Brit Hume and Joe the Plumber at the Media Research Center Confessional and Evan Bayh is Senator Strangelove.

OK, it's official. It's straight from the horse's ass, er, mouth.

Last night the euphemistically named Media Research Center gave Brit Hume of Fox News its “William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence.”

Media Research Center is one of the right wing propaganda outfits that make sure that the peasants don't clue in on the fact that most of what they believe runs totally opposite to their own self interests. You know, "All things which are good come from the wealthy and large corporations." Yes, there are a lot of folks who believe just that.

Media Research Center was founded by Buckley's nephew Brent Bozell. Bozell makes out really well by confirming that the right wing garbage that the less attentive of us take for truth is, indeed, truth. You know, Iraq brought down the World Trade Center and Barack Obama is a covert Muslim terrorist and the anti-Christ. After all, he is a multi-tasker.

Brit said a lot if interesting things that night. One of the more humorous things was:

HUME: What are we getting?…We’re getting bloggers and websites and all sorts of individual entrepreneurs, and we have a vaster menu of choices today than we’ve ever had. But I think that we also have the danger that everything will be presented from one political viewpoint or the other, and that the media that confront us are going to be more partisan than ever — which means that the Media Research Center will have a mission for many years to come, and a good thing that is.

Brit's worried that the media will be more partisan than ever. Brit works for Fox News. Are you starting to see the irony? Thank God for His creation of Fox News to protect us from the truth.

Then Brit really let the cat out of the bag. Apparently Fox News research needs to go no farther than Media Research Center. In fact they don't even need to go that far, because Media Research Center comes to them.

HUME: I want to say a word, however, of thanks, to [MRC president] Brent [Bozell] and to the team at the Media Research Center and all the contributors who make that work there possible. […] also for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report. I don’t know what we would have done without them. It was a daily, sort of a buffet of material to work from, and we — we — we certainly made tremendous use of it.

A buffet of bullshit and people keep coming back for more. Fox News, we repeat Media Research Center crap and you decide. It's just incredible the amount of people who have decided that they prefer bullshit.

It was a night of confessions. One man conservative think tank and emerging conservative leader Samuel Wurzelbacher, AKA Joe the Plumber, admitted to the crowd that rich white guys make him horny.

"God, all this love and everything in the room -- I'm horny," declared Joe.

Whether this will displace Jeff Gannon as the conservative's favorite male prostitute, only time will tell. My money's on Joe.

Joe went on to say:

"Unfortunately, we have a chairman up there who wants to redefine conservatism; he wants to make it hip hop, put it in a new package and sell it," Wurzelbacher said. "You can't sell principles; either you have them or you don't."

Poor Joe, he actually thinks that what conservatives have are principles.

Media Research Center's Anything But The Truth festival was a great success and a good time was had by all. The most often heard comment was "Hee, hee, hee, Joe said "horny"."

Meanwhile, in the real world, some Democrats after seeing how much fun the Republicans were having with their circular firing squad, decided that they wanted one too.

Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) proclaimed today on MSNBC's Morning Joe the beginning of a new group of conservative Democrats that could work to block Obama's budget priorities.

Bayh and his colleagues have joined with Republicans to insist that the president gain a super-majority of 60 votes to pass any of his major reforms. Others warned the president not to use existing budget rules that require only a simple majority of 51 votes to pass either his clean energy or his health care reforms. Now, if the Moderate Dems Working Group votes alongside Republicans against Senate Democrats, they will be able to block Obama's major reforms, which need at least 60 votes to pass.

It looks like things are getting back to normal. The Republicans are taking the express to Right Wing Fantasy Land and some Democrats standing in line for their tickets.

Enjoy the weekend.

Later.

Journolist: Source of Right Wing Paranoia and Other Malidies.

I know it's been on HBO for more than a month and most of you have already seen it, but it fits.

If you haven't seen it, click on it for the schedule.

OK. When I heard about this, I was just a bit upset.

The left has moved into a secret email listserve where left-wing bloggers, policy guys, and journalists collaborate online to form news stories that inevitably skew to the left.

I mean, no one let me know about it.

So naturally I just thought that my input wasn't wanted. But remembering the source, it was from REDSTATE, one of the many sites that right wingers go to in order to get their neuroses validated. You know, "Yes, you have every reason to be paranoid." and for the persecution complexed, "Yes, white, male, conservatives are the most oppressed group in America." So, I thought that I would check into it before I sent my resignation to the Vast Left Wing Blogger/Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make Conservatives Look Like Slack Jawed Knuckle Draggers. The VLWBLMCMCLLSJKD and I have had a long and happy association and I hated to end it.

