I would have expected the Time magazine feature, “The Secret World of Extreme Militias,” to be getting a lot more attention in the blogosphere than it has been getting. Earlier this week some elements of the Right had the vapors over an appearance by Kos on Countdown (which I missed), in which Kos discussed threats of right-wing violence. Anyway, Time‘s Barton Gellman writes,

As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets.

Maybe the righties are keeping quiet about the story because they don’t want to draw attention to it.

One story that I hadn’t heard before is of James Cummings, who had planned to bring a real dirty bomb to the Obama inauguration. And let me emphasize that, unlike the hapless Jose Padilla, Cummings had the goods. With the help of a large inheritance he had accumulated a remarkable amount of thorium, cesium and uranium, the means to disperse them, and enough smarts to pull it off. He intended to load his bomb into a motor home and drive it to Washington for the inauguration.

And he might have achieved his plan had his wife not shot and killed him in December 2008. Cummings had a long history as a domestic abuser, and I don’t believe Mrs. Cummings is being charged with anything. Indeed, she should get a medal.

See also Joe Conason.

Sharron Angle gets government-run health care.

CBO: Extending the Bush tax cuts will hurt the economy and reduce incomes.

Update: Must read — Matt Taibbi’s takedown of the Tea Party movement. Spot on. Excerpts:

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.

What few elements of the movement aren’t yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it’s only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP’s campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. (“Not me — I was protesting!” is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with “people who do not cherish America the way we do” is that “they did not read the Federalist Papers.”) Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill “cracker babies,” support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called “White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo,” checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.

They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it’s so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.

This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban soccer moms they’ve mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn’t an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.

The bad news is that the Tea Party’s political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That’s the reality; the rest of this is just noise.

Miss Lucy is still with us. She has good days and bad days. Yesterday she perked up a bit and wanted to snuggle and purr for a while, but today she’s keeping to herself.

I am very, very busy and can’t linger here long. Here’s stuff I would write about if I had time to write about it.

“Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview.” I don’t have time to read it now, but if you read it let me know what you think. TPM has the juicy bits.

Timothy Noah, “Theoretical Egalitarians: Why income distribution can’t be crowd-sourced.” More interesting than it sounds.

Peter Daou, “How a Handful of Liberal Bloggers Are Bringing Down the Obama Presidency.” I’m not necessarily endorsing Peter’s view, but there’s lots to discuss here. I never thought the liberal blogosphere should march in lockstep with the Democratic Party; far from it. However, I do get irritated with the hysterical, anti-Obama hyperbole on some liberal blogs. One can be critical where criticism is due without sorting everyone in the world into “us” versus “them” piles.

Bob Herbert, “What Is Paladino About?” Some pretty sick stuff, apparently.

Look, Dems, this is how it’s done.

Update: I understand that the “submit to me” line was taken out of context, which is a shame, but please note —

In a statement from the campaign Monday afternoon, Webster’s wife and campaign manager derided Grayson’s ad as “shameful” and “ludicrous.”

But the response does not refute any of the charges leveled in the ad – titled “Taliban Dan Webster” – which claimed that Webster, a former state Senate majority leader and state House speaker, wanted to make divorce illegal and deny abused women health care. Grayson’s ad even claims that Webster “tried to prohibit alimony to an ‘adulterous wife’ but not an adulterous husband,’” and that he “wants to force women to stay in abusive marriages.”

Webster’s response also does not address footage in the ad of Webster saying, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husband,” and “She should submit to me – that’s in the Bible.”

As Echidne points out, Webster is associated with a group of men who believe that wives should submit to their husbands.

Susannah Randolph, Grayson’s campaign manager, defended the ad. She pointed to Webster’s ties to the Institute in Basic Life Principles and its founder Bill Gothard, who has taught that women should be subservient to their husbands and not work outside the home. While in the state House in 1990, Webster spent $4,340 of taxpayer money to print and mail a district flier urging constituents to attend one of the group’s seminars.

Also,

The campaign spot also criticized Webster because of his opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape or incest; his sponsorship of a bill giving couples the option of entering a “covenant marriage” that would allow divorce only in cases of adultery; and his vote against a measure that would have prohibited insurance companies from treating domestic violence as a pre-existing condition.

Steve M. explains how Carl “Mr. Furious” Paladino, Republican nominee for governor of New York, is a creep. See also Joe Coscarelli at The Village Voice.

And this ad is all over New York City television —

Yes, it’s a fairly standard representation of the “negative ad” genre, but I think it’s pretty effective, and this and a very similar one are being shown a lot.

Polling in this race is a tad inconsistent. There are polls showing a tied race. There are polls showing Cuomo with a 2-to-1 lead. So much for the polls. Although there are places upstate that would elect a right-wing ham sandwich if it promised to cut taxes, I think as the voters of New York get a closer look at Paladino, they will drift over to Cuomo in this last few weeks. See also Nate Silver.

This is New York, not South Carolina. Or Nevada, for that matter. Sharron Angle has done everything but wrap tin foil around her head and try to fly off a roof, and she’s still a contender. Amazing.

If you hadn’t already noticed — at tax.com, David Kay Johnston analyzed the results of the Bush tax cuts and concluded the economy would have been better off without them. See also Economist’s View.

Bruce Bartlett, writing for Fiscal Times, writes,

The truth is that there is virtually no evidence in support of the Bush tax cuts as an economic elixir. To the extent that they had any positive effect on growth, it was very, very modest. Their main effect was simply to reduce the government’s revenue, thereby increasing the budget deficit, which all Republicans claim to abhor.

The Bartlett article is especially interesting, since it reviews George Bush’s “decision making” process. (h/t Angry Bear) See also “What the Rich Don’t Need.”

Update: Why righties are ignorant — some guy at National Review Online named Kevin Williamson writes, “The difference between communism and socialism: Under communism, politics begins with a gun in your face; under socialism, politics ends with a gun in your face.”

This is what passes for “clever” on the Right. But what does it actually tell us about either socialism or communism? Absolutely nothing. What does it tell us about totalitarian regimes that are neither socialist nor communist? Absolutely nothing. How does it prepare a citizen to judge what economic/political policies actually might be “socialist” under any academic definition of the term? It doesn’t.

All it does it set up the poorly educated among us to be afraid of anything that somebody labels “socialist,” whether that thing is socialist or not. And in doing so it sets up the poorly educated among us to stampede into the waiting arms of corporatism and plutocracy — both of which are capable of pointing lots of guns at lots of faces, although it’s not their usual style.

This same clever Mr. Williamson said elsewhere, “Socialism is when The Man comes to your house with a gun and tells you that you are going to serve the community.” To which someone at The Economist wearily objected:

Is that what socialism is? I thought that was corvée labour. It’s funny, because I have lived or spent time in several of the northern European social-democratic countries that are often described by American conservatives as “socialist”, and I don’t remember seeing anything like this going on. Let’s see, the Netherlands, Denmark, France…nope, don’t remember seeing The Man coming to anyone’s house with a gun to tell them to go serve the community. …

…Okay, enough with the cuteness: what I’m objecting to here is Mr Williamson’s use of the “gun in your face” trope (more usually rendered as “gun to your head”) as a grab-bag shorthand for law and government. This is a completely routine part of conservative language at this point. It’s also completely obfuscatory, aggressive and just plain inaccurate.

Mr. Williamson then whines that the Netherlands, Denmark, and France are different, and don’t count somehow, but he has lived in a real socialist state (he doesn’t say which one) and it was real awful.

Then he says,

The resort to violence is what makes the question of what kind of things it is legitimate for states to do an important moral concern. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to stop him murdering, raping, or robbing. It seems to me entirely unreasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to extort from him money to fund a project to get monkeys high on cocaine. Those seem to me fairly reasonable distinctions. It is illegitimate for government to use force or the threat of force for projects that are not inherently public in character.

Get monkeys high on cocaine? This is an old rightie trick — find some fairly standard academic research grant (in this case, $71,623 to Wake Forest University to study the effect of cocaine on monkeys), make it sound ridiculous, and blow it up into an Issue. Universities and medical research centers depend on grants like that to keep their equipment updated and to pay researcher staff salaries.

But when did anyone point a gun in anyone’s face to extort money for a research grant? We now see that we aren’t talking about real guns, but merely rhetorical guns, as a kind of metaphor for paying taxes.

So, we can infer that any nation that requires its citizens to pay taxes is socialist. Brilliant. And at the rate they are devolving the next generation of righties will be too stupid to learn how to use a fork.

Update: See Dean’s World.

I confess I haven’t had time to watch the video of Steven Colbert in the House, so I will leave it to others to decide if he was funny or whether it was smart/appropriate for him to stay in persona for the gig. I just want to point out that the headline writers can’t make up their minds about which party Colbert embarrassed more.

Think Progress: “Fox Apoplectic Over Colbert Testimony: Megyn Kelly Demands Apology, Rep. Steve King Calls Him A Liar”

OK, so he pissed off Republicans. But wait …

Byron York: Colbert embarrasses Dems; Conyers asks comedian to leave

Maybe some of you know this — in what context did Conyers ask Colbert to leave? Was he serious or was he kidding? Anyway, it’s not clear from York’s post exactly why the Dems were embarrassed by Colbert, just that they were, or that York thinks they should have been.

Jonathan Allen of Politico said that Colbert knocked Dems “off message”:

For a Democratic majority that has had difficulty demonstrating to voters that its policies are addressing their needs, Colbert provided another day off message and, perhaps, an emblem of a party that has lost its footing as it limps toward a preelection adjournment.

John Podhoretz actually said the Colbert testimony “may have been the single biggest pointless blunder in American political history, and I am not kidding.” Colbert hit a nerve, I take it.

Digby: “Of course in a world where Glenn Beck is considered a serious political figure, I suppose you can’t blame them for not getting the joke.”

On the whole, the reaction from leftie bloggers seems positive while the reaction from rightie bloggers is downright derisive. I take it wingnuts were pissed that the Colbert testimony took attention away from other testimony elsewhere on the Hill, regarding the New Black Panther Party / voter intimidation allegations.

Speaking of clown acts, here is a new Bill Maher video of Christine O’Donnell:

See also O’Donnell’s pledge to stop the whole country from having sex.

BTW, why is Christine O’Donnell not “the single biggest pointless blunder in American political history”? She’s a bigger joke than Colbert, any day.

Paul Krugman says the Republican Party has declared war on arithmetic. The Pledge to America promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and balance the federal budget by cutting everything but “common sense” exceptions for “seniors, veterans, and our troops.” Krugman interprets this to mean that Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are not on the table, but we’ll return to this point later.

Anyway, Krugman continues,

Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

For many years it’s been an article of faith among Wingnuts that if the feds could just cut out programs that assist the poor, plus other “frills” like the Department of Education and the National Council on the Arts, that the budget would balance. In reality, except for Social Security and Medicare, cutting all the programs wingnuts don’t like would barely scratch the surface of the deficit.

As Steve Benen says, Republicans “believe they have a policy agenda because they published a document they call a ‘policy agenda.’ … They find pesky details like arithmetic to be annoying distractions.”

And, of course to today’s Republicans a “policy agenda” is just a prop, a stack of paper to add gravitas to their dog-and-pony act du jour. And the point is to help them win elections. Krugman continues,

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

That, and turning the keys to government over to their corporate sponsors.

Even the editorial writers of the Washington Post smell a scam:

The Republicans would repeal the Obama health-care plan, a plan that at least holds out the prospect of slowing the growth of health-care spending in general and Medicare in particular. An earlier proposal by Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) at least had the honesty to outline major, if unwise, changes in Medicare; he would turn it into a voucher program. By contrast, the “Pledge” vows grandly to “make the decisions that are necessary to protect our entitlement programs for today’s seniors and future generations. That means requiring a full accounting of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, setting benchmarks for these programs and reviewing them regularly, and preventing the expansion of unfunded liabilities.” Asked about this big fat asterisk, Mr. Boehner promised “an adult conversation.” When? What was this, the children’s hour?

This paragraph was, of course, followed by the obligatory “Democrats are just as bad” clause. Hey, it’s the Washington Post.

Going back to Krugman– he says that while it is doubtful the GOP will be able to enact its real agenda in the near future, the real danger is that “Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way.” And as the quality of life in the United States deteriorates, so will go political stability. Hey, what was it the neocons used to say about “creative chaos“?

First, Miss Lucy and I want to thank everyone for your good wishes for her well-being. She is still fading, although she doesn’t seem to be in acute distress.

Second, here’s another Maddow clip that everyone in America needs to see. So send it to your friends:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Righties are getting bolder about declaring their intentions to end the Social Security program. One might think this is a really stupid thing to do, given that we’re getting very close to a critical midterm election. But I think they feel so certain of a smashing victory in November they cannot contain themselves.

At the Los Angeles Times, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson discuss why allowing the Bush tax cuts for the extremely well-off to end is good for democracy. The weakness of the article is that they don’t clearly explain why growing income inequality really is a threat to democratic government, and the troglodytes who added comments to the column certainly aren’t figuring it out on their own.

Ben Stein isn’t figuring it out on his own either; he whines that raising the taxes on the income he toils and sweats to wring out of his stock portfolio must be some kind of punishment.

The GOP trotted out its “Pledge to America” today, and of course it’s full of policy ideas that, if enacted, would pretty much put what’s left of the American Dream out of its misery. Yet it is not extreme enough for much of the Right Blosophere; not enough hate.

If you don’t want to be utterly depressed, don’t read “Walmart’s midnight baby formula bread line.”