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[H/t Heather]

It's hard sometime to believe the blithering, fact-free idiocy that passes for Beltway wisdom these days. Take David Gregory interviewing everyone's favorite Sunday talk-show guest, John McCain:

MR. GREGORY: I have a question that keeps nagging me about the enemy, about the Taliban.

SEN. McCAIN: Yeah.

MR. GREGORY: The United States is engaged in working with the Afghan central government to recruit Afghan soldiers. Why do we have to recruit Afghan soldiers? Who's training the Taliban? Nobody has to recruit them. They're out there fighting for, you know, what they see as a future. Which is, by the way, is a dark, terrorist, annihilist future. Nevertheless, they don't have to be recruited, and yet we're in this position where we're trying to recruit Afghan soldiers.

SEN. McCAIN: You know, that's a very good question. And it's clear that the Taliban is a very extremist and very fanatical element, and I think this is true with all insurgencies. But I think you also find that the majority of the people in Afghanistan do not want the return of the Taliban. They're afraid, though, that when the United States leaves that there will be assassination squads going around and taking care of those who cooperated with the government and the Americans. Look, Karzai is not doing the things we want him to do. I don't think there's any doubt about that in many respects. Maliki was not doing the things we wanted...

MR. GREGORY: In Iraq.

SEN. McCAIN: ...us to do. He was perceived as very weak. The level of sectarian violence in Iraq makes what's going on in Afghanistan pale in comparison, and I'm not saying it's not going to be long and hard and tough, and I'm not saying that it's going to be easy. And I--but I am convinced of one thing, you--fundamental of warfare, you tell the enemy when you're leaving, that--then they will wait. And Ho Chi Minh certainly is an authentication of that, of that course of action.

Can anyone tell me what the hell these two people are talking about? Or why they are considered wise and worthy voices to spend our time listening to on a Sunday morning?

Because Al Qaeda recruits all the time. It's a major part of their relative success. (Just Google "Al Qaeda recruitment" for a sample.)

Of course, it doesn't hurt that idiocy like this makes it possible for the United States to significantly improve the climate for recruitment of Al Qaeda terrorists, either.

Are you ready for a flame-thrower? The Washington Post gives Over The Cliff a quick hit and review:

Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane

By John Amato and David Neiwert

PoliPoint. 284 pp. Paperback, $16.95

The gist: In November 2008, the right wing lost its mind and has yet to recover: Extremists prowl the land, fill the airwaves, preaching that America is doomed under Barack Obama.

In its own words: "The American Right's descent into madness, embodied in its takeover by right-wing populists, was more than a problem just for serious conservatives who understood that it would ultimately prove to be their destruction. The very nature of the insanity that was being unleashed posed a larger problem for the nation at large -- namely, the implicit threat of violence and extremist unrest, represented most vividly by the revival of the militia movement.

After we wrote our book there were many other violent outbursts that we obviously didn't cover. You know, like a pesky Mosque bombing or the father and son act of Jerry and Joe Kane. There are many more issues we take up in the book, but at least he got some of it right.

We're selling this book mostly through the prism of our online brothers and sisters. So far it's going very well. David and I didn't write this book because we hoped to cash in on it. Seriously, that was the last thing we thought about and it won't happen; but we thought it was important to document what we have all just witnessed and have a public record all gathered in one place.

We were interviewed last week by Mike Panantonio of Ring Of Fire, and he marveled that when he read everything in the book -- some of which he knew, some of which he did not -- it brought a new appreciation to the severity of the problem and what has unfolded before our eyes and he thanked us.

Please support your liberal authors. You can grab a copy here.

You can find it in other formats and book stores here.

Rachel Maddow pointed out last night that a right winger and teabagger who's running for secretary of state in Kansas is claiming responsibility for "helping" Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce write the state's controversial new immigration law. (He has since removed the claim from his website.) Wingnut lawyer Kris Kobach, a constitutional law professor, is counsel for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and he says the reason he's running for secretary of state is to keep "criminal enterprise" ACORN from stealing elections. (He refers to Al Franken's "pseudo-election".)

Even though in 2007, as chair of the Kansas GOP, he openly bragged about the party "caging" voters - an illegal practice. Hey, it's okay if you're a Republican!

From Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times:

As disturbing as the prospect is of a nativist extremist lawyer like Kris Kobach training all 881 of Sheriff Joe's beigeshirts in immigration law, I have to wonder if it's a sign that Arpaio's throwing in the towel on the big Melendres vs. Arpaio racial-profiling lawsuit now underway in federal court.

What, was Stormfront's Don Black not available? Maybe Tom Metzger could take a break from running his white nationalist Web site The Insurgent to come down and offer some words of supremacist wisdom to Joe's benighted deputy dawgs. And don't forget David Duke, that cat's always lookin' for a gig.

I kid, of course. Being an attorney, Kobach's ties to anti-immigrant and extremist nativist organizations are far more white collar, with the emphasis on white. The controversial University of Missouri law prof acts as counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR, the notorious Federation for American Immigration Reform.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has tagged FAIR as a hate organization, and FAIR's earned the title. Last April, when Kobach was announced as a minority witness before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during the committee's hearing into the 287(g) program and Joe Arpaio, the SPLC hit the committee with a letter objecting to Kobach's presence because of his ties to FAIR.

Regarding FAIR, the SPLC's Mark Potok had this to say:

FAIR is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which publishes annual listings of such organizations. Among the reasons are its acceptance of $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a group founded to promote the genes of white colonials that funds studies of race, intelligence and genetics. FAIR has hired as key officials men who also joined white supremacist groups. It has board members who write regularly for hate publications. It promotes racist conspiracy theories about Latino immigrants. It has produced television programming featuring white nationalists.

And John Tanton, the man who founded the group in 1979, has a long personal history of associating with white nationalists. In a 1993 letter to Garret Hardin, a committed eugenicist who promoted pseudo-scientific ideas of racial purity, Tanton wrote candidly: "I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that."

The committee ultimately allowed Kobach to speak, but the stigma Kobach carries with him both precedes and hounds him. In 2004, he ran as a Republican against Democratic Congressman Dennis Moore, and was spanked hard, losing by 11 percent to Moore in Kansas' largely Republican 3rd District. One reason he lost, according to The Road to Congress 2004 was because, "in general, Kobach was accused of taking money from a white supremacist organization, and the charge stuck." Currently, Kobach is vying to be Kansas' Secretary of State.

Kobach also served under Attorney General John Ashcroft during the Bush administration. There he developed a controversial program to profile Muslim men from certain countries and track them while in the U.S.

Kobach is also the proponent of a near-mystical nativist legal concept: that local cops have the inherent authority to enforce all federal statutes. Most legal scholars find this idea laughable, but folks like Arpaio and Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce cling to it like a life preserver in choppy waters.

Oh, this is gonna be interesting. Here's something I found about Kobach's congressional run:

Kris Kobach ran an absolutely vicious primary campaign, worse than any of the previous primary campaigns, and remarkably one-sided. He called Adam Taff "ultra-liberal", he had Kansans for Life send out a letter saying that people who vote for Taff have the bloody water of abortionists on their hands, even though Taff supported restrictions on abortion. Kobach called the President's immigration plan a "liberal amnesty plan", Kobach sent out a letter from his wife that said Adam Taff made her think of her miscarried baby when he criticized Kobach, Kobach basically insulted everyone who was even a little less conservative than he was. That made a lot of people angry. I don't think most Republicans expect to be compared to Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, or told that their views are ultra-liberal, they tend to take offense to that kind of thing and they don't tend to forget it.

He's a soldier of God, and don't you ever forget it.

Watch this video and tell me what Joan Walsh did to elicit an over the top, bizarro-world reaction from the right-wing blogosphere. Are they so desperate for anything that they'll eat the scraps off a toilet bowl?

I met Mika and Joe at a book signing in LA and they were very friendly. Joe said that he appreciated the fact that CrooksandLiars has been very fair to him over the years, unlike a lot of other sites, but that being said ... why was Mika mocking Joan Walsh in such a childish fashion?

JOE SCARBOROUGH: ...I think it helps us all to say there are extreme voices on the left, there are extreme voices on the right, and it's our responsibility to call out people, I believe, on our side.

JOAN WALSH: Who would you have me call out? I mean who would you say on the left is comparable to Rush and...

SCARBOROUGH: Don't do it.

MIKA BREZEZINSKI: Mmm-mmm! No thanks, Joan. We're good. We're good.

SCARBOROUGH: Can we talk about the Chinese now?

MIKA: I think it's all very obvious.

WALSH: Is it obvious? Who on the left is comparable to Rush and Glenn on the right?

MIKA: Okay, Joan, if it's not obvious to you I'll talk to you off-set. I mean, my God! Alright so let's read from the Washington Post...

SCARBOROUGH: We'll talk off-set.

WALSH: Okay...

MIKA: Seriously, it's like BLIP... BLIP... BLIP... right in front of you and you're like [imitates willfully clueless Walsh] "I'm sorry, I don't see it!"

Joe plays the Republican game of false equivalency when he says that we need to call out the extremists on both sides. Joe isn't a dumb man. He knows that there's nothing on the left that even approaches the hate filled extremist nuts that have been polluting the tea party crowd alone. Couple that with FOX News, Limbaugh and the rest of his wannabe imitators and there's more hate than can be measured on the Richter scale being piped into our airwaves all day long. There isn't anyone on the left that acts like Rush or Beck and Mika and Morning Joe know it.

It appeared that Mika might be referencing Joan as some sort of left wing extremist in the mold of Beck, but that's pretty ridiculous since she's very grounded in her media appearances. Or were they referencing Keith Olbermann and just too chicken to say his name?

Well, if I had the chance to debate the likes of the sleaze known as Dick Armey, I wouldn't have the same composure she showed.

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Walsh: But this is serious business. The economy is a wreck, (Armey laughs) it's been wrecked by the Bush White House and by Republicans in Congress with a lot of help Democratic help, with (Armey makes more noises and sighs) --

Armey: Oh, give it a rest.

Walsh: President Obama -- Please stop saying 'give it a rest.' Do you have any anything else to say? -- President Obama has a mandate for change. (Armey laughs again) Your people have stood in his way. They are standing in his way in Capitol Hill right now and Rush Limbaugh is making ridiculous statements and Republicans are crawling to him and groveling. That's the state of our economy and our world right now Rep. Armey and it's sad.

Armey: I'm so glad that you could never be my wife because I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day.

Walsh: Well, wow that makes two of us sir, that was really an outstanding comment...

Armey: Look ma'am, you're talking like a paid political hack making your political points.

Poor lost wingnuts. They get their kicks out of a minute and a half know-nothing exchange.

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Bill O'Reilly was all worked up last night on his Fox News show, claiming that the "liberal media" are waving the bloody shirt again, using the violence and extremism and racism of a handful of joiners to smear an otherwise entirely innocent movement.

First, his Talking Points Memo segment was devoted to the notion that "the Tea Party as a whole is not responsible for the loons who may lurk among them."

Which is, you know, pretty much true. Unless, of course, the movement seems to attract a high percentage of loons, and especially if the movement itself employs loons as their speakers and representatives.

Which is the case with the Tea Parties.

This is pretty funny, really, coming from the guy -- as Matt Corley at ThinkProgress notes -- who only a couple of years ago was culling off comments at DailyKos to smear the entire liberal blogosphere as the equivalent of Nazis.

O'Reilly brought on Rev. Al Sharpton, who seems to have figured out how not to let O'Reilly make him into a punching bag, because he pretty effectively rebutted most of O'Reilly's points. Nonetheless, Monsieur Falafeloofah managed to assert that the "liberal media smear" of the Tea Parties by blaming them for their kooks is "unfair!"

This was followed by a segment with Mary Katherine Ham and Juan Williams. And Williams set off O'Reilly by pointing out that the Tea Parties are fundamentally a rebirth of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s:

WILLIAMS: You know, people who's have a lot of hateful attitudes towards President Bush and then somebody who is extremist on the fringe, yes. And if that was also to be then the case with the Tea Party, yes, that's too much and unfair. But, when you start to see militia groups start to associate with the Tea Party --

O'REILLY: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me stop you there. I haven't seen militia groups associating with the Tea Party.

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I've been a popular guy this week; been doing a lot of radio interviews. I also was on GritTV earlier this week, chatting with Laura Flanders about the wellsprings of the extremist rhetoric that is unleashing all this unhinged behavior from sore-loser Tea Partiers.

I'm still recovering from my jet lag and I look like crap, but I think I was at least reasonably coherent.

If not, let's talk about it here.

Let’s say that you’re a run-of-the-mill teabagger looking to set yourself apart from the mob. Nazi/Hitler signs tend to go over well, but that’s so not original. You could strap an assault rifle to your back – like this guy did outside an Obama speech – but that’s so not subtle.

Do not fret. Thanks to Zazzle.com, you can find just the right product to push you over the edge from workaday winger to racist extremist.

Want to encourage, or joke about, President Obama’s death? Check out this line of "Bullet holes anti Obama Bumper Stickers:"

Don’t forget to pick up a t-shirt for that special woman in your life:

Maybe you’re a little paranoid about the Secret Service and would rather joke about killing the president’s supporters rather than Obama himself, no problem:

Or maybe you’d prefer to have your dog joke about killing the president instead. What’s the Secret Service gonna do, arrest Fido?

