Xark!

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..."

Lunch hour report: Hersh on Iran NIE

(Editor's note) Say what you want about reporter Sy Hersh, but remember this: History gets the last word. His coverage of the Bush Administration's wars just keeps on getting confirmed -- months, even years later, yes, but that's the way things go in the world.

So what does Hersh have to say about the NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities? Here's a transcript of what he had to say to Wolf Blitzer on CNN last night (-dc)...

David Brock: Misinformation vs. motive

David Brock rewrote my operator's manual when he released The Republican Noise Machine in 2004. I'd spent years covering politics and grasped that the rules of the game, at least as I was playing it, were fixed in favor of political professionals who understood my world far better than I understood theirs.  Noise Machine explained the "how" of that better than anything I've read.

Links to that book and and to Brock's watchdog website, Media Matters for America, have appeared on Xark since its inception, so I was excited to attend his appearance Thursday night before The Alliance for Full Acceptance, Charleston's LGBT political group. There was nothing earthshaking about the presentation or the MMA highlights video the group screened: Brock is clearly working to help build a new coalition of progressive activists, and showing the flag in Charleston is part of that.

But I was fascinated by much of what he said during the Q&A, particularly his comments about the ways liberals/progressives are using decentralized networks to counter the power of Big Money and Big Media, and why Media Matters prefers not to talk about "bias"...

Karl Rove: It's the hookers, stupid

Dragnet: Larry Craig

Cheney on Iraq, 1994

Dick Cheney: Not part of Executive Branch

(Cartoonist note: I didn't really get to complete this one before I went to work this morning, so this updated, final version has some differences from the one I put up earlier today-- dc)

Preview: Dubya's long, hot summer

As the Buddhists say, karma is a bitch...

Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush Administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when nothing seemed to go right.

"It's just gotten steadily worse," he said. "There was some point during the Iranian hostage crisis, the gasoline rationing, the malaise speech, the sweater, the rabbit" -- Gingrich was referring to Carter's suggestion that Americans wear sweaters rather than turn up their thermostats, and to the "attack" on Carter by what cartoonists quickly portrayed as a "killer rabbit" during a fishing trip -- "that there was a morning where the average American went, 'You know, this really worries me.'" He added, "You hire Presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don't have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to draw the country together to meet great challenges you can't avoid thinking about."

-- Jeffrey Goldberg interviews former House Speaker (and current presidential hopeful)  Newt Gingrinch in his "Letter From Washington: PARTY UNFAITHFUL, The Republican implosion," from the June 4th issue of The New Yorker.

[S]ome big money players up from Texas recently paid a visit to their friend in the White House. The story goes that they got out exactly one question, and the rest of the meeting consisted of The President in an extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he’s doing things would be OK…etc., etc. This is called a “bunker mentality” and it’s not attractive when a friend does it. When the friend is the President of the United States, it can be downright dangerous. Apparently the Texas friends were suitably appalled, hence the story now in circulation.

-- From the April 30th issue of the subscription-only Nelson Report, a Washington insider newsletter, quoted by Think Progress and the Huffington Post...

Today you disparage us for opposing a massive amnesty program that endangers our economy and national security.  Today you even embrace the religion of global warming, a stunning shift from prior policy (your administration even went to the Supreme Court and argued correctly that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant).

What's a conservative to do?

-- Mark Levin, the National Review Online, May 31, addresses the President.

The other thing that's interesting to me is the degree to which the Right isn't even rational about this anymore. It doesn't even make arguments anymore about this or that part of the bill, it's just "We don't want any kind of immigration reform because it's going to legitimize 12 million people who are here and, oh by the way, aren't leaving. So let's just build a fence, and that's it." That seems to be the essence now of the conservative majority's immigration policy.

-- Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal's famously conservative editorial board, addressing the board on May 22.

We hereby challenge the Journal’s editors to debate the immigration bill in a neutral venue with a moderator of their choosing ...  It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t “rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of one of their editorial meetings last week.

