After her Tea Party Convention speech this weekend, Sarah Palin flew to Houston to continue campaigning for herself. The news focused on her appearance at a Rick Perry rally, but Palin also appeared at another event in Houston: a "motivational seminar" at the Toyota Center at which she was the featured attraction.

As Richard Connelly reported:

The other event here was the motivational seminar at Toyota Center. The event seemed to be grossly oversold (Tickets were just $19 for entire office staffs to attend), perhaps because organizers thought people would only attend parts of the all-day event.

But no one told attendees that Palin would be speaking at 8 a.m., so bitterly disappointed fans standing in line at 10:30 a.m. weren't happy.

Palin presumably was, having pocketed her fee for a 30-minute speech.

C&L had one of its friends at the seminar: Josef Jarod is a reporter in Houston, Texas with a background that includes work for Fox and CBS News. He presently is on a "mystery" assignment in the Bayou City.

Here's Jarod's report:

"I wasn't motivated" one man said to me in the elevator as I left the speech, "she sounded un-prepared and erratic and focused an awful lot on her script."

It was 9:30 AM, and Just half an hour earlier Sarah Palin had wrapped up a "motivational" speech about "achievement" at the Toyota Center in downtown Houston. Though Palin was to be the headliner of the all day business seminar which featured a dozen other speakers like General Colin Powell and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was the first to perform.

"I was also kind of amazed that they let her go first, I mean, we weren't even all seated yet when she started." Palin started her speech at 8:00 AM sharp, she was the first person out of the gates - there wasn't even a Master of Ceremonies. And given the fact that morning rush hour in Houston was exceptionally bad today, it meant there were going to be a lot of unhappy ticket holders(particularly as some paid as much as two hundred dollars.)

"She already gave her speech?!" One man exclaimed in the lobby after arriving minutes too late, "What the hell, I was stuck in traffic... why wouldn't they save the best for last?!" Several elderly women with Palin lapel pins who were trying desperately to hurry through security were also distraught when they heard the news, "Ohhh Noooooo! Nooooo!"

Sarah Palin had another engagement in California later in the afternoon and didn't have a minute to waste. The speech itself seemed more like a sermon, Sarah frequently attributed "God" and "Jesus Christ" to lifting her out of despair. She gave several long rambling examples of tough times in Alaska, during which she would occasionally lose her footing and immediately jump to praising the state for it's beauty.

She also focused heavily on her trade mark lines as a crutch. During one incredulous example of a way to get motivated describing a bed time fairy-tale she told to her daughter: "Last night Piper asked me to tell her a bedtime story and I said 'YOU BETCHA,' let me tell you about two brothers named Abel and Cain..."

The crowd was made up mostly of office-workers who opted to come to an "all day business seminar" instead of sitting in their cubicle and so the fanfare was minimal. As I gazed around the audience from my VIP seat - just feet away from the stage - I had the impression that most of those sitting near me were insulted. Sarah Palin was clearly still in campaign mode, but this wasn't a crowd looking for a stump speech.

She ended by spending several minutes with her head down reading from the podium and gave a very abrupt and final "God Bless America" before departing the stage. As she left one man with a thick country drawl leaned over to me and said "you know, she's not that impressive in person."

She's not that impressive on TV, either.

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From CNN:

(CNN) -- Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime fixture on the House subcommittee that oversees Pentagon spending, has died following complications from gallbladder surgery, according to his office. He was 77.

The veteran Democratic congressman recently underwent scheduled laparoscopic surgery to remove his gallbladder.

Murtha was hospitalized in December and had to postpone a hearing with Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the administration's strategy in Afghanistan. The congressman returned to work after a few days in the hospital and helped oversee final passage of the 2010 defense appropriations bill.

Murtha represented Pennsylvania's 12th congressional district in the House since 1974, making him the chamber's eighth most senior member. According to his biography on the House Web site, Murtha was the first Vietnam War combat veteran elected to Congress.

He was considered one of "the kings of pork" on Capitol Hill by taxpayer watchdog groups for requesting tens of millions of dollars in earmarks.

On his House Web site, Murtha strongly defended earmarks, saying, "I believe that elected representatives of the people understand their constituents and districts best." Supporters said his efforts have helped bring thousands of jobs to western Pennsylvania.

Other controversies dogged Murtha's career. Critics alleged he steered Pentagon contracts to businesses that hired his brother as a lobbyist, but Murtha insisted his brother was treated like everyone else.

The Fox anchors were restrained this morning in announcing the news. The right wingers have had Murtha in their sights for a long time. So you can count on the "opinion" crew to be licking its chops over the prospects of a Republican taking Murtha's seat this fall. Start your stopwatches.

(UPDATE: John Amato will be appearing on the Randi Rhodes Show at 1:35 pm PST to talk about this and other topics)

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Sarah Palin's followers no doubt thought she gave a great speech at the National Tea Party Convention last night. Actually, it was pretty much cookie-cutter stuff, sprinkled with the requisite cheap shots at President Obama. If red meat is your thing, there was plenty. But as always with Palin, there was no substance, and the delivery was pretty close to fingernails clawing their way down a blackboard.

Mostly, she staked out the core political position of the Tea Party movement as the right-wing populism we've already recognized it as. But she repeated that the movement was about "the people," and indeed wrapped it up with an incoherent bit of babble featuring "the people."

There was the requisite nod to the ah, "revolutionary" component of the movement:

Palin: And I am a big supporter of this movement, I believe in this movement. Got lots of friends and family in the Lower 48 who attend these events and across the country, just knowing that this is the movement, and America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this.

Of course, the Tea Partiers like to insist that this is a non-violent revolution. But the way they keep packing guns around at public gathering as demonstrations of their constitutional rights, the rest of us aren't feeling all that assured.

Palin also made an interesting remark about Tea Party candidates taking out regular Republican candidates:

Palin: A lot of great common-sense conservative candidates -- they're gonna put it all on the line in 2010, and this year, there are gonna be some tough primaries. And I think that's good. Competition in these primaries is good, competition makes us work harder and be more efficient, and produce more. And I hope you'll get out there and work hard for the candidates who reflect your values, your priorities, because, despite what the pundits want you to think, contested primaries aren't civil war. They're democracy at work, and that's beautiful.

Yeah, we bet John McCain thinks it's just beautiful that he's facing a tough primary challenge from Tea Party favorite J.D. Hayworth this year. Palin later told the audience how proud she was to run with McCain on his ticket, but she seemed to be encouraging candidates like Hayworth. Sounds like some serious cognitive dissonance going on there.

Mostly, Palin spent a lot of time slagging Obama:

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Pat Buchanan unleashed his inner Tea Partier yesterday on Hardball, telling Chris Matthews that he would campaign for Tea Party challenger J.D. Hayworth over John McCain in their Arizona primary race. Hayworth, you may recall, recently voiced support for the Birthers on the same show:

MATTHEWS: Where are you on McCain versus Hayworth?

BUCHANAN: If I‘m out in Arizona, I would vote for J.D. Hayworth, who is a friend of mine and a conservative. And if he lost, I would vote for John McCain.

MATTHEWS: OK, we know where you stand.

Joan Walsh took him to task for it:

WALSH: We absolutely know where you stand. He‘s a birther. He‘s an extremist. Thank you, Pat.

The "Birther" matter is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Hayworth. Back in 2006, en route to losing his congressional seat, Hayworth tried to revive Henry Ford's program of "Americanism," which you may recall was actually a code word for anti-Semitic eliminationism; it was also a favorite program promoted avidly by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

Hayworth lost that race, in no small part because of voters were repelled by his lame denials about the "Americanization" program.

Of course, none of this would bother the author of State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, would it?

But because he's still our avuncular Uncle Pitchfork, he of course resorted to the standard retort of conservatives when confronted with the realities of the extremists in their midst:

BUCHANAN: This is why you lose—do you know why you lose these people? Because you show contempt for them. You call them birthers. You call them names. I‘m talking about the people, the Tea Party people. All they want, Joan, is respect. And you liberals never give it to them. You call them all names. No wonder they go over to the Republican party.

Walsh then took Buchanan apart:

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If you thought, after watching the two segments of Jon Stewart's interview with Bill O'Reilly this week, that Stewart landed some telling observations, but he seemed to pull his punches a bit -- or at least they seemed to have been pulled for him -- you were right.

If you also noticed, as I did while making the clip, that the segments were pretty hamhandedly edited -- the continuity, especially in terms of Stewart's demeanor, was jarring -- it turns out you were also right.

Fox actually put the entire, unedited version of the interview up on its site, and the difference is jaw-dropping.

John Cook at Gawker (with the help of a couple of interns) got ahold of the full interview first, and provides a nice dissection that you should read (and watch) in full.

We've clipped some of the highlights for our own video, above.

If nothing else, the unedited video will be long remembered for the following quip:

I know what this is. I come from Jersey—it's the same thing: "I'm not saying your mother's a whore. I'm just saying she has sex for money. With people." [F]ox News used to be all about, you don't criticize a president during wartime. It's unacceptable, it's treasonous, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. All of a sudden, for some reason you can run out there and say, "Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country."

Though I also thought this exchange was perhaps the most telling:

Stewart: But let's go into this. Because all I hear on your network is, this guy is -- it's tyranny, and socialism.

O'Reilly: That's what he believes.

Stewart: So, how is Barack Obama a socialist? As far as I can see, the majority of the billions of dollars he's given, he's given to banks. So if he is a socialist, he's dyslexic! Because when you redistribute the wealth, it's supposed to be going to --

O'Reilly: But he does believe in redistribution of income.

Stewart: Well, he's redistributed it to the banks.

O'Reilly: And that is a socialist tenet -- no, he's redistributing it --

Stewart: He's going up. He's dyslexic! It's supposed to be coming down!

O'Reilly: He -- Look. If you don't know that the Obama administration is redistributing income, then I'm gonna have to haul your program away from you. Get you off the air.

Stewart: Let me ask you: What is different about his redistribution of income and all other presidents -- he wants to raise the marginal tax rate back to where it was during the Clinton era. Was Clinton a socialist?

O'Reilly: He has promoted a variety of programs, OK, that --

Stewart: We already have Medicare, right? We have Medicaid. We have Social Security. Are we a socialist country? Do you want to get rid of those three?

O'Reilly: No.

Stewart: So are we a socialist country?

O'Reilly: But I want to moderate them so we don't go bankrupt.

Stewart: OK, but that's different. Now you're talking about fiscal responsibility.

O'Reilly: In a socialist country, the government pays for all of these entitlements -- the Obama administration is down that path.

Stewart: Who pays for Medicare? Who pays for Medicaid?

O'Reilly: The government pays for it.

Stewart: So now we're socialist.

O'Reilly: But now we're on Medicaid and Medicare with steroids, with the new health care bill. That's steroids!

Stewart: Once again, this is like the old joke. "Would you sleep with me for ten dollars?" "No." "Would you sleep with me for a million?" "OK." So now we know what you are, you're just negotiating price. For you guys to stand up --

O'Reilly: Of course, that's the degree of anybody when you describe socialism. There are little socialistic programs and giant socialist programs. OK? And some people believe that Obama is on the huge government creation -- the government dominance. And you yourself said it! You yourself said it! He wants more regulation, he wants to create things, he wants big government.

Stewart: But he's given back so much executive power!

O'Reilly: What?

Stewart: Executive power!

O'Reilly: He hasn't given back anything. He just hasn't handled the Congress. He doesn't know how to handle them yet. That's inexperience. Now --

Stewart: So he's not a tyrant. Because if he's a tyrant, then he's pretty lame for a tyrant.

O'Reilly: I don't object --

Stewart: How many tyrants do you know that really suffer because they can't get cloture? Very few.

OK, OK. So it wasn't a literal evisceration. Stewart did not unzip O'Reilly from scrote to sternum and empty out his intestines. We understand that he's a tad sensitive about how his takedowns are described these days.

Still, you can sure see why O'Reilly's producers edited this stuff out. Lord knows the regular septuagenarian Bold/Fresh audience would have fainted dead away.

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Well, we knew the National Tea Party Convention this week was going to be a real festival of outrageous wingnuttery, but Tom Tancredo's speech to kick things off will already be hard to top:

Tancredo: Every year, the liberal Dems and the RINO Republicans turned up the temperature ever so slightly. It seemed after awhile that we'd all be boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state.

And then something really odd happened -- mostly because we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country.

[Applause]

People who cannot even spell the word "vote," or say it in English -- [applause] -- put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. Name is Barack Hussein Obama.

It's hard to say which was more disturbing: Tancredo's apparent call for reinstituting laws that, as John Byrne at Raw Story points out, were a fundamental component of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, or the massive round of applause he received for saying it. (The New York Daily News has more on the literacy tests.)

Yes, these people really are nuts. Witness, for instance, the applause Tancredo got for saying he was glad McCain lost -- because, after all, McCain was for "amnesty" too:

If McCain had been elected, the neocons would be writing flattering editorials in the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal. Congressman Gutierrez and President McCain would have been posing in the Rose Garden with big smiles as they received accolades from La Raza for having finally passed an amnesty.

Of course, most of the speech was just Tancredo channeling Glenn Beck. (The boiled frog metaphor was the giveaway, along with the "committed socialist ideologue" bit. As well as lines like this:

So the race for America is on, right now. The President and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it.

But as always with Tancredo -- as with his audience -- the real motivation comes down to defending white culture:

Some things we can deal with in just a political way -- which is, you know, by the votes we cast. Other things will require a commitment to passing on our culture -- and we really do have one, you know, it is based on Judeo-Christian principles whether people like it or they don't!

[Applause]

That's who we are! That is who we are! And if you don't like it, don't come here! And if you're here and you don't like it, go home! Go someplace else!

As the editors at Imagine 2050 observed:

It is obvious that Beck and Tancredo are trying to push the issue of immigration to the forefront of the tea party movement, something that was explicitly clear during Tancredo’s speech. The acts that followed paled in comparison to Tancredo, who definitely stole the first night spotlight of the three day event.

Indeed. If you thought the Tea Partiers went nuts at those town-hall forums on health care, wait till immigration reform is the issue. It's going to be very ugly.

Tom Tancredo, of course, will be leading the way, pitchfork in hand.

[UPDATE below.]

James O'Keefe and his boss, Andrew Breitbart, already are having trouble keeping their stories straight on O'Keefe's illegal attempts to access Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone system.

And now that Max Blumenthal has ripped off the facade from O'Keefe's background as a race-baiting right-wing dirty trickster the other day, they're having even more trouble.

Blumenthal reported in Salon that O'Keefe was actively involved in helping promote a white-nationalist conference in 2006:

Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O'Keefe at a 2006 conference on "Race and Conservatism" that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People's Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O'Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. But O'Keefe and fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

According to One People's Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O'Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me the table was filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. "We can say for certain that James O'Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that," Jenkins said. O'Keefe's attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client's role in the conference.

After reporting this, Andrew Breitbart -- O'Keefe's employer, and one of the chief promoters of his lawbreaking brand of "investigative journalism" -- went on the offensive. A writer for his "Big Journalism" site attacked Blumenthal's report as a "lie":

Here is the story they actually have:

James O’Keefe attended a forum years ago that dealt with race and politics. The forum was located at a Georgetown University building (that’s right, a 21-year-old man attended an event on a college campus). The forum had as one of its three speakers a controversial figure, Jared Taylor, with a track record of making racist statements. He was being debated by two other people including Mr. Martin (taking issue with the racist figure). Mr. Taylor has also appeared with Phil Donohue, Queen Latifa and Paula Zahn on their TV shows to debate race. Are the audience members of the Donohue show racist for sitting and watching that debate?

Honestly, that isn’t much of a story. But… you put Mr. O’Keefe at a table full of racist literature and you say that he was manning the table. And you say you have a picture proving it. And you make it sound like he was one of the organizers of this event. And you call the event a “White Supremacist Conference”. Well… now you’ve got a story.

Only problem: It’s all a lie.

Except, as Max pointed out subsequently, it was perfectly true:

According to an otherwise fact-challenged post on Breitbart, the website that has paid O’Keefe, O’Keefe said that he “attended the event with many of his Leadership Institute co-workers since it was right across the street from their building in Arlington, Va., and it was organized by other LI associates.”

In fact, a photographer who covered the event told me O’Keefe was helping its chief organizer, Marcus Epstein, and was not an innocent bystander, as he has claimed. But more on that later. First, O’Keefe vs. Breitbart…

Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe and attempted to defend him by calling my reporting “FALSE,” has been undermined by O’Keefe himself. O’Keefe concedes my report was true — he was at the event. Breitbart has therefore been contradicted by O’Keefe.

