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The other day FOX Host Megyn Kelly got into a heated argument with Kirsten Powers because Powers had the audacity to understand that the New Black Panther story Kelly was promoting was nothing more than FOX's attempt at race baiting. The post has spread through the blogosphere quickly and many are discussing this example of inflammatory "journalism" specifically. Last night, she went on The Factor to let off some steam and continue her assault against African-Americans. Unfortunately for Kelly, O'Reilly starts off by highlighting how ridiculous this NBPP story is by stating the fact that there is only EIGHT members in the whole party.

But Kelly has a much more sinister story to tell. One that connects the Obama administration to racist behavior.

O'Reilly: ...but why do you so passionately about the Panther story when there's only eight Panthers? There...er...it's a very minuscule organization.

Kelly: Yea, it's not about the Panthers. Ah, I got involved in this more seriously or more extensively as the DOJ whistleblower came...

Bill: Came on your show.

Kelly: And gave us his first television interview. And the reason that I'm passionate about this case and this story, Bill, is I believe in fidelity to the law. And I believe your viewers know that about me. It doesn't matter whether it's left or right, conservative or liberal. I try to follow the law.

That's the crux of her argument that O'Reilly dutifully is ready to distribute. Kelly is not being honest with the false narrative that she doesn't care which ideology is to blame for not upholding the law because her outrage was nowhere to be found during the Bush years.

It's all a smoke screen. J.Christian Adams is a fraud and everyone who has a smidgen of integrity knows it. Digby easily dispatches him here. The rest of the clip goes on to attack Newsweek's David Graham for rightly calling out this story in his piece: The New Black Panther Party Is the New ACORN

And make no mistake about it. This nothing of a case is all about whipping up the racist elements of the GOP/Tea Party Clans and the conservative movements, which they have seized upon and exploited for political gain for decades.

Kevin Drum has been writing about this story as well and he sees what I see. It's all about using The Scary Black Man Thing to appeal to the angry, disaffected white men and point his anger away from the real cause.

James Joyner, the right-leaning blogger takes a level-headed view as well.

Moreover, as others have pointed out, the district at which these two members of the NBPP were filmed was a majority black district that had gone overwhelmingly for John Kerry in 2004. If these two guys were really interested in intimidating white voters in the Philadelphia metro area rather than engaging in street theater, they would’ve shown up at a polling place in King of Prussia or Bensalem, not one in the inner-city at which, conveniently a guy with a video camera had shown up.

As I noted in an earlier post, there’s no evidence that any actual voters were intimidated by these two men, or even that their “protest” lasted longer than the amount of time that the camera crew was there filming them. In fact, judging from this video, it seems clear to me that these two guys were playing for the cameras.

The way FOX is amplifying the narrative of "The Angry Black Man" to their audience is disgusting. That's what Kelly has latched onto even if she deludes herself into thinking that she's on a righteous path. I might actually go on her FOX show and debate her. I've never gone on FOX before and although I've refused up to now, who knows? I doubt she'd have me anyway because I may know a little too much. Powers is hired by FOX and does a good job at times, but she is also a very conservative, pro-life Democrat and doesn't represent progressive thinking.

Drum later asks a good sort of a good question here.

(T)hey might be playing a dangerous game here. As Chait says, the Fox/Megyn Kelly crusade against the NBPP is taking this to a whole new level, one that's far more overt and far more incendiary than in the past. And there's no telling how that's going to turn out. As a friend puts it, "I think the reason why conservatives have so assiduously censored themselves from playing fast and loose with Atwater-esque racial overtones is that it can be a very difficult genie to put back in the bottle once released on a national stage." The press will start paying attention, tea partiers might feel freer to spout off, and the whole thing could turn ugly very quickly.

Or not. Who knows? But for reasons of both principle and self-interest, some of the conservative movement's big guns might want to think about weighing in on this before it gets out of hand. It can't hurt.

As a man studying the history of the conservative movement, I can make the observation that while conservatives hate and try to reject being painted with the racism brush, they do nothing whatsoever to stop those in their party from spreading this garbage. Like it was done before, the Atwateresque racial overtones still brings in the right wing engagement...and votes. That's the bottom line. No votes, no racism.

