Month: October 2014

Tea-Bola Infects The GOP: Symptoms Include Secession Obsession And California-itis

Posted by on October 6, 2014 at 11:47 am. 2 Comments :

Today’s Republican Party is very, very sick. They are exhibiting symptoms of acute cognitive failure and an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. This severe case of Tea-Bola is what accounts for their insistence that the federal government keep its hands off of Medicare; and their denial of Climate Change despite 97% of scientists affirming it; and their perception of a collapsing economy that has actually grown significantly.

The GOP, driven by its Tea Party caucus, is obsessed with repealing a health insurance reform plan that has resulted in lower costs and a substantial decrease in the number of uninsured Americans. They incessantly shout “Benghazi” as if they were suffering from a perverse form of Tourette’s Syndrome. And they want so badly to impeach President Obama that they have forgotten to establish any rationale for such a blatantly deranged legal overreach. Indeed, they are slipping away into wingnut delirium and there doesn’t seem to be any cure.

Tea-Bola

The latest manifestation of the right’s raving lunacy is illustrated in a poll conducted by Fox News (who is both suffering from, and spreading Tea-Bola). The Fox poll asked a question that reveals just how on target Jon Stewart was when he yelled at right-wing hypocrites, with exasperation, “Fuck you and your false patriotism.” The questions hinges on the notion of secession by one or more states. There have been several episodes of pseudo-patriotic Republicans articulating a desire for the United States to break apart, or for their state to secede. And now we have a survey that puts the matter into partisan perspective.

The poll asked: If your state were to hold an election on whether or not to split off from the United States, how would you vote? Democrats, at 4%, weren’t too keen on the idea, but three times as many Republicans (12%) favored it. However, it was the Tea Party that really lapped it up with 23% opting for secession. So much for American exceptionalism.

In another question, the divide was even more stark. The question asked was: Are there any states that you would vote out of the United States if you could? This wording is somewhat more hostile. It no longer wonders whether you would want to leave America yourself, but whether you would like kick out some other state. The party breakdown was: Democrats: 13%; Republicans: 21%; and a full third of the Tea Party contingent (34%) were firmly committed to banishing some other state from the land of the free.

The Tea Party’s favorite state to excommunicate is one that they frequently attack as a bastion of socialism and/or wacky secular heathens. To no one’s surprise it is California that was chosen by 83% of the Tea Party martinets of virtue. That’s six points higher than Republicans as a whole.

The incomparable idiocy of their blind hatred ignores the fact that California, by itself, accounts for about 13% of the nation’s GDP. If booted from the union it would become the sixth richest country in the world. It has all of the assets required to guarantee its ongoing prosperity, such as abundant natural resources; a diverse economy that includes agriculture, manufacturing, energy, technology, entertainment, and tourism; 800 miles of coastline and ports for access to the world’s trade routes; numerous defense plants and military installations; and an affluent population for its tax base. Let’s face, the U.S. needs California more than California needs the U.S.

If the GOP/Tea Party had its way they would end up with a much poorer America. California is a net positive contributor to the federal budget, getting back only 87 cents for every dollar paid in. Compare that to the Tea Party utopia of Mississippi where they mooch $2.47 for each dollar paid. And if the Teabaggers crusade extended to their second choice for banishment, New York, they would lose even more. New York is another prosperous (and Democratic) state that gets only 72 cents back on each dollar paid to the feds. The two-state combination of California and New York account for nearly a quarter (22%) of the entire nation’s GDP.

This display of stupidity extends to other questions in the Fox poll. For instance, when asked: How concerned are you that the Islamic extremist group known as ISIS will try to launch an attack on U.S. soil in the near future? Democrats had a reasonably healthy concern of 39%. Republicans were a bit more nervous with 59%. But the Tea Party are shivering in their bunkers with 76% consumed by the fear they’ve been fed by Fox News.

