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Glenn Beck says the rest of the media -- what he calls "the fringe media," which makes sense only if you live on Planet Beck -- should be covering what he's covering: Which is to say, his thesis that the Obama White House is a secret conspiracy to overthrow American capitalism and replace it with communism.

It's a refrain we're hearing from Fox a lot these days. They've been running ads attacking the other networks for not covering "the ACORN scandal" that they largely created out of whole cloth. There is, of course, a perfectly good reason they haven't: the shoddy journalistic standards Fox has adopted in these stories, ably limned by Joe Conason and Media Matters.

With Beck the problem is even more obvious: His entire "Tree of Revolution" is the kind of guilt-by-association conspiracist wingnuttery that heretofore had been almost solely the province of John Birch Society filmstrips. Now this kind of extremism is being broadcast daily to an audience of millions.

I mean, look at the thing. Right at its root, he has Woodrow Wilson -- one of the more authoritarian presidents in our history. In fact, he was most noted for his implementation of the Sedition Act of 1918, which was later repealed after Wilson-era abuses.

What was the purpose of the Sedition Act? Why, to outlaw revolutionaries and put them in jail.

That's some root of the "Tree of Revolution" there.

But then, there's nothing particularly coherent about Beck's guilt-by-association game here. It's just whatever names he can throw up around Barack Obama's name to make the president appear like he's surrounded by a bunch of communist radicals, rather than the Wall Street Establishmentarians he in reality is surrounded by.

Only on Planet Beck.

Thank God for Joe Conason, who's a consistent champion of the poor and working class. He writes about the trumped-up hysteria about ACORN - and says Republicans who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones:

[...] ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished. No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a "pimp and ho," but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). And while the idea of getting housing assistance for a brothel was clever, what ACORN really does, every day, is help those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Perhaps the congressional investigation now demanded by some Republican politicians would be a useful exercise, if conducted impartially. A fair investigation might begin to dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by right-wing media outlets.

Among the most popular canards on the right, repeated constantly by conservative pundits and politicians, is that ACORN has been found guilty of engaging in deliberate voter fraud, using federal funds. In reality, ACORN has registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the country over the past five years -- a laudable record with a very low incidence of fraud of any kind.

Over the past several years, a handful of ACORN employees have admitted falsifying names and signatures on registration cards, in order to boost the pay they received. When ACORN officials discovered those cases, they informed the state authorities and turned in the miscreants. (That was why the Bush Justice Department's blatant attempt to smear ACORN with rushed, election-timed indictments became a national scandal for Republicans rather than Democrats.) The proportion of fraud is infinitesimal. For example, a half-dozen ACORN workers were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election. They had completed fewer than two dozen false registrations -- out of more than a million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. The mythology that suggests that thousands or even millions of illegal registrants voted is itself a fraud.

If only the Republicans who have worked up a frenzy over ACORN's alleged crimes were so indignant about real and damaging voter fraud -- such as the amazing case of Young Political Majors, the firm that ran GOP registration efforts in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere before the authorities in Orange County, Calif., busted its president, Mark Anthony Jacoby, and sent him to jail last year. He had built a lucrative partisan career by teaching his minions to deceive thousands of voters into registering as Republicans rather than Democrats, among other scams. Of course, the only on-air mention of the Young Political Majors scandal on Fox News was made by blogger Brad Friedman -- and the national media, mainstream and conservative, generally ignored it. They were too busy generating "controversy" over ACORN.

So now the overhyped voting registration tales are metastasizing into wild accusations about ACORN's finances and programs, including claims that the group will receive billions in federal bailout funding and that it is a hotbed of corruption, perhaps even murder. In fact, ACORN affiliates -- those not involved with voter registration -- have received a few million dollars annually in federal funding. The group is not scheduled to receive any bailout money (although working people would probably benefit more from subsidizing ACORN than greasing AIG and Goldman Sachs).

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Joe Conason warned me that people were going to have a hard time saying the title of my book. I guess he was right -- Don Lemon had a rough time of it last night when he hosted me and Fran Townsend, a former Bush administration Homeland Security official, on CNN Newsroom.

