Alice in Foxland

When the Mad Hatter asks why a raven is like a writing desk, we recognize that the question is intentionally absurd.  What about the question of why Fox News seems to have given more coverage to the attack on the Benghazi embassy over 2 years ago than to anything in recent memory?  As it relates to the Republican refusal to allow spending on embassy security, we might as well find some connection to ravens and writing desks because the relentless hammering on the importance of  the incident isn't about the administrations "policies" as concerns terrorism, it's about Hillaryphobia. It's a coverup for their own negligence and misdeeds and failures. Steve Benin writes that the Fox aired nearly 1,100 segments over 20 months without any substantive revelations of any culpability and has yet to reveal any reasons to be horrified about anyone but the Republicans in Congress.  

I read in Media Matters that Foxed and Cloroxed host Elisabeth Hasselbeck tweeted the demand for the same transparency about Benghazi and the fake IRS scandal as we demand from the NFL.  Why is it so hard for the rear end of America to see the absurdity of this obsession, the need to connect everything to Benghazi and the cover-up that never was.

I could go on about the efficacy of the Big Lie, the oft-told lie, but  it doesn't help.  I had reluctantly to 'de-friend' someone I've admired on Facebook the other day, when he replied furiously to my comment that there was no scandal there and he'd have to come up with a better reason for his Obamabashing.  It won't be the last time I have to do that, I'm sure, because it's an article of faith that has to be protected from the heretical truth.

Is there a treatment for our national mental disease? Is everything  about Benghazi because nothing is about Benghazi?  Is it all because the people with desperate need to hate him and his party have such a hard time finding reasons after all these years of dire and disastrous predictions yet to come true? 

Why is Fox like a news network?  Like the Mad Hatter's riddle, it isn't a riddle at all.

Fox Lies, America dies

"You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" 

asked Joseph Welch of "tailgunner Joe" McCarthy, for decades the prototype for the vicious, unscrupulous and dishonest Republican Jihadist.  The unstated but nearly universally understood answer was "hell no."

McCarthy has been somewhat de-demonized after years of propaganda and  revision, but compared to what we had in 1954, at the height of the Communist witch hunt, the wealthy Corporate Political monsters now stomping on America like something from a 50's Japanese monster movie makes those little demons as pathetic as the rubber suited Godzilla compared to the thousand foot tall  computer generated version.

But is it surprising that the one thing Foxzilla has to say about the ultra radical (too radical for the al Qaeda leaders)  ISIS, now rendering all those dead and wounded and all those spent billions nugatory, is that not only is this not Bush's fault, but Bush foresaw that this would happen if we had some weak, Muslim-smelling, black Communist incompetent like Barack Obama in the White House. 

This is how America ends, not with anything but Fox.  Of course as any non-Republican -- and by Republican I mean malicious, truth-hating saboteur -- Bush signed off on the pledge to remove troops by 2012 and of course the troops wouldn't have been there but for him and his malicious lies and greed for conquest in the first place. We might not have had the Great Recession either if  he didn't lust after the title of "warpresident" he invented for himself but just like that recession that followed his war and deregulation policies, Iraq's inevitable collapse, long predicted by Bush's opponents now becomes Obama's fault and a Republican prediction.

At this point there's little left but gallows humor and bleak despair because we're all idiots, all deranged and all preoccupied with our own petty grievances:  missing airplanes, private racist comments by old men. Preoccupied by irrational fear and hog-tied by our own propaganda we just don't care enough to recall the things of only a few years ago and while we natter about like nitwits, we take step after step toward fascism and jingoism and a government of dollars, not men.

Gregg Who?

It's the Fox Look. You know, like you've just been prepped for your open-casket viewing or in the case of Andy Ann Coulter, for her loonie drag queen episodes on Fox.  Hey, don't laugh, it's a Republican thing.  Gregg Jarrett, like Lyin' Bill and Insanity Hannity and a host of hosts on Fox have that look. Way, too much makeup and perhaps a bit of Botox for that touch of zombie.

I'm sure one needs a shot or two (hypodermic and otherwise) to keep a straight face on the air, but apparently, off camera you'd hardly recognize them.  That's probably something else that's deliberate and particularly useful for guys like Jarrett who get drunk and disorderly in airport bars.  You might remember the same Minneapolis airport and fellow Republican 'Wide Stance Larry' Craig, but I digress.

Are we looking at the same dude here?    Yep, some yellow journalism lighting, some paint, a shave, the fake hair and a fake air of seriousness and he's ready for prime time again -- or will be as soon as the public forgets or a Fox Fable can be concocted about how it's Obama's fault or the Liberals or something.   He's got some personal problems says the Fox and he certainly does, especially now, despite the smile. Perhaps he's fed up with being a subversive and just can't take it any more.  Who knows?   But don't feel sorry for the Fox. Sure they've got a president to slander, a government to undermine, an economy to sabotage, fables to fabricate, Benghazi to shout -- but there are plenty of  others to fill his shoes and desk and with the right light, the right make-up and a full moon the Fox will make a seamless transition and the show will go on.   Gregg who?                                         

THIS JUST IN:

Seems Jarrett had just left rehab where he's been for a while.  I don't want to make light of a drug and alcohol problem and rehab is just where he should have been -- and apparently still should be.  All snark aside, I wish him well and hope he can redeem himself, medically and ethically.

This Month's Right Wing Hero: Cliven Bundy

I suppose that it's possible that you've been stuck in a cave for the last two weeks or so - maybe you're an amateur spelunker (I suppose those still exist). Or perhaps you actively avoid even looking at anything about Nevada (and who could blame you?)

If so, let's recap. We have a cattle rancher in Nevada named Cliven Bundy (apparently, "Cliven" is a reasonable choice for a name if you're from those parts). For the last twenty years, Bundy has been grazing his cattle on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management. That's not a crime: the BLM allows ranchers to do that all the time. The thing is, they charge a fee. And Bundy has never paid his grazing fees in over two decades.

He's claimed that he inherited grazing rights from his grandmother, because some of her ancestors kept cattle in the Virgin Valley since 1877. If this was true (and there's no evidence that it is), that just means that Bundy comes from a long line of criminals: the US Government has owned that land since it was given to us by Mexico (you know, after we took it from them) in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.

Let's just look at it this way: if you had flowers growing wild in your backyard, and your neighbor kept kicking down your fence and picking those flowers, you might get a little cranky, right?

Now the grazing fees aren't exactly exorbitant - they haven't changed in decades, and tend to be about $1.35 per animal per month. That's a lot less than feed costs, but Bundy didn't want to pay it. He's used a lot of different arguments over the years, but his latest one is kind of fascinating: he doesn't recognize the existence of the US government.

(The fact that he made that statement immediately raised red flags for me. That philosophy, and his use of the phrase "sovereign," is a mark of what's called the Sovereign Citizen Movement, a group of right-wing terrorists who don't believe that they need to follow pesky things like "laws.")

