Daily Kos

UPDATE: Kosmonauts upset Obama flack decried Helen Thomas comments: "when has he [Obama] ever kicked anyone's ass? Not counting little old ladies, that is."

Even as she sneered that the Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine," Helen Thomas could easily find fervent defenders in the hard-left environs of the Daily Kos. Some of them couldn't believe such a sweet and good-natured woman would be demonized. The blogger "General Choomin" literally claimed that on Tuesday night: 

This diary is mostly about the smear campaign aimed at Helen Thomas and how right wing propaganda easily mixes with Israeli propaganda. It is a story that people would label me as crazy if I didn't have the facts to back it up. How could such a good natured woman have so many people denounce her without even knowing the effort that went into it? How could so many people turn their backs on her even though she served her country in a way that most civilians never could?

Perhaps these people should try being on the other end of one of her rants before they try to paint her as Sweet Polly Purebred. "Chipoliwog" agreed on Tuesday that Helen the "patient heroine" had been wronged and her legacy of greatness was unappreciated: 

Yesterday, the world lost the voice of one of it's greatest journalists. Lost to the exigencies of political correctness. Hoisted on her own petard.

Daily Kos boss Markos Moulitsas is scheduled to appear on Jake Tapper's Sunday roundtable on This Week tomorrow. It would be great -- although the odds are very slim -- if Tapper would quote some of this Daily Kos bilge and ask Moulitsas to defend it. This Saturday morning post by Karen Hedwig Backman imagined Dick Cheney as a malevolent Angel of Death. It's called "Dick Cheney's Dismal Swamp of Death," and is so overwrought it's unintentionally funny:

A vast sea of dead and dying creatures presided over by the fat, repulsive Angel of Death Cheney. His ratlike minions scuttle around clutching their Blackberries and chittering corporate code.

Gloating, he hovers over the Gulf of Mexico, his oil-grimed black wings sinuously flapping... eldest daughter gleefully yapping at his ankles.

For the moment they are strangely silent, after months of constant presence on accommodating American television, showboating on Fox, one hopes that they might at last be experiencing guilt and shame -- but no.

They are momentarily stunned by the awesomeness of their success, silently savoring the sight of their spoils, dying pelicans dripping crude oil on the beaches, whitening and fouling corpses of fish, sea mammals, all manner of dead creatures brought to life by the seas and felled by the U.S. Supreme Court-strengthened arm of the Almighty Corporation.

From the "Did I Say That Out Loud?" Department: "Crashing Vor" on the Daily Kos asserted on Tuesday morning that a good crisis should never go to waste. The Gulf oil spill must be exploited, and the greens must "use this moment, use the deaths of species and the suffering of people who depend on them, in the most cynical, calculated way, as bad as a Republican after 9/11, to make real, lasting change in how we address the costs of our way of life." That means a command-and-control "climate change" bill. Get it now, before stupid Americans lose interest: 

There is only one possible redemption in this horror, and even that is a slim chance.  If the enormity of what has happened in the Gulf can hold the country's atrophied attention long enough, and if we can mobilize fast enough, we might, just might, be able to bring about a positive change from this:

Real and comprehensive energy and climate legislation.

We must act now to force our legislators to write law with teeth and real effect, law that requires consumers pay the true price of the carbon they burn, law that requires business to pay the true price of the carbon they spew, law that includes the costs of things "no one could have anticipated" into the price of doing business.

While liberals consistently worry out loud that conservative talk radio inspires violence, they're still avoiding blogs like the Daily Kos, which posted an item on Sunday headlined "I don't want to punch Rand Paul in the face, but...." This tongue-in-cheek lameness unfolded:

....but if someone happens to punch him in the face, I believe that this is their right and that we as a people should not put safeguards in place to prevent such an occurrence.

My name is glutz78 and I'm a Libertarian through and through (not really but let's just say...) and especially when it comes to punching people in the face.  Because getting punched in the face is part of the free market....  

If you think it's odd for Chris Matthews to blame Dick Cheney for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Daily Kos will go one further. The Kosmonaut with the byline "RFK Lives" is blaming Ronald Reagan:

For 30 years, our public policy has been dominated by this basic creed.  Whether it was telecom deregulation, financial deregulation, welfare "reform," regulatory "reform," or most any other issue, the Reaganite philosophy almost invariably prevailed.  Whether it was Gingrich, Greenspan, W, Cheney, or anyone else playing the tune, they were all using St. Ronnie's sheet music.

