As might be expected, Sarah Palin is leading off her new series of programs on Fox News with her strongest asset: lying.
In press reports describing the debut, rapper/actor LL Cool J is listed as part of the exclusive lineup that Palin will be featuring. As it turns out, the interview is actually a retread taped in 2008 and had nothing to do with Palin.
“Real American Stories features uplifting tales about overcoming adversity and we believe Mr. Smith’s interview fit that criteria. However, as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career.”
This is clearly the work of Fox News PR Priestess, Irena Briganti (or someone following in her footsteps). The pissy little comment at the close of the response is not only childish, but laughably untrue. Cool J is a veteran of film and TV and currently stars in one of the hottest shows on television, NCIS.
The Fox News PR department is notorious for this kind of unprofessionalism. A couple of years ago, David Bauder documented what came to be known as the “wishing well.” where Fox snidely wishes someone they don’t like well with the back of their hand. Take this for example:
“Because of his personal demons, Keith [Olbermann] has imploded everywhere he’s worked. From lashing out at co-workers to personally attacking Bill O’Reilly and all things Fox, it’s obvious Keith is a train wreck waiting to happen. And like all train wrecks, people might tune in out of morbid curiosity, but they eventually tune out, as evidenced by Keith’s recent ratings decline. In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.“
Oblivion for Olbermann must a long ways off. Two years later he is still the number two show on cable news. And Cool J’s career is far from fledgling. I would wager that the only train wreck in the foreseeable future is going to involve Palin who still has no discernible talent for anything but dishonesty and quitting.
Update: As my reader, Fed UP, noted, Toby Keith was also not particularly pleased with Palin dredging up a two year old interview and presenting it as new. Now that Keith has joined Cool J in complaining about this sleazy clip show Palin is hosting, will Fox News cut him out of the show as well? Will they insult him as a fledgling country singer? And when will Jack Welch issue a press release revealing that Palin and Fox had not contacted him either? This whole show appears to be a scam that is just a bunch of old clips edited together with some intros by Palin. And worst of all, LL Cool J, a black entertainer, is cut from the program for expressing his objection to being exploited by Fox, but Toby Keith, a white entertainer, does the same thing with no repercussions. Why am I not surprised?
Once again, Andrew Breitbart has dispatched his henchman, Jason Mattera, to annoy a member of congress. This time it’s Sen. Al Franken and, just as happened when he ambushed Rep. Alan Grayson with a false assertion that the health care bill provided funds for child molesters, Mattera is made to look the fool.
In this episode of Mattera’s Morons, Jason stalks Sen. Franken to ask about an alleged provision in the health care bill that allocates $7 billion for jungle gyms. The only problem for Mattera is that nothing of the sort is in the bill. Franken is acutely aware of this and engages Mattera in this exchange:
Franken: You came up to me and said “You know the part of the bill where they give $7 billion dollars to fund the jungle gyms?” And I said “Show me that.” It doesn’t say that in the bill. Mattera: Oh, it says infrastructure for healthy living in playgrounds for schools. What is that an army of monkey bars?
Sorry Jason. The bill doesn’t say anything about playgrounds or jungle gyms or monkey bars. And when you approach someone who is much more knowledgeable than yourself about legislation, you ought not try to lie about what’s in the bill. What the bill says is that funds in this section can be used for…
(i) creating healthier school environments, including increasing healthy food options, physical activity opportunities, promotion of healthy lifestyle, emotional wellness, and prevention curricula, and activities to prevent chronic diseases;
(ii) creating the infrastructure to support active living and access to nutritious foods in a safe environment;
So now we see that Breitbart and his ward are just as opposed to safe schools and nutritious foods as they are to preventing child abuse. But I have to admire his tenacity. After making an ass of himself over the non-existent jungle gyms, Mattera plowed ahead with a complaint about language in the bill that provides new mothers with reasonable breaks for breast feeding. I thought Republicans were supposed to be the “family values” party. Not that they ever actually supported family values, but they have long sought to pretend that they did. But here the truth is revealed as Mattera berates Franken for supporting a bill that permits new mothers to care for their infant children.
