Frank Luntz and Sean Hannity were all appalled last night at the vicious and harsh language being used by those eeeeevil liberals this week in describing poor, put-upon conservatives as "hostage-takers" for merely holding up unemployment insurance payouts for poor people in order to force tax cuts for the wealthy down everyone's throat. It was heart-wrenching.
Of course, when your scenario is a heavy-duty fantasy like this one, it means that you're going to be doing a lot of projection. Sure enough:
HANNITY: Let me disagree with you. This is the liberals doing this. This is Obama attacking Republicans as hostage-takers. This is the Democratic Party saying, you know, the president f'd up, f him, screw him, he betrayed us, he's betraying other - give me the example of where are conservatives using this rhetoric?
LUNTZ: But nobody is listening. The problem is that the right isn't listening to the left. The left isn't listening to the right.
HANNITY: I'm talking about the harsh vitriol and rhetoric is coming from the left.
LUNTZ: I don't disagree with the rhetoric, but I'm out with the public and I'm doing this now almost every other night and in all of the focus groups even when it is done for corporate clients or media clients.
People aren't listening to each other and they don't want to hear what each other says. They are taking their news based on what affirms them rather than what informs them. They don't even share the same basic facts and basic understanding. Sean, this country is more divided now than it has been since Vietnam.
HANNITY: I see that, but -- if I were to call President Obama the things that he's calling conservatives, or that liberals are calling him, I probably would be, you know, victim of a boycott or firing.
Hmmm. No small irony in Luntz observing that people are now "taking their news based on what affirms them rather than what informs them" on Fox News, of all places.
And goodness, where could this disparaging rhetoric be coming from? Certainly it couldn't be inspired by right-wing talkers like Sean Hannity, could it? After all, his rhetoric is always calm and reasonable and respectful, right?
Well, maybe not so much ...
HANNITY: Because they are so harsh in their rhetoric, is this going to backfire? In other words, does this hurt the Democrats? Forget about the disagreement, which I think we have two very fundamental different views of which direction the country ought to go. I think Obama has failed as president, but this language, this incendiary rhetoric does that come back to hurt them?
Pretty funny, isn't it, how utterly un-self-aware these right-wing fanatics are. They can utter their own self-contradiction in the same sentence and not even recognize it.
And when it comes to Obama, only Glenn Beck outdoes Hannity in terms of vicious and incendiary rhetoric on Fox.
And when it comes to vicious rhetoric toward liberals, he is again outdone on Fox only by Beck. Hannity mostly likes his little eliminationist jokes ("If we get rid of liberals, we solve our problems").
So yeah, Sean, we're gonna cry you a river over being called out for being the hostage takers you are. Boo freaking hoo.
BREAKING NEWS: Glenn Beck is certifiably insane!!!
Oh. You knew that.
Yeah, we could run that lede just about every day, actually. But this week, Beck has been whipping it to another level of Bats--t Crazy.
Now he's predicting IMMINENT VIOLENT REVOLUTION led by those evil progressive radicals who hate the Republic inside the Obama administration. In case he didn't notice, the actual dynamic in Washington these days is actually just a wee bit different, since it's become manifestly clear that President Obama is anything BUT a radical revolutionary. But hey, nothing ever deters the intrepid Beck in the pursuit of his apocalyptic conspiracy theories.
Yeah, that really panned out, eh? Instead we got Byron Williams. Hmmmm.
This theory really is just a warmed-over version of the IMMINENT DIRE THREAT Beck has been shouting at us about since he signed onto Fox. It's become repetitive but more intensified, a manifestation of Beck's steadily creeping paranoia.
That provoked this rant, earlier this week, when he demanded an apology from Forbes for correctly calling him out for his vicious, classically anti-Semitic smear of Soros:
As you can see, it was a pretty complete meltdown. We could've run today's lede then, too.
This can only end badly for Fox. And they will richly deserve it.
There was a lot of disinformation floating about yesterday regarding the DREAM Act's progress in the Senate, including Megyn Kelly and Shannon Bream on Fox, repeating long disproven canards about the legislation -- embodied, perhaps, by the chryon running with the report calling the act "sweeping immigration reform" (in reality, this law is very limited in its reach and scope, and falls far short of anything even remotely like comprehensive reform). Both of them characterized it (second-hand, of course) as "amnesty" -- which is how they describe any path to citizenship for brown people.
Then there was CNN, which filed the following bulletin:
-- Senate Democrats cancel vote on DREAM Act, meaning the immigration measure is likely dead for the year.
Senate Democrats on Thursday pulled a measure that would allow illegal immigrant students to earn legal status through education or military service after Republicans refused to allow a vote on a version of the legislation that had cleared the House on Wednesday.
Rather than try to break a Republican filibuster against the Senate’s so-called Dream Act, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, instead forced a vote to call off the attempt, presumably so he could try again later. Democrats prevailed on the motion to table the legislation, 59-40.
Since the Republicans in the Senate have vowed to block all bills until the issue of tax cuts was resolved, Sen. Reid made a motion to table the cloture vote on the DREAM Act that was otherwise scheduled to take place at 11:00 AM this morning. By tabling it, the Senate Democrats will be able to bring the version of the bill that has already been passed in the House, up for a vote in the coming week, once the other issues have been resolved. Immigrant rights advocates now have additional time to build on the momentum created by the House victory yesterday, and work on getting more Senate support for the DREAM Act, so that when it does finally come up for a vote, it can have the same success that it had in the House of Representatives.
After the historic victory yesterday in the House of Representatives, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made a bold move today to shelve a vote on the Senate's original version of the DREAM Act, scheduled to be voted on today. In doing so, he paved the way for the Senate to take up the House-passed version of the bill in the next few weeks.
Essentially, Senate leadership just breathed new life into the DREAM Act.
Faced with lock-step Republican opposition to deal with anything before tax cuts, today’s scheduled cloture vote on the motion to proceed was widely predicted to fail, which would have doomed the DREAM Act this year.
Here's a reaction from the national United We Dream Network, who have been lobbying all week in Washington:
The DREAM Act must now gather critical support from a number of Senators still sitting on the fence, both Democrats and Republicans. Having more time between votes gives us time to shift our focus from the House to the Senate and make sure our voices are heard.
