Get on the phone ASAP. The vote has not happened and it looks like it won’t until next week. Why? Because we are bringing pressure to bear and the Democrats are having a very hard time keeping a majority on the legislation.

We absolutely cannot falter on this. We must keep up the continuous pressure headed into the weekend. See the list of names below and call, call, call.

We should not be bailing out European national banks. We are less than a dozen votes away from being able to kill this. Call these members of Congress ASAP.

RedState and Firedoglake, working together – total insanity.

We the undersigned believe that the National Republican Senatorial Committee should be committed to serving ALL the members of the Republican Party.

Additionally, the NRSC should be focused on defeating Democrats, not Republicans. Towards that end, we believe it was completely inappropriate for the NRSC to endorse a candidate in the Florida primary race.

Therefore, we request that both you and the NRSC alter your position on the Florida Senate race, maintain neutrality, and promise to spend no money directly or indirectly in that race.

Among the signatories: Tea Party leader Eric Odom, controversial “anti-jihadist” blogger Pamela Geller, frequent Blogginghead and TV pundit Matt Lewis, and RedState’s Erick Erickson, who has been blistering in his criticism of Republican moderates.

When I was in college, I studied Southern Long Fist Kung Fu for more than a year and my teacher told me something that I never forgot.

I’d like to think that the F. Scott Fitzgerald rip is intentional. Sadly, the rest of the column is a call for conservative bloggers to “do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber,” as if Palin and Wurzelbacher were shrinking violets who did not embrace their statuses as public figures.

- Tom Swan, who managed Ned Lamont’s 2006 Senate campaign.

- Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, who you used to see at every liberal event pushing for the impeachment of former President George W. Bush.

- Paul Hogarth of BeyondChron.

- Todd Beeton of MyDD.com.

- John Arovosis of AmericaBlog.com.

So some of the people you’d expect to join this, but not really a landslide of anti-Specter sentiment. I can think of dozens of prominent progressives who have not joined this particular cause.

Charles Johnson’s disenchantment with a movement he did much to create is more likely a function of his contrary nature than his active conscience, but it would be ungracious to pry overmuch. The sad truth is that the self-proclaimed anti-jihadists, as a group, have done a great deal to discredit themselves in the past decade.

One thing I left on the cutting room floor, but tried to imply with some context and references, was just how comfortable Johnson was back in 2004, 2005 and 2006 with the people he is now crusading against.

It made sense, and to an extent it was the function of the “everybody on board” mentality that gripped the political blogospheres before the collapse of the Bush presidency. But it’s striking reading Johnson’s old posts now. From November 9, 2004, reacting to the banning of far-right Dutch Belgian party Vlaams Blok:

While it’s hard to approve of every one of Vlaams Blok’s policies, there’s also no denying that this is very much a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups such as the openly radical, terror-supporting Arab-European League—because almost no one else opposes them.

From February 11, 2006:

Atlas Shrugs is a year old today! Happy blogoversary, Pamela.

From July 17, 2006:

Atlas Shrugs has great coverage and lots of photographs of the Stand With Israel Rally in New York City.

From November 18, 2007:

Tonight’s recommended book is Robert Spencer’s detailed, relentlessly factual comparison of Islam and Christianity, examining the history and the ideologies behind the question: Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t.

UPDATE: Johnson links, and points out one error (which I’ve corrected) while arguing that his friendly comments about some people he’s now shunned were “from a different time” and fairly innocuous. All the same, it’s interesting to read those old posts and get a sense of how much that side of the blogosphere has changed.

I wrote a book called ‘Religion of Peace’ — which [Little Green Footballs' Charles] Johnson wrote a favorable review of — and I looked, and didn’t find, Christian extremists who were trying to replace the Constitution with Biblical law. They’re a myth. They’re the Santa Claus of the left.

He did say this, but he added the caveat that there are Christian activists who want to institute Biblical law through legal means, and who are extreme, but not terrorists.

The people they invoke are the Christian reconstructionists like [R.J.] Rushdooney, but if you read them they’re open about their agenda. It’s not secret. And they say that they want to bring back Biblical law using Constitutional means.

I didn’t want to get into the weeds on this tangential issue, so I cut this, but it’s important to note that Spencer acknowledges the existence of these sorts of fringe Christian activists.

