In March, Bill O'Reilly used footage of "union thugs" in Wisconsin shoving people. The clip used to illustrate his assessment had some suspicious looking palm trees in the background. Suspicious because there are no palm trees in Wisconsin. Yes, the family-friendly polite mid-western saunter around the Capitol Building was being reported as violent by right-wingers on Fox News. Those who couldn't get enough of all those wonderful tea partiers showing up with Glocks talking about watering the tree of liberty with BLOOD - denounced the teachers' union supporters as being ready to bust heads if their demands were not met. They doctored footage for it.

In Madison, there had been palm trees - blow up palm trees carried as an homage to the uprising in Egypt. Then O'Reilly tried to paint them all as psychopaths. Then the number of blow up palm trees increased, the meaning then changed. After the Factor clip above those palm tress were a big middle figure to Billo's BS. And they were still peaceful.

Mayor Bloomberg has allowed the NYPD to arrest the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. They were again pepper sprayed Wednesday. On the other side of the country, a horrible law passed during the midterms called Measure L, criminalized sleeping on the streets of San Fransisco. So the OccupySF group had a run in with SFPD last night too.

Those who oppose people who work for a living are figuring out how to kill this movement. They're going to throw whatever they can at it until something sticks.

We've grown so used to the extremist right-wing being smitten with protests and demonstrations because it's been their billionaire-funded buses bringing the outraged to photo ops. It'd be easy to assume they just enjoy the First Amendment in their venerated Constitution on display. The airing of ideas in the public square. They don't.

This is the brilliance of OccupyTogether. It disseminates the storyline. How can it be said that the Occupy Wall Street crowd are anarchists who want to eat your children for Satan / Soros / Mao / Hitler / Moveon / Unions / BlackPanthers / ACORN / Muslims / BigGovernment / Czars / Socialism / Illegal Immigrants / Obama / DeathPanels / ShariaLaw if the solidarity demonstrations are all peaceful? If it's your neighbors in your neighborhood locally being out there voicing their frustrations with a rigged system fixed for the 1 percent - it's impossible to slime all of them. The OccupyTogether movement is a Spartacus moment: "We are the 99 percent."

We are still doling out pizzas to the demonstrators. This is what I knew I could do to support locally-owned businesses and the protestors: buy pizzas across America. I had no IDEA how big it would get. Amato tells me over 440 of you have donated over $13,000 now. We've given out pizzas in seven or eight cities and it's only growing. Thank you guys for participating!

Bless her heart Michele Bachmann just can't win the song war. Maybe she should just give up and have someone make her own campaign song like Herman Cain did.

Tuesday, Bachmann greeted the crowd giving a nod to The King on the day of his birth after coming out on stage to "Promised Land." Only…. it wasn't his birthday. Fans of Elvis gathered in Graceland to celebrate his death instead.

As I'm sure you remember, Bachmann had some issues when she chose "American Girl" by Tom Petty to usher her out onto stages across Iowa. Petty wasn't too happy about it and asked Bachmann to stop or .. I suppose that would be the last dance with the Mary Jane of the Midwest.

But now Bachmann is using the Elvis Presley song "Promised Land." At least we say it was an Elvis song because he was the one who made it famous. And his is the version that Bachmann uses. The interesting thing is that it wasn't actually written by Elvis - it was actually written by Chuck Berry …. while he was in in a mid-western prison serving a sentence for armed robbery after hijacking a car at gunpoint, after sticking up a gas station and a convenience store.

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Keith Olbermann pinned the honor on him 8/17 for his remarks about Cindy Sheehan.

Download | play -WMP

Download | play -QT

Keith :

But the winner -- oh, it's the irrepressible Rush Limbaugh. On the radio, he said, quote, "Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real."

I guess she made up that dead-son-in-Iraq business! He also referred to her supporters as "dope-smoking FM types." I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics. Rush Limbaugh, today's worst person in the world!

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Credit: American Crossroads Watch

In the wake of Citizens United, ad spending has been ridiculously lopsided during this election cycle.

In Senate races, Republican-leaning interest groups outspent Democratic-leaning ones on television $10.9 million to $1.3 million, from Aug. 1 to Sept. 8, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, a company that tracks political advertising.

In the House, Republican-leaning groups outspent Democratic-leaning ones, $3.1 million to $1.5 million.

Right in the middle of all of this spending is American Crossroads, the Karl Rove organization created post-Citizens United to collect big donations from big money donors for the sole purpose of defeating candidates with ugly, negative, expensive commercials. Of course, they love to play the innocent game...

“The groups that perfected this were on the Democratic side,” said Steven Law, president and chief executive of American Crossroads, a Republican-oriented advocacy group, and its sister organization, Crossroads GPS. Crossroads GPS has been the biggest third-party player on television by far since early August.

Well, progressives aren't sitting still for it, and I'm glad to see it. That "wanted poster" image is the real deal. It offers a $100,000 reward for:

"information leading to the arrest and conviction of Karl Rove or any principal of American Crossroads for money laundering, election rigging, or felony campaign finance violations."

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via All Spin Zone: Has the GOP Senate and House leadership finally realized they have a stinking, rotting compost pile on their hands? Or has it finally dawned on them that there are simply more important things to be dealing with right now?... - From Forbes.com...

...RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmidt suggested that supporters who use the term "privatize" are listening to the wrong people.

"There's been a concerted effort on the part of Democrats to spread misinformation," she said. "The word `privatizing' has unfortunately seeped into the public dialogue." read on

Bizzaro World

via PITZ

"(Bill) LD 908, would make it illegal in Maine to abort a fetus that is known to have the 'gay gene.'"Ah, the spectre of eugenics being used to drive a wedge between liberals who identify primarily as pro-choice and those who identify primarily as supporters of gay rights."

Of course a Republican proposed this bill. Rep. Brian Duprey told the Portland Press Herald that he got the idea for the bill while listening to Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show.

This legislation borders obviously on the insane. However, if enough anti-abortion lobbyist and evangelicals tried to sign on to this bill, then wouldn't it have to force them to acknowledge that homosexuality is not a learned behaviour? TWhen the bill goes down in flames,... you get the point.

From Talk Left

Republicans to Push Faith-Based Legislation

Hawks Say What We've Been Saying All Along

They are not quick studies. We anti-war types have been arguing from day one that an American invasion of Iraq would be a disaster and would serve as the best recruitment campaign the Muslim fundies had ever seen:

A growing number of national security specialists who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein are moving to a position unthinkable even a few months ago: that the large US military presence is impeding stability as much as contributing to it and that the United States should begin major reductions in troops beginning early next year.

Their assessments, expressed in reports, think tank meetings, and interviews, run counter to the Bush administration's insistence that the troops will remain indefinitely to establish security. But some contend that the growing support for an earlier pullout could alter the administration's thinking.

Those arguing for immediate troop reductions include key Pentagon advisers, prominent neoconservatives, and some of the fiercest supporters of the Iraq invasion among Washington's policy elite.

The core of their arguments is that even as the US-led coalition goes on the offensive against the insurgency, the United States, by its very presence, is stimulating the resistance.

"Our large, direct presence has fueled the Iraqi insurgency as much as it has suppressed it," said Michael Vickers, a conservative-leaning Pentagon consultant and longtime senior CIA official who supported the war.

These people are specialists, for God's sake?

Tim Russert on the Imus show called it for Bush.

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McCain campaign manager Rick Davis took to FOX News this morning to defend the dangerous, out of control vitriol coming from McCain's rallies. His argument? John McCain was a POW!

"Look, Chris, I think we have to take this very seriously. The kind of comments made by Congressman Lewis, a big Obama supporter, are reprehensible. The idea that you're going to compare John McCain to the kinds of hate spread in the '60s by somebody like George Wallace is outrageous. Where was John McCain when George Wallace was spreading his hate and segregationist policies at that time? He was in a Vietnam prison camp serving his country with his civil rights also denied.

"Nobody knows sacrifice like John McCain does, and the idea that Barack Obama didn't address this issue directly, had his campaign walk out there with a half-baked statement that didn't even address the comments made by Lewis as related to John McCain. Barack Obama should apologize to John McCain directly for the kinds of comments made by John Lewis yesterday and that should be the end of this sordid affair."

What a WATB. The McCain campaign's central message is that Barack Obama is a an un-American terrorist sympathizer. Who the hell are they to complain when a civil rights pioneer rightly condemns them for creating a hateful atmosphere not seen since the tense days of forty years ago. McCain was right when he told Rick Warren that John Lewis was one of the wisest men he knows. It's just a shame that he now won't heed his advice.