I just had to watch Glenn Beck here in the 11 AM Pacific Hour, because some in the right-wing Twitterverse were all abuzz about a “big announcement.”

Beck complained about accusations that he is a McCarthyist, because he’s “not a Senator” and doesn’t have subpoena power, which of course is utterly true and utterly beside the point as he and the rest of the right continue their smear campaigns. Beck and the right have decided to repeat ad nauseam that there is some kind of secret “socialist” agenda at work by defining those who disagree with him as commies or whatever, so his crocodile tears are pretty transparent.

Beck then gave a rambling, nearly twenty minute speech in which he essentially compared Washington, D.C. to the swine flu and called for a “quarantine” of the city. I use the qualifier “essentially” because Beck goes all over the place in his little talks, earnestly professing his love for country and insisting that it’s not about partisanship, when in fact Beck has become the de facto leader of the kind of insane right wing partisanship that was last dominate when Bill Clinton was president.

It was all pretty awesome, with Beck standing in front of a big-screen graphic as the swine-flu-corruption disease spread across a map of the U.S, with Beck asking the computer controller to go back and start at the beginning of the outbreak for dramatic effect. He’s standing in front of a graphic! OMG!

Beck really wasn’t clear about his proposed “quarantine” of the seat of government, although at one point he seemed to be repeating something like “nothing in, no legislation out.” So it appears he’s not actually calling for a physical quarantine of D.C. Whew!

Then Beck moved into something of an Elmer Gantry act, promising redemption to members of both parties who would expose corruption, and asking for 56 “re-Founders” of the Republic, the same number as originally signed the Declaration of Independence. I’d imagine he might just get that number, seeing there are at least that number of far-right Republicans left in Congress who would likely have no compunction about hitching their wagon up to Beck.

Beck hit the corruption theme hard, naming mostly Democrats and liberal organizations but also at least one Republican. Beck promised his viewers (always leave them wanting more!) that on Monday he would tell members of Congress how to become a re-Founder, and promising to forgive members if they did the right thing. It’s a fascinating amalgam of populist rhetoric, Christian-like redemption talk and high-tech blinky lights that Beck uses.

Oh, it’s worth noting that Beck delivered his emotional appeal against corruption on the Rubert Murdoch-owned Fox Noise Channel, on the day that the 9-12 event Beck created was being sponsored by the following earnest grass roots organizations: (admittedly selective list, you can click through to see all of them)

Freedom Works
National Taxpayers Union
Grassfire.Org
The Club for Growth
The Ayn Rand Center
NARLO
Americans for Tax Reform
Senate Conservatives Fund
etc.

So yeah, corruption is bad, Glenn. Definitely bad.

Oops.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Coast Guard training exercise set off a security scare in Washington’s Potomac River on Friday as the United States marked the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

That’s bizarre, almost beyond belief. My tee-vee says President Obama was at the Pentagon for memorial services.

Civil wars have consequences.

On Monday I compared Fox Noise lunatic Glenn Beck to deceased Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and I asked:

Which obscure administration or member of Congress will be next? Will it it be a third under-secretary for African affairs, or will it be, um, YOU?

And today we found out the answer. From Huffington Post:

Glenn Beck has struck again.

Yosi Sergant, who recently popped up on Beck’s radar for his involvement in a conference call on national service, has been asked to resign as communications director by the National Endowment for the Arts, sources familiar with the move tell the Huffington Post.

At issue was an August conference call in which the NEA encouraged select artists to participate in an administration project dubbed “United We Serve” and led by the first lady.

Beck attacked Sergant and the NEA on his Fox News talk show, accusing the agency of propaganda efforts similar to those used by Nazi Germany. And now Sergant has been tossed overboard, making him Beck’s second victim in his campaign to rid the administration of perceived radicals, socialists, communists, fascists, anarchists and all other manner of nefarious influences.

Perhaps not coincidentally, both Sergant and Van Jones – Beck’s first takedown – have roots in on-the-ground organizing and were tightly connected with the grassroots progressive community.

While an update to the HuffPo piece reports the NEA says Sergant will remain at the agency, stepping down from a leadership type position, it’s pretty clear that Beck and his neo-McCarthyite followers will stop at nothing to smear anyone in the administration they can, no matter how ridiculous the charges. (I mean, go to search.gov on your own if you want. I got gardening and food banks, how very Third Reich.)

And to top it all off, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation is bringing Beck to Seattle on Sept. 26 for an appearance at Safeco Field.

Now, it’s not really surprising that EFFWA would bring in Beck, because that’s what they do with their seemingly unlimited budget of far-right foundation money that comes from god-knows-where. But as this is yet another instance of the noise machine operating in concert with libertard stink tanks, you’d think an enterprising reporter might plan on delving into it all here in the next two weeks or so.

Or will it just be presented as “hey, look, Glenn Beck is at the ballyard, he must be genuinely popular!”

Is there a traditional reporter left in Seattle with the guts to wade through the baseless and bizarre statements Beck makes on a routine basis?

Just got in, only heard snippets of President Barack Obama’s speech on health care. What I heard sounded good. Cesspool?

At Crosscut, Bob Simmons eloquently points out a simple historical truth with a contemporary meaning: private enterprise failed to provide electrical service to much of rural America, and it took the REA under Franklin D. Roosevelt (and Truman) to get it done. And the right wingers of the day called FDR a communist and everything else under the sun.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, where we’re even more indebted to government action for the creation of cheap, reliable electrical power, you kind of wonder if the morons proclaiming that they “don’t need the government for anything except defense and law enforcement” are going to stop using their computers, microwaves and flat screens, or if many of them are even aware of the BPA. I suppose the magic market fairy just fires up the PS3 for them.

The ridiculous hysteria of August should cause sensible people to reflect on what the proper role of government is in a democracy that adheres to a well-regulated capitalist system. This is a legitimate area for debate.

The essential position of progressives, as I understand it, is that if you don’t have a referee in key sectors the cheaters will prosper. This has been proven countless times in our history, from the railroads and oil companies of yore to Enron and the housing bubble in our own time. From time to time government action has been required to preserve capitalism, not destroy it. Notice nobody wants to centrally plan production of toilet paper or iPods, we’re only talking about essential services, health care being rather essential at times to not being dead.

One can argue for or against regulation in a given sector, and how little or what type of regulation will work best, but the far right has simply decided to hurl whatever insults it can muster instead, and is being egged on by corporate America acting in lockstep with the GOP. These are the folks who supposedly hate class warfare, but ruthlessly wage it against the most vulnerable Americans in order to harvest vast profits from the sick, the working poor and anyone else that gets sucked into the monstrosity known as health insurance.

We’re still waiting on that GOP plan to fix health insurance, and my bet is they’ll never produce one. The GOP and the insurance industry are essentially one and the same thing, and just because there are also a lot of Democrats who display similar whorishness does not excuse any of it.

The health insurance companies have become the new Enrons, and they must be refereed. Obama must indeed welcome their hatred, just as FDR did, or nothing much will be accomplished.

Then.

Capitalizing on his war record, McCarthy narrowly defeated the overconfident Senator Robert La Follette in the 1946 Republican senatorial primary and assailed his Democratic opponent, Howard McMurray, as a man so desperate for election that he would accept communist support. The baseless charge worked. McCarthy trounced McMurray and, in 1947, became the junior U.S. senator from Wisconsin. He quickly alienated his colleagues (especially after he tried to court the German-American vote by criticizing the prosecution of Nazis accused of slaughtering American troops during the Battle of the Bulge) and he soon feared that he could not be re-elected without a major issue to improve his political standing. Consequently, on February 7, 1950, he told a group of Republican women assembled in Wheeling, West Virginia, that there was serious “communist influence” in the Truman administration, declaring, ” I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . names that were known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” Even though no such list existed, McCarthy’s accusations gripped the media and he soon became a national figure, promoted on the covers of national news magazines.

Now.

The defining accomplishment of Van Jones’s life was his founding of the Ella Baker Freedom Center. While the controversy over his appointment was going on I meant to look into who she was, but didn’t get it done. Ron Radosh, an expert on the hard left of which he was once a member, has the answer:

[T]he name of Jones’ Oakland group, The Ella Baker Freedom Center, is most appropriate. Most people have referred to the late Baker as simply a civil rights activist. I am writing from vacation in Nantucket, without benefit of my files at home. But in my book, Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996, I point out that the late civil rights lawyer Joe Rauh had noted that everything Baker said in the 60’s might as well have been taken verbatim from The Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. Baker was so pro-Communist that she attacked Hubert Humphrey and other liberal anti-Communists as ultra reactionaries. Known as the “grandmother of SNCC,” Baker was aligned with those in the movement who were trying to push the organization to the far left.

I think that sums up the Obama administration pretty well. If you think Hubert Humphrey was an ultra-reactionary, this administration’s for you!

Red-baiting never goes out of style.

