Fox news: "we did PR for the tea party"

File under the utterly obvious. I was pondering what would have happened if the anti-war movement got as much profile as the tea parties did. The one problem (there was just one???)during the anti war effort was that what little media coverage we got was generally photos/film of the protests with most commentators on left(sic) and right talking more about the protests than the message. Granted the tea bagging meme was in a similar vien but no where near the level.

Via Media Matters report on the Fox News coverage of Tea Parties:

Examples of Fox News' and Fox Business' April 15 tea party coverage included:

Discussing how to show support for tea parties, Fox & Friends' Gretchen Carlson claimed: "You can hang [a teabag] from your mirror, too, like fuzzy dice."

Fox News host Megyn Kelly claimed that "you can join the tea party action from your home if you go to the FoxNation.com ... a virtual tax day tea party."

Fox Business anchor Cody Willard asked, "Guys, when are we going to wake up and start fighting the fascism that seems to be permeating this country?"

Willard further stated that conservatives and liberals are "both fascists who are taking all of my money and building up corporate America with my welfare."

Fox News host John Gibson expressed "hope[]" that millions of people" would participate in the protests.

Fox Business anchor David Asman told viewers they "need[ed] to go" to the tea party merchandise website "no matter what side of the issue you're on."
Willard asked a protester: "Are you worried about me taking these dollars from you ... or destroying those dollars? I mean that's what the government does anyway."

On The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News contributor Dennis Miller claimed that "the average American taxpayer feels like they've just been shot in the head in a deck chair on a sinking boat."

Fox News host Sean Hannity asked contributor Newt Gingrich "one serious question": "Is this now a battle between capitalism and socialism?"

Hannity also asked: "Why don't we have more anger towards government, or is this the anger that finally is beginning to emerge?"

Discussing the protests on Hannity, RedState's Erick Erickson stated, "[I]f we don't do something, if we don't turn the corner, we're going to be enslaved to the government."

Also on Hannity, radio host Bill "Bubba" Bussey said it was "time for a revolution."
Hannity also featured a Thomas Paine imitator to plug the tea parties.

Granted i'm not as in a huff as others about the astro turf campaign... if people come out, and organize on their own (like Henry's) thats grassroots to me. But the point remains it was astro turf--just like Obama's astro turf election I guess?

But here is a question... did you hear anything about the anti-war tax day protests? Yeah. I thought so.

Right wing entertainment...

Conservatism as Entertainment

You hear a lot these days that Republicans are “in disarray.” But they’re not, really. It’s just that the way our political institutions work, a congressional minority party doesn’t generate a high-profile leader. Now you combine this leadership vacuum with the fact that the right has developed a very robust ideological media apparatus on talk radio and on Fox News and you have a problem. In effect, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are more prominent public figures than are John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, to say nothing of legislators who might actually be appealing figure. And since only a tiny minority of Republican members of congress are willing to suffer the dread “RINO” tag, the vast majority of elected officials seem to feel the need to kowtow to the whims of conservative movement media leaders.

The problem is that the incentives facing a media figure are very different from the incentives facing a politician.

A politician needs, basically, a majority. And the decisive votes are bound to come from people who don’t like politics much or really care about it. For a media figure, however, a much smaller audience than “half the people” would still constitute enormous success. But you need to appeal, intensely, to the small minority of people who care enough about politics to bother watching, reading, or listening to political commentary.

One problem is that tv formating leads to sound byte politics.  Actually the internet leads to blog byte politics--where you send off links that nobody reads and get responses with links that you don't read...

When I debate online I make an effort to dig into the oppositions arguments and I know of a few others who do as well.  And yes, we all slip up and/or are on the fly.  But the entertainment factor in the conservative movement is just as true within "liberals" out in the world as well. 

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a great thing about the tea parties...

It exposes Fox News for what it is...

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O'Reilly needs facts? no kidding...

Bill O'Reilly Needs Facts!

A New York Post feature headlined "A Day in the Life of Bill O'Reilly" offers this insight into life working for the Fox host:

"The staff of 15 meets 7:30 every morning. Working for me, you've got to be a Navy SEAL. No mistakes. I need facts, or it'll get rammed down my throat."

Huh. When did this "no mistakes" policy start?

Of course, some former employees of O'Reilly recall a slightly different workplace experience....

 

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Baracknophobia...

Baracknophobia: Hannity, Bachmann, And Beck Terrified Of Obama (VIDEO)

"the mid-term election are coming up in 20 months... pace your rage!"

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O'Reilly at his best....

Over at think progress: O’Reilly Attacks Me As A ‘Villain’ For Highlighting His Rape Comments

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

This is a riot... or at least a good chuckle.

The enjoyable thing about the internet is you can find some great stuff.  This was cute.

The idealism, youthfulness, and ambition of this reminds me of being on a bus to San Fran talking to this young marxists who talked about the Revolution of 92.  And my best friend and I looked at each other--I was thinking to myself, hmmm somewhere in South America?

I finally stopped them and asked---uh which revolution?

"Oh, the uprising in LA after the Rodney King verdict."

Oh, the riots.  Yeah.  That wasn't a revolution that was a riot.

This is a riot as well... or at least will give you a good chuckle.  Just skip some of the pre-industrial revolution folk-lore that many people have about how government could/would work in a modern complex society of biological entities whom come to the table with different capacities, capabilities, and skill sets.

But at least they are trying.

 

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Rush Gets Played by Rahm

TPMCafe | TalkingPoints Memo | Rush Gets Played by Rahm

I had lunch with a very conservative friend today. We haven't seem eachother since early October of last year, before the Obama victory. The lunch was very civil and we found some common ground when my friend said upfront, he was glad Obama beat McCain and Palin. And then we found some more common ground on Health and Education Reform. So the meal was a lot less tempestuous than I expected. As we were getting in our cars, I asked him "How did Rush allow himself to get played like a stradavarius by Rahm Emanuel?".

It was at this point that my friend went ballistic on me and said "Obama was a chicken" not to debate Limbaugh one on one, like Rush has been asking on the air for weeks.

As I was driving away he was still ranting and I thought, only if Rush is the Republican Presidential candidate in four years, will he actually get a one on one debate with President Obama. Until then, he's just a bystander who helps the Democrats attract the 80% of the country who think El Rushbo is a drug addled loon.

Because he is becoming the Republican Brand, Limbaugh will find out just how small his "base" of white males really is. This is what I call the "Whig" strategy. Make your party's base so small that centrist's (like Abe Lincoln leaving the Whigs) break away and form a new party. Leaving you with just the dittoheads and the crackers.

I think its actually quite shocking how most conservatives I know in GA don't realize what a small group they are. I had great working relationships with Republicans in California... I have next to nothing in common with folks here. I'm not really sure why. One thing I noticed is that most "debates" on issues that I had with Republicans in Cali were productive and I learned a lot from. Most "debates" here are spent dwelling on basic facts, and acknowledgement of how government, markets, human beings exist.

Then again, notice I keep saying "Republicans in California." I guess the point is most Republicans here in GA are conservatives.

Keep on talking Rush... keep on talking. It only helps Barrack Hussein Obama, which will hopefully mean a new New Deal coalition of moderates, liberals, and the left.

Thomas Frank interview

Q+A With Thomas Frank

In the book you talk about this cynicism as being self-fulfilling.

If you believe in bad government you will deliver bad government. If you think big government is by nature going to fail, is corrupt, is evil, that's what you'll deliver. That's the larger message of the book...

...And yet they love big government, in the sense that they've figured out a way to appropriate it.

But they have the deniability. They can always get out of it. "No, we're against Bush. He's a Big Government conservative!" And then the people that criticize Bush will get in and do the same thing. My friend calls it the "no true Scotsman fallacy." The story goes like this: a guy is Scotland says no Scotsman would put soy milk in his porridge and someone says, Oh yeah, Joe Blow puts soy milk in his porridge. "Ah," he responds, "but no true Scotsman would ever put soy milk in his porridge. You can always retreat, but you see it's a fallacy. It's time to make that retreat impossible.That's one of the projects of the book, to take that sanctuary away from the conservatives. Let's examine this beast, this movement, not by what is says but what it has done every time it takes over.

Taxs cuts--the not so magic bullet...

EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT TAX CUTS LOSE REVENUE

right wing(nuts)

CONSERVATIVES' CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIES....

the Palin wing of the Republican party

Sean Hannity wins!

Misinformer of the year

Because of the unending stream of falsehoods and character attacks that fueled the "Stop Obama Express," and the countless other distortions he promoted throughout 2008, Sean Hannity is Media Matters for America's Misinformer of the Year.

Why the shoe?

Could it be...

One shoe the living?
4 million Iraqis displaced since war began: Oxfam

The report by Oxfam and NCCI, a network of aid organizations working in Iraq, also highlighted other dire statistics:

Four million Iraqis regularly cannot buy enough food.
70 per cent are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50 per cent in 2003.
28 per cent of children are malnourished, compared to 19 per cent before the 2003 invasion.
92 per cent of Iraqi children suffer learning problems, mostly due to the climate of fear.

One shoe for the 151,000 dead?

The authors of the WHO/Iraqi study, published last night in the New England Journal of Medicine, say that the new number, which could be anywhere between 104,000 and 223,000 allowing for misreporting, "points to a massive death toll in the wake of the 2003 invasion and represents only one of the many health and human consequences of an ongoing humanitarian crisis".

I dunno...

but some folks are baffled...

Juan Williams: we destroyed your country, how dare you disrespect our leader!

Because Bush has been such a defender of the views of governments who were being responsive to public opinion

sigh....

More right wing entertainment from Neil Boortz

American Narcissism at work:

The story says that the top-ten years in terms of temperature have occurred since Clinton's second coronation. Not true. The hottest year on record was 1934. These people just won't give up.

See the problem is he's only looking at US temperatures. What the article actually says is:

Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration.

LA Times addressed the story back at the time of the adjustment in US records:

A slight adjustment to U.S. temperature records has bumped 1998 as the hottest year in the nation's history and made the Dust Bowl year of 1934 the new record holder, according to NASA.

The reranking did not affect global records, and 1998 remains tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record worldwide, climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York said Tuesday.

The data adjustment changes "the inconsequential bragging rights for certain years in the U.S.," he said. But "global warming is a global issue, and the global numbers show that there is no question that the last five to 10 years have been the hottest period of the last century."

Inconsequential... too bad right wing entertainment isn't...

Getting global warming wrong is a theme for Boortz, who likes to promote the 650 "scientists" who deny global warming is man made:

Then that leads me to this ... a US Senate Minority Report is about to be released. It contains testimony from over 650 scientists (note that they are all scientists and not just ENVIRONMENTALISTS) who are criticizing the man-made climate claims of this UN conference.

Well all 650 scientist aren't actually climatologists who spend their careers looking at the issue. As the new republic blog points outhis list has been debunked before:

when people started sifting through the names, they found that many experts on the list were actually weathermen, economists, and people with no real background in climate science. Worse still, when Andrew Dessler started contacting some of the actual climate scientists listed, many of them expressed first shock, then horror, and then e-mailed Inhofe's staff and demanded to be taken off, since they didn't disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change at all.

For more on his fraud go read Inhofe's 400 Global Warming Deniers Debunked

List of "Scientists" Includes Economists, Amateurs, TV Weathermen and Industry Hacks

Boortz is an entertainer but does huge damage to the political process be feeding ignorance and fear.

More right wing entertainment from John Stossel

The fact that this man still has a job is amazing. Appears his latest bit of wisdom is to ring in a new great Depression.

John Stossel: Federal deficit is cause for worry
First he gets history wrong in regards to the lessons from the Great Depression:

Of course, neither was able to fix the economy. On the contrary, their policies made a depression the Great Depression, extending it many years and even generating a depression within a depression in 1937.

But Krugman and others suggest that since the New Deal ran moderate deficits and the Depression persisted, then Roosevelt should have run bigger multiyear deficits -- and so should Obama.

This is the wrong lesson to learn from the 1930s. The New Deal didn't fail because its deficits were too small. As Amity Shlaes shows in her book "The Forgotten Man," the New Deal failed because it interfered with the market's natural regenerative processes. By raising taxes, hamstringing producers with arbitrary regulations and creating uncertainly about what the government would do next, business people were unwilling to invest and hire workers.

I'll let krugman set the record straight.

And then Stossel goes on to say that Government spending will increase the problem and that deficits should be the big worry right now:

The 2009 deficit is projected to be $438 billion. Obama's "stimulus" could take it up to a trillion and beyond. That's just the beginning since the Democratic Congress' spending wish list and Medicare's $35 trillion unfunded liability loom.

We should all worry about the deficit.

I'll outsource to an economist for this one, Dean Baker from CEPR:

there is nothing that the economy needs more right now than very large deficits. The collapse of the housing bubble has destroyed more than $5tn in wealth. The fallout from this collapse has led to an even larger decline in stock market wealth. This massive loss in wealth in turn is leading to a plunge in consumption that is driving the economy into the most serious downturn since the Great Depression.

Economists from across the political spectrum agree that the only way to counteract this loss of consumption demand is through large increases in government spending.

If Stossel was really worried about Medicare's liability he'd be talking about health care reform because the health care crisis is going to be hitting the private sector in a major way. If you are worried about the recession turning into a depression government spending is exactly what you want. If you are worried about long term deficits health care reform is what you want.

Stossel is either lying or uneducated. I'm not a mind reader so I can't tell you which.

right wing entertainment

Glen Beck getting it right time and time again...

Beck: ‘I Was The Most Well-Researched Show’ On CNN, ‘They Forced Me To Document It’

In fact, it seems that no matter what politically-relevant topic Beck chose to discuss, we could count on Beck to get it wrong:

– On Taxes: Falsely claimed the U.S. is the “number two” highest taxed country in the world.

– On Energy: Falsely claimed “drilling in ANWR alone would yield 100 million barrels a day.”

– On Global Warming: Falsely claimed that “the globe was the hottest” and “America’s temperature peaked” in 1934.

– On Sub-prime Crisis: Falsely claimed that the sub-prime lenders were “blackmailed” into lending to the poor and minorities by community organizers.

– On The Iraq War: Falsely claimed that the U.S. “went into Iraq…to prevent World War III.”

– On the Middle East: Falsely claimed that Palestine is “being run now by Hezbollah,” President Abbas is an extremist.

– On Obama: Falsely claimed that Fidel Castro endorsed Obama’s candidacy.

Given Beck’s principled disregard for the facts, it’s no wonder that Sean Hannity recently welcomed beck to Fox News Channel saying, “You’re a perfect fit, a great addition to family“

No wonder people think Sarah Palin is talking any sense... this fits right in line with the sounds good, feels good policy of conservatives.

"And call off Christmas..."

Bill O'Reilly can be very silly at times...



Ahhh... good old right wing entertainment

Ahh... Mr. Westmoreland at it again...

on the auto bail out: "Competition makes people do a better job,"
Except we don't want to bring competition to the health insurance market... or remove patent protections... or create a free flow of labor for workers...
All of these protectionist policies are supported by Westmoreland.

Learn to walk the walk if you talk the talk (I still have to learn this myself from time to time....) Else ye are just condescending, hypocritical, or uneducated on your own policies positions. I'm not a mind reader so I can't speak for Congressman Westmoreland on this issue gaff...

Ah... Dean...

Tax Increases Are Not Stimulus

The NYT tells us that President Obama's plans to increase taxes on the wealthy are not part of his stimulus package. It would be very surprising if they were since tax increases, even on wealthy people, are not stimulus. His plan to withdraw from Iraq is probably not part of his stimulus package either.

--Dean Baker