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Dear 24 Hour Cable News Channels:

I understand your dilemma, I really do. You have 44 minutes on the hour to fill with content. And it has to be compelling stuff, so that the viewer isn't tempted to channel surf to your rivals. In the situation like the Fort Hood shootings, where news is coming scattershot and conflicting, it's even more difficult.

See? I get it.

But having said that--and I say this with love and respect--PLEASE, SHUT. THE. F#@K. UP. Don't spend time guessing on motivations when there is so little information available. Don't surmise terrorist intent when you can't possibly know. And for the love of everything holy, don't go to criminal profiler Cliff "A Hammer Sees Everything As A Nail" Van Zandt (a crime of which Keith Olbermann is also guilty) to make up utter bovine excrement.

At the time that Van Zandt was waxing rhapsodic over possible terrorist inclinations, remember, the news was that there were two or three shooters, one of whom was dead (Hasan, the single shooter, was alive and being treated at the time). That Maj. Nadil Hasan was of Jordanian, Arab, or Palestinian birth (he was born in Virginia of Palestinian immigrant parents), that he was a recent Muslim convert (he had been a practicing Muslim his whole life), that he was suffering from PTSD, or secondary PTSD from his work with returning vets in Virginia, that he was sympathetic with suicide bombers, angry at bad evaluations, upset at being deployed to Iraq, frustrated by the Army's dismissal of the harassment he got at Ft. Hood about his faith and/or desperate to get out of his upcoming deployment.

Bottom line: we didn't know enough. It was irresponsible of you to try to make suppositions when the information (including the fact that he was alive) was so sketchy.

And to focus on the one known of his name and then presuming his faith (A lot of 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants don't necessarily practice the religions of their grandparents, yet still have Middle Eastern names, and I will reiterate, in those early hours, WE DIDN'T KNOW) to then suggest jihadist and/or terrorist sympathies was to give legitimacy to all those hate-mongers like Michelle Malkin and Fox & Friends anchors Doocy and not-Doocy to once again, call into question ALL Muslims.

Don't you get it? "Terrorism" is not defined as "any violence by any Muslim anywhere at any time for any reason." If it's true that Hasan had been the victim of harassment because of his religion and that contributed to his state of mind, then those who create and foster an environment that makes it acceptable to demonize and dehumanize Muslims were right there with him, pulling the trigger. To focus on Hasan's faith as you did in those early hours was the lazy approach and avoids the deeper reasons:

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Lawyers, Guns, & Money: Poor FOX, for them being ignored is the same as being muzzled.

William K. Wolfrum: Wow, come to think of it, Fox Business Network isn't much of a business network.

Oh No They Didn't: Sesame Street Disavows American Apparel. No, really.

Joe My God: Whoops, male McCain voters lost more than an election last November, if ya know what I mean.

Jack & Jill Politics doesn't sugarcoat it about Cheney, and here's some motivational speaker advice for Dubya.

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Someone really should have thought twice before letting Sean Hannity embarrass himself with the failed stunt he tried in his interview with Michael Moore, the second half of which aired last night on Fox.

Hannity wanted to make a point about how health care in Cuba is so much worse than it is in the YooEssAy -- in contradistinction to Moore's own reportage -- so he offered what he called special video footage he had been provided of a "hospital" in Cuba.

What we then see is a rattletrap mess with old beds and rotting toilets, etc. But Moore notices what should be obvious: There are no patients, either.

Ah, but wait! We shortly see footage of patients in a hospital. But they're in an obviously different building (or at least wing), because this room is clean and the beds and equipment sanitary and well-tended. But we only get to see them for a few seconds before -- swoop! -- off we go back to the rat's nest.

Which is obviously an abandoned hospital or wing, which is certainly not unheard of, even in the YooEssAy.

Moore, of course, laughs at all of this with glee. Hannity quickly changes the subject, since his oh-so-convincing video evidence just makes him look as bad as he has recently in his Jennings Jihad.

You'd think Hannity & Co. would know better than to try to run such hamhandedly edited footage past an experienced filmmaker like Moore. This was so amateurish that they all should just be embarrassed.

