This is, to say the least, strange. Crazy enough that Hatch inserted it, odder still that Ted Kennedy and John Kerry supported it. But if passed, this will open the floodgates to every fringe group out there:

Reporting from Washington - Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."

It would have a minor effect on the overall cost of the bill -- Christian Science is a small church, and the prayer treatments can cost as little as $20 a day. But it has nevertheless stirred an intense controversy over the constitutional separation of church and state, and the possibility that other churches might seek reimbursements for so-called spiritual healing.

Can you say "Scientology"? I knew you could!

Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science Church official, said prayer treatment was an effective alternative to conventional healthcare.

"We are making the case for this, believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality," said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging support for the measure.

Don't get me wrong, I happen to believe this myself. But I wouldn't dream of asking other people to pay for my spiritual beliefs without their full knowledge and consent.

And since many Christian fundamentalists consider Christian Science to be a cult, I suspect the uproar will get this pulled out of the bill.

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This post should have gone up the other day, but I accidentally deleted it. Anyway, many Republicans in Congress think that the teabaggers are just your average extreme wingnut who has been radicalized by FOX, but still loves them their conservatives.

Well, Lindsey Graham got a taste of what has been going on far more times than the media will ever mention. Part of the teabagger base has no love for the warmongering Bushies either. They are too ignorant to apply the same rules for Beck and Hannity because they need leaders to focus their hatred for them, but Lindsey does not have such a luxury. They want the country to be made up of militia-style right wingers that are heavily armed and want no part of the black president.

Brad Johnson fills us in.

Right-wing activists across the nation are enraged by Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) decision to work with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) to craft comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation. In an op-ed published in Sunday’s New York Times, Graham and Kerry discussed their agreement on a framework for mandatory global warming pollution reductions linked to government support for the nuclear, coal, and natural gas industries. The Natural Resource Defense Council’s Dan Lashof embraced the announcement as a “game changer.” Bill Scher noted that Graham has “crossed the climate Rubicon,” abandoning denialist conservative activists by recognizing the threat of global warming and working with Democrats.
--
Graham held a town hall meeting in Greenville, South Carolina in which local Tea Party activists accused him of “going to bed with John Kerry” and making a “pact with the devil,” accusations which generated tremendous applause by the assembled crowd. This unhinged response is reflected in the conservative blogosphere, where Graham has been called a “fake Republican,” “RINO” (Republican in name only), a “traitor,” “disgrace,” “asshat,” “democrat in drag,” and a “wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy”

You can expect this behavior for a long time. If Dick Armey were still part of the Republican congress, he too would be getting the same treatment if he tried to help solve some problems facing America today with any Democratic politician. Instead, he's out there helping organize these characters -- at the behest of the insurance companies. Guys like Graham get to deal with the beast they've unleashed.

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Sean Hannity hosted not one but two whole segments last night devoted promoting the new book by Jerome Corsi -- godfather of the Swift-Boating of John Kerry -- titled America For Sale, which is basically an extended black-helicopter-style conspiracy tome straight out of the Patriot movement of the 1990s, updated for the new century.

This is a classic case of conservatives mainstreaming extremist ideas. I haven't read all of Corsi's book yet, but it differs very little in ideas and content and overall thesis from the kinds of books you could buy at militia-meeting tables in the '90s.

I haven't yet found whether Corsi decided to include his recent reportage for WorldNetDaily detailing the nefarious Obama conspiracy to round up conservatives and imprison them in concentration camps. Hannity managed to not bring up that point last night.

But yes, that's what Corsi wrote:

Text:

The proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention, appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany.

Funny, I still have a Militia of Montana book that outlines this very same nefarious plot being concocted by Bill Clinton.

As Steven Thomma explained for McClatchy:

In truth, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has proposed a bill that would order the Homeland Security Department to prepare national emergency centers — to provide temporary housing and medical facilities in national emergencies such as hurricanes. The bill also would allow the centers to be used to train first responders, and for "other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security."

