On Friday, Fox News' Monica Crowley informed Hannity's audience that President Obama and his administration have an "ideology of control" just like communist, socialist, and fascist regimes of times past.

Over the weekend, we heard comparison after comparison of the IRS so-called scandal to Watergate. Even David Gregory chimed in on that chorus by legitimizing the claims rather than forcing the squawkers to justify their claims.

Similarly, Paul Ryan's claim that connection between the IRS and Obamacare is somehow sinister and threatening is yet another dog whistle to the Tea Party masses.

Meanwhile, Rand Paul is trumpeting the fanfare over Benghazi and trying to flog Hillary Clinton with it. Of course, it's not just intended to flog Hillary, but also to serve as a clarion call for the masses to rise up this summer yet again.

On the extreme side of things, we have radio hosts claiming Obama is really the first openly gay president who hasn't come out of the closet yet. Um, okay. But wait! There's more.

According to Virginia's Republican Lieutenant Governor candidate, winger pastor EW Jackson, Democrats are slave masters and Obama is really a Muslim. Did I mention that Mr. Jackson happens to be black?

What we have here are the beginnings of a long, hot summer, with tons of manufactured discontent. Unlike 2009 and 2010, wingers don't have Obamacare to kick around anymore even though they think they do. They've had control of the House since 2010 but haven't done anything with it other than repeal ObamaCare 37 times, block every job bill that had a chance of actually improving the lives of Americans, and thump their chests about Benghazi and other stupid inventions.

All of the noise is, as Katrina Vanden Heuvel called it, deployment of weapons of mass distraction, sacrificing real issues and governance for political point-scoring, brewing a summer with town hall meetings full of angry elderly white people shaking their fists at evil Democrats for scandals Republicans caused.

Over the weekend I watched The Billionaires' Tea Party, which is an updated version of AstroTurf Wars made during the health care town halls. It includes footage from American Majority training sessions where participants are instructed in the fine art of gaming everything from Amazon reviews to social media. It was a good review in anticipation of what they plan for this summer and 2014.

The Occupy movement and all activists should be prepared to take them on this time. They do not get to benefit from the element of surprise. Most people who aren't insane know there's an effort afoot to gin up everything they possibly can to keep this president and Democrats from doing anything worthwhile, but we don't have the Villagers on our side, nor should we ever expect to.

If I were you, I'd put those local town hall dates in my planner and plan to attend, if only to counterbalance the insanity they're about to unleash on us all.

Radio host and mother Nicole Sandler was arrested for asking questions about Paul Ryan's Medicare proposal at Rep. Allen West's recent town hall.

The Republicans are reassuring the voters who are worried about Paul Ryan's Medicare "reform" that they're not getting stiffed -- "just" their kids.

It's a scam, of course. You know what Paul Ryan's Medicare plan is? Groupons for healthcare! We're supposed to be thrilled at getting healthcare for 50% off (or whatever their Deal of The Day is). Who doesn't love a deal, right?

They think this is a brilliant plan. They're wrong. They're forgetting about women. We're the ones who always know when a deal isn't worth it.

The same women 45 and older who, statistically speaking, are the ones dealing with the brunt of their elderly parents: overseeing medical care, trying to figure out what's best for their parents and wrestling with the Medicare paperwork.

If there's one thing I do know, it's that Medicare made my parents' final years far more comfortable than it would have been without it. Yes, my dad had a union pension and some investments, but that just covered the basics. Without Medicare, my parents -- a father with pancreatic cancer and a mother with congestive heart failure and an eroding spinal column that required several surgeries -- would have been impoverished.

And if the women who are dealing with their parents are anything like me, we're not only thankful our parents had Medicare, we're counting on it for ourselves, because we don't want to be a burden to our children.

We also want that same security for them.

Now, amoral politicians have one serious handicap: They assume everyone else is as selfish and uncaring as they are. They really don't understand mothers.

Every chance I get, I fight like hell for Medicare and Social Security, even though my own kids don't even believe it'll be there. One of them even believes the conservative propaganda that Baby Boomers selfishly bankrupted the country.

I fight anyway. I'm a mother. I know that even if I'm not here to see it, they'll thank me later.

And so will my grandchildren.

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Another night where Allen West tosses out anyone who disagrees with him. He thinks he's still in the military, and we all have to follow his orders:

BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Police escorted a number of people out of a town hall meeting Wednesday night. It's the second night in a row that Congressman Allen West held what became a heated event.

"I think they are a bunch of jerks," said Anne Dion after police walked her outside. "That's what I think about getting asked to leave."

Trouble was brewing even before the event started. Sign-carrying protesters were asked to leave private property.

U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-District 22, warned the crowd about lashing out. "You see a lot of media cameras, and the media is here because they want to see a show," he said.

The warning did not stop supporters and critics from turning up the volume.

"I don't care who's yelling at me, cursing at me, or whatever," said West. "You are still in America."

"I feel like the country is going down the tubes, and it we don't have somebody that does something about it, we are all in trouble," said Karl Hotaling, a supporter.

During the public question segment, Medicare proved to be a controversial topic.

"I don't think Medicare should be eliminated," said David Torgersen, a protester. "I think it should be there when people need it."

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Radio personality and C&L friend Nicole Sandler attended Allen West's town hall today and was led away in handcuffs.

Palm Beach Post:

Inside the meeting, West was less than a minute into his remarks tonight when two or three men began shouting from the audience.

"How about our Medicare that you're stealing?" shouted one.

"How about allowing questions from the audience?" shouted another man, apparently dissatisfied with West's decision to answer written questions submitted by audience members before the meeting.

At West's previous town halls, members of the public lined up to ask him questions in person, sometimes waiting 30 minutes or more to do so.

"What you have seen happen previously is you get such a line of people and a lot of folks want to come up and proseletyze for six or seven minutes and you're really not getting to the questions that people want to have answered," West said after the meeting.

West, who has gone back and forth with critics at his previous meetings, said the written format was not an effort to avoid tough questions.

"I don't duck," West said.

During the meeting, West had responded to a question about Medicare when Nicole Sandler of Coral Springs, a former radio host on the liberal Air America network, began shouting from the audience.

Other audience members began shouting at her and a police officer led her out.

"This is supposed to be a town hall meeting. That means back-and-forth," Sandler said as she exited.

Sandler argued with a Fort Lauderdale police officer in the lobby who told her to leave the building. After she yelled at the officer for placing his hand on her, she was arrested for "trespassing after warning" and led away in handcuffs.

Funny. I don't recall the 2009 town hall meetings as having the heavy police presence at every single one, or people being arrested for asking questions. And I certainly don't view Nicole Sandler as someone who is threatening in the least, but evidently those policemen did.

Nicole Sandler lives in Allen West's district. She is entitled to receive answers to her questions even if he doesn't like her politics. She is entitled to attend town hall meetings and ask those questions. She's even entitled to record those meetings.

Having her arrested for insisting on answers to her questions is just another indication of the totalitarian state people like Allen West, wingnut loony man, think of when they think of "liberty."

(ps - If you want a taste of what conservatives in Sandler's district want our country to look like, read the comments on that Palm Beach Post article)

Here's the video of her being ejected:

UPDATE: John Amato

I just spoke to a source close to the situation and $25.00 was already posted for her bail. She's not out yet. Since the town hall was on private property, the police were allowed to arrest her on a trumped up charge. She was pushed by the cop to get out of the building while she was trying to leave. He arrested her for daring to ask a question from the audience. If it had been in a public building there would have been no grounds to ask her to leave. West only answered pre-approved questions. What a cowardly move by Rep. Allen West's people.

Karoli wonders...

The "private property" Nicole was ejected from was Calvary Chapel's theater. Calvary Chapel is a tax-exempt organization. It seems to me that they should not be playing partisan politics, screening questions and supporting West's narrative without being accountable for that.

The thing I find most frustrating about our party is the reluctance (or inability?) to inspire and lead. After the last eight years, is it really that impossible to sell the case for a Democratic Congress? They're always so damned defensive, and it comes across as weakness -- which is what turns so many people off.

Yes, I know some districts are more difficult than others, but they're not all like that:

As Democrats fan out across the country to campaign for reelection this month, many are surprisingly quiet about their hard-won accomplishments — the major bills they have passed under President Obama.

In an effort coordinated with the White House, congressional leaders are urging Democrats to focus less on bragging about what they have done — a landmark healthcare law, a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulation and other far-reaching policy changes — and more on efforts to fix the economy and on the perils of Republican control of Congress.

One year after many town hall meetings were upended by raucous anti-government protesters, congressional Democrats are trying to ensure that this summer's debate sheds a more flattering light on their party as they navigate a bruising midterm election campaign.
To bulk up their record on job creation, Democratic leaders have gone to great lengths — even calling House members back from recess for a special session Tuesday — to pass a $26-billion bill to avert public employee layoffs.

And in an effort to turn attention to their opponents, Democrats from Obama on down have taken to warning that giving Republicans control of Congress would be akin to reelecting George W. Bush.

"The question for 2010 is: Whose side are you on?" Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said to reporters Thursday. He spoke after a closed meeting with Democratic senators, where palm cards itemizing contrasts between the parties were distributed for lawmakers to carry around during the recess.

"Democrats moving us forward, while Republicans take us back," the card says.

Obama has been reading from the same playbook, comparing Republicans to bad drivers who want to retrieve keys to a car they had driven into a ditch.

"When you get in your car, when you go forward, what do you do? You put it in 'D,' " Obama said last week at a Democratic National Committee event in Atlanta. "When you want to go back, what do you? You put it in 'R.' "

Republicans see those attacks as an effort to divert attention from the weak economy.

If the Democrats can't figure out a way put the blame for this recession on the Bush policies that caused it, they're just not trying. Or maybe they're so used to feeling defensive, they don't know any other way to be.

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Glenn Beck must have been feeling the pressure from Virginia Foxx yesterday in the Absurd Wingnuttery Championships. So, after Foxx compared the liberal health-care reform package working its way through Congress to terrorism, Beck went on his Fox News show and compared the package to the 9/11 attacks:

Beck: On 9/11, we experienced a feeling we had never had before -- when the buildings and our markets and the economy came falling down around our ears, we realized -- 'Oh my gosh. Our country isn't unsinkable.'

We came, on that day, to the understanding that this Republic is fragile. Here we are now, a decade later. I'm on the air again, warning you that our government cannot sustain our massive spending. The system will collapse if we continue down this progressive path.

Ten years ago, I could have shouted every single day about Osama bin Laden and his wacky, crazy threats to kill Americans in New York. And no one would have been willing to stand in line two hours while some security officers made grandma take her shoes off. No one would have done it.

But don't you see -- while the government is still not willing to do these things, today, America is different. America has changed. Washington, we're not going to let you get away with it anymore.

Look, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Conservatives are awake. 912ers are willing to do the hard things. We know what this means. We're taking time out of our busy lives, taking time away from their families, they're attending town-hall meetings -- you think they wanna do that? They are calling their representatives -- how many times do we have to be yelled at by your people in Washington? to work against the enactment of health care reform.

They are reading 2,000-page health-care bills on the weekend. They 912ers are willing to stand in line and take our shoes off before the plane actually hits the tower.

Glenn Beck has a long history of exploiting the 9/11 tragedy for the sake of ratings and rantings. (Who could forget his encomium to the widows? "It took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims' families.")

Indeed, you could make the case that his current stellar rise was built on such exploitation. Beck was a nobody until he started making incendiary remarks about Muslims on air and attacking liberals for their insufficient patriotism after 9/11 and cheerleading the Iraq invasion as a post-9/11 necessity. It's what made him famous in the first place.

And now he's springboarding from that to leading an open revolt against the liberal policies Americans just voted to implement, throwing a tantrum because no one believes in disproven and discredited conservative dogma anymore. No one, that is, except Glenn Beck and his hapless followers.

Via Teddy Partridge at FDL, the shocking news that military weapons are now being deployed against civilians in the United States, just as many of us predicted:

You think your town hall meeting's law enforcement presence was authoritarian and heavy-handed?

Check this out: San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore deployed (but did not use) military type sonic crowd-control devices at two town hall meetings, one held by GOP Darrell Issa and the other by Democrat Susan Davis. These devices are the same as those used to control crowds of insurgents in the Iraq war theatre and have been linked to ear and brain injury.

Both town halls took place without incident; however the use of the military device concerned San Diegians. The LRAD [Long-Range Acoustic Device] crowd control is primarily used in Iraq to control insurgents and can cause serious and lasting harm to humans.

According to the manufacture, American Technology Corporation, the LRAD provides “military personnel the capability to transition through the rules of engagement to determine a target’s intent and also provides greater assurance that innocent lives on both sides of the device are not lost due to miscommunication.”

[...]“It’s very concerning,” Kevin Keenan, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “ It is fine for the Sheriff’s Department to have new less-than-lethal weapons, but for their interactions with individuals these still-dangerous weapons need to be used only as substitutes for firearms. They can’t be used as just another tool on the tool belt. As we’ve seen with tasers and pepper spray, these types of weapons are being used to subdue people even though they pose the risk of serious physical harm.”

Continue reading »

Michael Steele goes to a black college and insults a woman whose mother died of cancer because she said that everyone should have good health care.

So people go out to town halls, they go to the community, and they’re like this. (SHAKES ARMS) It makes for great TV. You’ll probably make it tonight. Enjoy it.

First, there's the insanity of the head of the RNC criticizing anyone for disrupting a town hall meeting. Second, you have a woman whose mother died, ostensibly because of a lack of insurance, basically being insulted for daring to try to call attention to herself.

And this is not the only example. I can think of a dozen instances of Republican officials dismissing people trying to explain how the current system is broken. There was Tom Coburn telling the crying woman whose insurance refused to cover her husband that she should go to her neighbors for help. There was "Great White Hope" Republican Lynn Jenkins telling an uninsured constituent to be a grown-up and get insurance. The callousness on display at these things is palpable. And it could easily be turned into a powerful force for change.

That is, if there was one Democratic strategist interested in making a moral case anymore instead of a bunch of functionaries squandering a progressive agenda in favor of pleasing elites and talking about "bending the cost curve."

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Anyone who is aware of all Internet traditions has by now seen the footage of Barney Frank taking down the Larouchie who asked him if he would support a "Nazi policy" by asking her, "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" But Rep. Frank was in rare form that night, standing up to the uninformed shrieking of the right and offering a real lesson in how to argue with conservatives. Rep. Frank's office provided C&L with the tapes of that town hall meeting in Dartmouth from last week, and I put together a sort of greatest hits reel.

Frank explains what deficit hawks should concern themselves with:

"I am struck by those who say, well, you don't care about the deficit. No, I do. I do care about the deficit. That's one of the reasons, not the only one, why I voted against the single most wasteful expenditure in the history of America. The Iraq war. If we hadn't gone to the war in Iraq, which I thought was a terrible mistake and voted against, we would have had more than enough money to pay for health care."

He argues with a "tenther" who thinks that Congress isn't authorized to provide health care for their citizens:

Frank: Do you think Medicare is unconstitutional, sir?

Teabagger: I think that Medicare needs to be reformed.

Frank: Do you think it's unconstitutional? You said that the Constitution doesn't give us the authority to do it, but Medicare was done. And, do you think Medicare is unconstitutional?

Teabagger: I think that Medicare needs to be reformed.

Frank: But you won't tell me whether you think it's unconstitutional, which you said--

Teabagger: I am not a Constitutional scholar-

Frank: Then why did you start off arguing about the Constitution?

That's really a fantastic exchange, where Frank digs an inch below the surface and finds nothing. He insists on having this questioner back up the rhetoric he cribbed off of Free Republic or wherever he got it, and the guy just couldn't do it.

And this is my favorite part:

Teabagger: Can you pledge to all of us here tonight, that if a new government single-payer system is instituted, that you will opt out of your Cadillac insurance?

Frank: Yes I am in favor of single payer, and that's why I like Medicare. (yelling) You act as if you people have discovered it is August. I have been a co-sponsor of the single payer bill, I think it would be better...

Teabagger #2: But we watch tapes of Obama and everyone else secretly say they're in favor of an eventual single pay system.

Frank: I haven't... sir, it's been 21 years since I've had a secret. (Laughter) And I don't have one now! You have discovered that I'm for single payer! I've been a sponsor of single payer for years!

What you see here is several things: 1) Rep. Frank is always in control; 2) he concedes nothing; 3) he allows his opponents to hang themselves with the outlandish logic of their own claims; 4) he knows when to throw in a well-timed bon mot. At one point, Frank says, "When you say things that people can't refute, they try to drown you out. That's understandable." That's someone who is confident in their beliefs. Democrats could learn something from that.

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(h/t Heather.)

Robert Reich wonders why Baucus, Grassley et all are getting to decide for the nation on health care reform. We'll all pay for Obama's little experiment:

Aug. 23, 2009 | On Thursday, the so-called Gang of Six – three Republicans and three Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee – met by conference call and, according to Max Baucus, D-Mont., the committee's chair, reaffirmed their commitment "toward a bipartisan healthcare reform bill" (read: less coverage and no public insurance option). The Washington Post reports that the senators shared tales from their home states, where some have been besieged by protesters angry about a potential government takeover of the nation's healthcare system.

It's come down to these six senators. The House has reported a bill, as has another Senate committee, but all eyes are fixed on Senate Finance – and on these three Dems and three Republicans, in particular. But who, exactly, anointed these six to decide the fate of the nation's healthcare?

I don't get it. Of the three Republicans in the gang, the senior senator is Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. In recent weeks Grassley has refused to debunk the rumor that the House's healthcare bill will spawn "death panels," empowered to decide whether the sick and old get to live or die. At an Iowa town meeting last Tuesday Grassley called the president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi "intellectually dishonest" for claiming the opposite. On Thursday Grassley told the Washington Post that Congress should scale back its efforts to overhaul healthcare in the wake of intense anger at town hall meetings. But – wait – the anger is largely about distortions such as the "death panels" that Grassley refuses to debunk.

This week on Fox News, Grassley termed the House bill "the Pelosi bill," and called it "a government takeover of healthcare, exploding the deficit because it's not paid for and it's got high taxes in it."

No, it will explode the deficit because the Blue Dogs fought the Medicare reimbursement rate successfully and as a result, the so-called public option will now cost as much as regular insurance. And because WalMart successfully fought for a grandfather clause that will enable them to provide the crappy, bare-bones insurance they always did, but competitors will have to pay for the real insurance. (Oh, and those workers will now be kicked on Medicaid and forced to take WalMart's crappy plan. Good times!)

But I digress.

Reich continues:

I really don't get it. We have a Democratic president in the White House. Democrats control 60 votes in the Senate, enough to overcome a filibuster. It is possible to pass healthcare legislation through the Senate with 51 votes (that's what George W. Bush did with his tax-cut plan). Democrats control the House. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is a tough lady. She has said there will be no healthcare reform bill without a public option.

So why does the fate of healthcare rest in Grassley's hands?

It's not even as if the gang represents America. The three Dems in the gang are from Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota – states that together account for just over 1 percent of Americans. The three Republicans are from Maine, Wyoming and Iowa, which together account for 1.6 percent of the American population.

So, I repeat: Why has it come down to these six? Who anointed them? Apparently, the White House. At least that's what I'm repeatedly being told by sources both on the Hill and in the administration. "The Finance Committee is where the action is. They'll tee up the final bill," says someone who should know.