The phrase “not tethered to facts” came to mind when reading this Rick Moran piece lamenting the supposed equal polarization of the two major political parties in America. Bonus points to Moran for writing this post at PJ Media (aka Pajamas Media aka Open Source Media), which is a cesspool of conservative nonsense.

The idea that both parties/movements in America are equally extreme is a well-worn media meme and one that the right often rides. It also happens to be quite untrue. In reality, we have a right dominated by the hard right and a left created out of a coalition of the hard left, center-left, and centrists (who often echo the center-right). Look at the standard-bearers for both parties. Republicans picked George W. Bush, an evangelical conservative who appeared to honestly believe all the trickle down and privatization nonsense he was peddling. Democrats picked Barack Obama, who pushed a pay freeze of federal salaries while passing an economic stimulus bill that contained a considerable amount of tax cuts.

You don’t even have to go to the presidential level. In congress, Republicans have a Kentucky conservative leading them in the Senate along with John Boehner in the House, who thunderously opposed health care and subjected the traditional raising of the debt ceiling to an exercise in tea party hostage-taking. Go back further and you’ve got Sen. Bill Frist diagnosing Terry Schiavo over video tape and Tom DeLay jamming right-leaning legislation through the House.

On the Democratic side, while Pelosi is a “San Francisco liberal,” her top lieutenant has been Steny Hoyer — a moderate Democrat. When Democrats ran the House, contrary to conservative rhetoric they didn’t pass socialism. Since they’ve taken back the House, Boehner and Co. have passed far more legislation governing women’s bodies than there was equally socially liberal legislation passed under Pelosi’s leadership.

Senate Democrats are led by Harry Reid, a moderate on most issues who appointed conservative-leaning Democrats like Kent Conrad and Max Baucus to lead important committees. This led, in the case of health care reform, to a lot of the progressive-leaning legislation being ripped out in the final bill.

The two parties and movements are not equally extreme. The right is rhetorically led by Rush Limbaugh, a minority bashing advocate of the harshest brand of conservative economic and security policy. Even the top liberal voices in the media — people like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, etc. — practice at best FDR-style liberalism which isn’t nearly as radical as what Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and company say on a day-to-day basis.

The thesis is simply untrue. We have a center-left movement/party on one side and a right-wing party/movement on the other.

That said, they’re still going to try and work the media refs in his favor. Case in point: Conservative blogger/writer (and Confederate apologist) Robert Stacy McCain reaching for the fainting couch because David Gregory asked Cain a few basic questions that he flubbed (in the post-Palin lexicon this is described as some sort of grilling).

Specifically McCain whines “When Democrats go on Meet the Press, it’s like Justin Bieber sitting down for a hard-hitting interview with Tiger Beat.”

So I decided to do what conservatives hope liberals never do, and they doubly hope the mainstream media doesnt: I checked.

I went back to May of 2008, and then-candidate Barack Obama’s appearance on Meet The Press with the late Tim Russert. What did I find? Did Russert annoint Obama the next President? Did he crown him? Did he ask him about puppies, or even kittens?

No, Russert did what Russert often did: He asked Obama a bunch of questions that sounded as if they were hot off the presses from the RNC. Specifically, Russert asked Obama about that most relevant of issues, Jeremiah Wright. A sampling:

* What has the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright done to your campaign?

* You’re still a member of the church?

* Why do you think he re-emerged?

* What happened in those five weeks? Because you already knew, prior to the March speech, that he had suggested the U.S. government created the AIDS virus; you knew he went to Libya with Louis Farrakhan; you knew about his hate speech on September 11th, about the chickens coming home to roost and other things. What did you learn in those five weeks that you didn’t know in March?

* The critics have said he can attack the United States of America, he can do all sorts of things that divide the country, but only when he made it politically uncomfortable for you did you finally separate himself from him.

* Why didn’t you just say then, “You know, Reverend, we’re going on different paths because this country does not believe in white supremacy and black inferiority.”

* He said in a letter to The New York Times, he suggested that you apologized for not letting him do the invocation. Is that true?

* Is it fair for people to raise questions about your judgment for misjudging Reverend Wright?

* You’re done with him? If you’re elected president, you won’t seek his counsel?

* Could you have handled this better, differently, by severing your ties earlier? And what’s the most important thing you’ve learned from this?

These were the first questions Russert asked Obama on the supposedly softball Meet The Press: A litany of right-wing fed scarebait directly out of the school of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glen Beck. It doesn’t matter how far to the right the questions tilt, conservatives will be wailing about liberal media bias until the sun swallows the entire solar system.