Of course, Corsi and Hannity aren't the only ostensibly mainstream conservatives peddling this paranoiac fearmongering: So is Michelle Bachmann, among others:

"There is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service," Bachmann told a Minnesota radio station.

"And the real concern is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums."

It's also cropping up quite a bit at Tea Party gatherings. That's where you find outfits like the "Oath Keepers," whose organization is built around resisting citizen roundups.

Why, exactly, does Sean Hannity so avidly promote Jerome Corsi and his conspiracy theories anyway? Look at his record:

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Queen Olympia has decided that the very thing that would make insurance exchanges work is the thing that has to go. And you know when the queen speaks, the Senate listens! (Do you ever get the impression that the Queen is actually wearing no clothes?)

Olympia Snowe looks set to reprise her role in hobbling the stimulus bill in exchange for providing the key pivotal vote for it by killing John Kerry’s amendment, “Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers.” Jon Cohn explains:

In the bills that passed three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the exchange would be a “prudent purchaser.” In other words, it would have a staff that bargained with insurers to bring down premiums — and that made sure all plans lived up to strict guidelines for coverage and customer service. In effect, any insurer that wants to offer coverage through the exchanges has to get the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” from the administrators. This is precisely how it works in Massachusetts.

By contrast, the Senate Finance bill envisions much weaker exchanges. Instead of choosing which plans to make available, the exchange administrators would, by law, have to accept any plan that meets a relatively minimal set of standards.

There are several problems with this. One is that it’s going to be a mess for consumers. Another is that it threatens to turn the exchanges into playgrounds of implicit risk-shifting efforts wherein companies try to design policies specifically around dissuading high-need people from signing up. Thus ever-more burden is going to be placed on the untested risk-adjustment machinery that’s supposed to even this all out. Ezra Klein observes that Jon Kingsdale is basically the only person in America’s who’s run anything like the exchanges envisioned in all the different bills—he does the job in Massachusetts—and he views the prudent purchaser rule as absolutely essential. Against that Snowe is pitting, I guess, her intuition that this is too much government involvement.

TNR's Jonathan Cohn lays out his argument here:

The bills moving through Congress all set up exchanges modeled more or less on what Massachusetts has done. But there are a few critical differences. Among the most important is a difference in how the exchanges would select which plans to offer people.

In the bills that passed three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the exchange would be a "prudent purchaser." In other words, it would have a staff that bargained with insurers to bring down premiums--and that made sure all plans lived up to strict guidelines for coverage and customer service. In effect, any insurer that wants to offer coverage through the exchanges has to get the equivalent of a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" from the administrators. This is precisely how it works in Massachusetts.

By contrast, the Senate Finance bill envisions much weaker exchanges. Instead of choosing which plans to make available, the exchange administrators would, by law, have to accept any plan that meets a relatively minimal set of standards.

Jon Kingsdale, who runs the Massachusetts exchange, calls that a recipe for "policy disaster," as consumers faced a dizzying array of more expensive, less regulated choices. "It would be like telling your grocery store they have to offer every single kind of bread baked by every single bakery. ... The exchanges would be nothing more than an automated Yellow Pages."

Kingsdale is among several Massachusetts-based policy experts who have been ringing the alarm bells about this flaw in the Finance bill. And it's no coincidence that it's a Massachusetts senator, Kerry, who now proposed to fix it by giving the exchanges the same powers envisioned in the House and HELP bills.

But when Kerry introduced his plan last week, he couldn't get the votes to pass it. The reason, several sources on Capitol Hill say, was opposition from Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican who also sits on Senate Finance. Snowe seems to be concerned that a more aggressive exchange would amount to more government--which, in fact, it would be. But, as Massachusetts has shown, sometimes more government is exactly what health care needs.

Chances are reasonably good that Kerry's vision of reform will prevail, if not during the Senate floor debate then afterwards, when a conference committee merges whatever passes from the two congressional chambers. But it's not a sure thing, which is why this seemingly narrow question deserves a lot more attention.

Exchange design doesn't get the attention of controversies like the public option, abortion, or supposed death panels. In the long run, though, it could be far more decisive in whether reform works.

I had a very interesting tête-à-tête last week that I thought I'd share. As you may have guessed, I'm on the email distro lists for all the major Sunday shows and cable news networks, and I get email notifications for who the scheduled guests will be as well as transcripts, p.r. pieces and the like. Last week, when ABC sent me an email that John McCain was going to be their guest again, I sent back a snarky reply asking if they ever had John Kerry on after he lost the election to George Bush as often as they've had McCain, and why, when there are so many actual issues about which the public needs to be informed, they gave so much air time to GOP obstructionism. Normally, I shoot off those emails just as a private protest, but this time, I got a reply back from the executive producer:

Thanks very much for your email. I’d have to take issue with your suggestion that “so much time is given to GOP obstructionism.” Week to week we maintain a balance between Democratic and Republican guests. It’s not always a perfect balance – airtime often tips toward the party in power because the mission of our program is to ask questions of those who are in decision making and policy making roles. Our guest selection is also determined by the news stories we cover. As the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee Senator McCain is clearly the appropriate Republican guest to follow the Secretary of Defense in a discussion of US Afghanistan policy.

Well, if you've ever seen me in the comments, you have to know I'm not going to let a steaming pile of Village B.S. like that go unchallenged:

Thanks for your response.

The notion of a "balance" between Democratic and Republican guests is a false equivalence too often used in lieu of actual journalism. If you put brought on a creationist to discuss the fossil record with Stephen Jay Gould, are you serving your viewership well for balance?

With all due respect to Sen. McCain---and knowing full well how much he cultivates a good relationship with the media (I'm sure Mr. Stephanopoulos enjoyed his weekend in Arizona with the McCains when health care was the prime topic in the country)--his purpose as a follow up to Gates is to simply toe the GOP line of disagreeing reflexively with any agenda the President sets. My site, Crooksandliars.com, has been documenting this for the last five years.

How about instead of reducing every issue to a simplistic binary equation of Republican vs. Democrat, you seek to actually inform your viewership with people who have real background in Afghanistan or could bring a different (and not partisan) perspective? For example, Paul Rieckhoff of IAVA could discuss it from a soldier's POV. As a blogger involved in many journalism listservs, I personally could put you in touch with people far more versed in the history and the actualities in Afghanistan which would provide far more cogent and *informative* information than you will see from the man who tried to tell Americans that Baghdad was as safe as Main Street with his contingent of soldiers and helicopters guarding him.

Further, your insistence that this is the best person to follow up on Gates is disingenuous at best, when looked at the history of who THIS WEEK has booked. I've been a media analyst and political advocate for several years and my memory is not that short. John Kerry was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during Bush's presidency. How often did you ask Sen. Kerry on to discuss foreign policy as a response to Bush? Rarely.

And why is McCain on as *a response*? Why isn't he on first and then give Gates--as the person who can actually make policy, as opposed to the minority party--the opportunity to address the issues afterwards? Because air time tips to the party in power? Last time I checked, Americans have pretty decisively said that they weren't happy with the GOP being the party in power, not that we can tell from your bookings. It's bad enough that you give air time to George Will every week to spread disinformation (and if you'd like, I'm only too happy to provide you with at least 10 examples in the last year of things George Will has been factually wrong about), but to actually tell me that air time tips to the party in power when you have notoriously been favoring Republicans makes me question how forthright you're being about your booking choices. Let's see you book a Democratic blogger even once to "balance" your egregious booking of the completely factually-challenged Michelle Malkin. Or maybe it's just that *informing* your viewership is secondary.

