The Cover Of Glenn Beck's New Book

Not sure where to begin with this one . . .

Obama Makes A Good Point (With Update)

It is a point that needs to be made more often:

"...I have to say, part of the reason it spreads is the way reporting is done today. If somebody puts out misinformation, 'Obama's Creating Death Panels,' then the way the news report comes across is: 'Today such-and-such accused President Obama of putting forward death panels. The White House responded that that wasn't true.' And then they go on to the next story. And what they don't say is, 'In fact, it isn't true.'

"You know, it's fine to have a debate back and forth -- he said, she said -- except when somebody else is just not even telling remotely the truth. Then you should say in your reports, 'Oh, and by the way, that's just not true.'

"But that doesn't happen often enough."

You have to give the Republicans a lot of credit on this. Folks who give us the news know that if they report on the "death panel" story and then end the report by saying that nothing in the proposed legislation would result in the creation of death panels, the Radical Right would be all over the report claiming that it reflects left-winged thinking. [As Stephen Colbert once said: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."]

So instead of having to deal with the Radical Right Wing ire that will occur if the actual truth is told, members of the mainstream press simply forego pointing out that Sarah Palin and the rest of "the Deathers" are a bunch of fucking liars and thus give momentum to a story that is nothing more than a huge pile of horseshit.

Joe Klein recently summed up the problem this way:

Given the heinous dust that's been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that's a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer: How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?

Think about that for a second. America's Extreme Right has spent years accusing the Corporate Media of having a liberal bias -- the same Corporate Media, ironically, that cheerleaded us into the Iraq Debacle by ignoring BushCo lies -- and all that effort has paid off big time because now members of the Radical Right can spew the most outrageous lies knowing that the cowards in the media will report it without pointing out that it is all a lie.

Isn't that a form of right-wing media bias? Just asking.

UPDATE: Atrios says it better:

The thing is that press doesn't simply tolerate lies, they grant additional authority to the lie and the liar. Hosts and reporters who fail to correct lies implicitly bless them, adding their credibility to it.

Oops

This would suck:

You know times are tough when people are getting kicked out of their house when it’s not even for sale.

That’s what happened to Anna Ramirez after she found all of her stuff out on the front lawn of her Homestead home last week and a strange man demanding she get out of his newly purchased house.

The eviction came after Ramirez’s home was mistakenly auctioned off to the highest bidder by her bank, Washington Mutual. Usually, you get a warning before you get the boot. A foreclosure letter. Maybe a sign saying your house is up for sale. Not Ramirez, who found her belongings bashed and battered in the street.

"This came out of nowhere," Ramirez said. "The bank took the house from right under my feet."

The man who bought the house told Ramirez he paid $87,000 for it, which shocked Ramirez, who bought the house for $260,000.

What's worse is her husband, daughter and grand children were also kicked out by Homestead and Miami-Dade police officers, said Martha Taylor, who witnessed the unexpected eviction.

"I have never seen anything like it," Taylor said. "They literally threw all her stuff on the front lawn. I didn't sleep that night and it wasn't even my house." ***

A mistake in the Miami-Dade Clerk's Office appears to be behind the mishap, which landed Ramirez homeless for more than 24 hours.

The sale was eventually reversed by a Miami-Dade judge, allowing Ramirez to return to her old digs. Ramirez said she wants to sue for the damage to her furniture. ***

Finally (With Updates)

More please.

UPDATE: You can put this one in the "finally!" department as well (via Kevin Drum):

Given hardening Republican opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of the minority’s cooperation in approving any overhaul, and are increasingly focused on drawing support for a final plan from within their own ranks.

Top Democrats said Tuesday that their go-it-alone view was being shaped by what they saw as Republicans’ purposely strident tone against health care legislation during this month’s Congressional recess, as well as remarks by leading Republicans that current proposals were flawed beyond repair.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said the heated opposition was evidence that Republicans had made a political calculation to draw a line against any health care changes, the latest in a string of major administration proposals that Republicans have opposed.

