Right-Wing Turncoat Gives the Inside Scoop on Why Conservatives Are Rampaging Town Halls

FROM:

By Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet. Posted August 7, 2009.

The GOP is willing to disrupt the health care debate if they can't win it. Yesterday in Tampa, a mob of Glenn Beck supporters nearly caused a riot.

Editor's note: Stephen C. Webster writes for Raw Story the latest example of extreme right-wing demagoguery in Tampa on Thursday, this time inspired by right-wing Fox News's Glenn Beck: "In a stunning display of anger, Florida Republicans and fans of Fox editorialist Glenn Beck turned a Tampa healthcare forum into a “near riot,” one reporter said, as they attempted to enter the meeting hall and drown out a group of community organizers and a member of congress There were at least two reports of violence at the forum. “The meeting which was scheduled to begin at 6:00 at the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County drew hundreds of people who quickly began to overwhelm staff and event organizers at the front entrance,” reported Tampa news station 10 Connects. ...

“Thursday’s forum/near riot was sponsored by state Rep. Betty Reed, D-Tampa, and the Service Employees International Union, who apparently had hoped to hold something of a pep rally for President Obama’s health care reform proposal,” noted St. Petersburg Times reporter Adam Smith. He continued: “Instead, hundreds of vocal critics turned out, many of them saying they had been spurred on through the Tampa 912 activist group promoted by conservative radio and television personality Glenn Beck. Others had received e-mails from the Hillsborough Republican party that urged people to speak out against the plan and offered talking points to challenge supporters.” Such “mobs” have been denounced in recent days by Democratic lawmakers, while journalists like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow have revealed the corporate interests and Republican operatives that bankroll and organize these town hall disruptions.

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Right-Wing Turncoat Gives the Inside Scoop on Why Conservatives Are Rampaging Town Halls

by Francis Schaeffer

The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama's election has driven them over the edge. Consider Former Congressman Dick Armey. Several far right foundations and the multitrillion dollar health-insurance industry have teamed up with him to organize the far right foot soldiers of the Republican Party to intimidate people speaking on behalf of health-care reform. They are using my old shock troops -- given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.

Having failed at the ballot box, having watched their Fox News-organized "tea parties" fizzle the intimidation tactics which the Republicans have embraced are being used in a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect the profits of the insurance business. Armey's FreedomWorks is organizing against health care reform. Armey's lobbying firm represents pharmaceutical companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb. Armey's lobbying firm also represents the trade group for the life insurance industry. FreedomWorks is supporting the status quo at all costs. (They are also fans of fossil fuels. Armey's lobbying firm represents Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the UAE, on energy related issues.)

Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed FreedomWorks for building "amateur-looking" websites to promote far right interests of Armey. FreedomWorks represents a top-down, corporate-friendly approach that's been the norm for conservative organizations for years. How do I know this is the norm? Because I used to have strategy meetings with the late Jack Kemp and Dick Army and the rest of the Republican gang about using their business ties to help finance the pro-life movement to defeat Democrats. I know this script. I helped write it.

Democratic members of Congress are being harassed by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior at local town halls. It's the tactic we used to follow abortion providers around their neighborhoods. "Protesters" surrounded Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and forced police officers to have to escort him to his car for safety. We used to do the same to Dr. Tiller... until someone killed him.

How Can The Right Stoop So Low?

I used to know Dick Armey quite well. One of my sons even worked for him as an intern. I knew Armey in the context of his being a fan of my late Evangelical Religious Right leader father Francis Schaeffer. (Back in the day when I was a right wing "pro-life" organizer who has long since quit the Republicans in disgust at their -- our -- descent into extremism and hate.) Armey was once a decent guy, whatever his political views. How could he stoop so low as to be organizing what amounts to America's Brown Shirts today?

I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can't compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can't reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don't run the country any more -- and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the "other" into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court... for them this is the Apocalypse.

The last presidential election (to paraphrase Bart Simpson) "broke their brains." What else could explain their embrace of intimidation -- rather than discourse -- over the health care debate and such unsavory moments of madness as the Republicans accusing Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of racism, knowing full well that they'd just destroyed their chances with the Hispanic community forever?

The "Scorched Earth Policy"

Dick Army and company have been driven mad by their reversal, not just of political fortunes but of seeing that they've wasted their lives. They now know they were wrong: about the country, the free market, war for fun and profit, and what the American people really want. They made their best case and were rejected by the American people -- and by history. Bush was their man and he turned out to be a fool. So now all the the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can't win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!

