The GOP (Grossly Oblivious Party) Thinks It Won The Shutdown Debacle

Posted by on October 18, 2013 at 9:55 am. 6 Comments :

It’s only been a few hours since Republicans caved in and finally reopened the government and raised the debt ceiling, extracting none of the many demands they previously insisted upon. Every poll shows them at historic lows and election analysts are giving Democrats fair odds of taking back the House of Representatives.

And yet, some GOP politicians are already saying they intend to do it all again in the next couple of months and, this time, they are sure they will prevail because God told them so.

Obama/Tea
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Now, in support of that blind confidence, Bill Kristol, the man who thought that Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators; the brilliant electoral strategist who urged John McCain to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate and predicted that Obama wouldn’t win a single primary against Hillary Clinton; that Bill Kristol, who is the editor of the ultra-conservative Weekly Standard and a contributor on Fox News, has published an editorial that claims that Republicans won the shutdown debacle.

Kristol: Republican efforts over the last weeks have reminded the electorate that it is the Democrats who are the party of 1) the nightmare of Obamacare, 2) the burden of the ever-increasing public debt, and 3) the arrogance of Washington, D.C. Those reminders are worth a lot. So while the GOP has paid some price in the recent skirmishes, the greater price, I suspect, will end up being borne by Democrats.

There you have it. Americans will only remember a few of the hackneyed talking points that Republicans tried and failed to make central to the debate over the past three weeks. They won’t recall how the Tea-Publicans put the nation, and the world, at risk by threatening to default on our debt. Neither will they recall their absurd insistence that Obama undo his signature legislative achievement. Kristol thinks that the country will forget the circus atmosphere created by Ted Cruz and a handful of House Republican nitwits – not to mention the ineptness of GOP Speaker John Boehner.

Despite all of that, Kristol suspects that “the greater price will end up being borne by Democrats.” This is a troubling notion coming from one of the right’s most influential pundits. It suggests that the threat of another default and/or shutdown is still on the table.

On the other hand, it also suggests that Republicans are purposefully trying to return control of the House to Democrats. Perhaps they have recognized that they are unfit for leadership and are angling for a way to abdicate without losing face. That’s the only plausible explanation for why they would entertain any notion that there was a victory for them in any of this. It ‘s the only way Kristol could say with a straight face that…

“Now, with the skirmishing over and a tactical retreat accomplished, the GOP has a chance to regroup and rethink, so as to be better prepared for the next encounter in the new year.”

So he’s calling this embarrassing defeat a “tactical retreat.” Isn’t that cute? And didn’t they just complete a rethinking after they lost last year’s presidential election? Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, published an extensive “autopsy” of the botched campaign wherein they lost the White House as well as two senate seats and nine seats in the House. And apparently they still haven’t learned anything.

And to top off the superb comedy of this column, Kristol built it all around an analogy based of the travails on the Weekly Standard’s Europe 2013 Cruise, which apparently ran into some bad weather and was unable to make shore as scheduled. So he is comparing the GOP to a floundering cruise ship and concluding that they won a proud victory.

Um…OK. It think it’s best, at this point, if we just humor them.

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OBAMA SCARE: Fox News Finds Imaginary Threat On ObamaCare Website

Posted by on October 17, 2013 at 11:56 am. 8 Comments :

Fox News has been engaged in a massive disinformation campaign against the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) for going on three years now. After all that time, and having exhausted the considerable creative resources that came up with twelve “Pants on Fire” lies about the program, Fox’s desperation is showing.

Recently Fox News went apoplectic over a phony allegation that millions of Americans will be victimized by hackers if they try to enroll in a new health care plan. Then they fear mongered over the horror of Americans voting due to the Affordable Care Act website providing users with an opportunity to register. Then they trembled at the thought of ACORN zombies helping people to get health care coverage. And now they think they have uncovered an ominous threat lurking in the Healthcare.gov website.

And this is the Fox News mothership, not their rabidly dishonest Fox Nation community site.

Fox News Obama Scare

Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy (son of Fox & Friends Curvy Couch Potato, Steve Doocy) posted an article on the Fox News website that purported to have ferreted out what he called a “privacy threat” hidden in the ObamaCare source code. He wrote that “buried in that website’s blueprint (known as ‘source code’) lies an alarming warning.” He further stated, without any documentation, that unnamed security experts worry that “the U.S. government is ill-equipped to handle identity thieves.”

