Every Day Is Opposite Day

per Media Bias Fact Check:

The Western Journal:

While Obama Made Millions off the Presidency, New Report Says Trump Lost $1.1 Billion

Years after leftist media outlets attempted to paint former President Donald Trump as an evil, greedy menace, the exact opposite has recently been revealed.

Dealing a massive blow to the establishment media’s narrative of Trump’s alter ego as the devil himself, Forbes reported Tuesday that the former president actually lost $1.1 billion after his presidency, causing him to fall almost 300 places from his original spot in billionaire rankings.

I guess the point thye're trying to make is that the guy they said was totally inept at business is the guy who's made loads of money, and the guy they tell us is some kind of business genius is the guy who lost over a billion dollars, even though he was skimming federal revenues - funneling those tax dollars into his own pockets?

Alrighty then. Got it.

Rush Limbaugh Is Dead

I'm not celebrating the death of Rush Limbaugh. I just don't do that. I didn't celebrate when the SEALs nailed bin Laden, and I'm not going to do that even now when one of god's great asshole-ish fuckups suffers greatly and dies in pain.

You may have noticed, I'm not exactly sad about it either.

Rolling Stone:

When Rush Limbaugh, the Great Bloviater of the AM dial, signed off from the “Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies,” two days before Christmas, he warned the faithful in the raspy remains of his famous trumpeting baritone: “The day is gonna come, folks, where I’m not going to be able to do this anymore.”

For 13 terrible days in Trumpland — while the mad president that Limbaugh helped make possible was flailing for survival, while the­ faithful were trying to “stop the steal” of the election, and even while the Republicans blew their Senate majority in the Georgia runoffs — the loudest voice in the right-wing echo chamber remained silent. By the time January 6th rolled around, even the millions of fans praying for a miracle cancer cure had to figure: If Rush had passed up the chance to fearmonger about Raphael Warnock’s old sermons and mock Jon Ossoff’s hair, well, he must be finished. At least with his trademark golden microphone, if not with this earthly realm.

But then, a miracle: The president incited a white riot on Capitol Hill, and like a mortally wounded superhero detecting cries of distress from his people, Limbaugh got himself to his Palm Beach studio by noon the next day, and unleashed a master class in state-of-the-art conservative disinformation. He knew the drill. He’d pretty much invented it.

First, a signature move: Belittle the story as partisan hysteria from the lamestream media while sneaking in a big, exonerating lie. “All of a sudden, protesting Congress is being called the end of the world!” Limbaugh sneered, making use of his rested voice. “A bloody coup attempt! Even though the only blood spilled was that of an unarmed Trump supporter.”

Rioting? Looting? Blue Lives lost? Uncle Rush was here to remind everyone that those are things that the left, especially the “anti-American” Black Lives Matter, does all the time. “They’ve burned down political federal courthouses, after barricading people inside of them. They’ve taken over freeways. They’ve taken over entire cities,” Limbaugh said. Contrast that with the harmless shenanigans at the Capitol. “Yeah, I know they breached the doors and took some selfies.” But, folks, really — just look at who was in Washington on January 6th! “These are Republicans, they don’t raise mayhem,” Limbaugh scoffed. “They don’t know how. How many times have we sat here over 30 years bemoaning the fact that this is not what Republicans do?” A master touch there: So far were the “rioters” from actually rioting, one can only wish they had raised just a little hell while they were there, like the blacks and antifa do.

Then, of course, after he dramatically made the case that there was no violent insurrection on January 6th, Limbaugh justified and praised the violent insurrection on January 6th. “We’re supposed to be horrified by the protesters,” he said, feigning perplexity. “There’s a lot of people out there calling for an end to violence” — even, can you believe it, “a lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable regardless of the circumstances.” Pause for effect, here it comes: “I am glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea-party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord, didn’t feel that way.”

As Limbaugh surely hoped and expected, social media lit up with both “dittoheads” — shorthand, in Rush World, for 100 percent agreement with the host — and denunciations, as headlines quickly sprouted: “Limbaugh Compares Capitol Hill Riot to American Revolution,” “Limbaugh Dismisses Calls to End Violence After Mob Hits Capitol.” (On the next day’s show, he humble-bragged: “I did it on purpose. … I wanted to take the hit yesterday. I was attempting to take the flak and the incoming for Donald Trump.”)

