Via Digby, this great catch form the folks at MMFA:

Bethesda, Md.: I thought that “Why are Liberals So Condescending” was the most intelligent article I’ve read in the Post in some time.

Do you think that this is the result of a decision by your editors to be more fair and balanced?

Also, I would appreciate your comments on the “All serious scientists agree that Global Warming is an enormous problem.” school of thought. This matter has been positioned in exactly the same condescending manner.

Gerard Alexander: I can only tell you that the Post editor I dealt with searched me out, and were as encouraging as any editor could conceivably be.

Your liberal media at work.

In all honesty, the only thing that surprises me about this is that they felt the need to outsource it. Seems to me this could have been handled quite easily in house by Broder, Will, Krauthammer, Gerson, Hiatt, or, let’s face it- anyone on the WaPo op-ed pages not named Eugene Robinson.

If you’re snowbound and desperate for entertainment, Jezebel will be liveblogging Palin’s speech at 9pm.

Princess Sparkle Pony has a Sarah Palin Tea Party Convention Bingo card, which you could probably use for a drinking game, but only if you’re not planning on driving or possibly walking for at least 12 hours afterwards.

I’ll probably be out for dinner when the big event takes place, but with an estimated “almost a hundred” media (and only 600 paying guests), the odds are that we’ll find out pretty soon if anything significant happens.

John Cook at Gawker has a point-by-point teardown of Fox News’ “fair and balanced” editing of the underwhelming-on-the-air “faceoff” between Jon Stewart and Lord Falafel. “I’m Not Saying Your Mother’s A Whore: How Fox News Censored Jon Stewart vs. Bill O’Reilly” :

Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart’s case: A lot!

Last night on his show—Part Two of a ludicrously overhyped “faceoff” between O’Reilly and Stewart in which Stewart attempted, among other things, to present a critique of Fox as a fear-mongering GOP messaging operation—O’Reilly boasted that his edit of their 42-minute interview for broadcast was “a fair cut” and invited viewers to have a look at the unedited version online to judge for themselves: “Some of these idiots in the press who hate us, ‘O’Reilly cut the interview to make Stewart look’—OK, all of that is bull. It’s a fair cut. And then when you watch the cut and watch the whole interview you’ll see it.”

So we took him up on the offer, and guess what? If by “fair cut” O’Reilly means “cut in a manner that left some of Stewart’s best lines, most effective arguments, and most convincing evidence out of the interview and hidden from the broadcast audience,” then he’s absolutely right…

And to watch the Fox News cut of this exchange, you’d think O’Reilly scored a minor point by mocking Stewart’s repeated use of the word “cyclonic”

O’REILLY: Cavuto sane?
STEWART: Being the thinnest kid at fat camp. So let’s just get that straight. Here is what Fox has done through their cyclonic, perpetual…
O’REILLY: We’re back to the cyclonic.
STEWART: Their cyclonic perpetual emotion machine that is a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week. They’ve taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao. Explain to me why that is the narrative of your network?

Here’s what Stewart really said about Neil Cavuto’s practice of raising “Is Obama a Stalinist?”-style questions:

I know what this is. I come from Jersey—it’s the same thing: “I’m not saying your mother’s a whore. I’m just saying she has sex for money. With people.” [F]ox News used to be all about, you don’t criticize a president during wartime. It’s unacceptable, it’s treasonous, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. All of a sudden, for some reason you can run out there and say, “Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country.”

Ah yes—the Cavuto Mark in all its glory!

Read the whole thing. The Gawker staff deserves great credit for, as the saying goes, watching these idiots so we don’t have to, and for exploring Fox’s bad-faith chop job at length. Comments are well worth reading, too—including, I suppose, the Fox apologist who whines “The rife condescension in this thread is exactly why more people watch Fox than the Big Three. Obviously, the bulk of Fox’s viewers don’t really sweat the fact it’s a right-leaning outlet, just like the Big Three viewers don’t sweat the left-of-center bias. Fox’s viewers watch Fox because it’s the one place in the MSM they don’t get called stupid all day long.”

I don’t think New York Magazine’s epithet for Alabama’s Latest Shame is quite specific enough, because who north of the Mason-Dixon line knows which is the “Cotton State”? But they absolutely have found the best Getty photo of Shelby Steal, so you should give them the click and go admire it for yourselves.

Ezra Klein’s ransom note is pretty good, too.

Other potential labels from our brilliant BJ commentariat:

Senator Crimson Bribe
Sen. French Connection
The Alabama Extortionist
Senator Porkwall
Senator Squeegee Man
The ‘Bama Blackmailer
Sen. Earmarks-for-Airbus
Sen. Shellgame
The ‘Bama Scammer
Sen. “Roll Bribe!”
Shelby the French Privateer
Sen. Shelby (R-Toyota / Airbus)

And finally: “... has ‘traitor’ been taken?”

Choose a favorite below, or add your own!

Shortly after Senator Brown #2 abandoned his much-advertised pickup truck for the plush chauffered limos of DeeCee, there was a five-alarm tire fire back in his home town. Shortly after Scotty was sworn in, gleeful weatherpersons started predicting up to 24 inches of snow in the nation’s capital… and maybe an inch, or so, in the southern half of Massachusetts.

Assuming the forecasters are correct, we Massholes definitely got the better end of this particular deal with Pat Robertson’s devil. We have both firefighters and snow removal equipment here in New England.

It appears the teabaggers have stumbled upon the missing ingredient that will make their movement more palatable to the public at large- xenophobia:

The Tea Party movement has energized activism against President Obama’s vision for immigration reform.

The link between tea partiers and immigration politics developed last summer, when the impact of illegal immigration on the health care system became a prominent side issue in town hall debates.

Since then, illegal immigration has steadily gained ground on the Tea Party agenda.

Immigration “is one of our main issues in the state of North Carolina,” said David DeGerolamo, co-founder of Tea Party group NC Freedom, in a phone interview. “And what it comes down to is that the United States is a republic based on the rule of law. What part of illegal is right?”

DeGerolamo is scheduled to give a talk today on “How to Unite State Tea Party Groups” at the National Tea Party Convention, which began yesterday in Nashville.

The Nashville event has devoted a good share of its spotlight to activists devoted to promoting get-tough policies against illegal immigrants and blocking White House plans to offer a path to legal status for the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants.

I’m sure this is related to their anti-corporate stance.

And one of these days, can we stop calling them teabaggers and call them what they really are- Republicans.

*** Update ***

Then you have this:

The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and “the cult of multiculturalism,” asserting that Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”

What about a poll tax, Tancredo?

Nobody move, nobody gets hurt:

Congressional Republicans have been breathtakingly irresponsible of late, but Shelby’s latest gambit might be the single most ridiculous stunt in a long while. What kind of right-wing clown rails against government spending and then holds the Senate hostage until he gets his earmarks?

This from a senator who once pledged to do “whatever it takes” to give presidential nominees “up or down” votes?

If Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback” became a national punch-line, Shelby’s scheme—it’ll need a clever little name—should easily become a humiliating moment for the senator and his party.

What makes it even better is who will be the recipient of the largesse Shelby is demanding (via Marci Wheeler):

The key issue is that Shelby wants the Air Force to tweak an RFP for refueling tankers so that Airbus (partnered with Northrup Grumman) would win the bid again over Boeing. The contract had been awarded in 2008, but the GAO found that the Air Force had erred in calculating the award. After the Air Force wrote a new RFP in preparation to rebid the contract, Airbus calculated that it would not win the new bid, and started complaining. Now, Airbus is threatening to withdraw from the competition unless the specs in the RFP are revised.

Essentially, then, Shelby’s threat is primarily about gaming this bidding process to make sure Airbus–and not Boeing–wins the contract (there’s a smaller program he’s complaining about, too, but this is the truly huge potential bounty for his state).

I’m not sure why anyone at all is surprised about this. First of all, this is just a repeat performance for Shelby. You will remember, of course, during the auto bailouts, Sen. Shelby and Sen. Corker did everything they could to make sure that GM and Chrysler died, and people remember that they were motivated in large part by their insatiable desire to destroy the UAW and weaken the power of unions nationwide. But the other reason Shelby and Corker were so eager to see GM and Chrysler die was because of the large presence of foreign auto manufacturers in their respective states. In other words, they are used to going to bat for foreign manufacturers over the American people and American industry. That is just how they roll.

