Toronto’s Crack Smoking Mayor To Get TV Show On “Fox News North”

Posted by on November 18, 2013 at 12:35 pm. 5 Comments :

The ever-shrinking standards for cable television programming that have brought us Honey Boo Boo and Ted Nugent’s “Gun Country,” have once again established a new low. Apparently all that is necessary to get your own cable TV show is to shamelessly humiliate yourself in public. On that measure, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is destined for cable TV stardom.

Fox News

The program announced by the Sun News Network in Canada will feature the Mayor and his brother Doug, who is also a city councilman. The program my not actually be on the air very long because Ford has indicated his intention to run for reelection next year. If he files papers for the race in January he will have to leave the show due to Canada’s laws prohibiting active candidates from having their own broadcast programs.

What has not been mentioned by most of the stories about Ford’s television career is that Canada’s Sun News Network is known as “Fox News North,” due to its similarity to the hyper-partisan conservative network in the U.S. It’s chief architect is Kory Teneycke, the former press secretary to right-wing Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has met privately with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.

Sun News has been a controversial entity in Canada while failing to corral much of an audience. At one point they appealed to the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission to get mandatory distribution on Canada’s cable networks. It takes a fairly big chunk hypocrisy for a conservative network to beg the government to force private companies into doing business with them. What ever happened to the free market? Canadian viewers obviously don’t want to watch Sun, and they certainly don’t want to be forced to pay for it. So Fox News North is trying another approach to scare up viewers: hire scumbag, drug-addled mayors as hosts. How long before Fox News itself offers Ford a contract?

As an addendum to the Ford story, CNN did not acquit itself particularly well yesterday when they aired a segment on damage control that juxtaposed the repugnant Mayor Ford’s vile personal behavior with President Obama’s political tribulations. Seriously, CNN?

[Update 11/19/13] After one broadcast, Ford Nation has been cancelled. According Sun News it was a financial issue and had nothing to do with the controversial nature of the program’s host. Sun News also reported that the program exceeded the ratings of its previous top rated show, which just happened to also feature a disgraced ex-politician. Oh Canada.

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Comedy Or Dementia? Townhall’s “8 Reasons The Republican Party Has A Bright Future”

Posted by on November 17, 2013 at 8:43 am. 4 Comments :

It’s been a rocky couple of months for Democrats. After suffering through a government shutdown orchestrated by wing-nutsack Ted Cruz and the baleful John Boehner, Republicans embarked on a wild ride of ObamaCare bashing, Benghazi hoaxes, and all around crackpottery of the highest odor. So just in the nick of time the uber-rightist news aggregator, Townhall, has excreted a blast of crapola with the deranged headline, “8 Reasons The Republican Party Has A Bright Future.” Now, there could actually be some plausible reasons for Republicans to be throwing a Mad Tea Party, but the ones itemized in this article are uproariously funny.

gop-bright-future

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1) We have the most potent grassroots movement in politics:
Their very first reason for jumping for joy cites their ownership of the Tea Party. If that is representative of the GOP’s bright future, then they can throw away their sunglasses. The Tea Party has been steadily losing support since their debut. Their “very unfavorable” numbers have tripled since 2010, and they currently can brag about an approval rating of 30%, an all-time low. That’s about the same as the Republican Party itself. And we’re just getting started.

2) 2010 was the GOP’s best year since 1948:
Recognizing a sixty-five year slump hardly seems like a good place to start a celebration. Especially when the only thing that Republicans have to look forward to is looking back fondly on the anomaly of an off-year election where low turnout and corrupt gerrymandering helped them to temporarily win control of the House. Even so, somehow they have erased from their simple minds the 2012 election where they lost to a gay, socialist, Muslim from Kenya, for the second time. And they also lost eight of the House seats, and two in the Senate, that they won two years earlier in their much ballyhooed best year in six decades.

3) We should control the House at least until the next census:
The article makes this assertion without providing any evidence to back it up. It is, at best, wishful thinking. They also seem to think that the past three years of having accomplished nothing more than 47 failed attempts to repeal ObamaCare amounts to “control” of the House. The truth is that, after being handed the reigns of power, they demonstrated their pitiful incompetence and a unique inability to govern. In addition, the article admits that their current majority is the result of gerrymandering, and that their primary legislative goal is to “slam the brakes on government.” However, most polls show that Democrats are in a better position than ever to retake the House in 2014, and last month’s government shutdown helps them toward that goal immensely.

