TPM does the day in 100 seconds

4 comments July 1st, 2009

Some of her fellow Repubs tiring of Michele Bachmann’s looney knocks on Census

6 comments July 1st, 2009

 

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, the darling of wingnuts who find Sarah Palin too intellectual, gets a LITTLE WHAT-FOR from several GOP colleagues.

Glenn Beck gives affirmative nod to guest who wants Osama bin Laden to attack America again

15 comments July 1st, 2009

 

 Just when I think guys like this can’t get any nuttier, they PROVE ME WRONG.

 Imagine the kind of howls we would hear if some liberal TV host played patty-cake with a guest who said he wants Osama bin Laden “to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.”

 UPDATE: Speaking of Osama bin Laden, The New Yorker SAYS he visited America for a few weeks in 1979.

 UPDATE II: Several of our Applesauce commenters want us to believe that Glenn Beck disagreed with, or somehow disowned, Michael Scheuer’s stated wish for another terrorist attack on America.

 But that’s not what happened.

 Scheuer said that “only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.”

 Beck’s immediate response was this: “Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.”

 Beck wasn’t disagreeing with Scheuer. Quite the opposite. He was merely saying that Osama would be a fool to arouse the kind of American anger that Scheuer said would follow another attack. That’s why he said “if I were him.”

 Watch it for yourself:

Speaking of Michael Jackson

2 comments July 1st, 2009

I’ve never been a big fan of the King of Pop, but I always liked this video, which is about 20 years old:

 UPDATE: Speaking further of Michael Jackson, the inimitable Rush Limbaugh employs the dubious logic of post hoc ergo procter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) to the dude’s life and career.

 El Rushbo says Jackson “flourished under Reagan, languished under Clinton and Bush and died under Obama.”

 Listen to it HERE.

Pluralities see Democrats as too liberal and Republicans as too conservative

10 comments July 1st, 2009

 

 My initial reaction to a story I ran across yesterday via the Drudge Report prompted me to misdirect my cynical political suspicions, an error that is very much unlike me.

 Drudge’s headline for the article at issue read: ”GALLUP: More Americans See Democratic Party as ‘Too Liberal.’”

 Upon reading the story, I at first suspected that Matt Drudge had resorted to his customary conservative bias in his headline. But then I noticed that he had simply used the same words the Gallup people used — which is actually more unsettling, since they’re supposed to be completely nonpartisan.

 In any event, the story (HERE) has much more to say than the headline suggests. It refers to a new Gallup Poll in which 46 percent of respondents say they consider the Democratic Party to be “too liberal” while 43 percent say the Republican Party is “too conservative.” Those percentages are virtually the same, considering the poll’s stated margin of error of three points.

 Another way of putting the case, it seems to me, is that the two parties are tied in the public’s measure of excessive ideological bent.

 Which brings us to the question of which party is more commonly seen as “about right” in its political views. On this one, the Democrats have the advantage (no matter Drudge’s suspected reluctance to draw attention to it).

 The poll shows that 42 percent of Americans think the political views of the Democratic Party are “about right,” but only 34 percent say that about the Republican Party.

 The report from Gallup adds this telling observation:

In fact, the 34% who say the GOP is about right is a new low since the question was first asked in 1992, and a far cry from November 1994 and November 2002, when majorities thought the Republicans’ views were appropriately balanced.