HARLAN: It looks as if the rogue route is helping Sarah Palin. Her book tour has meant new support. A new Opinion Dynamics poll for 2012 shows her on top when it comes to landing the nomination. Palin is at 70 percent, about a third higher than this past July. Mike Huckabee stands at 63 percent. Mitt Romney’s 60.

Those figures add up to 193 percent. An accompanying graphic tried to squeeze the numbers into one pie chart:

In fact, the poll Harlan referred to did not ask Republican respondents to pick their favorite candidate. The numbers he cited merely represent favorable ratings among Republicans surveyed for each individual. Watch Harlan’s report:

(HT: Twitter user Kevinthepang)

During the game, Lawler expressed surprise that an Iranian would be playing in the NBA. “He’s from Iran?!” Lawler asked. “THAT Iran?!” Smith then ridiculed Haddadi by comparing him to “Borat”:

SMITH: Are you sure that’s not Borat’s older brother? […] If they ever make a movie avout Haddadi I’m going to get Sasha Baron Cohen to play the part. […]

LAWLER: Here’s Haddadi, nice little back door pass

SMITH: Look at that pass!

LAWLER: I guess those Iranians can pass the ball!

Watch it:

The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) encouraged Iranian-Americans to contact Fox to complain. “More than 2,000 people responded to our call,” NIAC claimed on Saturday announcing that Fox had issued an apology:

“We regret the remarks made by Clippers announcers Michael Smith and Ralph Lawler during Wednesday’s telecast. While we believe that Michael and Ralph did not intend their exchange to be offensive, in retrospect, the comments were inappropriate. We extend our apologies to Hamed Haddadi of the Memphis Grizzlies and to anyone who was offended. We have addressed this situation with Michael and Ralph and have taken appropriate action.”

NIAC is still working to ensure that the apology is read on air.

MMFA: Mr. Murdoch, can you be more specific about what racist comments the President allegedly made?

MURDOCH: I denied that absolutely. I don’t believe he’s a racist.

“But you said that he made racist statements,” the staffer noted as Murdoch walked away. Watch it:

But last night on Fox, the network’s top legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano — who has been known to disagree with Fox’s right-wing narratives on legal issues — disputed that view, citing the constitutional right to be tried in the place where the crime has been committed. “I don’t care about the Constitution!” host Bill O’Reilly responded. The debate continued:

O’REILLY: So why is he entitled to come to New York City to be tried in the civilian criminal court if he’s arrested in Pakistan?

NAPOLITANO: Because the document you don’t want me to talk about says when the government is going to prosecute you, it must do so in the place where the alleged harm was caused.

Later in the program, Fox analyst Brit Hume said he’d “been scouring the columns of various people opining about this to see if somebody makes a good argument for doing it,” adding, “And I really haven’t heard one.” Hume then noted Napolitano’s opinion and said, “I’m not certain I agree with that.” Watch it:

Holder’s “bold and principled” decision was “a victory for the rule of law and the American system of justice,” the Center for American Progress’ Ken Gude said.

“If you are accused, you get to know what you know what you are accused of, you get to face your accusers, and you get to defend yourself in court, and then you face a trial and a conviction. This is who we are as a system,” said Tom Andrews, director of the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo. “The Taliban? You can get a trial and a beheading in a few hours. That’s not our system of justice.”

Read more about Holder’s decision in today’s Progress Report.

Since reports emerged last month that top commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal asked President Obama for upwards of 40,000 additional troops to continue the war there, the right wing has been attacking the President for taking time to make a decision on his new strategy. “It is absolutely unconscionable,” Liz Cheney said yesterday on Fox News, that Obama “is denying our troops on the ground in Afghanistan the resources that they need to prevail to win that war.”