4) The party is thriving on the state level:
They may have a point here. Republicans have concentrated fiercely on state politics for the past few years. Their financiers, including the Koch brothers, have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to local races in order to hijack state governments for the purpose of suppressing votes, subjugating women, and subverting democracy through partisan redistricting. But Republican governors are still amongst the most reviled office-holders with characters like Rick Scott (FL), John Kasich (OH), and Rick Perry (TX), competing for Biggest Boob in America.

5) Our numbers with minorities are only going to go up:
Huh? Perhaps they didn’t finish that sentence and meant to say their numbers are going to go up in flames. After the 2012 election the GOP conducted what they themselves called an “autopsy,” in which they confessed to having no noticeable support from African-Americans or Latinos. So they set about to remedy that situation by passing laws aimed at keeping them from voting, by snubbing them by refusing to attend the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, and by opposing any immigration reform that might treat them with respect. The article makes the racially insulting and absurd statement that “White Americans tend to vote Republican.” But the actual election results don’t concur. Obama won 40% of the white vote in 2012, which is more than Clinton did in 1992. It isn’t that whites vote Republican, it’s that Republicans are almost all white. Those are two very different things.

6) Short Term: Obamacare means a strong 2014:
So this is what the GOP is hanging their asshats on? To be sure, if things with ObamaCare go as badly in the next year as they have for the past month, Democrats will have a tough time of it. But if the ObamaCare website is fixed, and people like having access to affordable, quality health care, Republicans are going to be punished severely for opposing it. Remember, Social Security and Medicare also encountered resistance in the beginning.

7) Barack Obama gives us a medium term opening:
The crux of this reason for Republicans to cheer is their contention that Obama is “the single worst President in American history.” The article regurgitates just about every assault on the President that was lobbed during the 2012 election. Remind me again, who won that one? Additionally, Obama has lead a recovery from his predecessor’s economic debacle that has seen the stock market soar to all-time highs, businesses reporting record profits, and the only reason the economy isn’t producing more jobs is because the GOP has blocked every attempt to create them, even through infrastructure development that is critically necessary anyway. Then the GOP harangues the victims of their policies as lazy moochers, and moves to cut food stamps. If Obama is giving Republicans an opening, Republicans seem to be scurrying to fill it in with fresh dirt.

8) Long term, the ground is very unfavorable to the Democrats:
Once again, the article has no certifiable facts to support this argument. They quote Grover Norquist and Margaret Thatcher as if they are popular contemporaries whose ultra-conservative rantings are shaping the modern political landscape. Funny…they didn’t mention Ronald Reagan. They also didn’t mention that in 2016 Republicans will be defending 24 senate seats versus only 10 for Democrats. In 2014 the GOP is already setting up their next roster of Todd Akins and Christine O’Donnells. And the way the Tea Party is imploding, Nancy Pelosi will probably be returning to the speakership before too long.

Perhaps the funniest thing about the article is the photo that accompanied it. You really have to wonder whose great idea it was to feature a picture of John Boehner atop an article heralding the GOP’s bright future. But in their defense, who else would they use? Rand Paul? Ted Cruz? Sarah Palin? Or maybe the vulgar Jersey philistine, Chris Christie? Oh yeah, Republicans have nothing but blue skies ahead.


Rachel Maddow Exposes GOP Obstructionism, While Media Is Shocked By Democratic Bipartisanship

Posted by on November 16, 2013 at 11:35 am. 9 Comments :

Conservatives have been hammering at President Obama for having promised that anyone who wants to keep their health care plan would be able to do so after the implementation of ObamaCare. That turned out not to be entirely accurate. Although, for the most part, those who would lose access to their existing plans would gain access to better, cheaper plans, there would be a few for whom that would not hold true.

Republicans took great joy in blasting the President over this anomaly that probably affects only 3% of the population, dismissing the fact that ObamaCare will benefit tens of millions more than it allegedly harms. They demanded that he take remedial action to permit people who have plans they like to keep them. So Obama announced that he would do just that, which led Republicans to criticize him for doing precisely what they asked.

Not content to take “yes” for an answer, the House GOP drafted legislation to fix the problem. However, rather than simply permiting people to keep their current plans, the GOP bill would allow insurance companies to sell those junk plans to new customers who never had them to begin with. That would seriously endanger the viability of ObamaCare because it take people out of the larger pool of covered individuals necessary to make the program work.

