"Now, that guy just hit me."

The hit isn't on camera, but we can see and hear that the Wisconsin protesters don't like Fox News.

"Yes, she’s got political views, but gosh, look how political views have worked for Fox."

"There’s certainly the opportunity to create a much more powerful liberal voice in the country. The fact that it hasn’t been done yet, doesn’t mean it can’t be done."

And since you paid $315 million for it...

"History tells us" something that history doesn't tell us, say sociologists stumbling to protect Frances Fox Piven.

Here's the expression of "outrage" by the officers of the American Sociological Association:

Scholars of her caliber, intellectuals of her stature, and especially those who tackle social conflicts and contradictions, mass movements and political action, should stimulate equal levels of serious challenge and creative dialogue. Being called by Glenn Beck one of the “nine most dangerous people in the world,” and an “enemy of the Constitution” is not a credible challenge; it is plain demagoguery.

So vigorous debate about Piven's ideas is really important, but it better be the right kind of debate by the right kind of people and most certainly not that terrible, terrible man Glenn Beck. She's very lofty and serious, so, while she should be challenged, she must be challenged only by lofty and serious individuals, and of course, Glenn Beck is not one.

Despite its lack of substance, Beck’s attacks have resulted in a flood of hate mail and internet postings attacking Professor Piven, including a series of death threats. While it is true that death threats are generally only a form of extremist rhetoric, they indicate an overheated emotional atmosphere that researchers on collective violence call “the hysteria zone.” It is a zone in which deranged individuals can be motivated to real violence against those targeted by demagoguery. History tells us that such things as the attempted assassination of Representative Giffords that resulted in six deaths in Tucson, Arizona can be examples of how abundant, polarizing rhetoric by political leaders and commentators can spur mass murder.

Does lofty, serious, intellectual sociology involve looking at evidence and analyzing it rationally? Linking the Tucson massacre to hot political rhetoric was a rash mistake made by demagogues — you want to talk about demagogues?! — demagogues who were slavering over the prospect of a right-wing massacre that would prove politically useful.

We call on Fox News to take steps to control the encouragement of violence that has run rampant in recent months. 

Fox News? And do you also call on The Nation, which published "Mobilizing the Jobless," by Frances Fox Piven, the article Glenn Beck brought to the attention of his large audience? Piven called for riots. She wrote:

An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees....

When did Glenn Beck call for violence?  Back to the sociologists' letter of outrage:

Serious and honest, undistorted disagreement and public debate on unemployment, economic crisis, the rights and tactics of welfare recipients, government intervention and the erosion of the American way of life should be supported. 

Undistorted? Okay, let's see you do it first. The "American way of life"? By that term, do you mean — in an undistorted sort of way — like Greece?

We in no way advocate restricting the freedom of speech of political commentators.... Where we all should draw the line is at name-calling and invective rising to the level of inciting others to violence.

So Piven should not have called for "something like" Greek-style riots, and it was good of Glenn Beck to point out that Piven crossed the line, right? I mean, we're dedicating ourselves to serious, undistorted analysis here. That's what you said you wanted, didn't you?

Roger Ailes to Fox News "guys": "I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually..."

"You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that."

By I hope the other side does that, I think he means he hopes the other side tones it down. But maybe her means he hopes the other side does it with bombast — so that it's the conservatives who are rational and the liberals who are raving.

Wait a minute! What am I saying? Conservatives... liberals... they're all journalists! But Ailes is the one who used the expression "the other side" — which is, I might add, rather militaristic and hence not toned down. Ironically.

***

Let me take one more opportunity to reprint what George Orwell said about dying metaphors:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.

Yeah, I know dying metaphors. Dying. Another negative metaphor. A metaphor about a metaphor.

By the way, what is bombast? Bombs must be involved, right?

bombast (n.)
1560s, "cotton padding," corrupted from earlier bombace (1550s), from O.Fr. bombace "cotton, cotton wadding," from L.L. bombacem, acc. of bombax "cotton, 'linteorum aut aliae quaevis quisquiliae,' " a corruption and transferred use of L. bombyx "silk," from Gk. bombyx "silk, silkworm" (which also came to mean "cotton" in Medieval Gk.), from some oriental word, perhaps related to Iranian pambak (modern panba) or Armenian bambok, perhaps ultimately from a PIE root meaning "to twist, wind." From stuffing and padding for clothes or upholstery, meaning extended to "pompous, empty speech" (1580s). Also from the same source are Swed. bomull, Dan. bomuld "cotton," and, via Turkish forms, Mod.Gk. mpampaki, Romanian bumbac, Serbo-Cr. pamuk. Ger. baumwolle "cotton" is probably from the Latin word but altered by folk-etymology to look like "tree wool." Pol. bawelna, Lith. bovelna are partial translations from German.

See? That's exactly what Orwell was talking about! People use the word "bombast" to convey explosiveness, but that is not the original metaphor.

Justice Stephen Breyer on "Fox News Sunday."

Watch here. Chris Wallace does a great job of needling him about things Breyer's written about constitutional interpretation and, Breyer, as I'd expect, rises to the occasion. Breyer literally waves the Constitution around, in tiny booklet form, and figuratively waves around a bigger book, his book "Making Our Democracy Work."

Now, let's rummage through the transcript. Chris Wallace questions him about "just applying the law as written," and Breyer plugs in the expected elementary lesson about the concision of the phrases in the Constitution and the need to apply them in the changed circumstances of the modern world (airplanes! the internet!), and then Wallace displays the text of the 2d Amendment:

WALLACE: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms" -- the right of the people to keep and bear arms -- "shall not be infringed." Now, Justice, I understand why, as a matter of policy, in a world with a lot of urban violence and big cities, that some people would say we need gun control, particularly in a big city like Washington, as they have here, and in Chicago. You ruled in both of those cases. And in both cases the court voted twice over your dissent that the founders meant what they said, people have a right to bear arms.

Breyer, of course, is ready for this:

BREYER: Yes. Yes. That's a wonderful example because, of course, it's not a matter of policy. It is a matter of what those framers intended. And you saw that first phrase, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."  What does that mean, the militia? Historians told us, and the dissenters thought they were right, that what that meant was that James Madison, thinking, "I've got to get this document ratified," was worried about opponents who would think Congress would call up state militias and nationalize them. "That can't happen," said Madison. And therefore, he wrote the Second Amendment to prove it. Now, if that was his motive historically, the dissenters were right.

There's some talk about judges acting like judges and how history can't answer some of the details. How do the old words and the old intent apply to new things? Breyer lists machine guns and torpedoes, and then, deviously, handguns. Wallace responds:

WALLACE: I understand. But it certainly didn't provide for a ban, at least that's what the court's decision was, your court's -- it didn't provide for a ban on all handguns as they have here in Washington, D.C.

BREYER: Are you a sportsman? Do you like to shoot pistols at targets? Well, get on the subway and go to Maryland. There is no problem, I don't think, for anyone who really wants to have...

WALLACE: But -- but it's...

BREYER: ... a gun.

WALLACE: ... but that's a policy issue. That's not a constitutional issue.

Breyer chooses not to jump on this point, perhaps because he'd have to say things that conservatives say. He'd have to promote federalism. Let me sketch it out.

If there isn't a right covering this particular subject, then state and local government will be able to legislate the policies that they, as a community, think are best. Yes, it's a policy issue, and — Breyer would say, if he'd gone on — that's why it's appropriate for legislative bodies to make decisions about it. If you don't like those decisions, the great thing about the United States is that you can move around and go to places that have policy preferences that suit your tastes. You have a right to travel and a right to change your residence to another state. And you also have the right to participate in politics, so there's also the alternative of trying to get the law in your state or city changed, so that handguns are not banned. Breyer's approach to the Second Amendment lets the people make the gun control laws what they want them to be and, when they do, they won't get caught up in litigation over the choices they make.

This is what conservatives say all the time about abortion and the separation of church and state (to cite the 2 most glaring examples). But here's Right Wing News — Chris Wysocki — excoriating Breyer for saying "get on the subway and go to Maryland."

Mind-boggling really, isn't it? Gee little black girl, do you want to go to the same school as white girls? Well, get on the subway and go to Maryland!

Well, no. There is a federal constitutional right covering that point, so you don't get the state-to-state variation. And that's the question: Is it a federal constitutional right or not? When you're arguing that there isn't a right, you're saying the law can vary from state to state. When is that intolerable and when isn't it? We all agree (now) to the uniform resolution of the school segregation problem that excluded decentralized decisionmaking. There is an Equal Protection right.

But there was, recently, a disagreement about the Second Amendment, and Breyer was on the side that thought there was no individual right. Put another way, Breyer's side of the Court thought that decentralized policymaking could govern. Do you think that's terrible? If you believe that there's a right, then, yes, of course, you do. But think of something else, where you think the Court is wrong about saying there's a right — perhaps, for you, abortion — and then, don't you remember all the times you made the argument that it wouldn't be so terrible because individual states could make their own decisions and people could move (or travel) to the states that gave them what they wanted?


Wysocki continues:

So mister, what if you are in a wheelchair? This doctor's office has stairs. If you want to see an accessible doctor, get on the subway and go to Maryland!

Whoa! You think the Constitution obliges private citizens, like doctors, to make their buildings wheelchair accessible?! That's so left-wing! Check your blog's name! What's the "Right Wing News" today, that righties have gone all lefty? That would be news!

***

(I have some more things to say about the Breyer interview, but I'll start a new post for that.)

CORRECTION: Sorry, I had "Chris Matthews" in the first sentence of this post. It's Chris Wallace.

"Fox News Commentators Caught On Camera Mocking Sarah Palin's Show."

Interesting clip, but I note that there are 5 commentators, and 3 sit silently while 2 do all the talking. The 3 are all men. The 2 are women. I'm picking up a real female-against-female vibe in this clip. It's not just what the women say and how they say it, it's the way the men sit back and maintain steely silence.

NPR set Juan Williams on fire.

And it's all on Fox News.



Especially hot:

Nina Totenberg wished that Senator Jesse Helms and his grandchildren would get AIDS -- I said would get AIDS. She's still working there.

A so-called humorist on NPR said the world would be a better place if 4 million Christians evaporated. Hilarious.

And calling millions of members of the Tea Party movement a sexual pejorative, tea baggers won't get you in hot water either.

So it seems some opinions are more equal than others at NPR.

"... Williams can come out of the closet as a full-on wingnut cartoon character."

"No more living a lie as a one-time journalist playing a fake liberal on Fox News."

Sayeth Josh Marshall.

NPR Fires Juan Williams because of what he said about Muslims.

Williams was on "The O’Reilly Factor":

Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly.

He continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

Williams managed to be a commentator on both NPR and Fox for quite a while, but I guess it was just too much to see him feeding red meat to O'Reilly just a few days after O'Reilly enraged Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg over the very same subject. These news media — Fox and NPR — want the image they want, and Williams did a great job, fitting into both templates for as long as he did.

The response from lefties and righties is predictable. William Kristol says:

I suspect the powers-that-be at NPR pretty much think what Juan thinks. But the standards of political correctness must be maintained. Pressure groups speaking for allegedly offended Muslims must be propitiated. And so Juan had to go.

Glenn Greenwald says:

Williams' trite attempt to glorify his bigotry as anti-P.C. Speaking of the Truth is inane, as his remarks were suffused with falsehoods...

Whether these latest comments were merely the opportunity they [NPR] were looking for to terminate their relationship with him, or whether it was caused solely by these disgusting comments, is unclear. But what is clear is that the anti-Muslim bigotry he spewed is both the proximate and cited cause....

And so on.

Williams is now free of the need to preserve his relationship with NPR. I'm pretty interested to hear what he'll say now that he's shaken off the chains of PC-radio. Talk to us, Juan!

"The Obama White House is too white"... so it keeps "tripping over race rather than inspiring on race."

Says Maureen Dowd:

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong....

The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. 

(Gays! Where did that come from?)

His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less. “Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?” asked a top black Democratic official....

“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” [Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina,] told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”

Dowd ends by recommending that Obama hire Shirley Sherrod for a newly created position called "Director of Black Outreach."

"Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News" headlines The Daily Caller in a weak effort to exploit the Journolist archive.

Jonathan Strong provides new extracts from the Journolist. I'm struggling to understand exactly what was said and meant, so work through this with me.

Strong begins by stirring up outrage over Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, writing that if she saw Rush Limbaugh having a heart attack, she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out.” I get it. Liberals hate Limbaugh. And, in casual company, people who aren't too prissy and think they are funny don't mind saying they'd like it if people they hate would drop dead. This has nothing to do with Fox, of course.