I wonder… Would Mattera prefer it if the woman had an abortion so that she wouldn’t have to miss any work time? Should she quit her job and reduce her income and her family’s ability to provide for themselves? Maybe she should just leave the kid at home and let it fend for itself in a Randian adventure of survival. Mattera’s idiocy is illustrative of something we’ve known all along: Conservatives care very deeply about fetuses but once you leave the womb they don’t give a flying frak.
This hysterical video was, once again, featured on Breitbart’s BigGovernment web site as well as the Fox Nation. And it still amazes me that Mattera thinks he comes off looking good in it. He clearly has a perverse sense of pride. Also Jason, it only makes you look like more of an immature jerk when call Franken “Senator Smalley.” It just drives home how obvious it is that you are NOT good enough, NOT smart enough, and, doggone it, no one likes you.
[Update, 3/31/2010:] Had this been announced a day later, I would have been certain that it was an April fools joke, but no…..Jason Mattera has actually been named editor-in-chief of the uber-conservative Human Events Magazine. Human Events sees some potential in this 26 year old moron whose chief quality appears to be making himself look like an idiot. Now he will oversee the magazine as well as their Internet properties like RedState, home of the new CNN contributor, Erick Erickson.
This past Saturday Glenn Beck held the first of his American Revival Traveling Salvation Shows in Florida. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News was there and reported that it was pretty much the evangelical, Apocalyptic fright fest one might have imagined from Beck. Along with his customary factless exhortations on the imminent demise of the nation, Beck beseeched his congregation to “Get God on your side.” But he was especially pessimistic on Saturday:
“If we don’t face the truth right now, we’ll be dead in five years; this country can’t survive.”
Five years? That’s barely enough time to schedule an appointment with the ObamaCare Death Panel. Beck’s audience heartily embraces his pessimism. Eighty percent said so in a survey conducted by texting in the auditorium. Who knew there were so many Americans who believe this nation is such a fragile thing that its prognosis for survival is hopelessly bleak? Nevertheless, the Beck pods were so moved that they expressed their enthusiasm for his vision as something of a spiritual awakening. Here are some retweets posted on Beck’s Twitter stream:
“the American Revival today was absolutely one of the best experiences of my life.”
“Thank you for one of the most amazing experiences in my life!!”
“I was blind but now I see!!.”
“Today’s American Revival inspired me more than any other day in my life so far….THANK YOU!”
“Thank you @glennbeck for an incredibly memorible day! Today I have heard the call in more ways than one!”
“I cry as I write: my life is forever change. TY”
These revival meetings are building up to an event in Washington, DC, that Beck calls Restoring Honor. Apparently Beck’s method of doing that is to hold a rally to launch his next book, “The Plan” – a 100 year strategy for … I don’t know … manifesting the dementia that infects his brain. This book launch masquerading as political event (and dishonestly exploiting a veterans charity) is being held on the anniversary of Martin Luther’s King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, and at the same location. That is a stinging insult to man that Beck doesn’t think deserves a holiday honoring him.
Beck has another book coming out in June. That one is reportedly a work of fiction, although that doesn’t really distinguish from everything else he does. It is called “The Overton Window” and incorporates much of the Apocalyptic fantasies that Beck dispenses on his radio and TV shows. The plot chronicles a nation in “a civil war, and life is upside-down planetwide.” And there is a group of heroes Beck calls the “Founders Keepers,” which I’m sure is how he sees himself, with all his talk of Re-Founding America and his beatification of Sam Adams, George Washington, et al.
But I think there is a more appropriate name for the group to which Beck belongs than Founders Keepers. I would call them the “Losers Weepers.” What else would call a bunch of ignorant hypocrites who can’t stop sobbing over imaginary villains lurking in every shadow? These are people who rail against big government when they go to pick up their unemployment checks. They are the ones who shout “Keep government’s hands off of my Social Security.” They profess to support the troops, unless those troops come back from the battlefield scarred and in need of physical and emotional rehabilitation. And these are the people who believe Beck’s lies and horror stories and would follow Beck anywhere. Perhaps even to Becktown where they could enjoy complimentary Kool-Aid.
This just in: Some of Beck’s fans left his revival to discover that their cars had been towed away. Actually 53 of them. It appears that they were misled by signs directing them to a parking lot for the Kappa Sigma fraternity. This may have been a mistake or a prank, no one seems to know for sure. But I have uncovered some evidence that it might be a plot devised by Barack Obama himself.
Please note this symbol for Kappa Sigma. It’s a crescent and star, which is also a symbol of ….. the Muslim faith. And since Obama is a secret Muslim. the connection is pretty obvious. The president planned this whole thing to attack Glenn Beck and his disciples. The Kappa Sigma are working clandestinely on behalf of the White House. After a enough of these operations, none of Beck’s viewers will have any transportation at all. They’ll be stuck at home and will miss all of the Tea Parties. It’s downright insidious.
This site’s mission has always been to focus on the media and its impact on society and culture. But this morning I was just thinking about how dysfunctional some of our political institutions are, and I thought I’d wander off the reservation for a while.
Friday President Obama had to make recess appointments for 15 nominees to federal posts because Senate Republicans refuse to permit a vote on them. And there are still dozens more in the same state of partisan limbo. In addition to that, Republicans have conducted a record breaking number of filibusters in their attempt to supersede the will of the Senate and the voters.
All of this leads me to question whether the Senate is an anachronism that no longer serves the best interests of democracy. States do not have the sort of parochial concerns that were once a part of the independent and geographically distinct colonies that made up the early confederation. Citizens migrate throughout the nation with little regard to loyalty based on home state affiliation. But the most striking illustration of the Senate having outgrown its usefulness is this chart I drew up:
[Detail breakdown in comments]
What I’d like to know is why do 31.4 million Americans in the twenty smallest states command a 40% share of the votes in the Senate, while 36.9 million Americans in California alone have only 2%? Is that democratic? Have those small-staters done something to deserve so much more influence over the country? Not so far as I can tell. Yet they have a theoretical veto power over the other 276 million citizens in the rest of the nation. That’s just not right.
What this amounts to is that a bunch of states that are mostly inhabited by brush and rodents have an inordinate sway over the laws that govern the vast majority of the country. And it’s often the senators from those small states who are the most obstructionist members of the body.
Maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe senators should represent districts whose lines are determined by population rather than by state boundaries. That would seem to be a much more fair and democratic way of handling this. Personally, I’m pretty tired of watching 10% of the country dictate how the other 90% are going to live.
I know this is not a new question, and there are barriers to any substantive change (mainly because the same small-staters would oppose it in the Senate). But it doesn’t hurt to bring it up from time to time and to hold out some hope that positive, democratic reform might still be possible. Because, in the end, no one should be allowed to be more equal than anyone else in America. No, seriously.
This morning on Fox News, Shannon Bream interviewed Fox News contributor Liz Trotta. The segment dealt with what Bream characterized as the over-reporting of incidents of violence directed at Democrats in the days following the passage of the health care bill. Those incidents included death threats, smashed windows, mail with suspicious white powder, severed gas lines, etc.
On Fox News, however, such examples of domestic terrorism are irrelevant trivialities. Trotta began her spiel by asserting that the left invented violent dissent back in the 1960’s. You know, the peacenik, free love, flower children, who marched to end discrimination and war. They were a frightening bunch, weren’t they? And because of them, the overt hostility being played out by extremist conservatives today is, in Trotta’s words, “laughable.”
It’s funny, my recollection of the sixties is very different. It wasn’t the followers of the Gandhi-inspired Martin Luther King who were stirring up trouble. It was the right-wingers who were beating up (or worse) anyone with long hair or dark skin. And the rightward proclivity for violence exists today with armed patriot and militia groups, and NRA-sponsored tea partiers who show up with signs that say “We came unarmed – this time.”
But Trotta doesn’t stop there. She goes on to discuss particular acts of violence that she thinks are unworthy of attention. She told Bream that “a brick through a window is pretty low on the violence scale.” I wonder how she would react if it were her window? I imagine she would casually get up from the sofa, pick up the brick with a chuckle, and tell her kids to turn off the TV and go play outside. After all, it’s only a brick. Don’t be a wuss.
Trotta’s exhibition of bravado is nothing new. During the presidential campaign she came out in favor of assassination:
“…and now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama … uh … Obama … well, both if we could.”
Trotta further disparaged the victims and critics of violence by portraying their complaints as “whining.” In Trotta’s view, if someone leaves you a profanity-laced message saying snipers are going to kill your children (as happened to Rep. Louise Slaughter), you are just a sniveling bellyacher if you bring it up on TV or report it to the police.
Trotta didn’t say whether she thought Republican Rep. Eric Cantor was whining when he held a press conference to disclose that he was a victim of violence. His allegations were broadcast on Fox News with a screen graphic that read “Gunman Shoots Up Office Of Number Two House Republican. Cantor whined that…
“I have been directly threatened. A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week.”
Perhaps it doesn’t qualify as whining if it is lying. Because police later revealed that the bullet did not directly threaten Cantor at all. It was not shot at his office (it was random gunfire into the air). It was not even his office that was hit (it was a different unit on a different floor). And no one even knew there was a campaign office in the building (the office was unmarked and wasn’t in his district). In short, everything Cantor alleged about the incident was utterly false. Yet Trotta never mentioned Cantor as one of the whiners for whom she has such scorn.
This is yet another example of Fox News embracing the most repulsively hostile rhetoric. Trotta, who has her own record of violent fantasy, is quite at home on the network that features folks like Ralph Peters who advocates military attacks on the press. And Michael Scheuer who told Glenn Beck that “[T]he only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.”
These sort of sentiments are a routine part of Fox’s editorial position. It isn’t whining, and it isn’t concealed. But It is an apologia for domestic terrorism and a justification, and invitation, for continued and escalating violence. The people at Fox News, from the administrative staff, to the presenters like Trotta and Glenn Beck, to the executives like Roger Ailes, and all the way up to Rupert Murdoch, should consider themselves culpable for any and all of the ugly events that their vulgar and irresponsible actions might predictably encourage. They are sitting on a powder keg and playing with matches. If something blows up they cannot pretend that they had nothing to do with it.
Posted by Mark NC on March 26, 2010 at 6:22 pm.
NOComments :
The Associated Press is reporting that James O’Keefe, the ersatz pimp made famous in his fraudulently edited videotapes of ACORN, is likely to plead guilty to reduced charges stemming from his misadventures in the offices of Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu.
Federal prosecutors filed reduced charges Friday against conservative activist James O’Keefe and three others who were accused of trying to tamper with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. […] The new charges carry maximum sentences of six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.
When this plea bargain is concluded it will represent the only conviction of anyone involved in the ACORN sting. ACORN itself was found to be innocent of any wrongdoing by three separate, independent investigations. Additionally, poorly considered legislation from Congress prohibiting federal funds from going to ACORN was ruled to be unconstitutional in federal court.
Nevertheless, before the ink was even dry on the deal, O’Keefe’s Sugardaddy, Andrew Breitbart (who supports child molesters), was trumpeting it as some sort of victory. He tweeted:
“BWAAAH: Conservative activist, 3 others have charges reduced in phone caper at La. senator’s office. Developing…”
I’m not sure what he’s so happy about. His apprentice propagandist is still facing jail time and will have a criminal record. No matter how Breitbart downplays the significance of this, the facts reveal that O’Keefe was engaged in some pretty shady activities. He maintains that he was only there to find out if Landrieu’s office was avoiding the phone calls of constituents. He claims he never intended to tamper with the lines. That’s an obvious lie. If it were true, then why did he and his cohorts leave Landrieu’s office to go to a separate facility that housed the telephone wiring and equipment?
While it is disappointing that O’Keefe et al won’t be held to fully account for their felonious behavior, the reality is that this is the way many criminal cases are resolved by prosecutors and courts who have an interest in reducing caseloads and acquiring convictions. And while there is some likelihood that these delinquents will end up getting little more than a slap on the wrist, being caught and convicted for malfeasance in a senator’s office is certainly nothing to be proud of.
The rabid rhetorical posture of Glenn Beck and the far right’s martinets of virtue is now manifesting what was the inevitable and predictable outcome of their rancid zealotry. Reports are surfacing that members of Congress who voted in favor of the health care bill have been the targets of hatred and violence. At least ten overt acts of hostility have prompted more than 100 representatives to seek additional security.
I find it hard to grasp that anyone could have failed to see this coming. When conservatives frame their opposition to policy as a battle against tyranny, socialism, fascism, and an end to America as we know it, the prospect of the unbalanced contingent acting out violently is a virtual certainty. If I truly believed that the government was forming death panels, plotting to kill my grandmother, ration my health care, and incite Armageddon, even I might consider extraordinary measures to avert such catastrophes.
And no one is yelling “fire” in this crowded theater louder than Glenn Beck. He makes unequivocal pronouncements that the current administration is infested with dangerous subversives who literally want the nation to collapse and are working toward that end. But he goes farther than that – much farther. He now contends that the villains in Washington are actually trying to get some poor, deluded, conservative, psycho (like there’s no shortage of them) to embrace assassination. Beck thinks that Obama, Pelosi, et al, want to be murdered for their cause. He said this on his radio show:
“Why do you think they are needling and poking and prodding all the time? Why do you think they slap you down on health care and just as you’re getting up they punch you in the face with immigration? Why do you think they’re being so divisive? […] They need you to be estranged from them. They need you to pick up a gun or a bomb. They need you to break the law.”
“This might be the most dangerous monologue I have ever done, because I am telling you now, they need you to be violent. They are begging for it. You are being set up. Do not give them what they want. […] I know people don’t say this on television, but it’s damn well time people do. Our country is in real trouble. Radicals – RADICALS – are poking and prodding.
Beck believes that this “poking” is a deliberate provocation to get someone to go off the deep end and commit an assault. He described an incident in Washington when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi walked through a crowd of people that included some aggressive protesters, as a staged event where Pelosi was hoping that she would be killed. Beck expressed his view of what she and other Democrats are thinking when they go out in public like this:
“What the hell do you have to do to these people to get them to kill us?”
My question: What the hell do you have to do to Beck’s audience to get them to realize that he is batshit insane? My answer: Don’t bother. They aren’t going to see it. They are fiercely devoted to his preaching and regard him as an anointed messenger of God. But no more than he regards himself as such. His program becomes more like the 700 Club every day. And this week he has stepped up the assholiness:
“You get down on your knees and pray. You pray for forgiveness for our arrogance; for how we’ve disregarded our freedoms; and you pray for the Finger of God. I have told you before, expect miracles in our lifetime. I am telling you you will see them. There are tough times ahead, but the only weapon in our arsenal we need is God. Beg him for help and guidance. He will take care of everything else.”
This sermonizing goes beyond mere admonitions to prostrate yourself before the Lord. Beck sees himself in the role of an evangelical savior of America to whom you must pay strict attention, and to no one else. And like any good savior, he is also at risk of persecution and even martyrdom at the hands of Obama’s Pharisees:
“Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet. I want what they have. And for those who say somehow or another that I am distorting the socialist view of social justice, oh my goodness. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy brother. Holy cow. You’ve broken three commandments. Three of them. Three of them all on one principle. That’s amazing. And for those of you in the administration who are coming after me on this one, I mean, remember, you’ve broken three, let’s not make it four. Thou shalt not kill.”
The spectacle of watching Beck beg for his life would be hysterical if it weren’t for it being so ….. OK, it’s just hysterical. But at some point Beck is going to have declare himself a prophet and move his disciples to Guyana (or maybe South Carolina).
The news that Sarah Palin’s Alaska has been picked up by the Discovery Channel should not come as a surprise to astute observers. After all, there are great opportunities for synergy with other Discovery properties.
First of all, Discovery has been on the forefront of environmental education. They broadcast documentaries on the subject frequently and even have a network devoted to the subject: Planet Green. This melds perfectly with Palin’s broadcast experience on the environment, which centers around her beliefs that global warming is a hoax and that we should “drill everywhere.” Her current employer, Fox News, also has an official position that states its commitment to the planet and reducing its carbon footprint, yet employs climate change deniers to convince their audience that the whole thing was trumped up by fascists and marketing executives at GE. So now both networks present people on air that are diametrically opposed to their official policies – and to science.
Secondly, Discovery’s schedule is loaded with complimentary programming. For instance…
Dirty Jobs: A peak into the world of politics.
Deadliest Catch: An examination of the loopholes in health insurance policies.
Cash Cab: Intimate stories of taxi rides with Washington lobbyists.
I haven’t actually seen any of these shows but I’m pretty sure that’s the gist of it.
But the big opportunity exists with Discovery’s best known show, Mythbusters. Just imagine the wealth of Palin-related material that Adam and Jamie can explore and debunk.
I can’t wait for their show Death Panels; or the trip to Alaska to find out just how much of Russia is visible from Palin’s porch; or their experiments on shooting wolves from helicopters; or the investigation into where that bridge to nowhere really went.
Congratulations Discovery. You have tea-bagged yourselves one heckuva star. I’m sure she will bring to the network a measure of respectability and credibility that you have long sought. And as for viewers…you couldn’t imagine a more compatible demographic of anti-science, God-fearing, creationists. I expect this show to be a ratings bonanza – for about fifteen minutes.
Late Breaking: Discovery will be airing Palin’s show on its TLC: The Learning Channel (which may have to undergo a name change). Her program will appear alongside “What Not to Wear,” “Paranormal Court,” and “Cake Boss.” And soon the premiere of “Sarah and Todd Plus Five.”
The terminally choleric Andrew Breitbart (or Boogerman as he’d prefer to be known) is featuring a story on his BigGovernment web site that illustrates a disturbing affinity for child sexual abusers.
The article is authored by Jason Mattera, who appears to be auditioning to be Bill O’Reilly’s next ambush geek. If so, he has some pretty big clown shoes to fill: Stuttering Jesse Watters and Griff Teabaggin Jenkins. But Mattera is off to a good start with a video of him pestering Rep. Alan Grayson. The video is titled: “Why would Alan Grayson want to give your money over to Native American child molesters?”
In the video Mattera is shown slyly gaining Grayson’s trust by talking about his Brooklyn upbringing. But it doesn’t take long before he reveals his psycho side – and Grayson picks it up immediately asking, in an understatement, if Mattera is a kook. But Mattera presses on undaunted in his attempt to tie Grayson to a government program that Mattera says gives money to child molesters. The source for Mattera’s allegation is this language in the recently passed health care bill that addresses…
“(2) perpetrators of child sexual abuse who are Indian or members of an Indian household.”
What Mattera leaves out is that the bill does not give any money to abusers. It funds treatment programs to prevent future incidents of abuse. In the section of the bill immediately following the one Mattera cites it explicitly describes the use of funds, including:
(5) To identify and provide behavioral health treatment to Indian perpetrators and perpetrators who are members of an Indian household–
(A) making efforts to begin offender and behavioral health treatment while the perpetrator is incarcerated or at the earliest possible date if the perpetrator is not incarcerated;
‘(B) providing treatment after the perpetrator is released, until it is determined that the perpetrator is not a threat to children.
So apparently Mattera and Breitbart are opposed to protecting children from child molesters. They are openly advocating a position wherein criminal deviants would be permitted to maintain their perversions and pose a continuing threat to kids. Perhaps Breitbart and company don’t want such treatment mandated because they might find themselves at risk of being obligated to participate in such treatment. I don’t know, I’m just asking. But it is undeniable that Breitbart is more interested in the rights of child molesters than in the child victims.
In a fit of psychotic bluster, the folks at Fox Nation have posted an article with a headline that was manufactured from whole cloth. There is nothing in their reporting, or the column to which they linked, that remotely implied the message in this headline:
“IRS Hiring Thousands of Armed Tax Agents to Enforce Obamacare.”
The source for the Fox Nationalists is a column in Tucker Carlson’s right-wing Daily Caller. You might expect that Fox could rely on Carlson to support their hallucinatory journalism. After all, Carlson is a Fox News employee. But the article in the Caller, while misleading on it’s own, doesn’t go anywhere near the Fox misinterpretation.
The Caller’s headline was somewhat less dishonest: “IRS looking to hire thousands of tax agents to enforce health care laws.” It does not make a declaration of fact that agents are actually being hired, only that the IRS is looking into it. But more importantly, there is no mention of these agents being armed. In all likelihood, any new hires are going to be accountants with calculators, not mercenaries with machine guns. That, however, didn’t stop the Caller from posting an accompanying photo of heavily armed soldiers in combat gear who have nothing whatsoever to do with the story. And, of course, Fox Nation re-posted the same photo.
The Caller’s article is filled with falsehoods. Anyone who actually bothers to read the article will notice that there is no substantiation of its claim that Democrats are working with the IRS to hire new agents. The only confirmation comes from Republicans supplying their own speculation as to staffing requirements.
