Reality Bites

From self-described the champions of "fiscal restraint":

Junior Florida Republican Party staffer had $1.3 million charged to party credit card

Among the damages:

Over the next 2½ years, nearly $1.3 million in charges wound up on Melanie Phister's AmEx — $40,000 at a London hotel, and nearly $20,000 in plane tickets for indicted former House Speaker Ray Sansom, his wife and kids, for starters. Statements show thousands spent on jewelry, sporting goods and in one case $15,000 for what's listed as a month-long stay at a posh Miami Beach hotel, but which the party says was a forfeited deposit.

The credit card records, obtained by the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald, offer the latest behind-the-scenes look at extravagant and free-wheeling spending by the party touting fiscal restraint. Not only did certain elite legislative leaders have their own party credit cards to spend donors' money with little oversight, but Phister's records show these leaders also liberally used an underling's card — without her knowledge, she says.

[...]

The Florida Democratic Party requires staffers and leaders to use their own credit cards and seek reimbursement for appropriate expenses. That's now the practice at the Florida Republican Party, and fundraiser Hoffman suggested it's about time.

[h/t C&L]

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Grounded in reality

Sandpoint (Idaho) Tea Party Patriots president Pam Stout's appeared last week on Letterman to discuss her newfound interest in politics. Of the grandmotherly Stout's politics, Digby writes:

Her politics aren't grounded in real life but in abstract concepts.

Stout's group, the New York Times wrote in February, "joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement." With all the grounded-in-reality that that entails.

For instance, the Detroit Free Press reported last week that indicted Hutaree militia member, Tina Stone, complained on her Facebook page that H.R. 1388 (signed recently by President Obama) allocated "$20 billion to help the terrorist group Hamas settle in the U.S." Apparently, Stone credulously accepted bogus facts she received in a chain email.

It was never about health care

September 11 let the air out of many Americans' sense of invulnerability. Fear filled the vacuum left behind and intensified the darkness already there. Fear of change. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the Other.

At dinner last night we talked about what was really behind the right's histrionic response to enactment of health insurance reform -- reform based in too large a part on Republican ideas. By the time the Sunday New York Times was online, Frank Rich had transcribed the essentially the same conversation under the title we might have given it, The Rage Is Not About Health Care:

Healthcaremageddon

A post by David Frum, the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, David Frum, that I cited Sunday night was all over the Net on Monday. Frum's take on the anti-government hysteria surrounding the health care debate included this:

Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

Today, President Obama signs the Senate bill passed on Sunday. Passage of the health care bill is a Republican Waterloo, Frum writes. Maybe. But I’ll be holding my breath for some time afterwards.

Cliff May lands a Triple Coulter

The Triple Coulter

A hair flip, followed by an exasperated sigh, completed with "It's just a joke!"
after being called out for saying something offensive, especially for shock value.

Like suggesting that the U.S. solve its Guantanamo prisoner problem by murdering the remaining prisoners.

Glenn Greenwald calls out Cliff May:

National Review's Cliff May, yesterday:

A Bipartisan Proposal

Step (1): Return all Gitmo detainees to Yemen.

Step (2): Use Predator missiles to strike the baggage-claim area 20 minutes after they arrive.

Just an idea.

Virtually all of the 90 Yemeni detainees currently at Guantanamo have been imprisoned for years despite never having been charged with any crime. Roughly half of them have been officially "cleared for release" -- meaning even the U.S. Government believes they did nothing wrong or pose no danger to the U.S. Two weeks ago, the Obama administration, to its credit, released 6 Yemeni detainees -- after years in captivity -- because a federal court was about to grant their habeas petition on the ground that there is no evidence to justify their detention. In response, people like John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein are demanding with a monarchical wave of the hand that all Yemenis be kept imprisoned anyway and not released, and according to this morning's New York Times, the Obama administration now plans to hold the rest of them indefinitely.

[...]

But Cliff May thinks we should take them all, including all the innocent ones, and just slaughter them -- and do so in the most cowardly way possible: by dropping a missile on them from the air while they're standing there, unarmed and unsuspecting. And if he suggested this murderous proposal only in humor, that's so warped it might actually be worse.

May responds by landing a Triple Coulter.

The Right is Left, right?

The GOP has gone to the (blue?) dogs, according to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). Here's the blurb from The Hill:

Conservative Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Wednesday called out the leadership of the Republican Party for straying too far from conservative principles.

DeMint, in an interview with the Christian Broadcast Network, also said that he is trying to recruit a new crop of GOP lawmakers to challenge the party establishment.