The Lobbyist-run Groups "Americans for Prosperity " and "FreedomWorks/ Dick Armey-Orchestrated Memo:

Here is a leaked excerpt from the folks organizing the intimidation campaign:

- Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: "Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington."

- Be Disruptive Early And Often: "You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early."

- Try To "Rattle Him," Not Have An Intelligent Debate: "The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions."

The Last Republican Tactic: Outright Lies

A barrage of outright lies, wherein the Democrats are being accused of wanting to launch a massive euthanasia program against the elderly, free abortions for everyone, and "a government takeover" of health-care is now being combined with physical intimidation that in several cases has required police escorts to protect pro health-care reform speakers surrounded by angry plants sent to disrupt public forums on the health-care issue. Demonstrators hung Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy outside of his office. (Missing from the reporting of these stories -- with the notable exception of Rachel Maddow -- is the fact that much of these protests are coordinated by public relations firms and lobbyists who have a stake in opposing President Obama's reforms.

There is no daylight between the Republican Party, the health-care insurance industry, far right leaders like Dick Armey, the legion of insurance lobbyists, and now, a small army of thugs. All we're missing is actual uniforms, otherwise we now have a full blown American version of the Nazi Brown Shirts.

No, I don't believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American.

The health-insurance industry is run by very smart and very greedy people who have sunk to a new low. So has the Republican Party's leadership that will not stand up and denounce the likes of Dick Armey for helping organize roving bands of thugs trying to strip the rest of us of the ability to be heard when it comes to the popular will on reforming health care.

Conclusion: the Fascist Formula

Here's the emerging American version of the fascist's formula: combine millions of dollars of lobbyists' money with embittered troublemakers who have a small army of not terribly bright white angry people (collected over decades through pro-life mass mailing networks) at their beck and call, ever ready to believe any myth or lie circulated by the semi literate and completely and routinely misinformed right wing -- Evangelical religious underground. Then put his little mob together with the insurance companies' big bucks. That's how it works -- American Brown Shirts at the ready.

What's the results of the fascist formula for the rest of us? Well, think how this "method" worked against Dr. Tiller's abortion clinic and how that story ended. In this case a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save our economy from going bankrupt because of spiraling health care costs may be lost, not because of a better argument, but because of lies backed up by anti-democratic embittered thuggery. The motive? Revenge on America by the Old White Guys of the far right, and greed by the insurance industry.

What Can Be Done?

It's time that this whole shabby (and insane) business be exposed, vilified in run out of town on a rail by whatever responsible Republicans -- if any -- that are still in the party and who want to see the fortunes of their party revived. Republican leaders taking insurance industry money via lobbying firms and using it to organize what amounts to roving bands of thugs not only need to be exposed but thrown out of the public debate forever. They should become absolute pariahs.

It's time to give this garbage in name: insurance industry funded fascism.

9 Conservative Myths About Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

FROM:



By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future. Posted June 20, 2009.

This is terrorism we're dealing with. We can't afford to let ourselves be distracted by spin. It's time to set the record straight with the facts.

It's been a wild couple of weeks for those of us in the wingnutology business. Our services have been in tremendous demand as the mainstream media try to sort out the meaning of what Scott Roeder and James von Brunn did.

I've done an average of one radio show every day for the past two weeks trying to help various lefty talkers around the country make some sense of it all; and I'm generally gratified at how seriously people are starting to take this.

At the same time, I'm also appalled (though, sadly, hardly surprised) by the conservative mythmaking that's going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. So it's obviously time to pull together another "Firing Back" piece to give progressives what they need to separate fact from fiction when these talking points start flying.

I've actually had every one of the following myths pitched to me by on-air interviewers, phone-in callers and/or online commenters over the last two weeks. Most of them have come up over and over, which suggests to me that you're likely to encounter them, too. So let's walk 'em through:

1. These are just "lone wolf" psychos who are acting alone. You can't hold anybody else responsible for what crazy people decide to do.

True and false. But mostly false.

It's true that every one of the nine right-wing terrorists who've made the news since Jan. 20 had a history of mental illness, domestic violence, and/or drug abuse. Several were military veterans who were having a really hard time adjusting to civilian life. None of these people could reasonably be considered sane; and, for whatever twisted reasons, they made a personal choice to do what they did.

But it's not true that they were acting alone. People who are dealing with these kinds of demons are often drawn into movements that offer a strong narrative that helps them make sense of a world that never seems to add up right for them. They're usually drawn into organizations like Operation Rescue or the Minutemen that are nominally nonviolent, but which also indoctrinate them into a worldview that justifies and motivates people to commit terrorist acts. They come to believe that they must do this to save the world, to serve God and to be the heroes they desperately want to be.

They're already walking sticks of dynamite. But it takes the heat of that apocalyptic, dualistic, eliminationist, pro-violence narrative to light their fuses and make them explode.

Unfortunately, these groups also make it easy to take that final step over the line, because they often have close ties to other, more secretive groups that do advocate and plan terrorist violence as a solution. Operation Rescue teaches that killing abortion doctors is justifiable homicide, and then feeds its most extreme members into the Army of God.

The Aryan Nations and several other white nationalist groups supplied the nine members of The Order, a racist terrorist group that killed two people (including left-wing talker Alan Berg) and stole over $4 million during a nine-month spree in 1984. Al-Qaida got many of its recruits from the nominally nonviolent (but still radical) Hizb al-Tahrir. Of course, when violence actually occurs, these groups always denounce it -- but they also usually have a very good idea of who was involved, because they've been hanging around with the perpetrators for quite a while themselves.

One of the things the public is finally beginning to understand is that the "lone wolf" story has never been accurate, because these guys are never really alone in the world. Every one of them was well-marinated in large, long-established subcultures that put them up to terrorism and promised to make heroes out of them if they succeeded.

2. These terrorists are really left-wingers, not right-wingers. Because everybody knows that fascism is a phenomenon that only occurs on the left.

False does not even begin to cover the absurdity of this claim.

Fascism has always been a phenomenon of the right. Every postwar academic scholar of fascism -- Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, Umberto Eco and onward -- has been emphatically clear about this. Benito Mussolini admitted as much. It's part of the very definition of the word.

Jonah Goldberg has gotten a lot of traction on the right for his argument that fascism is somehow a left-wing tendency; but in his badly argued, barely researched tome Liberal Fascism, he gets here by taking logical leaps that no college professor would accept from the greenest freshman.

The worst, perhaps, is the way he conflates "fascism" with "totalitarianism." There is such a thing as left-wing totalitarianism: Stalinism and Maoism both qualify. But they were communist, not fascist, movements. It's only when totalitarianism happens on the right that we call it fascism.

Still, this idea has caught on like wildfire and is being widely promoted by right-wing talkers like Glenn Beck. If you want the full takedown on this, I refer you to Dave Neiwert's exhaustive series of debunking articles, which are linked to in the sidebar at Orcinus.

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Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

The Big "Leftist Voter Fraud" Lie Exposed

FROM:



Posted by Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast at 7:00 AM on June 19, 2009.

Acorn, hunh?

Remember last fall, when ACORN was the new gay, or the new feminist, or the new Islamic terrorist, or whatever the wingnuts' boogeyman-of-the-month is? Remember the "concern" on the right about people being registered to vote who weren't eligible?

Well, well, well...take a look at what's happened in California, courtesy of Brad Friedman:

What's perhaps most interesting here is what isn't mentioned in this story, as written on the Los Angeles Times' "L.A. Now" blog. First, here's their entire blog item...

By Brad Friedman on 10/19/2008 9:34PM Breaks Report of CA GOP Voter Registration Arrest During Segment With Host Julie Banderas and the WSJ's John Fund... Well, that was fun. My first time on Fox. And I don't feel dirty at all! Hopefully, it'll not be my last. Hey, I was even honored to offer them a big scoop on air, in the form my very own "Fox News Alert", after which, I'm told, they ran the headline during top of the hour news and on the crawl. So we did some good, if only for that. You're welcome. Fox!UPDATE 6/17/09: Jacoby pleads guilty to voter registration fraud. Media hardly bothers to notice. Details here... Head of CA GOP Voter Registration Firm Pleads Guilty to Voter Registration Fraud Ssshhh...Don't tell Fox 'News'! FLASHBACK Brad covers arrest with 'Fox News Alert' on FNC last October amidst phony ACORN brouhaha... (Video above) What's perhaps most interesting here is what isn't mentioned in this story, as written on the Los Angeles Times' "L.A. Now" blog. First, here's their entire blog item... The owner of a voter-registration company pleaded guilty Tuesday to voter-registration fraud, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. Laguna Beach resident Mark Jacoby, who collects signatures for petition drives, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to three years' probation and 30 days of service with the California Department of Transportation. Jacoby, owner of Young Political Majors, registered to vote at Los Angeles addresses that were not his own. State law requires petition circulators to be qualified voters. Jacoby will also be required to show proof he is registered at his correct address. "

The owner of a voter-registration company pleaded guilty Tuesday to voter-registration fraud, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Laguna Beach resident Mark Jacoby, who collects signatures for petition drives, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to three years' probation and 30 days of service with the California Department of Transportation.

