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Credit: Blue Gal

Finally someone gets fired for saying stupid things on tee vee. Except he said it on Fox and he still has a job there nevermind.

Open thread below...

#1 on the charts on V-J Day, this Mercer tune seems to have captured the spirit of unbridled optimism abound across the country as World War II drew to its end. Mercer, one of the great American lyricists (Harry Warren wrote the music here), also seems to have foreseen the massive post-war migration from the row houses and tenements of the crowded and often chilly Northeast of row houses and tenements to the sunny climes, green lawns and Pacific horizons of Southern California- but more to the point, he really swung it with this song!

Collector's Series
	Artist: Johnny Mercer Price: $5.74 (As of 10/22/10 12:20 am details)

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Larry King spent the hour with Comedy Central's Jon Stewart on his show Wednesday night and Stewart was asked what he thought about CNN's Rick Sanchez being fired after calling Jon Stewart a "bigot" and saying that CNN and other news networks are run by Jewish people. Stewart did not think that Sanchez should have been fired just for his statements on Pete Dominick's radio show and that CNN was just looking for an excuse to fire him anyway.

When asked by King why Stewart picks on CNN so much Stewart replied "You're terrible!" and went on to chastise the network for squandering the opportunity "to be a real arbiter" of the news rather than running so many of their fake balance segments that they're so fond of.

Stewart also had some praise for Fox News, but not because he agrees with them or thinks that they are a news organization. He is absolutely correct that they are not a news organization, but an extremely effective political organization.

KING: Jon Stewart. We have several Tweets to Kings Things.

STEWART: This is a problem. News people shouldn't be going, we've got some Tweets. It's like you walked out in the middle of this and said, I was in the bathroom and a guy mentioned to me, you know --

KING: These are human beings and they're Tweeting us. Do you have no respect for them?

STEWART: No.

KING: OK.

STEWART: I don't know who they are. They could be anybody. They could be pretending to be -- who the hell knows who they are?

KING: They're asking this: what you thought about CNN, us, firing Rick Sanchez after he called you a bigot?

STEWART: Is that 140 characters, because that sounded a lot more than 140 characters. It sounded like somebody sent you a double or triple Tweet.

KING: May have been a double Tweet.

STEWART: We're on a news program and you're saying to me, so there's a Tweet. Isn't that a question you probably could have thought of yourself?

KING: We like to involve the audience. It's a gimmick.

STEWART: All right.

KING: Well, what do you think?

STEWART: Should they have fired him for that? No.

KING: You think they made a mistake?

STEWART: With the crap you guys have put on over the last ten years. What, are you kidding me? Fire somebody if you don't think they're doing a good job as a news person. This whole idea that people -- you know, they fired a woman for Tweeting something on her thing on her blog. They fired Sanchez for saying what he said.

I think it's absolute insanity. I think this idea that people have to be held to account for everything that comes out of their mouths as far as their livelihoods is concerned -- does he do a good job? Were you pleased with his job? Or was it an excuse to -- you know, to get rid of him?

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OK, this is genuinely bad news:

Rep. Raul Grijalva says that the FBI has confirmed the white powder in an envelope delivered to his office is a toxic substance.

It has not been confirmed exactly what substance was mailed to Grijalva's offices, located at the 800 block of East 22nd Street.

A staff member called Tucson Police earlier today after finding an envelope containing the suspicious white powder. The offices were locked down by Tucson Police, and the FBI arrived to assist in the investigation.

Let's be real clear: It's already considered an act of terrorism to send someone a letter with powder in it, as many right-wing fanatics have done in the past decade and more -- specifically, it's a kind of piggybacking, as in the case of that deranged Malkin/Ingraham/Coulter fan, Chad Castagana:

What Castagana's case demonstrates, clearly, is the way terrorism functions. Initial attacks always inspire subsequent rounds of echo attacks that intentionally feed off the terror created by the earlier rounds. It's called "piggybacking," and it has been an explicit strategy of the extremist right for two decades and longer.

The shape of Castagana's threats -- sending white powder in an envelope and including threats suggesting the powder is anthrax -- has been around for awhile. He almost certainly got the idea from its earlier perpetrators, most notably Clayton Waagner, who terrorized hundreds of abortion clinics with similar hoaxes.

Waagner's threats, in turn, piggybacked off the very real anthrax terrorist who killed five people, sickened dozens more, and scared the bejeesus out of the media for a couple of weeks, until they figured out that it most likely was a domestic terror attack.

And the anthrax terrorist, likewise, clearly piggybacked off of 9/11: the attacks occurred two weeks later, and the rampant speculation in the media for quite awhile was that this was another Al Qaeda attack, or perhaps one from Iraq.

Terrorists of all stripes -- foreign and domestic, Islamist and white nationalist, competent and incompetent -- have a symbiotic relationship with each other: one attack creates an "echo" that often has its own idiosyncratic purpose, but simultaneously enhances the intent of the original terrorist attack. The one thing all terrorists have in common, after all, is a general intent: to destabilize public confidence in the government and thus topple it. In the case of far-right domestic terrorists, they hope to present themselves as an authoritarian alternative to a system unable to keep its citizens secure.

What distinguishes those cases from this is that the powder they sent was benign, and the actual threat thus considerably diminished.

Now someone has sent genuine hazardous material that could have sickened Grijalva's staff.

Rep. Grijalva has already been the subject of death threats. Now it has escalated well beyond that.

This is some serious terrorism. It needs to be treated that way. Let's not let the media sweep this one under the carpet.

Rep. Grijalva is a friend of ours from many visits. Be sure and show him some support if you can.

Mark Kirk has a problem. Someone keeps leaking documents from his campaign -- highly confidential documents with donor names and fundraising information, goals and alliances. Via Capitol Fax Blog:

Congressman Mark Kirk’s US Senate campaign has been plagued by strange internal leaks for months. And now we have one that includes a plan for a “Bejing fundraiser,” which was held the day before a House vote to close tax loopholes for companies that send jobs out of the country.

The latest leak is the internal agenda of a mid-May Kirk campaign finance meeting. Click here to read it. (PDF)

[...]

The Kirk campaign says that the candidate held a “Skype” fundraising meeting with American businesspeople in Bejing, China. I’m told that 12 people participated in the event.

FEC records show that Geoffrey Enck contributed $1,000 to Kirk that day. Enck is the CEO of ITI China Holdings. One of the things the company does is investment banking for Chinese manufacturing plants.

And then the next day, Kirk voted “No” on a bill to close a tax loopholes that would prevent companies from “using current U.S. foreign tax credit rules to subsidize their foreign activities .”

Now, it’s not like the contributions from Americans doing business in China likely swayed Kirk much. Just about every Republican voted against that bill. And the Kirk campaign points to a story from 2008 about the Obama campaign sending people to China for fundraisers.

But Kirk co-chairs the China Congressional Working Group, and he’s taken heat several times for his ties to the nation. He infamously told Chinese officials that US budget numbers shouldn’t be believed, for instance. Kirk opposed legislation on Chinese currency manipulation.

“When you hear Congressman Kirk talk about job creation, he’s talking about jobs he created in China,” has been a standard line from Alexi Giannoulias this year. And while the campaign fundraiser looks legal, there are plenty of American businesses over there who are, indeed, exporting jobs to that country.

Of course, the author is right. Kirk would have voted against the bill because that's what Republicans do now. They don't really do anything besides vote against things. But the other side of it is also right -- Republicans have a vested interest these days in profiting from Chinese business relationships, and fostering the outsourcing of American jobs to China.

Just this past Tuesday, Think Progress reported on joint ventures between the US Chamber of Commerce and their Chinese affiliates, like the one sponsored by Sheldon Adelson teaching American businesses how to outsource to China.

Based on that alone, I'd say Mark Kirk isn't going to be a friend to unemployed Americans. Beyond that, it appears that he has some difficulty managing even the simple things, like keeping confidential memos secure.

Flying under the radar, but not to us, a new Bloomberg poll on the Tea Party movement confirms everything that David and I wrote in our book, Over the Cliff: Tea Party activists are an extension of the most extreme, far-right John Birch Society values, with the added bonus of funding from the corporate right. They are Grover Norquist's wet dream. Think South African apartheid, baby. The right-wing extremists once ousted by conservatives like William Buckley now rule the roost. The "Free Markets" reign unimpeded, led by "Christian values", for those white and 55 and over.

Bloomberg:

Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Oct. 15 issue: Respondents who identify with the Tea Party are almost unanimous in saying it stands for lower taxes, smaller government and personal responsibility. More than six in 10 say it advocates government based on Christian principles.
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Tea Party supporters are more likely than other voters to be white, married, 55 and older, and call themselves born-again Christians.

During the HCR debate, tea partiers were able to keep their Ralph Reed beliefs bottled up because they were able to target their rage away from social issues and into the health care debate. Are you surprised that there was so much violent rhetoric used by their members while toting guns in their belts? It wasn't until the end of the HCR debate that the abortion issue came up and suddenly members of Congress were yelling the term "baby killers" on the floor of Congress. The Ron Paul influence is also evident by their hatred of the Federal Reserve, which has been the subject of many conspiracy theories by the supposed libertarians that have joined him.

They also are more likely to be suspicious of the Federal Reserve, which sets monetary policy. Six out of 10 Tea Party supporters who plan to vote say they want to overhaul or abolish the Fed, compared with 45 percent of all likely voters.

They are as passionate about the deficit as the Birchers were worried that Communists had infiltrated the White House. Here's how out of the mainstream they are:

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Well, I'm sure Sean Hannity will be as quick as ever to pooh-pooh the prospects that President Obama is capable of igniting his supporters this year on the campaign trail -- it's been a running theme at Fox, you know, that there's a big "enthusiasm gap" and that candidates are actually running away from having Obama campaign for them.

Whatever. Today I went to Obama's campaign appearance for our friend Sen. Patty Murray in Seattle at the UW campus. As Murray put it: "I've got to tell you, for all those TV pundits and skeptics who say there's an enthusiasm gap -- I've got four words for them: Come to Washington state!"

Indeed, I'd wager that the majority of the 10,000 or so who packed HecEd Pavilion walked out energized and eager to go help drum up votes for Democrats over the next couple of weeks. Because Obama was at his best.

Perhaps the best indicator of a skilled rhetorician is one who can tell the same speech/story over and over again and yet find ways to make it fresh each telling. And Obama did that -- he's been telling this story about how Republicans drove the national car into a ditch for a long time, and he's been using the punch line: -- "You can't drive!" -- since at least May 14.

But he told it again, and you know what? It still worked.

Even a non-Obamabot like myself has to come away impressed with his sincerity and drive. And since I happen to share Obama's pragmatism, I'm more than happy to do my part to likewise urge people to get out and vote. Too much is at stake. It's too important that we spend the next two years playing offense. Sitting on our hands is going to mean we'll be playing a whole lotta defense.

Andrew Villeneuve at NPI has picture and some thoughts. Also, here's Philip Rucker's report for the WaPo.

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I don't know about you, but I still believe Anita Hill:

In her Senate testimony, Hill said that Thomas would make sexual comments to her at work, including references to scenes in hard-core pornographic films. Thomas angrily denied the allegations, memorably saying they amounted to a "high-tech lynching."

But Lillian McEwen, a former Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer who said she dated Clarence Thomas from 1979 through the mid-1980s, told The Washington Post in an interview that Hill's long-ago description of Thomas's behavior resonated with her.

"The Clarence I know was certainly capable not only of doing the things that Anita Hill said he did, but it would be totally consistent with the way he lived his personal life then," said McEwen, who is writing her own memoir but has never before publicly discussed her relationship with Clarence Thomas.

McEwen also told the Post she was not surprised that Virginia Thomas would leave Hill a message, even after all these years.

"In his autobiography, Clarence described himself as a person incapable of doing what Anita Hill said he did," McEwen said. "He is married to a woman who is loyal to him and religious in a way he would like to be. This combination of religiosity and loyalty and belief that he is really the kind of person who he describes in his book would just about compel her to do something like that."

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For those of you who follow LGBT politics, you'll know there's a lot of what some call "infighting". Infighting over tactics, messaging, how much Obama should be supported vs. criticized, and the like. It can get distracting and sometimes very personal.

A few weeks ago, myself, along with Joe Sudbay over at AMERICABlog and Rick Jacobs at the Courage Campaign, were chatting about all this. We agreed that (a) while debate over tactics etc. can be healthy, the division can threaten to undermine votes for LGBT equality coming up on Election Day (b) Despite the headlines, this community is more united than divided. There are a lot of voices in the pro-equality chorus, and like brothers and sisters in a family, we all sing in our own unique way. But when push comes to shove, we are always singing the same song.

So we decided to ask some of the bigger names in all these headlines if they would set their differences aside and come together on a common cause: that cause being re-electing Rep. Patrick Murphy, who led the fight to pass repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the House.

Murphy, who stormed back from being down double digits in the polls to being up 46-43 in yesterday's The Hill poll, is in a tough fight in an economically depressed district. DC Conventional Wisdom told him to stop working on that gay stuff and focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. Needless to say, he ignored them, worked side by side with those of us in the LGBT and allied community (online AND offline), whipped the votes, went on Maddow and anywhere else he could find to talk loud and proud about how important this cause is to him- a straight veteran- and got it done. He kept his promise.

So with the help of Dan Manatt at ManattMedia.com, we produced this video to send that message: that we're coming together to get Patrick's back because he got ours. Everyone was so excited that they recorded it right where they are, day of- wherever they could.

Please share the video widely, and chip in- whether you're LGBT or a straight ally- to re-elect a pro-equality, fighting Dem.

Cross-posted on OpenLeft.com, where you can also check out our live chat transcript from this afternoon with Rep. Murphy.

Those thugs that Joe Miller used to rough up reporters, it seems, aren't just your ordinary street-corner hooligans.

It turns out, as Glenn Greenwald noted yesterday, that they're also active-duty soldiers. On top of that: the company, Drop Zone, is an unlicensed business, and the supplier for the Alaska Militia.

PalinGates has the details:

"Dropzone Security Services" is not just a company run by people who are not very clever, but the company is also right at the heart of the "Alaska Citizens Militia" - a group commanded by Norm Olson, who once rose to "fame" as the founder of the Michigan militia.

...

"Dropzone Bill" is the "nickname" of none other than William F. Fulton, the owner of "Dropzone Security Services", who came across as an unprofessional "goon" during the "arrest" of Tony Hopfinger.

He uses this nickname for his postings on the google-message board of the "Alaska Citizens Militia", which conveniently is public, for everyone to see.

From the postings, several facts can be established: Fulton's "Dropzone" military surplus shop in Anchorage which he owns together with his (currently unlicensed) security company, is a regular meeting point for the members of the militia and appears also to be their main supplier, according to the messages on the website. In addition, Fulton aka "Dropzone Bill" is a local commander of the militia.

According to Tony Hopfinger's site, the Alaska Department of Public Safety is now investigating.

And the more you look at Drop Zone, the uglier they get. For instance, check out this "Lone Wolf Resistance Newsletter". It's from the militia site Patriot Resistance, which is based in Arizona, and built out of its page dedicated to the Lone Wolf Survival Manual.

You all remember lone wolves, don't you? Does the name James Von Brunn ring a bell?

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