This sounds like a very nice, conservative fellow who is laboring under the delusion that the Republican party is sincere. He apparently didn't know about such recent historical luminaries as Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed or Grover Norquist. It's quite a gap in his education.(There are other gaps as well -- he also thinks that he needs to save the United States from going the way of Russia.)
I'm sure the party establishment finds him to be adorably naive.
Remember how "hope and change"-y we all felt a year ago?
Brand new president, full of feel-good soaring rhetoric. Nice big majorities in the House and Senate, it was time to feel good about the direction the country was going in again. Doesn't it feel like somewhere along the line in the last year, we've crossed over into Bizarro World?
We're told constantly that the President must stop governing from the left and embrace the center (as Chris Matthews & Co. ask again today) and yet, I'm still waiting for any politician--other than our stalwarts, like Dennis Kucinich or Anthony Weiner--to even acknowledge the left's values much less govern from them.
Meanwhile, the sleaziest person in the Bush White House--and the person acknowledged by the media as the one responsible for all matter of deception and dirty tricks--is feted once again on the Sunday shows. Karl "Turdblossom" Rove gets to offer us yet another round of "is waterboarding torture or not" on Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday, media outlets too disingenuous to remember that we've already had this discussion and decided that yes, in fact, waterboarding IS torture.
And finally, pending the vote for the weakest possible health care reform--one made pathetic by the obstructionism of Republicans and the spineless timidity of Democrats--the noisiest, whiniest, most dishonest Republicans (Graham, Boehner, Cantor) get to go on after WH adviser David Axelrod to keep telling the public that they don't want health care reform. Face the Nation adds insult to injury by also inviting the head of AHIP to complain about what little restrictions remain in the bill. But is there anyone from HCAN on to advocate for the people?
Surely, you jest. Not in Bizarro World.
ABC's "This Week" - White House senior adviser David Axelrod; Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
CBS' "Face the Nation" - White House press secretary Robert Gibbs; Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.; Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.; Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans.
NBC's "Meet the Press" - Axelrod; Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.; Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; and Karl Rove, a former adviser to President George W. Bush.
NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Dan Rather, Katty Kay, Helene Cooper, Joe Klein. Topics: Obama's Road to Reelection: To the Left or To the Center? Mr. Universe: Why Is Obama's Popularity Abroad A Political Liability At Home? Meter Questions: Should Obama Move To the Center Instead of the Left As A Reelection Strategy? YES: 11 NO: 1;
Will "Repeal Health Care" Be A Winning Slogan For Republicans This Fall? YES: 5 No: 7.
CNN's "State of the Union" - Axelrod; House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Fox News Sunday" - Gibbs; Rove; Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.
Glenn Beck seems to be irked at the people digging into his past. But then, that's because his past is truly a disgusting thing to behold. I wouldn't want people looking at it either, if mine were anything remotely like Beck's.
He ranted about it last night on his Fox News show. He thinks we should be paying more attention to his phony "scandals" than to just what kind of character we're watching implore us to seek greater moral goods (as he sees them) every night.
He's no doubt thinking of Alexander Zaitchik's impressive threepartseries in Salon, the first of which does indeed point out that his mother's death remains a mystery -- and that Beck's own later assertion that it was a suicide was a peculiar event.
It was an incredibly revealing series -- particularly this nugget from the second part, describing Beck's antics when he had a falling out with a former radio-show partner named Bruce Kelly, who became a competitor in the Phoenix market. Beck was known as "the king of dirty tricks," including an invasion of Kelly's wedding.
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."
You have to wonder if Kelly contemplated returning the favor when Beck's second daughter was born with cerebral palsy.
But then, he'd have been forced to sink to the level of Glenn Beck to have done something like that.
Via Raw Story, Rachel Maddow points out that in a move to make himself the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, the so-called "sane, centrist, future of the Republican Party" Tim "Fear the Mullet" Pawlenty is putting together the usual assortment of Republican scum to run his political PAC:
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has signaled with the creation of his Freedom First PAC that he has his eye on the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, however, believes that far from making him a credible candidate, the list of Pawlenty's consultants and strategists represents "a who's who of some of the worst Republican scandals of the past decade."
Maddow pointed in particular to Pawlenty senior advisor Terry Nelson, a former deputy chief of staff at the Republican National Committee "known for being the guy in charge when the infamous New England phone-jamming
case went down."
That dirty tricks maneuver sabotaged the Democrats' get-out-the-vote operation during the 2002 New Hampshire election and helped elect Republican John Sununu to the Senate. Nelson was the direct supervisor of RNC regional director James Tobin, who was convicted for his role in the case.
Maddow went on to describe how Nelson then left the RNC to beoame a media consultant, hired an advisor to the Swiftboat Veterans, and was behind the notorious race-baiting "Harold, call me" ad that helped defeat the 2006 senatorial campaign of Democrat Harold Ford but was condemned even by many Republicans.
Story continues below...
Pawlenty has also hired former White House political director Sara Taylor, who became notorious in 2007 for her role in the US Attorney scandal and her inability to recall anything of significance when called to testify before Congress.
HOLY CRAP: Christianist wingnuts want god to hover over Capitol Visitors Center...Dear C Street Gang...Human Sacrifice: A lousy idea...Fundies foment Islamic radicalism...On Offendedness...Full court pander...The silliest smear...Billboard wars!..."The religion of Jesus was very different from what many of us think of as the Christian religion"...Christian conference to welcome an Old South slavery defender...Good or Evil?...Christianist extremism apparent contributor to infidelity and dishonesty...Palin church's Samurai Sword ceremony...The Interfaith Alliance pays tribute its honorary Chairman of the Board, Walter Cronkite...
The original quote, presented in a cropped clip of an Obama interview that discussed his policy on climate change and carbon "cap and trade", looked terrible for Obama. Especially in places like West Virginia and Ohio:
That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants are being built, they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted-down caps that are imposed every year. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches.
This from the same interview - and unmentioned by the unethical smear-merchants at Newsbusters, who first floated the rightwing's version of the truth:
"But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion. Because the fact of the matter is, is that right now we are getting a lot of our energy from coal. And China is building a coal-powered plant once a week. So what we have to do then is figure out how can we use coal without emitting greenhouse gases and carbon. And how can we sequester that carbon and capture it. If we can’t, then we’re gonna still be working on alternatives."
Shows clearly that Obama meant only plants not using clean-coal technology would be hit.
On June 21, 2005, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told McCain in a Senate debate that his legislation to curb climate change would "put coal of out of business." McCain didn't contest that claim. Indeed McCain agreed that his legislation would "require sacrifice" acknowledging that critics said it would cost "thousands of jobs."
But you won't be hearing that from Newsbusters, Drudge, Malkin, Fox News, Palin or any of the many others who climbed on this "November Surprise" bandwagon.
APFN: Last February Eliot Spitzer wrote a blistering opinion piece for the Washington Post detailing how, in 2003, the Bush administration had stopped the states from going after predatory lenders. During the same period, he testified before Congress on the matter. It wasn't long afterward Spitzer became the target of a White House and Wall Street dirty tricks operation to silence one of its most dangerous critics in the handling the financial crisis we're now living through.
Mother Jones: Where Credit is Due: A Timeline of the Mortgage Crisis
Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.
The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.
Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.
Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.
But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.
That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.
And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular. Read on...