Funnily enough, the producer didn't really have much response to that, simply thanking me for the input. Honestly, I wasn't really happy with the dismissive little pat on the head from the Villager who thought that little blogger me couldn't understand why McCain was a reasonable booking. So I thought I'd give him a suggestion as to real balance:

Here is a segment I would LOVE to see you do with Sen. McCain: why don't you invite my colleague, David Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists, on to discuss how the violent rhetoric that used to be relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party which has been mainstreamed since Obama's election and let Sen McCain respond to that? After all, he is the one who brought Sarah Palin to the national stage (and as I recall, actually said on your program that Palin was his "soul mate" after having only had one phone conversation and a short meeting with her before asking her on the ticket) and there is no other politician who has tapped so proficiently into that zeitgeist. I think it would be beneficial for Americans to hear someone of Sen. McCain's gravitas and stature disavow the kind of violent and racist rhetoric we've all seen. I'm more than happy to provide you with contact information for Mr. Neiwert if you are so inclined.

But if you're not interested in putting Sen. McCain on the spot, perhaps next time you do a show on the problems we're facing in Afghanistan, the "balance" you seek would be better achieved by putting on a politician who favors withdrawal, like Rep. Alan Grayson, instead of two hawks who will both say that the most important thing is "winning" in Afghanistan without actually explaining what "winning" means or how we can achieve it militarily. Where's the balance in that for your viewers?

Are you surprised that he had no response to that? Nah, me neither. I don't know if it impacted him at all, but I'm hoping that from now on he has a small voice inside his head reminding him that some of his viewers actually think critically and realize how badly he's--and all the rest of the bobblehead media--doing his job.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald looks at the sources that our liberal media uses to discuss the issues of the day.

Paul McCartney - Tug of War

Do you remember tug-of-wars from your childhood? I remember the adult in charge lining up us kids by height and then going down the line, alternating which team we would be on, to ensure that neither side was unfairly stacked. That notion of balancing the sides to make things fair has morphed in modern media to this simplistic binary equation of Republican vs. Democrat. But it's a false equivalence, because it assumes a completely valid argument on both sides, and as we chronicle daily here at C&L, rarely do we see sensible, much less valid, arguments coming from the right to make the "balance" actually informative. Instead we get death panels, socialicommunistmarxism, concern trollism over deficit spending and the Olympic Games.

This week, despite the fact that bills are coming out of committees on health care reform, the bobbleheads have decided we need to talk about Afghanistan. So we have National Security Adviser Jim Jones on Face the Nation and State of the Union, UN Ambassador Susan Rice on Meet the Press and former CENTCOM Commander Anthony Zinni on Face the Nation. The economy will also get big play, with former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan on This Week and Sen. Barbara Boxer and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm on State of the Union to talk unemployment. But never fear, health care will be discussed, with of course, the media's version of "balance" of putting Party of No members John Kyl, Lindsey Graham, Saxby Chambliss and John Cornyn on to obsfuscate some more. One bright note in the morning, Rachel Maddow will be back on Meet the Press roundtable, so we have a chance of some reasonable discussion there. That is, if the Davids--Gregory and Brooks--give her a chance to talk.

ABC's "This Week" - Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan; Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and John Cornyn, R-Texas.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - National security adviser James Jones; Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.; retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni; Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Bob Woodward, Katty Kay, Elisabeth Bumiller, Howard Fineman. Topics: Will President Obama send an additional 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan? Will Israel attack nuclear facilities in Iran without U.S. consent? Meter Questions: Was the anti-Obama venom unavoidable? YES: 6 NO: 6; Has Obama Got Command Back? YES: 12 No: 0.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Jones; Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.; Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - The United States holds its first one-on-one talks with Iran in decades. Will this new diplomatic approach work? Hear what our panelists have to say. Plus, the author of a controversial UN report on the Israel-Gaza conflict earlier this year. Finally, an interview with the President of Columbia on everything from the war on drugs to free markets and US relations.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Bob Casey, D-Pa.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

The Sunday talk shows certainly love John McCain. It's a joke that ABC has John McCain on as its guest almost weekly. He was just on August 23rd. Didn't he lose the general election? Being a guest once in a while is no biggie, but ABC's slavish behavior towards Sen. McCain is disturbing. They should just consummate their love affair and have him on every Sunday if they think his opinion outweighs all others.

I sure don't remember the media putting on John Kerry every week after he lost to Bush in 2005.

Lou Dobbs has gone and done it again:

On his radio show -- broadcast from the anti-immigration organization Federation for American Immigration Reform's "Hold Their Feet to the Fire" legislative advocacy event -- Lou Dobbs interviewed WorldNetDaily staff reporter Jerome Corsi, who Dobbs described as "a pretty good guy to talk to" about immigration issues. Corsi is a consistent promoter of the conspiracy theory -- previously advanced by Dobbs -- that President Obama has yet to produce a valid birth certificate; the author of falsehood-laden books about Obama and Sen. John Kerry that Dobbs' CNN colleagues panned as "discredited;" and has a history of making bigoted comments, some of which he later apologized for.

The piece documents Corsi's long history of promoting conspiracy theories, including most recently the "birther" nonsense, but more famously the "Swift Boat" garbage that sank John Kerry's candidacy.

Perhaps even more germane is that, beyond the "birther" conspiracy theories, Corsi has most recently been promoting the theory that President Obama is planning to round up conservatives and put them in concentration camps.

This willingness to abet the most insane wingnuttery is yet another drop in the bucket of evidence that CNN needs to give Dobbs the boot if it ever hopes to salvage what little credibility it has left.

A new site called DropDobbs.com is a joint effort by various progressive organizations -- including Media Matters, America's Voice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the National Council of La Raza -- to demand CNN make the change:

Over the years, Lou Dobbs has consistently used his CNN platform to spread hatred and fear. He played a critical role in skewing the immigration reform debate in 2006, leading to the derailment of that effort, and his obsession with the issue of immigration and with defeating immigration reform continues unabated. Adding to his repertoire of hate and fearmongering, he has recently aligned himself with the “birther” conspiracists and their racially tinged attack on the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. From his CNN platform, he has bolstered the claims of those on the fringe by asserting repeatedly that President Obama has failed to produce adequate proof that he was born in the United States. His recent focus on the birth certificate conspiracy issue has reinforced what immigration reform proponents have long known — that Dobbs has a long history of the worst kind of pandering by promoting hate and ethnic and racial division.

Timothy Karr at HuffPo has a thoughtful piece on what we can start to do to confront the flood of toxic garbage that is spewing out of right-wing media these days. Lou Dobbs is only one of the most prominent problems.

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Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Kerry (D-MA) talked about the process of health care reform on Sunday :

STEPHANOPOULOS: These insurance reforms, you can't be denied health care if you're sick. You can't get thrown out if you're sick.

A lot of Democrats, Republicans say that maybe we should have this individual mandate, to require people to buy insurance, to couple that with reforms.

Bill Bradley points out today, I think it was in The New York Times, that, you know, maybe they should include some malpractice reform as well. Are they -- those three things the building blocks of a deal?

HATCH: Yes, they really are. You know, Democrats have been unwilling to take on the personal injury lawyers. And look, there are cases that really deserve huge rewards, huge judgments.

We've got to find some way of getting rid of the frivolous cases, and most of them are. Most of them are brought...

KERRY: And that's doable, most definitely.

HATCH: Yes, and that's doable. Most of them are brought to -- you know, to get the defense costs. They know that once they bring them, the insurance companies are going to have to pay their defense costs rather than take a chance at a runaway jury.

But it's not just that. It's the other elements you've been talking about too. Those are three very important...

Let's just wait one minute here. Bill Bradley? Although he has a reputation as a liberal's liberal, Bradley has never met a tax cut he didn't like. And when he starts talking about malpractice reform in exchange for healthcare reform, what he's talking about once again is ordinary people giving up another degree of security and protection against powerful forces to meet some politician's ideal of centrist compromise.

When approximately five percent of all doctors are responsible for 95% of all medical malpractice, how is that a legal problem? I'll accept limitations on malpractice awards when we have a national health care system that pays for every service someone needs to deal with with the outcome of bad medicine. Until then, I'll keep my torts, thank you.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And then if you add some subsidies to that that move towards covering more people...

KERRY: Yes, which I think we have some -- actually, I think we have some flexibility on as to sort of the rate and manner in which you do that. So I think that there are ways to do this, George.

As a member of the Finance Committee, I've been part of this discussion, though many of us would like to see it broadened in some ways. I'd like -- I mean, you know, my question to Orrin and to others is, you know, who is the Republican? Who are the Republicans, plural, who are prepared to step up and do as Ted Kennedy would have done here?

STEPHANOPOULOS: You were part of the negotiations earlier this year but then stepped away. Are you ready to come back?

HATCH: Sure. I've always been ready to do that. But look, you talk about an individual mandate. The problem with an individual mandate is that the people who are really hurt the most are those on the lower end of the wage spectrum.

They either lose their jobs, a cutback in pay, or the company goes overseas. Once you start doing that -- because the theory behind that is that you've penalized the company if they don't provide insurance for their people by having them have it surcharged.

And look, let's just be honest about it, it's a very difficult thing to do. There are some ways we could do this, none – both sides...

KERRY: Actually, Orrin...

HATCH: Both sides are arguing for insurance reform. That's not the issue. The issue is, how do we put all of these elements together?

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I'm not sure what's more infuriating here, listening to Orrin Hatch pretend he doesn't know full well that what was done to the prisoners in our custody was torture, or John Kerry defending the Obama administration's decision not to go after the ones at the top who ordered it, and then smile and nod politely while Hatch spins.

STEPHANOPOULOS: OK. Let me move to another issue that came up earlier this week. The attorney general decided to investigate possible CIA abuses in the prisoner interrogation cases.

And Vice President Cheney this morning has blasted that decision by the attorney general.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DICK CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping the country safe over that period of time?

Instead, they're out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions, threatening, contrary to what the president originally said, they were going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: He called it an outrageous and possibly dangerous act.

KERRY: Well, Dick Cheney has shown through the years, frankly, a disrespect for the Constitution, for sharing of information with Congress, respect for the law, and I'm not surprised that he is upset about this.

The Obama administration has no intention -- I think the president himself has been unbelievably bending in the direction of trying to be careful about what happens to national security, protecting our national security interests, being very sensitive about the CIA's prerogatives and needs and so forth.

And in fact, I think there is a little bit of a tension between the White House itself and the lawyers in the Justice Department as they see the law and as what their obligation is.

And in a sense, that's good. That's appropriate, because it shows that we have an attorney general who is not pursuing a political agenda, but who is doing what he believes the law requires him to do.

And we have an administration, on the other hand, that is balancing some of those other interests.

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Jon Stewart got in his licks at Fox News the other night, accusing them of being "the new liberals" for their, umn, tolerant approach to the town hall health-care protesters.

Stewart caught Bill O'Reilly saying recently:

O'Reilly: When we cover the town-hall meetings, we don't describe the protesters as "loons."

Stewart: Of course you don't describe the protesters as loons! What kind of monster would describe honest Americans voicing their political opinions that way?

[Reverts to earlier clip of O'Reilly, describing an anti-war protest]

O'Reilly: Surveys show many protesters are simply loons.

So last night on The O'Reilly Factor, the Falafel Master offered, by way of excuse, to demonstrate that Stewart had edited out the exculpatory parts of his monologues which made it clear he didn't mean all the protesters. And indeed, on the longer clip, O'Reilly can be heard to say:

O'Reilly: There are the anti-Bush protesters in New York City. While most of these people have been peaceful, more than a thousand have been arrested and surveys show, many protesters are simply loons, calling for the destruction of the American system, calling for retreat in the face of terrorism. Here's a bulletin for you Bush-haters: These protesters are not helping John Kerry.