"The problem in the Republican Party is that the leadership has gone to the left," he said. "I need some new Republicans."

Rush Limbaugh took a swipe at the GOP leadership for not saying "no" enough, says The Hill:

“They are up there adding amendments. There’s no question they’re adding amendments to it. McConnell’s office did call here and say that they are opposing this, so I don’t know if adding amendments is a strategery [sic] to bollix it up and slow it down. But I — I disagree. They just need to say no; there’s nothing wrong with saying no to this!” Limbaugh said Tuesday.

Not to be outdone, the Tea Party and the Social Security Institute slammed the GOP for "collaboration with the enemy."

GOP moderates are the real threat, Stephen Colbert cautions, and the GOP's new purity test is the "perfect" response, "a party of white, Christian men who call Obama a Nazi pushing the concept of purity."

Lions and tigers and "progressives"

We received this second attack flyer on Saturday, just in time for Tuesday's local elections.



Both candidates won handily.

The End Is Always Nearer on the Right Side of the Street

A friend sent me a link received in one of those multi-forwarded, zombie right-wing chain mails that spammers use for harvesting emails for their lists. The email was headed, "Obama to sign away US freedom in December?"

With the forward came this plaintive request:

Please give me your opinion on this fellow - and give me some material to shoot back to the idiots sending it to me
pleeeeeease!

The link (which I won't bother to embed) is to a YouTube clip of one Lord Christopher Monckton, a former Maggie Thatcher advisor and climate change skeptic, speaking before a Minnesota Free Market Institute meeting in mid-October.

There's a climate change treaty to be signed in Copenhagen this December. "In the next few weeks," says Monckton, "unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away for ever, and neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back again."

The end is near. Again.

Exaspberated, I replied (tongue firmly in cheek):

But, but, but ... he's melodramatic. He has a classy British accent. He quoted Churchill. He kisses our American asses and says he "so loves and admires" us. He can't be a kook, can he?

Now, you thought they thought Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and defeated communism, and, being a Thatcherite, surely Monckton does. Au contraire! Monckton said Obama will sign our freedom away to a "communist world government" and once done, it cannot be undone. OMG!

Okay, there is that bit about the Congress having to ratify treaties, what with all their pages and pages of exemptions, but why should we let that minor detail get in the way of some good, old-fashioned conservative red baiting?

I mean, it's like that time in 1988 when that pinko Ronald Reagan sold out the the ol' US of A by signing the UN Convention Against Torture (the one Congress didn't ratify until 1994?). That commie rat bastard Reagan signed away America's sovereign, God-given right to torture people! We could have used torture against those Islamofascist bastards, al Qaida, ya know?

But NOOOOO!!!! The UN stopped us dead in our tracks, didn't it?

I, too, think of the US of A as the beacon of freedom to the world. I'm just relieved, as Monckton must be, that even after all that leftist propaganda about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that the world still sees us as he does, as the beacon of freedom. Now if we can only stop those lefties from keeping Miami Beach real estate from slipping beneath the waves like the Hood.

Sorry if I'm just all alarmist-out, but after a decade of the-end-is-near rhetoric from the right, I'm afraid I can hardly muster a yawn.

Do these people bathe in fear because they can't get an erection any more, and a chill up their spines is as good as it gets?

Other than that, she was probably a swell gal

SC Gov. Mark Sanford doesn't know enough to quit while he's behind. He's in Newsweek with a review of some new books about the life of Ayn Rand. Sanford's takeaway? "Government doesn't know best."

Whoa.

Sanford pauses in his paean to Rand long enough to acknowledge that her freedom fetish did not apply to members of her cult:

Ironically, as Heller's biography makes clear, while Rand's philosophy was based on the individual's absolute freedom, Rand herself exercised a dictatorial control over her followers. She would denounce anyone who expressed opinions even slightly diverging from her own... For the leader of a group dedicated to human freedom, Rand didn't allow much of it around her.

Sanford doesn't mention (and may not know) that Rand based one of her early fictional heroes on William Edward Hickman, who author Michael Prescott describes as "a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer. Other than that, he was probably a swell guy."

Prescott continues:

According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

The free-spirited Hickman kidnapped, held for ransom and dismembered a twelve year-old girl, after which the throw-social-convention-to-the-wind sprite threw her body parts out the door of his car.

Yeah, he was an axe murderer, but that wasn't what impressed Rand, but his personal credo, "what is good for me is right." As she writes in her journals:

"This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul."