“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.” ***

You're just now figuring this out, Rahm?

I hope that Obama and Company understood this all along and, as Drum suggests in his piece, were simply laying a huge trap for the GOP wherein the Republicans would ultimately be exposed as anti-heath care reform -- no matter what the reform was.

But I have a feeling Obama truly believed that there could be a bipartisan bill on this, and if so, then that was a major political error on his part.

UPDATE II: All I can say about this latest Tom Tomorrow cartoon is: Fucking-A.

Quote Of The Week

At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

-- Bill Maher

Oh, and by the way, Senator Chuck Grassley is a fucking idiot:

This morning, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called in to MSNBC's Morning Meeting to discuss health insurance reform. During the interview, host Dylan Ratigan asked Grassley about the so-called "death panels" in the House reform bill. Grassley, incredibly, responded that the fervor over end-of-life counseling is the result of "a distortion coming from [the] far-left."

Grassley said: "Well, listen. I see that as nothing more than a distortion coming from far-left with bringing up these end-of-life concerns, which are not the issue that we ought to be talking about. We ought to be talking about government takeover of the health care system. We ought to be talking about the exploding deficits. We ought to be talking about the failure to get on top of high health care costs. And all of these things are in the Pelosi health care bill, and it seems to me they don't want to talk about the real issues."

A distortion from the far left? I'm sure Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich would be interested to know that they are members of the Far Left.

My Advice To Birthers: Hire A New Lawyer (With Update)

This is pretty funny:

It's become very clear that the Birthers simply aren't going to stop -- ever. In fact, their craziness and ineptitude is now starting to spread over the whole globe in some pretty funny ways.

The Birthers dragged a complete bystander from yet another country, David Bomford of Adelaide, Australia, into this whole mess. And now, it appears, their ringleader is saying that he's the phony. It really is worth thinking about what has happened here.

After Orly Taitz released the quickly-debunked forged Kenyan birth certificate, it was discovered that the document was altered from a source document that didn't even come from Kenya, but was taken from Bomford's family genealogy site.

Bomford himself chimed in, and told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he would be taking his birth certificate off the family genealogy Web site, after security experts said he'd left himself open to identity theft. But he did seem a bit entertained about the whole experience: "I'm not particularly worried about it because no-one would honestly believe that anyone like me would be involved in it - just a grey-haired old guy sitting in a corner in quiet old Adelaide."

But Taitz is carrying on, having posted two days ago on her Web site that Bomford's certificate is the suspect one: "Bomford report was created to try to discredit my efforts." * * *

So let me see if I've got this right: Someone in the Birther Movement took this Aussie guy's birth certificate and used it as a template to forge Obama's "Kenyan" birth certificate, which Oily Taint herself presented as a legitimate Kenyan birth certificate. But now that this "Kenyan" document has been proved a forgery, Taint blames the victim of this whole fraud -- namely, the dude from Australia -- for being the one behind the conspiracy to discredit the forged birth certificate. In other words, the Aussie's birth certificate is the forgery.

The sound you just heard was my head exploding. I'm not certain how to make sense of all this, but I'm pretty sure that time travel would once again be a necessary component to such an explanation.

As an aside, wouldn't it be great to have a law practice where you could just make shit up all the time? You'd never have to worry about troublesome concepts such as ethics or truth. In fact, you wouldn't even have to be coherent.

UPDATE: Having some trouble locating your Kenyan birth certificate? No problem -- you can get it here.

What Kevin Drum Says (With Update)

He's absolutely right -- there is a big difference between the fringe people on the Left and the "fringe" people on the Right:

[T]he conservative lunatic brigade appeared so goddamn fast. It's true that some precincts on the left went nuts over Bush, but anti-Bush venom didn't really start to steamroll until late 2002 when he was making the case for war against Iraq. Nobody drew BusHitler signs after he signed NCLB or called him a war criminal for signing a tax cut. It took something really big to create a substantial cadre of big league Bush haters.