(h/t Heather)

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Clarence Thomas is suddenly upset that people have the audacity to criticize the Supreme Court. As long as conservatives attack the bench it's quite alright, but Clarice can't handle it critiques when they come from the left.

Questioning the Supreme Court and other government branches needs to stay within the range of fair criticism or "run the risk in our society of undermining institutions that we need to preserve our liberties," Justice Clarence Thomas said Thursday.

Thomas also told an audience at the University of Florida law school that some comments he hears about the court "border on being irresponsible."

He didn't speak specifically about the court's recent decision on campaign financing or mention President Barack Obama. But Thomas' comments come a week after Obama took the rare step of openly criticizing the decision during his State of the Union speech.

Thomas supported the 5-4 ruling that allows companies and unions to spend freely on ads that promote or target candidates by name.

Thomas said the court should be questioned but is bothered by some rhetoric with "the idea of assigning ulterior motives to opinions that people don't agree with, rather than saying simply that the court doesn't agree with my argument."

When Tom Delay, John Cornyn, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson declare open warfare against the activist Supreme Court, Thomas stays mute. Kinda like his behavior on the court except when he acts like an activist.

Mark McGwire's faux apology is backfiring on him as many sports reporters and fans are outraged now more than they were before he came out of the closet to rehabilitate his name. He has the audacity to say that steroids didn't help his power numbers and he still would have hit 70 HRs in a single season without being juiced. Right.

ESPN immediately did a thirty-minute infomercial in support of Big Mac, and the most egregious performance was carried out by former chokemeister Bobby Knight.

Knight began by announcing that he has "a different approach to performance-enhancing drugs." He continued:

Who decides what can be used and what can't be used, and on what basis is that decision made?

Fair enough. But then Knight pivoted to his first example, surely bewildering many viewers in the process. "Gatorade is a performance-enhancing substance," Knight said. Because the sports beverage replaces electrolytes, Knight says he has "always had a real skeptical approach to all of this performance enhancing stuff."

He's a great basketball mind who has a bad temper, so I had to ask myself: Self, why is a former college basketball coach going on Baseball Tonight to talk about Mark McGwire? WTF is he doing on a baseball show? Oh, because he wants to help clear Big Mac's name. Next up will be McGwire's family pets and then some of his aunts and uncles. ESPN is trying to track down his best friend from elementary school as we speak.

Ah, the audacity of playing it safe! Obama clearly doesn't understand how positively this will affect people's lives, or he wouldn't be so lukewarm. The public option is polling well everywhere - including those conservative districts.

In fact, just about the only group not strongly supportive are the big contributors:

President Barack Obama is actively discouraging Senate Democrats in their effort to include a public insurance option with a state opt-out clause as part of health care reform. In its place, say multiple Democratic sources, Obama has indicated a preference for an alternative policy, favored by the insurance industry, which would see a public plan "triggered" into effect in the future by a failure of the industry to meet certain benchmarks.

The administration retreat runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Obama's presidential campaign. The man who ran on the "Audacity of Hope" has now taken a more conservative stand than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), leaving progressives with a mix of confusion and outrage. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill have battled conservatives in their own party in an effort to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Now tantalizingly close, they are calling for Obama to step up.

"The leadership understands that pushing for a public option is a somewhat risky strategy, but we may be within striking distance. A signal from the president could be enough to put us over the top," said one Senate Democratic leadership aide. Such pleading is exceedingly rare on Capitol Hill and comes only after Senate leaders exhausted every effort to encourage Obama to engage.

"Everybody knows we're close enough that these guys could be rolled. They just don't want to do it because it makes the politics harder," said a senior Democratic source, saying that Obama is worried about the political fate of Blue Dogs and conservative Senate Democrats if the bill isn't seen as bipartisan. "These last couple folks, they could get them if Obama leaned on them."

But with fundamental reform of the health care system in plain sight for the first time in half a century, the president appears to be siding with those who see the Senate and its entrenched culture as too resistant to change. Administration officials say that Obama's preference for the trigger, which is backed by Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, is founded in a fear that Reid's public option couldn't get the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster. More specifically, aides fear that a handful of conservative Democrats will not support a bill unless it has at least one Republican member's support.