But they're too arrogant and too stupid to be so.

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A glimpse of reality managed to peek out between the lines of B.S. that largely constituted Bill O'Reilly's weekly conversation with Bernard Goldberg on Tuesday.

Goldberg: I think the guys at the White House, the political guys at the White House, say, 'You know, you have a couple of people here on this network who if their lips are moving, if their lips are moving, they're bashing the president.' And then the entertainment network, as Juan Williams said, the run the 'So You Think You Can Dance' instead of the president's speech to Congress. And I think these guys are saying, 'You want to play like that? You want to play like that, Fox? We can play like that too.' And, and, and --

O'Reilly: Yeah, but that's immature. It hurts them.

Goldberg: I agree. I agree. I agree.

It's nice of O'Reilly to finally acknowledge that the treatment of President Obama by his network is immature. That's probably the kindest description -- after "absurdly biased," "hateful," and "a journalistic travesty" -- one is likely to apply here, but it'll do. Fox's coverage of Obama has been worthy of a network run by eight-year-olds who like to stick out their tongues. (See the latest Time cover for more of that.)

And so perhaps for the White House to respond in kind is equally immature. But O'Reilly's glass palace isn't such a great place from which to throw these particular stones.

And the whining and kvetching. Oy! What a bunch of crybabies these people are.

O'Reilly then lists the Fox anchors who don't bash Obama with every breath (he calls it "giving Obama a fair shot"). It's a short list. Then he asks: "How many fair shots do you need?"

Which sort of begs the question, "Why not all of them?"

Really: Why should anyone have to absorb the barrage of cheap shots that's part and parcel of the Fox treatment for Democrats? Good on Obama for just saying No, at least this time around.

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Rep. Lynn Woolsey, chair of the largest caucus in Congress -- the Congressional Progressive Caucus -- refuted Fox's daylong talking point, that President Obama somehow took the public option off the table in his speech last night health-care reform, earlier today on Fox with Jon Scott:

Woolsey: I applauded, because ... public option is on the table. There's no question about it.

Scott: It's on the table, but it didn't seem to have his -- you know, it wasn't his ... He didn't say it's got to be there.

Woolsey: Well, he knows that 84 members of the Progressive Caucus, and many, many members besides ourselves are absolutely intent on the public option being part of the House health-care reform bill.

Scott: What's your chief argument for why you think it's got to be there?

Woolsey: Because it's the best way to cut costs and bring competition into the program, and actually to bring security for those who are already covered by health care, and might lose their jobs or want to change jobs, and want to have a choice. And one of those choices could be the public option.

Scott: You don't think that the free market would be the more efficient way to deliver that?

Woolsey: Well, has it been? Fifty years, private health-care insurance companies have not been able to do the job. Why would we think they could do it now?

Scott: What about Medicare and Medicaid? Are they examples of well-run, you know, government programs for dispensing medical care?

Woolsey: They're very popular programs, sir, as is the Veterans Administration and the military health care. Those are government programs that run well, they run at an overhead of less than 5 to 7 percent, versus 30 percent for the private health care insurance companies.

Funny that Scott should bring up precisely the programs that prove that "government run health care" can be a good thing. Woolsey hit that meaty pitch right out of the park.

Hopefully, she's right about the public option, too.

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It was obvious when the Obama White House stood back and let Van Jones get run over by the right-wing bus that he just happened to be first in line.

These wingnuts are just getting warmed up. That was self-evident yesterday on Fox, when not just Glenn Beck, but Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly piled on as well. These guys are now headed straight for the rest of Obama's progressive appointees, and ultimately are after Obama himself.

Beck had on Michelle Malkin to help him line up the next row of victims, who appear primarily to be John Holdren and Valerie Jarrett. Hannity, too, clearly has Jarrett in his sights; he featured a clip from her chat at Netroots Nation, talking up the value of having someone like Van Jones in the administration.

But really, this bus isn't just aimed at progressive appointees. It's directed ultimately at Obama himself. Beck made that clear in his segment with O'Reilly (who miraculously comes off as the voice of reason in all this), when he essentially admitted that the purpose of this whole campaign is to paint Obama as a closet Marxist who secretly wants to transform America into a communist state.

In other words, this is about delegitimizing the Obama presidency. That's been their purpose from Day One, and they appear to be right on schedule. With a helping hand from the Obama White House itself.

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Countdown's Worst Persons for Sept. 3, 2009 with winner double-talker Alberto Gonzales. Runners up those starting the "did Glenn Beck blank" rumors and Rupert Murdoch for putting Don Imus on Fox Business Channel.

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Okay, we've had the tea baggers, the birthers, the deathers and so what do we have now? The "speechers"? Good grief. Our own Susie Madrak wrote about this in her post Wingnuts Are In Full Bloom. Obama Speaking to Schoolchildren Is Really 'Recruiting for Hitler Youth.' and Media Matters has a good run down of the collective freak out over this at Fox Noise and some of the right wing blogs as well- Conservatives on Obama's stay-in-school speech: "Indoctrination," "brainwashing," Communist China, Hitler Youth.

Never ones to go off script, Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley continue the hysteria about Obama potentially wanting to have some sort of mind control over children by giving a speech that they should stay in school and Alan Colmes, for once, counters his right wing Fox cohorts and treats this nonsense as anyone with a functioning brain should. By mocking it.

Crowley: This guy is not over exposed enough right. So now he's going after pre-K, four and five year old kids, up to sixth grade with this message. Look, just when you think that this administration can't get any more surreal and Orwellian, here he comes to indoctrinate our children.

Colmes: Indoctrinate...

Crowley: You know that there's going to be a political message in here Laura, right? It's going to be something about the environment, green jobs...

Colmes: Where? I don't see that?

Crowley: Something is going to be embedded here because the guy cannot help it.

Colmes: Right.

Crowley: And look, there's a reason why he's only going up to the sixth grade. Because number one the older kids would be like "what is this?" And number two, he's gotta' get them young.

Colmes: (laughter)

Crowley: This is such, this is what Chairman Mao did Laura.

Colmes: Oh my god.

Crowley: This is Max Headroom. This is going into every single classroom. There is no escape from him.

Ingraham: Monica, I hate to burst your bubble, but there are also materials going out for sixth grade and high school...

Crowley: Oh! See, I knew it!

Colmes: Get 'em young! Get 'em in that tent! Get 'em in that Democratic liberal tent!

Crowley: That is the point.

Ingraham: Well first of all Alan the thing I like is that it's so micro-managed, it's so micro-managed that they even suggest the ways to make posters with Obama's notable quotes...

Colmes: It will be like this..

Ingraham: ...about past speeches. What is this?

(crosstalk)

Colmes: Next you're going to accuse them of implant chips in these kids' brains, right?... And they're going to program kids to go Obama... Obama... Obama right? That will be your next ah...

And they go on from there. Jebus, I think Ingraham and Crowley were trying to give Beck a run for his money tonight. I was glad to see Colmes looking like he had some what of a spine for once.

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I thought it was distasteful enough that Chris Wallace asked Juan Williams to have to explain why Ted Kennedy wasn't given the "Jesse Helms" treatment by the New York Times in their obituaries of the two men, but it also turns out that he was showing NewsBusters a little love as well. I'm glad Media Matters reads NewsBusters, so I don't have to.

Also, I'm sure I won't be the only one that thinks Chris Wallace or anyone at Fox complaining about "media coverage" is laughable on its face.

Wallace: I also want to talk about the "media" coverage of Ted Kennedy's death this week. Not only the amount of it, which was extraordinary, but also the tone of it, and I want to put up the first paragraph of The New York Times obituary on Ted Kennedy's death. This is the first paragraph this week.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew triumph and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night.

Now, here's the first paragraph of the Times' story on the passing of Jesse Helms last year.

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.

Bill Sammon, I'm sure some people will be offended that I'm even making the comparison between these two men, but that is a frightening difference.

Sammon: It is and there are two ways to rectify that double standard. One would have been for the New York Times to find something nice to say about Jesse Helms substantively, other than this mossy drawl. The other, if you're going to go the, and I think that's the preferable way to do it, because you want to, when someone dies, you want to find something nice to say.

The other way if they wanted to be fair would, they would have had to put something in Ted Kennedy's about Chappaquiddick, about his demagoguery Robert Bork, the, you know, lunch-counter America, the back alley abortions, all those kind of things, but they didn't, so either way you do it it's unfair, and that was a striking example.

Wallace: Juan, do you think that there's a striking difference in the way those two men were sent off?

Williams: Well, I think you should be nice to people at the time of their death in general, no matter what their sins, but in fact I think it was good journalism. I think in fact that if you look at the public impact that Jesse Helms had on the country, it was to stand in opposition to civil rights and all the gay rights and all this. If you look at the public impact of Ted Kennedy...

Wallace: But wasn't he for something?

Williams: Yeah! He was for stopping those things and that's what the lead said. I don't have any problem with that and in fact Chappaquiddick has been mentioned prominently throughout this whole period.

Sammon: Not in that lead.

Williams: Not in the lead but in the story. It's not like anybody's hiding Ted Kennedy's flaws. We know them.

Of course, par for the course, it's always alright to politicize a eulogy if you're a Republican. From our own Jon Perr-- Jesse Helms and the Partisan Eulogies of George W. Bush:

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Looks like Mr. Man-on-dog Rick Santorum's irony alert button is broken, but that's nothing new. While complaining about the mean old President saying that one network is devoted to doing nothing but attacking his administration, Santorum makes his point for him.

VAN SUSTEREN: Former senator Rick Santorum joins us here in Washington. Senator, I think he watches cable news!

SANTORUM: It's not cable -- he's watching FOX. I mean, he's talking about the cable chatter. He's certainly not talking about MSNBC. I mean, my goodness, they're the biggest cheerleader -- you know, they're just -- they're all over Barack Obama. This -- this is an attack on FOX. this is -- this reminds me of what Hugo Chavez was doing down in Venezuela, trying to shut down the voice of opposition in the media! This is -- this is not good, really, in my opinion, not good at all.

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, it's -- I mean, it's sort of a -- I mean, we have some people on this network who are, you know, politically conservative. Sean Hannity -- no one's going to dispute that.

SANTORUM: Sure.

VAN SUSTEREN: So he goes after him. But -- but we have a lot of news gatherers, as well, who are just gathering the news.

SANTORUM: And case in point, you. I mean, I don't think anyone's going to come and say, Well, you're just -- you've been brutal on Barack Obama. You've not been brutal on him. You've put the case -- you've made the case for and against him. When you thought he was right, you stood -- you stood out there and said it.

He's -- he's overreacting. This is a very thin-skinned president. This is a guy who's not used to being criticized. And the fact that some here on FOX are taking him on and some, like yourself, are just holding him accountable when he's crossing the line in the wrong direction -- you know, his reaction, I think, is really unprofessional.

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This too funny. Apparently Bill-O isn't happy with the way Jon Stewart has taken Fox to task for its "news coverage" and thinks he's "off the rails" for his treatment of his network. Truth hurts, doesn't it Bill? Bill tried to qualify his use of the word "loons" when it comes to liberals by cherry-picking one segment featured on the Daily Show, ignoring the fact that he throws the slur out there about every time he uses the word liberal. I'm sure the Great Orange Satan Markos Moulitsas or the good folks over at Media Matters that make Bill-O's head ready to explode on at least a weekly basis can attest to that.

Bill wraps this one by being worried that too many people think that Jon Stewart is "presenting an accurate picture of this country on his program". The propagandist doth protest too much about the court jester doesn't he? Sadly Bill, most people who watch The Daily Show are a whole lot more well informed than the ones who watch your show or your network, and the informed ones are well aware they're watching satire, and not "news".

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Keith reports on Fox's Glenn Beck problem with their advertisers for spreading racial hatred on his network and his remarks calling the President a racist who hates white people.

