From Salon
By Joe Conason

It wasn’t surprising when, after seven months of legal wrangling, the Minnesota Supreme Court declared that Al Franken had won the 2008 Senate race against incumbent Norm Coleman. Still less surprising (although vastly more entertaining) was the simultaneous breakdown of nearly all of Franken’s adversaries on the right, whose regurgitated insults, whining complaints and exploding noggins revealed nothing about him or his victory — and everything about them.

Upon learning that Franken had prevailed in a unanimous decision by his home state’s highest court, the usual suspects on Fox News Channel and in the Limbaugh wasteland of radio immediately threw up a barrage of furious invective. Wasting no time on gracious concessions, they concentrated on two themes. First: Franken himself is wild, spiteful, menacing, bigoted and, most of all, deranged (as must be anyone who voted for him). Second: Franken’s ascension to the Senate is tainted by the process, which his opponent insisted on prolonging.

Sadly, the most notorious Franken antagonist, Bill O’Reilly, was absent from the airwaves on the evening of Franken’s victory. Demure guest host Monica Crowley seemed bemused by the Minnesota outcome. But Glenn Beck, in his semiliterate way, heaped on enough abuse to keep Billo’s fans satisfied for the moment. “It shows how crazy our country has gone,” he began. “It shows that we’ve lost our minds. It’s like we’ve slipped through a wormhole. It’s like, this look likes the country I grew up in, but no — Al Franken would never be a senator … We have entered a place to where there isn’t statesmanship anymore.”

The tenor of the Fox attacks grew more feverish with the ranting of Brian Kilmeade, who judged Franken “barely sane if you read his books, and quite angry in every facet of his life.” Kilmeade went on to describe the new senator as “hateful,” “evil,” bitter,” and “maniacal,” and again as “angry.” Sean Hannity echoed Fox’s other amateur shrinks, saying, “This guy, Franken, he’s not all there.”

Read more Big Fat Idiot

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

There are several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR’s Ombdusman, Alica Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR’s ban on using the word “torture” to describe the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics. Given the utter vapidity of her rationale (”there are two sides to the issue. And I’m not sure, why is it so important to call something torture?”), I was momentarily amazed to learn that she actually teaches “Media Ethics” to graduate students at Georgetown University (my amazement quickly dissipated once I recalled that this is the same institution that, until last year, paid Doug Feith — Doug Feith — to teach students “national security policy” and that Berkeley Law School has John Yoo “teaching law” to its students; next semester at Georgetown: Karl Rove teaches Civility in a Post-Partisan Age, Bill Kristol lectures on Accountability in Punditry, while David Gregory examines The Role of Intellect in Adversarial Questioning).

NPR’s “torture” ban and its Ombudsman’s incoherent defense of it has now turned into a significant controversy for NPR — and rightfully so. Yesterday, The Huffington Post trumpeted the controversy in a prominent headline all day long, focusing on Shepard’s refusal to be interviewed here. The media reporter Simon Owens wrote a long column on Shepard’s refusal to discuss her rationale with me despite my having been a primary critic of NPR’s policy (indeed, this controversy began several weeks ago when I noted the ample documentation from NPR Check of NPR’s steadfast refusal to use the word “torture” and the embarrassing contortions it employs to accomplish that).

Also, along with her On the Media appearance this weekend, Shepard went on another NPR-affiliated show — Patt Morrison’s KPCC Southern California Public Radio program — in a quality segment that included several good questions from Morrison (and even better ones from callers); a very well-compiled, illustrative and cringe-inducing montage of NPR’s repeatedly going out of its way to avoid calling Bush interrogation tactics “torture,” juxtaposed with an excerpt where NPR explicitly accused Iraqis in Sadr City of “using torture” against detainees; and, finally, the inclusion in the discussion of a Berkeley Professor of Linguistics explaining why it matters so much what the media does in this regard and how virtually all media around the world — other than what he called the “spineless U.S. media” — call these tactics “torture” (the KPCC program credits my criticisms of Shepard for catalyzing the controversy and the segment can be heard here). Amazingly, a caller asked Shepard about the advent of blogs and how it has diversified commentary, and in replying, Shepard put on her most condescending and self-glorifying voice to say this:

Read more Controversy

From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

Wanna hear a good Holocaust joke? Or a rib-tickler about lynching? How about starving Ethiopians? You’ll bust a gut.