Second, the other reason he is doing this is because is because he can. He will pay no political price for this whatsoever. The beltway media will not flay him alive like they did Nelson, even though the 100 billion dollar potential contract to a company propped up by foreign governments is ONE THOUSAND times bigger than the 100 million dollar Nebraska sweetheart deal that Nelson received. Not only will he not pay a price, but, in a couple of weeks, you can guarantee that Shelby will be intoning gravely about deficit spending and pork on one of the Sunday shows, and NO ONE will call him on it. Remember his rhetoric during the stimulus debate?

So, in short, I’m just not sure why anyone is surprised by this. Like any serial liar and thief, the reason he is doing it is because he can. Remember- IOKIYAR.

Digby nails O’Keefe and company:

I’m not sure what this was trying to prove, but there’s little doubt that these guys are jackasses of the highest order. They are just mean little pranksters seeking to entrap low level clerks into validating bigots’ worst imaginations. The fact that the MSM never did any real investigations of these little creeps before now and gave them credibility instead, is a sad comment on journalism.

The thing you have to realize about these guys is that they are not trying to prove anything. They are simply trying to validate all the nonsense they and their followers already believe. If they were interested in proving anything, they would look at contrary evidence and allow that to factor into their judgment. But they don’t, do they?

So apparently aging sociopath John McCain slapped a hold NLRB nominee Craig Becker back in October, and even though Becker has been a nominee for six months and answered 280 written questions, McCain never found the time to submit any questions. Al Franken comes to the rescue:

You’d think with his 20 some appearances on Sunday talk shows, he would have had enough spare time to ask even one question to get at why he had a hold on Becker. Apparently not.

McCain’s only principle is what benefits him the most at that very minute. That is why he is able to be so mavericky and switch his postion on everything- he simply doesn’t really believe in it, so why not change your mind if there is some immediate political gain and some camera time to be had.

Meanwhile, the worthless shitheels in our national media (I’m talking to all you McCain fluffers, and especially you Sunday show hosts- Mr. David Gregory, Mr. Bob Schieffer), continue to pretend that McCain is a man of honor and integrity, and a man who stands on principle. Rather than confess their sins and admit what they helped to create, they’ll sit idly by as a bitter geriatric makes them his bitch.

The suicide rate for j-school professors has to be astronomical these days. Are any of David Gregory’s professors still alive?

(video courtesy of the Jane Hamsher’s of the left)

Rush Limbaugh, who spent the last eight years fluffing C+ Augustus so much that he voiced relief when he no longer had to defend them, is now taking to Fox News attacking Obama for… not doing his own work in college and law school and that other people wrote his law review articles:

Gotta love that affirmative action dog whistle- “turn his c’s into a’s.” Limbaugh dropped out of college after two semesters of flunking every course he took .

Anyone know who the seven Republicans are:

And when Obama backed a bipartisan commission to find ways to cut the long-term deficit – including reexamining popular entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – a handful of Republican sponsors switched their positions and joined in filibustering it, the president said.

“This failed by seven votes, when seven Republicans who had cosponsored the idea suddenly walked away from their own proposal after I endorsed it,’’ an exasperated Obama told the crowd. “I said, ‘Good idea.’ I turned around, they’re gone. What happened?’’

Dollars to doughnuts that Mean Old Man McCain is one of them.

Not sure how many of you caught Hardball tonight, but the Family Research Council trotted out Peter Sprigg, another one of their odious spokesbots to rail against the repeal of DADT, and at the end of the piece, this little exchange happened:

Matthews: Do you think we should outlaw gay behavior?

Sprigg: Well, I think certainly..

Matthews: I’m just asking, should we outlaw gay behavior?

Sprigg: I think the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas which overturned the sodomy laws in this country was wrongly decided. I think there would be a place in this country for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior.

Matthews: So we should outlaw gay behavior?

Sprigg: YES!

No dog whistles there. They aren’t even hiding it anymore.

Just woke up from a nap and saw DougJ’s thread about Ambinder and McCain. They just never are going to get it, are they?

McCain is a shallow hothead who personalizes everything, but politics most of all. The stories about this are legion, especially by local Arizona reporters who have pointing this out for years. The simple fact is that McCain does not like Obama for a number of reasons, including his belief that Obama slighted him as a Senator over lobbying reform (which was McCain’s personal fiefdom for tv grandstanding face time, whereas Obama wanted to do something about it), showed such disdain for him during the 2008 campaign that it was echoed openly by his staff, all amplified by the fact that Obama handed him his ass in the election. McCain is a bitter old man who is going to simply oppose everything Obama tries to do.

Period. There is no deeper reason. This is why McCain feels no remorse for thrusting Lady Starburst on a vulnerable America he claims to love. It was justified, because he had to beat Obama, who was the “enemy.” It is also why he always eagerly latches on to every neocon war scheme, because he is especially susceptible to manichean depictions of the world.

He’s a pathetic, disgusting shell of a man.

The end.

Suck it, Trebeck:

Among the 126 programs President Obama proposes to slash in the 2011 budget is a $1 million scholarship program that honors the late son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.).

Stupak is the conservative House Democrat who held up a House vote on Obama’s health-care initiative last fall with his demands that the legislation provide stronger assurances that no federal money be spent on abortion. Stupak’s amendment was adopted and the bill survived a close vote, but only after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) spent hours calming angry pro-choice advocates

He got off light. As far as I am concerned, not one dollar for re-election, either. And if I had my way, every single abortion rights bill in the future, should there be any, would be named after Bart.

Besides, just tell him it is the fiscally conservative thing to do and he will STFU. That is how the blue dogs roll, isn’t it? You just have to say “blah blah blah fiscal conservatism blah blah blah deficit hawk” and everything becomes expendable, right?

James Fallows has another excellent post on the death-spiral fallacy of “bipartisanship” in modern American politics:

I got this note from someone with many decades’ experience in national politics…

“Bipartisanship in the American sense means compromising on legislation so that a sufficient number of members of Congress from BOTH parties will support it, even if (as is typically the case) a few majority party members defect and most minority party members don’t join… It can’t happen if the minority party members vote as a block against major legislation. And that can happen only if the minority party has the ability to discipline its ranks so that none join the majority, which is the unprecedented situation we’ve got in Congress today.

“The way parliamentary parties maintain their discipline is straightforward. No candidate can run for office using the party label unless the party bestows that label upon him or her. And usually, the party itself and not the candidate raises and controls all the campaign funds. As every political scientist knows, the fact that in the U.S. any candidate can pick his or her own party label without needing anyone else’s approval, and can also raise his or her own campaign funds, is why there cannot be and never really has been any sustained party discipline before—even though it is a feature of parliamentary systems.

“The GOP now maintains party discipline by the equivalent of a parliamentary party’s tools: The GOP can effectively deny a candidate the party label (by running a more conservative GOP candidate against him or her), and the GOP can also provide the needed funds to the candidate of the party’s choice. And every GOP member of Congress knows it. (Snowe and Collins may be immune, but that’s about it.)

“I’ve missed almost all the punditry this past week… but what I’ve seen seems almost like a lot of misleading fluff designed to fill the void that should follow an understanding of the foregoing, at least on the subject of ‘why no bipartisanship?’ There’s really nothing more to be said about “why no bipartisanship,” once one recognizes the GOP party discipline. On this issue, it’s absolutely astounding to blame Obama or even the Congressional leadership (although Pelosi and Reid leave much to be desired otherwise). It’s doubly astounding that the GOP did it once before, less perfectly, but with a very large reward for bad behavior in the form of the 1994 mid-term elections. Yet no one calls them on it effectively, and bad behavior seems about to be rewarded again…

” ... a Dem could run against that GOP incumbent by pointing out that the GOP opponent lost X or Y or Z project or policy benefit for his or her district or state by insisting on voting down the line with the GOP. ‘Put his party above his constituents,’ might be the charge, or ‘Put Michael Steele above you and me.’ But so far, the Dems don’t seem to have cottoned onto this. They could go into the 2010 elections not just challenging the obstructionists in the GOP, but showing the electorate what the price of obstruction has been for real people back home.”

Fallows’ whole post is well worth reading, along with his cover article “How America Can Rise Again” (which I discussed here last week). Obama’s been compared to a lot of previous presidents, but it’s beginning to feel like his closest analogue may be Teddy Roosevelt—the progressive Republican whose bold measures to keep America during its first Gilded Age from devolving into another failed banana republic basically split his own party and reversed the social polarity of both major parties. The question may be whether President Obama has the character (in the old-fashioned sense) to defy his own inherently conservative instincts by going after “the malefactors of great wealth” and working to preserve our joint natural resources even when such preservation won’t be seen as “profitable” for another couple of generations.