Tonight, President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address. A major theme of the speech will be jobs and the economy. Let's hope the president spares a few minutes for Wall Street reforms that might prevent a repeat of the economic collapse that we're slowly starting to recover from.
On Countdown Friday, Chris Hayes reported on a new study from the Program on International Policy Attitudes and WorldPublicOpinion.org at the University of Maryland, dealing with media misinformation and the 2010 elections. The poll found that "9 in 10 voters said that in the 2010 election they encountered information they believed was misleading or false, with 56% saying this occurred frequently." It also found that voters were widely misinformed on a number of commonly-discussed issues. There was a clear pattern of increased misinformation with Fox viewers--the more they watched, the less they knew. But misinformation was so widespread that it simply has to be regarded as a feature of our current media system, not a bug. On six of the eleven questions asked, a majority of respondents gave incorrect answers--in some cases up to 80 and 90%--even higher. And as such--although MSNBC viewers are actually less misinformed than most overall--this segment on Countdown unfortunately misses the mark, even though what it reports is substantially true:
It should be further pointed out that although it wasn't proven that the Chamber of Commerce had used massive foreign donations to support GOP candidates, (1) it gave that impression in some of its overseas pitches, (2) under Citizens United its books were sealed, so proof was impossible, so (3) either it lied to overseas donors or it lied when it denied using their money in US elections. Either way, it can't be considered a credible source. In short, this one of those ironically rare situations where the people giving the factually false response may have been closer to the truth.
On the flip: First a series of charts from the report showing how misinformed voters were. Then a bit of discussion about where the worst misinformation comes from. Then a broader look at how all-pervasive it is.
(A thoroughly disgusting state of affairs - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
After Ahmed Ghailani was found guilty of participating in a conspiracy to bomb two U.S. embassies in November, a conviction that could land him life in prison (his sentencing hearing is scheduled for January), the usual slate of right-wing pundits took to the airwaves, eager to denounce President Obama for trying the suspected terrorist at all.
Liz Cheney declared that the guilty verdict "signals weakness in a time of war."
John Yoo said prosecutors were "lucky to even get one conviction," adding that "It is really hard to see what the upside is to having civilian trials."
And Laura Ingraham, sitting in for Bill O'Reilly on Fox, called trying terror suspects in federal court "insane," "wrong" and "potentially dangerous."
Here's an ad submitted by the Palm Center, a Santa Barbara-based research center that produces research and conferences on Don't Ask, Don't Tell:
The ad was rejected by FOX News. Here's Palm Center Director Aaron Belkin:
"I am surprised that Fox News would reject an ad featuring allied Generals, given that host Bill O'Reilly and guest contributor Liz Cheney have both expressed support for open gay service. This is an important time for input from all sides on this issue, and I hope Fox will reconsider."
Actually, I'm not surprised at all, and the spiral continues. The rejection only further demonstrates they are a right-wing institutional cog, something we all know, yet the response to that is- guess what, swell the corporate profits of FOX and buy some advertising. Hmm.
And I certainly see the counterpoints, those being (a) reaching conservative audiences, say the audience in the office of a Senator who is a swing vote, at this point is useful (b) marginalizing FOX is too. But there are any number of other ways to accomplish these goals, and the response to an institution being a terrible actor cannot be to monetarily support that institution.
At Salon, Alex Pareene has a well-observed piece on the latest developments and the broader context of Fox's war on NPR ("House GOP fails to defund NPR 'Nazis'"), which begins:
Phew! NPR will not have some minuscule fraction of its budget endangered by angry Republicans. For now. The vote to defund NPR -- which is not really funded by the federal government -- failed in the House of Represenatives 239-171.
But this isn't the end of it! Don't the Democrats know that the midterm elections were a referendum on Nancy Wilson's "Jazz Profiles"?
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said the vote demonstrates that Democrats "just don't get it" and "are still not ready to listen" to the American people after getting thumped on Nov. 2. He suggested that House Republicans will pursue another vote on the matter when the new Congress convenes next year, when the outcome is likely to be different. "If the Democrat majority wants to continue to ignore the will of the people that's their prerogative, but the new Republican majority will not follow suit next year," he said.
Democrats just don't get it. Republicans know the American people want Congress to defund NPR because defunding NPR won an online poll, the modern equivalent of a Constitutional Convention.
Why did it win that silly poll? Because it's a dumb thing that Fox won't shut up about, and that is all the House of Representatives will tackle for the foreseeable future.
The piece goes on to note:
Fox hates NPR for cultural reasons -- one strives to present an objective view of world events in as fair a style as possible, while the other one is a media experiment in infusing everything from a relentlessly mindless morning show to a psychotic Bircher's revival show with Republican propaganda (with one hour set aside for car chases and bear sightings) -- but the event that led to the pointless foofaraw was NPR's long-overdue dismissal of official Fox Liberal Juan Williams, who explained that he was scared of "Muslims" in their Muslimy clothes, and then refused to actually apologize when told that that offended his Muslim co-workers at NPR. Fox gave him $2 million to sit around being a symbol of the culture wars.
Rupert Murdoch, Fox's owner, has waged war against public broadcasting in every nation where he has a media presence. (His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, began the campaign by complaining that Australian Broadcasting Corp. -- their BBC -- would be "improper competition" to his newspapers.) His newspapers and his son are currently battling the BBC.
And, of course, proceeds to Roger Ailes most recent ranting:
"They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive."
But, you know, he sort of has a point. NPR sorta is like the Nazis--the Soup Nazi, that is. Except with facts (relative to Fox, that is.) This was proven quite decisively seven long years ago, when the Program on International Policy (PIPA) at the University of Maryland published a report, "Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War".
The report focused on three fundamental "misperceptions" (AKA lies)--that Irag had WMDs, the Iraq was connected to al Qaeda and that world opinion favored the US invasion of Iraq. Unsurprisingly, it found that Fox viewers were the most likely to believe these lies, and NPR viewers were the least likely. Furthermore, belief in the lies was related to support for the war. Details in charts on the flip.
It's ironic, but when I debate back and forth across today's political divide, the one thing that members of the Tea Party Movement consistently love to point out is that their candidates stand or fall on principles. Thus it is alleged that the movement's quasi-heroic candidates prefer to go down to defeat rather than compromise or deviate from those very deeply held, almost solemnly enumerated principles. Well for one Tea Party star in particular, Alaska's Joe Miller, the principle of honesty seems to be missing from his litany of deeply held, immutable beliefs. You see Miller, as per recently released records was: "disciplined for using three co-workers' computers for political purposes and initially lying about it when he worked as a part-time lawyer for the Fairbanks North Star Borough in 2008" And what was the purpose of this unauthorized use of other people's workstations? Nothing less than an attempt to influence an online opinion poll for the Alaska State Republican Party Chairmanship. Miller eventually admitted, "he was using the computers to vote with "different URLs" in an online poll about the state's Republican Party chairman, Randy Ruedrich, whom Mr. Miller wanted removed. Mr. Miller cleared Internet cache files from each of the computers. He also used his own computer to participate in the poll and then cleared his cache. After initially lying about the computer use, he eventually admitted to it in a letter to his supervisor, Rene Broker, the lead borough attorney." Joe Miller eventually resigned from his position at the Boro in the wake of disciplinary action, but only after denying the charges while having deleted years of e-mail that would have included public records.
While we're on the topic of Joe Miller, how about his hypocritical stance on the constitutionality of unemployment insurance. Miller believes that there are no enumerated powers within the Constitution that provide for this benefit. From his interview on Fox News:"Why are unemployment benefits unconstitutional?" asked Fox News' Chris Wallace? "The Constitution provides enumerated powers, answered Miller. I guess my challenge is to anybody that asks, show me the enumerated power. And then look at the 10th amendment that says if it's not done in the Constitution, it's a power that belongs to the state and the people...When pressed on what he would do for the poor if elected, Miller struggled to provide details." However, the controversy does not end there. If Miller has such an aversion to the social benefit that is unemployment insurance than why did he abide his wife's reciept of unemployment compensation after she lost her job for violating nepotism rules?
Another area of federal spending that Miller publicly opposes is farm subsidies. But privately he was more than happy to be a recipient of the very benefits that he is now opposes. How you say? Well as it turns out Miller had received an agricultural subsidy on farmland he once owned in Kansas. Yet, true to form as with the situation surrounding his unauthorized computer use, Miller tried to dance around the farm subsidy issue until he gave up and came clean on this as well. To wit: "Until Monday night, the campaign had also dodged questions as to whether Miller had received federal farm subsidies for land in Kansas, where he once lived. After Alaska Dispatch received Miller's farm subsidy records under the Freedom of Information Act and told the Miller campaign about them on Monday, Miller's staff confirmed he received federal payments for 140 acres of cropland he owned in Kansas between 1990 and 1998. Like the vast majority of farmers in that region, Joe received payment from the USDA in exchange for managing his crops according to government standards," said campaign spokesman Randy DeSoto in an e-mail Monday night."
So, once again, what are the voters supposed to believe? They consistently hear Tea Party candidates preaching the virtues of fiscal rectitude, personal responsibility, smaller government, low taxes, ad infinitum while some of these same candidates are engaging in or have engaged in the very behaviours and activities that they so routinely oppose in their rhetoric. Miller is not the first member of the Tea Party Movement, nor is he likely the last, to be swept up in this type of controversy. The question that begs asking now is how many more of these revelations are going to surface after next Tuesday and then what are all of those who worked so hard for the movement supposed to do when they are stuck with having elected these political charlatans who where supposed to help them take their country back and make it a better place? We've already seen charges of hypocrisy levelled at Sharron Angle and Michele Bachmann related to their positions on government provided health care and their own families benefiting from these programs. That said, who should be surprised by the fact that Joe Miller is now revealed to be a serial hypocrite? The only remaining questions are who will be the next Tea Party personality found to be in the same quandary and just how many of these ticking time bombs presently exist within the movement?
Alaska's Joe Miller states opposition to federal minimum wagehttp://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101004/el_yblog_upshot/alaskas-joe-miller-states-opposition-to-federal-minimum-wage
The Democratic Party is spending nearly 100 million dollars raised in part from foreign contributions to help elect more immigration reform minded men and women to Congress.
If you happen to be a conservative of the Grand Old tea Party variety, how does such startling "amnesty" related news make you feel?
Suspicious? Fearful? Angry? Perhaps even more xenophobic than usual?
Each of those emotional responses would be expected from tea partiers had the Democratic Party actually taken this foreign money -- it has not.
The "U.S." Chamber of Commerce however, is a different story entirely.
Say what you will about the tea party but it has been remarkably effective at pushing select fringe candidates to electoral victories.
In late 2009, you would have been hard pressed to find anyone in Washington who would have believed that a Republican would soon fill the Senate seat held for decades by the late Ted Kennedy.
Brown -- a state senator at the time of his election -- was the first in what would become a long line of tea party endorsed candidates with rather colorful pasts.
Breaking news in the Show Me state: Robin Carnahan has decided to go toe to toe with Fox News in a legal case with major political ramifications going forward. The ad, which you can see here, and which the Carnahan campaign has chosen to leave on the air in spite of Fox News legal threats, is of an interview on Fox News with Chris Wallace where Wallace destroys Blunt for his ties to Abramoff and Blunt's own lobbyist girlfriend. Fox is using a law firm to go after the Carnahan campaign which has close ties to Blunt over the last several years, and is hilariously claiming that "The value of [Fox News] reporting is based in part upon the public's faith in the accuracy and integrity of those reports".
Robin Carnahan is taking on the beast here, bravely standing up to their legal threats, and should be supported by the progressive community in doing so. Show her some love for standing up to Fox News.
When I joined Twitter in July 2006 I was the 3,365th person to sign up for the 140-character message streaming social network. Now, with more than 190 million users having taken the plunge, I guess you could call me an early adopter of sorts.
See, I've always believed that the Internet -- and by extension new online tools like Twitter -- have the ability to create change because it levels the political playing field tearing down walls that have traditionally separated the powerless and the powerful.
It turns out I may have been wrong -- at least when it comes to a certain half-termer from Alaska.
While we have already posted several telling interviews from our filming at Glenn Beck's 828 Restoring Honor Rally, but we haven't yet posted our most emotional, interactive, and intense experiences. Towards the end of our day downtown, we stopped to chat with some folks from the crowd- as we did throughout the day. When we began our interview with Madonna from Indiana, we were in the exact center of a circular cement area that is the entrance way to the World War II Memorial. Our conversation started with Madonna, the only person in her group of 5 or so who decided to stop and chat with us. Quickly, however, not only did several of her friends decide to join our discussion, but several onlookers decided that they belonged in our conversation as well. Before we knew it, we were encircled by 30 or so rally goers who decided to engage us (verbally) in an effort to try and convert us to Glen Beck's White Christian Civil Rights Utopia. Below is the majority of the half hour experience in 6 parts and at the very bottom is all 30 minutes of our discussions unedited.
Remember last year, when it seemed so funny that no elected Republican leader could stand up and contradict Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck? Well, it's not so funny now that Obama & his adminstration have gone one better: the mere prospect that they'll be lambasted by Glenn Beck is all that's needed to whip them into line.
Joined by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, media mogul Rupert Murdoch appeared on Fox News recently to discuss his support for immigration reform in America. The two are members of the recently created Partnership for a New American Economy, a coalition of high profile businessmen and politicians advocating for comprehensive immigration reform.
Prominent members of the partnership include the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney Co., Marriot International and Boeing. The mayors of San Antonio, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Los Angeles are also part of the group.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer seems to be replacing Sarah Palin as Fox News' right-wing darling du jour. Brewer was just interviewed -- again -- for Fox News, making this at least the 5th time Fox has pitched softball questions at Brewer since she signed SB1070.
Maybe it was inevitable. After all, Brewer and Palin have a lot in common, and not just the faux border security website they launched together in May that features singing sock puppets. Brewer and Palin also share a knack for extreme rhetoric. And a gift for ignoring the facts.
Taxes, more than any other issue is what drives the Tea Party movement. Thus those philosophical arguments related to taxation and the resulting size of government constitute the very essence of the rationale for the movement's existence. How then will the movement react and adapt to the latest findings of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which reveal the movement's essential positions to be clearly at odds with empirical facts? As such, the Tea Party movement may soon find that the very rationale for its existence is being fundamentally challenged by a reality very much at variance with the movement's belief system. Likewise, the Republican rhetoric about taxes increasing may also start to ring hollow.
The Bureau's findings as reported by UPI are as follows: "Including state, federal and local taxes -- with sales tax and property tax thrown in -- the average tax bill came out to 9.2 percent of personal income in 2009.... That's down from an average of 12 percent over the past 50 years. The tax burden has not been this low since 1950...The U.S. tax burden has shrunk to its lowest level in 60 years...The tax rate has fallen 26 percent since 2007, a sharp drop that reflects progressive tax rates passed during the Clinton and Bush administrations and the 2009 federal stimulus bill that cut taxes by $800 for married couples earning up to $150,000." The Bureau's findings are just the latest in a growing body of evidence that refutes the basic premise which the Tea Party movement relies upon to energize its followers and fuel it's much hoped for transformation of American government. In a piece that followed this years Tax Day Protests, the Associated Press observed: "Lost in the rhetoric was that taxes have gone down under Obama. Congress has cut individuals' federal taxes for this year by about $173 billion, leaving Americans with a lighter load despite nearly $29 billion in increases by states."
In an article, which appeared in Forbes in March; "The Misinformed Tea Party Movement", conservative writer Bruce Bartlett outlined just how little members of the Tea Party movement actually knew about the structure and level of taxation. Utilizing a survey of movement protestors at a recent rally Bartlett found: "Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944... In short, no matter how one slices the data, the Tea Party crowd appears to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are, whether referring to total taxes as a share of GDP or in terms of the taxes paid by a typical family." In contrast in 2009 the corresponding number was 14.8%. When it comes to the structure and composition of taxes, the Bartlett article is chock full of repudiation for just about everything that the Tea Partiers believe in and that does not bode well for a movement that has as one of it's stated goals, the reconstitution of the size of American government based on its belief that taxes are too high and that they will crowd private borrowers out of the credit markets. Bartlett sums up his skeptisim of the Tea Party movement with an insightful statement that points out just how confused the Tea Partiers may be: "It's hard to explain this divergence between perception and reality. Perhaps these people haven't calculated their tax returns for 2009 yet and simply don't know what they owe. Or perhaps they just assume that because a Democrat is president that taxes must have gone up, because that's what Republicans say that Democrats always do. In fact, there hasn't been a federal tax increase of any significance in this country since 1993." And to think, such an observation would roll off the tonuge of an economic censervative who once promoted supply-side theories and who had also worked for Ron Paul!
Ironically, its not just on the issue of taxes that the Tea Party movement is in a bit of a pickle. For one thing, the movement's overall lack of a cohesive strategy for affecting political change works against its durability as a force on the American politcal scene. Atlantic's Michael Kinsley points out that unlike the anti-war movement of the 1960s which had a central theme and aim, the Tea Party movement is so fractionalized in terms of leadership and difuse in its overall ideological makeup so as to be more than a little precarious as a long term movement with staying power. Quoting Kinsley:" Not only do TPPs (Tea Party Patriots) not have one big issue like Vietnam-they disagree about many of their smaller issues. What unites them is a more abstract resentment, an intensity of feeling rather than any concrete complaint or goal." Kinsley points out that in their undefined frustrations the Tea Partiers have in affect discarded the much-cherished notion so dear to the conservative credo, self responsibility, in that everyone's problems can be directly traced back to Washington D.C. or their state capitol. Kinsley defines this inherent flaw in the movement as follows: "Personal responsibility" has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs-even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn't have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great "other," a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?"
There is one other major time bomb ticking away inside the Tea Party movement, and that is the company it keeps. Who are the leading personalities associated with the movement, none other than some of the most controversial characters alive in American politics today: Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Glenn Beck. If Bachmann and Palin weren't the Thelma and Louise of the far right, who would it be? I mean if the G.O.P. ever were to find itself in the back seat of their car they will, like the movie characters find themselves on a joy ride off of a cliff and heading straight for political disaster. It goes without saying, that having Beck as the Tea Party movement's most vocal media personality leaves allot to be desired, unless your aim is to turn the movement into a laughingstock. After all, can you put together a more gruesome threesome than the aforementioned when it comes to alienating independents from the Republican Party? I doubt it.
Lets face it, if it were not for the fact that the Tea Party movement has become the primary pawn in the ideological proxy war between MSNBC and Fox News, its presence on the American political landscape would be far less visible. A recent Quinnipiac Poll found that only 13 percent of American voters say they are part of the Tea Party movement and that this group is largely white, had supported McCain and presently backs Sarah Palin. But in what could be the most telling piece of evidence derived from the Quinnipiac Poll is that: "Overall, this survey paints a picture of the Tea Party movement that encompasses a broad swath of the American middle class, but clearly at this stage one that is a minority group. In essence their numbers equate to about the size of the African-American electorate overall," That said and with that empirical evidence in hand, does anyone really think for a second that the future of American Conservatism or its fellow traveler the G.O.P. is best served by hitching its wagon to the Tea Party movement, especially when that movement has been exposed as containing a fundamental philosophical credo that is so starkly at variance with established political facts and trends.
3) Tea Party Rally Upbraids 'Gangster Government' by The Associated Presshttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125251286&sc=emaf.
4) My Country, Tis of Me, There's nothing patriotic about the Tea Party Patriots. by Michael Kinsleyhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/my-country-tis-of-me/8088/
5) QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY NATIONAL POLL: TEA PARTY COULD HURT GOPhttp://thepage.time.com/quinnipiac-university-national-poll-tea-party-could-hurt-gop/
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