Levi doesn't shut up

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Levi Johnston appeared on CBS' Early Show Wednesday, where he explained his reasons for spilling unflattering information about the Palin family and said he was keeping some "huge" secrets.
Among other things, Johnston said Palin joked about her son Trig's Down Syndrome, calling him her "retarded baby."
"I was just in shock the first time I heard it," he said, when host Maggie Rodriguez expressed disbelief. He also said Bristol took care of the baby much more than her mother: "Sarah was never home."
Johnston also said that Todd and Sarah would fight in front of their kids.
He said he was going public because the Palins betrayed him and backstabbed him: "I really don't care anymore ... Now it's my turn ... I told a little bit of stuff, and you know, I'm just not going to take it anymore."
"If she's going to go out there and say things to me, about me, I'm going to leak some things on her. I mean that's just how it is," he said. He added, however, that there are some things he won't say that would really hurt Palin. "I'm not gonna go that far," he said.
In recent weeks Johnston has seized the media spotlight, after the announcement that the 19-year-old plans to pose nude in an upcoming issue of Playgirl magazine.
The Washington Post offers more of the CBS interview:

When asked whether he resents Palin, Johnston says, "Well now I've heard all the things she's said. You know, the Sarah Palin I knew before, it was -- it was her putting on a front, it was her being fake to me and now that everything's slowly coming out and I'm hearing more things, you know, and things she's said and done, you know, I see the real Palin," Levi responds, before stepping through the looking glass.

Part two of Rodriguez's interview airs on Thursday morning.
UPDATE: Palin has issued a statement responding to Levi's remarks. "We have purposefully ignored the mean spirited, malicious and untrue attacks on our family. We, like many, are appalled at the inflammatory statements being made or implied." Palin also went after CBS and Levi's intentions to strip for Playgirl: "CBS should be ashamed for continually providing a forum to propagate lies. Consider the source of the most recent attention-getting lies -- those who would sell their body for money reflect a desperate need for attention and are likely to say and do anything for even more attention."

Hate Crime Legislation Expanded

Obama's signing today of expanded hate-crimes legislation named after her son Matthew means "everything" to her family.
"It's great. It's great," Shepard said as she, her husband Dennis and her son Logan left the East Room following a signing ceremony. "This is just the first step. We have a lot to do that's left. We need to be grateful for this and move on."
Shepard said she was "trying really hard not to cry," but she broke down when asked what this day means to her family.
"Everything," she replied. She said her hope is that under the new law "what happened maybe won't happen again."
"I just can’t even tell you how great it feels," she said.

Balloon Boy: The Most Over-The-Top, Dramatic Coverage Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/balloon-boy-the-most-over_n_324322.html

No matter what happens in the unfolding legal saga of the Heene family, the most appropriate response to the whole matter was that of Falcon Heene. He vomited. Twice. On national TV. Well, let me just say that Falcon speaks for me.
I had to stifle the same urge as I watched so much of the media devote so much of their resources to the story of the boy NOT in the balloon.
And, sure, I know that asking the media to have some sense of perspective on a story like this is like asking a dog not to bark. It's in their nature to give breathless, wall-to-wall coverage to these kinds of stories. But, even knowing this, I was shocked how little changed in the volume and tone of the coverage even after it was known the boy wasn't in the balloon. Even then, after we knew the balloon was empty, they kept running footage of the balloon, hour after hour.
As Bill Maher said on Real Time, "they're calling him Balloon Boy, which is so stupid, because the one thing we know about this kid, is that he was not in a balloon."
We actually know a lot more about Falcon. And we certainly know how concerned every anchor covering the story was about his welfare.
If ever we needed an example of the difference between sentimentality and empathy, this was it. As the story unfolded on Thursday, Wolf Blitzer told us how "deeply worried" he was about Falcon, and that he was "totally fearing the worst." Rick Sanchez talked about the "big hug" he'd give his own child if it happened to him (does Rick have a giant balloon in his backyard too?). And one Fox anchor expressed relief that a skydiver she was interviewing while Falcon's fate was still up in the air (sorry!) gave her "a little bit of hope" about the weather conditions the balloon was flying in because she was "worried about how cold this child might be."
Who knew the media were so "deeply worried" about the welfare of children? Well, as it turns out, their concern only extends to children in certain circumstances -- such as when they are thought to be trapped in a runaway balloon. Or when they have been washed up on U.S. shores in an inner tube and are forcibly repatriated to Cuba.
Remember Elian Gonzales? Watching the media's collective palpitations over Balloon Boy -- even after he turned out to be Attic Boy -- my mind immediately did a flashback to 2000 and the emotion-laden coverage of Elian, including Diane Sawyer standing on her head.
Back then, I felt the same uneasy feeling about what it takes for the media to care about at-risk kids.
In the midst of the hysteria over Elian, Jonathan Kozol came out with a book called Ordinary Resurrections, which featured the moving story of a boy named Elio who was the same age as Elian.
He was, as I wrote in a column in May 2000, a "little boy... living in the South Bronx, surrounded by gunfire, families being evicted, hungry people begging in the street. His mother works at a drugstore near St. Ann's church; his father is 'upstate' -- South Bronx shorthand for prison."

And while Elian was on the cover of Time magazine three times, no news magazines were writing about the thousands of Elios around America. "Why do we feel so much for Elian and so little for Elio?" I asked. "Why are we doing everything we can -- trips to Disney World, Nintendo games, playmates flown in from Cuba -- to make Elian happy, while leaving Elio to fend for himself?"
It wasn't a rhetorical question. I didn't know the answer then and I don't know the answer now.
The media are addicted to small-bore, high-drama stories like these. Two years after Elian, I wrote about the media binging on the Robert Blake trial and called for an intervention to help the media break its ersatz crisis habit. My call wasn't successful, to put it mildly.
Three years after that, the media devoted countless hours to the case of Natalee Holloway, the young woman who went missing in Aruba. "When defending these choices," I wrote in June of 2005, "news execs inevitably fall back on the old 'we're just giving the people what they want.'"
And not surprisingly, they're saying the same thing now. Which was why, when I went on the Ed Schultz show to talk about Afghanistan, I ended up spending most of the segment talking instead about a runaway balloon with no boy inside.
I find the media's obsession with these non-stories especially galling when they lead to endless agonizing over the welfare of a child -- agonizing that is sorely missing when there isn't a hot air balloon or inner tube in shark-infested waters involved.
So now that we know that Falcon is safe, how about repurposing some of that concern for, say:

-- the over 1.5 million children who are homeless.
-- the 42 percent of homeless children who are under the age of 6.
-- the one in six homeless children who suffers from an emotional problem.

It doesn't have to be wall-to-wall coverage, but how about some coverage of the 75 to 100 percent increase in the number of children who are newly homeless because of the foreclosure crisis? Or the 13 million American children living in poverty?
Not going to happen, you say? What if we built a giant balloon, put all 13 million of them in it, and just let it float away? Even better, let's just say that we did. It'll be a win-win-win. The news producers will have a giant balloon to shoot, the news anchors will have a fresh outlet for all that concern, and millions of kids in desperate need of some concern, attention, and time in the media spotlight will finally get it.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/how-about-a-little-covera_b_326472.html

The Hysterical Maniac Strikes Again

Brrrrrrrrrrr... Depopulation: 80%
Scaring isn't it?



Check FactCheck for the newest threads!

Grandma Unplugged

Another Wild Conspiracy Theory
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has attempted to clarify his comments on end-of-life care meaning the government could "pull the plug on grandma." He says he never used the phrase "death panel," but that there is the "possibility of unintended consequences" from the health care bill.

His full statement:

"I've said for a long time and repeated last week that we all ought to consider how we want to be treated if we are struck by an incapacitating illness, and that advanced care planning is a good thing to do. As far as legislation goes, it's not the case that provisions in the Pelosi health care reform bill this year are just like provisions Congress passed in the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. I've never called the Pelosi provisions a 'death panel.' The issue is whether end-of-life provisions should be part of legislation that's about controlling health care spending, and which also creates a government-run health care program, as the Pelosi bill does. Doing so escalates concerns about the rationing of health care, since government-run plans in other countries ration to control spending. Putting end-of-life consultations alongside cost containment and government-run health care causes legitimate concern. This context and the details of this year's proposal are different than the 2003 legislation, which covers advice from specialized physicians outside of any larger effort to control spending on health care. It's not fair to Americans who are asking questions to gloss over those facts and, in fact, end-of-life provisions haven't been part of ongoing Senate Finance Committee discussions as a result of those realities and the possibility of unintended consequences. On this subject and others, it's important that the debate is fair-minded and based on an accurate representation of the issues involved."

But Greg Sargent points out that Grassley's spokesperson walked back the whole claim in a comment to the Washington Post.

Grassley says he opposes that counseling as written in the House version of the bill, but a spokesman said the senator does not think the House provision would in fact give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die. The House bill allows patients to decide for themselves if they would like such counseling.

Summer of Hate

To believe that Obama's Health Care Reform is on the way to evoke an American holocaust you may also know who sponsors such accusations. Rachel Maddow has the story.

This week saw a rising threat of violence from America's right-wing militias and underground hate groups. John Avlon tallies 25 signs of trouble brewing.

Hate is a cheap and easy recruiting tool, but it can be murder on a democracy.

As Tea Partiers hijack town halls and Democrats deploy counteroffensives, we are seeing hyperpartisanship proliferate in what was supposed to be the post-partisan age of Obama.

For those who see politics as an ideological blood sport, this is a victory—the triumph of cynical experience over hope. For the Obama administration, it’s a setback from its aim to change the tone in Washington by building a broad governing coalition on the momentum of its election win. This rupture is in part a reaction to a liberal triumphalism that has resisted attempts at substantive policy outreach, but more forcefully a resistance on the part of the far right by folks who want to deny the legitimacy of President Obama’s election by any means necessary.

The increasing heat of the chatter this summer should be a cold wakeup call. We are courting a season of violence in America.

And so wingnuts are on the march across the country; armed with the loss of perspective that comes with hyperpartisanship, they demonize and dehumanize their political opponents. With their unhinged armies focused solely on faction, it’s the country we should be most concerned about. There is nothing more American than civil disobedience, but uncivil disobedience and hate-fueled politics becomes a cancer that can consume our body politic.

Summer is when violence erupts, murders spike and cities burn down. There always seems to be an August surprise that changes the political calculus overnight in unwelcome ways. Just Wednesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report saying Timothy McVeigh-style militia groups are on the rise, fueled by the stress of a bad economy and a liberal administration led by a black president.

In the nine weeks since Kansas Dr. George Tiller was murdered in a church, allegedly by antiabortion activist Scott Roeder, we’ve seen a serious serial degradation in our civic discourse, pumped up by professional polarizers in the media and politics. In the world of counterterrorism, this could be considered the equivalent of increased “chatter”—indicators of an increased likelihood of attack. In this case, the chatter is proliferating across the Internet, trickling down to a motley crew of unhinged activists. We don’t know where this will end, or what hot August surprise may be in store. Below is a partial tally of the hate-fueled chatter in our summer to date.

June:

• Abdulhakim Muhammad, a Muslim convert from Arkansas, was arrested for shootings outside an Army recruiting station in Little Rock that killed Private William Long and wounded another solider. He told police that “he was mad at the U.S. military because of what they had done to Muslims in the past.”

• Orange Country (Calif.) Pastor Wiley Drake—the 2008 vice-presidential nominee of Alan Keyes and the first plaintiff in Orly Taitz’s “birther” lawsuits—announced that he was praying for the death of “the usurper that is in the White House…B. Hussein Obama.”

