Slap on the ...

Click image for full Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette cartoon.

What if Rodney King never asked a rhetorical question?

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Is she a $100,000 granny?

The Republican ideology of health care is clear evidence of the GOP's lurch even harder to the right.  They no longer support universal health care.  That just encourages people who really can't afford it to get sick!

The clearest evidence for this is that Obamacare was born in the 1990s as a proposal from the Heritage Foundation, once upon a time just about the most ultraconservative bullshit factory that big media would quote.  Less than two decades later - like Mitt Romney, who proposed and signed an individual mandate here in Massachusetts - Heritage is running far far away from its disowned child.  Far to the right, to the Confederate theory of the Constitution.

The whole vast right-wing cabal that fantasizes a return to feudalism - though without the noblesse oblige - wants to kill any program that buys something the rich have and that would otherwise be hard or impossible for the rest of us to get.  If we die in the process, too bad.

Observing Republicans gear up to try to undo "Obamacare," I suspect the only thing that will satisfy some is to make medical care in the United States work like veterinary care. You get what you can pay for. Otherwise, tough luck.

If it costs too much, conservatives will let Granny die like Gene Lyons' horse Lucky.  But Lucky will still be aptly named.  At least he got the mercy of being put down.

Since religious fanatics dominate the GOP and they have perverted the gospel message of mercy into, "Tough luck.  Suffer," you won't even be able to offer Granny enough morphine to ease her going when you can't afford to replace and rehab her broken hip.

They accuse us of enacting death panels!  They would let the profit motive determine who lives and who dies.

Infotainment, not information

Mediamatters tries mockery to tarnish Princess Sarah, and that's good as far as it goes.  But mocking her as a misinformer is weak tea.  The teabaggers and indeed most Americans have already shown that they decide their votes based on infotainment, rather than information.

And the Princess excels at vain displays of a neck-snapping blend of self-entitlement and victimhood. 

It's puzzling that so many self-described real American men can't tell that yet another pretty, self-centered high school cheerleader is using them.  Even at the huge distance between their loungers and the set of Fox News, they're thinking with their dicks.  About which she'd say to herself, "You are never getting near me with that wrinkled piece of past-dated vienna sausage."

What do you think, video-pheromones?

More Republican insincerity

When I say Republicans don't care about the deficit, this is what I mean:

This is just one key feature of the GOP's playbook: CUT/GO. Under CUT/GO, all new spending has to be paid for, but tax cuts do not. Additionally any new spending must be paid for with parallel spending cuts elsewhere in the budget -- not with tax hikes. So unemployment benefits couldn't be paid for by closing a corporate tax loophole. But a corporate tax loophole could be widened without requiring any offsets.

You think the teabaggers will scream about this?  Of course they won't.  They are just as insincere as the Republicans, for whom they are the extremist wingnut base.

Update: Krugman (and dozens more, probably) beat me to this.

Snookered

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

What's the punishment for heresy?

Pat Robertson (R-another planet) slipped off his usual Calvinist orthodoxy - and his spokesman had to correct him:

Chris Roslan, a CBN spokesman, insisted Thursday that Robertson "did not call for the decriminalization of marijuana. ... Dr. Robertson unequivocally stated that he is against the use of illegal drugs."

But he should not feel so all alone.  Everybody must get stoned.  It's the mandatory minimum!

Republicans lie

... much more than Democrats do.

Now, of course, the GOP will have to accuse the fact-checking sites of liberal bias.  Even though the fact-checkers are much harder on Democrats than they are on Republicans.  If they were evenhanded, the tilt to conservative bullshit would be even more obvious.

Everyone knows Republicans have to lie.  They couldn't get elected with the truth.  Even Republicans know this.

Socialist gift redistribution complete!

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On to New Years

Redemption means more than a quarter back

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

What Tiny Tim said

You know Krugman wanted to use the word bullshit:

[T]he production of humbug — which was still a somewhat amateurish craft when Dickens wrote — has now become a systematic, even industrial, process.

Conservatism in America is built almost entirely on lies.  Consciously and intentionally.  It's deeply un-Christian and wholly uncharitable.

At Christmastime, Tiny Tim said, "God bless us, every one."

Conservatives to the contrary say with their actions, Devil take the hindmost.

Orwellian conservatives

Fox, like its Republican Party fellows, is actually radical in conservative clothing.

Even compared to the manifest swindles and perversions of the past 20 years or thereabouts, the United States has never seen anything like Fox News. The closest comparison to what Fox does daily would be the party-line propaganda sheets of the far left and extreme right that made Orwell worry "that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."

Fox doesn't care what's true, only what it wants to be true.

Orwell describes the corrosive effect of politicized mass media. In Spain, he wrote, "I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed ... I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.' "

More please!

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It's called the Daily Show. Is there a reason that good sense can't prevail every day?

Oh, right, Republicans...

Bullies

Reading up on the material in the Fox ignoramus effect, I found some really fun facts from 2008 about Fox's bullying of the rest of the big media (poor widdle babies!).

I had thought that reporters shied from taking on Fox because it might hire them some desperate day when the News Corporation owns all the big media.  Turns out, like Elisabeth Bumiller whose heart went pitty-pat when confronted by the hugeness and brilliance of Duhbya, reporters are mostly scared off.

Even those who will stand up have been bullied enough to hesitate:

Like most working journalists, whenever I type seven letters — Fox News — a series of alarms begins to whoop in my head: Danger. Warning. Much mayhem ahead.

Fox is like a middle school punk on the street corner when the elementary school lets out.  (h/t mistermix at Balloon Juice)  This is their offense in defense of the ignoramus effect:

In a statement, Michael Clemente, who is the senior vice president of news editorial for [Fox News], said: “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.’”

...

For the record, the Princeton Review says the University of Maryland ranks among the “Best Northeastern Colleges.” It was No. 19 on the Review’s list of “Best Party Schools.”

But back to 2008...

Can you imagine any other network than Fox digitally altering the appearance of journalists, Steven Reddicliffe and Jacques Steinberg, whom they're attacking?

The Fox attack dogs making this attack are Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade.  Yes, those two who show the value of competition by competing with each other to be the stupidest man on TV news.  They have the unmitigated gall to call Reddicliffe and Steinberg "attack dogs."

Fox is dangerous to American democracy.

Only you can cause forest fires

If the global temperature trend were headed downward instead of upward, what would we do to forestall another ice age?

We'd burn every bit of slash and plant scrap we could lay our hands on to pump up the greenhouse effect of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Turning that into policy would be as easy as falling off a (burning) log, except that perhaps the oil industry would lobby for a cut of the burning program.  Hey, something for Republicans to do to gum up the works in favor of their corporate sponsors!  Even ethanol producers would start to ballyhoo the carbon footprint of their fertilizers, cultivation, and product transport in hope of having it both ways.  Bipartisan subsidy too!

No doubt someone - maybe me - would whinge about the disproportionate Chinese contribution to solving global cooling.  Why do they get to have all the campfires!?  I remember when America led the world accidentally sparking forest fires!

Bonus graphic:

When I first saw a graph like this in the late 1970s, it wasn't even called the Keeling Curve, but it was already cause for worry.  In the meantime, propaganda, not science, is the only force diminishing that concern.  CO₂ keeps right on trucking.

Against ethics before he was for it

John Boehner (R-consistent hypocrite) decides that ethics might be useful in the House.  Finally.

His plan, I'm sure:  Take credit for the investigations that Democrats started of other Democrats.

Whitewashing

Nothing else to call it...

Haley Barbour (R-nostalgia for the white experience of Jim Crow) climbs down from his nostalgia:

When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns' integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn't tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the 'Citizens Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.

But by no means far enough.  The White Citizens Council was actually coercing other people, uppity black people:

"Look," said Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens Council, explaining why 51 of 53 Negroes who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names, "if a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don’t want him working for you — of course you don’t."

In Yazoo City, in August 1955, the Council members fired signers of the integration petition, or prevailed upon other white employers to get them fired. But the WCC continues to deny that it uses economic force: all the Council did in Yazoo City was to provide information (a full-page ad in the local weekly listing the “offenders”); spontaneous public feeling did the rest.

Bless ol' Haley's heart. At least his esteemed bigots didn't lynch anyone. They had such high standards!

Why we should have hanged Jeff Davis

Secession was treason and should have been treated as such.

One of America’s worst traitors, a man who had committed or condoned far worse acts against his country than Benedict Arnold, was allowed to go home after his brief detainment in Virginia. But even that lenient punishment was enough to elevate [Jefferson] Davis to Southern martyrdom. Rumors were spread throughout the South about his mistreatment at Fortress Monroe, although Davis himself said the stories were untrue. Until his death in 1889, he found a stronger voice in passionately defending the right of secession and extolling the nobility of the Lost Cause. He became, like so many of his fellow Confederates, an unreconstructed rebel. As one might expect, he never believed that he had committed a single traitorous act; in fact, he boldly, even arrogantly, affirmed that every one of his actions was legal and constitutional. Unlike Lee, he never sought a pardon, which is just as well because he probably would not have gotten it (although President Johnson, who was courting the Democratic Party at the time, could have easily caved in on this issue). But he also never uttered a single word of regret or remorse for the bloody revolutionary war he had willfully led against his country.

It was and is unpatriotic to adhere to the Confederacy.

Fox ignoramus effect

What went wrong in 2010?

The good news is that Americans realize that the media is bathing them in bullshit bubble-bath.


The bad news is that most of us apparently have no freaking idea how to distinguish shit from shinola.

The New York Times buries its lead (lede to the kool kidz). It wants to shout out - as it should - that Fox News makes its viewers more ignorant, not less. But it has to dither first, nicking MSNBC for the mote in its eye before proceeding to the log in Fox's.

The simple fact is Fox News infects its viewers with lies. Here's the proof Fox is a vector for bullshit:
There's an unmistakable Fox News ignoramus effect. The percentage of misinformed viewers goes up as their viewing peaks. Watching Fox daily disinforms viewers on 10 of 11 topics and disinforms them badly on 8 of the 11!

Note that Fox can get the facts right when those facts support Fox's political bias. The single topic on which Fox viewers became steadily better informed the more they watched: whether Democrats had proven the Chamber of Commerce used foreign money to finance its ad campaign against them.

Even after getting to their justified smackdown on Fox, the Times misses a much more dire story. No matter what medium an American prefers for news, there's a whole shit-load of ignorance out there. Fox is worst, CNN is pretty bad, but MSNBC is only good by exceedingly low standards. Newspapers in general are worse than MSNBC.

All of which is why we suffered in November a triumph at the polls of the refuted economic doctrines of the right wing:

Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.
Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.

Zombie lies, kept alive by Fox and other right-wing propagandists, including the entire Republican establishment. Until we as a people become more discerning of the truth, we'll only get more politics of dogma, in which conservatives feel entitled to their own facts, no matter how contradicted by reality.

Update (12/21):  Fox misleads again - successfully! - though only the second sense of lie, not the stronger first sense.