You've gotta admit that REDSTATE had an impeccable source.

i’m told otherwise. I am told, quite reliably I might add, that left wing bloggers and policy guys use this site as an express train to get their ideas into the mainstream media. And with sympathetic reporters who take the presuppositions made as truth, then add to those some original reporting, you have not an objective media, but a left wing echo chamber dominating print journalism and mainstream television journalism.

When you're told something, quite reliably, well hell, it has to be true.

It's not just REDSTATE, it's all over the right wing blogosphere now.

It all started with this article from Politico, JournoList: Inside the echo chamber. It appears to be a masterfully lame attempt to make a lot out of very little. You know, like Wall Street.

There actually is a JournoList. It's a list server operated by Ezra Klein, associate editor at The American Prospect. And this is what he has to say about the right wing hysteria.

As for sinister implications, is it "secret?" No. Is it off-the-record? Yes. The point is to create a space where experts feel comfortable offering informal analysis and testing out ideas. Is it an ornate temple where liberals get together to work out "talking points?" Of course not. Half the membership would instantly quit if anything like that emerged. There are no government or campaign employees on the list. More to the point, there are a number of folks who are straight news reporters and consciously eschew partisanship. Also, Erick Erickson writes:

I’m told such luminaries as David Shuster at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, a host of New York Times magazine writers, Frank Rich, and others all collaborate on this list.I'm not sure who told him that.

Not one of those people is on Journolist. If they were, I imagine I'd get booked for more spots on Maddow. It is true that the list is center to left. That's not about fostering ideology but preventing a collapse into flame war. The emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology.

Honestly, Olbermann, Maddow and Rich, not a one of them are on Journalist. So this is obviously just another example of the Right's perceptions being, once again, greater than the sum of the problem. At least it's entertaining.

Later.

Southern Pride and Ignorance.

You know, being a redneck doesn't mean that you have to be ignorant.

Just because you're born a working class, white guy in a southern state doesn't mean that you have to be the lame caricature of the under educated, closed minded, Limbaugh listening doofus.

If you don't have all the things that your heart desires, it's not the fault of African Americans, immigrants, New Yorkers, Democrats or liberals. It's pretty much your own fault for believing the crap that's put out by the Right Wing Propaganda Machine.

That's right, those Republicans that you look to that are somehow going bring back those halcyon, antebellum days when all the white folks down south were wealthy and got the respect that they deserved. Dream on. It ain't going to happen.

If you're working your butt off for a less than living wage, chances are it's because of the way you vote. If you're voting for the person because they wave the flag and thump the Bible, because they wear a little flag in their lapel, because they blame someone else for your low wages, because the NRA tells you to, because they're white or because you're just too damned lazy to check the facts yourself, then you're screwing yourself and your family. In other words, you're proudly ignorant and see no reason to change.

That's no problem. It's a free country and I would fight for your right to stay blissfully ignorant. I mean, if you don't mind being played for a chump by the people you vote for, that's your business.

Cheap labor. Even more than race, it's the thread that connects all of Southern history -- from the antebellum South of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis to Tennessee's Bob Corker, Alabama's Richard Shelby and the other anti-union Southerners in today's U.S. Senate.

It's at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a desperate, poorly educated workforce and a demagogic oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation line stronger than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of the nation.

In their zeal to destroy unions and their hard-fought wage-and-benefits packages, the Southern senators could not care less that workers in their home states are among the lowest paid in the nation. Ever wonder why the South remains the nation's poorest region despite generations of seniority-laden senators and representatives in Congress?

The idea of working people joining together to have a united voice across the table from management scares most Southern politicians to death. After all, they go to the same country clubs as management. When Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker warned of Democratic opponent Ronnie Musgrove's ties to the "Big Labor Bosses" in this year's U.S. Senate race, he was protecting the "Big Corporate Bosses" who are his benefactors.

The South today may be more racially enlightened than ever in its history. However, it is still a society in which the ruling class -- the chambers of commerce that have taken over from yesterday's plantation owners and textile barons -- uses politics to maintain control over a vast, jobs-hungry workforce. After the oligarchy lost its war for slavery -- the cheapest labor of all -- it secured the next best thing in Jim Crow and the indentured servitude known as sharecropping and tenant farming. It still sees cheap, pliable, docile labor as the linchpin of the Southern economy.

Think about it.

Later