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I haven't been writing too much lately because of publisher type duties I have to perform, but when I saw this bit of ridiculousness from Hot Air aimed at myself I wanted to respond. Everyone, right or left knows I don't make stuff up like some people we know (fill in the names yourself) but when Tina Korbe says that there's no way I could defend my earlier post about the riotous scene at Oklahoma State, I couldn't pass up the chance. By the way, I happen to be pretty good friends with Ed Morrissey, even if we view politics differently so this isn't personal towards Hot Air.

But I’m not sure John Amato of CrooksandLiars.com could come back with a follow-up piece that would convince me of the rightness of his reasoning in this little bit of commentary, provocatively headlined “#OWS Are Just Sleeping in Tents; College Football Fans Are Rioting.”

In it, just as the headline suggests, Amato argues that fans storming the field after a football game constitutes violent rioting.

Had he just stopped there, the piece would have been funny enough — but still somewhat defensible. He at least offers some evidence for his perspective: After the Oklahoma State University Cowboys subjugated the University of Oklahoma Sooners this weekend in the annual Oklahoma rivalry game aptly known as “Bedlam,” OSU fans were in such a hurry to dismantle the goalposts that they inadvertently injured at least 12 fellow fans, including one who had to be airlifted to the hospital.

She obviously missed my point so I'll let one of the biggest sports talk show hosts do it for me. In the above video, WFAN's talk show host Mike Francesa explained the riotous situation in Oklahoma State, which he described from someone on the field as "natural disaster" like that took place. His words not mine. Mike is a known Republican and political junkie so he doesn't have a political agenda about this incident like say, Hot Air does. he ripped into the entire event and wondered if stadiums will need to build fences so fans can't get on the field.

Now Korbe either doesn't understand the meaning of my earlier post or is not being honest about it, that's up to her to figure out.

But the more likely explanation than Amato’s is that the police have turned to questionable tactics to evict OWS protesters because Occupiers have proved themselves to be, time and again, belligerent. Defying lawful orders to pack up and leave isn't exactly the way to ensure you’re evicted peacefully.

Did you happen to see the police called in with pepper spray, tear gas and hazmat suits to make sure tea party town halls during the August recess didn't turn ugly, did you? And they did turn very ugly because groups like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity disseminated memos designed to aggressively disrupt those town halls.

The memo above also resembles the talking points being distributed by FreedomWorks for pushing an anti-health reform assault all summer. Patients United, a front group maintained by Americans for Prosperity, is currently busing people all over the country for more protests against Democratic members. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the NRCC, has endorsed the strategy, telling the Politico the days of civil town halls are now “over.”

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With all the hyperventilating hot air being spewed by the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Erick Erickson and Ted Nugent, et. al., it might appear the tea-bagging right wing is gaining momentum. The incendiary rhetoric being encouraged and even generated by Republican politicians egging on fanatical teabaggers to translate this into real violence can’t be simply written off as trivial; such behavior deserves as much exposure to the light of media as is possible to shine on such moral cockroaches -- mostly to show how very little support it actually does have with the vast majority of the American people.

Most children tend to grow out of the Terrible Two stage where ‘No!’ is their favourite reaction to everything. But however loudly Boehner screams ‘No, you can’t! at the top of his lungs, the softer tones of hope are becoming stronger every day, on both the right and the left, in spite of the Becks and the Boehners and the tea-baggers. It is comments left in on James Poniewozik’s post with a clip of a new viral video based on Will.i.am's "Yes We Can" from the 2008 primaries that give me hope the grown-ups are finally coming back.

‘I am yet another 50 year old small business owner for whom the tea party is a scary group,’ says Donnafre. ‘We can't sit back and assume it is okay to be a silent majority.’

‘Approaching my 70th year,’ says kbsamurai, a self-professed fiscal conservative and a social liberal, ‘Mr Boehner is [the] voice of fear trying to shout down the voices of hope. I did expect to see the left praise this video. I did not expect to see avowed Republicans speak the same language.’

And: ‘I'm 65, white, male, regular at church,’ says mcr57. ‘Yes We Can!’

There it is. That one little word. Yes. With such immense power in three little letters. Yes, we did. Yes, we will again. Yes. We Can.