This is just the beginning, unless someone with a really big megaphone decides to fight back. No, not the president, he’s too busy making sure bankers, health insurance executives and the rest of Wall Street are mollified.

You know who I mean. [ed. note update-I messed up my original link, the link is now to whom I am talking about. Congratulations to all who guessed “KO.” Sorry about the bad link.] Yeah, this is war. Either the far right puke funnel is brought to heel by utterly destroying its undeserved credibility, something that should have happened long ago, or our democracy plunges into neo-McCarthyite darkness for who-knows-how-long. Which obscure administration or member of Congress will be next? Will it it be a third under-secretary for African affairs, or will it be, um, YOU?

Throw in a still shaky economy and two foreign wars that seemingly have no end, and it’s difficult to predict what might happen.

How’s that post-partisanship civility working out? Yeah, I know, regular people get sick and tired of the clown shows, but the clown shows are not a bug, they’re a design feature. They show that many Democrats won’t fight for their principles, or that many Democrats are unprincipled whores, and in either case weakness and whorishness is exposed.

The clowns clown, the pundits pontificate and the “reasonable” Republicans chortle while they watch the polls and congratulate each other on what a great monkey wrench they possess. Next up will be a set of “promises” from the GOP, probably with some grandiose name only a Colbert could appreciate, that will list the requisite demands for lower taxes, bashing of immigrants, fear-mongering against gays and any clever phraseology Frank Luntz crafts to make a shit sandwich look like Pan-bagnat.

Democrats, please feel free to win this fight on policy grounds by carefully arguing your position, giving away the store to your opponents and then attempting to win over the public with excuses, that’ll work well.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNs7Zpqo98[/youtube]

Then the issue can be talked about. These are legitimate concerns expressed in this video, but no birthers, no tenthers, no deathers, etc. Regular people have legitimate concerns, they should be talked about. That is how you wind up with better legislation.

Nobody can be an expert on everything, and this often precludes sensible but otherwise busy people from stating their views and asking questions. That’s too bad sometimes, but it seems like a lot of folks will tune in this fall.

This is democracy. You don’t have to agree in the end, that’s fine. People of good will can agree to disagree without all the nuttiness, and certainly without violence or violent overtones.

The clown shows are drawing down, and it’s time to send out the clowns and let the grown ups try to figure this out. This is about health insurance reform, and people who insist on either blowing up the discourse or trying to make this about bizarre, far right revisionism need to be called out by the traditional media.

There’s a hint of Autumn in the air, and August is over. If only President Barack Obama has the will to lead…

Some folks had some other stuff they seemed to want to discuss, so here’s an open thread.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDR0W9SVi48[/youtube]

At the town hall meeting in Centralia on Wednesday night, Rep. Brian Baird turned the tables on a city of Centralia candidate for mayor named Matthew Trent. The Columbian included an account of the exchange in an article this morning:

One of the more contentious exchanges of the evening came when Centralia City Council candidate Matthew Trent approached the microphone.

Trent read quotes from a number of founding fathers, among them Declaration of Independence author and third president Thomas Jefferson.

Trent, who is opposing Centralia Mayor Tim Browning in the November general election, said that he had no doubt Jefferson would consider Baird “an enemy of God and the Republic” for his record on spending and supporting government controls.

Baird responded strongly, refuting the notion that Jefferson would frown upon his record.

“It’s not just my ilk, my friend,” Baird said, noting that there was no budget deficit when former President Bill Clinton left office.

As Chris notes at his blog, Trent is the beneficiary of a public education, attended a public community college and actually works for Lewis County, according to a blog created by Trent.

It’s great that Baird responded forcefully, but with great dignity, and one can hope the lesson he will take back to D.C. to share with leadership is that there is no negotiating with people like this. They’ve concocted a fantasy world of black and white in which they are the sole arbiters of the meaning of the Constitution, and of what the Founders actually intended.

They can puff up their chests and say stuff like this until the cows come home, but until and unless the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with them, they’re simply delusional fringe characters who deserve to be rhetorically smacked down with a vengeance.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. Good luck with your campaign, there, Mr. Trent.

There are two key indicators today in the brewing battle between the House and the administration over health care reform, and while they don’t represent any kind of change in position, they indicate progressives are holding their ground.

Earlier today, Greg Sargent reported that House progressives sent a letter to the White House stating that they will not support a bill lacking a so-called public option, and demanding a meeting with President Barack Obama.

Late this afternoon, TPM quotes a statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as saying that a bill without the public option will not pass the House.

