Weekend Update - November 1st

• Someone shot at Lou Dobbs and missed? After CNN host Lou Dobbs stated this past Monday on his radio show that “my wife has now been and I have been shot at,” right-wing pundits and nativist groups are rallying to his cause. But statements by New Jersey state police are putting Dobbs' claim that he and his wife had been shot at into question.


• The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true. Frank Rich in the NYT.


• Sean Hannity and Michele Bachmann recently did their best to disprove the theory that FOX news is an arm of the Republican Party. And failed laughably.


• Former Death Star VP Darth Cheney has been involved in interviews with the FBI concerning the Plame leak. And guess what, he just can't remember anything. Here's a non-comprehensive list of 22 things Dick Cheney claimed he couldn't recall about the Plame case, in the order they appear in the FBI's notes. From Mother Jones.


• It's true. My guess is that many clumsily educated Americans have been fully expecting some sort of wacky Hollywood-style apocalypse scenario as a result of all those dire prognostications, and are now feeling a little ripped off. "Where is my wrathful hurricane?" they demand in response to all the dire-but-boring scientific info about, say, melting ice caps and severe weather conditions in places most of them don't actually live. "Where are the screaming frogs? Where is the tidal wave crashing over the Himalayas with John Cusack yelling in panic? I still have to wear a jacket in December! Global warming, my meat-loving American ass!" Mark Morford in Part 2 of "10 Amazing Truths You Already Suspected."