So you can shout ‘No!’ as loud as you like, Mr. Boehner, not many are listening to you anymore. And just as the three – count them, three – teabaggers who showed up outside of Congressman Steve Driehaus’s home Sunday afternoon were scolded by a neighbour, ‘My family lives on the street, don’t do this to his kids,’ consider this video your well-earned trip to the naughty chair.

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We know that folks on the East Coast -- especially in New York and D.C. -- tend to think the world revolves around them, but this is ridiculous.

The Fox News anchors were having a field day yesterday, promoting their coverage of the East Coast snowstorms, mostly as a way of springboarding into their claim that the storms somehow prove that global warming is not happening -- a fixture in the Fox narrative.

Because, of course, the only part of the world that actually counts is the East Coast. Nevermind that for the planet as a whole, temperatures in 2009 were the second-warmest on record, nor that scientists are anticipating more records in the immediate years ahead.

The theme on Fox: Because it's colder in New York and D.C., it must be colder all around the rest of the world!

Eric Bolling taunted Al Gore, as did Glenn Beck, who then went on to laugh at the reports noting that in fact this is evidence of global-warming theory, claiming that we were now using an upside-down thermometer, then darkly proclaimed that this was all about the "progressive agenda", which has no use for "the truth." And on Hannity's show, he trotted out the "blizzards debunk global warming" line, and Greg Gutfeld proclaimed that this meant the demise of the "global warming industry."

Of course, we could just as easily proclaim that the record warm temperatures we're getting in Seattle are proof that global warming is real.

But here in Seattle, we understand that what happens to us locally doesn't mean the same thing is happening globally. We're not only more honest about it, we're more reality-based.

And the reality, as the New York Times explained this morning, is that the heavy snowstorms on the East Coast in fact perfectly fit into the model of climate change being predicated by scientists:

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground blog, said that the recent snows do not, by themselves, demonstrate anything about the long-term trajectory of the planet. Climate is, by definition, a measure of decades and centuries, not months or years.

But Dr. Masters also said that government and academic studies had consistently predicted an increasing frequency of just these kinds of record-setting storms, because warmer air carries more moisture.

“Of course,” he wrote on his blog Wednesday as new snows produced white-out conditions in much of the Eastern half of the country, “both climate-change contrarians and climate-change scientists agree that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change.

“However,” he continued, “one can ‘load the dice’ in favor of events that used to be rare — or unheard of — if the climate is changing to a new state.”

A federal government report issued last year, intended to be the authoritative statement of known climate trends in the United States, pointed to the likelihood of more frequent snowstorms in the Northeast and less frequent snow in the South and Southeast as a result of long-term temperature and precipitation patterns. The Climate Impacts report, from the multiagency United States Global Change Research Program, also projected more intense drought in the Southwest and more powerful Gulf Coast hurricanes because of warming.

In other words, if the government scientists are correct, look for more snow.

Fox's Jane Skinner featured a report this morning discussing this Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who laid out in more detail how the heavier snows are likely a product of the heavier amounts of moisture in the atmosphere from global warming.

Want to bet that this bit of reportage goes completely ignored by the "opinion" anchors?

Connecting the Dots: The Way We Live Now

Mugsy's Rap Sheet: Predictions for 2010

The Grey Matter: The Sunshine Boys and Their Hot Air Festival

Enduring America: An Open Letter to Charles Krauthammer

Presenting the 2009 Stinque Awards.

The Justice Department has subpoenaed indymedia.us for its visitor logs for a certain date. While this raises big flags regarding online privacy, something else happened with this action that is very odd. The recipient of the subpoena was told she could not talk about it unless authorized by the Justice Department – an essential gag order.

Of course news like this would send the right into a full frenzy that Obama is trying to silence the media, even a left-leaning site like indymedia. Here’s Hot Air’s take on it:

Did the White House try to open up a two-front war on the media?   Before the Obama administration launched an all-out battle with conservative-leaning Fox News Channel, the Department of Justice demanded the records of all visitor information of left-leaning Indymedia.us in an remarkable subpoena of a media outlet, for one specific day.  No one can recall any precedent for such a wide-ranging probe into the records of a media website, but it may provide a challenge to a national-security law if the DoJ presses hard enough:

But there’s a problem with this “blame Obama” mentality. The original source of the article is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and this is what they say about the subpoena:

On January 30th, 2009, Kristina Clair of Philadelphia, PA — one of the system administrators of the server that hosts the indymedia.us site — received in the mail a grand jury subpoena from the Southern District of Indiana federal court. The FBI had sent an email to Ms. Clair a couple of weeks earlier asking where a subpoena directed at the indymedia.us site should be sent. So, we at EFF were ready and waiting to evaluate the subpoena as soon as it arrived. Yet even we were surprised at what we saw. A PDF of the entire subpoena is available here.

