According to Jim Newell at Salon, Megyn Kelly tried her amazing GOTCHA powers on the man the nuttier conservatives would like to believe is “Obama’s Brain”:
… Ever since the story about Barack Obama going to Bill Ayers’ house once in 1995 at the start of his first Illinois state Senate campaign broke, this has been the line: Barack Obama launched his political career at the house of a radical left-wing terrorist. Sarah Palin’s famous riff about Obama “pallin’ around with terrorists” is the more folksy version. The implication on the right has always been that during that meeting, Obama and Ayers mapped out their long-con to seize control of the reins of American power and institute a regime of violent Communism from the inside. Now, that project is almost complete.
It’s not entirely clear why Bill Ayers would break his relative public silence on the set of “The Kelly File.” Perhaps for a laugh?…
But it doesn’t really matter, because Ayers is just a professor in Illinois and not the target of this Megyn Kelly EXCLUSIVE sit-down. That would be Barack Obama, who — to repeat — went inside Bill Ayers’ house once in the 1990s and may have even sat on a couch there or accepted an offer of coffee or iced tea. Near the end of the interview, Kelly gets to the point: What is Bill Ayers’ relationship with his fellow radical left-winger, the president of the United States? Do they looooooove each other?
KELLY: Well, many members of the Weather Underground are now in academia. President Obama, let me ask you this, how much ideology did the two of you share?
AYERS: Zero.
KELLY: Good friends, not good friends?
AYERS: I knew him as well as he knew 10,000 other people, and today I wish I knew him much better, and I wish he had listened to me….[snip]
This could be a breakthrough of truth for Fox News if it was interested in breaking through to the truth. It might suggest that … Barack Obama is a pretty standard center-left Democrat instead of a radical left-winger, and actual lefties have a lot of problems with his policies? No, no, that can’t be the case at all…
Should’ve stuck to interrogating people like Karl Rove and the Cheneys, Ms. Kelly.
***********
Apart from keeping an eye on Tropical Storm/Hurrican Arthur (Boston’s moved its famous Fourth of July festivities to this evening, even this far up the coast), what’s on the agenda for what in some quarters will be the start of an extended weekend?
Baud
Coming soon to a Newsmax near you:
raven
Have fun with this from the Federalist:
URBANA, Illinois—In 2008, the nation learned that the University of Illinois had long had an ex-domestic terrorist on its faculty: Bill Ayers, the co-founder of the Weather Underground, who was teaching at the UI’s Chicago campus, and who happened to be an old colleague of Barack Obama. Controversy flared, but there wasn’t much UI officials could do about it, even if they wanted to. Ayers had tenure. They were stuck with him.
Now, however, it turns out they’ve got another staffer with a background strikingly similar to Ayers—this one without tenure. And whether they keep him around is very much up in the air.
He’s James Kilgore, an instructor at the UI’s main campus in Champaign-Urbana—and a veteran of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), the 1970s revolutionary group best known for kidnapping heiress Patty Hearst, then recruiting or brainwashing her into joining their ranks.
MattF
The other thing about Ayers, besides being an ex-Weatherman is… he’s white. So, Obama’s Svengali is scary because he could be walking down your suburban street and you’d never know how radical and dangerous he is.
Mustang Bobby
Funny how a brief meeting with Bill Ayers can cause such twitterpation for Obama in the Fox world, but Chris McDaniels addressed neo-Confederates and they don’t even flinch. It’s almost like they have a double standard or something.
Baud
This reddit post is hilarious.
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/29pojd/the_diversity_of_fox_news_anchors/
OzarkHillbilly
@Mustang Bobby: Don’t forget those other favorites of the right, the patriots G Gordon Liddy and Ollie North.
amk
So, obama running for his 3rd term?
BillinGlendaleCA
@amk: Since Obummer’s a diktator, he doesn’t need to run for a 3rd term.
/rwnj
WereBear
As a child, I observed how some adults around me went nuckin’ futz over:
*the length of men’s hair
*the way women wore their hair
*the substances they chose to recreate with
*the music they listened to
*the colors men or women wore
*the advocation of what I thought were good things like peace, harmony, not littering, and getting along without prejudice
And these people are still nuts. They have never gotten over it. And now, they have hijacked a political party. The good news, and I say this simply as a point of fact, they are dying off and things will be very different without them.
It’s that simple.
Schlemizel
Lat day at Gettysburg today. I may write a bit ore about the experience when we get back hoe but I do have two things to share.
