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Sarah Palin reminds me, for some reason, of the late Helen Chenoweth -- the congresswoman from Idaho's 1st District from 1992 to 2000. Well, I actually can think of a lot of reasons: Maybe it's the slightly stilted, doll-like delivery in a red business suit. Or the beauty-queen smile. Or the absurd right-wingnuttery she sells with a distinctly populist style. Watch and judge for yourself.

Chenoweth was perhaps best known for being an avid promoter of the militia movement in Congress (though towards the end of her tenure shee made headlines for her extramarital affairs. Indeed, the above video is one I made from a video sold by the Militia of Montana as part of its New World Order conspiracy promotion, titled "America In Peril." It features Chenoweth speaking before an obviously preselected audience, prior to her election to Congress in 1992, as a "Natural Resources Consultant."

This snippet (the video is nearly an hour long) is from the first five minutes or so, and features Chenoweth holding forth on the causes of global warming:

What is some of the programs that the environmentalists are engaging in? Well, some of the programs are programs of fear -- fear that is so broad and so expansive that you and I can do nothing about it.

What about the idea that the earth is warming? You know, we hear that every day -- that the earth is warming. But when we look back, where are temperatures taken? Well, they’re taken from airports. Weather balloons go up from airports, where heat rises from miles and miles of concrete.

And you see, the satellites that are recording data around the globe will tell us that today, the earth is not warming. But you see, what the pseudoscientists -- who have turned into political scientists and lobbying scientists -- are saying is that these issues are so huge that you and I can do nothing about it.

You can almost envision Sarah Palin sitting at the back of the room taking notes. Indeed, as you can see, the camera irregularly pans to the nodding audience members, and one of these happens to bear a striking resemblance to Palin (she's at about the 5:40 mark of the video; you can see a still here). Not that this actually is Palin, but let's just say the imagery is complete.

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Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is plumping the efforts of an outfit called HowObamaGotElected, which in turn is now being bandied eagerly throughout the wingnutosphere.

Their main theme, apparently, is that Obama voters were "ignorant" because they hadn't absorbed the wingnuts' favorite smears about Obama during the campaign. The site claims that it commissioned a "Zogby Poll" which came up with the following results:

512 Obama Voters 11/13/08-11/15/08 MOE +/- 4.4 points

97.1% High School Graduate or higher, 55% College Graduates

Results to 12 simple Multiple Choice Questions

57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)

81.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)

82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)

88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)

56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).

And yet.....

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes

Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter

And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her "house," even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!

Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.

Only .5% got all of them correct. (And we "gave" one answer that was technically not Palin, but actually Tina Fey)

Now, the data about the voters' ability to correctly identify facts about Sarah Palin -- as well as their understandable confusion about what Palin actually said about Russia, considering that in fact she did say that one could see Russia from Alaska -- is essentially meaningless; a survey of McCain voters would almost certainly come up with similar statistics.

But as Nate Silver says, this is flat-out push-polling. Look at the questions in the first half of the data summary -- nearly every one of the supposed "facts" is either simply false or a grotesque distortion:

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[Photo by Ryan Wood, Midland Daily News]

Hard to believe, I know, but not all were joyous on Election Night. In Texas, Baylor students were bringing out the nooses. And in Midland, Michigan,: there was this guy:

A Midland man told police that his walking on the sidewalk in full Knights of Ku Klux Klan regalia while toting a handgun had nothing to do with Barack Obama winning the presidency.

Later, however, he admitted that Obama's victory was the catalyst for his display.

Midland police questioned Randy G. Gray II, 30, who was walking on the sidewalk along Eastman near North Saginaw Wednesday afternoon while waving an American flag, but released him because he wasn't breaking any laws.

Gray was walking up and down the sidewalk in front of a vehicle dealership while several motorists shouted obscenities at him and others shouted ''accolades,'' police said.

Randy Gray's name may ring some bells ...

Yep, that Randy Gray. He was tossed from the Ron Paul campaign when they discovered he was a Klansman. My guess is he didn't vote for McCain either.

Here he is in action at a Ron Paul rally "white power" event.

There are some things about the next four years I am definitely not looking forward to.

[Cross-posted at Orcinus.]

Jim Quinn yesterday on The War Room with Quinn & Rose:

You know, I was thinking about this. You know, if you were a slave in the old South, what did you get as a slave? You got free room and board, you got free money, and you got rewarded for having children because that was just, you know, tomorrow's slave. So, you got a free house, you got free money, and you got rewarded for having children. Can I ask a question? How's that different from welfare? You get a free house, you get free food, and you get rewarded for having children. Oh, wait a minute, hold on a second. There is a difference: The slave had to work for it.

Yeah, that was the difference. Right.

This raises the question: Are the wingnuts coming so unhinged they are losing any contact with reality?

[H/t to Hume's Ghost.]

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Laura Ingraham was repeating what's about to become wingnuts' favorite theme: Republicans lost because they weren't wingnutty enough!

Bill Hemmer: Let me flip that argument around here. If the Republicans are swept out of power -- I mean, the Senate, the House, the White House -- how does the Republican Party change, do you believe?

Ingraham: Well, I think -- I heard Mary Matalin say this last night, and really, she hit it out of the park. If McCain loses, if Republicans lose seats across the board, this is a rejection of Republicans who don't follow traditional conservative principles. It's not a rejection of conservatism, or Reagan, or small government.

... I think Republicans are going to have to do some soul-searching, but not on conservative principles -- on how they governed.

Er, mebbe. But how they governed was precisely according to conservative principles!

The Big Shitpile is a direct product of conservative principles enacted in governance -- namely, the Panglossian belief that deregulation of business, and the financial sector, was an unrelievedly good thing.

Well, the people who are paying the price for that foolishness have managed to figure that out.

[H/t to Dave for the video.]

McCain and Palin are obviously having trouble drawing a crowd these days, especially an enthusiastic one. (And the polls bear that out.) But it seems that those who are going have a ... special ... quality.

Down in Florida, the NYT's Julie Bosman reports that outside Sarah Palin rallies, McCain/Palin fans are indulging in anti-Arab xenophobia:

NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. – “John McCain! Not Hussein!”

So goes the latest popular chant on the campaign trail with Gov. Sarah Palin, demonstrated at a morning rally in central Florida.

Ms. Palin was midway through her stump speech when a group of supporters began shouting it in unison, drowned out a few seconds later as Ms. Palin talked over them.

But it wasn't just in New Port Richey. As the story notes, it was heard at a Pennsylvania rally too:

A similar chant, “Vote McCain, not Hussein,” was heard at a campaign event for Ms. Palin in Williamsport, Pa., earlier this week.

Senator Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein, a fact that some of his opponents say proves that he is a Muslim. Mr. Obama is, in fact, a Christian.

And we heard it in Henderson, Nev., as well. (See the video above.) At that rally, some of the people leading the chant openly identified themselves as racists.

I guess this is how Sarah Palin wages that spiritual warfare she is apparently so keen on. This is right-wing populism with a religious core.

Already, Palin is mustering the troops to rally behind her after the GOP's looming Epic Fail on Tuesday: In Florida, her rallies alreadt feature no mention of McCain's name.

It is disturbing to get these glimpses of what the Republican Party is going to look like when it's done reshaping itself. They may end up marginalizing themselves even further -- we can only hope -- but in the meantime they are going to be preying on people's fears, as they've been doing all along.

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So Bill O'Reilly is finally confronted with the reality that Daily Kos is nothing like a neo-Nazi hate site.

Give BillO credit: He decided to air a segment on the anti-Obama hate sites that can be found on the Web. He had on Townhall.com's Amanda Carpenter, who reported to O'Reilly that the virulent hatred of Obama found at neo-Nazi and white-supremacist websites was something truly stomach-churning.

At the height of the discussion he asks:

O'Reilly: OK, now, the Kos is a hate site on the left, uh, how would these neo-Nazi things compare to that?

Carpenter: Ah, these are ... it's, it's much worse than Kos.

O'Reilly: Yeah?

Carpenter: Because it's filled with the worst slurs you could think of against a black person. You know, they talk about aborting black children. The degree of casualness to which it's done is most alarming. I mean, I was frightened in there. I mean there's literature, you know, different kinds of bombs --

O'Reilly: Anything else? Sure. I mean, these are people like Tim McVeigh, who blow -- you know, those people --

Carpenter: Right.