Also during that time, Obama has made reflective gestures to those who have fallen in the wars he is now running, paying tribute to returning war dead at Dover Air Force Base and making an impromptu visit to Section 60 at Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day to commemorate Iraq and Afghanistan war casualties. Yesterday on Inside Washington, during a discussion of Obama’s upcoming decision on Afghanistan, syndicated columnist Mark Shields scoffed at Obama’s demeanor, wishing instead for a “manly man” in the White House:

SHIELDS: We have a president of real intellectual horse power who is cool, detached and analytical and if anything you can watch the emotional side of him emerge in this whole process. … There’s an emotional aspect, the comforter in chief as well as the commander in chief. Both roles. And I think it makes me nostalgic for those days when we had a manly man in the White House who could say, “Let’s kick some tail and ask questions afterwards” you know? That’s what we really need instead of any reflection.

Watch it:

Shields’ rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s justification for the war in Iraq, who in May 2003 argued that after 9/11, the U.S. had to invade in order to “burst” the terrorism bubble:

FRIEDMAN: And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck on this, okay?” That Charlie is what this war [in Iraq] is about. We could of hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could of hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Of course Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and after nearly 4,400 U.S soldiers dead, 32,000 wounded and nearly $1 trillion spent, the U.S. still has well over 100,000 troops stationed in Iraq.

Last night on Fox News, Bill Kristol called Napolitano’s comment “stupid” and stated outright that there should be no trial:

KRISTOL: I was very struck also by Janet Napolitano’s comment, I hadn’t read it before to see her say that, that the number one priority is to bring him to justice is such a knee-jerk comment and such a stupid comment. He’s going to be brought to justice. He is not going to be innocent of murder. There are a lot of eyewitnesses to that. They should just go ahead and convict him and put him to death.

Watch it:

Apparently, Kristol is not a huge believer in the Constitution, the Sixth Amendment of which states that “[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

Hasan’s attorney, Col. John Galligan (Ret.), noted this fact when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked how he could “represent someone accused of mass murder”:

GALLIGAN: I fully appreciate the importance of ensuring that everybody has a fair trial. I think that’s particularly important when it applies to anyone in uniform, officer or enlisted. Their profession is to defend us. We owe it to them as either fellow service members or as U.S. citizens to ensure that we properly defend them. The rights that I’m asking be accorded to Major Hasan are the rights that service members live and die for. Let’s just make sure we don’t deprive them in his case.

As Adam Serwer at TAPPED noted of those espousing Kristol’s view, “This is Salem Witch Trial justice: If the crime is heinous, the accused is automatically guilty. That the evidence may be overwhelming doesn’t matter: You don’t just ’skip’ a fair trial because you feel like it. There’s a word for systems of justice that selectively afford due process — that word is ‘corrupt.’”

But conservatives such as Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) criticized Obama’s visit calling it a “drive-through daiquiri summit,” while others “criticized the president for not touring the battered wetlands.”

Yesterday during an interview with Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) — the lone Republican to vote for the House health care bill last week — Washington Times radio channeled the GOP criticism. “He didn’t even stick around very long during his trip,” the host said. But Cao defended what the administration has done for the area:

CAO: Well, I just want to set the record straight, that even though the President only visited New Orleans once since his election, it was a brief stay, but this administration has been tremendous for the people of the 2nd district. Secretary Napolitano has been down here three or four times, the secretary of HUD, the secretary of Education, they have been down here numerous times. [...]

So I guess for me, it’s not that important to have the visit of the President, its much more important for me that I have a good working relationship with the administration and have the commitment…from the administration to push all the recovery issues of the 2nd District forward and they have been doing that in the last 9 months.

Listen here:

Paul Rainwater, the executive director of the state-run Louisiana Recovery Authority, agrees with Cao’s approach. “I would say it’s more important to have your cabinet secretaries down here,” he said last month. Indeed, the White House said there were 22 visits by senior administration officials to the area from March to August, 13 of them by cabinet secretaries.

She says that hiring practices at the paper — as well as her firing — were driven by racial prejudices rather than merit.

And she recounts the paper’s D.C. bureau chief stating that the publication’s goal was to “destroy [President] Barack Obama.”

Guzman’s revelation isn’t all that surprising considering that a Senior Vice President at Fox News, also a News Corp. subsidiary, admitted earlier this year that the network is consciously aiming to be “the voice of opposition” to the Obama administration “on some issues.”

Hume, a regular Fox News misinformer, surprisingly corrected O’Reilly, noting that Americans actually support the public option:

O’REILLY: They call it, you know, the public sector. What is the –

HUME: Public option, you mean?

O’REILLY: Public option, whatever. The folks don’t want it. … But it looks to me like they have maybe 55 votes to pass it. And that means they could be filibustered and never come up for a vote.

HUME: That’s what it looks like right now. The public option, actually some polls show that the public option standing by itself is not at all unpopular, but it is kind of popular. But that depends on how the poll question is raised. … We don’t need to go into all that right now.

Watch it:

Those trying to derail reform with a public option try to claim that Americans don’t support it. “All the polls now indicate substantial opposition to this particular type of health care reform,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said last night on Fox. But Hume is right. Americans do support the public option, as recent polling shows:

– CNN/Opinion Research, Oct. 30 – Nov. 1: 55 percent support “creating a public health insurance option administered by the federal government that would compete with plans offered by private health insurance companies.”

– Ipsos/McClatchy, Oct. 30 – Nov. 1: 51 percent support the “creation of a public entity to directly compete with existing health insurance companies.”

Other recent polls, such as USA Today/Gallup and Washington Post/ABC News, have found majority support for the public option — results that are consistent with other polling on this question throughout the health care debate this year.

Indeed, large majorities in Connecticut support the public option but Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), the state’s junior independent senator, has repeatedly said he will filibuster any bill that contains a public option. Like Hume, Lieberman doesn’t want to talk about polling support for the public option either, reportedly saying that poll respondents are simply “confused.”

Right winger Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Hollywood” blog took on the Sesame Street menace this week proclaiming: “Add one more soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News: Oscar the Grouch”:

If Mom and Dad watch cable news, it’s better than 50/50 they watch “POX News.” So what gives? PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news? The message is clear, I can’t even sit my kids in front of “Sesame Street” without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority.

Thursday night on Fox News, host Bill O’Reilly picked up on Big Hollywood’s rant and couldn’t resist defending his network against the smear merchants at Sesame Street. “Say it ain’t so. Sesame Street trashing Fox News!” O’Reilly complained. After airing the segment in question, O’Reilly said wryly, “We may have to ambush Oscar.” Watch it:

As Big Hollywood itself acknowledged, Fox News wasn’t the only news organization or media personality Sesame Street spoofed. “Walter Cranky,” “Dan Rather-Not,” “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler,” all made appearances on the show. And of course, Oscar’s employer, the “Grouchy News Network.”

Media Matters’ Simon Maloy notes, “It looks like Andrew Breitbart’s BigHollywood.com is looking to dethrone NewsBusters as the premiere source for asinine right-wing media criticism” by documenting “the absurd liberal bias in an episode of Sesame Street that aired two years ago. Just let that sink in for a moment…”

We wouldn’t put it past O’Reilly hit-man Jesse Watters to be staking out Oscar’s garbage can right now.

Around 4,000 right-wing activists showed up on Capitol Hill yesterday to protest reform. Last night on Fox News, Bachmann inflated the attendance numbers drastically. She also tried to paint the event as entirely grassroots, despite admitting that she had organized it:

BACHMANN: Today people told me they heard that call out on your show on Friday night, and they immediately started contacting other people. And this was totally word of mouth. This was nothing that we organized, nothing that we planned. We didn’t order one bus, one carload. Nothing. Complete word of mouth. And estimates are anywhere between 20 and 45,000 people had assembled. [...]

And also this absolutely outstanding grouping of people that we had today at the Capitol. This is organic. It was a meet up. It was spontaneous.

Watch it:

Bachmann’s claim is laughable. Aside from her leadership in organizing the protest, the corporate front group Americans For Prosperity helped coordinate. AFP mobilized about 40 buses to bring activists to DC, with AFP staffers standing at their designated bus drop off point near the Capitol, handing out signs, directions, talking points, petitions, and donuts to protesters. Moreover, notorious astroturf group FreedomWorks got involved in the action as well:

The protesters were fueled — literally and figuratively — by lobbying organizations like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, the groups behind the August town hall protests and “tea party” events. Freedomworks promoted this week’s event on their Web site DontKillGrandma.com with recommendations for protest tactics.

Moreover, AFP hosted Bachmann on a conference call the day before the rally to discuss their “House Call.”

“So you’re organizing and asking people to come meet you on the steps of the capital,” Fox host Sean Hannity asked Bachmann last Friday after her announcement. “Thursday at noon,” she said, “You can go to MicheleBachmann.com for more information.”

The next day on MSNBC, RNC Chair Michael Steele was asked if there was room for Snowe in the GOP. “Absolutely,” Steele said:

STEELE: Welcome! Welcome! Because–you know why that’s important? Because every footprint of this party is different from region to region, from county to county. I can’t win in the northeast with someone who’d be a better candidate suited in the south….So the reality of it is I’m looking to find my candidates where they are. And I want to lift them up beause they represent those districts. So like New England, Olympia Snowe works there for her. She may not translate in South Carolina. She works in Maine.

But today on ABC’s TopLine, Steele appeared to have a change of heart. When asked if he’s comfortable with GOP candidates who supported the stimulus, Steele said there’s “no justification” for that support, adding, “we’ll come after you”:

STEELE: So candidates who live in moderate to slightly liberal districts have got to walk a little bit carefully here, because you do not want to put yourself in a position where you’re crossing that line on conservative principles, fiscal principles, because we’ll come after you. [...]

You’re gonna find yourself in a very tough hole if you’re arguing for the president’s stimulus plan or Nancy Pelosi’s health plan. There’s no justification for growing the size of government the way this administration and this Congress wants to do it.

While Steele didn’t mention any names, clearly Snowe and fellow Republican Senator from Maine Susan Collins — who both supported the stimulus — may soon be in the RNC’s crosshairs.

By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people without health insurance would be reduced by about 3 million relative to current law, leaving about 52 million nonelderly residents uninsured. The share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage in 2019 would be about 83 percent, roughly in line with the current share. CBO and JCT estimate that enacting the amendment’s insurance coverage provisions would increase deficits by $8 billion over the 2010–2019 period.

The CBO found that the Democrats’ bill, however, would cover 36 million more Americans and “reduce the number of nonelderly Americans without coverage to around 18 million over the next decade.” Yet, just before the CBO scored the GOP bill, a spokesperson for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) falsely claimed their alternative “will cover millions more Americans” than the Democrats’ bill.

Last night on Fox News Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) dodged a question about how many uninsured the GOP plan would cover and instead railed at the Democrats for “trying to get at this business of universal coverage”:

PENCE: We believe you get at the coverage issue by lowering the cost of health insurance. … So Republicans by focusing on the cost of health insurance believe that we are going to take our country in a direction where we also deal with the tens of millions of people and employers that struggle with providing insurance.

Watch it:

Some conservatives are now calling the mishap “Obama’s Katrina.” Today in an interview with Axelrod on CBS’ Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer advanced that view:

SCHIEFFER: What do you do to correct this kind of thing? You’re told one thing, you’d have so much and you didn’t. These are the kinds of things we heard after Katrina during a previous administration.

NPR’s Juan Williams noted the huge distinction between the two situations on Fox News Sunday this morning:

WILLIAMS: I must say that there’s a huge difference between Hurricane Katrina in government failure and what we’re seeing here in terms of delivery of the vaccine. This is a matter of private manufacturers not living up to promises in terms of the delivery system. …But I don’t think most Americans are blaming the Obama administration for this as they blamed, as they said that President Bush’s administration failed to properly understand or pay attention to what FEMA was not doing with regard to helping Americans with Katrina.

