Trump Gets A Hannity Job While Spewing His Birther Theories Freely On Fox

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Earlier this week, while Ann Coulter was castigating any conservative who played along with Donald Trump's Birtherism, Sean Hannity whimperingly eagerly agreed (while kowtowing to Coulter) that he would raise with Donald Trump all sorts of the thorny facts that Coulter pointed out in her anti-Birther rant. (You may recall that she blamed the spread of the Trump/Birther story on the "liberal media".)

So of course, when Hannity finally did get around to raising the Birther issue with Trump in his two-part interview, he raised none of those issues and defended not a single fact.

Indeed, it was just a classic Hannity Job. Trump had nothing new to claim -- he just keeps regurgitating the same thoroughly debunked talking points on his theories. And Hannity just let him, of course -- with a little encouragement along the way.

So, in the same spirit, we'll just recap the debunking, as well as the salient points that Donald Trump's Birtherite candidacy raises:

-- Every point or claim that Trump raises is an outright falsehood or an incredibly obtuse distortion that only reveals how stupid and gullible he actually is.

-- In an ordinary universe where up is up and down is down, this would mean Trump would be making the rest of the GOP field look sane and intelligent by contrast.

-- Instead, he is now leading the GOP polls -- which not only must really suck for the usual Republican suspects, but also vividly illustrates the stupidity and gullibility of Republican primary voters.

-- He is quickly becoming the embodiment of Tea Party values: vapidity, irrationality, and arrogantly stupid.

Sensitive Republicans Are All Verklempt At How Mean Obama Was To Poor Paul Ryan: Waaaaahmbulance, Stat!

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The right-wing talkers and Beltway Villagers have all been wringing their hands at how mean and disrespectful President Obama was by inviting Paul Ryan to sit in the front row of his speech Wednesday and then to so openly rebuke his absurd 'Path to the Poorhouse' deficit-reduction plan.

One of the more vivid examples of this was Joe Scarborough's wailing and gnashing of teeth on Thursday morning on MSNBC. He was happily joined in this by Professional Wanker Mark Halperin.

Scarborough kept repeating that Obama had "called Ryan un-American," though of course Obama had done no such thing; he had repeatedly said that the Republican plan didn't reflect any America he knew -- which is of course quite a different thing. (We on the Left know what being called "un-American" sounds like -- and that ain't it.)

Of course, we all saw Ryan's little hissy-fit afterwards, in which he declared that the president was "dramatically inaccurate" in his speech. By Joe Scarborough's logic, that's exactly the same as calling him a liar! So who's being disrespectful?

I think Mika Brzezinski had it exactly right: Obama in fact was being unusually respectful in inviting Ryan and his cohorts to hear directly what he had to say, because he doesn't believe in doing things the Republican way: Slamming people not to their faces but waiting till they're not around and can't answer.

It's just such a radical concept for Republicans that they become utterly flabbergasted when confronted with it.

Republican Tea Partiers Just Can't Seem To Get Enough Of Those Obama/Black People/Chimpanzee Jokes

This is the image e-mailed to her friends by Orange County Republican committeewoman and Tea Party activist Marilyn Davenport

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Republicans seem to have a really, really narrow idea of what constitutes racism -- which is how they're able to claim that the Tea Parties aren't riddled with racism throughout.

But then little stories like this one from Orange County keep bubbling up to the surface of their fetid little Tea Party cesspool:

The Weekly has obtained a copy of an email sent to fellow conservatives this week by Marilyn Davenport, a Southern California Tea Party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party.

Under the words, "Now you know why no birth certificate," there's an Obama family portrait showing them as apes.

As always, the "sweet little old lady" who sent the mail had no idea that anyone might possibly construe the mail as racist, even though comparing black people to various kinds of apes has always been a stock feature of racist denigration in America. Why, some of her best friends are black!

Reached by telephone and asked if she thought the email was appropriate, Davenport said, "Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people--mostly people I didn't think would be upset by it."

The image did upset several local Republicans.

"It's unbelievable," one high-ranking OC GOP official told me. "It's much more racist than the watermelon email. I can't believe it was sent out. I'm not an Obama fan but how stupid do you have to be to do this?"

Another GOP official, who also asked not to be identified, said that Davenport is "a really, really sweet old lady so I am surprised to hear about this."

Scott Baugh, chairman of the OC Republican Party, told Davenport that the email was tasteless, Davenport--a Fullerton-based political activist--admitted to me during the telephone interview.

"You're not going to make a big deal about this are you?" she asked me. "It's just an Internet joke."

But Baugh believes the email is a big deal.

"When I saw that email today I thought it was despicable," Baugh said. "It is dripping with racism and it does not promote the type of message Orange County Republicans want to deliver to the public. I think she should consider stepping down as an elected official."

And just remember: There's nothing, NOTHING racist about those Tea Partiers, either. Just another isolated incident. Move along, please.

[H/t Tom Sullivan]

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer Vetoes Far-Right Republican Bills With A Branding Iron

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Now here's a dramatic way to make a point -- Montana style:

"About 96 people think they know better than the 990,000 people in Montana," says Governor Schweitzer.

Governor Schweitzer had the veto brands hot. Covering the gamet of issues important to Montanans, Schweitzer vetoed bills having to do with air and water, jobs and healthcare.

"When I swore to uphold the constitution, I meant it. There's some in this building who say, we don't care about the constitution and we don't care about the will of the people."

Now I'm sure right-wingers will rush to their fainting couches and demand Schweitzer apologize for being so violent and uncivil with his branding imagery.

But they'll have to explain why Montana Republicans tried to keep up with Schweitzer by bringing their own brand to the gathering:

Republican Senator Jason Priest, who had three bills vetoed Wednesday, says he wasn’t impressed with the theatrics.

"Consistently throughout this session we see the Governor making light of the bills that are coming across his desk instead of taking these proposals seriously," says Priest.

Priest brought a prop of his own. "That's why we got this brand today. We think Montanans are getting a bum steer and that's the BS on this brand."

And while it may have been a stunt, it was a stunt with an important point:

But Senate Democrat Cliff Larsen says the demonstration gave Schweitzer a platform to tell people about bills that could really hurt.

"The Governor used the opportunity to really make a statement about a lot of the bad bills that came through because there are a group of extremists in the Republican party that have pushed some of the agendas," says Larson.

Indeed, as we've reported, a group of far-right extremists took over the Montana Legislature this year under the banner of the Tea Party, and they've been running amok. Schweitzer torched a number of their bills today:

SB 114 – Hinkle – Federal law enforcement officers should communicate with sheriff

HB 318 – Warburton – Ensure county oversight in movement of publicly-owned wild buffalo or bison

SB 109 – Barrett – Revise definition of eligible renewable resources

HB 272 – Flynn – Eliminate ability for FWP to use hunting access fees to acquire fee title lands

SB 159 – Priest – Revise energy efficiency and code adoption requirements in building codes

HB 180 – Edmunds – Revise close of voter registration

SB 306 – Murphy – Revise mining laws regarding cyanide health and vat leach open-pit mining

HB 456 – Smith – Define scope/ boundaries of human sexuality/reproduct ed in K-12 public schools

HB 464 – Blasdel – Provide medical liability protection for hard-to-recruit subspecialists

SB 111 – Sonju – Limit noneconomic damages in motor vehicle accidents

SB 228 – Priest – Prohibit creation of health insurance exchange under PPACA

SB 324 – Balyeat – Revise consumer protection laws and settlement proceeds

SB 370 – Priest – Require cost-benefit analysis of mandated health insurance coverage of service

SB 254 – Hutton – Provide state eminent domain authority for federal lands

HB 161 – Milburn – Repeal medical marijuana law

SB 183 – Brown – Revise interim zoning laws

HB 542 – Esp – Revise subdivision and platting act

Good for Schweitzer. He's obviously figured out that giving these extremists even an inch will mean they'll take a mile.

