More 'Isolated Incidents': Wave Of Racist-right Crimes Hits Spokane Area -- But It's Not Alone

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Last weekend, my old friend Bill Morlin wrote a major Sunday piece for the Spokane Spokesman-Review describing how the old scourge of white-supremacist hatred and the violence that always accompanies it has been on the rise again:

There’s also been a spike in racist activity and hate crimes in Spokane and other Pacific Northwest communities – indeed, almost everywhere in the United States.

Racist graffiti, acts of malicious harassment and distribution of hate literature in 1980 marked the emergence of the Aryan Nations in North Idaho, recalls Marshall Mend, a founding member of the human relations task force.

For nearly three decades, the Aryans and their splinter-group associates were responsible for a series of crimes, including murders and bombings, throughout the United States.

The Aryan Nations held annual gatherings of hatemongers, burned KKK crosses and even got permits for disruptive parades down Sherman Avenue in Coeur d’Alene, all of which severely tarnished the region’s image.

Most local hate activity disappeared with a multimillion-dollar court verdict in 2000 that bankrupted the Aryan Nations. Four years later, Aryan founder Richard Butler died, and some wishfully thought hate, too, had disappeared in this region.

Now, though, there are two new self-proclaimed Aryan leaders in North Idaho – Gerald O’Brien and Paul Mullet – who are fighting each other for power. There are two competing Aryan Web sites. Another splinter faction, the Aryan Nations Revival, based in New York state, dissolved last week and, according to a Web posting, threw its support to O’Brien’s faction.

Meanwhile, almost a dozen hate crimes have been reported in the past 14 months to authorities in Kootenai and Spokane counties.

The region’s spike in hate crimes follows a national trend that started after the country elected its first black president in 2008. Besides more hate groups, experts say they also are seeing an increase in secretive, anti-government militia activity.

Sure enough, in the week that followed, there were three major stories involving white-supremacist violence in the Inland Empire.

First came the arrest of a Pullman white supremacist who apparently was leading hate-crime attacks on taco-truck drivers. No, really:

A Whitman County man who bragged online about being involved with racist taco truck protests in Kootenai County was arrested on a federal gun charge Wednesday.
Jeremiah Daniel “J.D.” Hop, who describes himself as an anti-race-mixing activist on the racist website Vanguard News Network, is accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Investigators spent most of Wednesday searching Hop’s home near Pullman, as well as another property in Whitman County associated with the suspect, said Don Robinson, supervisor for the FBI’s Coeur d’Alene office.

Hop, who was arrested Wednesday morning, is not a member of the Aryan Nations but is involved in racist circles, Robinson said. Hop was convicted of third-degree rape of a child in 2005.

The guy is obviously a genius. I thought everyone loved taco trucks. And the child-rape conviction just reminds us, once again, that a lot of these people have, well, issues.

Such as Kevin Harpham, the neo-Nazi arrested for planting a lethal backpack bomb along the parade route of this year's MLK parade in downtown Spokane. He was further charged with federal hate crimes this week. Meanwhile, the Spokesman's Meghann M. Cunniff reported on what Harpham's online postings revealed about his mindset -- and his politics:

He also wrote of being influenced by writings and podcasts by Edgar Steele, the former Aryan Nations lawyer who is currently awaiting trial on federal charges that he hired a man to kill his wife. Harpham promoted a speaking engagement by Steele in Florida in 2006 and wrote in 2007 that he “finally broke down and had to go out buy some silver,” because of Steele’s influence.

Harpham eventually became an active supporter of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination; he urged others to make individual rather than group contributions to help avoid any links between white supremacists and Paul’s candidacy. Harpham claimed in 2007 to have made two contributions, one for $50 and another for $25, to the Paul campaign but contradicted himself in other posts, saying he supports the campaign but wouldn’t spend money on it.

“I don’t care about getting America back on its feet, what I want is for Ron Paul to provide the conditions for us to build White communities with our own businesses and schools,” he wrote on Christmas Eve 2007. “We could do very well under these conditions and start amassing great wealth to expand.”

But as Paul’s presidential prospects faded and the U.S. economy tanked, violent themes began emerging in more of Harpham’s online comments.

Harpham last posted on Jan. 16, a day before the bomb was discovered. Ten days earlier, he had offered to let fugitive white supremacist Craig Cobb stay at his home. It’s unclear whether Cobb, who faces hate crime charges in Canada, took him up on the offer.

Oh, yes, and speaking of Edgar Steele -- he was found guilty of plotting to murder his wife and mother-in-law this week too. And it seems the wife, who has remained loyal through it all, is now denouncing the verdict:

A murder-for-hire trial comes to an emotional end. A federal jury convicted Edgar Steele on Thursday of plotting to kill his wife and mother-in-law. But Steele's wife vows to set the record straight. The Boise jury found Edgar Steele guilty on all four counts.

The trial was moved to Boise for fairness at the request of the defense. Despite those efforts, Cyndi Steele said her husband's trial was some kind of federal government conspiracy.

"They took our life and turned it into an ugly story, it is farthest from the truth," said Cyndi.

The story began when a mechanic found a pipe bomb under Cyndi Steele's car. Investigators said a hired hand, Larry Fairfax, planted the bomb at the request of her husband, Edgar Steele.

"I am the wife, the proud wife of Edgar J. Steele, and I am here to tell you that this is a cover-up, a frame-up to cover-up Larry Fairfax's crime against me," said Cyndi.

I have a hunch she's going to be showing up on Fox News to plead her case.

In any event, these are obviously all just "isolated incidents" that have no larger significance whatsoever. Move along, please.

When Teachers Push Back, All Of A Sudden Glenn Beck Loves The Unions -- At Least, The Idea Of Them

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Glenn Beck is obviously a profoundly confused guy. He wants to portray himself as a defender of the average working guy -- even though nearly every one of his programs is a propaganda hour for corporate power, including that of the corporation he works for. (For the time being, anyway.)

Yesterday he invited some teachers into his studio, selected from a group of people who were dissenting from business as usual at their schools. He was astonished to discover -- after having spent much of the show acting as though the unions hated these people and might bomb their cars -- that most of these teachers nonetheless were happy to defend their unions, and pushed back against his portrayal of the teachers' unions as being riddled with far-left radicals who wanted to destroy America.

Faced with this, Beck resorted to a defensive position in which he spewed out a line of pure gobbledygook that had NOTHING to do with anything he had ever said previously on any of his shows

BECK: I'm not against -- believe it or not -- I just talked to my mother-in-law -- I've told this story before -- was arrested on a union march with Jesse Jackson! And I just told her just the other day, she said, 'Man, our union' or uh -- ' our school is out of control.' And I said, 'Mom, I will march with you' -- she works at Yale. They treat their employees like garbage.

Unions -- I'm not against unions! I'm against corporations being so wildly out of control with no one watching over them. There's not stop! Right now, call the police on GE. Who you gonna call? Who you gonna call? All the way to the White House! There's no one to call! Because they're all in bed. OK?

If somebody's abusing the system in a corporation or in schools or whatever, and there's no union -- who you gonna call? What, are you gonna get another job? You're not gonna get another job! You know what I mean? So, it's the balance of things. When unions become too powerful, they get out of control. When business becomes too powerful, out of control, it's 'do the right thing'. And that's what's not being taught anymore.

Can you make any sense of that? I sure can't. Especially because it has nothing whatsoever to do with the sustained attacks on unions that have been part and parcel of Beck's show for the past year and more.