The discussion did give me a chance to talk about that Homeland Security bulletin and how accurate it was. I did try to see if Townsend could shed some light on when it was commissioned, but we ran out of time.

In any event, let me know how I did.

When it comes to scandals at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Reagan-era controversies would appear to take the cake. As Joe Conason explained not too long ago, Reagan’s HUD scandal included “politically connected Republicans criminally exploit[ing] the same housing assistance programs they routinely denounced as ‘wasteful.’”

As it turns out, Bush’s HUD scandals aren’t generating nearly the same amount of attention, but the controversies are nearly as serious.

Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson demanded that the Philadelphia Housing Authority transfer a $2 million public property to a developer at a substantial discount, then retaliated against the housing authority when it refused to do so, a recent court filing alleges.

The authority’s director, Carl Greene, contends in a court affidavit that Jackson called Philadelphia’s mayor in 2006 to demand the transfer to the developer, Kenny Gamble, a former soul-music songwriter who is a business friend of Jackson’s. Jackson’s aides followed up with “menacing” threats about the property and other housing programs in at least a dozen letters and phone calls over an 11-month period, Greene said in an interview.

Greene and his colleagues have alleged in the court filing that Philadelphia is now paying a severe price for disobeying a Bush Cabinet official. The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently vowed to strip the city’s housing authority of its ability to spend some federal funds, a move that the authority said could raise rents for most of its 84,000 low-income tenants and force the layoffs of 250 people. […]

“The secretary was determined that we turn over this land to this specific developer,” Greene said in an interview. “I refused. . . . He didn’t have the ability to remove me. So he resorted to these extraordinary measures to extract what he wanted.”

Mark Kleiman notes that Bush and Jackson have effectively turned the Department of Housing and Urban Development into “an extortion racket,” which, under the circumstances, sounds about right.

Joe Conason gives some historical context in the NY Observer:

Someday, historians will wonder why the highest officials in the Bush Justice Department believed that they could inflict heavy-handed political abuse on federal prosecutors-and get away with it. The punishment of the eight dismissed U.S. Attorneys betrays a strong sense of impunity in the White House, as if the President and his aides assumed that nobody would complain about these outrages or attempt to hold them accountable.

That confidence was understandable, of course, after so many years of living with a docile press corps and a compliant Congress. And the precedent for this misconduct was set long ago.

There was once another Republican prosecutor who insisted on behaving professionally instead of obeying partisan hints from the White House. His name was Charles A. Banks, and the Washington press corps said nothing when he was punished for his honesty by the administration of the first President Bush. Keep reading...

Agitprop: G-Dub to World's largest largest democracy..."BITE ME"

Calling All Wingnuts: Terriffic site featuring recordings of our hero calling winger talk shows and challenging the unhinged hosts...with facts! Rush, Laura Ingraham, O'Reilly, and more.

State of the Day: I feel safer knowing that singer, Morrissey, has been interrogated by by both British and American intel authorities. Singers seem to be drawing special attention. Recently, Henry Rollins was labled a "possible threat" by the Australian government. WTF?

Petrelis Files We may be safe from singers, but...these two DHS audits might frighten you about the current status of U.S. ports.

Not a blog, but Business as usual by Joe Conason is excellent.

Roger Ailes: Konservative Komedy KornerPetrelis Files We may be safe from singers, but...these two DHS audits might frighten you about the current status of U.S. ports.

Not a blog, but Business as usual by Joe Conason is excellent.

Roger Ailes: Konservative Komedy Korner

The Leftcoaster, AmericaBlog and Joe Conason have Jeff Gannon possibly involved in Rove-Gate.

There's nothing that fool would want more than is to have people talking about him again. That is except this part of his anatomy.

From Today's show, Al had Klein and Joe Conason on talking about the new Hillary book

Download | play -WMA-Part I

Download | play -WMA-Part II

Joe rips Klein.

Newshounds has the transcripts

From the Air America's website: FOR THE RECORD: KLEIN WAS TOLD ABOUT CONASON For those who just heard the interview with Ed Klein: Al called Adrian Zackheim, and was assured that Klein had been told that Joe Conason would be on the program. But it wasn't necessarily a lie. "He's been through so much this week," Zackheim told Al, "that maybe he forgot."