EXPOSED: The Reason Fox News Declared War On Media Matters

Posted by on February 14, 2012 at 7:13 pm. 9 Comments :

Yesterday Tucker Carlson of The Daily Caller (TDC) posted what he said was the first in a series of articles that would reveal the inner workings of Media Matters for America (MMfA). It was a pathetic little screed that proved nothing but how desperate the right-wing noise machine is to prevent the world from knowing what they are up to.

Today TDC posted a second chapter with even less substance than the first. So far as I can tell, the entirety of their problem is that MMfA revealed in a memo that they were considering…

“…hir[ing] a team of trackers to stake out private and public events with Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors and senior network/corporate staff.”

In other words, MMfA was plotting to do precisely what media watchdog groups always do.

More interesting is the extent to which Fox News has been promoting this astonishingly thin expose. Yesterday they broadcast three segments with their star anchors, Steve Doocy, Megyn Kelly, and Bill O’Reilly. They also posted four separate articles linking to the same TDC piece on Fox Nation. Today they added four more items on Fox Nation, an article on FoxNews.com, and two more Fox News broadcasts, including an interview of Carlson by Doocy that featured this startling exchange:

Doocy: They [MMfA] seem to be an extension of the Democratic Party. And now for this tax exempt organization to do this, where they’re gonna hire private investigators to dig into people’s backgrounds, that seems crazy.

Carlson: It’s pretty over the top. I would use the term Nixonian, because that’s what it is. The memo compares it to a presidential campaign, but no presidential campaign, no sane politician would ever engage in something like this because in some cases it might be illegal.

So digging into people’s backgrounds is crazy? Nixonian? Yet it is exactly what Carlson is doing with his intrusive and unsubstantiated article that accuses MMfA’s founder, David Brock, of everything from drug addiction to media manipulation to mental illness. It’s pretty personal stuff. Never mind that MMfA has never done anything remotely similar. In their monitoring of Fox News they have always focused solely on the delivery of the news – or whatever it is that Fox calls news.

The massive amount of attention that Fox is paying to a single column on an Internet blog is a curious affair. What could possibly motivate this outburst of bad publicity? Well, now we know.

David Brock and his colleague Ari Rabin-Havt have written a book that is scheduled to be released next week:

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

The book is “Based on the meticulous research of the news watchdog organization Media Matters for America, David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt show how Fox News, under its president Roger Ailes, changed from a right-leaning news network into a partisan advocate for the Republican Party.”

It is further described as “Featuring transcripts of leaked audio and memos from Fox News reporters and executives, The Fox Effect is a damning indictment of how the network’s news coverage and commentators have biased reporting, drummed up marginal stories, and even consciously manipulated established facts in their efforts to attack the Obama administration.”

In other words, the book is an investigation of the overtly partisan Fox News network and its efforts on behalf of a political agenda. So far as is discernible from their own marketing copy, it is not personal. It doesn’t slander Fox principals as insane or criminals. It sticks to factual representations of a news enterprise that abandoned its ethical obligations in favor of promoting an extreme right-wing ideology.

So a week before the release of a book from MMfA purporting to unveil the biases of Fox News via leaked memos and investigative reporting from within the organization, there is a pseudo-investigation published, and relentlessly hyped, that smears MMfA using allegedly similar tactics, albeit not particularly effectively? Is it just a coincidence, or is Fox News engaging in a preventative first strike in order to shelter themselves from the coming storm?

We report, you decide.

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Right-Wing Noise Machine Still Terrified Of Media Matters

Posted by on February 13, 2012 at 6:21 pm. 16 Comments :

Further affirming the desperation of the mavens of the conservative media, a new campaign of slander and innuendo has been launched to tarnish the reputation of Media Matters for America (MMfA), and its founder David Brock. This is reminiscent of a similar campaign orchestrated last year.

This latest barrage of defamation was initiated by Tucker Carlson’s Internet rag, The Daily Caller (TDC). Carlson is a Fox News contributor so it isn’t surprising that Fox immediately jumped aboard this effort with featured segments hosted by Steve Doocy and Megyn Kelly. They also posted the story on their Fox Nation web site, twice. [Update: Carlson later appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s program as well]

The gist of the story, as described by TDC, is that MMfA is manipulating news organizations, coordinating messaging with the White House, and struggling to cope with the “volatile and erratic behavior” of Brock, whom TDC alleges is mentally ill. TDC never reveals from where they got their psychiatric credentials, nor when they had an opportunity to examine and diagnose Brock. Likewise, they never reveal where they got any of the information for the other allegations they make against MMfA.

MMfA was created to document conservative media bias and work to implement reforms that would produce more balanced reporting. Yet, TDC is confused by the fact that MMfA’s research is cited by progressive organizations and media analysts. Why that would confuse them is, in itself, confusing. MMfA makes its materials available for that very purpose. They are providing a service that other interested organizations are free to employ or ignore. They are not manipulating anybody, nor are they forcing anyone to coordinate with them. Additionally, TDC thinks it’s unusual that people and enterprises who share an ideological viewpoint might produce commentaries that have certain similarities. Of course they do. It would be unusual if they didn’t. Does TDC think it’s unusual when John Boehner and Rush Limbaugh say similar things?

TDC’s multipart series on MMfA kicks off with a personal attack on Brock:

“David Brock was smoking a cigarette on the roof of his Washington, D.C. office one day in the late fall of 2010 when his assistant and two bodyguards suddenly appeared and whisked him and his colleague Eric Burns down the stairs. […] The threat he faced while smoking on his roof? ‘Snipers.'”

TDC then asserts that Brock is suffering from severe paranoia and believes that there are right-wing assassins out to get him. But how can Brock be characterized as paranoid when, while he was having a leisurely break, his security team took action to protect him. Perhaps the bodyguards are paranoid, but nothing in this story suggests that Brock is.

For contrast, it should be pointed out that there is no mention by TDC of the reported paranoia of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. No mention that he was cited as the reason that the NYPD provided police protection for the Fox headquarters at a cost of $500,000 a year to the people of New York. No mention of the obsessive fears described by Tim Dickinson in a Rolling Stone profile:

“Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun. […] Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having ‘bombproof glass’ installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet.”

The TDC article went to great lengths to expose something that ought to have been obvious – that liberal news outlets like DailyKos and Salon would utilize information compiled by MMfA. [Full disclosure: News Corpse has used MMfA materials frequently. It isn’t coordinated. It’s just reliable, documented content] The grunt work of aggregating video and other reporting is appreciated by those who use MMfA materials. Much of it is provided without any editorializing. The right has always been fearful of any entity that would simply record their disinformation, nonsense, and hostility, and then hold them accountable for it. But in condemning MMfA for providing such content to liberal media, they demonstrate their rank hypocrisy. They have yet to criticize NewsBusters or their parent organization, the Media Research Center. However, the former managing editor of Fox News was abundantly grateful:

Brit Hume: I want to say a word, however, of thanks to Brent [Bozell] and the team at the Media Research Center […] for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report, I don’t know what we would’ve done without them. It was a daily buffet of material to work from, and we certainly made tremendous use of it.

Much of the remaining TDC article is a montage of incongruous allegations and lame assumptions. For instance, they cite a meeting between Brock and Obama aide Valerie Jarret as signaling some sort of conspiracy. It was a one-time meeting that occurred over a year and a half ago. They complain that reporters would “get a thousand hostile emails” after exposure on MMfA. But isn’t that sort of accountability the point of an enterprise whose purpose is to unmask media bias?

TDC posted a link to a video of Brock that they labeled an “odd media appearance,” but which seemed pretty restrained and composed to me. They described his aspiration to develop a political action committee to challenge Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS as “unsettlingly grandiose.” Is that just their standard put-down for anyone who would dare to take on the mighty Rove? And perhaps the most disturbing revelation of all was that “there were very harsh penalties for getting things wrong. And justifiably so.” Imagine that…Brock actually insisted that his staff pay attention to detail and accuracy. What a beast! After all, they are just an organization that monitors the detail and accuracy of other organizations. Who cares if they get some things wrong? They should adopt the attitude of Fox News anchorette Gretchen Carlson:

“When we make a mistake reading the news headlines, whereas at a [broadcast] network you’d probably get fired, instead, we’re like, ‘Eh, we screwed up.’“

TDC says that there will be additional installments of this series throughout the week. I should hope so, because there was nothing in this installment that could be considered newsworthy. However, I expect that the upcoming chapters will be equally devoid of any useful information. So far the only thing that TDC has achieved with this expose is wasting their bandwidth with unsourced, anonymous gossip and personal insults. If it gets any play at all it will be due to the help they got from Carlson’s bosses at Fox News. And the only thing that any of it proves is how dreadfully afraid the conservative propagandists are of Media Matters. It is astonishing how the innocent act of recording their words can set the rightist empire to trembling.

[Update] The Fox Nationalists just posted their third fourth item about Media Matters (although all of them link to the same TDC article). Apparently the other two did not have sufficiently sensationalist headlines to stir the scandal-lust of their perverted readers, so this time they packed in unsubstantiated allegations that Brock is “believed to be” using illegal drugs.

Fox Nation

My anonymous sources have confirmed to me that Rupert Murdoch is believed to be funding the New American Nazi Party and patronizing Mistress Helga in swastika-print diapers.


Question For Fox News: How Much Rape Is Too Much Rape?

Posted by on February 12, 2012 at 7:28 pm. 9 Comments :

Contemporary media has many flaws that weigh upon its credibility. It has earned the disrespect of critics from across the political spectrum, and more importantly, from consumers of their news products. But every now and then there is an occurrence that is so inconceivably disgusting that it defies explanation. Such an occurrence took place today – where else – on Fox News.

In a discussion of the role of women in the military, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta expressed an opinion that could only be held by a seriously disturbed individual. On that measure, Trotta qualifies. The issue involved new rules from the Pentagon that would permit women to serve closer to the front lines. Trotta’s take on this centered on the problems faced by servicewomen who are sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers. She begins by insulting female soldiers as whiners who should shut up accept as a fact that if they work closely with men they should expect to be assaulted:

“We have women once more, the feminist, wanting to be warriors and victims at the same time. […] But while all of this is going on, just a few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta commented on a new Pentagon report on sexual abuse in the military. I think they have actually discovered there is a difference between men and women. And the sexual abuse report says that there has been, since 2006, a 64% increase in violent sexual assaults. Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact.”

You see, it’s not the fault of the rapists. It’s just serendipity, nature playing out its course. From there Trotta moves on to lament the cost of enforcing military laws that prevent such assaults or providing support for the victims:

“And the feminists have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims’ advocates, sexual response coordinators.”

I wonder if Trotta would also favor eliminating rules that prohibit any other sort of violent behavior. Perhaps she would oppose counseling for soldiers, male and female, suffering from post-traumatic stress. Those would be bad enough, but they don’t come close to what she said next:

“So, you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much.”

Raped too much? I would really like to know precisely how much rape is acceptable before it crosses Trotta’s line. Is there any context in which she might have meant that that isn’t unfathomably repulsive?

This is not the first time Trotta has articulated out loud, and on the air, an inexcusably revolting opinion. Last month, in a commentary following the State of the Union address, she demeaned our most elite soldiers by wondering, “How many times is [Obama] going to use Seal Team 6 to get out of trouble? […] They are becoming political operatives.” And during the last presidential election Trotta joked about assassinating Obama.

It is inconceivable that anyone with this sustained record of nauseating commentary can continue to hold down a job as a news analyst. Any network that practiced even the most rudimentary level of ethics would throw her loathsome keister out the door. Fortunately for her, she doesn’t work for a network with ethics. She works for Fox News.


Sarah Palin’s Top Seven CPAC Hack Attacks And Lies

Posted by on February 12, 2012 at 12:00 pm. 7 Comments :

There is no better example of the right’s embrace of idiocy than the rise of Sarah Palin. Conservatives take great pains to refudiate attacks on her intelligence (or lack thereof), but the very fact that they have to rush to her defense so often is evidence of her stupefying ignorance. You never see conservatives forced to defend Karl Rove on those grounds. Liberals may strongly disagree with him but they don’t doubt his IQ.

Palin, on the other hand, is a walking fountain of embarrassing witlessisms. And her keynote speech yesterday at CPAC contributed another mother lode of lunacy. As was to be expected, the bulk of her bluster was aimed squarely at Barack Obama, whom she can only see in terms of evil and strident anti-Americanism. This approach is well received by the simple-minded audience at CPAC that regards cracks about community organizing as worthy of a standing ovation. Surprisingly, the crowd was unfazed by Palin’s use of Satan’s own speaking device: the TelePrompTer.