Some republicans have blurred the debate by painting a negative portrayal of undocumented students. Senator Sessions took to the Senate to claim that DREAM-eligible people would buy fake diplomas online. Our lives are real and our diplomas are real. We need Senators to rise above the fakeness and get real, the time for DREAM is now. We urge everybody who has ever supported the DREAM Act to take time to make some phone calls and urge senators to vote YES on DREAM. As Representative John Lewis shared last night, “The time is always right to do what is right”.
The DREAM Act has traditionally been a bipartisan measure that has attracted real Republican backing. In 2007, eleven Republican Senators voted for the DREAM Act, and seven of them are still in office: Lugar, Bennett, Brownback, Hutchison, Snowe, Collins, and Hatch. In 2003, Republican Senators Kyl, Grassley, and Cornyn voted for the measure in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last night, eight Republican representatives voted for the bill. What’s needed in the Senate is for Republicans to shift from posturing on process to negotiating a bill that can pass next week.
We'll also be keeping up the pressure on a handful of shaky Democrats who still refuse to invest in America's future.
All in all this gives DREAM a better chance in passing, especially when considering that there are Senators on the fence who do not want to be targeted and be in the spotlight twice. And obviously this gives advocates, activists, and you more time to call and ask that DREAM be supported. (via VivirLatino)
Once again, Sarah Palin made Barbara Walters' list of the year's 10 most fascinating people, and in the little preview Walters gave us today of the accompanying interview (set to run in full this weekend), it looks like it went a little less than smoothly for the Wasilla Wonder:
BARBARA WALTERS: And Sarah Palin, for the third year, we have had Sarah Palin. Because every year, she does something fascinating. And you know, the Katie Couric question that caused her so much trouble? What do you read?
ROBIN ROBERTS: Sure.
WALTERS: Okay. I gave her another chance. And here's the answer.
[Cut to interview]
WALTERS: Well, you know, governor, many people find the thought of you as president a little scary. You hear, 'Oh, she's very charming, but she's uninformed.' Would you like to tell us what newspapers, magazines or books you are reading right now?
SARAH PALIN: I read a lot of C.S. Lewis when I want some divine inspiration. I read Newsmax and Wall Street Journal. I read all of our local papers, of course, in Alaska because that's where my heart is. I read anything and everything that I can get my hands on, as I have since I was a little girl. And that's one of those things, Barbara, where that issue that I don't read or I'm not informed, it's one of those questions where I like to turn that around and ask the reporters, why would it be that there is that perception that I don't read?
Ummmm ... I dunno ... how about the fact that you don't even seem to realize that this sort of question is a stock interview item for politicians?
Palin has a journalism degree and would know this if she had bothered to pay attention while attending class. (I certainly know it, and I attended the same school as Palin. Her appeal to claims of supposed media elitism here don't exactly wash.)
Perhaps even more to the point, the fact that Palin was caught flat-footed with such an obvious, stock question when Katie Couric asked it demonstrated to millions of discerning viewers that she is in fact horribly uninformed -- not to mention incurious and intellectually rigid and limited. Not the kind of person you want occupying the White House.
Of course, the wingnuts have their shorts in bunch over Walters' questions, which were actually rather neutral and matter of fact. Reality alert: The idea of Palin as president DOES scare the crap out of a lot of people. Deal with it, dudes.
One of the favorite pretenses at Fox News is to pretend that there is some magical barrier of objectivity between their "opinion" anchors and their shows and their "straight news" hours featuring "real" reporters -- guys like James Rosen.
Just the past couple of days, Rosen has coughed up a couple of real hairballs demonstrating (once again) just how "fair and balanced" Fox News really is.
First, on Bill O'Reilly's show Tuesday, Rosen argued, with a perfectly straight face, that President Obama had raised some serious concerns about national security because he had described Republicans in Congress as "hostage takers" with whom he had negotiated:
Rosen: One other point, Bill, if I may, and this should concern a broader spectrum than just the president and his supporters. And that is the potential national security implications of a president of the United States broadcasting to the world that he is willing to negotiate with hostage takers if he believes the hostage is being harmed.
O'Reilly actually burst out laughing, assuming that Rosen was kidding. He wasn't.
Then yesterday, on Happening Now, Rosen followed up with a segment about Obama's record regarding how well he's keeping his promises. It featured a clip of Obama saying, "Look at what I promised during the campaign. There is not a single thing that I said that I would do that I have not either done or tried to do," and "And if I haven't gotten it done yet, I'm still trying to do it."
Rosen then told his audience: "That leaves little terrain as ground for contradiction, and yet the Pulitzer Prize winning website PolitiFact.com lists more than 500 broken Obama campaign promises."
And the best part is that, because he said all these things on Fox News, Rosen will never have to run a correction. And Bill O'Reilly can keep laughing at his absurd "concerns".
Y'see, at Fox, spreading misinformation and lies and wild conjecture isn't cause for correction. It's the job description.
Probably the most aggravating aspect of President Obama's deal with the devil hostage-takers of the Republican Party is the way both the act itself -- and Obama's churlish spurning of the people who elected him at yesterday's press conference -- has been the opening it has created for the crass opportunists of the right-wing pundit class.
Guys like Sean Hannity, whose greatest aspiration of the past couple years has been to separate Obama from his supporters, have been all too happy to take that wedge Obama has handed them and drive it right down our gullets.
Take Hannity last night:
HANNITY: All right. Amidst all the controversy on Capitol Hill surrounding the extension of the Bush tax cuts, one thing is crystal clear. This deal marks a major defeat for the anointed one who let political gamesmanship get the best of him.
Well, now he's backtracking on one of his central campaign promises. But apparently that's not how he sees it.
Let's take a look at this exchange from his press conference earlier today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BEN FELLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS: You've been telling the American people all along that you oppose extending tax cuts for the wealthier Americans.
OBAMA: Yes.
FELLER: You said that again today. But what you never said was that you oppose the tax cuts, but you'd be willing to go ahead and extend them for a couple of years if the politics of the moment demand it.
So what I'm wondering is, when you take a stand like you had, why should the American people believe that you're going to stick with it? Why should the American people believe that you're going to flip-flop?