Getting the public option in the Senate bill makes it that much more likely that we'll be able to get it through conference, and not through the reconciliation process.

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When news came that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I looked at my husband and said, "just watch, the wingnuts will lose it over this." And sure enough, I was right. But what threw me for a loop was how nakedly partisan CBS's Chip Reid was in attacking Obama for having the audacity to win the Nobel Prize, something even the great St. Ronnie didn't do:

REID: I mean, most Democrats have praised it, and most Republicans have said, you have got to be kidding me -- Ronald Reagan didn't get one, but Barack Obama, nominated 12 days after he was sworn in, gets a Nobel Peace Prize. And the fear among some, even some Democrats, is that this is going to widen the partisan divide and make things even more difficult to accomplish on every front.

Really? Even more difficult than reflexively fighting *every* *single* Obama agenda item now? How is that possible?

It's touching, isn't it, to hear Chip Reid's concern that this will widen the partisan divide? After all, past winners have included Al Gore and Jimmy Carter...obviously the Nobel committee loves them some Democrats.

But here's the thing that all these insulated Beltway Villagers continually forget: Outside of DC, life is more than Republican vs. Democrat, something that Gibbs gently tries to suggest to Reid:

GIBBS: I'll leave the pundicizing to the pundits. The notion that somehow this is going to more greatly divide America, you know, I think it should be mandatory that pundits spend a certain amount of their days each year outside of the friendly confines of the viewership of the Washington, D.C., media market.

Of course, that goes right over Reid's head. For Reid, this is all about dismissing the Nobel committee -- in Norway, mind you, and not subject to the mind-numbing partisan reduction that Reid seems to breathe as oxygen -- as some liberal organization. He just can't get his head wrapped around the fact the Ronald Reagan -- the man who ended the Cold War! -- was never awarded the Peace Prize. As my friend, Steve Benen says:

A few thoughts here. First, when White House correspondents from major news outlets start sounding like members of Grover Norquist's "We Love Reagan" fan club, it's not a positive development.

Second, the notion that Reagan "helped bring the Cold War to an end" is, at best, a dubious proposition.

Actually, I think Chip Reid is unintentionally letting us into his psyche more than he realizes. He's continually been a go-to guy for Republican talking points for years. He routinely criticizes Democrats for things he lets pass by Republicans and uncritically passes on Republican attacks without context or fact-checking. And here again, he mouths the GOP mentality.

But think about it: if the Nobel Peace Prize only supports liberal causes, isn't Chip Reid admitting that peace is liberal? Then we need never look to conservatives again, because they will never bring peace. Right, Chip?

Transcript below the fold

Continue reading »

Remember how the Iranian elections results made the GOP assume voter fraud and start screaming about election integrity? The world is curiously silent now, isn't it?

In the southern Afghan district of Shorabak, the tribesmen gathered shortly before last month’s presidential election to discuss which candidate they would back. After a debate they chose to endorse Abdullah Abdullah, President Hamid Karzai’s leading opponent.

The tribal leaders prepared to deliver a landslide for Abdullah – but it never happened. They claim Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and leader of the Kandahar provincial council, detained the local governor and closed all the district’s 46 polling sites on election day.

The ballot boxes were taken back to the district headquarters where, tribal leaders allege, they were stuffed with ballots by local policemen. A total of 23,900 ballots were finally sent off to Kabul, the capital – every one of them a vote for Karzai.

The alleged fraud, which Ahmed Wali Karzai denies, was the most blatant example among hundreds of incidents that have threatened to make a mockery of the election.

The sheer scale and audacity of the cheating, which includes supposedly “state-sponsored” ballot-stuffing, vote burning, intimidation and the closure of polling stations in antigovernment areas, has overwhelmed the country’s fledgling Electoral Complaints Commission.

Its staff are battling with more than 2,600 reports of vote-rigging, including at least 650 deemed serious enough “materially” to influence the result.

“This is a blatant violation of the procedure and I think it is stealing in daylight,” Abdullah said yesterday.

His aides say privately that if Karzai wins the 50.1% of votes needed for victory in the first round, they won’t accept the result. Abdullah said he intended to use all legal means to challenge any Karzai victory; his supporters talked menacingly of “Iran-style protests with Kalashnikovs”.

So this is the test: do we really care about bringing democracy to Afghanistan?

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Apparently, Rip-Van-Winkle-like, Bill O'Reilly and Karl Rove simply slept through the 1990s, when Republicans couldn't stop obsessing about the Mighty Clenis and its powers of seduction.

Yesterday on The O'Reilly Factor, they both were mewling piteously about the mean liberals who are having a bit of a heyday with Mark Sanford's Appalachian Trail Adventures:

O'Reilly: Some in the Muslim world believe in stoning people. Apparently, some in the USA believe in stoning as well -- stoning with words.

Because, of course, Bill O'Reilly never attacks people with his words. You Pinhead!

What really got Rove's goat was Paul Begala, having the audacity to point out that he, like a lot of us, have had enough of the GOP's Holier-Than-Thou schtick, which they use with great regularity to beat liberals about the head and neck for their supposed "licentiousness".

Rove: I guess what it comes down to is when you get to socially liberal ideas like abortion, and like gay marriage, the left will seize on any opportunity that they think they have in order to condemn those who are pro-life and pro-traditional marriage. And it's just -- you know, there are people who are maybe moderate in their views on economics, or maybe nationalist on their views on international affairs, but when it comes down to social questions, they're liberal, and it's an instinct, and they cause a lot of people -- you know, like Paul Begala.

O'Reilly: I was just going to say that. Is that unbelievable?

Rove: Unbelievable. I don't recall -- you know, who exactly is accusing him of being a poor father or a poor Christian or not a patriot. But this sort of artificial victimhood -- and again, the purpose of it is, is to say to people --

O'Reilly: But wasn't Begala the guy, that it was just about sex, he and Carville were running around -- that's all they said for two years!

Don't you just love it when the guy who perfected right-wing victimhood as a phony schtick indulges it right there onscreen -- and then accuses the left of it!

And O'Reilly misses his own point: Begala was obviously complaining about Republicans' propensity to condemn all liberals as "immoral" based on a single person's failings (see, e.g., the right-wing claim after Sanford that "liberals are more to licentiousness"). Which is now the position he and Rove are trying to claim -- while accusing Begala of the opposite.

But the real capper was this:

Rove: What we saw last night was the coarseness and ugliness in American politics, carried forward by people who claim not to be political actors, but commentators and observers. And they gave the lie to their so-called neutrality or objectiveness last night.

Quoth the cohort of Lee Atwater and the man who "makes [Charles] Colson look like a novice".

The right's projection strategy is reaching absurd heights these days. But it at least makes for some amusing TV.

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If you happened to see Bill O'Reilly wanking ever onward Monday night in recapping his confrontation with Joan Walsh on Friday, you probably got the same low mordant chuckle out of his self-serving edit of the interview. After all, it gave him a chance to repeat three more times his leading "When did you stop beating your wife?" question.

But as we noted at the time, Walsh at critical junctures of the exchange handed O'Reilly his lunch -- especially when she zeroed in on his irresponsible, violent and often eliminationist rhetoric directed at the objects of his ire, and his refusal to man up to the predictable (and now manifest) consequences of that.

Indeed, O'Reilly (as usual) edited the video to make him look triumphant against the hapless liberal. But in reality, Walsh seriously called him out at key moments and kicked his butt -- especially at the end.

So we decided to offer our own Crooks and Liars Special Edition Video of the showdown. In which Walsh shines triumphant. It's not quite the whole story, but it's a lot closer to what actually happened than O'Reilly's pathetic whinefest.

Speaking of O'Reilly whinefests, I've also compiled a collage of his recent whining about left-wing meanies who have the audacity to call him out for nastiness -- denouncing in particular the "politics of ridicule" and the "demonization" of the opposition that those hateful far-left liberals employ. This includes some footage of one of his ambush crews attacking a woman at her car -- for having simply criticized O'Reilly.

And then it's capped off by a couple of his nastier "Pinhead" segments. Who's demonizing who?

