Your Daily Politics Video Blog: Are the Rove proteges reshaping McCain's campaign? Are they cracking down on the cringey laugh and turning McCain into just one more bland teleprompter jockey? And what's the progress on scoring the budget victory numbers? We bring you all up to date in today's McCain campaign update (with special new cringey laugh footage).

Rove's attorney sent the House Judiciary Committee a letter stating Karl Rove will not even show up to a hearing on July 10th per a subpoena citing executive privilege. Will the House call Rove's bluff?

Shockingly, not if Nancy Pelosi has anything to do with it. For more on that angle see www.hotpotatomash.com

Just how is buyout billionaire Bruce Wasserstein gouging our country's elderly?  Let's connect the dots: Wasserstein is the CEO of Lazard and has made billions by buying companies, cutting costs, and turning quick profits.  Lazard owns and manages Atria Senior Living—the third largest assisted-living provider in the U.S.—as a private equity investment.  Atria has been mismanaging its facilities left and right, making medication mistakes, wrongly locking in residents, and even failing to call emergency services. 

What is Atria's response?  The company slapped residents on a fixed income with steep rent increases to as much as $8,500 per month.  What's more, Atria pays its staff a measly average of $8-10 an hour with unaffordable healthcare, while Wasserstein made $41 million in 2007 alone.  That's right, Wasserstein is getting rich off our nation's grandmas and grandpas, a gross injustice that we have exposed in our newest video, Bruce Wasserstein: Gouging Grandma.

We have joined the SEIU to demand that Wasserstein stop gouging our grandparents and respect its employees.  Here's what you can do:

• Sign the petition from Campaign to Improve Assisted Living and Tell Bruce Wasserstein to Stop Gouging Seniors.

• E-mail this video and the petition to all your friends, family members, and coworkers. 

• Spread the word on sites like Digg, which will help create a public outcry to pressure Wasserstein and Lazard.

Make sure everyone knows we won't stand for Wasserstein's despicable behavior, and make sure it happens today.

The mainstream media repeats McCain's claims that Obama has flip-flopped on Iraq.

One wonders why both the MSM and McCain continually act as if there are no records of what people say and do....or are they that confident that most people will not bother to check?

Following a ruling ordering YouTube to turn over user data to Viacom, privacy concerns mount. YouTube must turn over information about its users as part of a lawsuit from Viacom. The move has outraged electronic privacy advocates. Bobbi Rebell reports.

Breaking down CNN's faulty logic.

Here are the details on the substance of Obama's withdrawal plan.

'Bout time Bill and Barack buried the hatchet!

Barack Obama voiced by Kyle Grooms. Bill Clinton by Marc Jacobs.  More videos at http://barelypolitical.com

George W. Bush, John McCain, Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Patrick McCrory and Multinational Big Oil Corporations want to gamble North Carolina's coastal ecosystems and tens of thousands of Tourism and Commercial Fishing jobs for a 2% chance of a commercial find of oil or gas from offshore drilling.

More at therealnews.com

Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff and Head of IAEA against attack, Iran's Foreign Minister says it's crazy

Brave New Foundation is currently seeking people who want to tell their stories about private insurance companies for a new short documentary project. We want to hear from people who have struggled to pay medical bills despite having full coverage; people that have been denied a claim; as well as from people who have been greatly assisted by public insurance systems such as Medicare and Medicaid.

If you have any stories that may be of interest to us and want to share them as a call to action to help fix the health care system in America, please EMAIL us at bnhealthcare@gmail.com.

FarkTV takes a comical look at some of the first immigrants ever to reach our shores.

Your Daily Politics Video Blog: The McCain camp has jumped all over Obama's statement last week that he would continue to "refine" his Iraq policyfollowing a planned upcoming meeting with military leaders in the country. Obama says he's remained totally consistent, but Joe Lieberman and the Fox News Sunday "All-Star Panel" beg to differ.

Teen pregnancy is on the rise in America for the first time since 1991. One in three teenage girls in the US becomes pregnant. Recent media hype and movies like Juno give teen pregnancy a certain kind of treatment.

America News Project went to one health center in the Northeast of Washington, DC to explore the real thing.

http://newsproject.org

More at therealnews.com

Triita Parsi talks about the affect of threats on Iranian public opinion.

Inside USA travels to Haiti to look at how the stories of politics, rice and the US are deeply interwoven.

See part 2 here.

Somebody should have told the White House that Virginia is David Swanson Country. The link to get tickets to the event was in the 'Do Something' section of MichaelMoore.com last week and it looks like we had some takers. Thanks to all the protesters who fight for our freedom.

Happy July 4th! Tossing another one on the grill at www.michaelmoore.com

Our friends at the Media Consortium are taping Live From Main Street, a televised town hall event in Miami this coming Saturday afternoon, and you are invited!

The town hall will be a unique discussion exploring how Miami communities and grassroots groups are facing the economic crunch and working to build a stronger sustainable city for generations to come.

And if you arrive early, you can score a free DVD with all five episodes of our documentary series This Brave Nation, along with Laura Flanders’ new book Blue Grit.

Here are all the details. 

Acting head of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Jonathan Scharfen, has promised several changes to the USCIS bureaucracy that would help speed-up the legalization and naturalization process.

While Scharfen claims that the USCIS is working on resolving the problem of backlogs in citizenship applications and background checks, he has also noted that moving from a paper-based bureaucracy to a computer age is the "ultimate solution." Indeed, computerizing applications would make the task faster and much more efficient, decreasing misplacement of documents and increasing effective communication. 

The USCIS seems to be gearing up for a change in administration and immigration policies. They have secured a "transformation" contract to modernize to an electronic system and get in touch with the 21st century.

"And we want to make sure that's in good shape, so when the new administration comes in, we're up and running and that contract is on the right track."

The big question is whether USCIS can deal with the legalization of 12.5 million undocumented immigrants. This is what Scharfen said: 

Go to www.mediamatters.org/billophobia to learn more and take action today!

"I think everybody's got to relax on all this gay stuff."
-- Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, August 15, 2007

From his suggestion that the "secular progressive movement" would like to have "poly-amorphous" marriage ("you can marry 18 people, you can marry a duck") to his statement that it would be "insane" and "inappropriate" to "cluster" gays near children, Bill O' Reilly has never been one to "relax on all this gay stuff."

When O'Reilly isn't dishing the homophobia himself, he's giving others a platform on his show to bash the LGBT community -- featuring guests like Marc Rudov, who recently advanced the bogus notion that "promoting a homosexual lifestyle" of gays and lesbians would cause "long-term consequences for children," that like a brain tumor, may take years to diagnose:

RUDOV: If there's going to be a brain tumor, it might not be discovered for 10 years -- and I kind of look at this in the same way, because children do form their sexual identities from their same-sex parents. And what's going on here is basically teaching children that there's no difference between a heterosexual marriage and a homosexual marriage.

Fox News and O'Reilly use the topic of same-sex couples and their families to promote his show and incite fear of the LGBT community. Never was this practice more clear than when Fox used footage from Rosie O'Donnell's cruise for gay and lesbian couples and their families to promote an upcoming edition of the Factor. The promo raised the question: "Is the media celebrating gay culture?" You can probably guess what the answer was.

Of course, we all know this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to O'Reilly and his attacks on the LGBT community.

Caleb McEwen kicks off our new political comedy series just in time for July 4 with a hilarious rant on the price of gas.

Produced by The UpTake in partnership with the Brave New Workshop Theater.