Hate! Envy! Spite! (and other conservative values)

When Barack Obama was surprisingly named the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, well, one could almost hear the heads exploding across the "Frank Burns Wing" of the nutosphere that currently makes up the core of the conservative movement. Funny thing is, they agree with the terrorists.

Some things are best left without comment from yours truly, particularly the ridiculous reactions from the Greek chorus over Obama receiving the award. So, here's a sampling of the pro-America love showed by the spiteful right:

"Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. A year later, he was out of power and the Soviet Union had dissolved." Bill Kristol

"The Nobel Peace Prize should be turned down by Barack Obama and given... to the Tea Party goers and the 9-12 Project." Glenn Beck

"(Obama) has to turn it down -- because it is such a joke -- that he'll turn it down and it's the only way for him make a win out of this. Only his arrogance will stop him from doing it." Glenn Beck (himself an authority on arrogance)

“The Nobel gang just suicide-bombed themselves. Gore, Carter, Obama, soon Bill Clinton. See a pattern here? They are all leftist sell-outs. George Bush liberates 50 million Muslims in Iraq, Reagan liberates hundreds of millions of Europeans and saves parts of Latin America. Any awards?” Limbaugh says “Obama gives speeches trashing his own country and for that gets a prize, which is now worth as much as whatever prizes they are putting in Cracker Jacks these days.” Rush Limbaugh, in an email to Newsweek.

"I think that everybody is laughing. Our president is a worldwide joke. Folks, do you realize something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about, and that is he doesn't deserve the award. Now that's hilarious, that I'm on the same side of something with the Taliban, and that we all are on the same side as the Taliban." Limbaugh

Now Barack, Im really happy for you, and imma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time! Kanye West (oops, sorry!)

"We all know what the Nobel Prize committee is ever since Yasir Arafat won. It's a radical leftist front group that hijacked Alfred Nobel's prize." Michael Savage.

"I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota." Erick Erickson, RedState.com

"It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights." Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele

"Before they break out the champagne at the White House, they may want to pause over the fact that Obama now shares this honor with Mohammed el-Baradei, Yasser Arafat, and flagrant liar Rigoberta Menchu Tum." Mona Charen, National Review

"Europe wants to reverse the American Revolution and re-colonize us, and it sees in Obama a kindred spirit willing to do its bidding." Dick Morris

"What do Barack Obama and Yassir Arafat have in common? They both hung out with anti-Semites who think Israel should be pushed into the sea. Oh, yeah—and they both were given the Nobel Prize for Peace." Michael Graham

"This makes three times, incidentally, in just seven years that the committee’s turned the Peace Prize into a “f*** Bush” award by bestowing it on a liberal American Democrat." Allahpundit

"He's sided with Marxists Castro, Chavez, Morales and Ortega. ... Obama's bankrupted the US economy and destroyed the morale of our military. No wonder he was awarded the Nobel." Gateway Pundit

"If Obama had an ounce of real humility, he’d refuse to accept the award." Michelle Malkin

"The Nobel committee is preaching at Americans, but they won’t be deceived. He should decline it and then ask to be considered again in three or four years when he has a record." Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton

"Obama did make a big show of appeasing Iran during its election crisis.  Perhaps they should change the award’s name to the Neville rather than the Nobel." Ed Morrissey


"I don't know what it does for us, for the country. I don't care what the French think of us and I could care less what the people in Oslo think of us." Republican strategist Chris LaCivita

"(Obama) got the prize for "de-emphasizing defense in favor of multi-national cooperation." Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)

"Congratulations to President Obama on his prize. I'm not sure what the international community loved best; his waffling on Afghanistan, pulling defense missiles out of Eastern Europe, turning his back on freedom fighters in Honduras, coddling Castro, siding with Palestinians against Israel, or almost getting tough on Iran." Rep. Gresham Barrett (R-SC)

"It's not Republicans that are throwing their lot in with terrorists -- it's the White House." Michael Goldfarb


"If today's headlines said, "Barack Obama Wins Yasser Arafat Prize," that would be perfect." Andy McCarthy

Obama's hope of achieving peace was all that was required, presumably making countless Miss Universe contestants equally eligible." Former Bush spokesman Tony Fratto


"Most people actually tend to think the world is a more dangerous place than, say, it was a year ago." Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)

Again, why do Conservatives hate America?

Thursday Tweeting

And here's a look at the week that was (so far), via the LTR Twitter page...

• First, those tighty-righties are really getting their undies in a bunch. When they're not rooting for this country to crumble, or plotting ways to overthrow our duly elected government, they're out there seemingly doing everything except for the job they were elected to do. Like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who's still willing to torpedo the effort in his continuous quest to make it "Obama's Waterloo." How about Rep. John Linder (R-GA), who compared the Obama administration to "Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy." Debating Hate Crimes, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), the guy who held up the "What Bill?" sign during Obama's address to Congress last month, has really lost what's left of his mind, rambling on in one speech about bestiality, sex with corpses, and how he once voted for a black man, to somehow prove that Republicans aren't racist (Rick Santorum would be so proud). Or Michelle Bachmann, who's still her usual crazy self.
• Gotta love RNC chairman Michael Steele. First, following a media event at the White House attended by an assortment of doctors, he claimed that the American Medical Organization "doesn't have credibility on health care reform." And then, as his party and its assortment of crazed lemmings have been attacking ACORN, turns out that Steele actually gave props to ACORN in an old speech. Amid all the bumbling of their beleaguered party chair, and his embarrassing attempts at setting GOP talking points, the rank and file have essentially told him to shut up. Moronic policy should be left in more able hands.
• Just the other night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann gave a blistering hour-long "Special Comment" on the sad state of America health care. As it turns out, voters prefer Obama's approach to health care over whatever it is the Republicans are trying to do/not to do, and why Obama's overall approval ratings are up 6%. Maybe it's because of things like this. And after have all thrown their hats in the ring in support of some kind of health care reform, it appears the GOP as a whole is ready to cave in.
• Allow me to give credit where credit is due. I'll admit that FAUX 'News' is doing well in the ratings. But an abundance of viewers does not make what they report any more credible. Repeating lies often enough does not miraculously turn them into the truth. If anything, they're doing nothing more than contributing to the death of real journalism. And soon enough, what comes up must come down, and people will get tired of the nonsense and start seeking out the truth. They'll especially tire of the various on-air circus geeks and perverts who seek to divide, rather than unite this country. Like Glenn Beck, who this week lost 19 more sponsors. In an interesting bit of irony, Beck, who has long had a history of making shit up, went after a site that tried to make shit up about him. As LBJ once said, make the bastard deny it. Things are so bad that all the pathetic GOP talking points in the world couldn't keep Sean Hannity from getting his ass handed to him by Michael Moore.
  