-- The editors of the National Review call out their Wall Street brethren for an East Coast Establishment conservative smack-down, May 31...

Longtime readers of this blog know that the Wall Street Journal is notorious for refusing to acknowledge its factual errors in editorials about immigration policy and for tarring its opponents as anti-immigrant racists. Will they rise to NR's challenge or continue to smear amnesty opponents from the safety of their Manhattan offices?

-- Michelle Malkin, treating the WSJ with a tone of scorn usually reserved for The New York Times. According to a poll on the post, 95 percent of her readers think the National Review editors would win.

Laura Ingraham "takes the gloves off." Doesn't she want to "do what's right for America"? Finally, conservatives get mad at this president - for all the conservative reasons we're now familiar with. It only took six years of betrayal to get there, but, hey guys, welcome aboard. I find myself echoing Glenn Reynolds:

Heck, I'm basically pro-immigration and I find the Administration's arguments for the bill sufficiently unpersuasive and insulting that I'm leaning against it on that basis alone.

It's the arrogance and condescension that finally makes your blood boil.

-- Conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan, blogging for The Atlantic, May 31

Message To The Left:  I'm not saying you should impeach him, I'm just sayin', you know, go with your hearts.

-- Conservative blogger Ace of Spades sums up his feelings about the president, May 31.

This is his legacy. Even his own supporters now despise him, even his own samurai are deserting him, even the people who could aid him are pushed aside. And we've got 19 months to go before January 2009.

FOX News: "We're not making this up!"

Fox & Friends apparently spent Tuesday morning covering a parody news story as a real news story. Says that guy who sits on the left side of the couch, "We're not making this up!... We're not being duped. I looked this up on a couple of Web sites up there."

And later in the day, Lou Dobbs picked up that erroneous "ham sandwich" fact from the Fox program, too (it was introduced in the Associated Content parody. The original incident involved a ham steak). Dobbs may not get his marching orders directly from Roger Ailes, but he's got his populist outrage down pat: "Mr. Superintendent, may I say, you're out of your cotton-pickin' mind."

Somebody. Shoot. Me..

Marshall on US attorneys

Joshua Micah Marshall, the guy out ahead of the mainstream media on reporting the US attorneys firing story:

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.

This much is already clear in the record. And we're now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

It's yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we've been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they're not even really denying the wrongdoing. They're ignoring the point or at least pleading 'no contest' and saying it's okay.

"This Pres?"

More.

Gay marriage: Hey, it worked last time

News item this morning:

STATESBORO, Ga. (AP) - President Bush has for months cast the midterm elections as a choice about just two issues: taxes and terrorism. Now, with polls predicting bleak results for Republicans, he is trying to fire up his party by decrying gay marriage.

"For decades, activist judges have tried to redefine America by court order," Bush said Monday. "Just this last week in New Jersey, another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage. We believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman, and should be defended."

The line earned Bush by far his most sustained applause at a rally of 5,000 people aimed at boosting former GOP Rep. Max Burns' effort to unseat a Democratic incumbent. In this conservative rural corner of eastern Georgia, even children jumped to their feet alongside their parents to cheer and clap for nearly 30 seconds - a near-eternity in political speechmaking...

...One alternative, civil unions, is an idea Bush supports. But he ignored that on the way to portraying the New Jersey decision as the kind of thing America should do without.

Photoshop cartoon originally published here on June 5.

Because everything needs a logo

Anyone who wishes to use this image elsewhere is free to do so. Link-love is good karma, but never required...

UPDATE: As Dewey reminds me, the better way to do this is to say "This image is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-noncommercial-sharealike license."

UPDATE NO. 2: You asked for it, you've got it: FOLEYGATE T-shirts and stickers are now available at Janet's (Jeda's) Cafepress store Guerilla Muse in the "Xark & Other Blog Blather" section. And her reworking of my original logo is brighter, sharper and... better.