Daily Kos

How nutty is the Daily Kos blog? Nutty enough to make an outraged defense of North Korea? Yes. On Wednesday afternoon, Niccolo Caldararo – an adjunct professor of anthropology at San Francisco State University – complained “The Western media wallows in the exotic and North Korea has been the clown of the 20th century, brought forward for comic relief now and then or pasted up as a ‘paper tiger,’ to scare voters before elections or as a distraction for other important news.”

To hear the professor tell it, the capitalist imperialists are licking their chops after the death of Kim Jong Il: “Let's face it, North Korea is ripe for capitalism, there are millions of potential workers who will work for near nothing.  The hope is that the regime will crumble like the Soviet Union and give way to massive investment opportunities." He actually argues North Korea is “no less responsible toward its own citizens” than South Korea or America:

You can count on the Daily Kos to be embarrassed by how America's Republican presidential contenders have ruined the country's image in the eyes of socialist Europeans -- to be specific, the hard-left German magazine Der Spiegel and its latest diatribe against Republicans, tenderly headlined "A Club of Liars, Demagogues and Ignoramuses."

The blogger "Downeastdem" cannot believe these GOP leaders dare present themselves on the debate stage: "It's horrifying because these eight so-called, would-be candidates are eagerly ruining not only their own reputations and that of their party, the party of Lincoln lore. Worse: They're ruining the reputation of the United States."

On Monday, the Daily Kos covered the Saturday night GOP debate in Iowa with a typical headline "Republicans pander to American Taliban." (Who's doing the pandering? That's also the title of the latest book by Kos bloglord Markos Moulitsas.) Jed  Lewison insisted Rick Santorum was Talibanesque when he said, in the Washington Post account: “As long as abortion is legal in this country... we will never have rest because that law does not comport with God’s law.”

Lewison proclaimed: "So the next time you hear Rick Santorum complain about government imposition of Sharia law, keep in mind that he doesn't have a problem with violating the separation of church and state. To him, the only thing that matters is whether the government is imposing his beliefs." (Italics in the original.) Blogs like Right Wing Watch (from People for the American Way) seized on the answer.

The next time you hear liberals mourning that today's conservative movement has no William F. Buckleyesque figure to banish the right-wing wackos to the fever swamps, just remember what passes for left-wing political thought at the Daily Kos. Last year, the Kosmonaut known as "Troubadour" predicted things were going to go very badly after the midterm elections: "Win or lose this election season, Republicans appear to be headed on a one-way path to organized political violence."

This has apparently been proven by police suppression of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and next the liberals should watch out for the "the internet blacklist bill" and the "the internet kill switch" if Republicans take power in 2013. Full-blown GOP dictatorship is around the corner:

CBS's Bigad Shaban failed to disclose the far-left politics of an "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrator on Monday's Early Show. Jesse LaGreca, a Daily Kos contributor who wrote in August that "Hurricane Irene is like having Christmas early" for Republicans, was identified on-screen as simply a "Wall Street protester." Shaban also barely devoted any time to critics of the nascent movement.

The left and its media allies have systematically reduced Tea Party members to caricatures, calling them everything from "bigots" to "racists" to "terrorists," hoping to make something stick. The latest installment is a rewrite of the famous story tale "Alice in Wonderland," in which their "Mad Hatter" leader is none other than GOP presidential contender Michele Bachmann.

TBTM Media, the authors of "Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book" have unveiled their latest attack on conservatives with, "Malice in Wonderland: A Tea Party Fable," in which they proudly claim that they have rewritten the Lewis Carroll classic to reflect "a bizarro world populated by Tea Party crazies!"

Liberals like to describe themselves as the most compassionate ones, the ones that believe like Hubert Humphrey did that the moral test of a society is how it treats its vulnerable citizens in the dawn and the twilight of life. That's not the party line at the Daily Kos.

