This used to sound like a lot of money, but now I just keep thinking, geeze, George, Bill Maher gave $1 million and he's not worth anywhere near as much as you:

WASHINGTON, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Billionaire financier George Soros has committed $1.5 million to "Super PACs" backing President Barack Obama and Democrats running for Congress in the Nov. 6 election, officials with those groups said on Thursday.

Soros - a prominent donor to liberal political causes - has pledged $1 million to Priorities USA Action, which is running ads to help the Democratic president's re-election bid, and $500,000 to Majority PAC and House Majority PAC, which help Democratic congressional candidates, the officials said.

The move by Soros, who had remained largely on the sidelines of this year's Super PAC fundraising barrage, could trigger more big checks from wealthy Democrats who previously avoided giving to the groups, citing dismay over the growing role of money in politics.

[...]Soros' adviser said previously that the financier was more focused in this campaign on grass-roots political organizing.

Soros last year made six-figure donations to the Majority and House Majority PACs and pledged $2 million earlier this year to American Bridge 21st Century, a research-focused Super PAC that does no ads, and America Votes, a group that helps coordinate campaign work for liberal groups nationwide .

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The wingnuts' great liberal bogeyman, George Soros, made a rare appearance on Fareed Zakaria GPS and said what every single person in the corporate media knows is true, but are too compromised to admit openly: The Republicans in Congress are cynically obstructing the Obama administration to keep the economy from recovering fully (from their own failed economic policies over the last thirty years).

George Soros: I'm worried that the politics of the election are going to interfere and put a lid on this –because the Republicans don't want to face elections where Obama can claim to have sort of seen the economy recover. So they will continue to push for austerity, no new taxes, and therefore cutting of services, which will depress economic activity and employment.

After the elections, if the Republicans win, actually they’ll undergo a miraculous transformation where they discover that actually it wouldn’t be so bad if maybe we can afford to have some stimulus.

Fareed Zakaria: So you think Mitt Romney, if elected would pursue a stimulus bill?

George Soros: I’m pretty sure that would happen. I mean, of course, Obama would like to as well. He may find it more difficult if the Republicans continue to obstruct him.

Fareed Zakaria: So in a sense, you feel that some part of this Republican opposition to an additional stimulus is just cynical? They want the economy to stay weak in an election year?

George Soros: Unfortunately, our political system is now not functioning the way it used to in the sense that the political parties are more determined to destroy each other than to lead to policies that would benefit the country.

Really, is there a bigger "Well, duh" statement uttered than that? It's amazing that it had to take Soros taking a break from all that alleged liberal media check writing he does to say out loud what we all know is true: the Republican Party is willing to take down the country--dropping almost 50 percent of Americans to near or below the poverty line-- for their own cynical political gain.

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The Fox freakout over the White House's new rapid-response media team headed by Jesse Lee picked up a head of steam last night on Sean Hannity's show, when Andrew Breitbart came on and sounded like his nemesis, Glenn Beck, for a bit, as he debated the token liberal, Democratis strategist Steve Murphy. All that was missing was the chalkboard:

BREITBART: Jesse Lee was at the forefront of the antiwar blogging movement, a point in time in which the same media that is out there saying that you can't criticize the president, Barack Obama, were out there saying 'dissent is patriotic' and so Jesse was protected by the media. Now he wants to go after Fox News, AM talk radio, Andrew Breitbart, and what he's doing is adding an extra protective layer to George Soros -- all the media that he's buying, and now Media Matters, which is a --

MURPHY: This is the Hannity show, not Beck.

BREITBART: This is a $15 million a year operation to try and shut up dissent. This is exactly what they do in totalitarian leftist nations like Venezuela. They try to shut people up.

At this point, Murphy thankfully jumped in and pointed out that Breitbart was being absurd -- this was a standard political media operation, only with more sophisticated media technology to work with. But Breitbart was intent mainly on smearing Jesse Lee:

BREITBART: He's a hit artist.

MURPHY: So are you!

Bretibart didn't really have much of a response to that one. He knew it was true.

It seems we're not the only ones frustrated with ineffectiveness of the "curl up on the floor in the fetal position" strategy favored so far by the administration. Perhaps these people have a better chance of being heard:

WASHINGTON -- At a private meeting on Tuesday afternoon, George Soros, a longtime supporter of progressive causes, voiced blunt criticism of the Obama administration, going so far as to suggest that Democratic donors direct their support somewhere other than the president.

The Hungarian-American financier was speaking to a small side gathering of donors who had convened in Washington D.C. for the annual gathering of the Democracy Alliance -- a formal community of well-funded, progressive-minded individuals and activists.

According to multiple sources with knowledge of his remarks, Soros told those in attendance that he is "used to fighting losing battles but doesn't like to lose without fighting."

"We have just lost this election, we need to draw a line," he said, according to several Democratic sources. "And if this president can't do what we need, it is time to start looking somewhere else."

Michael Vachon, an adviser to Soros, did not dispute the comment, though he stressed that there was no transcript of a private gathering to check. Vachon also clarified that the longtime progressive giver was not referring to a primary challenge to the president.

"Mr. Soros fully supports the president as the leader of the Democratic Party," said Vachon. "He was not suggesting that we seek another candidate for 2012. His comments were made in a private, informal conversation that was about the need for progressives to be more forceful in promoting their agenda. He was stressing the importance of being heard by elected officials."

Dissatisfaction with the Obama administration was not limited to Soros's private gathering with donors. On Wednesday morning, Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina received several tough questions during his address to the Democracy Alliance. According to a source in the room, he was pressed multiple times as to why the administration has declined to be more combative with Republicans, both in communication and legislative strategy. Another source in the room said the exchange was not entirely contentious as people were simply expressing frustration about the fact that "we just came out of an election where the right wing and the Republicans distorted what was going on."

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Yesterday the Anti-Defamation League made it official:

Glenn Beck's description of George Soros' actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top. For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say – inaccurately – that there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that's horrific.

While I, too, may disagree with many of Soros' views and analysis on the issues, to bring in this kind of innuendo about his past is unacceptable. To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.

The Holocaust was a horrific time, and many people had to make excruciating choices to ensure their survival. George Soros has been forthright about his childhood experiences and his family's history, and there the matter should rest.

So how did Beck respond? Well, first he went on the air and not only repeated the smear of Soros by the flaming anti-Semite Mohammad Mahatir, he actually ran a truncated quote of Soros' in order to lie about him even more egregiously.

Here's what Beck shows you:

QUESTIONER: The question is what whether we need and whether Mr. Soros and his foundations can help to bring more foreign influence in the United States instead of relying on what is essentially a balance between Democrats and conservative Republicans.

SOROS: I think you put your finger on a very important flaw in the current world order, and that is that only Americans have a vote in Congress. And yet, it is the United States that basically determines policy for the world. That is a flaw in the current setup.

To which Beck observes:

BECK: It's a problem for him that people in China or France don't get to vote, find out who sits in Congress. Is it for you? You need to make a choice. Mr. Soros has made his choice. I have made mine. Tonight you decide.

Well, here's the full quote, from a 2006 press conference:

Q: The question is whether we need and whether Mr. Soros and his foundations can help to bring more foreign influence into the United States instead of relying on what is essentially a balance between Democrats and conservative Republicans, which hasn't worked and is not about to start working.

SOROS: Look, I think -- I think you put your finger on a very important flaw in the current world order, and that is that only Americans have a vote in Congress. And yet, it is the United States that basically determines policy for the world. That is a flaw in the current setup. I don't think you can correct it by giving the Chinese government a vote in Congress. But it is a flaw, and I think this is where American leadership is needed, to take into account and respect the interests of others as well, in order to retain the dominant position we currently enjoy.

Soros actually said something that directly contradicted Beck's characterization of his views -- so of course, Beck omitted it.

This sort of journalistic fraud happens all the time at Fox, and plenty of it on Beck's show (we all recall how he pulled the same stunt with Anita Dunn.) It's one of the major reasons you can point to Fox's practices and clearly judge that this is not a news operation but a propaganda mill.

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Just the first day's dose of Glenn Beck's weeklong smear campaign against George Soros -- particularly its coarse insensitivity -- has outraged Jewish leaders:

The ADL's Abe Foxman is also a child survivor who lived only because his parents turned him over to his Catholic nanny.

“Look, I spit on Jews when I was six years old,” Foxman told me. “Does that make me an anti-Semite?”

The issue of the Shoah “is so sensitive that I'm not even sure Holocaust survivors themselves are willing to make such judgments,” Foxman went on “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say, there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, that's horrific. It's totally off limits and over the top.”

Beck's comments “were either out of total ignorance or total insensitivity,” he said.

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, called the Beck accusations “monstrous; you don't make such accusations without proof, and I have seen no such proof.”

Beck's charges, he said, “go to the heart of the instrumentalization and trivialization of the Holocaust."

Simon Greer, president of the Jewish Funds for Justice, met with Fox News executives in July to discuss Beck's “constant and often inappropriate invocation of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany on the air.”

Greer and Rabbi Steve Gutow of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) received a handwritten note from Beck saying “Please know that I understand the sensitivity and sacred nature of this dark chapter in Human History. Thank you for your candor and helpful thoughts.”

Yesterday's on-air comments by Beck “made a mockery of their professed understanding,” Greer said in a statement. “In an effort to demonize a political opponent, Beck and Fox News scurrilously attacked George Soros, a prominent Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor. No one who truly understands 'the sensitivity and sacred nature' of the Holocaust would deliberately and grotesquely mis-characterize the experience of a 13 year old Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non-Jewish family to keep him alive.”

Interfaith Alliance President Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy said Beck's “use of the Holocaust to discredit George Soros is beyond repugnant. The Holocaust is one of history’s most tragic events and those who survived it are owed our enduring respect.”

Moreover, as we pointed out, the whole argument is a replication of the classic anti-Semitic argument, largely unchanged from the 1920s:

Here is this conniving, conspiratorial rich international-investor JEW who is buying up all the media in American and surreptitiously seeking to destroy the American economy.

And if the anti-Semitism already weren't already obvious enough from the first day of the smear, Beck dug the hole even deeper yesterday, by opening the hourlong conspiracy-laden smear thus:

Last night, we introduced you to the puppet master, billionaire financier George Soros, notorious for collapsing economies and regimes all around the world. He's known as the man who broke the bank of England. The Prime Minister of Malaysia called Soros an unscrupulous profiteer. In Thailand, he was branded the "economic war criminal." They also said that he "sucks the blood from people."

Well, as Matt Gertz at Media Matters observes:

When Beck says that "The Prime Minister of Malaysia called Soros an unscrupulous profiteer," he's referencing former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's anti-Semitic conspiracy that Soros "helped trigger the economic meltdown" of Southeast Asian currencies in 1997. Mahathir was quoted at the time saying: "We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew. It is also a coincidence that the Malaysians are mostly Muslim." According to the New York Times, Mahathir "suggested that Malaysia's troubles might be the result of a Jewish 'agenda'" to weaken the country's economy.

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Glenn Beck unleashed his long-promised all-out attack on George Soros yesterday, and it was a doozy. Indeed, as both Ellen at NewsHounds and Ben Dimiero at Media Matters point out, in a normative world it would get him fired -- it was so rife with flat-out falsehoods and truly vicious distortions that Beck probably has indeed exposed Fox to a multimillion-dollar slander suit, should Soros choose to pursue it, public figure or not.

MM has compiled the entire hour Here. Meanwhile, Terry Krepel has compiled the list of utterly false things about Soros that Beck wants you to believe.

Anyone familiar with the history of anti-Semitism in America is more than familiar with the architecture of Beck's argument: Here is this conniving, conspiratorial rich international-investor JEW who is buying up all the media in American and surreptitiously seeking to destroy the American economy. The only thing new here is that Soros, an avowed atheist, has a largely secular "hidden agenda" rather than a religious one.

One of Beck's smears in particular stood out in this regard -- namely, his LaRouchite claim that Soros had participated in "confiscating" Jewish properties:

Beck: His childhood is shocking, dramatic. He grew up in Nazi Europe. Fourteen years old -- he had to help the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors.

He did not grow up in a strong-Jewish household. His mother was a strong anti-Semite -- George Soros' words, not mine -- but when he had to go over and take the lands from the people, his Jewish friends and neighbors who were being sent to the gas chambers -- I can't imagine what that would do to a teenager, anybody, an adult.

Well, what did it do to George Soros? In an interview with Steve Croft, Soros was asked if he felt guilt at all about taking the property from the Jews as a teenager. He responded, no. He also said, quote, 'I don't deny the Jews their national existence. But I don't want to be a part of it.'

Beck isn't the first figure on Fox to indulge this smear: Ann Coulter has done the same. And as we explained then:

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:

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The Almighty Liberal Puppetmaster George Soros, who even as you read this, is writing out a check for my Kabletown broadband and assorted other bills, is actually sitting out this election cycle, and says he's not feeling optimistic about the midterms:

“I made an exception getting involved in 2004,” Mr. Soros, 80, said in a brief interview Friday at a forum sponsored by the Bretton Woods Committee, which promotes understanding of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“And since I didn’t succeed in 2004, I remained engaged in 2006 and 2008. But I’m basically not a party man. I’d just been forced into that situation by what I considered the excesses of the Bush administration.”

Mr. Soros, a champion of liberal causes, has been directing his money to groups that work on health care and the environment, rather than electoral politics. Asked if the prospect of Republican control of one or both houses of Congress concerned him, he said: “It does, because I think they are pushing the wrong policies, but I’m not in a position to stop it. I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”

Here's a rather disturbing update on Byron Williams, the liberal-hating, parolee right-wing crazy guy who opened fire on the CHP last weekend.

Via KGO:

Court documents released Tuesday say Williams told investigators he intended to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco to kill people at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation, an organization that says it promotes economic justice.

"His plan was to go there and wait until it opens up in the morning; our investigators brought up to him that those organizations are probably closed on Sundays and he said he was going to wait until they opened up," Oakland Police Department spokesperson Jeff Thomason said.

Armed to the teeth, and as a third-striker, not particularly concerned with his fate, too:

When the officers tried to contact Williams, a 12-minute-long gun battle ensued. Williams, armed with three guns, including a .308-caliber rifle that can penetrate ballistic body armor and vehicles, eventually surrendered and exited the vehicle.

Williams was arraigned in Alameda County Superior Court Tuesday on four counts of attempted murder of a peace officer and being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition. He received enhancements for wearing body armor. [Read more]

The Tides Foundation is George Soros' philanthropic charity, and the ACLU is, well, the ACLU. I wonder, what would cause an unstable, bitter angry man to target the ACLU and the Tides Foundation? I wonder...

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Alternative Title: Glenn Beck descends further into paranoid delusion.

BECK: Gasoline Brazil. Now why am I telling you about this? Have you heard of another word? Soros. George Soros. I do have a bulletproof car, George. I just want you to know.

George Soros -- I'm going to show you this tonight. I'm going to spend an hour on this. I want you to DVD, write down, take notes, look into this. We're going to be talking a little bit about this in the next few days. This is -- I like to call it the circle of life, as it is now understood in America.

As a relative newcomer to the crazy that is the far right wing, I do not now, nor am I likely to ever understand the obsession they have with George Soros.

The right wing non-profit money machine outspends progressive non-profits by amounts in the billions. What Soros spends in a year on American politics is a big zero. Yet FreedomWorks grinds more tea in our face every day with full-throated (and walleted) support from the right.

There was a time in this country where people as paranoid and self-focused as Glenn Beck were placed in a room with padding and round corners until the meds took hold.

Now they go on national television. Rupert Murdoch's epitaph should read "He mainstreamed crazy."

h/t: Media Matters