Today's Pix

Today's Random Thought

We don't free ourselves by changing the world.  We free the world by changing ourselves.

Dear Gov Walker

Nice ad, Scott. But y'know what? If you want people to stop hatin' on ya, then you'll just have to figure out how to do fewer hateful things your own self. And BTW - what you're doing in this ad is called whining - which is exactly what you spent a good long time and lots of tax dollars railing against. But what really gripes me is that you decided to send your wife and kids out to do your fighting for you. Here's a look at the reactions from YouTube:

Quote

Knowledge is power.
Power corrupts.
Learn and grow evil.

Be Advised

Lots to do for the holidays and such, so I'll have to be away from the blog thing for a few days.

Watch for the new Christmas letter soon.

Have fun and I'll be back as soon as I can get my shit together.

A Short Battle

The War on Christmas is sometimes just a little hard to follow.  What if some Israeli settlers attacked a busload of Palestinian Christians (eg)?

Do ya think that's gonna find its way onto DumFux News? Yer right - prob'ly not. Ma'an News Agency

We Are So Fucked

The logical companion for Perpetual War is the Perpetual Election Campaign.

Simple arithmetic - and thank God for that cuz numbers ain't my thing:  If we get a huge turnout for 2012; something that approaches the 63% level of 2006, it still means the "majority" is actually comprised of just over 31.5% of the people who're eligible to vote.  In most years, that number is more like 23%.

Guess what?  A poll from USA Today/Gallup asking about the 2012 elections shows 70% "can't wait for it to be over".  Worse yet, that number goes to 75% if you're asking people in a dozen states that figure to be the battleground next year.

There's no such thing as "political coincidence".  If something happens, it's because somebody wanted something to happen.  That's not to say the Rule of Unintended Consequences has been repealed - it's only to say  that nothing in politics happens all by itself.  Cause and Effect is alive and well.

I'll say further that no matter what the prevailing sentiment is, somebody's gonna stand in front of it and tell us he's been leading that charge all along, or he'll point to it as an example of what we need him to fix for us.

After a good 25 years of Slimecasting, and Both Sides Do It, and They're All The Same, we have an electorate with no fucking clue what's going on and no fucking way to figure out what's going on, and that gives the smart politcos the opportunity to embrace the suck and turn Voter Alienation to their advantage.

First, you can make it harder for a lot of people to vote by passing Voter ID laws; by cutting back on Early Voting and Absentee Voting; by narrowing the window for voter registration; etc - and by making the process itself even more repellent, the people you're keeping out are less willing to fight to get back in.  Then you only have to concentrate on moving a couple of percent of the "undecideds".

We didn't just turn a blind corner and find ourselves in the shit - we're here because this is where somebody wants us to be.

A Question

If God sides with the Repubs, how come He put so many donkeys in His book?

The Good Samaritan 

Born in a manger

Palm Sunday, ridin' a what?

"...with the jawbone of an ass"

Where's alla elephants at?

Rick Perry

..is a total tool.

Perry officially retired in January so he could start collecting his lucrative pension benefits early, but he still gets to collect his salary — and has in turn dramatically boosted his take-home pay. (Texas Tribune, hat tip = Balloon Juice)

And also too:

The Free Market At Work

(hat tips = The Agonist and Hullabloo)

"Welcome to the AshleyMadison.com era"

From Media Bistro:

“Now that Newt is the leading contender in the race for the GOP nomination, we felt compelled to make a point to illustrate how times have changed when a serial divorcee/adulterer is capturing the hearts of the American people,” says Noel Biderman, founder and CEO, premier online affair service Ashleymadison.com.

One From Wonkette

Wonkette is on a roll.

...what we need is another ultimately unsuccessful Third Party Candidate to safely release the steam of rage from the national pressure cooker. It worked in the 1980s and the 1990s and all the way to 2000, heh heh. (Funny how Liberal Democrats kind of lost the taste for Third Party candidates after the GOP stomped back into the White House using Nader’s cover, right?)

La Musica

Too Typical

Did the KKK use the slogan "Keep America American"? Yes. Did the Romney campaign use the slogan "Keep America American"? Yes. Is any of that in dispute at all? No. But Tweety decides (for all of MSNBC, apparently) that they have to walk it back. And the reasoning is that MSNBC should have - but didn't - get a comment from Romney first. Really? Was yesterday the only chance anybody had to call Romney? Are all the phones broken or busy today? MSNBC has not been shy about reporting on Nixon's Southern Strategy in 1968, or Reagan's dog-whistle speech in Mississippi in 1980. They managed to point out the Trent Lott / Strom Thurmond / Dixiecrat connections, and they took several opportunities that I recall to remind us of Robert Byrd's KKK past. Wanna know why "Independents" keep gettin' suckered by Repubs? It's because the Dems and the Librul Media are so easy to paint as appeasers and apologizers. Grow some hair on your sack. If what you said was true, then stand up and defend it.

Bill O'Reilly: Super Genius

What is it with this guy? There's a part here where he actually tries to make the point that the US military is not "government".

Assuming my standard position that there are no accidents on DumFux News, then O'Reilly is either advocating for change, or he's announcing a change. I have to wonder - how close are we to the Cheney/Rumsfeld vision of a US Military-as-Private-Enterprise?

Considering his comment that "the government can't even run the Post Office" (which it doesn't, btw - and hasn't since about 1973), maybe he's just painting himself into a rhetorical corner(?)

(hat tip = Wonkette)

Where's Life Magazine When Ya Need It?

What if the war ended and nobody noticed?

It's A Wonderment (updated)

NOTE: I couldn't get any confirmation on this - no news outlets are picking it up at all.  So it's prob'ly falsely reported or an outright hoax.

This one has me going in 37 different directions at once. I'll try to get some guidance by running it by some people who should know about such things and come back to it later, but I feel the need to post it right now.

Some questions: Is this what Rumsfeld's vision was all about? Did he simply take Smedley Butler's characterization of the US military as "muscle for the corporations" and let it fly? 

This OathKeeper stuff has been around for a dozen (?) years, and the militarization of law enforcement has been there for just as long - why is this coming up big again now? Is it just because of this latest fight over Defense Authorization, or is it because "the wrong guy" happens to be in the Oval Office?

However it lays out, there's political gold in this for somebody.

(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Political Recycling

The Gingrich believes poor kids are in need of some good old fashioned lessons in The American Work Ethic, so he says we should put them to work scrubbing floors and toilets in their schools.  For right now, let's try to ignore the stunningly blatant hypocrisy of Big Government raising children, and just concentrate on the Modified Southern Strategy aspects of it all. (pause to reflect)

OK, now let's take a look at WIllard's latest foray into race baiting (via Wonkette):

Here’s the title of a pamphlet published in 1920 by the United Klans of America, as found in the catalog of Yale’s Beinecke Library:

Why you should become a klansman : of interest to white, protestant, native born Americans who want to keep America American.

None of this is new in any way shape or form. Let the freak speak his mind; and sometimes all you can do is turn your back and walk away, but then somebody who would normally be on his side has to have the balls to shut him down.

Something To Watch For?

I've been wondering when the smart guys on Wall Street would wake up and start to see the Occupy thing as a customer service issue, and apparently, some of them are doing just that.

From Mother Jones:

Founded in early October by former British diplomat Carne Ross, the 60-person Alternative Banking Group has become a repository for OWS-friendly financial insiders. It includes current and former investment bankers, traders, and lawyers for the securities industry, but also many laymen—including housewives, people who used to sleep in Zuccotti Park, and guys with piercings who wear Che Guevara T-shirts. The group shares Occupy Wall Street's website, its nonhierarchical structure, and its distaste for partisan politics. "I'd say the one thing that everybody agrees on is that the system isn't working," O'Neil says. "And there is nothing about being a Republican or a Democrat in that statement."

Early in the piece, there's a reference to a reform proposal put out by Jon Huntsman that I think has some merit - which prob'ly means the Wrong Wing Media will never let it see the light of day.

Today's Pix

Taking The War On Christmas Very Seriously Now

About That Liberal Press Thing

Couldn't remember if I'd posted the graphic when it came out, so just in case I missed it, here it is.

And BTW, this isn't some kind of outlier.  The basics that lead to these results don't ever change more than a few percentage points.

I remember Pew doing the same thing after the 2000 election, when the heat was really on - seemed like the nutters couldn't stop howling about how the press was constantly trying to put Gore in the White House.  Well, guess what, boys and girls?  Pew's research in 2001 showed a bias in favor of Bush positives and Gore negatives in every major newspaper - it all worked out to be something like 7-5 against Gore.  And of course it got practically no play outside of Academe.

Guess what else?  The effect this slanted coverage has on our thinking actually has a name: "Media Priming", and while it's news to me, it's been around for a very long time.

Here's a fun little appetizer from Melissa Dahl at msnbc.com:

It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance, says lead author Markus Appel, a psychologist at Austria's University of Linz.

And from a guy named Scott London, a good breakdown of "Framing":

In his book Is Anyone Responsible?, Shanto Iyengar evaluates the framing effects of television news on political issues. Through a series of laboratory experiments (reports of which constitute the core of the book), he finds that the framing of issues by television news shapes the way the public understands the causes of and the solutions to central political problems.

Since electoral accountability is the foundation of representative democracy, the public must be able to establish who is responsible for social problems, Iyengar argues. Yet the news media systematically filter the issues and deflect blame from the establishment by framing the news as "only a passing parade of specific events, a 'context of no context.'"

--more--

In their 1977 book, The Emergence of American Political Issues, McCombs and Shaw argued that the most important effect of the mass media was "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us." The news media "may not be successful in telling us what to think," the authors declared, "but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."

There are no accidents when it comes to what goes on in our politics.  It's being carefully scripted for us, and we have to find ways to countervail it.