So who has the momentum for the midterms?

Obama has already passed health care reform.


Financial reform? Polls show the American people want it, so Obama wins either by passing it, or by pounding on the Republicans for blocking it; the Republicans also blocked unemployment benefits repeatedly, and tried to kill a number of jobs bills.


Immigration reform? Polls say America wants it, Obama has a bill, Republicans are blocking it. Again, he wins either way. The Arizona law is the gift that keeps on giving for Obama – that, and he deployed troops to the border, and caught and deported more illegals than Bush.


Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Polls support repeal, Obama has a bill, the Republicans can either lose by fighting it or lose by letting it pass.


Elena Kagan? Again, Obama can’t lose. 2-0 in Court nominees.


Energy legislation? With BP destroying the state of Louisiana, Obama could get that too, particularly since the Bush-era regulators helped make the spill happen. He has Republicans jumping all over the place, actually hollering for more government action and condemning the corporate villain while simultaneously trying to cap BP’s liability, so it’s a double-win for Obama.


Scandals and stupid stuff? How about Rand Paul’s 7-8-9 explanations of his stance on Jim Crow laws, the Chicken Lady, Jan Brewer and the entire Arizona government, Mark Souder making an abstinence video with his mistress, the cop-killing teabagger, Bob McDonnell the friend of blacks and gays, Nikki Haley doing the nasty with a blogger, Michael Steele the gaffe machine, desperate candidates trying to dash to the right to fend off the teabaggers and then dash left to grab the independents, Tim “I found the Ark of the Covenant” D’Annunzio being ridiculed by his own party, Vaughn Ward stealing Obama’s speeches, primary opponents like McCain and Hayworth tearing each other’s throats out (we never declared war on Hitler!), the Westboro hatemongers, teabaggers sending death threats to Democrats, Palin’s repeated grand-mal seizures of cluelessness, Glenn and Rush…?


Boys and girls, there’s your leadership A-team! And most of that was just in the last month or so!


Republican ideas? In 1994 they won with Contract With America, but this time they have tried three times to launch their own manifesto of ideas, and each time they ended up mumbling…”hey, you voters, do you have any ideas we could use?” And one of the three efforts was funded by…taxpayers! The idea bag is empty.


So rolling into November, the Obama scorecard could read health care, financial reform, DADT, two Supreme Court justices, immigration reform, energy legislation, and bunch of smaller stuff. While the Republicans wallow in their own mistakes and intellectual vacuousness. And of course, vote suppression.


The Republicans have thrown the whole kitchen sink at Obama. Their bag of tricks is empty. What more can they come up with, to regain the momentum?

Republicans in a bookstore?

More proof that conservatism is intellectually bankrupt...

For many years now, conservatism has stood for nothing more or less than a fear and hatred of new ideas, new things, new people. The few times they have ventured out into the plain of intellectual endeavour, they have sunk into a quicksand of philosophical dishonesty, hiding behind stilted vocabulary and logical fallacy like Buckley, behind Hollywood imagery like Reagan, behind fallacious economic argument like Laffer, behind dangerous fiscal policies like Greenspan and Friedman, behind irrelevant historical references and absurd bowties like George Will. Three times this year, the Republican party has essentially proved their intellectual barrenness by launching a self-proclaimed rebirth of conservative leadership, which, in each case, involved nailing a suggestion box to the wall and waiting for their supporters to come up with the new ideas.

Here’s another example.

If you go to your local bookstore and go to the Politics section (or Current Events, or whatever they call it in your neighborhood), you will notice that the Republican wingnuts are going like gangbusters, absolutely loading the bookshelves with book after book after book attacking the Democrats.

Right now you can go to the local Barnes or Borders and get books written (or more like ghost-written) by Bush, Gingrich, Rove, Hannity, Ventura, Palin, Romney, George Allen, Nugent, Malkin, Ron Paul, O’Reilly, George Will, Huckabee. Beck alone has 4-5-6 of them out there.

The most energetic, of course, is Ann Coulter, who is so filled with spittle-spewing hate that she can hardly get through a year without popping out a book, each one with a title aimed at inflicting as much bile and insult upon the Democrats as her puny little powers can muster:

Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America.
Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
Godless: The Church of Liberalism.
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter.
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton.