Countdown didn't credit this site for the footage, but that Rick Larsen town hall clip they showed is from our own CSPANJunkie.

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Glenn Beck had a glass of wine with Nancy Pelosi last night.

Of course, it wasn't actually Pelosi. It was some poor Fox employee made to sit across the desk from Beck with a cardboard Pelosi mask, holding a glass of juice of some kind that was serving as a stand-in for wine.

It was all meant to spoof Pelosi for supposedly listening only to "millionaire contributors" instead of her constituents.

But then he tossed in a little "joke":

Beck: I just want you to drink it. Drink it. [Laughs] Drink it! I really just wanted to thank you for having us over here to wine country. You know, to be invited, I thought you had to be a major Democratic donor or longtime friend of yours, which I'm not. Oh, ah, by the way, I put poison in your -- no I --

Funny, it seems like only a couple of days ago Beck was imploring his viewers not to resort to acts of violence. (It was.) And now he's encouraging violence by joking about poisoning the Speaker of the House.

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Does anyone remember when Town Hall forums were civil affairs that gave citizens a chance to speak freely to their elected representatives in a civil conversation?

Yeah, that would have been last week. In the days since, Republicans and their astroturf gangs of protesters have transformed town halls into outlets for their prearranged shoutfests ginned up by Fox talkers.

The old town-hall forum may never be the same. And the country is the worse for it.

Check out the ugliness yesterday in Tampa Bay. It certainly fits the blueprint for action laid out early on in this effort: Disrupt, distract, and destroy any chance for an actual civil and informed conversation. In other words, demolish the entire purpose of a town-hall forum.

As Paul Krugman puts it:

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

... [T]he driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

No one has a problem with right-wingers marching in protest of the health-care plans. That's certainly their right. And no one minds that they choose to participate in these forums. But town halls were never designed to be vehicles for protest. They have always been about enabling real democratic discourse in a civil setting.

When someone's entire purpose in coming out to a town-hall forum is to chant and shout and protest and disrupt, they aren't just expressing their opinions -- they are actively shutting down democracy.

And that, folks, is a classically fascist thing to do.

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You have to believe things are really getting foul out there in cable land when Howard Kurtz -- whose willingness to look the other way when it comes to all kinds of vile and kooky wingnuttery is the stuff of legend -- finally reaches his threshold, as he apparently did Sunday on his 'Reliable Sources' program:

It's getting ugly out there. And by out there, I mean the great cable echo chamber. Six months after Barack Obama took office, the vitriol that often marked the Bush years when Iraq and terror were the driving issues is now being directed at his successor. And apparently, you can say just about anything about the president of the United States and still stay on the air. The national outrage meter doesn't even seem to move very much, so accustomed have we become about incendiary. My personal needle has hit the maximum.

What really pushed Kurtz over the line -- in addition to the Lou Dobbs 'Birther' controversy -- was Glenn Beck's charge that President Obama is a 'racist':

KURTZ: So, is some of this cable commentary getting out of control? Should there be a line you can't cross without getting fired? And why are we still debating the Skip Gates arrest?

Joining us now, Michel Martin, host of "Tell Me More" on National Public Radio; Amanda Carpenter, reporter and columnist for "The Washington Times"; and Michelle Cottle, senior editor of "The New Republic." Michel Martin, is calling the president a racist, not saying that he made a racist statement, but that he hates White people, is that simply out of bounds?

MARTIN: Yes.

KURTZ: And yet, there doesn't seem to be any great uproar about it.

MARTIN: I don't know. That's the part that surprises me a little. But there's a lot -- I guess it would be funny if it weren't so -- and here's a word that we've heard a lot of lately -- stupid.

I mean, here is a man who has a white mother, here is a man who was raised by two white grandparents who obviously adored him and who he adores. Here's a man who's better at so-called "white culture" than Glenn Beck is, and yet we have to hear this kind of commentary. It's quite remarkable.

Kurtz goes on to wonder how Beck and the rest of the inflammatory right-wing pundit class gets away this:

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