  And it seems as if the entire Murdoch media empire has it in for our President. Just this week, the company's New York Post fires the editor who dared criticize an outrageously racist Obama-Stimulus editorial cartoon that originated from the paper earlier this year. But I guess FAUX isn't all bad. Shepard Smith jumped off the reservation when he actually swatted down right-wing lies about health care reform. Hmm... they must have missed that one.
• Turn off that FAUX garbage and start stimulating your brain. Here's 15 Podcasts That Will Make You Smarter, as submitted by a reader.
• Perhaps the more high-profile right-wing pundits are seeking out new careers after the glitter fades. Rush Limbaugh (subject of what appears to be a new biography) is looking to buy his very own NFL team, the hopeless St. Louis Rams. Yes, the same Rush Limbaugh who seems to have it in for black quarterbacks, and who once called basketball the "favorite sport of gangs." So, what's he gonna do about all those black people playing for the team? Nonetheless, if he actually succeeds in getting the Rams, just don't let him in to the team's medicine cabinet.
• So, the oft-wacky Conservapedia (which I'm almost convinced is a parody site) thinks there's too much liberal bias in the Bible. And they want to change all that by creating their own version, one that fits in to their own beliefs. Does this completely kill their argument that the Bible is the verbatim word of the Lord, rather than a book based on "The Word" as transcribed by biased scholars? Thankfully, the good folks at Twitter have done a great job in giving suggestions for the proposed "Conservative Bible."

So, what else is going on?

• Hey, did you know that the state of Mississippi actually subsidizes a low rated commercial right-wing talk show network? That's what Republicans consider 'welfare.'
• Happy birthday to Monty Python, still lookin' good at 40!
• Paste Magazine counts down Rachel Maddow's Ten Greatest Moments.
• Here's a rather interesting article about the many different web browsers on the market, and how each of them is doing in market share.
• Corrupt former congressman Tom Delay's a quitter, and is also hoping to avoid another upcoming reality show, Dancing Behind Bars.
• Move over, Chuck Norris. Step aside Sylvester Stallone. John Elway is now a bonafide terrorist fighter.
• The latest Rock Band game, featuring The Beatles, is obviously inspiring other artists to get in on the act. U2, after turning down an offer to appear in the game, is rethinking their stance. Not to be outdone, look for David Bowie and Iggy Pop to appear in a new Rock Band game - Lego Rock Band. Pop admitted that he always wanted to have the freedom of being a toy. Speaking of The Beatles, your humble blogger (that's me) has made it through most of the band's remastered catalog, and hopes to have a follow-up review coming soon. Consider yourself warned.
• Finally, Sarah Palin may be "Going Rogue", but Levi Johnston, who formerly was bangin' her daughter, is "going commando" in an upcoming issue Playgirl. Soon, ladies (and lots of gay men) across the land will see Johnston as only Bristol Palin has. That is, if they really, really want to.

Remember, you can follow all the fun at the Twitter page, updated daily.

It's official - Senator Al Franken

Well, it looks like the long wait is over. Almost.

ST. PAUL, Minn. - The Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered that Democrat Al Franken be certified as the winner of the state's long-running Senate race, paving the way for a resolution in the seven-month fight over the seat.

The high court rejected a legal challenge from Republican Norm Coleman, whose options for regaining the Senate seat are dwindling.

Justices said Franken, a comedian, actor, writer and former Air America Radio talk show host, is entitled to the election certificate he needs to assume office. With Franken and the usual backing of two independents, Democrats will have a big enough majority to overcome Republican filibusters.

Coleman hasn't ruled out seeking federal court intervention.

(continued)

Notta lotta Limbaugh love

With the conservative movement currently in a state of disarray and seemingly leaderless, it seems that quite a few people are attempting to fill the void.

Most prominent of these is radio conservojock Rush Limbaugh. While many rank-and-file conservative Repbublicans deny that Limbaugh is the figurehead of the party, and act offended at suggestions from the left that this is the case (remember when they tried to claim people like Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore spoke for all Democrats?), the radio host has maintained a rather high profile as of late, going so far as to challenge President Obama to a debate on his show (which Obama rightfully ignored, probably after laughing his ass off). Like it or not, with no stronger direction currently existing for the GOP, they have become, in essence, the Party of Limbaugh.

And judging from the results of a recent CBS News poll, the GOP better get their act together. And fast. It seems that Limbaugh is not as popular as the extreme right wingers think. According to the poll, Limbaugh’s favorable rating stands at just 19 percent of Americans. The number, however, increases drastically when taking into account conservatives, crabby old white men, Florida drug dealers, Brian Maloney and Limbaugh himself.

Obama's approval rating? Try three times that - 62 percent.

From CBS News:

Limbaugh’s unfavorable rating, meanwhile, stands at 40 percent, while 41 percent say they don’t know or don’t have an opinion. Not surprisingly, the conservative commentator, who has said he hopes that the president’s economic policies fail, is far more popular with Republicans – 47 percent view him favorably – than with Democrats, just seven percent of whom view him favorably.

The poll also found that Republicans are relatively pessimistic about the future of their party. Just 40 percent believe the party is going in the right direction, while nearly as many – 36 percent – say it is going in the wrong direction. Among all Americans, just 27 percent say the party is going in the right direction and 48 percent say it is going in the wrong direction.

Perhaps the tide is indeed turning, and people are tiring of right-wing carnival barkers and their continuous attempts to divide and conquer America. People are sick of the bitching and kiddie games and want results, not rhetoric.

Weighty matters and the circular firing squad

Since there's not a whole heck of a lot to write about today, I thought I'd share with you a rather amusing political melodrama that's been unraveling over the past week or so. And what better than a genuine Republican cat fight?

These days, it's not much fun being a conservative Republican. Lots of backbiting. Tons of denial. And nonstop pouting. Sucks to be them.

And with all this negativity abound, it was a given that all hell would break loose as everything was reduced to inane childish name-calling. Hey, with these people, it usually does. Enter Laura Ingraham.

Ingraham is your typical right-wing radio blowhard. Syndicated show. Lots of punditry gigs on FOX News. Likes to dabble in nasty rhetoric and low-level insults. And her latest target is a fellow Republican, the daughter of her party's most recent presidential nominee - Meghan McCain, daughter of Sen. John McCain. All shooters, please form a circle now.

During the crazy election season last year, Meghan McCain stepped into the limelight to do all she could to help her old man in his uphill quest to become president. Hey, that's cool. I'm sure any one of us would do the same for our dads. She also started blogging about life on the campaign trail, in an effort to appeal to her own twenty-something demographic (a serious weak spot for Republicans). She was also a regular on the talk show circuit as she stumped for dear old dad.

Truth be told, it's quite difficult, even for those on the left, to dislike Meghan McCain. How could you? While it is certainly tempting to loathe her based on who her father is, she seemed to transcend that. She added an aura of warmth to the often cold and shallow persona of the McCain/Palin ticket. Her demeanor contrasted that of her father, who came across as an out-of-touch grouch, and her mother, icy (and even blonde) enough to be cast as the female lead in an Alfred Hitchcock flick. Meghan, on the other hand, comes across as friendly and genuine, as if she didn't really ask for all the hoopla orbiting her old man last year but made the most of it. Just a typical 24 year-old. And unlike the taverage gloomy wingnut, she has an air of positive enthusiasm about her. She never did get nasty and start flinging mud like many of her old man's paid underlings. Perhaps the party ran the wrong McCain.

With the election season over, and her defeated pop back in the Senate, she has turned her blogging thing into a full-time occupation, working for hot website The Daily Beast. Sure, many of her columns are a bit fluffy, such as complaining about how the campaign juggernaut put a damper on her love life. But more notably, she has continued in her quest to paint a big smiley face on the otherwise dour GOP, appealing to her peers with the bright side of Republicanism, and some ideas to work through the current malaise surrounding the movement. Though she doesn't take the low road and fire snide cheap shots toward the people she disagrees with, she has occasionally taken the lunatic fringe of the conservative movement to task. She is repelled by the nastier nature of pundits like Ann Coulter, whom she recently referred to as the "poster woman for the most extreme side of the Republican Party."

"If figureheads like Ann Coulter are turning me off, then they are definitely turning off other members of my generation as well," she wrote.

Pretty constructive criticism there. No nasty insults. No low blows. A very fair take, I'd say. To her credit, Coulter took it all in stride. The same, unfortunately, couldn't be said for Ingraham, who was not mentioned by McCain. In fact, until Ingraham went on the offensive, McCain had never even heard of her.

On her radio show, Ingraham played back parts of an interview that McCain did with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, in which McCain said, "I think there's an extreme in both parties and I hate extreme. I don't understand. I have friends that are the most radically conservative and radically liberal people possibly ever and we all get along. We can find a middle ground."

So, did Ingraham respond by countering McCain's remarks in a substantive manner? Of course not, silly. Instead, Ingraham mocked McCain, using a faux Valley-girl voice:

"Ok, I was really hoping that I was going to get that role in the 'Real World', but then I realized that, well, they don't like plus-sized models. They only like the women who look a certain way. And on this 50th anniversary of Barbie, I really have something to say."

So, just as before, what we get is not spirited debate or substantial reasoning. Instead, we get fat teeny-bopper jokes. Delivered by a woman who should know better.

Perhaps this is how people like Ingraham view the outside world from a rather, dare I say, elitist perch. If you're not Hollywood-type thin (i.e. a skeleton with a loose skin wrapper), then your just some low-life porker. What kind of message does this send to the women that may actually be listening to her radio show?

McCain shot back. On her blog, she wrote, "I expected substantive criticism from conservative pundits for my views, particularly my recent criticism of Ann Coulter. That is the nature of political discourse, and my intent was to generate discussion about the current problems facing the Republican Party. Unfortunately, even though Ingraham is more than 20 years older than I and has been a political pundit for longer, almost, than I have been alive, she responded in a form that was embarrassing to herself and to any woman listening to her radio program who was not a size 0."

On her Twitter page, she gave some words of encouragement to her peers. "To all my girls out there. Don't let anyone make you feel bad about your body! I love my curves and you should love yours too."

And on ABC's "The View," McCain all but told Ingraham to 'kiss my fat ass.' All Ingraham could muster in response was to call her "a useful idiot," whatever that means. We can all safely say that, in this case, McCain won.

What makes all this even more ridiculous is that Meghan McCain is not what most people would consider fat. Admittedly being a size 8 (up to 10 during the crazy campaign season), she's what many of us normal rank-and-file consider to be average.

And it's pretty sad that people like Ingraham think all women who possess curvier figures than her are obese. Especially considering that there are undoubtedly many, many women who would normally agree with her that would love to be down to a size 8.

What's telling, though, is that rather than take McCain to task and challenge her on substance, Ingraham, using her shock-and-awe conservojock radio schtick, had to take the low road. Sadly, I'm not even sure why I'm surprised.

I'm certain many hardcore conservative Republicans dislike Meghan McCain because, although her writing isn't necessarily 'weighty' in itself, she, like RNC chairman Michael Steele, has recently come forward to condemn the nasty rhetoric that has circulated in place of constructive ideas, especially at a time when they're needed most. And people like Ingraham just proved that point.

Without making this all sound like I'm writing an essay on a Sir Mix-A-Lot song, let me just it say again. Meghan McCain is not fat. Actually, she looks pretty damn good. Hey, I'd take her over the typical stick-figure Hollywood waif any day. I'm probably not alone. Using the entertainment industry as an example, I would think that more men would consider, say, recent Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet (very far from fat but given much grief by the media over the years in regard to her curvier-than-her-peers figure) sexier than the numerous weight-obsessed celebrity skeletons we often see splashed across publications displayed in the supermarket checkout lanes. The types of women who feel they must be P.O.W.-type thin in order to be considered attractive. And if they're taking that message to an extreme, letting it affect their self-confidence, what about their fans? This is what leads to things like anorexia, bulimia and substance abuse.

In the end, it's not what one's shell looks like, it's how one carries it around. If Meghan McCain is happy with her figure (and damn right she should be), then that great. More power to her. Paraphrasing an old Rod Stewart song, she wears it well.

Limbaugh: The tail wags the dog

If you had doubts that the Republican Party wasn't a complete mess thus far, well, let me give you even more evidence of it.

Following the antics of Fat Bastard, er... Rush Limbaugh at this past weekend's CPAC gathering of bitter right-wingers, recently elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele put his foot in his mouth, telling all what he really thinks of the pill-popping radio talker, got roasted over the coals by Fat Daddy himself, and slinked back to make a half-hearted apology.

Essentially, Michael Steele has no spine, and certainly no balls. Congratulations, GOP! You now have your very own Terry McAuliffe!

Here's the Politico.com account:

Steele told CNN host D.L. Hughley in an interview aired Saturday night: “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh — his whole thing is entertainment. He has this incendiary — yes, it's ugly.”

Then, Steele realized on what side his bread is buttered:

Steele, who won a hard-fought chairman's race on Jan. 30, told Politico he telephoned Limbaugh after his show on Monday afternoon and hoped that they would connect soon.

“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not."

“I’m not going to engage these guys and sit back and provide them the popcorn for a fight between me and Rush Limbaugh,” Steele added. “No such thing is going to happen. … I wasn’t trying to slam him or anything.”

And here's the retort from Jabber the Hut:

Okay, so I am an entertainer, and I have 20 million listeners, 22 million listeners because of my great song-and-dance routines here. Yes, said Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, I'm incendiary, and yes, it's ugly. Michael Steele, you are head of the RNC. You are not head of the Republican Party. Tens of millions of conservatives and Republicans have nothing to do with the RNC and right now they want nothing to do with it, and when you call them asking them for money, they hang up on you.

So yes, as much as the Republican Party tries to claim otherwise, they are so destitute after losing the Presidency and Congress in the past few years that they have essentially named a pill-popping ex-Top 40 disc jockey as their unofficial messiah. That's funny.

And one of the great things about not being a Republican is that I can freely write whatever the hell I want about that drug-addicted, child-raping, racist, hate-mongering Nazi gasbag, unlike other bloggers who have their heads buried so far up Limbaugh's ass that all they see is what he had for lunch. And boy, that freedom sure feels good.

A campaign for the ages, and why Barack Obama should be president

Believe it or not, this will all be (hopefully) over one week from today. And what a long strange trip it's been.

If current trends, polling numbers and momentum are correct, the United States of America will do itself a great favor by electing the man who even General Colin Powell, a Republican, calls a 'transitional' figure, Barack Obama. And it could change the course of our nation for the better. That's not small talk. I honestly believe that great things could happen under an Obama Administration.

At the beginning of the year, prior to the primaries, I didn't really have a horse in the race. I was repelled by the media's apparent anointing of Hillary Clinton as the potential nominee, with Obama as the runner-up. I turned away from Clinton for many reasons. I don't dislike Clinton. As a matter of fact, I gained more respect for her in recent months, and would have had no problem voting for her if she had gotten the nomination. But out of the gate, she was too mean, too establishment, too much of a suckup and quite frankly, while I was a strong supporter of her husband, I preferred a candidate not named Clinton or Bush. And I liked Obama, and was inspired by his own personal story, but after being burned by the lackadaisical campaign of John Kerry in 2004, I thought he'd get absolutely creamed in the primaries and general election. He seemingly didn't stand a chance.