Yes, a real man.

And Rand? Yeah, she was a sociopath, but that's not what impresses Gov. Mark Sanford. Rand's "one more major flaw" was that her sociopathy led her to her reject conventional Christian morality. But interpreting Atlas Shrugged as parable about limited government makes Rand "more relevant than ever."

Thus endeth Sanford's high school book report. A lot of people read Atlas Shrugged in high school. Most of them grow up.

Not Exactly the Mercury Theatre on the Air

At least the damage was minimal, Frank Rich suggests in this morning’s New York Times. It’s not as if the “balloon boy” fraud led the country into invading a sovereign country in search of nonexistent WMDs, or into investing in dot-coms with no business plans, or into buying oversized homes with no-income no-asset loans.

But “balloon boy” is this generation’s “War of the Worlds” hoax, Rich believes, “the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where ‘news,’ ‘reality’ television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled” — a culture in which media snake oil salesmen are as likely to be suckered as their audiences, if not more so.

Rich observes,

As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.

Not that anyone around him would have gotten it if he were.

(Crossposted from Scrutiny Hooligans)

Debunking the Hissy Fit Du Jour

Glenn Greenwald yesterday noted the hand-wringing and pearl clutching by the press over the White House calling out Fox News as an opinion outlet rather than a news network, and "a wing of the Republican Party." Greenwald lays out a bill of particulars:

All that hand-wringing rhetoric: why? Because the Obama administration threatened to criminally prosecute Fox? Or because the adminstration surveilled its reporters' telephone calls? Or illegally obtained their telephone records? Or shot missiles at hotels in which they were staying? Or dropped bombs on their offices? Or imprisoned them for years without charges? Or barred Fox reporters from riding on administration planes? Or conspired to "weed out" any critical voices from being heard on network and cable news programs? No, those are all things that the Bush administration did to reporters (see the links) -- all well above and beyond the numerous, constant rhetorical attacks from the Bush White House on media organizations they perceived to be hostile. Where was Tucker Carlson when that was happening, or Ruth Marcus, or Anderson Cooper, or David Carr?

And Glenn doesn't even mention getting a gay prostitute/journalist to TASS toss softball questions at White House pressers or paying opinion columnists to publish favorable pieces about them.

Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann further debunk the hissy fit with the TV equivalent of twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossies with circles and arrows, etc. Heaven forbid the right wing should attempt to rewrite history:

Projection TV: Real Americans Watch Fox News

A focus-group study by Democracy Corps explains that Republican base voters live in “a world apart from the rest of America.”

The Tea Parties of August already made that pretty clear.

Republican base voters believe themselves an oppressed minority that possesses “knowledge and insight that the majority of Americans – whether too lazy or too misguided to find it for themselves – do not possess.” And – surprise – they get their special knowledge and insight largely from Fox News.

In 1999, Al Franken wrote the same thing. During the Clinton health care debate, the Annenberg School for Communications found that conservative talk radio listeners judged themselves the most informed on the topic. Testing, however, revealed that they were the least informed.

Franken wondered [my edit],

But why would people so woefully lacking in the basic facts of an issue think they were the best informed? Social scientists call the phenomenon "pseudo-certainty." I call it "being a f*#king moron."

A decade later we have Glenn Beck reinforcing his viewers' paranoid proclivities and helping them project their own darkest impulses onto opponents.

According to Democracy Corps, four core beliefs set the Republican base apart:

1. Deception and a Hidden Agenda – “Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives.”

2. Speed – Obama is implementing change rapidly to keep ordinary Americans from knowing what he is doing.

3. Driving Government to the Brink and Total Control – Obama is deliberately trying to burden America with so much debt that citizens will be unable to resist efforts to implement Obama’s ultimate plan ...

4. The Ultimate Goal: Socialism and End to Liberties – Government takeover of health care is just the first step towards a complete suppression of liberty by our inefficient, ineffective and corrupt government.

It is a pretty stunning case of projection, as one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers suggests:

[Obama] is the out of control spender when they sat on their hands through all of Bush's malfeasance. That is why his talking to schoolchildren is dangerous when our government wiretapping its citizens wasn’t. That is why saving the financial system from years of Republican regulation is taking away our future. The more evil revealed about the right’s excesses on torture, or wars of choice, or nearly destroying the economy, the more evil Obama will look in their eyes, as they cannot tolerate owning responsibility, because in their own minds they are only good.