So there: That’s how it’s done. The plain, observable events of January 6th had not merely been denied and deflected, but transcended — wafted into the bubble of alternative right-wing reality that Limbaugh first began blowing up 32 years ago. Of course, this new narrative (or narratives — you can choose Republican innocence or justified violence, as you please) had absolutely no contact point with reality. And of course, Limbaugh spun his tale (as always) from the flotsam and jetsam of post-riot rumor and innuendo, subreddits, and Gateway pundits. Inside the bubble, sources matter as little as facts or logic. What makes sense in this parallel universe is whatever distracts and absolves white, non-liberal Americans from blame, guilt, or responsibility. It’s whatever reminds them of both their supremacy and their victimhood. It’s whatever emboldens them to strike back at the evil left-wing empire that is always busy plotting to subjugate them and destroy America As We Knew It.

And that is what Limbaugh delivered, once again, for Republican America in the wake of the insurrection. It was a final command performance of its kind, especially given the host’s condition. But it’s what Limbaugh had done, while dying, for a whole year. This incredibly wealthy super-patriot used his life’s last energies to do his damnedest to recast a pandemic as a deadly, partisan culture war. To paint a lawless and lunatic president as a wronged and heroic savior of the republic, a symbol of all the myriad wrongs done to Team White America. To call the first woman of color nominated for vice president a “ho” and a “mattress,” to depict racial-justice protests as signs of a coming Armageddon, and to stir up hysteria about a Democratic plot to steal the election. And, ultimately, to lead the cheers and comfort the troops as Republicans turned against democracy itself.

He did it all so well, in fact, that Limbaugh — despite frequent absences — shot back to the top of the Power 50 radio rankings for audience and influence. It was the strangest sort of comeback-slash-curtain call. And it should be career-defining now that Limbaugh, who died on Wednesday, has had his final say. Limbaugh might have begun as a ratings-obsessed provocateur, but he became one of the most influential subversives in American history. If we didn’t fully recognize that before 2020, or January 6th, we ought to know it now. No single person — not Reagan, not Cheney, not McConnell, not Trump, not Q — has contributed more than Limbaugh to the mass derangement of white America.

The piece goes on to describe Limbaugh's rise, and I don't give a fuck about that. I was there to watch it - it disgusted me then, and since, and that fucker's dead now, and I'm not the least bit interested in recounting the details of what a complete asshole he was.

Sometimes a man's death is a net positive.

Whittle Away

For some "conservatives", this could mean they start to turn back to a more mainstream version of their former selves.  Kinda where I used to be - before Willie Horton, and that horrifying clusterfuck at the '92 Republican convention in Houston.

(Yeah, OK - prob'ly not. A guy can dream)

Vox:

Notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claims a “form of psychosis” caused him to believe that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.

For years Jones, the founder of InfoWars.com, peddled a conspiracy theory about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman brutally killed 20 children and six adults in 2012. Jones has repeatedly claimed the massacre was a “giant hoax” carried out by “crisis actors” in a broad scheme to trample on Second Amendment rights.

In a video released Friday, Jones acknowledged in a sworn deposition stemming from a lawsuit filed by the families of Sandy Hook victims that the school shooting was in fact real. Jones blamed the “trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much” for triggering his extreme distrust in news and information.

In any field - any market at any time in history - there's always been a struggle to be seen and heard. They started calling it "clutter" as Mass Media was coming into its own, and if you want to get your message out, and make it stick so as to make yourself memorable to the consumer, you have to figure out ways of cutting through all that clutter.

In a media universe that exists in cyberspace, the clutter has grown to a level that drowns out all but the loudest voices - or the weirdest - or the most adamant - or the ones that are just plain adamant about their weirdness to the exclusion of everything but the part that might be useful for cutting through the clutter.

Anyway, one by one, the darlings of Wing-Nutopia are showing themselves to be even worse phonies than the "librul media elites" they say they love to hate.

And it's kind of encouraging that the courts are proving again to be the means of making some of these dicks behave less dickishly.

Of course, that means we're right to be worried about what Mitch McConnell is trying to pull - stacking the Judiciary with Daddy Staters who're more than a little sympathetic to shutting us off from our 1st amendment right to petition for redress.