O'Reilly somehow thinks this demonstrates his innocence:

O'Reilly: We were talking about the arrested protesters.

Actually, no, you weren't, Bill. Look at the transcript: You were talking about the protesters who were surveyed -- and that included all the protesters, not just those who were arrested.

Moreover, no one on the left or among the Democrats that I'm aware of has called all of the town-hall participants "loons." They've been careful to parse out the behavior of the people interested in civilized discourse. When protesters have been characterized as "loons" or some variation thereof, it's been because of their disruptive behavior.

So if BillO's excuse -- that he was just talking about some of the protesters -- is good enough for Bill, why not for everyone else?

But then, we already know that the standards BillO applies to others don't apply to his own august self. That's the real "O'Reilly Factor."

Are the Obama people really that dumb? They were "surprised," "caught off guard" by the massive dirtstorm unleashed on healthcare reform?

These are the geniuses of 11-dimensional chess? Puhleeze. I think they've started to believe their own press. Obama the Healer, Obama the Post-Racial Lincoln. What a bunch of damned dopes.

Dick Polman, the Philadelphia Inquirer political reporter, is also astounded at just how unprepared Team Obama was for the attacks on healthcare reform:

During the 1993-4 health care reform battle, the Clinton White House was outmaneuvered by the Republican right and their corporate allies, who swayed the electorate with all kinds of devious hyperbole. And, more recently, in the 2004 presidential race, John Kerry and his advisers sat back and did nothing for three crucial summer weeks, absolutely convinced that voters would never believe the Swift Boat attacks on his Vietnam record. That strategy worked out pretty well.

And now we have the Obama people, waking up to the idea that maybe it's not politically wise to sit mute and allow themselves to be tarred as fascists who would euthanize granny, ration health care, and slash Medicare benefits. (It's priceless to hear the Republicans portraying themselves as the defenders of Medicare, given the fact that, if they had been in charge back in 1965, they never would have enacted Medicare in the first place. But I digress.)

The Republican right understands the power of the visceral; it knows how to stoke emotions at the expense of civility. This is not exactly a fresh observation, yet it's amazing how flat-footed Democrats seem always to discover it anew. They seem forever convinced that the power of high ideals should be sufficient for victory - that, in the present case, Americans should simply be convinced, on the merits, that health care reform is preferable to the dysfunctional status quo. As Howard Paster, Clinton's health care guy in 1993, told The Times this morning, "The expectation (among the Obama people) was that things have gotten so bad in the last 16 years that there would be a consensus on the need to act this time."

But that's not how the other team plays the game. Indeed, numerous Democratic strategists and commentators have been trying to make this point for a long time. A couple years ago, for instance, radio host and ex-California Democratic chairman Bill Press offered this advise to his brethren: "In politics, if somebody slaps you on the cheek, you punch him in the nose. Then you punch him in the gut. Then you kick him in the groin. Then you crack a chair over his head. Then, just to make sure, you jump up and down on top of him with both feet...The only way to win is to fight back. Hard and tough. If they don't, they don't deserve to win."

Press was characteristically a tad over the top, but his basic point was that Democrats should stop being surprised to learn that politics ain't beanbag. This is not to suggest that Obama should retaliate by retailing lies equal in virulence to those being spewed by his opponents; if he was to conduct himself as his opponents are doing, he would be promptly attacked for failing to change the tone in Washington.

His best option is to do what he probably should have done months ago: find an attractively repeatable health reform pitch that can fit on a bumper sticker, something that can appeal to positive emotions. (Perhaps if Obama had done that during the spring, he could have at least partially preempted the nabobs of negativity.) Indeed, there are reports today that Obama will now pitch his plan as a vehicle for ending unfair insurance practices, for protecting the millions of Americans who have pre-existing health conditions.

Maybe a positive emotional pitch can still work - unless it is too little, too late, and insufficient weaponry for an alley fight.

KT Tunstall--Black Horse and the Cherry Tree

No, no, no, no, these are not the ones for me. I'm looking at the bobblehead parade and I'm wondering how much more decisively Obama would have to have won before David Gregory would stop inviting the non-President of the United States John McCain as a guest. I mean, how many times did Tim Russert have on Al Gore or John Kerry during GWB's terms? It would be one thing if Gregory mentioned the absolute idiocy of bringing Sarah Palin to the national attention, but you know he'd never do that.

Elsewhere along the dial, the prevailing topics are Sonia Sotomayor's upcoming nomination hearings and of course, health care. If you want a good laugh, you may want to check C-Span, where their "Newsmakers" show will highlight two Republican representatives (Burgess-TX, Cassidy-LA), who will map out the Republican health care plans. One would presume it would be a VERY short program: "Privatize! We don't wanna be no socialist country!" Done.

ABC's "This Week" - Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Dan Rather, Joan Biskupic, Helene Cooper, Pete Williams. Topics: How will Sonia Sotomayor change the U.S. Supreme Court if she is confirmed? How has President Obama made himself so effective at absorbing shocks? Will the Republicans support a health care bill with new taxes? YES: 7 NO: 5; Will Republicans unite as a bloc to oppose any health care reform bill? YES: 9 NO: 3.

CNN's "State of the Union/Reliable Sources" - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius; Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Judd Gregg, R-N.H., Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - U.S. Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner on the economic crisis. Did those green shoots we were seeing turn brown? And is Geithner doing enough to fix the problem? Plus, one of the biggest thorns in Prime Minister Putin's side. Obama quietly met with him in Russia this week. You'll hear from the leader of the Russian opposition, Boris Nemtsov.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and John Cornyn, R-Texas; Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

Kerry is a great person to be handling this, with his background in the BCCI investigation. Can't wait to see what he digs up!

May 29 (Bloomberg) -- John Kerry has never run for sheriff. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he is starting to act like one, and the world is his jurisdiction.

The Massachusetts Democrat is wielding his gavel with an investigative zeal, and plans to take on Iran’s nuclear program, gun-running on the Mexican border, terrorism, narcotics and human trafficking, all through the prism of money laundering. He has hired a former investigative reporter, an ex-CIA agent and a one-time managing director of Bear Stearns Cos. LLC to help him.

“There are lots of big pieces out there that depend on money moving,” he said in an interview in his office in the Senate, where he is serving his 24th year.

Kerry, who was a prosecutor and attorney in Massachusetts before starting his political career in 1982, said the lack of congressional oversight during the Bush administration left behind a target-rich environment for his panel. The Treasury Department “has its hands full” and is “inadequately resourced” to pursue these inquiries, he said.

“For the last eight years we’ve had an administration that has done its utmost to protect, hide, obfuscate, neglect, void, simply not even care about these issues,” said Kerry, 65.

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T. Boone Pickens has been in the news a lot lately pushing his so-called "Pickens Plan" which seeks to reduce America's reliance on foreign energy imports. Some aspects of the proposal are laudatory and actually quite brilliant, and some aspects are just downright stupid. But this post isn't about the merits of the idea; it's about what Pickens has to say when asked to reflect back on his role in bankrolling the insipid swift boat smear campaign against John Kerry. On this front, the billionaire oilman reveals his true, slimy colors. In this 60 Minutes profile, the cameras follow Pickens to the 2008 Democratic National Convention and capture his visibly uncomfortable encounter with the man he spent $3 million destroying.

60 Minutes:

"You spent $3 million funding an advertising campaign that, in some people’s mind, was representative of dirty politics, smear politics, character assassination, all of that. At this stage, do you have any regrets?" Rose asks.

"None," Pickens says.

Asked if he'd do it over again tomorrow, Pickens says, "What I knew then, I know that same thing now. And nothing has changed my mind."

SEE ALSO: Senator Kerry Confronts Swift Boat Funder