I wonder how many single payer advocates are going to make it past the audience screening:

The White House promised a very public campaign on health care by President Obama, and next week he's going prime time.

On the night of June 24, ABC News and Obama will host a health care town hall at the White House. The president will take questions "from an audience made up of Americans selected by ABC News who have divergent opinions in this historic debate," according to the network.

Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer will moderate the program to be held in the East Room. The one-hour telecast starts at 10 p.m. on June 24. The next morning, Sawyer will interview Obama for Good Morning America.

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Republicans seem to have picked a meme for fighting the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court: She's a racist!

It's on all the wingnut tongues. We had Tom Tancredo spewing this line on The Ed Show yesterday -- yeah, the same Tom Tancredo who once sang "Dixie" with the members of a white supremacist organization, and whose entire presidential candidacy was built on bashing Latinos.

You could kinda see where this was going then.

Sure enough, the rest of the Right's leading Racial Sensitivity icons -- Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan -- all were singing the same chorus: "She's a raaaaaacist!"

Limbaugh: The infamous Donovan McNabb incident is only the tip of his lengthy race-baiting record.

Beck: The guy who likes to link Latinos to crime and hyperventilates about Mexican crime regularly.

Coulter: The woman whose new book soft-pedals the existence and activities of white supremacists.

Buchanan: The man whose recent books have been rehashings of old white-supremacist eugenics from the early 20th century, fretting about white privilege being overturned by an evil brown tide.

Coulter's a classic case of this: As Diane Sawyer tried to get her to talk about the upside of seeing a Hispanic woman nominated to the Supreme Court, Coulter dourly refused, pouting that liberals hadn't done the same for Clarence Thomas or the execrable Miguel Estrada.

Yeah, those are just ideal people to be leading this charge for Republicans.

UPDATE: Newt Gingrich joins the parade. He fits right in.

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A man who has been totally disgraced for his past behavior, including ethics violations, as Speaker of the House now is constantly being given a platform to slime and smear any victim of his choosing freely. Nancy Pelosi is his newest target and he's been vicious in his attacks on her.

Newt, a man divorced many times over, just became a Catholic (a faith that frowns upon divorce) and got booted out of his Speaker's job because the American people hated his tactics. Yet he has the nerve to say Pelosi committed some unforgivable sin by saying the CIA lied, and that she should lose her leadership position. Being a Catholic now (I still consider myself one, but not very strict), who is he to point fingers at others when he himself has sinned so much?

He called her a liar among other smears yesterday on ABC radio, and then appeared on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer and went one step further.

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich today flatly declared that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be replaced in the wake of her allegation that the CIA lied to her about harsh interrogation techniques.

“She really disqualified herself to be speaker,” Gingrich, R-Ga., told Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America. “I think the Democrats should get a new speaker.”

When Sawyer brought up the fact that in 2008, Republican Sen. Peter Hoekstra similarly declared that the CIA lies to Congress, why didn't Newt demand that he be repudiated also? Newt practices the kind of hypocrisy he knows all too well.

Sawyer: Hoekstra: "We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it has been doing and then lies to Congress." That's a Republican saying it. And they're saying, where were you then, you didn't call for him to resign?

Gingrich: Well, I think in that particular argument he's fighting with them over a report he wants about a year and a half ago, but I've had a similar standard of toughness with Republicans on other issues...

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Al Gore tries to explain his book to Diane Sawyer on GMA, but can't get her to stop asking about him about he '08 election. Oh, and how fat is he? Here's the link to his book: The Assault on Reason,

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Faiz says:

In his new book, The Assault on Reason, which will be released tomorrow, Al Gore explains “why logic and reason and the best evidence available and the scientific discoveries do not have more force in changing the way we all think about the reality we are now facing.” Gore explains that part of the explanation lies in how much television viewing time is devoted to coverage of “serial obsessions,” such as the Anna Nicole Smith and JonBenet Ramsey.

In her interview with Al Gore this morning, ABC’s Diane Sawyer displayed the media’s propensity to focus on their “serial obsessions” rather than substantive issues that currently affect the country.

Media Matters:

On the February 16 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage asserted that ABC News correspondent Diane Sawyer was "aiding and abetting" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a February 13 interview in which, Savage claimed, Sawyer had refused to challenge Ahmadinejad's statements denying the existence of the Holocaust. Savage said: "Here Diane Sawyer goes to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and does not once say to him, 'How could you deny the Holocaust? Here are the pictures of the 6 or 7 million Jews that Hitler killed. How dare you do this to the world?' " Savage added: "So Diane Sawyer, in essence, is agreeing that the Holocaust didn't occur."

There's a logic leap worthy of a C-level right-wing pundit. Only problem, Mr. Weiner Savage, is that it's a complete and total lie. Sawyer DID ask about Ahmadinejad's statements and even offered to show him take him and show him records from Auschwitz. But why truth and facts get in the way of a nice little hate on?

While discussing this interview, Savage said Sawyer was "disgusting" and "full of crap" and repeatedly called her a "lying whore," a "prostitute," and a "witch." He added, "I stand by those words, and if you don't like it, sue me. Take me to a court of law for calling you a whore, because you are an intellectual prostitute for what you have done for ratings."

Um, yeah. That glass house looks a little shaky there, Mr. Weiner Savage.