It is fair to assume that expanding efforts to collect revenue would require additional personnel. However, the article notes that the new hiring is aimed at collecting taxes unrelated to the health care bill. So are Republicans and the Fox Nationalists taking the position that tax cheats should not be pursued or held accountable? Should law abiding Americans have to shoulder the burden for these deadbeats? Yes, that’s exactly their position. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee even issued a report that criticized the administration for proposing $8 billion to fund tax compliance measures. It seems to me that an $8 billion allocation to recover an estimated $300 billion in delinquent taxes is a pretty good return on investment and an effective way to reduce budget deficits.
The content of the article in the Caller is misleading in many respects, but the Fox Nation version is delusional. It states flatly that the IRS is hiring “armed” tax agents. It states flatly that these new agents will be dispatched to “enforce Obamacare.” Neither of those statements are substantiated and they aren’t even in the linked article. Yet the Fox Nationalists post the photo of soldiers in combat attire, weapons at the ready, deployed in a search and destroy posture.
The obvious intent of Fox is to frighten their congregation of Psycho-chicken Littles into believing that the “revenuers” are advancing on them to take their money and send them to FEMA camps where they will be forced to have abortions and marry gay socialists.
After struggling for fourteen months to derail the President’s agenda, and failing, Fox is upping the ante. They want people to be so afraid that they will fortify their bunkers, stockpile weapons, hoard rations, buy gold (brought to you by Glenn Beck), and prepare for Armageddon. And the way they advance that goal is by disseminating lies like this story from the scare-meisters at Fox Nation.
Update: Fox News continues to pour on the fear mongering. They are now reprising a story originally posted at Fox Nation almost two months: Boob Bombs!Terrorists Could Use Explosives in Breast Implants to Crash Planes.
Back in February the story was sourced to the ultra-wingnut WorldNetDaily web site. This time Fox is sourcing it to The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid, but, hilariously, the article quotes “terrorist expert Joseph Farah.” In fact, Farah is no terrorist expert, he is the publisher of WorldNetDaily. The propaganda comes full circle.
It seems that they are just going to repeat this story every few months until either people are sufficiently terrified of titties, or until Al Qaeda decides to give it a try. I maintain my position that this could have a devastating impact on air travel. As I said in February:
We would need to start including Scarlett Johansson in our profiling criteria. And because the same explosive devices could be inserted in the buttocks, Jennifer Lopez would have to be added to the no-fly list.
Update II: All of this is reminiscent of the hysteria Glenn Beck tried to trump up over what he said was a civilian national security force that Obama was supposedly amassing to assault him and his congregation. As it turns out it was just an initiative to expand the peace corps and similar organizations.
[Also…] FactChect.org debunked the claim of IRS hiring thousands of agents.
As might be expected, Sarah Palin is leading off her new series of programs on Fox News with her strongest asset: lying.
But I think there is a more appropriate name for the group to which Beck belongs than Founders Keepers. I would call them the “Losers Weepers.” What else would call a bunch of ignorant hypocrites who can’t stop sobbing over imaginary villains lurking in every shadow? These are people who rail against big government when they go to pick up their unemployment checks. They are the ones who shout “Keep government’s hands off of my Social Security.” They profess to support the troops, unless those troops come back from the battlefield scarred and in need of physical and emotional rehabilitation. And these are the people who believe Beck’s lies and horror stories and would follow Beck anywhere. Perhaps even to Becktown where they could enjoy complimentary Kool-Aid.
Please note this symbol for Kappa Sigma. It’s a crescent and star, which is also a symbol of ….. the Muslim faith. And since Obama is a secret Muslim. the connection is pretty obvious. The president planned this whole thing to attack Glenn Beck and his disciples. The Kappa Sigma are working clandestinely on behalf of the White House. After a enough of these operations, none of Beck’s viewers will have any transportation at all. They’ll be stuck at home and will miss all of the Tea Parties. It’s downright insidious.
The Associated Press is 
The rabid rhetorical posture of Glenn Beck and the far right’s martinets of virtue is now manifesting what was the inevitable and predictable outcome of their rancid zealotry. 
In a fit of psychotic bluster, the folks at Fox Nation have posted an article with a headline that was manufactured from whole cloth. There is nothing in their reporting, or the column to which they linked, that remotely implied the message in this headline:
Update: Fox News continues to pour on the fear mongering. They are now reprising a story originally posted at Fox Nation almost two months: