Stephen Colbert testified before Congress today. In character:

I feel like we’ve crossed some sort of boundary here, and I’m not sure I’m completely happy about it. But then, I kind of am (completely happy about it).

I especially liked the way the guy in the gallery just left of Colbert’s head never cracked a smile. I’m curious what that guy thinks about what he just saw.

Colbert got a little more serious in response to questions. (Interesting how for him, “getting more serious” means “smiles and loosens up”, since his character is normally so bombastic.) Here he is giving his take as a committed Christian (which I understand the real Colbert actually is) on why he chose to speak out on this issue in particular:

If you’re the kind of high school science teacher who thinks Biblical versions of our origins are appropriate for inclusion in the curriculum, Dale McGowan probably is not the parent whose kid you want in your class: Science, interrupted.

Connor (15) came home on the second day of school and collapsed on the sofa with a defeated look I’ve come to recognize.

“Uh…good day?”

“No.” He looked up at me. “Science.”

There’s a whole series of posts, which I’m actually finding really interesting. I’m looking forward to hearing how it ends.

I think he attributes too much influence to the right-wing noise machine in terms of eroding respect for institutions generally, but I liked the conclusion of this piece by David Roberts: The right’s climate denialism is part of something much larger.

Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world’s scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world’s governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives, the ones who found death panels in the healthcare bill.

It’s a species of theater, repeated so often people have become inured, but if you take it seriously it’s an extraordinary charge. For one thing, if it’s true that the world’s scientists are capable of deception and collusion on this scale, a lot more than climate change is in doubt. These same institutions have told us what we know about health and disease, species and ecosystems, energy and biochemistry. If they are corrupt, we have to consider whether any of the knowledge they’ve generated is trustworthy. We could be operating our medical facilities, economies, and technologies on faulty theories. We might not know anything! Here we are hip-deep in postmodernism and it came from the right, not the left academics they hate.

Isn’t local politics fun? Bessemer mayoral candidate Dorothy Davidson claims Nick Saban endorsement, passing out fliers with altered photo.

See also the update, in which Davidson’s campaign manager takes the blame: Bessemer mayoral candidate’s campaign manager admits he lied about endorsement from Alabama Coach Nick Saban.

Meg Whitman apparently thinks it’s fine to just make stuff up, and to do so in situations in which it’s trivial to call her on it. For example, she used a fake Fail Blog screenshot in this recent ad:

Except the operators of Fail Blog say the image was a fake created by the Whitman campaign; they never ran such an item: Honesty Fail.

This isn’t a huge transgression, obviously. But in the context of some of her other comments (challenging reporters to research her voter registration record, when she actually hadn’t been registered; asserting that the incident in which she shoved an employee at eBay was a verbal dispute), it starts to look like a pattern.

I liked these commentaries on the recent NYT/CBS poll of tea party activists. From Kevin Drum: Birchers yesterday, tea partiers today. And from Nate Silver: Tea party bears Beck’s imprint.

Ben Craw at the Huffington Post has some fun video of Bill 0’Reilly taking Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to task for telling a town hall audience that they shouldn’t believe everything they hear on Fox News. In particular, Coburn told the town hall they shouldn’t believe it when Fox tells them that Obama wants to put them in jail for failing to buy health insurance. “We researched to find out if anybody on Fox News had ever said you’re going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance,” said O’Reilly. “Nobody’s ever said it.”

I bet you know where this is going. Roll the tape!

Keeping the ball rolling, here’s Stephen Colbert’s interview with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange:

Here’s a fun clip from Rachel Maddow that focuses on how the “pimpgate” ACORN story and the “climategate” hacked-email stories were basically made-up controversies:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I normally don’t agree with much (okay, anything) David Frum has to say. But this sounds like a pretty credible take on the relationship between Tea Party-era conservatism, right-wing talk radio, and Republicans in Washington: Waterloo.

When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

Fifty years ago, the American Law Institute provided the legal framework that underlies this country’s implementation of the death penalty. Now, the Institute has withdrawn its support from that framework. Michael Traynor, former president of the Institute, had a nice op-ed piece in the LA Times today explaining why the Institute took that action: The death penalty — it’s unworkable.

In the decade after the institute published its law, which was part of a comprehensive model penal code, the statute became the prototype for death penalty laws across the United States. Some parts of the model — such as the categorical exclusion of the death penalty for crimes other than murder and for people of limited mental abilities — withstood the test of time. But the core of the statute, which created a list of factors to guide judges and jurors deciding when to sentence someone to death, has proved unworkable and fostered confusion and injustice.

Now, after searching analysis by our country’s top legal minds, the institute has concluded that the system it created does not work and cannot be fixed. It concluded that we cannot devise a death penalty system that will ensure fairness in process or outcome, or even that innocent people will not be executed.

The use of future tense (“or even that innocent people will not be executed”) is a delicate way around the obvious truth: Innocent people have been executed. Statistically, it’s a near-certainty.

I am speaking for myself, not as a representative of the institute, but I can say with certainty that the institute did not reach these conclusions lightly. It commissioned a special committee and a scholarly study, heard various viewpoints and debated the issues extensively. A strong consensus emerged that capital punishment in this country is riddled with pervasive problems.

[snip]

These problems are entrenched in the death penalty system, both in California and nationwide. The cumulative result: Executions remain as random as lightning strikes, or more so, and that is the very problem the institute’s model statute intended to fix. In addition, across the country, at least 139 individuals have been released from death row after establishing their innocence.

If a similar degree of effort had been devoted to establishing the innocence of those already executed, I have no doubt we’d have dozens of examples of that, too.

Lawrence Lessig is a very smart cookie. And he is not happy: How to get our democracy back.

Maybe this was his plan all along. It was not what he said. And by ignoring what he promised, and by doing what he attacked (“too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in”), Obama will leave the presidency, whether in 2013 or 2017, with Washington essentially intact and the movement he inspired betrayed.

Clearly, I haven’t been doing enough to stir the pot of partisan name-calling lately. So here you go: The 2010 Comprehensive Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll of Self-Identified Republicans.

Knock yourselves (or more likely, each other) out.

Kevin Drum has the following blunt advice on what should happen next with healthcare reform: Time to Grow a Pair.

This really is a defining moment for both Obama and the Democratic Party more broadly. So far both have failed miserably: the party is in a state of meltdown, surrendering completely to a resurgent Republican narrative, refusing to fight for anything it believes in, and caving in to a truly toxic combination of electoral fear and narrow interest group parochialism. For his part, Obama seems either unable or unwilling to rally his troops. I’m not sure which. But the American public really needs to hear some conviction from him, and so far they haven’t. He’s remained aloof from the healthcare upheaval, pivoted on financial regulation in a way that looks driven more by politics than by core beliefs, and has just generally sounded more chastened than reinvigorated.

This really needs to turn around fast. Another week like this — hell, another day or two like this — and we might as well start measuring the Oval Office drapes for the upcoming Cheney/Palin administration. It’s time for everyone to take a deep breath and grow a pair. Today would be a good time to start.

I happen to think Drum is exactly right. It’s not clear from this excerpt, but what he (and a lot of other smart people) are calling for is for the Democrats in the House to just pass the Senate version of healthcare reform, to avoid sending it back to the Senate where a 41-vote Republican minority could kill it procedurally.

I’m really not sure what’s going to happen. I think Obama means well, and has the ability to make (some) things happen. But I don’t know if that’s enough to turn things around in the face of the demonstrable collective cravenness of the House Democratic caucus.

Update: The same message, in video form, with beer and bikinis. Now how much would you pay?

Jay Rosen thinks the Sunday politics shows on TV could be improved: My Simple Fix for the Messed Up Sunday Shows:

The beauty of this idea is that it turns the biggest weakness of political television–the fact that time is expensive, and so complicated distortions, or simple distortions about complicated matters, are rational tactics for advantage-seeking pols–into a kind of strength.  The format beckons them to evade, deny, elide, demagogue and confuse…. but then they pay for it later if they give into temptation and make that choice.  So imagine the midweek fact check from last week as a short segment wrapping up the show the following week. Now you have an incentive system that’s at least pointed in the right direction.

This assumes, of course, that the Sunday chat shows are interested in fostering truth for its own sake. I get the feeling that news divisions at the networks have been moving in a different direction for a while now. But maybe calling people on their B.S. would be good for some ratings?

I actually don’t think more than a handful of people actually watch those shows. But since that handful includes lots of bloggers and politicians, maybe putting Rosen’s truth incentive in place would still have some sort of impact, at least among bloggers and/or politicians?

From White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer: The Same Old Washington Blame Game.

To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.

Srsly.

I don’t want to excerpt it, because the whole thing is too awesome. From Bruce Schneier: Is aviation security mostly for show?

Yeah, I haven’t talked much about the healthcare bill. I’ve been following some of the coverage, but it’s hard for me to get excited about this particular sausage being made.

Here’s one detail that was amusing, at least, with a question that I think random outside observers can interestingly weigh in on. From C-SPAN, via ThinkProgress, there was this video you probably saw (if you’ve been processing every tidbit):

So, the actually interesting question is, is that caller for real? Or was it a joke? Josh Marshall reposted an excerpt from an email that makes a pretty good case that it’s fake: Spoof or #prayerfail?. I’m curious what y’all think.

Most politics is lame, I’ll grant you. But this speech is a good example of why it’s still worth having elected representatives yack at each other in a fancy room with wood paneling and studded leather upholstery:

The part they aired on TV was pretty good, but I really liked the Internet-only portion of the Lou Dobbs interview on The Daily Show. It pains me to say it, but I don’t think Jon scored any better than a draw on this one. But regardless of winners and losers, there were some real nice moments.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3: