Open thread below.... Thanks for your continued support of this blog...no contribution is too small.

The Mahablog: Is America irrevocably ungovernable?

digby: Legal sanity in NY

Charles Rowley's Blog: The Dog That Does Not Bark

AverageBro: I guess I'm a racist, too

Guys from Area 51: Ignoble Prizes

Newshoggers: Chuck Kramer's Ode to Christmas

Suburban Guerrilla: SCREWED

Climate Progress: The Washington Post goes tabloid and publishes Palin's second falsehood-filled op-ed in five months - on climate science

TalkLeft: Leaving the cult?

Robert Reich's Blog: The president's jobs initiative doesn't measure up

MAL Contends: Ike the liberal

MN Progressive Project: Michelle Bachman: "Fiscal conservative" You must be kiddin' me!

Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog!: Lying runs in the family

The Hunting of the Snark: Greasing the Skids

Calculated Risk: Unofficial Problem Bank list grows to 500

La Gringa's Blogicito: Possible resolution to political crisis in Honduras

Ken Silverstein: Six questions for Desmond Travers on the Goldstone Report

The Impolitic: Big Friday news dump

Emptywheel: What if trials prove torture wasn't necessary?

The Diary of a Geek in Oxfordshire: If Mine Speech Offends Thee...

The Reaction: Nothing too shameful

Mother Jones: Filibusters and Holds

Thanks to Batocchio and Blue Gal for their great work during my absence

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Minnesota Political Blog, Private Buffoon, I can't believe it's not a democracy!

What does a self-described progressive city girl do when she chases love to a remote corner of Kansas? She blogs about the local news media covering the appropriate kind of squirrel meat to serve at Thanksgiving, among other hilarious findings. Mudflap Bubbas definitely worth the click.

Open thread below...

Economist's View: Will health insurance exchanges work?

The Agonist: The morality of deliberate defaults

The Progressive Puppy: Aaron McKinney now says that Matthew Shepard "needed killing"

The Plum Line: Happy Hour Roundup

No More Mister Nice Blog: Emotionally, it works for him

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Needlenose, True/Slant, American Nihilist, The Daily Background

TheZoo: How dare the president bid for the Olympics!

Alas, a blog: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Intellectual Right

The Rumpus: Where God and the Devil Wheel Lke Vultures: Report From El Paso

NotionsCapital: Blogs With Bite

East Bay Express: ACORN foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001

EnviroKnow: Nike staement on departure from the U. S. Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors

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Max Blumenthal went on Morning Joe today to debate the nature of the unhinged rhetoric and behavior that's becoming part and parcel of the right-wing response to Obama's presidency.

Joe Scarborough often talks a good game about realizing what a huge mistake it is for Republicans to allow themselves to be dragged over the cliff like this, but like David Brooks, he has yet to come to grips with the dimension of the beast he's up against. Max tried to set him straight, but as you can see, this is a very slow process for recovering movement conservatives.

Both Joe and Mike disputed some of Max's facts, and as promised he's posted the substantiation for those facts at his blog. Yes, it's true that Jim DeMint believes that neither single pregnant women nor gays and lesbians -- moral reprobates all, apparently -- should be allowed to teach in public schools.

Incidentally, you can find these details and many more in Max's new book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Destroyed the Party. On bookshelves everywhere!

From Nick Anderson at The Houston Chronicle (click here for larger). Found at the wonderful blog Yikes!

Open Thread below...

Arrgh, happy Talk Like a Pirate Day. This Dilbert cartoon found (as much buried treasure is) at Cap'n Dyke's blog, the long-reigning and much-loved Lesbian Pirate Queen of the Blogosphere.

Open thread below.

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[H/t Heather]

Nutbag wingnuts never ever go away even when they lose their tiny radio shows. They just come back again and again and again. Big money republicans always keep their wingnuts around in one form or another.
Anyway, Conservatives are crying a little more than usual lately because their racism has been so prominently displayed in their teabagger meetings and protests. And what do you know, my old pal Mark Williams is leading a teabagger party and his racism gets exposed by Anderson Cooper last night quite easily. He lies with the best of them and got caught by Anderson. Check it out.

COOPER: But I mean, Mark, what you're saying makes sense to me here when I'm hearing what you're saying. But then I read on your blog, you say -- you call the president an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

COOPER: Is that the kind of...

WILLIAMS: That's the way he's behaving.

COOPER: But I mean...

WILLIAMS: I mean, if he cares to be...

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Do you believe he's Indonesian? Do you believe he's a Muslim? Do you really believe he's a welfare thug?

WILLIAMS: He's certainly acting like it.

GERGEN: You think he's a racist in chief? Racist in chief? Is that what you called him? That's unbelievable. It's unbelievable,

WILLIAMS: Until he embraces the whole country -- what else can I conclude? He and guys like James are totally, totally isolating the rest of this country; if you're a working-class American, then you know, that's it.
CARVILLE: I tell you, if you're an American, and you like what you're hearing from this guy, if you like celebrating a man's death, go over there with these people.

Mark Williams found his new calling by joining up with the teabaggers which seems like a good fit to me since there was no where for him to go after he lost his radio show in Sacramento. In the segment he tries to downplay the psychos that make up a large part of the teabaggers and says there is no racism and then is exposed as a racist. You can't make this up.

Here's some context on this guy. His behavior was so outlandish that I've posted several clips of him over the years and he doesn't like me so much. I remember when I called Williams "Puke" in a post for his obnoxious comments he made on Hardball about Cindy Sheehan's son during Cindy's stand at Crawford ranch back in August of 2005.

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O'Donnell: "Mark, if you don't mind, you're making the case that Cindy Sheehan is hurting the morale of our troops?"

Williams: "She is aiding and abetting the enemies of this country and the people who killed her son. And right now Casey Sheehan is spinning in his grave!"

And the best response he could make to me was that I was trying to have his dog assassinated.

After Katrina hit, he acted like the lowest of the low when he attacked Katrina victims by saying they were too dumb and lazy to get out of NOLA.

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Williams: ..they didn't have the necessary brains and common sense to get out of the way of a Cat 5 Hurricane and then when it hit them- stood on the side of the convention Center expiring while reporters were coming and going..

Morris:...that's just sickening---that is atrocious what you are saying...

He calls Kanye West a racist while he spews racism.

Williams: The only role race plays in this is that the American black population has been the prototype for an entire race of people being, being turned into a group of dependents of the government--trapped there, I'm using that word very loosely are screaming we want help, we want help..

This is a man who is leading the teabagger brigade and is lapping up the attention. I hope the media sees these clips so they know who they are dealing with.

at-Largely: Bush/Cheney knew it was a crime when they kidnapped and held detainees

PERRspectives: Excerpts of President Obama's speech to America's students

Fafblog!: America: Still F*cked in the Head

AfterDowningStreet: At the Beck and Call of a Sunshine Patriot

Helena Cobban: Sweden and the Israel-linked organs story

Zen Comix: Michael Hussey's blog Pushing Rope, where I cross post my comix, has been running a series of posts about The Tampa Bay Tribune Online using bloggers content without paying the bloggers.

Esquire: Drug War Facts: America's prohibition of narcotics may be costing more lives than Mexico's — and nearly enough dollars for universal health care

Angry Bear: Gang of Six, Regular Order & the Johnson Treatment

Shakesville: If you're not already against the death penalty...

RaceWire: By the Numbers: Katrina families still wait for justice

Alas, a blog: Crazy for Cryin', Crazy for Tryin'...

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Reporter urged lynching...JoeNBC...Pentagon screening war reporters...WSJ ethics...Grandaddy of Hate Radio back on the air...Kurtz: In the tank AND stupid...Bringing down Beck...And his"Defenders"...Does anyone actually edit the WaPo?...'Oh No He Didn't'...NPR boosts private health insurers...Alaska Daily notes Levi Johnston Tell-All...

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John Fund at Americans for Prosperity's Right Online Conference cites Nate Silver's predictions for 2010, and the possibility of the Democrats losing 20-50 seats in the House. Nate talked about this with Ron Reagan Jr. on his radio show the other day and wrote about it at his blog Likely Voters and Unlikely Scenarios where he qualifies his predictions with this:

Is it possible that the electorate which is voting in November 2010 will be so down on the Democrats that they trust Republicans more on issues like these? Sure, it is possible -- if the enthusiasm gap is wide enough, if Obama's approval is low enough, if the health care debate has been bungled enough, and if the economy is still hemorrhaging jobs. But I'd consider it something of a worst-case scenario. That's probably the best way to regard these Rasmussen polls for the time being.

So maybe not quite as doom and gloom as Fund is making it out to be. As for the rest of his nonsense, well that's another matter. Fund goes on to claim that the Democrats' problem is they don't know how to govern as moderates. Heh. That's rich. Yeah, here we are again as Fund says, but not because the Democrats are governing from the left, but because they're governing as triangulating corporate "centrists".