Jacoby, owner of Young Political Majors, registered to vote at Los Angeles addresses that were not his own. State law requires petition circulators to be qualified voters. Jacoby will also be required to show proof he is registered at his correct address.

And what they didn't bother to mention in that story?...Amongst other things, the fact that Jacoby and Young Political Majors were hired by the California Republican Party to head up their voter registration efforts in the state. Jacoby had been arrested for Voter Registration Fraud last October, smack dab during the media's orgasmic heights of last year's phony GOP ACORN "Voter Fraud" hoax, even as Fox "News" (and the other news outlets who similarly fell for the scam) were going wall-to-wall with their unsupported insinuations about voter fraud by ACORN, Democrats and Obama.

The news about the arrest of Jacoby, at the time, had occurred just as I was heading out for an appearance on Fox "News", so I was able to break the news on-air in my own "Fox 'News' Alert". (Video originally posted here, reposted at bottom of this item.)

Given the way the LA Times blog "covered" the story of Jacoby's plea --- not even mentioning the fact that this guy and his group were hired by the California state Republican Party --- I'd say it's a fair bet Fox wouldn't even have bothered to mention the original arrest at all had I not been on air and forcing them to do so myself. Much as they are unlikely to bother reporting Jacoby's plea today.

More here.

It's worth listening to right-wingers in the media and in government, if only because when you hear them decry something, whether it's marital infidelity, gay sex, fraudulent voter registration, Obama Administration intrusion into people's lives, or anything else, they're actually talking about themselves.

Tagged as: voter fraud

Jill Hussein C. blogs at Brilliant at Breakfast.

Right-Wing Violence Will Continue, And Fox News Will Have to Answer For It

FROM:

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted June 10, 2009.

Agitators like O'Reilly and Beck traffic in incendiary rhetoric and it's pretty obvious where it's leading to.

If Fox News is going to continue to traffic in hateful, vigilante-style rhetoric, then folks at Fox News, as well as their apologists in the GOP Noise Machine, are going to have to come up with better talking points to spin away the consequences of the right-wing madness they're so eager to incite.

They need a better line of defense because the one they trotted out in the wake of the right-wing assassination of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was wholly unconvincing.

It was just as feeble as the defense Fox News' Glenn Beck tried to employ in May to distance himself from the accused right-wing cop killer in Pittsburgh who seemed to mimic Beck's language about how President Obama was coming to take away everyone's guns.

The Fox News crew is going to need better talking points because I fear the violence -- the bouts of right-wing domestic terrorism -- are likely to continue. As long as Fox News and the Noise Machine refuse to back off the incendiary language that they're actively mainstreaming, the political violence, visible just months into Obama's historic first term, may have only begun.

Note that during a jailhouse interview, Tiller's suspected killer claimed that similar assassination plots against abortion providers are already being planned.

And please note what you did not hear from virtually anyone on the far right who addressed the Tiller story last week. Yes, they tried furiously to distance Bill O'Reilly from the controversy or suggest there was nothing problematic with the "baby killer" rhetoric he used. But what you did not hear was anyone condemn, or even take issue with, O'Reilly's on-air crusade.

Why the silence? Because militia-style vigilante rhetoric has become a cornerstone of the conservative media movement in America, and it's now proudly championed by Fox News on a nearly hourly basis.

The fact is, I couldn't find a single prominent voice within the GOP Noise Machine who even hinted that O'Reilly's relentless attacks on Tiller were in any way off the mark or, in light of the vigilante Kansas church killing, needed to be reconsidered, that they should have been dialed down. And that's why the ugliness has only begun.

The unconvincing right-wing defense in the wake of the Tiller assassination last week was twofold, with the second layer even thinner than the first. The first was that when conservatives were hounding and demonizing Tiller for years, they were merely debating the issue of abortion. And surely nobody in America opposes a healthy debate, right? Nobody opposes "sharp political disagreement," as Michelle Malkin sugarcoated the Tiller attack, right?

Second, Noise Machine leaders claimed that liberal commentators do exactly what O'Reilly and Beck have been accused of: using violent political hate language that puts people's lives in danger. That claim has been made over and over, yet conservatives can't actually produce any proof -- can't find any hateful liberal quotes -- to buttress the claim.

That's because both talking points are complete fabrications.

First, the idea that O'Reilly and company simply debated Tiller's work is laughable. O'Reilly's never been interested in any kind of back-and-forth about the abortion issue. He just rants and demonizes the other side. And in the case of Tiller, O'Reilly portrayed him as a lawless executioner. As Mary Alice Carr, vice president of communications for NARAL Pro-Choice New York, wrote in a recent op-ed for The Washington Post, "O'Reilly knew that people wanted Tiller dead, and he knew full well that many of those people were avid viewers of his show. Still, he fanned the flames."

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There is justice after all . . . Evil-King of hate-speech Michael Savage is BANNED in U.K.!!!!

SENT BY: Cynthia I.

Named and shamed: the 16 barred from UK

By Beverley Rouse, Press Association

UK

Talk show host Michael Savage - real name Michael Weiner - is on the banned list

Sixteen people banned from entering the UK were "named and shamed" by the Home Office today.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she decided to make public the names of 16 people banned since October so others could better understand what sort of behaviour Britain was not prepared to tolerate.

The list includes hate preachers, anti-gay protesters and a far- right US talk show host.

"I think it's important that people understand the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here, the fact that it's a privilege to come and the sort of things that mean you won't be welcome in this country," Ms Smith told GMTV.

"Coming to this country is a privilege. If you can't live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what's more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded.

"We are publishing the names of 16 of those that we have excluded since October. We are telling people who they are and why it is we don't want them in this country."

She said the number of people excluded from Britain had risen from an average of two a month to five a month since October.

The list of the 16 "least wanted" includes radio talk show host Michael Savage, real name Michael Weiner.

"I want to sue the British home secretary for defamation," he said, "for linking me up with murderers because of my opinions, my writings, my speaking – none of which have advocated any violence, ever." Is he kidding? Many of his listeners are out there terrorizing, beating and even killing people who had done nothing to them, or to 'The Whiner' for that matter. Has he forgotten this? For a sample, a button sufices: "Are M. Savage, B. O'Reilly and S. Hannity Guilty of Accessory to Murder? Accessory: * Law. 1. One who incites, aids, or abets a lawbreaker in the commission of a crime but is not present at the time of the crime. Also called accessory before the fact. " A regular consumer of Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity, Jim David Adkisson was only following the arguments they make day in and day out, to their logical conclusions. And as you know, this is not an isolated case. Aurora

"This is someone who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country," Ms Smith told BBC Breakfast.

Also named are American Baptist pastor Fred Waldron Phelps Snr and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper, who have picketed the funerals of Aids victims and claimed the deaths of US soldiers are a punishment for US tolerance of homosexuality.

"If people have so clearly overstepped the mark in terms of the way not just that they are talking but the sort of attitudes that they are expressing to the extent that we think that this is likely to cause or have the potential to cause violence or inter-community tension in this country, then actually I think the right thing is not to let them into the country in the first place. Not to open the stable door then try to close it later," Ms Smith said.

"It's a privilege to come to this country. There are certain behaviours that mean you forfeit that privilege."

Hamas MP Yunis Al-Astal, Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen Donald Black and neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe are also on the list released today.

Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, the former leaders of a violent Russian skinhead gang which committed 20 racially motivated murders, are also banned from coming to Britain. Both are currently in prison.

Making up the rest of the 16 named by the Home Office today are preachers Wadgy Abd El Hamied Mohamed Ghoneim, Abdullah Qadri Al Ahdal, Safwat Hijazi and Amir Siddique, Muslim activist Abdul Ali Musa (previously Clarence Reams), murderer and Hezbollah terrorist Samir Al Quntar and Kashmiri terror group leader Nasr Javed.

The following is an article by: WorldNetDaily -( Note: this is a right-wing-conservative e-media that sympathizes with savage)
C.I.

Banned by U.K., Savage hits back

Radio talk star blocked from visits, along with terrorists, neo-Nazis
Posted: May 05, 2009
8:26 am Eastern

WorldNetDaily

Talk radio host Michael Savage is considering legal action against Britain's top homeland security official after she released today a list grouping him with terrorists and neo-Nazi murderers banned from entry because the government believes their views might provoke violence.

In a telephone interview with WND, Savage said he is still waiting to hear back from attorneys, but he noted Britain has very strict anti-defamation laws.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she decided to publicize the list of 16 people banned since October to show the type of behavior Britain will not tolerate, according to U.K. news reports.

Don't be silent! Sign the petition to block government attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Savage's immediate reaction upon hearing the news was typically wry.

"Darn! And I was just planning a trip to England for their superior dental work and cuisine," he recalled thinking.

"Then it sank in," he told WND, "and I said, 'She said this is the kind of behavior we won't tolerate? She's linking me with mass murderers who are in prison for killing Jewish children on buses? For my speech? The country where the Magna Carta was created?'"

