The violation of the no-fly zone Wednesday led more than 30,000 people to quickly leave the White House complex, the Capitol and the Supreme Court and triggered an eight-minute "red alert" at the White House.

At the time, Bush was riding a bicycle at a wildlife center in suburban Maryland and wasn't told of the alert until after he had completed his ride at 12:50

According to the latest campaign finance report, Wal-Mart has spent more than $280,000 trying to overturn one local ordinance. This makes this little local election the most expensive in Flagstaff's history. The Wal-Mart money is spent on full-page newspaper ads and mailings, both full of vicious Orwellian rhetoric implying that a zoning ordinance that limits store size is somehow the same as burning books. Yeah, go figure.

So, when H. Lee Scott Jr. says that Wal-Mart doesn't do that sort of thing anymore, he's a liar....I'm so surprised.

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Rep. Steve Cohen's "Big Lie" theory really got the RWNM up in arms.

Megyn Kelly told a guest on her show that nobody ever made a Nazi reference to attack the left on FOX News, ever/ She knows she said, because she watches the network, do you? here at C&L we've documented the many cases of FOX News hosts using the "Nazi" analogy. Glenn beck frequently uses it as has Bill O'Reilly. Well, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show rebutted Megyn's claim and strung together a host of Fox Newsers using the Nazi analogy which included BillO and someone even used it on Kelly's own show.

Bill O'Reilly got very upset about Stewart's piece and so he responded to it in his Personal Segment and briefly addressed his audience in his very own way.

O'Reilly: Jon Stewart didn't defend the man but he believes there's this hypocrisy in play and that I your humble correspondent am a part of it.

[O'Reilly from 2008]: If you look back at what happened in Germany and what Hitler and his cutthroats did back then and the hate filled blogs of what they're doing now.

And here is the context of that letter and that statement...

Bill then goes through the back story explaining why he compared the Huffington Post to Hitler. It turns out that Bill was infuriated not by an article or a blog post on the Huffington Post, but rather a nasty comment -- that was later deleted -- about Nancy Reagan. Now the high comedy begins, watch....

I'll submit to you ladies and gentleman that my comparison of the vile Nazi propaganda machine is dead on. you can make the call on that. Jon Stewart didn't mention Nancy Reagan or the context of my remarks, he just used a short clip of a much longer statement....

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Congressman Cohen directed his comments at Republicans who oppose Obamacare and classified them as using Nazi propaganda techniques. That's what he did. I pointed out a hateful post on the Huffington Post that should never have appeared, should have been taken down.

Did you just see that? He conned his audience into thinking that his Nazi analogy was taken out of context and appropriate because he used it to attack the Huffington Post, but Rep. Steve Cohen's was not because he used it against Republicans. That's FOX Logic, ladies and gentleman fronm your humble author...
Oh, by the way. using the incredible C&L archives I found a few other times Bill has been justified to call people Nazis. .. Back in December of 2005, Bill O'Reilly called people who protested an Ann Coulter appearance zealots and Nazis..

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O'Reilly: The far left in this country, the zealots, these are zealots-are Nazis...and this is exactly what the Nazis did.

He did it again back in 2007 when he attacked Kos during his attack on Jet Blue:

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OReilly: "It's like the Ku Klux Klan. It's like the Nazi party."

Colbert: "Exactly! The Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were both notorious for allowing people to express unpopular views in an open and free forum."

He also did it while he talked to Ms. Hamm, who actually disagreed with him over the same comment.

O'Reilly: What's the difference between the KKK and Arianna Huffington? What's the difference?

Ham: I think there is a difference,.

O'Reilly: I don't see any difference between Huffington and the Nazis. It's her, It's her, It's her...I didn't say she's a Nazi.

Ham: Alright.

O'Reilly: There's no difference between what the two do.

So in O'Reilly World, as long as he thinks he's applied the proper context to call somebody a Nazi -- in this case, a deleted comment from an anonymous person -- in which he smeared the entire Huffington Post, then that's A-OK. Media Matters writes: So O'Reilly's defense for comparing the "hate-filled blogs" to Nazis is that one random commenter on the Huffington Post said something cruel about Nancy Reagan in a comment that was later deleted. Funny how the full context doesn't actually make his Nazi analogy seem all that reasonable. And he's also cool with painting people he disagrees with as "The KKK." Very twisted logic indeed.