Nevertheless, the bill passed in the House with 39 Democrats voting along with the majority Republicans. The media response to this act of bipartisanship was surprise and characterizations of Democratic defiance and betrayal. It is exactly that sort of closed-mindedness that produces the unprecedented dysfunction we currently see in Congress. Any measure of cooperation is regarded as treason rather than teamwork. And that is also the guiding principle of the modern Tea Party Republican junta.

Fox News

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While Democrats behave in a manner that is consistent with advancing the country’s best interests, Republicans are fixated on crushing the Democrats. Even legislation that enjoys broad support by majorities of the American people is snubbed the GOP simply because it is also supported by Democrats or the President. Rachel Maddow illustrated this brilliantly on Friday’s program (video below).

The examples that Maddow highlighted were all issues that have extraordinarily wide support by the American public. From background checks on gun purchases, to immigration reform, to ending discrimination against gays, to raising the minimum wage, these are all issues that are backed by majorities of Democrats, independents, and even Republicans. But the GOP in Congress refuses to even bring these bills up for a vote, even though their own constituents want them to do so.

Rachel Maddow

This makes the media reaction to Democrats behaving bipartisanly all the more disturbing. It’s as if they prefer the sort of hostility that is routinely exhibited by Republican and Tea Party extremists. And of course, that is precisely the problem. The media does prefer open battling and distrust because it serves its purpose both for manufacturing the sort of drama that generates ratings, and for obstructing national policies that their corporate boards oppose. Here is a sampling of the reporting that followed the House vote:

  • NPR: With Democrats’ Help, House Votes Against Obamacare
  • Politico: With 39 Dems behind it, House passes Obamacare fix
  • Wall Street Journal: Democrats Defect on Health Rules
  • ABC News: 39 Dems Defect as House OKs ‘Keep Your Health Plan’ Bill
  • U.S. News & World Report: Democrats Break With Party to Support GOP Obamacare Fix
  • Los Angeles Times: Dozens of House Democrats back Republican healthcare bill
  • Fox News: Dems in disarry over ObamaCare fix [Note: Fox Nation also ran the same item. For more Fox Nation lies see Fox Nation vs. Reality]

Clearly the tone of the reporting is one that implies a negative result for a small number of Democrats who are portrayed as traitors simply because they had the temerity to agree with Republicans. It is reporting like that that discourages politicians from being productive in concert with their colleagues across the aisle. It reinforces the notion that bipartisanship will be punished in the press, so there better not be any of it.

Apparently, Republicans have already learned this lesson and have staunchly refused to cooperate with Democrats for at least the last five years. The real betrayal is that of the GOP against the nation and their own constituents in order to avoid media criticism, primary challenges, and most of all, to retain power, even at the expense of the national welfare. That’s the thinking that causes Republicans to shut down the goverment and defy the will of the voters. And they have the media to thank for enabling that destructive behavior.


So The Media And Congress Want To Bash Obama’s Low Approval Ratings?

Posted by on November 15, 2013 at 12:10 pm. 4 Comments :

Let’s face it, the botched rollout of the ObamaCare website has been an enormous black eye for the administration. While there were numerous obstacles that included a GOP opposition that threw everything they could find into the path, the administration should still have anticipated and accounted for that and completed the project successfully.

That said, the response from the politicians and the press who get tingly whenever they can land some punches on the President has been absurdly oblivious to the reality of their own status with the public. Republican members of congress are rushing to their podiums to declare that President Obama simply cannot be trusted. The media is making grossly inappropriate analogies with former President Bush’s mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina. [Note: The number of deaths caused by Katrina: 1,800. The number of deaths caused by Healthcare.gov: 0]

These opportunistic Obama bashers are aggressively insisting that Obama’s presidency is effectively over. His low poll numbers are all the evidence needed to validate their declaration of the end of a term that still has three years ahead of it. However, if poll numbers are the measuring stick that these critics want to hit Obama with, they had better take a look at their own:

congress-media-approval

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Even after the website debacle, Obama’s approval rating is 42%. That’s actually up three points in the past couple of days from his all-time low of 39%. But Congress is still wallowing at their bottom of 9%, less than a quarter of the President’s number. And the media isn’t doing much better at 11%. So it’s curious that these pathetic losers are citing polls as proof that Obama is such a failure that there is no hope for the remainder of his term.