Next, Strong has some discussion of whether the town hall meetings in the summer of 2009 reminded people of the early stages of the Nazis rise to power. The material here is, to me, pretty tame. It's actually a pretty cliché question to raise, and Strong presents us with no overt attempts to coordinate news stories about the meetings to push this Nazi comparison. It's standard and not shocking to muse over whether things seem fascist. (Ask Jonah Goldberg.)

Finally, we get to material about Fox News.

The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. 

Okay, you're writing about overreaction, and you use the phrase "paroxysms of rage"?

When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down. 

I want to see is the actual proposal to shut down Fox News.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

Libel law allows individuals to sue over damage to their reputation. Private lawsuits. That would not be the government taking action against the network, and it's certainly not a proposal to shut down Fox News.

“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”

What's the big deal there? Scherer isn't proposing that the government shut down Fox News. He's criticizing Fox News as not following good principles of journalism. It's not even a complaint about the conservative slant.

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

Is there a quote we are not getting? The material in quotes is not a proposal to "yank Fox of the air." It's a question — a question I read as critical of government action against Fox. Clicking some links, I finally figure out the quoted question is from Scherer, not Zasloff.

But Zasloff stuck to his position. 

What position?!

“I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”

So that's the worst of it? Zasloff thinks the government could or should limit access. That's not shutting down Fox!

Scherer seemed alarmed. “So we would have press briefings in which only media organizations that are deemed by the briefer to be acceptable are invited to attend?”

Zasloff got pushed back.

John Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, came down on Zasloff’s side, the side of censorship.

Censorship? What censorship?

“Pre-Fox,” he wrote, “I’d say Scherer’s questions made sense as a question of principle. Now it is only tactical.”

"Scherer's questions"? What questions? I see one question from Scherer in the article. I'm interested in this contrast between principle and tactics, but I can't understand what it refers to!

The Daily Caller needs to do a whole lot better with its own journalism if it wants to hit the big time criticizing journalists. This is weak!

***

I go back to the text of the article, and I see that it's been rewritten, without a notation that editing has taken place. The Scherer-Zasloff part that puzzled me so much now reads:

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”

And so a debate ensued. Time’s Scherer, who had seemed to express support for increased regulation of Fox, suddenly appeared to have qualms: “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

Zasloff asked a question. He's a law professor. Yes, it's inflammatory, but so what? He's getting a discussion going, and nobody goes for it. Broadcast licenses do require stations to serve the public interest, so there is a real topic to be discussed, and Zasloff isn't some weird crazy to ask. It's within the realm of law. What's notable is that the Journolist members don't support that kind of action against Fox.

***

My conclusion remains: The Daily Caller's article is weak. And I'm inclined to think the material in the Journolist archive is pretty mild stuff.

Benjamin Jealous and the Shirley Sherrod video.

Here's the statement by NAACP President Benjamin Jealous trying to shift the blame to "Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart" for editing the Shirley Sherrod video to heighten an apparent confession of racism. When he saw that video, Jealous's reaction against Sherrod was immediate. She was toxic and had to be spat out.

To react like that is to display the same human weakness that underlies racism itself. You see one thing, you see the whole person as nothing but that one thing, you feel instinctive aversion and fear, and you reflexively push that person away. Blaming those who showed you that one thing does not absolve you from your responsibility to rise above the level of instinct and fear. It is up to you to go beyond your first perception, to search for the truth, and to use reason and judgment before you make a decision about someone.

Jealous doesn't acknowledge this personal responsibility. Indeed, he continues to operate in this instinctive, reactive mode. It's not as if he went looking for the truth about Sherrod. Sherrod came forward and defended herself by relating the whole story and complaining about the edit. Her presentation was a new embarrassment, and Jealous's current statement is a reaction to that. Moreover, his shot at "Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart" is another instant reaction. Not only does Jealous assume a motive behind the edit — "the intention of deceiving" — he assumes Fox News and Breitbart did the editing. But Breitbart says he received the video already edited.

***

Here's the full Shirley Sherrod video. I will comment on it in a separate post.

Who said you're going to jail if you don't buy health insurance?

Surely, not anybody on Fox News!

VIDEO: Here's the right video.

Sorry, I had the wrong video before. I did not want to link to the video that way, at TNR, precisely because TNR displayed a Media Matters video without the embedding code. I hate when websites do that. They take video MM collected and use it in a way designed to force the link that I have now given them. I would have been happy to link to them, because that's where I found the video, if they had been properly generous to Media Matters and shown the embedding code. So I went to Media Matters to find the code myself... and found the wrong video, which made me write a post that didn't make a whole lot of sense. You have no idea how irritating that is to me.

ADDED: At that TNR link, Jonathan Chait not only has the video without embedding code, he also says "watch this fantastic video from HuffPo's Ben Craw (via Media Matters)" without any links to Ben Craw or Media Matters. It's easy enough to retaliate against TNR by dispensing with the usual "via" links when blogging about something you've found through them.

"Thanks Fox News."

From yesterday's Tea Party in Madison... I really don't know whether that sign is intended with sincerity or sarcasm.

Sarah Palin was a blithering idiot until she became a devious genius.

So here's Mark Leibovich, writing in the NYT, about the powerful political position Sarah Palin has devised for herself:

Ms. Palin represents a new breed of unelected public figures operating in an environment in which politics, news media and celebrity are fused as never before. Her growing cast of advisers and support system could be working in the service of any number of goals: a presidential run, a de facto role as the leader of the Tea Party movement, a lucrative career as a roving media entity — or all of the above. Whether she ever runs for anything else, Ms. Palin has already achieved a status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office....

... Ms. Palin is quietly assembling the infrastructure of an expanding political operation....

Ms. Palin has also enlisted a small team of policy counselors to guide her through the substantive areas in which many deemed her to be lacking in 2008....

People with knowledge of the daily briefings say they are conducted by phone or e-mail. They typically include information on the day’s news, material that could be relevant to an upcoming speech, or guidance about a candidate Ms. Palin might endorse....

[T]he question of Ms. Palin’s ambitions and abilities remain as much a mystery now as when she first stormed the national consciousness 18 months ago. They warn against any notion that she has any grand plan beside keeping faith that God would help her recognize “the next open door” (a favorite Palin refrain).

What I love about all this is the extreme contrast to the way Palin was mocked when she resigned as Governor of Alaska. I, myself, did not think it was stupid, because I pictured her doing something like what she is actually doing, but I certainly remember the derision. Her political career was over. She was "toast."

A big difference between what I pictured and what she's doing is that she's staying in Alaska. I thought she needed to get out of Alaska (in order to run for President). It's innovative the way she's staying in Alaska. As a blogger, operating from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, I love that she's working through Facebook and staying rooted in Wasila, Alaska. Fox News is building a TV studio in her house in Wasila. That's so not toast.

Martha Coakley: "The Scott Brown stalkers, who have followed me around..."

"... the people from the Brown campaign, who've been very aggressive in their stalking."

You already know that I don't think the shoving incident is a big deal. I also think the slanting in this Fox News local news clip is embarrassing:



But Coakley's "stalking" theme is lame... or it would be lame if it weren't devious. "Stalking" is a word that I think is deliberately chosen to signal that the man — here, Scott Brown — is dangerous to women.

Or, I should say that it's devious and lame, because it's unlikely to have the desired effect of getting voters to rally around the threatened woman. A politician needs to be strong and not easily pushed back. It's one thing to champion the weak — taking violence against women seriously, for example. But the champion of the weak can't herself be weak.

Since there is no real stalking — if there is, show me the evidence — all Coakley is doing is displaying that she can be intimidated, and what sort of representative will she be? She'll be what her opponents say she is: "a sock puppet for Harry Reid and the Democrats." Now, for voters who above all else want to preserve the 60th vote for healthcare, that's just fine. But those are the voters Coakley already has a lock on (though they may be too uninspired to vote).

I doubt if the more independent voters will feel like rushing to protect her from those (phantom) stalkers. Even if their protective instinct is stirred, there's no reason to put a fragile flower in the Senate.

ADDED: Here's a closeup detail from the photograph of Coakley looking on just after McCormack goes down:

It's not fair to judge an individual by one photograph, but this is what the voters are seeing as she frets about "stalking." Another thing that's not fair is the way Scott Brown looks.

AND: Thanks to lucid in the comments for pointing out that it's not Fox News. It's a local news show on Fox.

Did right-wing ideology fuel the Holocaust Museum shooter?

Paul Krugman assumes so.

But the evidence points elsewhere.

"I knew pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters would attempt to blame us for the crime."

Bill O'Reilly stands his ground after the Tiller murder:



(Via Think Progress.)