On August 13, 2008, Jenna Kern, a Long Island Unitarian in her 20s, wrote this excellent contributing article in Newsday in which she showed a link between the hate of right wing radio and the killing at the church in Tennessee.  Bill O'Reilly, one of the hate mongers who helped push the killer over the edge, was very briefly mentioned in Ms. Kern's article.

For speaking the truth, Bill O'Reilly decided to send his stalking producers to her home.  O'Reilly whipped up the hatred and soon thereafter Ms. Kern-Rugile received multiple death threats which has led to police protection.  Has O'Reilly denounced the death threats?  Of course not.

Let's be clear here.  O'Reilly intent is to terrorize Ms. Kern-Rugile and others into silence and make them fear for their lives.  And regardless of politics, we should all denounce this.  Thus I've sent the following editorial  to Newsday and asked them to print.

Short diary -- more of an announcement and a call for assistance. I'll keep it all above the fold.

1. Call to action: A man with two hunting rifles and two pistols was arrested in the Denver hotel where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was staying today.  Combined with the UUC shooting by the disturbed individual who'd been reading Savage, and O'Reilly and the murder of Arkansas Democratic Chair Bill Gwatney, a disturbing trend of violence is emerging. Help ePluribus Media gather additional information on this.

2. Dick Cheney and Ted Stevens have now been linked -- can you say "RICO"? Sure you can. And graft. Corruption. Republicans. It's all the same, if you're a Republican. Hat-tip Sarabeth.

3. Read my diary from yesterday, dammit.

The End.

Alternet is reporting that O'Reilly Attacks Woman Who Connects Dots Between Hate Speech and Violence

Apparently Jenna Kern, a Unitarian Universalist, had the audacity to speculate, in an Op-Ed piece for Newsday, about possible links between right wing shock jocks and right wing hate speech and the recent murderous shooting spree in a U-U church in Tennessee.

As a result, as something a self-fulfulling prophecy, the right wing goon squad, including none other than Bill O'Reilly, have started to come after her as well. Kern has recieved the usual death threats and has had to get police protection.

Not to diminish her legitimate fears, given actual violence by the right, I would suggest though, that ultimately, we should follow Kern's, and others' examples, and hit back and hard against these fascist bullies - following such examples as the ones below.

Summary: So let's see...in Bill O'Reilly's new column, we've got vampire-analogies, the Rightwing "moral equivalency" complaint showing up again, an attack on "a far-left commentator working for NBC News", and something about someone or some group being symbolic "of appeasement and anti-American attitudes".

Let's get a move on, shall we?

Keith Olbermann’s presentation on MSNBC is getting more and more filled with the constant appearance of a deranged, scared little man.

The results of the new Pew Survey on News Consumption (taken every two years and released this afternoon) suggest that viewers of the "fake news" programs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are more knowledgeable about current events (as judged by three test questions) than watchers of  "real" cable news shows hosted by  Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly and Larry King, among others -- as well as average consumers of NBC, ABC,  Fox News, CNN, C-SPAN and daily newspapers.

The national average for answering the three questions was only 18%.  But 34% of The Colbert Report fans got them right, with 30% of The Daily Show viewers doing so -- even though the two Comedy Central shows draw younger audiences which generally scored less well on the "test" than older viewers/readers.  

Boy, Obama must really hate himself.

Death threats and the like coming from GOP wingnuts are, sadly, not much of a surprise any longer, and neither is hypocrisy by Bill O'Reilly and the people at Fox "News".

But here's a particularly egregious example of the convergence of these forces.

Death threats do appear to be all right with O'Reilly and Fox, as long as a right-winger makes them.

Summary: I found out via the occasionally useful Newsbusters that there's a rap song out there called, "Kill Bill O'Reilly".

To the "East Coast Avengers" who made this song...uh, guys, you're not helping.

Warning: I'm not going to censor the rather explicit lyrics to this song, so you shouldn't exactly read this where you're going to get in trouble for doing so.

To help keep pace with all of the election coverage on the 24/7 news channels, Jed has been archiving closed captioning data. However, the sheer volume of text makes it hard to analyze.

In this diary, I'll show several automatically generated images (word clouds) that I created that highlight the prevalence of certain words in election coverage on these three channels; the analysis is over the last week's worth of closed captioning feeds. Let's look at the top 20 words on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News (from left to right):

Don't mind my diary errors, I only write one here every 4 years, I swear.                    

So far.... ;0)

The subject of politics is one that you can never grasp at one glance, it's something you have to live through daily to even understand how it works, and one of my subjects I tend to read about most often. The first favorite topic for me though is art. I wanted to be an artist when I was in the 8th grade at St Agnes, but I had this teacher who told me I had no talent. (BTW I'm now 45yoa) My parents told me I had to study something that had a safe salary behind it, and art was not it. In my junior year in college, my parents came to visit me on campus and was looking at some graphite sketched images taped to the walls, and pronounced that my roommate was very talented. I then quietly informed them that I had done them in between elementary education classes. And they, after closing their mouths, asked "Why didn't you tell us you could do this?" And I, being the long time obedient Catholic schooled oldest and only daughter before 5 brothers, replied "Because you told me I had to do something in which I would have a steady salary."

To be continued......

Summary: Bill O'Reilly's main page has this advertisement:

Wednesday, August 13:
• Is George Clooney advising Barack Obama? Dennis Miller weighs in
• Plus, the Daily Kos strikes again — this time attacking American troops who fought in Iraq!

It's the latter that I want to get into, because it led to another of Mr. O'Reilly's "the Left is worse than the Right" arguments.

Every once in a while, I turn the TV to Fox News and Bill O'Reilly, not for information, obviously, but to see how long I can stand it before I am

a) yelling at the TV

b) cursing

c) changing the station

I surfed by his website for similar reasons, and noticed there is a poll "measuring", and no doubt in a fair and balanced manner, what grade people would give to Barack Obama's campaign.  The results are to be used in a later broadcast.  

I gave Barack an A.  Perhaps many more Kossacks should drop by, and do the same thing.  Let's see if Bill-O will report a poll that leans heavily in favor of Senator Obama.

Messing with Bill-O

Often as adults we should let the children speak because they have shown time and time again they are smarter than we are. There is a new video from Brave New Films.

I hope that you enjoy the wisdom of these children as much as I did!

Last night, my right wing Dad called me.  We were talking about the new job I accepted.  Then he brought up DK.....

Summary: I'm not a political fanatic.  Yes, I tend to agree with the Political Left on most issues, but it's not because I think the Left is always right, and the Right is always wrong.

So I don't buy into the idea I've frequently read on the Internet that the Political Right is incapable of telling a good joke on account of all of their policies being wrong.  But this piece from the Weekly Standard ain't helping.

Obama got so much flak for that stupid Ludacris bit and the Bernie Mac bit all over the MSM,  and of course the "sweetie" comments, but McCain nods to Bill O'Reilly on an interview about "the white Christian MALE power structure" of which both "you and me" [O'Reilly and McCain"] are a part of, and thrusts his wife into a Sturgis rally or ORGY, rather, where guys screamed "show us your boobs" and no response? no condemnation? no questions? Where's the feminist outrage?

I mean for Christ's sake, MSNBC's Dan Abrams even applauded this as a good political tactic.

Going with your wife and daughter to a rally made to whore women out to bikers...no negative MSM response...

OH, the HYPOCRISY..

Short post: Channel surfing during a Countdown commercial last night and came across Bill O’Reilly and his body language expert looking at McCain’s deer-in-the-headlights response last Friday to a question posed at a Panama City media avail.

Was he trying to avoid a tough question?  Was he squirming?  Thinking about the political ramifications of his response.

No, the body language expert replied.  He was just totally lost.  Then Bill O chimes in – "yes, that was definitely a senior moment."