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Keith and Eugene Robinson had the same reaction I did to watching members of Congress out there calling for something close to the overthrow of our government. I agree completely with Eugene Robinson—it was frankly appalling.

OLBERMANN: Good evening from New York.

An elected Republican official today is leading a protest on the west steps of the Capitol that compared health care reform to Nazi death camps and encouraged mindless harassment of and possibly violence against the government. Not tea baggers anymore, not demagogic commentators, an actual congresswoman inciting a hateful rebellion against the rule of law and order. Her name is Michele Bachmann.

Our fifth story on the COUNTDOWN: As if that were not bad enough, Ms. Bachmann today joined by the House minority leader as well as countless other GOP representatives. This orgy of veiled threat and not so veiled racism of white power minority rule now fully the province of the Republican Party. Welcome to the coup!

Congressman Bachmann staging what she tried to claim was a spontaneous meet-up of opponents to health care reform, in 25 buses paid for by the AstroTurf group Americans for Prosperity, could be considered spontaneous. An estimated 4,000 people today answering Ms. Bachmann‘s call, bringing with them on those buses, not just their misunderstanding of health care reform but also their hatred of President Obama, as well as pure hatred, period.

Lee Fang of ThinkProgress.org taking these photographs of a sign that reads “National Socialist Health Care, Dachau, Germany, 1945,” superimposed over the horrific images of the corpses from Dachau. Other signs are slightly less shameful but many in no way related to health care.

Congresswoman Bachmann urging these people to rebel.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BACHMANN: It was Thomas Jefferson who said—a revolution every now and then is a good thing. What do you think?

(CHEERING)

BACHMANN: You feel so good right now, and we, the members of Congress that are gathered on these steps for this press conference, are so honored that you are here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Press conference? The geniuses at the Republican study committee trying to rebrand today‘s event not as a protest, nor a rally, but as a press conference. Urging House staffers in an e-mail last night to please make sure your boss does not turn this event a rally.

Does any of this sound like press conference to you?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. PAUL BROUN, GEORGIA: Who will kill this bill? You will! You will! And we must. The Constitution of the United States starts with three very powerful words: “We, the people.” And we the people are speaking. Nancy Pelosi, listen.

Fellow patriots, go tell your congressman you‘re not going to eat this rotten stinking fish that is Pelosi health care! We are going to put a stop sign in front of her steamroller of socialism. Go to it, Patriots!

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Marsha Blackburn does a good job of turning into a drama queen when it suits her, doesn't she? During the debate on the House floor over the health care bill being voted on today, Blackburn railed on about who's going to pay for this. I want to know when she's ever asked the same question about paying for war funding?

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Washington Journal host Peter Slen asks Marsha Blackburn about an editorial in The New York Times The Republican Health Plan and reads this passage:

It has some good provisions, such as prohibiting insurers from imposing annual or lifetime caps on what they will pay and automatic enrollment of workers in employer-sponsored group coverage. But it would not prevent insurers from denying coverage or charging higher premiums based on pre-existing conditions.

Blackburn's response:

Blackburn: Well, one of the ways to address that is going another route and getting to that universal access component that so many people want to see but doing it through high risk pools and through re-insurance and this is a model that many of our businesses are accustomed to dealing with. You know, they have different high risk for things—worker’s comp and other issues—and there is a way to do that and to address that and bring people into that, into those high risk pools. Addressing pre-existing and chronic conditions absolutely and being certain that there is a pool for that, that is set up, and there again, people can go to gop.gov and look at that, look at the bill and see how that is specifically addressed.

So the GOP's plan according to Rep. Blackburn is if you have a pre-existing condition, you're going to be put into a high risk pool. I don't believe she explained how that would prevent people from paying higher premiums for pre-existing conditions or from being denied care—quite the opposite.

Under conservative plans for health care reform, many more Americans with pre-existing conditions would find it even more difficult to obtain reasonably priced care. This is because conservative plans often seek to substitute insurance coverage purchased in the individual market for group coverage, such as the insurance that many Americans have through their employers. These proposals also call for expanding existing high-risk pools, such as the Maryland program, to provide coverage for people with chronic illnesses and costly health histories. Today’s state-based high-risk pools provide an important coverage option for some individuals, but the coverage is expensive, and it’s only available to a small portion of those eligible.

