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Number 15 in our countdown is a tie between several related videos. We like to call it "debate hate."

The video at the top is from the September 22, 2011 debate, where a gay soldier asked Rick Santorum whether he would roll back the repeal of DADT and the progress gays have made in the military under President Obama. Before Santorum could answer, some in the audience booed the soldier loudly. No candidate spoke up.

But that isn't the first time debate hate has reared its ugly head. On September 7th, the audience cheered Rick Perry's record of executing a record number of prisoners in Texas, including at least one who was innocent.

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Sometimes the pictures tell the story. Sarah Palin's latest Twitter favorite comes to us via Ann Coulter's tweets:

What is Ann's new church that Sarah thought was so cool she saved it as a favorite (one of only three, by the way)?

If you're having trouble reading that marquis, here's what it says:

The blood of Jesus against Obama
History Made 4 Nov 2008 A Taliban
Muslim illegally elected
President USA Hussein

And just to top it all off, pretend-President Palin dares to suggest that Obama is using the Pentagon for opposition research.

What a --- (you fill in the blank).

Just when I thought things couldn't get any more bizarre today, this gem crossed my Twitter stream, courtesy of Media Matters. Really, some folks ought to think before hitting the "tweet button." From the hatriot Neal Boortz, known as Talkmaster on Twitter, this little pair of gems:

Yes, it really DOES say that. Not content to leave that little bomb in the stream, he followed up with this:

While Media Matters was content to show this insanity with no further comment, I'm not. Small business is better off today than it was under Bush. This is fact. Their taxes are lower, they get an immediate tax credit for providing health benefits to their workers, and they finally get some parity with the big corporations.

Neal Boortz calls himself a libertarian, but he's really just a fool with a big mouth and a microphone.

I wonder if he's ever researched his company's past. If so, he'd know the founder of Cox Radio was Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate in 1920. FDR would NOT approve, and I somehow believe Mr. Cox would not either.

The hateful acts that occurred at the tea party rally in Washington this weekend were not isolated incidents -- they are part of a growing pattern of violent rhetoric, racially charged imagery, and paranoid conspiracy theories emerging from the Republican party's grassroots supporters.

Republicans officials have contributed to this atmosphere with fear-mongering and coded racism, and they have actively courted this element of their party. It's time that Republican leadership is forced to address what it's helped to create.

Please join us in confronting Republican leaders and demanding that they take responsibility for tamping down the bigotry and hate among their supporters, and that they disavow the fear-mongering that leads to it. And please ask your friends and family to do the same -- unless we take a strong stand against this kind of hate, it will continue. We need as many people as possible -- of every race -- demanding that it stop.

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A poll that appeared on Facebook which asked if President Obama should be murdered was pulled and now the U.S. Secret Service is investigating.

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating an online survey that asked whether people thought President Barack Obama should be assassinated, officials said Monday.

The poll, posted Saturday on Facebook, was taken off the popular social networking site quickly after company officials were alerted to its existence. But, like any threat against the president, Secret Service agents are taking no chances.

"We are aware of it and we will take the appropriate investigative steps," said Darrin Blackford, a Secret Service spokesman. "We take of these things seriously."

The poll asked respondents "Should Obama be killed?" The choices: No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.

The question was not created by Facebook, but by an independent person using an add-on application that has been suspended from the site.

President Obama will never allow himself to comment on this hatred, but this is serious stuff. If a poll like this was discovered when Bush was in office, it would be FOX News' number one story for weeks and weeks and would probably end up on Meet the Press in a roundtable discussion that would go something like: Should President Bush be worried? And are left-wingers fomenting this hate? I think the Secret Service has its hands full, that's for sure.

President Obama sought to reassure Americans last night that his administration has made progress in reviving the economy and said his $3.6 trillion budget is "inseparable from this recovery." After sprinting through his first months in office, Obama is now facing heightened criticism from Republicans, who have called his blueprint irresponsible, and from skeptical Democrats who have already set about trimming back his top budget priorities. Obama came into office amid lofty expectations and the worst economic crisis in generations, and he succeeded in pushing through a $787 billion stimulus and launching expensive plans to revive the banking system. Last night, against a backdrop of a broad national anxiety that the economy may still be failing, he attempted to recalibrate the high hopes to more closely fit the challenges he said lie ahead. Although he spoke sharply once in response to Republican criticism, Obama struck a tone of common purpose throughout his second prime-time news conference, urging the country to be patient as he works on issues as divergent as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the malign impact of lobbying in Washington. "We haven't immediately eliminated the influence of lobbyists in Washington," he said from the East Room of the White House. "We have not immediately eliminated wasteful pork projects. And we're not immediately going to get Middle East peace. We've been in office now a little over 60 days. "What I am confident about is that we're moving in the right direction." [...] Responding with his most partisan comment of the evening, Obama said his Republican critics should look to their own history with the federal budget, accusing them of having "a short memory" when it comes to deficits. "As I recall, I'm inheriting a $1.3 trillion annual deficit from them," he said.

Mark Potok at Hatewatch, the Southern Poverty Law Center's blog, has collected ten "truly extraordinary examples of asinine activities from the benighted denizens of the radical right" for 2008. It makes for some hilarious reading.

My two faves:

8. Worst International Travel Plan

Jerome Corsi — the insult-spewing WorldNetDaily “reporter” who helped lead the Swift Boat defamation of John Kerry and also wrote a fawning tome glorifying anti-immigrant vigilantes — had a plan. His new target was Barack Obama, and Corsi, who’d just been exposed on this blog for his appearance on a white supremacist radio show, decided in October to go to Kenya to track down “deep dark ties” between the Democratic presidential nominee and various Muslim politicians there, including the prime minister. Corsi apparently forgot that most people in Kenya, where Obama’s father was a well-known economist, thought quite a bit of the man who would be America’s first black president — and he also neglected to get a work permit. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when authorities snatched up Corsi, who likes to call Muslims “Boy-Bumpers” and “RAGHEADS,” and put him on the next plane back to the United States. Never one to be deterred by the facts, Corsi had also just published a book falsely claiming that Obama is secretly a Muslim.

5. Least Sanitary Nativist Award

This one was very much a judgment call, what with the thousands of truly unpleasant immigrant-bashers who populate the land. But it was hard to resist the indefatigable “Buffalo” Rick Galeener, 58, the former professional singing cowboy who has pledged to defend America against corruption and all manner of other ills from south of the border — in part, apparently, by peeing in front of a Hispanic lady (and her 2-year-old son) who he’d earlier insulted as part of his endless demonstrations against Latino day laborers in Phoenix. In December, after months of fighting the charge, Galeener pleaded guilty to urinating in public (prosecutors had originally charged him with indecent exposure) and was fined $194, according to Phoenix New Times. The director of the day labor center Galeener loves to picket told New Times that it would have been different if Galeener had been Latino and arrested by Joe Arpaio, the local sheriff who is widely accused of racial profiling: “If any day laborer had done that in a white neighborhood, they’d probably be in Arpaio’s jail as a sexual predator.”

The best thing about the far right is that the vast majority of them are too hapless to actually cause any serious damage. Most of the time, their nastiness goes hand in hand with sheer ineptitude. This is a good thing.

[From Creative Loafing.]

As we predicted before the election, Barack Obama's victory has loosed a flood of hatefulness from the racist right in America. Digby yesterday had a detailed post laying out some of the cases that have erupted so far. From an AP report:

Threats against a new president historically spike right after an election, but from Maine to Idaho law enforcement officials are seeing more against Barack Obama than ever before. The Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating. But since the Nov. 4 election, law enforcement officials have seen more potentially threatening writings, Internet postings and other activity directed at Obama than has been seen with any past president-elect, said officials aware of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue of a president's security is so sensitive.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

In rural Georgia, a group of high-schoolers gets a visit from the Secret Service after posting "inappropriate" comments about President-elect Barack Obama on the Web. In Raleigh, N.C., four college students admit to spraying race-tinged graffiti in a pedestrian tunnel after the election. On Nov. 6, a cross burns on the lawn of a biracial couple in Apolacon Township, Pa.

The election of America's first black president has triggered more than 200 hate-related incidents, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center – a record in modern presidential elections. Moreover, the white nationalist movement, bemoaning an election that confirmed voters' comfort with a multiracial demography, expects Mr. Obama's election to be a potent recruiting tool – one that watchdog groups warn could give new impetus to a mostly defanged fringe element.

I talked to the SPLC's Mark Potok this morning, and here are his observations:

I think there's something remarkable happening out there. I think we really are beginning to see a white backlash that may grow fairly large. The situation's worrying.

Not only do we have continuing nonwhite immigration, not only is the economy in the tank and very likely to get worse, but we have a black man in the White House. That is driving a kind of rage in a certain sector of the white population that is very, very worrying to me.

We are seeing literally hundreds of incidents around the country -- from cross-burnings to death threats to effigies hanging to confrontations in schoolyards, and it's quite remarkable.

I think that there are political leaders out there who are saying incredibly irresponsible things that could have the effect of undamming a real flood of hate. That includes media figures. On immigration, they have been some of the worst.

There's a lot going on, and it's very likely to lead to scapegoating. And in the end, scapegoating leaves corpses in the street.

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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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Sweet Jesus, this guy makes me hate him more and more...

Think Progress:

On Fox News today, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) discussed the downturn in Sen. John McCain's presidential prospects, saying McCain "is behind now because of the economy." Lieberman then said that he hopes the House passes bailout legislation tomorrow because "it will be good for our country."

"But frankly, it will be good for John McCain too," added Lieberman, explaining that "it will get people back to comparing the two candidates free of a sense of crisis that may make them want to turn against Republicans."

I don't think he talked to the McCain campaign before doing the interview, because at the same time, here's John McCain on Morning Joe:

Singer pointed out a couple odd McCain moments from the last couple days, and I'd like to add one more from today's Morning Joe (via Joe at AMERICAblog):

"This bill is putting us on the brink of economic disaster."

McCain voted for it...less than 24 hours ago.