fox news corrects sarah palin

Link via TPM: How low can a person’s credibility sink? If the answer is lower than Fox’s minimum required truthiness, then may the flying spaghetti monster have mercy on your soul.

The Party of No: I object! I object! I object! I object! I object!

Not having a plan of their own, the rightwingers and Republicans can only try to keep actual plans from being heard.

The teabaggers have taken over the party and the party has adopted the teabaggers methods of red faced screaming and tantrum throwing. It is willful and pridefully deliberate ignorance on parade and it is ugly and pathetic.

All they can do is try as hard as they can to stop debate. It is the old rightwing and Republican fear — fear that a public program designed to help people and stop outrageous corporate abuses and legal crimes will actually work and do what it is meant to do.

The version of health care reform under debate is woefully imperfect and must be improved on in the short and long terms. But it is something. Something that will have positive effect on many, many people’s lives.

And the rightwingers and Republicans are afraid of just such a good example. It proves their theories about public programs and private business interests are backwards and, literally, dangerous to our health.

Here, via Think Progress and Media Matters, is what they have reduced themselves to:

Update: Sam Stein at Huffington Post has news of Rep King losing his mind:

3:02 PM ET — Rep. King contemplates wrapping Capitol building with health care bill. Ten minutes after Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-M.D.) took to the House floor to relay the tale of a young boy who died because a tooth infection went untreated and spread to his brain, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) was trying to literally wrap the Capitol building with the legislation.

The House, on Saturday, began what should be a lengthy process of debating and voting on the final language of reform. But not everyone was willing to simply sit through the event. Outside, King and others were leading a mob of angry tea-party protesters in a round of bizarre and disruptive shenanigans.

About 20 feet off the House floor, at the entrance to the lawn in front of the Capitol building, King and two colleagues were wielding a massive copy of the 1,900-page bill, rolled up around a wooden poll. A man accompanying a clearly excited King, suggested that they wrap the legislation around the building.

“Let’s do it,” he proclaimed. “Let’s wrap the building.”

A security guard, looking on disapprovingly, patiently urged them not to try. “You can’t do that sir,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

In the background, the tea party protesters who had gathered for a second day of railing against health care’s passage were dispersing. Sensing a lost opportunity, King turned to go back outside, asking his co-conspirator to grab the rolled up bill.

A Hill aide tells the Huffington Post that he and others have been plotting to tape pieces of the bill to the Capitol building for several days.

Republicans: Dem wins = voter fraud; Rep wins = will of the people

TPM and Media Matters have good pieces up about rightwingers and Republicans already alleging voter pre fraud. That there is no evidence of this happening in 2006 or 2008 does not keep sites like redstate.com from alleging past and future fraud.

Does anyone want to place a wager on the accuracy of this prediction: rightwingers and Republicans will only protest close races in which the Republican (or, in NY23, the Conservative) party candidate loses; they will assert an overwhelming mandate and validation of the entire populace, not to mention the clear lack any fraud committed by their side, in races their preferred candidates win.

Meanwhile, their only plan of action in the health care reform discourse is to take up Michelle Bachman’s idea of storming congressional offices and the capitol itself, running down random congress people, staring deep into “the whites of their eyes” and demanding guv’mint stay out of their medicare and social security.

Of course, they’ve also said this and this.

A long term winning strategery if there ever was one…

redstate nuttery: the power of humor as critique

Ridicule of hypocrisy and factual analysis in action:

click for link

As a counterpoint, even in the process of attempting to dispatch the paranoid fringe of the Republican party, the still very rightwing David Frum treats the nuttery with undue respect and, in so doing, gives them the unwarranted air of serious contributors:

click for link

more rejection of reality

Think Progress has a piece up about the House Republicans continuing the theme:

click for link

This of course fires up the True Believers and, in the past, might have drawn enough others to produce a viable payoff. But, again, it ignores the dual nature of the web as both a distribution and an archival system.

This kind of blatant mendaciousness isn’t going to work for them now.

virtual reality: the refusal to reject demonstrably untrue ‘facts’

In the last few days there has been a rush of examples of rightwingers proudly rejecting reality and substituting a virtual world more suited to their worldview.

First there was the laughably absurd Great Obama Thesis Unveiling.

And today there was the totally neutral and not skewed poll from, uh, the Club for Growth putting Conservative Party candidate Hoffman first in the NY 23 special election.

Then there was the equally absurd, not to mention post dated, revelation that Pelosi would ban Fox from capitol hill.

The left, and people in general, are also at time prone to refuse to accept unsettling facts or, conversely, to be too willing to accept facts that suit their outlook.