OBAMA: Hold on a second, Ben. This isn't politics of the moment. This has to do with what can we get done right now.
(END OF VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: What can we get done right now? Now that sounds like the politics of the moment to me and the president's base is fed up that he caved in. A brand new survey "USA Today" poll shows that a whopping 74 percent of those who contributed to the anointed one in 2008 oppose the president cutting a deal to extend tax cuts for small business and, quote, "higher income earners."
And even more frightening for the president, 51 percent of those contributors said that the tax cut deal will make them less likely to contribute to the anointed one's reelection campaign in 2012. Well, that's music to my ears.
Hannity later invited on our favorite Faux defender of all things Democrat, Lanny Davis, who managed to point out that Hannity's logic wasn't exactly clear: Did he, as a conservative, really want Obama to stick to his guns?
HANNITY: Well, look, I would argue and I have argued that Bill Clinton changed after '94 and the Republican Revolution. I contend, and my analysis of President Obama is that he is a rigid, left wing, radical ideologue.
And I've said it many times on the program. I've never seen any inclination in his adult professional life that he has a willingness to be pragmatic to move to the middle to change.
Do you see that in him? Because I don't see it.
It's clear that, in a right-wing field of pundits full of rank opportunists, Sean Hannity is one of the most rank and ham-handed in his obviousness. And it's a reminder of what we all are up against.
It's too bad Obama doesn't seem to have figured that out; he appears more than happy enough to castigate his thoughtful liberal critics as "sanctimonious" and hold his supporters up for ridicule, exposing them to this kind of garbage. But we mustn't let our justifiable anger at Obama become a tool for right-wingers like Hannity and his fellow Fox pundits to divide and conquer. Obama may not be smarter than that, but the rest of us need to be.
Keith Chaudruc, of Madison, got the final question of the night.
The Livingston school district elementary teacher launched into a list of complaints about drops in municipal aid, increasing NJ Transit fares and tax cuts for those making more than $1 million.
His question: How could Christie sign off on a tax cut for the most wealthy, ignoring the regressive nature of the sales tax, while those at the bottom were getting squeezed with increases like the transit fares?
The two adversaries went back and forth for a few minutes, until Chaudruc, a Republican, interrupted the governor.
"You want to come up here?" Christie shouted. "You come up here ... Let’s have a conversation.."
Chaudruc, who stands 5’6" and weighs about 160 pounds, backed away until the governor insisted "bring him up here," and a state trooper escorted him to the stage.
Christie, a few inches taller and several pounds heavier, loomed over Chaudruc as he launched into a tirade.
"Your wonderful increase in taxes would have killed jobs in this state," Christie said pointing his index finger at Chaudruc. "You and I have different ideas of what being a Republican is all about because I’m not going to raise taxes."
Before he could get another word in, Chaudruc was ushered off the stage and out of the room by a trooper.
By bullying a citizen, hogging the microphone and condescendingly dismissing him, Christie was the rude one. But it’s nothing new.
Christie has turned state politics into one never-ending yo’ mama joke. It doesn’t matter who you are — school superintendent, teacher, student, U.S. senator, state Assembly leader, former education commissioner or just a regular guy trying to have a conversation: If you disagree with him, Christie will try to humiliate you publicly.
Some find Christie entertaining, but his combativeness is counterproductive and breeds the kind of hate speech that plaques the nation.
But some people find this totally delightful, because Chris Christie is basically an amusing comic television show character, like Charlie Sheen or Pat Buchanan. Whether it helps Christie politically depends on whether New Jersey residents find it funny or get bored with it. But Christie will continue doing it, because it's a major part of his "brand."
In lieu of class solidarity, which is a privilege only afforded to the wealthy these days, American politics are mostly about tribal self-identification. Most Republicans get this, and that's why being a shouty asshole doesn't hurt Christie. Democrats -- with a couple of exceptions, like Anthony Weiner -- are not so good at this, which is why MSNBC's liberal hosts whine about how Obama needs to "get tough" all the time without ever explaining how that would help him achieve policy goals and not just make them feel like they're backing a winner.
Like Digby, I find his bullying behavior clearly fascistic -- this is how real fascists, the kind you get in Hayden Lake and at Joe Arpaio rallies, behave. I guess Americans are getting accustomed to that and a lot more approve of it. And that may be the scariest aspect of Chris Christie.
A self-described militia leader pleaded guilty this week to federal gun charges connected to a grenade manufacturing operation at his trailer in Spirit Lake, Idaho.
Kenneth B. Kimbley Jr., 58, discussed bombing local bridges with an undercover federal agent and made threatening statements toward President Barack Obama, leading investigators last July to seize 20,000 ammunition rounds and several firearms from Kimbley’s property, where he and other suspected militia members gathered to construct grenades, according to court documents.
Kimbley, who remains in federal custody, pleaded guilty to Monday to unlawful possession of a firearm and attempt to make a firearm in violation of the National Firearms Act. He faces up to 10 years in prison when he’s sentenced Feb. 22.
... An undercover agent said Kimbley described himself as the leader of the “Brotherhood of America Patriots” militia and said “he would kill members of his group that did not follow orders,” according to court documents.
Kimbely reportedly described extensive booby traps he’d built and said his militia’s purpose “was to resist in the event the government started rounding up the patriots” and to resist foreign invasions or societal breakdowns.
His public defender, Kim Deater, did not return a phone call seeking comment. In court documents, she described Kimbley as a nonthreatening man who has passionate political views.
Though prosecutors have emphasized his militia ties and his dislike for Obama, Kimbley “made absolutely no threats to harm anyone at anytime,” Deater wrote in court documents.
“In fact, everything said by Mr. Kimbley is no different than what his idol, TV commentator Glenn Beck, typically states on the air and is protected free speech.”
The connection between Kimbley’s beliefs and Beck’s provocative on-air statements seems clear, especially his fear that the government plans to round up and intern liberty-loving Americans, a fear that was also expressed by Poplawski and Byron.
Moreover, this is now the fourth violent incident in which Fox News' mainstreaming of extremism played a significant role:
Make no mistake: Glenn Beck has been inciting acts of terrorist violence, and the Byron Williams case clearly establishes it -- even though it is far from the first such case. It in fact was preceded by several similar cases in which the dehumanizing rhetoric, scapegoating and conspiracist smears promoted by Fox clearly played a powerful role in the violence that ensued:
We've been rooting since the election for Senate Democrats to show some spine and reform the filibuster at the start of the coming session -- Sen. Jeff Merkley, as we reported then, has been developing a plan that makes so much sense it's almost certain never to make it through.
Moreover, as with the public option and the economic stimulus package, we haven't exactly been holding our collective breaths waiting for it to happen, given Democrats' extensive history of evolving spines made of orange Jell-O.
Now, however, it seems Republicans have so overplayed their hand in bullying Democrats around that they might actually force the Democrats to grow spines and do the job. Ezra Klein has the details:
Mitch McConnell's threat to filibuster literally everything Democrats want to do until Democrats and Republicans agree to a compromise on the Bush tax cuts can be read as a power play, but it can also be read as a dare: At this point, Republicans are sure that they can abuse the rules as much as they'd like and Democrats won't dare do a thing about it. McConnell's blanket filibuster now joins Richard Shelby's blanket hold as the two most egregious acts of procedural brinkmanship in a Congress that's been chock-full of rules-based obstruction.
If there's a wild card here, it's Sen. Jeff Merkley and the other Democrats who've been agitating for rules reform for well over a year now. Today, Merkley released his proposal (pdf), and it's a detailed, thoughtful and supportable package of reforms -- even for those who believe in the filibuster.
You can read the whole memo [file target="current" showinfo="1" id="7435"]here[/file]. As we noted before, the beauty of the Merkley plan is that it preserves the filibuster but makes it so it actually in practice is what it was intended to be: a last resort of a determined minority willing to stake its members' precious time and resources to make it happen, instead of an easy way to halt any kind of deliberation with a simple check-off, as is the case now. As Ezra notes:
This is filibuster reform that even the filibuster's supporters can love: It focuses the practice on the tradition of debate and discussion that Senate traditionalists consider to be the institution's indispensable trait. Even so, a few days ago, I would've told you it didn't have a chance, as there'd be no energy to look at the rules again. But McConnell's announcement of a blanket filibuster that's meant to stop the Senate from debating legislation rather than ensure that all sides have time to be heard may be just the push the traditionalists needed.
Merkley's office believes such a change to the rules could be accomplished with a simple majority vote in the Senate, and Merkley will be pushing colleagues to join his effort to make such a vote happen at the outset of the new session in January.
We already knew that right-wingers have by and large become conscienceless liars -- that, after all, is what keeps sites like this one in business. But the lying about the DREAM Act as a Senate vote nears has been quite remarkable, really.
Then there was Sen. Jeff Sessions last night on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, where he was of course permitted (indeed encouraged) to trot out the usual right-wing canards against the DREAM Act without challenge, including this:
HANNITY: All right. You sent out a press release, you're urging colleagues to oppose Dream Act amnesty. Why do you call it amnesty? And let's go into some detail on this.
SESSIONS: Because, Sean, it puts the applicants who qualify for this standard on a guaranteed path to citizenship. All they have to do is really just attend college for two years. They do not have to have a degree. Only a sliver of those will use the military. Ninety percent plus would use the college type and degree program to gain this amnesty. And it would deal with a million, two million individuals, up to age 30. It's just not the right policy. It would in fact just be -- be just the opposite of what message we should be sending, which is that we're going to end the lawlessness at the border and create a lawful system of immigration and stop rewarding illegal immigration.
...
HANNITY: All right. They're claiming this bill would only grant amnesty to children of illegal immigrants who join the military or attend college for two years. You're claiming that this would grant nearly unrestricted amnesty. Why is there such a conflicting view of what the bill says? Are they misrepresenting the bill?
SESSIONS: No -- well, what version of it? But if fundamentally all you have to do is sign up at a community college, even a correspondence course and understand it for two years, and claim you want to attend college basically, and want to get a degree, and that's all you have to do. You do not have to have a degree. Very few people are going to use the military option. Probably less than five percent, three percent, two percent. Most of them will use this education option to try to gain legal status, and you can do it up to age 30. Once a person is then legalized, they're able to legalize their brothers, who may have been the person who brought them here illegally. They can bring in other people from outside the country. And so these bills, there's so many different versions of it, but are just unwise. And also, one terribly dangerous thing is, an individual can just assert, once they're subject to deportation, that they're working on their degree and claim the benefits of the Dream Act, and really gum up the entire legal system. It would be a major detriment to enforcement.
Hyperbole about “floodgates” is just that—hyperbole. The DREAM Act is a limited remedy for students who can prove several key elements, including the fact that they have good moral character, graduate from a high school, or receive a GED in the U.S., go to college or join the military.
Around 800,000 students could ultimately benefit under the DREAM Act, and even if those students jump through numerous hoops and become U.S. citizens, they can never sponsor distant family members—such as uncles and cousins. Immigration law doesn’t allow it.
Most of the parents of DREAM Act beneficiaries will also be ineligible to adjust their immigration status. Students who fulfill all of the requirements prescribed in the DREAM Act may eventually (after years) apply to become U.S. citizens. If they meet the requirements and become citizens, like other U.S. citizens, they can petition for their parents when they turn 21. However, if their parents originally entered the country without being inspected by an immigration officer, they will not be eligible to get relief. While parents who entered without inspection may apply for an immigrant visa at a consulate abroad, they will likely be barred from entering the U.S. for ten years if they have been unlawfully present in the U.S. for over six months.
One of the real wonders of modern conservatism -- as Thomas Frank explored in some depth in What's the Matter With Kansas -- is the way it manages to convince working- and middle-class people that looking out for the interests of America's wealthy, in lieu of their own, is really their most important political undertaking. Their chief method for doing this is propaganda that convinces large numbers of people, mostly through culture-war-type appeals, to vote against their own interests.
Glenn Beck put on a really perfect display of this Tuesday on his Fox News show, when he spent the first half telling his audience that the poor in America don't have it so bad because they have TVs and microwaves, compared to what folks looked like back during the Depression.
Then he came back with a segment extolling the virtues of Depression-era poverty, when people canned their own food and made their own clothes. Then he said:
Beck: We think of poverty now as not having enough money for cable or high-speed Internet.
So saith one of the country's richest men -- a guy who has never canned his own food or raised his own garden or even worked an honest day in his life. A guy who knows NOTHING about the conditions of Americans living in poverty today, let alone yesterday or any other day. But he sure can stand back and admire the character of people living in poverty from afar.
But Glenn Beck wants us to think there's some nobility in all this -- as in: "Get used to it, suckers! This is how you're gonna live now!" Sounds about right for a rich guy.
I would bring back the Fairness Doctrine so you couldn’t have a spectacle of a Fox Flooze, which just makes stuff up and is a propaganda outlet. You would actually have to have some sanctioned human beings talking to the other side. And MSNBC would have to do the same. They would have to have some conservatives on there too. I think that’s much better for the country. ...Americans don’t know what’s going on and therefore the media can have their way with them intellectually.
To which Beck responded:
BECK: I would ask Mr. Dean to help me out. What is it that we make up?
I would ask you to just take a moment here. Do you really believe that I could or anybody here at Fox News could just make things up and remain on the air?
Ummmm .... YEAH!!!!! How about on a 24/7/365 basis?
And it isn't just Beck, who of course has a nearly unbeatable track record when it comes to making crap up. Just this morning we got another fine example of Fox News making crap up:
Fox & Friends reported that a school in central Florida had banned the "traditional Christmas colors" red and green from classrooms. In a statement to Media Matters, the school's district spokesperson, Regina Klares, has denied this, stating, "There is not a ban on the colors red and green at Heathrow Elementary."
This is not the exception, it is the rule at Fox News. There are simply no standards for truthfulness there; otherwise Beck would be right -- he wouldn't have been able to go on air and lie day after day, week after week, unless it was his job to lie. Which tells you everything you need to know about Fox News.
You know that Republican obsession with "American exceptionalism"? It's becoming pretty obvious, in all the right-wing wailing and teeth-gnashing over the WikiLeaks releases, that for most of these dangerous fools, this translates into a belief that the USA runs the world, and therefore can willy-nilly shove ourselves by force -- militarily or otherwise -- onto other countries without their permission or cooperation.
After all, the leading prospect for the Republican presidential nomination just announced that she thinks we should just go hunt down (and presumably kill) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Glenn Beck thought we should try him for treason -- which is kind of hard to do with a non-citizen. Then there was WaPo columnist Marc Thiessen last night on Sean Hannity's Fox News show:
THIESSEN: There are plenty of tools at our disposal. … But failing that, we can act unilaterally. We can go and get him without another country’s permission. We did it with General Noriega — there’s authority within the Office of Legal Counsel and that we can go and take anybody anywhere in the world.
As
Alec Seitz-Wald at ThinkProgress observes, this would pretty much mean invading one of the countries where Asange lives part-time, most likely Sweden or Iceland or Australia.
It’s worth noting that going and getting Gen. Manuel Noriega, the former narco-dictator of Panama, as Thiessen suggested, involved a full-scale invasion of the country with 25,000 American troops. Former President George H.W. Bush “broke both international law and [U.S.] government policies” in ordering the invasion in 1989, which resulted in the loss of 23 American servicemembers and the wounding of another 325, the death of hundreds of Panamanians, and major lasting damage to Panama’s economy and capital city.
In a stunning set of declarations aimed at the Tea Party faithful, however, Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips sounded more like an economic and political royalist. On the November 17 edition of his Tea Party Nation internet radio program, Phillips said: "The Founding Fathers originally said, they put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote. It wasn't you were just a citizen and you got to vote. Some of the restrictions, you know, you obviously would not think about today. But one of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you're a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community. If you're not a property owner, you know, I'm sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners."
Sure, let's just do away with the principle of "one man one vote" altogether! After all, the Roberts Court has now enshrined corporate personhood -- this would be the next logical step.
But that, as it turns out, was just the start of a conversation Phillips had with a guy named David DeGerolamo, who is the founder of Tea Party outfit called North Carolina Freedom.
Conspiracy theories aside, Phillips and DeGerolamo had their own special way of holding the Constitution dear to their patriotic hearts, by discussing which parts of it they would like to rip out.
Judson Phillips: "Of course, when people talk, three Amendments that really are the only ones that seriously get talked about getting repealed: the 16th Amendment, for the income tax, and we can only hope that happens; the 17th Amendment for having the appointment of Senators got back to state legislatures; and the 26th Amendment, I believe it is.
Do you know which one that is, David?"
David DeGerolamo: "No, but I know which one I want repealed." Judson Phillips: "Which one is that?"
David DeGerolamo: "I want the 14th Amendment repealed."
Judson Phillips: "At least modified, but yeah..."
What's especially noteworthy about all this is that al lthis talk is straight out of the Patriot movement of the 1990s, which often and openly discussed its belief in the "the organic Constitution," to wit, the core text and the Bill of Rights, and that by and large Patriot did not believe any of the ensuing amendments had been properly passed or were legally binding.
In particular, militiamen and Patriots have traditionally despised the 14th and 16th amendments, and would be delighted to see a raft of other overturned as well.
Of course, this crossover between the Patriots and the Tea Parties was also the subject of my report for AlterNet last week. Indeed, the more we see this kind of rhetoric coming from the movement's national leaders, the more it becomes clear the Tea Parties are becoming a kind of surreptitious way for the Patriot movement to mainstream itself on a massive scale.
We've always said that wingnuts never, ever give up. And that would be especially true of the wingnuttiest of the current crop, the Birthers -- because their theory has been so manifestly disproven so many times that you'd think they might have a clue by now. But no.
Now they're expanding their theory. They're arguing that Obama, per the constitutional requirement that he be a "natural born citizen", is disqualified from such status because his father was a British subject of Kenyan birth.
What's really funny about this theory is that these fetishists of all things from the Founding Fathers would thus have disqualified one of the leading founders, Thomas Jefferson, from the presidency.
What's perhaps not so funny about it is that the Supreme Court has this case on its docket.
Unsurprisingly, the wingnuts at WorldNetDaily are all over the story:
The Supreme Court conferred today on whether arguments should be heard on the merits of Kerchner v. Obama, a case challenging whether President Barack Obama is qualified to serve as president because he may not be a "natural-born citizen" as required by Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution.
Unlike other eligibility cases that have reached the Supreme Court, Kerchner vs. Obama focuses on the "Vattel theory," which argues that the writers of the Constitution believed the term "natural-born citizen" to mean a person born in the United States to parents who were both American citizens.
"This case is unprecedented," said Mario Apuzzo, the attorney bringing the suit. "I believe we presented an ironclad case. We've shown standing, and we've shown the importance of the issue for the Supreme Court. There's nothing standing in their way to grant us a writ of certiorari."
There really shouldn't be much to worry about here, truthfully: the lower courts have all tossed out this suit, and indeed the Third Circuit Appeals court ordered Apuzzo to explain why he shouldn't be sanctioned for filing a frivolous lawsuit (an order that was later vacated.
And what's the basis of their theory? Back to WND:
Apuzzo is arguing the "Vattel theory," which asserts that the term "natural-born citizen" as used in the Constitution was defined by Swiss writer Emer de Vattel. Vattel, whose work, "The Law of Nations," was widely known and respected by the founding fathers, used the term to mean an individual born of two citizens.
According to Apuzzo, Congress and the courts have addressed the question of who can be an American citizen, for example regarding former slaves, Asian immigrants, and American Indians. However, the term "natural-born citizen" has never been altered.
"The courts and Congress have never changed the definition," said Apuzzo. "The founding fathers understood that the commander-in-chief of the armed forces needed to have two American citizens as parents so that American values would be imparted to him."
Apuzzo said the Supreme Court had clearly accepted Vattel's definition of "natural-born citizen" in "dicta," or statements made in opinions on cases addressing other matters. He cited Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in the 1814 "Venus" case, in which Marshall endorses Vattel's definition.
This is pretty odd reasoning. Especially when you consider that the same standard would have disqualified Thomas Jefferson -- whose mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was born in London, England:
According to the Jefferson family bible, she was born 9 February 1721 (o.s.) in Shadwell parish, Tower Hamlets, London. The parish register of St. Paul's, Upper Shadwell, notes her baptism on 25 February 1721 as the daughter of Isham Randolph (1687-1742), "mariner" of Shakespeare's Walk (literally around the corner from the church), and Jane Rogers (1698-1760).
None of this has slowed Kerchner -- a retired Naval Reserve commander who lives in Pennsylvania -- and his attorney, Mario Apuzzo, whose blog is something of an Information Central for the case. Here, for instance, are the questions Apuzzo is arguing before the court:
QUESTIONS PRESENTED TO THE U.S. SUPREME COURT: PETITION 10-446 1. Whether petitioners sufficiently articulated a case or controversy against respondents which gives them Article III standing to make their Fifth Amendment due process and equal protection claims against them. 2. Whether putative President Obama can be an Article II “natural born Citizen” if he was born in the United States to a United States citizen mother and a non-United States citizen British father and under the British Nationality Act 1948 he was born a British citizen. 3. Whether putative President Obama and Congress violated petitioners’ Fifth Amendment due process rights to life, liberty, safety, security, tranquility, and property and Ninth Amendment rights by Congress failing to assure them pursuant to the Twentieth Amendment that Obama qualified as an Article II “natural born Citizen” before confirming his electoral votes and by Obama refusing to conclusively prove that he is a “natural born Citizen.” 4. Whether Congress violated petitioners’ rights under the Fifth Amendment to equal protection of their life, liberty, safety, security, tranquility, and property by investigating and confirming the “natural born Citizen” status of presidential candidate, John McCain, but not that of presidential candidate, Barack Obama.
As Eric Zorn observes, these folks seem to think the Supreme Court is going to validate their effort to have a sitting president declared ineligible. Lotsa luck with that. But then, these are people with a real Magical Thinking problem.
Every cliche that is wrong about Thanksgiving shows up in his proclamation. The Pilgrims show up at Plymouth. The Indians had been there for thousands of years. We get off the boats. We don't know how to feed ourselves. The Indians show us how. They shared their skill in agriculture, which helped the early colonists survive and whose rich culture continues to add to our nation's Heritage. Is it possible he believes it? I don't doubt that he believes it, and even if he doesn't believe it, he wants everybody else to believe it. Obama believes that this nation is fatally flawed since its founding, even before its founding, so it stands to reason -- you know, a lot of people did not hear the true story of Thanksgiving until I wrote it in my book in the early nineties. I can remember Snerdley and H.R. were stunned when they heard the first story of Thanksgiving, the real story, because we'd all been taught a variation of the Indians saved us. We had to draw pictures of it in school, that's exactly right, art projects of the Indians saving us.
Time and familiarity has reduced to quaint memory the crucial nature of Indian agriculture for white settlers on the Atlantic coast early in the seventeenth century. Every American school child can recite the story of Squanto and his service to the Pilgrims at Plymouth. It is a charming incident in our historical texts culminating in a grand feast of thanksgiving. The harsh reality of the time, as William Bradford well knew and recorded, inscribed a bleaker circumstance. Without the seed corn and beans Bradford's fellow adventurers unearthed in November 1620, survival of the colony was doubtful. Without Squanto to teach them the arts of New World agriculture the Pilgrims' future was likely to be short indeed. The settlers' failure to master Squanto's teaching forced the colony to rely on food supplies purchased from successful Indian farmers. Not until the second year did the Pilgrims' own fields produce in sufficient abundance to assure survival.
To the south, in Virginia, the Jamestown settlement had already benefited from Indian agriculture. On at least two occasions the imperial chieftain, Powhatan, provided Jamestown with sufficient food to stave off disaster. The Jamestown settlers and later commentators seldom understood Powhatan's motivation and apparent inconstancy toward the settlement. A broader view of the chief's effort to establish an empire in the Chesapeake area might shed some light on the seeming enigma, but for the Englishmen at Jamestown the fact that lie came and with food was enough.
To the good fortune of Plymouth and Jamestown the coastal Indians produced food in quantity. The coastal tribes' ability to feed themselves and the white settlements belied the popular conception of Indian agriculture in that region as bare subsistence. Indeed, where investigators have explored the question a different picture emerged. In southern New England at least, Indian agriculture accounted for over 65 percent of the native population's diet and surplus production for trade and storage was common. In any event, it did not take the Plymouth colony long to discover that their gift from the Indians had a value beyond feeding the settlement.
Within four years after their arrival at Plymouth settlers profited from Indian agriculture and entered into relationships that dominated Indian-white contacts for the next two hundred years and more. In the fall of 1625 Governor William Bradford sent a boatload of corn up the Kennebec River to trade with the interior tribes for furs. His men returned with a store of beaver and other furs that financed the colony's needs for the next year. In later years Massachusetts further developed its fur trade, raised its own corn for export, and purchased corn from the Indians for resale.
Now it is true that Bradford's account also details how the Pilgrims discovered that communal farming was a distinctly inferior scheme to private farming, which is where Stossel and Limbaugh obtain their claim that the first Thanksgiving was about the failure of socialism -- which, as Brian at RightWingWatch has detailed already, is a load of bollocks and a deliberate misreading of the history.
At this point it's clear that according to Rush, there's literally nothing good you can say about a racial minority in America (unless they are dutifully serving as right wing poster children.)
Of course not. Because in Rushtopia, white people are the cream of creation, and any suggestion that their inferiors might actually have helped them survive and thrive is an outrageous slander upon the race.
This video, produced by Taiwan's NMA (Next Media TV, is good for more than a laugh. It also makes you realize what an international laughingstock Palin's continuing high profile makes of the American political scene generally.
They must think that we're frigging nuts to even allow someone like this the kind of political ascendancy she's achieved. And you know what? They're right.
According to Gerson, people asserting this are indulging in "conspiracy theories":
Yet this is precisely what the sabotage theorists must deny. They must assert that the case for liberal policies is so self-evident that all opposition is malevolent. But given the recent record of liberal economics, policies that seem self-evident to them now seem questionable to many. Objective conditions call for alternatives. And Republicans are advocating the conservative alternatives - monetary restraint, lower spending, lower taxes - they have embraced for 30 years.
Right. Even though liberals don't to resort to the factless fantasies that are the essence of conspiracy theories, they do happen to believe that the preceding eight years of conservative governance in America drove the country to the brink of economic and political ruin -- and their beliefs are very much grounded in real fact. They don't subscribe to the ongoing fantasy by conservatives that "the conservative alternatives - monetary restraint, lower spending, lower taxes" are any kind of solution, because it's been definitively proven that they are not. Conservatives, contrary to reality, do.
That insistence on living in a fantasy world -- which really has come to define conservatism these days -- is also what leads conservatives, not liberals, to subscribe to all kinds of conspiracy theories, ranging from Obama's birth certificate to his supposed plan to grab Americans' guns to the widespread belief, spread by leading right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, that Obama is secretly a radical black America-hater intent on harming white Americans,
Funny that Gerson never seems fit to mention this, eh?
Instead, he informs us that serious Beltway Republicans find such talk unacceptable:
It is difficult to overstate how offensive elected Republicans find the sabotage accusation, which Obama himself has come very close to making. During the run-up to the midterm election, the president said at a town hall meeting in Racine, Wis.: "Before I was even inaugurated, there were leaders on the other side of the aisle who got together and they made the calculation that if Obama fails, then we win." Some Republican leaders naturally took this as an attack on their motives. Was the president really contending that Republican representatives want their constituents to be unemployed in order to gain a political benefit for themselves? No charge from the campaign more effectively undermined the possibility of future cooperation.
This really is precious. Because Republicans' desire to do anything -- anything, even vote against a fundamentally Republican health-care measure -- has led them to simply oppose anything President Obama hopes to achieve. This includes a START treaty that is basic to American security, as well as dealing with the debt limit in a responsible fashion, which Gerson disingenuously depicts as just a matter of conservatives balking at a lack of fiscal conservatism.
But this isn't a surprise to anyone. Republicans aren't interested in helping Americans as long as Obama is their president. They will only act constructively if they are in charge. As Krugman put it:
The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.
Nor has it been any less so among those congressional Republicans whose tender feelings have now been so easily offended by a little dose of truthfulness they are threatening to take their new government ball and go home. Indeed, they've been very explicit about it:
Mitch McConnell: "It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out," Mr. McConnell said about the health legislation in an interview, suggesting that even minimal Republican support could sway the public. "It's either bipartisan or it isn't."
Jim DeMint: "Senators and Congressmen will come back in September afraid to vote against the American people," DeMint predicted, adding that "this health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America." "If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
Since the election, they've been even more strident, a la Darrell Issa's hasty retreat from talk of "compromise": “You know, the word 'compromise' has been misunderstood."
Mitch McConnell: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
John Boehner: "This is not a time for compromise."
Then there was Mike Pence, vowing "no compromise" on CNN.
The odd thing about all this is that Gerson insists on calling all this a "conspiracy theory" when in fact all of this is merely a part of the public record, and Republicans have been quite clear -- at least, among themselves -- that they view obstructing Obama in any and every particular paramount, even at the cost of American economic advancement, which they believe must wait until they are back in charge. Otherwise, Americans might view Obama favorably.
This is the opposite of a conspiracy theory, which is always a farrago of paranoid fantasy, conjecture, and half-facts. As Chip Berlet explains:
What Richard Hofstadter described as the “paranoid style” in U.S. right-wing movements derives from belief in an apocalyptic struggle between “good” and “evil,” in which demonized enemies are complicit in a vast insidious plot against the common good, and against which the conspiracist must heroically sound the alarm.
.... Conspiracism is neither a healthy expression of skepticism nor a valid form of criticism; rather it is a belief system that refuses to obey the rules of logic. These theories operate from a pre-existing premise of a conspiracy based upon careless collection of facts and flawed assumptions. What constitutes “proof” for a conspiracist is often more accurately described as circumstance, rumor, and hearsay; and the allegations often use the tools of fear—dualism, demonization, scapegoating, and aggressively apocalyptic stories—which all too often are commandeered by demagogues.
Gerson is looking for conspiracy theories in all the wrong places, methinks.
Sarah Palin's still pushing hard on her "drill baby drill" mantra hard, especially in terms of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which she can barely wait to open up for drilling and a new pipeline. She went on Greta Van Susteren's show on Thanksgiving Day to criticize "the extreme politicians over on the left who want to buy into those extreme environmentalists who claim that there's no way you can responsibly develop a plot of land that was set aside for oil and gas development" -- particularly President Obama:
SARAH PALIN: Well, Obama needs to get up here. If he has as much time as he has on his hands to take all these vacations, maybe he should vacation in ANWR. At least fly over it, Mr. President, or play -- you know, play golf or do what he does. This is a national security need. This is -- there's that inherent link between security and our own domestic development. I think it's inexcusable that our president won't come up here and look at it.
Does anyone know what Palin's talking about here? Earlier this summer, Republicans tried attacking Obama for taking a vacation, until the WaPo pointed out that Obama at that point had taken far fewer days of vacation than his predecessor, the inimitable proprietor of the Lazy W Ranch in Crawford:
Obama has embarked on nine "vacations" since taking office, bringing his total days off to 48. Some of those trips lasted a day and some, like his Christmas holiday in Hawaii, more than a week.
By comparison, Bush had visited his ranch in Crawford, Tex., 14 times at this point in his administration and spent 115 days there.
Indeed, FactCheck found that Obama also took less vacation time than the revered Saint Ronnie, too -- though more than those lazy liberal Democrats, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
Indeed, the wingnuts of the wingnutosphere have insisted on referring to it as Obama's "vacation" in India. They were helped along in this by Glenn Beck, who described the trip as "$2 billion for ten days so [Obama] can go see the festival of lights."
BECK: All on the heels of his wife's lavish trip to Spain, now our president is planning another lavish trip. And our dollar is losing value and the Chinese are warning us. The media again is missing it. The bickering today back and forth about how many hundreds or maybe -- maybe billions of dollars this is going to cost to insure the president's security but no one is asking, "Wait a minute, it could cost up to $2 billion to make sure he's safe? Then why is he -- has he seen the Grand Canyon?"
From the November 4 edition of Glenn Beck:
BECK: A report came out that has made the rounds on the Internet about the high cost of this trip. Some people say that it is up to $2 billion for 10 days. Is that true? I don't know. The media is bickering back and forth about what the real cost is and how many ships will be there. Thirty-four warships, possibly. I don't know. Two hundred million dollars a day while in India. I don't know. president has blocked off eight hundred hotel rooms. Do we even know if he's traveling with 3,000 people? Do we know if that's true? No one knows any of the details of this trip, the real cost of the trip. One thing we can say for certain is it's going to be quite expensive.
In reality, of course, this is not a vacation at all, but a major diplomatic tour of ally nations, particularly India. And there's a great deal at stake, both in terms of security issue and major business deals.
Is that what Palin means by "all this vacation time"?
If so, it once again demonstrates her utter lack of fitness for the job.
So, for that matter, does her ceaseless attempts to push ANWR drilling, because it clearly displays her eagerness to not only ignore real science but also to essentially open up her entire state to resource extraction without regard to consequences.
To Van Susteren's credit, she did invite Rep. Jay Inslee on to discuss the other side of the issue:
INSLEE: Well, I guess I'd offer three reasons that I think it's unwise for us to move in this direction right now. Number one, the fact is -- and this is just a geologic and economic fact -- is that drilling in this area really is not going to make an appreciable difference for our economy. And the reason is, is that this represents less than half of 1 percent of the world's oil reserves. And according to the energy studies that have been done, even if they prove out, which remains a question, might have -- might have an impact of maybe 3 cents a gallon of our cost of gasoline in the year 2028. So it's quite a minimal amount when you look at the word oil supply.
In fact, the problem is, you know, we've only got 3 percent of the world's oil supply, but we use 25 percent of the world's oil. So it's really not a solution to our problem. That's number one.
Number two -- and I think this is an important fact -- and I appreciate your looking at this issue -- but the fact of the matter is, if we're going to grow our economy, if we are going to seize the jobs of the next century, we have to get busy focusing our national debate and our national investment on the new clean energy technologies, or China is going to eat our lunch.
China right now is preparing to roll out electric cars, lithium ion batteries, solar cells, cellulosic ethanol. This is where the future of energy is. We've a finite resource in oil, just like we had a finite resource in whale oil, and we made a transition. And we have to really focus our national energies in a bipartisan way, I would hope, on finding our way to compete with China to really build new energy sources of the future.
And third -- and this is an important one, and maybe it's obvious but I think it's worth saying. We've made some national commitments to our grandkids. We've done it in Yellowstone National Park. We've done it in Glacier. We've done it in Mt. Rainier National Park. And we've done it in the Arctic refuge.
You know, a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, started this whole shebang at the Pelican (ph) Refuge, and we've never violated that commitment. This is a special place. We've made a commitment that this is -- this is during the Eisenhower administration, by the way. We made a decision that we were going to make a commitment to our grandchildren that we were going to preserve this relatively small space the way the creator designed it. And I just think that's a commitment that we should keep. It's the right thing for America both economically and as a part of a commitment to our grandkids.
She later brought on Peter Van Tyne of the NRDC to explain that Palin in fact is lying about the impacts of the drilling:
VAN TYNE: I think it is wrong on a couple of points. First of all, the coastal plain of the arctic refuge about 1.5 million acres is considered by the scientists to be the biological heart of that refuge. And think about this -- in a two week period in the summer the porcupine caribou herd calves on the coastal plain, and they have 35,000 babies in that two-week period. On the coastal plain you have over 160 species of birds. In every state of your viewers there's a bird that spends some portion of their life cycle on the Arctic Refuge coastal plain.
And it's also considered by scientists to be the most important land habitat in the United States for polar bears. And scientists say in the entire arctic, circumpolar arctic this place has the most diverse plant and animal species.
You mentioned that there's an idea of drilling being only a small area. That is simply not borne out. You yourself were over in the Prudhoe Bay area and you looked at the development there. This is 1,000 square miles of development, the size of Rhode Island. You can see it from space.
There's no way -- the National Academy of Sciences has looked at these issues carefully. They say that when you drill in a particular place you've made the essential trade off, their words, not mine, where you are necessarily industrializing an area by drilling it for oil and actually undercutting if not completely eliminating the other values of the area.
Maybe Palin needs to take a vacation down in the Gulf of Mexico to see some of the consequences of trusting the oil companies too much, eh?
