Violence is contagious.

This Kentucky weirdo should be checked out very carefully.

A Kentucky woman has threatened a Michigan newspaper with a bloodbath similar to the massacre at Ft. Hood if they don't lay off criticism of the District 6 congresswoman.

Weird. We always thought Michele was a pro-life kinda gal. But on with the story, which begins with an editorial in the Port Huron Times Herald. It lambastes Bachmann as a "a hate-spewing, right-wing legislator from Minnesota."

Rally participants carried a variety of disturbing signs. One placard had a health care message superimposed over dead bodies from Holocaust concentration camps. One referred to President Barack Obama as "Sambo." One depicted the president as the evil "Joker" from Batman movies. One referred to "Obama and his Marxist buddies."At one point, the crowd chanted "Nazi, Nazi."

The unidentified Kentucky woman was having none of that, and according to Editor and Publisher, she put in a call to the Gannett customer service center in Louisville, Ky., threatening to arm herself and "do what they did at Fort Hood." (Gannett owns the Times Herald.)

Gannett gave a copy of the recording to Kentucky authorities, who paid the woman a visit last week. No charges have yet been filed in the case.

It's at the point where threats of bloodbaths and sicko murder fantasies like this should be a crime already. Oh, I forgot, the FRC will say it's denying their preachers the right to express themselves. My bad.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: 1115

PLAYS: 438

(Communists were thought to be everywhere, even comic books)

When we think about paranoia, conspiracy theories and black helicopters today, we think this is a relatively new phenomenon.

Sad to say, no. During the 1950s we were knee-deep in the Red Scare, the all-pervasive paranoia, the trigger-happy finger on the doomsday scenario.

It's no small wonder anti-depressants became popular around this time. It's also no small wonder people drank themselves into comas on an almost daily basis. You would too if you had to endure that much rampant distrust of your fellow human being - convinced every other person was hiding secret marching orders from The Kremlin.

Nasty times.

And so in 1955, one of the hot topics of discussion on mainstream media was just how much freedom Americans were losing, and were we in danger of losing it completely? Was the U.S. Government overrun with Communist subversives, poised to take over at the appointed time?

Then as now, a lot of the hysteria was media manufactured, pumped up by fringe element alarmists bent on scaring the crap out of people. Sending them, terror-stricken for comforting answers.

And as Senator Hubert Humphrey pointed out during the interview:

Sen. Hubert Humphrey: “ I think there are a number of people who would like to have the American people believe that the government is infiltrated by disloyal people and subversives and security risks and that isn’t a fact either. The Government employees are, as a group far above the average employee in the country. They’ve been screened, re-screened and double screened as to their security and as to their loyalty. I do feel however, that there’s been far too much demagoguery about the so-called security risks, the so-called numbers game. Many people have been dismissed from employment that were not disloyal at all. But just were unsuitable employees and then they’ve been tabulated as security risks. I think the sooner we get down to taking a look at our loyalty security program as citizens rather than as partisans, as members of Congress rather than as Republicans or Democrats, the better we’re going to be off and the better the country’s going to be off. We need security and freedom and we can have both.”

Despite the claims and facts to the contrary, the witch hunt kept right on pointing fingers and accusing. And the alarmists kept right on sowing hysteria.

Not much has changed in retrospect. Only the enemy.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1131)

PLAYS: (2455)

This is sickening. Rep. John Shadegg uses baby Maddie, a 7-month-old daughter of his Chief of Staff to the floor as a prop during the health-care debate in the House earlier today.

The Political Carnival writes:

I wanted to "spit up", and wished Maddy had.

Yes, John Shadegg actually used an innocent infant as a prop, spoke baby talk, and provided us with nothing more than what was most likely in Maddy's diaper at the time. And for this, he got applause.

The collective (im)maturity of the Rushpublic side of the aisle doesn't come close to measuring up to Maddy's level of sophistication. How utterly humiliating.

Henry Waxman made a joke and said: “That was a remarkable child,” “and a great ventriloquist.”

How could a father let his child be used as a prop like that? What would have happened if he hurt her in any way? The entire Republican Party is made up of fools, and I mean the staffers as well. And then there are the people who applauded this stunt ...

By the way, John Shadegg does have a somewhat checkered past, if you remember...

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the wingnuts tried to maliciously and deceitfully connect the Fort Hood shooter to the Obama White House. We just didn't expect it would take less than 24 hours.

And of course the perpetrator is the reliably wrong conspiracy-meister Jerome Corsi, writing at WorldNetDaily:

NEW YORK – Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday's massacre at Fort Hood, played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama's transition into the White House, according to a key university policy institute document.

The Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University published a document May 19, entitled "Thinking Anew – Security Priorities for the Next Administration: Proceedings Report of the HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force, April 2008 – January 2009," in which Hasan of the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine is listed on page 29 of the document as a Task Force Event Participant.

Media Matters has the facts:

However, Corsi himself acknowledges that there is no evidence that "the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition" -- indeed, the Task Force was initiated in April 2008. Moreover, while Hasan was listed as one of approximately 300 "Task Force Event Participants" in the report's appendix, HSPI has reportedly said he was not a "member" of the Task Force, and was listed because he RSVP'd for several of the group's open events.

Why, we can hardly wait for the next Glenn Beck episode.

The fact that it is crap, of course, guarantees that Glenn Beck et al will run with it. We can now look forward to a “the Fort Hood killer advised the Obama transition team” meme -– shortened to calling him “an Obama adviser”.

This is, naturally, just par for the course for Corsi:

Continue reading »

The GOP has embarrassed itself once more. How can they actively promote an event like their tea party/anti health care protest in DC and watch silently as disgusting signs and insane wackos fill their ranks? Well, it's easy to do when you have Rep. Michele Bachmann telling the teabaggers to "scare" her colleagues into voting against health care reform during this "Super Bowl of Freedom." I mean, come on. First of all she should be arrested for actively promoting this type of hatred form a current member of Congress and can she at least come up with a name that's not as ridiculous as she is?

OK, that's asking too much.

In a conference call Wednesday night with bloggers and activists for the advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) called on protesters to “scare” members of Congress into killing the proposed health care reform bill.

If the protesters succeed in scaring lawmakers, Bachmann said that it could cripple efforts to restructure health care for a decade.

“Nothing scares members of Congress more than freedom-loving Americans,” Bachmann said.

She said that members were frightened by the August town hall meetings, but “then they came back to Washington, and they got back in the bubble and Speaker Pelosi put the hammer down on the Democrats.”

Rep. Todd Akin is also one of those special kinds of idiots that occupy the rank and file tea party and he led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance because the word "God," just drives us all crazy. I guess he doesn't understand history very well because the original "Pledge of Allegiance" never had the word "God" in it at all, but nothing is allowed to interfere with their conservative/religious talking points.

At the Capitol Hill Tea Party just now, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) stepped up to lead the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance -- which he said drives the liberals crazy.

"And so as we now renew our commitment to the Red, White and Blue, let us with boldness proclaim the fact that we are one nation under God," said Akin. "It is altogether fitting that we should do this -- and it drives the liberals crazy."

The crowd laughed, and joined Akin in the Pledge, with a genuine shout given to the key words, "...one nation, UNDER GOD, with liberty..."

And no matter what Eric Cantor says, signs that use images of Holocaust victims are just sick and were not planted by anyone but his own. Has he not seen even one teabagger protest? My God, (I used the bad word) that's the norm at these astroturfed gatherings.
And our pal Dana Milbank fills us in even more.

Many of the demonstrators chanted "Weasel Queen," their pet name for the speaker of the House. Others wore masks of Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); they were covered in fake blood and carrying dolls representing aborted fetuses, as the Grim Reaper led them in chains to hell.

