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The continuing death of irony

Poor Cal Thomas. In trying to argue a conservative Christianist case this week against the Iowa Supreme Court's wise decision on gay marriage, he wound up satirizing himself yet again.

When Meredith Willson wrote the wildly popular musical "The Music Man" half a century ago, Harold Hill proclaimed trouble had come to River City, Iowa in the form of a pool hall, which he claimed would corrupt young people unless the local citizens bought the musical instruments he was selling and got their kids into a marching band. He promised that playing music would keep kids from "fritterin' away their mealtime, suppertime, chore time, too" ...

Neither Willson, nor his mythical character Hill, could have foreseen what "trouble" the Iowa Supreme Court has brought on the state (and potentially the nation) when it unanimously ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry "does not substantially further any important government objective"...

(snip)

The battle over same-sex marriage is on the way to being lost. For conservatives who still have faith in the political system to reverse the momentum, you are — to recall Harold Hill — "closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge."

Thomas' problem? If you'll recall your Broadway history, The Music Man is a story about a con man. That "trouble" they had right there in River City? There wasn't any. Just a con man trying to sell musical instruments by manipulating a bunch of rubes via drummed-up fears of a corrupting influence.

Amy Goodman arrested in St. Paul

Journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now is an honest, sensible, principled journalist and American.

What the hell is going on in Minnesota?

The Birth of Palin

(Click on images to see larger size. Click here to download original)

Photoshop cartoons by Dan Conover, via Xark's Creative Commons license.

Which one is smarterer?

Oh, I get it: It's because he's BLACK!

This pin was available this weekend at a vendor booth at the Texas State Republican Convention.

TPM called the Texas GOP and got a disavowal of knowledge from state GOP political director Hans Klingler.

"We had hundreds of vendors at the convention," Klingler said. "I don't know what the merchandise is, we don't check the merchandise."

Klingler added that the party would have done something if it had been brought to their attention at the time. "We wouldn't have let him sell it."

Fair enough. But as one commenter put it yesterday, "I guess we know who's getting the douchebag vote."

'You don't know what you're talking about'

Chris Matthew's talk-over-the-guest interviewing style on Hardball has always been nails on a chalkboard for me, but this might be the first time it ever came across as utterly appropriate. Kevin James, a right-wing talker from California, came on the show Thursday after President Bush's Knesset speech to talk about Israel, appeasement and Barack Obama, and his aggressive platitudes prompted Matthews to run a history check on his ass.

It immediately becomes clear that James doesn't have a clue who Neville Chamberlain was, or what happened in Munich. Partition of Czechoslovakia and dialog with Palestinians the Iranians? "It's the same thing!" he says.

What follows might be the greatest smack-down of a self-important, shallow idiot ever witnessed on national TV. Listen to the high-school essay-test evasion ploys and the empty wingnut counter-attack maneuver ("Thirty-eight or 39, Chris? Which one do you want?").

You've got to be morally and intellectually bankrupt if Tweety makes you look small in comparison.

GOP geography

Another great forward from Sabine...

FOX ATTACKS: Going after Obama

The FOX VIRUS...

Even Chris Wallace gets disgusted by it...

Just for context on the M.O. of Rupert Murdock's corporate news philosophy, The Investigators meet The Buzzsaw...

No, of course we're not surprised. I'm sure they originally prepared for an all-out assault on Hillary Clinton, but they retrenched, retooled, and sent their minions out after Barack Obama instead. And let's face it: The GOP is going to continue this steady drumbeat of sleaze from now through the election, supposedly at arm's length via their "remote operative," Roger Ailes, at the FOX News Division.

Our job is to recognize it, name it, talk about it, share it. Human beings, like many living things, are quorum sensors (bacteria do it chemically; we do it psychologically). So it isn't just the quality of the signals we receive from our environments that matter -- the number of signals of certain types that we receive quite literally count toward shaping our image of reality.

Ailes, Rove and others on the Right understood this many years ago.

Which is why I say: Share these videos. Embed them. E-mail them. Every time you use the power of human relationships and social networking to spread this exposure of media sleaze you are acting as an antidote to the sickening virus FOX keeps deliberately injecting into our culture. We have to become D.I.Y. media antibodies in defense of our society. We must inoculate ourselves against bullshit. When you show a thing that attempts to be secret, you remove some of its power.

To clarify: I have no quarrel with anyone who opposes Obama for policy reasons. Don't like his ideas about Iraq, or social security, or economics, or taxation? Fine. I disagree, but I respect reasonable disagreement.

But if you think that Obama is a Muslim, or a black racist, or a shadowy figure who secretly hates America? Conversation over.  You've just defined yourself out of  relevancy. My suggestion? Take another look at why you believe what you believe, and then rejoin the rest of us in our imperfect lurching toward a better future.

Hat tips: Janet, Revere at Effect Measure, MoveOn.org, Robert Greenwald.

We report, you decide

Ed Cone: "It's almost as if they were reading from a script..."