Thanks to E.A. Blair for suggesting this wonderful new product...and illustration. We're planning on introducing more of your favorite wingers on Flakies boxes because...well, because every wingnut deserves the recognition.
Let ...
Is there not an ounce of sanity left anywhere in the Republican party?
Barely 36 hours after the caustic New Year’s Day vote, Boehner faced a coup attempt from a clutch ...
From The Onion:
Saying that she’ll be gone soon anyway so she might as well, Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann introduced H.R. 259: The Homosexual Decapitation Act, which would give the United ...
Surprise, surprise. Stupidity is alive and well in the racist wing of the conservative movement.
Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly is riled up about comprehensive immigration reform, and she has hardly been ...
All good bad things must eventually come to an end.
Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann, who last year ran for the Republican presidential nomination, announced on Wednesday that she will stand ...
The best of late night political humor via Daniel Kurtzman’s Political Humor.
Happy Friday.
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"During a Senate hearing yesterday, Senator John McCain said it was too hard to always have to update ...
John McCain has finally had enough of his Republican teabagging cohorts, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
In the latest expression of Republican frustration with conservative GOP colleagues, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) ...
Our friend, John Liming, wonders how God might deal with two conflicting prayers of a political nature.
I have been reading an article on the website, Raw Story, where it is ...
Item 1:
The Oklahoma tornado disaster has killed at least 24 people, left hundreds injured and caused millions of dollars in damage. But that has not stopped a senator from that ...
If you're new to right-wing think, here's an easy to remember rule of thumb to help you along; any and all evil in the world can be attributed directly to ...
From a political party overflowing with sociopaths and creeps, none other than Dick Cheney encapsulates to a greater degree what it is the Republican party has become. The blood of ...
It can be debated as to whether the filibuster came about as a political accident or was created to give minority parties a stronger say in opposing specific legislation they ...
While gun nuts sink a little deeper into madness with each passing day, Seattle is turning guns into bricks.
The Seattle Police Department collected more than 700 guns during a buyback ...
Had enough of right-wing political crap and find yourself with a deep desire to get as far from the madding crowd as you can?
Read on...
The opportunity to travel to Mars ...
Here's the full quote from Charles P. Pierce.
If your "way of life" involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should ...
A guest post from James Fidlerten.
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After September 11, 2011, America became united, as it grieved the loss of so many lives on American soil. The tragic event also changed so ...
I'm not sure that 'crazy' is strong enough an adjective to describe the many (or few) who go to the absurd lengths they do in defending America's out-of-control gun culture. ...
Ana Marie Cox has a great piece in the Guardian on the changing relationship between Fox News and the Republican party. She captures the essence of the current relationship in this wonderful observation on how Fox and the GOP play off each other in fabricating conspiracies – in this example, Benghazi.
Witness the coverage of Benghazi, where conservative outrage on the channel remains strident and forceful and in harmony with Republican officials, despite the willingness of most of the country to move on to matters closer to home. It’s a positive feedback loop that spirals into irrelevance: Republicans pursue a conspiracy that only Fox viewers believe, based on reports only Fox airs, and new information gets hammered into a shape that fits the existing narrative.
Exactly right. Cox’s entire piece is well worth the read.
When you think perfection, does Mitt Romney come immediately to mind? If not, it should…at least according to Fox News’ Kimberly Guilfoyle.
He just seemed very presidential. I had like a moment on the floor where I was looking up at him and you see the big banners in the background and the pictures of him and you thought ‘wow, if you went to central casting you couldn’t pick a better guy that looked presidential, sounded strong and steady.’ I think there’s been kind of a reaction from the public until now that, listen, this guy is almost too perfect, the family looks perfect, like all the kids when they came out on stage. Is it such a bad thing to choose perfect? Like, why fault the man because he’s qualified and because he sounds good and he’s strong and steady and he’s not a showman. He just wants to get the job done.
What fascinates me about Guilfoyle’s remark, aside from the breathtaking ignorance it takes to make such a remark, is knowing that she believes every word of it.
I have little doubt that when she looked up from the floor of the Tampa arena and saw Mitt up there delivering his acceptance speech, she truly saw perfection. The lies, the bullshit, the phoniness, the cluelessness, the utter lack of principles and inner convictions, the complete disregard for the 99 percent who don’t have a million dollars stashed away in a savings account, the contempt for the poor and elderly neatly veiled behind empty platitudes of compassion …none of that was visible to Guilfoyle. All she saw was a financially successful man with nice hair…and a political affiliation whose label does not start with the letter ‘D’. Nothing else really mattered because life in a bubble does not require anything more.
If the gauge by which we judge the qualities of a leader is wealth, than yes, Mitt is Mr. Perfect. But by any other evaluation metric, Romney is little more than a rich guy whose entire life has been based on doing what he must to get what he wants.
In the study, 1,185 respondents nationwide were asked about what news sources they consumed in the past week and then were asked a variety of questions about current political and economic events in the U.S. and abroad. On average, people were able to answer correctly 1.8 of 4 questions about international news, and 1.6 of 5 questions about domestic affairs.
“Of course, knowledge of current events is predicted not just by watching news, but also by factors like ideology, education, age and gender,” said Dan Cassino, political scientist and poll analyst. “Based on these results, people who don’t watch any news at all are expected to answer correctly on average 1.22 of the questions about domestic politics, just by guessing or relying on existing basic knowledge.”
However, the study concludes that media sources have a significant impact on the number of questions that people were able to answer correctly. The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly — a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all. On the other hand, if they listened only to NPR, they would be expected to answer 1.51 questions correctly; viewers of Sunday morning talk shows fare similarly well. And people watching only The Daily Show with Jon Stewart could answer about 1.42 questions correctly.
…is directly attributable to watching garbage like this on a daily basis.
It’s so painfully stupid, one can almost hear brain cells frying and dying at every syllable spoken by this cast of clowns. As Ben Adler over at The Nation points out, Fox and its pundits are not deserving of anyone’s respect and it has nothing to do with their conservative views. It’s because they fail “the fundamental test of journalism: are you informing your audience?”
From the papers captured last year at Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout comes this.
Like any public figures, bin Laden and his advisers were mindful of the media. Adam Gadahn, one of bin Laden’s spokesmen, provided a summary of his view of U.S. TV cable news.
“From the professional point of view, they are all on one level except (Fox News) channel which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks neutrality too,” he wrote.
Obviously, even murderous, psychopathic madmen recognize trash when they hear it.
Here is a perfect example (they’re not difficult to find) of what David Frum was referring to when he wrote of Fox News being a key agent in creating a “whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.“
Two of Fox’s shining stars, Megyn ‘Barbie Doll’ Kelly and Bill ‘Lying’ O’Reilly, were discussing the pepper spraying of students by UC Davis police officers. As the two downplayed the needless brutality by police, they offered up healthy portions of that “alternate knowledge system” Fox specializes in.
First, Kelly on the harmless effects of pepper spray.
“…it’s like a derivative of actual pepper. It’s a food product, essentially.”
Yeah, right Megyn. Just like water is a harmless liquid, so pouring it down the nose and into the lungs of a person strapped to a table isn’t really torture; it’s just an alternate way of drinking water. No big deal, right?
Pepper spray in not torture but to downplay its effects by referring to it as a simple “food product” is just plain stupid and disingenuous. Here’s what pepper spray actually does to one’s system.
You gasp as the spray hits your airwaves, causing instant inflammation of the mucous membranes in your throat and nose. The lining of your throat swells—not enough to stop you from breathing, but just enough to make it tough to get your fill of air. Coughing, gagging, and shortness of breath are all to be expected. The stuff also temporarily paralyzes your larynx, making it difficult to speak. Then your mean arterial blood pressure shoots up; blood floods your face, making it appear as if it has been burned. Normal breathing—the calm in-and-out that you don’t usually think about—may not return for another 45 minutes.
As for O’Reilly, he chimed in with this bit of nonsense:
“I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police, particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.”
How dumb is that? O’Reilly routinely Monday-morning quarterbacks every story he deems newsworthy but the actions of police on non-violent students is, according to him, off-limits to criticism because it took place at a “fairly liberal campus”? God, is there a more pompous jackass in all of cable?
All of this helps explain the results of a poll released this week.
Sunday morning news shows do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who they don’t watch any news at all.
…
Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew theirgovernment than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news. “Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”
“Something?” There is “something about watching Fox News” which makes people more ignorant? They don’t know what that “something” is? Let me help them out:
PEOPLE WHO WATCH FOX NEWS REGULARLY ARE LIED TO EVERY SINGLE HOUR OF EVERY SINGLE DAY AND FED A STEADY SERVING OF REPUBLICAN RIGHT-WING BULLSHIT BY A CAST OF STOOGES AND CLOWNS WHO TAKE THEIR ORDERS FROM A MR. ROGER AILES AND THAT IS WHY FOX NEWS VIEWERS ARE MORE IGNORANT AND MISINFORMED THAN MOST FOLK.
Sorry for the shouting but I wanted to make sure that the good professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson heard me. May I also add that watching no news is preferable to watching Fox News. If you don’t watch news, you can always guess at an answer and have some chance of being correct. People who watch Fox News, on the other hand, are almost always guaranteed of dishing out the wrong answer because, as they’re fond of saying in the world of computer science – Garbage In, Garbage Out.
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