Once he made some noise about being anti-government, our intrepid insurrectionists over at Fox "News" decided to make a working-class hero out of him, without doing even the most basic research into whether he was a dangerous lunatic.

And sure enough, once Fox "News" started trying to make a hero out of a man stealing from the government, some of his Sovereign Citizen friends (and a bunch of other random nutjobs) came along to help him fight off the government trying to collect the money he owed them.

On Salon, Eric Stern put together almost two dozen of the various lies Fox "News" was trying to spread before Cliven started speaking his mind in public, and there's some real winners there. One of my favorites was actually made by a member of the Nevada legislature:

"Nobody has seen any bill for $1.1 million. It doesn't exist." (Michelle Fiore, R-Nevada Assembly, on MSNBC) Bundy says he has "never been sent a bill" but also says he never opens mail from the U.S. government because he does not recognize the U.S. government’s existence.

That just about says it all, doesn't it? But that's where it starts to get really interesting. Because then, somebody in the conservative media made the mistake of letting him talk on camera.

What happened was, Bundy liked being the center of attention, and he started holding daily press conferences. And even when the press dwindled down to (on this particular day) one reporter and one photographer, Bundy kept talking. Unfortunately for him, the reporter in question was from the New York Times.

"I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro," he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, "and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn't have nothing to do. They didn't have nothing for their kids to do. They didn't have nothing for their young girls to do.

"And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?" he asked. "They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom."

It was probably right about that point that the right-wing media screamed and ran away. But Bundy wasn't done - not by a long shot. He had an all-access pass to the media, and decades of evil built up in his soul. He wasn't going to shut up just because his new "friends" stopped taking his calls.

He started appearing on any talk show that would have him, basically repeating the mantra that "I'm not a racist," and interspersing it with statements like this.

If I say 'negro' or 'black boy' or 'slave' … if those people cannot take those kind of words and not be offensive (sic) then Martin Luther King didn't do his job.

Or he'd double down on his remarks.

Are they happier now under this government subsidy system than they were when they were slaves, and they was able to have their family structure together, and the chickens and garden, and the people had something to do? And so, in my mind I’m wondering, are they better off being slaves, in that sense, or better off being slaves to the United States government, in the sense of the subsidies. I’m wondering. That’s what. And the statement was right.

Proving, if nothing else, that he had no idea what slavery really was. On the other hand, in an interview on CNN, he proved that he understood how Fox "News" worked.

The CNN host suggested that Bundy had been abandoned at Fox News, something he said was apparent by the fact that the rancher was appearing on his network and not Fox.

"I don't think I've been abandoned. I think maybe they misunderstood me a little bit," Bundy said. "But I think Fox and I, I think, Hannity and I are just right on. I have no doubt that he would support me if he understood really what's in my heart. And I think he does understand me."

There was a time in America when the right wing had some reasonable members. But as they've gradually drifted down the rabbit hole, they've begun embracing more and more radical ideas. And now they've reached the point where everyone they embrace as a hero, from Ted Nugent to George Zimmerman, and now Cliven Bundy, has proven to be not just deeply flawed, but pathologically insane.

Perhaps they should take the hint, and realize that the problem lies, not in their heroes, but somewhere deeper in their philosophies.

Meanwhile, off in the distance, Cliven Bundy continues to spout authentic frontier gibberish.

For any reason

Lyin' Bill.  He earns his title every day. What's he lyin' about now you might ask?  Why, he's telling us that a Texas women can get an abortion at any time -- simply because of a sprained hand for instance.

“You can just kill the baby, or the fetus, however you want to describe it, any time you want for any reason, you know, women’s health, that’s any reason at all.”

Sure, we all know that women are hypochondriacs, prone to hysteria and likely to be faking things like they fake orgasms and I'm sure Bill has experience there. God makes sure women don't die in childbirth anyway, just like he makes sure they don't get pregnant when they get raped. So if a woman wants to terminate a pregnancy, we can be sure it's because she doesn't want to cancel a hair dresser appointment or something equally as important. Why we ever let them vote, I don't know.

In one of those bilious exchanges that Fox is famous for, O'Reilly and Kirsten Powers went back and forth ratcheting up the lies:

Lyin' Bill:  “In New York here, there’s a proposal, ‘I don’t want any limitations on anything!' It’s crazy.”

Powers: “The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.”

Lyin' Bill:  “Yeah! For any reason! Women’s health! ‘Hey! Look I sprained my hand!"

Powers: “Yeah.  For any reason. For any reason. Yeah.”

Of course no one of integrity, no one who gives a rancid shit about the truth or human rights or anything but his stinking faith believes this garbage. Very, very few late term abortions are ever performed and even fewer of that "partial birth" procedure they'd love to tell you happens all the time.  Such things are done with dead fetuses,  fetuses with no brain and the like, but Fox has never stumbled over a fact so far.  Nor, for all their ranting, whooping and hollering, all their pusillanimous persiflage about how Liberals are trashing the constitution have they ever really seen the law as anything but a nuisance and impediment to "freedom" and something that can be and should be ignored by any state with or without public support. 

No, there should be no regulation of anything but women and if God didn't bother to ban abortion, well then the Great State a' Texas is gonna take care of it for him, now all y'all have a nice day, y'hear?

Dead Man Talking

What is it with Brit Hume? I don't mean his embarrassing and offensive opinions, I'll get to that later, but his face hangs on him like a corpse propped up in its coffin at some ghastly wake or at best some dopey cartoon Basset Hound.  It's so distracting that the import of the things he says is delayed in reaching my awareness and often feels like a slap in the face.  It's not that I actually watch him on purpose. Fox News has long since been removed from my TV's menu, but sometimes I see him quoted and my jaw sags like Hume's jowls and I despair. Chewing the cud over Nancy Pelosi's comments about the challenge to the angry white birds party  of our changing demographics,Hume gives us:

“Look, I’ve read all kinds of analysis of this… I am absolutely convinced that this troupe [ now did he mean trope?] that you’re hearing, that says if the Republicans don’t go for immigration reform much as the Senate has done, they’re never gonna win another presidential election -- oh, baloney.”

That's a true conservative speaking.  Things you see, should always be like they were and if they change, we ignore it until it goes away. Bad things like genocide and deportation and slavery really don't matter and we should as Brit says, keep the focus on white people. America was always about white people, even if it wasn't and if we keep pretending, keep believing, why then we can fly to Never Never Land with Peter Pan (even if the name sounds a bit gay) where the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home and everyone knew his genetically determined place White men at the table, black men serving dinner and brown men outside trimming the topiary.

Look, 'these people' don't really vote all that much (we've put so much effort into making that so) and

“So, if you look at it from an ethnic point of view, that addresses the question of whether you need to get right with the Hispanics,” 

said Brit to the approval of his ventriloquist's dummy.


America is all about white people and white people like Brit Hume, or so he maintains. The Republican party shouldn't waste it's time pretending that isn't so and you can always depend on that league of white gentlemen to bring in the votes while the lesser folk, the folk that live here on our sufferance, keep their heads down lest we send them elsewhere. 

Will they continue to win elections as they continue to whistle Dixie and have seizures when they hear Spanish spoken?  Yeah, sure, but fewer and fewer and not just because more people have names like Gomez. The people who lick Hume's spittle, who watch Fox and drink Budweiser in the evening are being marginalized for all sorts of reasons and they know it.  That's why they watch -- to pretend they're not doomed to failure and insignificance as the empire of the past crumbles.

Smoke gets in your lies

They asked me how I knew

None of this was true

Oh I of course replied

It cannot be denied

Bill O'Rielly lied

 -With apologies to Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach-

Newspapers have long been chastised for either getting it wrong or just plain lying on the front page and apologizing or retracting on the last page.  And then there's Fox News where the lies never stop, the lies never die -- ever.

On a recent Thursday night, Lyin' Bill  O'Reilly told us he'd found a "smoking gun" of some unspecified sort because  former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had visited the White House 157 times between 2009 and 2012. One has to wonder what kind of smoke it was or into what orifice it was being blown since in actuality, as it came out the following day, the story was fake, Shulman having only attended 11 events having to do with health care, far fewer than he had been cleared to attend and having nothing to do with any kind of scandal, real or imagined. 

"You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions."

 Not much need to actually, Shulman had been cleared, as the public record shows, to meet, mostly in other venues than the White House with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill.  Still he did not attend 146 of them. Is it possible, under oath or not to explain what one was doing at a place one was not?  Perhaps Lyin' Bill would like to explain what he was doing in North Korea 157 times.  What?  He wasn't there?  Now there's a smoking gun for sure.

But it's too good a story for Fox to let go, even if it's not true, so although the debunking was thorough, Lyin' Bill was at it the next day saying:

 "We still don't know much about former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visiting the White House 157 times.  That's extraordinary."

No, of course we don't know what he was doing there when he wasn't there to do anything and  if anything is extraordinary it's Lyin' Bill's ability to charge about like a bull in the arena with all sorts of facts stuck in his hide like banderillas and  bellowing discredited and debunked charges ad nauseam. Of course we're talking about Fox News here and their garbled and disreputable gospels have a following of the faithful and of course it was picked up as divine word by Investor's Business Daily and metastasised through the drainage system of the Blog world where, at least in the minds of the Right, it became true.

You know we still don't know about Bill O'Reilly meeting 157 times with Kim Jong Un to discuss an attack on Hawaii.  I think he needs to explain under oath just what he was doing there don't you?

Fox News Boosts Preposterone to the Max

By (O)CT(O)PUS

I don’t think Greta or Megyn will be fetching coffee for Erick and his sidekicks anytime soon. Here is the latest imbroglio from Fox News, a gender comedy in five acts:

Act 1.  Breadwinner Moms: Mothers Are the Sole or Primary Provider in Four-in-Ten Households with Children:

“These “breadwinner moms” are made up of two very different groups: 5.1 million (37%) are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands, and 8.6 million (63%) are single mothers” (Pew Research Center).

Act 2.  Fox News: Rise In Female Breadwinners Is A Sign Of Society's Downfall:

“You're seeing the disintegration of marriage, you're seeing men who were hard hit by the economic recession in ways that women weren't. But you're seeing, I think, systemically, larger than the political stories that we follow every day, something going terribly wrong in American society …” (Juan Williams).

“When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role” (Erick Erickson).

Act 3.  Fox News Host Rips Sexist Male Colleagues:

“Have these men lost their minds? (and these are my colleagues??!! oh brother… maybe I need to have a little chat with them) (next thing they will have a segment to discuss eliminating women’s right to vote?) …” (Greta Van Susteren).

Act 4.  Some Women Believe They Can Have It All, And That's The Crux Of The Problem:

“ I also noted that the left, which tells us all the time we’re just another animal in the animal kingdom, is rather anti-science when it comes to this. In many, many animal species, the male and female of the species play complementary roles, with the male dominant in strength and protection and the female dominant in nurture … One notable exception is the lion, where the male lion looks flashy but behaves mostly like a lazy beta-male MSNBC producer” (Erick Erickson).

Act 5.  Fox News Host Demolishes Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs Over Sexist Comments:

"I didn't like what you wrote one bit. To me you sound like somebody who's judging and then wants to come out and say 'I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, and now let me judge judge judge, and by the way it's science it's science it's science it's fact fact fact fact. Well, I have a whole list of studies saying your science is wrong and your facts are wrong” (Megyn Kelly).

At Fox News, you can always count on the slogan "Fair and Balanced" to serve as a cover for "stupid."  Here is how other networks covered the Pew Research story:  Unlike Fox, CNN And MSNBC Turned to Female Panelists for Comments on "Breadwinner" Study.  Instead of R-2, E-2, and Lou-too, perhaps what Fox News really needs is a comment troll:

“Because who better than men to comment on women's issues? Sheesh, you libtards understand nothing. Obviously a noted mysoginst [sic] like Eric Ericson's [sic] opinion is far more germaine [sic] to the debate than some broad's. oh, and tell the dames to vote Republican, if they know what's good for them, rant, rant, foam, foam, blather, blather, my old man's a chipmunk, etc, etc... "  (remKuzucu).

Foxerwocky

I've been waiting a long time for Fox to sic their gibbering, barking, slobbering and leg humping dogs on Easter and they finally have.  Yep, there's a war on Easter although it's hard to tell who the combatants are and even what Fox New's position is.  Seems some school in Alabama, speaking (according to Foxlogic of course) for all schools in all of the United States, cancelled all Easter and other Christian themed events because they thought it inappropriate. It is.  One classroom could represent as many as six religions. 

Consideration for others and respect for the right to teach one's own children one's own religious traditions. That's the sort of things Fox and Fiends like to call "politically correct" since to attack what might otherwise be called tolerance or good will or common decency requires a meaningless epithet that can mean anything you need it to mean. PC.

All this means of course, that someone, somewhere is waging war on Easter even though there's no evidence anywhere that the celebration of the holiday is being suppressed.  It isn't; neither the mythology of  death and resurrection nor the syncretion  of  Jesus with the European fertility Goddess for whom the holiday is named. It's long been a Goddess holiday and students of semitic languages will notice that the Ish in Ishtar, for instance sounds like the Isha -- the woman created for the Ish, Adam.

Yes, one principal in one school in Alabama doth a war make because he decided that his school is not a Sunday School, but a secular school, supported by taxes, whose business is not to give parties, either with eggs and bunnies or ridiculous stories about resurrected first century Jewish revolutionaries as recounted by people who weren't there.

Of course having no factual knowledge or rational basis for argument, having no interest in educating or informing the public, the Fox Coven launched this morning into a typically fatuous farrago of fallacy and peremptorily non-sequitur assertions such as Gretchen the Witch's:

 “Have we just gotten so deep into this political correctness that we now just can’t take the religion as it is, celebrate it and move on?”

 Pardon me?  Are we so stupid that we didn't notice you haven't made a case at all - neither logical or mystical or truthful?  You've just snickered and sneered and flung dung and declared war. Decency is PC so let's do what we will? 

The real question of the propriety of making kids perform rituals, ridiculous or otherwise, was not addressed, not discussed, not acknowledged, as the 'discussion' devolved into a bouillabaisse of bullshit.  Easter celebrations can't be offensive because bunnies aren't in the Bible?  Are you the same morons who want to get rid of Halloween because it's pagan?  What's next, they cackle -- can't we say Nor'easter?  Can we still teach about Easter Island in Geography? It's a pagan holiday anyway, or maybe it isn't and why can't we just gyre and gimble in the wabe with The Christrabbit and eat Mithras buns with the Mome raths
?  Right or wrong, we're right because it's just so much fun to mock -- anyone can do it!  Brillig, man, just brillig.

Suffer the Children?

Want to know what ticks me off?  Of course you do -- it's that so many of us who think we're out of the woods because the Republicans lost the last two presidential elections   have resumed the idiotic posturing and bickering, hyperbolizing, fear mongering and in-fighting about our often worn out  liberal issues.  Does anyone really think that right wing extremism has slunk away like the loser in a dog fight?

Is the Democratic party going back to being the ban-it party, the baby-on-board ' can't trust anybody party that can't agree with each other enough to get anything done? Are we back to 'ban-the-bomb' naïveté while real evil marches on? Of course, that's what we do, but guess what bucky, Limbaugh still draws ratings and the Fox is still alive -- or at least undead.

Remember when Obama's little talk about patriotism to schoolchildren was "just like Pol Pot?"  Well when Obama cancelled some White House tours, it was only so that he could "maximize the pain" for children says grimacing Gretchen the witch of Fox News.  "Can we be adults about this?" she asked while meanwhile back at the fortress of evil, a Republican (Texas of course) Rep was proposing that Obama can't play golf again until the Republicans say so. Is Louie Gohmert old enough to remember when Eisenhower was accused of playing golf while the Russkies missle-gapped us?

Meanwhile, while Carlson and the Doocebag are trying to Fox Block Obama, inquiring minds are asking whether the Evil Empire will discuss the effect the sequestration gambit will have on American Children.  That's right, children.  They're such useful tools and they're great for breakfast too.  Just ask the Fox.

Hate is in the blood, says Lyin' Bill

So lyin' Bill is still at it.  I don't go looking for his wisdom any more than I go around opening manhole covers looking for a pleasant smell, but sometimes you just stumble into it - like you might step into some dog shit on the sidewalk.  Anyway,  here we have him again running his foul mouth for his foul audience hoping to promote evil and ugliness and hate wherever he can -- and get rich from doing it.

So Barack Obama hates half the country, says O'Reilly -- the white half, of course, because even though the only family he ever knew was white, he must hate white people because he's black -- even though he's every bit  as white as he is black, unless of course, the old Confederate, Secessionist USA hating bigots like Lyin' Bill  are right that one drop of "black" blood means you're black and inferior. Old Confederate, Secessionist bigots like Lyin' Bill must think that "black blood" is mighty powerful stuff though, if one drop of it can pollute an ocean of whiteness and all the superiority it conveys. Lyin' Bill must believe in "black power!"  Whattaya know!

But Dennis Miller, that other Fox bastard who, back when he was funny and before he sold his soul for a buck thirty seven used to try to impress us all with his brilliance and erudition and vocabulary, is reduced to making a living with pusillanimous persiflage for the amusement of the stupidest fraction of mediocre American minds by bantering with Bill, would none the less opine that he seeth not the anger of blackness but the haughtiness of the educated.  Fox and grapes, Dennis? Nobody thinks you're smart or funny any more.

So they're back to this -- still at this, since every factual-seeming accusation has been erased like grafitti under the blast from a power washer.  The fake numbers, the fake stories, the false identification with George Bush's blunders misdeeds, blunders and frauds -- it all has a shelf life and perhaps the lies have gone past it and are beginning to spoil and so it's back to racists and Bolshevik class warfare:  he's a racist, he's a snob, he's consumed with hate (just like us.)

Nothing Informs Better Than Fox News (With an Update by Octopus)

Please take the title of this post at face value with no derision or mockery intended. According to a recent PublicMind Poll from Fairleigh Dickenson University (FDU), Some News Leaves People Knowing Less than those who consume no news at all.

The poll tested consumers’ knowledge of recent popular uprisings in Egypt and Syria and found a disturbing pattern of wrong answers by news source. Here is what the poll tested:  Did the people of Egypt successfully topple the regime of Hosni Mubarak? The highest percentage of correct answers came from listeners of NPR at 68%.  Lowest on the scale were viewers of Fox News at 49%.

According to Dan Cassino, a political science professor at FDU and an analyst for the poll: “The [poll] results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

These results come as no surprise. On July 25, 2010, I posted this commentary, A Contest of Madmen for the Primacy of the Sewer, which covered similar findings from The Center for Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.  In all studies thus far, Fox News ranks at the bottom of the heap. Of course, few of us need a poll to confirm what we know intuitively: Fox News is not a news source but merely a ratings engine with only one purpose: To deliver maximum audience share for the Murdoch propaganda machine.

For a more detailed account on the sorry state of contemporary journalism, please have a look at the original post (which includes an important historical observation by Bloggingdino).


Wednesday Update:
(Pls. see comments below): "Not if one maintains an active mind."

If any visitors to this forum are implying – even in jest – that any writers or readers of this community have “inactive” minds, think again!  Our minds are NOT inactive!  Nor uninformed!  Nor unwashed!  If this is your implication, then consider me a very pissed off cephalopod. PAY ATTENTION because I will not repeat this again:

Fox News is the #1 purveyor of PARTISAN HATE SPEECH in America today. Fevered hysteria and conspiratorial fear mongering on national television are not harmless. For years, Fox News gave Glenn Beck a national audience, and this is what partisan hate speech has wrought (all have active links to original sources):

Man Shoots Two California Highway Patrol Officers:

Accused Gunman Acknowledges Influence of Glenn Beck

Three Pittsburgh Police Officers Ambushed and Killed:

Gunman Posted Glenn Beck Video on White Supremacist Website

Federal Prison for Man Who Threatened Senator Murray:

Glenn Beck Cast Spell on Accused Man, Says Family

Federal Prison for Man Who Threatened House Speaker Pelosi:

Mother of Accused Man Blames Fox News

Glenn Beck Fans Target Legendary Scholar with Death Threats

Death Threats Against League of Women Voters Linked to Glenn Beck

Murders, shooting sprees, domestic terrorism, private citizens hiding in fear, infamous intimidations and provocations broadcast on national television - all linked to Fox News!

After the shooting rampage in Tucson that left six people dead and thirteen injured, including Congresswoman Giffords, Fox News President Roger Ailes offered this appeal for civility: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast.”

More bullshit!  Nothing has changed. Week after week, Fox News churns out a constant sludge of partisan hate speech from verbal abusers such as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy, and his son, Peter Doocy, as examples.

How quickly we forget these lessons of history. How the language of eradication and elimination (i.e. characterizing people as diseased, as vermin, as traitors, as a scourge) has led to genocide, pogroms, murder, and violence. The poisoned atmosphere unleashed by Fox News means any citizen - Democrat, Centrist, or Republican - can be slandered in public and targeted for persecution. Furthermore, these messages reach unhinged misfits who are most likely to act on impulse, and events have shown that violent rhetoric leads to violent acts. There is no plausible deniability that can exonerate Fox News.

Furthermore, when toxic television threatens public safety, it concerns everyone. Even prominent Republicans are alarmed:

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum:

“[Glenn Beck] such people do terrible damage”

Former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner: 

“the role Glenn Beck is playing is harmful in its totality”

National correspondent for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg:

“a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling”

Partisan hate speech is not free speech. Nor entertainment. Nor funny.  For all reasons cited above, gratuitous liberal bashing - even implied - is unacceptable here.   If anything, perhaps the partisan biases of certain readers have blinded them to these outrageous abuses of the public airwaves.  As the saying goes:  No news is good news - and far better news than Fox News.

A CONTEST OF MADMEN FOR THE PRIMACY OF THE SEWER

By Octopus

If the title of this post caught your attention, you have come to right place. The art of writing an audience-grabbing headline is one of the first lessons learned in Journalism 101 and a convention born in the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century. Yellow journalism is a derisive term that has become synonymous with lurid and sensational headlines, scare- and scandal-mongering, and journalistic misconduct. When discussing the failings of contemporary journalism, the era of the yellow press is likely to be invoked. The criticisms are valid because the features of yellow journalism continue to live and thrive in our modern mass media. Before I continue, perhaps I should give this post a less presupposing title:

Yellow Journalism in the Age of Cable News

Although elusive to definition, most historians agree on the signature traits of yellow journalism:

• Sensational or misleading headlines “that screamed excitement about comparatively unimportant news” (Mott); a “variety of topics reported on the front page, including news of politics, war, international diplomacy, sports, and society” (Campbell);

• A “lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance” (Mott); “bold and experimental layouts … enhanced by the use of color” (Campbell)

• “Imposters and frauds of various kinds” (Mott); “a tendency to rely on anonymous sources, particularly in dispatches of leading reporters” (Campbell);

• A “more or less ostentatious sympathy with the underdog … with campaigns against abuses suffered by the common people” (Mott); “a fearless and efficient instrument for the exposure of public wrongdoing” (Campbell);

• A “hearty indulgence in self-congratulation” (Campbell) to drive circulation and sales, but not necessarily serve the public interest with accurate or newsworthy stories.

Originally coined by Ervin Wardman of the New York Press, the term ‘yellow journalism’ has never explicitly been defined, although popular accounts attribute the term to a comic strip character nicknamed the ‘Yellow Kid’ drawn by cartoonist Richard F. Outcault. Yellow journalism begins with the competitive rivalry between two publishing legends, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

When Pulitzer bought the New York World in 1883, he introduced provocative headlines, pictures, games, and novelties to attract readers and boost circulation. Although Pulitzer was certainly an ambitious and aggressive newspaper entrepreneur, his motives were not entirely self-serving. Pulitzer also believed in journalism as a civic responsibility whose mission is to improve society. In an era marked by immigration, labor unrest, abuses of power, and injustice, Pulitzer transformed the World into the dominant metropolitan daily of New York City … and the leading voice of social reform.

During his student years at Harvard, William Randolph Hearst read and admired the World. When Hearst inherited the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887, he resolved to turn it into a similarly engaging tabloid with editorial and layout innovations borrowed from Pulitzer. The Examiner featured garish headlines, crime stories cast as morality plays, crusades against public corruption, and scantily clad pinups. By 1895 and flushed with success, Hearst set his sights on new markets and acquired a penny paper called the New York Journal.

Virtually overnight, the contest between the World and the Journal devolved into a clash of America’s most famous newspaper titans. In the fierce rough-and-tumble rivalries typical of the Gilded Age, each tried to surpass the other with ever more garish headlines and self-congratulatory boasting. In response to competition from the Journal, Pulitzer dropped the price of the World to a penny to drive Hearst out of business. In retaliation, Hearst raided Pulitzer’s staff including Richard Outcault, creator of the ‘Yellow Kid.’

In short order, yellow journalism spread to Boston, Chicago, Denver, and beyond. The staid establishment tabloids of the era denounced the excesses of the yellow press, as evidenced in this 1906 commentary by Harper’s Weekly:

”We may talk about the perils incident to the concentration of wealth, about the perils flowing from a disregard of fiduciary responsibility, about abuses of privilege, about exploiting the government for private advantage; but all these menaces, great as they are, are nothing compared with the deliberate, persistent, artful, purchased endeavor to pervert and vitiate the public judgment.”

Sound familiar? Even in simpler times, critics called attention to the presumed malevolence of media to shape public opinion, a concern still shared a century later. Despite its flamboyant and checkered history, Campbell acknowledges the contributions of a genre that transformed American society and culture:

”It was a lively, provocative, swaggering style of journalism well suited to an innovative and expansive time – a period when the United States first projected its military power beyond the Western Hemisphere in a sustained manner.”

All told, yellow journalism has been described as irritating yet irresistible, imaginative yet frivolous, aggressive yet self-indulgent, and activist but arrogant. These historical accounts are useful in understanding it’s contemporary reincarnations. Against this background, perhaps the more pressing questions to ask ourselves are: What has remained the same? What has changed? Should we be concerned?

To find examples of yellow journalism in contemporary media, we need look no further than supermarket tabloids brimming with stories of alien abductions and lurid celebrity gossip. The genre has migrated from print media to the Internet as embodied in these headlines at the Huffington Post:

Ellen Page Peed In Bucket, Composted Her Urine

Stunning Lingerie Model WILL Run Naked After World Cup Loss

'Nazi Octopus' Slain By Argentine TV Host In World Cup Revenge

As yellow journalists dispense ‘frivolities and slush,’ the last signature trait of the genre is impenitence and a stubborn refusal to be held accountable. Rarely, if ever, will yellow journalists acknowledge their errors, excesses, or indiscretions. These survey results sum up the state of contemporary journalism:

According to the Columbia Journalism Review:

• 70% of respondents believe journalists are doing a ‘poor’ job of correcting their mistakes;

• 91% say newsrooms need more honesty and openness in addressing editorial errors;

• 40% accuse reporters of hiding their mistakes.

According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

• 73% of respondents are skeptical about the accuracy of news;

• 85% believe newspapers ‘over-dramatize’ stories to grab attention and audience share;

• 59% say newspapers are more motivated by profit than serving the public interest.

Has anything changed from the Gilded Age to the present? Not according to these surveys. Yellow journalism is not some long deceased ancestor from a bygone era but living offspring born of the same DNA; and no cable news channel typifies the genre better than Fox News.

”Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network if the thing that undermines a strong Republican party” (David Frum, March 23, 2010).

How ironic! Here is George Bush’s former speechwriter accusing a conservative news network of being the tail that wags the dog. More than a tacit admission of partisan bias, Frum has the temerity to regard Fox News as a dedicated mouthpiece for the Republican Party and the naivety to overlook the prerogatives of independent media operating within the framework of free enterprise. Fox News is far more likely to put commercial self-interest above loyalty, and why should Frum presume otherwise! Furthermore, how does a biased and partisan news network – especially in the employ of powerful interests - better serve the public? According to Howell Rains, former executive editor of the New York Times:

[Fox News] has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalism since World War II … Why has our profession, through its general silence – or only spasmodic protest – helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in it [sic] conclusions and biased in its gestalt?

For Howell Rains, the answer lies in economics, in the collapse of print journalism, and steep losses in audience share at CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC. Even Roger Ailes, chief architect of the Fox News stratagem, boasts about seeing himself as a producer of ratings rather than as a journalist, that audience share is his only yardstick.

Night after night on Fox News, under-educated former disc jockeys with scarcely a college course on their resumé expound on every conceivable topic – politics, economics, foreign affairs, energy, religion, and public morality. These bellicose, arrogant, and shameless clowns weave delusional narratives about how government death panels will kill your grandmother, how liberals will seize your guns and property, how a sinister art deco plot will subvert capitalism and corrupt your kids. Their daily fulminations are rife with fabrications, misinformation, and outright lies.

Hannity and Beck are modern analogues of the charlatans and fraudsters that once characterized the yellow press. When we catch them in the act of dissembling, they reflexively lash out when criticized, demonize their opponents, or feign innocence by claiming the mantle of entertainment. Perhaps more to the point, they are the ‘yellow kids’ of broadcast journalism. From the Gilded Age to the present, has anything changed?


Media Consolidation

Historians debunk the myth that Hearst had provoked the Spanish-American War.  There were thousands of independently owned newspapers with close ties to rural communities, and the vast majority of Americans did not live in population centers served by the yellow press.  Thus, no tabloid had the reach or power to influence national opinion (Campbell).

By 1975, however, two-thirds of all independently owned newspapers and one-third of all independently owned TV stations had disappeared. Twenty-two companies now control 70% of national newspaper circulation, and ten companies own broadcast networks that reach 85% of the American public. Five companies dominate the cable news network segment – the same ones that own the top Internet news sites.

What has changed from the Gilded Age to the present? Media consolidation has concentrated far more power among too few players, which now have the means to dominate markets and “pervert and vitiate the public judgment.”  Sadly, the latest Nielson ratings confirm this impression. Of the top 30 programs on primetime cable news, Fox occupies the top 10 slots:

By far, Fox News commands the dominant position in the cable news segment, which gives it a powerful platform to push a hard line partisan agenda and move public opinion. If Roger Ailes understands yellow journalism, he also understands his audience - those undiscerning viewers who forgo critical thinking and prefer to have their morality pre-packaged in church pews and their politics shrink-wrapped on the nightly news.

Should we be concerned? You betcha! We have long known how media can be manipulated – by paying journalists to promote a corporate or industry viewpoint, by hiring PR firms to feed stories to the press, by faking news with maliciously edited videotape, by using smear tactics to destroy reputations, by repeating hot-button weasel words to propagate suspicion and fear, by leveraging the powers of government to shape public opinion and sell a war. We understand intuitively how often our news networks have failed in their mission and betrayed our trust.

Furthermore, we understand intuitively that today’s viewers are far less informed – and more willing to be suckered by demagogues and propagandists - than a generation ago. The Center for Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland tested this hypothesis. During a seven-month study, researchers asked news consumers a series of questions about the Iraq War and world opinion of American foreign policy. What they measured: A disturbing pattern of wrong answers, errors, and misconceptions by cable news source:

Surprisingly, differences in party affiliation and educational attainment do not fully account for these results. Among Republicans, those who got their news from cable networks had a 25% higher error rate compared with those who got their news from PBS/NPR. For viewers with a college education, the error rate for cable news consumers averaged 27%, compared with only 10% for patrons of PBS/NPR. Clearly, cable news networks are failing to inform the public, and the worst by far is Fox.

In closing, I leave you with the following quotations:

"You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards. We have become more racist. This was their doing. Breitbart put that together, misrepresenting what I was saying, and Fox carried it" (Shirley Sherrod, July 21, 2010).

In his keynote address to the National Conference on Media Reform (November 8, 2003), Bill Moyers warned of a “quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to … the most powerful interests in the world.”  I leave the last word to our friend and colleague at the Swash Zone, Bloggingdino, who recently said (11:31 AM, July 21, 2010):

“I'm reminded of William Shirer's account in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich of just how strongly a non-stop stream of propaganda affected his own judgment … he [Shirer] found it hard to discount completely even the sort of offal that his journalistic instincts told him must be false, mainly because it was coming through vital information channels and being repeated by everyone. Amplification and bad argument from authority, in other words, worked together to create a toxic discursive bubble inside of which an entire nation was forced to live and breathe.”

That’s the way it is in 2010. American news journalism has finally fulfilled the ambitions of its progenitors by turning itself into “a contest of madmen for the primacy of the sewer.” Good night and good luck.


References:
ABC News, David Frum on GOP: Now We Work for Fox.
W. Joseph Campbell (2003), Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, Praeger.
Daily Source, Current Problems in the Media.
Global Issues, Media Manipulation.
Huffington Post, Cable News Ratings: Top 30 Programs In Q2 2010.
Media Matters, Shirley Sherrod: I'm a Victim of Breitbart, Fox 'Racism'.
Frank Luther Mott (1962), American Journalism: A History: 1690-1960, 3d ed., Macmillan.
Bill Moyers, Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform.
Howell Raines, Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?

Cicero on Fox News

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Come to New Mexico, Eric Bolling

So, the "special" students at Fox Business think torture is funny? Monica Crowley and Eric Bolling seem to think that it's just fine.

So here's a challenge for you, Bolling. Come on down to Albuquerque. You'll sign a release, and I'll waterboard you. And before I'm done, you will admit that you like to be ass-raped by Palestinians wearing tutus. On camera.

I guarantee it, you unamerican goat-fucker.

If you're a puss, I'll even have a doctor from the ER standing by. Come on down, son; I'll show you a real good time.

In fact, there are a lot of people out there claiming that torturing prisoners is just fine: hell, we got bin Laden because of our "enhanced interrogation techniques"! All of these people have suspiciously tiny penises (except for Ann Coulter - that reamed-out drag queen is hung like a horse).

Let's be clear here. It didn't happen. Over at Firedoglake, blogger emptywheel lays out the timeline. And the Rude Pundit (who, in the same post, explains other reasons it didn't happen that way) puts it best.

No scenario exists here that would justify the calculated mistreatment of people who were mistaken for terrorists.

What exists is the pathetic willingness of so, so many in this nation to cast aside our morality and laws for the expedience (no matter how long it took) of vengeance. Frankly, if the only way to get to bin Laden was waterboarding, the Rude Pundit would have rather bin Laden had stayed free. Because the Rude Pundit is more goddamned patriotic than any of these fuckers who put their animal instincts over the truly ethical principles that are supposed to guide us.

And you know who would back him up? Benjamin Franklin, man. In a mucho-quoted sentence, Franklin said, "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted." Except, of course, the false patriots of the right.

Aside from being morally repugnant to everyone but the completely unsalvageable pervert and sociopath, torture doesn't work. The person being tortured will tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear, true or false, just to get it to stop. You don't get "actionable intelligence" from torture: you get whatever the person being tortured thinks you want to hear.

John McCain broke under torture, and taped a confession calling himself an "air pirate" and "black criminal."

And in 1998, Qin Yanhong, a Chinese villager, confessed to the rape and murder of a woman he'd never met. Because he was tortured.

If you happen to be a Christian, remember that Christ was supposed to have been tortured before being crucified. How do you think He would feel about it? I mean, I thought all the fundamentalists watched Passion of the Christ because it brought them closer to Jesus. Not to masturbate.

Fox News has learned. . .

By Capt. Fogg

No they haven't.

Alex Jones' Prison Planet website is the kind of place you expect to find very right wing viewpoints and so when I find agreement that Fox News lies, I feel good about it. It gives me a defense when people behind the Fox curtain accuse me of being a far-left Commie/Liberal liar, which seems to be the best they can do, considering all the evidence that Fox is indeed a lie factory and propaganda machine -- more than just simply being affiliated with and a sponsor of the GOP.

"The latest example comes from Fox News, who completely manufactured the claim that Gaddafi was using western journalists as human shields to prevent fighter jets from bombing his compound,"

writes blog editor Paul Joseph Watson today.

In a piece entitled, EXCLUSIVE: Libyans Use Journalists as Human Shields, Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin & Justin Fishel wrote, says Watson:

“An attack on the compound of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi on Sunday had to be curtailed because of journalists nearby, Fox News has learned.”

But there’s a problem, he says. One of the CNN journalists supposedly used by Gaddafi as a human shield subsequently appeared on CNN and labeled the claim,

“Outrageous and absolutely hypocritical. The idea that we were some kind of human shields is nuts,” CNN international correspondent Nic Robertson told Wolf Blitzer.

"Fox News has proven itself to be a complete tool of the US military-industrial complex. Nothing it now reports about the attack on Libya can ever be trusted."

says Prison Planet, QED -- and who can dispute it?

Abeckalypse Now

Why would a news organization retain the services of someone who calls their veracity into constant question and may actually cost them money by making advertisers queasy and uncomfortable at the flow of misinformation and distortion and psychodrama?

Well, perhaps one of the ways a chronic failure in the prophecy business covers up an unblemished record of being wrong is to maintain the distraction that theatrical extremists provide. The Fox Faithful aren't likely to reflect as much on such failures when their ears are filled with brand new, fresh and fabricated outrages from their stable of performance artists.

Why, for instance, allow speculation and comparison with our failed attempts at nation building and regime changing so vehemently supported by the GOP News Outlet with spontaneous and indigenous and possibly more successful attempts we had nothing to do with other than supporting the status quo? If Egypt moves toward democracy without and in spite of American economic and military assistance to a dictator, people might become cynical.

So keep them busy with visions of the Apocalypse and associate it with people exercising their endowed right to assemble, to speak out, to petition peacefully. Find a video clip where hazy air, a dirty lens and bright lights create lens flare. If you're a photographer, if you have aging eyes, you know what it is, but if you're a sheep in the Fox Flock, it's an apocalyptic horseman:



You get paid actors to report this idiocy with a straight face. You get Glenn Beck to howl insanely about a Muslim Caliphate to the illiterates who buzz about him like flies. You use everything you can to keep the audience focused on the moment and to make the moment seem perilous. You do anything you can to keep them from remembering that they've been on the wrong side of every prediction, whether dire or deliriously optimistic. If you run out of smoke and mirrors, dust and streetlights, you just make it up.

It's a bit like a Ponzi scheme. You need new lies coming in to cover the old ones, but sooner or later, no matter how gullible the patsies are, it blows up. It becomes an Abeckalypse. And they are gullible. According to a University study, Fox watchers will believe anything and the more they watch, the stupider they get.

Help Pull the Plug on Glenn Beck

After the shooting rampage in Tucson that left six people dead and thirteen injured, including Congresswoman Giffords, Fox News President Roger Ailes appealed for civility:  “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast.”

Weeks after Tucson, nothing has changed.  If anything, Fox News has turned up the volume on partisan hate speech.  Fevered hysteria and conspiratorial fear mongering on national television are not harmless.

How quickly we forget the lessons of history. The bogeymen of 1930s anti-Semitism that morphed into the bogeymen of 1950s McCarthyism has morphed again into the mainstreaming of Glenn Beck Militia Theater. The message is clear: Glenn Beck wants to extort your silence, and anyone who refuses to capitulate will be targeted and stalked:

Glenn Beck, Self-Appointed "Progressive Hunter"
The poisoned atmosphere unleashed by Glenn Beck and Fox News means any citizen - Democrat, Centrist, or Republican - can be slandered in public and targeted for persecution.  Beck pitches his messages at unhinged misfits who are most likely to act on impulse, and events have shown that violent rhetoric leads to violent acts. There is no plausible deniability that can remove this blood from Beck’s hands:

Man Shoots Two California Highway Patrol Officers:

Accused Gunman Acknowledges Influence of Glenn Beck

Three Pittsburgh Police Officers Ambushed and Killed:

Gunman Posted Glenn Beck Video on White Supremacist Website

Federal Prison for Man Who Threatened Senator Murray:

Glenn Beck Cast Spell on Accused Man, Says Family

Federal Prison for Man Who Threatened House Speaker Pelosi:

Mother of Accused Man Blames Fox News

Glenn Beck Fans Target Legendary Scholar with Death Threats

Death Threats Against League of Women Voters Linked to Glenn Beck

Murders, shooting sprees, domestic terrorism, private citizens hiding in fear, infamous intimidations and provocations broadcast on national television - all linked to Glenn Beck - enough is enough!  When toxic television threatens public safety, it concerns everyone.  Even prominent Republicans are becoming alarmed:

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum:

“[Glenn Beck] such people do terrible damage”

Former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner: 

“the role Glenn Beck is playing is harmful in its totality”

National correspondent for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg:

“a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling”

It is time to pull the plug on Glenn Beck and serve notice to Fox News that partisan hate speech has no place in a free society. The strongest message you can send is to vote your pocketbook. Write letters to Fox News advertisers; tell them you will no longer patronize their products and services; and keep boycotting sponsors of Fox News until these outrageous partisan witch-hunts have stopped. Removing Glenn Beck from the airwaves will save lives.

Resources:
Visit the Drop Fox Website Here
Visit the Fox News Boycott Website Here
Visit the Stop Beck Website Here

Endorsements:
Captain Fogg, Sheria, BJ, Octopus, Squatlo, Sue, Nance, TnLib, TomCat, Truth 101, Maleeper, Green Eagle, Kay, Shaw Kenawe, RockyNC.

UPDATE: To help spread this message, I am placing this article in the public domain, which means anyone may use it freely without credit or attribution. If you want a copy of the complete text (including imbedded links and html code), please send a request via email to swashzone@gmail.com. Finally, a note of special recognition to The Legendary Spocko who taught us how to take on Big Media by boycotting their sponsors.

"Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint."

I don't have to look for evidence that the United States of America isn't united, unless you consider enraged confusion to be a uniting factor. A Pew polling report last year showed that only 34 percent of Americans think Obama is a Christian. I have no idea how many Americans like me, don't give a damn if he's a Zoroastrian as long as he keeps his scriptures under his pillow and not under mine. His religion or lack thereof is no more significant to me than his favorite basketball team and indeed the private beliefs of most of our better presidents have rarely been a factor in their official lives.

Of course those who wish to destabilize and polarize what's left of the informed electorate for reasons of partisan gain are happy to make an issue of it and for them it's indeed a game with few rules and only one strategy: attack, attack, attack. Prominent amongst that breed of snakes is of course, Fox News, who can depend on a base of religious chauvinists and racist bigots who know less about the certainties they profess than their enthusiasm might indicate.

Take the recently manufactured "scandal" about the inaccuracy of Obama's reading of Isaiah 40:31 at the National Prayer Breakfast this week. Fox Followers can't really be expected to know much about the archaeological history of Isaiah, the variations between extant scrolls or that chapters 40 - 66 seem to have been written about two centuries after Isaiah himself, but apparently they have so little regard for the knowledge of America's scholarship that they also don't expect us to remember that there are other and better translations than the King James version, some of which have incorporated what has been found at Qumran and most of all: that the original certainly isn't in English. President Obama was simply quoting the very popular New International Version. Some scandal.

One can hope that these fragments scraped from the bottom of the GOP slime barrel, indicate that the barrel is empty. Sad to say, it's very easy to make a fool of one's self in America, but it's still difficult to get Americans to notice it amidst the sound and fury.

If this be Treason. . .

The Republicans like to use the word Tyrant a lot. Perhaps it's the same sort of tendency you find in liars and cheats and thieves of other types who use those words to describe those who threaten to expose them. Perhaps not, but I've noticed of late that there have been a lot of calls for summary and extra-legal executions coming from Right wing writers and hate shouters like good ol' love thy neighbor Mike Huckabee or Foxboy Tucker Carlson who "personally" would like to have had Michael Vick put up against a wall and shot even though dear justice loving Tucker professes to be -- you guessed it -- a Christian. Pardon me, but I'm confused.

If you find it hard to reconcile what you think you know about Jesus and non-judgmentalism and forgiveness with summary executions for animal cruelty, perhaps you're unaware of the overriding moral imperative of the Values Party: anything we do to undermine Obama and the Democrats is patriotic and is justified through patriotism because our word is law, not your damned Constitution. Barack Obama praised the NFL's Eagles for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance and of course Barack Obama is the Tyrant Prince of Darkness so if he does anything, it's a bad thing. Vick must die, even if those animal rights people are bleeding heart liberals and even if you don't give a damn about dogs.

Last Wednesday in my local paper, I suffered through a tortuous justification of summary execution for treason of the fellow who leaked those diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the essence of which was that: had he leaked different information under different circumstances at a different time, some terrible thing might have happened. That's the basis of Mike Huckabee's equally loathsome demand for twisting the treason definition to allow the Republicans to kill their critics for the crime of informing the public that our allies aren't our allies and the government doesn't know what it's doing.

Of course if someone were lying about the failures of our government, that would be different. They'd get a regular show on Fox like Huckabee and Beck, make the big bucks and none would dare call it treason. The truth is what makes it bad, you see.

Never mind that something is exposed that would cause us to hang a foreigner the way we did an Nuremberg for, if we do it, it's not a crime. A bit like saying that if your aunt had had wheels instead of legs she'd have been a bus and so she can be sued for not picking you up at the bus stop this morning even if you don't ride the bus and she has legs anyway -- and you'd see the logic of that if you weren't a damned Libtard lover of tyranny.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, the fellow who embarrassed the military with his Afghanistan videos of course should be put up against the same wall for revealing the incompetence of Government, the lies, cover ups and perhaps the slaughter of innocents because after all, anything that doesn't cover up our misdeeds is treason unless the deeds have political importance for Republicans -- then anything is fair game and lawbreakers are heroes and patriots. Are you starting to get it? Criticizing the government is treason because it helps the enemy and there's always an enemy, don't you know -- except when the elite does it, of course, and you know who they are.

Yes, the government is corrupt, incompetent and can't do anything and so we're against it as long as that's actually false. If it's true and you prove it, you're a traitor and should be shot without due process. That's not tyranny -- a middle class tax cut is tyranny, ending insurance company abuse is tyranny, taking deadly contaminated meat off the shelves is tyranny, ending bigotry against law abiding citizens is tyranny, addressing schoolchildren on TV is Tyranny as bad as anything Pol Pot ever did. Making BP pay for their incompetence is tyranny and if you don't agree, the unelected leaders at Fox want you dead and aren't embarrassed to suggest that you be killed. Sic semper tyrannis.