Day: 2/28/2012

Koch Brothers Whine About Obama Fund Raising Letter

Posted by on February 28, 2012 at 1:03 pm. 9 Comments :

For a couple of multi-billionaires with virtually unlimited resources who vigorously engage in hardball political activity, the Koch brothers are an awfully lily-livered pair of wusses.

The Koch brothers created and bankrolled the Tea Party, an AstroTurf, corporate funded, pseudo-movement, that incessantly disparages President Obama as a communist, a Nazi, a Muslim, an atheist, a Kenyan, and a Manchurian agent whose mission is to deliver America to its enemies and/or Satan. The Kochs are also the money behind numerous think tanks and organizations whose purpose is to destroy the presidency through propaganda or outright manipulation and suppression of the vote (such as the American Legislative Exchange Council).

Despite their prominent role in attacking the President, the Kochs are wetting their britches because the Obama reelection team mentions them in a fund raising letter. The exchange looks something like this:

Obama Fund Raising Letter: In just about 24 hours, Mitt Romney is headed to a hotel ballroom to give a speech sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a front group founded and funded by the Koch brothers. Those are the same Koch brothers whose business model is to make millions by jacking up prices at the pump, and who have bankrolled Tea Party extremism and committed $200 million to try to destroy President Obama before Election Day.

Koch Response: [I]t is an abuse of the President’s position and does a disservice to our nation for the President and his campaign to criticize private citizens simply for the act of engaging in their constitutional right of free speech about important matters of public policy. The implication in that sort of attack is obvious: dare to criticize the President’s policies and you will be singled out and personally maligned by the President and his campaign in an effort to chill free speech and squelch dissent. […] the inference is that you would prefer that citizens who disagree with the President and his policies refrain from voicing their own viewpoint. Clearly, that’s not the way a free society should operate.

Apparently the way a free society should operate, according to the Kochs, is that critics of the administration are permitted vast leeway to spew any and all slander that they like, but if the other side seeks to respond they are guilty of squelching dissent. That’s not debate. That’s a one-sided harangue. And it becomes media propaganda when the right-wing press links arms with the Kochs to take their side and whine about free speech. Seriously? Fox News is grumbling about free speech?

The Koch brothers have absolutely no case when they are actively orchestrating nasty campaigns against the White House and other Democrats, but expect their targets to stay silent. They have recruited Fox News, who spent six minutes on this topic this morning with Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham, but no opposing view. They recruited Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago by planting an article written by the Kochs’ attorney on their editorial page. Fox Nation joined in with a featured item that linked back to the Kelly/Ingraham segment on Fox News. Kelly even plugged the Wall Street Journal article to bring the noise machine gears around full-circle.

The Kochs need to quit crying like toddlers lost in a Wal-Mart. They are not merely private citizens engaging in free speech. They are political powerhouses who have committed more than $200 million dollars to defeating the President. The Bush administration was quite vocal in denouncing their critics, including Cindy Sheehan, who was not a billionaire, but the mother of a slain soldier in Iraq. Vice-President Cheney actually did seek to chill free speech by explicitly warning people to “watch what you say.” But we never responded by whimpering about the White House being mean to us. We continued to press our case, get our message out, and speak truth to power.

If the Koch brothers think that they can persuade people that they are sympathetic waifs being put upon by a mean president, they are out of their minds. They are only embarrassing themselves by appearing to be wealthy weaklings who want to dish it out but run away weeping if the victim of their vitriol raises his voice.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: Taking Candy From Children

Posted by on February 28, 2012 at 9:53 am. 4 Comments :

Fox Nation is reporting the results of a new study that reveals some of the character differentials between the rich and the poor. As reported in the Huffington Post:

“The report contradicts the notion that poor people are more likely to act unethically out of financial necessity. Instead, the researchers wrote the ‘relative independence’ and ‘increased privacy’ of the wealthy make them more likely to act unethically. They also share ‘feelings of entitlement and inattention to the consequences of one’s actions on others’ that may play into their moral decisions.”

The study conducted experiments that showed that rich participants took twice as many candies as poorer participants from a jar that had been designated for children. The study also found that nearly half of all drivers of expensive cars cut off pedestrians at crosswalks, while no drivers of the cheapest cars did so (and only about 30% of drivers of less expensive cars). In addition, the study found that the rich were more likely to cheat in a game and lie to potential job applicants.

But the interesting part of the coverage by the Fox Nationalists is how they framed the study: LIB STUDY: Rich People More Likely to Take Candy from Children.

Fox Nation

The “LIB STUDY” prefix was attached by Fox in an obvious attempt to disparage the research and to bias readers against it before they even read the article. So who is this liberal institution that is poisoning the minds of America with their phony studies that bash our nation’s patriotic millionaires? Well, it’s that bastion of secular-progressive propaganda, the National Academy of Sciences.

This is just more evidence of the right’s knee-jerk reaction to science, education and higher learning. They have an involuntary motor response that causes them to shake uncontrollably whenever learned people present documented research. It just cuts against the grain of the conservative mind that favors religious fables over science and faith over proof.

This study is only a part of the body of research on human behavior. It may or may not be conclusive of anything as there are likely to be other studies that either affirm or negate its results. That isn’t important here. What’s important is that, regardless of what you might think of this study, the representation by Fox that the National Academy of Sciences is just some liberal operation and therefore undeserving of consideration, further defines them as anti-science, pseudo-news hacks who champion illiteracy and ignorance.