Karmic Update: Recall Campaign Against AZ Senate President Russell Pearce Gaining Steam

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

You may remember how Russell Pearce, the Arizona Republican state Senate leader and architect of SB1070, went on Bill O'Reilly's show a couple of months ago and pushed hard for a recall campaign against Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for daring to opine that extremist right-wing rhetoric played a role in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. (An effort which, last we checked, was going nowhere fast.)

Well, karmic payback can be a rhymes-with-witch:

What may seem to some as an uphill battle is becoming close to a reality for a non-partisan political group as they gather signatures to recall Senate President Russell Pearce.

"I have no doubt we'll get enough signatures to force the recall campaign," said Chad Snow, chairman of Citizens for a Better Arizona.

The group has two thirds of the signatures needed to force a recall election on the senator they accuse of having an extreme agenda.

Now, there are lots of reasons to recall Russell Pearce along these lines (or better yet, never elect him in the first damned place).

There's the recent spate of Tentherism in which he seemingly urged people to declare themselves sovereign citizens.

Or the long-established record of playing footsie with the local neo-Nazis.

Or, if you like, he might be recalled for the corruption that's surfaced in Pearce's dealings and his intimate involvement in that monumentally embarrassing Fiesta Bowl scandal.

No, but what really has people torqued at Pearce is what you might expect from ultimately pragmatic voters: He has fiddled incessantly with his pet immigration fetish while Arizona has burned to a crisp economically. No wonder he's in trouble.

"We feel that Russell Pearce has completely thrown Arizona's economy under the bus so he could pursue one issue," said Snow.

That issue is immigration. Pearce sponsored the controversial SB1070 and even though the law has gained negative national attention, polls show an overwhelming amount of Arizonans support it.

But Snow told us Pearce has neglected what Arizonans really care about.

"He's done nothing for education, jobs or the economy. Instead he focuses on only immigration and gun control."

Then there have been stunts he's been involved in that have exposed the seamy underbelly of Pearce's fetish, like the racist letter read on the floor of the Senate (at Pearce's behest):

Citizens for a Better Arizona needs to collect over 7,700 signatures by May 31st to force a recall election, but Snow is confident they will get more, claiming the Senate President's actions are helping their efforts.

"He's had racist letters read on the Senate floor, he's been reported to have accepted thousands of dollars of gifts from the Fiesta Bowl that he didn't report as required by law. He feels he's above the law and doesn't represent the best interest of Arizona and he's unfit for public office," said Snow.

Oh, and let's not forget the Arizona Senate's latest achievement: A Birther bill that accepts the features of a presidential candidate's penis as evidence of his citizenship. The citizens of Mesa must be so proud.

Trump's Poll Surge Underscores The Insanity Of The American Right

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Donald Trump's recent surge to the front of Republican presidential primary polls has been confirmed by Public Policy Polling:

Only 38% of Republican primary voters say they're willing to support a candidate for President next year who firmly rejects the birther theory and those folks want Mitt Romney to be their nominee for President next year. With the other 62% of Republicans- 23% of whom say they are only willing to vote for a birther and 39% of whom are not sure- Donald Trump is cleaning up. And as a result Trump's ridden the controversy about Barack Obama's place of birth to the highest level of support we've found for anyone in our national GOP polling so far in 2011.

Trump's broken the perpetual gridlock we've found at the top of the Republican field, getting 26% to 17% for Mike Huckabee, 15% for Romney, 11% for Newt Gingrich, 8% for Sarah Palin, 5% for Ron Paul, and 4% for Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty.

Among that 23% only willing to vote for a birther Trump is cleaning up even more, getting 37% to 13% for Huckabee and Palin, and 10% for Romney and Gingrich. He's a lot weaker with the 38% who say they're perfectly happy to vote for someone who's dismissed the birther theory- with them Romney leads at 23%, with Huckabee at 18%, Trump at 17%, Gingrich at 10%, and Palin at only 7%.

Interestingly, Politico's Ben Smith thinks that even asking such poll questions is absurd:

Who seriously thinks Republican primary voters spend much time thinking about whether birth certificate views disqualify a candidate, much less are going to vote on those purported views. It's really a great example of the deep irrelevance of most early polling.

Actually, Smith's remark is typical of someone who lives deep inside the Beltway bubble and doesn't get out and mix much those ordinary voters out in the heartland. Because if you talk to Tea Partying Republican voters out in the heartland, these issues are very much a big deal to them. A large percentage of these voters have harbored doubts about Obama's citizenship for some time even if they haven't wholly embraced the Birther theories -- and as Trump legitimizes them, both the theories and Trump have gained traction with them.

Of course, Trump is also gaining traction with the Tea Partiers -- a majority of whom take the Birther claims quite seriously -- because he embodies so many of their values in many other regards, particularly their Randian/right-wing populist fantasies about the immense innate wisdom of our captains of industry. Really, this is the Donald Galt candidacy.

But the synchronicity of Trump's Birtherism with its resurgence among Republican primary voters is not merely an accident. At first, it appeared that Trump was just trying to make the rest of the GOP field look sane and intelligent by comparison. But what's become clear instead is that their embrace of Trump reflects their willingness to ardently embrace claims and ideas that are provably untrue as long as they undermine -- or better yet, functionally delegitimize -- your political opponents.

Last night on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, his "Great American Panel" (loaded up, as usual, with a preponderance of right-wingers with a token liberal/voice of sanity) was claiming that Trump's ascension was "making liberal heads spin", even as Hannity was asserting that "the best case" Democrats have for proving Obama's Hawaiian birth is the independent corroboration provided by the Hawaiian newspaper birth announcements (rather than the fact that Hawaiian officials say they have his long form on record there, and have issued a short-form birth certificate attesting to this fact).

It may be true that liberal heads are spinning -- and for that matter, as Ben Smith indicates, so are those of the Beltway villagers and corporate conservatives, all of whom cannot conceive of the reality that, yes, the American Right really has gone insane. We've been saying it for awhile now, you'll notice. Indeed, we even wrote a book about it.

Too many liberals, particularly those inside the Beltway, continue to believe that they can negotiate with these people. But the reality is, you can't even have a normal conversation with them. Eventually they're going to go tearing off into some Obama/socialist/Marxist/Caliphate conspiracy theory or another. And you'll be left sitting there with a gaping mouth.

Trump really is proving what we've been saying along: the Right has gone completely over a cliff. The question now is whether they'll take the rest of us with them.

MoveOn's 'Big Mike' Breaks Down The Budget Battles: Wealth Vs. People

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[YouTube here.]

Big Mike -- MoveOn.org's "Break It Down" guy -- is kind of a rationalist response to Glenn Beck: He too uses blackboards, etc., to explain seemingly complex issues. But unlike Beck, who actually makes things out to be much more dense, murky, and inexplicable than they really are (not to mention inventing things that never were), Mike has the gift of taking complex subjects and actually helping ordinary people understand them.

So I every much enjoyed his latest "Break It Down" installment -- this time on the ongoing federal-budget battles. It really is about the nation's Top 1 percent income earners against the rest of us -- and it's going to become even more intense:

And all of this fighting is just over this year's budget. Next year's budget is where things get really crazy.

Because even though taxes for the rich are the lowest they have been in generations, the Republicans want to cut them even further, so millionaires and billionaires are paying 25% instead of 35%.

But where are they going to get the trillions of dollars they need to do that?

Their ideas are fairly simple: Slash $350 billion from things like food stamps, education, training, employment, Cut another $400 billion from programs that help low-income families. Oh, and get rid of Medicare.

Yeah, almost forgot about that. They're going to take away Medicare, give seniors vouchers, and throw them on the mercy of Big Insurance. Because when I think compassion, I think Big Insurance.

So if you or your aging parents actually depend on Medicare, they can look forward to a future where they can choose between buying their meds….or eating.