Sarah Palin at CPAC

However, Palin saved some of her bile for fellow Republican Mitt Romney. She did not mention him by name, but it was clear to whom she was referring when she said that she hoped the nominating process would continue, even to the convention. And it was likewise obvious that Palin was smacking Romney when she said that…

“Our candidate must be someone who can instinctively turn right to constitutional, conservative principles. It’s too late in the game to teach it or spin it at this point. It’s either there or it isn’t.”

But the real entertainment was spread throughout Palin’s address. While there was virtually nothing of substance, there was an abundance of blatant applause lines that fed the Pavlovian lust of the CPACers. Here are just a few of the most mentally deficient snippets from her harangue:

1) [Obama] promised to transform America, and that’s one promise he kept, transforming a shining city on a hill into a sinking ship.
Remember how shiny America was in 2008 when the McCain/Palin ticket was so soundly defeated? The economy was in free fall, we were bleeding jobs, and there were two wars in progress. Obama took command of this ship after Bush and the GOP had already run it into an iceberg, and he has managed to keep it afloat and steer it back into safer waters.

2) When I listened to his State of the Union last month, I was really struck that he barely mentioned unemployment.
Which State of the Union was she listening to? It certainly wasn’t the one Obama delivered where he mentioned “jobs” 33 times. Her dreadful comprehension skills may explain why she was unable to answer a gotcha question like “What do you read?”

3) He’ll invest your money in bullet trains to nowhere, but he’ll stop Boeing from building airplanes anywhere.
It takes balls for Palin to reference the “bridge to nowhere” that was a boondoggle she supported in her home state of Alaska. And it’s no less ballsy to berate initiatives like high-speed rail that would create jobs and improve the infrastructure for commerce. Also, The NLRB decision to oppose Boeing’s plan to to move their facilities to South Carolina was intended to save the jobs of workers that Boeing proposed to abandon in Washington state.

4) We have a better job plan and it’s called the free market. And it worked before this president, and it will work again after this president.
Well, except for this:

Job Creation

5) He says that we need more of his financial regulations. We say go ask MF Global customers how happy they are with his regulatory agencies. Where were they when Jon Corzine lost $1.2 billion of customer funds?
Exactly! Where were Obama’s regulatory agencies? They were tied up by Palin’s Republican pals in Congress who refused to pass the bills that would create them or to confirm the department heads who would manage them. And isn’t Palin thoughtful for showing her concern about a billion dollars lost by wealthy hedge fund investors, but no such concern for hundreds of billions lost by average American homeowners?

6) We’re gonna put our confidence in the strength of our armed forces, not the hollow promises of our adversaries and not the cleverness of our diplomats and our bureaucrats.
So Palin advocates only military solutions to foreign policy disputes. She just can’t abide clever diplomats that could defuse an international crisis and avoid putting American lives at risk, not to mention saving billions of dollars that would be spent at war. Something tells me that even our armed forces would rather rely on diplomacy first.

7) We’ve suffered massive job losses out there. But Washington is hiring.
Actually, there have been 3,000,000 jobs created in the private sector in the past two years. Government jobs, however, have declined by 2.6% during the Obama administration. That’s a record. Obama has done more to shrink government than even Ronald Reagan.

Sitting through Palin’s speech was an excruciating ordeal. Her screechy whine was itself torturous, but the ignorance infused with every sentence, and the cheers it elicited from the undiscriminating crowd, was like aural tasering. Imagine my relief when she came to the obligatory “God bless America” and the end was in sight. However, the final punch line was her selection of Shania Twain’s “Not Just A Pretty Face” to accompany her exit from the stage. It’s amazing that the ego that approved that song can fit into her miniaturized brain.


Andrew Breitbart At CPAC: I Have Videos Of Obama In College

Posted by on February 11, 2012 at 4:11 pm. 7 Comments :

Andrew BreitbartAs if Andrew Breitbart’s performance before some Occupy protesters wasn’t pathetic enough, the terminally choleric pundit delivered an incoherent rant from the CPAC podium. He spent much of the time rambling in sentence fragments, struggling to make sense. But one portion of his speech teased what may be his next video crusade. And, no, I’m not talking about the hilariously twisted “Hating Breitbart” documentary that was announced at the conference. I’m referring to Breitbart’s tantalizing claim to have unearthed videos of President Obama in college.

