from cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, who’s certainly qualified to serve in that role. In a long, thoughtful blog entry he reports on the barrage of nasty email he receives daily, hourly, from the hard-core right. He says, “…[it] makes you wonder, for the first time in your life, even including the years of Reagan and Bush the elder, if this country is actually, literally, genuinely headed for something more frightening than you’d ever thought possible.”

has compiled an interesting page called Right Wing Myths Exposed. The best part is about the “Liberal Media” myth: “For conservatives of every persuasion, it is a self-evident truth that the mass media are liberally biased. As a proud liberal myself, I wish it was true: where are those liberal TV channels?” Check out the map at the top too.

mentioned the Superbowl commercials in Scripting News today, and wondered aloud, “What’s coming next. A link between abortion and terrorism? A link between voting Democratic and terrorism? A link between being black or jewish and terrorism?”

I suggest that the link between abortion and terrorism has already been made, albeit with relative subtlety. Go watch it again. The very last frame of the second commercial features a young woman delivering one of the “reverse testimonials” that is at the heart of the piece. She says, “My life, my body,” followed by a voice-over (female) that says, “It’s not like I was hurting anyone else.”

If that isn’t a very thinly veiled anti-abortion message that more or less equates abortion with terrorism, I’ll eat my hat.

by Tom Tomorrow: “This isn’t just about bringing down skyscrapers and murdering civilians and wreaking havoc and discord–it’s about setting into motion a chain of events through which we end up doing irreperable [sic] damage to ourselves, to that part of our society which can only be destroyed from within, to the very ideals which define us.”

Bingo. And if the hyperbolic “anti-drug” ads aired last night during the Superbowl (#1, #2) are any indication, the White House (at least the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy) absolutely does not get this. Or, worse still, they do get it, but don’t mind.

: George W. in the Garden of Gethsemane. “Let me ask you this: If someone was setting a house on fire, and they called you to help them set it on fire, and you said no you wouldn’t help them — BUT then you also DIDN’T call 911 and inform the police that someone was going to burn down a house, do you think you would have committed a crime?”