Texas Republican Pete Olson probably figured he could get away with using a young child as a propaganda tool at a recent town hall meeting -- but he was in for a big surprise.

Republican Congressman Olson (R-TX) tells the townhall about a mother who was turned away by the free market doctors for her unborn child's heart defect. She was denied by the free market doctors but persisted and was able to find a specialized doctor and got a very delicate operation and a heart transplant 17 days after he was born. Olson then claims that the public option would have denied him the needed health care and he would have died! After being challenged he abruptly ended the discussion. Watch as he is challenged, and clueless as to what to say.

As Olson spews out his talking points, people in the crowd repeatedly point out to him that it wasn't the government who turned this poor child away, it was the insurance companies. Olson was absolutely gobsmacked when people started calling him out on his obvious gaffe as he stood there looking like a deer caught in the headlights. It’s so encouraging to see some town hall video from health care reform supporters giving these GOP shills a taste of their own medicine!

From the aptly named Doctor Zero at Hot Air:

Radio and television host Glenn Beck finds himself confronting an advertiser boycott, organized by people who don’t watch his show anyway. The primary effect of the boycott will be denying advertisers like Best Buy, CVS, and Travelocity access to Beck’s immense and rapidly growing audience. (By the way, one of the participating advertisers is GMAC. Don’t we taxpayers own five or six billion dollars worth of GMAC? Something tells me the boycott supporters include a far larger percentage of people who don’t pay any federal income tax than Beck’s audience does. GMAC should require permission from actual taxpayers before it’s allowed to engage in a silly boycott that could damage its profitability, and devalue our five billion dollar investment.)

Oh, but Doctor Zero isn't finished frothing. Obama is just as bad as people who attended KKK rallies because he attended Jeremiah Wright's church:

Perhaps we could defuse the tension by asking the boycott organizers if they think someone who sat quietly at Klan rallies for twenty years could credibly be accused of racism. I’m sure they would say “no”… and since that’s an accurate analogy for Obama’s decades at Jeremiah Wright’s Church of Racial Hatred, Beck would doubtless be moved to offer a polite apology, and we could call the boycott off...

Oh yeah, and one more thing -- Obama has never said or written anything nice about white people, and the good Doctor challenges you to find where he has:

The rest of Beck’s comment, asserting that Obama has “deep-seated hatred for white people of the white culture,” should be easy for the President’s defenders to disprove. All they have to do is cite one positive thing Obama has said or written about white culture. Anywhere. Ever. Hopefully they can get back to us before GMAC needs another taxpayer bailout, to address the self-inflicted financial damage from its participation in the boycott. I wouldn’t recommend wasting any time going through Obama’s university compositions, assuming you can find where they’re buried, and get past the three-headed guard dog... Read on...

Get it? The boycott is nonsense because President Obama really IS a racist and Glenn Beck is just speaking the truth!

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From AC360, David Gergen takes Heritage Foundation and Townhall contributor Peter Brookes to task over the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, and whether the American government gave anything up in the negotiations to get them back to the United States.

I think it's about time we're talking instead of the aggressive tone we've taken under the Bush administration, where the first reflex is to threaten to drop a bomb on someone's head, or label them part of an "Axis of Evil", and then wonder why they might want weapons of their own.

Of course nothing the Obama administration does is going to satisfy any of the right wingers out there, especially if it involves Bill Clinton to boot. Had this been St. Ronnie making this deal, they'd have been singing his praises to the heavens.

HILL: They are home now.

Digging deeper, though, on the global implications of how they got home, what Tom Foreman was talking about before the break. Of course, this meeting all happened at a time when North Korea hasn't hesitated to test nukes and missiles and on the heels of news that three more Americans are now being held in a country America also does not have a diplomatic relationship with, Iran.

So, does this pump up one dictator and perhaps embolden others?

We're joined now by senior political analyst David Gergen, and Peter Brookes, former Pentagon official in the Bush administration and also currently with the Heritage Foundation.

Gentlemen, good to have both of you with us.

PETER BROOKES, SENIOR FELLOW, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Good evening.

HILL: David, I want to start with you. It -- it's almost impossible to ignore the message many people are saying this sends to North Korea and, for that matter, to other nations, as we just mentioned, who may be on shaky ground with the U.S., that, the next time they have U.S. citizens in their custody, they can use them as bargaining chips for perhaps access to high-level U.S. politicians, essentially rewarding bad behavior.

So, David, how does the U.S. keep that from happening?

Continue reading »

The conservative blog Townhall has a new spokesperson making the rounds these days and well, let's just say she is the perfect example of today's GOP -- and all that is wrong with it.

Jillian Bandes has been quite busy lately, appearing on CSPAN Friday morning, then showing up on MSNBC where she got very nasty with our dear friend Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, who laid waste to her right wing talking points.

Bandes is no stranger to controversy. As Tintin at one of my favorite blogs, Sadly No! reminds us, she made her bones by publishing an anti-Arab screed in her college newspaper:

Hey, whatever happend to Jillian Bandes? You remember her. She was the redneck wingnut who was fired from the UNC student newspaper after writing a column advocating that all Arab guys should be strip-searched at airports and that this wasn’t really a problem because Arab guys would enjoy getting all “sexed up” at the airport. Well, guess what? Jillian is now a contributor to the Clown Hall blog — “Where racism isn’t just a philosophy, it’s a job qualification!”

The other great thing about blogging for Clown Hall is you can recycle some stale wingnut blogger talking points from weeks ago, lard it up with ridiculously hyperbolic language à la Atlas’s Jugs, make up some shit to throw in for good measure to get the half-witted Town Hall commentariat all torn up, offer it up as your own blog posting, and then call it a day, collect your wingnut welfare check, and get to happy hour at Smith Point by mid-afternoon. Which is pretty much what Jillian did with her latest offering: “Michelle Obama’s Veggie Garden Is Poisoned!” Read on...

Here are a few snippets from Bandes' anti-Arab rant:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

I don’t care if they’re being inconvenienced. I don’t care if it seems as though their rights are being violated.

They’re some of the brightest, kindest people I’ve ever met. Tragically, they’re also members of an ethnicity that is responsible for almost every act of terror committed against the West in the recent past....

Stay class...never mind. If you don't have Sadly No! bookmarked, you should. It's a guilty pleasure of mine that never disappoints!