Book after book tries to whip up anger over the insidious Democratic plot to Destroy America As We Know It:

The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency
Obama Zombies
Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity
That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom: Team Obama’s Assault on Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans
Enemy Within: Saving America From The Liberal Assault On Our Churches, Schools, And Military
The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change
Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions
National Suicide: How Washington Is Destroying the American Dream from a to Z

And more books are aimed at peddling the illusion that Obama is trying to silence them so liberals can win the battle of ideas, which is pretty absurd when you see how many books have been openly published and sold on the topic:

The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds
Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who want to Kill Talk Radio, the Self-Serving Congress, Companies that Help Iran, and W… (the title’s so long it runs off the page)
Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History
Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies: Issue by Issue Responses to the Most Common Claims of the Left from A to Z

One school of “thought” is the insinuation that Obama = Muslim = Terrorist:

Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America
Terror and Liberalism
The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

But they start to get vague when it’s time to tell us what they would do if they regained power. The last time they had power they trashed the joint, so now when they write about their plans for the future in their ideal world, its does get a little vague, and when they do delve into detail, they end up with foolishness like dismantling the Fed or the IRS:

Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve
The Coming Insurrection
Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal
The Fair Tax Book
End the Fed

So what’s the problem?

The overwhelming majority of their “philosophy” is “we hate Democrats”. Other than that…essentially substance-free. And these people, believe it or not, are the leaders of the conservative intellectual movement: the rest of the conservatives are even more ignorant and dishonest than they are.

Obama’s a Maoist!

One of the sillier efforts by the wingnuts has been to call Obama a “Maoist”. Their three or four minutes of research turned up the nugget that Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party were influenced by Maoist teaching decades ago, and like all wingnuts they have a great deal of trouble telling one scary brown person from another, so they have made the equation that Obama = Black Panther.

Which is silly, because if any group is pursuing Maoism, it’s…the teabaggers. Maoism involves a revolutionary struggle of the masses of the people against the exploiting classes and their state structures, focusing on rural folks and, when necessary, guerrilla-like tactics. That is the teabaggers in a nutshell – the struggle by Good White Folks in the fly-over states against Obama and Big Gummint. The tea-party tactics are straight out of Mao’s seminal book on guerrilla warfare. And they even split into rival “more-revolutionary-than-thou” factions just like the Maoists did, arguing over who really represents the true spirit of the movement.

China’s Maoists and America’s teabaggers have followed much the same path: they created a cult of personality around their founder (Reagan versus Mao), who led a group of allies who created economic disasters and committed many crimes. Today the die-hard Maoists and teabaggers both are firmly rooted in an extremism which is based on a complete divorce from the reality of the world around them, due, in the case of the teabaggers, to their reliance on Fox, Rush and their own tinfoil websites; in both cases they have become too extreme even for their own party leaders, who in turn are condemned as “revisionist” (or RINO’s in teabag-speak). The Maoists and the teabaggers have another thing in common: the Maoists roundly resisted the pragmatic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, and his ethos of following the facts wherever they lead, eschewing ideology, and judging state policies in accordance with whether or not they work; Obama has offered the same sort of “anti-Maoist” formula, and the teabaggers have rejected him too.

So the next time you hear Newt or Rush or one of the other brain-dead pseudo-intellectuals of the loony right bloviating about Obama’s Maoist program, try not to laugh at them too obviously. Because that’s another thing that Maoists and teabaggers have in common: they get nasty and violent when you ridicule their bullcrap arguments.

Star Trek and Rush Limbaugh!

Plenty of perfectly sane adults go to Star Trek conventions, dressed up as Star Trek characters, even dressed up as aliens, speaking Klingon, and indulge themselves in their weird little world, the world of phasers and photon torpedos and new planets and the Borg. Then they go home to their relatively normal lives, putting the world of Star Fleet behind.


That’s the key. They go home and take off the costumes and the fake ears.


Plenty of normal people dress up and go off to Ren Fest, dressed as kings and queens and varlets and wenches, gnawing on their turkey legs, drinking their fake “mead”. And then they leave that world behind and go home.


Even children open up Harry Potter books and dive into a world of magic and fantasy. Then they close the books and go back to reality.


But there is a particular fantasy world that some people have trouble letting go of. Planet Wingnut. Every day the fans of this particular fantasy turn on Fox and Rush, and listen to their fantastic tales of this mythical planet, where the president is a Marxist Muslim from another country, where Big Gummint is plotting to take away all your rights and all your guns, where all white people are afraid, where all black and brown people are lazy and scary by turns, where the astounding lies of Beck and Hannity are actually true. The problem being that the listeners turn off their televisions and radios – and refuse to go back to reality. They think that Planet Wingnut is where they really live, in the real world. As though the other folks really thought they were on the bridge of the Enterprise, or at the court of Henry VIII, or at Hogwarts. The wingnuts have created a fantasy world for themselves, but they refuse to leave it.


Rush claims that leftist terrorists caused the BP spill, that Obama has ignored the Tennessee flood, that Obama threw a party to celebrate the unemployment rate going to 9.9 percent, that Obama lied about the Times Square bomber’s ties to Pakistani terrorists, that Homeland Security handled the Times Square case incompetently, that America supports arresting people without due process, that Obamacare will cut your insurance and raise the deficit, that only the rich pay taxes, that Obama caused the Dow to crash…those are the wingnut lies, JUST from Rush Limbaugh, JUST from today.


People listen to this crap for hours every day, and it’s practically all the “news” they get regarding the outside world.


And these are the people who control the agenda of the GOP. People who are clinically insane. And instead of plastic “phasers” and Tudor-style broadswords, these people have real guns with real bullets. And they really think the people around them – you and me – are the Klingons who need to be destroyed. In fact, the crazier they are, the more they indulge in all the Obama-wants-your-guns paranoia, the more likely they are to have guns.

A fake American trying to hunt down a fake American?

Good catch from Ariana this week. Look at the four frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012? Huckabee, Palin, Romney, Gingrich. What do they have in common?

Three of the four are employees of Fox News. All but Mitt. And it’s still early days – they may get him too!

So no matter who the GOP nominates to run against Obama, that person is likely to be an employee of Rupert Murdoch.

The wingnuts are screaming that Obama is taking orders from non-existent Kenyans, whereas the Republicans are taking orders from a very real Australian, who is so rich, so creepy, so weird, that he was parodied as an insane James Bond villain in Tomorrow Never Dies. Murdoch has a track record of killing competition, busting unions, interference in electoral politics, and making gigantic earnings without paying taxes, but here’s my favourite part: he skirted around U.S. laws decreeing that only U.S. citizens could own our TV stations, by securing a naturalization for himself. So the leader at the apex of this conservative movement to delegitimize Obama because he was allegedly born overseas and played some sort of sneaky game with his naturalization…played a sneaky game with his naturalization. All those people screeching that Obama’s a fake American take their marching orders from a fake American.

GOP attacks fizzling?

Polling data from ABC shows that the tea party movement is fizzling out, and doing little damage to the Democrats. The movement is drawing support from the Republican party almost exclusively, and the movement's supporters mostly lean Republican already. Only 8 percent of its own members are even active anymore, the movement has little room for growth, Americans have decided that the more they learn about the movement the less they like, and they don't want to learn any more about it.

Another fizzle: GOP voter enthusiasm for the 2010 midterms is dropping like a rock.

Fizzle: a lot of the tea-party shrieking about the evils of Big Gummint have fizzled out as the need for Gummint becomes laughably obvious due to the recent disasters. Bobby Jindal, already a figure of ridicule for making fun of volcano research before a volcanic eruption cut Europe off from the rest of the world, is now being forced to eat his words about government spending as he screams for Gummint to help clean up the BP oil. Meanwhile the heart of tea-party country, the "we-hate-Obama" belt running through Tennessee and neighboring states, is underwater and everyone is hollering for...help from the Gummint.

Fizzle: despite all the anti-Obama screeching, to the effect that he botched the oil-spill response and that it's "Obama's Katrina", only 26 percent say he's doing a poor job -- the same 26 percent that hates all things Democratic.