Conversely, the conservatives who think Obama is a socialist, or think Obama was born in Kenya, or think healthcare reform is going to kill your grandma, or think Obama is going to take all your guns away — well, that stuff started up approximately on January 21st, if not before. And it's not just a weird 1% fringe. There's a lot of conservatives who believe this stuff. And there wasn't any precipitating cause other than the fact of Obama's election in the first place. * * *

I'm definitely part of the group that didn't start hating Bush until all the talk about invading Iraq started. Prior to that, I thought he was doing a pretty good job.

But the Obama Haters appeared on or before the swearing-in, much like the Clinton Haters did in the early 90s. Unlike Democrats, members of the GOP appear to believe that only a Republican has a right to be President of the United States and that any Democrat who happens to win the presidency is some kind of usurper who must be viciously attacked on Day One no matter what his policies are.

Is it just me, or is there something treasonous about wanting your commander-in-chief to fail even before he is sworn in? One would think that if you truly loved your country, you'd give your brand new president a little time before wishing him ill. But a good portion of the GOP don't appear to love their country. They are instead in love with an extremist ideology and will attack anyone who doesn't agree with it, even folks in their own party.

In any event, Drum raises an excellent point, namely, there really doesn't seem to be a right-wing "fringe." For example, as I noted in the previous post, I thought the Birther Movement made up just a small percentage of the GOP, but it turns out that most Republicans either think Obama is an illegal alien or are "undecided" on that issue:

Among Republicans, it's a much weaker plurality of only 42% who say Obama was born in the U.S., with 28% saying he was not, with a very high undecided number of 30%. Among Democrats, the number is 93%-4%, and among independents it's 83%-8%.

I find the numbers on Independents to be particularly fascinating. The Democrats seem to have a real opportunity here to further erode independent voters' support for Republicans. The Dems should do everything possible to paint the GOP as a fringe group that is out-of-touch with mainstream America. And they wouldn't even have to lie about it -- the numbers certainly support such a notion.

I know Democrats don't particularly like to do that kind of stuff. It's a weakness they have. But if the shoe was on the other foot and a majority of Democrats believed something as bat-shit crazy as the beliefs adhered to by the Birther Movement, the GOP and its surrogates would certainly be saturating the airwaves with ads that pointed out this craziness.

UPDATE: As usual, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker nails it:

* * * “We got too many Jim DeMints (South Carolina) and Tom Coburns (Oklahoma),” [Ohio Sen. George Voinovich] told The Columbus Dispatch. “It's the Southerners. They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, ‘These people, they're Southerners. The party's being taken over by Southerners. What the hell they got to do with Ohio?' ”

Whatever Voinovich's sound effects were intended to convey, his meaning was clear enough: Those ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks are ruining the party.

Alas, Voinovich was not entirely wrong.

Not all Southern Republicans are wing nuts. Nor does the GOP have a monopoly on ignorance or racism. And, the South, for all its sins, is also lush with beauty, grace and mystery. Nevertheless, it is true that the GOP is fast becoming regionalized below the Mason-Dixon, and becoming increasingly associated with some of the South's worst ideas.

It is not helpful (or surprising) that “birthers” — conspiracy theorists who have convinced themselves that Barack Obama is not a native son — have assumed kudzu qualities among Republicans in the South. In a poll commissioned by the liberal blog, Daily Kos, participants were asked: “Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?”

Hefty majorities in the Northeast, Midwest and West believe Obama was born in the U.S. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten, only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure. Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.

Though Voinovich's views may be shared by others in the party, it's a tad late — not to mention ungrateful — to indict the South. Republicans have been harvesting Southern votes for decades from seeds strategically planted during the Civil Rights era. When Lyndon B. Johnson predicted in 1965 that the Voting Rights Act meant the South would go Republican for the next 50 years, he wasn't just whistling Dixie. * * *