None of this was supported by any actual evidence. Mini-Doocy simply cited as his source a column on the ultra-conservative Weekly Standard website that said…

“Now comes another example of why the website’s reputation is in tatters. Buried in the source code of Healthcare.gov is this sentence that could prove embarrassing: ‘You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system.’ Though not visible to users and obviously not intended as part of the terms and conditions, the language is nevertheless a part of the underlying code for the ‘Terms & Conditions’ page on the site.”

This is another situation where you have to wonder whether these people are embarrassingly stupid or brazenly dishonest. There is a reason that this language was not visible. It was deliberately removed with the use of HTML comment tags by the site’s programmers. It was undoubtedly edited out because it was not an accurate expression of the site’s privacy policy. It does not mean that users are agreeing to a secret clause permitting the government to spy on them as Fox News implied. If any of these “reporters” had a fourteen year old at home they could have learned what this is about.

In all likelihood, one of the programmers probably copied a block of text from a privacy policy somewhere else and then edited it by taking out the parts that don’t apply. The Weekly Standard even included this possibility in their article, but then downplayed it with their deliberately ambiguous assertion that “the language is nevertheless a part of the underlying code.” Not really. It’s only a part of some inoperative text that is not a part of the privacy policy and no one is bound by it. Fox News left out this explanation entirely. Their goal is to leave Americans with the false impression that some danger lurks beneath the surface of ObamaCare.

To make matters worse, Doocy’s article on the Fox News website was accompanied by a video that had nothing to with this source code matter. The video did feature Doocy reporting on Fox News an utterly asinine conspiracy theory that the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services “Planned Obamacare Website Glitches To Curb Cost Scare.”

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The crux of this nonsense was Doocy’s assertion that the administration was afraid that citizens would be put off if they saw insurance premiums prior to being adjusted by available subsidies and tax credits. Of course they would. It’s like saying car buyers would be put off by the manufacturer’s sticker price before being told of the dealer’s actual discounted sale price. The administration wasn’t trying to hide anything. They were trying to make all of the relevant information available so the consumer could make an informed decision. But in FoxNewsLand this amounts to a conspiratorial plot by the government to hobble their own website despite the obvious negative fallout from doing so.

Once again, this is proof that Fox News is committed to frightening the American people to keep them from taking advantage of a program that will be of great benefit to them and the nation. Fox News knows that this program will be popular once the public is aware of it’s value. And Fox will do everything it can to keep that from happening – even inventing phony horror stories.


The Cost Of Winning: Shutting Down The GOP/Tea Party Shutdown

Posted by on October 17, 2013 at 3:24 am. 13 Comments :

Last night the Senate finally crafted a bipartisan resolution to raise the debt ceiling and end the GOP/Tea Party driven shutdown. The sixteen days that government was closed had a materially negative impact on millions of Americans. Nearly 800,000 were furloughed from work. Many more were turned away from federal agencies that provide aid and public services for parks, education, etc.

The media will now spend days/weeks analyzing the repercussions and adjudicating winners and losers. While it may be apparent that the Republican Party and its extremist Tea Party wing have suffered a hobbling blow (their favorability has sunk to historic lows), the harm to the public at large cannot be dismissed. Although, sadly, it may be as the media ignores the ongoing strife in favor of reporting on horse-race style politics. Despite the relief we all feel that the immediate crisis was averted, there is still a price to be paid. And it isn’t cheap:

Shutdown Receipt

Yep, the shutdown cost America about $24 billion. That is courtesy of the allegedly fiscally responsible Republicans in Congress. Voters need to remember this in November 2014, and Democrats need to repeatedly remind them between now and then. Democrats only need to gain 17 seats in order to take the Speaker’s gavel out of John Boehner’s inept hands. Doing so will improve the prospects for economic recovery, job growth, infrastructure repair, environmental action, and progress on civil rights and income equality.

A change in party control of Congress won’t solve all of the nation’s problems. It won’t end radical Tea Party demands to repeal ObamaCare or for severe cuts to Social Security and Medicare. It won’t stop the birthers and the racists who disparage President Obama and oppose every policy put forth by Democrats. It won’t keep pseudo-patriots from advocating for war at every turn. And it won’t restore sanity to the global financial system that evades criminal responsibilities and exploits average people throughout the world.