Charles Johnson (YouTube)

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jazz musician and Web designer Charles Johnson has devoted his blog, Little Green Footballs, to exposing Muslim extremism in and outside the United States. His targets have included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filmmaker Michael Moore, Reuters, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dan Rather, and the late pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie — who some LGF commenters (not Johnson) call “St. Pancake,” a tribute to the Israeli steamroller that killed her. LGF helped write the lexicon of the self-styled “anti-Jihadist” blogosphere — from “moonbat” (”an unthinking or insane leftist”) to “anti-idiotarian” (”anyone who grasps the significance of and does his or her best to combat the post-9/11 political alliance between the ‘Old Left’ and militant Islam”).

Image by: Matt Mahurin

But in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, LGF has become better known for the various fights it picks with many on the right — including conservative bloggers, critics of Islamic extremism, and critics of Islam in general who used to be Johnson’s fellow travelers.

Johnson has blasted Fox News host Glenn Beck, promoting a video from a Beck-inspired party that shows conservatives ranting about evolution and arguing that “this turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP.” In response to the news that the Department of Homeland Security was watching for increased right-wing extremism — something that most of the conservative blogosphere, like most Republicans, responded to with angry ridicule — Johnson pointed to the recent arrests of right-wing terrorists and criticized bloggers for buying into “distorted claims” about the DHS report. When Obama genuflected before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Johnson found archival video of President Bush bowing to take a medal from the King and urged conservatives to turn down their “hyperventilating nonsense.”

This has the blogger’s peers asking themselves the same question, over and over: What the heck happened to Charles Johnson?

“I don’t think I’ve changed,” Johnson said. “I’ve always been pretty independent. This is something I’ve really tried to put out there on my blog. I don’t consider myself right-wing.”

It sounds strange coming from a blogger who played an underrated role in forcing CBS News to back down from its 2004 story on President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service, and whose first reaction to Obama’s election in November — after a quick post congratulating him — was to note that the Muslim Brotherhood, “the world’s largest jihadist organization,” was pleased.

Johnson supported Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, but he spent some of the campaign attacking anti-Obama conspiracy theorists, and he rejected the idea   designs were malicious, rather than merely naive. Johnson worries, in conversation and on his blog, that his old allies have been duped by far-right European political parties and have bought into wild attacks on the president that discredit their own causes.

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watched some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

Johnson’s disgust with the terrorism-focused conservative blogosphere has had a traumatic effect on a dogged and dogmatic community of bloggers and scholars. When Johnson began blogging about Islam and terrorism after 9/11, he inspired untold other supporters of an aggressive war on terror to start their own Websites, link up, and push back against “Dhimmitude” — organizations and foreign policy decision makers that were “soft” on terrorism. Now, some of his followers have started blogs that track Johnson’s “madness,” while a video that portrays Johnson as Adolf Hitler going mad in his bunker makes the rounds.

“He’s the reason I started blogging,” said Atlas Shrugs editor Pamela Geller, a New Yorker who says she was “mugged by Sept. 11″ and started reading LGF for news and fellowship. “I wrote birthday messages to him. I respected and admired him.”

Robert Spencer, the director of JihadWatch and the author of the bestselling, “Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam,” had an established career as a critic of militant Islam before he met Johnson. “But right after 9/11, he was the only one out there reporting on this,” Spencer said. “He built my Website. I learned how to blog from reading his stuff.”

Johnson has turned hard against Spencer and Geller, attacking the former for joining a “genocidal Facebook group,” while referring to the latter as a “shrieking lunatic,” and labeling both of them “hatebloggers.” Johnson now points to Geller’s posts about Barack Obama’s heritage and her quest to fund a headstone for the victim of a Muslim honor killing as proof that “the woman is deranged.” Other bloggers in the movement have been purged from Johnson’s blogroll or pilloried on the site, never to be mentioned again. The most successful sites that arose in LGF’s wake, including Gateway Pundit, Gates of Vienna, and Brussels Journal, are also on the outs.

While Johnson’s own blog was a launchpad for the movement and his comment sections have often been a place for anti-Muslim and anti-liberal rage — one Web quiz lets users guess whether a quote comes from “Little Green Footballs or Late German Fascists” — Johnson believes that LGF is now policed for fringe activity. “A lot of the people most responsible for causing our bad reputation are now gone,” he said. “I wrote all the backend software, and I have ways of cleaning up the site.”

Johnson’s former allies can pinpoint the month, if not the moment, when he started to turn on them. In October 2007, some of the leading terrorism-focused conservative bloggers flew to Belgium for a Counterjihad Summit sponsored in part by the Center for Vigilant Freedom (now the International Civil Liberties Alliance), an outgrowth of the LGF-inspired blog Gates of Vienna.

“It was the best conference I ever went to,” remembered Geller. But the summit included members of Vlaams Belang, a controversial Belgian political party that criticizes Islam and Shariah law, and had been attacked within the Netherlands for its connections to extremism and racism. Johnson went to work exposing this, and the attendees reeled from the negative attention.

“He chose to portray the Brussels Conference as evil and he unconscionably slandered the people who attended,” said Dymphna, one of the editors of Gates of Vienna. Baron Bodissey, the other site editor (both editors use pen names), worries that Johnson “did serious damage to the American blogosphere’s view of European nationalists who oppose the EU, even those who have no anti-Semitic tendencies.”

“Not only that,” said Bodissey, “he made it harder for certain American anti-jihad groups to raise funds if they failed to repudiate his designated ‘fascist-enablers’ like us.”

Johnson is unapologetic about his actions. While he was attacking the attendees of the Counterjihad Summit, he was also blasting Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) for taking money from, and being photographed with, the owner of the extremist Web site Stormfront.org.

“Some people at that summit in Belgium were not people we should have been associated with,” Johnson said, pointing out that since 2007 the terrorism-focused conservative bloggers have become supporters of Dutch politician Geert Wilders , who wants to outlaw Islam in his country. “Some of these people outright want to ban Islam from the United States, which I think is crazy, completely nuts. That’s not something we do in this country. These people will outright defend banning the Koran or deporting Muslims. That’s popular with the Geller/Spencer crowd.”

When they talk about Johnson today, the rest of the terrorism-focused bloggers alternate between anger and regret. He has smeared them, they say, and according to Dymphna he’s “destroyed a lot of networking that was beginning to emerge” between American and European critics of Islamic extremism. “He’s really gone off the deep end,” Geller said, pointing to Johnson’s more and more frequent criticisms of creationists, such as the attack on the anti-evolution, Glenn Beck-inspired event, which made the host angry enough to lash out at LGF on his show. “He’s a leftist blogger now.”

Johnson brushes that criticism aside. “A lot of people think I discovered this creationism thing overnight,” he said, “but that’s not true. I was posting about this before 9/11. After 9/11 I had other things on my mind. And now I’ve come back to it.” But Spencer accuses Johnson of losing sight of the threat of extremist Islam by obsessing over the American religious right and equating the two faiths.

“There is no global movement of Christians trying to subjugate the world,” Spencer said. “There is such a movement on the extreme of Islam. I wrote a book called ‘Religion of Peace’ — which Johnson wrote a favorable review of — and I looked, and didn’t find, Christian extremists who were trying to replace the Constitution with Biblical law. They’re a myth. They’re the Santa Claus of the left.”

Some of Johnson’s former allies experienced a decrease in traffic numbers when he started attacking them, but they all now feel they’ve recovered from the break. “LGF tried to destroy my reputation so I wouldn’t have the access I have to my sources in law enforcement and academia,” said Spencer, “but that hasn’t happened.”

Geller has rebounded with increased prominence — she was a guest on the Fox News show “Red Eye” last week — and she said she has survived the “besmirching” of her reputation and she now fills the information-spreading role that Johnson once did. “I get my stuff from people on the inside,” she said, “from people in Europe. I field 800-900 emails a day. We all depend on our readers for these tips. That’s where Charles was getting his stuff. And now he’s cracked and he’s not getting that anymore.”

Johnson brushes off that kind of criticism. LGF is his site, and if it has to name names and shame the people who are debasing the movement against extremist Islam, he’ll do it. “I’ve definitely seen an uptick in craziness since the election,” he sighs. “Well, I don’t know if Geller got crazier. She always was nuts.”

“Civil liberties advocates are accusing the Obama administration of forsaking campaign rhetoric and adopting the same expansive arguments that his predecessor used to cloak some of the most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs of the Bush White House,” Johnson wrote.

No kidding.

While The Post has mentioned some of these issues in previous stories, it hasn’t given the Obama administration’s surprising position on “state secrets”  nearly the sort of sustained attention that it deserves.  The Obama administration’s use of secrecy privileges to protect the previous administration’s lawbreaking has been going on for months, as I’ve been writing about here, and other legal bloggers, such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon, have been extensively reporting on as well.

Most recently, in the al-Haramain case, in which an Islamic charity sued the government for wiretapping the group and its lawyers without a warrant, the Obama administration told a federal district court that it simply did not have the authority to do what the court ordered (turn over critical documents that would allow the suit to go forward) and hence, it was not going to comply. What’s more, the new, open, free information-loving administration basically threatened to send in the federal marshals to seize from the judge’s files the offending “secret” documents at issue in the case, if he planned to turn them over to al-Haramain’s lawyers. It didn’t matter that the organization’s lawyers had already seen them, and knew exactly what they revealed: that the Bush administration had been secretly wiretapping the Islamic charity and its attorneys, without a warrant, in violation of federal law.

This was the second major Obama Justice Department showdown over the “state secrets” privilege (explained here). The first, which TWI was first to write about, was in the case of Binyam Mohamed and other torture victims suing Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that assisted the CIA in transporting the men to be tortured. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the men have pressed their claims against the company in part to avoid the broad range of immunities government officials usually claim — only to be thwarted by the Bush administration’s assertion that the “state secrets” privilege requires its dismissal.  Incredibly – even to the judges, it seemed — the Obama administration has continued to maintain that position.

In response, last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn.) introduced a bill that would require judges to look at the classified evidence when the government makes the state secrets claim, rather than blindly accept the government’s claims about the sensitivity of the materials.

Now that the mainstream media is finally taking a serious look at this — as I’ve noted before, some in the press seem to have been willfully avoiding some of these troubling Obama administration positions — that legislation might have a chance.

Please note President Obama’s comments at today’s media avail that he is not spending much time “worrying about that.”

The sinking Dow Jones Industrial Average is emerging as an attack line for Republicans—on his radio show today, Rush Limbaugh claimed that “capital is on strike” against the president—but there’s some message muddle about when, exactly, Obama started wrecking everything.

Jeff Emanuel of RedState.com:

Since the Democrats took over Congress in January 2007, the Dow has lost 46% of its value — 5,699.86 points — with 1,452.38 of that decline coming in the mere month and a half since President Obama’s inauguration.

Sean Hannity on Fox News last night:

If we go back to May 6th when it was apparent that he was going to probably be the Democratic nominee the stock market was over 13000, and if we go to October just before the election, the polls show that he had a pretty commanding lead over John McCain, the stock market was, what, around the 11000 plus mark.

Michelle Malkin:

On Nov. 4, after Barack Obama clinched the White House, the market closed at 9,625.28.

So when was it?

Blogger Michelle Malkin, in a story on the conservative Web site TownHall.com on Wednesday, said that if Hughes “had more time, she probably would have remembered to ask Obama to fill up her gas tank, too.”

“The soul-fixer dutifully asked her name, gave her a hug and ordered his staff to meet with her. Supporters cried, ‘Amen!’ and ‘Yes!’ ” she added.

One reader questioned Hughes’ motives and asked how the homeless woman got to the rally at all.

“How does a 61-year-old homeless woman who’s living in a pickup truck with her son JUST HAPPEN to get a ticket so she can VERY PUBLICALLY ask Prez. Obama for a HOUSE? Anyone? Who pushes her up on stage? She’s right at the front of the crowd. Did she just happen to get a seat there?” asked reader Erik E.

Malkin’s got pull in the conservative blogosphere, but it might have been worth mentioning that the last time she doubted a human interest story that reflected poorly on Republicans, it ended with her botching facts and snooping outside a Maryland family’s home to “confirm” them. (She was slightly more credulous about Joe the Plumber.) Why cite her on this? She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.