You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (537)

PLAYS: (1386)

The right's latest fake controversy is what happens whenever any Democrat happens to bring up historical truths about conservatism -- like the fact that it has been on the wrong side of right and wrong for much of the nation's history. They scream and shout about how mean liberals are and then cover over these truths with a pile of afactual excrement.

Here's what upset them so. Harry Reid accurately laid out the sorry history of conservatives in America whenever important and momentous advances in civil rights and the betterment of life for all Americans happen to arise: They stick up for the forces of oppression, hatred, and economic deprivation.

"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all Republicans have come up with is this slow down, stop everything, let's start over."

"You think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, slow down, it's too early. Let's wait. Things aren't bad enough. When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted slow down, there will be a better day to do that. The day isn't quite right.

When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

The only thing right-wingers heard was that "Reid compared opponents of health-care reform to opponents of slavery."

Well, not exactly: He was pointing out that there was continuum to all of these, a common thread. That is, the opponents of health care, just like opponents of civil rights for minorities, and opponents of the vote for women, and opponents of ending slavery all had one big thing in common: They were all conservative.

Rather laughably, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove try to cover this over -- as does Michelle Malkin -- by pointing out the wonderful things Republicans have done over the decades, such as Lincoln freeing the slaves. Of course, what they don't mention is that these things were achieved by people who would today be considered liberal Republicans. Malkin also wants you to remember those Democrats who fought against civil rights: Of course, she conveniently omits the history of the Southern Strategy and the way old-line bigots like Strom Thurmond joined the GOP en masse in the 1960s and '70s, thereby transforming the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Neo-Confederates.

(Oh, and a reminder to Karl Rove, who claims that "Joe Wilson got in trouble for speaking the truth": He should ask Wilson sometime his views on Lincoln.)

And what they especially avoid confronting is that Reid is right in that opponents of ending slavery were CONSERVATIVE, and opponents of health-care reform are CONSERVATIVE. The contexts change with the shifting challenges of our respective eons, but we can always count on one thing:

When conservatives stand up to fight against common-sense advances that improve the lives of Americans, we can feel a sense of surety that history will prove them wrong. It always has in the past.

By the way, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison was whining on Fox's Your World (with Eric Bolling filling in for Neil Cavuto) that Reid's remarks were "over the top" and asking him to apologize:

Continue reading »

As David Sirota points out, here are some "objective, nonpartisan, non-ideological facts":

-- The 2010 Pentagon budget means "every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on (defense) programs and agencies next year," reports the Cato Institute. "By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China's per capita spending is less than $100."

-- "(The Pentagon budget) dwarfs the combined defense budgets of U.S. allies and potential U.S. enemies alike," reports Hearst Newspapers.

-- "President (Obama) is on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II," reports National Journal's Government Executive magazine.

-- In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal health care for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal health care plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.

Obviously -- obviously! -- these points are no cause for alarm and certainly no cause for defense spending reductions, right? All they must prove is that the archconservative Cato Institute, William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, National Journal employees and Pentagon officials are secretly America-hating liberals. And -- obviously! -- so are two of the most aggressive neoconservative hawks ever to hold government office, Sen. John McCain and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After all, they're the ones who issued those scathing statements about wasteful defense spending in the pop quiz above. That means they're actually terrorist-appeasing lefties, right?

Really, how could anyone other than traitorous communists see the data and then consider backing the mildest Pentagon spending cuts? I mean, come on -- in a country whose paranoid conservative movement now makes a dead-serious ideology out of Stephen Colbert wisecracks, how dare any red-blooded American even think of pondering basic budgetary facts?

...why do Americans care if taxes are raised at all? And why should Americans care about tax cuts also?

As you guys know, I watch the mind numbingly sophomoric Fox Saturday block of Stock Shows that goes by the name of "The Cost of Freedom." They consist of four 30-minute shows, and every single week there's an idiot on who says the only people that pay taxes are the richest members of our society.

OK, let's say I agree. Then why should 290,000,000 Americans more or less give a rip about the ramifications of raising taxes? They make the argument for us that taxes should be raised since only the very rich pay them.

Dave Neiwert wrote about this in one of his earlier posts: Populism: It's all the right-wing rage these days

The Tea Parties, in every incarnation -- from the Tax Day protests to the health-care town halls to the "Tea Party Express" and the "912 March on Washington" to Michele Bachmann's lame "Super Bowl of Freedom" -- has been all about populism, and it is distinctly right-wing populism.

A giveaway moment came during Sean Hannity's April 15 evening "Tea Party" broadcast from Atlanta, when he brought in a live feed from the Rick and Bubba Tea Tantrum in Alabama:

Hannity: And I'm going to tell you one other thing: When did we ever get to a point in America where, we're nearly at the point where fifty percent of Americans don't pay anything in taxes! Nothing!

[Crowd boos]

Rick: The numbers out are just astounding that, that, how much that the very top taxpayers actually pay. I feel like these taxpayers are disenfranchised. I want them to have a share of the burden just like they have a share of the vote.

That's right -- it's the wealthy top percentage of the country that needs a tax break. After all, they are the one Obama's targeting, right? So at least they're being upfront about just who "the taxpayers" are whose interests they're out marching to defend...read on

Don't you feel sorry for these poor rich bastards? If this is their argument, then I say President Obama should impose immediate tax increases like a war tax, a health-insurance tax and a jobs creation tax on the top tier of Americans. Make it a payroll tax and take it right out of their checks every pay period. That would immediately satisfy the deficit scolds.

After all, who will care if it's only the Fox Noise demographic? In the end all conservative policies do is destroy the least of us. They treat the American worker like trained seals, whose only function in life is to fuel their wealth.

Digby has more:

I think they tend to make their judgments about the upper and lower classes based as much on tribalism as anything else. (Recall that the populist hero Ross Perot was a billionaire who made his fortune from government contracts -- but he sounded like a good old boy.) These things never play themselves out exactly the same ways but the fundamental appeals remain the same. The upper levels of society usually find a way to pull the strings and control these people, but the more vulnerable often suffer quite a bit at their hands. Neiwert's piece is a very important primer for those of us who are trying to understand where this Palin-Beck teabag phenomenon comes from and how it relates to other right0wing philosophies like Randism and militias. At the end of the day it all translates into ugly know-nothingism that lashes out at everyone but the adherents themselves, who see themselves as the defenders of the Real America.

I get the impulse and I feel the same frustrations. But their solutions are always worse than the problems they seek to solve.

You know, between the crooks, the politicians and the payoffs, this issue shouldn't be a third rail anymore. Democrats need to decide which we can afford: Shoveling trillions of dollars into the military-industrial-congressional complex (and the pockets of defense donors), or rebuilding this country's economic and social infrastructure. David Sirota:

In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal healthcare for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal healthcare plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.

Obviously -- obviously! -- these points are no cause for alarm and certainly no cause for defense spending reductions, right? All they must prove is that the archconservative Cato Institute, William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, National Journal employees and Pentagon officials are secretly America-hating liberals. And -- obviously! -- so are two of the most aggressive neoconservative hawks ever to hold government office, Sen. John McCain and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After all, they’re the ones who issued those scathing statements about wasteful defense spending in the pop quiz above. That means they’re actually terrorist-appeasing lefties, right?

Really, how could anyone other than traitorous communists see the data and then consider backing the mildest Pentagon spending cuts? I mean, come on -- in a country whose paranoid conservative movement now makes a dead-serious ideology out of Stephen Colbert wisecracks, how dare any red-blooded American even think of pondering basic budgetary facts?

Of course here's a typical conservative reaction:

Lost in all the typical liberal hyperventilating over increased defense spending during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is just how low current defense spending compared to the last 45 years.

Oh, well then! Quit yer griping!

Your defense of Glenn Beck is touching on AOL, but it comes up very short and very sad. You claim that the big bad lefty meanie comedians are picking on Beck even when he is sick. Well, let's get something straight. Glenn Beck is inciting violence and helping legitimizing radical militia and white nationalist movements that otherwise would still be chatting on their MySpace pages. And the hatred that he is helping to unleash on this country is indefensible.

He was the butt of a few jokes by comedians at a time that you disapprove of. OK, are you now saying that the ADL is also being mean to him when they call him the "fearmonger in chief?" Will you weep for him over that too?

What did you think of those gun-brandishing "patriots" who showed up for teabagger protests? Were you happy to see all that vitriol targeted at President Obama by a lot of clueless robots who are out their because of talkers like Beck who have only one goal in mind -- to tear down this president after Bush and conservatism tore down our country for the last eight years?

It's not as though Beck himself hasn't been demonizing people -- his McCarthyite attacks on a number of people have not only been absurdly distorted but viciously personal. And it's not as though Beck is an innocent in the media personal-attack game; indeed, you may recall that he was responsible for one of the ugliest on-air smears in broadcast history: When Beck had a falling-out with a former radio-show partner named Bruce Kelly, who became a competitor in the Phoenix market, Beck embarked on a series of dirty tricks, including an invasion of Kelly's wedding. But Beck hit a new low a little later:

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

Two wrongs don't make a right, and here at C&L we've avoided making it personal with Beck (beyond pointing out his utter lunacy). Just because we choose to pitch clean, though, doesn't mean we much mind seeing a toxic clown like Beck face a little chin music.

Please, spare us the tears and defend somebody who truly deserves it.

John Amato...

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (788)

PLAYS: (1153)

Chris Matthews is getting all hot and bothered because liberals in Congress and from the netroots are pushing hard to get a public option included in health care reform. That's called legislating, Chris. It's a long, hard process sometimes.

The Village really gets upset when dirty f*&king hippies get uppity and speak out on issues that matter. Villagers don't care that America voted in Obama with a mandate on health-care reform. Villagers don't care that America rejected conservatism, which practically caused the world to almost spin off its axis. It's getting to the point that Tweety is pulling stuff out of his pie hole because he hates us so much. And apparently Tweety forgot that "the left" was elected in droves in 2008. "The Left" is not a fringe teabagger, tax evading group, it dominates the House of Representatives. Here he is on Andrea Mitchell talking about Obama and Afghanistan and see where Tweety goes with it all.

Matthews: Everybody is doing their politics here. She represents San Francisco and she represents, I know the Speaker's role. you have to respond to the nosiest elements in your caucus, and the most passionate and apparently, I assume just knowing the Democratic House, the voices she's hearing from every single day are the left who want out. Now this president never promised to get out of Afghanistan. And he's not gonna...

He never promised to pull out, that was the good war, the necessary war. Oh, by the way he never ran on the public option. Somebody's got to tell these people on the left and the netroots and some of our colleagues, yeah, he might like the idea of a public option, he may prefer it. He didn't run on it. He didn't get elected for it. So this idea that he somehow betrayed a left wing mandate is nonsense.

Where to begin. Why is it OK to attack Nancy Pelosi for representing San Francisco? What did they ever do to Bill O'Reilly and Tweety? Aren't they part of the US of A too? That she is from the Bay Area somehow minimizes the fact that she's the Speaker. On Afghanistan, he's right. President Obama did not promises to withdraw from there. That's why we on the left have to put pressure on the administration or we could be there for decades.

But President Obama did campaign on the public option., It was part of his health-care plan that he unveiled in the primaries. I asked Ezra Klein to verify it for me and he did.

Berkeley's Jacob Hacker, who was the first to persuasively articulate it; to the Economic Policy Institute, which fleshed out the specifics; and to the Campaign for America's Future, which took the lead in selling it to advocacy groups and the presidential campaigns. John Edwards picked it up and made it central to his proposal, and the other candidates followed suit to protect their left flanks.

And I found that Paul Krugman has it also.

The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health care plan.

Tweety needs to apologize to President Obama, the netroots and the liberals in Congress who he just smeared in this clip. We are fighting for real health-care reform in America and not some mythical-bipartisan Beltway compromise bill that is completely useless to all the real working families that the Villagers like to pretend they speak for all the time.

(h/t Heather at Video Cafe)

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1037)

PLAYS: (5516)

So yesterday, Rush Limbaugh belittled Joe Scarborough's manhood over the differences regarding where the Great Gasbag is taking the Republican Party. He called him a "neutered chickified moderate". Oooooh.

So today, Scarborough fired back, with pal Mika Brzezinski somewhat aghast at the gonadial turn of the conversation:

Scarborough: I would be careful. If I had put my testicles in a blind trust for George W. Bush for eight years I'd be careful ..

Brzezinski: Can you say "testicles" on Morning Joe?

... [Crosstalk]

Scarborough: But there are a lot of people on the right that did in fact put their testicles in a blind trust for the past eight years, and stopped being conservative and started being apologists. And, um, that's about all I'll say.

Other than, other than -- you remember that, that scene with George W. Bush carrying Rush Limbaugh's suitcase into the White House? Now we know what was inside the suitcase.

It's all rather amusing to watch. It's funny, too -- both Scarborough and Limbaugh have been playing the "conservatism could not fail, it was George W. Bush who failed conservatism" card since before the election. Now they're accusing each other of not having the right brand of conservatism.

As we observed already, Scarborough is in pretty deep denial about just how far into the abyss his movement has fallen.

Scarborough went on in this segment to vent that he wrote a book back in 2004 warning that the Bush administration's out-of-control spending would have dire consequences that would make the GOP unpopular. And it's true, he wrote that.

But the Bush budget deficits were only a small part of the picture when it comes to the causes of the massive recession he catastrophically brought down upon the nation's head. The biggest single cause of this recession was the mania for deregulation -- particularly within the financial sector -- and the breakdown of firewalls within that sector that had been erected to protect consumers and the industry itself back during the FDR era.

These policies -- especially the desire to destroy the legacy of the New Deal embodied by the mania for deregulation -- have always been, and continue to be, central themes for conservatism, not just for the Rush Limbaugh wingnut bloc but for the Joe Scarborough "mainstream conservative" bloc too.

In other words, it was conservatism itself that created this mess. And while you boys are off fighting about your penises, we liberals will be busy cleaning it up, as usual.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1139)

PLAYS: (3376)

Steven Hayward asked a key question this weekend: "Is Conservatism Brain Dead?" The key paragraph was this:

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book "Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present," it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

There's one little problem with this: The entire thesis of Goldberg's book is a fraud. Goldberg not only deployed the F-word, he built the entire book on a false, historically untenable, claim: that "fascism, properly understood," is not a right-wing phenomenon but a left-wing one.

Indeed, the spread of Goldberg's thesis into conventional wisdom on the right is one of the main drivers in the transformation of conservatism into a pack of mouth-foaming pseudo-populists:

One of the most persistent components of this is the right's ardent embrace of the fraudulent thesis of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism -- to wit, that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The embrace of this fraud as somehow truthful has produced those teabaggers' signs bearing swastikas (suggesting that health-care reform is fascist) and signs showing Barack Obama as Hitler and, moreover, the claims that Obama is marching the nation down the road to fascism.

It's been particularly embraced by movement conservatives in their efforts to whitewash from public view the existence of right-wing extremists among their ranks.

The impact of this embrace on our national discourse has been deeper than probably anyone suspected when the book was first published last year. Not only is Goldberg's thesis now taken as an article of faith by such right-wing talkers as Rush Limbaugh (who probably helped inspire Goldberg's thesis in any event), Glenn Beck, Michael Savage,, but also among the teabagging protesters whose ranks are increasingly filled by real right-wing extremists.

What's most noteworthy, perhaps, is that Goldberg's thesis is being used to attack anyone who points out the frequently violent and intimidating behavior of these extremists. It's not the right-wing protesters carrying open weapons, Obama=Hitler signs, and openly disrupting the discussion of health-care reform at town-hall sessions who are behaving like Brownshirts, they insist -- it's the liberals who show enough nerve to stand up to them!

You can trace a lot of the popularization of Goldberg's thesis to Beck's open promotion of it, as in the video above from earlier this year. And when you're talking about brain-dead conservatives, Beck is safely Subject No. 1.

Oddly enough, though, Hayward then goes on to suggest that perhaps Beck himself is the chief hope for ending conservatism's intellectual drought. Oy.

If Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck are the leading intellectual lights of this generation of conservatives, there can be no other answer to Hayward's question than an affirmative one.

[H/t to Mitch.]

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1306)

PLAYS: (8858)

While discussing the success of Sarah Palin's book Mike Murphy echoes David Brooks with his statement that "the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do". Murphy needs to tell that to those sour-grapes Palin voters hitting those tea bag protests across the country. I also wonder if he thinks there's a difference between the "conservative media machine" and Fox News?

Rachel Maddow rightly points out they're not going to be able to dismiss Palin that easily and need to answer for the brand of conservatism that has elevated her to the position she has in the party, 2012 nominee or not.

MURPHY: No, she will sell a lot. I'm, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to wait for it to get spell-checked, but then I'm going to buy it.

GREGORY: Right. And she's number--I should point out, I mean, number one on the best-seller list for Amazon.

MURPHY: Yeah. No, no, look, she has a constituency. She'll never be the nominee, I totally agree with David. I agree with Steve Schmidt, it would be actually a disaster if she was the nominee. I do wish my friend Steve felt that a year ago when a lot of people were asking John McCain to put her on the ticket. But the truth is--and I'm going to agree with David here, too--the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do. These radio guys can't deliver a pizza, let alone a nomination. And you can case study that out in the last election. So I--the question is whether or not our party will learn, when we have a pretty good midterm victory due to Obama's mistakes this time, that turning up the volume is not the reason that we're going to do well, I believe, in the midterms. And the fact is to get all the way, there are a lot of things we have to do to modernize conservatism to be successful.

MADDOW: I, I do think that there's a little bit of reckoning that needs to happen on the right for Sarah Palin's success. I mean, she was the vice presidential nominee, she is going to sell a kazillion books and she is the biggest brand name in Republican politics still right now. And she's chose--the person who's writing her book, her last--the last person who she co-authored a book with was called "Donkey Cons" and it was co-authored with a guy who's widely believed to be and I believe him to be a white supremacist. So she's chosen Lynn Vincent, who's written a book with a white supremacist, to write her book, and she's the biggest name in Republican politics.

MURPHY: Oh, but, Rachel...

MADDOW: And you can dismiss her and say she's not going to be the nominee, but I do think the right needs to sort of answer for what's happened to conservatism.

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1009)

PLAYS: (2833)

Fox News' Bret Baier asked Sen. Lindsey Graham to elaborate on his opinion that Glenn Beck is a "cynic" Sunday.

"What I am saying, he doesn't represent the Republican Party," said Graham.

"But at the end of the day, when a person says he represents conservatism and that the country's better off with Barack Obama than John McCain," Graham continued. "That sort of ends the debate for me as to how much more I'm going to listen."

No matter how big his media empire, or how staunch his devotion to conservatism, Rupert Murdoch's enduring legacy is, from this day forward, that he brought to the world Glenn Beck boiling a handful of rubber frogs as a metaphor for "The American People."

Open Thread below....

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1302)

PLAYS: (7857)

Wow. Maybe he was inspired by his earlier session with Max Blumenthal. Or maybe it was the way Glenn Beck dissed Mika by telling her to "shut the hell up." Or maybe he's just as sick of Glenn Beck as the rest of us are.

Whatever it was, Joe Scarborough was relentless and on-point this morning in attacking not just Glenn Beck, but the conservatives who condone and empower him.

He took his cue from Peter Wehner's piece in Commentary, "Glenn Beck: Harmful to the Conservative Movement":

I understand that a political movement is a mansion with many rooms; the people who occupy them are involved in intellectual and policy work, in politics, and in polemics. Different people take on different roles. And certainly some of the things Beck has done on his program are fine and appropriate. But the role Glenn Beck is playing is harmful in its totality. My hunch is that he is a comet blazing across the media sky right now—and will soon flame out. Whether he does or not, he isn’t the face or disposition that should represent modern-day conservatism. At a time when we should aim for intellectual depth, for tough-minded and reasoned arguments, for good cheer and calm purpose, rather than erratic behavior, he is not the kind of figure conservatives should embrace or cheer on.

Scarborough was even more damning:

Scarborough: But when you preach this kind of hatred, and say that an African American president hates all white people -- stay with me -- hates all white people, you are playing with fire. And bad things can happen. And if they do happen, not only is Glenn Beck responsible, but conservatives who don't -- call -- him -- out -- are responsible.

Incidentally, Mark Levin was just as harsh in knocking down Beck.

This is certainly a good start for conservatives serious about rescuing their movement from the abyss into which it is descending. But again, as with David Brooks, none of them quite grasp the dimensions of what they're up against.

Sure, the things Glenn Beck says are completely nuts and reflect poorly on the American Right generally. That's probably because Beck is in reality a genuine far-right extremist who is gradually coming out of the closet about that -- and as he does, he's lapping up the ratings.

But Beck is far from the only extremist dragging movement conservatism to the right. The bridges between the far right and mainstream conservatives are so numerous and widely trafficked that it's hard to keep up, but they range from the extreme religious right connections that Blumenthal describes in his new book in detail, to the "Patriot" wingnut right like WorldNetDaily, which has multiple ties to the Republican National Committee. And yes, ordinary conservatives do have reason to be concerned.

This is especially the case when it comes to the Tea Parties, which actually reflect the takeover of movement conservatism by right-wing populists. They have become a fundamentally important nexus for the promotion of extremist beliefs and fringe conspiracy theories.

Because that's what Joe Scarborough is up against. Glenn Beck is just the face. There's a much larger beast lurking there alongside him.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1815)

PLAYS: (5534)

Howard Kurtz asks his panel of the editor of The New York Times Week in Review and The New York Times Book Review Sam Tanenhaus, the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody and the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly what they think of the right wing's preemptive freak out over President Obama's speech to school children last week.

Tanenhaus says it is an indication of what he calls "the death of conservatism" which is the theme and name of his book.

Brody thinks the President has a "perception problem". Hmmmm.... I wonder what might have contributed to that. The media overplaying the right wing screechers that should otherwise be dismissed couldn't have possibly contributed to that, could it David?

And Ceci Connolly says the "media are addicted to conflict". And don't blame them for feeding us crap on a daily basis since that 24 hour news cycle is so hard to fill up. Well here's a thought. Why not fill it with something besides crap? Somehow Amy Goodman manages to find an hours worth of news every day that you guys can't find the time to report on in that 24 hour cycle. Imagine that. I would imagine that a good deal of our readers here at Crooks and Liars could recommend more stories that are worth reporting on than there would be time for in the 24 hour news cycle, even on a "slow day".

I'd like to think that Sam Tanenhaus' observation is the correct one and that this over the top rhetoric does mean the death of the conservative movement, but our "mainstream media" along with a lot of other powerful forces are going to do their best to make sure it doesn't happen any time soon.

Transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

tttthink: On 9/10, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld admitted the Pentagon couldn't account 2.3 trillion dollars. Then 9/11 happened and everyone forgot

AlterNet: 14 things you need to know about Joe Wilson

Lean Left: "Mr. Gorbachev, Build Up This Wall" - Jackass Rightwinger's cynical hypocrisy hits historic high

Welcome Back to Pottersville: The Big Casino

attytood: College president honors "diversity" by naming center for Dick Cheney

Garry Wills on the death of conservatism

The Bush Administration sure had a knack for letting criminals get away with it, didn't they? They failed to stop 9/11, never caught bin Laden, and now we're learning about the total incompetence of the SEC in responding to Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly missed chances to catch Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion fraud over 16 years by assigning inexperienced investigators and accepting “implausible” explanations after catching him in lies, the agency’s internal watchdog said.

At least six warnings from sources including a money manager, a “respected hedge-fund manager” and a firm that studied Madoff’s business failed to spur a “thorough and competent” probe, Inspector General H. David Kotz wrote in a summary of a report released today. Madoff, in an interview with Kotz, said even he “was astonished” when investigators failed to check trading records that would have exposed his scam.

“Despite numerous credible and detailed complaints, the SEC never properly examined or investigated Madoff’s trading and never took the necessary, but basic, steps to determine if Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme,” Kotz wrote.

This is not only an incredible report, it plays into a larger truth about the conservative conception of regulation as a needless bother rather than a diligent effort to protect the consumer. One incredible moment, referenced above but covered in detail by Zachary Roth, shows that Madoff basically thought he was caught and the scheme had been discovered by federal regulators, only to find himself safe once again.

The agency's biggest screw up, says the summary, was the fact that examiners never verified Madoff's trading through an independent third party.

The details of that failure are more astonishing still. Madoff at one point told examiners that all his trades were cleared through his account at the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a clearing agency -- and he gave the examiners his DTC account number. At that point, Madoff told Kotz in an interview, "I thought it was the end game, over. Monday morning they'll call DTC and this will be over." Amazingly, the SEC never followed up with DTC. Madoff said he was "astonished."

The summary almost makes clear that the SEC's right hand didn't know what the left was doing. It notes with astonishment that at one point, two Madoff examinations were going on at the same time within the agency, without either being aware of the other. It was Madoff himself who informed one team of the other's existence [...]

The final, failed Madoff investigation of 2006 -- triggered by a detailed Markopolos complaint -- was perhaps the most egregious. According to the summary, most of the investigative work was done by a staff attorney "who recently graduated from law school and only joined the SEC nineteen months before she was given the Madoff investigation. She had never previously been the lead staff attorney on any investigation, and had been involved in very few investigations overall. The Madoff assignment was also her first real exposure to broker-dealer issues."

According to the summary, that inexperience helps explain why, when Madoff told the examiners that he got such unprecedentedly good return simply because he had a good "feel" for the market, they took that nonsensical explanation at face value.

Bush's SEC didn't bother to check up on Madoff's dealings, and they took his explanations as good enough for them, because their attitude toward regulation was "don't mess with a good thing." Indeed, the entire stock market during the Bush years was kind of operating under a false reality in its own right. Madoff was a crook, but at least an honest crook. And even he couldn't get caught.

This is not just the story of one agency's embarrassing failure. The failure lied in the theory of government, existing to make profits for cronies and lay off the connected and the powerful. The failure to catch Madoff and the failure of conservatism are essentially the same stories.