And why is this important? In midterms, timing is everything. The Dems lost the House because the NRA got a ton of momentum in September 1994, when the gun bill was passed. The Dems won the House back in 2006 partly because they had momentum: the GOP sex scandals blew up just before the voting. And now the GOP, which had hoped to retake the House this fall, is losing some, um, tumescence in its effort to get people riled up.


Partly because they sound kind of silly. To wit:

Day 1. We hate Big Gummint! Big Gummint should do little or nothing!

Day 2. Why isn't Big Gummint helping more in the Tennessee flooding?

Day 3. Why isn't Big Gummint moving faster on the BP spill?

Day 4. Why isn't Big Gummint moving faster to secure the Arizona border?

Day 5. Why isn't Big Gummint moving faster to follow Oklahoma's lead in shoving probes up women's vaginas in abortion clinics?

Day 6. Why isn't Big Gummint stripping the citizenship from terror suspects -- while letting them keep their guns?

Day 7. ...We hate Big Gummint!

Graham complains when Obama did what he told him to do: move forward on immigration

Lindsey Graham is throwing a titanic hissy fit, to the effect that he must stop bilateral talks on climate change, because the Democratic effort of immigration is a “cynical ploy” which undermines the legislative process.

The problem?

Graham was working on immigration with Schumer and the other Democrats. In March he even complained that Obama wasn’t moving forward fast enough on it. "At the end of the day, the president needs to step it up a little bit.”

So Obama’s team does exactly what Graham said he should do. Cue the hissy fit.

Which tells us what we already knew: this has nothing to do with immigration, and everything to do with peeing all over Obama no matter what he does.

the chicken that roared

Okay, this is a critical test for the Democrats.

First we have the Republican Senate leadership spewing lies about finance reform that are so obviously bullcrap that even the other Republicans couldn't keep a straight face. The Iron Curtain Of Pigheaded Republican Obstruction collapsed in days. They got caught in an obvious bald-faced lie on an issue where the public is fully on the side of the Democrats.

And then Sue Lowden creates comedy gold with "bring a chicken to the doctor", which sounds an awful lot like she wants to wipe out, not just health insurance reform, but health insurance itself.

If the Democrats can't hit 700-foot home runs with these hanging curveballs, and run nine billion "chicken to the doctor" ads this campaign season, and turn the Republicans into the laughingstocks they richly deserve to be...then they should all be sued for political malpractice and drummed out of professional politics. Even a Milquetoast like Harry Reid should be swinging for the bleachers, in his own Mister Whipple kinda way.


...oh wait, I forgot! Hanging Curve Ball #3, Arizona's plan to grab anyone with a tan and toss them in jail for "lookin kinda furrin".

...which the governor actually signed!

Everyone enjoying the Obama tax cut on tax day?

That's right, girls.

Obama cut your taxes. Because he's a socialist.
Obama removed government-run single-payer from the health plan. Because he's a socialist.
Obama removed the government-run public option from the health plan. Because he's a socialist.
Obama saved the auto manufacturers. Because he's a socialist.
Obama saved the banks, and resisted the urge to impose draconian regulations. Because he's a socialist.
He gave the green light for offshore drilling. Damn socialist, helping out those damn socialist oil corporations….

And because he hates capitalism, he saw to it that the the Dow goes from 7000 to 11000, jobs go from 700K lost in a month to 160K created, stimulus saves a million jobs, GDP goes from minus six percent to plus six, and housing prices are up a whopping 20 percent. Because he's a socialist and hates capitalism.

And at every step of the way, Obama was fought by the Republicans. They impeded his effort to save capitalism. Because they're capitalists, fighting that nasty old socialist.

Right?

And, quick recap: HE CUT YOUR TAXES, JETHRO.

Ya see -- when you take Republican "logic" and apply actual logic to their logic, it starts to sound kinda....stupid.

"Community organizer"

Lately the Republicans, in their desperation, have started whinging about having – gasp! – a community organizer as President. That’s their code language for “angry uppity black man who stirs up trouble in the ghetto and maybe even causing a riot in a neighborhood near you”. Scary black man! Be afraid!

