The problem, however, is that people like Palin stopped being funny a while ago. The prominence they enjoy in our political discourse is so far out of whack with their abilities and intentions that it vastly exaggerates their influence over a variety of very serious matters that affect each and every one of us. The British have the Monster Raving Loony Party, who are a joke and exert no real influence, and we have the Republican Party, filled with monster raving loonies who exert a tremendous amount of influence because the news media thinks we are a nation of people who like to look at car accidents on the highway, which, by and large, we are. We've been well-trained by 20 years of shock television to mistake clowns and jesters for serious people, and because of that mistake, these people's deranged opinions and deformed ideas get taken seriously. As digby recently noted on the excellent Hullabaloo blog, "I'm not saying that we should panic. These people are politically weak in their own right. But when I see the liberal gasbags on TV blithely dismissing this as if it's impossible that Americans could ever fall for such lunacy, I feel a little frisson of alarm. I've read too many accounts of people who, 80 or so years ago, complacently made the same assumption.

Right-wing groups in Israel want to create a climate of fear among left-wing scholars at Israeli universities by emulating the 'witch-hunt' tactics of the US academic monitoring group Campus Watch, Israeli professors warn. “I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”“The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us,” a senior Israeli lecturer said. “It’s a model of ‘policing’ faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US.” Both Israel Academia Monitor, established in 2004, and the later IsraCampus, model themselves on Campus Watch, a US organisation founded by Daniel Pipes, an academic closely identified with the US neoconservative movement. Campus Watch has been widely accused of intimidating US scholars who have expressed views critical of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. The organisation’s goal, according to critics, is to pressure US universities to avoid hiring left-wing lecturers or awarding them tenure.

The appeals court today rejected Soffar's argument that the trial judge erred by refusing to admit evidence that another man confessed to committing the murders, and that this man committed a series of highly similar robbery-murders in Tennessee. The man, Paul Reid, formerly of Houston, now awaits execution on Tennessee's death row. A photograph of Reid, taken in Houston nine days after the crime, strongly resembles the composite sketch the police prepared based on the description of the sole witness to the crime.

Even for The Weekly Standard, this bitter, juvenile McCarthyite attack on the ACLU by Thomas Joscelyn sputters with so much fact-free, impotent, and self-defeating rage that it's hard to believe it was printed. Right in the headline, it oh-so-cleverly smears the ACLU as "Al Qaeda's Civil Liberties Union"; it ends by proclaiming the group to be "al Qaeda's useful idiots"; and it's filled in the middle with all sorts of trite innuendo circa 2002 that anyone who believes in the Constitution -- i.e., radical "far leftist" doctrines such as "trials" and "due process" -- secretly harbors love for the Terrorists and hatred for America ("The ACLU has worked diligently to undermine America's stance in what was formerly known as the 'war on terror,' and has even been willing to disseminate propaganda on behalf of our jihadist enemies"). What the article actually -- and ironically -- reveals is how much contempt The Weekly Standard and much of America's Right has for the nation's core political values and how, in the process, they do more to aid Islamic extremists than even those who directly fund and advocate for them.

If you dislike Sarah Palin as much as I do, and dislike her new autobiography before you even read it, as I have, you will love this review by Ed from Instaputz. With the incision of a modern-day Mencken, Ed dissects the ghost-written piece of crap with uncanny accuracy. There is only this hope: that I too can become a millionaire without having anyone killed.

The Progressive Book Club, Media Matters, and Max Blumenthal team up to fact check and debunk Sarah Palin's book. This is the first in a new partnership between Progressive Book Club and Media Matters - the Right Wing Book Watch

ConnecticutMan1 emailed me an unlikely and highly entertaining article posted by Warranted Wiretaps. They have obtained an exclusive mp3 file of a conference call put together by "the national liberty movement" to improve the quality of right wing blogs. Unfortunately for them, their call was crashed by a group of twittering humorists.

One immigrant rights activist going by the name of Robert Erickson even tricked the anti-immigrant rally organizers into letting him speak at their rally. He began his speech with what sounded like the usual hateful anti-immigrant message. But as he continued, it became clear he was not criticizing Latin American immigrants coming across the Mexican border. Instead he was condemning the European colonizers who came here starting 500 years ago and stole the land from Native Americans while committing genocide against them. At first the anti-immigrant crowd cheered for him until they slowly realized he was not giving their message. Then they fell into silent confusion, as immigrant rights protesters shouted their approval.

"No force on Earth can stop Sarah Palin from becoming our very own "lite" version of Eva Perón -- a glamorous and tragic legend, minus the tragedy. Eventually, some clever composer will write a blockbuster musical about her life and times. Stage directions will include: "SARAH fires gun. MOOSE dies." It's futile to try to ignore Palin, however noble the effort may be. She's a phenomenon, and it hardly matters that so many people believe she augurs the final dissolution of American politics into a big, frothy bowl of mush. The republic will survive even her."