Here are a couple of examples from the past month:



As you can see, Beck's has attacked unions for being infiltrated throughout by conniving evil radicals who want to destroy the American way of life. Controlling corporations has never been mentioned previously. Indeed, Beck starts out defending his position initially by referring to all of his "proof" that the unions are far-left radicals -- and then, when faced with the real world concerns of teachers, he suddenly shifts gears and starts claiming that he loooooves unions and wants to march with them because they're the only counterweight to corporations -- even though this has not a thing to do with teachers' unions, who are not doing battle with corporations directly at all.

Just goes to show: Not only is Beck a pathological liar, he's a two-faced weasel to boot.

Cue The Waaaahmbulance: Brent Bozell Whines That Bush Didn't Get Any Credit For Getting Bin Laden -- Or 'Winning The Iraq War'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]


Sean Hannity was busy all week flogging the torture-apologist line, claiming (falsely) that the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad produced the intel that led to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Last night he had on his buddy Brent Bozell of the wingnut Media Research Center to continue flogging this line:

HANNITY: And none of it would have happened but for George W. Bush, enhanced interrogation, rednition, black sites -- they don't touch it! They don't mention it, Brent Bozell. Why?

BOZELL: Think about this, Sean, what Barbara Walters just said. 'But it was Obama who had the courage and the guts and the coolness.' Oh, George Bush didn't have courage and guts and coolness? You know -- even Bill Clinton! He didn't have courage and guts. Only Osama bin Laden -- I mean, [giggles], Barack Obama -- had the courage and the guts and the coolness?

Look, you want to praise the man for -- the president for what he did? I'm all for that. He did a great job. But my God, where were they when George Bush won us the war in Iraq? Where were they praising him? And why can't they -- why can't they give him the most minimal praise?

It is because of this man's techniques -- that they condemned all these years -- it's because of those techniques that that man is dead today.

Ah, yes, the "Bush deserves credit" line that Fox & Friends trotted out on Monday. Actually, Bozell was quick to jump on that bandwagon, complaining earlier this week that Obama himself snubbed President Bush in his speech announcing the raid:

Unfortunately, while the president spoke for the whole country in remembering the pain of 9/11, his remarks left a gaping hole. He made no generous bow to all the efforts of his predecessor George W. Bush as well as his team. My one regret is that Bush 43 didn't get this scalp. He deserved it more than anyone.

Instead, Obama played subtle and wholly undignified games. He underlined that Osama had “avoided capture” under Bush and “continued to operate” during his tenure. But “I directed” CIA director Leon Panetta to make getting Osama the “top priority” (as opposed to?), and “I” gave the go-ahead to the final mission. Obama also avoided Bush in a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday afternoon. Even in a Monday night “bipartisan” event at the White House, Obama honored the “military and counter-terrorism professionals” and “the members of Congress from both parties” who offered support to the mission....but no credit for Bush.

If the roles had been reversed, you know Bush would have been more generous. It’s what Bushes do.

Oh, we remember what Bushes do, all right. The last one ran the presidency like a hung-over, coked-out spoiled preppie out careering through the skies in a Texas Air National Guard F-102, half asleep at the wheel. And when he eventually had to unceremoniously bail out just as he crashed the economy, he and his conservative apologists somehow managed to blame it on minority lending practices.

[Later in this Hannity episode, Bozell adds that "the far left is not happy that Osama bin Laden is dead." Oh really, Brent? Do you have any evidence of that?]

But there's a problem: Bush really deserves very little credit at all for the success of this operation -- because the death of Bin Laden, as every serious foreign-policy person understands, is a direct result of Obama's decision to adopt a completely new strategy against Al Qaeda:

Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader this week lies a profound discontinuity between administrations—a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists. From his first great public moment when, as a state senator, he called Iraq a “dumb war,” Obama indicated that he thought that George W. Bush had badly misconceived the challenge of 9/11. And very quickly upon taking office as president, Obama reoriented the war back to where, in the view of many experts, it always belonged. He discarded the idea of a “global war on terror” that conflated all terror threats from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah. Obama replaced it with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.

This reorientation was part of Obama’s reset of America’s relations with the world. Bush, having gradually expanded his definition of the war to include all Islamic “extremists,” had condemned the United States to a kind of permanent war, one that Americans had to fight all but alone because no one else agreed on such a broadly defined enemy. (Hez­bollah and Hamas, for example, arguably had legitimate political aims that al-Qaida did not, which is one reason they distanced themselves from bin Laden.) In Obama’s view, only by focusing narrowly on true transnational terrorism, and winning back all of the natural allies that the United States had lost over the previous decade, could he achieve America’s goal of uniting the world around the goal of extinguishing al-Qaida.

Bush had also portrayed al-Qaida and terrorism in general as a millennial threat; he and his top aides especially liked to compare the conflict to the Cold War. “This is the great ideological struggle of the 21st century—and it is the calling of our generation,” Bush said in 2006, in a dramatic rendezvous-with-destiny speech timed to the fifth anniversary of 9/11. “Freedom is once again contending with the forces of darkness and tyranny”—the terrorists who would seek to impose what he called a “totalitarian Islamic empire.”

But the comparisons to the Cold War or the fight against fascism in the 1940s were silly. Al-Qaida, even in its best days, never represented anything like the ideological threat from the Soviet Union or the hegemonic threat of Hitler’s Germany. As Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison wrote in a little-noted article in The Atlantic in September 2004, on the eve of 9/11, al-Qaida was a small, fractious group whose members could not even agree among themselves what its goal was. Quoting a remarkable series of letters he found on Ayman al-Zawahiri’s old computer in Afghanistan, Cullison wrote that jihadis who were members of Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad—the biggest component of al-Qaida—still wanted to make Egypt the main enemy. They wanted to focus on the jihadis’ old adversary, the “near enemy” of the repressive Arab regimes, rather than endorse bin Laden’s rather grandiose effort to take on the “far enemy,” the United States.

By invading Iraq, the Bush administration resolved the debate for al-Qaida, turning America into the “near enemy.” Years of relief followed for al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan as Bush dealt with the Iraqi insurgents, lumping them together with the “terrorists” of 9/11 as though one static group of global bad guys existed whom Americans would be fighting at home if they weren’t in Iraq. The 43rd president, in effect, concocted a new war in the middle of a half-finished one, sapping our military, our credibility, our economy, our morale, and our moral standing; alienating much of the world; and diverting our attention from destroying the chief culprit of 9/11.

The Bush approach remained scattershot throughout his two terms in office and was conceived “piece by piece,” in the words of one European diplomat in Washington. There is no evidence that Bush ever held a grand strategy session with his principals, in which all of the variables were laid on the table: the price of the global war on terrorism, the strategic goal, and the real costs, in dollars and lives, of an Iraq invasion.

The lack of clarity in strategic conception led directly to the imbroglio in Afghanistan and Pakistan today. There is no longer any question that the diversion of U.S. troops and, in particular, intelligence assets and special forces to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 produced a Taliban and Qaida resurgence in South Asia. It also made the Pakistanis—who even in the best of times were playing a double game—hedge about their own strategic shift away from support for jihadis as a counterweight to India. In 2007, Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States at the time, suggested that this was when Washington began to lose some of his country’s support. After 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi in March 2003—just as Bush was invading Iraq—“al-Qaida was almost destroyed in an operational sense,” Durrani told me. “But then al-Qaida got a vacuum in Afghanistan. And they got a motivational area in Iraq. Al-Qaida rejuvenated.”

Fortunately for the United States, Osama bin Laden made his share of mistakes in the past decade as well. And now, at long last, with America’s focus once again back where it belonged, he has paid for them. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once famously lamented that “we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.” Neither he nor other senior members of the Bush administration ever developed those “metrics.” But by any metric, Barack Obama has just tallied a major victory.

Pre-debate Tea Party Gathering In Greenville: Chock Full O' Nuts!

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[Photo via Judd Legum at ThinkProgress]
Seems there was a very good reason Tim Pawlenty decided not to show up for that pre-debate Tea Party rally in Greenville, S.C., last night: It was being run by some of the wingnuttiest, far-right elements in America:

According to [its] official program, the pre-debate “Freedom Rally” is sponsored by several extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers militia group and the radical anti-communist John Birch Society. You can see a picture of the program here.

And the speakers were straight out of casting central for rattle-eyed nutcases -- right along side GOP stalwarts like their new governor:

The rally also featured a cadre of high profile speakers, including Judge Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who lost his job after refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building, and Nikki Haley, South Carolina's first female governor.

Yep, that would be the same Roy Moore who flirted with a presidential bid under the banner of the militia-friendly/far-right Constitution Party. And while the local press reported that Haley "fired up" the Tea Partiers while mostly sticking to "policy issues" in her speech, she couldn't help brushing up against the nutcases everywhere she turned:

She followed John Birch Society president John McManus, who equated neo-conservatives with socialists, and Greenville Republican activist Dan Herren, who urged the tea party to try to work within the GOP to make it more conservative.

On top of that, she spoke with that huge Oath Keepers banner right behind her. That's one of the rally's chief sponsors -- and it's one of the most bizarre, paranoid and extreme -- not to mention potentially dangerous -- of the Tea Party factions.

After all, let's recall the 10 points that Oath Keepers proclaim as their oath:

• 1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.
• 2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people.
• 3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.
• 4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.
• 5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.
• 6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.
• 7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.
• 8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control."
• 9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.
• 10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

As Mark Potok of the SPLC told Bill O'Reilly:

But the reality about the group is that what it's really about is the fear that martial law is about to be imposed, that Americans are about to be herded into concentration camps, that foreign troops are going to be put down on American soil. The Oath Keepers says specifically, we will not obey these orders, we will refuse orders to put Americans into concentration camps. Now, is that dangerous? It seems to me the danger is that these are men and women, in the case of police officers, who are given a real power over the rest of us, sometimes the power of life and death. They make very important decisions. And if these men and women are animated by the idea that, you know, foreign forces are about to come into this country and put us under martial law and throw us all into concentration camps, I think there is a certain danger associated with that. ... They're operating on the basis on crazy theories that may cause one of them to draw a gun one day.

The Oath Keepers are also extensively involved in the Tea Party movement, having helped co-sponsor their national convention in Tennessee last year, as well as a host of local Tea Party gatherings, such as that full-bore Patriot gathering I attended in Montana.

Then there's the John Birch Society -- whose paranoiac fantasies spun over many long decades have given birth to many of the paranoid fears trotted out by folks like the Oath Keepers and Alex Jones: they're the true godfathers of American right-wing extremism, and the true godfathers of the Tea Party movement as well.

Rachel Maddow exposed them a little while back and they didn't like it one bit. That's too bad: after all, the Tea Partiers often betray their true Bircher lineage in polls, as well as in the overt agenda of their movement leaders. Indeed, movement icons like Glenn Beck promote Bircherite conspiracy theories on Fox News. In the past year, it seems, they've become mainstream Republican again.

Which tells you just how insane the Right really has become.

Once Again, Senate ConservaDems Prove Suckers For Republican Voodoo Economics

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[Video via MoveOn.org]


Dean Baker has a question for Claire McCaskill:

Why Does Senator McCaskill Want to Bankrupt Our Children?

That is what people should be asking Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill along with her fellow senators who are advocated strict caps on government spending. The idea being pushed by Senator McCaskill, together with Tennessee Senator Bob Corker and several other prominent senators, would limit federal spending to 20.6 percent of GDP. It would require difficult-to-obtain super-majorities to exceed this cap. Spending would be cut across a variety of programs if the cap is not reached.

This proposal is hugely deserving of ridicule for a variety of reasons. First, it operates from a blatantly wrong premise -- that government spending has grown out of control.
Those familiar with arithmetic know that government spending had increased by little as a share of GDP prior to the downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. In 2007, the last year before the onset of the recession, spending as a share of GDP was 19.6 percent. That is 1.1 percentage points less than the 20.7 percent share 30 years earlier in 1977. So the idea that there is a long-term trend of out-of-control spending is simply not true, or what they call outside of Washington, a "lie."

Robert Reich calls it "lipstick on a pig":

Republicans figure that if they can’t sell the pig, they’ll just put lipstick on it and find some suckers who will think it’s something else.

That’s the proposal emerging in the Senate from Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee and also Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri. It would get the deficit down not by raising taxes on the rich but by capping federal spending.

If Congress failed to stay under the cap, the budget would be automatically cut.
According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the McCaskill/Corker plan would require $800 billion of cuts in 2022 alone. That’s the equivalent of eliminating Medicare entirely, or the entire Department of Defense.

Obviously the Defense Department wouldn’t disappear, so what would go? Giant cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and much of everything else Americans depend on.

It’s the Republican plan with lipstick. It would have the same exact result. But by disguising it with caps and procedures, Republicans can avoid saying what they’re intending to do.

Why is it that ConservaDems think that suckering for right-wing voodoo economics is some kind of "bipartisanship," anyway?

Sarah Palin's Tribute To The Military Becomes A Nasty Attack On Obama

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Well, the black hole we feared might open due to the critical mass of wingnuttery in one location didn't quite occur Monday night in Colorado, but Sarah Palin's "Tribute to the Troops" speech certainly gave us a look at the black hole that is her mind.

Her speech was full of all kinds of classic Palinisms -- such as her insistence that American troops never be placed under foreign command. (In reality, of course, U.S. soldiers have served under foreign commanders numerous times in the past century, including in critical theaters of World War II.) Or her bizarre formulation for world peace.

But what really stood out was the fact that Palin's speech -- delivered less than 24 hours after the death of Osama bin Laden was announced, and full of all kinds of congratulations and praise to the troops and commanders who made it happen -- deliberately omitted, in about as obvious and as graceless and clumsy a fashion imaginable, President Obama from the congratulations.

Indeed, she instead congratulated George W. Bush. And then she went on to attack Obama for his foreign policy -- and worse yet, imply to the gathered soldiers that he was undeserving of their loyalty -- without, in fact, ever once even enunciating his name.

Here's how her congratulations went:

PALIN: Last night -- thank God, last night -- all of us hearing the news that one evil leader -- [applause] -- one evil leader of Islamic extremists who was responsible for the murders of thousands of innocent Americans had finally met justice, at the hands of America's finest. [Applause] It is my honor to get to speak of those finest in uniform today. We get to pay tribute to those finest United States military.

I know that we'll probably all remember as individuals where we were that September day when the horrific thoughts and ambitions and plans of this terrorist cut short the thoughts, ambitions and plans of beloved innocent Americans who were heartlessly murdered on September 11, 2001. God bless all the brave men and women in our military and our intelligence services who carried out the successful mission to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. And all those who had laid the groundwork over the years to make that victory possible.

This historic action that was announced last night, it was the result of the diligence, and the hard work, and the character of countless American warriors.

...

Yesterday was a testament to the military’s dedication in relentlessly hunting down an enemy through many years of war. And we thank our president -- we thank President Bush for having made the right calls to set up this victory.

