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Markos commissioned a national poll to ascertain just how many people out there are suckering for the right's "Birther" conspiracy theories.

For the country as a whole, it looks good:

Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?

Yes 77
No 11
Not sure 12

But when we look at Republicans alone, it looks pretty grim:

Yes No Not sure
Dem 93 4 3
Rep 42 28 30
Ind 83 8 9

In other words, nearly a third of them believe the Birthers outright, and another third of them think "they may have a point there, Vern."

And where are the bulk of these gullible saps from?

Yes No Not sure
Northeast 93 4 3
South 47 23 30
Midwest 90 6 4
West 87 7 6

These numbers reveal that there's a strong regional component to the abject willingness of some Americans to buy any kind of cockamamie BS available if it bashes liberals.

[Ed. note: Please welcome to the C&L team our old friend Ian Welsh, whose work from the Agonist and FDL many of you many know. Ian will be writing whatever he chooses, but that usually means economics and international politics.]

It's Memorial Day. I gather for many it's just another long weekend, but I know that for many it's what Remembrance Day is for Canadians like myself: a day to remember those who have died in war. I won't say "died to protect our freedom" or any such trite BS, because with few exceptions, most wars had nothing to do with protecting anyone's freedom, but they did die, nonetheless, for us.

Their blood is on our hands, sticky and wet, and it will never dry. Why?

Because we live in democracies. Because we elected the leaders who sent them to war. Whether you think those wars are justified, or not, at the end of the day, we bear the collective guilt of their deaths. They died due to the decisions we made, the society we live in.

Oh, we can say "I did everything I could to oppose the war", whether that's Iraq or Vietnam, or some other war. But even if that's true, well, you failed, didn't you? (Didn't I?) And so off went the young men and women, and they died, or they were maimed, or their brain case got knocked around and they came back shaking, and they wake up screaming at night, and they can't control their emotions and they'll never be the same again.

It's one of the ironies of democracy that we're all responsible, collectively, and yet each of us, individually, can say "but not me, I voted against him" or "I protested against that policy". And because it's true, each of us can feel, in the end, that the deaths and suffering caused by our society, whether in war, or through a horrific medical system, or through abuses in the penal system, aren't our fault.

But is it true? Or is it true instead, that we failed, that we support the system with both our consent and our tax dollars, and that we are therefor complicit in what it does?

I don't know. But I do know this, on this Memorial day, even if it's not a Canadian holiday, I'm thinking of those who died, both soldiers and civilian.

And at the very least, I know I failed.

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Sure, like Duncan says, Glenn Beck is a WATB. We knew that the first time he cried on-air for us.

He's also an evasive guy when confronted with his falsehoods. We saw that yesterday on The View. Whoopie Goldberg's epithet for Beck -- A Lying Sack of Dog Mess -- is a name that's going to stick, like something on the bottom of his shoe.

In fact, we now have a new acronym for him: the LSDM. We don't need to use his actual name anymore.

Oh, yeah, besides being a WATB -- check out his website's report in which he claims he was "ambushed" -- he's also seriously FOS. As when he called in sick for his own show that same afternoon, leaving us to the tender mercies of Judge Napolitano and Michelle Malkin.

Then, at the very end, he called in all plugged-up sounding and claimed he had "a case of the 24-hour swine flu". And then proceeded to once again prevaricate about the "ridiculous" interview we had all just watched that morning.

Beck: Apparently I was a liar because I said that -- which is true -- uh, that she -- I, I, Barbara Walters said hello to me, instead, it was I said hello to Barbara Walters. I walked up to her -- I guess that's we need to spend our time on for seven minutes.

In Beck's truncated version of what transpired at The View, the only reason to call him a liar was that he and Walters had different views on who said hello first. But that's BS On A Stick.

Roll the tape: You'll quickly note that the greeting disagreement started things off, but the main reason they called him a liar was that his whole story on the radio was a narrative about how you can't reserve a seat on an Amtrak train, and here these two media elites came and got reserved seats! The audacity!

But as both Walters and Goldberg explained to the LSDM, they hadn't gotten reserved seats at all. They had worked their ways back to that car after finding no seats in the front cars.

The LSDM, as is his wont, was just making stuff up. No wonder he kinda accidentally omitted that from his lamestain excuse -- it would have made it just that much lamer.

In any event, we remain indebted to Whoopie Goldberg for her masterful contribution to the Wingnut Lexicon.

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Bill O'Reilly must be feeling a bit sensitive these days about the ongoing mockery of his work over at Comedy Central in the form of Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Stephen Colbert's show, which is essentially a running parody of O'Reilly anyway.

Last night, he even deigned to respond -- first, to Stewart, with smug, self-serving BS, and then to Colbert by attempting comedy. Which, as you can see, might be funny to someone with long-term dementia, but otherwise ... well, Bill, don't quit your day job.

Actually, the self-serving crap was really quite funny:

O'Reilly: Like Mr. Stewart, we like to poke a little fun -- but we're not hateful. Unlike Jon, we give the entire story, because our audience wants that.

That gave me quite a chuckle.