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Christine O'Donnell appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday evening during the segment immediately following his opening monologue and blamed her witch ad debacle on her advisers and wanted to get into it with Maher over whether it's fair or not to continue to blame Bush for the troubles with the economy we're still having today. Thankfully, her time was cut short since she was not a member of the panel on the show - or at least she wasn't until the Internet only Overtime segment.

As with all of his shows, Bill Maher always brings all of the guests back in for the on-line version only end of his show and listening to the stupidity that came out of Christine O'Donnell's mouth during this segment was just truly astounding. She was asked how she rectified her supposed "small government conservatism" with the intrusion into people's lives with her social beliefs, and she pretty much spent the entire rest of the segment tying herself in knots, not being able to explain the differences between or need for states' rights and when the federal government needs to step in, revising history, and just making crap up when it suited her.

The other guests who were uselessly trying to reason with her, which was pretty much impossible since you can't reason with someone who's head is thick as a brick, mainly looked like they were all just ready to bang their own heads on the desk by the time this thing was over.

I can honestly say I pity David Simon, Steve Schmidt, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jim VandeHei, well, maybe not VandeHei, but the rest of them for having to sit through this debacle and try to argue with this know nothing teabagger.

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I hate to break it to Peggy Noonan, if there's anyone out there who's taking an "extremist" position, it's the Catholic bishops and those on the right like herself, who are in disagreement with the 98 percent of Catholic women who have used contraception at some point in their lives.

Noonan joins the list of recent lackeys for the Catholic bishops, who are not only out of touch with their own female church members but with the American public in general. She does her best to conflate support for contraceptive services with being in support of abortion, and paints this as some black and white issue with only two sides which don't exist. I guess it's too much for her to grasp that if you don't want women to have abortions, then the first thing you should be supporting is for them to have access to contraception.

As always, what this really comes down to is sex and wanting to make people ashamed for having it. Conservatives can pretend this is about morality or abortion, but it always comes back to them wanting to control people's sex lives. And as far as these Catholic bishops go, when they stop protecting child molesters among their ranks and give women some equal standing in their church hierarchy instead of being second class citizens, maybe they'll have a leg to stand on to tell someone else what they're doing is immoral.

And if Republicans think running on a campaign of not paying for women's birth control is a winner this upcoming election as the Villagers in the corporate media keep trying to tell us it is, bring it on. They're going to see a backlash from this where they don't know what hit them once enough women start to realize they want to move backwards on covering contraception in the year 2012. Peggy Noonan is going to find out those so-called "leftists" in the Democratic base are actually right in the middle of where the rest of the country is at when it comes to the availability and affordability of contraceptives.

Transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

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Bill Maher joined Bill O'Reilly's show and discussed who's to blame for the deficit, whether his political views have shifted over the last twenty years and whether there is racism in the "Tea Party" or as I'd prefer to call them, the Republican base. Bill used his line from one of his New Rules segment where he described what's happened with the two major political parties and the fact that there are no more moderates left in the GOP.

At some point in the last 20 years, the left moved to the center, and the right moved into a mental institution.

And Fox is helping to send them there. O'Reilly said he's going to have the entire "unedited" version of the interview available on Fox's web site after they air part two on Thursday. I wonder how much of it will still be cut out as they did with his recent interview with Jon Stewart?

John Oliver says Muslims are allowed to put a mosque near Ground Zero, just like Catholics can build a church next to a playground.

Another part showed Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Iman behind the project, who FOX are now trying to make into some kind of boogeyman. Nevermind that a few months earlier he had appeared on FOX talking about plans for the Islamic cultural center.

Asshats.

The Daily Show have captured this farce better than the so-called legitimate news networks. But that's nothing new, is it?

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Human excrement Newt Gingrich repeated his inflammatory rhetoric from over the weekend this morning for the Fox & Friends kids. From the New York Times:

Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, also condemned the proposed mosque and the President’s comments.

“There is nothing surprising in the president’s continued pandering to radical Islam,” he said. “What he said last night is untrue and in accurate. The fact is this is not about religious liberty.”

Mr. Gingrich said the proposed mosque would be a symbol of Muslim “triumphalism” and that building the mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

“It’s profoundly and terribly wrong,” he said.

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So if you're a Tea Party leader and you post a racist online screed mocking NAACP "Coloreds" what does the media do? Why reward you with television appearances so you can try to sugar coat your hatred of course. Think Progress has more on his appearance with MSNBC's Tamron Hall.

