The Hollywood Liberal

Repubs Poised to Make Governor Gains
Republicans are well-positioned to pick up a substantial number of governor’s seats in this year’s election, with potentially far-reaching effects on issues like implementation of the new health care law, Congressional redistricting and presidential politics, according to the New York Times. Democrats hold 26 governorships and Republicans 24, but Republicans hold the upper hand in many of this year’s 37 races.

Don Blankenship just harrumphed himself into a stupor
As terrible as the disaster in Hungary is, the response is not what we expect from our Nation’s “beloved” corporate honchos.

screen capture of Hungary Disaster from Gwydionwilliams at flickr.com

These Hungarians don’t understand the free market:

The owners of the metals plant whose reservoir burst, flooding several towns in western Hungary with caustic red sludge, have expressed their condolences to the families of the seven people killed, as well as to those injured. They say they are sorry for not having done so sooner.

MAL Rt., which owns the alumina plant in Ajka, also said it was willing to pay compensation “in proportion to its responsibility” for the damage caused by the deluge.

And those folks were so close to becoming just like Republicans. The secret is to not only cause the disaster, but refuse to take responsibility and not apologize after.

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Early Morning Swim

• Teabaggers: still totally just about economic issues.
• Nothing like fanning the flames of hate.
• Better late than never, I guess.
• Krugman: Hey, small spender.
• Silly Duncan. Roads pay for themselves.
• Getting screwed by the banksters? Tough shit.

• Teabaggers: still totally just about economic issues.
• Nothing like fanning the flames of hate.
• Better late than never, I guess.
• Krugman: Hey, small spender.
• Silly Duncan. Roads pay for themselves.
• Getting screwed by the banksters? Tough shit.

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Karzai to Take His Talents to Minneapolis
Fake news by Andy Borowitz In a three-way swap that may be unprecedented in U.S. history, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to become vice president of the United States, Vice President Joe Biden will become president of Afghanistan and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will be traded to the Minnesota Vikings. Fake news by Andy Borowitz By Andy Borowitz

In a three-way swap that may be unprecedented in U.S. history, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to become vice president of the United States, Vice President Joe Biden will become president of Afghanistan and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will be traded to the Minnesota Vikings.

Related Entries

• October 10, 2010 The Shadow Class War of 2010
• October 7, 2010 Needed: Competition for Black Votes

Emma Ruby-Sachs: The Tea Party Are Just Bullies
The similarities between Paladino’s political posturing and school yard bullying cannot be ignored; the Tea Party will continue to recruit bullies and those attracted to them.

Jeff Danziger: Ann Coulter Remake

Robert Kuttner: Obama Calls the Question on Geithner
Housing prices are declining again, despite record low mortgage interest rates (available only to blue chip borrowers), which creates a serious drag on the economy. And the housing market won’t return to normal until the mortgage mess is resolved. But the belated recognition that millions of mortgages are inadequately documented could be a blessing in disguise. It could force the administration to come up with stronger medicine both to clean up the banks and to help distressed homeowners.

A guide to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks

As journalist John Hamilton reported, alleged California highway shooter Byron Williams — who reportedly told investigators that “his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU” — recommended David Horowitz’s conservative website DiscoverTheNetworks.org (DTN) as a source of information about financier George Soros and Tides. DTN has attacked Soros and accused the Tides Foundation of wanting “America destroyed” and of laundering money to radical leftist causes.

Williams recommended DiscoverTheNetworks as an information source

Williams cited DTN as a source for information about Soros and Tides. From John Hamilton’s “Progressive Hunters“:

In his letter to me, Byron writes: “I have been praying for a media advocate; one, to make people aware of why I’m in here (public opinion could help me), and two, to make people realize that corrupt killers are in power, and want re-election! I was also fearful that this issue would be ‘burried.'”

Byron writes, “You want to know about Soros and Tides, yes, Glenn Beck is doing very well uncovering his wickedness, check his ‘June’ programs for ‘Petrobraz’, also look into ‘DiscoverTheNetworks.com.’ “

[…]

Beck, of course, isn’t alone in his war against Tides. As Byron told me, those interested in “Soros and Tides” can visit DiscoverTheNetworks, a website run by David Horowitz.

Horowitz, a conservative ideologue, is a frequent guest on Beck’s broadcasts. Discussing Beck’s tirades against organized labor, for example, Horowitz said that teachers’ unions, the SEIU, and AFSCME are “communist unions.”

DiscoverTheNetworks calls itself a “Guide to the Political Left”

DiscoverTheNetworks identifies itself as a “Guide to the Political Left,” and describes itself as follows: “It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left’s (often hidden) programmatic agendas and it provides an understanding of its history and ideas.”

DiscoverTheNetworks states that its database catalogues how “radical” liberal activists began moving into the political mainstream:

The database will readily answer many questions that previously would have required volumes of printed text to establish. The primary question is: “Is there a left?” Since the early 1970s, radical activists began referring to themselves as “liberals” (in part to distance themselves from their failures as a socialist left. A sympathetic media culture went along with this deception, with the result that the word “left” has all but disappeared from the political lexicon. The spectrum of views is now regularly described in the media culture as extending from “liberal” to “moderate” to “conservative” or right, as though a left did not exist or was so marginal as not to matter.

[…]

The database provides a complete guide to all the principal groups responsible for organizing the national protests against the war, their leaders, their core agendas and beliefs. (Follow the guide icon, which is shaped like a heptagram on the homepage, by clicking on GROUPS and then ANTI-WAR). While the database cannot account for the motivations and beliefs of all the individuals who participated in these protests or who came in an unorganized fashion to oppose the war, it can describe with reasonable certainty the identities and agendas of all the principal anti-war groups and leaders who initiated these protests, organized their events and shaped the political debate. Inspection of the database shows that without exception the agendas of these groups and the individuals who ran them were anti-corporate and socialist (often Marxist-Leninist), rather than pacifists and non-violent or merely liberal, as described in the general media. Their opposition to the war went well beyond the issue of the war itself.

The relational aspects of this database reveal the paths by which these radicals were able to influence institutions like the Democratic Party that are not radical (See Shadow Party.) Using the information provided in the base, one can thus trace the progress of a radical menu of leftwing policies and complaints into the heart of the American political mainstream.

DiscoverTheNetworks is a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which states that its mission is “to institutionalize his [David Horowitz’s] campaigns against the Left and its anti-Americanism.” Horowitz is an ex-“New Left” member turned conservative activist.

Horowitz has frequently lobbed incendiary rhetoric against progressives. For instance, Horowitz has claimed that former SEIU president Andy Stern is a “Leninist” and teachers unions, SEIU, and AFSCME are “communist unions;” that President Carter is an “anti-Semite,” and blacks are “the human shields of the Democratic Party”; that Democrats are “apologists for terrorists”; and that Obama is “the Manchurian Candidate.”

Horowitz: DiscoverTheNetworks shows “that there are only a couple of degrees of separation between anybody on the left and the terrorists.” In an interview about DiscoverTheNetworks published March 24, 2005, in The Washington Times (accessed via Nexis), Horowitz said:

For 20 years, I dreamed of writing a book about the left, based on the reality I carry around in my head, as somebody who spent decades on the left or studying it. … The Web provides a wonderful format, because you can put up hundreds of tables of contents, indexes and links, and you can even provide visual maps, which will show you the network on one screen. …

What I’ve shown is that there are only a couple of degrees of separation between anybody on the left and the terrorists – and that includes people in the Democratic Party, even those who are anti-terrorist.

For example, the coalition of civil liberties groups that attacked the USA Patriot Act are thoroughly penetrated by pro-terrorist radicals based in organizations like the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. This doesn’t mean that every Democrat or every Republican who opposes the USA Patriot Act is a “useful idiot.” … But it does mean that they need to be more mindful of the arguments they are being presented with and supporting.

DTN pushes Soros oil conspiracy, attacks Soros

DTN pushes Obama-Soros $2 billion oil conspiracy. Like Glenn Beck, DiscoverTheNetworks pushes the conspiracy theory that Obama is trying to enrich Soros through a Brazilian oil company. DTN writes:

In late August 2009, President Obama agreed to lend $2 billion to Brazil’s quasi-public national oil company, Petrobras, to fund its exploration and drilling of 270 sites in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the richest oil fields in the world (where environmentalist objections had historically thwarted any drilling proposals by U.S. companies).