“I have videos. This election we’re going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out, that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver ponytails in the 1980s, like Bill (Ayers) and Bernadine Dohrn, who said one day we would have the presidency, and the rest of us slept as they plotted.”

OMG! Obama in college plotting with Ayers to become president. That’s blockbuster material. I can just picture it: A twenty year old Obama meeting with the middle-aged Ayers, drafting a scheme that would see Obama elected to the presidency thirty years later. What foresight and commitment they must have had. Especially since they never met until long after Obama graduated from Harvard Law and eventually moved to Chicago where Ayers lived.

It is also interesting that Breitbart would characterize his comrades on the right as sleeping through the eighties. You know, the eighties when Ronald Reagan was president and conservatism was at its peak. That would explain a lot, like how Reagan got elected president in the first place. Little did they know that liberals were holed up conspiring to take over the free world – thirty years in the future – by electing a black man with no birth certificate to the presidency. A brilliant plan that couldn’t possibly fail. It makes you wonder if there might not be a young, undocumented, Mexican atheist currently putting together a plan with billionaire drug lords to occupy the White House in 2040.

For Breitbart to make these allegations involving Bill Ayers is curious since he just attended a dinner party thrown by Ayers a few days ago. Breitbart was invited to the party by Tucker Carlson who paid $2,500 in a charity auction to have dinner with Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. Breitbart, ever the gracious guest, told Eric Bolling on the Fox Business Network (whose show was just canceled) that Ayers was a great conversationalist, an incredible chef, and a sociopath.

Another guest for dinner, Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard, posted his recollections of the affair with a distinct and buoyant whine about not having had enough time to harangue his hosts. He ate their food (personally prepared by Ayers), drank their wine, and enjoyed a scrumptious desert of apple pie topped with Ben & Jerry’s AmeriCone Dream (the flavor inspired by Stephen Colbert). But apparently two hours and a free gourmet meal is not deserving of appreciation. How rude of the Ayers’ not to take a seat in the dunking booth and allow their rightist guests to harass them for another hour or two about things they did forty years ago.

Which brings us back to the videos that Breitbart claims to have in his possession. If they are anything like the videos he has released in the past, we can be assured that they will utterly lack any truthful representation of events. Like the ACORN videos that were deliberately edited to create false and negative impressions of people who were unselfishly helping low income citizens to vote and find housing for their families. Like the Shirley Sherrod video that was cut to make her look like a racist when the the whole, unedited video proved just the opposite. Breitbart’s history with video exposes is a cavalcade of conscious deceit.

I have doubts that any videos of Obama’s college years will ever actually be released, but if they are it seems unlikely that they will have any relevance this many years later. Breitbart once famously declared that he would “take down the institutional left” in three weeks. That was two years ago. He’s a radioactive bundle of bluster and petulant anger. And even though he has threatened his liberal enemies saying that “We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns”, I’m not losing any sleep over it.


Andrew Breitbart vs. Occupy: Behave Yourselves You Filthy Freaks

Posted by on February 11, 2012 at 1:24 pm. 10 Comments :

Every year at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) there are demonstrations of ludicrous and hateful behavior by the nation’s rightist luminaries. Already this year we have seen three of the candidates for the Republican nomination for president take the stage to throw red meat invectives at President Obama and other Democrats, to the delight of the ravenous crowd.

But nothing has yet come close to the maniacal tantrum thrown by Internet mogul wannabe, Andrew Breitbart. And it was all caught on tape:

Breitbart often tries to present himself as someone who wants to be taken seriously by the media. He thinks he is a credible journalist and media critic. But his behavior belies even the notion that he is mentally stable. By repeating incessantly, at high decibels, his demand that Occupy protesters behave themselves, he is not exactly a model of civil behavior. But then he escalates his tirade to inexplicably accuse the protesters of rape and murder. He becomes so completely unhinged that security guards intervene to remove him from the scene.

It boggles the mind that so-called respectable news networks provide Breitbart with a platform to spew his bile. When CNN, for instance, puts him on the air they are validating him as a credible commentator, despite his resume that is replete with hostility and brazen dishonesty. This latest episode of frenzied derangement ought to put an end to his media exploitation but, unfortunately, that will probably not be the case. Too many media executives (like CNN’s Ken Jautz) are more concerned with ratings generating controversy than they are with professionalism or journalistic ethics.

