Columnist – John SammonYou watch the Republican Party impotently thrash around in its death throes, searching for a thread, a purpose, a cause other than hate, with its dysfunctional tea-baggers, health care reactionaries, town hall hecklers, storm trooper talk radio hosts, assorted hillbilly would-be serial assassins, gun nuts, Klan racists and you’re-going-to-hell religious xenophobes. It [...]

“This man helped us at a time when we were all alone, when those who say we should not come here were helping the enemy (South Africa’s white government).” –Nelson Mandela. Mandela visited Libya twice between his release from jail in 1990 and his election as South Africa’s first black leader in 1994. [ Read [...]

I wonder whether this bimbo even knew where she was! Several audience members reportedly walked out of Ms Palin’s speech 30 minutes before the end, citing “more important things to do” or describing the talk as “too partisan and too much like a speech at the Republican convention.“ Reading a speech written for her by [...]

MediaMatters: Beck Praises Constitutional Provision Protecting Slave Trade — In a chapter in his new book purporting to explain to “idiots” what “our Founding Fathers really intended,” Glenn Beck praises an obsolete provision of the U.S. Constitution that prohibited Congress from outlawing the slave trade before 1808 and capped taxes on the slave trade at [...]

HALPERIN’S TAKE: Why the Republican Party (and the Conservative Movement) Is in a World of Hurt Today   1.   The jury remains out (to say the least) on the Michael Steele era (see especially: nuts and bolts, communications, fundraising).   2.   The inordinate actual power that radio and cable hosts have over the actions of Republican elected officials.   3.   The [...]