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However, it will remove from power a gang of nutjobs who hate Obama more than they love their country. It will bring Nancy Pelosi back to the Speaker’s office. It will install Democrats as the chairmen of all committees, replacing corrupt GOP ideologues like Darrell Issa, Dave Camp, and Paul Ryan. And it will put us on surer footing and give us a more productive legislative branch that actually has an interest in governing positively, and in building up America rather than in tearing it down. That’s progress.


OBAMA SCARE: Fox News Fears ACORN Is Back To Push ObamaCare

Posted by on October 16, 2013 at 12:07 pm. 6 Comments :

Fox News has been engaged in a massive disinformation campaign against the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) for going on three years now. After all that time, and having exhausted the considerable creative resources that came up with twelve “Pants on Fire” lies about the program, Fox’s desperation is showing.

Recently Fox News went apoplectic over a phony allegation that millions of Americans will be victimized by hackers if they try to enroll in a new health care plan. Then they fear mongered over the horror of Americans voting due to the Affordable Care Act website providing users with an opportunity to register. And now Fox is trembling at the thought of ACORN zombies helping people to get health care coverage.

Fox News Obama Scare

The Curvy Couch Potatoes over at Fox & Friends had a jolly old time resurrecting their fear of a community organizing enterprise that no longer exists. ACORN was hounded out of business by right-wing opponents after pseudo-journalist and convicted criminal, James O’Keefe, distributed some deceitfully edited and libelous videos. But that hasn’t stopped conservative media from exhuming the corpse whenever they are in need of a sensationalistic story as demonstrated by this morning’s broadcast:

Elisabeth Hasselbeck: We’re getting information that ACORN operatives are trying to sign people up for the Affordable Care Act.
Brian Kilmeade: Good luck. Let them try.
Hasselbeck: They’re banking on the American people forgetting what had happened in terms of voter fraud. So we need to ring the bell a little on this one.

As previously noted, there aren’t any ACORN operatives, and multiple investigations never found any evidence of wrongdoing by ACORN or their former staff. Despite their innocence, the Foxpods think that anyone affiliated with the former ACORN must retire to caves in Antarctica rather than resuming their vocation of helping the American people to navigate the complexities of government services. Fox just hates it when any organization aspires to help people for any reason. They continue…

Steve Doocy: Remember back in the old days, we used to show this video when we would show ACORN locations back in 2009. Famously they were caught in a sting operation by a journalist that showed they were showing people how to break the law. […] After the scandal, and they were exposed, ACORN was banned from getting taxpayer money. So if they’re getting some of this navigator money in that kind of serpentine way — still illegal.

That’s cute. Doocy called O’Keefe a “journalist.” As for his allegation of illegality, there is nothing in the law that prevents organizations with former ACORN staff from getting federal grants. In fact, there isn’t even any law that prevents ACORN from getting grants as the previous ban was not included in the latest Continuing Resolution. Doocy is brazenly misrepresenting the facts, just as Hasselbeck does when she implies that ACORN will be getting $67 million. Actually, that’s the total amount of the ACA navigator program for all grantees. But then Hasselbeck introduces a new irrational fear:

Hasselbeck: The American people have great cause to be concerned about their personal information, medical information, financial information, being handed over – not just in terms of the money the government is giving out, but your information that is being given to an organization that will most likely be used against you at some point, politically.

Yowsa! ACORN using this information against us would be bad enough, but the prospect of such use being “most likely” really ought to scare the bejeezus out of the Teabaggers who watch Fox. Hasselbeck never explains how this info can used to politically harm anyone, but then again, she never offers any proof of her allegations in the first place. It is simply an attempt to dangle a ominous sword over the heads of her dimwitted audience.

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To recap, Fox has so far announced that ObamaCare enrollees are subject to financial ruin due to hackers, political strife due to ACORN, and some unspecified horror due to access to voter registration forms. They never mention the fact that they will also be covered by an affordable health care plan that may preserve their medical well being and prevent an illness-rated bankruptcy. No wonder Fox News viewers are so clueless about this and pretty much every other issue.


Oh The Stupidity: Sarah Palin Wants Obama Impeached For Both Solving/Not Solving The Debt Crisis

Posted by on October 15, 2013 at 12:30 pm. 15 Comments :

America’s own rogue GOPachyderm, Sarah Palin, is such a consistent source of hilarity it seems impossible that she could keep up the pace any longer. But just when you think she’s exhausted her supply of inanity, she posts another Facebook column and reestablishes her crackpot bona fides:

“Apparently the president thinks he can furlough reality when talking about the debt limit. To suggest that raising the debt limit doesn’t incur more debt is laughably absurd. The very reason why you raise the debt limit is so that you can incur more debt. Otherwise what’s the point?”

What Palin is mocking as “laughably absurd” is known to those who have advanced beyond remedial economics as “the truth.” The point of raising the debt ceiling, which Palin goes out of her way to misunderstand, is to pay for debt already incurred. It does not, and cannot, authorize new spending. Only Congress can do that. So if Palin has a problem with the outstanding debt, she needs to take it up with John Boehner.

Palin continues by declaring that “It’s also shameful to see [Obama] scaremongering the markets with his talk of default.” I wonder if she would castigate the sainted Tea Party icon, Ronald Reagan, for saying (video here)…

“Congress consistently brings the Government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the Federal deficit would soar.”

But Palin hasn’t even begun to showcase her Olympian idiocy. Her Facebook drivel proceeds with a self-contradictory passage that begins by stating that…

“There is no way we can default if we follow the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4, requires that we service our debt first.”

Actually, what the Fourteenth Amendment (Section 4) says is that “The validity of the public debt of the United States […] shall not be questioned.” It is a controversial clause that many interpret as authorization for the President to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling at will. So it appears that Palin is advising the President to take matters into his own hands. But her next paragraph puts an end to that sort of thinking.

“Defaulting on our national debt is an impeachable offense, and any attempt by President Obama to unilaterally raise the debt limit without Congress is also an impeachable offense.”

Huh? Palin just got finished arguing that the Constitution demands that the President take any and all measures to pay our debts. Now she says that if he does so he is guilty of an impeachable offense. And just to lock in the crazy, she also says that not doing so is likewise impeachable. In Palin’s twisted reality Obama cannot glance sideways without violating his oath of office.

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What is abundantly clear is that Palin wants to believe that whatever this President does is a justification for impeachment. Her perspective is so irreparably warped that it has lost any semblance of rationality. This is something that has been noticeable for quite some time with Palin, but what stands out as utterly incomprehensible is that there are still people who hang on her every word – including in the media. It’s a sad state of affairs, but one that is not irreversible. We just need to provide the proper educational support. So let’s start with something that Palin might be able to grasp.

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Cletus on Debt Ceiling


OBAMA SCARE: Fox News Mortified That ObamaCare Web Site Links To Voter Registration Form

Posted by on October 14, 2013 at 9:31 pm. 1 Comments :

Fox News has been engaged in a massive disinformation campaign against ObamaCare for going on three years now. After all that time, and having exhausted the considerable creative resources that came up with twelve “Pants on Fire” lies about the program, Fox’s desperation is showing. Just last week they went apoplectic over a phony allegation that millions of Americans will be victimized by hackers if they try to enroll in a new health care plan. This week they are testing another absurdity intended to rattle consumers.

Fox News

Once again, Real Story host Gretchen Carlson is carrying the water for the Tea-Publican extremists with a segment that reveals the shocking news that the “ObamaCare Exchange Website Asks Folks To Register To Vote.” This startling revelation is met with foreboding by Carlson’s guest, Dr. Marc Siegel (a member of the Fox News Medical A-Team along with this quack):

“I have a problem with it because it seems like more salesmanship. Like, here, go to the state exchange and now, by the way, vote. Vote for who? Vote for a Democrat who’s supporting this? Or maybe if you can’t get through to the exchange, Gretchen, then maybe you vote for a Republican, right?”

Right! Except that no one is ever directed to vote. They are merely given the opportunity to register. And they may register however they wish, just as Siegel himself pointed out. But the core of the right’s trepidation is rooted in a more fundamental aversion to the act of voting itself. It is why they are continually erecting new barriers to voting, such as unreasonably stringent identification requirements, shorter early voting periods, wholesale purges of voter rolls, and of course, brazenly discriminatory gerrymandering.

Republicans simply hate it when people participate in democracy, particularly when Democrats are doing it. To be fair, Democrats would be happy if fewer Republicans voted also, but unlike the GOP, Democrats have not tried to legislate away the right of Republicans to vote. To the contrary, they have sought to expand voter turnout with bills like the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (aka Motor Voter) that mandates that certain government agencies provide people with access to voter registration. In fact, it is that twenty year old law that requires the ObamaCare administrators to make voter registration available. Fox News, and their similarly mortified conservative comrades, are either unaware of this, or are deliberately feigning ignorance in order to rile up their dimwitted base.

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The icing on the top of this manufactured controversy is that it appears to have been cooked up by the right-wing MacIver Institute, a think tank funded by the Koch brothers and the neo-fascist John Birch Society. The story appeared first on Fox’s community web site and Fib Factory, Fox Nation, where it was sourced to MacIver. It traveled from there to a flurry of right-wing sites including National Review, Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, Breitbart News, the Daily Caller, and eventually, the Fox News mothership. This is yet another means that the Koch brothers use to funnel their propaganda into Fox News in the guise of journalism.

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Fox News Promotes Nazi Insults Aimed At First Responders By Anti-Obama Protesters

Posted by on October 14, 2013 at 2:16 pm. 4 Comments :

Fox News presents itself as the red, white, and bluest cable news network the world has ever seen. They savor their Patriopathic zeal and wear their jingoistic bias as a badge of honor. Of course, it’s all a disingenuous affectation manufactured to lure in gullible tea-billies that Fox whips into a frenzied mob to oppose our socialist, Muslim president from Kenya. That makes it all the more blatantly hypocritical when those Blockhead Brigades march on the Capital to protest a government shutdown that was planned and executed by the Tea Party right.

Fox Nation

The Fox News community web site and Fib Factory, Fox Nation, posted an item celebrating the “Million Vet March,” that only managed to attract a few hundred marchers. The event was a sorry spectacle despite having star attractions like Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz topping the bill. Protesters expressed their outrage that several war memorials were closed due to the shutdown. So they “stormed” through barricades that could be easily pushed aside, and milled around the memorials without paying much attention to them. Later they carried the portable barricades to the street in front of the White House and discarded them there as an act of ….. petulance?

The Fox Nationalists included a video (below) of this rally that was labeled “Veterans face off with Obama Storm Troopers At White House!” The reference to “Storm Troopers” (Hitler’s paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party) is rhetoric that is all too common with these right-wing extremists. In the video the protesters loudly boo the arrival of the police. You can hear them shouting chants and slurs such as “Looks like something out of Kenya,” and “It’s the Brown Shirts,” another Nazi reference.

The police, of course, are there to protect people and property from harm, behavior that the demonstrators already proved they are willing to engage in. Officers never made any aggressive moves toward the demonstrators that would have justified the bile spewed at them. And if something terrible had happened, these same abusive protesters would be clamoring for assistance from these brave public servants. It is thoroughly repulsive how these Teabaggers can go from praising first responders during natural disasters or terrorism, to vilifying them for doing their jobs during an unruly demonstration.

It is also notable that the Tea-Publican Party malcontents who caused the government shutdown are now so fixated on just one of many of the repercussions for which they previously cheered. They characteristically have chosen to focus on a symbolic outrage having to do with some senior citizen veterans being able to visit some statues in a park. Wouldn’t it be nice if they cared just as much about the children who have been locked out of programs that provide necessary food and health care?

GOP Shutdown

And if you thought that this weekend’s rally had something to do with veterans, or a health care plan, or government spending, you just need to listen to the words of Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman, who was a featured speaker at the rally and said…

“We are now ruled by a president that bows down to Allah. […] I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.”


OBAMA SCARE: Fox News Warns That If You Sign Up For ObamaCare Hackers Will Steal Your Life Savings

Posted by on October 13, 2013 at 1:31 pm. 8 Comments :

On Friday’s episode of “The Real Story” on Fox News, host Gretchen Carlson introduced an ominous new strain of fear mongering to intimidate Americans from learning more about how the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) can benefit them. Fox News is so terrified that people will discover how much there is to gain by enrolling, that they continue to invent ever more frightening tales of horror.

Fox News Obama Scare
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Carlson’s guest for the segment was John McAfee, the notorious developer of the anti-virus software company, who is presently a fugitive from a murder investigation. Carlson introduced McAfee with a declarative statement that enrolling in ObamaCare is dangerous because “Hackers could easily steal your identity. You could even lose you life savings if you do sign up.”

Oh my! That sounds awful. Pack up the kids Mabel, we’re moving to our bunker in Idaho where we stashed the gold bullion and freeze-fried moose stew. Fox News has confirmed that legions of hackers will be stalking innocent health insurance consumers to bleed them dry and deliver their souls to Satan.

