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Glenn Beck seems to be irked at the people digging into his past. But then, that's because his past is truly a disgusting thing to behold. I wouldn't want people looking at it either, if mine were anything remotely like Beck's.

He ranted about it last night on his Fox News show. He thinks we should be paying more attention to his phony "scandals" than to just what kind of character we're watching implore us to seek greater moral goods (as he sees them) every night.

He's no doubt thinking of Alexander Zaitchik's impressive three part series in Salon, the first of which does indeed point out that his mother's death remains a mystery -- and that Beck's own later assertion that it was a suicide was a peculiar event.

It was an incredibly revealing series -- particularly this nugget from the second part, describing Beck's antics when he had a falling out with a former radio-show partner named Bruce Kelly, who became a competitor in the Phoenix market. Beck was known as "the king of dirty tricks," including an invasion of Kelly's wedding.

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

You have to wonder if Kelly contemplated returning the favor when Beck's second daughter was born with cerebral palsy.

But then, he'd have been forced to sink to the level of Glenn Beck to have done something like that.

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Via Raw Story, Rachel Maddow points out that in a move to make himself the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, the so-called "sane, centrist, future of the Republican Party" Tim "Fear the Mullet" Pawlenty is putting together the usual assortment of Republican scum to run his political PAC:

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has signaled with the creation of his Freedom First PAC that he has his eye on the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, however, believes that far from making him a credible candidate, the list of Pawlenty's consultants and strategists represents "a who's who of some of the worst Republican scandals of the past decade."

Maddow pointed in particular to Pawlenty senior advisor Terry Nelson, a former deputy chief of staff at the Republican National Committee "known for being the guy in charge when the infamous New England phone-jamming
case went down."

That dirty tricks maneuver sabotaged the Democrats' get-out-the-vote operation during the 2002 New Hampshire election and helped elect Republican John Sununu to the Senate. Nelson was the direct supervisor of RNC regional director James Tobin, who was convicted for his role in the case.

Maddow went on to describe how Nelson then left the RNC to beoame a media consultant, hired an advisor to the Swiftboat Veterans, and was behind the notorious race-baiting "Harold, call me" ad that helped defeat the 2006 senatorial campaign of Democrat Harold Ford but was condemned even by many Republicans.
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Pawlenty has also hired former White House political director Sara Taylor, who became notorious in 2007 for her role in the US Attorney scandal and her inability to recall anything of significance when called to testify before Congress.

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(So infamous, they even wrote songs about him)

The name J.Edgar Hoover has been fading from Americas collective memory the past few decades. He died in 1972. But from 1924 up until his death he ran the FBI, taking it from a somewhat bumbling government agency into a monolith that was synonymous with eavesdropping, wiretaps, file keeping, political power plays, espionage and dirty tricks. He was the reason all subsequent FBI Directors had term limits. He made the FBI his life and his kingdom and was in charge right up to the last. He was the guy with all the secrets and he made a lot of innocent lives uncomfortable as the result.

Here he is from September 23, 1940 giving an address to the America Legion Convention in Boston, talking about one of his favorite subjects, The Communist Threat and "Foreignism".

With all that paranoia floating around, it's a wonder anybody slept at night.

Take one cherry-picked quote, say that a newspaper has been "hiding" it when it has been on their website all along and hype the result through several different rightwing noise-makers. Result - a scandal which says that Obama would like to drive the coal industry bankrupt. One good enough for Sarah Palin to tout on the stump.

The original quote, presented in a cropped clip of an Obama interview that discussed his policy on climate change and carbon "cap and trade", looked terrible for Obama. Especially in places like West Virginia and Ohio:

That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants are being built, they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted-down caps that are imposed every year. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches.

But it's just the Right cherry-picking its quotes again to fabricate a smear out of whole cloth.

This from the same interview - and unmentioned by the unethical smear-merchants at Newsbusters, who first floated the rightwing's version of the truth:

"But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion. Because the fact of the matter is, is that right now we are getting a lot of our energy from coal. And China is building a coal-powered plant once a week. So what we have to do then is figure out how can we use coal without emitting greenhouse gases and carbon. And how can we sequester that carbon and capture it. If we can’t, then we’re gonna still be working on alternatives."

Shows clearly that Obama meant only plants not using clean-coal technology would be hit.

And that is also McCain's position.

On June 21, 2005, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told McCain in a Senate debate that his legislation to curb climate change would "put coal of out of business." McCain didn't contest that claim. Indeed McCain agreed that his legislation would "require sacrifice" acknowledging that critics said it would cost "thousands of jobs."

But you won't be hearing that from Newsbusters, Drudge, Malkin, Fox News, Palin or any of the many others who climbed on this "November Surprise" bandwagon.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

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