What Fox and the Right Wing and Republicans Have Done to Media

What Fox and the Right Wing and Republicans have done to the news and media. This, from self-professed Right Winger himself Charlie Sykes. (Click on page for larger viewing, possible easier reading).

Names I'd Like to Never Hear Again

Herewith, then, just that--a list of names of people and places I could go through the rest of a long, healthy, very happy life having never again heard.

Trump

Fiorina

Cruz

Paul (when preceded by Rand)

Rand (when preceded by Ayn)

Carson (when preceded by Ben)

Huckabee

Bush (absolutely, never again another Bush)

Christie

Walker (when preceded by Scott)

O'Reilly

Hannity

Rove

Murdoch (when preceded by Rupert)

Limbaugh (never again and it can't be soon enough)

Cheney

Ramadi

Mosul

Erbil

Falluja

Bagram

Kandahar (and let me be clear, I'm not an isolationist)

Wolfowitz

Ailes

Hutus

Tutsis

Netanyahu

Hitler (I mean, really)

Blunt (anyone from that Missouri, government-leeching family)

Reince (when used as a first name)

Preibus (when used as a surname)

McConnell (when preceded by Mitch)

I'm sure there are more but that's enough for now.

How about you? Any people or places you'd prefer to never hear about or from again?

Explaining America and Middle-Class Support for Republicans

I held off one day, in an effort for us all to maybe just simply enjoy Thanksgiving to post something about this terrific article I found yesterday.

Here’s how delusional nostalgia is killing the white working class

There's a great deal of good information here, backed by scientific, sociological studies but I'll just point out a few of the best highlights:

A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute finds there are a few things you can count on about those who believe America’s best days are behind us. They are overwhelmingly white, and if you dig a bit deeper and examine the socioeconomics, often working class. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they stubbornly believe white people are subject to the same levels of racism as black and other people of color. They think the U.S. was a better place in the 1950s, when Jim Crow was law, immigrants were overwhelmingly European, women knew their place, and gay people were essentially invisible.

In tandem with the findings of another recent study revealing middle-age, working-class white Americans are the only group in the country whose health and mortality rates are worsening, the survey offers more than just a look at the ideas and attitudes that characterize a slice of the population. It provides a possible diagnosis for what ails, and may very well be killing, an entire demographic.

There have been previous indications—scientific, sociological, and anecdotal—of some of PRRI’s findings. A 2011 Tufts University survey showed white Americans believe they actually experience more racism than African Americans, and a Pew survey from the same year found non-college-educated, working-class whites are the least hopeful group in the country about the future. The rightwing rallying cry to “Make America Great Again” (a recycled political slogan that is now the property of Donald Trump) is proof that a decent portion of white voters think America was at its best when fewer citizens had civil and political rights, at some arbitrary point in this country’s rich history of morally indefensible state-sanctioned injustice, violence and oppression. One cannot avoid noticing that the current culture wars, full of incoming attacks from the right on nearly every civil and human rights gain of the last 60 years, are being fought with renewed vigor by those who want to turn back the hands of time.

Really, this explains so much.

It explains why some people from my own, very deeply middle-class family would buy off on the Republican Party, its platform and so many of the things that come out of the Right Wing. It's just sad. But additionally, it's frustrating, even to the point, at their worst, frightening. 

What's also scary and even odd is that these people of the middle-, lower- and working classes who hold these views and vote Right Wing and Republican are also so very deeply proud of their membership in the Right Wing and Republican Party and so proud of their views. And along with being proud, they're also very emotional about their views and opinions and that's where hate and disdain for others with opposing views and even racism can and do, too frequently, jump in.

Here's one part of the studies that's exceptionally disturbing, if not frightening:

The 2015 American Values Survey reaffirms the myopic outlook of an astounding portion of the country. Researchers, who polled nearly 2,700 adults from every state and Washington, D.C., found that 43 percent of Americans overall believe racial bigotry against whites has become a problem on par with discrimination against black people and other people of color...