This may partially explain the serious diversion from reality that exists in the American electorate. The same poll shows that Obama’s approval rating is currently at 40%. That’s surprisingly low for a president who presided over the nation’s recovery from the worst financial calamity since the Great Depression; who disposed of Osama Bin Laden; and who signed the first major health insurance reform bill.

And yet Obama’s low rating is a drag on Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterm election. Polls show that many of the battleground states are perilously tight, with Republicans leading in some. But while Obama is riding around in the low forties, Republicans in Congress are floundering at 23%, almost half of Obama’s placing.

So why are voters considering casting their votes for Republicans whom they like much less than Obama and the Democrats? The answer is that the polling is counting “likely” voters. When a broader group of registered voters, or all eligible voters, are surveyed, the Democrats come out ahead. So the problem here is that Democrats are not considered likely to vote. That makes turnout for this year’s election the most critical objective. If Democrats vote in ratios comparable to Republicans, Democrats will win.

Of course, Republicans are doing everything they can to suppress voter turnout, and particularly to suppress Democratic turnout. They have been implementing voter ID laws that do nothing to prevent fraud, but are deliberately aimed at preventing Democrats from exercising their right to vote. Republicans are spending unprecedented sums on negative and dishonest advertising, largely bankrolled by the Koch brothers and other baldly partisan operatives.

The GOP/Tea Party wants very badly to block your ability to cast a vote. If you allow them to do that you are, in effect, aiding their cause. You are succumbing to their tactics. You are their bitch.

Shameless self-promotion…
Get Fox Nation vs. Reality. Available now at Amazon.

It’s time to stand up for something positive, as opposed to the relentlessly negative harping of the right. A Republican senate is not a symbolic victory for the other side. It means that every chairman of every committee will be a Republican. It means a senate filled with Darrell Issas and Louis Gohmerts and Michelle Bachmanns deciding what legislation will be considered and what phony investigations will be pursued. It will put more power in the hands of Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. It will almost certainly result in an attempt to impeach the President.

But it doesn’t have to end that way. There are more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is vote. It isn’t that hard. You can register online in many states, and you can vote through the mail. Just fucking do it. Otherwise some toothless, tea-swilling, racist, moron will vote in your stead. The polls are all consistent. If we vote, we win. We can overwhelm their “likely” voter paradigm by simply showing up. And if we do, we beat back the Koch brothers, the GOP elitists, the Tea Party dimwits, and the cynical media that thinks YOU are too stupid to act in your own best interests.

As it turns out, voting is the cure for Tea-Bola.

Fear Factor: Fox News Fabricating Terror, Pure And Simple

Posted by on October 4, 2014 at 5:16 pm. 2 Comments :

Taking a break from their special programming highlighting the fake pandemic of Ebola, Fox News returned to their fake fear mongering over rampant domestic terrorism. This morning on Forbes On Fox, the panel took a demented view of the Oklahoma murder case wherein a disgruntled former employee decapitated a former coworker. The theme of the segment was whether this crime was workplace violence or terrorism. However, that question was quickly dismissed in favor a blatant position that was summarized by the program’s namesake:

Steve Forbes: This was a terrorist act, pure and simple.

Fox News

Having set the stage for a mostly one-sided discussion, the host, David Asman, dutifully agreed that all signs pointed to terrorism, ignoring the actual known facts.

Asman: It’s tough enough even to get them to say the word terrorism. To head off a threat though, you’ve got to be willing to acknowledge it first. That’s part of what led to the growth of ISIS, isn’t it?

Exactly. There would have been no ISIS at all if only people had said the word “terrorism” more often. Or maybe they just needed to clap louder so that Tinkerbell would have survived to kick the terrorists’ butts.

The only problem with these alarmist rants is that they are not in alignment with reality. First of all, Terrorists generally target victims either randomly or at a specific enemy, but these victims were the perpetrator’s former coworkers whom he knew personally and against whom he had grudges.

Secondly, terrorists strive to create as much damage, and thus fear, as possible in order to send a message. They seek out highly populated targets where they can harm the most number of people. But this crime scene was sparsely populated, remote, and chosen only for its connection to the perpetrator.