But I felt compelled to settle on someone. And I thought that John Edwards, the vice presidential nominee from four years ago, had a compelling message. I disregarded the fact that he came across as much more conservative while serving as the senator from South Carolina. Politicians in deep red states have to do that. Lyndon Johnson and Al Gore were moderate-conservative southern senators that turned out to be much more liberal when broken from those restraints. This year, Edwards pushed a strong, populist, working-class platform, acknowledging what most discovered - that the 'trickle-down economics' philosophy that favors the wealthy at the expense of virtually everyone else almost always leads to financial turmoil, as it did in the 20's and 80's.

But anything could happen in the primaries. Edwards ran an aggressive third place, though Clinton and Obama sucked all the air out of the room. It was definitely an uphill battle. He eventually gave up, and soon admitted to an extramaritial affair that had started to surface during the primaries. I felt deceived. If he had that skeleton in the closet, he had no right to run in the first place until he totally came clean and put it all on the table for the voters to decide. When Edwards ended his campaign, the last of the longshots to fall by the wayside, I had to settle on another horse. By that time, I had really started to like the idea of a President Obama.

The big surprise in the primaries was that Obama got better as the campaign rolled on. Much better. I give him a ton of credit for taking on the most powerful and most aggressive political machine of our time, that of the Clintons. Hillary threw everything she had at him, and at times got rather nasty, as I assumed she would. I don't blame her too much - if Obama was to be the nominee, he had to be tested. And he passed that test, as far as I was concerned. He was confident, charismatic, intelligent, and had a highly organized campaign with a ground game unsurpassed in political history. Obama and his crew took the best idea of Howard Dean's surprising 2004 run, a mostly tech-saavy people-powered movement, and refined it into a massive grassroots juggernaut. He didn't have a gang behind him - he had a whole army!

This massive effort, and the fact that this was a relatively unknown young black Chicago politician with the unlikely name of Barack Obama who attracted people like flies to honey, really opened my eyes. And with a middle name like 'Hussein,' I knew this guy had to have balls of steel to get as far as fast as he had. To overcome perceived shallow racism and xenophobia in post-9/11 America really says something about Obama's perseverernce and appeal. He wasn't going to let anything stand in his way. He was a fighter. John Kerry couldn't overcome a group of Republicans lying about his honorable military record, which banished him to the Hall of Shame for lightweight candidates, along with names like McGovern, Goldwater, Dole and Mondale. I was convinced that if Obama could overcome all the stuff that made him who he was, things shallow-minded people would hold against him, he could accomplish anything he wanted. I knew Obama could easily become our next president, and a very good one. I was sold.

After clinching the nomination, Obama ran a very strong campaign, and one that kept growing stronger by the day. A characteristic of a good president is one that can evolve, roll with the punches and adapt to a changing environment. He did so without losing focus on the big picture.

Obama also tried to stay above the fray. Kerry was done in by very nasty campaigning. Obama was attacked mercilessly for really stupid stuff, but he stood firm on his message. He wanted to give people a reason to vote for him, rather than against his opponent, in contrast to his rival, John McCain, who had no real compelling statement for his own bid. Sure, Obama could have flooded the airwaves with a ton of negative advertising, and could have easily attacked McCain on many personal points. They could have aggressively brought up the scandal involving S&L swindler Charles Keating, who bankrolled McCain's early political career and used his influence to get McCain and other senators to stonewall investigations into his shady dealings. Aside from a small web campaign, they opted to attack McCain on the issues. When McCain brought up former radical Bill Ayers, Obama could easily have brought up McCain cronies like convicted Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy, who at times openly advocated the assassination of federal agents. And that's what set the two camps apart. Obama and his minions have held back most of their possible negative attacks, perferring to challenge McCain's positions on the issues and his embrace of the policies of the increasingly unpopular President Bush. In this respect, Obama seemed to be running from a loftier, more confident plain, while McCain seemed like he was desperately gasping for air.

To his credit, McCain himself personally avoided bringing up Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Smart move. Sure, Wright is wild and outspoken, and the YouTube soundbytes, taken out of context, could easily stir up a lot of phony outrage. But McCain and the Republicans have much more serious pastor problems, when one considers the loose lips of Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, James Dobson, John Hagee and others. And don't forget Republican running mate Sarah Palin's own crazy guru, Thomas Muthee, the Kenyan/Alaskan witch doctor. Do they really want to go there?

Democrats typically have a tougher time getting their message across. Their ideas are usually a bit too heavy and too wonky for many Americans to wrap their minds around. For Republicans, they have gotten by with merely waving the flag and singing "God Bless The USA." Democrats have a tough time reducing their ideas to small soundbytes, let along simple sentences. To Obama's credit, he was able to get his messages across effectively. After months of pounding, his middle class tax cut plan seemed to resonate. So much that McCain and his minions had to try to spin it in their favor. As of late, they have called it 'socialism,' a charge all too often shouted by Republican candidates going all the way back to Herbert Hoover in 1932. What they won't tell you is that Obama's tax and spending plan is virtually a 21st century version of Clintonomics. It's the same basic principle, but updated for the current environment. And we all know about the booming economy and budget surpluses of the 90's. McCain is still beating the dead horse once referred to by George H.W. Bush as "voodoo economics." As I said, Calvin Coolidge and the Republicans lived by it during the 1920s until the stock market collapsed and Reagan revived it, driving up the deficit and ushering in a late-80s recession. Our current president is a strong advocate of the same plan, and the Wall Street crash of '87 seems to be happening several times a week. History has proven that corporate anarchy and the culture of greed, as advocated by the trickle-down crowd, leads to fiscal catastrophes like the one we're currently experiencing. That, of course, has given Obama's message a bit more resonance.

While Obama's campaign has, at times, taken a 'do no wrong' sense of momentum, the effort of his rival, McCain, has been bogged down by disorganization, chaos and inconsistency. McCain has shifted positions and talking points so often that many voters were left confused as to which John McCain was actually running for the White House. He derided his opponent a big government socialist only a few weeks after impulsively trumpeting a plan to spend $300 million dollars to buy up bad home mortgages and advocating his own form of corporate socialism. He spent the early summer attacking Obama as an inexperienced celebrity, then taps Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, buys her $150,000 worth of designer clothing and tries to mold her into a... celebrity. The Palin pick, designed to attract social conservatives, women and disenfranchised Hillary Clinton supporters, has, in hindsight, been a complete disaster. Many Republicans have jumped ship to support Obama, citing the Palin pick as a major reason. As of late, stories come out daily about the turmoil and finger pointing in the McCain camp. Even Palin has expressed a desire to 'go rogue.'

Of the two candidates, Obama made the smarter running mate pick, bringing in longtime Delaware Senator Joe Biden. The move was not designed to win a particular state or constituency. It was based mostly on who Obama trusted to be at his side during the campaign and in the White House. McCain's pick of Palin, who he had only met a few times prior, was really just a cheap political gimmick. When people actually woke up and realized the only thing separating her from the presidency was a 72 year-old heartbeat, reality started to set in. Think McCain wakes up every morning, smacks himself on the head and says, "Damn, I should have picked Romney?"

One constant line of attack from adversaries this year has been on Obama's resume, or seeming lack of. He doesn't have a long history in the U.S. Senate, and most of his legislative experience has been in the state of Illinois. But his career trajectory is eerily similar to that of our 16th president, who's sole political background was eight years in the Illinois legislature, two years in the House of Representatives, a failed congressional campaign, and a reputation as a dynamic orator. I'm not saying Obama is the second coming of Abraham Lincoln, but it certainly pokes holes in the 'experience' argument. In another example, our 28th president's background consisted of only two years as New Jersey governor and a decade before that as president of Princeton University. Yet Woodrow Wilson consistently ranks near the top of many presidential polls. Both Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, would be attacked mercilessly nowadays for their thin resumes. Meanwhile, the most 'experienced' candidate of all, James Buchanan, was a complete disaster in the White House, as his weak and irascable personality all but encouraged the southern states to secede from the Union by 1860. As far as I'm concerned, character, temperament and flexibilty are much better indicators of presidential success than how many lines of text their resumes consist of. It's what separates Barack Obama from someone like Sarah Palin, who McCain has repeatedly trumpeted as being more experienced. But really, who would you rather have in the Oval Office? Ability trumps experience.

While some Democrats, particularly a few wayward Hillary Clinton supporters, may still be grumbling about their current presidential candidate, they should realize that in Obama, they have perhaps the party's best, if most unlikely, nominee since Bill Clinton in 1992 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. The guy is sharp, and unlike many Democrats in the past, like Carter and Clinton, he could have an easier time working with a Democratically-controlled Congress. He is one one of them. And Democrats, shockingly enough, are much more organized than in years past. Many longtime Democratic platforms, such as health care reform and alternative energy, have been bogged down by inter-branch bickering between the White House and Congress. This time, we could see things finally get done in government, positive things. We could see affordable health care available to all, like virtually every other capitalist country in the world. We could see a shift away from Middle East oil, and a cleaning up of the environment. We could see a prosperous middle class, and even a more prosperous upper class. We could again command great respect throughout the world, which will really help to boost our economy, security and overall way of life. And we could see an end to the nasty divisive rhetoric spewed by such groups as evangelical reactionaries. With an Obama win, the tide could most definitely turn. And for the better.

Online political junkies swing to the left

In the midst of the most-talked about presidential election in recent times, independent online political news sites have seen their numbers shoot through the roof. And the biggest one-year gains are being enjoyed by left-leaning websites.

Comscore, a group that monitors internet trends, released the report showing which politically-oriented sites, blogs and online communities have been the most popular in this election cycle. The survey monitors only independent sites, and not ones associated with any newspaper, magazine or broadcast media entity.

The big winner – and the most-read independent political site of them all – is Huffington Post. The three year-old news and commentary site, an ambitious effort by namesake Arianna Huffington and others, was yet another attempt at creating a headline clearing house to rival Matt Drudge's conservative-leaning Drudge Report. In addition, the headlines were supplemented by a long list of bloggers (including Hollywood celebrities) and even sections devoted to media and entertainment news. While many Drudge-inspired sites have come and gone, this effort has paid off. Big time. During the period spanning September 2007 to September 2008, HuffPo saw its readership numbers surge a whopping 474%, reeling in over 4.5 million unique visitors.

Coming in second is another relatively new site, the just over a year old Politico. The non-partisan site, founded by several former Washington Post staffers, has also seen strong one year gains, up 344% to over 2.3 million unique visitors during the past month. Politico has been a must-read site for political junkies, and has even broken some big stories, including the most recent scandal involving the Republican Party's $150,000 shopping spree for Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. While Politico also puts out a magazine, it is clear that it is the site that fuels the whole thing, and not the other way around. Politico plays it straight down the middle ideologically, and does not favor any particular candidates. Readers on both sides of the political spectrum have criticized the site for being slanted toward one side or the other, which means that they are obviously doing their job.

In third place is a surprising entry. Since it's founding in the early days of the internet, the Drudge Report has been one of the most-visited sites on the internet. It seemed as if everyone read it, and was a go-to for news and political junkies. And it has been copied, imitated and parodied by many over the years. But years later, Drudge seems to have become more and more irrelevant, eclipsed by other sites with more content, more vibrant layouts and original content. Perhaps readers grew bored with the c. 1995-style plain text layout. Or the blatant right-wing spin and mock outrage-stirring. Drudge even got some egg on his face last week by playing up the hoax attack involving McCain campaign volunteer Ashley Todd. He hyped it heavily, after reportedly being tipped off by Republican operatives (where he gets many of his stories), and found himself in a rather embarrassing spot when it was discovered Todd lied about the whole thing. Are we finally seeing the tide turn to the point that Drudge will slide into obscurity? Will Drudge Report fizzle out into obscurity like Excite, Metaverse, “The Spot” and many other ancient relics of the early web? To be fair, his readership has gone up during the election season, up 70% to 2.1 unique visitors, but it is evident that the site has lost much of its clout, having been eclipsed by younger, scrappier up-and-comers in HuffPo and Politico.

Perhaps the bland mid-90s Windows 95 look, which Drudge devotedly still clings to, also hurt reactionary message board community Free Republic, which actually lost readers from last September, sliding 3%

Several sites in the top 20 enjoyed massive gains in the past year. The non-partisan Real Clear Politics, which concentrates heavily on polling data, shot up 481% to #4. And Talking Points Memo, the left-leaning blog run by Josh Marshall, shot up 1,321%, placing it at #11, thanks in part to a heavy breaking news approach that employs real-time election data. The venerable Daily Kos shot up 381% to #7 on the list. Crooks and Liars, a blog that has been a go-to destination for television news show clips, is still quite popular (and does drive a lot of traffic to other sites, as I can personally attest). Media Matters for America saw a slight gain. And Americablog makes its first showing on the list this year. Of the left-leaning sites listed the only one that has declined is the five year-old Raw Story. This earlier attempt at a left-leaning Drudge Report dropped 3%, most likely eclipsed by the similar HuffPo. Nonetheless, it's still a good site, particularly for stories regarding the mainstream media.

A few right-wing sites did enjoy gains. Newsbusters.org, part of Brent Bozell's consortium of phony outrage, enjoyed a 547% gain in readers who like to piss and moan about liberal bias in the media. Redstate.com is up 514%. Townhall.com, World Net Daily and Michelle Malkin saw some gains as well.

Some new non-partisan sites have made quite a splash too. CQ Politics, fivethirtyeight.com and Pollster have started making a big splash as of late.

And before writing this, I had no idea what Capitol Advantage was. As I did a little digging, they're the folks who publish Roll Call and other publications. They are also heavy into federal government directories.

In addition to the aforementioned sites, there are many other useful ones. A longtime favorite of mine is the nonpartisan electoral-vote.com, which monitors the latest polling data for the presidential, senate and congressional races. The site also features an interactive roll-over map with the latest electoral college estimates. And the relatively-new Democratic Convention Watch has continued even past last August's Denver shindig. Initially, they tracked delegate and superdelegate numbers through the primary season, but as of late have been following campaign headlines and newspaper endorsements, as has Editor and Publisher. And of course, there's the traditional news sites, such as television and newspapers, as well as news aggregator portals such as Yahoo!, Google and MSN.

However you get your political fix, there's plenty of ways to do it via the World Wide Web.

Here is the list (color coded by yours truly) of the top twenty political web sites:

You can't make chicken salad out of chickenhawks and chickenshit

Writing about things like this is a real pain in the ass sometimes.

I like to try to be above the fray, and I have no desire to make a comment every time some moron conservative demagogue opens his or her big mouth and says something stupid. It just happens all too often. I also tire of gossiping about the spats between middle-aged political wonks in suits tossing out insults at each other. Besides, these articles take a long time to write, seemingly almost as much time as it's taken Axl Rose and what's left of Guns n' Roses to finish Chinese Democracy.

Besides, other sources, such as Think Progress and Media Matters for America do a much better job of chronicling the nonsense. I can only offer witty commentary when something really noteworthy comes up. Or if something happens that really makes me scratch my head and wonder, "why?"

Today, I'll share a couple recent interconnected incidents that have made me rather enraged, bored to tears, and wondering in amazement about the overall decline of our society.

Let us begin. This little war of words and ideas started a few weeks ago.

General David H. Petrayus, President Bush's war lackey, testified before Congress and the nation on the state of the Iraq War. And, not surprisingly, he toed the Bush line on the whole ordeal, as our insecure president feels most comfortable around an army of yes-men. I most certainly wasn't surprised by Petrayus' statements. He's a soldier, and soldiers follow the orders of their superiors.

But many were furious, including political activist group MoveOn, which retorted with a scathing ad placed in the New York Times. Since much ado has been made about the wording of the ad, albeit with little actual quoting from it, below is the whole body of text, unedited:

GENERAL PETRAEUS OR
GENERAL BETRAY US?

Cooking the Books for the White House

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was “tangible progress” in Iraq and that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward.” And last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq, said, “We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress.”

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there. We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war. We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops. But we won’t hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.

And boy, did conservatives get pissed! Quite frankly, I didn't see any kind of vile cheap shots directed at General Petrayus in the ad. Sure, there's that "Betrayus" thing, but anyone who gets offended by that needs to grow a thicker skin. But Republicans, unlike their elephant mascots, don't necessarily have thick skins. And because of this, the recent anti-MoveOn movement became a major cause for a conservative movement that desperately needed a rallying cry.

The AM radio meatheads were all over it. Sean Insannity himself spent over a week trying to compare MoveOn to a terrorist organization, and trying to find some kind of connection to their favorite whipping girl Hillary Clinton. MoveOn temporarily moved ahead of Media Matters for America on Bill O'Reilly's shit list. Bush himself called the ad 'disgusting,' while obviously having no problem winning the 2004 election thanks to the smearing of another decorated military officer (a.k.a. John Kerry).

Yes, there's Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who saw this as such a pressing matter that he moved to stop everything in Congress so that he could introduce a new Republican wedge issue on the floor of the Senate. At least we can expect this kind of childish nonsense out of Republicans. What irritated me the most was that there were far too many Democrats that caved in and supported this incredible waste of time!

The vote was 72-25 in favor of this silly political stunt. That's right, 72 Senators support the condemnation of free speech that they don't like. That includes almost half of the Democrats, who are showing themselves to be spineless on a completely different level than the Republicans! Just disgusting. Think that time could be better spent trying to get our troops out of Iraq? But like many other things that go on in our government, this wasn't about the best interests of Americans. It was yet another childish pissing match between the Republicans and Democrats, a.k.a. the Bloods and the Crips.

MoveOn's response to all of this? "Yesterday, they couldn't even pass a bill to give soldiers adequate leave with their families before redeploying. But they're spending time cracking down on a newspaper ad?"

So now, a week has passed. And now it's time to call the GOP on the carpet. Because it was only inevitable that one of their own would flash some serious conservative hypocrisy. And that man was no other than their main mouthpiece, Rush Limbaugh.

On his radio show, Limbaugh, speaking with a caller, lashed out at dissenters in the military, and called them 'phony soldiers'. Here's an excerpt:

LIMBAUGH: "Save the -- keep the troops safe" or whatever. I -- it's not possible, intellectually, to follow these people.

CALLER 2: No, it's not, and what's really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.

LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers.

CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they're willing to sacrifice for their country.

LIMBAUGH: They joined to be in Iraq. They joined --

CALLER 2: A lot of them -- the new kids, yeah.

It takes a massive set of nuts, or millions of dollars in 'fuck-you money' for a guy who dodged the draft due to a pimple on his ass to call a combat veteran a 'phony soldier.' As the heat started to thicken, he went into damage control mode, Limbaugh claimed that the "phony soldiers' comment was directed at guys like Jesse Macbeth, a con artist who just got nabbed for pretending to be a soldier. But this had nothing to do with Macbeth. In actuality, that "phony soldiers" comment was likely directed at people like Captain John Soltz of VoteVets.org. Smoltz knew this, and in return, slapped him silly at Huffington Post.

Of course, Rush did no wrong in the eyes of his lemmings. They claimed the "phony soldiers" comment was taken out of context. I dunno, I heard the audio clip from his show, and read the unedited transcript, which displayed El Rushbo getting his ass handed to him by anti-war caller 'Mike in Chicago' and the follow-up call with the 'phony soldiers' comment. Sounded pretty plain to me. But the fault of this gaffe lied not with Limbaugh, but with another entity - Media Matters.

This was yet another ploy in the neocon playbook. Never attack the message, attack the messenger. So, this is why Republicans and their minions didn't condemn Limbaugh's lashing. Instead, it was all Media Matters' fault!

So, once again come the attacks on the media watchdog. Limbaugh, who allegedly pulls in upwards of $30 million a year, claims it's a conspiracy and that they're coming to get him. Riiiiight. The guy must really be scared. Then things got even more ridiculous. Brent Bozell's NewsBusters again clutched at all the straws they could, and claimed that ABC News did a story about 'phony soldiers' a few days earlier. But that report was about Jesse Macbeth, the con artist mentioned earlier. Nice try, guys. FOX News goon John Gibson used an edited version of the conversation to prove that MMFA edited the conversation. Aye carumba!

And now, shrill San Francisco radio bimbo Melanie Morgan, who has to say really outrageous stuff because nobody really cares about her otherwise, is now using colorful terms like "fake," "phony," "poser" and the worn-out cliche "anti-America" in reference to people like Soltz. Obviously, all those years of combat - if you call getting shit-faced drunk in casinos while neglecting your kids 'combat' - has prepared Ms. Morgan well for things like this.

Of course, it was inevitable that all of this would reach the government, which as of late seems all too happy to comment on pop culture happenings. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blasted Limbaugh on the floor of the Senate, calling for an apology and for fellow Democrats to join him in writing a letter to Limbaugh's handlers at Clear Channel Communications, whose Premiere Radio Networks syndicates his show.

Now, this is where I'm torn. I'm glad Reid and co. decided to get tough, and shove the Republicans' hypocrisy back in their faces. But I was furious over the Senate's chiding of MoveOn last week, and I certainly don't think things like this are the best use of the Senate's time and resources. Does the Senate have to comment on everything in the world of current pop culture? What's next? Is the Senate going to give Britney Spears her kids back? Will they pick the next "American Idol"?

The Senate should not speak out against the rights of any American to speak their mind. That includes MoveOn protesting the war, and that also includes Limbaugh yet again making a complete ass of himself. But let's assume that I enjoyed Limbaugh getting raked over the coals. Because in doing so, I could enjoy Drugboy going into spastic meltdown mode on his show yesterday, as he challenged Reid to 'say it to his face.'

Now that's funny! Limbaugh trying to be an alpha male. A real badass. I'll bet his personal boot licker Brian Maloney is in such awe that's he's ready to swallow this time instead of spit!

But really, is Limbaugh really so thin-skinned that he has to issue threats over a microphone, from the security of his home studio in South Florida? After all the insults he's spouted at so many others? Would he ever tell Bill Clinton that his daughter was "the White House dog?" Or repeat all those nasty things he said about John Kerry or Al Gore directly to their faces? Of course not.

Let's face it, Rush Limbaugh is not only a chickenhawk, but he's a chickenshit. A true coward. Anyone listening to the 'phony soldiers' audio bit heard him get his ass handed to him by "Mike in Chicago," an anti-war caller. Limbaugh couldn't argue his way out of a paper bag. And most certainly not with Harry Reid. And most certainly not with Capt. Soltz, who had issued the 'say it to my face' challenge earlier:

My challenge to you, then, is to have me on the show and say all of this again, right to the face of someone who served in Iraq. I'll come on any day, any time. Not only will I once again explain why your comments were so wrong, but I will completely school you on why your refusal to seek a way out of Iraq is only aiding al Qaeda and crippling American security.

Ball's in your court.

In addition, VoteVets.org has released a new television and radio ad, saying that very thing. They were aiming to air the ad on a few of Limbaugh's radio affiliates.

In all actuality, I certainly hope this swinging dick competition ends soon. Not that I don't enjoy seeing wingnut bloviators get their words thrown back at them. I do. But aren't there more important things going on the world? Like the Iraq War? Or Britney Spears' kids?

Priorities, we've got to have our priorities.

LTR follows the money

"Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in."

- Michael Corleone, as portrayed by Al Pacino, in The Godfather: Part III

I was hoping what I wrote last week would be the end of it. Every once in a while I just gotta get one of those things out of my system. And I thought I had said all I needed to say about Media Matters for America, George Soros and paranoid right-wing talk show hosts. But sure enough, another reason comes along to write something about it. Here we go again.

Bill O'Reilly of FOX Noise Channel hates Media Matters. I mean, he really hates them. So much that in the past, he's compared them to the likes of Mao, Castro, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazis. He called them "cowards" and "people who are afraid to answer any questions," yet will not allow anyone from MMfA to come on his show to spar with him. And now, MMfA must have really pissed O'Liely off, since he has trotted out his own personal doomsday device. His own neutron bomb. Yes, in his strange personal game of "six degrees of separation," he has a chart that links MMfA to George Soros' deep pockets. With this, he grasps at all the straws he possibly can in proving that, while Soros hasn't directly given money to the group, organizations funded by Soros have themselves sent money to MMfA. Oh the horror!

Only thing is, you'll never hear about why Soros is such a bad man on the "All-Spin Zone." Oh sure, you'll hear accusations of insider trading. Or that he's some kind of radical to the left of Abbie Hoffman. Or that he was a teenage Nazi back in World War II. Or that he's some kind of Dr. Evil, set on world domination (no doubt complete with laserbeam-fitted sharks and his mysterious Alan Parsons Project). Suffice it to say, O'Reilly's gone batshit crazy.

Now, here's a guy, Soros, who's a self-made billionaire, and in turn spent a lot of money fighting communism in Eastern Europe. One would assume that would make him a virtual hero to the right-wing of America. He sounds like a Reagan Republican's dream guy. Only one problem, though - he turned on the Bush Administration. A big no-no. Even after being buddy-buddy with the Bushes in Carlyle Group. Even after Harkin Energy, which Soros was part owner of, bailed out Junior's failed oil company, Soros soured on Dubya's economic and foreign policies. The war in Iraq was the final straw. First, he ran full-page ads in major US newspapers challenging the honesty of the Bush administration's rationale for the war. He also wrote a book, The Bubble of American Supremacy, which criticized the president's foreign policy. Then he pledged to spend up to $30 million to help defeat Bush in the 2004 election, donating nearly $24 million to various political action committees and liberal think tanks. The biggest beneficiaries of Soros' generosity were Americans Coming Together ($10 million), MoveOn.org ($2.5 million) and the Center for American Progress ($3 million). It's a rather small list. And no, Media Matters was not on that list. And neither was Air America Radio. Soros basically shot his $30 million load and left. But that $30 million is why the right-wing hates him so much. Or, they're scared shitless of the guy. So much that they're making up myths about this alleged bogeyman.

Michael Savage called Soros "a totally dangerous individual" who "doesn't miss an opportunity to attack this country" and "should be stripped of his citizenship." Right-wing activist David Horowitz, backed by quite a few generous right wing benefactors himself, has made ridiculous claims about Soros' campaign donations. O'Reilly called him "the big left-wing loon who's financing all these smear sites," and added, "They ought to hang this Soros guy." When Soros recently donated $2,100 to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, O'Reilly put on his tinfoil hat, oblivious to the fact that Soros once donated the same sum of money to John McCain. He really lives in fear in his belief that Soros is waging a war against him via MMfA. In short, Bill O'Reilly is one big pussy.

But enough about Soros. As I claimed last week, Soros isn't the only one doing it. On the left, there's Progressive Insurance CEO Peter Lewis and a few others. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the other side. See, on the right, there's a whole ton of people. Some of the names I mentioned in the past, such as cult leader Sun Myung Moon and Rupert Murdoch are pretty out in the open. They invest in blatant partisan media geared toward right-wing propaganda. Richard DeVos, founder of the Amway pyramid scheme, has long been one of the biggest contributors to the Republican Party, and his kids have followed suit.

Behind the scenes, though, are a wide variety of billionaires, families, corporations and foundations throwing obscene amounts of money at political action committees, think tanks, media watchdog organizations, lobbying groups, and various propaganda outlets. Many of them stay out of the limelight. In this group, you'll find families like the Coors in Colorado, the Bradleys of Milwaukee, the Olin Foundation and others. They're still giving. But the most effective sugardaddy of them all is in Pittsburgh. The man is Richard Mellon Scaife.

Recall last week when I claimed that Moon was the top fatcat for the New Right. In terms of total spent, he likely is. But Scaife is the one who got the biggest bang for his buck. It's very likely that people like O'Reilly will never talk about right-wing moneymen like Scaife who heavily fund ventures designed to attack the left. Of course he wouldn't. Otherwise, he'll sound like a complete hypocrite. Most wingnuts will never acknowledge the efforts of the Coors, the Bradleys and the Scaifes. Even the Radio Tranquilizer has been whining that they don't have their own Soros or Lewis. Evidently, he's either not doing his homework or there are some things he just refuses to tell his readers. They're just pissy because we're now playing the game on their turf. The usual B.S. you hear is that left-leaning donors are squashing the right-wing with their spending. But that's utterly ridiculous. See, I have decided to track where all that right-wing foundation money goes, and after taking a trip down the rabbit hole, was pretty damned shocked to see where it all wound up. In fact, I struggled like crazy in making a similar chart to the simplistic one that O'Reilly's people coughed up, just because it went in so many directions. Here's a partial chart of what I came up with:


It's time to follow the money.

Now, who is Richard Mellon Scaife? He's an insanely rich man living in Pittsburgh, with interests in banking, oil, uranium and newspapers. Unlike Soros, who earned his own way from a poor immigrant, Scaife made his money the old fashioned way - he inherited it. And while Soros kept reinvesting his money to make more money, in that grand ol' American tradition, Scaife used his money to gain influence, spending roughly a third of his fortune on various right wing causes. Scaife is a man that seems to lurk in the shadows. He's a bit reclusive. He doesn't go on FOX Noise and play pundit. He doesn't write op-eds in the paper. In the grand tradition of Hearst, Hughes and others, he stays out of the limelight.

Even for a newspaper publisher, he's not very media-friendly. When former Wall Street Journal reporter Karen Rothmeyer, denied an interview on several occasions, ran into him on the street and asked him about his donations, an enraged Scaife yelled "You f*cking Communist c*nt, get out of here." In the remaining five minutes of the interview, Scaife told her she was ugly and that her teeth were "terrible." He closed by saying, "Don't look behind you." Wow, now THAT'S unhinged!

"If a liberal politician doesn't toe the Soros line, he or she will be denied funding and brutally attacked. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman about what MoveOn and Media Matters did to him," claimed O'Reilly. Yeah, just like Scaife did when Brock was canned for not being mean enough to Hillary Clinton and severed ties to American Spectator when they gave a bad review to a book by one of his henchmen. Pot, say hello to kettle.

Scaife is the Kevin Bacon of the New Right, in that just about anything and everything neocon seems to have connection to him, within even fewer degrees. So, how much has he forked over to prop up the right-wing? By 1999, according to the Washington Post, Scaife's foundations have forked over $340 million dollars to conservative causes and groups. Again, this is just Scaife we're talking about here. Granted, Scaife isn't forking it over like he used to, but thanks to his past efforts, the groups that he's given to are the ones now paying it forward.

To start with, Scaife made a shady donation of $990,000 to the 1972 re-election campaign of Richard Nixon. Due to loopholes, he wasn't charged with a crime, but roughly $45,000 of that went to a fund linked to the Watergate scandal. Quite a beginning there, Dick!

What really got Scaife hot though was a semi-obscure Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton. Fearing that this guy actually stood a decent chance of beating Bush I in the 1992 election, Scaife brought out all the guns. He was a major backer of The American Spectator, a right-wing magazine that was planning an all-out smear campaign now commonly referred to as "The Arkansas Project." The purpose was to find out anything about Clinton, and if that wasn't good enough, just make stuff up. This is where stuff like Paula Jones came from. And later Whitewater, the suicide of Vince Foster (which they tried to paint as a murder), and whatever else they could pull out of their asses. The purpose was to force Clinton from office and endlessly dog and harass him and his family. This was with the help of Scaife's own personal attack dog reporter, Christopher Ruddy, who later founded NewsMax.com. In other words, lots of time and effort was spent in trying to topple a presidency, an act that could theoretically be considered treason. Scaife sunk a ton of his own money into these ventures, reportedly almost $2 million dollars (not counting money he gave to then-House Speaker and Clinton antagonist Newt Gingrich's various groups), giving Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr a lot to work with. Ironically (or not), Scaife endowed a new school of public policy at Pepperdine University, and Starr was named its first dean. A controversy brewed, and Starr turned it down, before accepting it again in 2004.

Ironically, Scaife indirectly helped fund MMfA, since founder David Brock was a top writer for American Spectator at the time of the Arkansas Project, and was paid handsomely to lash out at the Clintons with various ridiculous claims. Following an eventual change of heart and his brave decision to publicly declare his sexual orientation, Brock drifted toward the other side and founded MMfA, obviously using some of the money paid to him from the Spectator's coffers. We can thank Scaife in part for that.

Like many other conservative sugardaddies, Scaife sunk money into other ventures. The American Enterprise Institute was another big benefactor, and they in turn helped prop up the epicenter of neo-conservatism, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), as well as the Federalist Society, which could be seen as the starting point for conservative trash-talker Ann Coulter. Coulter's scating columns have since been published in various Scaife media ventures.

And while O'Reilly and his ilk constantly charge that Soros funds MMfA, several conservative-leaning media watchdogs have stuck their hands in Scaife's cookie jar. Directly. The Center for Media and Public Affairs is one, and the ironically-titled Accuracy in Media is another beneficiary. You remember AIM, right? They were out front in the whole Vince Foster conspiracy. But the most well-known of these watchdogs is the Media Research Center (MRC), headed by Brent Bozell, complete with a $6 million annual budget and 60 staff members. And they've even branched out, starting their very own news organization, the Cybercast (formerly Conservative) News Service (CNS). They were the ones that claimed they had proof of Saddam Hussein's WMD's. In addition, the MRC started up a MMfA-type blog, Newsbusters.org. MRC's affiliate, the Parents Television Council (PTC), is similar in nature. The MRC has also helped encourage the efforts of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose purpose was to dog John Kerry with lies and vague accusations during the 2004 presidential campaign. And unlike MMfA, the MRC/PTC has actually taken their fight against liberalism to the government, in the form of various complaints to the FCC.

Scaife has also thrown money at right-wing news organizations. Besides his ownership of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, he presently has an ownership stake in NewsMax.com. He donated to Heritage Society and Moral Majority founder Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, which in turn started an ill-fated conservative TV network, National Empowerment Television (later America's Voice), a venture that turned out to be a financial sinkhole that nobody watched. He also sent $330,000 directly to the Western Journalism Center, which helped start Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily.com.

Scaife sent money to the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a group founded by former Marxist-turned-right wing activist David Horowitz. Horowitz in turn started FrontPageMag.com, Discover the Networks, which tracks funding to and from left-leaning causes, and most curiously, the Matt Drudge Defense Fund, which supported him in a lawsuit a few years back. Needless to say, Drudge knows who his sugardaddy is.

Lately, Scaife has been a buyer of buyer of books, in mass quantities. Ever wonder about those high rankings on the New York Times bestseller lists for conservative books? Or those conservative book clubs offering titles for ridiculously low prices? Thank Scaife for that, since he buys in bulk. Particularly titles from Regnery Press, which publishes the work of Michelle Malkin, David Limbaugh and most famously, "Unfit for Command," which helped jumpstart that "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" thing a few years back. Ah, yes - another connection to the Swift Nuts!

And Scaife also contributed money and resources to the Council for National Policy, a secretive networking group that counts among its members a who's-who of the New Right, including Bozell, Moon, DeVos, Pat Robertson, Donald Wildmon, Jerry Falwell, Grover Norquist, disgraced congressman Tom DeLay, Senator Trent Lott, Tommy Thompson and others. Whew!

Needless to say, Scaife gets around. And it's not just him either. The names of Coors and Bradley also pop up here and there. But for head marionette status, nobody can top Scaife. Sure, he didn't make much financial return on these investments, but for overall influence and power, he most certainly got his money's worth. So when people like O'Reilly piss and moan about the right wing being horribly underfunded, we can all laugh at him. Or when Brian Maloney whines on his fact-lacking blog about the lack of a Soros or Lewis on his side (that is, when he's not writing ridiculous entries about Sheryl Crow and toilet paper - which is a fitting topic for him, since he is kind of an asswipe anyway), then we can point him in the right direction and he can stop begging his readers to send him money. So consider this a helpful tool for the right. That's right, I'm providing a service here. Because, if you get all your news from Rush Limbaugh, the FOX Noise Channel and AM radio, you'll likely never know about the Coors, or the Bradleys, or the John M. Olin Foundation, or Jeremiah Milbank, or ExxonMobil, or Lockheed Martin, or any of the other 'philanthropists', foundations, corporations or other sugardaddies and fatcats.

And certainly not Richard Mellon Scaife.

In an ironic footnote, the Scaife Family Foundation is now under the control of his daughter Jennie, and the focus has changed quite a bit. Much of the money currently goes to nonpolitical projects such as medical programs, drug treatment and animal welfare. They also send money to Planned Parenthood, though against her father's wishes. Hey, at least there's still all those other donors, foundations and think tanks, provided they haven't jumped ship already. But thanks to the infrastructure provided by the likes of Scaife, they can all sail on autopilot for a long time to come.