Right. Those whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. And so we quickly move on ...

Except that this kind of blows a hole in O'Reilly's horseshit claim that Kos is a "hate site" just like the Nazis. As we noted at the time, there's a wee problem with this thesis: what real Nazi/hate sites are like.

Ah, but instead we quickly move on to even more specious crap ...

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The Jed Report put together this little video mashup of WFTV's Barbara West, giving us a nice side-by-side contrast of her respective interviews with Joe Biden and John McCain.

You can see the full Biden interview here and the full McCain video here. The latter is especially instructive in that we see just how far out there West is; mostly she's obsequious to the point of outright cheerleading with McCain, and her idea of a "tough" question for him is to ask him why he's not being wingnutty enough!

OTOH, you've just gotta love when she quotes Marx and then asks Biden why "spreading the wealth" isn't Marxist. Someone's been drinking the Bircher Kool Aid, which is in fact a direct ticket to Planet Bizarro.

Well, over at Firedoglake, they have a petition up asking for the station to apologize for sponsoring such bizarre behavior and such biased treatment. Go sign it.

In LasVegas, videographer Matt Toplikar captured footage of McCain/Palin supporters as they came out from a rally featuring an appearance by Sarah Palin.

One camouflage-capped fellow captures the spirit of the event:

Obama wins, I'm gonna move to Alaska.

... Haven't you ever heard that the United States is gonna be taken down from within? What better way to get taken down from within than haveing the President of the United States be the one that's going to do it?

It seems they became especially aggravated when they encountered anti-McCain protesters outside. The same Alaska-bound supporter started leading a chant in front of them:

Vote McCain, Not Hussein!

Then there's the Pam Atlas wannabee:

This country needs to wake up! Obama is dangerous! This man is a tyrant to this country. I mean, he has connections to Arabs! His education was paid for by Arabs! He's an abomination.

And of course, the obligatory racist:

Don't be afraid of me! Be afraid of Obama! Obama bin Laden, that's what you should be afraid of!

... Yes, I am a racist. If you consider me a racist, well [unintelligible]. Those Arabs are dirtbags. They're dirty people, they hate Americans, they hate my kids, they hate my grandkids. And people like him [points to another supporter], more power to them.

McCain and Palin have somewhat ratcheted back their rhetoric, but the fuse has been lit.

Ever notice how the wingnuts start a-flapping whenever someone remotely suggests that some far-right nutcase or other ought not to be speaking on the public dime (see particularly Ann Coulter), or when a right-wing hack winds up getting his show cancelled because he hacked up a ratings hairball? Censorship! they cry.

But when it comes to left-wing figures, especially the targets of their fury, well, such scruples vanish like the little bubbles they always were.

So yesterday the University of Nebraska gave in to the wingnutosphere's onslaught against cause celebre William Ayers, who was scheduled to speak there next month.

Mind you, they did so not because they agreed with the claim that Ayers shouldn't speak, but because the frothing has reached the point that officials feared for the safety of Ayers as well as the attending public:

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln rescinded its speaking invitation tonight for 1960s radical-turned-educator William Ayers.

University officials cited "safety reasons" for canceling Ayers' Nov. 15 appearance.

Spokeswoman Kelly Bartling declined to elaborate on what safety concerns would keep Ayers from addressing a College of Education and Human Sciences event.

Earlier today, Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman strongly condemned the invitation and called on the NU Board of Regents and President J.B. Milliken to block it.

The earlier version of the story reports:

University officials said in a news release Friday evening that “the university’s threat assessment group monitored e-mails and other information UNL received regarding Ayers’ scheduled Nov. 15 visit and identified safety concerns which resulted in the university canceling the event.”

Of course, leading the torchlight brigade to block Ayers' appearance was our old friend Michelle Malkin, who earlier this week descended even farther into self-parody by complaining that poor Joe the Self-Promoter's Plumber's ordinary rights as a citizen were being trampled upon by the "deranged" liberal bloggers and reporters who decided to look into his background.

So what does she have to say about the reasons for the Ayers cancellation?

“Safety concerns.”

Whose safety?

Gee, I wonder.

Waiting for someone to scream “RAAAAACIST” or something.

How about "fascist"? That oughta work. Not to mention fit.