Yes...An Amazing Accomplishment!

May 7, 2008 Jonathan Schwarz: What an Amazing Accomplishment It’s September 12, 2001. You’re sitting in front of a TV, watching footage of the World Trade Center collapse over and over and over again. All of a sudden, someone from seven years in the future walks out of a tiny temporal vortex, and tells you: George W. Bush is going to fuck this up so badly that in 2008, the United States of America will likely elect as president a black man whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim. Oh, and he also admits he’s used cocaine. I think it would have been easier to convince me of the reality of time travel. “No, no, I believe you really are from the future. But the other stuff, that’s CRAZY.” posted by Jonathan Schwarz at 3:33 PM

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It was not only untrue, it was demonstrably untrue

Tom Tomorrow: The age of disinformation

One of the top stories on right wing talk radio yesterday (with mentions on NPR and in the New York Times) was the fact that Hillary Clinton did not leave a tip at a restaraunt. I suspect that this has now been enshrined into conventional wisdom on the right, and will be one of those anecdotes which the candidate will never, ever be rid of. Well, big effing surprise: like pretty much everything else you might hear on right wing talk radio, it was not only untrue, it was demonstrably untrue. It’s a strange age we live in. To paraphrase Mark Twain, in the time it takes the truth to boot up a browser for a Google search, a lie can circle the globe several times over.

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Unbelievable by Tom Tomorrow

Click image for large view.
Click here for original on Salon.com.
Click here for original Tom Tomorrow post

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Courage, Leadership and Humility

With thanks to This Modern World for originally posting this video.

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Every day should be...

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The Annual Republican Witch-Hunting Season is Underway

Tom Tomorrow: Olbermann

So the President, behaving a little bit more than usual, like we’d all interrupted him while he was watching his favorite cartoons on the DVR, stepped before the press conference microphone and after side-stepping most of the substantive issues like the Israeli raid on Syria in condescending and infuriating fashion, produced a big-wow political finish that indicates, certainly, that if it wasn’t already — the annual Republican witch-hunting season is underway. (read the entire article)

Adobe Acrobat copy of Tom Tomorrow: Olbermann

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YearlyKos 2006 featuring Tom Tomorrow

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Sparkman and the Blinkster! by Tom Tomorrow

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Plan 9 from Inside the Beltway by Tom Tomorrow

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How Idiotic Arguments Enter the Political Mainstream...

The Overton Window, Illustrated, from Corrente (Boldy shrill...) and other sources.

Or: How extremists play a role in setting public policy.

(click on image for larger view)
As the Overton Window shifts along the spectrum, a specific policy (a notch in the graph) goes through the following phases of public acceptance:

• Unthinkable


• Radical


• Acceptable


• Sensible


• Popular


• Policy

"The Overton Window, in my opinion, is basically the key to the Republicans' success over the past twenty years--and it comes straight from the Republican think tanks. "...the GOP knows that the middle DOES matter. They know that by playing to their base in very well-crafted ways, they can shift the very definition of what the middle is. By introducing radicalism into the public discourse (and taking initial heat for it), whatever used to be radical within this context becomes moderate by comparison." Why the Right-Wing Gets It--and Why Dems Don't by thereisnospoon

This cartoon (© Tom Tomorrow) says it all:

(click on image for larger view)

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They actually believe this...

Tom Tomorrow:

One if by land, two if by sea

From the article: "Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States — the Pajamas Media/ right-wing-blogosphere / Fox News / Michelle Malkin / Rush Limbaugh listener strain — actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and “our women” will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have — not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview." (read the entire article)

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