Bill O’Reilly And John Boehner: Brotherhood Of The Traveling Pants On Fire

Posted by on March 6, 2013 at 4:49 am. 2 Comments :

In recent days, the resounding cry from the right-wing pundits and politicians regarding sequestration has been a demonstrably false yammering that President Obama has neglected to put forth a plan to cut spending. And it’s a pretty good talking point except for the fact that there isn’t a bit of truth to it.

Boehner/O'Reilly

This plaintive squeal was heard last Sunday when John Boehner appeared on Meet the Press to peddle his party line fiction. He told host David Gregory that “even today, there’s no plan from Senate Democrats or the White House to replace the sequester.” For that mangling of the truth, Boehner earned a “Pants On Fire” designation from PolitiFact who posted a detailed debunking of Boehner’s…well, bunk. Boehner went on to blame senate Democrats for not passing a bill that only failed due to senate Republicans filibustering it.

The howling further escalated last night when Bill O’Reilly nearly had an aneurism while debating the same subject with Alan Colmes (video below). O’Reilly almost immediately began shouting red-faced at Colmes for his having correctly stated that the President does have a plan. O’Reilly viciously called his fellow Fox News employee a liar seven times in rapid succession as Colmes calmly objected and tried to settle him down. But O’Reilly could not be assuaged. Here is a partial transcript of the exchange:

O’Reilly: The President’s willing to have Americans suffer for the greater good of trying to have Nancy Pelosi be the new Speaker of the House. […] Give me one program he said he would cut.
Colmes: He would cut Medicare and Medicaid.
O’Reilly: That’s not a specific program.
Colmes: You asked me for a program – those are programs.
O’Reilly: You’re not telling me anything. It’s jack____ what you’re saying.
Colmes: There would be less money going to the states. There would be less money being reimbursed to doctors.
O’Reilly: You don’t know where. You don’t know how much. You don’t know to whom. And the reason you don’t know it is because the guy you revere refuses to say anything specific about anything.

O’Reilly’s high-pitched histrionics did nothing to make the substance of his ranting more truthful. Just as Boehner’s demurring failed to refute the factual evidence that the President’s plan does exist. It is available on the White House web site for anyone who is interested and honest – which obviously exempts Boehner and O’Reilly.

Watching trained circus clowns like O’Reilly and Boehner distort reality is bad enough, but what’s really troubling is the tendency of so much of the media to fail to set the record straight when there is no credible case to support the lies of these charlatans. And they will certainly not set the record straight themselves. O’Reilly in particular is notorious for digging in his heels even after he has been proven to be wrong. It’s a character trait common among egomaniacal sociopaths who regard themselves as infallible defenders of humanity’s virtue.

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Roger Ailes Uses Fox News Personnel As His Personal Attack Dogs

Posted by on March 5, 2013 at 2:16 pm. 1 Comments :

Dylan Byers of Politico posted an article yesterday that dug into the literary battle between two competing biographies of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. One of the bios is by an independent reporter, Gabriel Sherman, who has demonstrated his ability to break stories from within the Fox bubble. The other is by a hack, Zev Chafets, who previously penned a gushing homage to Rush Limbaugh and who has the blessing of Ailes – including access to the subject, his family, friends, and colleagues.

Roger Ailes

Byers noted that Sherman has already been targeted by Ailes’ defenders on the Fox News payroll. He has been assailed as a “phony journalist,” a “stalker,” a “harasser,” and when all else fails, as “a [George] Soros puppet.” [Sherman is presently a fellow of the New America Foundation to which Soros has donated a miniscule sum. Conservative and Fox News pundit Jim Pinkerton also has a fellowship]. Despite this full-court bad press assault, Byers is not convinced that there is any coordinated effort to malign Sherman. He writes…

“To date, no evidence has emerged that Ailes ordered his employees to stir up the attacks on Sherman — which have gone beyond the usual confines of professional critiques and into the realm of personal insult and innuendo.”

If Byers is looking for evidence, he might examine the track record at Fox when they decide that they are under fire from an ideological enemy. When David Brock of Media Matters was preparing the release of his book “The Fox Effect,” the Ailes team fired up a preemptive blitzkrieg of slander and character assassination. They labeled Brock everything from mentally unstable to a drug user to a self-hating megalomaniac. They also mounted a campaign to get Fox viewers to file complaints with the IRS to get Media Matters’ tax exemption as a charitable organization revoked. All of this because Brock had a book that was about to come out.

This is all consistent with the Ailes business plan. He sits atop an enterprise that engages in scorched earth assaults against perceived enemies, driven by his own well-known paranoia. So it is not particularly surprising that, after hearing about an unauthorized (and perhaps unfriendly) biography in the works, he would solicit his own biographer whom he could be certain would canonize him and then attempt to discredit the opposing author before any truth inadvertently slipped out.

Sherman recently certified his reporting skills, and the reliability of his sources within Fox, by exposing a couple of incidents that revealed some of the inner workings of the network. In one case he found that shortly after the massacre in Newtown, CT, Fox producers had been given instructions “not to talk about gun-control policy on air.” In the other case, just after the election results that Fox had so badly botched, Sherman discovered that Ailes had sent out orders “mandating that producers must get permission before booking [Karl] Rove or [Dick] Morris,” two of the more notoriously flawed Fox analysts.

Sherman’s book is expected to be released in a few months. If his prior reporting is any indication, it should be an interesting read. The same cannot be said for the book by Chafets, unless you happen to be partial to sycophantic hero-worship based on fantastical diversions from reality. But because of the timing, neither book is likely to record how Ailes unethically deploys his “news” staff to smack down independent reporting that he is afraid might be too honest and probing – especially when it is about himself. It is easy to predict that, as the publish date for Sherman’s book approaches, Sherman will become increasingly under attack by the Ailes machine. It may be a withering onslaught of defamation, but it will also be an affirmation that he is doing his job.

[Update] An excerpt of the Ailes-approved Chafets book was published in Vanity Fair. Aside from the expected adulatory tone, Chafets revealed how juvenile Ailes can be when criticizing those he dislikes. He called Newt Gingrich “a prick.” He said VP Joe Biden is “dumb as an ashtray.” He mocked CNN’s Soledad O’Brien as the anchor “named after a prison” (actually, she was named after the Virgin Mary). He went after his own son-in-law saying that he “needed to see a psychiatrist.” And he sunk to racist dog-whistling by calling President Obama “lazy.” Based on these excerpts, this is one book that should hit the bargain bins pretty fast.


Daily Caller’s Videos Of Alleged Menendez Prostitution Scandal Were Faked

Posted by on March 4, 2013 at 10:16 pm. 1 Comments :

It is long past the point when any reputable news enterprise should take seriously any story emanating from the pathological liars at The Daily Caller, or Breitbart News, or even Fox News. Particularly if the story hinges on videos of unknown origin with anonymous sources and fraudulent editing.

The latest example of the unscrupulous deceit practiced by right-wing media involves an undocumented accusation that Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey was cavorting with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. Menendez denied the charges from the start, but that didn’t stop the unethical reporters at The Daily Caller from disseminating the story, which eventually wormed its way up the media food chain from Breitbart to Fox to other more mainstream outlets.

The scandalous tales told by the Daily Caller peaked when they posted exclusive videos of the alleged hookers confessing to their association with Menendez. All of this just happened to go down during the final days of Menendez’s reelection campaign.

Today the Washington Post published an article that blows the whole story apart. The headline, “Escort says Menendez prostitution claims were made up,” sums up the affair and should put to rest any question about the Daily Caller’s credibility. The article begins…

“An escort who appeared on a video claiming that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican authorities that she was instead paid to make up the claims and has never met or seen the senator, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.

“The woman said a local lawyer had approached her and a fellow escort and asked them to help frame Menendez and a top donor, Salomon Melgen, according to affidavits obtained by The Washington Post.”

The Washington Post sought a statement from the Daily Caller’s chief, Tucker Carlson (also a Fox News contributor), but Carlson, despite his usual enthusiasm for media attention, refused to make a comment. There have been no corrections or updates to any of the reports previously published by the Daily Caller, Breitbart, or Fox. This is consistent with their standard operating practice of hyping smears and innuendos, but neglecting to set the record straight when their lies are exposed.

Menendez ValentineAnother player to jump on the Menendez bandwagon is the Republican National Committee who put out a satirical “valentine” slamming the Senator with a snide reference to the phony sex scandal. Undoubtedly they will neglect to apologize now that they know the charges were false. What makes the GOP attack even worse is that their own senator David Vitter was caught with actual hookers in Washington, D.C. and subsequently admitted his criminal behavior. Yet he continues to represent Louisiana and, so far as we know, has not received any snarky valentines from the GOP.

The question for the media at large is, when will they finally stop paying attention to the cretinous slime merchants at the Daily Caller, Breitbart, etc.? After notorious failures like the ACORN affair, the Shirley Sherrod debacle, and just last month, Breitbart’s expose about Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel taking money from a terrorist group that, as it turns out, doesn’t exist, there should be no doubt that these pseudo-news manglers are undeserving of any respect. They should be left to peddle their tripe to the glassy-eyed blockheads who don’t know any better and the rest of the world should tune them out entirely. At this point, anyone who gives credence to these fakers is just an embarassment.


NewsBusters Trolling: Imagine If A Fox News Host Had Said…

Posted by on March 1, 2013 at 8:37 pm. 8 Comments :

Please be sure you are seated before reading this. The shock that will sweep over you may rival Hurricane Sandy in its sheer, raw power. Are you ready? OK…..

Last night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, his guest Rachel Maddow called Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia…..a TROLL!

Oh lawdy, where’s the smellin’ salts? I dare say I may faint. And I’m not alone. Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters was so appalled that he penned an op-ed for Fox News to unleash his umbrage at this scandalous effrontery. How dare this wanton trollop deign to insult such a virtuous citizen with so foul a curse. And because every spasm of faux outrage requires a racial reference, Sheppard managed to find something in Maddow’s comment that was analogous to the use of the “N-word.” The editorial begins innocently enough by asking us to…

“Imagine for a moment a Fox News host calling one of the liberal Supreme Court justices such as Sonia Sotomayor a ‘troll.'”

Indeed. Just imagine it. Oh wait. You don’t have to imagine it because on April 30, 2009, Erick Erickson said this about retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter:

“The nation loses the only goat fucking child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court in David Souter’s retirement.”

Erick Erickson

Now that’s the way to express respect for our judiciary. I hope Maddow is paying attention. Erickson was not working for Fox News when he said that, although it does sound like something that would have been posted on the fib-infested Fox Nation. However, Erickson was just hired by Fox in January, and I’m sure that having that comment on his resume helped him to land the job.

Rachel Maddow - Erick Erickson

I’ll be waiting to see Sheppard’s op-ed castigating Erickson and Fox for behaving so disrespectfully to a justice of the high court. And then they can all join Megyn Kelly on her Fox program where she also took a swipe at Maddow. Perhaps they will eventually recognize that calling someone a troll is not nearly as bad as calling the landmark Voting Rights Act a “racial entitlement,” which is what Scalia said that inspired Maddow’s criticism in the first place.


Right-Wingers Think Obama Donor Is Buying Up Gun-Related Media To Shut It Down

Posted by on March 1, 2013 at 2:22 pm. 1 Comments :

FERCHRISSAKES!!! I just can’t take it anymore.

There have been a plethora of utterly insane notions floated by cretins on the right that make no rational sense whatsoever. They range from non-existent “death panels,” to FEMA concentration camps, to Kenyan-born presidents, and those are the least deranged among them. Recently the Tea-publicans were aghast at a ridiculous claim that the Department of Homeland Security was stockpiling munitions in preparation to wipe out large swaths of the American population. Seriously, they really believe that.

But now they are venturing further afield into territory that is unexplored by even the most severely hallucinatory meth freaks. An article published on Fox Nation cries “Obama Donor Buying Up and ‘Destroying’ America’s Top Pro-gun Media Outlets.”

Fox Nation

The article is a re-posting from the Daily Caller web site which is run by Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson. It was written by Patrick Howley, someone they identify as an “Investigative Reporter,” despite his history as a violent right-wing activist who admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. Howley asserts in his opening paragraph that…

“Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.’s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them.”

What a perfectly devious plot. Hindery is an investor with more than thirty years in the media business. He has been a significant figure in sports programming, cable television, telecommunications, and other properties that have made him one of America’s wealthiest businessmen. Yet the paranoia-racked brains of conservative dimwits think that he is plotting to “consolidate all of the major pro-Second Amendment media titles in this country, strip them down, and destroy them.” For some reason they think that Hindery has suddenly cast off his mantle of capitalist media baron and is willing to lose millions of dollars in a scheme to deprive magazine readers of titles like “Shooting Times” and “Gun Dog.” That’ll show the NRA. And he and Obama will have a good laugh.

The evidence presented by Howley consists mainly of testimony from anonymous employees who are afraid they are about to be laid off. Imagine that – there are magazines and media companies that are struggling in these digital times and may have to downsize or close. Who knew? Howley also cites the reduction in work at a Minnesota studio that he describes as a “beautiful” facility that had “60 employees, a massive studio, at least nine editing bays and fully-wired machine rooms and was conducting about four studio shoots per year.” Pardon me but, it doesn’t seem like four shoots a year is enough to sustain the studio he just described.

The weakness of the arguments in the article are almost irrelevant when considering that the premise is so bonkers to begin with. This is nothing more than an investment company pulling together assets and then seeking ways to mitigate expenses through operational mergers. There may be a case to be made that such consolidation negatively impacts employees and public choice, but that’s not a case that Republicans ever seem to be concerned about. In fact, they generally defend and celebrate such monopolistic corporate behavior as the workings of the glorious free market. There is nothing here, however, that any sane observer could claim is a plot to deliberately destroy these businesses in league with the Obama administration as an assault on the Second Amendment.

It is just astonishing that people will put stories like this out and expect to have any credibility. They are cognitively numb and running on the fumes of conspiracy theories and delusional psychoses. Their audience must be on feeding tubes waiting for someone to declare them legally brain-dead and pull the plug. And when their businesses fail I’m sure they will have an explanation at hand that blames it all on Obama, George Soros, and eco-terrorists.


Sequestering The Truth: Fox News Misreports Their Own Polling Results

Posted by on March 1, 2013 at 4:09 am. NO Comments :

Unhappy with the data, Fox makes up their own.

It’s bad enough that Fox News is compulsively disposed to lying about President Obama and anyone else who challenges their hyper-conservative dogma, but when they resort to lying about the product of their own reporting it’s an indication of something gone terribly askew. This is the sort of brazen deceit that Fox usually reserves for their notorious Fib Factory, Fox Nation.

Fox News just published the results of their polling wherein they asked respondents whether they would prefer a budget deal that reduced the deficit with spending cuts or with tax increases. The question itself was grossly biased in that it implies that there are proposals to avert sequestration by raising taxes. However, neither party is proposing any tax increases in the current negotiations, only the closing of loopholes to which both sides had previously agreed. Setting that aside, Fox posted its account of the poll results with a headline reading “Voters Say Cuts Are ‘Only Way’ to Control Deficit.”

Fox News Poll

That’s an interesting (i.e. thoroughly dishonest) interpretation of the poll’s actual results which found that respondents preferred deficit reduction by focusing…

  • Only on cutting government spending: 33%
  • Mostly on cutting spending, and a small number of tax increases: 19%
  • On an equal mix of spending cuts and tax increases: 36%
  • Only on adding further tax increases 7%

It doesn’t take a master statistician to recognize that the choice of most respondents was the “equal mix.” How Fox concluded that they preferred cutting spending as the “only way” is mysterious and unexplained. Furthermore, if you total all the choices that included at least some tax increases there is a clear majority (67%) in favor of adding revenue rather than spending cuts alone. In other words, it’s the exact opposite of what Fox is reporting. If Fox doesn’t like what their own poll says, maybe they shouldn’t publish the results. Apparently, flagrantly lying in order to misrepresent the truth is more their style.

Some additional results from the survey include: Obama’s favorability is at 51%. His job approval is at 46%, compared to congress which is at 16%, with a jaw-dropping 77% disapproving. Digging deeper into those numbers reveals that the disapproval of congress cuts across party lines with Democrats registering a negative 72%. Republicans like congress even less with 79% disapproving. And at 82%, Independents really hate them.

Fox also measured the favorability of several other notable figures, all of whom scored lower than the President. Obama: 51%; Pope Benedict: 45%; John Kerry: 43%; Marco Rubio: 31%; John Boehner: 23%; And Chuck Hagel: 17%. Note that all of the Republicans in Fox’s poll sit at the bottom of the list.

Finally, for some reason Fox included a curious question not asked by many other pollsters:

“Former President George W. Bush stopped golfing after the start of the Iraq war. Do you think President Barack Obama should stop golfing until the unemployment rate improves and the economy is doing better?”

First of all, it’s somewhat grotesque to juxtapose a lackluster economy with the deadly consequences of war. That said, respondents apparently don’t care much whether Obama goes golfing or not. Forty-three percent answered that he should stow his clubs, but 45% say he should go ahead and play. And for the record, Bush did not stop golfing after the Iraq war began in March of 2003, so the question is misleading from the outset. But more to the point, reports documented that Bush continued to hit the links well into October. And even after he did quit golfing, he engaged in other leisurely pastimes like biking and his personal passion for clearing brush.

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Bob Woodward IS Going To Regret Making An Ass Of Himself

Posted by on February 28, 2013 at 10:53 am. 9 Comments :

For almost a week now Fox News and their rightist comrades have been giddily singing the praises of Bob Woodward, someone they ordinarily denounce as a minion of Satan. The reason for this new found worship is that Woodward has taken to satisfying Fox’s never-ending craving for sound bites that portray President Obama as a thug.

Woodward has made a very public showing of what he has characterized as a threat. He asserted that a “very senior person” in the administration delivered an ominous warning that “You will regret doing this.” He went on to say “It makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something.”

The White House disputed the inference Woodward was making and he was eventually compelled to release the emails that he said were the source of the alleged threat. As so often occurs, Woodward was obviously being hyper-sensitive and his comments about the exchange bear little resemblance to reality. No wonder Fox News pounced on it. Misrepresentation of reality is their forte. Here is what the actual email from White House Economic Council Director Gene Sperling said:

“I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim. The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand barain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start.”

It is absolutely disingenuous and untrue to cast these remarks as a threat. Sperling was speaking “as a friend” and offering advice that Woodward’s position would prove to be wrong and it is that error that he would eventually regret, not any imagined reprisal from the President. And to underscore how tame the exchange was even from Woodward’s perspective, he responded to Sperling’s email saying…

“Gene: You do not ever have to apologize to me. You get wound up because you are making your points and you believe them. This is all part of a serious discussion. I for one welcome a little heat; there should more given the importance. I also welcome your personal advice.”

Does that sound like someone who feels that he was threatened by a powerful and hostile government enforcer? Nevertheless, Woodward went on television and drew a picture of the exchange that is totally at odds with his own account. The only plausible explanation for this deception is that he wanted to gin up a controversy that would thrust him into the limelight and make him look like a courageous journalist suffering at the hands of a vengeful despot. In other words…a pitiful ploy for attention. Which is something he got in abundance from the right-wing media who eat this stuff up.

Fox News has been drooling over this debate for days, and their lie-riddled web site Fox Nation posted an absurd item that excised Woodward’s email response and topped off the piece with a headline bleating “Will the White House Make Bob Woodward ‘Regret’ Reporting Obama’s Sequester ‘Lies’?”

Fox Nation - Bob Woodward

In one short sentence Fox distorted the Woodward/Sperling exchange (no one threatened to “make” anyone do anything), and they inserted an unsupported allegation that Obama had lied about the sequester. All in a day’s obfuscation and deceit for Fox News.

[Update] Media Matters is reporting that a number of right-wing critics are backtracking now that the actual emails have been released and the alleged threat is clearly non-existent. For instance, Matt Lewis (The Daily Caller) says that conservatives were “played” by Woodward. Tucker Carlson appeared on Fox to say the intimidation claim was “hyped.” Erick Erickson (Red State) says he “must now move to the ‘not a threat’ camp.” However, some dead-enders are still pushing the fabricated theme. They include Breitbart’s John Nolte, Matt Drudge, and, of course, Fox News, where Neil Cavuto joined in and then let Manic Mark Levin rant uninterrupted about what a “sleazy,” “nasty,” person Obama is.

Fox News - Bob Wodward


Conservatives Struck By Epidemic Of Sequester Pychosis Syndrome

Posted by on February 27, 2013 at 12:29 pm. 7 Comments :

As the deadline approaches for congress to take action on the indiscriminate budget cuts they themselves voted for, the wailing on the part of conservative politicians and pundits is reaching ear-shattering decibel levels. While there are credible arguments on both sides of this issue that could be put forward, it seems the right-wing Tea-publican faction has chosen instead to offer only the most deranged excuses for their negligence and absolution.

Fox Nation

The conservative blame game is frantically pointing fingers at the Obama administration for the sequestration ordeal. But what they, and their accomplices in the press, are deliberately obscuring is the fact that majorities of Republicans voted for the bill in both chambers of congress. And even more significant is the context under which the plan was agreed to. It was intended to be something so severe that neither side could stomach the notion of its implementation and would be motivated to draft an alternative – any alternative – to avoid it. So the authorship of the original idea is entirely irrelevant because it was not proposed as something that anyone would support. To say that it was the President’s idea as something he advocated is simply a lie. It was gimmick to get a bunch of lazy, gutless politicians to do their damn jobs. And it didn’t even work.

So now Republicans who voted for the gimmick are pitifully trying to run away from the monster they helped to create. In the process they are trampling all over themselves and their own messages.

First of all, the GOP is supposed to be the party of small government and identifies strongly with budget cutting and deficit reduction. So it goes against the grain when they now bitch about the cuts that will be made due to sequestration. Logic tells us that they cannot argue for budget cutting and against sequestration simultaneously, but that is exactly what they are doing. Only in a mind ravaged by disease could that occur.

Secondly, Republicans are scrambling to shift blame from themselves to the President. They want any negative repercussions of the sequester to fall solely on his back. But since they believe that deficit reduction through shrinking federal budgets is a good thing, then shouldn’t the benefits they have been insisting would transpire be credited to Obama?

Republicans have decided that it is no longer necessary for them to make any sense. They say they want profound budget cuts, but at the same time they say it would be disastrous and all the fault of Obama. They say that sequestration is good because it will reduce the deficit, but at the same time they say Obama should be excoriated for daring to propose it.

How they can maintain their balance while their heads are spinning so furiously is a mystery. But the saddest part is that media has been so negligent in reporting the most basic facts about this situation, what led up to it, and where the GOP is trying to take it now that they got what they insist they have wanted for decades. Yet somehow, when Republicans get what they want, and it has a bad outcome, they blame Obama for giving it to them. And they do so in the most repugnant manner.

Fox’s Andrew Napolitano has suggested that Obama could be impeached for implementing the budget cuts mandated by congress. Even worse, in an op-ed in today’s “Moonie” Washington Times (republished by Fox Nation), Charles Hurt makes numerous references to the President as a terrorist. He said that Obama “began shooting hostages,” when the Department of Homeland Security announced some of the measures they would be forced to take if sequestration is implemented. Then, with regard to potentially delayed Social Security payments, he said that last year, in a “drunken stupor” “Mr. Obama threatened to start shooting seniors.”

This is the hostile (and infantile) level to which the right has sunk in their battle to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the bill they overwhelmingly backed. Their obsession with tarring the President by blaming him for their own mistakes has resulted in an acute case of mental decay. And unfortunately, the media could administer a remedy by simply reporting truthfully what is going on, but they appear to be as sickened by Sequester Psychosis as the GOP regulars.


Glenn Beck Wants To Make YOU Pay For His Conspiracy Broadcast Network

Posted by on February 27, 2013 at 9:54 am. 3 Comments :

“They can take my job and they can take my wealth but that’s okay… I will use American ingenuity and my ingenuity to pull myself up, and I will find another way to get my message out on a platform that will be a thousand times more powerful!”

Those are the words Glenn Beck used to console himself when he came under attack while still hosting his old program on Fox News. As a consequence of calling the President a racist (and numerous other delusional ravings), Beck saw his advertisers and audience fleeing in droves. Yet he was adamant that if he were to lose the soapbox given to him by Fox he would rise on the third day and ascend to ever greater glory.

Glenn Beck

After nearly two years in the hinterlands of the InterTubes, Beck has changed his mind about television and the imaginary “thousand times more powerful” platform he espoused. He is now begging to be readmitted to the television tabernacle. He realizes that his public profile has receded, effectively making him a non-entity on the political landscape. To be sure, he’s making plenty of money by charging his flock to watch his sermons, but that isn’t enough for someone with Beck’s pathological egocentrism.

Beck has launched a campaign to recruit his disciples into a lobbying force aimed at pressuring cable providers to add his webcast to their channel lineup. But if cable operators were to succumb to this effort it would be an unprecedented breach of trust that would force every cable customer to subsidize Beck’s right-wing conspiracy mongering. Depending on the terms of the agreement, content providers providers are generally paid a per-subscriber fee by the cable operator for the rights to their programming. That fee is due whether or not anyone watches the channel. Therefore, if your cable company carries Beck’s webcast, they pay him royalties derived from your cable bill even if you never watch him.

In his appeal to his followers Beck makes the weak argument that extracting such involuntary financial support is comparable to what is currently being done with MSNBC. However, no matter what one thinks of MSNBC’s leanings, they are a bona fide news enterprise and there are massive differences between that and Beck’s Acute Paranoia Revue and Holy Huckster Sideshow. Despite Beck’s assertion that “Adding TheBlaze will ensure that you and your family have a source of news and analysis that you can trust and that doesn’t betray your values,” the obvious truth is that his programming will only contribute to the garbage heap of fear peddling that permeates rightist media. And this statement in his own promotional piece exposes the dishonesty of his intentions:

“If we succeed then we change the media. If we change the media, we control the debate. If we control the debate, we change politics. And if we change politics, we change the country.”

That is not the sort of mission statement issued by a credible news organization. Beck is forthrightly declaring his intention to proselytize his Tea-vangelism, and that makes his “channel” an inappropriate selection for a cable operator who would pass on the costs to unwilling subscribers. We should not be forced to make up for his business failures.

Amongst Beck’s defenders there will be those who will deny that Beck is having any problem generating revenue with his webcast. But here’s financial breakdown: He is presently charging between five and ten dollars per month to subscribe to his programs online. If he does secure cable carriage that programming will be available for free to all of the current cable subscribers on the system. Consequently, they would no longer need to pay for the Internet access. If the Internet subscription model was working for him, Beck wouldn’t risk cannibalizing his online customers by offering them the same content for free on cable. But he doesn’t care about his web audience because he knows that with cable penetration comparable to what MSNBC has, Beck could triple his earnings.

The bottom line for Beck is that he is upset because no one is paying any attention to him. So he wants to wedge himself back into the TV community and make you pay the bill. This would be a good time to say “NO!” And you may as well use his own web site to do so. Beck has thoughtfully compiled a directory of the Facebook pages for the cable providers he is soliciting. There is no reason why you couldn’t use those same links to let them know that if they add Beck to their lineup you will cancel the service, because you don’t want to line the pockets of someone who is so brazenly dishonest, divisive, and hateful. We successfully exiled Beck to his current island in the Internet ocean once before. Let’s not allow him to sneak back in at our expense.


Rush Limbaugh’s Dementia-Riddled Post-Oscar Blabbering

Posted by on February 25, 2013 at 5:49 pm. 4 Comments :

Rush Limbaugh entered the post-Oscar analysis circus to add to the ludicrous accusations directed at the First Lady’s perfectly harmless appearance to present the award for Best Picture. Limbaugh charged her with “hijacking the Academy Awards” because of some unintelligible conspiracy having to do with the Obamas being “snubbed” by the Academy. See if you can decipher what he’s talking about:

“They had to throw the Obamas a crumb cause I think, in truth, the Obamas got snubbed. Not only did his campaign ad, Zero Dark Thirty, not win, but his semi-autobiography lost out too. […] Lincoln? That’s about Obama. Everybody knows that.”

Rush Limbaugh

So they had to mollify the Obamas because Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln didn’t win? And they did this by inviting Michelle to present an award? But that invitation was sent two weeks before anyone other than the Academy’s outside accounting firm knew who the winners were.

What makes Limbaugh think that the Obamas care whether or not Zero Dark Thirty won is never explained. Even worse, Limbaugh thinks that President Obama wrote Lincoln – about himself! And everybody knows it? What part of that film depicts anything associated with Obama? As close as I can figure it is just Limbaugh’s fantasy that Obama will meet the same end as Lincoln.

A little later in his rant, Limbaugh totally loses his mind. He confesses that “I can’t figure Twitter out,” and elaborates on that for several minutes. He also discusses the old “1984” TV ad for Apple, about which he says “you can’t find this ad on the Internet.” He is referring to this one – that I found on the Internet:

Limbaugh manages to find similarities between the dour Big Brother character in the ad with Obama’s cheerful and positive presentation on the Oscar broadcast. And he speculates that the Oscar gig was “a giant propaganda effort by the White House to put ‘Moo-chelle’ up there,” and that “this was the opening salvo of a Michelle Obama for president effort.” Somehow, he doesn’t find any irony in the fact that he is stretching reason to cast Mrs. Obama as a would-be dictator with robotic disciples, while he forgets that he proudly refers to his own followers as “dittoheads.”

If there was any doubt before, it is now indisputable that Limbaugh is in an advanced stage of dementia, perhaps brought on by age, Oxy-Contin, and/or exposure to dangerous levels of Teabaggery. His abnormally enlarged ego couldn’t be helping matters either.