This wild assertion that visitors to HealthCare.gov are going to be victimized by hackers is designed to frighten people away from the web site. Fox News has embarked on a full scale assault against ObamaCare with false allegations of higher costs, reduced service, death panels, national deficits, and even allusions to slavery. Their goal is to steer enough gullible viewers away from participating in order to engineer the program’s failure. And now they are deploying their latest tactic, fear of a malicious army of identity thieves.

During the interview, Carlson raises the specter of outlaw hackers laying in wait on the ObamaCare web site. However, neither she nor McAfee actually provide any evidence of such a threat. In fact, when directly asked about it. McAfee diverts from the question and lays out a completely different threat that has nothing whatsoever to do with the ObamaCare web site:

“There are no safeguards to prevent anyone – you, me, anyone who can develop a web site that only costs a couple of hundred dollars – and pretend to be an examiner, an agent, and you can log on, I’ll ask you for your Social Security number, your date of birth, everything I need to an hour later empty your bank account. And this is going to happen, and it’s going to happen very soon. Nothing in the ObamaCare system safeguards against this.”

To be clear, McAfee is not talking about any flaw or security risk to users of HealthCare.gov. He is saying that other nefarious individuals could set up their own unaffiliated web sites in the hopes of luring naive people of whom they will seek to take advantage. Of course, that is a threat that exists every day for every web site, and has since the Internet began. It has absolutely nothing to do with the ObamaCare site and does represent any risk to its users.

In short, if you give your Social Security number to a fake web site, or the widow of a Nigerian prince, it isn’t Obama’s fault. And the fact that Fox News will lie about this so brazenly is evidence of how scared they are that most Americans are going to appreciate having access to affordable health care for the first time. They are going to appreciate declining costs and lower national deficits. And they are going to remember who it was that threw every obstacle they could find in the path of these reforms when they go to the polls in November 2014.


Is Fox News The Most Flaccid Propaganda Tool Ever?

Posted by on October 12, 2013 at 3:09 pm. 3 Comments :

Twelve days ago the Tea Party dominated Republican House caucus shut down the United States government in an attempt coerce the majority of the Congress into defunding, delaying, or otherwise crippling the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare).

They were aided and abetted by their partners in political crime, Fox News. In fact, Fox News took a leadership role in disseminating disinformation aimed at either preventing ObamaCare from being implemented or poisoning public opinion to oppose it based on the lies that Fox manufactured.

Fox News
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The ferocity of the Fox campaign was dialed up to maximum volume with absurdly dishonest claims that tested the boundaries of hyperbole. They coordinated their attack plan to traverse the Fox empire including their business network, the Wall Street Journal, and the notorious Fib Factory, Fox Nation. They spoke of non-existent death panels, encroaching socialism, largest tax increases in history, comparisons to slavery, and endless references to tyranny, Hitler, and the total destruction of America.

So what did Fox gain from that virulent assault on a law that was passed by Congress, signed by the President, deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court, and affirmed by the reelection of Obama? They emboldened the most strident extremists on the right who pursued a suicidal mission to impose their unpopular will on the nation. And their ultimate reward is that ObamaCare is now regarded more favorably than it was before the government shutdown (or “slimdown” as Fox calls it):

“[W]hat is perhaps even more worrisome for the GOP is the ‘boomerang’ effect: As the party has used the shutdown and fiscal fight to campaign against the nation’s health-care law and for limited government, the poll shows those efforts have backfired.

“For one thing, the health-care law has become more popular since the shutdown began. Thirty-eight percent see the Affordable Care Act (or ‘Obamacare’) as a good idea, versus 43 percent who see it as a bad idea – up from 31 percent good idea, 44 percent bad idea last month.”

Ted CruzNot only that, but while America has been warming up to ObamaCare (which most are only now getting there first personal exposure to), their dislike for Republicans is growing exponentially. For that they can thank the Tea Party nutjobs like Ted Cruz and the tiny faction of Teabaggers in the House who have such a firm grip on John Boehner’s cojones:

“By a 22-point margin (53 percent to 31 percent), the public blames the Republican Party more for the shutdown than President Barack Obama – a wider margin of blame for the GOP than the party received during the poll during the last shutdown in 1995-96.

“Just 24 percent of respondents have a favorable opinion about the GOP, and only 21 percent have a favorable view of the Tea Party, which are both at all-time lows in the history of poll.”