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Bill O'Reilly allows Fox News "Strategic Analyst" Lt. Col. Ralph Peters to go on a rant calling the shooting at Fort Hood "the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11" with little to no push back other than to say that Hasan may have had personal problems that had little to do with his religion and time will tell if his religion was the primary reason for the shooting spree. The race baiting manifested itself in full force when Peters made this statement which O'Reilly left un-countered.

Peters: Yeah, well first of all, the charge that you know, he was harassed and he broke, good god, I mean every soldier goes through a little harassment, but let me tell you from personal experience, if there’s harassment toward a minority or a religious minority in our military, man…your career is over for harassing. And this guy filed a charge that was found, there was no foundation to the charge. He’d been a trouble maker and a sad sack for a long time but because he was part of a protected species, a protected minority, the Army let him slide, just reassigned him, and what happened? 13 soldiers, fellow soldiers and civilian dead, 28 seriously wounded, a few more lightly wounded and what do we say?

Oops? No, it’s time to get rid of the PC culture in the Army, in society, in the media, and Bill I believe your viewers understand that this was an act of Islamist terror, and the media is not going to fool them and President Obama’s not going to fool them and at some point we need to quit focusing on “Oh how tormented this poor Maj. Hasan was, and remember, what…how many of the names do we know of the dead? What about the names of the wounded? Have the media covered the family lives that have been destroyed? The lives that have been destroyed? No. It’s all about poor Maj. Hasan and I am ready to puke.

O’Reilly: Alright Col. we appreciate that very much.

What sort of mindset does it take to be able to equate human beings to a "protected species”? This was truly just disgusting to watch. And while I do not disagree with some of what Peters said, such as paying attention to the fact that there are a whole lot of families out there going through what are some really horrific times right now because of this tragedy, calling this the “worst terrorist attack since 9-11” is utterly ridiculous. And I would hope that we are taking a better look at why this man snapped other than the cartoon-like stereotype that Peters attempted to paint here and using this as an excuse to demonize or dehumanize the Muslim community.

I have a lot of questions about just what happened to cause this tragic and very sad event. I don’t have a lot of faith that any of us will have those questions ever answered honestly any time soon. In the mean time, we can count on Fox News to draw their own conclusions if it means drumming up the fear factor and racial tensions in America for ratings.

From GRITtv:

In Max Blumenthal’s book Republican Gomorrah and in his GRITtv appearance, he introduced us to Francis Schaeffer, one of the important figures in the anti-choice and religious right movements in the United States. Frank Schaeffer, Francis’s son, wrote a book about growing up in the religious right, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.

Schaeffer has a new book now, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism), and in it he takes on both the “incipient fascism” of the religious right and what he called “proselytizing” atheism of Richard Dawkins and others. He joins Laura on GRITtv for a fascinating interview about his own journey, and how people, religious or irreligious, are all looking for answers to the same questions.

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Keith names JAG Tom Kenniff the winner of his Worst Person in the World segment. Runners up Allen West and Brian Kilmeade, Gretchen Carlson and Peter Johnson of Fox News.

Glenn Beck's appendicitis proves to be comedy gold for the good folks at The Daily Show. Stewart's Beckisms are bang on.

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How is that the House Minority Leader can mix up the U.S. Constitution with the Declaration of Independence in front of a Tea Party crowd at the Capitol? Who knows..but he did it, pulling out his pocket copy of the Constitution he's pledged to uphold, today pledging to "stand here with our Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident ..."

Here's more from Rick Sanchez.

SANCHEZ: Representative John Boehner is House minority leader, the number-one Republican in the House of Representatives. So, you would think that he would know the Constitution, know in fact the thing backward and forward.

Well, I got a bit of a surprise for you. Here's John Boehner just a short time ago, House Minority Leader John Boehner addressing a TEA Party rally against health care reform from the marble steps of the U.S. Capitol.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BOEHNER: This is my copy -- this is my copy of the Constitution. And I'm going to stand here with our founding fathers who wrote in the preamble, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: And do you believe it? As most fifth-graders would know, the document Boehner was quoting is not the Constitution. It's the Declaration of Independence. I'm assuming he knows the difference, but maybe -- I'm not sure now.

Those other House Republicans, the ones behind him, Roy Blunt, Virginia Foxx, Michele Bachmann, are they cringing in despair or just blissfully unaware? I don't know.

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November 06, 2009 C-SPAN

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During some of the media's endless coverage of the Fort Hood shootings today, Larry King brought in former POW Shoshana Johnson, Dr. Phil McGraw and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff to speculate about what the mindset of the accused attacker Nidal Malik Hasan may have been. When Kenniff called some of CNN's previous coverage on the topic "psycho-babble", tried to say that a ranking officer could not be suffering from PTSD and asserted that Hasan's motivations looked more like an act of terrorism because he has a Muslim name, Shoshana Johnson and Phil McGraw both rightfully called him out for it.

When Kenniff while attempting to counter McGraw and Johnson asked Johnson if she had ever been to Iraq, she had to remind him that she was a POW:

KENNIF: I spent a year in Iraq, ma'am. Have you ever been to Iraq?

JOHNSON: I'm a POW. I got shot.

Kenniff was obviously unaware that Johnson was in fact the first female African American POW in U.S. history.

KING: We're back.

We are happy to be able to call on our friend, Dr. Phil, the host of his own show, "New York Times" best-selling author and a -- and a member of the fraternity that is from Texas.

In fact, do you know Fort Hood?

DR. PHIL MCGRAW, TV SHOW HOST: I do. I've been there and I've spent time working with some of the widows of soldiers and widows and widowers of soldiers that were lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I've spent time on Fort Hood. And it's a -- it's a wonderful...

KING: It's a huge base, right?

MCGRAW: It's 339 acres. It's a city within itself down there. And on any given day, you can have 30,000 or 40,000 people on the base. It truly is a city within a city and good folks. And, as the general said, it's -- it's their home. I mean this isn't a war zone, it's their home.

KING: I asked the FBI if he had -- the FBI agent if he had ever heard of a psychiatrist committing mayhem. He never had.

Have you?

MCGRAW: Well, no, I have not. But, Larry, we're dealing with a very different kind of war here. And, you know, this is a man that, from what I understand, was doing all kinds of drug and rehabilitation counseling with -- with soldiers and returning soldiers. And we know that there is a tremendous degree of stress with this war. And I think the military will tell you that it's a new animal and nobody knows exactly what to do with it. And I don't know -- everything is speculation at this point. But he was apparently scheduled for deployment, did not want to go. I think he has maybe seen the problems that some of these soldiers were experiencing when they come back to try to reintegrate into society, and maybe the fear got him, and he just snapped.

You can't make sense out of nonsense. And you have to stop and think about this, Larry. How far out of touch with reality and reason do you have to go to actually pick up a weapon and kill your friends, kill your fellow soldiers, your fellow warriors? This is a major mental event. This guy was not just having a bad day. This is a serious, serious --

KING: Joining us in New York is Tom Kennif a commissioned officer with the Army National Guard's Judge Advocates General Group. He is a general with the war in Iraq, and a criminal defense attorney. In Washington, our old friend Shoshanna Johnson, former POW, U.S. Army specialist, now serves on the Advisory Panel for the Veterans Administration.

Dr. Phil is with us here in the studios in Los Angeles.

Tom, what do you make of this?

TOM KENNIFF, FMR. ARMY JAG: Look, Larry, you know, with all due respect to Dr. Phil, you know, having been through the war in Iraq, and having seen what these soldiers go through, you know, with respect to this incident, I need to take a giant step back from all the psycho-babble I've been hearing for the last few hours.

Let's take a look at the facts of this situation. This is not some lower enlisted soldier. This is a major. He is a high ranking field grade officer. That means that he outranks approximately 95 percent of the military.

He has a medical -- he is a medical doctor. He is an MD. That means he occupies a position of prestige, not only within the military, but also within society at large.

He is paid well for the job he does. You know, this looks a lot less like PTSD, and a lot more like the Hassan Akbar case in 2003, where another soldier who has an Islamic last name, throws grenades randomly into tents occupied by his fellow officers, and by his fellow soldiers, for no other reason but to commit acts of terror, and to instill fear on the military installation, and to bring attention to himself.

SHOSHANA JOHNSON, FORMER POW: Hello.

KING: Are you doing, Tom -- by mentioning Islamic last name, are you doing speculating of your own?

KENNIFF: I am speculating. . That's true. We have very limited information right now. But we're all speculating. And what I'm saying is my speculation seems to fit a lot more in with the reality of this case.

JOHNSON: No. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. I think you're talking --

(CROSS TALK)

KING: Hold it. Let's --

MCGRAW: I don't think you can say that. I think that's a terrible innuendo here.

(CROSS TALK)

JOHNSON: As someone who suffers from PTSD, I know exactly what I say to my psychiatrist. And if he is sitting back and hearing this day in and day out, the fear may get to him. The fact of the matter that he is a major, or the fact that he is a doctor doesn't excuse that he is a human being and he feels.

You're saying because he is a major in the Army that he is not going to feel the way a private does.

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November 04, 2009 NBC Jay Leno

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Fox News host Brian Kilmeade wants to know if it's time to make all Muslims in the military pay for the alleged crimes of the Ft. Hood shooting suspect. "Do you think it's time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers -- anybody enlisted? Because if I'm going to deployed in a foxhole, if I'm going to be sticking in an outpost I got to know the guy next to me is not going to want to kill me," Brian Kilmeade asked Geraldo Rivera.

To his credit, Rivera rejected the idea. "Isn't this the headline, Brian, that there are 4 or 5 million American Muslims and how scant and few and far between these horrifying incidents are?" asked Rivera.

"I want to ask this question another way," interrupted Gretchen Carlson. "Could it be that the military -- because our society, lets just face it, has become very politically correct -- could it be that the military was also exercising political correctness?" asked Carlson. "Even though he had a poor performance report and even though he spoke openly about being a radical being a radical muslim and had those supposed postings online. Could it be that the military was exercising political correctness in not approaching him as seriously as they would have had he not been a Muslim?"

"Yes is the short answer," relented Rivera. "Because the military is a government agency."

But Peter B. Johnson wasn't letting the idea of screenings go. "You won't countenance special screening for Muslims will you?"

"It's a hard step for me to take," said Rivera. "This is an American born person."

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November 05, 2009 CBS David Letterman

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While I definitely do not agree with Dylan Ratigan on a host of issues, the one thing I've found refreshing about his show is that the guests had better not come on there and start spouting mindless talking points without expecting to be challenged on them--because they will be if they do, and forcefully as Betsy McCaughey found out the hard way about a month ago. Rep. Pete King was no exception today. With some help from Chrystia Freeland, Ratigan calls out Rep. Pete King for distorting what's in the House health care bill.

King asked for everyone to come join the Tea Baggers "press conference" on Capitol hill today and trotted out the tired old line about being able to buy insurance across state lines as a cost saving measure and allowing people "the freedom to choose" their health insurance provider. He also said that 85% of people are happy with their insurance companies and that Pelosi's plan would "cancel every policy".

Ratigan pointed out that it is not true that people are happy with their insurance companies and that the GOP bill would not assure more choices. Freeland noted that allowing people to cross state lines to buy insurance would just mean a race to the bottom and companies going to the states with the least regulations and make it even harder with people with pre-existing conditions to get coverage.

King and the rest of the GOP have nothing but the same tired rhetoric to offer on what their idea of “reform” is. They’re more worried about getting the Tea Baggers whipped into a frenzy than anything that resembles legislating.

From The Colbert Report:

Barack Obama loses the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, and Chris Christie uses Monty Python to attack Jon Corzine.