It goes on:

On “reverse racism,” half of white Americans overall agree “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

This certainly explains things I see even out of our own Kansas City and St. Louis and Springfield, let alone across the nation.

In all, it's stunning. What I don't know is how we change this. I don't know how we educate and inform people of how our nation actually is, today, let alone the total picture of our nation's history that got us to today, to where we are today. These people are adults, after all. They certainly aren't going back to any classroom to study American history they need to know, let alone any current events or civics or sociology classes that could get them up to speed with how things actually are, especially for people of other races in our country.

And in the meantime, Fox and Breitbart and Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are out there spreading untruths and emotionalism and ugly opinions and racism and all kinds of ugliness and negativity. Making things worse--worst, really--there's a Right Wing, racist, hating nutjob, Donald Trump, who's in first place in opinion polls in next year's presidential race.

Usually, I can end these things with hope.

Additional link:  Why Does the (White) Lower Middle Class Vote Republican?

People Who Should Just Go Away

I don't mean anything bad or awful should happen to them but honestly, they should just go away.

Mitt Romney

George W. Bush

Dick Cheney (should have happened years ago)

Both Koch brothers

Donald Trump

All the Walton siblings

Chris Christie

Carly Fiorina

Rand Paul.

Rick Perry

Ted Cruz (see a trend here?)

Mike Huckabee (from Arkansas)

Senator Tom Cotton (also from Arkansas)

Bill O'Reilly.

Rush Limbaugh.

Sean Hannity.

Steve Doofus. Doocy. Whatever.

Ray Romano (just because he's so incredibly dull)

I'd say Jay Leno but thankfully, he did go away

Climate change deniers

Obama haters

Haters, period

NRA President Wayne LaPierre

Racists (but that's an easy one)

People who scream, fixatedly, about the nation's deficit

Single-issue people (again, this could be people fixated on the national deficit or abortion or whatever)

The overly emotional

The icy cold, eartless bastards of the world

All the Kardashians (there's more than one, right?)

Kanye West

Anne Coulter (absolutlely)

Rudy Giuliani

Sheriff Joe Arapaio

Megyn Kelly

Rupert Murdoch

Pat Robertson (the crazy, greedy, rich old bastard)

Anyone who doesn't bring intelligence or laughter or kindness--at least one--to the world

Quote of the day

"People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."

 

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau

 

 

One of America's Biggest Political Problems

I've subconsciously thought and felt this about us, about America and Americans for some time. I got to thinking about it this past Sunday afternoon and put it in words. We read about the polarization of the nation, politically and economically and it seems our minds are already made up. We have our opinions, facts be damned, and we're extremely sincere and even emotional about these opinions. The "other side"--or really, anyone who doesn't agree with us---are only to be dismissed or even demonized.

We used to talk to one another. We used to discuss. We used to try to both recognize and evaluate problems and then go further and come to shared conclusions and solutions.

We don't do that any more.

And this is no way to run a country.

We need to get back to being Americans.

All of us.


The hippies were right.

Herman Cain agrees with us

"Cept we said this about him and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and Bill O'Really and nearly everyone on Fox "News", too:

Herman Cain: 'Stupid People Are Ruining America'

Quote of the day -- on a jobs/infrastructure bill from this Congress

“The middle class of America is collapsing … poverty is up and the rich are doing phenomenally well. What do you do? What you do is say that in America we are going to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. By doing that we're going to create millions of jobs,” 

--Sen. Bernie Sanders said Friday on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News.



America needs the jobs an infrastructure bill from this Congress would provide.

We need the infrastructure repair and improvements.

The economy needs the boost.

Why isn't this being done?

Why isn't this a "no-brainer"?

Why aren't we raising hell?

On 2016 and President Hillary Rodham Clinton

Much as I would love, love, love to have a woman, specifically Hillary Clinton, as next president of these United States and as good as that would be, in at least some, if not a lot of ways, I've come to the conclusion that, even though it should be inconsequential--a woman as president--it will, quite likely, tear the nation apart.

I was speaking with an older, white friend last evening--and I mention his color because it does, in fact, matter--and mind you, he's beyond Right Wing, he's that far out there, and the anger and invective that came from his mouth at the mention of Hillary Clinton as next president of the nation was extremely strong and swift.

I think, for these people, quite likely a great deal of them, they feel or have felt that the election of the first black as president, Barack Obama, of course, was an aberration, whether they think the election was stolen or that he was put in there by some Left Wing cabal or the "Illuminati" or whatever. They'd like to get away from that aberration, naturally, in this line of thought, and getting back to some man--nearly any man but preferably, again, of course, a Republican, first but just ANY man would be accepted and an improvement, even if he's a Librul, God forbid.

Going from, first, a black man--a Kenyan, at that, they think--to a woman, THAT woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton--will just be continuing the nightmare for these people. Sure, it would do wonders for Fox "News" and Rush "Porkulus" Limbaugh and Bill O'Really and Glen Beck and Mike "Huckster" Huckabee and all the haters but with both their hate and anger, I believe they may well come to the conclusion, for all their hysterical but deeply held beliefs and "reasons", that we, America and Americans, really are "going to hell" and Hillary Clinton as president, if even for only 4 years would be beyond the pale.  It would be too far. It would be too much. For them, anyway.

Forget that, as I said above, you'd think and hope that it's inconsequential that she happens to be female. Forget the historic factor of, not just finally, finally, as a nation, having our first female elected president or that she would be, in fact, also following the first elected black president and forget that there would also, at the same time, be a former president as sitting "First Man" in the White House. Forget all that, sweep that aside, monumental as it would all be.

The fact is, Ms. Clinton has a good to great shot at being the next president of this country.  Naturally, it's a long, long way from November, 2016 politically but it is coming up on the time horizon very quickly, nonetheless. The race has clearly already begun, for that matter. The positioning for the job began at least months ago.

The possibilities and likelihoods of all this for the nation is both exciting and scary, all at once.

These are fascinating times in which we live.

I could go for a bit less "fascinating", however.

Other nations can have a female leader for their countries.

We Americans just don't seem to be that intelligent, mature or open-minded to it yet.  We aren't ready.

I'd love to be wrong about that.

Quote of the day -- on sincerity

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.” 

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian novelist, who died on this date in 1881, at age 59.

Great question

“Why is it that if you take advantage of a tax break, you’re a smart businessman, but if you take advantage of something---he was referencing food stamps---you need to not be hungry, you’re a moocher?”

--Jon Stewart, last evening, in his mock debate against Bill O'Reilly

Links: http://popwatch.ew.com/2012/10/06/jon-stewart-bill-oreilly-rumble-top-lines/

http://news.yahoo.com/oreilly-stewart-tangle-mock-debate-014019527.html

Quote of the day

"There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance." ~Goethe

More proof of why we need the "Fairness Doctrine" back in our country (guest post)

A good and important read I somehow missed last Fall (and that nearly no one will read).
Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news

By Ted Koppel
Sunday, November 14, 2010

To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.

Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.

And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men's jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.

Perhaps it doesn't matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.

To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the "public interest, convenience and necessity," as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses. The three major broadcast networks pointed to their news divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence that they were fulfilling the FCC's mandate. News was, in a manner of speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.

On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.

Until, that is, CBS News unveiled its "60 Minutes" news magazine in 1968. When, after three years or so, "60 Minutes" turned a profit (something no television news program had previously achieved), a light went on, and the news divisions of all three networks came to be seen as profit centers, with all the expectations that entailed.

I recall a Washington meeting many years later at which Michael Eisner, then the chief executive of Disney, ABC's parent company, took questions from a group of ABC News correspondents and compared our status in the corporate structure to that of the Disney artists who create the company's world-famous cartoons. (He clearly and sincerely intended the analogy to flatter us.) Even they, Eisner pointed out, were expected to make budget cuts; we would have to do the same.

I mentioned several names to Eisner and asked if he recognized any. He did not. They were, I said, ABC correspondents and cameramen who had been killed or wounded while on assignment. While appreciating the enormous talent of the corporation's cartoonists, I pointed out that working on a television crew, covering wars, revolutions and natural disasters, was different. The suggestion was not well received.

The parent companies of all three networks would ultimately find a common way of dealing with the risk and expense inherent in operating news bureaus around the world: They would eliminate them. Peter Jennings and I, who joined ABC News within a year of each other in the early 1960s, were profoundly influenced by our years as foreign correspondents. When we became the anchors and managing editors of our respective programs, we tried to make sure foreign news remained a major ingredient. It was a struggle.

Peter called me one afternoon in the mid-'90s to ask whether we at "Nightline" had been receiving the same inquiries that he and his producers were getting at "World News Tonight." We had, indeed, been getting calls from company bean-counters wanting to know how many times our program had used a given overseas bureau in the preceding year. This data in hand, the accountants constructed the simplest of equations: Divide the cost of running a bureau by the number of television segments it produced. The cost, inevitably, was deemed too high to justify leaving the bureau as it was. Trims led to cuts and, in most cases, to elimination.

The networks say they still maintain bureaus around the world, but whereas in the 1960s I was one of 20 to 30 correspondents working out of fully staffed offices in more than a dozen major capitals, for the most part, a "bureau" now is just a local fixer who speaks English and can facilitate the work of a visiting producer or a correspondent in from London.

Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening, separate but together, while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of compromise among those who disagreed.

It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn't know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.

The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.

Broadcast news has been outflanked and will soon be overtaken by scores of other media options. The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been. But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.

As you may know, Olbermann returned to his MSNBC program after just two days of enforced absence. (Given cable television's short attention span, two days may well have seemed like an "indefinite suspension.") He was gracious about the whole thing, acknowledging at least the historical merit of the rule he had broken: "It's not a stupid rule," he said. "It needs to be adapted to the realities of 21st-century journalism."

There is, after all, not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules. Technology and the market are offering a tantalizing array of channels, each designed to fill a particular niche - sports, weather, cooking, religion - and an infinite variety of news, prepared and seasoned to reflect our taste, just the way we like it. As someone used to say in a bygone era, "That's the way it is."

Ted Koppel, managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, now a contributing analyst for "BBC World News America."

Bill Maher on the Tea Party and Founding Fathers

New Rule:

Now that they've finished reading the Constitution out loud, 'teabaggers' must call out that group of elitist liberals whose values are so antithetical to theirs.  I'm talking, of course, about the 'Founding Fathers', who, the 'teabaggers' believe, are just like them.  

But aren't.

One is a group of exclusively white men who live in a bygone century, have bad teeth and think of blacks as three-fifths of a person.

And the others are the 'Founding Fathers.'

Now, I want you 'teabaggers' out there to understand one thing:  while you idolize the 'Founding Fathers' and dress up like them and smell like them, I think it's pretty clear that the 'Founding Fathers' would have hated your guts.

And what's more, you would have hated them.

They were everything you despise.  

They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris and though the Bible was mostly bullshit.  And yet, there is a popular painting in wing-nut America.  Yes, that's Jesus with the 'Founding Fathers' behind him, presenting the Constitution to America.  Either that or it's a settlement offer for that boy  after he sued the Rectory.

Super-religious guy Glenn Beck likes to play dress up as Thomas Paine.  

Thomas Paine, an atheist who said churches were human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind. 

John Adams.

Adams said this would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.  Which is not to say the Founders didn't have a moral code.  Of course they did.  They just didn't get it from the Bible.  Well, except for the part that it's cool to own slaves.  It's in there, folks.  I didn't make it up.

The Founders disagreed amongst themselves about that and most issues.  But the one thing they never argued about was that political power must stay in the hands of the smartest people and out of the hands of the dumbest loudmouths slowing down the checkout line at Home Depot.  And yet Sarah Palin once said of Obama, "We need a Commander in Chief, not a professor of law standing at a lectern!"

How gay is that?

I hate to break it to you, but Thomas Jefferson, a lawyer;  Alexander Hamilton, Constitutional lawyer;  James Madison, lawyer;  John Adams, Constitutional lawyer.  They were not the "common man" of the day.