Then, as the Denver Post reported, she went on to attack Obama's foreign policy:

Striking a more political note, Palin said American troops need clear leadership. She cited the Obama administration's policy in Libya as an example of "a lack of clarity."

"We can't fight every war," she said. "We can't undo every injustice in the world.

"We don't go looking for dragons to slay."

Then she wrapped up on a truly scurrilous note:

PALIN: We need leaders who embody the same standard as to which the men and women in uniform hold themselves.

Remember: the true soldier fights because he loves what is behind him. Behind him here is tradition, it's patriotism, it's -- it's not a need for a fundamental transformation of America! It's for a renewal of all that's good about America!

Does that sound to you like she's telling these soldiers that President Obama is undeserving of their loyalty? It sure does to me.

By the way, we haven't gotten word yet on what Jerry Boykin's speech contained. Considering that he's been promoting the theory that President Obama and the radical liberals are working hand in glove with Bin Laden and the Islamic radicals to destroy America, well, let's just guess that major portions of it had to be rewritten. We'll report back when we learn more.

A Retrospective: What Was The President Thinking At That Saturday Night Dinner?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Looking back at Saturday night's White House Correspondents Dinner, it's clear now that some of the jokes were more than little pungent -- considering that the president at that point had authorized the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

For example, there was this bit from Seth Meyer's ribbing of various entities, including the president and C-SPAN:

MEYERS: Every time I tune into C-SPAN it looks like they just had a fire drill. C-SPAN is one unpaid electric bill away from being a radio station.

People think Bin Laden is hiding in the Hindu Kush. But did you know that every day from 4 to 5 he hosts a show on C-SPAN?

You can see that Obama enjoyed that joke quite a bit. You have to wonder what he was thinking just then.

That's even more the case in his pwnage of Donald Trump:



Josh Marshall pointed this one out:

OBAMA: But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. (Laughter.) For example -- no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice -- (laughter) -- at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil' Jon or Meat Loaf. (Laughter.) You fired Gary Busey. (Laughter.) And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. (Laughter and applause.) Well handled, sir. (Laughter.) Well handled.

That was already a cutting and sardonic appraisal. Given the weight that Obama was carrying that night, it now appears in retrospect to be flatly devastating.

The Torture Apologists Have To Rewrite All Kinds Of History

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

We know Republicans seem to have a deep-seated belief that only torture will keep us safe from the terrorists, even though the people who do real intelligence gathering can tell you that just wrong: It's ineffective and counterproductive -- not to mention morally depraved. Not that any of this seems to deter conservatives.

So the spectacle of every right-winger on the planet rushing to claim that it was torture that provided the intelligence leading to the killing of Osama bin Laden was nothing if not predictable. And of course, it turned out to be wholly wrong.

For instance, here were Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity last night on Fox. Most of the segment was devoted to claiming that it was "aggressive interrogation techniques" that provided the key intelligence to finding Bin Laden, though at one point Hannity actually commended President Obama -- and then lied about him:

HANNITY: But we needed the intelligence to confirm that right. Does this now bring this debate back to the forefront? And by the way, and I give President Obama a lot of credit here. Because I thought it was a gutsy choice.

GIULIANI: It was.

HANNITY: A gutsy choice, not to drop a 2,000-pound bomb but to send these guys in, so we can confirm that it's him.

GIULIANI: When you consider everything that could have gone wrong and how President Obama would look today if it did, it took a lot of courage to do that and I do admire that. And I think there's a good day the last two days for both President Obama and President Bush. Because I think President Bush set in motion all of the things that led to this. And then President Obama picked up on it and carried it out. And I give both of them a tremendous amount of credits.

HANNITY: And I do too. And this is a good day for this country and we'll going to talk to Todd Beamer's dad who's going to be on the program. And -- is going to be on the program tonight. And General Tommy Franks is on tonight. But as I look at this, would President Obama not now realize that without the intelligence, he wouldn't have had the ability to make this decision, I would hope that it might change his mind.

GIULIANI: Maybe it will. And the reality is he also at that very last minute when he's made the decision had to know that intelligence had to know, 50/50. I mean, you never know.

HANNITY: You'll never know.

GIULIANI: They were going in there to get Osama Bin Laden but who knows if it wasn't somebody that just looked like him or was like him. The better your intelligence, the more accurate your decision making and the safer we are. And the reality is, and I was glad to hear the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton say this. This is not the end, we are in the middle of this, and we can't let down our guard. We shouldn't be leaving Afghanistan as a result of this. We shouldn't be leaving Iraq, we should remain there to get the job done.

HANNITY: I agree but this is where I find myself a little conflicted here because this is almost the opposite of what candidate Obama said he would do. And maybe for the first time he's grown in office.

Oh, yeah, it was almost the opposite: -- if by "almost" you mean "the opposite of":

Now, you can argue that Hannity and Giuliani couldn't have known that they were 100 percent wrong in their speculation, since John Brennan didn't officially shoot it down until today.

But in fact, we already knew that waterboarding had nothing to do with this intelligence. It had already been reported by the Associated Press:

Mohammed did not discuss al-Kuwaiti while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He acknowledged knowing him many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

It took years of work before the CIA identified the courier's real name: Sheikh Abu Ahmed, a Pakistani man born in Kuwait. When they did identify him, he was nowhere to be found.

Once again, smart, lawful intelligence gathering made the difference here. I gather that this is anathema to the conservative mindset, however. No wonder they're so incompetent.

Fox & Friends Wants To Be Sure Everyone Gives George W. Bush Credit For Bin Laden's Death

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Fox & Friends had wall-to-wall coverage of the celebrations inspired by news of Osama bin Laden's death this morning, and had on lots of analysts to discuss the Obama administration's big victory in the so-called "war on terror".

To do that, strangely enough, they had on all sorts of commentators, including various politicians, such as Karl Rove, and featured statements from the likes of Dick Cheney. Oddly enough, not a single segment managed to include a Democratic politician or even one person from the Obama administration.

Instead, what we heard all morning was how George W. Bush deserves credit too! They even ran a segment featuring Bush vowing in 2001 he would eventually get Bin Laden, with the longest time frame being a year from then.

As Steve Benen puts it:

There's a fair amount of this rhetoric bouncing around this morning, and it's not especially surprising -- Republicans aren't going to credit President Obama, regardless of merit, so it stands to reason they'll try to bring George W. Bush into the picture.

If this is going to be a new GOP talking point, we might as well set the record straight.
In March 2002, just six months after 9/11, Bush said of bin Laden, "I truly am not that concerned about him.... You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you."

In July 2006, we learned that the Bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin Laden.

In September 2006, Bush told Fred Barnes, one of his most sycophantic media allies, that an "emphasis on bin Laden doesn't fit with the administration's strategy for combating terrorism."

And don't even get me started on Bush's failed strategy that allowed bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora.

I'm happy to extend plenty of credit to all kinds of officials throughout the government, but crediting Bush's "vigilance" on bin Laden is deeply silly.

But it's what we expect from Republicans. And especially the crew at F&F.

Sarah Palin Gets Her Message Across On Fox, All Right: She's Dangerously Clueless

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It's been quite a whirlwind the past couple of weeks, watching Donald Trump wow the Republican world with his dazzling mixture of aggressive ignorance and utter crassness. He's like Sarah Palin on steroids.

But Palin herself remains a potent spokesperson for the forces of ignorance. And while a lot of her apologists and defenders like to claim that Palin is unfairly victimized by quick sound bites, she really makes a much bigger impression -- as someone so utterly clueless they should never be permitted near any public office again -- in longer formats, such as her wide-ranging and rambling interview yesterday with Fox News' Bret Baier.