They lead a church that claims to stand on the side of the sick and the poor, the meek who shall inherit the earth. But in the course of a single week, the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed themselves willing to see health-care denied to millions of uninsured Americans, and to yank the social-service rug out from under the feet of tens of thousands of urban poor in the nation's capital -- all to serve the bishops' obsession with the sex lives and reproductive organs of others.

Fox News has reported that Republican lawmakers are planning on holding town hall meetings on health care reform for no other reason than to invite protestors to show up and show their rage.

While the national debate over immigration may be a ways off, an assortment of evangelical Christian organizations are already at odds over the issue. In early October, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) -- which has over 40 member organizations and is made up of nearly 30 million U.S. evangelicals -- passed a resolution endorsing "comprehensive" immigration reform. In no time, Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion & Democracy pounced.... "The Bible does not offer a blueprint for modern legislation, but it can serve as a moral compass and shape the attitudes of those who believe in God," the NEA resolution stated....IRD's Tooley later told OneNewsNews -- the news service of Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, that "The NAE has in the recent past become outspoken on environmentalism and global warming, and then condemn[ed] the U.S. for what it calls 'torture' in its interrogation of terror detainees. And next, [the NAE] plans to adopt a petition regarding nuclear disarmament."

"We're too scared to have real trials in our country" is a level of cowardice unmatched in the world.

We've seen corporations use "free trade" agreements to quietly camouflage their push for exploitable labor in broader arguments about globalization. What we haven't seen is corporate special interests openly push for U.S. regulators to openly allow companies to sell goods made with child and slave labor...until now. -- The way to stop this is for the world's largest economies to establish basic rules which everyone else will inevitably follow as a price of admission to those economies' markets. If the United States says companies cannot sell products in our market made with child slave labor, most companies will cease making products with child slave labor fearing the loss of access to our market which would destroy their business. -- We've seen corporations use "free trade" agreements to quietly camouflage their push for exploitable labor in broader arguments about globalization. What we haven't seen is corporate special interests openly push for U.S. regulators to openly allow companies to sell goods made with child and slave labor...until now. --- The way to stop this is for the world's largest economies to establish basic rules which everyone else will inevitably follow as a price of admission to those economies' markets. If the United States says companies cannot sell products in our market made with child slave labor, most companies will cease making products with child slave labor fearing the loss of access to our market which would destroy their business. -- Of course, that's why business has opposed every effort to put basic labor, environmental and human rights standards into our international trade agreements - and why business groups are now preparing to try to weaken the laws barring products made with child slave labor. They know that the less rules that exist in the American market, the more cost-cutting exploitation they can engage in. -- That corporations' advocacy for deregulation has now become so brazen that they are effectively pushing the U.S. government to endorse child slave labor is predictable. This is what their globalization agenda has always been all about. -- The only thing surprising about it is that in a Washington so overtly dominated by Big Money, it has taken them this long to be this blatant about their objectives.

I suppose sane Republicans can be embarrassed by the right wing extremists who seem to have control over the Republican Party, whether young or old. It isn’t just the racism, alarmist lies and sexism, but also the behaviors of members of the RNC, one of whom has been arrested for sexual harrassment.

"A Florida conservative has registered an official 'Tea Party' with the office of the Secretary of State, and is promising to run candidates against Republicans and Democrats in state and national races."

Just when I thought the religious reich had hit rock bottom, they have starting digging with reckless abandon.... Westboro Baptist Church, the fringe-of-the-fringe anti-gay group famous for protesting at military funerals and claiming that God is punishing the country for its tolerance of homosexuality, was spotted this morning protesting outside Sidwell Friends, the school attended by Sasha and Malia Obama. Protesters were carrying signs with anti-gay, anti-abortion and anti-Obama slogans, slowing down traffic all along Wisconsin Avenue this morning.

Well, we have a healthcare bill passed in the House. While I have very mixed feelings on the bill, it is at least a step in the right direction, albeit a baby step. However, as while I wanted the bill to be stronger and fear it's fate in the "House of Lords" known as the U.S. Senate, I will not sit idly by as Conservative idiot "pundits" lie about the process which gave birth to this historical vote.

The right just loves to fear the dark. After falling for the propoganda of fear constantly pushed during the George W. Bush years, it seems as if they have a new leader to whip them it to paranodic frenzy. Yes Sarah Palin, the Queen of the foolish, and of right wing loons everywhere, has struck yet again.

While Republicans have indicated that they consider the block of antiabortion, pro-life Democrats Stupak leads as their last best chance for sinking the Democrats' health care reform effort, Stupak says his threatened insurgency would be driven simply by his absolute refusal to allow any federal dollars to subsidize abortions under a new health care system. Stupak's position could hardly be better crafted to create an unresolvable impasse and that, in conjunction with his close association with the fundamentalist antidemocratic Washington influence peddling group known as The Family which some accuse of being an unregistered lobby, raises troubling questions.