While this epic cratering of support was unfolding, President Obama’s favorability actually went up two points in the last month.

The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this is that, despite Fox’s inflated ego and boastful self-importance, it is really a pathetically lame distributor of rightist propaganda. They threw everything they had at Obama and his eponymous health care program and came out farther underwater than when they started. This result is similar to last year’s election when Fox targeted Obama as something just shy of the Anti-Christ, but he still won by a sizable margin. And, not to be overlooked, it was a campaign that focused heavily on ObamaCare. More recently, Fox’s efforts to stir up their fringy malcontents to get them to take to the streets ended in an embarrassing flop.

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the destructive influence of Fox News. It is a bad example for other news outlets who think that conservative extremism might be a viable business model. It provides a platform and encouragement for crackpots like Cruz, Michele Bachamnn, Louie Gohmert, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, etc., to cling to positions that are wildly out of touch with the American people. It muddies the debate over critical public affairs with misrepresentations and lies. But one thing we do not have to worry about is whether Fox is effective at persuading Americans to join their Blockhead Brigade. On that measure Fox has proved to be pitifully feeble despite their exhaustive and desperate intentions.


Weak Tea: Fox News Sponsored Tea Party Protests Fizzle Out

Posted by on October 11, 2013 at 1:00 pm. 5 Comments :

Remember back in 2009 when Fox News was pulling out all the stops to promote the newborn Tea Party? They broadcast every town howl and invited an endless stream of tri-cornered hat wearing crackpots to rant about tyranny and Kenyan usurpers. Fox even branded the Tea Party movement as its own entity while beseeching viewers to attend rallies.

Fox Tea Party

Well, this year they have not had much success pushing their fringe agenda. They spent months hammering away on Benghazi, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, and a bevy of second-tier scandalettes, but have been met with yawns. After Fox launched a campaign to hype the false allegation that the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups for harassment, the national protest to “Rein In the IRS” drew tens of angry Teabaggers to IRS offices across the country.

IRS Protest

The latest effort by Fox to pump up the right-wing wrath was a planned protest by America’s truckers to create the “biggest traffic jam in history” in Washington, D.C. Their promises ranged from thousands of truckers jamming the capital’s highways and arresting members of Congress, to hundreds of millions of citizens nationwide participating in a show of solidarity. This morning the protest began with nothing more than a trickle of trucks that failed to have any noticeable impact on traffic. Even Fox News posted a story reporting that “Dozens, not thousands, show up for DC trucker protest.”

The “Truckers Ride for the Constitution” was supposed to send a message to Washington that they were “sick and tired of the corruption that is destroying America!” Apparently, the hordes of sickly, fatigued protesters never materialized. This will surely cut into their comically delusional list of demands that include that President Obama immediately resign from office.

Next up for the Fox News Protest Committee is an event targeting the closure of American memorials and monuments due to the Tea Party driven government shutdown (or slimdown, as Fox is calling it). On Fox’s community web site, the lie-riddled Fox Nation, they have posted an item that can hardly be characterized as news. It concerns something called the “Million Vet March” that is scheduled for this Sunday. That seems like bad planning on Fox’s part, because if the truckers rally had successfully stopped traffic in D.C., how would the vets get to their event?

The Fox Nationalists promotion of the Million Vet March was not actually a story about the proposed rally. It was a link to the web site of the political action committee that is sponsoring it, the Special Operations Speaks PAC. The PAC’s web site indicates that it was formed to lobby for a Watergate-style congressional committee to investigate Benghazi. Now they are taking a detour to protest the “vicious tyrant” in the White House who “shut down our nation’s war memorials and declared a war on our veterans!”

Never mind that it was the House Republicans who shut down the government and the memorials. The The bigger problem is that Fox is posting links to partisan activist organizations in the guise of reporting the news. If Fox had written a story about this march, or linked to a story written by another news outlet, that would be bad enough and they would still be guilty of proselytizing on behalf of a political cause. But Fox didn’t even bother to put that much distance between themselves and the fringe group organizing the march. They just linked directly to the organizer’s web site where you are greeted with a solicitation to donate.

It is pretty unlikely that anywhere near a million veterans are going to show up in D.C. on Sunday. So this event will be just as big a flop as the trucker rally. But both events demonstrate that Fox is not a news network, and they aren’t even pretending to be one anymore. They are a political advocacy enterprise and, measuring by their recent efforts, they aren’t even any good at that.