Jon Stafford bluntly wrote on Wednesday night that "I often describe myself as 'Not Pro-Choice, Pro-Abortion.  There are too many goddam people already.' And while this is meant to be facetious, nevertheless there is a seed of truth in it, because I believe that the world is wildly overpopulated and that we must take steps as a society to reduce it.  This will undoubtedly be met with accusations of callousness, but we could really use is a global superplague.  The Black Death may have been horrible, but without it there would never have been a Renaissance."

One week ago, two stories dominated the news. In Norway, a madman had murdered dozens, while in the U.S., the debt-limit debate raged.

In Kosland, however, the Norwegian terrorist attacks and the Washington wrangling were to a large extent the same story, since both centered on, you guessed it, out-of-control right-wing extremism.

And Anders Breivik wasn't even the most despicable person or entity to which Kossacks likened the Tea Party this past week -- see below for the disgusting details.

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

It may have been the "heat dome" or the giant, invisible wool blanket or whatever it was that made much of the country miserable, or perhaps the numbing effect of the debt-ceiling talks. In any event, when there's not much new news, so to speak, grumpy, bored Kossacks can always fall back, as they did this past week, on their old standby: the evil and stupidity of conservatism and conservatives. They did not, however, fail to single out their favorite new righty target, a certain Minnesota congresswoman and presidential candidate.

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

Vyan at Daily Kos is getting giddy in a post headlined “Could we soon see a world without Fox News?” It's apparently all over for FNC: "In less than a week the News of the World Wiretapping and Bribery Scandal has quickly metastasized into a Multi-Headed Dragon of Death for Murdoch Empire and simply lopping off one head, doesn't seem to be enough - the infection has already spread."

Now that Fox-hating liberal interest groups, bloggers,  and Democrat politicians are vowing to investigate, the Kosmonauts think Murdoch's "criminal enterprise" is about to collapse:

On Friday morning, the Daily Kos blogger with the byline Seneca Doane tried to have fun with the mass defection away from Newt Gingrich, satirically offering Newt his services in defeating the other GOP candidates. He was especially vicious with Herman Cain: "I'll admit it right up front -- Cain scares me.  I don't mean as an opponent; I mean as a human being." Cain, he says is the perfect racist:

Cain poses a problem, though.  Cain can get away with saying more racist things than you can, because white (i.e., almost all) Republicans think that because he's Black, he can't be racist, even if he's trotting out every vicious anti-Black stereotype in the book to the delight of white onlookers.  (And he will.  You should let people know that he'll be your choice for HUD Secretary.  The more pissed off he gets at it and denies that he'd take the job, the better.  You'll tell him that you know that he wants a job and will give it his all.)

Denizens of the Daily Kos were delighted Monday by a more-than-6,300-word rant by an abortionist from Texas bylined "Beket." The headline was "Extreme Religion Stops a Thinking Brain -- and Kills Women and Teenage Girls." Naturally, it was "One of the best diaries I have read on DKos," wrote one thrilled commenter. "Well-written. Well-thought out." 

Dr. "Beket" began: "I am a proud, even defiant, abortion provider...First, let me assure you that it is not that I love embryos and fetuses less, but that I love women and teenage girls more – although I must confess that I really have no love, nor any feeling at all, for insentient embryos and fetuses in the wombs of women and teenage girls who do not want them there." The people who call themselves "pro-life," he insisted, were "religious extremists" and deluded, psychotic torturers and murderers:

Twitter and other social networks have provided social scientists with unprecedented means of measuring human interaction. As it turns out, that fact has implications for the media bias debate.

In a study to be released next month, three Duke University researchers rank politicians and other public figures by political ideology as measured by a formula that incorporates whom they follow on Twitter, and who follows them. "The results dovetailed with ideological ranking systems based on the politicians’ voting records," the New York Times reported on Monday.

If the study is accurate, it demonstrates just how liberal some of America's most prominent journalists really are. Check below the break for some key findings concerning on the not-so-neutral news media.

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Tennessee state assemblyman buys the lie!

If you frequent liberal blogs, you were likely under the impression this weekend that Minnesota state Republicans were trying to make it illegal for the poor to carry more than $20 in their pockets or handbags.

Fortunately the Left has someone in its ranks interested in exposing lies rather than spreading them: