Not another Bush.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will not run for the open Senate seat of Sen. Mel Martinez, he announced in a statement released moments ago.

"After thoughtful consideration, I have decided not to run for the United States Senate in 2010," said Bush. "While the opportunity to serve my state and country during these turbulent and dynamic times is compelling, now is not the right time to return to elected office."

Bush's decision robs Republicans of a top-tier recruit who would have immediately been favored to hold Martinez's seat. Without Bush in the race, Republicans are almost certain to play host to a crowded and competitive primary.

The announcement comes after 48 hours of rampant rumors among the Florida political community that Bush had decided not to make the race.

Finally a decision we can all back from the Bush family tree.

John Hinderaker just can't wait to get his Obama Derangement Syndrome on with this post.

So I confess to some satisfaction in seeing Obama's likeness paraded at a hate rally in Jakarta, along with those of Mubarak and Olmert. The protesters were blaming Obama for Israel's attack on Hamas, when he hasn't even been inaugurated yet!

Hinderaker once called President Bush a genius, which gives us some insight about his acuity and stability "mentally."

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

The Middle East is a horrible situation, as we are witnessing; for this wingnut to take pleasure in ugly scenes like this just shows the Conservative mind at its best.

It's true indeed that Obama hasn't been sworn in yet, but the world's sickness over Bush was caused by his policies. After 9/11, the world was with us like never before and it did take a true destructive genius to wreck that. By attacking a country that didn't do anything to us, Bush has created an international hatred of America like never before.

The wonder of Bush's tenure is that we actually have a country still standing after eight years of misrule. Now it's up to Obama to pick up the pieces of an economy that is in utter shambles, and a global reputation as torturers and thugs -- which inspires scenes like the ones Hinderaker seems to enjoy.

(h/t Kevin)

Oh, how the wingnuts writhe and hiss at the prospect of Sen. Al Franken ... especially now that it's about to come true:

A state election board on Monday will announce Democrat Al Franken has defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, state officials told CNN Sunday.

The canvassing board on Monday will say a recount determined Franken won by 225 votes, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie told CNN.

However, Coleman's campaign, which contends the recount should have included about 650 absentee ballots it says were improperly rejected in the initial count, has indicated it will challenge the certification.

It's all going to wind up in the courts before it gets settled, but there's little doubt Franken has the upper hand.

I suppose it would be wicked to savor the knowledge that the wingnuts are going crazy at the thought of Sen. Al Franken, and are sharpening their shivs as we speak. BillO in particular, given his history with Franken.

Likewise with Ann Coulter. My weekly e-mail from the Brownshirt Barbie this week featured her shrieking about Franken:

Dear Fellow Conservative,

Last night, I had a horrible dream... and no, this isn't the famous "I Had a Dream" speech. Frankly, I think that one could use a rest.

No, in my dream it was 12 noon, so naturally I tuned in for my daily dose of conservative news and commentary from the greatest political talk show host in the history of radio.

As I imagined one half of a giant brain being tied behind a familiar back, just to make it fair, the familiar bass notes from "My City Was Gone" throbbed, and the announcer's voice boomed...

"Ladies and gentleman... in accordance with Fairness Doctrine broadcasting regulations... here's AL FRANKEN!"

I woke up screaming. But then I realized it was just a bad dream.

Or was it?

Actually, the whole schtick is just a pitch for yet another one of Coulter's imagined liberal plots -- that largely nonexistent scheme to revive the Fairness Doctrine. Coulter's been on a real tear lately in terms of pulling crap out of thin air. But it's worth noting that Al Franken has the ability to make her extra-nutty-kookoo with sprinkles on top.

One can only imagine what they'll be dreaming up for him as a senator.

Because calling liberals traitors---anti American---terrorist loving Nazis is all good fun for Conservative pundits and TV executives. The TODAY Show really, really loves her no matter what she says.

In any event, divorced mothers should be called "divorced mothers," not "single mothers." We also have a term for the youngsters involved: "the children of divorce," or as I call them, "future strippers." It is a mark of how attractive it is to be a phony victim that divorcées will often claim to belong to the more disreputable category of "single mothers." [Page 36]

She also attacks Michelle Obama as well.

Coulter facetiously and snidely refers to Michelle Obama as a "saint" and "Mother Teresa" and suggests that her public service career "advanced in lockstep with the political advancement of her husband."

And of course she uses Obama's name for enjoyment:

In the book, Coulter repeatedly refers to the President-elect as "B. Hussein Obama" and complains that the media "literally wanted to have sex with him."

Yup. I'll bet Chris Matthews will be giving her a full hour soon to spew her garbage. It wouldn't be so bad if the anchors actually exposed Coulter's lunacy to the American audience, but that happens so rarely now that they are making her appear like a normal cog in our society these days. So sad....

There's a rather worrisome meme going around progressive bloggers nowadays - "if we all ignore John Bolton, his cabal will go away". Bolton hated the second Dubya term because it pretended diplomacy - demanding as preconditions everything that was supposedly to be negotiated and forcing Europe to push that pretense as America's proxies - rather than just invading. Now, his prescription is only changed from 2003 in that he realises that a US ensnared in two wars he and his neocon buddies pushed makes it unlikley that America can do the attacking on its own: he writes "Options on Iran are more limited, but meaningful efforts at regime change and assisting Israel should it decide to strike Iran's nuclear facilities would be good first steps."

Steve Benen is the latest in a line of progressives I've seen suggesting that Bolton should just be ignored:

Bolton, of course, doesn't need an excuse. He called for a war against Iran over and over and over again. It doesn't matter that his idea is crazy, Bolton has access to conservative media outlets and he knows how to use them.

One of the more ridiculous personnel decisions Bush has ever made was nominating Bolton as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fighting for his confirmation, and then giving Bolton a recess appointment when senators balked. One of the more accurate personnel assessments Bush has ever made came a year later when the president said, "Let me just say from the outset that I don't consider Bolton credible."

I'm not sure why anyone would.

While I sympathize with Steve's sentiment, Bolton isn't just some rogue loose cannon who can be ignored onto the sidelines. He's still a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and receives funding from the very deep ($30 million a year) pockets of that neocon mothership and its corporate support system.

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Download | Play    Download | Play [H/t Heather]

So it seems there's this Rooskie professor who thinks the United States is going to wind up following the path of the old Soviet Republic:

For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

Dunno about you, but the results of the last election didn't seem to suggest any dissolution of the United States -- rather the opposite. We seem to be in the process of healing old divisions and coming back together after a decade of Republican-induced strife. We'll see if it continues. But Professor Panarin sounds like he has a bad case of the projections.

Of course, there's always that possible asteroid impact that's been all over the YouTubes, if you prefer your apocalyptic scenarios more, ah, complete.

Either way, I take some comfort in knowing that the cranks who keep predicting the end of the world are still with us. (Oh, hello, Pastor Hagee.) They've all been so wrong over so many years that I'd actually start to worry if they stopped the predictions.

For myself, I look forward to waking up to a new day and a new year this morning. It's as full of risk and promise as every day, but for some reason, this year is already looking better than the past eight. And that's good enough for me.

(Posting will be light today. We're going to be like normal people and mostly take the day off.)

After polling our readers earlier this week, we've come up with the winner of the First Annual Golden Crookies Award for the Year's Biggest Wingnut. And it really wasn't a contest:

Sarah Palin: 5738 (38%)

Sean Hannity: 2762 (18%)

Michelle Bachmann: 1969 (13%)

Bill Kristol: 1535 (10%)

Rush Limbaugh: 1089 (7%)

Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher: 808 (5%)

Bill O'Reilly: 781 (5%)

Mike Huckabee: 237 (2%)

Lou Dobbs: 179 (1%)

Pastor John Hagee: 144 (1%)

In honor of Palin's stunning runaway victory, herein are some of her greatest hits:

Download | play   Download | play

Download | Play    Download | Play

Download | play   Download | play

Download | play   Download | play

I just hope I don't have to go back to Wasilla to give her the prize.

Here's another good award....

Vote for the Wank of the Year, 2008

With the election season---,wanking was at an all time high....
We have our own awards being voted on also....

"The Golden Crookies"

Who was the biggest wingnut of 2008?

Everybody's been compiling their Top 10 lists of 2008. We've decided to compile a list of the biggest right-wing nutcases of the year -- which, admittedly, could be a very long list indeed.

I consulted the C&L staff, and indeed there was not shortage of suggestions. The competition was fierce, but we finally pared it down to the list on the poll below.

Some absent names were especially notable -- George W. Bush and John Sydney McCain in particular. But the former just became increasingly irrelevant, and the latter was actually outdone by his surrounding cast of right-wing nutcases.

Vote today! We'll gather the data and announce the winner on New Year's Day.

More information on each of the contestants at the links below:

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Steve J. at Radamisto notices that even though Barack Obama hasn't even been sworn in yet, Sean Hannity is organizing the wingnuts already into a would-be force to attempt to stop him from enacting "radical" policies:

Since the election, Hannity has described his radio show as the outpost of "the conservative underground," as if a show that's legally on over 500 stations could be underground in any real sense of that word. There is little doubt that there are many conservatives who think America will become a radical country under the Democrats and last night I heard on Mike Gallagher's show of a group that is trying to organize these people - Grassfire. They ask people to "join the resistance" and sign a petition that opposes what they mistakenly think will happen if unopposed.

They hope to have 1,000,000 signatures on the petition by Inauguration Day and right now, they are quite a bit short of that goal ...

Hannity has been embarrassing himself regularly lately by promoting every conspiracy theory in sight about Obama. Expect the pace to pick up as the Inauguration approaches -- and really take off afterward.

Conservatives are expected to oppose Obama, naturally. But only wingnuts will believe every bit of garbage thrown at him and spin it into a massive belief system about the looming oppression of a socialist state, yadda yadda yadda. It probably would happen to any elected Democrat, but it will be even worse for Obama.

As Paul Krugman pointed out, if you're a right winger --no matter what crazy, f*&ked up thought you utter, it's A-OK.

Case in point is wingnut extraordinare Dennis Prager. Here's a sample:

The subject is one of the most common problems that besets marriages: the wife who is not in the mood and the consequently frustrated and hurt husband.

It gets more preposterous from there. In right-wing culture, it's always the ladies that are at fault.

This is a major reason many husbands clam up. A man whose wife frequently denies him sex will first be hurt, then sad, then angry, then quiet. And most men will never tell their wives why they have become quiet and distant. They are afraid to tell their wives. They are often made to feel ashamed of their male sexual nature, and they are humiliated (indeed emasculated) by feeling that they are reduced to having to beg for sex.

I think James Dobson has it wrong. It's right-wing freaks like Prager who want to destroy the institution of marriage. Yet this nut is a frequent guest on CNN. Why does he get the megaphone that he does?

But, to repeat the key point, rejection of sex should happen infrequently. And it should almost never be dependent on mood -- see Part II next week.

5. I know this and that's why I rarely say no to my husband.

This is a wise woman. She knows a sexually fulfilled husband is a happy husband. (At the same time, men need to recognize that complete sexual fulfillment is unattainable in this world.) And because a happy husband loves his wife more, this cycle of love produces a happy home.

Nice wife, good wife, fulfill me when I want so I am happy. WTF does any of this drivel mean? He makes Dr. Phil almost bearable.

Pandagon lets loose.

Last spring a southern Idaho right-wing talk-show host named Zeb Bell made some minor headlines by featuring a conversation on his daytime show in Twin Falls by referring to the "negroid black Barack Obama" and calling Obama's mother "trailer trash" with a fixation on black men. Bell, you may recall, ultimately refused to apologize, claiming the remarks all came from his guest, a far-right nativist well noted for his racial slurs named Frosty Woolridge.

More recently, Bell has been plunging even farther off the deep end, attacking gays and lesbians as the centerpiece of his defense of California's Prop 8, even going so far as to argue that "God's laws" trump the Constitution.

Most notably, he's being openly defiant about the bigoted nature of his broadcasts, going so far as to assemble his audience under the banner of "Bell's Bigots".

The fine folks at Mountain Goat Report and at The Political Game (with a hat tip to 43rd State Blues) have been tracking this disturbing trend for some months now, and as Bell has picked up his volume and gained traction in Idaho, they've assembled a Zeb Bell page with links to the wingnuttery that Bell is spreading apace.

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George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews.

- Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

Download | Play    Download | Play (h/t Heather)

You are reading the headline correctly. Bill O'Reilly really has no material to work with on his phony "War on Christmas" theme-based show, so he's resorted to just making sh&t up. F&F's Gretchen Carlson is all fired up too over the big Christmas crisis so far. The only incident that he's been really passionate about because -- there ain't nothin' to complain about anywhere else -- is in Washington state. David gives you the back story:

According to Bill O'Reilly, it's the fact that an atheist group was permitted to erect a holiday display alongside a Nativity scene at the state Capitol in Washington state...read on

What really got Gretchen was a possible exhibit for the great "Festivus" holiday from Seinfield being proposed too. Hey, she can take only so much.

Carlson: When they wanted to do Festivus, give me a break.

O'Reilly: This is a mocking of Gregoire...

Carlson: To me that was the final straw today because Bill, what is going to be next?

O'Reilly: What's going to be next is in our secular progressive society they are going to try and revoke the federal holiday. You wait and see. That's going to come.

Carlson: That's what I said. Jesus is taking a back seat.

They're going to say separation of church and state, you can't have a federal holiday based on religion. You wait and see, that's what's going to be next.

Hey, I like Christmas and all, but Bill is speaking in "baby talk" over this stuff. We're assuming that most of us have jobs next year, what a moronic man who nobody likes, not even his boss. America doesn't get enough time off as it is and even if people objected to a federally mandated law based on it, I doubt they mind getting the time off from work. Oh, and Bill: Merry Christmas.

Good night and good luck, Ari Fleischer.

Freedom’s Watch, the 501 (c4) organization heavily funded by Las Vegas Sands Corp. Chairman Sheldon Adelson and hyped as the conservative answer to MoveOn.org, is shutting its doors. Ed Patru, Vice President of Communications for Freedom’s Watch, said in an interview that the organization would be effectively ceasing its operations at the end of the year.

Freedom’s Watch launched in the summer of 2007 with a splash, launching a $15 million nationwide ad campaign supporting President Bush’s troop escalation in Iraq and announcing a staff roster that read like a who’s who of the Washington Republican establishment, including former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and Bradley Blakeman, a former deputy assistant to President Bush. Rumors circulated that the organization would spend as much as $200 million in the course of the 2008 election cycle...read on

With all your help, Blue America took them head on. Blue America vs Freedom's Watch

Chris Cilliza of the Washington Post wrote this today:

We don't want Karl Rove to pick off the good progressives who are already running in 2008, so we're putting robocalls into their districts to counter the deceptive ones created by Freedom's Watch," explained Jane Hamsher, the founder of Firedoglake and a member of Blue America.

John Amato, founder of Crooks and Liars, added: "[Freedom's Watch is] blaming Democrats for the outrageous gas prices we now see all across America, ... which is actually the product of almost eight years of Republican control."