NPR finally wakes up and shitcans Juan Williams.

As we can all see now, when Fox says jump, the Obama administration asks how high? (Then jumps one inch less and considers it a progressive victory). Is there anyone Obama won’t fire or throw under the bus if Fox asks him to? What if they ask Obama to fire himself? Would he do it? Or would he just fire Biden and say he met them halfway?

It’s becoming nearly impossible for me to watch television news these days of any sort. Where has Bernard Shaw gone? And I don’t mean the man Bernard Shaw; I mean the Journalist Bernard Shaw. Try as I might, I can’t see him. I used to rely on him for news, religiously. There was something about his demeanor and the steadiness of his voice, his willingness to ask razor-bladed questions without apologizing, and his refusal to waste time on bedazzled “news” that made him “trusted”, that made CNN the most trusted news source in the world. With Shaw, there was none of the circus act, just news delivered in as respectful a manner as possible.

On October 12, 2007, the Dow Jones Industrial average hit an all-time high of 14,093. On March 6, 2009, it hit bottom (or so we hope), at 6,626, representing more than a fifty percent decline in a year and a half. Since then, it has risen to 10,800 and beyond over the course of one year. What happened in between represents one of the largest wealth redistribution events in our nation’s history, as millions upon millions of middle class Americans saw their savings decline by more than fifty percent, while the wealthy were there to buy up the stocks that no one else could afford at bargain basement prices. Executives of large Banks and Wall Street firms received huge bonuses along with Federal bailouts that allowed them to ride out the financial crisis in high style, while normal Americans were left worrying about their jobs, their homes, and their futures.

Glenn Beck, don’t worry–you didn’t waste our time by having Eric Massa on.

Yesterday Joe Stack flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin. There is nothing that this can be called but an act of domestic terrorism. Now, clearly, Mr. Stack was deranged. He set his house on fire and then went to commit this terrorism, and that is not the act of a same individual. We are likely to find that Mr. Stack has held some of what we would consider fringe views as the investigation goes forward and he will be written off as a “nut”.

The thing is there seem to be a lot more violent “nuts” on the political Right these days than on the Left. We are often treated to the false equivalence that “both sides have their nuts” by the traditional media and even in the blogosphere. The problem here is that while the Left does have its fringe elements, I am not seeing any of them killing people over their beliefs.

You can go to any right wing website and find eliminationist rhetoric. People like Ann Cloture have written about poisoning Supreme Court Justices. The level of vitriol, which these sites operate at on a daily basis, is shocking, yet because it is the standard operating procedure, it is normalized for those who mostly read these sites.

It is good for ratings to stoke this kind of anger, but there is an inherent danger in it too. The number of folks who will go off the deep end like Mr. Stack is always likely to be small. However, individuals and small groups can do large amounts of damage. Look at the Oklahoma City bombing. A couple of guys killed 169 people and destroyed a large building because they were angry with the government.

This week in federal court, a legal odd couple will join forces to overturn California’s Proposition 8 because it violates the U.S. Constitution. Cue the right-wing media’s hysteria and homophobia.

My holiday letter Bill O’Reilly

The results of this past Tuesday’s election are already wrapping yesterday’s fish.

Try as they will, Conservatives have not really been able to make a good argument that Obama, by moving away from the failed foreign policies of the Bush Administration, has in reality made America less safe. Instead they have responded with a series of knee jerk reactions aimed at the obstruction and rejection of anything and everything that Obama has either done or proposed.