While progressives and the Speaker are reiterating already stated positions, it’s an encouraging sign that the right-wing clown shows (and one left wing finger-biter) have not changed the basic fact that there are more progressives than Blue Dogs, and there are far more Democrats than Republicans in the House.

So while the traditional media (and we bloggers) have duly watched, been outraged, been disgusted and been doubled over in laughter at different times by the circus, it’s worth noting that the House, the most representative body, is poised to actually represent the interests of all Americans, absurd lies about death panels, the 10th Amendment and so on notwithstanding.

Yes, nothing is perfect, but millions of Americans voted in November 2008, and the Democratic Party was handed the majority in Congress and the White House. Extremists who claim some special exemption from the results of elections, making up bizarre theories to suite their own purposes, need to be eyed with suspicion. If a health care plan finally emerges, there will be another set of elections only 14 months from now, and the people will get to vote again. That’s how it works. Elections have consequences, as the Bushites reminded us so frequently.

We are talking about figuring out a way to help our fellow citizens, people. Nobody from the government will show up at people’s houses unannounced to administer prostate exams, indoctrinate children or whatever other nonsensical (and excessively paranoid) claims have been made. Frankly, the fact the right wing puke funnel insists on regurgitating all manner of idiotic bullshit only shows how little love they have for real democracy. It’s all about democracy with them, until they lose a couple of elections, then they unleash the crazy in hopes of intimidating Democrats into backing down.

If people wish to object to certain ideas, like mandates, great. I have qualms about that myself. But the impotent rage of the right has contributed little of value, unless you’re the CEO of a private insurance company.

And then there’s the Senate. Ah, the Senate. There’s talk of using the relatively arcane reconciliation process to pass a bill without 60 votes, but it would smack of a parliamentary trick, which it would be. Not that righties will ever concede one inch no matter how legislation is passed, but they might be able to make the case to others that Democrats did something underhanded.

It’s become nearly conventional wisdom that one needs 60 votes to pass a bill, but this is because nobody ever calls anyone’s bluff on the filibuster. Frankly it is about time that somebody is actually forced to filibuster, it would be political theater on a grand stage.

Cable tee-vee news needs programming anyhow, and since trying to provide health insurance coverage to all Americans has now been portrayed by opponents as being like the Alamo, Pearl Harbor and Armageddon at once, it might be good for the American people to be exposed to the fine minds that would engage in a filibuster.

The obstructionism, obfuscation and dissembling that would be on display is hard to envision, but you can bet it would be both mighty in its rage and absurd in the extreme. For once Democrats need to dare the GOP to put itself on full and unfiltered display before the American people, and let folks compare the ideas of the two parties.

They’re all heart, I tell you. The Daily Astorian reports on Brian Baird’s town forum in Ilwaco, and state GOP executive board member Nansen Malin reveals what Republicans actually think:

“We want everyone to have quality healthcare, “Malin said, “But I am against universal health care.”

But how can everyone have quality health care if everyone doesn’t have…oh never mind.

Personally, I want everyone to have Twitter, but I am against universal Twittering.

Nansen Malin, GOP executive board member from Pacific County, via that twit thing:

Never thought I’d see this: CNN poll-Majority oppose ObamaCare. the details are very interesting.

Details:

Now thinking specifically about the health insurance plans available to most Americans, would you favor or oppose creating a public health insurance option administered by the federal government that would compete with plans offered by private health insurance companies?

Favor – 55%
Oppose – 41%
No opinion – 4%

Details are interesting.

I suppose it’s hard to concentrate on details while twitting and tweeting and teabagging and stuff with over 100,000 followers. I know I would drive right off the road, so please, Malin, let’s be safe.

And BTW, Malin, if we’re so “intolerant,” as you accuse, why is the Cesspool full of right wing shit? You can say anything you want here, so come say it. You can even use more than 140 characters.

Obama will speak to a joint session of Congress, yeah okay. But what’s the end game?

“It’s so important to get a deal,” a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about strategy. “He will do almost anything it takes to get one.”

Remind me not to take Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama car shopping, because they’d probably take me to Billy Tauzin’s used car lot.

Fool me once…

There are ppl we don’t know here inciting trouble about public health care option
about 1 hour ago from txt

Obviously it’s the dastardly work of the Ilwaco chapter of ACORN.

UPDATE–Here’s another tweet from the same GOP official:

Also ONLY known dems (small town) received yellow feedback forms for Baird
about 4 hours ago from txt

But I thought there were people there she doesn’t know? I’m so confused.

Obviously Twitter needs an “internal consistency” hashtag.