And so it never ends.

There's no such thing as Once-n-For-All, and we have to stay in this fight no matter what.

Today's Tweet

It's more than just possible that both this asshole and our current POTUS could be the results of Wingnut Hate Media.

Homeboy Aaron Schlossberg just ruined his whole life because he couldn’t keep his racist mouth shut.

pic.twitter.com/GnMXIPsv34

— Zach Moody (@zach_pilot) May 16, 2018

 

That kind of rant is not something that just springs into being from that guy's own internal dialogue - it's not organic.

It's a product of training.

Today's Tweet

Trump’s rigged election conspiracies are the product of years of conservative "voter fraud" fear-mongering and it threatens our democracy: pic.twitter.com/LeZqtJXvUR

— Media Matters (@mmfa) October 26, 2016

This Just In

So, the Radical Right keeps pissin' and moanin' about how everything's all skewed in Hillary's favor, and they never get an even break (in spite of Mr Barnum's admonishing us never to give them one), and how Trump can't lose in a place like Pennsylvania unless it's rigged and on and on and on.

Well, Breitbart being the stand-up kinda joint they are, decided to spend some money and put a poll of their own in the field, and - oh golly - turns out their hand-picked sample came back with Hillary up by 5 points.

Oops

hat tip = Twitter @taniel

Today's Stoopid

Limbaugh's really starting to flame out and spiral in - he's on the down-slope of the bell curve - so the topics of discussion (as well as the level of the discussion itself) have to get weirder and farther out in order to keep his audience of diehard dead-enders tuned in.

“Don’t doubt me on this. A lot of people think that all of us used to be gorillas, and they’re looking for the missing link out there. The evolution crowd. They think we were originally apes... If we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape, and how come he didn’t become one of us?”

Today's Wingnut

They don't come any slimier than Alex Jones.

And y'know, Alex - your obsessing about Rubio's obsessing about Trump (and other stuff too) seems to indicate a certain particularly obsessive thing that might say a helluva lot more about your pathology than anybody else's.

Jesus Schwartz, dude.  How is anybody supposed to keep up with any of this double flip with a full-twisting backward takeoff whatever the fuck?

Zimmerman III

...or IV, or whatever we're up to now.  It's hard to keep track.  I guess I'm wondering when they'll finally get tired of fucking around with this guy and just Cop-Murder him, and I'm not advocating for the cops to punch this asshole's ticket BTW, but isn't that kinda what we do now?  We have a Criminal Justice System that doesn't work for shit, and an awful lot of our cops have come out of a military where the basic policy is Kill Your Way To A Peaceful Resolution - what're we waiting for?

Or maybe he's still alive because he's not anonymous enough to be disposed of discreetly.  Celebrity has its privileges here in USAmerica Inc.

CNN:

George Zimmerman -- the man acquitted by a Florida jury over the death of Trayvon Martin -- was arrested Friday in Florida on suspicion of domestic violence with a weapon, local authorities said.

Zimmerman, 31, was arrested by police in Lake Mary around 10 p.m. and booked into the John E. Polk Correctional Facility, according to that facility's website.

In addition to domestic violence, Zimmerman faces a charge of aggravated assault, reports the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, which operates the Polk Correctional Facility.

And one more little thing - battalions of Daddy State Chicken Chokers spent buttloads of time and energy defending George Zimmerman and slagging Trayvon Martin; when might we expect them to step up and tell us they got that one wrong?

Small Wonder

I really don't get a lot of what Rush Limbaugh has to say.  And I'd like to think it's mostly because I'm just not that dumb.  But sometimes, it's even harder than usual for me to understand, unless I stop and remind myself that it's a show.  Like most of the wingnut junk out there, it's just a show.  The fact that millions of rubes gobble it up and then make voting decisions based on this bullshit is a disaster worthy of George Carlin's fondest imaginings, but that's a different puddle of puke waiting for us at a different subway station.

Today's wonderment is:  Limbaugh is always on some kind of rant about Political Correctness, but if he's so dead set against it, then why does he so often use the terminologies of Political Correctness?  In this clip, he even goes so far as to manufacture a phrase like "British African-Americans".

The guy is an obvious phony, but when I remember that he's been at it for 25 years - and that he's amassed a personal fortune of $400M doing it - I have to stand in awe of that level of hucksterism.

hat tip = Mock Paper Scissors

Listen To Charlie

Logical fallacy is the bread-n-butter of American Media.  Almost everything that goes out on TV & Radio, or into what's left of the Dead Tree Publications business is going to include some level of "Yeah but the Democrats" and "Both sides do it" and "It has to be all and only this way or all and only that other way".  

Wanna know where all that False Equivalence and False Dichotomy shit gets us?

Here's Charlie Pierce to 'splain some of it to us:

What we had in the AIDS epidemic was political opportunism married to what became obvious ignorance. What we are seeing now, promulgated by a conservative bubble machine that has built a self-sustaining universe around itself, is political opportunism married to an active campaign of disinformation. This is a terrible thing. The people making a profit out of it are people who are too lazy to mug old ladies or swindle the blind. The people making a profit out of it are people without consciences, people who are as free of patriotism as they are free of the inconveniences of having a soul. These are dangerous people, and it's far past time for the honorable people in my profession to stop treating them like the worthless hacks they are. They are no longer cute. They are no longer funny. They are no longer the respectable "other side" of some fanciful imaginary political debate. They are dangerous propagandists. They are peddling poisonous lies and putting people's lives at risk. Every journalist who treats them as anything else, and every politician who treats them as anything else, are actively abetting evil.

Take, for example, Laura Ingraham, who cashes a very nice check from ABC News in addition to her day job as a radio flamethrower. Ingraham has begun to traffic in "alternative" theories about Ebola, treating a virus as though it were another vote to suppress or immigrant to bash, and lending her microphone to fringe nitwits because panic is profitable, and because almost everything, even a rare disease, is worth throwing at a president you don't like.

Like the man said - the earth is a roughly spherical body that turns on its axis about once per day and orbits the local mid-sized star about once every 365 days, and while you're entitled to believe otherwise, your opinions to the contrary don't mean diddly-shit.

--and--

The country simply cannot go on this way, with one of our two political parties completely insane, and with a counter-cultural universe that claims the right to promulgate its own science as equal to the science produced by actual scientists, and with this dangerous lunacy treated as legitimate by powerful people who ought to know better. As I once wrote, it doesn't matter how many people vote for the anti-gravity party, you still can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. A dangerous disease is not a matter of debate. Your profitable fantasy and the reality of the disease do not deserve an equal place in the discussion of what we as a society will do about the disease. The response is going to have to be precise and empirical. It is going to have to be impatient with cant, and immune to the delusions on which demented ideology feeds.

It's kinda important to believe as many true things as possible, and to not believe as many false things as possible; and so it's really really really important to be able to tell the difference.

Listen to driftglass and BlueGal every Friday, and almost every time, you'll get a decent reminder on how to spot the "both sides" crap.

Today At Fox Nation

Here're 3 of the top stories at Fox Nation today, and I've circled the numbers of the comments for each article.

OK - we're all about hyped up nationalistic pride and compulsory expressions of patriotism, so yeah - yay, troops!

But wait - problems at the VA?  Problems that are real; and problems that probably can actually be laid at Obama's feet?  But crap, that means I'd hafta consider acknowledging that I want Da Gubmint to do something - it just confuses me.  So y'know what?  Uhm... if these guys didn't have the guts to die on the battlefield like they were supposed to, then they can't expect me to go outa my way to do anything special about it now.  Buncha moochers.  Fuck 'em.

Now you're talkin'!  All we need is a little glimmer of daylight and we'll be able to find some quack to speculate wildly about Hillary's "condition", and that means we can go on ignoring our problems while we squat in the dirt chanting Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!

No soul and no honor.

Stating The Obvious

Because sometimes, ya just gotta say it straight out.

From No More Mister Nice Blog:

This study has been conducted five times since 1971. The percentage of reporters identifying as Democrats has dropped, too, though not as much, while the number calling themselves independents has increased. Yes, the right thinks this proves the existence of media bias.

You know what could really turn this around? Imagine if right-wing kids could watch conservative journalists practice in real time. What if they could actually see journalistic conservatism modeled for them that way? How different everything would be if -- I know this sounds crazy -- a conservative channel were the highest-rated news source on American television. Yeah, I know -- crazy, right?

The existence of Fox News, and the fact that it's extremely successful in the ratings, should be an inspiration to right-wing wannabe journalists eveywhere. It isn't, though, for two reasons:

First, nobody at Fox News actually practices journalism. Nobody digs out stories, finds scoops, offers depth and perspective and background on what's happening in America and the world. It's all advocacy. There's no reporting.

Second, the Fox party line is that journalism is evil, even though, ostensibly, Fox is in the business of journalism. If the central news source in the right-wing universe tells its audience every day that the news business is in league with the devil, well, you can't be surprised when righty kids don't want to turn Satanic.

And my first reaction is, "well duh".  But if it's really all that obvious, then more people would be completely hip to the scam of Wingnut Media, and we wouldn't have anywhere near the problems with Deliberate Ignorance that we have in this joint right now, and we'd also have something that more closely resembles a Functioning Government.

Charlie's Pissed

And you really don't want Charlie Pierce pissed at you.  He'll cut you - up down and continuously.

DumFux News "reporter" Ed Henry flounced out of the room when Jay Carney refused to call on him during a press briefing - Mr Pierce, if you please:

(the piece starts off with a block quote from HuffPo)
A visibly angry Henry walked out of the briefing after press secretary Jay Carney ignored his repeated questions. Speaking to colleague Brian Kilmeade on Monday, Henry said that, though he looked annoyed, he had to duck out to appear on television. "The briefing went on for about 40 minutes and I didn't get a question, for whatever reason," he said. "I guess Jay Carney will have to answer that. I don't know why, I guess maybe he was upset. I wasn't. I was running to do a live shot." "Does he do that a lot?" Kilmeade asked of Carney. "That hasn't happened before, ever," Henry said, adding later that the "professional thing" for Carney to do would have been to call on him.

And Charlie goes to work:

You work for the bilge pump of wingnut propaganda. The "professional thing" for you to do is to slink off and do five years penance reading the hog reports on a 300-watt station in west Texas before you're allowed in respectable company again. The "professional thing" for journalists with any pride to do is to spit at the mention of your network's name and to hang bells around the neck of you and all your colleagues so that we know when you're coming and can clear the room. You're lucky you have Jay Carney. Put me in that job and you're doing your stand-ups from a chicken wagon halfway down the mall. Put me in that job and your picture is in every guard shack.

Your organization is a running sore on the profession. It's what happens when a craft fails to keep its septic system up to date. You do not deserve the respect given to a schizophrenic in Lafayette Park who screams about the aliens from Zontar and the Rockefellers. I know people who staple their screeds to lamp posts in Central Square who are far more worthy of professional courtesy than you are. You work for a Chronic Ward of grifters, unemployables, and whatever else sticks to the bottom of journalism's shoes on a hot summer's day.
Brian Kilmeade is your "colleague."
Res ipse loquitur, dude.

Today's Best Blog Line - #2

"Ignorance Arbitrage"

Here's the whole post from No More Mister Nice Blog:

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

EVEN THE TRIVIAL TALKING POINTS FROM THE RIGHT ARE DISHONEST

I saw that Newsmax was pushing this ridiculous story and wasn't sure it was worth a post, but now I see it's a front-page story at Fox Nation, so here's the ridiculousness:

'Butler' Box Office Sales Plummet by One-Third

The movie "Lee Daniels' The Butler" saw its weekend box office receipts plummet by nearly a third, from $24.6 million in its opening week to $17 million last week, after a storm of protests from Republican and veterans groups.

The film depicts a White House butler who served eight presidents, and has come under fire for its portrayal of former President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy as being racially insensitive and for casting Jane Fonda as the first lady.

Supporters of President Reagan and veterans groups especially have criticized the film, with some calling for boycotts....

Oh, its box office plummeted? By nearly a third? And it's all because of boycotts by Reagan lovers and Jane Fonda haters? (Or, as the Fox Nation headline implies, because America has suddenly become tired of Oprah Winfrey?)

Nonsense. Every movie that reaches #1 at the weekend box office "plummets" the next week. Boycotts aren't necessary -- moviegoers just move on.

Yes, The Butler's box office dropped 33.0% in its second weekend, according to Box Office Mojo. But the previous #1, Elysium, suffered a54.1% drop in its second week. Before that was 2 Guns: a 58.4% drop.Before that was The Wolverine: a 59.9% drop. Before that was The Conjuring: a 46.9% drop.

Do I need to go on? In fact, The Butler had the smallest second-week drop for a #1 movie since Identity Thief back in March.

This story is up at Fox Nation even though Rupert Murdoch runs a movie studio. It's not as if the moviegoing habits of Americans are unknowable to the Fox media empire.

But this is what I call the right-wing media's "ignorance arbitrage." The conservative purveyors of this nonsense know it's nonsense. But they know they can sell it to people who don't. And that's what they do.

Groundswell

David Corn talking about the Wingnuts planning to take over the whole joint.



It's a bit less scary when we learn more about it.

But something that stays a little scary for me is that "the messaging" effort (ie: Corn's point about the apparent collusion between GOP and "The Press") is pretty solid simply because we've grown accustomed to the false assertion of a "librul bias in the media".  How long have 'Conservatives' have been bitchin' about that one?  The frame's been in place for a long time, so we're ready to accept this development as just another example of Both Sides Do It.

So here's the pitch: "the media's been lying to us all along - we all know that.  We're breaking away from 'the establishment' and we're gonna tell the real truth about what the government doesn't want you to know...blah blah blah."

Another weird development is that DumFux News is starting to become identified (by some) as not being Pure Right enough.

The glimmer of hope is that these new revolutionaries can be recognized as being  different from the old ones only in the extreme levels of their hunger for power.  And the exceedingly dangerous deliciousness is that Ginny Thomas and Ted Cruz and Alan West make up the monster of the Republican id.  Created for a political purpose, the monster now turns to destroy its creators.

Here's to keeping the collateral damage to a minimum.

One more random connect-the-dots wondering:  how does Jeff Bezos buying WaPo figure into any of this?

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Holy Crap

I had no idea this thing still existed.

On "Age of the Earth":

See also Counterexamples to an Old Earth.

The Age of the Earth has been a matter of interest to humans for millennia. The subject is still debated today, particularly between young-Earth scientists, who believe that the Earth is only approximately 6,000-10,000 (8 × 103 ± 25%) years old, and most scientific organisations who believe that Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years (4.54 × 109 ± 1%).[1][1] The scientific evidence points to a young age of the earth and the universe, and the biblical creation organization Creation Ministries International published an article entitled 101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe, which further argues for the young age of the Earth.

Old Earth advocates rely on one flawed assumption to the exclusion of other evidence, similar to how an investigator may mistakenly rely on one eyewitness's opinion to the exclusion of all else. In fact, eyewitness testimony is proven to be less reliable to than other indicators, just as the assumption by Old Earth proponents that the rate of radioactive decay has always been constant is flawed. In fact, a large number of physical processes, such as neutron capture and fluctuations in solar radiation, can affect the rate of radioactive decay of elements in the Earth's crust and render radioactive dating measurements unreliable with errors up to 5%, depending upon the specific methods used.[2] Even so, such an error will not cause a calculation of the age of the Earth based on radiometric dating to be off by up to five orders of magnitude.

A test to quantify openmindedness:

1. Do you resist admitting the possibility that a conservative approach to education is far more effective for students than a liberal one?
2. If it were proven to your satisfaction that some idea you've been using to bolster a political argument was false, would you keep using that idea in your argument?
3. Do you resist admitting that something you accepted for over a decade is, in fact, completely false?
4. Do you resist the possibility that Hollywood values result in significant harm for those who believe in them, and to innocent bystanders?
5. Do you think it is impossible that increased gun ownership reduces the rate of crime?
6. When President Ronald Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, would you have thought that it was politically impossible for the Berlin Wall to be torn down?
7. Did you think, or still think, that the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") is impossible?
8. Do you think that it is impossible that the Shroud of Turin is authentic?
9. Do you think that there must be a purely material-based explanation (such as magnetism) for remarkable homing and migration behavior of birds and butterflies?
10. Do you think that it is impossible for the speed of light in the Earth's atmosphere to have been measurably different in the past?
11. Do you think that it is impossible to measure openmindedness?
12. Do you think that evolution[2] must have occurred?
13. Do you think that is impossible for the power of 2 in Newtonian gravity, whereby the gravitational force is proportional to 1/r2, to be more precise with an exponent that is slightly different from 2, such as a gravitational force proportional to 1/r2.00000001?
14. Do you resist admitting that some things taught to you in school are completely false, and even known to be false by some responsible for the material?
15. Do you deny that some widely required theories of science, such as the theory of evolution, may actually impede the progress of science?[3]
16. Do you deny that the imposition of socialism and same-sex marriage on a nation could harm its competitiveness at international events like the Olympics?
17. Do you refuse to consider the possibility that "experts" may not have all the answers, and that the best of the public may have valuable insights to which experts are blind?
18. Do you think that if you read parts of the Bible years ago as a child, you can claim to "have read the Bible" and that you have no reason to read it regularly now?
19. Do you believe that because the Earth's orbit and rotation are what they are now, they are guaranteed to remain stable for billions of years?
20. Do you refuse to consider the possibility that Hebrews might have been authored by Jesus?

The above questions can be asked, and one's closed-mindedness can be scored based on how often they answered "yes" above. Answering more than half as "yes" reflects acute closed-mindedness.

That's what passes for intellectual inquiry and insight from our friends way over there on the far end of the spectrum - except I get a bad feeling sometimes that maybe it's not considered all that far out.  When I talk to some people, they seem to accept this nonsense; or at least have it in their minds that this is nothing more than a difference of opinion.  And the main problem I have with that thinking is that an awful lot of  "conservatives" are not willing to leave it as a matter of differing opinions - they're actively seeking to turn this shit into law.  And the people who shrug and give me the standard "comme ci, comme ça" response are the ones doing nothing to counteract it.

Go, Charley

The staffers working for Charley Pierce must be truly awesome (or maybe it's just Charley).  I dunno, but dang, somebody has some real chops when it comes to diggin' up nuts.

I first saw President Reagan as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little ...frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads. --Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for the Reagan administration

If you wanna good breakdown of the monuments to mendacious mediocrity that David Brooks puts up every week, read driftglass (he does pretty well with Sully and Friedman too).

But nobody (imo) gets at Nooners With Ronnie better than Charley Pierce:

Anyway, she's on again about the IRS dumbassery. A while back, she pronounced it the worst scandal in the history of scandalosity. Everybody laughed, even the ghosts of the Nicaraguan peasants killed by the contras with the weapons we bought for them by selling missiles to the mullahs in Iran, which happened while Peggums herself was contemplating hot monkey bunion-sex with Reagan's metatarsals. So, she has now moved along. The IRS dumbassery is now a clash of American civilization itself.

The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason.

Uh, because it was the first one?
(This is really too easy.)

Today's Wingnut Media Bite

Ben Shapiro (of the epic fail "Friends of Hamas" incident) runs this:

...which leads Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs to ponder: "I think young Ben is honestly intimidated. Cowed, even. His dissent is being chilled. You can tell by the giant 73-pixel all-caps screaming headline."

That's the game these deep-fried-guano-for-brains-whiney-butt pussies play all the time.  Shapiro is so intimidated; Obama has everybody so flummoxed and shivery that...what, exactly?  If they weren't so afraid - so intimidated - they'd do something more than run their horseshit headlines in the eleventy-seven point fonts they're using now?  Like what?  What're they calling on people to do?

And when might we expect the Press Poodles to fucking call 'em on this?

Today's Stoopid

This is the pic somebody working for The Director of Communications chose for the White House's twitter account:

Now, if you're a Wingnut, then it has to be perfectly obvious that Obama is sending a subtle message to his fellow-Islamists that the plan is proceeding apace, and that the US is on the verge of collapse, and Death To America, my bruthuhs!

What this is actually - is what visitors to the Oval Office see when they're standing in front of Obama's desk and they happen to look up at the ceiling above them.

So yeah.  Obama's trying to kill us all by making it possible for everybody to get decent healthcare insurance; and by dis-entangling us from foreign wars; and by making sure the banks work properly; and why even bother debunking this crap?  I need to stop.

Don't be such a fucking rube.