Too thick to be shamed

President Obama hugged Nina Pham. In the Oval Office!!!

All the wingnut chicken littles who've been fanning fear of ebola are probably too out of their minds with cowardice to notice that Obama's message to them is:

I'm not only smarter, calmer, and better informed, I'm much braver than you crybabies.

Right-wing media's purpose is to keep its consumers outraged and afraid so that they don't notice the con and keep swilling the bullshit and voting for its purveyors.

We used to say, "The stupid, it burns." Evidently not. I wish it did, but it wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all be Fox "News" personalities.

Radical Christian extremist ISIS

Phil Robertson is the moral equivalent of ISIS tyrant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Robertson quotes Proverbs, "All who hate me love death."



His choice for Muslims is the same choice that ISIS has posed to Yazidis (and doesn't even offer to Shias): Convert  (to my extremist religion) or die.

In fact, Robertson thinks it's too late even for conversion. "That time has come and gone," he says.

For Robertson, there's no place in the world for moral reasoning, only for winning the war over which god is the bigger murderous asshole. And he thinks Satan is the problem!

Of course, Sean Hannity, handmaiden to genocide, is just fine with all this.

What the shit is he putting in his tea?

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo New cartoon.

Segregation academies

Conservatives are frothing at the mouth (again! You'd think they'd run out of froth) about President Obama's completely innocuous comments about schools and communities separated along sectarian lines in Northern Ireland.

The reason our homegrown American paranoid wingnuts are angry about this - other than anger being what they do - is that they've spent the past forty years building separate institutions parallel to public and secular institutions.

Their building started as a way to keep their delicate little white babies from having to learn with colored chillun. You never know what might happen when children sit next to each other in class. They might become friends! Or those dark boys might deflower innocent Southern girls. Mongrelization, miscegenation, race-mixing, and bastardization of America!

Feh.

After resegregating K-12, of course, the racist wingers needed "higher" education that would permit their smallworldview to go unchallenged all the way through college and even grad school. But you can't say cadres for Christ - that sounds too much like the Bolsheviks. Hence Bob Jones University (BJU, unintended double entendre foreshadowing teabagger) and Liberty University. Too bad Oklahoma's ORU wasn't named for a televangelist named Oral Richards.

Then of course, the conservatives built their own media, intended from the beginning to get their story our, never mind what's true. Fox pretends to be news to pump out propaganda. Rush and his ilk of haters purvey unguested confrontation and won't countenance any response on their bullshit programs.

Well, not quite never mind what's true. Some viewers need a little convincing. So billionaire wingnuts built tax exempt foundations to provide a thin veil of propaganda for the alleged truth of their views. Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Accuracy in Media, and all the various denier "think" tanks on climate change, tobacco, and the so-called free market, etc.

Conservatives hate what Obama said in Northern Ireland because they've graduated from advocating separate but unequal for black folk into advocating separate institutions for themselves - and, oh by the way, the destruction of public institutions for the rest of us.

Gullible audience

Fox lies all the time, although you do have to ask whether "Fox and Friends" - the show that dominates the news stupidity in a media landscape that's filled with media stupidity - knows for sure that their bullshit is bullshit.

Here's another lie from Roger Ailes's right-wing propaganda machine:

Fox deceptively edited Obama's answer to only include the portion of his response in which he discusses long debunked myths related to the talking points, removing the beginning of Obama's answer to the question about the Benghazi attacks and the related talking points. 

Obama began his response by saying that "Americans died in Benghazi." He followed by asserting that he wanted to ensure that a similar situation doesn't happen again and that the assailants would be "held accountable."

If you watch Fox and believe it, I don't understand how you actually have enough sense to make a living and not get fleeced out of it by retail scam artists. There are a couple of possibilities:

• You live in a group home with a guard at the door.
• You like being lied to because otherwise you'd have to cope with a complex world whose complexion is not to your liking.
• You're so fearful you can't think straight.

Does Brian Kilmeade remind anyone else of Emily Litella?

By the way, did you know that the word gullible isn't even in the dictionary? Probably another Obama conspiracy...

For when you really have to suck

Bill of attainder

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

No, not working corruption of blood, as fascist ninny Ann Coulter would.

Fox - whatever its bullshit lip service to the contrary - is tainted with its hatred of the liberal work that is the U.S. Constitution.

Media performance after the Boston Marathon bombing

Or, should I say, non-performance?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

My observations:

• CNN really truly sucks at journalism.  cnn.com, though, is still a useful source of breaking news.
• Fox I avoid on general principles, but they can manage breaking stories in between the toxic bigotry of their opinion personalities. I watched a little Shepard Smith on Monday while the story was still news and not yet another opportunity to push invidious delusions into the puke funnel of the VRWC.
• MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is vital for background. Her competitors who lean backward into infotainment breathlessly reported on pressure cooker bombs, as if everyone knew what that meant. She actually reported it.
• Both the Boston Globe and the New York Times web sites failed. To judge by the Globe's subsequent removal of access controls, they may lack enough oomph in their user authentication servers.
• NECN was o.k. for a while, but then reported that Boston was being evacuated on the strength of one cop with a bullhorn. Panic, people, panic! But keep watching!
• Any media outlet that gives Alex Jones a platform cannot be trusted.
• Infotainment is the norm:

Gasbag deflation

How clueless do you have to be to imagine that Bill O'Reilly has a clue?

TV nooz

Off message

Thomas Ricks will never appear on Fox again.

War on sanity

More evidence that we're in deep trouble against the wingnut propaganda machine.

The Nate Silver problem

Right-wing pundits toe the line far better than left-wing pundits. The wingers know that their job is to provide plausible bullshit for their audiences so that wingnut victories become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Left-wing pundits foolishly think their job is a combination of analysis and opinion, tethered to facts. They fail to realize they're in the propaganda business.

Nate Silver kills them both. He looks at reality with some statistical sophistication, and he and his model learn to reduce new sources of uncertainty. Why no one ever aggregated polls and then simulated outcomes based on their remaining uncertainties is a mystery.

The wingnut pundits whined about Silver's predictions, as they did about all polls. Add one more item to the (overlapping) list of liberally biased areas:

• media
• facts
• reality
• science
• now pollsters

You didn't think Fox would stop trying to bullshit you, did you?

Of course they'll keep trying. It's just harder now that Silver has once against proven his sagacity. But Dick Morris on his streak of oh-for-forever, will keep right on adding more thumb-sucks to his well established record of toe-sucking. Newt Gingrich will continue to have outlets for his wild opinions about the future, so he may well need to confess his errors again in the future.

And Neil Cavuto will continue to defend the "totality" of Fox's pundit eclipse:

The Atlantic's pundit scorecard is a wee bit harsh - no reason to flunk the racetrack touts who got it mostly right. Still, we'd be better off if we expected pundits to present arguments, instead of spewing the unreliable contents of their notoriously inaccurate guts. But that would be harder to do, and if there's anything TV pundits hate, it's the slightest whiff of effort.

When will we know?

In the aftermath of Sandy, scientists are sticking to their guns:

Hesitantly, climate scientists offered an answer this week that is likely to satisfy no one, themselves included. They simply do not know for sure if the storm was caused or made worse by human-induced global warming.

This is really pretty simple. Single events are weather. The totality of weather events make up climate. Trends in climate are climate change.

We don't have to confuse the two the way Fox always does in a cold snap - and probably will again this winter.

The trend doesn't look good, though, there's no doubt about that.

Bullshit coming and going

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The honest truth is that Mitt Rmoney's latest blithering gaffe is exactly what the Republican base voters believe. No matter how many times you show them that federal taxes don't begin and end with the income tax, that our federal tax system is not very progressive, that almost everyone with a good job pays taxes, that members of the 1% of the 1% (the 0.01%) often pay a far lower rate than anyone but the very poor, even the middle class hard-working white guy pulling down a median income around $50,000 a year thinks he's one of the makers and that other guy is a manipulative taker. I've tried to expose this bullshit, to little avail. Even though Rmoney claims this middle class guy needs another $150,000 a year to join the middle class at all...

I think this comes from the shriveled greedy coal-black hearts of the right wingers. They aren't motivated by anything but money, and they don't have any generosity of spirit (outside very narrow tribal boundaries) nor any ability to evaluate a picture larger than their own wallet, so they assume no one could possibly be a Democrat or a liberal without being paid off. They can't believe a member of the 5% like me could possibly believe the country is better off as a whole with a fairer distribution of taxation, income, and wealth. (Note to moron trolls: fair does not mean equal.)

So Republicans will wonder what all the fuss is about, because they lack basic human sympathy. They've got theirs, devil take the hindmost.

Shut up and watch, wingnuts

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Virulent ignorance

Why is it that the angriest anti-immigrant blatherers can't bother themselves to learn the most basic facts about immigration, illegal or legal?

Dobbs repeatedly suggested that undocumented immigrants should just come out of the shadows and apply for citizenship. He failed to understand that the point of the current debate is that they can't.

(h/t Atrios)

Sean Hannity, lying douchebag

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

There is simply no explanation for this other than the one I've been asserting for years: Fox is a propaganda outlet with no interest in the truth.

Three stupidest people on television

Bullshitting for a living

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.