It's truly time to stick a fork in this one. Megyn Kelly can keep trying to beat dead horses, but when Bush appointee Abigail Thernstrom -- well-known for her conservative views on affirmative action and other civil rights issues -- says this, it's more or less a dead horse that's been flogged until it's unrecognizable.

But when it comes to the investigation that the Republican-dominated commission is now conducting into the Justice Department’s handling of an alleged incident of voter intimidation involving the New Black Panther Party — a controversy that has consumed conservative media in recent months — Thernstrom has made a dramatic break from her usual allies.

“This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers; this has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration,” said Thernstrom, who said members of the commission voiced their political aims “in the initial discussions” of the Panther case last year.

“My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring Eric Holder down and really damage the president,” Thernstrom said in an interview with POLITICO.

Now there's a surprise. Conservative politicians plotting to manufacture a controversy in order to 'bring down' the Attorney General? And surely they wouldn't be doing it with the assistance of Fox News and the ginned up breathless reporting of airheaded bimbos like Megyn Kelly, would they? Why, yes they would. As Media Matters points out, the Fox News hyping of this story follows the same right-wing trajectory as the ACORN, Ayers, and ClimateGate stories.

Writing for the National Review Online, Thernstrom elaborates:

So far — after months of hearings, testimony and investigation — no one has produced actual evidence that any voters were too scared to cast their ballots. Too much overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges has been devoted to this case.

She finishes the argument and the controversy with this:

The two Panthers have been described as “armed” — which suggests guns. One of them was carrying a billy club, and it is alleged that his repeated slapping of the club against his palm constituted brandishing it in a menacing way. They have also been described as wearing “jackboots,” but the boots were no different from a pair my husband owns.

A disaffected former Justice Department attorney has written: “We had indications that polling-place thugs were deployed elsewhere.” “Indications”? Again, evidence has yet to be offered.

The balance of Thernstrom's article concerns the upcoming redistricting battle where she reverts to a line of reasoning that suggests Eric Holder is behaving in a sinister way to stack redistricting decks. It's classic conservative argument and while I disagree wholeheartedly, I still think Thernstrom deserves a kudo or two for pointing out that the emperor truly does have no clothes and Fox has no sense.

Adam Serwer sums up the remaining shreds of the non-story thus:

So in the past day, the following things have been happened: The idea that there was outside pressure from the administration to close the case has been shown to have no evidentiary basis, the commission has been exposed as deliberately attempting to damage the administration with this investigation, and Adams' claim that the Voting Section does not intervene on behalf of white voters has been proven conclusively false.

Let's see Megyn Kelly try to spin that.

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The latest campaign by Fox to smear another Obama appointee, it seems, is the Washington Times-based attack on Judge Edward Chen, who it seems is too liberal for their tastes. Or, as with Judge Sonia Sotomayor, not white enough.

Either way, they're trying to paint him as a radical for saying things like this:

In a speech on Sept. 22, 2001, he said that among his first responses to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America was a "sickening feeling in my stomach about what might happen to race relations and religious tolerance on our own soil. ... One has to wonder whether the seemingly irresistible forces of racism, nativism and scapegoating which has [sic] recurred so often in our history can be effectively restrained."

Bill O'Reilly, of course, was all over this like stink on smegma. He hosted Monica Crowley and Alan Colmes to chew it over.

Crowley practically shrieked at Chen's concerns, and O'Reilly was appalled. Colmes, as he has become adept at doing, was the sole voice of reason:

O'Reilly: It sounds radical left, does it not? It sounds Phil Donahue.

Crowley: And that speech was delivered 11 days after Sept. 11, when this country was still so raw with the deaths of 3,000 dead Americans in the street, and Chen is worried about nativism -- he was essentially there accusing the United States of being a country of bigots and racists.

O'Reilly: But the thing that bothered me most about it, Colmes, is that didn't happen.

Colmes: Well, I have to disagree. We have seen nativism, we have seen racism. Just the other day, we saw the Broward County Republican Club, having their meeting at a gun club where they put up a likeness of Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, and a stereotypical --

O'Reilly: Wait wait wait wait wait wait. [Crosstalk] Are you going to sit there and tell me that eight years after 9/11, there has been rampant nativism, racism and scapegoating in this country?

Colmes: I didn't say rampant, but there's been several --

O'Reilly: That's what he said.

Colmes: There's been an element of that.

Actually, Bill, Chen never said nativism and racism was "rampant" -- he wondered whether these forces could be constrained in the then-current environment.

And let's be clear: Among the few things that the Bush administration did right in the wake of 9/11 was that, eventually, it did effectively constrain the forces of racism and reaction when it came to treatment of Arab Americans and Muslims.

But to claim that we haven't seen rampant nativism and racism since 9/11 is a joke -- we have, and everyone knows it. However, instead of the obvious targets after 9/11, it has been directed instead largely toward Latino immigrants, who the jingoists have in fact often connected to their post-9/11 fears.

