Susan Gardner of Daily Kos wrote a review of "Over The Cliff," on Sunday.

Her review covers a number of topics that we wrote about and she sums it up:

Readability/quality: Concise, persuasive and methodically documented, Over the Cliff is a smooth and sobering read. It feels much shorter than it actually is—there's a lot of information packed in, both historical and current, and a tremendous job has been done in picking through the right-wing landscape for pertinent, on-the-money examples. Lord knows you could spend a couple thousand pages just on documenting the day-to-day rhetoric (in fact, Media Matters does just that). So thanks, guys, for paring it down and honing it.

Who should read it: Everybody. Seriously. This is a wake-up call for those in denial, a refresher course for the painfully aware. Good reference to have on hand in your permanent home library for quick examples of extremism in Obama's first year.

For David, who has written a number of books already this is old hat in a way, but for me it's another new experience. An experience that I'm proud to bear witness to. We'll be going over to answer some questions with Susan next week I believe.

UPDATE: And we're appearing on 'Ring of Fire' with Michael Papantonio Wednesday at 11:30 am PST.

Don't forget to support Liberal authors and grab a copy at many online book stores including Amazon and there are eBook versions too.

Mother Jones: In 2008, BP touted it's new tech to measure oil flow. This may be why it stopped working

the glttering eye: Making excuses

cab drollery: Balance

The Reaction: Belgium on the brink: Parliamentary elections could lead to a split

World-O-Crap: Physician, Heal Thyself

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Beck promotes book of Nazi sympathizer...Make it stop, please...The siege of Helen...Just shoot me...MoDo misunderstands irony, writing...LA Times employs a full-time wingnut...MSM ignores blogger's work...Cold water on their meme...Lie and Spin

CIA Shakeup

David Kaplan and Kevin Whitelaw have more pieces of the puzzle, and provide some intriguing insights about the odd departure of super-spy Stephen Kappes. This just appeared in Monday's issue of U.S. News & World Report.

Here is the enticing opening to a very interesting article:

To those who worked with him, Stephen Kappes seemed the perfect choice to lead the covert side of the CIA in the midst of the war on terrorism. Appointed in June, Kappes, a former marine, is a veteran CIA case officer who served in dangerous and difficult postings in Moscow and Pakistan. More recently, he reported directly to President Bush as the CIA's point man in secret high-stakes negotiations with Libya that ended the rogue state's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

So last week, many CIA insiders were astonished when Kappes became an early casualty under the rule of Porter Goss, the recently appointed director of central intelligence. Goss, himself a former CIA case officer who recently chaired the House Intelligence Committee, came into his job in September with a mandate to reform a troubled agency blamed for a series of grave lapses before the September 11 attacks and the Iraq war.

But while Goss was widely expected to shake the place up, the departure of Kappes and his deputy, Michael Sulick, stunned intelligence veterans in Washington, who saw the pair as the most qualified team to lead the CIA's Directorate of Operations in years. "The planets lined up," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year CIA veteran who ran the agency's arming of Afghan rebels in the Soviet war. "You had the right guys in the right job at the right time." Ironically, the two men shared Goss's critique of the CIA's shortcomings.

Says a former top CIA official who worked with Kappes: "These guys weren't in denial that 9/11 and Iraq were intelligence failures."

Princess Sparkle Pony's Tea Party Roundup: Poll reveals they have a split personality. And their salt-of-the earth cheerleader is dedicated to luxury hotels, private jets, a team of consultants, and BIG FEES

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Booman Tribune: A history lesson for Sarah Palin

Calculated Risk: The SEC and other Banks

Wall St. Cheat Sheet: The Cost of Terror

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Monkey Muck (who is 4 years old!), Watergate Summer, Manifesto Joe's Texas Blues

Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli has been in the news a lot lately. You may have heard about the letter he wrote earlier this month to all of Virginia’s public colleges – UVA, VA Tech, William and Mary, etc. calling on them to drop policies banning discrimination against gays and lesbians. He claims they have no legal authority to adopt such policies.

Or maybe you heard Cuccinelli speculate about whether President Obama was born in the United States. In this recently unearthed recording from the campaign trail, Cuccinelli can be heard telling a birther that he might be able to challenge federal laws on the basis of Obama’s birth place:

Cuccinelli has since dashed off a denial, but the fun doesn’t stop there.

