Right wing madness taken to its sickest extreme--domestic division

It is an ugly truth that the right wing contains some of the worst human beings on the planet. Aside from all the evidence that conservatives don't care about the welfare of others, there are little jolts of sickness from them that make it to the public eye. For example, the Warren Pennsylvania Times-Observer published a personal ad today that carries an incendiary message all too common to those demented jackasses:

For those of you unaware, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy are the 4 Presidents of the US who have been assassinated. Nicely done, you perverted, twisted loser. May your wish be granted upon your head instead.

NPR: Not what you think it is

For decades, NPR has represented a supposedly liberal stance in their news reportage, and I have many liberal/progressive friends that listen to, and trust, it as the best source for news on the dial. Any look at their guest lists, however, let alone what those people are saying, will serve as a wake-up call belying that tradition and that reputation. Yesterday we heard yet more evidence of their capitulation to the forces of authoritarian right wing nuttery, during All Things Considered.
Host Alix Spiegel called upon Bryce Lefever to explain why he says the US torture of detainees is a good thing, and Lefever went even further--he said that the military psychologists employed to torture were patriots deserving praise. "I think the media ought to give us a big ol' thank you for our efforts on behalf of America," Lefever says. "There should be some recognition of the effort — the really extreme effort — that we've gone through to help."
That there are some freaks out there that believe this is not news, really. Republicans have been lauding torture in public for years now, from Smirky on down to Joe the Plumber. So why exactly would NPR sanction an interview like this one, given their reputation? The only answer I can come up with is that they are dropping even the pretense of being an objective news organization (which is itself a liberal construct) in favor of propagating right wing views at public expense. At no point during the interview, apparently, did Spiegel challenge or question Lefever's points, or qualifications, or even engage in any kind of dialogue whatsoever. This kind of stenography is the hallmark of right wing media as envisioned by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes when they launched Fox News Channel, initiating the final assault on objective news reportage.
NPR still contains wonderful niche programming--I love "Car Talk" and "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"--and I'm willing to entertain the idea that there are some personalities on NPR that haven't sold out completely, but I'm afraid anyone listening to NPR for "the news" is, and has been for awhile now, deceived into thinking that they are well-informed from a centrist, much less a liberal, perspective. That the people hosting and guesting on most of the news shows seem sane and measured in tone merely reinforces what nickname watchful leftists and progressives use for it: Nice Polite Republicans.

And you thought Arlen Specter was just a selfish pol looking for the easiest way to keep his seat . . .

Well, he is, actually. But even so, on Face the Nation yesterday, he claimed "Jack Kemp would be alive today" had this country's federal government followed up on Richard Nixon's 1970 declaration of a "war on cancer". Seeing as how for most of those 38 years (26 of them, to be precise) Republicans were in charge of the White House--and even when Clinton was President, Republicans controlled Congress for 6 years--Specter's lamentation is a notable condemnation of his former party's venal lack of concern for our citizenry.
Way to go, Arlen?
Yikes!