Feb. 21 clip from CBS’ Face the Nation, by way of MediaMatters:

Rush Limbaugh declaring Powell’s assessment to be racially motivated in 3…  2… Oh, wait.  It’s Sunday?  On Monday, then.

Digg the MMFA post –> HERE

Stephen sends up the Fox “News” Channel pundits for their idiotic equating of recent heavy snowfall with “proof” that climate change isn’t happening.

FNC really must hold their viewers in the lowest intellectual regard.

Say what you want about Glenn Beck, but do not dispute this: The man is enormously influential in the American political debate. Spend some time with any one of the new conserva-libertarians who’ve been getting so much face time since last spring — the Tea Party, the 9/12 Project, or more extreme groups that are out there like the Oath Keepers — and you’ll often find that their activism traces back to Beck, whether it’s something he said on his Fox News program or his radio show or the books that he’s touted into best-sellers like the “The 5000 Year Leap,” an obscure Christian-oriented take on the Constitution and the Founding Fathers by a deceased John Birch-era right-winger that has sold by the truckload since it was Beck-endorsed.

[snip]

The real reason that history “is no longer taught” is because…it’s bogus. Let’s look at Barton — who Texas Monthly called in a massive profile “The King of the Christocrats” – and his track record”

[snip]

Barton is the founder of a Texas-based group called the WallBuilders, a foundation devoted to proving that the roots of the United States and its Constitution are not based on the separation of church of state — as is widely believed and widely taught — but as country built upon a bedrock of Christianity. That is also the premise of a widely circulated book that Barton published in the 1990s called “The Myth of Separation” — a book that was eventually re-written and issued under a different name because it was larded with bad information, some of which nevertheless became gospel on conservative talk radio. As noted in the 2006 Texas Monthly article (via Nexis):

In 1995 the historian Robert Alley attempted to trace the provenance of a quote that Rush Limbaugh had mistakenly attributed to James Madison, in which Madison purportedly called the Ten Commandments the foundation of American civilization. All roads led to David Barton,whose The Myth of Separation attributed the following quote to Madison: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” Barton cited two sources for the quote: a 1939 book by Harold K. Lane called Liberty! Cry Liberty! and Frederick Nyneyer’s 1958 book First Principles in Morality and Economics: Neighborly Love and Ricardo’s Law of Association. Alley couldn’t find the quote anywhere in Nyneyer’s book, however, and eventually concluded that Barton had pulled it from an article in a journal with the unlikely title Progressive Calvinism, which, in turn, had attributed it to something called the “1958 calendar of Spiritual Mobilization.” In any case, Alley reported, the editors of Madison’s papers were unable to find anything in his writings that was even remotely similar. “In addition,” they added, “the idea is inconsistent with everything we know about Madison’s views on religion and government, which he expressed time and time again in public and in private.”

Read More–> Glenn Beck’s plan to save America…with Christian-right pseudohistory | Philly | 02/09/2010.

January 22, 2010 9:06 am ET by Eric Boehlert

Thanks to this Scott Brown-related dispatch [emphasis added]:

Mass. could benefit if senators set aside partisanship

Right, and if ponies could fly they’d land on rainbows.

This goes back to the point I made yesterday about how the political press refuses to tell the truth about what’s been happening inside the Beltway for the last 13 months regarding how the GOP has adopted a radical and unprecedented partisan approach to the White House, to the point where basically every single GOP member opposes all key administration initiatives. We’ve never seen anything like it in modern American history, but the press pretends like it’s normal, and that gosh, bipartisanship is still possible.

Does the Globe really think there’s a chance Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner are suddenly going to free their members to vote their conscience on issues and to vote for what’s best for their constituents?

The Globe is being almost childishly naive here.

via Boston Globe wins Most Naive Headline of the Day honors | Media Matters for America.

Glenn Greenwald takes issue with David Brooks’ new found respect for public opinion; specifically, the latter’s suggestion in his Jan. 18 NYT column that it would be “political suicide” to proceed with health care reform if Martha Coakley lost the Jan. 19 MA special election (Which, of course, she did.)

Greenwald deftly demonstrates Brooks’ and the Washington Establishment’s standard disregard for public opinion.

Public opinion merits “the profoundest respect” 19 January 2010 ~

Here we have one of the most common and manipulative tools of the political class:  pretending to care about public opinion only when it’s consistent with one’s own views (it’s “worthy of the profoundest respect”), and disregarding it as the irrelevant bile of the ignorant rabble when it’s not.

I remember another policy that was even more unpopular with the “Ameican people” than Obama’s health care plan.  It was called the Iraq War.

[snip]

If the Washington Establishment is adept at anything, it is ignoring and marginalizing public opinion. That bothers very few of its members, least of all David Brooks. Here was Brooks, in the midst of the deeply unpopular Wall Street bailout, celebrating the return of rule by “a cohesive financial establishment” that “does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge” and which “will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks”: “We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.” The man who yearns for oligarchical rule by good-natured “heads from the investment banks” today parades around as the defender of public opinion.

Read More–>Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

Maddow did some fantastic work in 2009.  Particularly compelling was her coverage exposing the PR mechanisms behind anti-health care reform astroturf.

The below clip is from her final 2009 broadcast.  Within it, Maddow gives a fantastic explanation for why the shadowy fringe of right-wing politics should be subjected to constant scrutiny.

Maddow discusses the 2000 election debacle with The Nation’s Chris Hayes.

The next time I hear a talking head refer to this nonsense as the work of “concerned political activists…’  I’m coming through the EF’ing screen! At least with Rachel, my television will always be safe.

At some point, as I suggested in an August 6 Care2.com post, convincing a bunch of poorly informed, needlessly frightened citizens to advocate contrary to their own interests, as a political strategy (if you can call it that), eventually has to backfire.  How can it not?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5L4dXl4fns&hl=en&fs=1&]

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2979773&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]