Robot Monkeys

Whenever I think that nothing Fox will do will surprise me, they manage to dig a ditch an get just that much lower.

The great thing about Fox & Friends is just how unabashedly “fair and balanced” it is. The hosts are such horrible hacks, but even then I didn’t think Roger Alles would let them stupid to essentially juvenile graffiti. Photoshopping photos of people you don’t like.

Wow. Just wow.

So CNN publishes an article about the Great Tomato Scare of 2008 (If anyone wants to use that, you owe me a buck.), and the headline completely misrepresents the article. The headline: “Health Officials Question Whether Tomatoes Behind Outbreak“. And what’s the quote from the story hightlights?
“FDA: ‘There is a strong epidemiological association with tomatoes.’” So where’s the source of the fear?

“Produce investigations are very difficult, because a lot of times, vegetables are eaten all together,” said Dr. Patricia Griffin, chief of the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. That makes it hard to trace back any one item to a source of contamination, she added. “We continue to keep an open mind about the possible source of this outbreak, as does FDA.”

Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, agreed. “There is a strong epidemiological association with tomatoes,” but the agency is also “looking into other ingredients,” he said.

So you have the scientists basically saying, “While we can’t be 100% sure it’s not from the tomatoes, we really really think it is.” Which of course means the take away is, “Scientists Dumbfounded!”

Now Occam’s Razor and Hanlon’s Razor says that I should attribute this to pure laziness, and that’s probably true. After all, the one story from Billy’s journalism classes is the time the TA or prof tried to explain the concept of a quorum using the example of “one more after the half.” Apparently this was too much more most of the students who would calculate the number required for a quorum as simply half, or one less than half. At least one proclaiming, “We’re not math majors!”

The future of American journalism at its finest.

However, I can’t help but think that this CNN headline is more indicative of American attitudes towards science. Nothing is known for certain, so nothing is known, and therefore everything is equally likely.
I believe this attitude comes from the poor state of math and science education in this country, and the need for “fair and balanced” coverage.

After 5 years of Iraq and 7 years on Afghanistan, the war is played out.

So why am I supposed to take the MSM seriously again?

Anonymous former newspaper man, as recounted by Frank Scandale, editor of The Record of Bergen County, New Jersey:

Yep, you guys have a liberal paper, albeit one I have never read. How can I know this? Well, and I say this with tongue in cheek, it would never occur to a conservative paper to engage in such introspection.

So I was looking at the CNN website and saw two icons sitting next to some of the headlines. One icon was a movie camera, which I knew meant it was a video link. The other icon is a t-shirt. Yes. You can get a t-shirt for selected hard hitting, breaking news stories like, LBJ Tapes reveal sudden about face.

So, why am I supposed to take CNN seriously again? And why can’t I get a t-shirt that reads “350 feared dead in Myanmar cyclone” or “Relative: Incest suspect served time for rape”?

All I need to do is figure out what they’re md5 hashing, and I can make my own!

CNN’s Rick Sanchez is still playing the Jeremiah Wright soundbite on a continuous loop. My god. This has been going on for weeks now. Can we please move past this? No, of course not. This is the easy story. The story that even most simpleton can write – and by “write” I mean “repeatedly play the same pixelated clip from YouTube.”

Of course CNN Newsroom is the crappiest of all the CNN programs. The stories right now on the web page are “Is Your Computer Slower Than When You Bought It?” and a featured article on tattoos.

I’m not surprised. It’s an easy narrative. I guess what makes the whole thing that much sadder is that when Obama said:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

part of me wishes that just for once, the media wouldn’t have interpreted that as a call to arms as Stephen Colbert mocked on his show.

So the press and the blogosphere is all in a dither about whether or not Hillary’s emotional moment in New Hampshire. Did she cry? Did she not? Was it genuine or was a ploy? Is she too weak to be president?

I’ve seen the footage. It was genuine. For all my complaints about Hillary, I’ve never doubted that she wants what is best for the country (most of the time at least). ThinkProgress is right. The press coverage of this is different for Hillary than any other candidate. Why? She’s a woman. And she’s Hillary Clinton.

The whole “Is she too weak?” talk is sexism. Blatant sexism we haven’t seen in years. It’s “She’s gonna get on the rag and nuke us all,” talk. No one has ever described Hillary Clinton as “weak.” This is sexist talk plain and simple, and it’s surprising that someone would even mention that in today’s day and age.