Now, look, Herman Cain is a joke. He can’t answer basic 101 level questions, his economic plan is dumb — even for a conservative. But even for a Trivial Pursuit-bound candidate like Cain, conservatives are willing to pervert, twist, and distort history and act under the pretense that the big bad mean liberal media beat up on their poor widdle candidate.

It’s what they do, it’s how they operate. It’s dishonest, pathetic, moronic, and sadly it works.

So far Perry’s been treated with mostly kid gloves, particularly from his fellow Republican candidates. Compare the fighting so far between Romney and Perry to Obama vs. Hillary, or Obama vs. McCain.

Rick Perry’s barely gotten his cowboy boots dirty, let alone “brutalized” so far. He’s been dancing with people who believe in his trickle down, dirty energy, crony capitalism shuck and jive. He hasn’t been challenged at all.

If he’s the GOP nominee and this is how tough he is, you can expect him to be on his heels from the get-go. This whining is practically Palinesque in how it telegraphs a glass jaw.

The biggest problem is, of course, that the GOP is unlikely to pass much of this bill. It really doesn’t matter to them that it consists of ideas that they supported in the past, or that it could help America. Their priority is party, not country. The right figures if something is a “loss” for Obama and Democrats, who cares if it hurts the country?

So we will have paralysis. But this President needs to keep fighting even in the face of GOP obstruction. You don’t beat cancer by making accommodations for it. You fight it, and you hope to win.

Balderdash.

I criticize President Obama because I think he and his team can do better. I critique them because we are in a world filled with gigantic problems and only a Democratic president is going to seriously address them. In addition to years of praise of Obama, I also verbally rap them on the knuckles when they screw up. And they have.

The stimulus should have been larger, and even within its limited size it should have been less about tax cuts and more about directly stimulative spending that had more of an effect on the employment figures.

On health care reform, Obama and the Democrats should have fought harder for a public option. I understand the votes weren’t there, but there is value both movement-wide and electorally in making the Republican party the one who killed the option, rather than have the Democrats take it off the table pre-emptively. As I’ve written before, there is value in inching the ball ahead for an initiative that you are destined to lose in the short run.

The inability to articulate a simple message around health care reform, and allowing congress to take the lead role on it past the point of absurdity were key factors in Republicans winning the House in 2010. It energized the conservative vote without a counterpart on the Democratic side. Had the fight for a public option gone on to the point where Republicans were the bulk of the vote sticking a knife in its belly, Obama and the Democrats would have had a stronger rallying cry going into the 2010 election.

On the tax cuts, while I understand the bargain that was struck at the end of last year was for the greater good – even though Obama got more out of it than I thought at the time – I still think it was wrong to extend this indecent give away to the uber-rich that was initially condemned by even John McCain.

In the most recent argument about the debt ceiling, Obama never seriously put raising revenue on the table. That is key to both our credit-worthiness and the fiscal balance of the country. Obama never seriously presented it as a factor in the debt negotiation.

These are all serious, important issues where I feel the administration’s desire to come up with a bipartisan solution defies common sense and reality. While I think it is important for a President to extend a hand out to the political opposition, the current GOP is not even as interested in working together on solutions as the hyper-partisan crazy Clinton-era entity. They’ve pushed back on Obama overtures since before he was even inaugurated, and they got worse after the Tea Party types won in 2010. So while I still want and expect for Obama to ask the GOP for help in running the country, he’s got to quit mortgaging everything on bipartisan support that isn’t coming. If even Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe aren’t going to be onboard, nobody is and the White House needs to act as if they’re in an ideological fight of some sort.

That said, I still support Obama and the broad outlines of his agenda. I think that Democratic leadership is far better for America than the Republican alternative. I think even the Democrats that are to the right of me are a better alternative than the Republican that could inhabit their seat.

But, I don’t do my sort of punditry in order to elect Democrats or to protect the Democratic party. While I was once satisfied to just have a (D) in a seat , that is no longer the case. When a problem comes up, I think we need to take the progressive solution and have the progressive politician with a forward-looking take on the issues on hand to solve it. I think America at its best has been progressive (worker’s rights, civil rights, scientific advancement, defending freedom).

If a Democrat is promoting a regressive, counterproductive solution, he or she ought to be called on it. Even if it’s a local representative all the way up to a President.

As I have for almost 10 years now, I will write online what I believe. I’m not angling for anything but an America that is more prosperous, forward-looking, and free.

Except Romney counts negative job growth while Bush was president 2007- Jan 2009 as part of the “Obama Recovery.” Talk about creating your own reality that has no resemblance to the truth.

So, who is this man? He’s the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He’s a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than “3″, and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.

Every single person who’d attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They’re unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.

As Romney began to leave the company after his hourlong visit, he looked at the owner’s girlfriend, Ellen Boss. “Nice,” Romney said as she blushed. “Nice choice. Just like me.”

(via)

Realclearpolitics.com yesterday had John McCain ahead of Barack Obama by 274 to 264 electoral votes, counting leaners. RCP has Obama carrying just two Bush ’04 states, Iowa and New Mexico, with 12 electoral votes. McCain’s lead in two other Bush ’04 states, Virginia and Colorado, with 20 electoral votes is microscopic, but then so is Obama’s lead in New Hampshire, with four electoral votes. And when RCP takes tossup states, with 132 electoral votes, out of the totals, Obama is ahead 228 to 178. Still…

CNN, August 2008:

On the eve of the Republican convention, a new national poll suggests the race for the White House remains dead even.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Sunday night shows the Obama-Biden ticket leading the McCain-Palin ticket by one point, 49 percent to 48 percent, a statistical dead heat.

Guardian, August 2008

What is worrying the Democrats, in spite of all these pluses, is that Obama’s poll lead has remained stubbornly small. A tracking poll by RealClearPolitics published yesterday has Obama on 46.9% compared with John McCain’s 43.3%.

“I think there are a lot of Democrats who are nervous,” said Tad Devine, chief strategist for the Kerry White House bid in 2004. “I think they thought this election would fall into their laps.”

Devine stressed that he was not among the pessimists and cautioned against what he described as “an artificial expectation that he needs to be way ahead at this time”.

But the concern among Democrats is not just over the size of the poll lead but over the impact of negative ads from McCain over the last two weeks that have reawakened bitter memories of Republican tactics in 2000 and 2004.

MSNBC, August 2008

With just days before the vice-presidential announcements, the political conventions and the final sprint to Election Day, Republican Sen. John McCain has cut Democrat Sen. Barack Obama’s national lead in half, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

“Whatever momentum that Obama took into the summer, he really appears to have lost it,” says Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart. “It is not a dead heat, but it is close.”

I’m sure I’ll be writing this come August 2012 as well, but the sense of panic among Democrats is the same old same old August slump we’ve seen before as far as I can see.

I take my life advice from Douglas Adams’ epic, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: DON’T PANIC.

Yawn. I’ve seen this show before. The media swoons over a cliche-ridden Texas twang. They take his proclamations as if they’re something serious, etc. I think Perry matches up versus Obama worse than Romney, and I don’t think America is yet ready to give a chance to someone who is not only a Bush clone ideologically (most of the GOP field is that) but also physically.

He’s also a terrible judge of character.

Here are some of my 2012 election predictions:

1. President Obama will not face any serious primary challenge and will easily be re-nominated
2. The Obama campaign will reach or be very close to the $1 billion mark for fundraising
3. Mitt Romney will not be the Republican nominee (I thought Pawlenty could squeeze in but his campaign is poorly run. I actually see a path to the nomination for Bachmann — please, please, please — and they may be seduced by Rick Perry or some other fool who checks the right boxes)
4. Democrats will retain the Senate (this is my least certain prediction) and eat into the GOP’s House majority
5. President Obama will be re-elected. His margin of victory will be smaller than 2008 (unless the nominee is Palin or Bachmann). Swing states he will keep: Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

As usual, these predictions are worth what you paid for them (nothing) and are probably all wrong.

A mystery company that pumped $1 million into a political committee backing Mitt Romney has been dissolved just months after it was formed, leaving few clues as to who was behind one of the biggest contributions yet of the 2012 presidential campaign.

The existence of the million-dollar donation — as gleaned from campaign and corporate records obtained by NBC News — provides a vivid example of how secret campaign cash is being funneled in ever more circuitous ways into the political system.

The company, W Spann LLC, was formed in March by a Boston lawyer who specializes in estate tax planning for “high net worth individuals,” according to corporate records and the lawyer’s bio on her firm’s website.

The position of President Obama and the Democrats on the debt ceiling is terrible. It involves cuts to social programs, and a belt tightening philosophy precisely when the economic environment demands almost exactly the opposite sort of policy.

The problem is it is the best worst option available to us. The Republican proposals were even more austere and less useful in shoring up our economy.

The Overton Window refers to the concept of an idea slowly gaining acceptance until it becomes mainstream thought. The Overton Window has so shifted that the crappy Democratic proposal seems like a far better choice.

We are doomed.

We face gigantic problems in the country and in the world. But our political machinery is simply incapable of even acknowledging the problems, much less fixing them. An economy paralyzed by job loss is being discussed as a debt problem, for Christ’s sake.

We are going down the same road to austerity as England, and what they’ve had to show for it is stagnant growth — and oh, lucky for us, England has a far more extensive safety net for the middle class and unfortunate. When our economy seizes up as we feed Grover Norquist’s fetish for starving the beast, there’s not nearly enough of a cushion for those who need it.

We are doomed.

52% find the President has acted responsibly, while only 33% say the same of the House GOP — while 63% rightly say the Republicans have not acted responsibly.

If the the ceiling isn’t raised, only 30% say President Obama is responsible, while 51% would blame the GOP.

When they are asked what to cut and who to tax, people say hands off farm subsidies, pensions for government workers, medicaid, medicare, and social security. A thinner majority (52-47) supports defense cuts, while there is huge support (70%+) for ending subsidies to big oil, increasing the tax on private jets, and increasing taxes on those making over $250,000 a year.

This is an almost across-the-board win for the positions Democrats have mostly pushed — but the media and the right keeps acting as if the fringe tea party position has any serious support. It is seriously out of whack.

Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty walked back earlier criticism of rival Michele Bachmann’s migraines on Wednesday, calling the attention over her headaches “a sideshow.”

“I think it’s mostly a sideshow,” Pawlenty said on Fox News. “I’ve observed Congresswoman Bachmann. I’ve never seen her have a medical condition or impairment that would seem to be a concern.”

For a while I thought Pawlenty was just inoffensive enough to secure the nomination – Romney without the flip flop and religious problems. But that seems like a stretch now. He’ll be lucky to do as well as also-rans like Duncan Hunter did in 2008.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised a combined $86 million between April and June, blowing past the $60 million goal set by both groups at the start of the fundraising quarter. Obama campaign manager Jim Messina announced the total in a video released before dawn Wednesday, touting the 552,462 donors who contributed and claiming “more grassroots support at this point in the process than any campaign in political history.” “We did this from the bottom up. We didn’t accept one single dollar from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs,” Messina said.

At 27, he is a full-time “tracker” for American Bridge 21st Century, a new Democratic organization that aims to record every handshake, every utterance by Republican candidates in 2011 and 2012, looking for gotcha moments that could derail political ambitions or provide fodder for television advertisements by liberal groups next year.

The organization has hired a dozen professional trackers like Mr. Fielding, outfitted them with the latest high-tech cameras and computers and positioned them in key states where Republican candidates are busy chattering away to voters. If all works as planned, incriminating moments captured by American Bridge will quickly become part of the political bloodstream.

Combined with a team of 20 researchers in a Washington “war room” that has a large rack of computer servers, the effort is part of a push by Democratic groups to bolster their opposition research. Republicans also have trackers, but so far have not assembled the kind of centralized video archive of political caught-on-tape moments that their rivals envision.

Heath Shuler sucked as the Redskins starting quarterback for the 4 mins he held the job, and he has sucked as a “Democrat” in congress who thinks his calling is to attack Democrats and knife Pelosi in the back.

Heath Shuler sucks.

So I wonder if the University of Tennessee understands that while Heath played well for them in his college years, his post-college life has largely been a giant bowl of suck, and I’m betting he’ll suck at being an athletic director.

That said, if he leaves congress, that institution will suck a little less. (via Todd, who understands that Heath Shuler sucks)

That’s a little like former FEMA head Michael Brown running against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 and thinking anybody would vote for him.

But that doesn’t deter the media, and especially not professional center-mush cheerleader Matt Bai who has a column on why we ought to take Huntsman seriously you guys.

As Bai almost always does, he gets in a dig at Democrats:

Democrats and some commentators tend to see the Republican Party right now as a kind of wild, barren land where nothing thoughtful ever grows.

Yeah, where would we get an idea like that? It isn’t as if there is a Republican electorate seriously pondering the end of Medicare, Palin/Bachmann as legitimate candidates, or that the President is a secret Muslim bent on subjugating America to global government. Right?

If you wonder why the coverage of the right from outlets like the Times has such a poor connection to reality, it is because writers like Bai refuse to acknowledge the movement and its party for the extremist beast it is.

In their world, because Lindsey Graham chats them up real nice at a dinner party, there’s no way they could be the reality-denying luddites those mean old Democrats make them out to be. For the mainstream press, the thought is unthinkable.

And that’s why a writer like Bai pretends this away and pens silly columns about how the primary electorate in the Republican party unlike every other election year is really this time going to be sweet and moderate and not crazy at all so they will vote for a moderate-ish Mormon former Obama administration member.

If you think otherwise, you’re one of those mean old Democrats.