As the fights in Wisconsin and Ohio rage on over efforts to strip workers of their rights, everybody has an opinion. It's interesting to see the difference.

Rich Lowry's op-ed in the Columbia Tribune was most representative of the disdain the right has for union workers. Here's a taste:

No, the most important measure at stake in Wisconsin is the governor’s proposal for the state to stop deducting union dues from the paychecks of state workers. This practice essentially wields the taxing power of the government on behalf of the institutional interests of the unions. It makes the government an arm of the public-sector unions. It is a priceless favor.

Wisconsin doesn’t collect dues for Elks lodges or the NRA. What makes these organizations different from public-sector unions is that people freely choose to join them and freely choose to pay their dues. They are truly voluntary organizations that don’t rely on the power of the state for their well-being. Walker wants to give members of public-sector unions a measure of this same autonomy.

[...]

Public-sector unions are a creature of government, and the Democrats are the party of government. The two of them have identical interests and worldviews, and both want to leverage government to swell their campaign coffers. How to characterize this? The word “shame” comes to mind.

Lowry of course fails to note that unions must disclose each and every penny they spend on campaigns, independent ad expenditures, and other political activity. That doesn't seem to faze him as much as the outrage that union dues are collected by payroll deduction. Is he also outraged that insurance companies' coffers are fattened by private corporations who take payroll deductions for their employees' health insurance? Of course not.

Now here's the view from the left side of the aisle, via Thos Payne at MyAuburnJournal:

The fact that Americans for Prosperity is now going on the air makes it clear that this is about something far larger going on than getting Wisconsin's finances under control; it underscores the degree to which this has become, for the Republicans, an ideological battle of elite corporatism verses the working class - oil industry billionaires are pitted against union workers; their ideological ally a rented governor who is intent on destroying trade unions. This kind of struggle needs to be called what it is - class warfare.

What's happening in Wisconsin is no accident. Class warfare depends on the suppression of democracy. The Koch brothers depend on corruption within the Supreme Court. The extreme right-wing judicial activism that was the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision was just the opening salvo.

[...]

Buying elections didn't stop in Wisconsin and the agenda isn't confined to the Koch brothers. It's the entire Republican agenda - an agenda that is threatened by America's demographic evolution. This agenda has always has depended on suppressing the vote, and now it depends on the suppression of democracy itself.

Make no mistake, this is class warfare. It's a war on democracy itself, and Wisconsin is just the first battle.

Wisconsin is symbolic to both sides. To the right, it's an effort to weaken the power of collective voices by de-funding unions. To the left, it's a class war.

The right wing takes away. The left wing gives back. In Wisconsin, they're looking to take away people's voice and their power. The left (and most independents, too) are giving back that voice and power by the only means available to them -- protest.

Which is why it shouldn't surprise you to discover that Jim DeMint is hedging Governor Walker's bet by introducing a federal right-to-work bill. Evidently states' rights only matter when they're exercised to rob ordinary people.

“No American should be forced to join a union and pay dues to get a job in this country,” said Senator DeMint. “Many Americans are already struggling just to put food on the table, and they shouldn’t have to fear losing their jobs or face discrimination if they don’t want to join a union. Forced-unionism shields unions from member accountability and has a detrimental effect on the economy. In states where companies are forced to hire only union workers, businesses have struggled to compete while they deal with counterproductive work rules.”

Funny thing. Statistics prove that workers in states which are not right-to-work states have more job security, and those states have lower unemployment rates, which means Senators DeMint, Coburn, Hatch, Lee, Paul, Risch, Toomey and Vitter are big fat liars.

But we knew that.

So. In response to a Politico piece in which the authors and White House whine about the left wing blogosphere not being happy with all of Obama's "wins" and not caring about potential losses in 2010, Kevin Drum writes:

Here's the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here's the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

Here's the thing. What matters is whether policy works. It does not matter if what Obama did was more left wing than anything that's been done in a while (though in absolute terms I would argue it mostly wasn't left wing, the health care plan, for example, was essentially a Republican plan from the 90s), what matters is if it was left wing enough (big enough stimulus, smart enough health care plan) to improve people's lives enough that they noticed.

It wasn't, and that's all that matters. Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn't even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.

Sometimes half doesn't work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama's half assed "left wing" policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a "socialist" this means that Obama's policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.