First, the movie at the visitor center get some bad reviews from wingnuts as ‘revisionist’. I wondered about that. The movie is a decent basic overview of the cause of the war & the major events of the war. They make it clear that the war was not caused by attempts to end slavery but by demands it not expand. I bet that makes the dead enders mad!
Second, after the movie my wife turned to me and said “You know, this sounds exactly like what is going on today in politics.” Which is something I have been saying for years so, yeah.
OzarkHillbilly
@WereBear: never trust any one over 70.
max
Lat day at Gettysburg today.
Man, that place must be crowded right now. It was crowded when I went and that was in June.
Daily Dot:
Uh, they’ve already propagandized and militarized social networks; they’re simply trying to increase effectiveness. That is, when you (and a bunch of people like you) get upset about something they might very well be right (or completely wrong) to get upset about, they want to make it we either go away with a flick of a switch. OR they can maximize the contagion so it can focused it on overthrowing various governments.
This might be kinda problematic if they’re using it to, AHEM, try and deal with ‘civil unrest’ in American politics.
max
[‘Curiously, DoD and DoJ seem just fine with this neo-Confederate thing.’]
zoot
obama is a middle of the road republican, not a center-left Democrat
Frankensteinbeck
@WereBear:
I like to think they’re merely being overtaken by more liberal, or at least less insane, generations.
dmsilev
Ayers has been trolling wingnuts for years. He’s done things like outright “confessing” to have ghost-written Obama’s books to random people that buttonholed him in airports and so forth.
Schlemizel
@max: Yest it is fairly crowded at certain spots. In town is a nightmare, I could never live there. Our guide does though and claims he does not mind. If you want to avoid crowds stay away from Little ROund Top, that movie has made LRT a shrine. Go to Culps Hill where fighting was just as intense and the situation just as desperate but no movie was made and you can have the place to yourself. Hell, even the center, where 1st MN saved day 2 and day 3 was concentrated on did not seem to draw the crowds that LRT did.
@zoot: its a sign of how screwed up we are as a nation thet more people are not aware of exactly this.
WereBear
@OzarkHillbilly: LOL!
While I always regretted being too young to experience the hippie movement, it nonetheless taught me a lot.
Baud
@Schlemizel:
C’mon. Don’t feed the trolls.
WereBear
@Frankensteinbeck: And it was because of the Sixties, in my view.
My parents lived and thought exactly as my grandparents, and their parents, did. And now, the speed of change is even faster.
OzarkHillbilly
@zoot: Yes! A pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-healthcare, pro-gay rights, pro-green energy, pro-environment, anti-war, Republican. You don’t see many of them these days!!!
Mustang Bobby
@WereBear: To my utter mortification, my parents were always ahead of their kids. They switched to the Democrats in 1960 because of Nixon whereas my Cub Scout troop was in the local Nixon parade; they listened to jazz and bought Sgt. Pepper’s on 8-track for the Ford Country Squire in 1967; they were on the local board of Planned Parenthood in the early 1960’s and Mom volunteered at a shelter for single mom teenagers. And in 2003, Mom sold me her Mustang GT convertible so she could buy a Mini. They’re constantly on my case to be more liberal. (By the way, they’re still at it in their mid-80’s and living in a “life enrichment community” now.) I’ve got a lot to live up to…
JPL
@Schlemizel: I do hope you write more about your adventures. You have to forgive the whackos because there number one source of information is talk radio.
WereBear
@Mustang Bobby: So you had the “hip” parents! Cool.
My mother has turned out to be quite the progressive humanist by this time. Though that was not the case when I was growing up, when we were both shackled by Midwestern expectations; except that she broke all of us free of that at some point, which took a lot of courage.
She always credits me with raising her consciousness and making her a feminist, I’m happy to say.
R-Jud
Gosh, I’ve met Bill Ayers twice. I guess I’ve been double-super-secret radicalized to the point where I’m not even aware of it.
Kropadope
@OzarkHillbilly: Hey, the only liberals/Democrats in my family are my grandparents’ generation, mainly on my Dad’s side. My grandpa used to argue with my Dad over chess and my great-uncle even had an Obama hat the last time I saw him.
Sly
@zoot:
“Obama shares many of the policy positions of Jacob Javits, who has been dead for almost thirty years, so therefor he’s really a Republican.”
Anya
How sweet! Megyn Kelly is taking her wingnut audiance on 08 nostalgic memories tour. But shouldn’t she wait till 2016 to play their greatest hits?
JPL
@Anya: That’s when she’ll interview Monica. Fox news in general will be speculating about Hillary’s gay lovers.
