A few Saturday links.

* Mom Tasered in front of her kids for talking on a cell phone speeding "disorderly conduct" no damn reason.

* The nascent Whole Foods boycott gets some big media attention. Apparently the apology email was generated after WFMI stock dropped 2% yesterday.

* Adam Kotsko rewatches the second season of Mad Men for PopMatters.

* Return of the Militias: the Southern Poverty Law Center reports. MetaFilter discusses.

Three links for this Wednesday.

* "A consensus has developed during IPY that the Greenland ice sheet will disappear." This and other terrible news on climate change from Newsweek's science editor Sharon Begley.

* California is facing a severe prison crisis, which the disastrous "three strikes" law will only make worse.

* Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President's Secret Service.

Krugman: There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Crooks & Liars has an exhaustive post on Glenn Beck, James W. Von Brunn, and the limits of responsible discourse. The takeaway point, as always, is not some binary assertion of "guilt" or "innocence" but the simple observation that people gifted with mass media bullhorns should use them responsibly, not to promulgate known falsehoods or fan the flames of extremist hysteria. They shouldn't—just for starters—use that bullhorn to validate fringe ideologies like Posse Comitatus or neosecessionism.

A 88-year-old gunman— by reports a white supremacist and birther—opened fire earlier today at the Holocaust Museum. (Early reports that no one was killed have become inaccurate; a security guard has now died. TPM has running updates.) The suspect was arrested twenty-eight years ago for attempting to perform a citizen's arrest of the Federal Reserve Board. His writings have been widely circulating on the Internet.

In light of today's shooting and the George Tiller assassination, both Steve Benen and Matt Yglesias remember the Homeland Security report from earlier this year that caused so much manufactured controversy, which had warned against the threat of precisely this sort of violence from political extremists.

Thursday again! How does this keep happening?

* Today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. MetaFilter remembers.

* Planetary #27 finally on its way. October.

* New Hampshire officially passes marriage equality. It looked for a while like nitpicking from the governor's office might actually kill this; very glad it didn't.

* Country first: Lindsey Graham admits he puts the Republican Party before the good of the nation.

* In the wake of Dr. George Tiller's assassination, a frequent Fox News guest has put photos and addresses for the last two late-term abortion providers in the country on the Web.

* Obama speaks in Cairo.

* E.J. Dionne on the corporate media's continued rightward slant. More from Steve Benen.

* The recession: a global view. It's important to remember how good America actually has it—and that the current level of hardship in the States is, relatively speaking, not even all that bad.

* Here comes heath care. Donkeylicious says Team Edwards has something to crow about here. Maybe, but the health-care justification for Edwards's (and later Hillary Clinton's) candidacy long past viability was always weak—the plan you campaign on is never the plan that gets passed.

* And sad news: Bill, killed. Early reports declare David Carradine a suicide.

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning inside the lobby of his Wichita church.

When people like me bemoan the rise of eliminationist rhetoric in political discourse, it's not just elected officials but also people like George Tiller we are hoping to protect from attack or assassination. As Amanda Marcotte discusses at length, Tiller was providing medical treatment to women under very difficult circumstances. That was his crime. Undertaking difficult service on behalf of those who needed it was enough to mark this private citizen for demonization, lies, hate, and now death. What else would you call this, if not terrorism?

UPDATE: The suspected assassin has been arrested.

Sean Hannity, patriot, wants a revolution.

Night.

* Glenn Beck, lunatic, openly calls for secession.

You can't convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn't allow you to secede.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and if a state says: `I don't want to go there, because that's suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right -- people have a right to not commit economic suicide...

...Texas says go to hell, Washington, which by the way has been said before. I believe it was Davey Crocket...it's about time that somebody says that again.

He's riffing off some similarly histrionic language from Texas Gov. Rick Perry. When is Fox going to pull the plug on this guy?

* New York joins the future: Gov. David A. Paterson on Thursday will announce plans to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriage, according to people with knowledge of the governor’s plans.

* Roasted Peanuts: a blog devoted to the best of classic Peanuts. Via MeFi, which points one I'm rather fond of.