Polls change with great frequency as events occur that influence the people’s opinions. A month from now, if the website is functioning properly and people are satisfied with their insurance plans, Obama’s polling could be in the 60’s. But there isn’t any foreseeable event that could raise the numbers for Congress or the media into positive territory. Given these facts, it’s clear that Obama is in a better position to restore his reputation with the public. And if the politicians and pundits know what’s good for them, they will stop citing polls to firm up their already weak arguments.


How Fox News Links ObamaCare To Falling Into An Orchestra Pit

Posted by on November 14, 2013 at 1:17 pm. 8 Comments :

“If you have two guys on stage and one guy says ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” ~ Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes

The “Orchestra Pit” theory of news programming by Roger Ailes perfectly describes the way much of the mainstream media, and particularly Fox News, responds to current events. Whatever angle they can wrench themselves into that results in producing more superfluous melodrama is the one they choose, regardless of how far that diverts from real substance or even reality (see Fox Nation vs. Reality for some flagrant assaults on truth).

Roger Ailes

Yesterday the administration released data on the number of people who enrolled in new health insurance plans made available by ObamaCare. In the first month there were 106,000 people who got new plans via Heathcare.gov and the state-based exchanges. Almost immediately that number was decried as a catastrophic failure by the media. However, very few reporters actually provided the necessary context within which to view this data. They leaped at the opportunity to bellow ignorantly about what they characterized as an insurmountable defeat. Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer even discussed the possibility that this would herald the end of liberalism.

A more thorough analysis of the data shows that the magnitude of the fiasco was not nearly as pronounced as the media declared. First of all, everyone knew that there were functional problems with the website that would hamper enrollments. So to register surprise when numbers were released that fell below estimates made a year ago is plainly dishonest. The lower figures were expected by everyone involved and the feigned shock illustrates the devotion that media has for hysterical theatricality.

Furthermore, the numbers are not even all that bad despite the botched technology. Comparing this rollout to the rollout of RomneyCare in Massachusetts shows a similar pattern wherein enrollments started out slowly and rapidly increased as it got closer to the deadline. The Washington Post reported last month that…

“Just 123 people signed up during the Bay State’s first month of open enrollment. By contrast, 20 percent of the first year’s 36,000 enrollees purchased coverage in the last month before an individual mandate penalty kicked in.”

It is also notable that the states that provided their own exchanges signed up many more people than those that failed to do so. For instance, Kentucky’s exchange signed up five times more citizens than its exchange-less neighbor, Tennessee. Of the “Four Corners” states (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah), only Colorado has its own exchange. But it signed up three times the number of citizens as the other three combined. In fact, California’s exchange enrolled more citizens than all 36 exchange-less states combined. What’s more, many in the media are conveniently forgetting that the expansion of Medicaid is also a part of ObamaCare. And 400,000 Americans now have health insurance through Medicaid as a result. That brings the total to half a million.

By this measure, with four months left in the open enrollment period, ObamaCare is on track to meet or exceed its estimates so long as the website problems are resolved, or people have adequate access to alternatives. But another factor that comes into play is the relentless attacks on ObamaCare by Fox News and other right-wing media. The consequences of this coordinated effort to frighten the American people include both dissuading new enrollments and prodding Congress to push for crippling legislation to delay and/or defund the program. It’s a self-fulling prophecy of doom wherein critics blast ObamaCare as failing to meet expectations, act to disparage and dismantle it, and then complain when it falls short of inflated expectations. Extremist right-wingers have been working furiously to sabotage ObamaCare, and it is no coincidence that almost every state without an exchange has a Republican governor and legislature.

The downside of this unfolding of ObamaCare news is the allegedly poor rate of enrollment. And on that matter, Fox obsessively focuses on negative reports that characterize the program as having tripped and fallen into a bottomless (orchestra) pit. But the other newsmaker on the stage is Obama’s plan that has provided 48 million Americans with access to health care that they had been denied previously. This solves a problem that prior administrations, going back FDR, have tried and failed to solve.

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It is a historic achievement, but the media is fixated on the website that fell into the Orchestra Pit, while ignoring the far greater achievement of making health care accessible to millions. So thanks, Roger Ailes, for helping the press to neglect what is truly important in order to promote relative trivialities and misrepresentations, and thereby advancing your personal agenda of Tea Party extremism and callous insensitivity toward those less fortunate than you. Despite your campaign to destroy a program that will bring life-saving relief to millions of Americans, the people are going to discover the benefits of this innovation and reward those who delivered it – and punish those who tried to kill it.


Serial Liar, James O’Keefe, Releases Another Deceitfully Edited Video: ObamaCare Edition

Posted by on November 12, 2013 at 1:28 pm. 14 Comments :

Some people are just gluttons for punishment. Take James O’Keefe for instance. The petulant, wannabe ambush journalist has already been exposed as a purveyor of dishonest videos that are deceptively edited in order to slander his victims. He was caught trying to execute a perverse scheme to seduce a CNN reporter. He had to pay a $100,000 to settle a defamation suit brought by a former ACORN staffer. And he was convicted of criminal behavior in a stunt he tried to pull in Louisiana.

James O'KeefeSince then his projects have been few and even many of his former allies declined to promote them. But now he has a new video that purports to expose some malfeasance on the part of some ObamaCare “navigators” who are helping people to acquire health insurance. As I’ve noted before, O’Keefe’s inner sadist assures that his projects are almost always aimed at attacking people and programs that serve the less fortunate. That’s true in this case as well.

The ObamaCare association seems to have loosened up those who abandoned him in the past, including Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. However, his reputation for producing video fiction is fully intact. In the new video he sends in a shill to pretend to inquire about enrolling in a health care plan. In the process, the shill attempts to trick his unsuspecting victims into giving bad advice. However, we can’t know for sure whether they did that because the videos are so heavily edited that there is no way to discern the actual context. Also, the people O’Keefe’s shill spoke with weren’t certified navigators, but were in fact trainees. So the prospect of them making a few mistakes shouldn’t shock anyone.

In one case, though, it is apparent that the navigators did not do what O’Keefe accused them of doing. O’Keefe alleged that the navigators advised the shill to misrepresent his income. In reality, they simply told him to report on the ObamaCare website the same amounts he reported to the IRS. It’s his responsibility to file his income taxes honestly. But the conclusions drawn in the video conceal that. That’s just one example of how creative editing can distort the true picture of what occurred.

Given that Fox News is immersed in an obsessive campaign to cripple ObamaCare, they must have given the green light to O’Reilly to readmit O’Keefe into their good graces – sort of. O’Reilly devoted most of his opening segment to O’Keefe’s video, but without ever mentioning his name. That may have been wise considering the disrepute associated with O’Keefe and his band of dissemblers. O’Reilly only identified the video as the work of Project Veritas, which he helpfully explained to his viewers means “truth,” something with which O’Reilly and O’Keefe have limited experience.

Even Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze couldn’t post O’Keefe’s video without disclaiming that “It should be noted that the video is heavily edited and employs deceptive tactics in order to catch the navigators offering the shocking advice.” When Beck’s crew is disturbed by deceptive tactics, you know you’ve crossed a line that most charlatans never see in their whole lives.

Shameless Plug: Please Get My Ebook,
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault On Truth

What’s worse, a United States senator, John Cornyn, Republican of Texas (where else?), also cited the O’Keefe video as evidence that ObamaCare needs to be stopped immediately. Cornyn said that “This behavior is unacceptable, and is yet another broken piece of a deeply flawed system. The Obama administration should stop this program immediately.” Obviously – if a trainee tells a dishonest, partisan shill something that isn’t quite accurate, in a video produced by a known liar and criminal, then an entire government program that was set up to help 48 million previously uninsured Americans get access to health care should be thrown out.

That’s the quality of the logic in use by Republican and Tea Party opponents of ObamaCare. And, as such, is more than ample justification for ignoring them completely. It also explains how the pathetically amateurish video fabrications of James O’Keefe get taken seriously by idiots in politics and the press.

[Update 11/14/2013] Another Fox News program is hyping the O’Keefe lies. Sean Hannity did a segment during which he also referred to Project Veritas as the video’s producer and never mentioned O’Keefe’s name. He also spewed other lies about the cost of the website, the navigators not getting background checks, and the scope of the people whose current plans will be terminated by insurance companies.

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Sarah Palin Joins The “Just Like Slavery” Teabernacle Choir

Posted by on November 11, 2013 at 4:55 pm. 15 Comments :

When republican critics get tired of calling President Obama a Muslim or a socialist or a Kenyan or a homosexual or a tyrant or a mad genius or an idiot figurehead or a Black Panther or a Wall Street lackey or lizard overseer, they generally just resort to comparing him to Adolf Hitler. However, lately a new unfounded and irrational insult has been working its way up the charts of the conservative hitlist, and has-been, half-term governor Sarah Palin is the latest to give it her rendition.