If we want to get serious about shrinking the deficit, it won't happen on the backs of the middle class that’s already being squeezed.

He actually might have made good use of another chart MoveOn recently published:

President Obama's Speech Makes The Baby Paul Ryan Cry

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

My favorite part of the president's speech on the budget today was when he eviscerated Rep. Paul Ryan's phony "Path to Prosperity":

Now, to their credit, one vision has been presented and championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.

These are both worthy goals. They’re worthy goals for us to achieve. But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.

A 70 percent cut in clean energy. A 25 percent cut in education. A 30 percent cut in transportation. Cuts in college Pell Grants that will grow to more than $1,000 per year. That’s the proposal. These aren’t the kind of cuts you make when you’re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget. These aren’t the kinds of cuts that the Fiscal Commission proposed. These are the kinds of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America that I believe in and I think you believe in.

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them.

Go to China and you’ll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. They’re scrambling to figure out how they put more money into education. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but on biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the American people, the United States of America -– the greatest nation on Earth -– can’t afford any of this.

It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that 10 years from now, if you’re a 65-year-old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck -– you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.

It’s a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. Who are these 50 million Americans? Many are somebody’s grandparents -- may be one of yours -- who wouldn’t be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some of these kids with disabilities are -- the disabilities are so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.

And worst of all, this is a vision that says even though Americans can’t afford to invest in education at current levels, or clean energy, even though we can’t afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about that.

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That’s who needs to pay less taxes?

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right. And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

This, of course, deeply upset Rep. Ryan:

RYAN: I'm very disappointed in the president. I was excited when we got invited to attend his speech today. I thought the president's invitation to Mr. Camp, Mr. Hensley and myself was an olive branch. Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate in addressing our country's pressing fiscal challenges. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander in chief. What we heard today was a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.

If Ryan is going to accuse the president of being "dramatically inaccurate," he better be ready to back it up. As you can see, Obama's evisceration of the Ryan budget was based on a set of well-established facts.

In the meantime, I'm sure you'll all join me in playing "Cry Me a River" on the world's smallest violin for Ryan. Especially when he calls Obama's budget outline "doubling down on the failed politics of the past." Projection, anyone? There was no greater failure than the economic politics of George W. "I Never Met A Tax Cut For the Wealthy I Didn't Like" Bush -- and Ryan's plan is Bushism on steroids.

Trump Ties With Huck For Lead In CNN Poll Of GOP Voters: Must Suck To Be Romney

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It must kinda suck to be Mitt Romney today.

I mean, you go ahead take the first preliminary steps for running for president by announcing you're running for president. You kick off with a speech that includes lotsa de rigeur trash talk directed at President Obama, and vow that he will be a one-term president. It's supposed to be your big day, right?

And then CNN comes out with a poll showing you in fourth place -- trailing far behind a hairpiece, a preacher, and the Shrilla From Wasilla:

Donald Trump is now tied with Mike Huckabee for first place when Republicans are asked who they support for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, according to a new national poll.

But while a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday indicates that the real estate mogul and reality TV star has nearly doubled his support since mid-March, it doesn't mean he has smooth sailing ahead.

"More than four in ten Republicans say they would not like to see Trump toss his hat in the ring," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

Nineteen percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents questioned in the poll say that as of now, they'd be most likely to support Trump for next year's GOP presidential nomination. Trump says he'll decide by June whether he runs for the White House. An equal amount say they'd back Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate says he'll decide by later this year if he'll make another bid for the White House.

Twelve percent say they'd support former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, who was the party's 2008 vice presidential nominee, with 11 percent backing former Massachusetts Gov. and 2008 White House hopeful Mitt Romney and the same amount supporting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Seven percent say they are backing Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, another 2008 presidential candidate, with five percent supporting Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who enjoys strong backing from many in the Tea Party movement. Everyone else registers in the low single digits.

The funniest part of this is seeing Trump rise steadily in the polls even as he sinks ever deeper into Birtherism. You'd think this would just make the other Republican candidates look sane and intelligent by comparison, but apparently in the Planet Bizarro Universe that is "reality" for Republican voters, it works just the other way around!

Mark Blumenthal points out that Trump's numbers are pretty ephemeral, though -- especially when you start getting into the general public, which largely finds Donald Trump a despicable and repellent creature: 47 percent of the adults in Gallup's polling have a highly unfavorable view of Trump, compared to only 43 percent who view him positively.

As Blumenthal explains:

So while Trump begins with a level of visibility and name recognition that many of the other Republicans lack, he also retains significant negatives that will likely limit his appeal in the all-important early primaries.

Gallup has tracked Trump's favorable rating four times in the last ten years, and as they report, "Trump's public image is roughly the same now as it was in September 1999," just before he formed a committee to explore running for president as a Reform Party candidate.

But it's clear where the impetus for this is coming from: the Tea Partiers of the Republican base -- who, not so coincidentally, have an extremely high rate of Birtherism. Per Blumenthal:

That shift is likely spurred by Tea Party Republicans. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump does better among Tea Party supporters than among other Republicans, winning slightly more support (20 percent) than Romney (17 percent), Huckabee (14 percent), Palin (12 percent) or Gingrich (9 percent).

It only makes sense, after all: Trump embodies all the Tea Partiers' right-wing populist myths about Producers. He may also come to embody the Tea Partiers' limited influence on the upcoming GOP primary.

Sarah Palin Gets Behind Trump's Birtherism: 'More Power To Him!'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Sarah Palin showed back up on Fox News' bottom-of-the-barrel show -- Justice With Judge Jeanine -- this weekend and put in a nice word for Donald Trump and his raving Birtherism.

Of course, we think Trump is just trying to make the rest of the GOP field look sane and intelligent by comparison. In which case, Palin just tossed away his little gift:

PALIN: Well, I appreciate that the Donald wants to spend his resources getting to the bottom of something that so interests him and many Americans. You know, more power to him. He's not just throwin' stones and, um, from the sidelines -- he's diggin' in there, he's paying for researchers to find out why President Obama would have spent two million dollars to not show his birth certificate.

Of course, Obama has NOT spent "two million dollars" or anything close to that on this matter. What money he has spent has been on defending the legitimacy of his claim to be president against the lawsuits brought by nuts like Orly Taitz and Phil Berg -- not to "hide" his official birth certificate from the state of Hawaii, which he has in fact displayed publicly since 2008 -- and that money has been closer to a couple thousand dollars, if that much.

The claim that he spent this money originated with yet another phony story from WorldNutDaily, the home of All Things Birther. It was carefully examined by Mother Jones, which (surprise, surprise) found that it was another bit of dishonest absurdity:

Given the sheer number of cases, it seems plausible that the president and the government may have been forced to devote real resources to their defense. But in fact the opposite may be true: The birthers' own copious legal bungling could wind up costing them more than Obama will have to spend defending himself.

The birthers have peppered dozens of state and federal courts around the country with legal challenges—against the president and other government officials and organizations who had some role in allowing Obama's name to be placed on the ballot, including the Federal Election Commission, various state election officials, and the US Supreme Court.

Some of the suits, particularly those filed by the movement's leading lady, California lawyer/dentist Orly Taitz, have been headlined by members of the military claiming they've been wrongfully made to serve in foreign wars by an illegitimate commander in chief. Most recently, birther attorneys have represented car dealers who charge that Obama is a phony president who lacked the authority to order a restructuring of Chrysler that they say cost them their businesses.

WorldNetDaily has noted that FEC filings show that Obama's presidential campaign has paid out more than $1.7 million since the election to the law firm of Perkins Coie. Until recently, that firm was home to Obama's campaign lawyer, and now White House counsel, Robert Bauer—the very same DC lawyer, says WND, who has defended Obama in many of the birther lawsuits. Ergo, WND concluded, Obama must be devoting that entire $1.7 million to crushing birthers in court. This is a ridiculous claim: Even after an election is over a presidential campaign has plenty of need for lawyers as it winds down operations and meets campaign finance law requirements.

And it's been pretty cheap to defend these suits, because the people bringing them are -- in addition to being irrational scam artists -- simply incompetent:

But the birthers' lawsuits don't exactly seem to be requiring Obama's lawyers—government or private—to burn the midnight oil.

Roger West, an assistant US attorney in the central district of California, represented the government in a lawsuit brought by Taitz on behalf of perennial presidential candidate Alan Keyes, asking the court to require that Obama prove he is a natural-born citizen.

The case has dragged on for more than a year, mostly because Taitz, a graduate of an online, unaccredited law school, failed to serve the defendants. Judge David O. Carter dismissed the suit in October for a host of reasons, but Taitz has appealed. Yet West says that far from bleeding his office, Taitz and her co-counsel Gary Kreep have assembled such a weak case that he hasn't had to spend much time on it. "I filed one motion that didn't take too long, we've had two hearings and that's it," he says. "It's not like we've devoted some sort of task force to this."

Army Major Rebecca Ausprung handled two of the birther cases against the Department of the Army that disputed Obama's authority as commander in chief to order soldiers to war. Ausprung says she spent a few hours drafting motions and doing research, and she did have to make three short trips to Georgia from Arlington, Virginia. She prevailed in both cases. "The monetary cost to the government in defending these two cases was extremely minimal," she says.

But Trump and Palin can get on Fox News and tell the world that he's spending millions to "hide" his birth certificate.

Of course, that begs the question: Even if he were "hiding" these medical records, doesn't he have the right to medical privacy we give every other American? No one else born in Hawaii would have to provide their "long form" to prove their citizenship by birth -- why should Obama?

We know the answer: Because Republicans believe they can only win when they gin up fake scandals with no basis in reality. They had so much success with it in 2004 -- and now they're addicted to it.

Appeals Court Upholds Judge Bolton's Stay Of SB1070, But Arizona Nativists Confident About Supreme Court

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Well, considering how obviously unconsitutional SB1070 is, despite its Constitution-lovin' pedigree, you really can't say this was a big surprise:

A federal appeals court upheld Monday a lower court's block of much of Arizona's controversial SB 1070 law aimed at illegal immigration.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the lower court "did not abuse its discretion" in blocking parts of the law from taking effect last year.
The decision, a victory for the Obama administration and immigration activists, means the SB 170 case will likely find its way to the Supreme Court.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction July 28 preventing sections of the anti-illegal immigration law from taking effect.

Parts of the law that were blocked:

The section that requires an officer make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a person stopped, detained or arrested if there's reasonable suspicion they're in the country illegally, and the section requiring that anyone arrested have their immigration status verified.

The section that creates a state crime of failure to apply for or carry "alien-registration papers."

The section that makes it a crime for illegal immigrants to solicit, apply for or perform work (but not the section on day laborers).

The section that allows for a warrantless arrest of a person where there is probable cause to believe they have committed a public offense that makes them removable from the United States.

Despite the significant holes the court blew in Arizona's claims, its nativist sponsors were quite confident about their prospects going foward:

One judge asked Arizona's lawyer, John Bouma, how the state could enforce federal law.
"If I don't pay my federal income tax, can the state make me?" the judge asked.

The appellate panel seemed not to have problems with police officers asking about immigration status, but struggled with the notion implicit in the law that detainees could be held indefinitely while their immigration status was confirmed.

The judges also questioned how a law enforcement officer could determine what constitutes a removable offense.

The ruling isn't unexpected. Bill sponsor Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, attended the hearing and predicted this outcome.

"We know this will survive," Pearce said of the law. "This is the most overturned court in the nation. We'll win it in the Supreme Court."

The appeals court ruling is expected to be appealed. The state can ask the 9th Circuit to revisit the issue en banc, which is by a larger panel of judges. It also could eventually be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ignoring the example of Arizona -- which really has suffered economically because it passed SB1070 -- the geniuses running the Alabama Legislature are rushing to join them in ignominy.

Meanwhile, back in Arizona, some of the state's cooler heads are starting to bring some more intelligent thought processes to the issue -- in the form of some thought-provoking plays being put onstage for the public at the state capitol in Phoenix:

“Needless to say last year was a year in which Arizona caught the attention of the world,” said James Garcia, producing artistic director for the New Carpa Theatre Company. “In my work at the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce I was taking calls from Belgium and Germany and soforth, as well as those in the United States. In a way people were all asking the same question – why is there such a conflict over this issue? Why has it turned so ugly? I’ve been immersed in it since before the passage of Senate Bill 1070. I knew in some way, shape or form I had to deal with it as an artist as well.”

Garcia, an Ahwatukee Foothills resident, is a former journalist and a longtime playwright. He says he has written news stories and plays about immigration, but has also seen it first hand with his family from Mexico.

In recent years, Garcia has become more involved with community work and efforts to get the state to focus on things other than immigration. These short plays are part of that push to tell legislators to stop and let the federal government handle immigration.

Garcia sent out a message across the nation looking for short plays and performance pieces about immigration. He was pleasantly surprised when he he received 70 responses. Not only did he receive a wide variety of performances, but he said the work was very high quality.

“I sort of thought in my head, maybe prejudiced because I live here in the Southwest, that we were going to get plays about the border and about border patrol agents and immigrants from Mexico,” Garcia said. “That turned out not to be the case.”

The 12 works chosen for the final production show Irish immigrants in the prohibition era, Canadian immigrants, Native Americans, abstract ideas about building walls between cultures, as well as Mexican immigrants and the fears surrounding SB 1070.

Not that this will ever affect the Russell Pearces of the world. Tides can take awhile to turn -- but this is one that will, eventually, inexorably.

A Look Back On Beck's Nutty Fox News Career: Turning Discourse Into A Series Of Stunts

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I'm not sure exactly what Roger Ailes and his fellow poobahs at Fox News were thinking when they hired Glenn Beck to join them in January 2009, but it is a telling fact that Beck's primary professional background was as a morning zoo-show host -- someone who specializes in goofy stunts and wild-over-the-top envelope pushing. Because that, of course, is exactly what they got for the next couple of years, before they finally decided to cut their losses.

Now, there are plenty of things to object to about Glenn's trainwreck of a career at Fox, particularly the noxious and yet little-noticed way he almost effortlessly mainstreamed extremist ideas and rhetoric, most recently with his full-bore descent into promoting John Birch Society conspiracism.

Undoubtedly, Beck's relentless fearmongering and the vicious eliminationism of his rhetoric were important components of what made Beck so toxic. Media Matters has compiled an impressive list of the "50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said On Fox News" that gives a pretty good rundown -- but is really only a start.

Ultimately, the worst damage he caused was to the shape of our national discourse -- from all these factors, but especially in the way he wrapped it up in a "zany" morning-zoo-show format, dragging that discourse down to the level of a prearranged pro-wrestling match. As Will Bunch puts it:

Because the truth is that Beck's ouster isn't really the end of the nightmare, but just the beginning of the end. Over the last 27 months, Beck -- and let's be clear that he had a lot of help from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity and Rand Paul and all the folks in the Tea Party Movement -- managed to do incalculable harm to the American body politic, that Beck was exactly like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.."

You'll probably hear a lot about how Beck coarsened the political debate and how his words may have incited violence, but I think the wreckage is a lot more substantive, to actual policies that affect Americans every day. You see, there was a reason that Beck was so fond of a political theory called the Overton Window-- so enamored, in fact, that he made it the title of his (officially) fictional "thriller" novel last summer. The Overton Window is a notion that you can radically move the parameters of political debate by pushing talk to the outer limits, so that ideas that were once deemed extreme suddenly appeared to be normal.

Ironically, no one mastered the use of the Overton Window better than Beck. With all the focus on the leading edge of Beck's craziness -- the "caliphate" stuff, the flirtation with "the FEMA camps," or President Obama's "deep-seated hatred" of white people -- it's easy to foget how he rationalized once out-there ideas to millions of American conservatives, and how those ideas became ingrained in the Republican agenda that has thwarted progressivism from virtually the day Obama took office.

... You could go on and on -- the talk-radio jihad against big government that has put gutless Democrats so on the defensive that they no longer fight to protect vital programs but only over whether to agree to "steep" spending cuts or "draconian" ones, or the fear-mongering on terrorism and Gitmo that made quivering members of Congress afraid to house terror suspects in our supermax prisons. Don't think that Beck's nightly burst of insanity didn't have a lot to do with these things, because they did.

Don't believe me? Then ask a fellow in South Carolina named Bob Inglis who was a Republican congressman until he told his constituents to "turn off Glenn Beck," and lost a primary to an upstart who got 71 percent of the vote. Why do you think the Republicans in Washington remain in lock step, even as 90 percent of what they stay in lock step for is bat-guano crazy?

As Amato said, Beck inflicted the damage that conservatives needed him to inflict. Now the rest of us get to pay for the long, slow, and perhaps impossible job of repairing it.

Longtime Far-Right 'Patriots' Moving Into The Mainstream -- Thanks To The Tea Partiers

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Tim Steller had an interesting profile of Richard Mack in the Arizona Daily Star the other day:

For years, Richard Mack wrote books and gave speeches, arguing for gun rights, sovereign states and "constitutional sheriffs."

At first, not many people listened to Mack, a two-term Graham County sheriff who lives in Safford. Many wrote him off as a radical.

But that's changing. The tea party's nationwide emergence and Arizona's drift to the right are bringing Mack's ideas from the political edge into the eddies of the mainstream.

Since Barack Obama's election as president, Mack, 58, has been a hot national speaker, and some of his dearest ideas have come up in the current Legislature.

A system for Arizona to "nullify" federal laws reached the floor of the state Senate before being voted down last month. Another bill would have forced federal regulators to register with the sheriff in any Arizona county where they want to work.

The bill's author, Rep. Chester Crandell of Heber, said Mack inspired him.

"I think the county sheriff has that power and should be protecting the rights of the people," Crandell said. "This is a way to send a message and say we are a sovereign state."

This is, of course, the same scheme tea-partying legislators in Montana are attempting to pass, too.

And as you can see from the above video, it all emanates from Mack's ceaseless promotion of the radical right's extremist localism -- the belief that the sheriff, and not the federal government, represent the supreme law of the land.

Mack certainly didn't invent this system. Rather, it was first promoted back in the 1960s and '70s by the old Posse Comitatus movement, which contended that "there is no legitimate form of government above that of the county level and no higher law authority than the county sheriff. If the sheriff refuses to carry out the will of the county's citizens:"

...he shall be removed by the Posse to the most populated intersection of streets in the township and at high noon be hung by the neck, the body remaining until sundown as an example to those who would subvert the law.

Not only was the Posse one of the most radical far-right organizations -- it became closely associated with the racist Christian Identity movement -- it was also one of the most violent, inspiring acts of "lone wolves" like Gordon Kahl as well as the radicals at the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord.

It's also the root of the sovereign citizen movement, which we've seen resurgent in the past couple of years as well, along with its accompanying violence and criminal plotting of violence.

And now, according to Steller, Mack is getting a broad audience at various Tea Party-related gatherings -- and lots of new adherents:

In the last 18 months, Mack said, he has given 125 presentations, including an April 15 speech last year before thousands in Amarillo, Texas, and a December appearance at Faneuil Hall in Boston.

But he's got plans, and they could include running for office in Pima County.

"Let's not beat around the bush here," Mack told about 25 people at the Dusenberry-River Library in the Catalina Foothills March 8. "We no longer live in a free country."

"They control our land, our air, our water, our education, our finances and now our health care," Mack said of the federal government in a later interview. "What do I get to decide for myself? Nothing."

Of course, we pointed out the meaning of Mack's involvement with the Tea Parties some time back -- namely, he represents an increasing flow of radical-right ideas into mainstream conservatism, where they are being gobbled up like candy. And now Republican legislators are trying to enact these extremist beliefs -- which are profoundly inimical to progressive ideals -- into law.

And no one seems to be paying it much of any mind.

Watch Glenn Go: When He's Finally Freed From Fox, Expect Beck To Build On His Apocalyptic Cult

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Finally, Glenn Beck really will get to feel a little like Martin Luther King -- because he is free, free at last, God almighty, free at last.

Unfortunately, our long national nightmare ... is probably just switching to a new phase.

He explained to his audience yesterday on Fox that he was leaving his regular show there because, gosh, he had to have his arm twisted in the first place just do it:

BECK: When Fox was generous enough to offer me the time at 5 o'clock, I originally didn't take them up on it. I turned them down. One of the reasons was I didn't want to -- I just -- didn't wanna do this. I hated doing it at the other place. This place is sweet! -- in comparison. But I also knew -- believe it or not, anybody who knows me in my real life as everybody -- wee little Erin will tell you too -- I avoid confrontation like nobody's business. Unless I am forced. But it also -- I don't like it.

But -- sometimes you have to stand. I took the job two years ago because I thought I had something important to share. I really thought if I could prove my case -- that something wicked this way was coming -- something in America was wrong, America would listen. And they have.

What noble guy. Brings a tear to your eye and puts a swell in your heart, doesn't it?

Beck's removal from the Fox daily lineup really is, as David Brock puts it, "A victory for civil discourse". (Media Matters, by the way, has put together a list of the 50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Has Said.)

And it was overdue. As George Zornick at ThinkProgress explains:

Beck entered the year without one-third of his earlier audience. Only months into his show, advertisers began deserting his program, and pressure by liberal groups resulted in a loss of nearly 300 advertisers during the course of his show.

Last month, Fox News officials told the New York Times anonymously that they were “contemplating life without Mr. Beck.” The Times also reported that “[m]any on the news side of Fox have wondered whether his chronic outrageousness — he suggested that the president has ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people’— have made it difficult for Fox to hang onto its credibility as a news network.”

That seems like a reasonable concern.

Beck, meanwhile, is actually in a bizarre defensive-gloating position, telling his radio audience this morning:

BECK: Let me just tell you something. Liberal left -- let me make a prediction. ... One year from now, you on the left will be crapping yourselves so much -- you haven't, you haven't crapped in your pants as much as you will in a year from now, as you did since you were a child. Maybe more. You'll be making -- you'll crap yourself more than when you were a baby! And you will find Jesus. You will suddenly find religion and you will be kneeling at some altar lighting candles every day praying to Jesus that Glenn Beck would please just do 5 o'clock on the Fox News Channel.There's my prediction.

Alexander Zaitchik, who (as the author of Common Nonsense) should know, forward his own speculation about Beck to Dave Weigel, who thinks Beck will do the Oprah thing now:

I'd be careful about comparisons to Oprah, who has a scale of resources, commercial appeal, and popularity that Beck never will. But he'll remain active and ambitious and his projects will continue to be controversial from time to time. He's been too much guilty-pleasure fun as a pinata for his critics to completely ignore him. But now that he has a shrunken media footprint, I think a lot of people will go on a much-deserved Beck Vacation, and maybe never return.

Moving forward, I see him turning into a sort of hybrid-figure, part Limbaugh, part Breitbart, part Pat Robertson, maybe a little Ben Stein on the documentaries front. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that his days as a heavy, constant presence in the mainstream conversation are over. Whatever media shape-shift he's about to perform post-Fox, he's a greatly diminished national presence for those who aren't "Insider Extreme" members at glennbeck.com. Which is a blessed, blessed thing.

I wish I could be so optimistic. My own hunch, as I described it yesterday:

[L]ook for him to become Alex Jones on steroids. Which means that someday we probably CAN figure on watching the armed FBI standoff from the GlennBeckian Cult Compound someday down the pike.

Beck has been the leading figure for the Tea Parties this year, and he is certain to be out leading them in the trenches next year too -- probably organizing more Lincoln-Memorial-type rallies, and maybe doing a national tour promoting Tea Partyism. Along the way, he'll be gathering more cult followers and establishing them as an outside-politics force.

He's not going away, that's for sure. But we don't have to watch him mainstreaming his extremism to an audience of millions every day any more, either. And that's a real victory all by itself.

To Sell The Repeal Of Birthright Citizenship, Republicans Like Vitter Lie About Scope Of 'Baby Tourism'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I guess this is how Republicans do the Latino-outreach thing: Demonize Latino children, threaten to take away their birthright citizenship, and blatantly lie about the numbers of "anchor babies" being born by mothers coming here specifically to have citizen children.

Here's Sen. David Vitter yesterday on Fox News, promoting his new federal bill to strip American-born children of undocumented immigrants of their birthright citizenship:

VITTER: It's a very real problem. About 200,000 women come into this country annually from other countries legally, with a tourist visa, something like that, to give birth in this country so that child can automatically become a U.S. citizen. 200,000 a year!

I'm guessing that Vitter's source for this number is either somewhere up his own nether regions, or those of hate groups such as FAIR and CIS that pump out fake statistics like this for eager Latino-bashers like Vitter and his three Senate colleagues to regurgitate into policy.

Because, as ABC News explained in their own report on this legislation:

Of the 4.2 million live births in the United States in 2006, the most recent data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics, only 7,670 were children born to mothers who said they do not live here.

Some of those mothers could be "baby tourists," experts say, but many could be foreign college students, diplomatic staff, or vacationers. The government does not track the reasons non-resident mothers are in the United States at the time of the birth or their citizenship.

Indeed, as the story notes, the "anchor baby" problem is a statistical pimple:

"There's no evidence that birth tourism is a widespread problem," said Michele Waslin, a senior policy analyst with the Immigration Policy Center. "There are ways to dealing with that issue without such sweeping changes. This is like using a sledgehammer, not a scalpel."

Indeed, as we explained when Russell Pearce trotted out the same garbage in Arizona:

[T]his is a sick joke. Surveys of undocumented workers have made indelibly clear that they don't come here to have "anchor babies," or to get our free health care, or any of the other fantasies harbored by nativists: they come here for jobs.

Moreover, there's no serious benefit to be had from having your child be born a citizen -- because under American law, you can be deported anyway, and in fact thousands of parents of American birthright-citizen children are deported every year: 100,000 of them over 10 years, to be precise.

There is an exemption available: After the immigrant parent has been present for no less than ten years, he or she may apply for Cancellation of Removal if he/she can prove ten years of good moral character and establish that deportation would create an exceptional hardship to her citizen child. There is an annual cap of 4,000 on the number of illegal immigrants who can be granted such relief, and for the past several years the government has not even reached that cap.

Vitter goes on to make the shaky explanation that his bill would not require a repeal of the 14th Amendment -- rather, it would force an interpretation of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" contained therein to somehow mean that non-citizens somehow are no longer "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. when on American soil.

The Immigration Policy Center has a good rundown on the myths and facts about birthright citizenship. Among those facts are these:

The arguments for Congressional authority to limit birthright citizenship are all reliant upon an expansive interpretation of the term “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. For example, some opponents of birthright citizenship dispute that the Citizenship Clause embodies the jus soli definition of citizenship and instead argue that it confers citizenship only to children of those who give their complete allegiance to the United States. Under this view, because citizens of foreign countries still owe “allegiance” to a foreign sovereign, children born on U.S. soil to non-U.S.-citizen parents do not owe complete allegiance to the United States.

This argument is misleading and based on flawed premises. Even if “allegiance” were the defining characteristic of birthright citizenship, the Reconstruction framers understood allegiance to spring from the place of one’s birth, not the citizenship status of one’s parents. The 1866 debates established that a person “owes allegiance to the country of his birth, and that country owes him protection.” Similarly, one of the opinions from the Dred Scott decision, the backdrop against which the Citizenship Clause was drafted, acknowledged that “allegiance and citizenship spring from the place of birth.”

This understanding of allegiance deriving from one’s place of birth underscores the Reconstruction framers’ focus on the child born within the United States, not the status of his parents. The text of the Citizenship Clause thus refers to “[a]ll persons born … within the United States” and not “all persons born of parents born within the United States.” The Reconstruction framers expressly recognized this distinction: Senator Trumbull remarked that “even the infant child of a foreigner born in this land is a citizen of the United States long before his father.” Some even acknowledged that birthright citizenship could encourage immigration, noting that the civil rights bill was “not made for any class or creed, or race or color, but in the great future that awaits us will, if it become a law, protect every citizen, including the millions of people of foreign birth who will flock to our shores to become citizens and to find here a land of liberty and law.”

As Elizabeth Wydra put it in her Issue Brief for the American Constitution Society (titled "Born Under the Constitution: Why Recent Attacks on Birthright Citizenship are Unfounded") [PDF file]:

A close study of the text of the Citizenship Clause and Reconstruction history demonstrates that the Citizenship Clause provides birthright citizenship to all those born on U.S. soil, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. To revoke birthright citizenship based on the status and national origin of a child‘s ancestors, as some anti-citizenship activists are suggesting, goes against the purpose of the Citizenship Clause and the text and context of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Perhaps more important, the principles motivating the Framers of the Reconstruction Amendments, of which the Citizenship Clause is a part, suggest that we amend the Constitution to reject automatic citizenship at the peril of our core constitutional values. At the heart of the 14th Amendment is the fundamental belief that all people are born equal, and, if born in the United States, are born equal citizens regardless of color, creed or social status. It is no exaggeration to say that the 14th Amendment is the constitutional embodiment of the Declaration of Independence and lays the foundation for the American Dream. Because of the 14th Amendment, all American citizens are equal and equally American. Whether one‘s parents were rich or poor, saint or sinner, the 14th Amendment proclaims that ours is a nation where an American child will be judged by his or her own deeds.

To Real Muricans like David Vitter and Rand Paul, though, such qualms are insignificant. It's worth it to to destroy the meaning of the 14th Amendment and the long tradition of jus soli in America for the sake of a nonexistent "baby tourism" plague, you know.

'Shut It Down!' Mike Pence And AFP Tea Partiers Leave Little Doubt Who's Pushing For A Shutdown

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Republicans have been playing the innocent the past couple of weeks as the now-imminent government shutdown began looming closer, even though it was obvious they were taking their cues from Fox pundits and Rush Limbaugh, who were urging them to embrace the concept.

Who, us, push for a shutdown? they've been saying. Why, it's the Democrats who've been pushing for it, they claim.

Well, Mike Pence cleared that up for us yesterday -- first in an interview with MSNBC's Contessa Brewer, then more loudly at a Tea Party gathering organized at the Capitol by those noted astroturfers 'entrepreneurial advocates' at Americans for Prosperity:

PENCE: It's time to take a stand. We need to say to liberals, 'This far and no further.' To borrow a line from another Harry, we've got to say, 'The debt stops here.' And if liberals in the Senate would rather play political games and force a government shutdown instead of accepting a modest down payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say, 'Shut it down.'

After which, of course, the crowd chanted: "Shut It Down! Shut It Down!"

You get the idea of their idea of a workable compromise: Utter defeat for Democrats:

The crowd of bussed-in people from Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and other states, repeatedly cheered for a shutdown and for deeper cuts. “A quarter of a trillion [in cuts] won’t be enough,” Rick Mishoe from South Carolina, told TheDC.

Yet Pence did not threaten to campaign against any deal cut by Boehner. He didn’t lay down any markers, nor demand any particular level of cuts.

Asked afterward if the GOP caucus would gain from a shutdown, he punted, and said that “the politics will take care of themselves.”

“It’s not 1995, the American people are more informed and more engaged… The taxpayer will win in any confrontation with big spenders in Washington,” Pence said.

Well, as Scott Keyes at ThinkProgress observes:

The reason for Boehner’s intransigence is increasingly clear: as Republicans and Democratic lawmakers negotiate, Boehner is giving the Tea Party veto-power. Sen. Chuck Schumer detailed this point while discussing the ongoing negotiations on Good Morning America this week, noting that “The tea party just continues to pull Speaker Boehner further back and back and back. They’re the people who say they don’t want compromise. They’re the people who say they relish a shutdown.”

I can't believe anyone who's watched Fox or listened to Limbaugh for the past couple of weeks would have any doubt about Republican thinking on the issue. Because that's obviously what's being executed here.

Donald Trump Claims To Be The Ideal Tea Party Candidate: 'I Represent A Lot Of The Ingredients Of The Tea Party'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Donald Trump is now fashioning himself the darling of the Tea Party crowd:

TRUMP: I think the people of the Tea Party like me, because I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party. What I represent very much, I think, represents the Tea Party.

In this segment, Fox's Bret Baier mentions that Trump once sent a nice note to Nancy Pelosi, which is certain to get him into hot water with the Tea Partiers -- though even then, he probably managed to score points with them with his sexist dismissal of the question. Far more likely to get him in trouble both with Tea Partiers as well as with rank-and-file Republicans is his 2008 declaration that George W. Bush should have been impeached by Pelosi.

But in reality, Trump may be right. Bill O'Reilly has taken to identifying Trump as a "populist," which might seem absurd on its face -- for one of the world's richest men to claim to be a man of the people is like Colonel Sanders claiming to be a man of the chickens.

However, they're actually right, insofar as Trump is clearly a right-wing populist -- which means he's a manifestation of all their wildest Randian fantasies and the mythology attached thereupon. This might explain why Trump has been doing so well in Republican polls lately.

As we explained awhile back:

This kind of obeisance to the captains of industry and their utrammeled right to make profits at the expense of everyone else is a phenomenon known as Producerism, which is a hallmark of right-wing populism. It's accurately defined in Wikipedia as:

a syncretic ideology of populist economic nationalism which holds that the productive forces of society - the ordinary worker, the small businessman, and the entrepreneur, are being held back by parasitical elements at both the top and bottom of the social structure.

... Producerism sees society's strength being "drained from both ends"--from the top by the machinations of globalized financial capital and the large, politically connected corporations which together conspire to restrict free enterprise, avoid taxes and destroy the fortunes of the honest businessman, and from the bottom by members of the underclass and illegal immigrants whose reliance on welfare and government benefits drains the strength of the nation. Consequently, nativist rhetoric is central to modern Producerism (Kazin, Berlet & Lyons). Illegal immigrants are viewed as a threat to the prosperity of the middle class, a drain on social services, and as a vanguard of globalization that threatens to destroy national identities and sovereignty. Some advocates of producerism go further, taking a similar position on legal immigration.

In the United States, Producerists are distrustful of both major political parties. The Republican Party is rejected for its support of corrupt Big Business and the Democratic Party for its advocacy of the unproductive lazy waiting for their entitlement handouts (Kazin, Stock, Berlet & Lyons).

...

The Producerist narrative is why Henry Ford – who, as the ostensible author of The International Jew, a 1920 conspiracist tome that inspired Hitler’s paranoia, and whose capital later helped build the Nazi war machine in the 1930s, was also (and not coincidentally) perhaps the ultimate American enabler of fascism – is such a seminal figure for American right-wing populists, both as a leader in the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as a figure of reverence today. (Glenn Beck, in fact, has on several occasions on his Fox News show referenced Ford as something of a holy figure for his efforts to resist FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s.) The same narrative is also why, in today’s context, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged – a tendentious novel speculating on the disasters that would befall the world if its great industrial leaders suddenly chose to stop producing – are so important in their mythology.

Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too can someday become rich and famous -- because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It's all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.

The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be called "sucker populism."

I guess this means there's a Republican born every minute.

Just Listen To Bryan Fischer: How Can Newt Claim The AFA Isn't A Hate Group?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

As Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress reported the other day, Newt Gingrich insists that the American Family Association -- a group he channeled massive amounts of funding into -- really isn't a hate group, as the SPLC has designated them, along with other viciously gay-bashing groups like the Family Research Council.

Obviously, he hasn't spent any time listening to Bryan Fischer, or better yet, reading his columns (via JoeMyGod):

We have spent over $16 trillion fighting the war on poverty, and it’s time to run up the white flag of surrender. Poverty has won. We now have more people on food stamps - think children here - than at any time in our history. The war on poverty has been a total, dismal failure and it’s time to recognize that. You get more of whatever you subsidize. You subsidize poverty, which we have done since 1965, and you just get more of it.

Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. Welfare has subsidized illegitimacy by offering financial rewards to women who have more children out of wedlock. We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.

And children are the ones who get chewed up. Welfare, as Walter Williams has pointed out, has done what slavery, racism and Jim Crow laws could not do: destroy the black family. The Christ-centered statesman puts himself in the place of a fatherless black child, sees the catastrophic damage that the meltdown of the family has caused, and pursues policies to wean people off marriage- and child-destroying welfare, and pursues policies that incentivize marriage, incentivize self-reliance rather than abject dependence, and incentivize the reconstruction of the American family.

Got that? All those black folks are ruttin' like rabbits because we've let them have welfare instead of their previous condition, which involved starvation in poverty. Most likely Fischer prefers the previous option -- it builds character, as Glenn Beck would say.

This is stuff straight out of the David Duke handbook. Indeed, it isn't hard to envision Fischer intoning this into a mike through a Klan Grand Dragon mask.

The AFA was obviously embarrassed by this outburst of naked racist hatemongering and changed the text of the post so that the last sentence now reads:

We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of those who engage in random and reckless promiscuity, whether they are Caucasian, Hispanic, or African-American.

[A screen grab of the original is here.]

But that didn't matter -- because then Fischer published a new post not only defending his original post, but actually stating it all over again, including the "rutting like rabbits" bit:

This was in response to my statement that our welfare policies - in which we subsidize and reward sex outside of marriage - is incentivizing people of all ethnic groups to “rut like rabbits.” This is a simple and unmistakable fact. You get more of whatever you subsidize, and we are clearly getting more sex outside of marriage and more children born out of wedlock than ever before. (I have since made changes in my original column to clarify any confusion and misinterpretation of my comments.)

I was commenting on the effect of our misguided welfare policies across the board, and was not singling out the African-American community in particular, although the consequences of our disastrous welfare policies are felt most acutely there. I was speaking generally to the fact that fallen human nature is going to gravitate to whatever behavior government rewards, even if the behavior itself is self-destructive.

Because we are subsidizing fornication and illegitimacy - every illegitimate baby means more taxpayer money for the mother - we now have 40% of all babies being born out of wedlock overall. In the Hispanic community, the number is over 50% and in the African-American community, the number is now catastrophically over 70%.

And that's just how he talks about black people. As Karoli has explained, he's every bit as bad when it comes to gays and lesbians.

Then there's the way he bashes Muslims -- by claiming they have no constitutional rights:

Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.

Our government has no obligation to allow a treasonous ideology to receive special protections in America, but this is exactly what the Democrats are trying to do right now with Islam.

From a constitutional point of view, Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques in America. They have that privilege at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States. The Constitution, it bears repeating, is not a suicide pact. For Muslims, patriotism is not the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the First Amendment is.

And because they have no constitutional rights, there's no reason to permit Muslim to immigrate to America, either -- in fact, Fischer insists such immigration should be outlawed, along with the building of mosques on American soil:

Immigration is obviously a matter for Congress, since authority to control immigration is vested by the Constitution in Congress. But we must never forget that immigration to the United States is a privilege, not a right, and that we should follow the wisdom of the Founders who urged that we only admit to our shores those who will strengthen our nation and assimilate themselves into it, adopting our flag, our history, our heroes, and our values. This is something that devout Muslims simply cannot do. The privilege of immigration should be reserved for those willing to integrate into our culture, become unhyphenated Americans, and adopt American values.

So immigration is a congressional issue. But as I explained above, states have considerable latitude in religious liberty matters, and states are thus free to ban the building of any more mosques within their borders. If states won’t do it, then local planning and zoning commissions can and must do it. And if we understand the Constitution as given to us by the Founders, there is no constitutional impediment in their doing so.

More recently, his anti-Muslim rants have taken on a distinctly familiar cast. Via Brian at RightWingWatch:

We allow unrestricted Muslim immigration into the United States we are welcoming to our shores, welcoming to our borders, men who are determined to destroy us. They’ve said it themselves, it’s in their own writings, it’s in their own words; they’re out to eliminate and destroy western civilization. It’s just absolute folly to invite that kind of toxic cancer into our culture, but that’s what we’re doing every single day.

This, of course, fits my basic definition of eliminationism to a T:

[A] politics and a culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile, and ejection, or extermination.

Rhetorically, eliminationism takes on certain distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as beyond the pale, the embodiment of evil itself, unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus worthy of elimination. It often further depicts its designated Enemy as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and disease-like cancers on the body politic. A close corollary—but not as nakedly eliminationist—are claims that opponents are traitors or criminals and that they pose a threat to our national security.

Eliminationism is often voiced as crude "jokes," a sense of humor inevitably predicated on venomous hatred. And such rhetoric—we know as surely as we know that night follows day—eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

Glenn Beck Predicts Imminent Revolutionary Violence From The Left This Summer -- Just Like He Did In 2010. And In 2009.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Glenn Beck devoted his show yesterday to predicting another "summer of rage" from the oh-so-violence-prone American Left:

BECK: America, I want to warn you, this is the summer of revolution. Things are going to get worse, and I believe May is going to play a huge role, as will September. [draws breath] Oh, did I say something that I shouldn't have, socialists and communists? Yes, we're listening and we're reading, sometimes right over your shoulder, and you don't know it.

Funny thing -- that's just what he predicted would happen last summer too! From June 2010:

BECK: America, these guys joined with these guys -- the politicians joined with the revolutionaries so they could gain power. Now it is time to break apart -- because the summer of rage is about to begin.

And another funny thing: He predicted the same thing in 2009 too:

BECK: Now here is the One Thing that everybody seems to be missing: The extreme Left is actively calling for violence! As world economies go down the tank and unemployment continues to rise, disenfranchised people are set to explode.

It kinda reminds me of those apocalyptic cults who periodically predict that the world is really about to end, so their followers all gather in the cult compound (often in remote places like Montana) to prepare for it, and then they either all drink Kool Aid and die, or they hold intensive prayer sessions and then, when the predicted Day of Doom comes and goes without event, announce that their prayers have saved the world -- for now -- and go home as though nothing had happened.

Now that it's Sayonara Beck at Fox News, look for him to become Alex Jones on steroids. Which means that someday we probably CAN figure on watching the armed FBI standoff from the GlennBeckian Cult Compound someday down the pike.

Meanwhile, of course, Beck wants you to pay no mind to the picture of right-wing violence we're getting:

Fox Talkers Really Hate It When Progressives Cite MLK's Pro-Union Legacy

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

For some strange reason, after having attacked and demonized Martin Luther King for the entirety of his Civil Rights career when he was alive, right-wingers now seem to want to claim him as one of their own -- a small-government conservative preacher who believed in fiscal restraint. Eh?

So yesterday, while union supporters marched on the anniversary of King's assassination, the talkers at Fox News were in full denunciation mode. First there was Neil Cavuto, claiming that the unions were "co-opting" King for their cause. To persuade us of this, he hosted Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson (the guy who previously had gone on the air and claimed that "Barack Obama is destroying America based on lies" and that "Barack Obama hates white people -- especially white men. Sorry folks, but the truth will set you free!"):

PETERSON: If it's possible to turn over in your grave, I believe that Dr. King is turning over in his grave today. I was born on a plantation down in Alabama, I participated in the Civil Rights movement, I did sit-ins. And Dr. King was about uniting the races, he wasn't about dividing them. Dr. King believed that the same law that protected white Americans should protect black Americans. He wanted us to have the freedom to move about in this country. He was about morality and justice. And for Jesse Jackson and others to take his movement, to take his purpose and use it for personal gain, I have to say, Neil, is nothing less than evil.

Cavuto apparently thinks it was a mere coincidence -- due to the fact that most of the workers were black -- that King was in Memphis to support striking garbage workers. Peterson, likewise, tries to claim that King had no special affinity for the cause of labor unions.

Then there was Glenn Beck, arguing that it was "absurd" to suggest that King was a supporter of the unions' cause:

BECK: Trying to take away the rights Dr. King gave his life for, really? ... This is what he gave his life for, a union? Now, he may have supported this event, this cause, but he gave his life -- fighting for civil rights. The right of all men to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, or, uh, their union label.

Is there a person within the sound of my voice -- outside the union halls -- that I could ask, Why did someone kill Martin Luther King? Why? And they would say, 'Good thing you asked me -- collective bargaining rights, of course!' That's absurd!

Of course, this shouldn't surprise anyone, since in the case of Beck we're talking about a guy who promotes the work of King-haters like Cleon Skousen on one hand while trying to claim King's legacy for himself with the other. A guy who viciously attacks progressives and their causes while conveniently overlooking the historical fact that his adopted idol was himself an ardent progressive.

Indeed, King fully understood that civil rights and labor rights are powerfully intertwined -- that ensuring the ability of black people to organize for their rights was part of a parallel fight for all working people to organize for theirs. And that the very people who opposed the rights of unions to organize were the same people who wanted to keep black people from enjoying their full rights as citizens.

Really, all you have to do to understand this is to read Dr. King's own words, which stand as stark repudiation of the union-hating garbage being spewed on Fox.

For instance, take his 1961 address to the AFL-CIO:

"Negroes are almost entirely a working people…. Our needs are identical with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature, spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth."

"The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over the nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society."

"Negroes in the United States read the history of labor and find it mirrors their own experience. We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the goodwill and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us. They deplore our discontent, they resent our will to organize, so that we may guarantee that humanity will prevail and equality will be exacted. They are shocked that action organizations, sit-ins, civil disobedience and protests are becoming our everyday tools, just as strikes, demonstrations and union organization became yours to insure that bargaining power genuinely existed on both sides of the table.

"We want to rely upon the goodwill of those who oppose us. Indeed, we have brought forward the method of nonviolence to give an example of unilateral goodwill in an effort to evoke it in those who have not yet felt it in their hearts. But we know that if we are not simultaneously organizing our strength we will have no means to move forward. If we do not advance, the crushing burden of centuries of neglect and economic deprivation will destroy our will, our spirits and our hope. In this way, labor's historic tradition of moving forward to create vital people as consumers and citizens has become our own tradition, and for the same reasons."

And he was similarly clear about the principles involved in the current labor battles:

"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right to work.' It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. It is supported by Southern segregationists who are trying to keep us from achieving our civil rights and our right of equal job opportunity. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote."

Or you can visit AFSCME's page devoted to King's role in the Memphis strikes to get a clear picture of why King was there and how intimately the causes of civil rights and labor rights were twinned.
Not that these right-wingers will ever admit that.