The speculation that it was a ploy is more of an phenomenon about the Clintons. They’re viewed as manipulative. Triangulating. The people that are saying that she faked it are so blinded by their own hatred they can’t see her as a person.

Hillary will say whatever she thinks will help her get elected, but she wasn’t then.

Via Think Progress:

The corporatists want the plebs to know they’re place.

Since Ryan loves his “lib blogistan,” I’ll write up my thoughts that I’ve already put out in a series of emails.

Huckabee is the nominee. It’s a done deal. I already said, Huckabee wins Iowa, loses New Hampshire, wins South Carolina, and the rest of the South and thus the nomination.

So why will this work. Well let’s examine the other candidates.

Fred Thompson’s campaign was DOA. I never understood why anyone thought he would be a serious candidate. He just never cared about running for president, and it showed. I was shocked he finished just above McCain in Iowa.

When he drops out, I can’t imagine him actually making a speech. I figure he’ll just stop showing up to events.

Giuliani’s “national strategy” was dumb and always was. He completely botched the nominating process for the start. Iowa and New Hampshire, and South Carolina are small states that don’t have many delegates, but the whole reason to campaign in them is to get the inordinate and undeserved press coverage they get.

Giuliani forgot that you’re not campaigning for delegates in Iowa, you’re campaigning for the bump. The press coverage, and the aura of inevitability. Staking your campaign on a bunch of retired New Yorkers in Broward County Florida that don’t even vote until four weeks and four lost elections pass, is a losing strategy. You have no buzz, no positive press, and worst of all, you’re a confirmed loser.

Add in his general big city mayor level of corruption, the fact that MSM is based out of NYC and don’t actually like him from his mayoral stint (for whatever reason), and the fact that evangelicals are squimish, he was going to have a rough time no matter what.

Romney is the only one that can knock off Huckabee. He’ll win New Hampshire, with Huckabee finishing a respectable second or perhaps just begin edged out for third. Still the story will be Huckabee because New Hampshire isn’t supposed to go for evangelicals, and New Hampshire likes voting against Iowa to show that they are “important.”

Romney is Huckabee’s main threat because the corporatists candidate. He’s got the money and the machinery. He can outspend Huckabee in every state, but Romney’s biggest problem is Romney. He never got traction in Iowa or anywhere for that matter. His whole appeal was, “I’m the choice if you don’t like Giuliani.” Not a very rousing message. The base doesn’t trust him. They rightfully think he’s an opportunistic flip flopper. He was pro-choice, and now he’s anti-abortion. He was for for gay rights, now he’s not. He is governor of liberal Taxachussets, and they won’t let him forget that.

The idea that Romney will become the nominee hinges on the idea that the corporatists won’t allow Huckabee to become the nominee. The corporatists don’t like Huckabee because he was a baptist minister prior to becoming governor of Arkansas and he has a populist message. However I don’t think they can stop him.

For 20-30 years the corporatists of the Republican party been playing their Southern Strategy of race baiting and stoking the fires of evangelicals. And for all those years, those people has been believing the lie that they can remake America. Well those kids, have grown up, and the corporatists that were running the party are retiring. Do you think it’s an accident that the Justice Department is full of Regent University graduates? The corporatists had to throw bones to the evangelicals to drag them along, and now those people that caught those bones 20 years are moving up in the hierarchy and bringing like minded people with them.

Now I’m not saying that a theocratic state is around the corner, but I am saying that there are true believers in the Christian right that believe that the party is theirs. I don’t think the plan of Wall Street sitting back and saying, “Tell the hicks we’ll protect them from the homosexuals,” is going to work forever, and the Huckabee candidacy is just the most recent crack to show.

The BBC recently reported on the change of the evangelicals from Bible thumping to a more nuanced message. Even the NY Times picked up the “evangelical left.”

So what does this mean? It means the corporatists of the Republican party are losing control of the evangelicals. They used to be able to say, “Here is your candidate. You show up to the polls and you vote for him, and he’ll end gay abortions,” while the candidate winked and nodded, and took up serpents and “spoke in tongues” and then passed a capital gains tax cut and a free trade agreement to move more jobs offshore.

Now, over twenty years later the evangelicals outnumber the corporatists and their grip is slipping. Sure you have some evangelicals like Joel Olsteen and rest of the absurdly materialistic “prosperity gospel” preachers, that say that Jesus wants you to be rich, and so it’s a sin to tax captial gains and what not. (Actually, I’m giving Joel Olsteen too much credit here. He doesn’t have any political agenda. He’s just running a standard confidence game and lining his pockets with old ladies’ social security checks like all the televangelists before him, but the corporatist evangelicals with the whole divine right undercurrent are a very real phenomenon, and the ones the Wall Street corporatists enjoy the most.

Then you have the social only evangelicals that want to keep the sodomites down, but want to keep their jobs as well. In times of economic uncertainty, this is a pretty big group, and this is who Huckabee talks to.

Then finally, you have evangelical left, that for some reason feels compelled to be born again, but is no longer buying into the Republican platform at any level. A small group, yes, but a growing group.

So why won’t the corporatists simply abandon Romney and back McCain and give him the nomination? Because even if the corporatists move to McCain, it won’t matter, because the base isn’t going to vote for McCain, even with, as Ryan put it, “[the media] publicly felating him every step of the way.”

McCain is regarded as a RINO. He’s the Joe Lieberman of the Republican party. Yes he’s backed Iraq. Yes, he backed the surge. And yes, we’re supposed to believe that the surge is “working,” but none of that matters. He’s “John McCain: the Democrats favorite Republican.” This is John McCain, who said called Robertson and Falwell in 2000, ”agents of intolerance.”

In 2000, John McCain ran as John McCain, the “Goldwater conservative” as he described himself, and he learned that there was no place in the 2000 Republican party for that kind of Republican. So starting in 2006, when he decided he’d run for president again, he started courting the religious right.

The christian right may be stupid, but they’re not that stupid. McCain is a poser, and no amount of adoration by the press is going to convince them otherwise. The MSM loves McCain because of the real John McCain. But whenever the Liberal Media Elite™ lavishes praise on him, it just confirms that McCain is not a real Republican. Or as I graphically put it, “[W]henever the Tim Russert et. al try to suck the cum from McCain’s balls, they’re sucking the life from his campaign.”

For Huckabee not to win the nomination, Huckabee has to screw it up. Huckabee has gotten the reputation of being a lightweight when it comes to international events, but frankly that’s not going to matter. It didn’t matter in 2000. It didn’t matter in 2004. And it’s not going to matter in 2008. The conventional wisdom (i.e. what a bunch of New York City news editors sitting around a water cooler think) is that Huckabee’s unpreparedness is a result of not having a staff to keep him up to date. That’s a pretty good insulator. Also, immediately after Iowa Chris Matthews was interviewing Huckabee and mentioned an article in the Jerusalem Post, and Huckabee mentioned that it was actually an AP story that the Jerusalem Post picked up. Matthews was visibly surprised (and said so) that Huckabee knew that. A few more moments like that, and Huckabee is in the clear on being out of touch.

Huckabee is probably already raking in the dough after his win in Iowa. This means he will be better financed to take on Romney and the rest. Huckabee is in this until the end. Huckabee’s biggest problem now is going to be hiring people to help him spend that money. A few bad moves and it can move away from him, but I don’t think Huckabee is going to do that. He’s comfortable with himself and his campaign. He’s got a winning formula and he’s going to stick with it.

Huckabee is going to lose New Hampshire, but place a second, perhaps just be eked out for a close third. This loss won’t matter because he already has the buzz from Iowa, and is expected to do well in South Carolina. Also the press has already laughed about New Hampshire having a habit of choosing someone different from Iowa. New Hampshire doesn’t have nearly as many evangelicals as the south and the midwest, but they might buy into Huckabee’s populist message, and that’s unique twist that differentiates himself from the rest of the pack, and put people that are wary of his evangelical background at ease.

Huckabee can appeal to everyone, and that’s why he’s going to get the nomination.

So Castro has surgery and passes power to his brother. Am I the only who hears this and says, “big freakin’ deal,” as opposed “My god! This is a Big Freakin’ Deal!”? It seems like the media has worked itself into a dither running their “Casto’s dead” storylines, about how Raul will relate to the US, when Fidel is going to take back power in a week, if that. What the hell is wrong with these people? It’s not like the press gets this worked up when the president goes under general anethesia. (”The president invoked the 25th amendment, and transfered power to the vice-president at 11am this morning just before being wheeled into an operating room for a routine procedure that is expected to last two hours. What shake-ups can we expect under the vice-president’s administration? Who will he appoint as Attorney General, and could martial law be declared? For some perspectives we’ve assembled this round table of AM radio talk-show hosts from around the country, and this political hack that has a book being published by our publishing arm. This will be immediately followed by a retrospective President Vice-President: Two Hours of History.”)