We have, sadly, reached the logical end result of Reaganism.  

The anti-capitalist left seems to despise all privately owned media outlets as hopelessly servile lackeys of the robber barons. But even through this dark lens, Fox News is still the worst. Raccoondog on the Daily Kos says in the wake of the Gulf oil spill that it is "by design a criminal enterprise" and Sarah Palin is guilty of "criminal imbecility." [Image at top right also from Daily Kos.]

Mostly unreported or downplayed by the corporate media, which every day that passes lengthens its record of complicity in its masters' crimes (and I'm not even thinking here of Fox News, which is by design a criminal enterprise), the oil industry has seen thousands of accidents injurious to the environment just in the last quarter century.

Daily Kos may be an almost official stop of the Democratic Party -- today's top ad demands you help the Arizona Democrats fight the new immigration law -- but it's certainly not a religious website. In fact, last Friday, the blogger "HumeSkeptic" declared that all religions pale in comparison to earth worship:  

In so far as all morality is fundamentally based on preservation, betterment and continuation of life, there is no higher morality than environmentalism.

All religions pale in comparison.  

It appears that it wasn't only media types such as MSNBC's Contessa Brewer who were disappointed that the Times Square bombing suspect turned out to be a Muslim. They were joined by virtually the entire leftwing blogosphere in their frustration that the suspect wasn't a tea party activist or a member of a "rightwing" militia group.  Before the identity of the bombing suspect was  made known, Kossack "waterboard sean" conducted a poll on who the perpetrator could be. And here are the hilarious results of that poll (I am using Kossack terminology here):

An al Qaeda terrorist  ---4%

An American sympathetic to al Qaeda ---5%

A militia wackjob  ---30%

A teapartier ---32%

A religious wackjob ---9%

April 28 was apparently Abortion Uber Alles day at the liberal Web site Daily Kos. Aimee Thorne-Thomsen of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project stated that the number of women who receive abortions is “too low” in “Keep Abortions Safe and Legal? Yes. Make it Rare? Not the Point.” A separate article blasted the new law in Oklahoma that makes it mandatory for woman to receive ultrasounds by making crude comparisons and calling it “blackmail.”

Even though 1.21 million abortions were performed in 2005, this was not enough for Thorne-Thomsen. She wrote, “On the other hand, if those 1.21 million abortions represent only the women who could access abortion financially, geographically or otherwise, then that number is too low. Yes, too low.”

Some conservatives don't bother reading or quoting from the Daily Kos because it's just too bizarre to take seriously. This would certainly be a good exhibit: Fox News is the network of "exterminationist rhetoric."  

There's no doubt in my mind that Glenn Beck is the closest thing we've had to a Neonazi leader in America in a long long time, and he's by far the most dangerous conservative to have emerged in my lifetime in terms of the violence he's inspiring in American citizens.

His eliminationist rhetoric has already inspired an American Neonazi to murder police officers.

Will Fox News ever pull him off the air for his eliminationist talk? No. The network itself is a rabid supporter of exterminationist rhetoric and the consequences of it.

Over at the Daily Kos, the gay activist that writes under the byline "Bill in Portland, Maine" (I'd prefer Boogers of Change) slammed both the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts in his regular "Cheers and Jeers" column on Thursday:  

CHEERS to justice served.  Let us not forget that the Catholic Church isn't the only institution owned and operated by ultra-conservatives that's getting battered with pervert accusations.  There's also the Boy Scouts of America, which a jury just tied up in knots:

Is there anything more ridiculous than putting on the architect of the dark and ghastly radical castle called the Daily Kos to denounce extremism and irresponsible rhetoric? And yet that's exactly what Keith Olbermann did on Tuesday night's Countdown -- he brought on Markos Moulitsas.

He didn't ask about the Kos blogger who compared Virginia attorney general (then-candidate) Ken Cuccinelli to a dragon that "can be killed." Or the one where we are oblivious to America's reign of terror? Olbermann didn't even ask Moulitsas about his own disgust that Obama shouldn't have pushed Van Jones out to placate conservatives because "you don't negotiate with terrorists."

Nope, these two routinely vituperative political communicators lectured about the absurdity of conservative victimhood at the hands of MSNBC and other liberal outlets:

Bloggers and activists on the left are furious when anyone suggests that the religion of Islam leads to violence. But on Thursday, bomb-throwing secularist Barrett Brown on the Daily Kos (and also on the blog True/Slant) compares the Catholic Church – unfavorably – to the atrocities of Stalinism and Maoism.

He even wrote, more broadly, that "Next to the Christian God, Stalin was a piker" – in that, Stalin only killed your body, while God torments the souls of unbelievers like him for eternity. Brown argues that the Catholic Church was a remarkable slaughterer without modern technology:

To smile upon the Church for reigning [sic] in its excesses is to smile upon the Soviet hardliners for reigning in its own. Both were dragged into an age of individual liberty by way of other ideologies. Look back upon the road on which they were taken, and one sees the marks made by fingernails grasping frantically at the ground in an effort to stop the process.

In the upside-down universe of the Daily Kos, Tom Brokaw is a conservative who rooted for Bush-Cheney, and his Thursday night CNBC special on Boomers lauded the "Greatest Generation" at the expense of the real patriots, the ones that dropped acid and protested the evil military-industrial complex that ran America:

I know plenty of people with battle scars from nightsticks and tear gas who did it out of a love for this country and dedication to its founding principals [sic]. Kent State proved to all of us that we didn’t have free speech. Our country, our National Guard would open fire on any student and not just those who protested. If we didn't agree to die in Vietnam - they'd kill us here instead.

We got the message Mr. Brokaw. Our country killed our heroes and was taking aim at us. It would have been safer to go along with the establishment. But these were people of conscience, people of great courage. They were patriots in the truest sense of the word.

To follow up on Brent Baker's post about the move to put Ronald Reagan on the 50-dollar bill, this was not well-received by the feverish left at the Daily Kos. The blogger "Kansasr" wailed on Wednesday:

It's bad enough that I have to fly into the Regan [sic] airport in Washington (I still call it National) or have to drive on the Ronald Regan [sic] Turnpike in Florida. What's next? Slobodan Milosevic on the twenty?

To ask how one would compare Reagan to a Yugoslavian war criminal, you would have to imbibe deeply of the myth that Reagan did nothing about AIDS. (That's what they call "counter-factual." See Brent Bozell's refutation here.) But that's the rationale:

Washington Post "investigative humorist" Gene Weingarten mocked conservatives again in Sunday’s Post Magazine, playing off the recent Daily Kos poll playing up the number of Republicans who believe Barack Obama wasn’t born in America, is a racist, and should be impeached. Weingarten makes no mention of the leftist source of his data. For all the reader knows, it’s a Gallup poll. Weingarten then makes up his own poll questions and answers for "humor,’ and the lowest blow is smearing conservatives with an anti-Semitic brush:

Do you trust any mainstream TV or print publications?

Eighty-one percent said, "Only Fox News."

Nineteen percent said, "Only The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Here’s more of his fake poll of the right-wing haters:

It’s getting tiresome that the liberal media will use the ramblings of any extremist on Twitter and try and associate them with the conservative movement. CBSNews.com [on their 48 Hours Mystery page] blogged the AP and the New York Daily News reporting that Austin suicide pilot Joe Stack has fan pages on the Internet:

"Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the Constitution," wrote Emily Walters of Louisville, Ky.

"Joe Stack, you are a true American Hero and we need more of you to make a stand," tweeted Greg Lenihan of San Diego, according to the paper.

...If they think that’s not a sop to the left, the Daily Kos rejoiced at the story:

While leftist networks like MSNBC try to associate the entire conservative movement with birthers and racists, liberals might want to ponder that consistent embarrassment known as the Daily Kos. On Saturday, "WinSmith" declared his outrage that the media would treat Republicans with civility, and the Stewarts and Colberts would merely mock them -- when they are destroying the country and want Obama dead (emphasis in the original): 

Where are the pundits, the elected officials and the media voices to say one simple thing: the republican party has gone too far.  That the primal scream of angry, hate filled, incoherent savagery on display is destroying the fabric of this country.

How can journalists possibly claim to be "objective" (in the Old Media, I-have-no-opinions sense of the term) when they get their news only from hyper-partisan sources on one side of the political spectrum? To do so should make any reporter blush.

But David Shuster, apparently, has no issue with undertaking such objective journalistic endeavors as "fact checking and analyzing", while gathering information from the left's most prominent online talking-point repositories.

Not content with simply relaying those talking points to his viewers, he makes sure to direct them (via Twitter) to websites where they can get their fills of the latest lefty banter. Johnny Dollar took the liberty of compiling a chart of the sites to which Shuster directed his Twitter followers throughout the month of January. The results are striking:

There are times you read blog posts at the Daily Kos and genuinely think the writers are secret saboteurs trying to make the left look ridiculous. Take the blogger "Angry Mouse" on Sunday morning, who insists a grandma handing out pamphlets outside an abortion clinic is a terrorist, a regular al-Qaeda equivalent:

A distinction is often made between the violent and non-violent members of this "movement." The government, the media, and the activists are careful to point out that the Scott Roeders and Paul Hills of the world are rare. Most of the activists just want to "inform" women about their options. Most of the activists care about preserving all life, including the lives of the providers and women.

On his radio show Friday, Rush Limbaugh expressed frustration with how the Obama administration’s economic policies are designed to squelch economic recovery: "This government is governing against its own citizens. This president and his party are governing against us. We are at war with our own President, we are at war with our own government. They’re the ones standing in the way of the private sector rebounding. They’re the ones standing in the way of job creation – purposely!"

But in the hyperbolic imaginations of the bloggers at Daily Kos, this is a call for violent revolution and harming President Obama. So wrote Lauren Monica:

Today, on his radio show, The Head of the Republican Party is officially asking His Dittoheads to harm the President of the United States and other Dems Leaders in Congress. He said "We are at war with our own President, we are at war with our own government". Translation, Mr Limbaugh just had committed treason by calling for a "violent" revolt (with the use of the word "War") against the President Of The United States.

For some strange reason, the Daily Kos has gained the reputation in the mainstream media for somehow being composed of "reasonable progressives" in stark contrast to their Democratic Underground cousins whom even many in the MSM will admit are flat out loons. However, certain events prove that the Kossacks are every bit as crazed and full of hate as the DUers. And one such event that has proved this to be true is the reaction of the two sites to the news that Rush Limbaugh has been hospitalized in Hawaii.

Of course there was a DU thread full of hate towards Rush but as you can see in this Kossack thread, they are every bit as hateful as the DUers. Some sanity-challenged sample comments from the Kossacks on the subject of Rush Limbaugh's hospitalization:

He does NOT have a f---ing right to make up s--t and present it as fact to incite his millions of so-called ditto heads to hatred and violence. 

i hope that this piece of human excrement that has lied and lied his way to a fortune is silenced for a long time...eternity

It’s probably not a good idea to blog drunk. That impression comes from the Christmas Eve ravings on the Daily Kos, fresh from the Cheers & Jeers page of the Kosmonaut calling himself Bill from Portland, Maine:

I can think of no better way to spend Christmas eve than eating beans in the nude while swapping conspiracy theories with my friends. So tonight we're throwing away the usual tux-and-tails formality of C&J to simply let the mirth ooze forth spontaneously like boogers of change conga-lining through the nasal passages of freedom. I'll be staggering between tables, dispensing rum balls and deliciously ill-informed opinions.

Another Kos contributor with the byline Devilstower unspools his literary theory that conservatives live in a backwards fantasy land while liberals work to make a science-fiction utopia possible:

Science fiction and fantasy often share shelf space at the book store...[b]ut there is a difference between the two genres.

Remember how the vocal elements among the left-wing media were all too eager to exploit disagreements between prominent conservatives?

There were comments Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele made about Rush Limbaugh earlier this year and the back-and-forth between former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former GOP vice-presidential nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. These and other overblown instances were offered as anecdotal evidence there was a divide in the Republican Party and/or conservative movement by MSNBC personalities and sometimes by even more mainstream media types like George Stephanopoulos.

Bad blood brewing between Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews?

Schultz today invited a guest on his show for the express purpose of taking shots at fellow MSNBCer Matthews!

On yesterday's Hardball, Matthews criticized the netroots who are trashing the watered-down ObamaCare bill.  "I don't consider them Democrats," said Matthews, dismissing them as "troublemakers." Concluded Chris: "they get their giggles sitting in the back seat and bitching."