* Barack Obama, great president or greatest president? The president recently sent a video praising Chicago in its bid to hold the 2016 Summer Games. Now he has endorsed the United States’ effort to hold the World Cup of soccer either in 2018 or 2022.

* After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features "comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)" and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham ("Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison"), and more.

Last of the great Tuesday night linkdumps.

* Daily Kos has a nice round-up post on eliminationist rhetoric and its consequences in light of last weekend's Pittsburgh shooting.

* Barack Obama as a character from a Bob Dylan song. Via TPM.

BF: You liked Barack Obama early on. Why was that?

BD: I’d read his book and it intrigued me.
Multimedia

BF: Audacity of Hope?

BD: No it was called Dreams of My Father.

BF: What struck you about him?

BD: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage - cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

Lenin's Tomb on crisis, accumulation, Barack Obama, and neoliberalism.

* MyDD wants you to encourage NC AG Roy Cooper to run for Senate.

The last word on the eliminationist rhetoric of the failed McCain/Palin ticket: Sarah Palin's attacks on Barack Obama's patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president, Secret Service agents revealed during the final weeks of the campaign.

Politico picks up on another uh-oh moment from a Republican representative up for re-election. Rep. Robin Hayes, during a warm-up act for John McCain this weekend in North Carolina, remarked to a rowdy crowd that “liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God.”

Here's a picture of the 8th district of North Carolina. You're gonna wanna stay away from there.

Politics Monday.

* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann's now desperately trying to backpeddle.

* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.

* West Virginia electronic voting machines don't work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.

* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?

* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn't working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.

* Or, you know, don't: John McCain doesn't really seem to mind losing. A lot of "moderate" conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.

* It turns out McCain's also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.

* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.

* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.

* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.

* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates' health, McCain's in particular.

* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its "Building the New Energy Economy" theme.

* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.

Debate Day 3. So what are people talking about?

* The head of John McCain's transition team lobbied for Saddam Hussein. Really. Really.

* The Supreme Court has refused to hear the case of Troy Davis, set to be executed in Georgia in the absence of forensic evidence (no weapon, fingerprints, or DNA) and solely on the word of nine witnesses, seven of whom have since recanted their testimony and another of whom is the other primary suspect in the case. More at MeFi.

* Rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship Watch: Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for Bush-Cheney '04, walks away from Team Maverick™.

"They didn't let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP," Dowd declared during the Time Warner Summit panel. "When Sarah Palin got picked instead of Joe Lieberman, which I fundamentally believed would have given John McCain the best opportunity in this race... as soon as he picked Palin, that whole ready versus not ready argument was not credible."

Saying that Palin was a "net negative" on the ticket, he went on: "[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that."

* The Oliver Stone W film comes out this weekend. Here's an interview from the Times, where Stone doesn't hold back.

Stone has said repeatedly that if Bush had fought on the ground in Vietnam he would never have gone to war against Iraq (he also maintains that if Bush had been president during the Cuban missile crisis, “we would have been in a nuclear war. Definitely. Wiped out. We wouldn’t be here talking.”). So I ask him what he makes of John McCain. After all, the Republican presidential candidate was both a supporter of ousting Saddam and a long-time resident of Vietnam’s “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp.

“I think McCain’s a very special story because he was never a soldier,” Stone says coldly. “He’s said he never saw the results of his own bombing. I saw the damage we did, I saw the corpses, the decay, I smelt the flesh, I saw people who’d been napalmed, people who’d been killed by shrapnel, mutilated. I saw horrible things. McCain was a prisoner and he has a siege mentality. He doesn’t see a balanced portrait of cause and effect – there’s something missing in the man, mentally."

* Nouriel Roubini says the economic hurt has only just begun.

* Biden says we'll win West Virginia. And he has a little bit of fun with it.

According to NBC's Mike Memoli, Biden asked the crowd in St. Clairsville, Ohio, "Which way is West-By-God-Virginia?" He then said, "I want to send a message to West Virginia -- we're going to win in West Virginia! ... We're going to shock the living devil out of y'all!"

* The latest CBS/NY Times poll says we'll win everywhere.

Obama 53 (48)
McCain 39 (45)

* They're still yelling out awful things at McCain/Palin rallies.

