We Have A Media Problem

Convenient Myths

 From "creationism" to "lower taxes for the rich" the GOP is full of them, hell, built upon them:

In fact, if you ranked each year since 1950 by overall job growth, the top five years would all boast marginal tax rates at 70 percent or higher. The top 10 years would share marginal tax rates at 50 percent or higher. The two worst years, on the other hand, were 2008 and 2009, when the top marginal tax rate was 35 percent. In the 13 years that the top marginal tax rate has been at its current level or lower, only one year even cracks the top 20 in overall job creation.

Of course, when you are Diane Sawyer, David Gregory, or any of the network or cable news stars making seven figures what possible personal bias would you have about your own tax rate? That Nantucket or Hampton's kitchen needs another new model of stove and a chance to pay Mario Batali to cook with it.

So screw ever reporting this inconvenient fact, just keep on letting me get that new sailboat.

 Lifted entirely from Rising Hegemon 

Home Front

The plants love the long days (previous post).

I miss the boys, but I do recall how easily I'd be pulled from a deep sleep by the "nom, nom, crunch, crunch" sound of Walter destroying one of the plants.

Truman wasn't interested in plant killing, but seemed to enjoy the early morning drama that Walter regularly created.

The debts of the poor ARE the wealth of the rich.*

"The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it's also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.

If you're in that top 1%, life is grand."

*From here.

For the middle class, the system is gamed to make it impossible to live without debt. It isn't an organic phenomenon—for American style capitalism—it's the plan.

John Fucking Wayne?

Michelle Bachmann

Why on earth would a 21st century politician cite John Wayne—even the actor—as a guide to American life?
Has she grown tired of Ronald Reagan?

John Wayne Gacy (in case you forgot)

Updated:
Matt Taibbi cautions us not to laugh at her candidacy—Kos is there too.

20 Billion

Christ on a cracker...kill. me.

Friday Soundtrack

Whitey (updated)

The Massachusetts news media is throbbing today.

I'm rather certain his life on the lamb was fairly banal, but for the next several days we'll be subjected to countless interviews with bodega clerks and diner waitresses who actually sold him cigars and served him coffee. Riveting!

Update:
How could I not predict the sterling news value of multiple interviews with Boston natives who currently live in Santa Monica.

"Yeah, what a pissah, Whitey Bulger only lived 10 minutes away from me, that's wicked close!"

Trademarkin’®

Dumbshit®

Turd Polisher®

Sarah Palin®

Word Salad Shooter®

Mooselini®

Spiteful Gasbag®

If first you don't succeed...

Why Isn't This Hyperbole?

Tom Tomorrow

Our Soulless Punditocracy

A wealthy ratbastard like Chris Matthews could care less about you and me. As long as he can put his dick in the Republican star chamber, anything Bachmann says is brilliant.

But, once upon a time...



If she believes her own horseshit—she's a winner.

Sunday Talk Show Soundtrack

If it's Sunday, it's the Republican's House of Mirrors (and not just on Fox).

If He Runs, Pray To Your God For Mercy

I'm not crazy about Maher's delivery, but he makes some good points about Texas' latest evangelical disaster.

He strenuously opposed Obama's stimulus plan, but the skewed economic statistics Perry regularly flogs wouldn't exist without it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Friday Soundtrack

Somewhat related.

Nothing To See Here

USA!USA!USA!

American workers are winning the race to the bottom.

American Corporations are running out of places to store their cash.

h/t Talking Points Memo

An Awesome Three Legged Stool!

Katherine Harris calls in to The Majority Report to support Michele Bachmann's presidential bid.



Janeane Garofalo is hilarious...and the right wing loves her.

American Healthcare Is The Most Awesome Thing In The World!

So ignore this.

"Ask a Briton to describe "American-style" healthcare, and you'll hear a catalog of horrors that include grossly expensive and unnecessary medical procedures and a privatized system that favors the rich. For a people accustomed to free healthcare for all, regardless of income, the fact that millions of their cousins across the Atlantic have no insurance and can't afford decent treatment is a farce as well as a tragedy."

From here.

What Will Be The Next Big Distraction?

Tom Tomorrow

Maybe a shark with a man's penis terrorizing young bathers? How about a shark with a man's penis and it's also scamming Medicare? Maybe a shark...never mind.

Unelected Asshole

Captain of Industry

After David Koch Leaves NIH Board, NIH Hands Down Long-Delayed Classification Of Top Koch Pollutant As A Carcinogen

"Last year, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that billionaire David Koch, whose company Georgia Pacfic (a subsidiary of Koch Industries) is one of the country’s top producers of formaldehyde, was appointed to the NIH cancer board at a time when the NIH delayed action on the chemical."

"Faced with mounting pressure from Greenpeace and the scientific community, Koch left offered an early resignation from the board in October."

Two Elected Pricks

"An investigation by ProPublica found that Sens. David Vitter (R-LA) and James Inhofe (R-OK) had used their power to add years of delay to the report. The piece linked Vitter to lobbying from Koch’s Georgia Pacific company, which has plywood plants in Louisiana."

You realize we're losing this game, right?

Work-life Soundtrack

Sunday Soundtrack

A good day to unplug.

Libertarians Are Really Crazy

"New York is by far the least free state in the Union. It has also experienced the most interstate emigration of any state over the last decade. New York has by far the highest taxes in the country. Property, selective sales, individual income, and corporate-income taxes are particularly high. Spending on public welfare, hospitals, electric power, transit, employee retirement, and “other and unallocable” expenses are well above national norms."

Crazy, and well funded by the Koch brothers.

Context...

...for previous post.

Three parts of a BBC documentary from 1991.
It doesn't necessarily answer the question "why then and not now?" But it does give one a sense of the complexities of our culture in the late 60s and early 70s.

Artists, in this case, were working to disrupt the indifference of political and cultural institutions on a variety of fronts. Their work often reflected a broadening of the civil rights movement—or at least its energy—to include feminism, gay rights, class, and opposition to the war.

One could argue that then, unlike now, the media was much less homogeneous and certainly less corporate. Narratives that focused on the inhumanity of Vietnam, poverty, and discrimination, were more widely available and consequently had more power in the culture. There was a language for dissent on the left that doesn't really exist today.

Dissent in our current culture and media is largely conservative. A message designed to undo the gains of the broader civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s—a cynical effort to leverage an economically insecure population into believing that it's just too darn expensive to care about war, poverty and civil rights.

Art Break

Leon Golub
Head-Napalmed, 1971

Afterthought:
We are currently engaged in 3 wars; Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (covertly Yemen and Pakistan). It challenges the mind to contemplate how much our culture has changed since this painting was made.

Got Nothin' (and busy)

h/t Dependable Renegade

Also...





I want this movie.

Rand Park

h/t Dangerous Minds

Breathe deep—finally, a life free of the liberal nanny state.

Jeebus

Texas Governor Rick Perry to host prayer summit that calls upon Jesus to solve America’s problems

"Perry is the longest-serving governor in Texas history and is considering making a run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. In April, he issued an official proclamation urging Texans to pray for rain in the midst of a severe drought that had sparked more than 8,000 wildfires. Last year, he said the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might have been an "act of God" that would have occurred regardless of safety regulations."

From here.

Bush squared

Work-life Soundtrack

1969.

"Long-term unemployment worse now than during Great Depression," Chris Matthews didn't say.

Because all he could think about was Anthony Weiner's cock.

Original headline from here.

Good Grief

Please kill me.
One of the more vocal and combative progressives shoots himself in the foot. Andrew Breitbart can now play victim and dragon slayer simultaneously.
What a fucking mess.

From Hullabaloo:

"But listening to Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman crow and strut about cornering him into admitting his "crime" is far worse. This is the essence of the Village folks. We are about to be treated to endless nauseating lectures about propriety from a bunch of wealthy, decadent, television celebrities who will be rending their garments over the allegedly shocking sexual behavior of politicians as if they are the elders of a small American town circa 1957..."

"I honestly haven't seen a Hardball this turgid and throbbing since some time in 1998. Matthews is positively beaming..."

My take: we need more women in politics—the men are too often moronic ego monkeys.

..................................................................................................................

The media will spend the next week or more NOT talking about the things that truly matter. This thing is like catnip laced with angel dust.

I'm glad I cancelled my cable TV last week.


Updated: The inimitable Matt Taibbi last Friday:

"I don’t want to gloat too much about Weiner. Milligan is right, it’s not like the guy is a serial killer. But as the Monday Night Football crew would say, C’mon, Man! If you want to be a national political figure, run for high office, and also have a family at the same time, you can’t be playing Russian roulette with your wife’s reputation every time you log on to your basement computer.

In other words, when you’re a certain kind of famous, there are a few things you’ve just got to give up in life – like uploading pictures of your dick, for instance, or tweet-herding hot twentysomething women by the hundreds. Is it really that hard to find other hobbies? Why do I feel like this kind of thing isn’t a problem for someone like Bernie Sanders? Politicians never cease to amaze."

Pandering Liar

"Jeebus, is there any historical event these ignorant GOP assholes won’t shamelessly hump in the service of their reactionary agenda? First Palin tries to posthumously induct Paul Revere into the NRA, and now this booger-eating moron tries to co-opt The Greatest Generation into Coupons4Codgers. For shame!"

Betty Cracker at Rumproast

Santorum

I Got Nothin'

He's a hungry little bastard.

Because They Care Deeply About The Nation

Privatize Medicare or else.

Everybody gets that the Republicans have every reason to prevent any improvement in the economy—it's their 2012 campaign. You get that, right?

Image from here.

Good Grief

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

 PALIN: He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free...and we were going to be armed.

"Bells!? Oh, for christsakes..." Piper thought.

It's interesting, while local media ribbed Palin for garbling history, most of them edited out the bit at the end about being armed.

Big Boned

Chris Christie, R-NJ
Not fat, just full of shit.

The nonpartisan New Jersey Office of Legislative Services analyzed Gov. Christie’s proposal and found that a middle-class family of four earning $40,000 a year would see a tax increase of $1,066, while a family of four earning $500,000 would see a decrease in taxes of $1,811.

From here.

Come on.
Everybody gets this, right? Republicans are engaged in a multi-front war on the middle class.

More to the point, it's a nationwide effort to shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the great unwashed moochers that make up 97% of the nation's population.

When Republicans say shared sacrifice, they mean shift sacrifice—it sounds similar.

Stormy Massachusetts Soundtrack

Pretty wild weather for Massachusetts.

The Future

Casually accurate.
The Wink Martindale dad/husband approving the little woman's purchases is more 1955 than 1966.

So, they foresaw a future of e-commerce, e-banking, home security, and residual sexism—it's interesting that they couldn't predict that most available bandwidth in the future would be devoted to porn. Huh.