Some images from Campaign '08:

In Idaho Falls, Idaho. Video here

From New Mexico.

Location uncertain. Via Smoking Gun.

Bells, Tennessee.

Ad seen at Right Wing News.

A picture says a thousand words.

This is my favorite video right now. Says what needs sayin'.

Especially when I read pieces like Noam Scheiber's latest offering.

Gee, imagine that. A GOP bloodbath over Evita Sarah Palin:

But the real bile has been saved for those conservatives who have balked at the selection of Sarah Palin.

In addition to Mr Frum, who thinks her not ready to be president, Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's greatest speechwriter and a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, condemned Mr McCain's running mate as a "symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation of American politics." Conservative columnist David Brooks called her a "fatal cancer to the Republican Party".

The backlash that ensued last week revealed the fault lines of the coming civil war.

Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of right wing talk radio hosts, denounced Noonan, Brooks and Frum. Neconservative writer Charles Krauthammer condemned "the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama", while fellow columnist Tony Blankley said that instead of collaborating in heralding Mr Obama's arrival they should be fighting "in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country".

During the primaries the Democratic Party was bitterly divided between Barack Obama's "latte liberals" and Hillary Clinton's heartland supporters, but now the same cultural division threatens to tear the Republican Party apart.

Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as "cocktail party conservatives" who "give aid and comfort to the enemy".

He told The Sunday Telegraph: "There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"

But the best quote in this UK Telegraph piece was this one from Nuzzo:

"Win or lose, there is a ready made conservative candidate waiting in the wings. Sarah Palin is not the new Iain Duncan Smith, she is the new Ronald Reagan."

No doubt Palin is already the GOP frontrunner for 2012. (Sorry, Mitt.) Guess we'll be seeing the Republican Party finally decay into all-out right-wing populism. Which means: It's gonna get real ugly over the next four years.

A couple of staffers from Virginia's 10th District congressional candidate Judy Feder's campaign tried to approach her opponent, Republican Rep. Frank Wolf, the other day to ask him to make clear his position on health care (something Wolf has refused to do so far) and, rather than talk them, stood by as members of his own staff assaulted one staffer with a cane, while a couple of others backed the second staffer against a wall.

Temperatures always rise towards the end of the campaign season, but this year, the prospect of massive GOP losses looms large in the minds of Republicans, and they're obviously lashing out in a lot of ways. Ugly rhetoric is one. This is another.

Raising Kaine has more.

The Jed Report put together this little video mashup of WFTV's Barbara West, giving us a nice side-by-side contrast of her respective interviews with Joe Biden and John McCain.

You can see the full Biden interview here and the full McCain video here. The latter is especially instructive in that we see just how far out there West is; mostly she's obsequious to the point of outright cheerleading with McCain, and her idea of a "tough" question for him is to ask him why he's not being wingnutty enough!

OTOH, you've just gotta love when she quotes Marx and then asks Biden why "spreading the wealth" isn't Marxist. Someone's been drinking the Bircher Kool Aid, which is in fact a direct ticket to Planet Bizarro.

Well, over at Firedoglake, they have a petition up asking for the station to apologize for sponsoring such bizarre behavior and such biased treatment. Go sign it.

A plot to assassinate Barack Obama and kill 102 black people has been broken up by the ATF in Tennessee:

Federal agents have broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree, the ATF said Monday.

In court records unsealed Monday, federal agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target a predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads. Agents said the skinheads did not identify the school by name.

Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the two men planned to shoot 88 black people and decapitate another 14. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.

The men also sought to go on a national killing spree, with Obama as its final target, Cavanaugh told The Associated Press.

"They said that would be their last, final act - that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."

Well, you have to hope that the U.S. Attorney in Tennessee has more integrity than the one in Colorado.

We'll update with video when it comes available.

UPDATE: More details with names here. [H/t to Andante51.]

I'm sure Michelle Bachmann was hoping that her apology for seeming a little overly McCarthylike the other day would put all the controversy surrounding her remarks to rest so that she could maybe get that party funding back.

Ah, but once the spotlight comes on ...

The Uptake at Huffpo has the video and transcript of her remarks at a primary debate in Minneapolis earlier this year in which she lets the ol' xenophobia out of the bag:

There is a movement afoot that's occurring and part of that is whole philosophical idea of multi-cultural diversity, which on the face sounds wonderful. Let's appreciate and value everyone's cultures. But guess what? Not all cultures are equal. Not all values are equal.

And one thing that we're seeing is that in the midst of this violence that's being encouraged by al Jazeera and by the jihadists that's occurring, is that we are seeing that those who are coming into France -- which had a beautiful culture -- the French culture is actually diminished. It's going away. And just with the population of France they are losing Western Europeans and it's being taken over by muh...by a Muslim ethic. Not that Muslims are bad. But they are not assimilating.

Hmmm. My guess is that she was staying up late reading Mark Steyn.

In LasVegas, videographer Matt Toplikar captured footage of McCain/Palin supporters as they came out from a rally featuring an appearance by Sarah Palin.

One camouflage-capped fellow captures the spirit of the event:

Obama wins, I'm gonna move to Alaska.

... Haven't you ever heard that the United States is gonna be taken down from within? What better way to get taken down from within than haveing the President of the United States be the one that's going to do it?

It seems they became especially aggravated when they encountered anti-McCain protesters outside. The same Alaska-bound supporter started leading a chant in front of them:

Vote McCain, Not Hussein!

Then there's the Pam Atlas wannabee:

This country needs to wake up! Obama is dangerous! This man is a tyrant to this country. I mean, he has connections to Arabs! His education was paid for by Arabs! He's an abomination.

And of course, the obligatory racist:

Don't be afraid of me! Be afraid of Obama! Obama bin Laden, that's what you should be afraid of!

... Yes, I am a racist. If you consider me a racist, well [unintelligible]. Those Arabs are dirtbags. They're dirty people, they hate Americans, they hate my kids, they hate my grandkids. And people like him [points to another supporter], more power to them.

McCain and Palin have somewhat ratcheted back their rhetoric, but the fuse has been lit.

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Fox exec John Moody has it precisely right: the "Obama fan attacked McCain worker" hoax in fact does "forever link" the McCain campaign to race-baiting.

However, it's not just McCain. The entire Republican Party this year has been revealed as the Party of Racial Fear. Nor is it anything new: Republicans for years have tried to make hay off of racially incendiary cases that turn out to tell us more about the motives and worldviews of the torch-bearing mob than anything they might be chanting.

Pam Spaulding nails it:

It's like Susan Smith and Charles Stuart all over again -- a disturbed person blaming a non-existent black man for a crime, fomenting the fear of "the Other" based on our country's inability to acknowledge and deal with race, difference, and stereotypes. That this perpetrator of a hoax was a McCain campaign worker underscores the whole whipped up race frenzy of the McCain mob that we've seen in the last several weeks. It's time to flush this toxic sludge away.

What's equally remarkable, we might add, is the eager role played both by the McCain campaign and by the wingnutosphere -- led by Matt Drudge -- in whipping up a frenzy around this case without considering the potentially incendiary nature of the charges, not to mention the actual credibility of the storytellers.

This is particularly the case with the Mark Noonans out there, furiously clinging to their belief that the story is true, and claiming that the attack heralded the onset of "Nazism 2.0" under Obama: "God help us if Obama wins."

Along with John McCain, their credibility has just sustained a serious body blow. Couldn't be happening to a nicer bunch.

Ari observes that Sarah Palin refused to acknowledge the existence of right-wing domestic terrorists in her NBC interview that aired last night:

Brian Williams: Back to the notion of terrorists and terrorism, this word has come up in relation to Mr. Ayers -- hanging out with terrorist – domestic terrorists. It is said that it gives it a vaguely post uh 9-11 hint, using that word, that we don’t normally associate with domestic crimes. Are we changing the definition? Are the people who set fire to American cities during the ‘60’s terrorists, under this definition? Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under the definition?

Sarah Palin: There is no question that Bill Ayers via his own admittance was um one who sought to destroy our US Capitol and our Pentagon -- that is a domestic terrorist. There’s no question there. Now others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or um facilities, that uh, it would be unacceptable -- I don’t know if you could use the word terrorist, but its unacceptable and it would not be condoned of course on our watch. I don’t know if what you are asking is if I regret referring to Bill Ayers as an unrepentant domestic terrorist. I don’t regret characterizing him as that.

Williams: I’m just asking what other categories you would put in there. Abortion clinic bombers? Protesters in cities where fires were started, Molotov cocktails, were thrown? People died.

Palin: I would put in that category of Bill Ayers anyone else who would seek to destroy our United States Capitol and our Pentagon and would seek to destroy innocent Americans.

Well, just in case Mrs. Palin forgot, there was a running spate of domestic terrorism in the United States in the 1990s created by the far-right "Patriot" movement, much of it revolving around abortion and hatred of the federal government.

The signature event, of course, was the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. But that was hardly the end of it. Indeed, by the end of 1999, we were able to document over 40 such cases -- many of which were nipped in the bud before they reached fruition. Some were not.

It seems Palin needs a refresher course. The Jed Report video above mentions two abortion-clinic shooters, Paul Hill and Michael Griffin, who were among the murderous terrorists who inspired the federal law that protects abortion providers -- a law John McCain twice voted against.

But that was hardly all. Below, a rundown of other significant domestic terrorists:

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