Petrobras has been run since 2005 by José Sergio Gabrielli, a firebrand socialist member of Brazil’s leftist Workers’ Party. Brazil’s socialist government holds 40 percent of Petrobras’ shares of stock. The Communist Chinese government – which was guaranteed a supply of 200,000 barrels of oil per day for ten years by the Brazilians in exchange for a $10 billion loan earlier in 2009 – also owns a significant stake in Petrobras. Petrobras’ largest individual shareholder, by far, is the leftist billionaire (and close Obama ally) George Soros, whose hedge fund had dramatically increased its holdings in Petrobras just prior to Obama’s loan announcement.

The theory is based on the false claim that Obama issued a loan to Brazil’s Petrobras oil company; in reality, the loan was approved by appointees of the Bush administration to the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Kevin Varney, senior vice president and chief of staff of the bank has reportedly said that the decision to approve the loan “did not even rise to the level of presidential awareness.” Furthermore, Soros decreased his stake in Petrobras before the funds for the loan in question were distributed.

John Hamilton reported extensively about Williams’ belief in the Soros-Obama-Petrobras oil conspiracy.  

DTN quotes Horowitz collaborator claiming Soros pushing for transformation of America into a “socialist hive.” DiscoverTheNetworks writes:

According to Richard Poe, co-author (with David Horowitz) of the book The Shadow Party:

“The Shadow Party is the real power driving the Democrat machine. It is a network of radicals dedicated to transforming our constitutional republic into a socialist hive. The leader of these radicals is … George Soros. He has essentially privatized the Democratic Party, bringing it under his personal control. The Shadow Party is the instrument through which he exerts that control…. It works by siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions that would have gone to the Democratic Party in normal times, and putting those contributions at the personal disposal of Mr. Soros. He then uses that money to buy influence and loyalty where he sees fit. In 2003, Soros set up a network of privately-owned groups which acts as a shadow or mirror image of the Party. It performs all the functions we would normally expect the real Democratic Party to perform, such as shaping the Party platform, fielding candidates, running campaigns, and so forth.  However, it performs these functions under the private supervision of Mr. Soros and his associates. The Shadow Party derives its power from its ability to raise huge sums of money. By controlling the Democrat purse strings, the Shadow Party can make or break any Democrat candidate by deciding whether or not to fund him. During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party raised more than $300 million for Democrat candidates, prompting one of its operatives, MoveOn PAC director Eli Pariser, to declare, ‘Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it….'”

Media Matters has documented factual errors and doctored quotes in Horowitz and Poe’s book.

DTN suggests Soros will instigate a coup in America. DiscoverTheNetworks writes:                                                     

Soros had previously experienced considerable success in effecting “regime change” elsewhere in the world. For instance, he helped fund the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” that brought Vaclav Havel to power in the Czech Republic. And by his own admission, he helped engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, Georgia, and Yugoslavia. 

When Soros targets a country for “regime change,” he begins by creating a shadow government — a fully formed government-in-exile, ready to assume power when the opportunity arises. The Shadow Party he has built in America greatly resembles those he has created in other countries prior to instigating a coup.                                                     

DTN directs readers to articles vilifying Soros. DiscoverTheNetworks links to numerous articles vilifying Soros, such as: “George Soros: A Bridge to Radicalism;” “The Hidden Soros Agenda: Drugs, Money, the Media, and Political Power;” and “Soros: Republic Enemy #1.” 

DTN on Tides: Money laundering to radical leftist groups

DTN on Tides: They “launder” money to “radical” groups. In the opening paragraph of its Tides profile, DiscoverTheNetworks writes:

Established in 1976 by California-based activist Drummond Pike, the Tides Foundation was set up as a public charity that receives money from donors and then funnels it to the recipients of their choice. Because many of these recipient groups are quite radical, the donors often prefer not to have their names publicly linked with the donees. By letting the Tides Foundation, in effect, “launder” the money for them and pass it along to the intended beneficiaries, donors can avoid leaving a “paper trail.” Such contributions are called “donor-advised,” or donor-directed, funds.

Through this legal loophole, nonprofit entities can also create for-profit organizations and then funnel money to them through Tides — thereby circumventing the laws that bar nonprofits from directly funding their own for-profit enterprises.

DTN: Tides “is a major funder of the Shadow Party, a George Soros-conceived nationwide network” of progressive groups. DiscoverTheNetworks writes in its Tides profile:

Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response.” Tides later replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was financed in large measure by the Open Society Institute of George Soros, who has donated more than $7 million to Tides over the years. Reciprocally, the Tides Foundation is a major funder of the Shadow Party, a George Soros-conceived nationwide network of several dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, and which are engaged in campaigning for the Democrats.

 DTN: Tides supports “leftist agendas” and “radical” causes. DiscoverTheNetworks writes:

The Tides Foundation promotes a multitude of leftist agendas, as evidenced by its assertion: “We strengthen community-based organizations and the progressive movement by providing an innovative and cost-effective framework for your philanthropy.” Among the crusades to which Tides contributes are: radical environmentalism; the “exclusion of humans from public and private wildlands”; the anti-war movement; anti-free trade campaigns; the banning of firearms ownership; abolition of the death penalty; access to government-funded abortion-on-demand; and radical gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender advocacy. The Foundation is also a member organization of the International Human Rights Funders Group, a network of more than six-dozen grantmakers dedicated to finaning leftwing groups and causes.

DTN article: Tides “Fund the Subversion and Perversion of America’s Youth.” DiscoverTheNetworks posted a January 3, 2007, article by Linda Kimball attacking the group Gay-Straight Alliances and those “allowing” them into schools. Under a section headlined “Marxist-Progressives Who Fund the Subversion and Perversion of America’s Youth,” Kimball attacks Tides as funneling money “to the New Left’s matrix of communist front groups”:

Marxist-Progressives Who Fund the Subversion and Perversion of America’s Youth

On the bottom of the GSA homepage it states, “GSA is a project of the Tides Center.” (http://www.gsanetwork.org/)

The Tides Center/Foundation funnels money from wealthy international and national donors–both individuals and foundations/institutes–to the New Left’s matrix of communist front groups. Essentially, the New Left is the “hired assassins” doing the dirty work for wealthy progressives who want America destroyed and don’t care about the criminal methods employed, but who don’t want to dirty their hands. Among wealthy individuals who donate to Tides is Teresa Heinz Kerry, who has donated more than $4 million. Another donor is multi-millionaire George Soros and his Shadow Party and Open Society Institute.

“The Tides ‘family’ of organizations is a nerve center of radical Shadow Party activity. George Soros has given more than $17 million to the Tides Center since 1999.” (”The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party,” by David Horowitz and Richard Poe, p.126) 

The article concludes that “as a people united by the principles of freedom and personal liberty, we must commit ourselves to the long and arduous fight to recapture every square inch of our culture, laws, and government and cleanse them of the corruptions caused by the Church of Criminal Orthodoxy.”  

DTN links to “resources” vilifying Tides. On the left-hand side of its Tides profile, DiscoverTheNetworks links to several articles vilifying Tides. One profile, by the conservative organization Western Center for Journalism, states that “there exists a large network of far left philanthropists and foundations in America dedicated to destroying the American way of life, our Christian-based culture and our free enterprise system.  They seek to remove America from its constitutional foundations and move it toward a European-style socialism.  Much of this effort is coordinated by a little known group called the Tides Foundation and its related group, the Tides Center.” The profile adds that Tides gives “hundreds of millions of dollars to anti-free enterprise groups, gun control groups, anti-private property groups, abortion rights groups, homosexual groups, groups engaged in voter fraud, anti-military groups, and organizations that seek to destroy America’s constitutional basis.”  

Another link goes to a profile of Tides by “Ron Arnold’s Left Tracking Library,” which contains an address for Tides and a picture of the Tides office. Arnold states that Tides is the “Command center of the most potent left wing money machine in the world. No officer receives compensation from Tides Network, but they are compensated by other Tides entities controlled by Tides Network. Tides Network is a non-profit holding company, a shell for other organizations, so it has virtually no funding itself – even though it controls one of the largest financial networks of left wing activists.”  

Beck touted DiscoverTheNetworks on his program

Beck: “Please look at this website.” During the November 23, 2009, edition (from Nexis) of his Fox News program, while discussing progressives, Beck hosted David Horowitz and recommended DiscoverTheNetworks:

BECK: David Horowitz, editor of “Front Page” magazine and a Website that is not only this one, but also — I can’t remember the name of it. 

HOROWITZ: “DiscoverTheNetworks.” 

BECK: Yes. OK. “DiscoverTheNetworks.” It is fantastic if you want to find out who is connected to whom and what who is going on. “Discover the Network” — please look at this Web site. 

All right. So David, this is the trick that they have been using. They just shout things, that whether they’re true or not, if they can stage like a die-in and they can call somebody a racist or whatever, they have won. You’re saying now if the right will use these tactics, the left won’t know how to deal with it. 

HOROWITZ: Oh, exactly. I mean, you’re inverting the whole paradigm and the left will be caught off guard. Actually, this is what Saul Alinsky argues. You catch the other side off guard.

But it is exposing the reality. The reality is that liberals, so-called – of course, they’re not liberal. They are socialists. They are intolerant. And leftists and progressives are the oppressors of minorities and the poor. They control all the big inner cities in America, and they have for nearly 100 years. 

And these programs they’re putting in — they run the schools. There is a jobs program for adults. There are millions of poor, black and Hispanic kids whose lives are being destroyed by their policies and they don’t care. 

Beck: DiscoverTheNetworks documenting that “it’s the same players in all of these little organizations.” During a June 8, 2009, segment about “ACORN and its alliance with very wealthy people,” Beck touted DiscoverTheNetworks as a website that has been documenting that “it’s the same players in all of these little organizations.” From the program: 

The Border Hawk Texas Sheriff And The ‘Lake Pirates’
The search continues for the body of David Hartley, the American man who’s wife says was shot while the couple was jet skiing on the Mexican side of a border-straddling lake. David’s wife, Tiffany Hartley, has made many media appearances during the week, and has become the face of the incident. But Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez is the one who first told reporters he suspected “lake pirates” were to blame for the alleged shooting, which put the story on the national radar. And it turns out this isn’t the first Gonzalez has been in the national press talking up threats from down south.

Wife Of ‘Lake Pirates’ Victim: We Need To Take Back The Lake
Tiffany Hartley, the wife of the man reportedly shot by “lake pirates” on the Texas-Mexico border, has been all over the media in recent days, telling her harrowing tale. Hartley has also been calling on the federal government to take more responsibility for the incident.

Ethics Hearings For Waters, Rangel To Be Held After Election
The ethics committee hearings for Reps. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) will be held after Election Day, the committee announced today.

The Tattlesnake – Even More New Entries for the (Politically) Askewed Dictionary
Aspigmatism: The inability to see that wealthy elites are making a sucker out of you. (See ‘Tea Party Express.’) Atwatering: Throwing up so many specious charges that your political opponent is forced to spend all of his or her time responding to them, thereby destroying any chance they have for election by leaving the impression in […]

The Secret Big-Money Takeover Of America
Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before – and they’re doing it behind closed doors. Hundreds of millions…

Where “Social Network” Really Began — and Ends
What happens between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in “Social Network” may not be quite what happened between them in real life, but the movie version bears some uncanny resemblances to what really did happen between Time magazine co-founders and…

Tom Donilon: The Last Best Hope to Help Obama Make Vital Strategic Leaps
Recently I met with David Rothkopf, Foreign Policy blogger and one of Washington’s premier chroniclers of American national security personalities and architecture, for lunch and discussed with him who President Obama’s next National Security Advisor should be. Our list was…

Gillespie Claims NY Times And Wash. Post Have ?Refudiated? ThinkProgress On Secret Corporate Spending

On Face the Nation this morning, host Bob Schieffer grilled both White House advisor David Axelrod and GOP strategist Ed Gillespie on the millions of dollars being secretly funneled by Wall Street and the oil industry to defeat Democratic candidates this November, and particularly the role of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Gillespie, along with Karl Rove, is the mastermind behind American Crossroads, a group tied to the Chamber which also funnels corporate money into attack ads. As first revealed by a ThinkProgress report, the Chamber solicits funds from foreign corporations — including state-owned oil companies — that go into the same general account that funds their $75 million electioneering campaign. Using a neologism coined by Sarah Palin, Gillespie argued that the Washington Post and the New York Times had “completely refudiated” the report:

GILLESPIE: The Washington Post and The New York Times both completely refudiated this charge of foreign money being funneled through the Chamber of Commerce into American campaigns. The charge of illegal criminal activity, that was based on a blog posting that the President of the United States repeated, that was put on a website that’s affiliated with Center for American Progress, a liberal nonprofit advocacy group that does not disclose its donors.

Watch it:

In fact, neither the Post nor the Times “refudiated” the ThinkProgress report. Both merely quoted Chamber of Commerce officials who only discussed the limited “AmCham” funds, only one of several avenues for foreign funding of the Chamber. Both articles recognized that there is no outside oversight of the Chamber’s money flow. “Money, however, is fungible,” the New York Times editorial board explained, “and it is impossible for an outsider to know whether the group is following its rules.” As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent writes, “The Chamber still hasn’t addressed in any detail the core allegation against it.”

Only Gillespie has made the “charge of illegal criminal activity.” Although it is illegal to solicit foreign funds for electioneering, the essential fact is that there are no disclosure requirements that provide oversight to know whether or not the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is obeying the law. The Chamber successfully lobbied to kill the DISCLOSE Act, which would have closed the loopholes opened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Earlier in the program, Axelrod explained:

This issue of this special interest spending is very important. It’s never happened before, that organizations are are spending this kind of money. And the American people need to ask why is the oil industry, Wall Street and others spending this kind of money to defeat candidates and elect others in this sort of secretive way? You know, that is a threat to our democracy.

Unlike the Chamber, the Koch brothers, and Ed Gillespie, the Center for American Progress strongly supports the DISCLOSE Act and broad campaign finance reform.

After Embracing Privatizers, Tenthers, Tea Partiers, & An Ex-Witch, Cantor Distances GOP From Nazi Reenactor

Appearing today on Fox News Sunday, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) finally revealed just how extreme a GOP candidate needs to be in order to be rejected by their party leadership. Reacting to Ohio GOP Congressional candidate Rich Iott’s membership in a Nazi reenactment group that “salute[s]” Nazi sympathizers who viewed the Third Reich as “the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life,” Cantor expressly repudiated Iott’s candidacy in an exchange with Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL):

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: You have one candidate in Ohio who actually thinks it’s a good bonding experience to reenact Nazi battles with his son. […]

CANTOR: Now Debbie went and launched into her attacks as to some of the reports about some of the candidates that are running, particularly the one in Ohio having to do with a Nazi reenactment.  She knows that I would absolutely repudiate that and do not support an individual that would do something like that.

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ: Well you haven’t.

CANTOR: I’m doing it right here.

Watch it:

Cantor did the right thing by repudiating Iott, but his decision to do so is surprising in light of the fact that Cantor and other GOP leaders have consistently refused to denounce the most extreme right-wing candidates in this election cycle. Here are just a few examples of the kind of radical views that are perfectly at home in today’s Republican Party:

• Eliminating Medicare” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, proposed phasing-out Medicare by replacing the entire Medicare program with a privatized voucher system and then having that voucher gradually decrease in value over time. Yet Republicans have kept Ryan as their chief budget policymaker in the House, and Cantor even co-authored a book touting himself and Ryan as the party’s new “Young Guns.”  Some Republican candidates have even claimed that Medicare is unconstitutional.
• Privatizing Social Security: Countless GOP lawmakers and candidates — including Republican budget chief Ryan — want to privatize Social Security, even though privatization imposes significant new risks on seniors, creates new administrative costs, forces benefit reductions, and costs more money than the present system.  Some of these candidates also believe that Social Security is unconstitutional.
• Tearing Up The Constitution: Beyond the fringe claims that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional, leading GOPers have embraced repealing the Constitution’s grant of citizenship to all children born in the United States, repealing the constitutional right to elect your own senators, and one leading GOP Senate candidate claimed that it is unconstitutional for the United States to belong to the United Nations.
• Former Witches Against Masturbation:  The National Republican Senatorial Committee even cut a $42,000 check to Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, an anti-masturbation activist who “dabbled into witchcraft” and who wants to stop the “whole country from having sex.”

Lest there be any confusion about what positions GOP candidates are allowed to embrace, ThinkProgress is happy to provide this handy chart explaining which stances the GOP does and does not view as too extreme:

Alaska Sen. Murkowski embraces new outsider status with write-in campaign
IN ANCHORAGE “Fill in the bubble! Write in the name! Fill in the bubble! Write in the name! Fill in the bubble! Write in the name!”

Cable news chatter is changing the electoral landscape
When Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, he read her some advice from another Fox commentator, Sarah Palin.

Though often overshadowed, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine remains a tireless, loyal messenger
NEW YORK–There might be no worse job in American politics today than Tim Kaine’s. As chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the former Virginia governor has logged nearly 200,000 miles this campaign season, his life a whirl of cold chicken, anonymous hotel rooms and the seemingly endless…