If you’d prefer to be a little more oblique about threatening Obama, while no less offensive, these are for you:

The above designs are all the handiwork of a single user of Zazzle named NOBAMAMAN (thanks go to the Active Art blog for discovering them). Bad taste isn’t against the law, but many of these designs are clearly beyond the pale – especially in an environment of heightened threats against the president.

Last month Zazzle banned a line of products which called on people to pray for Obama’s death. The company said the so-called Psalm 109 products “may be interpreted in such a way as to suggest physical harm to the President of the United States.” In light of this, we should be sure to call Zazzle’s attention to some of the above products. You can email Zazzle here, post in their forum, comment on their blog, or use Twitter.

UPDATE: Zazzle appears to have taken down the offerings.

[X-posted from Right Wing Watch]

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Glenn Beck seems to be increasingly rattled by having been designated by the ADL as the nation's "Fearmonger in Chief" -- though he continues, on his Fox News show at least, to avoid tackling his critics by name. (He's pushed back at the ADL on his radio show, but only briefly.)

Yesterday he went on his show and denounced the unnamed "they" who say he is encouraging violence with his extremist rhetoric (which would decidedly include us). Keying off his softball interview with Barbara Walters -- who never did bring up his serial falsehoods about Walters and her colleagues at The View, oddly enough -- Beck gets all worked up about the toughest point raised in the whole conversation:

Beck: Barbara Walters even played into this nonsense during her interview with me last night on her annual 'Fascinating People' show. Here it is:

[CLIP] Walters: Glenn Beck is somebody who incites people to violence --

Beck: Oh, I've heard a lot --

Walters: -- He is inflammatory, he makes us scared.

Beck: Yeah. People say Glenn Beck is someone who incites people to violence. Yeah, a lot of people are saying that, but what's the evidence?

She also mentioned that I called Barack Obama a fascist. I don't know -- I, I don't think so. Maybe -- I don't think so, I do realize that Media Matters and MoveOn.org now just got an extra grant from Soros and they're moving into hyper-scramble to find, you know, an example. But I don't know if I ever even called him a fascist. I know I've said 'fascistic tendencies' -- sure, the administration is going in this direction.

Actually, what Walters said was this:

Walters: OK, you have said the Obama administration is fascist.

And in fact, that is exactly what he has done -- on multiple occasions, but most notably back on April 1:

Beck: Like it or not, fascism is on the rise. And that doesn't mean the Adolf Hitler kind of fascism. It's fascism with a happy face. I'll explain the exact definition of fascism in a second, and it will boggle your mind.

--

Beck: I looked up the definition of fascism yesterday, and I want to break it down. The first part is: "Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners." Wouldn't you say this is what's happening with GM right now?

As we noted then, this even included a segment with a time-traveling dime:

How far out to lunch was Beck here? Well, one of the goofier moments in this whole charade came when Beck trotted out the back of an old American dime -- first minted, as Beck says, in 1916 -- which has a fasces, the fascist symbol, on its reverse side:

This is the famed "Mercury dime", which was designed by sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who won a 1915 competition: "The reverse design, a fasces juxtaposed with an olive branch, was intended to symbolize America's readiness for war, combined with its desire for peace."

Now, the fasces has a long history of inclusion in various parts of American symbology besides just this dime. You can find it in the Oval Office, on National Guard Bureau insignia, on the American flag that flies in the U.S. House, in the Mace of the House of Representatives; on the seal of the U.S. Senate, on the Statue of Freedom atop the United States Capitol building, and on a frieze on the facade of the United States Supreme Court building. Fasces are incorporated into the Lincoln Memorial.

But then, fascism as a political movement was not born until 1919. So for sculptor Weinman to have intended the fasces on the Mercury dime to imply a "fascist" intent, he'd have had to have jumped in a time machine, traveled to the future, met Mussolini, and come back to 1915 with that nefarious design in his head. Somehow I doubt this.

Beck had made the charge even before then, in a February conversation with Laura Ingraham:

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I was flipping the channels last night and I came across an ad for one of those Barbara Walters "10 Most Fascinating People" specials, and this year she included Glenn Beck on her list.

What is ABC thinking? They only feed into his lunacy and make him go more insane by the minute. His nuttiness does hurt America. When did being a lunatic become interesting, Barbara? Sure, Bill O'Reilly is jealous, but who cares?

This is why our media are so screwed up. They take a far right-black helicopter extremist and tell Americans that he's interesting, No, he's dangerous. Just check out his role in Richard Poplawski's deadly outburst.

Shame on Barbara and shame on ABC.

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Michelle Malkin's latest column wants to turn the deaths of police officers around the country -- spurred by the recent horror in Lakewood, WA -- into a chance to blame liberals for the deaths.

The Left has a popular mantra: “Stop the hate.” Why don’t they start applying it to the men and women who protect and serve?

She listed some officers killed in a couple of different incidents involving career criminals and a bizarre recent case here in Seattle.

Well, I've got a few other officers here she seemed to have forgotten about:

Pittsburgh officers Eric Kelly, Paul Sciullo III and Stephen Mayhle, gunned down by budding neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski, because he believed the officers were part of a nefarious plan to take citizens' guns away.

Security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns, shot down by extremist nutcase James von Brunn at the Holocaust Museum.

Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies Burt Lopez and Warren "Skip" York, gunned down by right-wing nutcase Joshua Cartwright, who believed right-wing propaganda that President Obama was going to take his guns away.

Later in her column, Malkin asks:

From where does the deadened and deadly callousness toward the thin blue line come?

Oh, I dunno. Maybe it comes from conservatives like Michelle Malkin, who shriek and holler when mean "liberals" at the Department of Homeland Security issue an important bulletin to law-enforcement officers warning them of the threat posed by right-wing extremists to their health and well-being, crying that in doing so they're just "smearing conservatives."

Even though, as we pointed out, the report was an important heads up about the Richard Poplawskis out there:

The Department of Homeland Security more than likely couldn't give a rat's patoot about today's right-wing Tea Tantrums, because they're mostly exercises in futility and stupidity anyway.

But I'll tell you who they do care about: the people in uniform who go out every day and put their lives on the line to keep you and I and our families and neighborhoods safe -- that is, the men and women in law enforcement. People like those three officers in Pittsburgh, who had no reason to suspect a killer was about to ambush them.

A recent study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism lays out in painful detail the very real threat that right-wing extremists pose to people in law enforcement:

Research led by Dr. Joshua D. Freilich (John Jay College, CUNY) and Dr. Steven Chermak (Michigan State University) and funded by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has revealed a violent history of fatal attacks against law enforcement officers in the United States by individuals who adhere to far-right ideology.

* In the United States, 42 law enforcement officers have been killed in 32 incidents in which at least one of the suspects was a far-rightist since 1990.

* 94% of these incidents involved local or state law enforcement. Only two events—high-profile attacks at Ruby Ridge and at the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City—involved federal agents. Much more common are events like the tragic Pittsburgh triple slayings.

* Attacks on police by far-rightists tend to occur during routine law enforcement activities. 34% of the officers killed by far-rightists were slain during a traffic stop, and a number of law enforcement officers have been killed while responding to calls for service similar to the domestic violence call that precipitated the Pittsburgh murders.

* Firearms were the most common type of weapon used during these fatal anti-police attacks. 88% of the incidents involved guns, while only 6% involved explosives and 6% involved knives. 81% of the victims were killed by guns.

* Only 12% of the suspects in these attacks were members of formal groups with far-right ideologies. The vast majority—like Poplawski—acted alone. This greatly complicates law-enforcement efforts to anticipate which individuals might pose a threat to police officers.

* Beyond these law enforcement murders, far-right violence presents a broader threat to national security and American citizens. Since 1990, far-rightists have been linked to more than 275 homicide incidents in 36 states. These crimes have resulted in the more than 530 fatalities, including the 168 victims murdered by Timothy McVeigh when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The vast majority of these suspects are white and male, with almost 70% being 30 years old or younger.

Back then, Michelle couldn't be bothered to express even a scintilla of concern about the safety of law-enforcement officers:

This is where I wonder about the grotesquely skewed priorities of the conservative movement and its leading pundits. Because all the yammering has been fearmongering about the DHS potentially targeting ordinary conservatives -- especially VETERANS!!!! -- when in fact there is not a scintilla of evidence they have done so or are considering it.

Yet in the meantime, as we just pointed out, these right-wing extremists who are the subject and the raison d'etre of this bulletin are also known lethal threats for the men and women who work in law enforcement ...

So while the folks at Faux News fearmonger for the sake of yet-unharmed veterans and conservatives, they're completely turning their backs on the interests of the men and women who risk their lives each day serving as law-enforcement officers.

Yeah, well, that was then. This opportunity is now. Even if it means connecting Obama to the Oakland cop killings through Van Jones, just because he was a black nationalist from Oakland ... it's all about Michelle's agenda. Dead cops just make handy props for it.

We know this because on her next post, she argues that funding for public safety and health functions -- like, you know, police -- is the same thing as funding toxic assets:

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