The conservative blog Townhall has a new spokesperson making the rounds these days and well, let's just say she is the perfect example of today's GOP -- and all that is wrong with it.

Jillian Bandes has been quite busy lately, appearing on CSPAN Friday morning, then showing up on MSNBC where she got very nasty with our dear friend Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, who laid waste to her right wing talking points.

Bandes is no stranger to controversy. As Tintin at one of my favorite blogs, Sadly No! reminds us, she made her bones by publishing an anti-Arab screed in her college newspaper:

Hey, whatever happend to Jillian Bandes? You remember her. She was the redneck wingnut who was fired from the UNC student newspaper after writing a column advocating that all Arab guys should be strip-searched at airports and that this wasn’t really a problem because Arab guys would enjoy getting all “sexed up” at the airport. Well, guess what? Jillian is now a contributor to the Clown Hall blog — “Where racism isn’t just a philosophy, it’s a job qualification!”

The other great thing about blogging for Clown Hall is you can recycle some stale wingnut blogger talking points from weeks ago, lard it up with ridiculously hyperbolic language à la Atlas’s Jugs, make up some shit to throw in for good measure to get the half-witted Town Hall commentariat all torn up, offer it up as your own blog posting, and then call it a day, collect your wingnut welfare check, and get to happy hour at Smith Point by mid-afternoon. Which is pretty much what Jillian did with her latest offering: “Michelle Obama’s Veggie Garden Is Poisoned!” Read on...

Here are a few snippets from Bandes' anti-Arab rant:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

I don’t care if they’re being inconvenienced. I don’t care if it seems as though their rights are being violated.

They’re some of the brightest, kindest people I’ve ever met. Tragically, they’re also members of an ethnicity that is responsible for almost every act of terror committed against the West in the recent past....

Stay class...never mind. If you don't have Sadly No! bookmarked, you should. It's a guilty pleasure of mine that never disappoints!

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Jane Hamsher takes on Townhall wingnut Jillian Bandes on MSNBC over health care reform. The argument got personal when Jane talked about what she's had to put up with as a sixteen year cancer survivor.

Hamsher: Seventy six percent of the American public want a public plan, and as a sixteen year cancer survivor myself, I really find it offensive that people try and drag others into this and say that somehow our system that we have right now represents the fifty million people who are uninsured, or that it does anything..

Bandes: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa...

Hamsher:...superior for people like me, for people like me who've had to be at the mercy of bureaucrats....

Bandes: I'm sorry I'm not a cancer survivor, but that doesn't mean I can't criticize the public plan.

Hamsher:...and insurance companies that won't pay your bills. Yeah, well I suppose you are, but you don't know what you're talking about.

[.....]

Hamsher: The people in this country who have to go and face bureaucrats who will not pay their bills and have to face financial ruin in order to get themselves treated, is criminal. Basic health care access should be a basic human right in America. We spend two trillion dollars on the banks last year....

Bandes: Should food be a basic human right?

Hamsher:....and now we're talking about that we cannot... Do you have any, do you have any pride whatsoever? Do you have any shame when you go out there and you say this kind of stuff, and when you interrupt people when they're trying to talk about their own personal experience?

Obviously Jane, she doesn't or she wouldn't be shilling for the insurance companies.

Jane's got more over at Firedoglake's Campaign Silo: Health Care: It’s Time To Get Mad and as Think Progress noted, for most of the world, food is considered a basic human right.

David Waldman, also known as Kagro X at DailyKos and Congress Matters, appeared on a CNN webshow and showed these mealy-mouthed Democratic Party talking heads how to really frame and control the debate on torture. Finally, someone on who has a firm grasp of the facts and will not allow the discussion to get sidetracked to pointless distractions. Jane Hamsher put it best:

The successful hijacking of the torture debate by its proponents obscures the underlying facts, as Kagro makes abundantly clear:

1. Private contractors were conducting torture
2. It was torture for political gain
3. Pollsters should be asking if Americans support using torture to extract false confessions for political purposes, because that's what happened

There were no "ticking time bombs" -- as former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson and McClatchey have confirmed, torture was conducted to extract false evidence linking Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. It was ordered by Dick Cheney and George Bush just as it was during the Spanish Inquisition, to force political compliance.

The Washington Examiner's Chris Stirewalt objects when Kagro invokes the obvious parallel, shamelessly hiding behind the military when he says "On behalf of American soldiers, on behalf of American soldiers, that's not cool." In classic Yellow Elephant fashion, Stirewalt apparently never served in the military.

You know what else is not cool, Chris? Invoking some quasi-patriotic symbol to obfuscate over what should be patently obvious to even mouth-breathing Republican apologists like you: Torturing people is a crime against humanity. Torturing people for political gain is an even more despicable crime against humanity. It doesn't matter who commits it: Spain, the Catholic Church, Japan or Dick Cheney. It is a crime. And you are an apologist for it.

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Rachel Maddow explains the emerging dynamic that is sadly happening within the Democrtaic Party. A handful of Democrats are banding together to try and hijack President Obama's agenda. They actually are voting with the minority party Republicans who were voted out of office by the people.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, Bayh unveiled a centrist group of 15 Democrat senators whom he described as “pragmatists” and “not ideologues” and “not strident partisans.” Three of the 15 are up for election next year -- Bayh himself, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. Bayh has a history of sparring with the left in his party. As chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council in 2003, he warned of then-rising presidential campaign of Howard Dean. “The Democratic Party is at risk of being taken over by the far left,” he told DLC members in 2003. “We have an important choice to make: Do we want to vent, or do we want to govern?”

Even the twittering McCaskill is doing her part to align herself very badly.

Three Democrats, Sens. Evan Bayh, Russ Feingold and Claire McCaskill "opposed the bill as wasteful," and those "defections were small but could signal problems for Mr. Reid as he tries to hold his troops together as Congress faces an array of complex bills."

Maddow talked to Jane Hamsher about why the Conserva-dems are bucking their own party and siding with the Republicans. From Firedoglake:

Why is Bayh bucking his party—and, more importantly, his own state’s population—to go to the mat for the banks?

As noted Bayh's campaign contributions may have a lot to do with it.

FDL is working with Campaign for America's Future and US Action to target "conservative" Democrats who are taking lobbying money and blocking President Obama's agenda. I'm sure many more groups will follow. As Rachel said with friends like these...
(h/t John Amato)

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Jane Hamsher and Cenk Uygur talk to David Shuster about what issues they think President Obama will and should address in his speech tonight in Shuster's segment "Net Interest". I'm glad to see Shuster giving some time to those on the left side of the blogosphere as a regular feature on his show.

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David Shuster talks to Jane Hamsher about her article at the Huffington Post DC Journalists Love GOP Obstructionists, But Americans Don't.

There appears to be a pretty big gap between what DC journalists think Americans think, and what Americans actually think. No better example of this can be found than the "winners" and "losers" that DC media are proclaiming in the wake of the passage of the stimulus bill, and what DailyKos/Research 2000 polling on the subject indicates.

January 16, 2009 C-SPAN
Jane Hamsher talked about the presidency of George W. Bush. She responded to telephone calls and electronic mail. Ms. Hamsher is a long-time critic of the administration. Clips of President Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech and January 15, 2009, farewell address were shown. See more CSPANJunkie Videos here.

I see Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, but where'd Amato get to?  Dare I guess he was trying to work that Amato mojo on some hot female Democrat delegates to get into the party?

Download | play    Download | play   (h/t Heather)

Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! looks at the Blue Dogs' party at the DNC and how secretive they are being towards the press about their get together.  Medea Benjamin and Code Pink show up as well to let the Blue Dogs know how they feel.   

However, they're not being completely discreet, as Matt Stoller points out at Open Left.   Gotta love that democracy in action.

Well, I know who Jane would pick...but in another case of Strange Bedfellows, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr can't find much to argue with: 

[What] George W. Bush has done to the fabric of our constitutional government, to Separation of Powers, to a government of limited powers, to destroy the notion that we are a nation of laws, not of men, is something that is absolutely unforgiveable, irresponsible and terribly, terribly destructive of our notion of government. President Clinton, certainly had my problems with him, but what he did in terms of perjury and obstruction was bad, but it was not destructive of the very systemic foundations of our country.  

You can watch more of Jane and Barr's Bloggingheads segment here.