Thirdly, terrorists generally plan their missions in advance to have the greatest impact. This crime was spontaneous, occurring on the same day that the perp was fired, and directed at those he felt were responsible for his firing. He even used a weapon that was available at the scene, rather than acquiring or building something more broadly destructive.

So contrary to the ranting by Fox News, and other panicky fear merchants, all signs actually point to workplace violence. Is it possible that the murderer was also influenced to decapitate his victim by his exposure to radical jihadists? Might he have wanted to falsely project that as his motivation? Sure, but that would only be a secondary component of the crime. From all of the actual evidence, the motivation was personal and the perp acted spontaneously out of rage resulting from his being fired. Had he been an actual terrorist he would not have timed his crime to coincide with his termination. He would not have confined his victims to those he knew and from whom he sought revenge.

The purpose of Fox News passing judgment on this as “a terrorist act, pure and simple” is that it fits squarely into their mission to raise the boiling point of hate and fear regardless of the facts. Fox needs people to be frantic and disoriented in order to effectively brainwash them with their phony horror stories. That makes it much easier to blame liberals for all of the world’s ills and argue that only the courageous billionaires, corporations, and defense contractors have our best interests at heart.

If you buy into this you are a member of the Psycho-Chicken Little Society, and have willingly abandoned your common sense. Reality tells you that the doomsday scenarios that right-wingers preach are fiction. There is no epidemic of terrorism in America. There will always be crime, and there will likely be other attempted terrorist attacks, but to dawn combat helmets and take up defensive postures in backyard bunkers is the behavior of crackpots. With serious issues to face in this country, this is no time to let the nut cases rule our future.

Taking It To Eleven: “Principles For American Renewal” Is The GOP’s Latest Re-Branding Debacle

Posted by on October 4, 2014 at 3:34 am. 7 Comments :

Shortly after President Obama won a resounding victory for reelection in 2012, the Republican National Committee stowed away to analyze what they did so terribly wrong that they lost an election they thought would be a cakewalk. They emerged with a document that they called an “autopsy” of the campaign that included their missteps and a prescription for future success.

Most of the recommendations revolved around improving messaging and outreach to voter blocs that are critical to any winning campaign: women, African-Americans, Latinos, seniors, and youth. The autopsy acknowledged that Republicans had a terrible image with these voters and the party would need to improve it significantly if they ever hoped to win again.

With their new mandate in hand, the GOP set out to ignore everything that it advised. Instead of reaching out to neglected voters, Republicans doubled down on alienating them. They pursued the same policies that drove voters away in the first place and continued to find new methods of garnering their distrust. For instance, they pushed for voter ID laws that disenfranchise minorities, seniors and students, in an effort to prevent election fraud that doesn’t exist. They also enacted laws that negatively impact reproductive health care for women, including forced vaginal probes and restricting access to birth control and cancer screenings. And supporting cops who murder unarmed black teenagers, while opposing care for immigrant children, doesn’t do much to polish their reputation in minority communities.

So what does the Republican Party do after they have abandoned their own solutions? They develop another set of solutions and try to peddle that to skeptical voters. The new program has a name straight out of propaganda 101: Principles For American Renewal. And so as not to be accused of just jotting down the same top ten list of pandering platitudes, the GOP PR team came up with eleven pandering platitudes. Let’s take a look at the GOP’s set of principles:

GOP Principles

  • CONSTITUTION: Our Constitution should be preserved, valued and honored.
    Except when it prohibits forced Christianity or enables same-sex marriage or doesn’t recognize that corporations are people.
  • ECONOMY: We need to start growing America’s economy instead of Washington’s economy so that working Americans see better wages and more opportunity.
    Unless that means raising the minimum wage or asking the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes or creating jobs in vital infrastructure rebuilding. And never mind that the past six years has seen record growth in corporate profits and reduction in unemployment.
  • BUDGET: We need to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, make government more efficient, and leave the next generation with opportunity, not debt.
    Even though balanced budgets are a ridiculous notion that no successful business would ever consider, and our current debt was the result of the Bush tax cuts and two off-the-books wars. And please forget that Obama has cut the deficit by more than half.
  • HEALTH CARE: We need to start over with real healthcare reform that puts patients and their doctors in charge, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington.
    Under ObamaCare patients and doctors are still in charge, not unelected insurance adjusters. It’s just that now people can afford insurance so they can see their doctors. By the way, where is that GOP health care plan (other than repealing ObamaCare)?
  • VETERANS: Our veterans have earned our respect and gratitude, and no veteran should have to wait in line for months or years just to see a doctor.
    But we’ll still vote against funding the V.A., even while we vote for new wars that create more veterans who need health care. Plus, we won’t help poor, homeless vets get housing or food.
  • SECURITY: Keeping America safe and strong requires a strong military, growing the economy, energy independence, and secure borders.
    And since each of these things has increased by leaps and bounds in the past six years, how does the GOP opposition to the policies that resulted in that progress help, and what are their alternatives? They don’t say.
  • EDUCATION: Every child should have an equal opportunity to get a great education; no parent should be forced to send their child to a failing school.
    In other words, we will refuse to sufficiently fund public education and parents will have an equal opportunity to homeschool their kids or pay for private school if they can afford it.
  • POVERTY: The best anti-poverty program is a strong family and a good job, so our focus should be on getting people out of poverty by lifting up all people and helping them find work.
    And making them belong to the sort of families that we approve of, and working for wages that are insufficient to raise them out of poverty. And while they are trying to get back on their feet, the moochers will get no financial support or assistance with food or education.
  • VALUES: Our country should value the traditions of family, life, religious liberty, and hard work.
    Unless the family has two mommies, or the religion is not sanctioned by Pat Robertson, or the workers demand fair treatment and living wages.
  • ENERGY: We should make America energy independent by encouraging investment in domestic energy, lowering prices, and creating jobs at home.
    Unless that energy is produced by the sun or wind. And God forbid that we transition away from carbon-based fuels that pollute our air and water and exacerbate the disastrous effects of Climate Change.
  • IMMIGRATION: We need an immigration system that secures our borders, upholds the law, and boosts our economy.
    This policy seems to have left something out: Immigrants. It also ignores the reality that our society relies on immigration and is already benefiting from it.

The Republicans should be commended for coming up with the most vacant and substanceless list of “principles” ever devised. It studiously avoids taking a position on any issue or offering a specific policy that can be debated and enacted. In short, it declares that they are in favor of the Constitution and opposed to poverty. How courageous. in addition, it leaves out some important matters entirely, such as crime, the environment, campaign finance reform, and foreign policy.

It is telling that the GOP has delivered this heap of empty rhetoric just one month before the midterms. They are struggling to find a unified campaign theme that will nationalize the election. They once thought that ObamaCare would serve that function. In fact, just last February the RNC’s chairman, Reince Priebus, was so certain of that that he said…

“I think it’s going to be Obamacare all the time between now and November 5. If you ask me what day it is, I’m going to tell you it’s Obamacare. If you want to know what I want in my coffee, I’m going to tell you Obamacare. I’m going to talk about Obamacare all the time because I think it’s the No. 1 issue.”

He has barely mentioned it since then. Part of the reason for that may be that just about every metric for measuring the success of ObamaCare has surpassed expectations. Even Republican enrollees have reported being overwhelmingly satisfied. And thus we have the roll-out of yet another re-branding scheme that fails to recognize that the fundamental problems the party is experiencing are rooted in their policies, not their messaging. Here is a more accurate illustration of the Republican Party’s true brand:

GOP Rebranding

Ebola Terror Threat? The Best Fox News Horror Story Since Boob Bombs

Posted by on October 3, 2014 at 2:39 pm. NO Comments :

The Ebola crisis in West Africa is a truly disturbing situation that is tragically taking the lives of hundreds of people. But as painful as that is, the compulsion to turn it into a geopolitical hazard is unfounded and irrational.

Fox News Ebola

Nevertheless, Fox News is among the many media outlets who are attempting to unduly frighten the American people by speculating that terrorists are going to embrace Ebola as a mechanism for their homicidal escapades. Of course, anyone with any knowledge of biology is aware that Ebola would be an awful candidate for weaponized bioterror. It is difficult to work with without infecting oneself, and it isn’t even an effective agent because of how hard it is to spread. Every good terrorist knows that anthrax, ricin, or sarin, among others, would be far more effective. Even the conventional flu virus, which already kills about 36,000 American each year, would be a better choice.

What is abundantly clear is that the right-wing media is obsessed with turning every scary news story into a prospective terror plot. Children cross the southern border into Texas and suddenly terrorists are disguising themselves as twelve year old immigrants. A women is decapitated by a disgruntled former co-worker and now beheadings can be expected across the nation. A single man is found to have placed a bomb in his shoe in a failed attempt at bringing down a jetliner and now millions of people have to remove their shoes to board a plane.

Perhaps the most ludicrous nightmare fantasy came from Fox News when they published an article sourced to the ultra-fringe WorldNetDaily that announced that British spies were “Hunting Breast Implants of Death.” That’s right, folks. Boob Bombs have arrived to terrorize our helpless mammary-fixated nation. And while that was over four years ago, there has still not been a breast-related attack, unless you count a few angry Hooters waitresses.

To date, the number of deaths attributable to Ebola in the United States is zero. Contrast that with the 8,000+ homicides committed by guns. There is a good argument to be made that the NRA is a bigger threat to America than Ebola. In fact, the U.S. currently has no Surgeon General (a figure who could be instrumental in educating the nation during this alleged crisis) because the NRA has conservative members of Congress scared of confirming the nominee that President Obama put forward, specifically because of his views that firearms play a role in public health. That view is affirmed, of course, by the statistic cited above.

Shameless self-promotion…
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And if you’re not already sufficiently afraid of infectious terrorists from Mexico with exploding breasts hiding in every shadow, then think about this: Jihad Monkeys: A ridiculous story about the Taliban training monkeys to do battle with American soldiers. The story, sourced to the People’s Daily in China, was published by at least two Murdoch properties, Fox Nation and the New York Post. No, really. Here’s “proof.”

Fox News: A Fanged Threat To Freedom Of The American People

Posted by on October 2, 2014 at 3:10 pm. 1 Comments :

President Obama delivered a speech this afternoon on the state of the economy. Coming just a month before the critical midterm election, it was a significant opportunity to communicate the facts that Americans need to know prior to voting. So of course, Fox News was the only cable news network to fail to broadcast any of the address live.

Fox News

See how Fox Nation shows it fangs every day.
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The blatant editorial bias of Fox News validates a small portion of Obama’s speech wherein he mentioned the network that would refuse to air his remarks. He said…

“There’s a reason fewer Republicans, you hear ’em running around about ObamaCare. Because while good, affordable health care might seem like a fanged threat to freedom of the American people on Fox News, it turns out it’s working pretty well in the real world.”

Exactly. And that’s why Fox decided that they must not alert their sheltered and frightened viewers to the reality of a nation that has come a long way since the Bush administration put it on a path to economic collapse. While there is still some ways to go, anyone with a clear perspective recognizes that we a have made astonishing progress in the past six years.

Polls, however, do not reflect the positive results we’ve seen. Perhaps people need to be reminded of the days when the stock market lost half its value, dropping thousands of points and bankrupting iconic institutions like Merril Lynch, AIG, and Bear Stearns, The auto industry was on the brink of total failure and had to be bailed out with federal funds. The country was losing 800,000 jobs a month, and more Americans than ever were losing their homes to foreclosure. Plus, we were still mired in two costly wars that were off the books and not reflected in our deficit.

This year the stock market continues to reach new all-time highs. Corporate profits are breaking all previous records. The unemployment rate has declined from a high of 10% to 6.1%, while jobs are being created at more than 200,000 per month. The auto industry is back in the black, as is home construction and retail sales and services. The annual deficit has been cut by more than half. And with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare), health care costs are rising at record low rates, while Americans are getting coverage in greater numbers than ever. With stats like those how can anyone plausibly say that we are not better off now than in 2008?

We could be doing more, but for the obstructionism on the part of Republicans who fear that any more good news will harm their ability to fool Americans into voting for them. We should be raising the minimum wage to put more buying power into the hands of working people. We should be embarking on an infrastructure rehabilitation that will not only create jobs, but enhance the economy by improving transportation and safety. And we could pay for that with a modest increase in the top tax rates for wealthy individuals and corporations who are enjoying some of the best economic times of their lives.

The President’s speech is well worth reading as it lays the foundation for the road ahead. It also puts into perspective the path we’ve just traveled and the hardships we’ve endured and prevailed over. You didn’t see this speech on Fox News because it conflicts with their mission to disparage Obama at every opportunity and smear him and his policies with lies. And the last thing Fox wants before an election is for voters to get a realistic view of the state of the nation. Because if the American people were better informed there would be very few Republicans celebrating on November 5th.

Fox News Gets No Emmys For News (Again). Maybe Reporting Some News Would Help

Posted by on October 1, 2014 at 12:17 pm. 10 Comments :

Today much of the electronic journalism world will be talking about the television ratings for the just-concluded third quarter of 2014. As expected, Fox News topped the cable news category, as it has for several years. Also, as expected, Fox will hype the crap out of this non-newsworthy information that is only an affirmation of Fox’s ability to herd all of the conservative viewers/cattle into their cable corral.

To put this news in perspective, earlier this year Fox News posted their worst ratings in thirteen years. So their achievement spotlighted in this report is that they are now slightly higher than their worst showing in thirteen years. They must be so proud.

Go Fox Yourself

However, there was another less noticed announcement today that has far more significance. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences released the recipients of the Emmys for news and documentaries. And the winners were: PBS with eleven Emmys; CBS News won ten; ABC News won three; NBC News and the BBC each got two; and CNN and Al Jazeera America both received one Emmy.

Conspicuously missing from that list was Fox “News.” Or perhaps the real surprise would be if they had actually won an Emmy. Fox has been stiffed by the Academy since their launch in 1996. That is largely due to the fact that Fox doesn’t broadcast any news. They are strictly an entertainment network that is filled with fiction, drama, scandal, soap opera, soft-porn, and a prodigious amount of unintentional comedy. What’s more, their entertainment projects are slanted heavily in favor of the Republican right for whom Fox serves as a PR agency. For instance, see if you can find a pattern in these special “Fox News Reporting” investigations:

  • Benghazi: The Truth Behind the Smokescreen.
  • Benghazi: White House Cover-Up Revealed?
  • 13 Hours In Benghazi.
  • Charles Krauthammer: A Life That Matters.
  • The Great Food Stamp Binge.
  • Behind the Obama Breakdown.
  • Surrendering America.
  • Behind Obama’s Green Agenda.
  • Live Free Or Die: Obamacare In New Hampshire.

Those are just a few of the blatant attack pieces produced by Fox to smear the Obama administration. They were laden with rumor, innuendo, unsubstantiated allegations, and outright lies, that never resulted in any noteworthy revelation. Like all of Fox’s scandal mongering, they went nowhere because there were no facts to support their made-up premises. Is it any wonder why Fox can’t snag an Emmy?

A few years ago, in an impudent rant, Fox publicly stated that they were refusing to compete in the Emmy contest, accusing the Academy of being biased against them. However, in order to take that complaint seriously, you would have to believe that all of their peers in the business were biased, because it is they who vote. The Academy merely tabulates the votes. So Fox is admitting that their own colleagues have no respect for them as journalists. Hence, they took their deflated ball and went running home whining “We don’t want your crummy Emmy anyway.” So there.

Shameless self-promotion…
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