Let’s set aside the stupidity of their implications with respect to what a community organizer actually does – in the real world, Obama worked to train people to get jobs and get into college. Quite the radical. Instead let’s look at the timeline here.

Obama was a community organizer before he even went to Harvard. He was practically a child.

After his work as community organizer, he went to Harvard Law, headed the Law Review, became a professor, a state Senator and a U.S. Senator.

Then he built a brilliant, 15-million-man campaign with new, ground-breaking innovations seemingly every week, on everything from fundraising to communication to caucus strategy. He destroyed the invincible Clinton machine and then John McCain, got votes in places that had scarcely seen Democratic candidates in decades, like Indiana, and won in a landslide.

As president, he saved the economy, saved a million jobs with the stimulus package, saved the auto industry, saved the financial industry, got the bailout money back from the banks, turned America around on jobs and GDP and housing prices and the Dow, cut taxes, cut the deficit, helped the unemployed, helped small businesses, punished corporations who send our jobs overseas, punished dishonest credit card companies, threw lobbyists out of Washington, stopped crooked defense contracts, helped our troops with pay and benefits and housing and health care and body armor and jobs for wives, passed a landmark health care plan, stopped the torture, closed the secret prisons, started getting us out of Guantanamo, fixed our policy in Afghanistan, signed a nuclear treaty with Russia, improved relations with Muslims, persuaded the Pakistanis to hunt down the Taliban, freed prisoners in Korea and Myanmar, killed Somali pirates, and won a little thing called the Nobel Prize.

And he’s only been president a little over a year.

The Republicans want you to ignore everything he’s accomplished since his Chicago days. They want to freeze him in your minds, like a fly in amber, as the “angry black man” in Chicago, and ignore everything he’s done since. Because they just can’t accept that their 2001 dream of a thousand-year-Reich permanent-GOP-majority is over, and that they not only got crushed in two consecutive elections – they got beat by a black guy. A black guy, beat them in Virginia, Carolina, Florida, Indiana.


"Community organizer" is one of their substitutes for the N-word, when they're not using "ACORN!".

Oh, no! Message discipline!

Republicans usually excel at message discipline.

For weeks they screamed that the reconcilation process was an unconstitutional usurpation. It was a laughable lie -- reconciliation is not only constitutional, but the Republicans themselves used it to beat up the Democrats many times. But the GOP maintained discipline and kept hollering the same lie over and over, until a lot of people began to believe it.

Hitler taught the Republicans many years ago that a lie can be sold to a target audience if you maintain discipline and repeat it over and over.

But alas, the Republicans didn't have their mentor Hitler to shepherd them along this week. So while some Republicans were howling the lie that Obamacare will put 15,000 IRS agents on the streets to grab your money, other Republicans were screaming that Obama is completely removing our nuclear deterrent, also a lie.


No no no no no!

This week is Obamacare Lie Week.

Next week is Nuclear Lie Week.

Didn't you get your program? Weren't you watching Fox like you were told to??

Obama's numbers go UP after Detroit bomb scare

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/polls-show-no-political-backlash-against-obama-after-flight-253----even-a-possible-improvement.php?ref=fpa


More GOP smear attacks fail.

Obama still most popular despite a year of smear attacks

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-12-29-admire-gallup-poll_N.htm

A solid year of unprecedented smear attacks against Obama, and he is still, by a mile, the most popular man in America. All the crap about birth certificates, death panels, government takeovers, improper choice of mustard...All ignored by the 80 percent of the country that is not insane.

And Hillary, not Sarah Palin, is the most popular woman.

All that GOP effort bashing Team Blue, to no avail.

GOP blocking choice for TSA chief -- the airport security guy...?

Months ago, the GOP was screeching about Obama's handling of the swine flu crisis -- neatly ignoring the fact that they were holding up the nominations of the top Health and Human Services officials who would have handled the mess.

Now they're hollering about Obama's handling of the Detroit airplane scare -- all while they're blocking the appointment of the TSA chief. They have also been blocking the approval for TSA money.

The menace from Fredonia

Let’s play a parlor trick on the Republicans.

Let’s send Robert Gibbs out to announce to the White House press corps that America faces an imminent attack from terrorists based in Fredonia.

And then wait for the insanity to begin.

Glenn Beck: (weeping) OMG the humanity! All the women and little children at risk of being MURDERED IN THEIR BEDS by these Fredonians!

Michael Steele: We’re imposing a new litmus test. Anyone Republican doesn’t take a hard line on Fredonians will be drummed out of the party.

Dick Cheney: We warned the Obama people about this Fredonia threat, but they just don’t care about endangering every American man, woman and child.

Sarah Palin: All ya gotta do is look at the dang map, and see the border between Fredonia and Ruritania, and the threat is so obvious that everybody but Obama can see it!

Joe Lieberman: Clearly Obama was remiss in not nuking Fredonia because of the obvious threat to Israel …

Orly Taitz: If Obama was a real American, he would have wiped out the Fredonians months ago!

Mitch McConnell: We’re introducing an amendment that will block all health care reform unless the Fredonian menace is met with military conquest – and all abortions and gay marriages are banned in conquered Fredonia.

Chris Matthews: back in my day, Lyndon Johnson was a real man, he never would have let this Fredonia thing spin out of control!

David Broder: If only Obama had the good sense to listen to the establishment and the moderates in his own party on Fredonia, we wouldn’t be in such terrible danger!

David Gregory: I’ve been to Fredonia many times, and I just can’t understand how the Obama administration lost control of this issue.

Boehner: …and those Fredonians have that creepy brown skin too. Gives me the willies.

Chuck Todd: In an overnight poll, two-thirds of Americans are afraid of Fredonia and think Obama isn’t doing enough to fight them.

McCain: My advisers told me to attack Obama last year for his naïve policy on Fredonia, but I don’t believe in going negative.

George Stephanopoulos: Bill Clinton would have reached a deal with these Fredonians before things got out of hand. Where is Obama on this??

Teabaggers: NUKE FRENODIA! NUKE FRENODIA!


Then we’ll explain to them that Fredonia is a fictional country invented by Groucho Marx.

And they STILL won’t back down. Because they never back down when they’re busted on their lies – they invariably double down on their bets, in the hope that America has more stupid people than smart people.

"I am Captain Spalding, the African explorer..."

Fox is going off the air!

Last week Fox was caught lying yet again, this time by faking the size of the turnout at a Palin book-signing. But this time they actually admitted the error and imposed a zero-tolerance policy for errors: people who put factual errors on the air face punishment. “Jobs are on the line here”!

So obviously Fox will go off the air in a matter of weeks, because none of their on-air talent can restrain themselves from lies, smears and other nonsense. Glenn Beck can scarcely clear his throat at the top of his broadcast without spewing lies – he’ll be gone in days.

Why Obama must take on Rush

First of all, Rush Limbaugh did not rise to power because of the brilliance of his own political acumen, but because of the cleverness (and dumb luck) of the business model created by his managers. Back in the 1990s radio music was moving heavily away from AM to FM, leaving AM stations in the red, looking for cheap content to fill up their hours. In comes Premiere Radio, swooping down on many, many stations in the small rural markets, offering Rush’s show for free, in return for preferential advertising deals. Thus, the station doesn’t need to pay anybody to broadcast during that bloc; Rush probably doesn’t want you to know that he did more than anyone to wipe out local jobs, and local radio voices, in those rural areas. Soon, the only thing on in a lot of those rural areas was Rush, and once all those stations adopted conservative formats, it became very difficult to mix liberal and conservative on the same stations, so conservative radio, by getting in the door first, made liberal radio almost impossible to launch (although Air America has bounced back its market penetration is dwarfed by Rush). And the only reason this Limbaugh Invasion was possible, was that Reagan had eliminated the Fairness Doctrine a few years earlier.

While Premiere was building Rush a massive nationwide platform to shout from, the Republican party was destroying itself, leaderless, creating a power vacuum. Rush jumped in. Now, everyone fears him: with his unequalled ability to mobilize large numbers of people to make calls and write emails, and to coordinate his message with folks like Fox, Republicans can’t even question Rush’s statements on the record. The party has lost control of both Rush and the wingnuts at his command: they know, and he knows, that he could split the party in two instantly.

So Rush was aided by the entertainment vacuum in AM radio, the power vacuum in the GOP, and then…the election of Obama. Rush’s audience had peaked at about 25 million during the Clinton era and then dropped to 14 million, but Obama’s arrival pumped it back up to 20 again. Nevertheless the onslaughts from rival media sources like the internet, the decline of AM radio, the rapid aging of his audience, the prospect of the reinstatement of the hated Fairness Doctrine, and the fact that his broadcasts are loaded with obvious lies and bullcrap, will in time bring Rush down.

But in the meantime, Rush is much more dangerous than Fox.

In Jean Anouilh’s “Becket”, the doomed archbishop pointed out that the kingdom of God must be defended like any other kingdom. John Milton optimistically argued that we should just let truth and falsehood grapple, and truth inevitably would win, but my view is more “Becket-like”: the truth must be actively defended from falsehood. We must take up arms. The political system cannot function if the lies are crowding out the truth, and if the media won’t do their jobs and separate truth from falsehood, Obama must do it himself.

In 1928 FDR was elected governor of New York. At that time, the state of New York was blanketed with small-town Republican newspapers, and there were wide swathes of the state which were only hearing Republican viewpoints, just as there are wide swathes of the country that are only hearing Rush’s voice now. FDR took action and spent $100,000 on a reporting bureau to help shoot down the Republican lies and attacks in New York. By the same token, Obama, as America’s political leader, has every right to see to it that the truth gets the same play as the lies, and to help truth to fight on a level playing field with bullcrap: the President is allowed to defend himself, and he is allowed to refute lies (he is also allowed to deny a bully pulpit to people who lie all day – presidential access is not a First-Amendment right, which is why the supermarket rags aren’t invited into the White House press room). This is all the more important since the media won’t both to do what it used to do, shoot down the lies – as we learned when the mainstream media utterly failed to shoot down all the kill-grandma death-panel lies this summer.

So not only is Obama absolutely justified in calling Fox out for their endless lies, he needs to expand the attack and take down Rush.

Liberal bias of the media?

The Washington Post and the NY Times whine that the Peace prize is a burden and a liability to Obama.

MSNBC, the Communist Network? They’re whining that people are stumped over the award, they’re dismissing it, it’s a disaster.

CBS is calling it Obama’s fake “Mission Accomplished” moment.

ABC actually reprinted a big stack of anti-Obama jokes about the Peace Prize, collected by a conservative activist.

CNN – waah waah waah, it doesn’t feel right.

If the media are shitting all over Obama when he just won the FREAKIN’ NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, it’s small wonder that these media clowns are also crapping all over the health care reform process, and failing catastrophically in their civic duty to shoot down the endless lies and attacks by the Republicans.

Rasmussen caught lying again, to help the GOP

From Daily Kos:

Earlier this week, Rasmussen went into Minnesota and polled the public climate for the office-holders there. This was not covered in the wrap, because the three names involved (Al Franken, Amy Klobuchar, and Tim Pawlenty) are not on the ballot in the 2010 elections. What it did show that while Franken had net positives (41/31), they were less than both Klobuchar and the newly-minted right-winger Tim Pawlenty. This made its way into a variety of tradmed stories, but Jonathan Singer at MyDD made a great catch: Pawlenty's question was based on the traditional four-option menu of "strongly approve", "somewhat approve", "somewhat disapprove", "strongly disapprove". The Democrats were based on a four-option menu which asked if voters through their performance was "excellent", "good", "fair", or "poor". Research has shown that the former arrangement leads to better numbers in the top two boxes, because some voters will conflate a "fair" performance with one that is worthy of the rating "slightly approve". Not only that, but in a subtle wording change, it said Pawlenty was "doing a job" as governor, while it said Franken was "performing a role" as senator. When Mark Blumenthal went to Rasmussen Reports with a query about this, he was told it was a "mistake that slipped through the cracks."

wingnuts caught lying about size of 912 crowd

Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the group that organized the event, said on stage at the rally that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance. At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as "tens of thousands."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/protest-crowd-size-estimate-falsely-attributed-abc-news/story?id=8558055

They lie, they get caught, they lie, they get caught.....