmed citizen ends up dead as a result of what would have been a minor crime,” Deborah Jacobs, executive director for the ACLU in New Jersey, told the Star-Ledger . “Considering the seriousness of the incident and many unanswered questions, this investigation demands the legitimacy that only an external review can provide.” A spokeswoman for the Essex County prosecutor’s office told ABC News that she had no response to the Gaymon family’s assertions. She said the issue would be investigated by a grand jury. Under New Jersey law, all deaths at the hands of police officers are investigated by a grand jury to determine if the death was justified.

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Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) couldn’t find a straight answer to give Sunday when he was asked how Republican fiscal policies today differ from their policies during the Bush era. “What does distinguish the Republican Party of today from the Republican Party under President Bush’s rule with regards to spending, which is where it got out of control — under Republican rule,” asked host David Gregory on NBC’s Meet The Press . “Let’s look at a few facts — thank you for the opportunity, because I want to respond to what Chris said. The last year that President Bush was in office, 2008, the deficit was 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product. Today it’s ten percent. We just hit the $13 trillion cap on national debt,” Cornyn said. “Where did some of that debt come from?” Gregory asked. “The President of the United States was George Bush when they passed a huge TARP, which was to bail out the banks. I mean that’s what ran up a lot of debt as well. Are you saying a Republican was somehow different?” “You’re ignoring the stimulus that … failed according to the president’s own standards,” Cornyn replied. “He said he was supposed to keep unemployment to eight percent.” Story continues below… But Gregory persisted in his original question. “So my question is still: What is the distinction of the Republican Party of today versus the Bush record that you’re defending?” “Well, I think what people are looking for, David, are checks and balances,” Cornyn said. “They’ve had single-party government and it’s scaring the living daylights out of them, and it’s keeping job creators on the sidelines rather than investing and creating jobs. That’s why the private sector isn’t creating jobs.” “In other words,” comments the AlterPolitics blog , which posted the Cornyn interview online, “they intend to resume Bush’s policies of increasing the national debt to pay for deeper tax cuts for the rich, to bail out Wall Street fat cats, and to wage more endless and unnecessary wars.” Cornyn’s lack of detail will give ammunition to critics of Republican policies who argue the party is determined to roll ahead with the same policies that some economists now blame for the economic meltdown — things such as the Bush tax cuts, which some argue contributed to the federal government’s debt burden and resulted in a greater share of wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few. Many critics point to the GOP’s campaign to extend the Bush tax cuts as proof of this. Last week, Arizona Republican Sen. John Kyl came in for heavy criticism when he argued that the extension of the Bush tax cuts — unlike health care reform and jobless benefits — shouldn’t be offset by spending cuts. It’s estimated that extending the tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year, would cost the US $2.2 trillion. Extending only the part applying to people earning over $250,000 would cost $678 billion. On Saturday, President Barack Obama took an aggressive stance against Republican tactics and policies, saying the party was harming the unemployed to look fiscally responsible. “They say we shouldn’t provide unemployment insurance because it costs money,” Obama said during his weekly radio address. “So after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed.” The following video was broadcast on NBC’s Meet The Press Sunday July 18, 2010, and uploaded to YouTube by DemRapidResponse.

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Sources close to General Stanley McChrystal are pushing back heavily against last month’s Rolling Stone article that resulted in the general being relieved of his command over US forces in Afghanistan. Reporter Michael Hastings’s story was replete with quotes from the banter among McChrystal and his “traveling staff of 10.” He described, for example, McChrystal making a laughing reference to Vice President Joe Biden and a “top adviser” firing back, “Biden? Did you say: Bite Me?” A story in Thursday’s Army Times, however, calls into question Hasting’s description of the speaker as a “top adviser.” A McChrystal staff member who was along on the trip told the paper that “the impolitic comments that torpedoed Gen. Stan McChrystal’s career were ‘almost all’ made by his most junior staff — men who ‘make tea, keep the principal on time and carry bags’ — who had no reason to believe their words would end up in print.” Two anonymous sources, along with McChrystal’s personal spokesman, Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis also insisted “the quotes that appeared in a Rolling Stone article that got McChrystal in trouble were made in ‘off-the-record’ settings.” They charged that Hastings had violated verbal ground rules by publishing them. The counterattack by McChrystal’s allies began as early as June 25, just two days after McChrystal resigned, when, according to the Washington Post, “officials close to McChrystal began trying to salvage his reputation by asserting that the author, Michael Hastings, quoted the general and his staff in conversations that he was allowed to witness but not report. The officials also challenged a statement by Rolling Stone’s executive editor that the magazine had thoroughly reviewed the story with McChrystal’s staff ahead of publication.” Story continues below… The Army Times article revives both these assertions while adding a new level of detail. “Ground rules varied as appropriate, but significant portions of the time were considered to be off the record or on background,” Sholtis told the paper. He added, “I’m confident that Gen. McChrystal and his staff believed they were off the record.” The paper’s sources acknowledged, however, that Hastings had not been required to sign a document confirming his understanding of the ground rules, which “left the rules open to differing interpretations, or at least to have left McChrystal’s people with no hard evidence that Hastings broke them.” This admission appears to undercut CBS correspondent Lara Logan’s implication that Hastings might be lying because McChrystal and his people “never let their guard down like that.” At the time of the Post story, Rolling Stone Executive Editor Eric Bates rejected the claim that the comments were off the record as “absolutely untrue.” Bates also insisted during a June 22 appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “We ran everything by them in our fact-checking process, as we always do, so I think they had a sense of what was coming.” Sholtis, however, told the Army Times that McChrystal’s team had no knowledge of the “sensitive content” in the article until advance copies were leaked a few days prior to publication, and he and the other sources “accused Rolling Stone of publicly misrepresenting its communications with McChrystal’s headquarters.” Copies of emails between Rolling Stone and the McChrystal assistant who was in charge of the project do confirm that — as previously reported by the Washington Post, — “The questions contained no hint of what became the controversial portions of the story.”

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