Over at DailyKOS is a long and detailed and well linked diary about the Republican media filter machine, and how it misinforms the public, and how it keeps facts from the public.

Those Republicans who seek out a more complete set of facts are not fooled by the Republican media machine - they are entertained by it, as I am entertained by Buzzflash.com.

But what about those millions of rabid right-wing media followers who drink the koolaid and cannot or will not take the time to discover more facts for themselves? They seem to live in an alternative universe of belief about the state of things in the USA.

That’s not good for our future. It would be nice if the spinwits would take Jon Stewart’s advice and “stop hurting us.”

Another aspect of the alternative universe of Republican politics is the Kansas Monkey Trial. Look around in Science vs. Religion, or in Theocracy, for more on that.

Daily Kos :: Glitch in the Republican Matrix
FOX News is a filter, Limbaugh is a filter, the thousands of extreme religious right radio talk show hosts scattered across the country are a filter. (Blogs too, on both sides are a filter, as Thune and “those helping with his campaign” obviously realized.) And while many newspapers produce mountains of damning evidence against the White House and Republicans in Congress, it is usually almost all for naught - these filters will make sure that this evidence never reaches the eyes or ears of the greater public.

Contemplating this is slightly terrifying for me, largely because it seems like such a massive, entrenched infrastructure that it would take decades to deconstruct even if we discovered how to do so. And day by day, this insulation of much of the public from facts essential to making an informed choice at the ballot box seems to be cleaving off vast sections fof the country into an entirely alternate universe.

I noticed this release Friday from Regnery Publishing…

Washington Post, May 12, 2005: “The Constitution specifies that Congress will set the jurisdiction and budgets of the courts, and Republican lawmakers began agitating to exercise that power after Schiavo’s death. DeLay drew wide attention to the issue by declaring that the judges involved in that case would have to ‘answer for their behavior.’ As a guide to his views on the subject, DeLay has been urging reporters to read Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America, by Mark R. Levin.”

Yesterday, NewsMax - one of the original backers of the book - picked up the release and ran with it. For those not intimately familiar with this book, this was a review by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate…

If a book lands on the best-seller list and nobody hears it, did it really happen? Mark R. Levin’s Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America was ranked eighth on the New York Times list this week; it’s been on that list for six weeks now, and seems to be leaping off the bookshelves, despite the fact that it concerns constitutional law and the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet it has been reviewed virtually no place and written up by almost no one. True, Charles Lane did a piece about it in the Washington Post a few days ago; he noted that absolutely nobody who writes, talks, or thinks about the high court has even read it. It’s selling, it seems, almost entirely due to endorsements by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News.

As it happens, Lithwick published that review the day after Tom DeLay started threatening judges, and obviously appropriately in hindsight, drew the connection. In our own universe, it is difficult to tell who should be hurt more by the link - DeLay or the author. In the alternate universe of the Republican filter, a high-profile Republican leader has finally jumped on the bandwagon for one of the greatest books on the judiciary ever written by the perhaps the best Constitutional scholar in the country. Just ask Rush.