On his show this evening, Schultz invited netroot-in-chief Markos Moulitsas on to fire back at Matthews.  Not merely did Schultz offer Kos a platform, he prodded him with leading questions sure to stir up a pointed response. Kos was only too happy to take up the cudgel, accusing Matthews of being "trapped in a bubble," "not learning from his mistakes," and warning that Matthews "has a thing coming."

On Wednesday’s Situation Room, CNN correspondent Jeanne Moos exposed some of the left-wing rage being directed at Senator Joe Lieberman, especially on the Internet. Moos’s examples of “liberal hate” at the Connecticut politician ranged from fantasy Hanukkah gifts, such as a muzzle, to a YouTube video of a woman having her cats attack a string which stood in for the senator [Moos's full report is available here].

The correspondent’s latest light report for CNN highlighted Liberman’s “new low among liberals.” Along with the multiple examples of leftists mocking the senator on YouTube.com, Moos noted the strong reactions from “progressive radio hosts,” such as Mike Malloy, and attacks on liberal blogs like The Huffington Post and Daily Kos:

Liberals are so incensed at Connecticut Senator Joe Liberman's refusal to vote for ObamaCare, that they have taken to attacking his wife, who works for a prominent breast cancer organization. Their ad hominem assaults and wild speculation about the Senator's supposedly evil motives reveal their hypocrisy when it comes to political centrists, and their desperation concerning health care legislation.

At Huffington Post, FireDogLake founder and breast cancer survivor Jane Hamsher revealed that her request to the Susan G. Komen foundation that money raised to find a cure not be used to pay Mrs. Lieberman's salary went unheeded. Hamsher went on to accuse the Lieberman couple of conspiring to sink health care reform in order to line their own pockets.

Hamsher accuses Mrs. Lieberman using "her association with her husband the Senator ... in order to secure these lucrative positions and advance the interests of her clients" at a lobbying firm for which she is a consultant. This contention, Hamsher claims, is "unquestionable," though she offers no evidence to support the accusation, other than speculation about the couple's income.

A number of the conservative movement's prominent online figures are battling to be the right's equivalent of Talking Points Memo or Huffington Post--political organizations that report hard news. Many believe that to truly harness the power of the Web, political organizations must report their own news, rather than comment on reporitng from traditional outlets.

"The left needs Daily Kos, but they also need the Huffington Post," Politics Daily columnist Matt Lewis told Politico. He praised the roles of activists and opinion commentators on the right such as Red State's Erick Erickson, but noted that the conservatives have not yet matched the left's capability for original reporting.

Though HuffPo, TPM, and other politcally stilted but journalism-oriented sites, liberals "have the ability to amplify stories into the mainstream media conversation," according to Politico. Conservatives have a large void to fill when it comes to producing original content, rather than solely commenting on what is already out there. There are conservative sites providing original reporting, but there are so far no center-right equivalents to the left's powerhouse online news operations.

Sometimes libtalkers just make you shake your head in disbelief. Keith Olbermann trumpeted his most recent example of bias-denail on Daily Kos over the weekend, where he insisted that his show does not tout a partisan agenda, and simply serves as a watchdog against others' unchecked opinions (h/t Olbermann Watch's Johnny Dollar).

I'll wait for readers to stop laughing. Done? Okay. It truly is unbelievable that one of the most partisan and divisive commentators on cable television would even suggest that he pays lip service to those who don't share his views. Olbermann has a right to trumpet his liberal vitriol, but he should at least acknowledge it for what it is.

But Olbermann claimed in post on Daily Kos that he simply challenges the unchallenged, leaving some to wonder, to paraphrase Juvenal, who challenges the challengers?

How much can the left-wing blogosphere hate Dick Cheney? Apparently enough to compare him to notorious Seventies serial killers. The blogger calling himself "Meteor Blades" at Daily Kos compared Cheney to Ted Bundy in a post Tuesday afternoon titled "The Last Person Who Should Be Opening His Mouth."

Whatever Democrats think about Obama's plans for Afghanistan, he writes, "the one thing we can all agree on is that we're sick of hearing arsonists hanging around the fire they started telling us the best way put it out." He's furious that Politico would carry Cheney's criticism of Obama:

It takes no special effort or reading between the lines to see the main theme behind Cheney's remarks: Obama is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Nothing any Democratic President can do will ever stop the flow of "weak-on-defense" canards that began 60 years ago with shrieks of "Who Lost China?"....