The gist of this year's CPAC message

Shorter CPAC message: The nefarious Jew Progressive is destroying Germany America.

I think the last video is particularly revealing, as it gives some insight into why the anti-ACORN reality revision is so important to movement conservative mythology. For conservative supremacists, any election which is not won by "conservatives" is by definition illigitimate, a "hihack[ing]" of the country and the democratic process. Thus, the election must have been stolen by those dark skinned poor people at ACORN - part of the super secret sinister 100 year progressive commie atheist fascist one world government Freddy Krueger plot to destroy America.

Dave Niewert and David Sirota have more on Beck's eliminationist message.

The banality of the American news culture

As I've been rather busy and occupied for the last several months, I have not had the time to actively follow the news. But it has been quite illuminating to notice the "news" I still manage to pick up by a sort of process of cultural osmosis.

For instance, it has been impossible for me not to hear about the marital problems of Tiger Woods and the press conference that he held to discuss them. Call me crazy, but I was under the impression that the relevance of Tiger Woods was as a person capable of hitting a golf ball with great proficiency, not on his fidelity to his wife. Apparently, the sexual affairs of a professional golfer are of grave national importance.

Meanwhile, other than this post by Glenn Greenwald I have heard nothing about the UK inquiry into the legality of the invasion of Iraq. Obviously, the illegal invasion and destruction of another nation resulting in mass death and chaos, while creating a blackhole of financial loss and a perpetual source of anti-American global sentiment by comparison is insignificant to the Tiger Woods affair.

The rise of uncommon sense (and why that's a good thing)

From "The Mythbusters of Psychology" in eSkeptic

KARL POPPER WROTE: “SCIENCE MUST BEGIN WITH MYTHS and with the criticism of myths.” Popular psychology is a prolific source of myths. It has produced widely held beliefs that “everyone knows are true” but that are contradicted by psychological research. A new book does an excellent job of mythbusting: 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and the late, great skeptic Barry L. Beyerstein ...

The authors start with a chapter explaining how myths and misconceptions arise.

1.Word of mouth. If we hear something repeated enough times, we tend to believe it.
2.Desire for easy answers and quick fixes.
3.Selective perception and memory. We remember our hits and forget our misses.
4.Inferring causation from correlation.
5.Post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning.
6.Exposure to a biased sample. Psychologists overestimate the difficulty of stopping smoking because they only see patients who come to them for help, not the many who stop on their own.
7.Reasoning by representativeness — evaluating the similarity between two things on the basis of superficial resemblance.
8.Misleading film and media portrayals.
9.Exaggeration of a kernel of truth.
10.Terminological confusion. Because of the etymology of the word schizophrenia, many people confuse it with multiple personality disorder.

The authors discuss our susceptibility to optical illusions and other cognitive illusions, our propensity to see patterns where they don’t exist, the unreliability of intuition, and the fact that common sense frequently misleads us. They characterize science as “uncommon sense” — it requires us to set aside our common sense preconceptions when evaluating evidence. They cover 50 myths in depth, explaining their origins, why people believe them, and what the published research has to say about the claims. Everything is meticulously documented with sources listed.

Why do "centrists" always need to find a false equivalency between "right" and "left?"

I walked into the current affairs section of the book store the other day to see this book featured prominently. Please take a moment and look at the cover ...

Ok, anyone see something that doesn't fit in the cover picture of the book titled Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America? That's correct: Keith Olbermann is not a left-wing fringe lunatic who is hijacking America. Olbermann is not as far "left" as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are "right."

Keith Olbermann can be obnoxious and he can engage in hyperbole or go to far into over-the-top overhyped criticism (his freaking out over Hillary Clinton's remark about the Kennedy assasination comes to mind) but he is not an ideological left-winger who promotes bizarre, reality detached beliefs. Olbermann is, however, a vociferous critic of the former Bush administration, which I suppose makes him an evil, crazy, extremist by Beltway "centrist" logic.

Seeing this book reminded me of this book which lamented the silence of the "rational center." I had much the same feeling of frustration when I first noticed it in the book store as I flipped through it to come to a section where it said that the public was not serviced by a debate on Bush tax policies between Paul Krugman and Bill O'Reilly because both men are merely well-informed laypersons. Um, no. Bill O'Reilly is a sort of (mis)informed layperson. Paul Krugman is an expert in economics who has since won the Nobel Prize in economics.

The most laughable part of the book is the updated epilogue which celebrates how the Iraq Study Group represents the return of the "rational center" and the long arm of the George HW Bush administration reaching out to fix the Iraq debacle (how'd that work out?) Funny how the "centrist" position is only centrist by defining the acceptable spectrum as between those who are pro-war and those who are pro-war.

But the ultimate point I'm trying to make is exemplified by this post from Steve Benen about the latest crazy conspiracy theory from someone well positioned within the conservative movement

It's easy to laugh at the stupidity of all of this, but I think Max Bergmann's point is a good one: "Gaffney is a prominent member of the right wing security establishment. He writes a regular column for the Washington Times, is a frequent commentator on cable television, and runs his own right-wing defense organization. Just this past October, at Gaffney's Center for Security Policy 'Keeper of the Flame' annual award dinner, Vice President Cheney was the featured speaker and recipient of the reward. Other guest speakers included Sen. Jon Kyl and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."