Palin: When that note comes due … and this isn’t racist … but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.

Sarah Palin
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Palin was referring to the national debt, which she seems to believe is at risk of being sent to the International Collections and Captivity Corporation for redemption. While it was thoughtful of her to remind us that associating her remarks about the first African-American president with the historical scab of slavery isn’t racist, she nevertheless fails to grasp the intricacies of economics. But she does align herself with a growing congregation of noxious Tea Partiers who think that anything President Obama does that they don’t like is just like slavery. For instance…

  • Rush Limbaugh: Well over 50% of the American people don’t want [Obamacare]. And the Republicans are like ‘well we can’t do anything about it. The law’s the law, It’s the law of the land.’ Well, so was slavery one time, the law of the land.
  • Dr. Ben Carson: Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. […] In a way, it is slavery, because it is making all of us subservient to the government.
  • Sen. Rand Paul: Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? You’re basically saying you believe in slavery.
  • VA Atty Genl Ken Cuccinelli: “The founders knew how bad [slavery] was. We have other things in this country today and abortion is one of them.
  • Former Rep. Allen West: He does not want you to have the self-esteem of getting up and earning, and having that title of American. He’d rather you be his slave.
  • NH Rep. Bill O’Brien: And what is Obamacare? It is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act.
  • Glenn Beck: What do you think these federal jobs are all about? These federal jobs are not about helping anything. They are about getting people enslaved to the state.

Is this trend of comparing Obama’s agenda to slavery better than comparing him to Hitler? It’s a tough call. But many on the right may not mean it as an insult. There are some prominent conservatives who have publicly expressed their opinion that slavery was actually a pretty good thing. So perhaps this is just Palin’s way of complementing Obama.


The CBS ’60 Minutes’ Benghazi Hoax Was Overseen By A Former Fox News Executive

Posted by on November 10, 2013 at 4:02 pm. 10 Comments :

The biggest media story of the week was clearly the confession by CBS that their big Benghazi Hoax on 60 Minutes had relied on a disreputable figure who had lied to pretty much everyone involved. CBS has now apologized for the broadcast and will issue a correction on the air tonight.

But the question of how the network could have fallen for what in retrospect appears to be a transparent fraud still lingers. The evidence of the falsehoods in their source’s account were easily discovered by reporters who bothered to look. The explanation for CBS’s failure to do so may lie in the identity of the executives in charge of the network’s news operations.

CBS News David Rhodes
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The President of CBS News is David Rhodes, who assumed the post in February of 2011. His bio on the CBS website tells us something of his professional past:

“Rhodes began his career as a Production Assistant at the newly-launched Fox News Channel in 1996, where he later became Vice President of News. At the network he managed coverage of three presidential elections, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, hurricanes including Katrina, and was the channel’s Assignment Manager on the news desk the morning of September 11, 2001.”

What this tells us is that Rhodes was a top executive at Fox News during the hotly contested 2000 presidential election where Fox mistakenly called the state of Florida (and thus the nation) for George W. Bush. He was there when Fox News was cheerleading for the U.S. to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and did not pose any threat to America. He was there when Fox was defending Bush’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. He was there during the economic meltdown of 2008 to make sure that it was blamed on poor people buying homes and the Democrats in Congress. He was there when Fox was hyping electoral attacks against candidate Obama that included maligning ACORN, advancing associations with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, and of course, the everlasting nonsense of birtherism.

In short, Rhodes was one of the principal architects of the Fox News slant toward far-right extremism and brazen conservative partisanship. CBS News must have known what they were getting when they hired him. Additionally, 60 Minutes correspondent, Lara Logan, has been known to swing rightward, particularly with regard to a militaristic foreign policy.

Following the 60 Minutes episode, much of the conservative media rushed to regurgitate the false accounts presented. Chief among them was Fox News where, the day after the broadcast, Fox devoted 47 minutes to heralding the story as validation of their prior reporting on the issue. That’s three times as long as the original story on CBS. Since then they have spent only 26 seconds (yes, seconds) informing their viewers that the story was utterly false. And the Fox News community website and notorious peddler of lies, Fox Nation, didn’t bother to report the CBS retraction at all.

Given the benefit of this perspective, it is not surprising that CBS would allow itself to be cajoled into believing the fabrications of an obvious grifter. There was such an inbred attraction to his distortion of reality that they were willing to disseminate it to their audience without subjecting it to routine scrutiny. The fact that their source was also the author of a book that was being published by a company that CBS owns and is run by a prominent conservative operative, Mary Matalin, should also have been a red flag. Matalin’s company, Threshold Editions (a division of Simon and Schuster) also publishes books by Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney. [The Benghazi book has now been pulled from release].


The Stink Of Censorship: News Corpse BANNED On Reddit/Politics

Posted by on November 9, 2013 at 3:17 pm. 6 Comments :

That’s right. News Corpse was banned as an “Unacceptable Domain” by the martinets of virtue at Reddit.

[Update: After a prolonged dialogue, News Corpse was reinstated, it’s honor restored, and you can now visit the previously expunged post]

[Update II: I spoke too soon. Another moderator has intervened to say that my website will continue to be banned even though he can’t articulate a coherent reason why. So on it goes.]

Reddit Bans News Corpse

For the past few weeks there has been a raging battle on the Reddit forum for politics. Known as a “subreddit” (or sub) the Politics section was created to be a venue for discussion, debate, and the exchange of information. Unfortunately, recent decisions by the moderators resulted in a venue where that exchange has become something less than free.

The problems began when the moderators revised a list of banned sites (now relocated here) that would be automatically removed from the politics sub. The list contains numerous news sites that are recognized as major contributors to the political discourse, including Alternet, The Heritage Foundation, Media Matters, Mother Jones, National Review, Reason, Salon, and ThinkProgress. [Mother Jones has since been reinstated]. The new policy was quickly denounced by the community at large who reamed the moderators as censors, McCarthyites, and myriad other displays of verbal waterboarding.

At first the moderators defended their actions as necessary to curb the alleged plague of what they called “blogspam,” “sensationalism,” or “bad journalism.” Obviously, it is impossible to fairly adjudicate most of these subjective principles without violating standards of free expression. The fact that respected journalists like the award-winning reporters at Mother Jones made the list is evidence of the foolishness of such lists. A politics discussion forum is supposed to be unfettered and open to broad-based opinions. By slapping blanket bans on the domains of credible media sites, the moderators exposed themselves to the criticisms and insults that, in many cases, they thoroughly deserved.

After a couple of weeks of torment, the moderators took a step back and reconsidered their new policy. They apologized for acting too swiftly, but not for the actual sin of imposing the bans. The community was not mollified by this tepid response and continued to hammer away at the moderators. The mods position at this point is that they will review the sites that were banned and reverse any that they deem to have been banned inappropriately. However, that reeks of putting random people in prison and then promising to arrange future trials whereby they may eventually earn their release. And it still leaves a handful of moderators in charge of the content to which some three million readers will have access.

Which brings us to the subject of this article. This morning a Reddit user named antistatusquo submitted an article from News Corpse. The submission was immediately removed and tagged as an “Unacceptable Domain.” When I noticed this I sent a message to the moderators to inquire as to why my domain was suddenly regarded as unacceptable. I was not on the banned list and never had been. The first response I got was from a new moderator who speculated that my Scarlet Letter was due to the fact that another website, Americans Against the Tea Party, which for some unexplained reason is on the banned list, has shared some of my articles on their Facebook page. What that has to do with my status on Reddit is a mystery, and it reveals a disturbingly ignorant grasp of social media. It also smacks of a sort of perverse guilt-by-association. What’s next, will they ask me to name names?

Later, a more experienced moderator responded who said that the removal of “my” post was simply because the domain was banned. I had to explain that the post that was removed was not mine (it was by antistatusquo), and that, in any case, the domain was not banned (unless they had a secret banned list that was not available to the public). After a few more back-and-forth messages, the mod determined that the whole thing was a mistake. The post was restored and the “unacceptable” tag was removed.

[As noted above, the ban was later reinstated by a different mod. His justification for doing so was an accusation that I had “spammed” on behalf of my website. He sent me his analysis, covering a full year, showing that about 17% of the articles I had submitted were from my website. However, the posted rules explicitly define spamming as “If a user submits to any one domain more than 33% of the time.” So I was at about half of that threshold according to his own numbers. When I pointed this out to the mod he stopped responding to my messages]

The moral of this story is that censorship is not an innocuous act that can be toyed with without producing tangible harm. Once it is invoked it’s effects can spread and multiply. Reddit still has their banned list in place while they claim that they are reviewing the prisoners for possible parole. But in the interim, there are sites like mine that are getting caught up in the net of suppression without justification. Although the problem in my case was eventually resolved, the hours it took to do so resulted in the posting falling below many other subsequent posts so that fewer people would ever see it or have the opportunity to vote on it. [if you would like to visit it now, click here]

Hopefully the Politics sub moderators will quickly conclude that they made a terrible mistake and restore the banned domains and let the community vote on which they think are deserving or not. That is the whole concept behind the Reddit website, and it works brilliantly if the moderators will let it.


What About Fox News? CBS Apologizes For ’60 Minutes’ Benghazi Hoax

Posted by on November 8, 2013 at 12:52 pm. 14 Comments :

On October 27, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a dramatic report that purported to tell the story of an eye witness in Benghazi who corroborated much of what the conservative critics of the administration had been calling a scandal of Watergate proportions.

Almost from the outset there were problems with the report that included sharply divergent accounts offered by the source himself. For instance, while he told CBS that he had gone to the compound in Benghazi, he had previously filed an incident report with his employer that said he never went anywhere near it. More recently it is been discovered that he also told FBI investigators that he was never there.

After first defending their story, CBS has now pulled it from their website and their correspondent, Lara Logan, appeared on CBS This Morning to apologize (video below):

“We were wrong. We made a mistake. […] We no longer have confidence in our source and we were wrong to put him on air. […] We apologize to our viewers and we will correct the record on our broadcast on Sunday night.”

Fox News CBS Benghazi

Immediately following the 60 Minutes broadcast, conservative media assembled a victory parade to congratulate themselves for having leaped to the front of the Benghazi Hoax and to celebrate their vindication by the establishment news authority at CBS. As might be expected, Fox News lead the parade with more than 47 minutes of reporting (that’s three times the length of the original CBS report) on eleven different programs on just the day after 60 Minutes aired. Some of the applause the Benghazi Hoax-sters handed out to themselves included…

  • Bret Baier (Fox News): Last night, one of journalism’s heavy hitters reaffirmed what we knew and had reported on.
  • Steve Doocy (Fox News): It’s great that mainstream media finally catching up. […] 60 Minutes doesn’t cover phony scandals.
  • Martha MacCallum (Fox News): Now 60 Minutes, the venerable Sunday night news program, is putting a lot of focus on this story. Here at Fox News we’ve been covering this story for a very long time.
  • John Hayward (Human Events): ’60 Minutes’ ran a report on the Benghazi scandal Sunday night that confirmed its status as an enduring scandal with many questions still remaining to be answered.
  • Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs): Over a year after the murderous attack, finally, media is talking straight about Benghazi.
  • Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit): ’60 Minutes’ Finally Reveals Benghazi Was a Real Scandal & You Were Lied To.
  • Monica Crowley (Fox News): Solid 60Minutes piece on Benghazi. CBSNews & FoxNews among the very, very few reporting on this grave & outrageous scandal.
  • Dan Gainor (Media Research Center/NewsBusters): 60 Minutes piece on Benghazi shows how much admin has lied and hidden facts on deadly disaster. Blame Obama AND Hillary.
  • Jonah Goldberg (National Review): This 60 Minutes Benghazi piece corroborates pretty much everything FoxNews has reported so far.

As it turns out, the only thing the 60 Minutes report confirmed is the deceit at the heart of right-wing media. Everyone who jumped at the chance to laud CBS for its alleged truth-telling is now egg-faced since the esteemed source of their validation has crumbled in an embarrassing journalistic flop.

While CBS still has some questions to answer and some accountability to dispense, they deserve some credit for coming clean and retracting the story. They also need to address the book by their source which is being published by Threshold Editions, a subsidiary of Simon and Schuster, which is owned by CBS (another undisclosed ethical violation by 60 Minutes). And for the record, Threshold’s rogue’s gallery of authors include Glenn Beck, Jerome Corsi, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney. [Update: Simon and Schuster has suspended publication of the book and called for stores to return it.]

So far Fox News has not had a thing to say about the story they had previously claimed was an affirmation their scandal mongering. Like everything else connected to the tragedy in Libya, Fox has failed in their relentless obsession to manufacture political outrage. Their desperation to bring down President Obama has been raging impotently for years.

Fox News Benghazi Tantrum
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Now that the story has fallen apart and CBS has apologized and retracted it, will Fox News, and the other right-wing purveyors of dishonesty who hailed the erroneous story, show the same measure of integrity? Don’t hold your breath.

Lara Logan on CBS This Morning: