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By Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart’s job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration. Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography.

Since we took last week off to write something patriotic for Independence Day weekend, we’ve got two weeks to cover today. Fortunately, every other week in Washington (or so it seems) is vacation time for Congress, meaning they were only in session (or “working”) for one week of that. Add to this the fact that Congress usually defines “a work week” as from noon on Tuesday to noon on Thursday (nice work if you can get it, eh?), and it puts it all in perspective.

I’ve heard it said that complaining doesn’t solve anything, it merely restates the problem. That may be true, but sometimes it’s worth restating problems just to make sure that everyone knows what solutions they should be working on. Well, that, and sometimes it just feels good to bitch a little. It seems to me that the people who are against improving health care because they claim it will saddle their children and grandchildren with too much debt are the same people who want to keep drilling off our precious coastlines.

Rand Paul, in his now infamous interview with Rachel Maddow, defending his opposition to Federal laws banning racial discrimination in businesses like public restaurants: MADDOW: Hold on just one second. Until the year 2000, Bob Jones University, a private institution, had a ban on interracial dating at their school, their private institution. If Bob Jones University wanted to bring that back now, would you support their right to do so?

The indispensable George Lakoff has been very illuminating on the topic of the political brain this week. He explains how what appears irrational to liberals is experienced without a whiff of irony by the conservatives. One of the glaring inconsistencies I’ve noticed is the Tea Partiers’ insistence that the bank bailout was wrong and evil, coupled in the same breath with a denunciation of higher taxes on the rich.

There was no shortage of drama at the nation’s Capitol Saturday as House Democrats narrowly passed their final version of the health care reform bill — and the Illinois delegation was right in the thick of it. While every Illinois Democrat supported the bill, Reps. Dan Lipinski and Jerry Costello were key backers of the controversial amendment that secured its passage but has since deeply divided the party.

Fox Network’s numbers speaks for themselves. In the first quarter Fox was the second-most-watched network in primetime. It bagged the top spot among nine out of ten cable shows. It made CNN and MSNBC look like amateurish high school student broadcast facilities. In the second quarter Fox did even better with an astonishing ratings jump more than thirty percent higher than the first quarter. Their runaway number one audience, ad, and ratings recruiter is President Obama. Yet, Obama keeps pitching Fox. First he publicty tried to shoo everyone away from the network.

If you watched ORLY Taitz’s MSNBC interview on Monday night, you probably thought it was the nuttiest thing you’d see all week. But you were wrong… way, way wrong. Between the pop culture war , the townhalls gone wild , the Nazi comparisons and President Obama’s ” death panel ,” by week’s end, the volume of the crazy coming from the right had reached 11 .

But if you think the “liberal” media make up everything they write about Sarah Palin, you’re not reading, you just have a fetish for middle aged women who look like cheerleaders. But if you think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, you are willfully ignorant. But if you think that the majority of illegal immigrants are gangsters,you secretly wish they were Swedish,so you could welcome them with open arms.

Even as the right prepares to oppose Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, they’re finding it increasingly difficult to work up a proper fury. Partly that’s because there’s nearly universal agreement from people who have worked with Sotomayor. The American Bar Association gave Sotomayor its highest rating on Tuesday. The vote was unanimous, based on hundreds of confidential interviews with Sotomoayor’s colleagues on and off the bench, and a review of her opinions by scholars and practitioners. Partly it’s the support she has from national organizations.