Right. It's tempting to think some paranoid nutjob with bizarre conspiracy theories is irrelevant in modern American politics. But prominent conservatives consider Frank Gaffney a credible figure.

The mainstream of fringe lunacy is one of the key differences between the left and right in contemporary politics. Both sides have their nutty fringe, but only side thinks its whackjobs are sane.

Quote of the day

From Democracy in America

[T]he BBC reporter asked [East Anglia climate scientist Phil] Jones whether he would concede that global warming since 1995 has not been statistically significant. Mr Jones replied: "Yes, but only just," and went on to note that there was a measured global warming of 0.12°C per decade since then, and that it tends to be harder to get statistical significance out of shorter time samples.

This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995."

Since I've advocated a more explicit use of the word "lie", I'll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you'll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.

What's truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.

h/t Deltoid

A rule of thumb for tv news

If you're using footage from TMZ, there is a high probability (approaching 100%) that what you're running is not actual news.

Those old time commie Republicans

Take a look at the commie beliefs of the Republicans of 1956. Of course, the pseudo-conservatives of that era actually did consider those Republicans to be communists or communist dupes ... which is why the JBS was considered to be political extremists.

Now they're part of mainstream conservatism.

This comment from Dispatches gets it about right

There is something bizarre about listening to constant [Republican]* complaints that the Democrats are constantly moving ever further into the far left and comparing that to the reality that if Goldwater was still alive he would probably be classified as a liberal democrat.

*The commenter employed a common pejorative instead of "Republican" which I edited out since I don't approve of such usage.

Today's discount book purchase

The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (hc) for $5.44.

See here for a review.

"Justice" Department considers illegal torture "poor judgement"

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

Today's discount book purchase

Head and Heart: American Christianities (hc) by Gary Wills for 6 dollars.

I already read this a few years ago when I checked it out from the library, but it's such an excellent resource that I couldn't resist getting a copy for my personal collection.

See below for Wills's Fora.tv discussion of his book (which is about the history and conflict of evangelical and enlightened Christianity in America.) You can click the little button on the bottom right to get to the whole program.

Glenn Beck is the most delusional man on tv

Beck thinks that Thomas Paine was the Glenn Beck of his day.

Let's see: Thomas Paine, child of the Enlightenment, secular deist, advocate of social democracy and scientific enthusiast; the greatest avatar of democracy in American history.

Yep, that's the equivalent of a nutty AM radio host who thinks that reading old John Birch Society literature makes him a polymath.

More on the bizarro backlash

I didn't have time yesterday to mention the "2" in Glenn Beck's 1-2 punch of bizarro populism. Namely: cutting spending.

So while the tax burden on the not rich increases while the tax burden on the rich decreases, the not rich will concomitantly get less out of their tax dollars as spending on public infrastructure, the welfare state, totalitarian* environmental and worker protections and such are reduced. Their money will instead go towards subsidizing the corporations that will get the lucrative contracts as a result of the privatization of government functions and the always increasing military budget.

That's the thing about Laffer's supply side economics. Despite their having failed disastrously time and again, they are quite proficient at siphoning wealth from the many to the very few.

It's why I keep going back to the following Thomas Frank quote from What's the Matter with Kansas? which I find so very perspicacious:

Like a French Revolution in reverse - one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy - the backlash pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right, to the right, father to the right. It may never bring prayer back to the public schools, but it has rescued all manner of right-wing nostrums from history's dustbin. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash might repeal the entire twentieth century.

Glenn Beck wants to return his audience to the days of Upton Sinclair's jungle.

Again: this is populism?

*Sarcasm.

This is populism?

I caught another one of Glenn Beck's zany, extended rants that open up his Fox tv show today. He was saying that to solve America's economic crisis taxes should be lowered. Specifically, that taxes on the rich should go down and taxes on the poor and lower working class should go up.

Then he brought on Arthur Laffer to explain how to fix the economy. That would be the same Arthur Laffer who inspired the economic policies of the Bush administration which transformed a large budget surplus into a large budget deficit and helped crash the economy.

Only in right-wing world

A scientist makes a statement completely consistent with the IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming, gets the statement distorted by a dishonest propaganda mag, and the usual idiots,* who have no understanding of science what-so-ever, yet speak authoritatively on the subject to their audience, proclaim that the scientist has admitted that there is no warming.

*As I type this I'm watching Glenn Beck in the background smugly repeating everyone of these falsehoods(plus more). I've never seen anyone so confidently stupid before in my life.

Quote of the day

"What prosecutor can look away when a perpetrator mocks the law itself and revels in his role in violating it? Such cases cry out for prosecution. Dick Cheney wants to be prosecuted. And prosecutors should give him what he wants." - Scott Horton, commenting on Dick Cheney bragging about his advocacy of torture

Funny because it's true

Quote of the day

"The very same people who have been demanding for years that Muslims be imprisoned for life, tortured and killed with no trials or charges of any kind suddenly become extremely sensitive to the nuances of due process and humane detention conditions -- they start sounding like Amnesty International civil liberties extremists -- the minute it's a Christian, rather than a Muslim, who is subjected to such treatment." - Glenn Greenwald

It really is quite a spectable watching people who champion the chargeless/trialless indefinite detention and torture of Muslims by Americans complain of lesser human rights abuses committed by other nations against Americans or Christians.

It's kind of like how Abraham Lincoln put it in his letter to Henry Pierce.

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

In other words, if you don't want to be held without charges and tortured, you shouldn't consent to have others held without charges and tortured; furthermore, to do so violates the spirit of universal human rights which was the bedrock principle of the Declaration of Independence, i.e. "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

The hypocrites who believe in rights for some but not for others seem to prefer the maxim of the ruling pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

A literal market place of ideas

From The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank

Like many winger ideas – anticommunism, for example – it sounds good at first. A “free market of ideas” sounds like “free inquiry,” or a "free exchange of ideas”; an environment in which hypothesis are tested and bad ones are weeded out while good ones go on to earn the respect of the community of scholars. But this is not what the phrase means at all. Markets do not determine the objective merit of things, only their price, which is to say, their merit in the eyes of capital or consumers. To cast intellectual life as a “market” is to set up a standard for measuring ideas quite different from the standard of truthfulness. Here ideas are bid up or down depending on how well they please those with the funds to underwrite inquiry – which effectively means, how well they please large corporations and the very wealthy.

From "The Lobbying-Media Complex" by Sebastian Jones in The Nation.

Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances.

For lobbyists, PR firms and corporate officials, going on cable television is a chance to promote clients and their interests on the most widely cited source of news in the United States. These appearances also generate good will and access to major players inside the Democratic and Republican parties. For their part, the cable networks, eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way. At times, the networks have even disregarded their own written ethics guidelines. Just about everyone involved is heavily invested in maintaining the current system, with the exception of the viewer.

Was Abe Lincoln a communist?

"The only question is as to sustaining the change [an increase in taxation] before the people. I believe it can be sustained, because it does not increase the tax upon the 'many poor' but upon the 'wealthy few' by taxing the land that is worth $50 or $100 per acre, in proportion to its value, instead of, as heretofore, nor more than that which was worth but $5 per acre. This valuable land, as is well known, belongs, not to the poor, but to the wealthy citizen.

"On the other hand, the wealthy can not justly complain, because the change is equitable within itself, and also a sine qua non to a compliance with the Constitution." - Abraham Lincoln, letter to William S. Wait (March 2, 1839)

Lincoln goes on to cynically observe that even if the wealthy do complain, regardless of fairness, there aren't enough of them to carry an election. But that's beside the point: I bring this up as further evidence of how utterly stupid and ridiculous it is for Barack Obama to be called a communist, Marxist, or socialist simply because of his "spread the wealth" remark (which is almost always cited by critics out of context.)

A parsimonious argument for acknowledging the reality of global warming

Mark Vuletic explains why it is more absurd to deny the reality of global warming than to accept it. (And also provides a link to the humorous yet useful Global Warming Sceptic Bingo.)

A nice supplement to Vuletic's article is this post from Arthur Goldwag.

An age of American unreason

I really can't think of a more exemplary demonstration of the triumph of unreason in America than the sad fact that someone who runs a blog that features on a daily basis shrieking hysterical right-wing craziness that leaps off the page at you is asked to discuss politics on a major pretend news network on a pretend news show hosted by a comedian.

Update: To elaborate, here is a post where Geller says that President Obama is attempting to create a Nazi brownshirt youth movement which employs "thuggery and intimidation" to indoctrinate children into national socialism. That's insane, ok? Why is someone with no intellectual or academic accomplishments besides a demonstrated ability to say rabidly insane things about "liberals" and who wants to exterminate Muslims appearing on national tv? What's worse, what does it say about us as a society that someone who herself has an affinity for crypto-fascists and believes the absurd conspiracy theory that the President is a foreign agent (non-citizen)*, writes a book arguing that the Obama administration is waging "war on America" and gets a forward written by a former United States ambassador to the UN.

Are you kidding me? Is there anything short of flat-out white supremacism that would discredit a "conservative?" It's as if as long as you're saying terrible, horrible things about "liberals" - regardless of factuality or any kind of connection to reality - there is a place for you somewhere in the conservative movement.

*Here is a charming post where she suggests that the Obama administration is killing people to hide the fact that President Obama's birth certificate is a forgery.

The mobocratic spirit

"When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, to hang murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one, who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defence of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded. But all this even, is not the full extent of the evil. By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained." - Abraham Lincoln, "The Political Religion of the Nation" (Jan. 27, 1838)

Although Lincoln was speaking to citizen organized vigilante justice, I find the point equally applicable to government organized vigilante justice.

My latest discount book purchase

Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental (hc) by Marc Gerstein (with Michael Ellsberg) for 2 dollars.

The book's website has some good resources, too.