Daryle Jenkins' response was equally pointed:

First off, you can't say that those who have written about your boy James O'Keefe attending a white racist forum is a lie when you yourself are publishing a story where he admits to going. Secondly, you are not going to make the charge of racism go away when that same article is downplaying a racist idiot like Jared Taylor, an editor of a white supremacist newsletter (who by the way is organizing a conference of white supremacists in Washington DC the same weekend as the Conservative Political Action Conference), as a guy who is just someone "with a track record of making racist statements." Thirdly, you might also want to think twice about pretending that if someone calls him a white supremacist when he is not white, it doesn't mean forum organizer Marcus Epstein (whose claim to fame besides working for Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo is karate-chopping a black woman in the street and calling her the n-word while drunk off his behind) is not a racist that doesn't work with white supremacists.

To put just what Epstein and O'Keefe were doing in context, it's important to understand what guys like Jared Taylor excel at -- namely, lending a respectable sheen to old-fashioned bigotry through a combination of pseudo-social science and pseudo-logical obfuscation. They constitute the self-proclaimed "academic wing" of the white-supremacist movement.

Here's the complete ADL backgrounder on Taylor. Some lowlights:

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President Obama ignored warnings not to appear at the National Prayer Breakfast today, since it was organized by fundamentalist religionists whose animus towards not just him but all progressives has been all too obvious for years. But he did anyway -- and, as Sam Stein at HuffPo reports, actually managed to deliver an important message about the critical role of civility in a democratic society.

The main point was that right-wing nutcases, and their frothing about Obama's supposed foreignness and radicalism and hatred of Christianity, make it impossible to even have a rational discussion:

Obama: Civility also requires relearning how to disagree without being disagreeable -- understanding, as President [Kennedy] said, 'Civility is not a sign of weakness.' Now I am the first to confess I am not always right. Michelle will testify to that. But surely, you can question my policies without questioning my faith. Or for that matter, my citizenship.

No doubt, the talkers at Fox will take this as evidence that he hates the "jes' folks" who populate the Tea Parties.

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Bill O'Reilly was all worked up last night on his Fox News show about that DailyKos poll revealing the Republican base for the collection of nutcases that it's fast becoming -- thanks in no small part to Fox News.

He launched into a vicious attack on not just DailyKos, but the rest of the liberal blogosphere as well, comparing them to the Birthers:

Apparently the leader of the Kos brigade is writing a book comparing Republicans and conservatives to the Taliban, and so this poll was designed to back up his insane point of view.

The survey says 39 percent of self-identified Republicans believe President Obama should be impeached. Sixty-three percent believe he is a socialist. Only 42 percent of GOPers think the president was actually born in the United States. And 31 percent believe he hates white people.

Now, if you believe that poll, you also believe Nancy Pelosi once dated Dick Cheney. The poll is a fraud, as is the Web site. But what is serious is the hatred that ideological Internet nuts continue to spew out there, and they have enablers on TV and radio, as we all know.

In fact, President Obama himself is very annoyed by the continuing intrusion that cable news has upon his administration. On Wednesday, he said this while addressing Democratic senators:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If everybody here turned off your CNN, your Fox, your, you know, just turn off the TV, MSNBC, blogs, and just go talk to folks out there, instead of being in this echo chamber where the topic is constantly politics.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Now, "Talking Points" understands the president's pique, but when you consider that the mainstream media has been very friendly to Mr. Obama, his concern about cable TV news rings somewhat hollow. I mean, just about every major urban newspaper in America loves the president, so I don't know why he's so annoyed that there are few verbal snipers on the tube.

What Mr. Obama should be concerned about is the growing acceptance of lies by some Americans on both the left and the right. For example, by investigating the birth announcements in two Honolulu newspapers in August of 1961, "The Factor" has proven that Barack Obama was indeed born in America. It would have been impossible for anyone to get bogus birth announcements into two newspapers. And why would anyone bother unless they knew baby Barack would someday become President Barack? The birther deal is just madness.

On the left, we already told you about the crazy Kos people, but somehow folks like Arianna Huffington are now considered legitimate news sources. That's what the president should be worried about.

It is now very easy to demonize anyone in America, to slander and libel them all day long. There's no question the president has been treated unfairly in some precincts, but the garbage flows both ways, and Mr. Obama should point that out.

That's right, it's not right-wing kookery that Obama should be concerned about -- it's the liberal blogosphere.

Of course, O'Reilly neglects to provide any examples in which the liberal blogs, either DailyKos or HuffingtonPost or for that matter any of the rest of us on the "far left", have actually traded in bizarre conspiracy theories or provably false information. Indeed, what we've all tended to be preoccupied with is the provably false information and bizarre conspiracy theories being peddled on Fox News.

So then he brought on Karl Rove to agree with him:

O'Reilly: Now, the DailyKos -- it's interesting, it's not a real power in America but it does get picked up by powerful people, which is usually the way this game works. These far-out websites on the left, and on the right, a little bit, but not so much, uh, filter their little garbage into the New York Times and other people and then it gets mainstreamed out.

They are presenting a picture of the Republican Party as a bunch of extreme loons. You know, they want Obama impeached, they think he's not born here, or that he's a racist, he hates white people. You know, what I'm trying to get at it is this:

There's no doubt there's an extreme element of the Republican Party in the conservative movement. There's no doubt. They're there. But how much do you think that is?

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Of course, by the time Election Day 2008 rolled around, most of us were well acquainted with just how "mavericky" a Republican John McCain really was: If there was an issue he could show his "independence" on, he'd leap at it; but the end result was always to toe the right-wing line.

So McCain has had it on display this week in his assaults on the Obama administration for working to overturn the military's odious "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy for gays and lesbians in the military.

First, it may be helpful to recall John McCain on the campaign trail in 2006:

And I understand the opposition to it, and I‘ve had these debates and discussions, but the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, Senator, we ought to change the policy, then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to.

Then watch him last night on Greta Van Susteren's Fox show:

McCain: I respect the views of Admiral Mullen, who said it was his individual opinion, but we have not heard from the rest of the military leadership. And I'd be very interested in hearing from our military on this issue.

... I have always said that I believe 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' is working, and I believe it is.

Yup, that's John McCain, Professional Calvinball Player. How swiftly those goalposts move!

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Tackling Bill O'Reilly on his home turf is never easy, yet Jon Stewart more than held his own last night.

The L.A. Times has more:

But most of all, Stewart used his second appearance ever on "The O'Reilly Factor" to levy a robust critique of Fox News and its coverage of President Obama.

"Here's what Fox has done, through their cyclonic perpetual emotional machine that is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: They have taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao," the comedian told his host.

"I think some people do that, but most people don't," O'Reilly responded, calling it "the narrative of a couple of guys."

That is, of course, a whole lotta hooey, as Stewart himself has ably limned.

You could tell that O'Reilly was on the defensive: He resorted to a cheap physical-intimidation tactic, shoving his finger at Stewart over the fact that Stewart made fun of Fox for cutting away from President Obama's tete-a-tete with the GOP last week. Stewart had to explain to him that he made fun of Fox because it was funny, not because he had anything against Fox.

Funny that BillO didn't bother to bring up the time that Stewart totally pwned Sean Hannity for showing fake footage. Guess it musta slipped his mind.

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It's been amusing watching Glenn Beck twist and squirm and try to explain what he meant last October when he proclaimed that President Obama was flying the American airplane right into the trees, "taking you to a place to be slaughtered."

After Arianna Huffington raised the matter with Fox Chief Roger Ailes this weekend -- and then explored it in some detail with Keith Olbermann -- Beck has been scurrying about coming up with a variety of shifting rationales for what he was saying.

First, he said, "I don't know if I've ever used the word 'slaughtered'." Then, upon discovering that he had indeed used it, still tried to claim he "had never used it on the air," but was only referring to SEIU's Andy Stern. Finally, he settled on the claim that he wasn't speaking "literally" about "slaughter," he was talking about, um, the economy! Yeah, that's the ticket!

That was the rationale he followed yesterday on his Fox News show, smirking and acting as though his rationale would reveal his critics for the fools they were. Of course, what you can really see is what a fool anyone who believes Glenn Beck is.

Here is what he actually said in October:

Beck: I told you yesterday, buckle up your seatbelt, America. Find the exit -- there's one here, here, and here. Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing. Because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees!

Most likely, it'll happen sometime after Christmas. You're gonna see this economy come up -- we're already seeing it, and now it's gonna start coming back down again. And when you see the effects of what they're doing to the economy, remember these words: We will survive. No -- we'll do better than survive, we will thrive. As long as these people are not in control. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered!

As Arianna noted in her response:

No, Beck contended again and again and again, the whole time he was just talking about "the economy." Barack Obama is going to slaughter the economy. Even though he clearly said "taking you" not "taking the economy."

So, to review the ever-changing explanations: Beck never used the word "slaughter" -- until it was proven that he did. Then he only used it in reference to Mao, Stalin, or Hitler -- until it was proven that this wasn't the case. Then, when he used it, he wasn't referring to the Obama administration, he was referring to Andy Stern. Then he was referring to Obama -- but didn't mean it literally.

Got it? You might need to use Beck's trademark chalkboard to keep track.

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Bill O'Reilly has been irked at Joe Klein since last October, after Klein wrote a typical Villager piece for Time castigating President Obama for standing up to Fox News. That's not what upset O'Reilly, though. Rather, it was these lines:

Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

So last night on Fox, O'Reilly finally got his chance to pin Klein down for this, and found he had his hands full defending Glenn Beck:

Klein: I have worked with an awful lot of Fox journalists, the ones who actually bring you the news, like Carl Cameron and Major Garrett.

O'Reilly: And those people are good guys, right?

Klein: Those -- those are good guys, I think you're a good guy, we come from the same neck of the woods.

But I think that your pal Glenn Beck is peddling a lot of hateful crap.

O'Reilly: But he's funny! He's doing it in a funny way! What's hateful about it?

Klein: Oh, he's doing a hilarious -- I thought the part where he describes the president as intentionally steering the airplane of state into the ground was hilarious. And the stuff about Obama not being an American citizen? That was hysterical!

O'Reilly: He's got a blackboard out there, he's got a phone to the White House -- look, he is everyman sitting on a barstool. Why shouldn't everyman have a show?

Klein: No, no, he is Father Coughlin trying to delude and entertain the American people.

O'Reilly: That's such baloney. That's the left-wing line, that this guy is a threat to the union. If anybody thinks Glenn Beck is a threat to the union, they're insane!

Actually, the comparison to Father Coughlin is more than appropriate -- it fits like a glove.

And dontcha just love how Beck being "funny" means he isn't hateful? I understand Theodore Bilbo was quite the crackup too.

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James O'Keefe went on Sean Hannity's Fox News show last night and was sticking to his story: He and his gang of "phone repairmen" were just there to try to get to the bottom of Landrieu's claim that her phone lines were jammed.

But when Hannity asked him to describe the arrest and the facts of the case in detail, he clammed up, saying it was the subject of a federal investigation? Well, yeah, but if that's a problem, why go on a national news show in the first place?

Most of all, he not only refused to corroborate Andrew Bretibart's claims that he was held without access to an attorney, but he contradicted Brietbart's conspiracy theory that the DOJ was out to get him by saying: "I have no complaints about how the U.S. attorney is handling this."

These guys need to get their stories straight, dontcha think?

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It's really pretty funny watching Andrew Breitbart throw conniptions claiming that his little dirty trickster, James O'Keefe, was actually set up by the Department of Justice.

Breitbart said he though the U.S. attorney's effort was part of a payback scheme against O'Keefe, who posed as a pimp and prostitute with another citizen journalist to enter ACORN offices around the country and get advice on how to apply for federal housing grants for a brothel.

"It's tied to the Justice Department. And we've been very aggressive in asking (Attorney General) Eric Holder to investigate what's seen on these ACORN tapes and he's ignored it," Breitbart said of the media ploy.

Apparently they were lured into donning phone-repairman disguises and attempting to infiltrate the phone system at a federal building. By, um, Sen. Landrieu! That's the ticket! They did the whole "jammed phone lines" thing just to sucker in poor O'Keefe. Uh-huh. Poor guys.