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They don’t like the truth, so they summarily dismiss it,” he says. “They say it’s a government takeover of health care — a big lie. Just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually people believe it. Like ‘blood libel,’’’ he said, pounding his fist on the dais. “That’s the same kind of thing. The Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it and you had the Holocaust. You tell a lie over and over again. And we’ve heard it on this floor — ‘government...

ABC News Jonathan Karl reports: The newfound civility didn’t last long. Political rhetoric in Congress doesn’t get much nastier than the words of one House Democrat during the debate on repealing the health care law. In an extraordinary outburst on the House floor, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) invoked the Holocaust to attack Republicans on health care and compared rhetoric on the issue to the work of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. “They say it's a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels," Cohen said. "You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie,...

ABC News has learned that Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has died. On Friday, Holbrooke was rushed to the hospital with a torn aorta. He went through more than 20 hours of surgery. Earlier this evening, speaking at the US State Department, President Obama sang Holbrooke's praises and called him "a tough son of a gun." Holbrooke, 69, was a former ambassador to the United Nations and served as chief negotiator at the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. The New Yorker's George Packer wrote a nice story about Holbrooke last year,...

Palin needs a history lessonRICHARD COHEN Tuesday, November 23, 2010 When I was 11, my father thought it was time to show my sister and me the nation's capital. **SNIP** It's appalling that Palin and too many others fail to understand that fact - indeed so many facts of American history. They don't offer the slightest hint that they can appreciate the history of the Obama family and that in Michelle's case, her ancestors were slaves - Jim Robinson of South Carolina, her paternal great-great grandfather, being one. Even after they were freed they were consigned to peonage, second-class citizens,...

Steve Cohen, who greeted voters at a Democratic event several blocks away in Midtown, said that he had in fact been a part of historic bills to give people tax breaks, not tax hikes. "We voted on the largest tax breaks in United States history in the 111th Congress. In fact, the stimulus bill was 40 percent tax breaks. There have been more tax breaks for 95 percent of the citizens of the middle class," Cohen said. Cohen is not knocking on doors this weekend, but is still passing out his signature buttons that he said he likes to collect....

oing into the 2010 election cycle, conventional political wisdom held that U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, the incumbent 9th Congressional District representative from Memphis, would face his toughest test in the Democratic primary before cruising to victory in November. After all, it was former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton challenging Cohen in the primary, and the general election would likely pit him against a Republican candidate embracing tea-party philosophy in a district where 77 percent of the voters went for President Barack Obama in 2008. But that general-election opponent, a rare African-American Republican candidate named Charlotte Bergmann, appears to be galvanizing more...

“Hello, my name is Eco Nomic Illiterate, and I’m voting for Scott Lee Cohen.” Sorry if that seems cruel, but there are some commercials in the current cycle that are really bothering me, and they exemplify a much larger issue: the problem of economic illiteracy across broad swaths of the electorate. For most of our nation’s history, there was general uniformity in the understanding of what created jobs and wealth. The Founding Fathers – Republican and Federalist alike – understood that a small government was good for the economy, and a large government was not. They differed a bit on...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - For someone who her incumbent opponent has dismissed as a "fringe candidate", 9th District Republican congressional challenger, Charlotte Bergmann, stridently sends a "mainstream message"- granted with a conservative bent. “Success comes with people voting to insure the government stays out of the business of people who are trying to grow their businesses,” said Bergman. “I don't think of her as a maverick in the sense of being a maverick in ideas. But, I know one thing. Her ideas will be for the people. All the people,” said John Willingham, former Shelby County Commissioner. If the variety of...

Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. Where to start with the doomed campaign of Republican Tea Party-backed Charlotte Bergmann, who is challenging incumbent U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen for the Ninth District Congressional seat? Let's start with her campaign signs -- symbols of a political novice and her delusions.

Almost like an apparition, Jimmy Carter stalks Barack Obama. The former president has published yet another book, his 25th, which has been greeted with some scorn and plenty of ridicule. Garry Wills, in the reliably liberal New York Review of Books, writes that "Carter is a better man than his worst enemy would portray him as. And his worst enemy, it turns out is himself." To which a chorus of critics would quickly add, "Not as long as I'm around." Those critics are having a very good time with Carter's latest book, "White House Diary." It turns out that Carter...

WASHINGTON - Former Tennessee Gov. Winfield Dunn will be in Memphis Oct. 9 for a fundraiser breakfast for 9th Congressional District Republican candidate Charlotte Bergmann, he confirmed this afternoon. "She is our nominee and from all that I've been told she's a fine person with excellent credentials, and it's on that basis I agreed to come down and lend what influence I might to her efforts," Dunn said. "She's someone I look forward to meeting." Bergman is running against Democratic incumbent Steve Cohen.

Start unloading on the reporter!Jeff Beimfohr's email JBeimfohr@abc24.com

Yet, even as Steve Cohen's 9th Congressional District opponent prepares a campaign that may include a billboard proclaiming "Charlotte Bergmann can whip Steve Cohen," Memphis' most popular elected Democratic legislator is indicating he will not mount a large campaign aimed at motivating Democratic voters. Snip Cohen wasn't even sure how much effort he would put into a get-out-the-vote operation for his Democratic base.

"Really, it's not him, it's you."Journolist may be gone but the brain-dead mantra generating machine continues its uncritical support of The Lightbringer. Not only do six out of 10 voters "lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country," according to a Post-ABC News poll, but Barack Obama does not even get credit for the right decisions he's made. The bank bailout averted a financial crackup and the stimulus package pulled the economy back from the abyss. Along with reform of the financial industry and health care, these are considerable achievements. Only the voters disagree. Stupid...

Cohen responded to a billboard that says Republican challenger Charlotte Bergmann will "whip" Herenton. "She's first got to win her primary," Cohen said, "and she's got two opponents." The winner of the Republican primary goes up against the Democratic primary winner in November. Cohen said it was a waste of campaign money to put up such a billboard without knowing who Bergmann will be up against until the primary election on August 5.

NEW YORK--Answering a question from a reader as to whether a teacher should post a cartoon on his door that disparages President Obama as a socialist, New York Times columnist Randy Cohen writes: [W]hile this teacher does not transgress ethically, he does seem to fall short intellectually, offering not deft political analysis but slogans and clichés... Incidentally...how does it defame a person to call him a “socialist” (outside of nutty far-right circles) — a set of ideas many advanced Western democracies find congenial, what with the accessible health-care, affordable higher education and good public transportation? Cohen, who writes the Times'...

http://freedomisx.blogspot.com/2010/06/press-release-from-desk-of-sist-ceo.html

Chicago - Scott Lee Cohen announced Monday that he plans to run for governor as an independent. He said he was running because he was "tired of waste and mismanagement." Cohen was pressured to drop out of the race for lieutenant governor after embarassing details surfaced about his personal life, including allegations of abuse from his wife and ex-girlfriend and overdue child support. "I am not perfect, but I am honest," Cohen said. "And Illinois needs more honesty than perfection." A spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan says Cohen notified party leaders of his plans to run for governor in...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Capitol Police are investigating an E-mailed threat to U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen's campaign committee, and the FBI in Memphis is aware of the threat and is taking it seriously, spokesmen for both agencies said today. Someone with a Yahoo.com address sent the message to a Cohen for Congress website saying, "If our tea parties had hoods, we would burn your ass on a cross on the White House front lawn." The reference to hoods followed a Cohen interview last week in which he described TEA Party activists using racial epithets "without robes and hoods" of the...

WASHINGTON - A year ago, an activist group from the Seattle area gave Howard Dean (news - web sites) a thin, golden statue of a backbone. The Oscar-like award honored the former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont governor for standing up against the Iraq (news - web sites) war and other Bush administration policies. Now, as Dean settles into his new role as head of the Democratic Party, that golden spine has come to represent, for many liberal Democrats, Dean's potential to develop a tougher, take-no-prisoners attitude among the party faithful. "There's no gut-check required for Dean. Dean just needs...