Bizarro quote of the day

"I think - for justice and for the sheer fun of it - that once we gain a commanding majority in the Senate, we should void the censure of Joe McCarthy (arguably liberal fascism’s most prominent American victim) and have him set up with a Presidential Medal of Freedom." - Mark Noonan

It's like a dispatch from some Twilight Zone-like alternate dimension.

What scientists know but the public doesn't know they know

Via Island of Doubt: 96% of climate scientists say the planet is getting hotter, but only 34% of the public think that climate scientists acknowledge that global warming is real.

Looks like I'm going to have to bump up Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming on my reading queue.

Bias at NPR

One of the most curious arguments that I ever hear in relation to "liberal bias" is that AM radio is just an answer to the "liberally biased" or "left-wing" NPR. It's one of the things that I find so outlandish that I'm not quite sure what to say to anyone who believes such. Listening to ten minutes of AM radio and then ten minutes of NPR ought to be enough to demonstrate that there is no such equivalency: NPR is a well rounded news source which provides diverse views and intelligent, open discussion, while AM radio is a cesspool of vitriolic, fire-breathing one-sided/close-minded partisan propaganda.

A few years back when Milton Friedman died, I remember thinking to myself while listening to NPR's respectful and laudatory obituary of him, that were NPR actually as biased as its movement conservative critics accuse it of being, I'd have been instead hearing fiery denunciations of Friedman's economics. And conversely, I thought to myself, if it was a Howard Zinn or a Noam Chomsky who had died, there is about a zero percent chance you'd be hearing praising obits in AM radio world.

Well, that little thought experiment is now a reality, as leftist icon Howard Zinn died on Wednesday. FAIR noticed (h/t CMD) that NPR didn't have exactly the same standard for discussing the death of Zinn as it did for conservative icon William Buckley.

When progressive historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, NPR's All Things Considered (1/28/10) marked his passing with something you don't often see in an obituary: a rebuttal.

After quoting Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, NPR's Allison Keyes turned to far-right activist David Horowitz to symbolically spit on Zinn's grave. "There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect," Horowitz declared. "Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse."

Horowitz's substance-free attack contributed nothing to an understanding of Zinn's life or work, other than conveying that he's disliked by cranky right-wingers. (Horowitz has been best known in recent years for his race-baiting and Muslim-bashing--Extra!, 5-6/02; FAIR report, 10/1/08.) He seems to have been included merely to demonstrate that NPR will not allow praise for a leftist to go unaccompanied by conservative contempt.

Needless to say, it is not the case that NPR has a consistent principle that all its obituaries be thus "balanced." Take its coverage of the death of William F. Buckley, a figure as admired by the right as much as Zinn was on the left. Upon his death in February 2008, NPR aired six segments commemorating him, none of which included a non-admiring guest.

I'm not the only one

I see that Media Matters also recognizes that Beck keeps saying the same nonsense over and over again like a broken record.

Who is it again that's supposed to be the criminal?

James O'Keefe, one of the conservative supremacists responsible for the anti-ACORN propaganda videos that were supposed to demonstrate how super duper evil and nefarious ACORN is, has been arrested.

History repeats itself today as the FBI arrests four people attempting to bug the district office of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA). David Hammer of The Times-Picayune is reporting that the the right-wing "gotcha" man, James O'Keefe, who orchestrated the effort to discredit ACORN via spliced video footage last year, is one of those who were arrested in the plot against a sitting U.S. Senator who is up for election later this year.

The FBI believes O'Keefe aided and abetted Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, "who dressed up as employees of a telephone company and attempted to interfere with the office's telephone system," thus entering federal property under false pretenses, at a minimum. O'Keefe was purportedly present for the attempting bugging and claimed to be waiting for someone.

Historians respond to Jonah Goldberg's "liberal fascism"

Make sure you take the time to check out the essays from several historians (and one researcher with a left-wing background) that Dave Neiwert organized for the History News Network that were posted today.

Academic historians, in fact, have tended to shy away from tackling Goldberg's book, precisely because it is such an obvious work of propagandistic polemics, and his methodology so shabby, that they haven't considered the work (such as it is) contained therein to be worthy of academic consideration.

But because Goldberg's fraudulent thesis has now become conventional wisdom on the American Right -- and particularly among the Tea Party set, where signs equating liberals to fascists and Obama to Hitler have become commonplace -- many historians, especially those who have specialized in the serious study of fascism, have come to the realization that calling out Goldberg for his fraud is long overdue.

To that end, I began organizing last fall a series of essays from academic historians and political scientists critiquing Liberal Fascism. The essays are now ready, and this Monday, Jan. 25, they will be presented at History News Network.

In addition to my introductory essay, there will be essays by four widely acknowledged experts on fascism:

-- Robert O. Paxton, professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of The Anatomy of Fascism.

-- Roger Griffin, professor of political science at Oxford Brookes and the author of The Nature of Fascism.

-- Matthew Feldman, professor of history at University of Northampton, and a co-editor of several academic texts on fascism.

-- Chip Berlet, senior researcher at Political Research Associates and the co-author (with Matthew Lyons) of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.

I'm particularly looking forward to reading Paxton's response as he has written what is widely considered to be one of the most definitive texts on fascism.

How much longer can Reason magazine exist in my links?

Having Ronald Bailey endorse the intellectual atrocity that is Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism was bad enough, but Nick Gillespie appearing in Beck's hour long dumbumentary of the book is really testing my patience.

It's nigh impossible for me to find anyone credible who isn't immediately disgusted by Beck's mainstreaming of classic paranoid, anti-intellectual extremism.

The wrong business model to emulate

I've already noted how dismaying I find it to see MSNBC attempting to emulate Fox News, but Ed Brayton notes another example of the Foxification of MSNBC in its hire of Ed Schulz, who recently advocated for voter fraud.

I'm not sure how many people with journalism backgrounds work in executive type functions at MSNBC, but I must wonder how many of them are bothered by the fact that their network presents a block of primetime programming from 6pm all the way through the mid-am morning that insists entirely of commentary/opinion and no straight news. A strange thing for any entity designating itself a "news network."

Explicit eliminationism from Beck

"The republic and the progressive movement cannot coexist," says Beck.

You know, with someone who spends almost all of his time saying in a round-about way that liberals caused the Holocaust, you might think the irony of such a statement would hit Beck considering that the people who carried out the Holocaust believed that Jews and the German nation could not coexist.

Quote of the day

'In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by "the Left," let alone "the furthest left elements" of the Party?' - Glenn Greenwald

How many ways can Glenn Beck deliver the same crazy rant?

I have been busy lately so I haven't watched Glenn Beck's Fox tv show much over the last couple of months (thankfully), but I did happen to catch the show on Monday. And its like no time passed at all. Beck continues to repeat what he has said before .... over and over and over again.

He cites the same couple of audio clips; posits the same absurd, elaborate, Beautiful Mind meets the Da Vinci Code style conspiracies; makes the same McCarthyist charges; tosses out the same loaded buzzwords; and presents the same general message: "progressives" are totalitarian monsters secretly plotting to destroy America, and soon.

Someone needs to create the Beck/progressive equivalent of DDT Ban Myth Bingo where you can go ahead and check off a box everytime Beck mentions Alinsky, Soros, ACORN, Marxists, "fundamentally transform", etc.

During Monday's program Beck was ranting about ACORN and George Soros, something about Al Franken (stealing elections?), and the supposed Chairman Mao lovers in the White House. That the "manifesto" of "progressives" is to steal elections just like Saul Alinsky taught them to. That the White House is full of radicals and revolutionaries who admire Che, Marx, and Castro. Etc.

This was all leading up to Beck's teaser for his latest propaganda scare video "Live Free or Die," in which he has apparently attempted to up the ante of craziness from his last ridiculous propaganda video about the same imaginary subject. Check out the teaser



Really, I'm at a point where I'm not sure what to say to people who don't consider this as self-evidently insane. Consider that it has the same production value as Frank's "Scrooge" trailer from Scrooged.

Acid rain.
Drug addiction.
International terrorism.
Freeway killers.
Now, more than ever.....we must remember the true meaning of Christmas.
Don't miss Charles Dickens' immortal classic, "Scrooge",
Your life might just depend on it.

Another payola pundit

One of the very first things I blogged about was the outrage I felt over the Bush administration's use of payola pundits to corrupt the fourth estate. Although time forces me into brevity, I must observe that I'm also outraged - again - that the Obama administration has employed at least one such "independent" analyst who was clandestinely on the WH's payroll.

In January 2005, USA Today revealed that a U.S. Department of Education contract paid Williams to promote Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation on his TV show and to ask other African American journalists to do likewise. Democrats and media activists were appropriately outraged at such blatant and hidden government propaganda. A January 7, 2010, report by Marcy Wheeler on her Firedoglake blog exposed the similar failure of the Obama Administration and influential MIT economist Jonathan Gruber to fully and consistently reveal Gruber's role in receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars as a paid consultant to the Obama Administration, while promoting Obama's health care legislation.
...

What a difference partisanship makes now that Obama is president. In the Gruber scandal prominent liberals including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have attacked the messenger, Marcy Wheeler and Firedoglake, rather than criticizing the lack of disclosure and the money changing hands, and digging further into the relationship between Obama and his paid health care advocate Jonathan Gruber. Who else is receiving convenient Administration funding while flacking "independently" for Obama policies? In a democracy, we need to know and we have a right to know, no matter which party controls the White House.

Also see Glenn Greenwald's response to those who would defend the failure to disclose Kruber's finanical ties.

Quote of the day

'Hume and Kant both wrote about reason. We think of the Enlightenment as privileging reason, but for Hume and Kant their question was: what are the limits of reason? Hume was sceptical about the capacity of reason to solve our problems in metaphysics and elsewhere. And so indeed was Kant. For me, this is the reason why both Hume and Kant are central Enlightenment figures, and of course Kant is the author of the great essay “What is Enlightenment?” People ask, if they are Enlightenment thinkers, why are they looking for the limits of reason? The answer is that before the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the Enlightenment, the source of knowledge was authority – the authority of the deity, the Bible, the Church. If we are going to exercise authority over the acquisition of knowledge, we have to understand our instrument. That is why we need a critique of our mental powers. Look also at Locke, a major figure in stimulating the Enlightenment. His question was, What can we know? How much can we know? This is why one distinctive feature of the Enlightenment is the examination of the nature and extent of reason.' - AC Grayling, interview with Tzvetan Todorov

Fox News continues to demolish the line between "news" and Republican politics

Fox News has added its third potential Republican 2012 presidential candidate (after Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee) to its roster of "analysts" and commentators.

The former Alaska governor will appear as a pundit on various Fox shows, beginning Tuesday on "The O'Reilly Factor," and host an occasional series that was already in the works, "Real American Stories," which will examine inspirational tales involving ordinary citizens who have suffered setbacks. Palin has used similar language in speeches, and apologized during the presidential campaign for referring to small towns as "the real America" and the "pro-America areas of this great nation."

Palin said in a statement that she is "thrilled" to be joining Fox, adding, "It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news."

Fox News is an absolute and utter disgrace. Palin is completely unqualified to perform any kind of journalistic function. Fox hired her for the ratings boost and she took the job to help further her political aspirations.

Creating an informed citizenry - the real purpose of true journalism - had nothing to do with this hire.

During the course of her moron meets crazed moron interview with Glenn Beck, she agreed with Beck that unless you share their political views you're going to Hell (because God will be mad that you didn't do enough to stop President Obama from transforming America into a totalitarian Marxist dystopia). She also agreed without hesitation with Beck's conspiracy theory that President Obama is deliberately trying to crash the American economy.

I loved the part where Beck and Palin said they no longer recognize their country. Yes, efforts (however flawed they are) to expand health insurance coverage to more citizens signify the destruction of everything great about America, but people being kidnapped, put in prison without charges, and tortured to death is fine and dandy with them.

Trivia of the day

Question: When did the first public demonstration of anesthesia take place?

Answer: Carl Zimmer writes in Discover

The first public demonstration of public anesthesia during surgery took place in 1846 in Boston. A man named Gilbert Abbott took some deep drafts of ether, and surgeons began cutting a tumor off his jaw. The audience was shocked that Abbott did not scream and squirm. One London newspaper expressed the amazement that many must have felt: "Oh, what delight for every feeling heart to find the new year ushered in with the announcement of this noble discovery of the power to still the sense of pain and veil the eye and memory from all the horrors of an operation."

New conservative meme: there was no domestic terrorism under Bush 43

"We had no domestic attacks under Bush." - Rudy Giuliani

Leave it to partisan Bush hacks to make a ubiquitous Orwell reference necessary.

An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.

'It exists!' he cried.

'No,' said O'Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall.

'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.'

'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.'

'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.

Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

Beck's eliminationism: turn Manhattan into a prison island for liberals

My latest discount book purchase

Atheistic Humanism (hc) by Antony Flew for 5 dollars.

Flew before he converted to poorly informed Intelligent Design deism.

It's mint, too.

A curious pro-torture argument

Mark Noonan argues that because 58% of people in a Rasmussen poll think the Christmas Day terrorist should be waterboarded, waterboarding isn't torture:

Ok, liberals, you claimed that we needed to elect Obama in order to remove the stain of the evil Chimpy McSmirk BusHitler - including his heinous “waterboarding”, which you on the left actually consider to be torture. What say you to a strong majority of your fellow Americans figuring that we should go right ahead and do it? Are we all evil, too?

All evil, no. Blind to an evil? .... yes. I find it curious that Noonan seems to consider it inconceivable that a majority of Americans could agree that an evil practice is not evil. Cracking open a history book should dispel that notion; or for that matter, a book of basic logic.

The thing I find truly remarkable is how Noonan completely inverts reality and accuses "liberals" of doing precisely what he himself is doing.

Or is there any chance you out there will realize that the whole waterboarding issue was manufactured? You know - liberal leaders needed something to get your juices up about - get you donating, get you willing to back Democrats, that sort of thing - and so worked up a physically harmless but rather effective interrogation technique as if it were something right out of the Nazi/Communist play book.

In reality, waterboarding has been recognized as a quintessential torture since at least the Inquisition. It has been prosecuted in the United States at various legal levels as torture, including at the state level when it was used in the Jim Crow South to elicit false confessions from blacks. It wasn't until the Bush administration declared waterboarding a harmless, effective interrogation method that it magically became so for authoritarian followers like Noonan.

"As if it were something right out of the Nazi/Communist [sic] play book."

Ok, first. Why the slash in between Nazi and Communist, as if both forms of totalitarianism are some kind of unitary evil. Secondly, and more importantly, there is no as if to it. Calling your torture "enhanced interrogation" is something that Nazis did.

George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase “enhanced interrogation technique”. By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed torture and that “any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful”.

So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.

The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform – they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation – and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).

The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration’s house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

And the reverse-engineered torture techniques that the Bush administration approved as "enhanced interrogation" did literally come from a Communist play book!

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ignoring Noonan's inability to consider the damaging long-term psychologocial effects that can result from being drowned repeatedly, let's consider his belief that waterboarding is phsyically harmless. Once again, he's wrong.

It seems pretty obvious that waterboarding can cause emotional trauma, but does it threaten a person's physical health?

No doubt about it, says Allen Keller, an associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine (who, it should be noted, testified that waterboarding is a form of torture before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2007). During waterboarding, some of this water can flow through the nostrils and into the lungs, Keller explains. Water in the lungs, especially if it's dirty, can cause potentially deadly pneumonia or pleuritis, an inflammation of the lung lining.

Waterboarding could also cause hypoxia, a condition in which the body is not getting enough oxygen, either because the victim is holding his or her breath or inhaling water -- and inadequate oxygen supplies can lead to deadly organ failure, Keller adds.

But don't underestimate how tightly intertwined the physical and psychological experiences of waterboarding are, Keller notes. Since it mimics the terrifying sensation of drowning, it triggers the release of stress hormones called catecholamines that can cause heart rate and blood pressure to soar, potentially setting the stage for heart attack in a person with underlying heart disease, he says.

But even healthy people can die from sheer terror, as Martin A. Samuels, chairman of the neurology department at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston told ScientificAmerican.com earlier this year. The sudden outpouring of stress hormones can cause the heart to beat abnormally, hampering its ability to deliver blood to the body.

There's also the matter of waterboarding itself being part of a larger pattern of disregard for American and international law prohibiting the mistreatment of prisoners. A disregard that has resulted in persons being "interrogated" to death in multiple instances.

Finally, the bit about waterboading's effectiveness at yielding information. Wrong again.

On public education

"To afford all members of the human race the means of providing for their needs; of securing their welfare, of recognizing and fulfilling their duties; to assure for everyone opportunities of perfecting their skill and rendering themselves capable of the social duties to which they have a right to be called; to develop to the utmost the talents with which nature has endowed them and, in so doing, to establish among all citizens a true equality and thus make real the political equality realised by law - this should be the primary aim of a national system of education, and from this point of view its establishment is for the public authority an obligation of justice." - Marquis de Condorcet, report to French Legislative Assembly (1791)

My New Year's re-resolution

Due largely to two factors: 1) have my reading time reduced this year and 2) my inability to read through a book without being distracted into starting a different book - I failed to complete last year's resolution.

I did rather miserably, actually, only getting about 2/5ths through Donald's Lincoln. So my resolution this year is simply to complete last year's resolution.

Quote of the day

"[W]hen the political/media elite come to view the possibility that Larry Craig tried to pick up a guy in an airport as more scandalous than Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, or the dishonest march to war against a country that didn't attack us, we're in pretty bad shape." - Jamison Foser

Obama's political brain

Drew Westen, an Emory university psychologist and the author of The Political Brain, has written a lengthy article trying to figure out how it is that President Obama has managed to so quickly turn-off the very electorate that he was so good at mobilizing during the presidential campaign and election. The whole thing is worth perusal, but I'd like to highlight this portion:

Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it's uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can't tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead.

We have seen the same pattern of pretty speeches followed by empty exhortations on issue after issue. The president has, on more than one occasion, gone to Wall Street or called in its titans (who have often just ignored him and failed to show up) to exhort them to be nice to the people they're foreclosing at record rates, yet he has done virtually nothing for those people ...

The time for exhortation is over. FDR didn't exhort robber barons to stem the redistribution of wealth from working Americans to the upper 1 percent, and neither did his fifth cousin Teddy. Both men told the most powerful men in the United States that they weren't going to rip off the American people any more, and they backed up their words with actions.

Top science stories of the year

Scientific American's The Top 10 Science Stories of 2009 [Slide Show]

Discover's Top 100 Stories of 2009

As I'm writing this up, Discover has only posted up through story #65, but will be posting the rest of the stories through January. If you haven't already seen the list in the print copy, you may want to bookmark the page or subscribe to the feed to keep up with the list. The top 100 is always the issue I look forward to most.

Report absolves ACORN, Republican doesn't blink

From the Center for Media and Democracy

A newly-issued Congressional Research Service (CRS) study (pdf) on the activities of the community group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) found no evidence the group has engaged in fraudulent voting or violations of federal financing rules over the last five years.

The New York Times article that CMD uses as its source notes that

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa and one of the most vocal critics of Acorn in the House, said he found the report unconvincing.

“This report doesn’t begin to cover the transgressions of Acorn,” Mr. King said. “I think Acorn is bigger than Watergate.”

Right. Because the President ordering illegal activity is no big deal compared to imaginary fraud committed by a group that helps people keep their homes and registers minorities to vote.

Another political hack, untethered from reality

I've asked this question before, but I must ask again: what must an individual do in our political media culture - besides holding "left of center" views - to discredit oneself to the point that such an individual is no longer constantly called upon to offer commentary?

Is there any level of factual disconnect from reality that would merit this?

I mean, wouldn't this be getting kind of close?

On CNN today, GOP strategist and former Dick Cheney adviser Mary Matalin argued that President Obama is speaking too much about the severe debt, deficits, and economic recession he inherited from the previous administration. Defending her former boss, Matalin charged that President Bush had in fact “inherited a recession” and the September 11th attacks from President Clinton:

MATALIN: I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history. And President Bush dealt with it and within a year of his presidency within a comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent.

Matalin joins the ranks of Dana Perino in attempting to white-wash the Bush administration's failure to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks out of history.

Also, I'm not sure what she's talking about with the unemployment rate. The rate was 4.7% in January 2001; 5% by October 2001. What's her point? That Bush inherited an employment rate just below 5 percent while Obama inherited one at 8.5%? That the recession Obama inherited from Bush is far graver than the one Bush inherited from Clinton?

Liberals killed Jesus?

I haven't written much about the right-wing postmodernist effort that is Conservapedia, a site which purports to answer the supposed bias of Wikipedia by creating a site which filters reality through a conservative ideological prism. There are mainly two reasons I've ignored the site:

1. It's too easy. The site is so poorly written, so factually challenged, that I can't bother with it. The writing level seems so juvenile and amateurish that it doesn't just feel right responding to it, kind of like how it wasn't right for Billy Madison to play dodgeball with his new classmates.

2. The articles are so absurd that I have trouble believing that pranksters aren't editing them as satire.

For instance, when I wrote this I was trying to come up with the best way I could think of to satire the site's efforts to re-edit the Bible, conservatively. If I had actually gone about satirizing the enterprise itself, I would have joked about describing Satan as a liberal or writing that liberals put Jesus to death.

And then I actually come across this

“The trouble is, new translations of the Bible are done by professors at liberal universities who overwhelmingly voted for Obama,” Mr. Schlafly said. “Their political bias seeps into their translations and we felt it necessary to counteract that with one that uproots and eradicates any liberal bias.”

In Mark 3:6, for example, they have changed “Pharisees” – the Jews who were regarded as antagonists of Jesus – to “Liberals” though one user helpfully suggested “self-proclaimed elite.”

And the Conservapedia entry on "Pharisees" says that "they were the 'Democratic Party' of their day"

Right, see? Conservapedia has solved that pesky problem of the long history of various Christian sects blaming Jews for deicide. Jews didn't kill Jesus - liberals did. If you happen to have a Manichean, authoritarian framework of viewing the world - and the group that formerly was your scapegoat is no longer socially acceptable to hate - replacing them with a more generic group (i.e. "liberals" for "Jews") is about the only way that particular meme can survive.

Just tune into AM radio. You're not going to hear much talk about Jews waging war on Christianity and such, but you'll find no shortage of voices going on and on about "liberals" doing just that.

And this doesn't have to be any kind of conscience, explicit effort to hide anti-Semitic tendencies, so much a process of cognitive dissonance and rationalization that over time shifts the preferred scapegoat group from "Jews" to "liberals."

To see the transposed hate, consider this: when the Conservapedia crowd watches The Passion of the Christ - a film that seems quite apparently to have the marks of Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic upbringing - they must consider the movie's villains to be "liberals." Now, as Charles Krauthammer observed

In none of the Gospels does the high priest Caiaphas stand there with his cruel, impassive fellow priests witnessing the scourging. In Gibson's movie they do. When it comes to the Jews, Gibson deviates from the Gospels -- glorying in his artistic vision -- time and again. He bends, he stretches, he makes stuff up. And these deviations point overwhelmingly in a single direction -- to the villainy and culpability of the Jews.

The most subtle, and most revolting, of these has to my knowledge not been commented upon. In Gibson's movie, Satan appears four times. Not one of these appearances occurs in the four Gospels. They are pure invention. Twice, this sinister, hooded, androgynous embodiment of evil is found . . . where? Moving among the crowd of Jews. Gibson's camera follows close up, documentary style, as Satan glides among them, his face popping up among theirs -- merging with, indeed, defining the murderous Jewish crowd. After all, a perfect match: Satan's own people.

So I suppose"liberals" are Satan's people for the Conservapedia crowd. As Arthur Goldwag noted in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, a meme developed during the '08 election that Barack Obama was actually a literal minion of Satan via his admiration for Saul Alinksy, because Alinsky had made a dedication to Satan in Rules for Radicals. Nevermind that Alinsky made that dedication in the same spirit of various poets and artists (Goldwag cites William Blake) who made use of Satan as a symbol of rebellion against establishment or authority. A jaunt around Free Republic will find you several discussion threads about President Obama being a Satanic agent, based upon that very Alinsky dedication. The general perspective of such individuals, as Goldwag put it in an e-mail exchange is that, "Satan personifies liberalism--that's why Saul Alinsky liked him so much. Boil down the liberal enterprise to its essence and it's mostly infant sacrifice (legal abortion)--just like in the days of Moloch." This mentality is exemplified in Ann Coulter's Godless, in which she argues that "liberals" are monsterous, murderous atheists who worship abortion. (See here to view Goldwag's own post on the Conservapedia Bible project.)

And now I see that Chuck Norris - who apparently is a credible conservative pundit because he's an accomplished martial artist and has starred in numerous bad action flicks - has imagined that liberals/progressives would have retroactively aborted Jesus.

I reiterate for the nth time, I find it remarkable how casually acceptable this sort of hate is in our society, that it has such currency.