And let’s look at when the actual subpoena was signed:

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The wingnuts do get themselves all worked up, don't they?

The fringey-right are upset at the news that Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow attended an off-the-record briefing at the White House:

A day after key White House officials declared the Fox News Channel wasn't a news organization, President Obama met with MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Talk about your delicious hypocrisy.

Fittingly, the news was broken by FNC's Bret Baier during Tuesday's "Special Report" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, relevant section at 1:45, h/t Hot Air via NBer Thomas Stewart):

BRET BAIER, HOST: And finally, during this morning's off-camera White House briefing with reporters, ABC's Jake Tapper asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the ongoing White House attacks on FOX News Channel.

After being asked about the charge that FOX isn't a real news organization, Gibbs answered, quote "We render opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness of that coverage."

Tapper: "That's a sweeping declaration that they're not a news organization. How are they different from say, ABC, MSNBC, Univision?"

Gibbs: "You and I should watch around 9:00 tonight or 5:00 this afternoon."

Tapper: "I'm not talking about the opinion programs or issues you have with certain reports. I'm talking about saying that thousands of individuals who work for a media organization do not work for a news organization. Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?"

Gibbs: "That is our opinion."

Well, the White House's strong opinions about our opinion shows - - Glenn Beck runs at 5:00 p.m. and Sean Hannity at 9:00 p.m. -- apparently do not extend to similar shows on other networks.

A White House official confirms to us that the audience for Monday's off the record briefing with President Obama included MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Hmmm. So the White House thinks Fox isn't a news organization because it has a perspective, and specifically points fingers at Beck and Hannity.

What does the Adminstration think Olbermann and Maddow have?

I guess it's not a problem for a new organization and its members to have a perspective so long as it's one the White House shares.

They seem to miss the big difference between people like Olbermann and Maddow: They attempt to gather and present facts on their shows. Sometimes they slip up, but it's not usually intentional. Get it?

And they're suffering from memory loss again:

The guest list included Sean Hannity, Neal Boortz, Michael Medved, Laura Ingraham, and Mike Gallagher. (Rush Limbaugh was unable to attend.) Friday’s off-the-record talk, set for 30 minutes, ended up lasting 90 minutes, where Bush told his guests that the war on terror has to be about right versus wrong, “because if it’s about Christianity versus Islam, we’ll lose.” He also showed them the pistol Saddam Hussein had when he was captured.

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Rob Waters at Hatewatch happened to catch the above short-lived video the other day:

It advises President Obama and other prominent people (“Our Dear Leader and co.”) to “leave now and give us our country back” and to do so by next week.

“If you stay,” the silent video message continues, “ ‘We, The People’ will systematically dismantle you, destroy you and reclaim what is rightfully ours. …

“We are angry and we are ready to take back the rights of the people. We will fight and We will win. …

“Dead line [sic] for your national response: October 15, 2009

“Thank you to all patriots who support our cause. … Be prepared for when the fateful day of the declaration of war is nationally announced.”

As the post notes in an update, the video was taken down shortly after it appeared on the SPLC site with no explanation. However, we managed to capture it before then and have reproduced it here in its original form, with a C&L tag at the end.

The "National Militia, Soldiers of Freedom" is not a known organization of any kind. Most likely it is some guy sitting in his basement.

This is about 99.99999999 percent certain to be just so much hot air from the "Patriot" movement and its attendant lunatic fringe. It reminds me of the threat to organize a "Million Man Militia" march back in July that never came close to materializing.

These kinds of delusions of grandeur are endemic to the Patriot movement, and are part and parcel of the grand paranoia about a looming New World Order planning to imprison conservatives and the radical communist regime of Barack Obama. That is, not only do they wildly imagine the nefarious conspiracy out to destroy America, but their imaginations similarly run riot when assessing their own breadth and strength -- not mention their abilities to act on their fantasies.

Still, the spread of this kind of rhetoric underscores the violent mindset of the militia units we now see forming at various locales around the country. Eventually, someone competent is going to act on it. And it's clearly being abetted by the wild fearmongering being promulgated by the likes of Glenn Beck and other right-wing pundits.

Indeed, you have to wonder if this is the kind of thing Glenn Beck had in mind in his recent interview with Newsmax:

"I fear a Reichstag moment," he said, referring to the 1933 burning of Germany's parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed on communists and Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional liberties and consolidate power.

"God forbid, another 9/11. Something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced."

Of course, I think we can predict now that if there is another Oklahoma City -- rather than a 9/11 -- Glenn Beck will also be calling it a "Reichstag moment" and claiming it's the product of a government conspiracy to clamp down on civil rights.

This is why he and the rest of the right-wing chorus have been so eager to dismiss the existence of right-wing extremists -- even in the face of obvious evidence that the violent crazies are coming out of the woodwork. We can thank the tea parties for providing the fertile ground for much of this rhetoric.

If you want a sampling of how bad it's getting, check out the video below, which I captured from the same YouTube site as the one that hosted the "warning" video. The owner stocks it up with Alex Jones conspiracy videos, but this profile of the militias caught my eye:

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I know most of America understands this, but let me say it anyway. President Obama's speech to the middle east was not meant for the neocon, warmongering fringe psychos like Charles Krauthammer. He was apoplectic on Brett Baier's show today on FOX because Obama's team didn't craft a speech that the AEI would approve of. It was meant to reach out to the Muslim population and try to repair some of the damage caused by war hungry neocon fanatics that got their wish under George Bush with disastrous consequences.

Kauthammer: The damage in policy was rather small. The damage to our position philosophically was large. On policy the speech was small because the speech was so abstract and vapid in self absorbed that it didn't touch on a lot of policy except on Iran. Here he was exceedingly weak, that was the weakest statement on Iran on Nukes in at least eight or nine years from anyone in the west....there was once again apologies over and over again. Apologies in moral equivalence....

Moral equivalency was his theme and he gets crazier as he goes on...What he obviously means is that George Bush and Cheney are no longer in power to incite violence around the world...

President Obama's message has a much greater chance to start influencing some hearts and minds in the middle east where we need to do exactly that. I hope they realize that we all don't want to invade their countries and turn them into Christians. On that major point he succeeded. To all the neocon pundits that unfortunately dominate our airwaves I think I speak for many liberals when I say: Go Cheney yourself.

I want to give some props to Ed Morrissey (who I disagree with on most issues, but met and like personally) for not taking the usual conservative line as he called the speech: Quite Good. The readers on Hot Air were not too please with Ed on this one. I doubt you can read many of their comments because you'll constantly read teabagger nonsense about Obama like this: 'The first Muslim president,' and so forth...

And Malkin's comment section is much different then ours because we don't pre-screen and then approve people like they do.

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Bill O'Reilly had Amanda Carpenter on The O'Reilly Factor yesterday (she's now with the Washington Times) to do one his segments called "Policing the Net," which is supposed to highlight the wackiness on the left and right side of the blogosphere. It's an attempt to minimize us, as usual.

The segment dealt with blogger reactions over Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. O'Reilly singled out Michelle Malkin's Hot Air as a blog that had nutty posts on it regarding the Supreme Court nomination.

What O'Reilly did is typical of what some mainstream media types do to us -- and also is what Michelle Malkin, this proprietor of Hot Air, has a history of doing: He cherry-picked some crazy comments and assigned them to the bloggers as if they wrote it as one of their pieces.

Hot Air rightly has a legitimate gripe, because they didn't write the crazy comments that O'Reilly uses to attack them with, but it was from one of their pre-screened commenters instead:

O'Reilly: Alright, I'm going to read a couple of comments, these are from bloggers. Free Republic is probably the roughest right wing website....

This comes from Hot Air.com, "Unqualified, militant and socialist. NEXT please. The GOP has to block any of Hussein's (That's the president) extremist picks".

You know when you read something like that nobody's going to block the pick. Do you ever think who's writing this? Does that person live in the US, it's just not going to happen. The numbers are overwhelmingly democratic and they're going to vote for her.

And the guy who writes this, I guess isn't living here. Let's got to the liberal side.

Amanda Carpenter, once a loyal rightie, didn't even bother to offer up a defense for them (or for Kos). I guess getting a gig with the Moonies has affected her judgment.