It produced little exchanges like this one, on increasing the debt ceiling:

PALIN: Hells no. I would not vote to increase that debt ceiling. Otherwise it just shows the American public we're not serious yet. We're still gonna incur more debt. No. And we don't have to increase the debt ceiling here in the next few weeks. It turns my stomach to hear this assumption articulated that, well, we have to despite the fact that we're raking in, the federal government, six billion dollars a day.

Take that money and service our debt first! And pay down some of that debt. Make sure that we're showing the international financial markets and our lenders that we're serious about getting our debt and our deficit problems under control.

BAIER: So, what would you say to the Republicans who do vote for it, on the advice of some experts on Wall Street and around the country who believe that not increasing it would really hurt the economy and create a disaster?

PALIN: I would say, before you seriously think about voting to increase the debt limit and incur more unsustainable, immoral, unethical debt that is really going to ruin our country, to continue down this path -- prioritize, service the debt first, pay for the very essential services that are constitutionally mandated.

Let the states take care of a whole lot of these services and projects, and if a state wants to do something a little bit special, like some extra roads or some extra museums and monuments and cowboy poetry, let that state figure out how they're gonna pay for it.

Palin also sort of weighed in on the other presidential candidates, though you'll notice she actually says nothing at all about any of them, other than that she respects them because they're good Republicans and by golly she loves to see them running; and then remains firmly noncommittal about her own prospects for running.

Then she wraps it all up by suggesting that President Obama had foreign money flowing into his campaign accounts in the 2008 election -- which would, of course, be a crime. Baier asks her:

BAIER: Before I let you go, are you suggesting that the FEC may find that foreign money got into the Obama campaign in 2008?

PALIN: Am I wrong to bring up the fact -- and maybe, Bret, at this point you have more information than I do on where a lot of those dollars were that were unaccounted for. Remember that we saw much proof of a lot of the donations to Obama's campaign -- credit-card contributions under fake names, addresses that perhaps weren't even real addresses in the U.S.

You know, I hope that we don't just give up on making sure that we have free and fair elections -- not just Obama's! Heck, some on the GOP too! Uh, on the GOP side. Let's make sure that rules are being followed. We are a land of laws.

Methinks she's been dipping into Pam "Atlas Wanks" Geller's beandip again.

Apparently, God's Wrath Was Directed At Those Southern Tornado Victims

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

First we had the the professional corporate climate-change deniers snorting at the idea that global warming might have played a role in this week's devastating tornadoes in the South.

Now we have religious-right climate-change deniers claiming that they know what did cause those tornadoes: in fact, the storms were a product of God's wrath and an expression of his judgment.

This time it's Dr. Calvin Beisner, voicing his views on the radio show of the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer, via RightWingWatch:

BEISNER: What this tells me, Bryan, is that we need to recognize that natural disasters like this are like distant early-warning signals. There is judgment to come. We are all sinners. None of us, none of us is righteous enough to say, 'Oh, I wouldn't deserve it if that happened to me.'

I'm sure folks in Alabama and Georgia will be pleased to hear that God singled them out for judgment -- especially ahead of such godless places as Hollywood -- just to prove that it can happen to good people too.

And why are we getting God's wrath? you ask. Well, Pat Robertson has the answer -- it's because we've become a modern-day "Sodom and Gomorrah":

Robertson: And I believe that the anointing of the Lord has been here to fulfill the desire of those early settlers, to take the gospel from America throughout the world, and that’s what we’ve been here to do. But let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t take a great scholar to tell you the United States has lost its moorings.

When you think that courts have denied children the right to pray in schools, that there’s a vendetta against religious belief, that now homosexuality has been made a constitutional right, that abortion has been made a constitutional right, the courts and judges have trampled on the early origins of our nation, they have distorted the meaning of the First Amendment. It’s all been done, and we’ve let it happen.

But I was reading today about a place called Sodom and Gomorrah, and a man named Abraham stood before God, and he says, “God, there’re righteous people in that city, would you kill them along with the wicked, must not the judge of all the earth do right?” And God finally promised, “If I can find ten righteous in that city, I will spare it,” just ten. Well the time came he could only find six, so they destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

But there’re many righteous here in America, and we need to band together and pray that God Almighty will spare this great land and reestablish in our hearts the vision of the pioneers.

Well, considering that the storms struck hardest in states represented by some of the most hardcore global-warming denialists, maybe they're onto something with this whole "God's retribution" bit. Though not for the reasons they presume.

Donald Talks Dirty To The Ladies: Trump Launches Obscenity-laced Rant In Vegas Talk To GOP Women [unbleeped]

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I'll bet the sweet ladies of the Spring Mountain Republican Women's club in Nevada weren't really prepared for this.

Speaking before several GOP women's groups who invited him to Las Vegas, Donald Trump launched into a profanity-laced tirade against President Obama and his administration's policies.

Among the bon mots, as you can hear in the amateur video above [originals here]:

-- Trump would deal with OPEC in order to lower oil prices just by being tough: "We have nobody in Washington that sits back and said, you're not going to raise that f—-ing price."

-- Here's how he'd tell China he intends to slap a tariff on their exports: "Listen you mother——ers we're going to tax you 25 percent!"

He sprinkled obscenities throughout, including one not in the video, describing Iraq: "We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school, we build another school, we build another road they blow them up, we build again, in the meantime we can't get a f---king school in Brooklyn."

Oh, and apparently he believes that the idea that Iraq could become a democracy is a joke. Which makes you wonder about his audience of former George W. Bush devotees -- especially when they applaud this loudly.

Now, I understand that, you know, when in Rome, blah blah blah. But you gotta wonder if Franklin Graham or the rest of the Religious Right still think Trump is a good horse to be backing, you know what I mean? Not to mention the Spring Mountain Republican Women's Club.

Conservatives Like O'Reilly Fleeing The Birther Bogosity Insist: What Racism?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Bill O'Reilly thinks it's just shameful that liberals are calling out the Birthers for their racism so last night he brought on Margaret Hoover and Alicia Menendez to talk about it.

Of course, Hoover thought it was entirely "predictable" that people would decry the innate racism of the Birther theories and their progenitors -- which is like saying it's "predictable" people would be distraught by a terrorist attack.

Then Menendez sort of agreed with Hoover, but added:

MENENDEZ: There are big conversations we need to be having about the fact that there are so many racial tensions and anxieties in this country.

O'REILLY: Well, let me stop you there.

MENENDEZ: When you start calling people racist...

O'REILLY: Let me stop you there. I don't see all of these racial confrontations in this country, and I do this every day. What I see is Barack Obama elected president with 43 percent of the white vote. He got something like 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. I don't see it. And unless you can show it to me, Alicia...

... Look, wouldn't you both agree that calling somebody a racist, anybody, without proof beyond a reasonable doubt is a vicious, hateful thing to do? Would you agree?

MENENDEZ: As vicious as suggesting that the president of the United States is not a real American.

O'REILLY: No, no, no. Just answer my question, Alicia. Calling somebody a racist without proof beyond a reasonable doubt, a vicious, hateful thing, yes or no?

MENENDEZ: I agree.

O'REILLY: OK, you agree.

MENENDEZ: I think that part of the reason you see that rhetoric...

O'REILLY: Now we have a cadre of people on national television doing a vicious, hateful thing. Yet...

MENENDEZ: But Bill, they're doing it in response to what was a vicious and hateful thing coming out of the right. And there were very few people like you who are being honest and calling it what it was.