I don't want Obama doing anything I agree with, because he will screw it up and discredit it. In this respect he is like Bush. He is poison because he is incompetent at policy.

As for the original Politico post, the hysterical ranting at the peanut gallery the authors clearly don't even read, says more about them and the White House than it does about the left wing blogosphere they try to blame for Democrats own failures.

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The other day, our friend Markos went on Countdown and called out Glenn Beck and his fellow teabaggers for their incessant use of eliminationist rhetoric.

Of course, this deeply upset Glenn Beck, who responded on his show yesterday (transcript via Jed):

I want to start in an unusual place. I want to show you what the founder of the Daily Kos, which is this far-left wing blog, said. Here's what he said just the other day about tea parties:

This is what the people voted for, and it's one thing to oppose it on policy, it's another thing to use the kind of exterminationist, eliminationist rhetoric that they're using in appealing to violence and that sort of thing.

OK. Extermination talk? I haven't heard any of the extermination talk. It sounds like, again, he's calling us Nazis. How can you paint the right like Nazis?

Maybe Glenn Beck hasn't heard any eliminationist rhetoric because he's one of the loudest voices using it, and doing so on a regular basis:

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As I noted awhile back:

Beck actually has been engaging in eliminationist rhetoric in attacking progressives since June of last year, though he's been recently ratcheting it down to new depths.

I compiled the video above with a sampling from the past nine months. In it, you can see Beck call progressives a "cancer" (multiple times), "the disease that's killing us," a "virus," a "parasite," "vampires" who will "suck the life out" of the Democratic Party, and claim that progressives intend the "destruction of the Constitution" and will strike it a "death blow".

Since then, we've been treated to such disquisitions as this:

Beck: What they're about to pass is not a tumor. Because the doctor can come over here and say, 'Yeah, there's a tumor here, and we've got to go in and cut this out.' I don't know if you can cut this tumor out. Maybe not. But you can try. But what they're about to pass is a bloodstream disease. It will be injected into our system and it will be incurable.

Beck: I think they're gonna pass this thing. They are gonna do whatever it takes to pass this, and they're not going to go the traditional way, they are gonna go the way of snakes and cockroaches. They're gonna crawl out in the cover of darkness, and they're going to pass this, make it happen one way or another.

Apparently, though, Beck is confused about just what Markos meant, because of course he couldn't be talking about people like Beck. Somehow, it has to do with Beck's Planet Bizarro-style confusion about political categories -- as in Beck's reconfiguration of things to equate neo-Nazis with the "Progressive Right":

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Glenn Beck's eliminiationist jihad against the progressive movement took an interesting rhetorical turn yesterday, when Beck tried to claim that the "progressive road" leads to Communism and Nazism:

Beck: It's not about Communists. Never has been about Communists, either. Really hasn't. That's guy's a lunatic fringe. Just like the white supremacists on the other side. Right here! [Points to chalkboard diagram]

This side, up and down! Communists and fascists -- those people are crazy! This is about progressivism. And most people, they're in here -- when they say they are progressive, they don't think they're headed here. But progress -- baby steps -- you are moving toward something! You are moving toward one of these.

This is why they called George Bush a fascist. Because progressives know what's at the end of the progressive road -- Nazis or Communists! Someone has to control your life. Someone will be at the controls.

Communists would like it to be them. Nazis are rooting for their side. I'm not rooting for any side! I'm rooting for this side [points to right side of diagram]. Wrong side of the scale, guy!

Now, there's at least some reason to connect progressivism with Communism, since they are both left-wing phenomena and share at least some values. But Nazism?

Let's look at some real American Nazis -- say, the folks who come out in support of Sheriff Joe Arpaio:

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See anything "progressive" there? Actually, you do -- you see it among the pro-immigrant marchers the Nazis are protesting against.

But you'd have a hard time convincing anyone -- especially these neo-Nazis themselves -- that they have anything even remotely to do with "progressivism." Indeed, the very thing that animates them into barbaric bloodlust is the progressive movement -- that is, the desire to destroy it utterly.

As we've explained previously, in the context of Jonah Goldberg's fraudulent Liberal Fascism thesis -- which, of course, is the basis for Beck's lumping of fascism and communism together under the "end of the progressive road" -- what makes these people right-wing extremists is that they not only adopt right-wing political positions, they take them to their most extreme logical (if that's the word for it) outcome:

• They not only oppose abortion, they believe abortion providers should be killed.
• They not only believe that liberal elites control the media and financial institutions, but that a conniving cabal of Jews is at the heart of this conspiracy to destroy America.
• They not only despise Big Government, they believe it is part of a New World Order plot to enslave us all.
• They not only defend gun rights avidly, they stockpile them out of fear that President Obama plans to send in U.N. troops to take them away from citizens.
• They not only oppose homosexuality as immoral, they believe gays and lesbians deserve the death penalty.
• They not only oppose civil-rights advances for minorities, they also believe a "race war" is imminent, necessary and desirable.

And on and on. Every part of the agenda of the agenda of right-wing extremists is essentially an extreme expression of conservative positions. And that, fundamentally, is why American fascism always has been and always will be, properly understood, an unmistakable phenomenon of the Right.

Methinks Beck needs some better diagrams.

Eric Boehlert makes an incredible point.

If you don't think there's a media double standard that favors Republicans over Democrats, then let's play a game of what-if.

What if, in 2006, at Yearly Kos, the first annual convention of liberal bloggers and their readers, organizers shelled out $100,000 for former Vice President Al Gore to address attendees? And what if the same organizers booked as an opening-night speaker a fringe, radical-left conspiracy theorist who'd spent the previous year pushing the thoroughly debunked claim that some Bush White administration insiders played a role in, and even planned, the 9-11 attacks. What if the speaker (also proudly anti-Semitic) received a standing ovation from the liberal Yearly Kos crowd?

Given that backdrop, and given the fact that the 9-11 Truther nut had for weeks bragged about his chance to share the stage with Gore, do you think the press would have demanded that Gore justify his association with a hateful conference that embraced a 9-11 Truther? Do you think pundits would have universally mocked and ridiculed Gore's judgment while condemning the Yearly Kos convention as being a hothouse of left-wing hate? Do you think Gore's appearance would have become a thing?

I sure do.

Gore and liberal bloggers would have been crucified by the press and the D.C. chattering class if the scenario I described ever unfolded in real life. (FYI, it goes without saying that organizers for Yearly Kos, now known as Netroots Nation, would never dream of mainstreaming an anti-Semitic 9-11 Truther via a prime-time speaking gig.)

But this past weekend in Nashville, at the first National Tea Party Convention, the Beltway press did just the opposite with regard to Sarah Palin's keynote address, which did follow a prime-time speech by "birther" nut Joseph Farah, who over the years has carved out a uniquely hateful and demented corner of the right-wing blogosphere. Because, yes, at the Tea Party convention, Farah, a proud Muslim-hater and gay-hater, did receive a standing ovation from the conservative crowd after he unfurled his thoroughly debunked birther garbage. (i.e. Obama "doesn't have a birth certificate.") And Farah did brag in the weeks leading up to the event about his chance to share the stage with Palin, to associate with Palin. ("Sold out! Palin-Farah ticket rocks tea-party convention," read the headline at Farah's discredited right-wing site, WorldNetDaily.com.)

Worst of all, though, the press played dumb about the whole thing.

Fact: Virtually nobody in the corporate media said boo about Palin helping to legitimize Farah by sharing the same stage with him. She was given a total free ride.

And I mean nobody. According to Nexis, there were more than 150 newspaper articles and columns published in the U.S. last week that mentioned both Palin and the Tea Party. (Combined, The New York Times and The Washington Post published 18 of them.) Yet out of all those articles and columns, exactly two also mentioned Joseph Farah by name. (Congrats to the Philadelphia Daily News and New Hampshire's Concord Monitor.)

When MoveOn held a video contest called Bush in 30 seconds and a Bush-Hitler video showed up and slipped through, the RNC and the media went ballistic.

Six months ago, MoveOn.org held a contest to find the best amateur ad against President Bush. The group invited people to make ads and submit them to its Web site. Some idiot spliced images of Bush together with images of Adolf Hitler, evidently trying to make Bush look like a warmonger. His submissions, which arrived with 1,500 others—too many to be screened quickly—were posted on the contest Web site. As soon as MoveOn.org leaders realized what was in the ad, they removed and denounced it.

We've seen hundreds of signs at Tea Party events that are racist and violent, but there never was an outcry from the media over them like there was over Move On, who didn't even produce it. FOX News and others in the media ripped every Democratic politician who went to Yearly Kos back in 2006. And when many of the Democratic presidential nominees went to the same event in 2007 instead of the DLC convention, the criticism was abundant. Why didn't Kristol rip his Quayle project (Sarah Palin) over making over 100K and speaking at the Tea Party convention? Well, that would never happen because conservatives can do no wrong. Even if she did appear with the likes of a birther like Joseph Farah because he serves a purpose for the GOP.

Digby writes:

I don't think there's any doubt. In fact, the first Yearly Kos got a lot of media attention and it featured some big names like Howard Dean and Harry Reid. But the organizers didn't pay for any of them and there were no extremist cranks invited, so there was nothing to compel the huge hue and cry that would have been raised if they had done so. It was, all in all, a pretty staid affair, with the only controversy surrounding the fact that Mark Warner paid 50k for a party --- which was roundly criticized by the participants as gilding the lily.

Considering what would have been a feeding frenzy if the netroots had done something similar, Boehlert goes on to wonder why the mainstream press didn't bother to report the fact that Sarah Palin, whose speech was broadcast live on television, followed a prime time speech by "birther" fruitcake Joseph Farah.

By the way, here's some of the highlights that Farah came away with at the tea party convention. It's very scary stuff. If the media was actually covering the convention then why did they ignore this garbage?

I recently had a political conversation with a few friends and family members, most of whom are Republicans, and it was nothing short of exasperating. I thought that some of them had progressed over the past few years, but I now know they still have a long way to go.

After George W. Bush was installed in 2000, I told all of my Republican friends and family that not only would he be an abject failure, but that he would take us to war in Iraq and our economy would be in ruins by the time he left office. I was chastised for years after, but I never gloated as time went by and I was sadly proven right. Dubya and his party ran our country into the ground and I thought that many of those conservative friends and family had come around -- but as it turns out, not so much.

Just minutes into the aforementioned discussion, it became painfully clear that the right-leaning narratives put out by our corporate media had indeed sunk in and they had bought into them hook, line and sinker -- and most of these folks admitted they can no longer stomach Fox News so I knew they were getting their talking points from the likes of CNN and other non-Fox media outlets.

No matter what the topic, from health care reform to Wall Street, and no matter how many points we agreed on or how many facts I laid at their feet, someone would invariably turn to me and dismissively say "Yes, but you're so left wing that you..." or "This is a center-right country, and you're so far left that..." In each case I asked them to explain -- please give examples of what makes me, or anyone, "left wing." The only thing they could come up with was deficits! Pelosi and Reid! Beyond that, it was because I didn't hate people like Al Gore and Howard Dean and I watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, and EVERYBODY knows they are really "far left."

Head. Smash. Desk.

The irony of it all is that in the end, we agreed on about 90% of everything we talked about. Old habits die hard and they couldn't let go of the old targets they were trained to hate by the right wing media. In their minds, any policy or legislation that comes from Democrats with no support from the right is just far left and that can't be good. We ended up agreeing to disagree ... on all the issues we agreed on! I'm sure I'm not the only one who has suffered through these kinds of skull-numbing experiences so if you've found yourself in the same position, please feel free to use this post to vent.

(Note: That's not me in the picture...at least on the outside.)

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Andrea Mitchell asked a Villager health-care panel on her show today to discuss how Harry Reid can get to 60 votes with the public option since the "Gang of Four" refuses to budge and threatens to kill health-care reform entirely.

Mitchell: And Ruth Marcus, what do they do, how do they water down the public option to make it acceptable to some of the moderates but placate some of the more liberals?

Marcus: Well, it's the "and still placate some of the more liberals" is the hardest part. You're dealing with a very complex Rubik's cube really at this point because every time you change something to please someone, you're annoying someone else and potentially losing his or her vote.

But the public option, I think, could be scaled back. There is already something that Sen. Carper from Delaware is working on in terms of allowing it to take effect perhaps more quickly in states or immediately in states which have very high costs and other states could opt in. There is Sen. Snowe's old trigger option that one could still pull the trigger on, so there are ways of doing it.

I think that in the end it is possible to mollify enough of the centrist Democrats, perhaps even a Republican -- now that seems awfully remote. The president, I think, is going to have to tell the left wing of his party and the balking liberal Senators that it is crazy to pull down the entirety of health care over this one issue which the president has already said is not the be all end all of health reform.

It's always the liberals who need to compromise their positions to the conventional wisdom of the Villagers. The Gang of Four are all righteous and virtuous while liberals are out-of-control hippies who act like barking dogs. How dare they want to produce a real reform measure that could eventually provide true competition for the health care industry and that will help lower overall health care costs? Outrageous!

Remember, Marcus was being a concern troll the day after America elected Obama to the presidency with a mandate to overhaul health care and wrote a column telling him to not to govern from the left.

Yet the experience of President Bill Clinton's rocky early months -- remember gays in the military? the BTU tax? -- suggests the steep political price of governing in a way that is, or seems, skewed to the left. This risk is particularly acute for Obama, whose opponents have painted him as a leftist extremist. The good news is that his advisers seem exquisitely aware of this trap and determined not to fall into it.

As David Sirota wrote:

The standard lie about Clinton's failures aside (it was NAFTA, stupid), the last sentence is particularly odd. Obama's "opponents have painted him as a leftist extremist." Yet, that supposed "leftist extremist" won the largest presidential mandate in the last generation.

And somehow, having done that, we are supposed to believe that means he should tack to the right.

Say what?

Email Marcus and ask her why the Gang of Four aren't the real problem, since 56 other Senators are fine with the public option: marcusr@washpost.com

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Rep. Luis Gutierrez, the Illinois Democrat, kick-started the coming immigration debate this week by delivering a 10-point plan for immigration reform that looks like a solid progressive start:

Pathway to legalization for undocumented workers

Professional and effective border enforcement

Smart and humane interior enforcement

Protecting workers

Verification systems

Family unity as a cornerstone of our immigration system

Future flows of workers

AgJOBS

DREAM Act

Promoting immigrant integration

[Go read the details.]

Then he went on Lou Dobbs' CNN program to discuss the plan with an obviously skeptical Dobbs -- who, of course, had to whine about how he was being attacked as a racist, just for promoting an extremist agenda.

In the process, he makes clear just what the primary cry of the nativists in the upcoming debate will be: "Amnesty!"

DOBBS: Fundamental to the question becomes, is it every illegal immigrant, is it unconditional amnesty, and what will be the impact of that? And those are issues. Think about it, we're here in 2009, some left wing ethnocentric interest groups are calling for my firing from CNN because I'm quote unquote a racist. I could obtain purity in a moment if I would just simply embrace open borders and sponsor illegal immigration. That's the kind of distortion that is not helpful. The reality is, we have some basic questions that people are avoiding asking. And if I may, let me ask a couple and see how we go and go forward. One, should every illegal immigrant in this country receive amnesty?

Gutierrez, however, is up to the job, and gives a clear and sensible answer:

GUTIERREZ: I believe that every undocumented worker in this country who can come forward and show that they've violated no other law except the immigration law, which they used breaking the immigration law to arrive in this country, that's it. No other felony, no other criminal record. That they are sustentative, they got family, they've got a job, they've been working, and they're ready to prove that by bringing forward and going through a very rigorous background check, we should give them an opportunity. Does that mean they go directly to permanent residency and directly to citizenship? No, we have to earn that too. But I think we can give them a program of five, six years which they continue to work, pay taxes, learn English, civics, become fully incorporated and at the end, if they fill the test, then we'll let them stay. But I want them to earn because in the interim period, many Americans say they're here and they're not paying their fair share. My program says, let them pay their fair share. Because we don't have political will, we don't have the programs to deport them, why don't we integrate them? There will be undesirable immigrants to this country, which we can weed out of the program very easily. We can have a set of rules.

It was a good start, if the objective is to make this a rational debate. And certainly, that's what progressives will want to do, because they have the facts and hard realities on their side.

Not that it means we'll actually get a rational debate. The Dobbses seem intent on ignoring the facts and whipping up people's fears, and we can expect that's what we'll get from the Fox crew as well.

Still, anticipating that, progressives need to find a common set of principles for advancing real immigration reform that works and makes valued citizens out of marginalized immigrants, brings them into the labor force (especially as union members) and taxpayers. Because there is going to be a lot of divisive crap thrown up in this debate, and lot of different and competing legislative plans. It will be important to keep our eyes on the prize.

To that end, Duke1676 at MigraMatters has put together a list of 25 principles for progressives in the immigration debate, including:

-- End policies that rely only on enforcement and deterrence as the sole means of regulating migration.

-- Address the root causes of immigration, and change US policy so that it doesn't foster and produce conditions that force hundreds of thousands of people each year to leave their countries of origin in order to simply survive.

-- Tie all current and future trade, military, and foreign aid agreements to not only worker protections both here and abroad, but also to their ability to foster economic progress and social justice for the working class and poor in sender nations.

-- Formulate a reasonable, humane, fair and practical method for determining the levels of immigration going forward. Establish an independent commission free from the pressures of political expediency and business interests to review all the pertinent data and set admission numbers based on labor, economic, social, and humanitarian needs.

-- Provide a path to legalization for all current undocumented immigrants living and working in the US, free of restrictions based on country of origin, economic status, education, length of residency, or any other “merit based” criteria.

-- Secure the borders by first ensuring that the vast majority of new immigrants have the ability and opportunity to legally enter the country through legal ports of entry by increasing the availability and equitable distribution of green cards. This would curtail the flow of migration through illegal channels. Only after that, should enforcement begin to ensure compliance, or any work to physically secure the border take place.

And finally, the bottom line:

Recognize that immigration is a vital part of maintaining a healthy and vibrant America. It is what has set this nation apart from all others since its inception. To close our borders to new immigrants is to cut off the lifeblood that has always made this nation grow and prosper.

These are good starts. Progressives are setting the table for a rational debate on immigration. We're inviting conservatives to join us. But we're not holding our breaths.

Below: Another video of Rep. Gutierrez outlining his plan.

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[H/t to Gordon Skene at Newstalgia for the archival footage]

Yesterday was one of those anniversaries many of us try to put out of our minds. Conservatives these days seem to be trying especially hard.

But for some of us, those memories still burn:

It was 14 years ago when Doris Battle's parents were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, just two of the 168 people who died during the nation's worst domestic terrorist attack.

Battle was among 400 people who gathered Sunday to observe the 14th anniversary of the bombing of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, an attack that also injured hundreds of people. The explosion of a truck loaded with 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil tore the face off the building and caused millions of dollars in damage to other downtown structures.

"I can't go home and see him anymore," Battle said of her father, Calvin Battle, who died with her mother Peola when the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed on April 19, 1995. And Battle said the passage of time has not diminished the loss she still feels.

And yet, erasing the very memory of the worst act of homegrown terrorism ever committed on American soil -- and until 9/11, the worst such act ever -- seems to be what movement conservatives have been doing all week.

Ever since word emerged earlier this week about the Department of Homeland Security's internal-assessment bulletin about domestic terrorism, the mainstream right has been wallowing in paranoia about the possibility the report might have meant them.

Moreover, no amount of rebuttal -- even from the DHS secretary herself -- is good enough for them.

Yet if you read the report, it couldn't be clearer that it is concerned almost exclusively with far-right extremists: neo-Nazis, skinheads, anti-abortion bombers, and their assorted fellow travelers. What the teeth-gnashing from the right suggests is that they recognize themselves, and their influence, all too readily in the thugs and terrorists who take their beliefs and twist them into something violent.

Guilty conscience, much?

Prime example: There was Bill Bennett, that right-wing moral icon, telling John King's "State of the Union" panel yesterday on CNN that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano's clear explanation wasn't good enough.

It's bad enough that he can't even get his facts straight. What's especially noteworthy is the way he airbrushes out the very real existence of actual domestic right-wing terrorist groups:

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KING: Bill, she says they have intelligence and active investigations of this possibility. Do you take her at her word?

BENNETT: She wouldn't give you one bit of evidence. You asked her for the names of any groups, any organizations. You pressed her on it -- nothing.

When they put out a report on certain left-wing organizations back in January, there were some specifics. There are no specifics here, except they target veterans. They say look out for veterans being recruited and look out for people who are opposed to abortion and immigration.

Of course, as we explained recently:

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Tonight I am at a blogger meet-up in Washington DC, sponsored by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. A shout out to the bloggers in attendence I've had the opportunity to meet: Last Left Before Hooterville, My Left Wing, Yikes!, Pharyngula, Bad Astronomer, One Pissed Off Veteran, Tristero of Hullabaloo, Neural Gourmet and Lambert and Vast Left from Corrente.

Open Thread below. Happy Sunday.