Well, Slap Me Happy

Good heavens. Found on the Fox News website, and presented in complete astonishment. Because when Fake Noise is calling your ass out...

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was  Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling

Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.

Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn't what the president said. Period. 

And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about.

Ryan didn’t mention his extremist stance on banning all abortions with no exception for rape or incest, a stance that is out of touch with 75% of American voters

Ryan didn’t mention how his budget would eviscerate programs that help the poor and raise taxes on 95% of Americans in order to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires even further and increase — yes, increase —the deficit. 

I never ever thought I would say this about Fox News, but do go read the whole thing.

Liar Liar, Teevee On Fire

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

Known Liars Should Be Banned From TV

In this case, the Pinocchio is John Sununu, who insists--major fact-checkers and CNN to the contrary--that President Obama's welfare initiative does indeed cut work requirements. What I can't figure out is why people keep inviting him to soil their screens, other than the usual he said/she said nonsense. Got to get the "other side" to weigh in on the matter, even though the other side is spouting that the moon is made of green cheese.

(Of course, if this was ever implemented, Fox News would cease to exist, and climate-change deniers, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney's entire campaign would vanish. Which would be a feature, not a bug.)

Facts are facts, folks, no matter how much Fox News Fake Noise whines about "liberal bias." I also think there should be fact-checking for letters to the editor, and letters that assert things that are not truthful (which happens all the time in my local paper) should not be published. They're just "opinion," you say? Bullcrap. If your opinion isn't based on the facts, it isn't worth diddleysquat.

"The ballot is stronger than the bullet"

"A man without a vote is a man without protection." Lyndon B. Johnson

Charlie Pierce goes ballistic, and righteously so, over the subject of voter suppression.


I admit it: I am a fanatic about voting. I vote in every damn election every damn time. I buy stuff I shouldn't be eating at the bake sale. Pay attention, I tell people. A while back, when nobody was looking, a bunch of creationist fanatics took over the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania and rammed through an "intelligent design" program in the local high school. Parents sued. The fanatics lost, and it eventually cost the local school board over a million bucks in legal fees. All because not enough people paid attention to a school-board election. Don't take an election off, because you never know what the bastards are trying to pull. I say this all the time to young people and, most of the time, they act as though I've asked them if they've heard the new Wishbone Ash album, or seen the latest Pennebaker doc. But things changed over the past 10 years, and especially in the last five. The 2008 campaign was a revelation to cynical old souls like me. It took a lot to break down a generation of apathy about how government works and our place in it. That new spirit is still very fragile. One hinked-up national election and it's gone again, maybe for good. That is what I'm worried about.


The same thing that can be said about the people in Dover could also be said of the people who stayed home in Wisconsin and woke up with Scott Walker as their governor, and Ron Johnson as their senator, and a legislature full of wingnuts whose respect for actual American values doesn't extend much past what fits in their wallets. And this is why they are making it so hard for people to vote there. Not because they're concerned about the "integrity of the process" (Scott Walker? The integrity of the process? Stop me before I bust a rib here) but because they're afraid the basic integrity of the process — one man, one vote, all together — will reassert itself against the inattention that gave them the power to screw with all John Lewis accomplished.

There's also a very telling comment from Barry Friedman.

Just because there are two sides to every story doesn't mean there are two legitimate (and sane) sides to every story.

This Republican canard about "voter fraud" should be rebutted at every opportunity, because It. Simply. Is. Not. True. Period. But by using this fear-mongering myth, elderly people, and poor people, and brown people, and students, are being denied their right to vote. (Hopefully, Eric Holder will put his money where his mouth is and crack down on this odious practice.)

Still, one must ask why this is so popular among certain Republican governors and legislatures. Well, which party do poor people, and brown people, and students, and even a fair amount of elderly people, vote for?

I'll give you one guess: it sure ain't the Gerrymandering Obstructionist Pinheads. (The only useful word Bill O'Reilly ever made up.)

This should be a national scandal. Hearings should be held, and journalists should be shouting this from the rooftops. The Repugs basically hate President Obama so much they are willing to do anything to defeat him, including rigging the game in their favor. Of course, the Republican propaganda machine, Fake Noise, is a big help in convincing people this falsehood is true.

We can't afford to get distracted with this election, folks. The Republican endgame is in sight.

The Last Chance Saloon

"I thought this must be obvious to everyone else, as it seemed obvious to me; and that, if once it became apparent that we were on the edge, all the Great Powers would call a halt and recoil from the abyss."  ~Edward Grey

Paul Krugman has peered into the abyss, the abyss has peered back, and his pants have turned brown.

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying. 

The Great Recession should have been a huge wake-up call. Nothing like this was supposed to be possible in the modern world. Everyone, and I mean everyone, should be engaged in serious soul-searching, asking how much of what he or she thought was true actually isn’t. 

But the G.O.P. has responded to the crisis not by rethinking its dogma but by adopting an even cruder version of that dogma, becoming a caricature of itself. During the debate, the hosts played a clip of Ronald Reagan calling for increased revenue; today, no politician hoping to get anywhere in Reagan’s party would dare say such a thing. 

It’s a terrible thing when an individual loses his or her grip on reality. But it’s much worse when the same thing happens to a whole political party, one that already has the power to block anything the president proposes — and which may soon control the whole government. 

I've been saying for a while now that if the Republicans take the White House in 2012, or (Gods forbid) the Senate, the country as we know it will be gone. Bye-bye, United States of America. Welcome, the United Theocratic Oligarchy, of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%. Where (white) men rule the roost, women are little more than reproductive slaves, and the Civil Rights Act is eviscerated because of concerns over "property rights."

Where the barbarians not only have taken the gates, they sit upon the thrones.

Under such a scenario, it does not matter if you don't like President Obama or the Democrats. You need to quit whining, get off your ass and work for them anyway, because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate. 

Personally, I think there's far more and better reasons to re-elect Obama than that, and this site has a list of some of them. (This is the PG-rated version of the site, which I linked to only because I get tired of hearing effity effity eff all the time. The curse word "Battlestar Galactica" used, frak, is a lot cooler anyway.)

Nevertheless. The country made a huge mistake in the 2010 midterms. One wouldn't think so many people would be so mind-bogglingly wrong, but one can't underestimate the power of an ill-informed, pissed-off voter paired with the propaganda of Fake Noise. (I'm not going to explain that--if you don't know what it is, you must also figure the moon is made of green cheese.) Electing so many Republicans to office has crippled Congress, as Steve Benen so eloquently explains.

I think we've got one more chance to get it right. Otherwise, this noble two-hundred-year-old experiment will go down the tubes. 

It's the Little Things

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." ~Mohatmas. K. Gandhi

Today's act of rebellion: While having my car's oil changed, I flipped the dealership's tv station OFF Fox News.

Gotta fight that propaganda wherever you can.

"The Skillful and Sustained Use"

By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.  ~Adolf Hitler

If anyone who reads this doesn't vow to never watch the Fake Noise Propaganda Machine ever again...you're simply not living in the real world.

The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.  

Fox News is false, people. Inside and out. They are unfair and unbalanced, their "facts" are not facts, and the entire operation consists of nothing more than Republican shills...run by a paranoid Nixonian twerp.

Like I've said before, the greatest thing George Soros (or Bill Gates, or any other patriotic billionaire) could do for this country is buy this sucker--and shut it down.

As they say...read the whole thing.