Paul Rosenberg explains the viewpoint in a separate discussion at Open Left:

[T]he disconnect is particularly strikingly. That is, until you take a step back, and see the underlying consistency ... in their minds, they alone are America. If they're not running things, then it's not America... If you are the real America and everyone else is not, well, then, you can do pretty much whatever you want – and do it all in the name of America.

Conservatives and independents in the Democracy Corps focus group were sensitive to charges that racism is behind their criticism of Obama. So much so, that they came back to it “again and again.”

However much it is, their discomfort is not all about race. It’s broader. It’s tribal.

“Real Americans” view those outside their tribe with suspicion, like teenagers in the mall they are convinced are there to shoplift – illigitimate, untrustworthy, low-caste Irresponsibles, bad apples who don’t deserve America. Those outside their tribe don’t deserve to carry the flag, don’t deserve to wear the uniform or to enjoy the blessings of liberty. Especially, they don’t deserve to vote.

“Real Americans” believe America’s bad apples pay no taxes. The “lucky duckies” don’t even pay sales tax, property tax, tax on gasoline, on heating oil, cigarette tax, telephone excise tax, unemployment tax, Social Security tax, Medicare and Medicaid.

“Real Americans” would love to repeal the 16th Amendment, but so long as they pay taxes, they'll be the betters of countrymen they think pay any less. They will rail about how unfairly they’re treated and what a drag on the economy and their fortunes are the great unwashed who have turned this once great country into one "where poor people can put billionaires out of business."

These Atlases see themselves stoically carrying America upon their shoulders while being dragged relentlessly down by the grubby, grasping hands of the less well-born; by people not as honest, upstanding and hard-working as they are; by the parasites of capitalism who contribute nothing; by deadbeats and losers who have structured their lives so they can spend them sucking the teat of real America.

No wonder they feel "a world apart." And Fox News is there to remind them, if they ever have doubts.

(Crossposted from Huffington Post.)

What Civilized Country Operates Like This?

You have seen it. The plastic bucket beside the cash register at the convenience store. A photo is taped to it. A child needs an operation. His father lost his job. The family lost its insurance. They are about to lose their home. Can you spare some change?

What civilized country operates like this? In case God-and-country defenders of the status quo need reminding, America’s for-profit health insurance system serves neither.

Reform advocates must hammer away at this relentlessly: health insurance reform is a moral issue more than an economic one.

Nicholas Kristof delivered further proof that the system is morally bankrupt in the October 4 New York Times.

Travis and Michael Waddington hoped to donate a kidney to their father, David, 58, a wine retailer and victim of polycystic kidney disease. PKD had destroyed David’s kidneys. Since the disease is genetic, Travis and Michael needed to be tested for the disease themselves before donating. Yet a positive result might mean the sons might never be able to get insurance. So their doctors advised against getting tested. Another advised getting tested under fictitious names. To protect their sons, husband and wife shot down the idea, even at the risk of David’s life.

Eventually, David received a kidney from a deceased donor, but Michael recently began experiencing PKD symptoms and now faces an insurance nightmare now all too familiar, obtaining affordable insurance – or any insurance – after being diagnosed with a serious illness.

Closer to home, an acquaintance recently donated a kidney to his father under somewhat different circumstances, but with similar risks. Such acts of mercy by organ donors (talk about risky behavior) present insurers with an elective pre-existing condition, and present donors with a moral dilemma. Fortunately, his father’s insurance covered both transplant surgeries. But both the son’s own physician and the transplant surgeons recommended that he say nothing to his insurer. It was illegal to deny coverage or insurance to organ donors, doctors told him. Nonetheless, they often heard of it happening.

Why tempt fate? He told his insurer nothing.

Kristoff calls an insurance system that forces patients into such impossible choices, “the disgrace of the industrialized world.”

But that’s putting it mildly. As T.R. Reid puts it in The Healing of America, our system is virtually a worldwide laughingstock. One thing on which experts at international health care symposia can agree, Reid explains, is that the U.S. for-profit insurance system is a mess. “Bashing the U.S. system is a standard agenda item.”

Joanne Ford, a patient on Social Security disability and wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses, arrived for a Remote Area Medical free clinic in Knoxville. She came hoping to get a new pair for free. But nearly last in line, she almost missed her chance. Interviewed by 60 Minutes, Ford said tearfully, “I am sad that we are the wealthiest nation in the world and we don’t take care of our own.”

Even the socialist bogeymen of Europe treat their own better.

For-profit insurance can be cruel and capricious, not unlike the age of Dickens that Keith Olbermann invoked in a recent hour-long commentary. America’s uninsured have "a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts," a new Harvard study finds. Furthermore, 45,000 Americans a year die from lack of health insurance. Like Dickens’ London, America’s working poor too often are either invisible or else blamed as surplus population –– impediments to the economic fortunes of their “betters.”

It is a seasonal tradition to revisit cherished redemption stories during the coming dark nights around the solstice, to refresh human connections not just to family and friends, but to our fellow men. Defenders of the status quo, especially, need to refresh theirs.

America would do well to revisit those redemption stories earlier this year as it considers how best to rehabilitate a business more informed by Wall Street than A Christmas Carol. For-profit health insurance is rare in the civilized world, and rightly so. It is a cold-hearted business more interested in serving the numbers on its balance sheets than the humanity behind the numbers.

That calls into question the humanity of its defenders, like the conservative radio icon who brags about taking on all comers with half his brain tied behind his back. That would be the feeling half. The human half. The half that Messrs. Scrooge and Potter let atrophy as an impediment to being good men of business.

Right now, a popular caterer downtown has posters on her door. A child needs an operation. A strawberry blonde boy in an adult-sized straw hat. He has a severe immune deficiency disease. He is with his parents at Duke University Medical Center for a bone marrow transplant. There's a pancake breakfast to raise money.

You might as well hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

What civilized country operates like this?

(Cross-posted from Huffington Post.

What Does Happen Here

Last weekend, tens of thousands of health reform protesters prompted by Glenn Beck descended on Washington. They fear America is turning fascist because Barack Obama wants health insurance reform that reduces cost, guarantees choice, and is affordable and high quality for every American.

Diabolical.

“Don’t Tread On Me” is their battle cry — emphasis on “Me.” There is no "we" in their America, no welcome for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of Americans, much less immigrants. E pluribus unum is Greek to them. They have reduced freedom to a fetish.

This is the kind of cheap, plastic, made-in-China patriotism you buy at Wal-Mart at everyday low prices — all packaging and empty on the inside.

Read more at Campaign for American Future.

The Bile Boils Over

Enter the Tea Baggers, the Birthers, the Deathers, Glenn Beck, town hall shouters, guys with guns, and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC). The right's simmering kettle of bile is boiling over.

You almost can't blame them for losing it. Conservatives spent three decades building, Bolero-like, towards their denouement: control of both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. And a permanent Republican majority.

Their efforts climaxed with the presidency of George W. Bush. They lost it all to Barack Obama.

Bush's presidency climaxed on a pile of rubble in New York just after 9/11.

A flood of post-September 11 articles asked how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us. One savvy pundit asked, Would America keep its head?

We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.

Did America keep its head? Uh, no.

But with the election of its first bi-racial president, the electorate threw the movement conservative and neocon bums out. Had America's temporary insanity finally abated? Uh, no. It's worse.

Osama was one thing. But Obama?

People weren't this crazed over Jackie Robinson, were they? Father Coughlin was off the air by then. People's minds were not as marinated in the mind poison the right-wing has pumped out daily for the last twenty years.

Case in point. I once worked in an office where a guy recorded Rush Limbaugh every afternoon. Using a small FM transmitter, he rebroadcast the show the next morning to fellow dittoheads in the building so they would be primed for Limbaugh's live broadcast at noon.

No lie.

In Appalachia, dentists call it "Mountain Dew mouth." Children carry around the acidic, heavily caffeinated soda, taking a sip every few minutes. It's "like bathing the teeth in it all day," according to one dentist. Children go from decayed to toothless.

Is the mind rot from listening to Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity or Savage every day any different? Or from passing on the sludge from Drudge or WorldNetDaily? Or from reading those chain e-mails forwarded by relatives and friends who spread them like Typhoid Mary? Inhaling mercury vapors might be less harmful.

Conservatives bathed in daily lies -- from WMDs to "death panels" -- have become so comfortable spreading them that they treat it like good, clean fun for the whole family. They spread them dutifully, no matter how extreme or outlandish (assuming they know the difference any longer).

The day of Obama's speech, Crooks and Liars' Dave Neiwert again insisted that "ideas, agendas, talking points, and memes in general regularly [migrate] from the extremist right in America into mainstream conservatism." This week we saw just how far up the infection goes.

Hours before South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson yelled "You lie!" at the president, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on NPR's Morning Edition and rebuffed an invitation to condemn the "death panel" rhetoric. The GOP leadership won't quit the useful idiots who do their dirty work for them.

By Obama's address that evening, "the town hall freak show" had come to a joint session of Congress.

Responding to Birthers, Deathers, and a flood of right-wing paranoia from the likes of Glenn Beck, Open Left's Paul Rosenberg discusses the mental elasticity of linear thinkers like Beck. They build elaborate conspiracies like Frankenstein's monster, linking together random bits of their own chaotic fears. "They are put together, but can't be logically deconstructed," he writes, nor argued with "any more than you can reason with a nightmare."

Responding to his flood of hate mail filled with "spitting, incoherent rage," Paul Krugman commented, "Something is going very wrong in the head of a substantial number of Americans."

The poison has spread to the GOP's very soul.

Cross-posted from Huffington Post.

Push them harder

From Steve Benen at Washington Monthly:

IT'S COME TO THIS.... In 1988, then-President Reagan spoke to students nationwide via C-SPAN telecast. Among other things, he talked about his positions on political issues of the day. Three years later, then-President Bush addressed school kids in a speech broadcast live to school classrooms nationwide. Among other things, he promoted his own administration's education policies.

President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.

Eventually, the spectacle of right-wing lunacy could supplant reality TV as profitable, ratings-rich popular entertainment.

So if I were a producer of such tripe, I'd be sending my scouts looking for the furthest-right wingnuts. As reality-TV talent, they've got it all: duplicitous, petty, rigid, manipulative, mean-spirited, histrionic, boogiemen hiding in their closets. America's Most Maladjusted. Now that's entertainment.

Push them harder, I say. This show is just getting good.

Like Tax Cuts That Way

What Digby said:

This is one of the problems with health care reform, as I've mentioned before. If the economy is doing well and deficits are going down, everybody's working and the fiscal scolds insist that reform will rain on the parade and ruin everything. More people working means more people have health insurance and the calls for reform are muted. If the economy is in trouble, then the fiscal scolds insist that the sky is falling because of rising deficits and reform will make everything even worse. Fewer people working makes the need more critical, but many of them see the deficit as a sign that government is dysfunctional and so they reject reform. No matter what, "the deficit" has a stranglehold on the political discourse in ways that makes reform nearly impossible.

The economy's good? It's time for tax cuts.

The economy's bad? It's time for tax cuts.

The tax cuts don't produce jobs as promised? It just means you need more tax cuts.

It's never time for health care for all Americans.

Elsewhere on Hullabaloo:

If these Democrats had a brain in their heads they'd realize that the best way to maintain their power (and keep getting those big bucks) is to pass a good bill. Successful reform will be their only defense because the true political downside to passing a bad bill now is being out there alone selling out the American people all by themselves.

Hey, McFly! Your shoe's untied!

When are these guys going to wise up?

Do Progressives Have What It Takes To Win?

Maybe it is something congenital about the left. Faced with lies, propaganda and intimidation, liberals go to Google to arm themselves with more and better facts.

Here! See my data?

Writing on Philly.com, Dick Polman wonders "whether there is some fundamental flaw in the Democratic gene pool ..." that the Democratic leadership was caught off guard by the conservative backlash against health care reform.

Recent town hall displays -- including the swastikas and death threats, explicit and implied -- prove again that it's past time that progressives got a clue and stopped bringing letter openers to gun fights.

Read more at Huffington Post.

Back to Boise

Today I finally looked back in on Bill Cope of Boise Weekly. A few weeks ago, I saw where Cope had ventured into the mountains to get some insight on socialist health care from "Badger" Bob, the socialist. Bob is both a capitalist libertarian and a socialist, so he ought to know socialism when he sees it. Bill found Bob drinking pitchers of Oly and throwing horseshoes with his buddy, Hoot, "a straight-up libertarian."

Things got a little heated:

"Tell me something, Hoot. Were you so damned confident in the free markets back when Enron was kicking the crap out of California by manipulating the energy grid? Or how about when we found out that Halliburton bunch was screwing the military out of billions? Did that make you proud of your unfettered laissez faire? Huh? Or what we're going through now with all these damn banks and such? ... Doesn't that make you wonder even a little bit if unregulated commerce ain't entirely what it's cracked up to be? You really suppose this is what your precious Adam Smith had in mind?"

If you look further, Cope explains the common medical condition, HUHA.

Something I ran across

As for the argument that government is unable to pull off anything like health care successfully, Steve Benen at Washington Monthly recalled a memorable scene from film:

It reminds me a bit of a scene in “Life of Brian.” The People’s Front of Judea are having a meeting and considering what the Romans had ever done for them. Reg asks, “Apart apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”