After all, one of the favorite arguments of the Minuteman/GlennBeckistan crowd is that we need to "secure our borders" because that's what will keep us safe from terrorists like those who hit us on 9/11. (Note to nativist nimrods: The 9/11 terrorists came through airports with fake papers, like most skilled terrorists do. There has never been a record of a single Islamic terrorist entering the States

And so, eight years after 9/11, we do in fact have if not rampant at least a significant level of nativism and racism manifesting itself in America. We've provided some examples in the video above: Rabid Joe Arpaio fans who think we ought to shoot any man, woman or child who crosses the border. Neo-Nazi supporters of Arpaio turning out to harass Latino marchers. A violent counter-protest by white nationalists at a pro-immigrant March in Connecticut. And those are just in the past several months alone.

Moreover, if you look at the conditions that immediately followed the events of 9/11 -- including especially the 11 days leading up to Chen's speech -- his commentary was fully justified. Or have all those Fox folks somehow managed to scrub from their memories the horrendous outbreak of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the days immediately after 9/11?

Four days after hijacked planes tore into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, shopkeepers were shot to death in California, Texas and Arizona as an anti-Muslim backlash broke out across the country.

"It's an unbelievable situation," Laila Al-Qatami, a spokeswoman for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) told the Chicago Tribune.

"The incidents have ranged from hate mail to verbal assaults to crimes that have resulted in deaths. The number of calls we're getting is unprecedented."

By Oct. 11, one month after the terrorist attacks, the ADC had collected more than 700 reports of hate crimes. The Council on American-Islamic Relations had 785 reports.

At hate-crime hotlines set up by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the volume of calls per hour peaked at 70. In Los Angeles alone, the police and sheriff's departments reported 167 hate crimes in the first four weeks of the backlash.

The targets included a large number of Sikhs mistaken for Arabs. Five years later, it was still a big problem. In more recent years, anti-Muslim bias crimes have declined somewhat as anti-Latino crimes have skyrocketed.

And while the Bush administration may have done a good job of responding to the hate-crime outbreak and tamping down anti-Arab xenophobia, they did do without much support from the larger conservative community.

Recall, after all, that there was a chorus of right-wing voices calling for the immediate use of racial profiling as a national-security measure. Many of them were rabid and vicious, and they remain with us today. Michelle Malkin -- long a Fox favorite -- even wrote and published a book justifying the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as a way of defending the very concept of racial profiling.

Finally, the notion that Judge Chen evincing this concern in the days immediately following 9/11 is somehow a "far left" and "America hating" and "radical" thing actually tells us a lot more about the people arguing this -- people like O'Reilly and Crowley -- than anything else.

Because 9/11 immediately rang bells of alarm throughout the Asian American community -- Japanese Americans having been the primary targets of wartime hysteria last time around ... hysteria that eventually led to their incarcerated in miserable concentration camps in the interior U.S. for the war's duration.

I describe this in the Epilogue of my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community:

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Liz Cheney told the Washington Times that she might consider a run for some kind of political office, which was the shoe we've all been waiting to drop since we started seeing her face over all the cable channels the past couple of months:

The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that running for political office is on her horizon.

"It's something I very well may do," said Elizabeth "Liz" Cheney, a lawyer and State Department appointee who has worked on two Republican presidential campaigns.

This of course set the cable heads who've had her on previously to chattering, including Chris Matthews, and she appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News program and answered the question noncommittally. Uh-huh.

Now we're waiting for the other shoe to drop, which will be for Cheney to be declared one of the "fresh upcoming faces" for the GOP as it struggles to redefine itself in the post-Bush era. Nothing like a Cheney for that task, eh?

On the other hand, now that a majority of Republicans now think Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president, they need to start looking ahead. And for all her less-appealing qualities -- particularly the sneer she shares with her father -- she is at least seemingly competent and capable and reasonably intelligent. Which makes her a big improvement on Palin right away.

One certainly can see what Republicans would like about her: As you can see from the rest of the Hannity segment, she was out there touting her charge that the looming possibility of torture investigations proves "we can't trust Democrats with national security".

In other words, she fearmongers and lies and distorts right up there with the best of 'em. But then, she learned at the knee of one of the best.

Besides, I'm not sure that it's altogether a bad thing to have such a vivid reminder of the manifest failures of Bush/Cheney conservatism as another scheming Cheney out there fronting for the GOP.

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There sure was an eruption of interest in domestic terrorism in the media yesterday over that case involving the black Muslim men who wanted to bomb synagogues and planes in the Bronx.

However, you'll notice one key detail here:

A federal law enforcement official described the plot as “aspirational” — meaning that the suspects wanted to do something but had no weapons or explosives — and described the operation as a sting with a cooperator within the group.

“It was fully controlled at all times,” a law enforcement official said.

In other words, these guys had neither the means nor the wherewithal to actually pull off any of these attacks. And an FBI informant helped them take action. We'll see if this case withstands the obvious entrapment defense that the men's attorneys are about 99.9% certain to use.

And that word, "aspirational" -- where have we heard that before? Oh yeah.

That was the word U.S. Attorney Troy Eid of Colorado used when he announced his decision not to pursue the case of the white-supremacist tweakers who were caught trying to kill Barack Obama in Denver. He called their plot "more aspirational than operational".

So you have to wonder how authorities -- not to mention the media, particularly right-wing media like Fox News, and particularly right-wing pundits like Laura Ingraham, who wondered out loud why President Obama didn't mention the Bronx case in his speech yesterday regarding terrorists -- would react if the guys who had been caught yesterday had all been white.

Actually, we know already. They'd have completely ignored the case. Just like the Denver case. And just like dozens of others.

Some others of recent vintage, all of which featured elaborate fantasies of destruction akin to our Bronx bombers' plot, and all of which involved white domestic terrorists, all of which were largely ignored by the media:

-- The skinheads arrested in Tennessee for plotting to kill Obama too. Remember their plan?

According to the ATF, Cowart and Schlesselman planned to suit up in white tuxedoes and top hats and then massacre 88 black people, 14 by decapitation, including Obama among their targets.

-- The Alabama militiamen who plotted to go on an anti-Latino killing rampage:

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Orcinus: FBI wanted Obama plotters charged, but a Rove appointee said no

Average Bro: RNC night three recap

The Rude Pundit: Perfectly pitched critique of Palin's speech

World-O-Crap: Wingnuts say the darndest things

Hannah's Blog: Did McCain's mole sell US on invasion od Iraq?

The Satirical Political Report: Palin's 'contributions' to women

Reality Principles: A branding & marketing professional noticed something important about John McCain's new ad: He is not being marketed as a Republican. Apparently, Republicans realize their 'Brand' is toxic.

The Daily Dish: The War Criminal President

Obsidian Wings: Another quality BUSHCO appointee going down...

The Big Picture: Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner Arthur Levitt says the Bear 'bailout' raises new regulatory issues.

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: FCC opens inquiry into Siegelman report blackout...A gay hero soldier and the Wapo...NPR News: National Pentagon Radio underreports Iraq deaths...and they're in the tank for McCain...Frameshop on the Wright stuff...Obama guilty once again...Venezuela vs. WaPo...Where was the media when the subprime crisis unfolded?...Reality TV kills

DownWithTyranny:

GSA head Lurita Doan was a suspicious appointee to begin with. Her qualifications to head the nation's main federal contracting agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), seemed to have been primarily that she and her husband had given hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions to Bush and other right wing politicians. Yesterday Bush's Office of Special Counsel recommended she be fired for engaging in "the most pernicious of political activity" banned by the 1939 Hatch Act and for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. ""Doan solicited the political activity of over 30 of her subordinate employees when she asked 'How can we help our [Republican] candidates?'" The recommendation points out that "Doan has shown no remorse and lacks an appreciation for the seriousness of her violation." Read more...

For those of you who missed the testimony of the "totally paranoid" Lurita Doan, you can see portions of it here. She has another date with Henry Waxman tomorrow...

democracyarsenal: Operation Bite: More than we can chew?

Infowars: No agreed upon border between Iraq and lran, so where were those British sailors?

The Galloping Beaver: Before you eat that USDA Prime steak, read this...

The Gun Toting Liberal: Embedded bloggers?

The Gavel: A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions.

HOLY CRAP: 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University are currently serving in the Bush administration...Grotesquely unqualified Christianist "doctor" Eric Keroack has resigned from the Health and Human Services Department...Gaddafi says only Islam a universal religion...What the hell is the Congressional Prayer Caucus?...A Christian homophobe sees the error of his ways...The Glenn Beck Bible Hour...The Texas Baby Purchasing Act of 2007...Civilized discussions On Faith...The war on public education aided by private army?...This guy should stick to coaching football...Are these the most dangerous people on the planet? ...Bill Donohue is in high dudgeon again, this time it's an artist's chocolate Jesus...Michael Savage says of 9/11, "That was God speaking"...Revelations 13 gets a workout in the latest chapter of Mick LaSalle's- "The Event"...Jump into the blogswarm against theocracy Easter Weekend. Even this Baptist minister thinks it is a valid expression of an authentic faith...And finally, this says it all for me

Who here thinks that this study was commissioned by a Bush appointee charged with ensuring science was compatible with Republican Family Values?

Cooking, Cleaning And Washing Helps You Ward Off Breast Cancer (h/t OK)

My husband has now generously offered to give me his share of the household chores...you know, for my health. *sigh*