In another recently unearthed recording, Cuccinelli told a crowd that he’s worried about the government tracking his family. He said he might not register his newborn son for a Social Security number because "it is being used to track you." He also claimed that many other Americans aren’t registering for Social Security numbers for the same reason:

We're gonna have our 7th child on Monday, if he's not born before. And, for the very concerns you state, we're actually considering – as I'm sure many of you here didn't get a Social Security number when you were born, they do it now – we're considering not doing that. And a lot of people are considering that now, because it is being used to track you.

Cuccinelli’s hard line against gays, paranoia about the Social Security Administration, and openness to birther conspiracies prove that he is the real deal – a bona fide Teabagger of the highest order. And now he’s the chief legal officer of an entire state.

For anyone wondering what a Tea Party-controlled GOP might look like, keep your eyes on Virginia.

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Glenn Beck was trying real hard yesterday to convince people that his running theory -- that Barack Obama is secretly a Marxist who intends to radically transform America into a communist state -- just might be right.

He compared his theory to the early stages of the Monica-baiting of Clinton in 1998, when everyone was in denial -- because, you see, he thinks eventually he'll be proven right. OK, whatever.

Then he blurted this out:

Beck: I mean, at this point, you have to try to not pay attention. I mean, you have to be working to miss the pattern here. There's so much anti-free-market rhetoric from Obama and his top officials, you'd either have to either be living in a cave in Afghanistan next to Obama, and you can't hear anything that Ob -- uh, Osama is saying because of the goats going, ah-ah-ah, or you're so deeply in love with Obama that you can't detect a single flaw in him.

This is what we'll call a Beckean Slip: An apparent slip of the tongue that is most likely intentional, and at the bare minimum clearly exposes the desire to confuse the public.

It isn't the first time Beck has slipped and mixed up Osama bin Laden's name with President Obama's. And it certainly won't be the last.

However, it does tend to undermine Beck's subsequent claim to having this high-level, all-seeing mind that is "right" about a whole host of things (that he's actually been wrong about). Indeed, it reveals a confused mind incapable of clearly distinguishing between the president of the United States and a cave-dwelling terrorist.

Beck also adds that "I could be wrong" but "I haven't been before"? Um, yeah, except for the dozens of times he actually has been wrong. (Remember when he was predicting that Americans would eventually go for McCain at the polls? That prediction turned out well, didn't it?)

Clearly, his fans are hoping that he'll be proven right, because then they'll be justified in subsequently mounting a violent assault on the White House or something. But with a mind like Beck's concocting the theories, you might have better luck putting a bagful of cats in a roomful of word processors and hoping that Shakespeare's collected sonnets somehow emerge.

All of which raises a question that Glenn Beck should ask himself: What if you're wrong?

Because then, all you have done is smear a boatload of innocent and decent people, dragged their names through the mud, and ruined their careers.

But hey, that doesn't matter, because Glenn Beck is all about values, right? Like the value of his new mansion in Connecticut ... those are the values that matter to Glenn Beck.

Basic decency? Not so much.

Take a look at this ad from America's Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industry lobby.

See what's missing? The words "public option." Or really, any attack on the current plan in Congress at all. The spot associates AHIP with a reform banning denial of coverage for pre-existing condition in exchange for getting every American covered, gently asks for the final bill to be bipartisan, and... that's it.

Similarly, Olympia Snowe, who signed on to the letter calling for a delay in the deadline for reporting a health care bill out of the Senate, positively called for a public option on day one in a speech this weekend in Maine.

What this shows me is that we have now moved beyond the public option as the fulcrum point for the health care debate. We don't know what form it will take or how accessible it will be to all Americans, but if there's a bill signed by the President, it will include a public option. The major players have given up on that score and moved on to other issues to try and derail health care, particularly costs. We've seen much more criticism about cost controls and surtaxes on the wealthy over the last week than any discussion of the public option.

That's because those other facets of the policy don't poll as well as a public option does. They're also harder to explain and quantify. And the forces defending the status quo have found a much easier path by arguing for more delay, questioning costs, lying about the impact on small businesses, claiming that Democrats are engaging in class warfare, raising specters about rationing, and generally using that fiscal scold pose, saying we cannot pay for health care reform while protecting federal health care funding for their districts and localities. On the far right fringe you have lies about how the bill "outlaws private insurance," but in general, the status quo forces think they can trap the bill with a discussion about its cost, not its function.

Of course, the larger effort here is to destroy the Democratic agenda and basically ensure a first term without substantive accomplishments. And Obama is right to use Jim DeMint's "Waterloo" line against him, make it famous, and condemn those who would turn an urgent need for tens of millions of Americans into a game of political hardball:

Just the other day, one Republican Senator said, and I’m quoting him now, “if we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This about a health care system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy. And we can’t afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care. Not this time, not now. There are too many lives and livelihoods at stake.

What we may see is a brief scaling back on the deadline, which should still leave enough time to report a bill out of both houses in September and reconcile them by October. But the fights ahead for health care appear to be playing out over cost and who pays. The public option is in the bill, as long as it gets dragged over the line.

Obsidian Wings: Farewell, Hilzoy

skippy the bush kangaroo: The same Republicans who scoffed at the CBO during the Bush administration's crazed spending and tax cutting, now revere the office's prognostications

AverageBro: Mr. "I Been Had" is back

A Tiny Revolution: Interview with Wendell Potter, a former head of corporate communications for CIGNA who finally listened to his conscience, left behind the blood money, and started talking about the evil he was doing as a shill for the health care denial industry.

Bitch Ph.D.: PUMAS are all about the white ladies

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(image courtesy of bjkeefe)

The right is collectively imploding over Sarah Palin's resignation, and as with any sort of passing there comes a period of grieving. Two major stages in that process are denial and anger, and the always-classy Erick Erickson of RedState is already showing signs of both:

1. Sarah Palin resigned, I think, to spare her family from more attacks. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Sarah Palin is doing this just days after a very nasty Vanity Fair article where folks like Nicolle Wallace and, according to Bill Kristol, McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt (though I’m told Schmidt is not involved), savaged her.

2. Unfortunately, by resigning, I think the left and national media will be emboldened to ritualistically engage in the metaphorical gang raping of conservative politicians, particularly those who are female and have children. They’ll decide savaging Palin’s family drove her from office, so the sky’s the limit on the next conservative with kids.

Finally, Erickson goes flat out delusional, comparing Palin's resignation to Obi Wan Kenobi taking one for the team and sacrificing it all to fight the dark side:

4. I’ve had this running thought all day, perhaps because I was watching it on TV in HD for the first time, that this is kind of like Ben Kenobi letting Darth Vader strike him down. Palin is not going to run in 2012, but by doing this she can now become Barack Obama’s worst nightmare, and help rebuild the opposition to Obama. How? Because were she to remain a 2012 contender, she’d keep having stories by anonymous McCain campaign staffers and other 2012 contenders going after her and her family. Take that ambition off the table and it neutralizes a lot of that. So she can focus on candidates and ideas without an ulterior motive focused on 2012.

Read on...

Really? Erick, you know this wasn't about her children. She used them as political props all through the '08 campaign and continued to do it till the bitter end. And in the end, it was her ineptitude and ethical shortcomings that did her in. Perhaps the enduring lesson from this tragic political tale with be that going forward, politicians of all stripes should think twice about exploiting their children for political gain.

Is there an indictment coming for Palin? That remains to be seen, but one thing seems certain -- Sarah Palin is now toxic. She walked away from the people of her state when the going got tough and has shed any remaining crumbs of credibility she may have had left.

Digby points out the obvious class system that's firmly in place for health care. There are so many exceptions, so much denial of care, we really should start calling it "KatrinaCare." (h/t DCBlogger)

Other countries have systems that prioritize health care treatment on the basis of need --- a triage system. We prioritize health care on the basis of who can pay. And in the most perverse form of rationing there is, we make the sickest people have the most difficult time getting access to health care. (The sickest, after all, can't hold down a job, so the employer based system doesn't really work for them, at least not in the long term.)

And let's not forget: If you get sick while you're on unemployment, they can stop your benefits because you're no longer ready to work!

The idea that the US doesn't ration health care is absurd. We certainly do. We just make people do it to themselves out of economic hardship. I guess that's supposed to be a tribute to our sense of individualism and personal freedom.

Hey, nobody's going to tell you you can't be treated --- you made that decision all by yourself when you opted not to have a lot of money. That's what freedom's all about. (Unless you're sick and you want to die, of course, in which case the state won't let you.)

The debate is really about irrational rationing vs rational rationing -- and the US is the undisputed leader of the first method. When we set our minds to it, nobody can be as irrational as we are.