The always-clever James Urbaniak pointed out on Twitter this little gem: Sarah Palin’s objection to Rahm Emanuel characterizing Barton’s statement as representative of the GOP:

RahmEmanuel= as shallow/narrowminded/political/irresponsible as they come,to falsely claim Barton’s BP comment is “GOP philosophy”Rahm,u lie

Urbaniak, however, noted this here study from the Caucus of House Conservatives, which states of the BP mess that

it is important to note that there is no legal authority for the President to compel a private company to set up or contribute to an escrow account.

I have nothing against people who live in the countryside. Heck, my grandfather is one.

I do have something against the right-wing trope that people in rural areas, or people in the rural “heartland”, are the “real Americans”. By extension, those urban people and coastal people don’t represent America.

The next time I hear that crap, I’m pointing the offender at this URL of census data.

People who live in metropolitan areas? 80% of the country.
People who live in the central cities of those areas? 30% of the country.

If you think those uppity urban types aren’t “real Americans”, then apparently only 1 in 5 citizens in this country are “real”.

The muddled Tea Party version of history is more than wrong and fraudulent. It’s offensive. Calling Obama a tyrant, a communist, or a fascist is deeply offensive to all the real victims of tyranny, the real victims of communism and fascism. The tens of millions murdered. It trivializes such suffering inexcusably for the T.P.ers to claim that they are suffering from similar oppression because they might have their taxes raised or be subject to demonic “federal regulation.”

Read on at Slate.

Rachel Maddow gives this terrific roundup of the Republicans who are expressing dismay at passing the health care bill — in direct contradiction of their own record. Whether it’s Sen. Grassley opposing his own proposal, or numerous Senators claiming that reconciliation is the end of the democratic process despite their repeated use of it in the past, the GOP hypocrisy is simply appalling, as is their apparent belief that we won’t notice their own voting records:

NO SERIOUSLY

Check out the results from this poll.

I… I am speechless. I can’t even summarize it.

Okay, let me try. 2000 Republicans surveyed, and the results include

Should contraceptive use be outlawed?
Yes 31
No 56
Not Sure 13

THIRTY ONE PERCENT
SOMEWHERE, MARGARET ATWOOD IS PULLING OUT HER HAIR

This website started as a snarky attempt to take Glenn Beck’s “I insist you refute this completely untrue rumor” rhetorical style. Well, turns out Mr. Beck’s skin runs a little thin.

As this MetaFilter post explains, Beck’s lawyers know that the site is protected under the First Amendment, so they are instead attempting to seize the domain by arguing that Beck has the rights to the domain name.

The defendant’s lawyer’s brief is really worth a read, it being the only legal brief I know of to reference “All your base belong to us” and “Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten”.

John Boehner, House Minority Leader, said he couldn’t find a single American outside of Congress or the Obama administration who supported a public option.

So this guy went to Boehner’s district to see if he could find one.

Stay tuned to the end, past the credits, for the capstone.

(Thanks to Michael Ian Black for the link)

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post comes this profile in today’s Salon of revisionist and fundamentalist extremist W. Cleon Skousen.

Skousen’s former employer had a low opinion of him as an overzealous right-winger. Which employer? The FBI… during the J. Edgar Hoover years:

When Skousen’s books started popping up in the nation’s high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau’s answer was an exasperated and resounding “no.” One 1962 FBI memo notes, “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.”

Things didn’t get better.

By 1963, Skousen’s extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had “gone off the deep end.” One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen “money mad … totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”

When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch’s charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” the last of Skousen’s dwindling corporate clients dumped him.

So who’s the guy currently touting Skousen and his books? Who, forty years later, would consider this wingnut a reliable source of American history?

Glenn Beck.

Jon Armstrong, of blurbomat.com, writes this editorial on “Why I Write So Much Against Fringe Conservatives”:

So here we are. Glenn Beck and the others talking about feeling like we did that day after 9/11, by inspiring divisiveness, cynicism and fucking with the very notion of what words mean. Obama is the scary “racist” “fascist” “socialist” “communist” that is going to kill grandma. Yet one of Glenn Beck’s heroes was found, by Mormons of all people, to be propagating thought that closely resembles the philosophical underpinnings of Nazism.

