Sarah Palin

Fox News FINALLY Refudiates Violent Rhetoric

Posted by on August 31, 2010 at 3:02 pm. 9 Comments :

Almost since its inception, Fox News has been a hotbed of irresponsible discourse that encouraged intolerance and hostility. They have harbored hosts, contributors and guests whose language was sometimes thinly veiled advocacy of violence, and sometimes there was no veil at all.

  • Bill O’Reilly threatened to “hunt down” and “strangle” members of the media.
  • Liz Trotta joked that “somebody knock off Osama … uh … Obama … well, both if we could.”
  • Rush Limbaugh told his listeners to start riots at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, “with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s the objective here.”
  • Sarah Palin has taken to giving her followers this advice: “Don’t retreat…Reload!”
  • Glenn Beck agreed with his guest Michael Scheuer that the only hope for America “is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.”

Beck is one of the worst perpetrators of hostile rhetoric. He used to have a regular radio bit wherein he speculated about who he would like to beat to death with a shovel. He fantasized about choking Michael Moore to death with his bare hands. And more recently he frequently condemns progressives as a cancer that has to be “cut out.” So perhaps it was Beck to whom this Fox News story was referring when they said that provocative remarks “could easily incite a rabid fan to commit violent acts.” And that fans “could be influenced because of their devotion.” The article quoted Cooper Lawrence, the author of “Cult of Celebrity” saying that:

“The fear isn’t that a celebrity will influence someone to do something violent or out of character due to the sheer devotion to the celebrity, the fear is that someone who is already vulnerable, mentally disturbed, already considering something dangerous, may be encouraged to do so if it is advocated by their favorite star.”

Image consultant Michael Sands concurred saying that he “is taking his fame too seriously. He is having delusions and his anger” could “get him arrested!”

These criticisms ought to be taken seriously by anyone, left or right, who ventures into such disturbing scenarios and has the ability to influence others who may not be of particularly sound mind. Certainly that would apply to someone with the public posture of Glenn Beck. Just one little thing…The article was not referring to Beck or any of the other viscerally divisive characters above. It was referring to actor John Cusack who Tweeted…

“I AM FOR A SATANIC DEATH CULT CENTER AT FOX NEWS HQ AND OUTSIDE THE OFFICES ORDICK ARMEYAND NEWT GINGRICH-and all the GOP WELFARE FREAKS”

Much of the reaction at Fox News, and elsewhere in the rightist blogosphere, is that Cusack was articulating some kind of threat. That just illustrates how deficient their comprehension skills are. Anyone with a functioning cerebrum can see that Cusack was responding to the bigoted and illogical arguments against the Islamic community center being planned near ground zero in Lower Manhattan. Cusack was satirically turning the controversy on its head by proposing a church of Satan near Fox’s offices. But the dimwits at Fox, and their ideological peers, just don’t get it.

It’s too bad that when Fox News finally gets around to making a principled statement against violent hate-speech that they direct it toward someone who wasn’t engaging in it and ignore their own complicity. It would be nice if those getting so worked up about this phony misinterpretation of Cusack’s comments would be similarly outraged by the very real violent rhetoric that is a regular part of Fox’s programming, as noted above. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that expression of fairness and balance to occur.

The Ever Irrelevant Fox Nation Slams Sheryl Crow

Posted by on August 19, 2010 at 3:23 pm. 9 Comments :

Sheryl CrowToday on Fox Nation the editors featured a story that further demonstrates how out of touch they are and how desperately dishonest. The Fox Nationalists decided to go after the beautiful and talented Sheryl Crow for her audacity to exercise her First Amendment rights. The headline in their entertainment section was “Increasingly Irrelevant Sheryl Crow Sings Anti-Palin Tune.”

For the record, Crow is a nine-time Grammy winner. Her last album, “Detours,” debuted on the billboard charts at number two and received another Grammy nomination just last year. Her just-released “100 Miles From Memphis” is presently #10 on Amazon’s overall music listings and #1 on Amazon’s Adult Contemporary list.

For a news enterprise that repeatedly features Ted Nugent, Jon Voight, and Victoria Jackson, they have a pretty funny definition of “irrelevant.” Especially since Crow’s new album is getting a lot of buzz and she is making high-profile appearances around the country and on national television programs like Letterman and Leno. Her anti-Palin song only reinforces her relevance. Plus, it’s a great song:

I think what the Fox Nationalists may really be upset about is that Crow speaks her mind, and does so effectively. A previous article on Fox Nation referenced an interview of Crow by Katie Couric in Glamour Magazine. In that interview Couric asked Crow what she thought of the Tea Party.

“My main concern is that it’s really fear-based. What’s coming out of the Tea Party most often, especially if you go onto YouTube, and you see some of the interviews with these people who really don’t even know what the issues are, they’re just swept up in the fear of it and the anger of it. They’re not sure what they’re angry at; They don’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street. They haven’t educated themselves, but they’re just pissed off. And I understand that, I’m pissed off too. But knowledge is power, and anything less than that when it comes to anger is dangerous.”

Those remarks led the right-wing media machine to condemn Crow for calling Tea Partiers angry, uneducated, and dangerous. I don’t know what they’re complaining about, it seems fairly accurate to me. Now her new song is getting blasted by the same wingnut crowd, and even though they call it an anti-Palin song, it is much broader than that. In fact there is only one reference to Palin via her notorious Tweet asking her disciples to “reload.” There’s your angry, uneducated, and dangerous, right there.

The central theme of the song addresses the noisy bickering of cable news shoutcasters. It is more a critique of the media than a hit on Palin. In one line she laments that, “Ignorance is patriotic. Reasons are so idiotic.” That pretty much describes the state of debate amongst the right-wingers who inhabit Fox News. They glorify ignorance and revile reason. All the better to exploit emotion and propaganda. And if that’s not relevant, I don’t know what is.

Get Sheryl Crow’s new album here:


America Hates The Media – Thank You Fox News

Posted by on August 14, 2010 at 12:39 pm. 5 Comments :

A new survey by the Gallup organization reveals that Americans have all but given up on old media services like newspapers and television. Only about 25% of respondents say that they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in either. This puts the legacy media on a par with perennially hated institutions like banks, HMOs and congress.

It isn’t difficult to surmise the reason for this deep distrust. While the media has long been held in low esteem, there was a noticeable decline that began in the mid-1990s. Since that time confidence has dropped about 30%. And just as a point of interest, Fox News launched in 1996.

There isn’t really anything coincidental about it. Fox News has always had as its purpose the discrediting of news as an institution. I made the case for this last year in Fox News Confidential: The Truth Behind Its Secret Mission:

The real mission of Fox News is [cue trumpets] to so thoroughly tarnish the practice of journalism that majorities of the public would recoil in disgust at all of it. Murdoch and Ailes knew that the introduction of a single cable network would have a difficult time enshrouding the whole of the mediasphere in their veil of lies. So rather than try to change people’s minds, they would endeavor to poison the relationship that people have with the press.

Mission accomplished. By trivializing journalism with tabloid-style sensationalism, and diluting its authority with speculation and hyperbolic opinion, Fox has succeeded in producing large majorities of the American public who are now repulsed by the “mainstream” media that barges into their homes every day. The lies Fox News spews are secondary to the campaign of defamation that they launched against the media as a whole. As a result, their fictional accounts of current events are more enduring because people are paying less attention overall.

The saddest part of this scenario is that the non-Fox media have essentially cooperated with Fox’s disparagement of them. Rather than defend themselves and the integrity of their profession, they went along and allowed Fox to create the negative impressions that are now dominant in society. Even worse, they actually helped to reinforce those impressions.

The Washington Post apologized for not covering more of the fakery of Andrew Breitbart. CNN bent over backwards to endorse the wacko wing of the right by hiring RedState’s Erick Erickson. MSNBC continues to host disreputable characters like Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan. And everybody persists in covering non-entities like Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. With respect to the latter, Sarah Palin just came in fourth (pdf) amongst Republicans in a preference poll for 2012. And the Tea Party registered a measly (pdf) 30% favorable rating with an even smaller percentage (25%) saying they would vote for a candidate with a Tea Party affiliation. Yet these two subjects get wall-to-wall coverage across the media spectrum.

Perhaps if newspaper and television reporters would cover issues that actually address the interests of their audience they would not be so universally reviled. If they could manage to resist the melodramatic minutiae that Fox News has embraced they could recover some of their lost respect. And above all they need to put objectivity and honesty at the top of their agenda, not ratings and revenue.

In other words, if they deliver a product that is informative and useful, and contributes to people’s lives, profits and popularity will follow. If they continue to pursue the Fox model they will only succeed in further damaging their reputation and their prospects for the future. To say nothing about the damage they are doing to a country whose democracy relies on a well-informed population.

Sarah Palin’s Zoo

Posted by on July 8, 2010 at 1:07 pm. 16 Comments :


Sarah Palin (left) with Glenn Beck.

In a new video from Sarah Palin’s PAC, women are brought into the spotlight in some particularly unflattering portrayals. Rather than casting women as intelligent and productive participants in the nation’s affairs, Palin repeatedly analogizes them to animals. Starting with pit bulls, then advancing to grizzly bears, and ending with a flourish of stampeding elephants.

In every case Palin’s imagery is of angry and hostile beasts, as opposed to thoughtful and serious citizens. She describes the rise of conservative women as a “mom awakening,” but there is little evidence of enlightenment in the movement.

Palin declines to even acknowledge that women can be clear thinkers and problem solvers. Instead, she praises their stereotypical feminine assets “…because moms kind of just know when something’s wrong.” That’s the insight of intuition, not education, experience, reason, or intellect. Is that what Palin and her “mama grizzlies” would bring to governing? I can almost hear her response to a reporter’s inquiry on why she thinks the U.S. should bomb Iran: “I kind of just know, dontcha know?” Then adding, “And God bless America, also.”

The entire video is a tribute to Sarah Palin as she promenades through rallies, book signings, and tea parties. There is plenty of footage of her faithful followers demonstrating their devotion. And to no one’s surprise, the crowd is conspicuously devoid of faces of color. This is the sort of attendance that she can expect at her appearance with Glenn Beck in Washington, DC, next month. DC’s National Zoo may want to close down for the day because the real wild kingdom is going to be on display on the stage in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Sarah Palin: America By Heart?

Posted by on May 11, 2010 at 4:29 pm. 5 Comments :

HarperCollins (a Rupert Murdoch company) just announced details about Sarah Palin’s next book, America By Heart, Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag. It is scheduled to be release November 23. This is the followup to her previous literary achievement, Going Rogue, An American Life. I suppose that she will have “America” in the title of all of her books. She wouldn’t want to confuse her fans who might think it’s some foreign Sarah Palin.

The first question on most people’s minds will be who is going to write this one. The first book attributed to Palin, a biography, was actually ghost written by conservative scribe, Lynn Vincent. This time it should be even easier to outsource due to the subject matter that the Associated Press describes as…

“…selections from classic and contemporary readings that have moved her,” according to HarperCollins, along with “the nation’s founding documents to great speeches, sermons, letters, literature and poetry, biography, and even some of her favorite songs and movies.”

In other words, the book writes itself. In fact, most of it has already been written by other people. HarperCollins adds that the book will feature…

“…portraits of some of the extraordinary men and women she admires and who embody her deep love of country, her strong rootedness in faith, and her profound love and appreciation of family.”

She’s really going out on limb with this subject matter. It immediately rules out any Democrats or liberals who are, of course, all treasonous atheists from broken homes. But I really have to wonder about the title, America By Heart. Does she mean America memorized? Or the song “America” by the band Heart? Heart really does have a song called America, and it’s about the dying off of a generation that clung to old ideas like racism. The song includes these lyrics:

America, America
Are you losing your mind
America, America
Don’t leave me behind

I also wonder why Palin keeps having serendipitous affiliations with this band. She was also called Sarah Barracuda in high school (and in the 2008 campaign). The lyrics of that song included…

If the real thing don’t do the trick
You better make up something quick

Appropriate on so many levels. And since the book will include some of her favorite songs, perhaps these will be amongst them. Even better, maybe she will favor us with her own rendition as she embarks on another book tour (sponsored by Fox News). This will be her second book tour, which makes it two more than the number of press conferences she’s ever held (or books she’s read). As for me, I’m still waiting for the definitive Palin Book, Going Reggae.


Sarah Palin And Glenn Beck Tarnish The Time 100

Posted by on April 29, 2010 at 1:31 pm. 6 Comments :

Time Magazine once again brings us their list of the 100 most influential people of the year. And once again they include some sour notes that evoke a tortured combination of laughter and groans. By naming Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck as “most influential” Time is courageously cutting against the grain. After all, Palin received the Lie of the Year award from Politifact last year. And Beck was Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year. But perhaps the funniest part of this year’s worst honorees is the people selected to honor them.

Sarah Palin, number nine on the list, received an adoring tribute from the Motor City Jackass, Ted Nugent. Palin must be so proud to be praised by the has-been rocker whose last album featured a woman in bondage, on a platter like a pig, with a hand grenade stuck in her mouth. Also, during the last presidential campaign Nugent said this while brandishing a couple of assault weapons:

Nugent: I was in Chicago last week I said, “Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk?” Obama, he’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on one of my machine guns. Let’s hear it for them. I was in New York and I said, “Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch.” Since I’m in California, I’m gonna find Barbara Boxer she might wanna suck on my machine guns. Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore.

Ted Nugent was obviously the best qualified person to represent the political philosophy of Palin, especially her commitment to equal rights and respect for women. In his commentary he even had the guts to praise Palin for her “herculean work ethic,” by which he must mean her decision to quit halfway through the gubernatorial post to which she was elected so that she could stuff her pockets full of cash.

Glenn Beck got an even more fitting tribute from an even bigger jackass – Sarah Palin. Beck was lauded by Palin as a “history buff,” and “America’s professor of common sense.” That’s mighty high praise coming from someone who couldn’t cite a single magazine that she read, and who thinks that the Constitution gives the vice-president authority over the Senate.

“Glenn’s like the high school government teacher so many wish they’d had, charting and connecting ideas with chalk-dusted fingers – kicking it old school – instead of becoming just another talking-heads show host.”

Excuse me, Sarah. But Glenn Beck IS just another talking-heads show host. What exactly do you think he does for a living? And I don’t know anyone who wishes they had Beck as high school government teacher. Certainly not anyone who was actually interested in learning. There may have been some who thought he would be an easy grader since he wouldn’t have known any of the correct answers himself. And if his fingers were dusted with anything, it would have been cocaine.

Nevertheless, Time has seen fit to honor both Palin and Beck. It’s hard to see what Time regards as influential when both of these people have higher unfavorable ratings than favorable, and most of the country/world pays them no attention at all. Even a majority of Republicans think that Palin is unqualified to be president and Fox News left Beck off of their new ad promoting the network as “The Most Powerful Name In News.”

But that’s Time Magazine and the liberal media for ya.

Sinking Fast: Sarah Palin And The Tea Bag Sag

Posted by on April 14, 2010 at 3:47 pm. 4 Comments :

In a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, the ephemeral nature of the Tea Party movement is once again revealed. When asked for their opinion of Tea Parties, respondents were decidedly unenthusiastic.

  April January
Strongly Support 12% 15%
Moderately Support 15% 20%
Moderately Oppose 6% 8%
Strongly Oppose 21% 11%
Don’t Know Enough 45% 45%

While the total numbers for support and opposition are tied at 27%, the support numbers have declined since January and those strongly opposed have doubled. A mere 4% reported having attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. And, although little attention is usually paid to the “Don’t Know” response, 45 is a pretty high figure. Nearly half the country has no opinion at all about the Tea Party.

These numbers confirm previous polling that shows the Tea Party to be a much smaller phenomenon than the impression given to it by the media. It incorporates a tiny percentage of the population and is widely disliked. This disparity between the reality and the press coverage is something I detailed in two previous reports:
The Tea Party Delusion and The Phony Populism Of The Tea Crusades

The Red Palin
Malice in Wonderland

The Tea Bag sag coincides with the plummeting popularity of the Tea Bag Hag, Sarah Palin. The CNN poll showed Palin’s favorability rating at 39% (55% unfavorable). 69% of respondents said that she is not qualified to be president. She came in third in preference rankings following Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. And while Obama beats all three in head-to-head match-ups, Palin fares the worst losing 55% to 42%. This confirms the findings of a Fox News poll in January that had Obama over Palin 55/31.

The facts notwithstanding, many in the media will continue to push the Myth of the Bagged Teasers as if it were a credible force in contemporary politics. They will saturate the air with coverage of tomorrow’s tax day Tea Bagging and pretend that this fringe (and often vulgar and violent) group deserves recognition. And Fox News will, once again lead the parade with its top anchors dispatched around the country to herald the phony movement that they helped to invent.

It’s particularly telling that Fox, and their partners in talk radio, have invested so much time and money in the Tea Crusades and have so little to show for it: 4% participation and overwhelming unfavorability. By any measure, that’s a lousy return on investment.

[Addendum] CBS also released a poll that asks Tea Partiers about themselves. The short story: They are old, white, Republican, Fox News junkies who believe that Obama is a foreign-born socialist. Surprise!

Sarah Palin’s Real American Fluff Gets Soft Reception

Posted by on April 2, 2010 at 5:31 pm. 10 Comments :


See the entire Malice in Wonderland

If Fox News thought they had the next big thing locked up when they signed Sarah Palin, they may be having second thoughts today.

The broadcast of Sarah Palin’s Real American Fluff Pieces, a collection of old clips that were supposed to be inspirational, probably did not inspire much excitement in the Fox News executive suites. The audience, while besting the competition, was not particularly impressive for Fox. In fact, Palin had fewer viewers than Greta Van Susteren’s On the Record, the program she preempted. There were only about 2 million real Americans tuning into Palin’s show (472K adults 25-54). That compares to Van Susteren’s 2.3 million viewers (654K 25-54) last Thursday and 2.1 million (559K 25-54) average for the first quarter of 2010.

From a critical perspective, the reviews are in, and they aren’t lighting up the Fox Towers. Most of the comments employ adjectives like “tame,” “canned,” “stiffness,” “innocuous,” and “disconnected.” If this is her out-of-town tryout, she isn’t going on to Broadway.

It’s fair to assume that Palin is well compensated for her efforts on behalf of Fox News. I haven’t seen any disclosures of her salary but she gets a minimum of $100,000 for speaking engagements, so you can bet she got a gold-plated contract from her pal Rupert Murdoch. Nevertheless, her numbers would have put her in seventh place in the cable news rankings following Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Special Report w/Bret Baier, Van Susteren, and Fox Report w/Shepard Smith. She did manage to beat Neil Cavuto and an O’Reilly rerun.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what Roger Ailes had in mind when he dropped a pile of cash on her. Of course, this is not her only duties at Fox. She also provides commentary to programs like Van Susteren’s and O’Reilly’s. Well, commentary may be too generous a description. It’s more like a litany of platitudes and cliches that she probably wrote on her palm. Even her colleague Chris Wallace dressed her down on the air – to her face – saying, “Well, you’re not a very good analyst.” Palin responded by inviting Ailes to fire her. That notion might have entered his mind this morning when he saw the overnights.

Yesterday’s program got off to a rocky start when one of the featured guests, LL Cool J, revealed that he had never spoken to Fox or Palin and that the interview was a two year old clip that he had not given permission to rebroadcast for this purpose. Fox responded by insulting him and cutting him out of the show. Shortly after, Toby Keith, another featured guest, made the same complaint as LL Cool J. Oddly enough, the white country singer was neither insulted nor edited out, as the black rapper/actor was.

Fox News is the most profitable division of Murdoch’s News Corp. Over the past few years their ratings have grown and they’ve renegotiated richer contracts with cable operators. But business decisions like the Palin signing are not going to add to the company’s future prospects. They are already suffering the embarrassment of having their second highest rated program, Glenn Beck, going to air with advertising for diet pills and gold recyclers because Ford and Wal-Mart don’t want to be associated with him.

Under the circumstances, I’m not sure that Murdoch and Ailes can possibly think that they are getting their money’s worth from Beck or Palin. But that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to carry them. Murdoch has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into the New York Post and it has never been profitable for as long as he’s owned it. He purchased the Wall Street Journal for $5 billion and last year wrote off $2 billion of that. He has been deficit financing the Fox Business Network for over two years with still no sign of it going into the black. In short, he’s made of money and doesn’t care how much of it he loses in pursuit of his political agenda.

That ought to come as a great relief to Sarah Palin after this disastrous debut as an anchor.

Sarah Palin Launches Her New Fox News Show With A Lie

Posted by on March 31, 2010 at 11:51 am. 9 Comments :

Sarah Palin FactorAs might be expected, Sarah Palin is leading off her new series of programs on Fox News with her strongest asset: lying.

In press reports describing the debut, rapper/actor LL Cool J is listed as part of the exclusive lineup that Palin will be featuring. As it turns out, the interview is actually a retread taped in 2008 and had nothing to do with Palin.

A surprised Cool J tweeted this information:

“Fox lifted interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & R misrepresenting to public 2 promote Palins Show.”

To which Fox News responded in a typically churlish manner:

“Real American Stories features uplifting tales about overcoming adversity and we believe Mr. Smith’s interview fit that criteria. However, as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career.”

This is clearly the work of Fox News PR Priestess, Irena Briganti (or someone following in her footsteps). The pissy little comment at the close of the response is not only childish, but laughably untrue. Cool J is a veteran of film and TV and currently stars in one of the hottest shows on television, NCIS.

The Fox News PR department is notorious for this kind of unprofessionalism. A couple of years ago, David Bauder documented what came to be known as the “wishing well.” where Fox snidely wishes someone they don’t like well with the back of their hand. Take this for example:

“Because of his personal demons, Keith [Olbermann] has imploded everywhere he’s worked. From lashing out at co-workers to personally attacking Bill O’Reilly and all things Fox, it’s obvious Keith is a train wreck waiting to happen. And like all train wrecks, people might tune in out of morbid curiosity, but they eventually tune out, as evidenced by Keith’s recent ratings decline. In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.“

Oblivion for Olbermann must a long ways off. Two years later he is still the number two show on cable news. And Cool J’s career is far from fledgling. I would wager that the only train wreck in the foreseeable future is going to involve Palin who still has no discernible talent for anything but dishonesty and quitting.

Update: As my reader, Fed UP, noted, Toby Keith was also not particularly pleased with Palin dredging up a two year old interview and presenting it as new. Now that Keith has joined Cool J in complaining about this sleazy clip show Palin is hosting, will Fox News cut him out of the show as well? Will they insult him as a fledgling country singer? And when will Jack Welch issue a press release revealing that Palin and Fox had not contacted him either? This whole show appears to be a scam that is just a bunch of old clips edited together with some intros by Palin. And worst of all, LL Cool J, a black entertainer, is cut from the program for expressing his objection to being exploited by Fox, but Toby Keith, a white entertainer, does the same thing with no repercussions. Why am I not surprised?

Myth Blusters: Sarah Palin Headed For Discovery

Posted by on March 25, 2010 at 10:55 am. 1 Comments :

The news that Sarah Palin’s Alaska has been picked up by the Discovery Channel should not come as a surprise to astute observers. After all, there are great opportunities for synergy with other Discovery properties.

First of all, Discovery has been on the forefront of environmental education. They broadcast documentaries on the subject frequently and even have a network devoted to the subject: Planet Green. This melds perfectly with Palin’s broadcast experience on the environment, which centers around her beliefs that global warming is a hoax and that we should “drill everywhere.” Her current employer, Fox News, also has an official position that states its commitment to the planet and reducing its carbon footprint, yet employs climate change deniers to convince their audience that the whole thing was trumped up by fascists and marketing executives at GE. So now both networks present people on air that are diametrically opposed to their official policies – and to science.

Secondly, Discovery’s schedule is loaded with complimentary programming. For instance…

  • Dirty Jobs: A peak into the world of politics.
  • Deadliest Catch: An examination of the loopholes in health insurance policies.
  • Cash Cab: Intimate stories of taxi rides with Washington lobbyists.

I haven’t actually seen any of these shows but I’m pretty sure that’s the gist of it.

But the big opportunity exists with Discovery’s best known show, Mythbusters. Just imagine the wealth of Palin-related material that Adam and Jamie can explore and debunk.

I can’t wait for their show Death Panels; or the trip to Alaska to find out just how much of Russia is visible from Palin’s porch; or their experiments on shooting wolves from helicopters; or the investigation into where that bridge to nowhere really went.

Congratulations Discovery. You have tea-bagged yourselves one heckuva star. I’m sure she will bring to the network a measure of respectability and credibility that you have long sought. And as for viewers…you couldn’t imagine a more compatible demographic of anti-science, God-fearing, creationists. I expect this show to be a ratings bonanza – for about fifteen minutes.

Late Breaking: Discovery will be airing Palin’s show on its TLC: The Learning Channel (which may have to undergo a name change). Her program will appear alongside “What Not to Wear,” “Paranormal Court,” and “Cake Boss.” And soon the premiere of “Sarah and Todd Plus Five.”