• Former Rep. Tom Tancredo weighed in on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor by characterizing the Hispanic civil-rights organization La Raza as “nothing more than a … Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.”

• Liberal cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall called on President Obama to resign because he has not been liberal enough, writing: “With Democrats Like Him, Who Needs Dictators?...Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.”

• Playboy.com posted a list of the top 10 conservative women “we hate to love”—complete with a “hate-fuck” rating.

• Former South Carolina State Election Commissioner Rusty DePass posted a comment on Facebook saying that a missing gorilla from a local zoo was related to first lady Michelle Obama.

• Eighty-eight-year-old white supremacist James Von Brunn attacked Washington’s Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.

• Ann Coulter weighed in on George Tiller’s murder on The O’Reilly Factor, saying, “I don’t really like to think of it as murder…It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester.”

July:

• Audra Shay is elected chairman of the Young Republicans after it is revealed by The Daily Beast that she not only laughed at a supporter’s racist online comments about Obama but that her Web posts are littered with comments that the president is “anti-American,” as in: “I think that you are ignorant if you believe this man is anything but anti-American.”

• U.S. Army reserve major Stefan Frederick Cook refuses deployment to Afghanistan on the grounds that President Obama might not be a natural-born citizen and therefore constitutionally ineligible to be considered commander in chief.

• In Paris, Texas, a riot breaks out between the KKK, neo-Nazis, and the New Black Panthers.

• Glenn Beck announces that in addition to putting America on a road to socialism that will lead to communism, the president has “a deep-seated hatred for white people” and is a “racist.”

• Republican Rep. Mike Castle’s town-hall meeting becomes the first to be hijacked by the "birthers," as a woman in red screams: “I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back!” The clip quickly goes viral.

• Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert becomes the ninth Republican member of Congress to co-sponsor the so-called birther bill.

August:

• A Long Island, New York, woman named Nancy Genovese is arrested outside an Air National Guard base with an XM-15 assault rifle, a shotgun, and 500 rounds of ammunition in her car. She had cased the base before—apparently in the belief that a FEMA concentration camp was being built there.

• Liberal talk-show host Mike Malloy indulges in an on-air fantasy about Glenn Beck committing suicide and having it become popular viewing on YouTube.

• Grassroots conservative activist Bob MacGuffie circulates a memo urging activists to disrupt town halls using “the [Saul] Alinsky playbook of which the left is so proud: freeze it, attack it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

• Maryland Rep. Frank Kratovil is hung in effigy outside his office.

• Protesters against Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd suggest that he commit suicide with whiskey and painkillers as a treatment for his newly diagnosed prostate cancer.

• North Carolina Rep. Brad Miller receives a death threat phoned into his office and cancels his summer town-hall meetings.

• Arizona Rep. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ aides call the cops after one town-hall attendee drops a gun at the event.

• Rep. Brian Baird of Washington State is faxed a death threat addressed to President Obama and declares, “What we’re seeing right now is close to Brown Shirt tactics.”

• Sarah Palin jumps the shark by posting on her Facebook page: “my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

• Rush Limbaugh compares President Obama to Adolf Hitler.

• A swastika is spray-painted outside the office of Rep. David Scott’s office in Georgia.

The increasing heat of the chatter this summer should be a cold wakeup call. We are courting a season of violence in America. We are eroding our common sense and common decency. By pumping up hyperpartisanship as a means of gaining market share or as a recruitment tool, we are playing with forces that can easily get out of control. We are giving cover—and sometimes a sense of purpose—to the crazy among us.

We have enjoyed a relative period of innocence in American politics. We have been mercifully free of assassination in recent years—even as we have pumped up hyperpartisanship and coarsened our civic dialogue. But we are not immune from the larger cycles of violence that occasionally erupt and shock even the most stable societies in history. 1968 is 40 years and one bad day away. That’s the problem with hate; it ultimately leads to violence.

John P. Avlon is the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics. He writes a weekly column for The Daily Beast. Previously, he served as chief speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun.

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Con Amore