The Thin Black Duke
Does it make any sense for anybody who isn’t a drooling, Teabagging Neanderthal to even watch the news anymore?
Betty Cracker
I like Ayers. He’s in on the joke.
WereBear
@Betty Cracker: Yes, and it’s too bad the Tea Baggers don’t get jokes unless they are mean.
WereBear
@Sly: This also explains his crazed radical reputation.
How can one man be so much to so many :)
WaterGirl
@Mustang Bobby: Your parents sound awesome, and now we know how you came to be Mustang
SallyBobby!WaterGirl
Was there a double-secret BJ thread from last night that is no longer visible? It seems like there were no new threads last night and only about 50 comments on BJ between when I went to bed and when I got up this morning.
Slackers!
OzarkHillbilly
@Kropadope: Oh yeah, back in ’08 I bought a bunch fo “Rednecks for Obama” bumper stickers and a couple t-shirts from the old guys who coined the term (a real hoot those 2), and my mother (a life long Republican) told me in the months before she died (’06) that she would never vote GOP again. The thing that most disgusted her with them was all the dog-whistle racism. She grew up in the South and knew what they meant. Dog, if she had lived to see what the GOP had become today.
Morzer
@JPL:
Bill was Hillary’s beard and Monica (FBI codename NIKITA) was the lesbian assassin who disposed of Vince Foster.. etc etc etc.
Culture of Truth
I’m told George Bush once met with famous war criminal Dick Cheney.
OzarkHillbilly
@Culture of Truth: I heard they were secret lovers.
JPL
The conservatives keep mentioning contraception and liberals having free sex. Rush must be jealous since he always had to pay for his sex.
PurpleGirl
I just have to get through this morning then I can relax. I’m attending a memorial service for my typing client. She passed about two weeks ago. I worked with/for her for close to twenty years.
The Republicans are just so absurd at this point — dangerous but absurd. I’d really love to just point and laugh but they are undermining the very idea of self-governance.
ETA: I’ll read the thread later when I get home.
Baud
Good jobs report.
FlipYrWhig
@Sly: Srsly. Not only is it a lazy disparagement of Obama, it gives current Republicans far too much credit for the basic human decency they uniformly and utterly lack.
WereBear
@PurpleGirl: I’m sorry. 20 years is a long relationship.
Emily68
@Schlemizel:
If you want an uncrowded battlefield, try Antietam. I was there a few years ago in August with my brothers and it was definitely not crowded.
Ben Cisco
@The Thin Black Duke: No.
Chris
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think my favorite thing about Liddy is that he appeared on Miami Vice basically playing… himself. As a bad guy.
Mustang Bobby
@WaterGirl: Actually, here’s the backstory on my nickname. And thanks, my folks are indeed awesome.
Rob in CT
Reading a Voxsplainer about abortion restrictions since 2010 was infuriating. Why did I do that? I knew already.
Maybe I should start yelling about wanting MY country back.
Glocksman
Well, after reviewing my actual cellphone data and voice usage, I decided to save $20 a month by switching from a $60/month ATT unlimited voice/2.5 GB data prepaid plan to a $40/month plan from Consumer Cellular that offers 600 voice minutes plus 1 GB data.
I thought about Straight Talk, but I’ve heard horror story after horror story about their customer service and data throttling.
Besides, I don’t really want to make Carlos Slim any richer.
Glocksman
@Chris:
As a teenager, I tried to read Ayn Rand, but couldn’t make it even halfway through Atlas Shrugged.
I did read Liddy’s autobiography Will, though, and it played a large part in making me the wingnut that I was up until 2005 or so.
Today I realize that someone willing to both shoot Jack Anderson and be shot himself in order to save Richard Nixon’s career needs to be held for a court ordered psych evaluation.
WaterGirl
@PurpleGirl: 20 years is a long time. I’m sorry for your loss.
Tokyokie
I knew Cleta Deatherage Mitchell in college, and attended a house party she held for Fred R. Harris’ presidential campaign around 1975, at which I met Fred and LaDonna Harris. So I guess, by Fox News’ reasoning, that little soirée, all these years later, makes Cleta a hard-core lefty.
JPL
@PurpleGirl: I’m so sorry.
Iowa Old Lady
In Panera this morning, one table was occupied by a group of 4 older men doing Bible study. I see them in there all the time. One of them is a local news anchor.
As I walked past their table this morning, the news anchor was saying, “What is it Fox says? Fair and…” “Balanced,” another guy finished. And the news anchor says, “That’s their first lie.” And they all laughed.
Then they went on to diss “liberals” for picking and choosing what to believe from the Bible.
I have no idea what to make of that except that in his own area of expertise, the news anchor knew nonsense when he heard it.
Elizabelle
@PurpleGirl:
Hope the memorial service was a meaningful one, and I’m sorry for your loss.
Was your friend an author?
WaterGirl
@Mustang Bobby: I can picture your dad, excited as a little kid waiting for christmas, waiting for the moment when he got to execute his little plan for his son’s big surprise. I think I love your dad for that.
Woodrowfan
@WereBear:
same here, but a lot of these teabaggers are our generation. So when you and I rolled our eyes when our elders went on about some guy’s hair length, the baggers are our classmates who took it seriously…
Woodrowfan
I am so sorry purplegirl
Elizabelle
Louis Zamperini has died, aged 97. War hero, subject of Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken” and Angelina Jolie’s upcoming film.
Didn’t read the book, but hear it’s an amazing story.
From the LATimes: Zamperini had been chosen as next year’s Rose Bowl Grand Marshal.
Hollywood first optioned a movie on Mr. Zamperini 50 years ago.
bemused
Is there such a thing as a straw man joke? There’s a rightwinger I know that doesn’t seem to understand what a straw man is.
WereBear
@Woodrowfan: RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!
Because I said so.
As a kid, I thought that made no sense at all. So I guess I was ready to tip over into liberal from the beginning!
The Dangerman
I watched parts of it; somehow, it meandered from Ayres to Obama to Holder…
…and, just about the point I wondered about how anybody could give a shit, everything circled back to the pardons Clinton gave when he left office. It’s not really about Obama, it’s about Hillary.
Botsplainer
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/1311314
Upshot – Cochran has conference call that is stupidly shared with The Base (aka Al Quaeda). Said base of Tealiban disrupts the conference call (kind of like they did the healthcare town halls). Cochran’s spox whimper about “see what we have to put up with”.
I continue to root for injuries.
SFAW
@Anya:
From the reddit string linked above.
Also: check out the “Career in Journimalism” section.
SFAW
@JPL:
On the plus side, he doesn’t have to worry about Dominican boys getting pregnant.
Woodrowfan
@WereBear: same here. I wanted to know why they were the authority.
FWIW. In third grade we had a mock election and I was the only Humphrey supporter in my class. The Nixon kids kept tearing down my signs. I’ve disliked republicans ever since. :)
Belafon
@zoot: There are no middle of the road Republicans, not since the 1890s. There have been those that have faked it for a while here and there, but their goal has always been moving money to the rich, and reduce the country to a fiefdom.
Obama is neither socially conservative nor economically conservative. The only real things you can fault him with is 1) thinking that Republicans would believe elections have consequences, 2) that the American people would punish Republicans for acting like they do, and 3) believing that we couldn’t let the largest banking system in the world fold (FDR also saved the banking system, but had Congress’s help in restructuring it).
Matt McIrvin
Meanwhile, the governor of Maine hangs out with antisemitic “Watchmen” who believe they can’t be convicted of crimes because the flag in the courtroom has gold fringe on it, and is still in office.
Tripod
Buried a couple of “Reagan Democrats” and avid Fox Nooz viewers in the last few weeks.
The racist had a black priest handle the funeral mass. I’m not sure if that was a sign from on high, or a final FU from a surviving relative.
JPL
There is so much gerrmandering that it will take decades before we can establish a sane congress.
SFAW
@Woodrowfan:
What continues to amaze me is that, even as evil as Nixon was, he might not survive today’s Rethug party. Of course, Zombie Nixon might be leading the Cleek’s Law charge, but I would have hoped that, even as nuts as he was, he would pull back from the abyss a little.
WereBear
@Woodrowfan: Yep, sixth grade, all three classes, me and one other child has sense. Everyone else, Nixon.
Even in sixth grade, I was all, “Have you seen his face? You trust him?”
Sherparick
Digby has drawn my attention to the big wet kiss that Glenn Greenwald’s favorite Senator has given to the Neocons and their Theocrat allies who hope to trigger the Battle of Armageddon and bring on the second coming. See http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/rand-paul-israeli-teens-kidnapped-response-national-review-108517.html#ixzz36KCU11Dv
Matt McIrvin
Gerrymandering isn’t magic. There’s a tradeoff: you can make super-safe districts for your party, or you can get as many districts as possible by drawing boundaries to take more marginal ones, and making the other guys’ few districts super-safe. The latter is what usually happens, and it means that the hold on the legislative majority can be tenuous.
It’s truly a Both Sides Do It, but the Republicans have benefited much more in recent years just because the mathematical tools for gerrymandering have gotten so much better. But it doesn’t change the fact that at some point these gerrymandered legislative majorities in swing states can flip hard.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@JPL:
Rush must be jealous since he always had to pay for his sex.
With Dominican rent boys…
Rex Everything
@WereBear:
RIGHT.
ON.
x1000
Mandalay
@Matt McIrvin:
They can, but they generally don’t. But there is a more insidious aspect to gerrymandering: incumbents can be so secure that they are free to take positions without consequences. Incumbents in gerrymandered districts can be in favor of government shutdowns, invading Poland, and arming teachers, and still get re-elected, even though the views of their constituents are being ignored. Because the game is so rigged that the only way they can lose is in their primary. And they make sure that doesn’t happen by placating the wackos who vote in primaries.
Gerrymandering performed by those with a stake in the outcome is massively harmful to democracy.
Rex Everything
@WereBear:
It struck me at a very early age how odd it was that these principled, pious people would oppose so many obviously good things, from disarmament to equal rights to welfare to saving the whales.
I remember a conservative adult, the parent of a friend, explaining how evil Karl Marx was. He told us about Marx’s ideas and we were like, “so? All that stuff’s good, right?” Then he had to basically lecture us on how black was white. A bit of an odd moment, but (eventually) an instructive one.
wenchacha
In other great news, I heard the lovely liltings of Lara Logan this morning on CBS! She was reporting on someone (in Texas) who was freed thanks to the Innocence Project. And here I thought that would be counter to her type of “journalism.”
She does have a lovely voice, though.
Bubblegum Tate
I don’t have an opinion about Ayers other than it’s hilarious the way he trolls wingnuts.
Amir Khalid
Why is Mark Halperin talking up Al Gore’s presidential chances for 2016 when Gore has shown no sign whatsoever of running? Even Halperin’s sources don’t seem to think Gore is considering it at all — merely that Gore might just stand a chance against Hillary. Even for a pundit, it seems an extreme case of pulling one out of his keester.
Morzer
@Tripod:
Further proof that Obama Khrushchev was right. We really are burying them. Forward the FEMA Death Battalions!
Amir Khalid
@Bubblegum Tate:
I remember when Ayers offered to split the royalties from Dreams From My Father with the first person to prove that he, Ayers, was its actual author.
Mandalay
@Amir Khalid:
In the world of Beltway punditry there is no such thing as bad publicity. So making asinine comments is a way for Halperin to get himself some publicity.
JGabriel
Amir Khalid:
Never let it be said that Mark Halperin isn’t an ass-wing extremist.
.
JGabriel
Mandalay:
It’s surprising that still works for him. By now, you’d think an asinine comment from Halperin would rate about as much news space as Mother Uses Counter To Change Diaper Of Baby Who Pooped.
JGabriel
@zoot:
MOR Republican circa 1952. Which today makes him a center left Democrat.
Mustang Bobby
@WaterGirl: Thank you. Both the real dad and the one in the novel are wonderful men.
Frankensteinbeck
@Iowa Old Lady:
It means that like most Fundies and most Republicans, they’re motivated by hate. They know the truth. It’s not as important to them as sticking it to liberals/blacks/poors/women/everybody else.
@JGabriel:
And if you have to go that far back, ‘Republican’ and Democrat’ are meaningless in a modern context. As the Republicans like to point out, Lincoln was a Republican. They do not grasp the irony.
The Moar You Know
@Tripod: Lost the last grandparent recently. I am floored how many people try to work out their grudges with a dead person. Little late, dontcha think?
Tokyokie
@Woodrowfan: We had similar primaries in my junior-high social-studies class. After the teacher went through all the prominent candidates, none of the boys had voted. So I (not) helpfully pointed out that she had not mentioned one announced candidate, and when I gave her the name, all the boys in the class raised their hands for Harold Stassen.
My first effort at political organizing was extremely successful. So much so, that after only a couple of state primaries, the teacher dispensed with this exercise.
WaterGirl
@Mustang Bobby: Okay, now I am confused. Did you get the car and the nickname as told in the story, or was that fiction?
AndyG
From TPM/Yahoo this morning…
There are no words…….
Hal
As part of a block by block fundraiser, meet and greet with Ayers house being one of the many stops. Though according to Game Change it pained McCain to let Palin even bring up the Ayers stuff because he was so principled and ethical.