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Bill O'Reilly must really being feeling guilty subconsciously over the death of Dr. Tiller. But he's also looking to blame somebody else for his behavior and that somebody is NBC news. He is one sick person. He has the audacity to use the murder of our military recruiter named Private Long to his own advantage -- as did Malkin -- to try and convince his audience that he did nothing wrong in his vile behavior towards the late Dr. Tiller. The old faux comparison if I ever saw one. Has he no shame?

Last night on The Factor, BillO took up half his show trying to defend himself and used his favorite conservative professor, Brian Russell, to do so, as well as his favorite stooge, Juan Williams.

In his talking points he was upset that NBC was blaming him for Tiller's death so now tried to fake out the audience by saying that since NBC covers torture and the debate over closing Gitmo, they helped drive Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad over the edge to commit this atrocity.

O'Reilly: ..so here's my question. Is NBC complicit in the murder of Private Long? After all, that network has relentlessly branded America a torture nation. A nation run by human rights's violators. Didn't NBC news incite Mr. Muhammad to kill the soldier? The answer is no. The killer is a loon. The media had nothing to do with it. That is the truth. However, Private Long's situation will not be heavily debated on NBC News Because they're not much interested in the truth. Brian Williams is a big problem here. Last night as managing editor of the Nightly News, he allowed a correspondent to highlight me as a villain in the Tiller situation. Williams takes his orders directly from NBC President Jeff Zucker, who is a committed liberal, who has completely ruined the news operation, turning it into the most far left outfit in the history of broadcasting....

Psych out. He didn't mean it. Hey, Bill. NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, MSNBC and most every other legitimate news organizations never called America "Iraqi baby killers", and never called America mass murderers time and time again over the invasion of two Middle Eastern countries, but that's how you portrayed Dr. Tiller. The media in general did almost no reporting on the run-up to the war that was counter to any of the propaganda the Bush Administration put out. They've been covering the news, Bill, even if they've done it badly.

And by the way ... General Petraeus, your hero, believes that America made many, many mistakes, which includes torture, the breaking of the Geneva Convention, and creating an extralegal prison at Guantanamo Bay in his criticism of America's behavior after 9/11. So is he to blame for Mr. Mohammad's actions too?

Billie Boy continued on his anti-choice rant about Dr. Tiller and then said that the government has the goods that GE is doing business with Iran. And he's going to be looking into to it very, very closely. I feel bad for Pvt. Long's family, their grief must run deep, but now they also have to withstand Bill O'Reilly using his death in a crass, cheaply sensational way for his own self-serving justification for the inexcusable.

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Last night Bill O'Reilly unleashed one of his patented Falafel Jihads against the ole-time liberal-hater's favorite, the ACLU, for having had the audacity not only to sue to have those photos of detainee abuse released, but to have actually won in court.

For that, O'Reilly last night flatly accused the ACLU of setting out to harm the nation, and in fact being solely motivated by the desire to hold the country up to humiliation and expose our soldiers to harm. Seriously. Of course, he produces nary a scintilla of evidence to buttress his claims, but then, he's Bill O'Reilly. He doesn't have to.

What's clearly never occurred to O'Reilly is the reality that what he's looking at is one of the very pragmatic and practical reasons American forces have historically eschewed torture: Indulging it not only gives our enemies a rationale to employ it on our own soldiers when captured, but in fact motivates them to capture our soldiers solely for the purpose of retaliatory torture.

That has been one of the little-observed but longstanding and overwhelming ethical reasons to oppose any kind of torture for these prisoners, and has been all along, ever since it was outlawed internationally and nationally: that condoning any kind of abuse provides a pretext for our enemies to do the same, or worse, to American prisoners held abroad.

Moreover, the inevitable Arab anger over the photos further demonstrates know that torturing prisoners makes us less safe -- because, as the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate indicated, these actions provide a profound motivation for radicalizing young Muslims. Another study, as Fox recently reported, found a concrete connection between the Abu Ghraib torture photos and the recruitment of suicide bombers in Iraq.

No one wants to put American soldiers deeper in harm's way. But Bill O'Reilly needs to be confronted with the cold fact that it wasn't the actions of the ACLU that put them in that position -- it was the profoundly unwise policy choices of the Bush administration, and its many, many apologists for instituting a torture regime.

Bill O'Reilly, of course, being among the foremost cheerleaders.