I spent an eerie couple of hours recently on the wrong side of the sicko line, checking out hate sites and hate jokes. What’s the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead . . .

I won’t go on, but we have to think about this. Hate crimes and hate speech are, you could say, democracy’s paradox. Let’s start with a definition: An “ordinary crime” (as though there could ever be anything ordinary about, say, murder) morphs into a “hate crime” when it’s primary or, perhaps, entire point is to amplify speech, perfectly legal in and of itself, that targets and dehumanizes a particular group. Indeed, a hate crime is a perverted form of altruism in that it isn’t generally committed for personal gain, but rather, for social intimidation and control.

I would add that hate crimes also reflect values that are socially marginal. James von Brunn, who had once blogged that Hitler’s worst mistake was that he didn’t gas the Jews, walks into Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum with a rifle and opens fire, killing a security guard. The judgment against him is instant and visceral: He’s a violent loner nut. Look at his eyes. He’s not there. His humanity has been replaced with an ideology of hate. And this judgment begins to generate both fear and counter-hatred.

I confess to those emotions, especially as I wandered through some of the sites that would have stoked von Brunn’s fires, like, oh, tightrope.cc, with a logo that proclaims, “It’s not illegal to be White . . . yet” and flaunts an illustration of a hand holding a noose.

Click on “n-jokes” and you’ll find the humor equivalent of snuff porn or graphic photos of dead Iraqis: a hundred or so short jokes, which I took the trouble to categorize. The biggest bunch of them, a good 30 percent, could be called “murder is funny” jokes, celebrating lynching, gas ovens, starvation and he-men, a la von Brunn, shooting off their rifles. The second largest category, about 25 percent, sucked humor out of the gross dehumanization of the target subjects (African-Americans, Africans, Jews, Latinos and Chinese). A small group of jokes extolled the joys of slave ownership, with the rest of them resurrecting various long-dead ethnic and racial stereotypes.

Read more Paradox

From The NY Times
By Bob Herbert

Stephen Johns, known as “Big John,” was opening the door for a man he thought was just an elderly visitor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington when he was shot dead on Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Johns was a security guard. The bullet that killed him was a reminder of the continuing menace of bigotry and violence that pervades this country — and that we insist on underestimating.

The authorities have identified an 88-year-old, hard-core white supremacist, James von Brunn, as the killer. Our knee-jerk tendency is to comfort ourselves by declaring that this guy is so freakish, so far out of the American mainstream, that he is not representative of much of anything. Sane people are not violently obsessed with blacks and Jews. The murder was a tragic aberration. After all, this is a country that only recently elected an African-American president.

So let’s mop up the blood from the museum floor, and try to keep matters in perspective.

The problem when we think in terms of freaks and aberrations is that there are so many of them, which calls into question just how freakish or aberrational they really are. Was it an aberration when, according to authorities, Scott Roeder went into the lobby of a Lutheran church in Wichita two weeks ago and shot Dr. George Tiller to death? Hardly. The murder of Dr. Tiller, who was the nation’s most prominent provider of so-called late-term abortions, was the fourth assassination of an abortion provider in the U.S. since 1993.

Read more Us

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

“Them Jews aren’t going to let President Obama talk to me.”
— the Rev. Jeremiah Wright

“I hate gay people … ”
— Tim Hardaway, former NBA star

“A Third World country.”
— Tom Tancredo, former Colorado representative, speaking of Miami

“She’s frightening. And she’s racist.”
— Dennis Baxley, former executive director, Christian Coalition of Florida, speaking of Judge Sonia Sotomayor

“Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”
— Glenn Beck, talk show host, to Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim

“Fifty years ago they’d have you hanging upside down with a (expletive) fork up your (expletive).”
— Michael Richards, comedian, to an African-American in his audience

I’ve always liked this place.

“Enjoy” is not a word one uses in connection with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, but I’ve always found a visit here conducive to contemplation and reflection. So it is even on a fog-shrouded morning when you can’t get in, when yellow tape rings off the entrance, police vehicles sit with lights flashing and armed security stands watch.

Read more Hate

From Salon
By Joe Conason

Acts of madness like the killing of George Tiller and Stephen T. Johns can be too easily dismissed as the work of disturbed individuals and then subsumed in the usual rumble of recrimination between left and right. But if we are to understand the deeper implications of those acts of murder, what must be examined is their origin in the shadow world of white nationalism.

Nobody knows more about the movements that spawned the alleged gunmen than Leonard Zeskind, who has spent most of a lifetime observing, analyzing and opposing racism and anti-Semitism in America and abroad. Now he has distilled those hard and dangerous decades of work into “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,” a magisterial new book that explains how and why racial hatred became and remains a significant political force in American society.

To Zeskind, the most recent attacks only represent the latest stage in a long wave of extremist violence dating back to the early 1980s, marked by assassinations, bombings, bank robberies and other crimes that were largely ignored by the mainstream media because they often occurred in distant rural locations. “The reason we’re talking about this incident,” he said “is because it happened in Washington, D.C., at the Holocaust Museum, instead of somewhere in the backwoods of Montana.”

According to Zeskind, “the level of racist and anti-Semitic violence was much worse during the Reagan era, back in the ’80s, when we had the Order, which killed [Jewish radio host] Alan Berg, and certainly in the ’90s when Clinton was president, when we had Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, the Aryan Republican Army robbing banks, the Phineas Priesthood shooting people. Those years saw much more of these kind of attacks than what we are seeing right now.”

Read more Assassination

From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.”

Read more Hate

From Salon
By Robert Reich

I poked around Washington Friday, talking with friends on the Hill who confirmed the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging healthcare bill.

You know why, of course. They don’t want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better healthcare at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, “unfair” is anything that undermines their profits.

So they’re pulling out all the stops — pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called moderate Republicans who say they’re in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they’ve been doing for years. A third is to bind the public plan to the same rules that private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.

Max Baucus, chair of Senate Finance (now exactly why does the Senate Finance Committee have so much say over healthcare?) hasn’t shown his cards, but staffers tell me he’s more than happy to sign on to any one of those. But Baucus is waiting for more support from his colleagues, and none of the three proposals has emerged as the leading candidate for those who want to kill the public option without showing they’re killing it.

Read more Attack

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

The same right-wing extremists who drove the country into the ground continue to attack Sonia Sotomayor with blatant and ugly stereotypes. She’s one of those judges selected “for their readiness to discard the rule of law whenever emotion moves them,” claims the highly credible legal scholar Karl Rove today in The Wall St. Journal. According to Rove — whose profound respect for the rule of law is legendary — she makes decisions based on her emotional “concern for the downtrodden, the powerless and the voiceless” rather than legal considerations. Because of her background, ethnicity and gender, hordes of people who know nothing about her and haven’t bothered to examine what she’s actually done as a judge instantaneously believe this caricature, while the media keeps repeating these accusations without, as usual, any critical scrutiny.

As happens virtually always, the facts are now starting to be examined and they reveal just how deliberately false are these right-wing smears. They just make things up without having any idea if they’re true. Not only is that caricature of Sotomayor false, the opposite is true: if anything, Sotomayor’s flaw is that she is excessively legalistic in her approach. And the assumption — from both sides — that she is some sort of pure, doctrainnaire liberal seems quite dubious at best.

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne says that today “liberals would be foolish to embrace Sotomayor as one of their own because her record is clearly that of a moderate.” The New York Times’ Charlie Savage suggests that pro-choice groups are worried about how reliable a vote she will be. And Daphne Evitar thoroughly examines Sotomayor’s judicial record and concludes that liberals “may end up being disappointed with the president’s choice” because “it’s starting to sound like Obama nominated a highly capable technocrat.”

My writing about this issue from the start has not been based on my view that Sotomayor is the best choice for the Court. There is still too much unknown about her to reach a conclusion in that regard (though see this encouraging snippet of her at Oral Argument in a critical case). My interest has been due to the fact that the smears against her were both totally unrecognizable, driven by very ugly sentiments and enabled by reckless “reporting” methods.

Read more Anecdote

From The Raw Story

Former soldier Ralph Peters has carved out quite a niche for himself in the world of publishing. His work regularly lands on the pages of The New York Post and has cropped up in USA Today. He’s even a special contributor to Fox News.

But after today’s showing, in his latest column for the Journal of International Security Affairs, Mr. Peters seemingly treads very close to finding himself at odds with his journalistic colleagues.

After all, reporters don’t really like it when the editorial page calls for consideration of grinding them into bloody chunks as a matter of war policy.

In his latest essay, in a segment titled “The killers without guns,” Peters suggests that the media is responsible for “saving” Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, but that media had “failed to defeat” the U.S. government’s charge toward Iraq.

“Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar,” he gallingly charges.

Read more War Journalists