Ben Franklin studied scientific phenomena like lightning and the Aurora Borealis.  And were he alive today, he could probably explain to Bill O'Reilly why the tides go in and out.  James Madison was fluent in Greek and Latin and could translate Virgil and Cicero.  John Boehner can't translate Fareed Zakariah.  And Thomas Jefferson was an astronomer and a physicist who founded the University of Virginia, played the violin and spoke six languages.

Or, as Palin would say, "All of them."

Link:  http://www.hbo.com/real-time-with-bill-maher/index.html

http://politicalhumor.about.com/b/2011/01/18/bill-maher-to-tea-party-the-founding-fathers-would-have-hated-your-guts.htm

On Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Fox "News, etc., etc.

"The partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions."    --Plato

Quote of the day--on the disappearing intellectual

In a media scape and public sphere that view criticism, dialog and thoughtfulness as a liability, such anti-intellectuals abound, providing commentaries that are nativist, racist, reactionary and morally repugnant. But the premium put on ignorance and the disdain for critical intellectuals is not monopolized by the dominant media, it appears to have become one of the few criteria left for largely wealthy individuals to qualify for public office. One typical example is Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who throws out inanities such as labeling the Obama administration a "gangster government." Bachmann refuses to take critical questions from the press because she claims that they unfairly focus on her language. She has a point. After all, it might be difficult to support statements such as the claim that "the US government used the census information to round up the Japanese [Americans] and put them in concentration camps." Another typical example can be found in Congressman Joe Barton's apology to BP for having to pay for damages to the government stemming from its disastrous oil spill. This "upscaling of ignorance" gets worse. Richard Cohen, writing in The Washington Post about Sen. Michael Bennett, was shocked to discover that he was actually well-educated and smart but had to hide his qualifications in his primary campaign so as to not undermine his chance of being re-elected. Cohen concludes that in politics, "We have come to value ignorance." He further argues that the notion that a politician should actually know something about domestic and foreign affairs is now considered a liability. Link to original post (good, important read): http://www.truth-out.org/the-disappearing-intellectual-age-economic-darwinism61287

Quotes of the day--I think we're getting through to 'em

"Do you believe that gay marriage is a threat to the country in any way?" asked Bill O'Reilly. "No, I don't," said Glenn Beck. "Will the gays come and get us?" Link to original post: http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/38973

Word to Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, all the Teabaggers, etc.

Check out that quote of the day here, today, on this page, to the right:

"If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen."

And look who said it.

None other than Republican and Former President Ronald Reagan.

So the next time you or anyone you hear, wants to trash "Liberals", "Lefties", "Socialists" (even the imagined ones), Blacks, African-Americans, Hispanics, Mexican-Americans, or any other minority, remember this.

Please.

We're Americans first.

We're all in this together.

Let's all work for the bettering of the country.

Together.

That includes listening to one another.

Let's have a great weekend, y'all.

On being open-minded

 

"I dreamed a lot when I was younger
I'm older now and still I hunger
for some understanding
There's no understanding now
Was there ever?"

--Ambrosia, "Harvey"
From the album "Somewhere I've Never Travelled"

Weekend entertainment suggestion

I think I have a great weekend entertainment suggestion for you today.

A friend mentioned that he did it last night while we were at breakfast this morning.

If you either get tired of "March Madness" basketball or your team isn't on or you just want something to watch on TV with the thought of having a good laugh, turn on Fox "News" this weekend.

Oh, yeah.

They're going nuts right now, what with the President and the Democrats anchoring to get a health care reform fix right now.

They're flipping out.

They're coming unhinged.

Whether it's Hannity or Beck or O'Really or whomever, go over and give them a view.

It's a hoot.

They're just sure that this is the end of the world or the virtual end of the world or that by Sunday evening we'll all be living in a Socialist country or some such absurd, ludicrous, insane, and/or emotional nonsense and hyperbole.

You may thank us later.

Have a great weekend, y'all.