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Fox News Poll: Obama Shines, Tea Party Whines

Posted by on February 10, 2012 at 12:33 pm. 5 Comments :

There are a number of uber-conservative commentators who have arrived at the conclusion that Fox News has slithered down the rabbit hole to a Hades-flavored Wonderland of liberalism. They have convinced themselves that Fox has become as liberal as what they perceive the rest of the media to be. For example. Cliff Kincaid of the far-right Accuracy in Media sees the recent hiring of Fox contributor (and out lesbian) Sally Kohn as evidence of the network’s rightist apostasy. If that bothers him, wait until he sees this: According to a new Fox News poll…

“Barack Obama bests each of the Republican presidential candidates in hypothetical matchups. In addition, the president’s job approval rating hits its highest point in over six months.”

The poll reveals that voters prefer Obama over Romney (47-42), Paul (48-38), Santorum (50-38), and Gingrich (51-38). [Note: A Fox News poll two years ago had similar results] On questions of enthusiasm and integrity, Obama also outpolled all of the Republican hopefuls. Twice as many voters say they are “very” confident in Obama’s ability to fix the economy as say so about Romney. And a majority (61%) of voters approve of the administration’s position on requiring all employer health plans to provide coverage for contraception.

Rupert MurdochThat settles it. Obviously Rupert Murdoch has either succumbed to the will of the Kenyan dictator occupying the White House, or he has converted to Islam, or he has employed a polling firm owned by George Soros. What other explanations can there be for Fox News suddenly reneging on it’s obligation to publish only GOP-friendly press releases dressed up as news?

There are some other notable findings tucked away in the internals of this poll that unveil interesting realities about the Tea Party. First of all, validating my long-held contention that there is no Tea Party (it’s just the farthest right flank of the Republican Party) is that 72% of the so-called Tea Partiers vote Republican. They are even more Republican than other Republicans. For instance on the issue of contraception coverage, Republicans oppose the administration by 57%, but Tea Partiers oppose it by 71%.

More interestingly, the Tea Party faction is a decidedly gloomy congregation. On the economy, 64% of Republicans hold the view that the worst is yet to come, but 72% of Tea Partiers are the hard core economic pessimists. And on almost every question where there was some judgment about Obama, the Tea Partiers were significantly more negative:

  • If Barack Obama were to be re-elected, respondents who said they would be “scared”:
    Republican: 55% / Tea Party: 68%
  • Respondents saying that Obama doesn’t have the integrity to serve:
    Republican: 66% / Tea Party: 75%
  • Respondents saying they are not confidant in Obama fixing the economy:
    Republican: 65% / Tea Party: 76%
  • Respondents saying that they are not confidant in Obama preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons:
    Republican: 48% / Tea Party: 63:

Perhaps the Tea Party could just be renamed the Knee-Jerk Virulently Anti-Obama Party. It is that sort of extremist, fringe positioning that has made the Tea Party anathema even to many loyal Republicans. It is why Tea Party candidates like Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Linda McMahon, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, Carly Fiorina, all bombed so miserably in the last election cycle. It’s why the GOP clown car was filled to the brim with characters like Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum. And it’s why there is so little enthusiasm for their inevitable, empty suit nominee Mitt Romney

Americans are a generally optimistic bunch. They don’t have much in common with the doomsayers that populate Glenn Beck rallies. And for as long as the GOP allows such pessimism to permeate their ranks, they will be perceived as the party of despair and irrational hatred. But judging by the stump speeches of their current batch of presidential candidates, that may be exactly what they are aiming for.


Fox Business Network Cancels Entire Primetime Lineup

Posted by on February 10, 2012 at 2:53 am. 3 Comments :

Fox Business NetworkThe day after News Corp released their latest quarterly earnings report, they made another announcement that somehow was left out of the earnings conference call.

The struggling Fox Business Network (FBN) has, in one fell swoop, canceled their entire primetime lineup. Wiped from the schedule are “Freedom Watch” with Andrew Napolitano, “Power & Money” with David Asman, and “Follow the Money” with Eric Bolling. All three programs had little business running on a business network in the first place. They were brazenly political vehicles for sharply partisan, right-wing gasbags.

Andrew Napolitano is a notorious 9/11 truther who believes that the attack on the World Trade Center towers was an inside job. He also lamented the killing of Osama Bin Laden whom he characterized as a victim of assassination, “killed on the illegal whim of the President.”

David Asman has said that we should all be celebrating the 1%. He is an advocate of shutting down the government and believes that its size must be cut “before it kills us all.” He called Obama “Hugo Chavez on the Potomac.” And he believes that Social Security is “one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated.”

Eric Bolling is perhaps the most deserving of the Glenn Beck Memorial Wingnut Award for Delusional Hyperbole. He has accused President Obama of engaging in class warfare that was “forged in Marxist Germany.” He embraces every conspiracy theory that comes along including that Sesame Street was demonizing the Tea Party. He even accused the American hikers who were held in an Iranian prison of being spies and said that Iran should have kept them.

The demise of these programs signals the dismal shape that FBN is in. The decision to swing the axe was not prompted by the development of new programs to take their place. FBN will fill the holes with repeats of programs that air earlier in the day. It is clearly a desperation move by a network that needs to cut the dead weight and run leaner and cheaper.

FBN’s primetime lineup never drew more than about 25,000 viewers in the coveted 25-54 year old demographic. Their ratings have been pathetic from the start, when they proposed to launch a new business channel that would appeal to “Main Street.” That was a direct contradiction of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch who said that “a Fox channel would be ‘more business-friendly than CNBC.'” Of course, a business network is not supposed to be “friendly” toward the businesses it is covering.

In an ironic twist, FBN’s Vice-President, Kevin Magee, recently distributed a memo to his staff admonishing them for being too much like their sister network, Fox News.

Magee: “I’ve been asked to remind you all again that they are separate channels and the more we make FBN look like FNC the more of a disservice we do to ourselves. I understand the temptation to imitate our sibling network in hopes of imitating its success, but we cannot. If we give the audience a choice between FNC and the almost-FNC, they will choose FNC every time.”

That’s excellent advice. CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC should pay attention. However, it apparently came too late to save the most Foxish programs on the network. Now Magee has lopped off the worst offenders in the hopes of rescuing the floundering enterprise. Though the losers will still be around as Magee notes that “We look forward to Judge Napolitano, David and Eric continuing to make significant contributions to both FOX Business and FOX News.” Yeah right.

The only purpose Fox Business ever had was to extend the rightist propaganda already blaring from Fox News. They loaded up the network with conservative extremist pundits and vacant ratings whores like Don Imus. That approach has proven to be another failure for Murdoch, whose MySpace investment quickly went down the tubes; whose New York Post has lost millions for as long as he has owned it; for his international newspaper syndicate that is still reeling from the discovery of rampant criminal activity, phone hacking, and the the shuttering of his biggest paper in the UK, the News of the World.

Another item of information that was disclosed with the News Corp earnings release is that their cable television assets represent 60% of their revenue. That’s a pretty heavy reliance on one business segment of a conglomerate that includes international publishing and film operations. Now that FBN is slipping away, all that Murdoch needs is to have his Fox News falter. That is the last remaining support for his crumbling empire. And for the benefit of honest journalism, the nation, and the world, it can’t come too soon.


Nancy Pelosi Launches Campaign To Stop Stephen Colbert And Super PACs

Posted by on February 9, 2012 at 3:49 pm. 6 Comments :

The Democratic Leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has just launched a campaign to “Stop Colbert,” as in Stephen Colbert, the acerbic incarnation of right-wing blowhardism. The first shot in this battle, for which a brutal retaliation from Colbert can be expected after he gets back from vacation, is this video that Pelosi posted yesterday:

The issue is one that has become an integral part of this election year that has seen income inequality, corporate abuse of power, and fair elections, take precedence over almost every issue other than jobs. Pelosi sums up her position saying that…

“…House Democrats are reintroducing the DISCLOSE Act today to get unlimited, secret donations out of politics. The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United opened the floodgates to unrestricted special interest campaign donations in American elections—permitting corporations to spend unlimited funds, directly or through third parties and Political Action Committees organized for those purposes, to influence Federal elections and opened the door for the emergence of Super PACs.”

It is Colbert who has succeeded in making Super PACs one of the most reviled political devices ever conceived. And he did it by starting his own (Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow) and demonstrating how easy it is to collect huge sums of money from secret sources and spending it on self-serving activities without any unaccountability whatsoever.

The issue made headlines this week when President Obama announced that he would not oppose the formation of Super PACs to support his reelection. Republicans immediately pounced on the announcement, portraying it as a flip-flop of his previously expressed position against Super PACs. Of course, Obama did not flip-flop at all. He is still against Super PACS, he has just resigned himself to the fact that they are a part of the electoral process as it currently exists and that abstaining from using them would amount to a unilateral disarmament that would permit Republicans to vastly outspend Democrats this year.

Obama and other Democrats still intend to pursue an agenda to bring an end to the practice as quickly as they can get support from enough members of the GOP to pass legislation like the DISCLOSE Act which Pelosi is addressing in the video above. It is only by the obstructionism of the GOP that the bill has not already become law.

Pelosi is firing both barrels at Colbert in the video. She hammers him for “taking secret money from special interests” and for being “out of control.” And she nails him for his hatred of kittens. As an aside, she zings Newt Gingrich with what could be a fatal blow by referring to him as her friend. If Gingrich’s campaign weren’t already dead, this would surely kill it.

Still, this campaign aimed at Colbert is a big step for Pelosi and company. It was not that long ago that one of Pelosi’s top lieutenants in the House was advising Democratic members to refrain from appearing on The Colbert Report. Rahm Emanuel was the Democratic Caucus chairman before leaving to become Obama’s Chief of Staff, and then mayor of Chicago. But back in March of 2007. while still a member of Congress, Emanuel told his colleagues to “steer clear of Stephen Colbert.” That advice was widely ignored, to the dismay of many congressmen with deficient senses of humor.

The DISCLOSE Act is an important first step in restoring the power of people over corporations and wealthy special interests. Pelosi’s efforts on behalf of this bill are welcome. But in this topsy-turvy world it may turn out that Colbert will wield more influence over the matter in the long run. His brilliant comedic sensibility and fearlessness in injecting his satire into the real world is having an impact that could never have been anticipated. And as Pelosi says, He.Must.Be.Stopped!


Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Obama Downgrade Threat

Posted by on February 9, 2012 at 10:59 am. 1 Comments :

Once again Fox News has twisted the facts of a breaking story beyond all recognition. The headline on their Fox Nation blog reads: S&P Threatens Obama With Another Downgrade.

Fox Nation

The Fox Nationalists link to an article on Zero Hedge where the original headline says: S&P Threatens US With Another Downgrade. That is an obviously more accurate representation of the opinion expressed by S&P’s John Chambers, who was not threatening Obama at all. The prospect of another credit rating downgrade was directed at the United States, not the White House. Furthermore, its impact will be felt by the nation as a whole, not by the President as an individual.

If anything, the threat was aimed more at Congress, because that is where the budget is drafted, and it is where S&P has previously laid the blame for the downgrade. In their decision last August to drop the U.S. from AAA to AA+, S&P hammered at the disfunctionality of the Tea Party purists in the House who seemed to hunger for an American default:

[T]he downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges […] The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.

Tea Party DowngradeChambers noted in his latest comments that the “political brinkmanship hasn’t gone away. That simply doesn’t happen in other AAA economies.” Indeed, the same intransigent Tea Party extremists are presently attempting to welch on prior agreements on payroll tax cuts and budget reductions stipulated by the failure of the so-called Super Committee to arrive at a compromise spending bill.

The absurdity of Fox Nation trying to suggest that S&P is threatening Obama makes more sense when you recognize that the mission of Fox News is to disparage the President at every conceivable opportunity. They don’t care whether or not the criticism is factual. The only thing they are concerned with is their obsession with personalizing every negative event as being solely attributable to Obama in particular and Democrats in general. That agenda is not only dishonest, but it is also harmful in that it distracts from the real concerns presented by potential occurrences that will affect the entire nation and every citizen in it.

Fox News doesn’t care about the harm it produces. It only cares about harming Obama and running him out of Washington. Never mind that even if they were successful it wouldn’t change the S&P analysis one bit since it is Congress who is responsible for the budget. The determination of Fox News to harm the country is evident everyday. It is evident in their lamenting of lower unemployment rates, which they dismiss as contrived. And it is evident in their disdain for improvements in American manufacturing in auto and other industries. If there is one thing that is clear about Fox News it is that they revel in bad news for America and they are willing to hurt the country in order to achieve their rightist political goals.