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Glenn Beck has a history of appropriating Martin Niemoller's famous poem, "First They Came..." -- one of the most memorable descriptions of the creep of Nazi totalitarianism -- for his own purposes, often by way of describing his own self-martyrdom, because of course it's really about people like him:

"You ever heard of the old poem 'first they came for the Jews'? Well, first they came for the banks, then it was the insurance companies, then it was the car companies."

"First they came for the Jews and I stayed silent-- next I'll show you the very latest attacks on me ..."

He was at it again on Thursday, declaring that attempts to confront his penchant for violent rhetoric and its effects on the public were an evil attempt to silence and persecute poor Glenn:

BECK: But the pink symbol should be a lesson to everyone. I don't care what you are, who you are -- everyone!

"At first they came for the Jews, and I didn't say anything. And then they came --"

Silence equals death. Never -- never allow someone to take away your First Amendment right of free speech. It's number one for a reason! Because that's the most important -- your right to assemble, your right to speak out! It's Number One. Guard it. Protect it. Revel in it. Responsibly share it.

Of course, that's the issue, isn't it? Not that anyone wants to take away Beck's rights to free speech -- but they are concerned because he is so profoundly irresponsible with his abuse of his media megaphone to demonize and smear other people and indulge eliminationist rhetoric against his "progressive" nemeses.

But it's really quite revealing that Beck NEVER gets Niemoller's poem right. There are a number of different versions with slight variations, but the most common is this one:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists ,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

The first two victim groups cited were Communists and trade unionists. Both of whom happen to be groups high on Glenn Beck's list of groups he likes to demonize.

Indeed, for most his tenure at Fox we've been hearing about how President Obama is eeeevil because he's "surrounding himself" with "dedicated Communists" like Van Jones:

And of course, someday, he warns, we ordinary liberals are going to have to take those Communists out by "shooting them in the head".

Maybe that's why Glenn Beck never can get Niemoller's poem right: It really is about people like him.

Santorum Scandal-Nazi references thrown at the NY Times

viaSwing State Project: Two major updates on the Santorum Scandal.

Chuck Pennacchio, Democrat challenging Santorum in 2006, has posted a startling video on his blog of Santorum using a Nazi slander against the New York Times.

The Anti-Defamation League is outraged

Check out Bob's post on this.

For a man who opposes the use of Nazis references, Santorum sure likes to use them.

Digby torches Ricky: Ricky In Paris: So, we have both Byrd and Santorum making references to Hitler as regards this rules change. One is barely comprehensible and posits an absurd analogy to Democrats being Hitler in Paris. The other quite astutely points out that these arbitrary rules changes to advance the power of one party are not without precedent.

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Glenn Beck got all worked up yesterday defending Arizonans from the outrageous, slanderous comparisons of their fair new police state to Nazi Germany. Heaven forfend:

Beck: Arizona sure is putting the AZ in Nazi. I really hate to rain on the hate parade, but could we slow down for just a second here and ask: You’re out of your mind? Are you comparing the systematic cold-blooded extermination of millions of Jews, to America making sure people are here legally? The parallels are non-existent.

Of course, Beck blithely neglects to mention that the Nazi laws requiring papers were originally about "making sure people were there legally" too. That's how police states work. The roundups come later.

And in case anyone forgot, there have been a lot of comparisons of liberals generally and the Obama administration to Nazis and Germany. Right there on Fox News, a number of times. By a guy named Glenn Beck.

We provide the examples in the video.

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The other day, our friend Markos went on Countdown and called out Glenn Beck and his fellow teabaggers for their incessant use of eliminationist rhetoric.

Of course, this deeply upset Glenn Beck, who responded on his show yesterday (transcript via Jed):

I want to start in an unusual place. I want to show you what the founder of the Daily Kos, which is this far-left wing blog, said. Here's what he said just the other day about tea parties:

This is what the people voted for, and it's one thing to oppose it on policy, it's another thing to use the kind of exterminationist, eliminationist rhetoric that they're using in appealing to violence and that sort of thing.

OK. Extermination talk? I haven't heard any of the extermination talk. It sounds like, again, he's calling us Nazis. How can you paint the right like Nazis?

Maybe Glenn Beck hasn't heard any eliminationist rhetoric because he's one of the loudest voices using it, and doing so on a regular basis:

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As I noted awhile back:

Beck actually has been engaging in eliminationist rhetoric in attacking progressives since June of last year, though he's been recently ratcheting it down to new depths.

I compiled the video above with a sampling from the past nine months. In it, you can see Beck call progressives a "cancer" (multiple times), "the disease that's killing us," a "virus," a "parasite," "vampires" who will "suck the life out" of the Democratic Party, and claim that progressives intend the "destruction of the Constitution" and will strike it a "death blow".

Since then, we've been treated to such disquisitions as this:

Beck: What they're about to pass is not a tumor. Because the doctor can come over here and say, 'Yeah, there's a tumor here, and we've got to go in and cut this out.' I don't know if you can cut this tumor out. Maybe not. But you can try. But what they're about to pass is a bloodstream disease. It will be injected into our system and it will be incurable.

Beck: I think they're gonna pass this thing. They are gonna do whatever it takes to pass this, and they're not going to go the traditional way, they are gonna go the way of snakes and cockroaches. They're gonna crawl out in the cover of darkness, and they're going to pass this, make it happen one way or another.

Apparently, though, Beck is confused about just what Markos meant, because of course he couldn't be talking about people like Beck. Somehow, it has to do with Beck's Planet Bizarro-style confusion about political categories -- as in Beck's reconfiguration of things to equate neo-Nazis with the "Progressive Right":

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(h/t Heather for the video)

C&Lers know that I've had a history with the odious Mark Williams over the years. He once sent out an email claiming that we were trying to hurt his dog to drum up support for his failing radio show.

With no where to go he turned to the tea party movement and now is leading one of those buses that drives around screaming about death panels and calling Obama an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief' who is taking away our freedoms and whatnot. Dylan had him come on the air following Mark Potok of the SPLC, who issued a new extremism report that says hate groups have exploded in 2009. Dylan wanted to know from Williams why they tolerate hate groups becoming part of the tea party movement.

Mark, how do you draw the bright line between the very admirable and understandable principles that are advocated by so many....and the more radical views and hide if you will inside the tea party umbrella?

Williams: That's real simple. There's wingnuts and there's normal people...

Ratigan: It's not that simple...

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What confuses me about the tea party, is the tea parties willingness to accept the wingnuts as you put it

Williams: So it's our fault that they are nuts?

Ratigan: You have not shamed them Mark....Do you accept racists and Nazis in the tea parties?

Williams: Here at Sacramento...

Ratigan: I'm asking you a question my man, do you want to have a conversation or do you want to come on my TV show and do a commercial for yourself?

Ratigan walks off camera.

Williams: I'm answering the question. We have a women here from a local NBC affiliate who after an anti-Semitic rant at Sac State was promoted from reporter to anchor does that make NBC, does that make you an anti-Semitic?

Ratigan: Mark, do I run NBC? Are you a guest on my show? Do you have any intention of answering any of my questions because I don't want to continue to fool with this. You're wasting valuable oxygen. Can we please cut off this man's microphone, He has no interest in answering my questions, Mark a pleasure. Actually not really a pleasure. It was offensive, you're offensive. Your treatment of my show as a vehicle to spread your propaganda, ignore my questions, offensive and an indication of what is wrong with the dialogue in this country. Period. Not to mention that a group that would accept Nazis and racists.

The comedy started as soon as Williams tried to separate himself from wingnuts. Mark is never on to answer any question and Dylan got a taste of what an idiot this man is. Williams will never be able to justify the Radical-hate filled-Patriot-racist-right wing elements that make up the tea parties.

FOX News and movement conservatism reached out to the outer fringes of Planet Wingnuttia to build the tea party movement. Obviously not everyone is part of the Patriot movement that has joined in, but a large segment of these haters do inhabit there and have found a nice new home to be very open with their beliefs. They certainly carry enough signs around at their tea party events to let the world know what and who they are.

Ratigan gets mad props for dislodging Williams from his show. Yes, it's unfortunate that he gets asked to come on many cable news shows, but this is the best possible treatment. It's too bad that not enough Villagers take the few minutes to understand the teabaggers. They are merely an extension of the movement conservatives of the 80's only they didn't have a the media infrastructure that they do know.

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David Sirota observes in his column this week the really ugly nature of Glenn Beck's express hatred of progressives, embodied in his CPAC speech:

To wild applause, he labeled this alleged tumor of "community" the supposedly evil "progressivism" -- and he told disciples to "eradicate it" from the nation.

The lesson was eminently clear, coming in no less than the keynote address to one of America's most important political conventions. Beck taught us that a once-principled conservative movement of reasoned activists has turned into a mob -- one that does not engage in civilized battles of ideas. Instead, these torch-carriers, gun-brandishers and tea partiers follow an anti-government terrorist attack by cheering a demagogue's demand for the physical annihilation of those with whom he disagrees -- namely anyone, but particularly progressives, who value "community."

No doubt, some conservatives will parse, insisting Beck was only endorsing the "eradication" of progressivism but not of progressives. These same willful ignoramuses will also likely say that the Nazis' beef was with Judaism but not Jews, and that white supremacists dislike African-American culture but have no problem with black people.

Other conservatives will surely depict Beck's "eradication" line as just the jest of a self-described "rodeo clown" -- merely the "fusion of entertainment and enlightenment," as his radio motto intones. But if Beck is half as smart as he incessantly tells listeners he is, then he knows it's no joke.

What he's describing, of course, is the very subject of my last book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right:

What motivates this kind of talk and behavior is called eliminationism: a politics and a culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile, and ejection, or extermination.

Rhetorically, eliminationism takes on certain distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as beyond the pale, the embodiment of evil itself, unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus worthy of elimination. It often further depicts its designated Enemy as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and disease-like cancers on the body politic. A close corollary—but not as nakedly eliminationist—are claims that opponents are traitors or criminals and that they pose a threat to our national security.

Eliminationism is often voiced as crude "jokes," a sense of humor inevitably predicated on venomous hatred. And such rhetoric—we know as surely as we know that night follows day—eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

Beck actually has been engaging in eliminationist rhetoric in attacking progressives since June of last year, though he's been recently ratcheting it down to new depths.

I compiled the video above with a sampling from the past nine months. In it, you can see Beck call progressives a "cancer" (multiple times), "the disease that's killing us," a "virus," a "parasite," "vampires" who will "suck the life out" of the Democratic Party, and claim that progressives intend the "destruction of the Constitution" and will strike it a "death blow".

As Sirota notes, Beck is taking us down a certain path with this kind of rhetoric, and it always, as Beck himself puts it, "ends badly."

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The right-wingers were out in force yesterday in their attempt to paint the Fort Hood shootings as an act of radical Islamist jihadi terrorism, and claiming that "political correctness" kept the military from screening him as a threat -- evidently simply because he was Muslim.

Kicking things off bright and early on that front were the gang at Fox Friends, especially Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson. Kilmeade asked Geraldo Rivera early on the show:

Kilmeade: Do you think it’s time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers — anybody enlisted? Because if I'm going to be in a foxhole, if I'm gonna be stuck in an outpost, I've gotta know the guy next to me is not gonna wanna kill me.

Actually, Brian, they wouldn't have to be Muslim, or anything else, to want that -- especially, one suspects, after more than an hour in close proximity to your charming personality.

Then Carlson chimed in:

Carlson: I want to ask this question another way. Could it be that the military, because our society -- let's face it, our society has become very politically correct -- could it be that the military was also exercising political correctness, even though he had a poor performance report, and even though he spoke openly about being a radical Muslim, and had those supposed postings online, could it be that the military was exercising political correctness in not approaching him as seriously as they would have had he not been a Muslim?

Rivera answers "Yes," of course, but the answer is actually, "Political correctness has nothing to do with it." After all, the Army allows neo-Nazis within its ranks to post online and does not treat them as a particular threat -- even though they pose a variety of problems, not the least of which is that they tend to become violent themselves. If the military is practicing "political correctness," it's a peculiar kind.

Moreover, as Spencer Ackerman put it, this is a spectacularly short-sighted bit of bigotry.

But this is the way it goes. We were told by Fox News that to blame right-wingers for the actions of George Tiller’s murderer or the anti-Semite who shot up the Holocaust Museum was out of line. But Muslim soldiers — people who guard the freedoms that Fox bleats about with jingoistic sanctimony — are to be slandered by association. This is a disgrace to the memories of Spc. Kareem R. Khan, Capt. Humayun Saqib Khan, and so many others who have given their lives for this country.

David Frum, notably, chimes in with a provocative reminder for the jingoes.

That was only the beginning. These same notes were repeated throughout the day. Ackerman also noticed Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel "promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee," quoted in The Hill:

"This enemy preys on downtrodden soldiers and teaches them extremism will lift them up,” West said in a statement. “Our soldiers are being brainwashed.”

The release added that West claims “the horrible tragedy at Fort Hood is proof the enemy is infiltrating our military.”

Then there was Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey:

Retired 4-Star General Barry McCaffrey, who attended a fundraiser Thursdays night in Rochester for the Veterans Outreach Center, believes today's shooting could turn out to be an act of terrorism. “This is going to turn out to be a political act. People who are frightened of deployment don't murder their fellow soldiers. This was completely out of the ordinary, we've never seen anything like this. We have murders periodically in the armed forces, but it's somebody 20 years old, drunk, it's two o’clock in the morning, it's drugs, it's girls, it's cards its something so this was planned mass murder.”

Blue Texan at Firedoglake has a decent roundup from the wingnutosphere. Media Matters has the rundown of the insanity in the right-wing media.

Interestingly, later that morning on Fox and Friends, Kilmeade interviewed two real experts -- Dr. Paul Ragan, a former Navy psychiatrist, and Pat Brown, a professional criminal profiler -- who basically tried to explain that he was full of crap when he tried to paint the event as an act of Islamic jihad.

Kilmeade: It seems to me, Pat, religion plays a role. He perhaps was on a different mission.

Brown: Well, Brian, actually, I think religion does not play a role in this. What we're actually looking at is a typical mass murderer.

Mass murderers are either two age groups. They are either teenagers, who are disgruntled with where they are in life, and don't think they're going to be anything -- those teenagers that say 'I'm being bullied and nobody likes me, and so let me take everybody out -- or they're middle-aged men who are going downhill in life -- they're having problems with people, personality issues, you know, going up against authority. For whatever reasons, they're failing, and then when they start failing they have to find something to hang their hat on, they have to blame something.

So he happened to pick what he picked. But I don't think it really has anything to do with him being Muslim or any kind of "jihad." I think he just wanted to kill people and this was his excuse.

Kilmeade: Well, he did yell out, "Allah," that's kind of an odd thing to yell out for somebody who was just unhappy with his success in life.

Brown: But he was already going downhill. He's a psychopath, and that -- he's gonna say something.

Ragan went on to back up Brown's assessment. Kilmeade just didn't want to hear it.

Nobody on the right does. Because it's so much easier to bash Muslims when you have great cover like this, and the folks on the right aren't going to let it go to waste.

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Ann Coulter revealed her inner Lyndon LaRouche last night on Sean Hannity's Fox News show:

Coulter: This has nothing to do with reality. There -- I mean, most of the things, it's not a matter of forgiving Rush for saying them, he never said them -- but one thing that I think might be, I don't know, in my book, unforgivable, would be being a Nazi collaborator. And oh yeah, part of the consortium trying to buy the St. Louis Rams is still George Soros, who admitted on TV to having collaborated with the Nazis. But he's fine, because he owns the Democratic Party.

... But in any event, I would wager that a fair number of the players would agree more with Rush Limbaugh's politics than with George Soros' politics. I mean, not for nothing, a lot of them are Christians, point one. Point two -- and I mean real Christians, you know, Christ Christians -- and point two, they make a lot of money. I don't know that they like all these tax-and-spend plans of the Democrats. So I wouldn't hold it against the players. It's just these wussy owners --

Hannity: I want to know if Dave Checketts is now going to tell Soros to take a hike. Maybe that's the next question. Somebody needs to ask the NFL if they want George Soros to be a part owner. If this is the world we live in --

Coulter: An admitted -- right -- and he's an admitted Nazi collaborator. He pointed out who the Jews were in Hungary when he was 15 years old. He admitted that to Steve Croft on TV.

She's right, this explanation certainly had nothing to do with reality. Leaving aside the absurdity of claiming that NFL owners -- who are probably some of the most right-wing rock-ribbed group of Republicans in business -- were being "politically correct" and "prejudiced against conservatives" (as Hannity put it) ... And the absurdity of claiming that "he didn't say those things" by cherry-picking two fake racist quotes while ignoring the twenty genuine racist quotes ...

Coulter is not just grossly, immorally distorting Soros' story, she is also flat-out lying about it too. The claim that Soros was a "Nazi collaborator" originated with the LaRouche organization and has since spread to the likes of David Horowitz.

The facts: Soros was a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust. From Media Matters:

Michael T. Kaufman wrote in a biography of Soros, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire (Knopf, 2002), that Soros' father attempted to protect his family from Nazi persecution by paying an employee of Hungary's Ministry of Agriculture named Baumbach to take in Soros, "ostensibly as his godson." Soros accompanied his "godfather" as he went to oversee the confiscation of property from Hungarian Jews, as Media Matters has noted.

This is also where Coulter actually lies about Soros, too -- and it's an outrageous lie, too. Soros never was involved in "pointing out Jews" -- he simply accompanied his protector while he carried out his civic duties, which included confiscating property from Jews.

Here's the relevant passage from the 60 Minutes interview in question:

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