Bigoted Tea Party Leader Mark Williams: ‘It’s Impossible For There To Be A Racist Element In The Tea Party’:

When host Tamron Hall asked why not “move forward” by condemning extremism in both camps, Williams instead pointed fingers, blaming all cases of racism on agent provocateurs Crash the Tea Party. Even more absurd, Williams said it is “impossible” for the tea party movement to contain racist elements:

HALL: Do we move forward by either side calling out extremism in their party? [...]

WILLIAMS: It’s impossible — it’s impossible for there to be a racist element in the tea party, you don’t get it! The tea party is about human rights, it’s about the United States constitution. The United States constitution mankind’s foremost human rights document.

HALL: What about the signs of the president as an African with a bone in his nose? What is that? Is that about the constitution?

WILLIAMS: Those signs were brought by Crash the Tea party, the coalition of anti-tea party groups, google crashed the tea party. You will find it all there. … Buy my book!

Of course, as ThinkProgress has documented, Williams needs to look no farther than himself to know that it is not “impossible” for the tea party movement to contain racist elements. Moreover, William’s pathetic attempt to dismiss every single example of tea party racism as the work of Crash the Party is complete nonsense. If he took his own advice and googled Crash the Tea Party, he would see that the group didn’t even exist until April of this year — a year after racist and bigoted signs began appearing at tea party rallies. Beyond this, the counter-protesters never really materialized, and basic common sense should tell Williams that the group couldn’t possibly be responsible for every single racist sign.

This guy really is a piece of work. It's too bad Hall didn't call him out for trying to blame a group that didn't exist for those signs until way after those racist signs started showing up at their rallies. It was obvious she didn't buy his line but didn't challenge him either. John King didn't do much better and allowed Williams to paint a happy face on his extreme comments and his writing and claim that what he said was just "misconstrued". Williams knows he stepped in it or he wouldn't be trying to do this kind of damage control.

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A Republican candidate in Missouri warned Monday that his opponent and the president are blocking the path to salvation.

In an interview on the Gina Loudon radio program, Ed Martin said that President Barack Obama and Rep. Russ Carnahan and keeping people from finding the Lord.

"We're great because we created a place and space where people can be free," said Martin. "And they can choose Christ, they can choose to be faithful. They can worship, and they find their way to the Lord."

"And that's one of the things that's most destructive about the growth of government. It's this taking away that freedom. The freedom -- the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation," he continued.

"And I think that's one of the things that we have to be very, very aware of that the Obama Administration and Congressman Carnahan are doing to us," he said.

"Very well said," agreed Loudon.

Fired Up! Missouri first noticed the interview Monday.

"This is pure lunacy, and as a person of faith, I find this incredibly offensive and outrageous. It's too insane for a response, really," wrote Sean at Fired Up! Missouri:

Martin doesn't explain which policies supported by Obama and Carnahan "take away all your choices" to be a Christian or find any other religion, perhaps because there aren't any. Maybe it's health care reform that keeps people from Jesus? Or unemployment benefits? Whatever they are, "we have to be very, very aware" of them anyway.

Martin's remarks echo comments he made about Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan in 2009. "She is very, very devious. She does -- with a, with a clever hand -- she does the devil's work," he said.

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Homeland Security Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman told Fox News' Chris Wallace that he wants the Department of Defense to launch an investigation into the shooting rampage at Ft. Hood. Lieberman said evidence indicates that Major Nidal Malik Hasan was probably a "self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist."

"If the reports that we're receiving of various statements he made, acts he took, are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism, and, therefore, if that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act and, in fact,it was the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on american soil since 9/11," Lieberman said Sunday.

Lieberman wants the Department of Defense to conduct a special investigation to see if the shootings could have been predicted. "While the Army and the FBI are conducting the criminal investigation about exactly what happened and what Dr. Hasan should be charged with, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense has a real obligation to convene an independent investigation to go back and look at whether warning signs were missed, both the stress he was under, but also the statements that he was making which really could lead people to believe that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist," said Lieberman.

"A couple of years ago, after a two-year investigation, my committee put out a report that said the new face of terrorism in America would not just be the attacks as 9/11 organized abroad and sending people in here, it would be people within this country, homegrown terrorists, self-radicalized, often over the internet, going to jihadist websites, and there's concern from what we know now about Hasan that, in fact, that's exactly what he was, a self-radicalized home grown terrorist," Lieberman concluded.

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Conservatives virtually declared victory after forcing a moderate Republican out of a highly contested House race in upstate New York. The Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, withdrew Saturday virtually guaranteeing a win for Conservative Party Candidate Doug Hoffman in New York's 23rd Congressional district.

White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett told ABC's George Stephanopolous that pressure on Scozzafava to drop out shows how conservatives are marginalizing moderates. "I think [the Republican Party is] becoming more and extreme and more and more marginalized," said Jarrett.