Watch it:

Indeed, Williams is right, Americans aren’t blaming the Obama administration. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, “69 percent of respondents said they were confident in a federal response to the outbreak.”

Even conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer acquitted the Obama administration of responsibility over the vaccine shortages today on Inside Washington. “I would be inclined to blaming this all on Obama but I rise in his defense because…this stuff is extremely hard to do safely, it’s a long process. … I would give him a pass in terms of assigning political blame,” he said.

By the way, in 1987, after my first visit to the United States, Vice President Bush accompanied me to the airport, and told me: “Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him, and when he says that something is necessary, they trust him. But if some Democrat had proposed what Reagan did, with you, they might not have trusted him.”

When asked what lessons he learned “that President Obama should heed in making his decisions about Afghanistan,” Gorbachev – who ended the Soviet Union’s 10 year war there in 1989 — replied, “One was that problems there could not be solved with the use of force. Such attempts inside someone else’s country end badly.”

Matt Yglesias observes that “this sort of result tends not to support the idea that breaking with congressional Democrats to join congressional Republicans in a filibuster of Obama’s signature health initiatives would be a political winner.”

But many on the right have failed to mention the more substantive point, namely that Cheney and the Bush administration itself “dithered” on Afghanistan and diverted valuable resources to invade Iraq. But last night on Fox News, former Republican senator Rick Santorum stepped up to the plate:

SANTORUM: My sense is that we have an obligation to support our generals in the field, to give them the resources they need to accomplish the mission. That was not done by the prior administration. Let’s be very clear about that. They put their own political imprint on the Afghan strategy.

Watch it:

Of course, Santorum is right. In 2008, Gen. David McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, asked the Bush administration for more troops, a request that was denied.

Indeed, as McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay — one of the few Washington journalists whose reporting matched the facts in the run-up to the Iraq war — asked of Cheney’s recent attacks: “Do we smell a campaign of historic revisionism by those widely seen as primarily responsible for the disaster in Afghanistan that has prompted Army Gen. Stanley A. McCrystal’s request for up to 80,000 more soldiers?”:

As late as December 2005, despite official warnings about the Taliban resurgence and a lack of U.S. resources for critical reconstruction programs, the Bush administration planned to reduce the 19,000 U.S. troops then in Afghanistan by 2,500 soldiers in order to bolster hard-pressed U.S. forces in Iraq.

And even after seven years of war _ and the deaths of 630 U.S. service members, more than 400 other coalition soldiers and thousands of Afghans _ the Bush administration lacked strategies for dealing with the al Qaida and Taliban safe haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where it backed a military dictatorship, or building Afghan security forces, according to the Government Accountability Office.

It’s nice to see Santorum recognize reality.

Beck hosted the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief — and one-time GOP presidential candidate — Steve Forbes on his radio show Wednesday and complained about the award. “[You're] making me the number one scariest man in America?” Beck asked. “People always want to be at the top of our list,” Forbes replied. “Not this one,” Beck bemoaned. Forbes then started sucking up to Beck:

FORBES: It was a mis — it was a miscommunication. We were going to put you on the most admired, most beloved, most reasonable, most enlightened list.

BECK: Right, right.

FORBES: But we figured if we did that, it would yeah, we wanted to put a mask on you so you wouldn’t get killed by the liberals.

BECK: I mean, here’s the competition: Rod Blagojevich, Bernie Madoff, Michael Jackson, David Letterman, Michael Moore, Roman Polanski. You’ve got a rapist who is nine slots lower than I am ….

FORBES: We normally would put you on the 400 list but we respect your privacy.

In fact, after the show, Forbes went back and amended the original article to be more flattering of Beck:

By Steve Forbes
I hereby amend Halloween Masks — The Scariest People Of 2009

“Glenn Beck is the scariest person to big tax; big government; big spend; and weak defense liberals.”

Salon’s Alex Koppelman observes, “The idea that your outlet’s owner could decide he disagreed with something you wrote — something that had already been published — and then just blithely go in and change it is pretty scary. There’s an ethical problem involved, certainly.”

Beck’s power within the GOP establishment is far and wide. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) once brought a copy of Beck’s book to a town hall meeting this summer to “pass it on.” (He ended up giving ThinkProgress his copy, which we did not pass on.) Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said “the American people are smart” to listen to right wing radio hosts such as Beck and Limbaugh. And RNC chair Michael Steele recently passed up an opportunity to distance himself from Beck’s “racist” attack on President Obama. “That’s one man’s opinion,” Steele said.

(HT: The War Room)

Later, during a conference call with progressive bloggers, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) was asked if, given Lieberman’s position, he would support using the reconciliation process to pass health care reform with a public option, which would require a mere simple majority for passage. Specter said that he might eventually but added that he thinks the Democratic caucus will get 60 votes:

SPECTER: Well as I have said I would consider that as a last, last, last, resort. I think that the institutional safeguard of 60 votes is a very important one. … [M]oving away from that institutional 60 votes is something I think would be a last, last, last resort. You might have to fight fire with fire when there are so many filibusters. The number is now 81. And a lot of nominations are being blocked and action is being blocked. …

On the issue of fighting fire with fire, maybe so, but I think that we are not going to come to this. I think we can muster the 60 votes and not have to face the reconciliation.

Q: Senator if I have this correctly, as a last resort, you would not oppose using reconciliation…

SPECTER: As a last, last, last, resort I would consider it, yeah.

Specter later said that Lieberman is “not going to want to see reconciliation used,” adding, “I think it’s gonna work out.” Listen here:

In fact, the top two Democrats in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), have not taken reconciliation off the table in order to pass health care reform. “Sure, it’s always an option,” Reid said on Monday. “The failsafe on this is reconciliation,” Durbin said, but added, “I hope we don’t reach it because you can only do a limited amount of things on reconciliation.”

Gingrich explained his support for Scozzafava at a book signing event yesterday: “She is the nominee of the local party, my bias is to be for the nominee of the local party, and I don’t second guess the local party.” On his Fox News program yesterday, Glenn Beck attacked Gingrich. “I couldn’t disagree more with you on this one,” Beck said, arguing, “You vote with a person you agree with most…and it doesn’t matter what party they’re in.”

Last night on Fox News’ On the Record, host Greta Van Susteren asked Gingrich about the “heat” he’s been getting for endorsing Scozzafava, especially from Beck. Gingrich fired back, saying the right-wing support for Hoffman is based on “misinformation” and an abandonment of conservative values:

GINGRICH: I just find it fascinating that my many friends who claim to be against Washington having too much power, they claim to be in favor of the 10th Amendment giving states back their rights, they claim to favor local control and local authority, now they suddenly get local control and local authority in upstate New York, they don’t like the outcome. [...]

So I say to my many conservative friends who suddenly decided that whether they’re from Minnesota or Alaska or Texas, they know more than the upstate New York Republicans? I don’t think so. And I don’t think it’s a good precedent. [...]

And so this idea that we’re suddenly going to establish litmus tests, and all across the country, we’re going to purge the party of anybody who doesn’t agree with us 100 percent — that guarantees Obama’s reelection. That guarantees Pelosi is Speaker for life. I mean, I think that is a very destructive model for the Republican Party.

Watch it:

Conservative bloggers are now going after Gingrich for lashing out at his critics, with the Other McCain writing, “I was disgusted just now to see Newt Gingrich’s appearance on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News show tonight.” “Newt Gingrich disappointed national conservatives again tonight,” Gateway Pundit added.