* And the Paradise Up North continues to hang with a bad crowd.

Lots of stuff happened this weekend, and I didn't blog about any of it. Here's some catch-up.

* Marriage equality has reached Connecticut. Three down, forty-seven to go.

* John McCain is finally trying to calm his crowds down and getting booed for his efforts.

* How big is "big"? However big "big" is, Obama's still-unannounced fundraising total is it.

* Since polling began, only one candidate has ever closed a gap as the one now facing John McCain: Ronald Reagan. And since we already know Obama is the liberal Ronald Reagan, that leaves McCain pretty much high and dry. The RNC is even thinking of bailing on him to try and protect congressional seats.

* Though not everyone agrees McCain is toast. "My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.” And the media backs up his unhealthy delusions by reporting ten-point Obama leads as "toss-ups" and 2% McCain leads as "Lean McCain."

* Palin cleared in Troopergate probe—by herself. The real probe says she acted unlawfully, and so does the New York Times.

* And is this the end of American capitalism?

The McCain campaign directive that 'The Ayers smears we've been enjoying from the McCain campaign since the weekend are apparently no longer operative' (issued, you may recall, just yesterday) is apparently no longer operative.

I guess this was the "major announcement." (UPDATE: Martin confirms it was.)

Well done, sir.



UPDATE: Somebody owes Alex $20.

The Queen of Hearts apparently attends McCain/Palin rallies now.

As seen at recent McCain events, this afternoon's crowd was vocal in their support for McCain and their anger with Senator Obama. At one point one man could be heard yelling, "Off with his head," when McCain spoke about Obama's tax plan. That enthusiasm was even more present during Palin's remarks, and as other observers have reported in the past, today there was a sizeable number of people making their way towards the exit after McCain's running mate left the podium.

The McCain camp is teasing some sort of major announcement this morning—could it perhaps be the long-sought endorsement of Tweedle Dee?

I suppose an erratic campaign is the peril you face when you run the Mad Hatter for president.

Nick Beaudrot at Cogitamus has an eliminationism reality check: as bad as McCain/Palin have been the last few days, they haven't quite reached the fever-swamp heights of the Republican Party of the 1990s. That's...comforting. I guess.

The good news is the McCain camp really does seem to be pulling back from the brink on this, with news today that Sarah Palin's stump speech is now Ayers-less. Perhaps this is partly a result of heightened media attention on their rallies; Biden and Obama spokesman Bill Burton were both asked about the rabid crowds on TV today.

In other Sarah Palin news, via Washington Monthly, David Brooks has called the vice-presidential candidate "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," echoing my statement earlier today that if Republicans have any sense they'll put Palin permanently out to pasture on November 5:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Pre-debate links.

* Those McCain/Palin rallies aren't getting any better.

In the latest instance of inflammatory outbursts at McCain-Palin rallies, a crowd member screamed "treason!" during an event on Tuesday after Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of criticizing U.S. troops.

Whether or not McCain and Palin can hear these words being shouted at them on the stump, these stories have been in the news for two days now. This is a case where silence really is deafening: when your supporters are screaming out "Treason!" and "Kill him!" you have a moral obligation to step in and put a stop to it. Hell, even Rudy Giuliani knows that.

* Good news/bad news: Apparently Brokaw never agreed to the no followups rule, so the campaigns are expecting there to be followups after all. That's the good news. The bad news: Brokaw ♥s McCain.

* How McCain destroyed the best brand in politics, with more at Washington Monthly.

* They found Sarah Palin's doodles. Rachel Maddow had some fun with this last night. You know, I'm beginning to think this VP choice speaks poorly of McCain's judgment.

* Also at Washington Monthly: analysis of Obama's latest, very good ad.

"He's out of ideas. Out of touch. And running out of time. But with no plan to lift our economy up, John McCain wants to tear Barack Obama down, with smears that have been proven false. Why? McCain's own campaign admits that if the election is about the economy, he's going to lose. But as Americans lose their jobs, homes and savings, it's time for a President who'll change the economy. Not change the subject."

* And despite what you sometimes hear in the comments of this blog, Pennsylvania is not a swing state.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Another scene from the McCain/Palin lynch mob.

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."