I want to ask Allahpundit a question: How does it feel? Your boss has set this very standard up on her own blog by going into liberal blogger comment sections (she does that to C&L quite often) and then cherry-picking our comments to prove her own silly talking points of the moment. It doesn't feel good, does it?

Yeah, you defended Kos one time, but since Malkin set the standard a long time ago, your defense is hollow. Go read her book "Unhinged," and see where it goes.

In response, I know I've highlighted their commenters repeatedly to try and show the MSM what goes on there too. Of course, it's very difficult to post on most right-wing blogs. On the left, we've always kept it pretty open, but once wingers came here and left lynching pictures on my site back in 2005, so I had to change my policies.

The MSM, which was afraid of the right-wingers, used our comments sections to try and paint liberal bloggers as crazy, anti-American traitors who are mean-spirited and vile people. The media always wanted to never give a face to the liberal blogs, but depicted us as this formless, nasty comment entity blob that oozes around the Internet so that it would scare away readers from our work. That didn't work out very well, because readers understood it was a bogus claim. You see, they read what we write and how we present it to our readers. And now the liberal blogosphere is an industry standard that the traditional media are imitating in their quest to catch up with us.

I do agree with Hot Air that O'Reilly smeared them, but I have no sympathy for them, because Michelle Malkin is the queen of using this tactic. Malkin then went on Fox and complained, and righties are asking for a retraction from BillO. Good luck with that, and too bad. You set this up, and now you get to taste what you cooked.

Everyone knows that comments on blogs do not equal what I or any other blogger means when they post. I never even curse in my posts (who would have guessed, since I'm a dirty f*&king hippie). And if Malkin wants an apology she should start by apologizing to all of us first.

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It's pretty much getting to the point where, if you heard it on Fox, you can pretty much be assured it's a lie. Especially when the subject is global warming.

It's not just Sean Hannity, though he's bad enough. It's pretty much every single anchor and reporter they have. On the subject of global warming, they seem incapable of reporting a single straight fact.

Take Neil Cavuto yesterday. He opened the segment by talking about how cold temperatures are right now. This is a big surprise, since we're in the dead of winter.

But this is part of the larger theme: It's colder than crap here in America, so that must mean there's no global warming! We're hearing it constantly.

Fairly typical of this approach was the e-mail we got yesterday from a reader who wanted to defend Hannity:

Sean Hannity may be many things, but your claim his statement about 2009 being colder is a lie doesn't hold water. In fact, Accuweather.com says this winter may be the worst and coldest since 1985.

http://www.accuweather.com/news-weather-features.asp?#extremes

Please stop misleading people into this global warming crap.

Dave Boylen

Maui, Hawaii

If you go to the story he links, you'll find a story about how we're getting record-cold temperatures this year in the United States.

Because, of course, the USA is the only part of the globe that matters. Temperatures elsewhere? Who cares?

It's the same approach Cavuto's guest, a Palin fan who built an ice sculpture showing Al Gore blowing hot air, took in the above segment.

Even though the reality, as we explained, is that in terms of global temperatures, 2009 will go down as one of the hottest years on record.

Cavuto and his guest also plop out the polar-bear canard -- that polar-bear populations are actually at new heights. This, too, is just a flat-out falsehood:

First, it's important to note that scientists lack historical data on polar bear numbers—they only have rough estimates. What we do know, though, is that in the 1960s, polar bear populations dropped precipitously due to over-hunting. When restrictions on polar bear harvests were put in place in the early 1970s, populations rebounded. That situation was a conservation success story ... but the current threat to polar bears is entirely different, and more dire.

Today's polar bears are facing the rapid loss of the sea-ice habitat that they rely on to hunt, breed, and, in some cases, to den. Last summer alone, the melt-off in the Arctic was equal to the size of Alaska, Texas, and the state of Washington combined—a shrinkage that was not predicted to happen until 2040. The loss of Arctic sea ice has resulted in a shorter hunting season for the bears, which has led to a scientifically documented decline in the best-studied population, Western Hudson Bay, and predictions of decline in the second best-studied population, the Southern Beaufort Sea.

... At the most recent meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (Copenhagen, 2009), scientists reported that of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing, and seven have insufficient data on which to base a decision. (The number of declining populations has increased from five at the group's 2005 meeting.)

Warming deniers like Hannity and Cavuto lie with impunity, and the worst part is, no one will ever hold them accountable. In 10 years, when they are proven catastrophically wrong, they'll find ways to claim they were actually right.

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