But it seems the rightwingers, who so proudly scorn the ‘reality based community,’ are particularly susceptible to such willfully self imposed ignorance. But perhaps I’m biased given my own perspective. Please note examples of people on the left doing this in the comments.

Some examples I can think of are the faked docs relating to Bush’s time freeing the skies of Texas of viet kong and a few racist but completely undocumented quotes attributed to Limbaugh — alongside many of Limbaugh’s comments that are undeniably racist and undeniably accurate.

Others?

Senator Inouye: don’t be a rapist hater

Absolutely disgusting. I don’t care how venerated he is, this is wrong.

From Sam Stein at Huffington Post:

An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.

Multiple sources have told the Huffington Post that Sen. Dan Inouye, a longtime Democrat from Hawaii, is considering removing or altering the provision, which was offered by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and passed by the Senate several weeks ago.

Firedoglake puts it more succinctly:

click image for link

Inouye has a long record of service, but this will forever mar that record if it turns out to be true. I hope he reconsiders.

Crooks and Liars is also weighing in.

inter racial marriage, penny pinching jews and shooting tree hugging liberals — oh my

The Republican noise machine has been busy the last few days, arguing, among other nuttiness, that:

• Jews are penny pinchers (but they meant that as a compliment)
• Inter racial marriage is bad for children and shouldn’t happen (why would anyone disagree??!!)
• It’s fun to joke about shooting “tree hugging liberals” in the same area of Mississippi where civil rights workers were murdered for the crime of being liberal (hey, lighten up — it’s all in good fun)

As of this writing, only the geniuses responsible for the calling Jews penny pinchers have apoligized — if anyone was offended. A fake non apology; but at least they went through the motions.

The justice who refuses to perform inter racial marriages and the shooting liberals is funny Republican representative are defiant and just don’t see how anyone could have a problem with what they’ve said and done.

It’s classic bigotry — they are so deep into prejudice, racism and hatred that they literally cannot imagine how anyone could see the world differently than they do.

It’s just this kind of crack political messaging that will propel the Republicans back into power on a wave of righteous, old, southern, white, conservative protestant indignation and determination to take “their” country back.

If blue dogs kill reform, they will own their failure

Digby has a great piece up, referencing a piece by Yglesias, in which she concurs with his observation that if the blue dogs kill health care reform because the public option offends their corporate sugar daddies, then they will be forever responsible for their actions.

If the blue dogs and their cheerleaders are right and the public option is in the end a minor facet of reform, then surely they wouldn’t kill the entire package of reform just because the other members of the Democratic caucus listen to the vast majority of Americans who favor the public option and include it in the bill they send to the president.

If they kill the entire package of reform over an aspect they claim is so minor, what is their real motivation? Of course, we all know that it is no coincidence that people like Baucus receive so much dough from the health industry but, for some reason, inconvenient little truths like that get little mention in corporate media, even some — but by no means all — of the more progressive venues.

But killing the entire reform package because of something they claim to be of such minor significance would be a bridge too far. They seem to have no reluctance to lecture the majority of Americans and the majority of their party that the public option is such a minor element of reform that its absence in a final bill should not be enough to kill the package.

By that same logic the reverse is true: if it is indeed such a minor piece of the more important whole puzzle, then its inclusion should not be enough of a bother for the blue dogs to kill the bill, fatally damage their president and in all likelihood snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and doom their party for at least a generation.

Of course, they are always free to publicly and explicitly state any other factors that might be motivating them to be so servile to the health insurance industry.

Pelosi’s husband buys football team, Limbaugh and rightwingers will not be amused

Obviously, this headline from the Huffington Post is destined to cause some on the right to complain about double standards.

click for link to story

The story links to a Washington Post report. Here’s a screen grab of some of the thoughtful objections it has inspired.

click image to go straight to comments

This poster spices his faux misplaced outrage with some misogyny and anti latino bigotry, but he’s a ‘patriot’ so it’s okay.

As a commenter on the Huffington Post thread notes, Rush and a whole lot of people on the right are going to be quite irate about this on Monday. But, that’s still a day and a half away. I’m sure we’ll be hearing from them about this well before then.

Their general hatred for Pelosi is of immense proportion. Their collective freak out over this is going to be a spectacle…

Update: In keeping with today’s theme of screen grabs, here’s one from the redstate post and comment thread I linked to in my last post. It’s in reaction to a story claiming that the lyricist from Black Eyed Peas is buying an ownership share of a team.

click image for link to redstate post and comments

Aside from the hilarity and stunning lack of irony of the title, it’s also an indication of the reaction to Pelosi owning a team. I mean, we’re talking about a blond white woman in a rap group with black guys.

Despite the ancient fear and loathing that arrangement brings up, the reaction to Pelosi’s husband owning a football team will still probably be many orders of magnitude greater.