Smith explained to Britain's GMTV that she believed it was "important that people understand the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here, the fact that it's a privilege to come and the sort of things that mean you won't be welcome in this country."

"Coming to this country is a privilege," she said. "If you can't live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what's more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded."

Savage said he wants top First Amendment attorneys to represent him "in a major international case."

"I want to sue the British home secretary for defamation," he said, "for linking me up with murderers because of my opinions, my writings, my speaking – none of which have advocated any violence, ever."

Savage said the last time he was in Britain was about 20 years ago, and he had no immediate plans to return.

In an interview with the BBC, Smith said Savage, the No. 3-rated radio host in the U.S., is "someone who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country."

Savage said his message for Smith and the people of the U.K. is, "Shame on you. Shame that you've fallen to such a low level."

"It's interesting to me that here I am a talk show host, who does not advocate violence, who advocates patriotic traditional values – borders, language, culture – who is now on a list banned in England," Savage said. "What does that say about the government of England? It says more about them than it says about me."

The U.K. list also includes Hamas leader Yunis Al-Astal, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen Donald Black, neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe and radical American pastor Fred Phelps, known for his virulent anti-gay protests at funerals. Phelps' daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper also is on the list.

Smith said the British government believes the people on the list have views or attitudes that could provoke violence.

"If people have so clearly overstepped the mark in terms of the way not just that they are talking but the sort of attitudes that they are expressing to the extent that we think that this is likely to cause or have the potential to cause violence or inter-community tension in this country, then actually I think the right thing is not to let them into the country in the first place. Not to open the stable door then try to close it later," she said.

"It's a privilege to come to this country. There are certain behaviors that mean you forfeit that privilege."

The others on the list are Jewish nationalist Mike Guzovsky; imprisoned Russian skinhead leaders Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky; and Islamic leaders Wadgy Abd El Hamied Mohamed Ghoneim, Abdullah Qadri Al Ahdal, Safwat Hijazi , Amir Siddique, Abdul Ali Musa, Samir Al Quntar and Nasr Javed.

Said Savage, "How can a nation put me on a list and leave hate preachers in England who say that we're going to kill all of you? We're going to convert all of you to Islam. How is it possible that those hate preachers can't be deported from Britain, but I can be banned from Britain? People who advocate actual murder cannot be deported from Britain.

"How is it that liberalism has gotten so distorted and cowardly?"

The De-Evolution of Talk Radio

A quite hard-hitting post by C. James Thomas on February 12, 2009 in his TPM Blog, he virtually eviscerates right wing radio, of course, he is being attacked as a Marxist, a Leninist who wants to silence the opposition as is the case to what the listeners of what is commonly referred as 'Hate-Radio' do to anybody who brings up the detrimental effects that these shock jocks have on US society as a whole.

A noteworthy aspect of his exposé, is that he is speaking from his own experience as a listener to these talk-radio shows.

Since moving to Dallas I have become an avid talk radio listener since I spend a lot of time driving to and from work. It has turned into a true addiction, as bad as smoking cigarettes. And just like smoking I can't give up this habit even though I know it is bad for me.

I can see why Democrats are pushing to pass the "Fairness Doctrine" as the medium is at times completely out of control. But what I find fascinating is that with each passing hour in the day the talk shows themselves become more and more extreme so that by 11pm that average goober who has been listening all day has become so pumped up with rage they are ready to grab a shotgun and start peppering their local rancher and all his barnyard animals in order to get the hate out of their system.

Yes indeed, we are seeing the effects in the rise of hate crimes against people who are different than them and vulnerable enough to be blamed and attacked for the woes of their listeners, they misdirect their dissatisfaction and frustration to the changes around them, by giving them a target to hate, rather than to look at the real culprits of their predicaments, which ironically are the people that their listeners support and elect into office who literally pick their pockets and worsen their living conditions.

He starts with the initiator of the 'hate radio genre', Rush Limbaugh, whom he (C. James Thomas), inexplicable to me, kind of paints as mainstream while at the same time does recognize his extremism, by comparison with the others, I concede that he may have a valid point.

El Rushbo is the father of conservative talk radio which makes him, in our anthropological descent chain, the original Neanderthal. But Limbaugh is not actually the most extreme guy on the radio dial contrary to what you might believe. He represents mainstream conservative thought and many Republicans share his political beliefs. Limbaugh is a fervent culture warrior who views liberalism as being more dangerous than even foreign threats, like terrorism itself. While that is certainly a sign of political extremism amongst normal Americans that is par for the course when it comes to social conservatives whose hatred of the political left trumps all other hatreds. That's saying a lot considering how many other hatreds the right embraces.

The anti-liberal hate is the issue that I find most vexingly puzzling, the monumental ignorance of the right wing radio audience and their gullibility in believing such false tenets as Michael Savage's "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder" or Hannity's "Deliver us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism." Or Limbaugh's pronouncements that "liberalism as being more dangerous than even foreign threats, like terrorism itself"

A quick review of Liberal positions, the cultural and legislative changes brought about due to their beliefs and deeds, gave us the Labor Movement which in turn gave us the 5 days work week, the 8 hour work day, overtime, weekends off, vacations, sick leave, workplace safety, health benefits for millions, retirement benefits, educational opportunities for other than the wealthy, etc.

And here is the paradox, the shock jocks' audience, are mostly members of the quickly disappearing middle class, blue collar workers and what might be termed, lower class whites, in other words, these are the people who most benefited from Liberal Thought and Action and yet, they hate Liberalism and worship Conservatism.

And if we take a scant look to what the Conservative Thought and Policies have given us, what jumps at us is a Corporatist Agenda, where the lower classes' sole purpose of existence is to enrich the Upper Class, we find that in the 1800s the working and living conditions of the lower classes were miserable, we jump to the Hoover Era and we have a continuation of the conditions in the previous century, culminating with the Great Depression of October 1929 which lasted until under what are considered Liberal Economic Policies, the New Deal was forged and implemented, thus reversing the downturn spiral that the Conservatives / Republicans had brought about.

If we look at one of their biggest heroes, lauded as "America's Greatest President", Ronald Reagan, we can clearly see that the right wingers of the lower class are being sold a bill of goods:

Some of Ronald Reagan's Legacy:

It would be impossible in this space to catalogue all the damage Reagan wrought in eight years. The standard line is that he won the cold war, but elsewhere in this issue Jonathan Schell corrects that notion. It is also worth noting that this man who yearned so much for freedom and democracy in Soviet-bloc nations showed limited concern for democracy and human rights in other parts of the globe. After Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa, Reagan vetoed the measure. His Administration cuddled up with the fascistic and anti-Semitic junta of Argentina and backed militaries in El Salvador and Guatemala that massacred civilians. It moved to normalize relations with Augusto Pinochet, the tyrant of Chile. Reagan sent George Bush the First to the Philippines, where the Vice President toasted dictator Ferdinand Marcos for fostering "democracy." Pursuing a quasi-secret war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the Reagan Administration violated international law and circumvented Congress to support contra rebels engaged in human rights abuses and, according to the CIA's own Inspector General, worked with suspected drug traffickers. Reagan covertly sent arms to the mullahs of Iran and courted Saddam Hussein, even after his use of chemical weapons. He appointed officials who claimed nuclear war was winnable, thus raising the chances that miscalculations by the Soviet Union or the United States would plunge the world into chaos.

On the home front Reagan was almost as divisive and disingenuous as the second Bush, as William Greider recounts on page 5. His deficit-causing supply-side tax cuts (derided by the elder Bush as "voodoo economics") were sold with phony numbers and sleight-of-hand accounting. These "trickle-down" tax cuts--coupled with a tremendous boost in military spending--were designed to bankrupt the government, pressuring it to reduce government spending and thereby justifying draconian cuts in social programs. (Remember ketchup as a vegetable?)

Reagan showed little concern for the deindustrialized workers who suffered during the 1980s, and he was actively hostile to unions, firing PATCO air-traffic controllers en masse after they struck for better pay and working conditions. His Attorney General, Edwin Meese, displayed little regard for civil liberties, noting, "You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime." His Interior Secretary, James Watt, fancied dead trees over live ones. And no one in the Reagan White House appeared to care about a new pandemic that mainly killed homosexuals. Reagan's inaction and bigotry against gays and drug-users led to tens of thousands of deaths that might have been avoided if he had moved earlier.

And today, right wing radio would have you believe in an unparalleled greatness of him (See also The Reagan Legacy: "He was a true believer who moved the country divisively to the right. But compared to the current president, Ronald Reagan looks like a moderate." --
"As the eulogies come down the pike, don't let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan; respect him. But don't let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter"

If we look at the present, we have George W. Bush's familiar Conservative ideas and policies which have not only sunk the US in Economical turmoil but the whole world, Foreign Relations? Do I need to go into it?

One of the latest lies making the circle of right wing radio is the notion that FDR caused the Great Depression, I was tempted to say that they are very good at making their audience believe their misinformation, but on second thought, I think it speaks more to the low level and quality if information in their audience, but in any event, it is so pervasive that even one of the newest Republican Representatives, Steve Austria of Ohio, repeated this lie, worse yet, even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) inaccurately argued that the New Deal “exacerbated the Great Depression.”

“Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.” As Dean Baker has explained, “Roosevelt’s New Deal Agenda lowered the unemployment rate from 25 percent in 1933 to 10 percent in 1937.”

And the Shock Jocks keep infecting their listeners with the notion that Conservatism is good and that Liberalism is bad, worse than terrorism - and people have died, are dying and continue suffering because of it.

C. James Thomas continues:

Hannity is perhaps the biggest hack on the radio. There is no line he won't cross or hypocrisy he won't commit in order to defend "conservatism." Like Limbaugh, he too is a social conservative whose war against liberalism trumps all other concerns. Hannity even wrote a book titled, "Deliver us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism." Now what kind of kook lumps in liberalism with terrorism and despotism?" It is this kind of garden variety hackery that keeps Hannity from evolving into a Rush Limbaugh style Neanderthal and instead keeps him stuck in the "Australopithecine" stage of Talk Radio development.

But at least Hannity is able to walk erect on two legs. Come 6pm after Sean Hannity has signed off the most savage of primates takes to the airwaves. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Mark Levin, a howler monkey of the lowest order. Levin is a loathsome creature whose spittle flecked microphone is quickly coarsened with a whole host of slanderous invective aimed at liberals, moderates, Democrats, Independents and anyone else who refuses to acknowledge the greatness of Herbert Hoover.

But as nefarious as Levin is, C. James Thomas gives Michael Savage the highest, or the lowest in this instance, honors:

Levin's "Center for Immigration Studies" is a crude exercise in wedge politics and racial scapegoating. He has one section dubbed "Black Americans" which attempts to whip up anti-Hispanic sentiment amongst African Americans by throwing around all sorts of statistics that show how those scheming Mexicans are stealing all of the jobs of poor black folks. As if Mark Levin gives a rat's ass about the plight of the black underclass...

All in a day's work for "the Great One." But if you thought Levin was the worst of these anti-American shlock jocks then you haven't met the vilest bottom feeder of the bunch. Michael Savage.

To say that Michael Savage is a conservative is to acknowledge that he actually traffics in ideas, which would be news even to Savage himself. For Michael Savage doesn't engage in debate, he doesn't adhere to any ideology, not even the kind of fringe conservatism that Mark Levin peddles. No, Michael Savage is simply a festering boil on the ass of America, oozing a unique puss of resentment, prejudice and bombast.

The Savage Nation has become infamous for its hate speech. Media Matters has put together a dossier on Michael Savage that reads like something the Southern Poverty Law Center would have on the Ku Klux Klan. That Savage hasn't had his broadcasting license revoked is a scandal considering how much more destructive his show is than anything Howard Stern has ever said.

We start with the rampant rhetorical gay bashing that has gotten so out of control his own fans have been inspired to kill innocent parishioners whose sole crime was that they were worshipping in a "liberal" church. We move on to Savage's routine race baiting diatribes that Savage spews forth at minorities of all stripes with such classics as, "they imposed affirmative action on me and stole my very birthright simply because I was white." Or his slandering of African immigrants with this statement, "Bring them in by the millions. Bring in 10 million more from Africa. Bring them in with AIDS. Show how multicultural you are. They can't reason, but bring them in with a machete in their head. Go ahead. Bring them in with machetes in their mind."

And if that imagery wasn't racist enough for you how about this image Savage gave to his listeners one day, "The Statue of Liberty is crying, she's been raped and disheveled -- raped and disheveled by illegal aliens."

Few are the ones who escape the lash of Savage's forked tongue. Parents of autistic children will be happy to know that Savage believes these "brats" have "a phony disease." Or that Barbara Walters is "a double-talking slut." Or that Madeleine Albright is a "traitor" who "should be hung."

And on and on it goes...

By the time the clock rolls around to 11pm the descent becomes complete. Talk Radio gets reduced to sub-human status as Michael Savage takes the form of Gollum himself.

He ends his post by saying:

... what I am saying is that the public deserves a legitimate center-right party not a collection of self-absorbed, knuckles-dragging troglodytes who would rather smash the American melting pot to pieces than lose any control over how the broth gets stirred.

But sadly, the yahoos are in firm control of the Party of Lincoln. And on Lincoln's 200th birthday, the United States of America deserves much better than that.

Amén!