In the front of the protest, a sign showed President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker. The sign, visible to the lawmakers as they looked into the cameras, carried a plea to "Stop Obamunism." A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist.

But the best of Bachmann's recruits were a few rows into the crowd, holding aloft a pair of 5-by-8-foot banners proclaiming "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945." Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children.

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1926)

PLAYS: (1495)

No sooner was the identity of the Fort Hood shooter released -- a man with the Arab name Nadal Malik Hasan -- than the wingnuts sprang into predictable action: Of course he was a jihadi embarking on a murderous terrorism spree!

Pam "Atlas Barks" Geller immediately proclaimed it "an obvious act terrorism" and ran big all all caps heads declaring: "IT'S THE JIHAD STUPID." Elsewhere in the right blogosphere, people like the folks at HotAir jumped all over the "news" that Hasan was a convert to Islam.

Then Shepard Smith interviewed Hasan's cousin, and we found out that this was all so much tripe:

-- Hasan was American born and educated, but raised Muslim. He was not a convert.

-- He had never previously been deployed to Iraq or anywhere overseas, for that matter. So much for the theories he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

-- He was regularly abused by his colleagues in the military for being Muslim -- called a "raghead" and other such terms -- and had been seeking to get out of the military because the environment had become so hostile.

Another interview, on just before this one, that Smith had with a former colleague of Hasan's indicated that Hasan was prone to making outrageous remarks about Muslims "defending themselves," particularly in reference to last summer's shooting of two military recruiters in Arkansas by a Muslim convert.

There are also reports that he had recently been the victim of a hate crime: His car was vandalized, with the word "Allah" scratched into the paint, and he was reportedly extremely upset by it.

It's obviously a complicated story. We'd all be well advised to reserve the speculation to actual hard facts about the case as they emerge. But it certainly appears this is much a matter of Columbine-like backlash to bullying as it is anything ideological.

And no, it's not the Jihad, stupid.

Newt was the darling of the right just a few moments ago, it seemed, but now he's in a battle with the lunatic fringe of his own party.

Rush Limbaugh zeroed in on Newtie today and took out his rage against Gingrich and the "party bosses" because he supported a moderate conservative over the Palin-Beck-Limbaugh teabagger nominee named Doug Hoffman and Hoffman lost. Sarah Palin has as much egg on her face as the rest of them do. When a district like NY-23 comes up for election, a Republican always wins. Their purity test helped lose them a guaranteed seat. Pretty awesome.

LIMBAUGH: Here is -- these are my thoughts on New York-23. In the first place, I'll have to double check this, but I'm reasonably sure that this was the highest percentage of the vote ever won on the Conservative Party line by a House or Senate candidate. I think Hoffman had a higher percentage of the vote than even James Buckley, who won his U.S. Senate race on the -- against or against this Gooddell guy, Charles Gooddell, in the '70s. So, that's one thing.

But, the right message; we cannot forget how this whole thing happened in the first place. There was not a primary. The right message here would indict the way party bosses, Republican Party bosses and these big thinkers like Newt screwed the whole thing up from the get go.

And here we have another nut job Republican who claims health care reform will destroy America. Where's the outrage by the Villagers over these statements?
Media Matters:

It's an impressive feat, but there may not be a Republican member of Congress who has been more openly scornful of President Obama's plans for health care reform than Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA).

In July, Broun declared that the public insurance option "is gonna kill people." Later in the month, he argued that "ObamaCare" would "give every single one of those illegal aliens health insurance." At a town hall meeting in September, Broun literally walked away from a constituent who couldn't get health coverage after telling him, "If you have a suggestion, send it to me." And, just a few weeks ago, he introduced "alternative" legislation that would eliminate Medicare altogether.

Yesterday, Broun escalated his attacks on the Democratic reform bill, saying that its passage "destroy America as we know it today."

Right -- if a liberal like Grayson calls out Republicans (who have no health care plan), they get their freak on. But I guess they have already been immunized to conservative insanity.

Oh, and we have Rep. Gohmert saying this: Dems Would Allow Seniors To "Die Off More Quickly"

This is standard conservative behavior that never gets mentioned by the media. It only comes up when a liberal is attacked and then they spend 24-48 hours to defend themselves and are forced to use these outrageous statement made by Republicans. And of course they have no traction, because of the defensive position the media puts liberals in.

All day long MSNBC has had on one pundit after another using the election in NY-23 as their springboard to make the case that the Dems are weak. There hasn't been a Democrat elected in that seat for more years than I've been alive, but that doesn't seem to enter into the equation.

The real story, though, is the fighting going on within the GOP. Rudy Giuliani was on with Chuck Todd and saying that the GOP will never win national elections if they never win in NY and California and so there needs to be a more inclusive Republican party. NY-23 didn't pan out that way for Rudy and he had to figure a way to lighten the blow. He said that Scozzafava was really a liberal and implied that he told Newt not to back her. He said the GOP needs moderates in the party, but they have to be 80% with them on issues and 20% against.

Of course Chuck Todd either couldn't be bothered to check Scozzafava's voting record and history on issues or decided to give Rudy the floor with no opposition because Scozzafava is not 80% liberal and 20% conservative, as Giuliani claimed.

The reality is this: When people say “don’t judge a book by its cover”, you should take their advice. The “cover” on Scozzafava was that she was this progressive Republican because she was backed by the WFP, supported a woman’s right to choose and has been a supporter of marriage equality. But the “book” tells the whole story (as it usually does). Scozzafava has a few positions that are more liberal (on abortion and marriage equality) but most of her positions are, at best, moderate-to-conservative. More often than not, however, she is a conservative.

This race is interesting to watch just to see the Villagers scurry around and try to make it a national story, but at least they could take the time and get their facts straight.

Duncan writes:

Tip Of The Spear

I'm not sure if the teabaggers will have much success in purifying their party, but it'll be interesting to see how the Villagers will react. My guess is they'll portray them as just folks exercising their patriotic duties, unlike those dirty fucking hippie traitors who ran a primary against the greatest man in America, Joe Lieberman.

The cable shows are covering these races as if the outcome will determine if Obama should step down as the president.

And very predictably, as the results come in, Doug Hoffman is claiming that ACORN is stealing the election.

At a short press availability in his campaign office here, NY-23 Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman said that a GOTV volunteer’s tires had been slashed, and all but blamed Democrats for the dirty trick. “There are reports that they’re bringing in the troops and they’re bringing in ACORN,” said Hoffman. “I think the Democrats are doing anything they possibly can to steal this election away from the 23rd district.”
--
Update: Anton Troianovski of the Wall Street Journal followed up with the Plattsburgh police on this, and was told that the volunteer actually damaged his tire on a broken bottle. I asked Hoffman campaign manager Dan Tripp about this–he said he had no comment because the campaign had not heard this yet.

They will blame ACORN for everything. Digby sees this through the prism of her brilliance.

I just hope that all the major networks and newspapers assign a special reporter to look into these accusations by the teabaggers' darling. Certainly Fox will be running with them and everyone knows that the mainstream press has been remiss by failing to follow up on such important Fox investigations.

It's actually a smart move. Since Fox has intimidated the pants off of the other news organizations, they will bend over backwards to be "fair and balanced" thus lending credence to the ACORN meme.

I just hope they don't end up accidentally arresting Hoffman's African American staffer in their zeal to reveal the ACORNs in the woodpile.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1142)

PLAYS: (4464)

Bill O'Reilly is still all worked up about the White House's "war" on Fox -- which, actually, he says he hopes end soon. Yeah, I'll bet he does. I'll bet a lot of people at Fox are not happy that we are having this national conversation right now and kicking over all kinds of rocks.

You never know what turns up when you start looking at Fox's record, do you?

What angered O'Reilly was Joe Klein's recent column in Time, which really was a classic piece of Village excrement (a la Sally Quinn) about how silly the Obama White House is to stand up to Fox. Along the way, of course, he offends O'Reilly by writing this:

Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

But I don't understand why the White House would give such poisonous helium balloons as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the opportunity for still greater spasms of self-inflation by declaring war on Fox.

If the problem is that stories bloated far beyond their actual importance--ACORN's corruption, Van Jones's radical past--are in danger of leaching out of the Fox hothouse into the general media, then perhaps the Administration should be a bit more diligent about whom it hires and whom it funds.

If the problem is broader--that Fox News spreads seditious lies to its demographic sliver of an audience--the Administration should probably be stoic: the wingnuts will always be with us. The best antidote to their garbage is elegant, intelligent governance. The next-best antidote is occasional engagement: I thought Obama came away from his O'Reilly and Chris Wallace interviews much the better for it. (Though you don't want to sit down with a thug like Hannity or a weirdo like Beck.)

Now, understand: The Fox-bashing here is simply classic Villager ass-covering, so that Joe Klein can go back later and say, "See? Both sides are mad at me. I must be right!"

Nonetheless, it outrages O'Reilly, who not only devotes a whole Talking Points Memo to "refuting" the Klein column with an even larger dose of flatulence, but then brings on Bernard Goldberg to chew it over some more:

Goldberg: But when you start throwing words around like sedition. I mean, who exactly at Fox News is inciting a rebellion against the government?

Not that we're much interested in defending Joe Klein, but this was too silly not to take note. So we've provided Bernie with some handy reminders just who at Fox News has indeed been inciting rebellion against the government -- some of it by outright, straight-on incitement (see the tea parties for more of this), and some by fear-mongering. Enjoy.

UPDATE: I remembered this morning that, while not on Fox, Rush Limbaugh has touted the idea of a military coup against Obama.

Steve Benen found a good one. Looks like the wingnuts are so eager to find "proof" for their theories about Obama, they don't even bother to check the source. Can't say I'm surprised!

Right-wing pundit Michael Ledeen published an item this week on Barack Obama's "college thesis," which Obama allegedly wrote as a student at Columbia 25 years ago. Leeden cited some website, which ran a piece in August.

The paper was called "Aristocracy Reborn," and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein -- who wrote about it for Time -- was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote:

"... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

That's quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate.... Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh picked up on Leeden's report, blasting Obama for the alleged paper.

The first sign of trouble was when Joe Klein noted that he's never seen or written about Obama's college thesis, and has "no idea where this report comes from."

The second sign of trouble was when one stopped to notice that Obama didn't write a senior thesis (though he did write a thesis-length paper on Soviet nuclear disarmament).

The third sign of trouble was when one clicked on the link that Leeden provided as support and found the word "satire."

Yes, Leeden and Limbaugh got all worked up, trashing the president for a paper he didn't write in college 25 years ago, relying on a satirical blog post. And for real entertainment value, notice what Leeden and Limbaugh did when they realized they'd fallen for a dumb joke -- they blamed Obama anyway.

Leeden conceded he was wrong and apologized, but added, "It worked because it's plausible." Limbaugh said the text he touted was fake, but it didn't matter because, "I know Obama thinks it." Yep, even when they're wrong, it's only because the president makes it easy for them to be confused.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1167)

PLAYS: (4136)

The wingnuts were out in force yesterday denouncing that Washington Post/ABC News poll showing strong public support for the public option.

But as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, there was a lot more data in the poll that should really have them clutching their pearls and fainting:

OLBERMANN: When anti-government protesters targeted President Obama and other Democratic leaders on April 15, the party took a hit. When town halls raged and the Tea Bag crowd hit Washington, the party staggered further. Now, the Tea Bag guys are on the move again. But in our third story tonight, signs that the party getting hurt by the anti-government Tea Bag people is the Republican party.

This week's "Washington Post"/ABC poll found 51 percent of Americans say that in next year's Congressional vote, faced with the generic Democrat versus the generic Republican, they'll vote for the Democrat; 39 percent will vote for the Republican. Only 19 percent have at least a good amount of confidence in Congressional Republicans to make the right decisions, far lower than Democrats or the president, for that matter.

And the number of Americans calling themselves Republicans has fallen to 20 percent -- 20, the lowest since 1983. A closer look shows that number has fallen from 25 percent just since mid-August. That's not a five percent loss for Republicans. Dropping from 25 percent to 20 percent is a loss of a fifth. Meaning since the height of town hall, Palin, Beck, death panel palooza, one out of five Republicans has stopped being Republican.

Republicans stopped at 25 percent back in March too, nine days after Tea Bag nations. Republicans were down to 21 percent. Naturally, Republicans are trying again. That's right, Tea Party Express II launches this weekend, coming to 38 cities, according to its press release, 37 on their website. Oh, well.

Previous Tea Parties so successful, they now have to hold them in such venues as Wichita's Lawrence Piedmont Stadium (ph) parking lot, Fallon (ph) Nevada's old Walmart's parking lot, a high school auditorium in Tri-Cities in Washington, Bozeman, Montana's Heritage Christian School gymnasium, and in Amarillo, Texas, John Stiff Memorial Park, picnic area number four. Seriously, picnic area number four. Don't interrupt the outing in area number three, please.

A dozen cities have no venue listed at all. According to the tour's Facebook page, "192 people are planning to attend these rallies."

In its own press release, a spokesman says about its new video, the web video promoting the tour, quote, "the tone of the ad is upbeat and positive." The name of the upbeat, positive ad is, "Countdown to Judgment Day."

And here's what upbeat and positive sounds like to these people.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you had enough of the out-of-control spending, bailouts, higher taxes, a spiraling national debt and big-government liberalism, then we invite you to join the Tea Party Express rally nearest you. We'll send a message to the politicians. Come election day, we're going to hand you a pink slip and take our country back.

Of course, it was simpler for Sean Hannity to just be in denial, since the poll made a liar out of him the day before when he tried to claim all the polls showed the public hated the public option. So he went on his show last night and said this:

Hannity: The business of this White House is division. And the White House's war against Fox News Channel is the latest evidence that it will throw its principles by the wayside to ensure that everybody falls in line with their agenda. And with the exception of Fox News, the other networks, they're receiving gold stars on their White House report cards.

And the latest case in point is the Washington Post/ABC News poll that shows that 57 percent of Americans support a government health-care takeover, and only 40 percent oppose it.

Now, a closer look at that poll explains why. Now, get this: They polled 13 percent more Democrats than Republicans! That explains a few things!

Of course, if Sean Hannity worked for a real news organization, he would likely know -- or have somebody around to explain to him before committing idiocies like this -- that polls use what they call "sampling" to get accurate results. In this case, they sampled more Democrats than Republicans for a very simple reason: The latest party-identification polling shows a 13-percent difference between Americans who call themselves Democrats and those who (shudderingly) admit to being Republican.

But then, Hannity doesn't work for a real news organization. So of course this kind of propagandistic crap is what we get polluting our teevees. Which, anymore, is the only thing the shrinking ranks of the rabid right have going for them still.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (877)

PLAYS: (3087)

When news came that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I looked at my husband and said, "just watch, the wingnuts will lose it over this." And sure enough, I was right. But what threw me for a loop was how nakedly partisan CBS's Chip Reid was in attacking Obama for having the audacity to win the Nobel Prize, something even the great St. Ronnie didn't do:

REID: I mean, most Democrats have praised it, and most Republicans have said, you have got to be kidding me -- Ronald Reagan didn't get one, but Barack Obama, nominated 12 days after he was sworn in, gets a Nobel Peace Prize. And the fear among some, even some Democrats, is that this is going to widen the partisan divide and make things even more difficult to accomplish on every front.

Really? Even more difficult than reflexively fighting *every* *single* Obama agenda item now? How is that possible?

It's touching, isn't it, to hear Chip Reid's concern that this will widen the partisan divide? After all, past winners have included Al Gore and Jimmy Carter...obviously the Nobel committee loves them some Democrats.

But here's the thing that all these insulated Beltway Villagers continually forget: Outside of DC, life is more than Republican vs. Democrat, something that Gibbs gently tries to suggest to Reid:

GIBBS: I'll leave the pundicizing to the pundits. The notion that somehow this is going to more greatly divide America, you know, I think it should be mandatory that pundits spend a certain amount of their days each year outside of the friendly confines of the viewership of the Washington, D.C., media market.

Of course, that goes right over Reid's head. For Reid, this is all about dismissing the Nobel committee -- in Norway, mind you, and not subject to the mind-numbing partisan reduction that Reid seems to breathe as oxygen -- as some liberal organization. He just can't get his head wrapped around the fact the Ronald Reagan -- the man who ended the Cold War! -- was never awarded the Peace Prize. As my friend, Steve Benen says:

A few thoughts here. First, when White House correspondents from major news outlets start sounding like members of Grover Norquist's "We Love Reagan" fan club, it's not a positive development.

Second, the notion that Reagan "helped bring the Cold War to an end" is, at best, a dubious proposition.

Actually, I think Chip Reid is unintentionally letting us into his psyche more than he realizes. He's continually been a go-to guy for Republican talking points for years. He routinely criticizes Democrats for things he lets pass by Republicans and uncritically passes on Republican attacks without context or fact-checking. And here again, he mouths the GOP mentality.

But think about it: if the Nobel Peace Prize only supports liberal causes, isn't Chip Reid admitting that peace is liberal? Then we need never look to conservatives again, because they will never bring peace. Right, Chip?

Transcript below the fold

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (958)

PLAYS: (7427)

You all remember how the wingnuts exploded in joy at the news that Chicago had been denied its bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Rather typically, our RedState pal Erick Erickson crowed:

So much for improving America’s standing in the world, Barry O. Maybe now perhaps we can hope he will mature a bit on the issues of foreign affairs. But I doubt it.

Well, now their heads are exploding at the news that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here's what Erickson tweeted in response:

(Via ThinkProgress.)

Then there was Fox News. As you can see from the video above, it was like Scanners on steroids on Fox & Friends this morning, with Brian Kilmeade noting that this was the third honoree whose name was not George W. Bush. (Maybe those Swedes' "pure genes" got the better of them, eh?)

Even Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee got into the act:

“The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’ It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain – President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”

Congratulations? Perish the thought!

Blue Texan at Firedoglake has a nice roundup from around the wingnutosphere.

Meanwhile, Media Matters has compiled a handy video of the early reaction:

Michele Bachmann, one of the sickest members of Congress that we've ever seen, keeps up the crazy talk when she lies about what's in the SBHC.

Bachmann: The bill goes on to say what's going to go on -- comprehensive primary health services, physicals, treatment of minor acute medical conditions, referrals to follow-up for specialty care -- is that abortion? Does that mean that someone's 13 year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus that night? Mom and dad are never the wiser.

As Elyse Siegel reports:

Section 2511 of the health care bill referred to by Bachmann, makes no mention of abortion and stipulates,

(i) "SBHC services will be provides in accordance with Federal, State, and local laws governing-- (I) obtaining parental or guardian consent; and (II) patient privacy and student records, including section 264 of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and section 444 of the General Education Provision Act;

The concept of "school based health care clinics" was introduced under the notion that students achieve higher academic performance when they are healthy and receive adequate medical attention. According to the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, if implemented SBHCs would give schools access to physicians "so students avoid health-related absense and get support to succeed in the classroom."

UPDATE: The nonpartisan fact-checking group PolitiFact rips into Bachmann's claim, rating it a "Pants On Fire" falsehood.

I have to give LGF credit. As much as I've feuded with Charles Johnson in the past, he's shown a very cool switch and has exposed a lot of right wing insanity.