It’s time to call it. Smart people need to stand up and call this bullshit what it is: toxic waste hurled out across the public airwaves as pseudo-intellect and deep care for this great country. It’s dangerous. And it’s time to drop it.

“America already has the best health care in the world,” says Glenn Beck, insisting that we should change nothing.

Well, that’s what he says now. Jon Stewart shows that his tune has, um, changed somewhat:

As if the “death panels” crap wasn’t bad enough, the RNC has now gone totally shameless with baseless fearmongering. A recent RNC fundraiser mailing includes a “survey” which asks, among other things,

“It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person’s political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibly concern you?”

“It has been suggested”. Nice use of weasel-word passive voice there, guys. You know, it’s also been suggested that the RNC leadership are a bunch of PCP-addicted, hooker-murdering transvestites with intestinal disorders and ties to the Ukrainian mob. Does this possibly concern you?

Many people, including Keith Olbermann (as we blogged here) noted the all-too-coincidental timing between Bush’s falling poll numbers and Homeland Security terror alerts. Turns out, yeah, it wasn’t coincidence.

In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.

Read on.

“Birther” wingnuts have been circulating a document “proving” that Obama was born in Kenya. Of course, it has been proven a fake.

Perhaps they even used this awesome Web site to make it.

The Huffington Post has a great clip from Letterman, wherein Letterman responds to Cheney’s attacks on Obama by taking a little look at Cheney’s own record.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Robert Reich refutes a bunch of right-wing myths about taxes. An excerpt:

No one likes to pay taxes, so tax day typically attracts a range of right-wing Republicans, kooks, and demagogues, all of whom tell us how awful we have it. Herewith a short citizen’s guide (that is, a citizen’s guide that’s short rather than a guide for short citizens) responding to the predictable charges:

1. “Americans pay too much in taxes.” Wrong: The United States has the lowest taxes of all developed nations.

2. “The rich pay too much! The top ten percent of income earners pay over 72 percent of all income taxes!” Misleading: The main reason the rich pay such a large percent is they’ve become so much richer than the bottom 90 percent in recent years. If you look at what they pay as individuals — the percent of their incomes over and above the highest rate below them — you’ll see a steady decline over the years. When Republican Dwight Eisenhower was president, the marginal rate on the highest earners was 91 percent (after deductions and tax credits, closer to 50 percent); by 1980 it was still up there, at 70 percent (an effective rate of closer to 45 percent); under Bill Clinton, it was 38 percent (an effective rate closer to 28 percent).

He also provides this anecdote:

An acquaintance from law school, now a partner in one of Washington’s biggest and wealthiest law firms, explained to me one day over lunch how he and his partners use tax rules to create offsetting taxable gains and losses, and then allocate the gains to the firm’s foreign partners who don’t pay taxes in the United States. That way, they keep the losses here and shelter their income abroad. I noticed he had an American flag lapel pin. “You’re supporting our troops,” I said, referring to his pin. “Yup,” he replied, entirely missing my point.

True patriotism isn’t cheap. It’s about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.

Former radio program director Dan Shelley writes:

I worked for three years as news director, and then, in 1998, gained the additional title of assistant program director, a role I held until leaving the station in July 2006. From that position, I worked closely with our talk show hosts and became intimately familiar with how they appeal to listeners and shape their vision of the world. Let me tell you some of the lessons I learned.

To begin with, talk show hosts such as Charlie Sykes – one of the best in the business – are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels disenfranchised and even victimized by the media. These people believe the media are predominantly staffed by and consistently reflect the views of social liberals. This view is by now so long-held and deep-rooted, it has evolved into part of virtually every conservative’s DNA.

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

This enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast.

The latest newsletter by an Inland Republican women’s group depicts Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama surrounded by a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken, prompting outrage in political circles.

The October newsletter by the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated says if Obama is elected his image will appear on food stamps — instead of dollar bills like other presidents. The statement is followed by an illustration of “Obama Bucks” — a phony $10 bill featuring Obama’s face on a donkey’s body, labeled “United States Food Stamps.”

Read on, if you can stomach it.

(Thanks to Aaron for the pointer.)

Tired of all the political lies being flung around this election season?

Want a chance to fight back against them?

Try playing Truth Invaders, at www.truthinvaders.com.  Learn the facts and have a great catharsis, all at the same time.

ABC News reports:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

…”These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”