As long as the Republicans continue this sort of mindless hatred and exploitation, they will continue to slide further into the political wilderness:

State Sen. David Schultheis said he didn't intend for a Twitter post accusing President Barack Obama of "flying the U.S. plane right into the ground" and ending with "let's roll" as a threat or a reference to United Flight 93, which crashed during the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The tweet stirred ire and some support for the Colorado Springs Republican, whose standard eschewal of political correctness has earned him criticism in the past.

Schultheis' full tweet Tuesday was: "Don't for a second think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. plane right into the ground at full speed. Let's roll."

This isn't the first time Schultheis has stepped in it. In 2007 the xenophobic Republican fought against a bill that would require all pregnant women to be tested for AIDS because the infected children would teach women not to be such sluts:

Schultheis voted in February against a bill requiring pregnant women to be tested for AIDS to prevent spreading the disease to the children. He said then that infected children would set examples for women against sexual promiscuity.

The senator railed in January against public service announcements in Spanish encouraging people to fasten seat belts. Read on...

If you'd like to contact Senator Schultheis and let him know your thoughts on the matter, here is his contact information. Remember...be nice.

Busted! Jon Stewart notices that Sean Hannity, in "reporting" on Michele Bachmann's teabagger anti-health-care rally last week, showed his audience footage from Glenn Beck's "912 Project" project of the month before, in order to make it look like there were big crowds out for it.

My question: Why aren't any journalists actually discussing the complete and utter travesty of "journalistic standards" as practiced by Fox News?

And why don't those Villagers who tut-tut the White House for standing up to the nonstop onslaught from Fox ever talk about this kind of crap? It's a constant, everyday occurrence at Fox.

Don't journalists care about their reputations anymore? Because Fox sullies the name of everyone who calls him- or herself a journalist.

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What a week. We've already seen Blue Dogs take women to the back of the bus (or was it the alley?) with Stupak's impressively Stupid Amendment. Now we're hearing that those who supposedly worry about "too much spending" when it comes to health care--you know, the meatloaf-brains who rejected the public option, which would create competition and actually bring down costs--are now blathering on about embracing "tort reform."

Because you'd really want to take away the rights of victims in a democracy to lower the health care costs by...wait for it...wait for it... ".5%" (according to the CBO).

All you really need to know is that Blue Dogs/GOPers (is there any difference?) are those in favor of this counterproductive course of action, yet if you do indeed need more, watch the heart wrenching videos recounting the tragic results of medical malpractice. To learn more about the 98,000 lives lost due to medical error each year--or 268 every day--go to 98,000 reasons, a website set up by the American Association for Justice. Once there send a message to your Senator: Remind them you won't have your rights further stripped away so they can scarf down more caviar with their contributors at Big Insurance.

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From an email by ChangeCongress:

We've got great news to report about our campaign shaming Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) for taking $700,000 from the defense industry and Chamber of Commerce and then siding with them against rape victims and his constituents. Thousands of people have signed our national expression of outrage and told their friends to sign -- and the national and local media are reporting on our campaign!

We need to keep the momentum up. Can you check out our petition and sign today?

From the National Journal:

Reform group Change Congress launched a campaign yesterday to shame Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., for voting against legislation that would help ensure victims of rape have the right to bring their case to court. The government reform group hit cyberspace with an email asking people to sign a 'national expression of outrage.' Citing $700,000 in campaign contributions from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the defense industry, Change Congress accused Burr of putting special interests before rape victims.

The more signatures we get, the more the media will report on his campaign. We need to keep publicly shaming these politicians one by one until Congress realizes it's time to replace special-interest-funded elections with citizen-funded elections.

Until they do, Americans will continue to ask: Did you vote that way because it made good sense, or because it raised special-interest campaign dollars?

See that picture? That looks like a million people to G. Gordon Liddy's producer:

(T)oday’s anti-health care reform rally has been much more sparsely attended (than the 9/12 protests, but) that hasn’t stopped conservatives from inflating the numbers again. On G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show (Thursday), producer Franklin Raff, who was on the ground at the rally, told guest host Joseph Farah that the crowd is “just as big or bigger than” the 9/12 rally, which Raff estimated “at about a million.”

Uh yup. Rep. Eric Cantor dialed the number down, though not entirely into factual territory:

(S)hortly after addressing the crowd, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) actually blamed Democrats for the hateful images on display. In an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, Cantor suggested that the signs were the mere result of "frustration" over the democratically elected majority's "extreme policies." Mitchell pushed him to say whether he's "comfortable with those attacks against the President of the United States," but Cantor quickly changed the subject:

CANTOR: Listen, I don't think we should engage in personal attacks. But I think, and what I take the message from the gathering of tens of thousands of people on the steps of the Capitol today, and the elections on Tuesday, is the fact that, you know what, we need some balance here in Washington.

You know what, Cantor? You and the rest of your willfully ignorant and fear mongering party (and that includes your mouthpieces at Fox News) own every one of those sickening, disgusting, inexcusable signs, not Democrats.

The Politico, treading gracelessly between their GOP advocacy position and whatever journalistic integrity they still imagine themselves to have put the number at 10,000. Actually, according to reality-based sources, the number was around 3,000 - 4,000.

There's a joke I could make on how sad it must be for their wives when they must continually overinflate numbers, but I think their massive overcompensation speaks for itself.

Okay, maybe requiring minimum IQs as a standard to run for national office is a bit harsh, but can we at least insist that politicians prove that they are actually human and not some mindless automaton programmed with talking points?

(In the past,) Foxx has claimed Democratic reforms would mean seniors are “put to death by their government,” that health reform is a “distraction,” and that “there are no Americans who don’t have health care.” She was at it again today on the House floor, arguing that health reform is a greater threat to our country than “any terrorist right now in any country”:

Everywhere I go in my district, people tell me they are frightened. … I share that fear, and I believe they should be fearful. And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

Normally, this is where my head makes a very loud thunk against my desk at the stupidity, but instead I just find myself really angry at this illogical fear mongering and ugliness. But what can you expect from a politician ugly enough to call Matthew Shepard's murder "a hoax"?. Obviously her lip service towards valuing life doesn't really mean any living people.

Rep. Foxx, the lives of those 44,000 Americans who die needlessly every year because they do not have insurance is blood on your hands.

From NOW on PBS--Power Struggle. More available here.

This is what I hate having to explain to my relatives and friends abroad in Europe about politics in the US. We know that global warming is a fact. We know that our actions, if they didn't cause global warming, definitely exacerbate it. We know that we must reduce our dependency on oil, for both ecological and political/strategic reasons. And yet, what we are able to do is hampered so predictably by the Republican party:

Here we go again. James Inhofe, the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for next week’s markup:

But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.

Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.

“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”

Sadly, this is a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding strategy of delaying clean energy legislation:

• As Chairman Markey shepherded his American Clean Energy and Security Act through the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Republicans employed multiple parliamentary tricks to — as Politico put it — “nitpick the bill into legislative oblivion.” Brian Beutler called these nefarious stall tactics, and noted that Democrats responded by hiring a speed reader.
• Last year during the debate over the Climate Security Act, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded that the entire 491 page bill be read on the floor of the United States Senate. A strategy memo was leaked at the time detailing the Republican strategy for delaying the bill as much as humanly possible.

While this Republican obstructionism is not necessarily surprising, it is especially egregious this time. Here are a few things about this episode that struck me:

1. Despite the fact that Senator Inhofe has been working to orchestrate this obstruction for a week now, Republicans are pretending the effort is being led by the two moderate Republicans on the committee. Politico handled the stenography.

The Politco, acting as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party? Say it isn't so!

Can you imagine how much further we'd get in this country if we didn't have so many idiots in office?

Joe Sudbay posted this over at Americablog and I had to pass it along.

Remember Fox News' now-defunct Half Hour Comedy Hour? Not Funny. They just don't do cool, well. Case in point, teabagging rapper, Hi-Caliber. Forget about his fact-free, "patriotic rap," he just sucks. I'll let the C&L'ers pick this stinker apart in the comments. Anyone care to offer up a more appropriate rap name for this guy?

The health care reform debate has been brutal. The insurance companies, right wing media and the Republican Party have spreading myriad lies and distortions about the public option and

From the department of You Can't Make This Sh*t Up:

Republican Rep. Tom Price, of Georgia, has introduced a House resolution that would, if passed, express the legislative body's "gratitude and appreciation" to Tea Party members who marched on Washington on Sept. 12 to "show their love of liberty and their grievance with recent government actions."

The proposed resolution is co-signed by more than 70 members of the House.

The proposed resolution would single for praise the "hundreds of thousands of American patriots, who refuse to sit idly by as the Federal Government advances skyrocketing deficits, taxpayer-funded bailouts, pork-barrel projects, burdensome taxes, unaccountable policy czars, command-and-control energy policy, and a government takeover of health care, came to Washington, D.C, to show their disapproval ..."

So let me get this straight...Price wants to pass a resolution that would praise anti-government, right wing extremists who want to overthrow their president? Really? If one single Democrat votes for this garbage, you can be sure we will call them out and ridicule them mercilessly.

Just to be clear, there weren't hundreds of thousands of people at that joke of a march on September 12th. And this was not an anti-tax march, this was a well funded hate-fest that was organized by Fox News and Glenn Beck.

You can read Price's entire resolution here. For added entertainment, click through to the original article and check out some of the comments. Didn't they learn anything from our Jon Perr's 10 Lessons for Teabaggers?

Steve Benen found a good one. Looks like the wingnuts are so eager to find "proof" for their theories about Obama, they don't even bother to check the source. Can't say I'm surprised!

Right-wing pundit Michael Ledeen published an item this week on Barack Obama's "college thesis," which Obama allegedly wrote as a student at Columbia 25 years ago. Leeden cited some website, which ran a piece in August.

The paper was called "Aristocracy Reborn," and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein -- who wrote about it for Time -- was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote:

"... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

That's quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate.... Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh picked up on Leeden's report, blasting Obama for the alleged paper.

The first sign of trouble was when Joe Klein noted that he's never seen or written about Obama's college thesis, and has "no idea where this report comes from."

The second sign of trouble was when one stopped to notice that Obama didn't write a senior thesis (though he did write a thesis-length paper on Soviet nuclear disarmament).

The third sign of trouble was when one clicked on the link that Leeden provided as support and found the word "satire."

Yes, Leeden and Limbaugh got all worked up, trashing the president for a paper he didn't write in college 25 years ago, relying on a satirical blog post. And for real entertainment value, notice what Leeden and Limbaugh did when they realized they'd fallen for a dumb joke -- they blamed Obama anyway.

Leeden conceded he was wrong and apologized, but added, "It worked because it's plausible." Limbaugh said the text he touted was fake, but it didn't matter because, "I know Obama thinks it." Yep, even when they're wrong, it's only because the president makes it easy for them to be confused.

Obama officials went on the offensive on the talk show circuit last Sunday, reminding America and the corporate media that Fox News is not a legitimate news organization.

Staying true to their entertainment format, on Monday Fox News responded by putting up a poll on their website and what do you know...all of the choices are incorrect and none of them allow for the possibility that Obama is right.

What a knee-slapper! Feel free to re-write your own reality-based poll for them in the comments.

It's no secret that effective and intelligent use of the internet has escaped the Republican Party. That said, it should come as no surprise that the reviews are in on the new and improved GOP.com, and it's not good. Of course, progressive blogs give it the thumbs down, but let's see what right wing blogs have to say -- starting with Townhall:

As Jillian subtly points out, GOP chairman Michael Steele is not 13-years-old and, therefore, should not have a blog entitled "What Up?"

But along with the chairman's new blog, a new GOP site has been unveiled as the party attempts to re-brand itself. "Something is happening at GOP.com," booms the voice of Steele as the page loads. No joke: a digital Michael Steele struts across the computer monitor to explain the new website and how "that something new -- is you!" Sure this tiny Michael Steele and cheesy line is enough to make you roll your eyes, but it gets worse. Much worse.

In fact, it gets downright embarrassing.

And how about Little Green Footballs?

And even worse, the new website violates one of the cardinal rules of web design: web pages should never make sound without the visitor’s consent. The GOP home page has a little Javascript-animated Michael Steele who comes walking out and starts talking, like one of those incredibly annoying advertisements you see on cheesy websites.

It’s the political party with a website that’s not safe for work.

Red State loves it, but it must be discouraging that the "Future Leaders" page doesn't actually have any names on it. As I looked around the site, I noticed that each time I changed or refreshed pages, a new face would pop up on the page, just like my screen cap above. Strangely, a disproportionate number of those photos were of African-Americans and there were plenty of fresh, young faces too. You know, people who don't belong to the Republican Party, and never will? They even have the nerve to try to claim the ghost of Jackie Robinson!

(h/t Think Progress for the video)

Tuesday morning on Morning Joe, CNBC host Donny Deutsch had a few choice words to describe Rush Limbaugh, including "megalomaniac" and a "scary, distasteful human being." He didn't stop there, though. He had another word in mind and let's just say, it wasn't pretty:

Then, a few minutes later, Scarborough and Deutsch discussed Limbaugh's potential part-ownership an NFL team and the comments that led to his departure from ESPN. During the conversation, the audio cut out while Deutsch was talking and Scarborough said, semi-laughing, "...bleeped that out again. Why did you have to do that? Why?" Donny later explained, "I called Rush Limbaugh a feminine hygiene product that starts with a D and sounds like my last name. It was bleeped you can't say that on TV." At the end of the program Mika Brzezinski claimed, "I learned that you can't do a show with Donny without him saying something perverted." Read on...

John Amato has forbidden me from using the "D word" to describe the likes of Limbaugh and Beck for years -- all for the better, no doubt. Should Deutsch have used the word on air? Probably not. Was he right? We report, you decide...

You may recall the above town hall video of Kansas Republican Lynn Jenkins laughing at a young, uninsured mother and telling her to grow up and get health insurance. Jenkins may be best known for her stunning gaffe in which she talked of the GOP searching for their "great white hope."

Seeing a major opportunity for victory in 2010, Democratic State Senator Laura Kelly has decided to throw her hat in the ring and has announced she will take on Lynn Jenkins:

Kansas State Sen. Laura Kelly, a Topeka Democrat, said Friday she'll run to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins next year.

Democrats like their chances. It's a district that's gone both ways in the past few election cycles, and Jenkins, in her first-term, has had a gaffe or two. (Remember Jenkins' "great white hope" comment from two months ago?)

"Kansas families in the 2nd district deserve a representative who will energetically stand up for their most important concerns - their pocketbooks, their jobs, and their health care - not sit back and block progress in Washington," Kelly said in her campaign announcement.

"In the last few months people from all across the district have been urging me to run for Congress. They are tired of leaders tied to a do-or-die narrow partisan agenda that has failed our country for the last eight years. Saying NO is not enough in these challenging times. People deserve common sense answers and real solutions," she said. Read on...

Lynn Jenkins has been nothing short of an embarrassment to her state and our country and is extremely vulnerable. Click here to visit Laura Kelly's website, and if you like what you see and want to show her some love, donate if you can. Jenkins ranks near the top of the right wing nutjob heap -- let's send her packing.