O'REILLY: No. 1, you don't commit bad behavior and point to other bad behavior. And what came out of the right -- that's true, Alicia. Write it down. Don't justify bad behavior by pointing to other. Wait a minute. And the second thing is what came out of the right and was absolutely blown apart on this broadcast was the birth certificate might be
phony. I didn't think that had any racial overtone at all. It was a birth certificate deal.

MENENDEZ: So you think -- you think it's just coincidental that the first president to have this type of public questioning of his land of origin of being a real American happens to be our first black president? That's just a weird coincidence?

O'REILLY: It's born out of hatred for the man. They'll get -- the people who hate Barack Obama will latch onto anything.

S'funny: Do any of you remember Bill O'Reilly getting all outraged and denouncing Glenn Beck when he called President Obama a racist who hates white people? Hm? No, I seem instead to recall him launching a multi-city "speaking" tour with Beck.

Strange how O'Reilly's rather selective outrage works, isn't it?

What's especially noteworthy is that he and Margaret Hoover seem to believe that we're long past the days of naked racism and bigotry and that racial tensions don't really exist. Let me point them first to Baratunde Thurston's reply to Donald Trump on that score. Or, for that matter, to those little ol' jus' folks Tea Partiers who strangely seem unable to avoid racist outbreaks.

And nevermind that the Birthers are still going strong, even on Fox.

And seriously: Does O'Reilly believe that these nutcases continue to cling to their Birther beliefs, even after Obama has gotten out his long form too for them, simply because they hate Obama? And that their hatred of Obama has no basis in his race? And he expects the rest of us to be that naive? Really?

He better rename his show's motto "The New Spin Zone".

Sarah Palin To Share Stage With Gen. Jerry 'Jack D. Ripper' Boykin At 'Troop Tribute'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Gee, it sounds like a match made in Tea Party Heaven: Sarah Palin and Jerry Boykin, appearing on the same stage to deliver a good ol' fashioned right-wing fundamentalist "Tribute to the Troops":

Former Alaska governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin will be the keynote speaker for Tribute to the Troops, a military and veterans appreciation rally at Colorado Christian University on May 2, 2011.

Boykin will speak on "Our Debt of Gratitude". Not sure what that means -- but since it's coming from the guy who brought you both Abu Ghraib and Waco, it could be anything.

As Kyle at RightWingWatch observes:

Since leaving the military, Boykin has joined up with self-proclaimed prophet Rick Joyner and become the Religious Right's resident "expert" on all things Islam and a leading member of the Religious Right's Spartan-like army. He is also the man who exposed the fact that President Obama is a Marxist who intends to use the health care reform legislation to build an army of Brownshirts loyal only to him ...

Indeed, it was while elucidating on this charge that it became clear that Boykin is a direct military descendant of Gen. Jack D. Ripper himself:



And of course, his "expertise" at all things Islam meant that he was the go-to guy when Glenn Beck was expounding on the looming "Caliphate" in the Middle East.

More recently, he's been declaring "Molon Labe" to the dirty America-hating secret-Muslim libruls who he's convinced are coming to take his "rights" away.

Combined with Palin's presence ... well, let's just hope that the critical mass of wingnuttery coming together in one place like that doesn't open a hole in the space-time continuum.

Oh Look. The Birthers Are Already Playing With The New Toy President Obama Gave Them.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Memo to President Obama: You may have thought you finally shut the Birthers up yesterday. But you will never shut them up.

These are people who are deeply invested, emotionally and otherwise, in believing that you are not a legitimate president. It's the only way they can cope with the concept of you holding the office of the presidency in the first place. All you really did yesterday was give them a nice shiny new toy to play with.

The proof was on Fox Business News last night, where Eric Bolling hosted a panel led by wingnut extraordinaire Pam Geller, one of the most reptilian creatures of the entire wingnutosphere.

The entire show was a discussion of Bolling's evident belief that what the president presented yesterday was a forgery:

BOLLING: Pamela, were any of these notation on here - I don't know if our camera can get it in too close --- you can see some of these numbers that are clearly written in handwriting on the side. We don't know what they are. Trying to figure out a zero, a two there, an X up over here, a one up here. Were they on the short form?

GELLER: Look, this is a certification of live birth. When I left the hospital, I left with a birth certificate. I'm sorry, I didn't bring with it me, but it looked very much like Donald Trump's. It's a little piece of paper, you've got the nurse -- you know what I'm talking about? Certificate - you know, birth certificate. This is a certification of a live birth. This is actually not a birth certificate.

BOLLING: I need to know this. You see this fold. This has clearly been photocopied from a book. You see that? It kind of folds back to, like, almost like a binding of a book. And then for some reason, there's a green border around it that had to be Photoshopped in. Trying to figure out why they would do that.

GELLER: Well, this whole border is suspect. I mean, if you're taking a scan of something, it would, to your point, it would be white. Why is this the color of the same --

BOLLING: Note this - note this, you guys, April 25, 2011 -- two days ago -- is when this was requested from the state registrar, Alvin Onaka. So we'll keep our eye on it. We'll keep digging. Hey, listen. It may or may not be, but certainly opens up the can of worms that there are at least questions for it.

The absurdity didn't end there. Perhaps the height of absurdity came when, as Ben Dimiero at Media Matters points out, Bolling suggested that the doctor who delivered Obama should have traveled forward in time in order to know that he had delivered the president:

Memo to President Obama: You may have thought you finally shut the Birthers up yesterday. But you will never shut them up.

These are people who are deeply invested, emotionally and otherwise, in believing that you are not a legitimate president. It's the only way they can cope with the concept of you holding the office of the presidency in the first place. All you really did yesterday was give them a nice shiny new toy to play with.

The proof was on Fox Business News last night, where Eric Bolling hosted a panel led by wingnut extraordinaire Pam Geller, one of the most reptilian creatures of the entire wingnutosphere.

The entire show was a discussion of Bolling's evident belief that what the president presented yesterday was a forgery:

BOLLING: Pamela, were any of these notation on here - I don't know if our camera can get it in too close --- you can see some of these numbers that are clearly written in handwriting on the side. We don't know what they are. Trying to figure out a zero, a two there, an X up over here, a one up here. Were they on the short form?

GELLER: Look, this is a certification of live birth. When I left the hospital, I left with a birth certificate. I'm sorry, I didn't bring with it me, but it looked very much like Donald Trump's. It's a little piece of paper, you've got the nurse -- you know what I'm talking about? Certificate - you know, birth certificate. This is a certification of a live birth. This is actually not a birth certificate.

BOLLING: I need to know this. You see this fold. This has clearly been photocopied from a book. You see that? It kind of folds back to, like, almost like a binding of a book. And then for some reason, there's a green border around it that had to be Photoshopped in. Trying to figure out why they would do that.

GELLER: Well, this whole border is suspect. I mean, if you're taking a scan of something, it would, to your point, it would be white. Why is this the color of the same --

BOLLING: Note this - note this, you guys, April 25, 2011 -- two days ago -- is when this was requested from the state registrar, Alvin Onaka. So we'll keep our eye on it. We'll keep digging. Hey, listen. It may or may not be, but certainly opens up the can of worms that there are at least questions for it.

The absurdity didn't end there. Perhaps the height of absurdity came when, as Ben Dimiero at Media Matters points out, Bolling suggested that the doctor who delivered Obama should have traveled forward in time in order to know that he had delivered the president:

BOLLING: Very quickly, Pamela, this doctor right here, the guy who signed it four days after the birth. He passed away, but his wife today, TMZ had his wife saying I had no idea. She didn't know about it. His son said I had no idea. It came as a complete shock to him as well. If you gave birth to the president of the United States, don't you think your family would know about it?

GELLER: Maybe he doesn't know about it, either. I mean, I think it's very telling that for three years he didn't release it. There's a big question there. We have to say why -- why didn't he release it after three years?

As Dimiero acidly observes:

The doctor died in 2003.

Let that sink in for a second.

At the time, Barack Obama was a little-known state senator in Illinois. If the doctor had told his family before he died that he delivered the future president, that would have spawned a much more interesting conspiracy theory (he's a wizard!). Apparently Eric Bolling thinks obstetricians give their families a list of the most interesting people they delivered -- with a special section for "potential future presidents" -- before they die.

Then Monica Crowley chimed in with the argument that Obama might now be disqualified because he was not "a natural born citizen" because his father was African:



Rather hilariously, Crowley claims that the "courts have not adjudicated" the issue of the meaning of "natural born citizen" -- when, in fact, they have done so numerous times. Most recently, the current Supreme Court rejected this argument without comment.

Crowley is just promoting the next phase of the Birthers' claims, one that's been floating out there for awhile and has gone nowhere -- for good reason.

But that never matters to these fanatics.

Obama Releases His Long-Form Birth Certificate. No Apology From Trump, Just Glory-Grabbing.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Apparently, President Obama decided that the Donald Trump Birther Circus was becoming enough of a distraction that he wanted it dealt with, so this morning he released his long-form birth certificate from Hawaii:

Now, normally I would not comment on something like this, because obviously there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press on at any given day and I've got other things to do. But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we're going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.

And so I just want to make a larger point here. We've got some enormous challenges out there. There are a lot of folks out there who are still looking for work. Everybody is still suffering under high gas prices. We're going to have to make a series of very difficult decisions about how we invest in our future but also get ahold of our deficit and our debt -- how do we do that in a balanced way.

And this is going to generate huge and serious debates, important debates. And there are going to be some fierce disagreements -- and that’s good. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. And I am confident that the American people and America’s political leaders can come together in a bipartisan way and solve these problems. We always have.
But we’re not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We’re not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other. We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

And of course, who should step up and claim this as a glorious moment but the Carnival-Barker-in-Chief himself:

"Today I'm very proud of myself, because I've accomplished something that no one else has been able to accomplish," Trump said, adding, "Our president has finally released a birth certificate."

However, he said he would have to check out the certificate himself and wondered why the president didn't do this "a long time ago."

Of course, Obama actually released a birth certificate back in 2008 -- but it wasn't enough to satisfy nutcases like Trump and his political adviser, WorldNutDaily's Joseph Farah.

Trump has nothing to be proud of: Indeed, he owes the president an apology -- for smearing his name and casting doubt on his birth and citizenship.

Not that we'll ever get it. After all, Being Republican Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry.
Ari Melber has a great piece up at The Nation about the naked racism that lies just beneath the surface of Trump's attacks on Obama:

Even respected liberal commentators have given Trump something of a pass for the racial tension animating Birtherism. Hendrik Hertzberg, the authoritative essayist, argues in this week's New Yorker that Trump's appeal to birtherism is "part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality" by Republicans, like denying the science of global warming, or believing that "contraception causes abortion."

I think that a loose relationship with the scientific method surely helps conspiracies spread, but Birtherism draws on passions that depart substantially from greenhouse gasses. It is a putatively non-racial, vaguely constitutional way to challenge the legitimacy of the first black president and appeal to racists without sounding officially racist. Sure, there may be plenty of GOP tenets running counter to reality nowadays, yet none evoke the suppressed fury of the Birthers. They won't go away. They are an audience-in-waiting for any amplified race-baiter, from Lou Dobbs to unserious presidential candidates. Indeed, Politifact, the fact-checking site for politics, says its article about the issue, (with a link to the certification of live birth!), is the most read item that it has ever published.

And really, does the White House honestly believe that releasing this piece of paper will satisfy these nuts? Already, here's the headline over at Fox, via ThinkProgress:

They're never going to stop. Now they'll just move into another phase.

Where Wrong Is Right And False Is True: The Inverted Moral World Of The American Right

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Digby, commenting on Rick Perlstein's marvelous piece in Mother Jones on the rise of our current "mendocracy" and the legitimation of lying by the modern media, added this:

This history provides an important foundation for my ongoing quest to understand the right's ability to operate without the constraints of hypocrisy or consistency in an environment of epistemic relativism so extreme that we end up believing that wrong is right. It's literally mind-boggling.

There are a couple of mechanisms by which this is occurring. An example of the first kind was this truly mind-boggling exchange between Monica Crowley and Stuart Varney the other day on Fox News, wherein Crowley leapt upon the recent releases of intelligence from Guantanamo via WikiLeaks to declare that they established once and for all that, by golly, torture really did work!

VARNEY: I want your judgment. Do you think President Obama would order it done?

CROWLEY: I think if there were an imminent threat, the commander in chief, regardless of who it was, would order it done, yes.

VARNEY: And you think it should be done.

CROWLEY: I absolutely think it should be done. Listen, the commander-in-chief has one job, and that's to protect American lives. You need to do what's necessary when faced with an imminent threat to do it.

Nevermind that Crowley's evidence that torture works is dubious at best. But it's breathtaking how quickly Crowley and Varney leap over the question: If torture works, should you do it?

What seems not to cross either Crowley's or Varney's minds is the notion that the president might have a higher calling to the nation than simply keeping Americans alive -- that preserving the Constitution and, concomitantly, both our long-term security and our standing in the world as a moral beacon, might be such a higher purpose. The president has an obligation not to make America into a nation of torturers, too. (Of course, it's worth observing that the previous president -- an object of ardent admiration by both these pundits -- not only had a disastrous record on this latter obligation, he was also an abject failure in terms of preserving American lives, too.)

This really is a simple and clear moral issue: Does America torture or not? It is not just a cliche but a great truth that "the torturer is the enemy of all mankind". Which side are we on?

But in the inverted moral world of conservatives, that is not even an issue. All that is at stake for them is criticizing any liberal politician or policy and ardently defending any conservative or Republican. That's their moral compass.

This same imperative is what drives the second mechanism by which the Right's world is turned inside out. And that is a simple and uncomplicated refusal to accepts facts as realities and to embrace lies in their place -- if those lies burnish the emotional narratives upon which the Right ultimately relies for its appeal.

This is manifest particularly in the case of the Birthers, who are singularly immune to fact, logic, reason, or rationality, and ultimately reality. Instead, they've built their little bubble world and nothing, NOTHING will draw them out.

Here's Michelangelo Signorile dealing with a Birther on his radio show the other day, which provides a classic example of this:



This is why President Obama's release this morning of his long-form birth certificate will not be the air-clearing catharsis he hopes it will be -- it's just the beginning of the next phase in the Birthers' conspiracism.

Because the overriding narrative in all this is what matters to these folks -- namely, that Barack Obama is not a legitimate president.

They absolutely need to believe this, you see, because these folks are all right-wing authoritarians.

As I've explained previously:

Right-wing populism is always fueled and populated by right-wing authoritarians -- people who believe that the nation/state needs strong rulers and that it's the duty of citizens to obey them assiduously. This why they suffer so much cognitive dissonance when the nation's top authority is a Democrat/liberal/socialist/Marxist/fascist -- and why their first impulse, in such situations, is to embark on a vicious campaign of delegitimization (see, e.g., Bill Clinton). It's why they basically go insane.

And it's true not merely of the Tea Partiers, but of Beltway Village Establishment conservatives too:

Nothing Obama does will ever satisfy the likes of Liz Cheney. Right-wing authoritarians believe above all in bowing and adhering to those in authority -- and the thought of bowing to a Democratic president, liberal or otherwise, as a legitimate president is too much cognitive dissonance for them to handle.

So they turn the world upside down: Torture is hunky-dory, truth is falsehood, facts are fiction. It's the only way they can continue to cling to a worldview that constantly runs aground on the hard shoals of reality.

The Public Shrugged: Guess They Won't Be Making 'Atlas Wanked' Parts 2 And 3 After All ...

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Hear that sound? That's the sound of a hundred right-wing Randian hearts breaking:

Despite our commenters predicting that “This movie and this idea will grow and grow like a Tsunami” and that “This movie will break records… for years… remember “Star Wars”?,” the film managed a decent enough limited opening a few weeks back picking up $1.7 million at around 300 locations, but this past weekend, it took a hefty 50% drop, despite adding more than 150 screens to its count suggesting that the rails had already run out on the film’s commercial prospects.

And it’s fair to say the film’s hefty drop was down to the critics—“Atlas Shrugged Pt. 1” managed only a 7% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with most critics happy to tear the film a new asshole. Even Jeff Otto, who reviewed the film for us, who took a far more impartial look at the film that this writer could have managed, gave it a rare ‘F’ grade, calling it “an aimless, amateurish and, more to the point, stone cold boring piece of drivel.” All in all, it seems to mean that Aglialoro won’t push ahead with his plans to film the rest of the book.

24 Frames talked to the producer, who told them “Critics, you won. I’m having deep second thoughts on why I should do Part 2… Why should I put up all of that money if the critics are coming like lemmings? I’ll make my money back and I’ll make a profit, but do I wanna go and do to? Maybe I just wanna see my grandkids and go on strike.” A strike? Now that’s something that Rand would certainly have approved of. No one loved the labor movement more than she did.

As Aglialoro suggests, he won’t lose money on it—the film was produced far too cheaply for that—but it seems that the effort involved, the low profit margins, and the critical brickbats slung at the film, have sapped his desire to get Rand’s work on screens. So, a victory for our liberal media elite conspiracy! Oh, shit, uh, we mean, uh… Look over there, there’s evidence of Barack Obama faking his birth certificate!

In reality, “Atlas Shrugged Pt. 1” was, ironically, crushed at the free market—the film had every chance of being a crossover hit, but it was marketed exclusively at a niche audience of Tea Party types, who either didn’t bother to show up, or don’t exist in sizable enough numbers to sustain a film like this. Essentially, it’s the “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” of Objectivist thinking.

Quick, someone get Jonah Goldberg and John Stossel a couple of crying rooms! The magic of the marketplace has spoken ... and their movie sucks!

My guess is that the movie was every bit as tedious and hollow as the book:

Glenn Beck Slags Huckabee And Breitbart Again -- But Hey, There's No Feud Here!

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

As his Fox News show reaches the end of the road, Glenn Beck has been feuding with a couple of noteworthy figures on his own side of the political aisle -- with his Fox colleague Mike Huckabee, labeled by Beck a "progressive" Republican (which in Outer GlennBeckistan is the equivalent of being called a cancerous Nazi) and with Andrew Breitbart, who is still pissed that Beck "threw him under the bus" over the Shirley Sherrod fiasco.

On his Fox show yesterday, Beck tried to address these feuds by claiming that he really doesn't have any serious differences with these two -- they're all on the same side, after all. Then he proceeded to quarrel further with Breitbart by going on ad nauseum about how important God really is to America -- a sly way of holding Breitbart up as unworthy for the Religious Right folks out there in his audience, and also absurdly misleading: Their differences really aren't about religion. Beck has mostly parted ways with Breitbart over the fact that not only has Breitbart misled, distorted, and lied egregiously in his attacks on liberals, he made the egregious misjudgment of getting caught at it.

And he continued his attacks on Huckabee, even while claiming to be dismissing their differences. Indeed, he continued to insist that Huckabee is a "progressive" -- which for Beckheads means he is heading down the path to Nazism (indeed, he's in the same category as neo-Nazis) and is a cancer on the American body politic.

Beck has even tried to claim he didn't say these things. But then again, it isn't only conspiracy theories that can be easily disproven. So can outright lies.

Was SB1070 A Success For Arizona? Pearce Claims U-Haul Rentals Prove It Was. Problem Is, He's Lying.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Russell Pearce is getting increasingly desperate to claim that Arizona's police-state immigration law, SB1070, has been a big success for the state.

So much so that now he's just making shit up:

State Senator Russell Pearce claimed this week he has proof that the controversial illegal immigration legislation is doing its job in Arizona.

Pearce, who authored SB 1070, points to a rise in U-Haul rentals as evidence that Arizona's tough immigration law is forcing illegal immigrants to leave the state. But does Pearce's claim hold true?

... Now that SB 1070 is approaching its one year anniversary, Senator Pearce has claimed that illegal immigrants are leaving Arizona "in caravans" and that U-Haul is busier than ever with one-way trips leaving the state. 9 On Your Side called U-Haul to check on Pearce's claim.

However, the truck rental company confirmed to KGUN9 News, since SB 1070 became law, it's helped 0.5% more people move into than out of Arizona in 2010. These same numbers spiked to double digits, 13.2% to be exact, during the first three months of 2011. Therefore, according to U-Haul, its numbers prove Pearce's claim may not be entirely accurate after all.

Or you could just call it a lie. Because that's what it is.

Especially because we already know that SB1070 has been an unmitigated economic disaster for Arizona:

“I don’t believe that anyone, including myself, foresaw the national and international reaction” to April’s bill, said Glenn Hamer, chief executive of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who said estimates of lost tourism business ranged from $15 million to $150 million. “Now we have that experience under our belts. We know these measures can cause economic damage; it’s just a matter of degree.”

The tourism and image-related business losses were only the tip of the iceberg, though, when it comes to the damage inflicted on the state by SB1070 and its related anti-immigration measures. As we've explained previously, simply deporting and/or driving out all the state's undocumented immigrants would have disastrous economic consequences on a broad basis for the state -- some of which are already being felt.

A new study from the Center for American Progress, "A Rising Tide or a Shrinking Pie: The Economic Impact of Legalization Versus Deportation in Arizona" lays it all out in great detail:

The economic analysis in this report shows the S.B. 1070 approach would have devastating economic consequences if its goals were accomplished. When undocumented workers are taken out of the economy, the jobs they support through their labor, consumption, and tax payments disappear as well. Particularly during a time of profound economic uncertainty, the type of economic dislocation envisioned by S.B. 1070-type policies runs directly counter to the interests of our nation as we continue to struggle to distance ourselves from the ravages of the Great Recession.

Conversely, our analysis shows that legalizing undocumented immigrants in Arizona would yield a significant positive economic impact. Based on the historical results of the last legalization program under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, our analysis shows a similar program would increase wages not only for immigrants but also for their native-born co-workers. This would generate more tax revenue and more consumer and business spending, supporting additional jobs throughout the economy.

Public debate over the wisdom of laws such as S.B. 1070 is heated but generally lacking in substance. The proponents of S.B. 1070 and related legislation now under debate in other cities and states claim to be acting in the best economic interests of native-born Americans, but as this report demonstrates, their claim is wholly unsubstantiated.