Is That A Poll In Your Pants or...

"...A Times/CBS poll of Tea Party supporters confirmed what we all suspected — two-thirds of them admit to getting all or most of their “news” from Fox News. These are true ‘people of the bubble” who are genuinely surprised if we laugh at them for believing that the president was born in Kenya. Inside their bubble it’s a twilight world of distemper, paranoia, and rumor where the warm light of reason (or even the dim light of neutrality) will never fall. Where did the Tea Party get the dizzy notion that health care reform was some kind of communist plot? Fox personality Glenn Beck, the unstable caveman now routinely described as “the guru of the new right wing,” was monitored by the Politico website for his use of inflammatory buzzwords while America debated health care. Its log showed Beck saying “Marxist” 127 times, “communist” 330 times and “socialist” 404 times. This kind of demagoguery leaves nothing to chance. Herding the uncomprehending for the enrichment of the cynical won’t win you a place in heaven, but it’s highly lucrative. In his first year tracking communists for Fox, Beck increased his audience by more than 50% and became the hottest property on cable TV, with an eight-figure salary...

Still, Beck is a special head case. Testing his limits, he’s pressing boldly into unmapped territory on the Outer Right, out where few public figures have ventured since Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare or Father Coughlin’s pro-Nazi broadcasts of the ‘30s. (Though Father Coughlin, no whore to Wall Street, called capitalism and communism the two horns of Satan, which is still worth considering.) In a recent outburst Beck warned his radio audience to boycott any church that preaches social justice — code words for Communism and Nazism, he declared — and was quickly repudiated by his own Mormon Church. Last week he denounced Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” as subversive, un-American music. If Beck had stumbled onto Dan Pollitt’s memorial service in Chapel Hill, he would have called the FBI. Even his on-camera colleagues at Fox, solemn purveyors of audience-tested right-wing bombast, have been eyeing Beck uneasily. Just as the Republican Party grows increasingly wary of the Tea Party—-what kind of woolly-wild candidate might it take to win their votes, how far right is there before you fall off the edge of the American mind?—-smug corporate reactionaries are beginning to suspect that Glenn Beck really means it, and that he may be inconveniently deranged..."

Read more @ Progressive Populist.

Media Rare

“…every time one of my concrete-pouring pals tells me the country is headed to hell in a hand basket thanks to drug-addled media lesbians soft on crime, I am tempted to reply, in my best third-grade-recess voice, ‘I know you are, but what is Rush?’ There are the standard targets, but I swear to your, the scariest thing I heard on my car radio all year aired on a station that had recently switched to a liberal talk format and was running promotional liners one of which featured a female caller saying, ‘I used to listen to NPR, but now I listen to Air America in the morning, because they make me laugh.’ I was pouring hot coffee in my lap at the time, and may have misheard.”

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

TEA and Fantasy

"Many people live in information cocoons in which they talk only to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect."

David Brooks
NY Time columnist


"They come with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality...and create a world in which their consumers have a reality presented to them that is completely at odds with the reality the rest of us live in."

Michael Tomasky
New York Review of Books

Still thinking small...

The biggest science machine ever built has begun churning out the smallest known bits of matter in the universe. Its goal is to uncover some of the deepest, long-hidden secrets of nature.

This enormously ambitious device is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, a 17-mile-long ring-shaped tunnel 300 feet under the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It began operations on March 30 and has been called the greatest scientific undertaking since the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb during World War II...


"... The proton collisions produce a spray of even tinier particles, mostly "quarks,'' which are the smallest, most fundamental building blocks of matter so far discovered. According to CERN, protons are 100,000 times smaller than the simplest atom, hydrogen, and quarks are 10,000 times smaller than protons. For comparison, if a hydrogen atom were 6 miles across, a quark would still measure less than four thousandths of an inch..."

Read more @ McClatchy Newspapers.

Think small...what's in a nonmillion.

"...What ocean microbes lack in size they make up for in numbers. Marine census researchers calculate there are a "nonillion" of them.

Never heard of nonillion? Well, it's a lot. It's 1,000 times 1 billion, times 1 billion, times 1 billion.

Of course no one can really envision a number like that, so the researchers turned to the popular comparison measure — the African elephant.

A nonillion microbe cells, they say, is about the same weight as 240 billion African elephants — or the equivalent of 35 elephants for every person on Earth.

And that's just the microbes."

Read more...

Spill Baby Spill

What's It All Mean?

“To be sure, there were times you needed tall, tall boots, and every once in a while, if things got too bloated, or someone overreached, Taylor would rare back in his chair and – his one hand triple-tasking a whiskey glass, cigarette, and a pointer finger simultaneously – would direct our attention across the barroom to the opposite wall and say, ‘Hey. Hey. Hey.” Until everyone was looking at the photo-enlarged R. Crumb comic book cover just up the wall from the jukebox and beside the bulletin board with the postcards, bumper stickers, and headline ephemera. On the cover, Mr. Natural – in his robe and wingtips – is riding the sidewalk on a kick scooter. Flakey Foont and Big Baby are peeping over a wooden fence, and Flakey Foont says, “Mr. Natural! What does it all MEAN??’

And Mr. Natural, just cruising on that scooter, says “Don’t mean sheeit…”

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

Racism On The Ropes

You Only Have To Drink The Kool Aid

James Bopp Jr, a Republican National Committee member from Indiana and author of a "purity" resolution that will receive consideration among committee members this week, said the resolution is about bringing conservatives back into the GOP fold :

"It's the difference between success and defeat," Bopp said. "It's counter productive for us to moderate our conservative message. We've tried that and it failed... We nominated the moderate's poster child, John McCain, for president. It's a prescription for defeat. What we have to do is be faithful to our conservative principles and when we do we will win."


"There is significant opposition on the RNC to any sort of litmus test or resolution that would take power away from the state parties or even primary voters as this proposed resolution would do," said Henry Barbour, a committee member from Mississippi. "We need to stick to our conservative principles without telling folks in the Massachusetts GOP that their choice for a U.S. Senate nominee cannot receive funding because of some litmus test."

Barbour, a nephew of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), said the meeting should focus instead on the "blocking and tackling of elections."

Read more @Washington Post

Textbook Fundementals

“There are two basic facts about man. He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge thing.”

Don McLeroy
Texas Board of Education


“Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict. But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.”

Don McLeroy

"I'm a dentist, not a historian. But I'm fascinated by history, so I've read a lot."

Don McLeroy

Read How Cristian Were Our founders @ New York Times Magazine

Hee Haw

“Democrats give away their old clothes; Republicans wear theirs. Republicans employ exterminators; Democrats step on the bugs. Democrats eat the fish they catch; Republicans stuff 'em and hang 'em on the wall.”

Sean Donlon

Not Too Big To Fail: Blockbuster

"The increasingly competitive industry conditions under which we operate has negatively impacted our results of operations and cash flows and may continue to in the future. These factors raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern."

Blockbuster Video
Press Release


NEW YORK (AP) - Shares of Blockbuster Inc. sank 30 percent Wednesday after the video rental chain warned that it may have to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Competition from DVD-by-mail company Netflix Inc. and DVD vending machines operated by Coinstar Inc. have eroded the Dallas company's revenue even as it staggers under a heavy debt load.

Blockbuster Inc. said in a regulatory filing late Tuesday that it was suffering "significant liquidity constraints," and could have to file for bankruptcy protection if it was unable to convince creditors to restructure a big chunk of its debt or its business continued to deteriorate.

Read more...

This Is Wisconsin...

"I can't say the cows ever appeared overly distressed by what certainly had to be a disruption in their day. They would pause in chewing their cud, kinda freezing in a "hunh?" sorta pose, and their eyes would bulge a tad, about like yours would at the point of realizing your taxes were due yesterday. Occasionally one would engage in a little do-si-do (who wouldn't), but all things considered, their reaction to having a stranger's arm up the rectum was positively restrained."

Michael Perry
Coop: A year of poultry, pigs and parenting (2009)

What If FOX News Is Wrong About Global Climate Change? #3

Death of world's coral reefs could wreak global chaos


"Whole nations will be threatened in terms of their existence!"
Carl Gustaf Lundin
International Union for the Conservation of Nature

"Fish will become a luxury good. You already have a billion people who are facing hunger, and this is just going to aggravate the situation," she added. "We will not be able to maintain food security around the world."
Cassandra deYoung
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

By Brian Skoloff
Associated Press

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — Coral reefs are dying, and scientists and governments around the world are contemplating what will happen if they disappear altogether.
The idea positively scares them.

Coral reefs are part of the foundation of the ocean food chain. Nearly half the fish the world eats make their homes around them. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide — by some estimates, 1 billion across Asia alone — depend on them for their food and their livelihoods.

If the reefs vanished, experts say, hunger, poverty and political instability could ensue....

Read more at USA Today

"Global warming skeptics are usually depicted as knuckle-dragging, Fox News-watching rubes who are too unsophisticated to understand the scientific complexities that irrefutably support climate change."

Dave Fedorchak
FOX News viewer from King George, VA

What's New Under Your Sun?

The John Birch Society meets The Republican TEA Party...

"...It was more than 50 years ago that disgruntled conservatives organized themselves into the John Birch Society. Mocked mercilessly for being against fluoridation, the John Birch Society is also famous for imagining a communist under every rock, going so far as accusing even Republican President Eisenhower of being a communist agent. Conservative extremists in 1960 were also virulently anti-Catholic and with the Irish-Catholic John Kennedy atop the Democratic ticket, the 1960 presidential election was marred with overheated rhetoric and violent activities. Like many conservative extremists today with President Obama, members of the John Birch Society never accepted the legitimacy of the Kennedy presidency and continued their delusional and dangerous rhetoric..."

Michael Mullaley
Hingham Journal

Read more...

"Noise and Rampant Fractionalization"

“Dialogue has waxed and waned ever since Socrates took the hemlock, and you know you could always find some grump down at the end of the Athenian coffee bar who would tell you this chowder head Socrates was no Anaxagoras. And whenever my ears purse at the sound of my own bemoaning, I make it a policy to recall that the halcyon days of yore included the Harding administration. It’s just that the two powers currently ascendant are noise and rampant fractionalization. Agents’ provocateurs aimming to tweak the squares (most of whom are otherwise occupied with paying their rent and fixing your furnace) or marchers on the square still draw cameras and microphones, but a sense of diminishing returns prevails. Give your local mechanic a headline and he can tell you how to spin it, left or right. Your hairdresser is a pundit. The plumber arrives with talking points. The yield curve or babble is approaching the perpendicular. Among the piquant conundrums due to face the nation is: How do you whip the folks into meaningful action when everyone is cocooning in like-minded corners of the Web, rather than synthesizing some sort of national unity through the late-lamented mainstream media, which no matter how you tilt the screen, has had it? The corpse will be wrapped in unsold newsprint, and the viewing will take place online in downloadable form. As a guy who types for a living, I intend to diversify, perhaps into goats, perhaps survivalist chinchillas, but certainly into chickens. I am told there is no longer money to be made in llamas. Additionally, I am pricing solar panels, sawing off my shotgun, and trolling the Y2K sites of yesterday."

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

It's Still Profits Over Safety

"...Why won't the USDA require testing? The Times quoted Dr. Kenneth Petersen, assistant administrator of the department's Food Safety and Inspection Service: "I have to look at the entire industry," Petersen said, "not just what is best for public health." That quote perfectly encapsulates the belief system that has spread like a virus for 30 years in our society--that nothing can be allowed to get in the way of driving down the prices of raw materials to fatten profit margins...

...What would happen if we returned to a world in which hamburger was just a ground-up piece of beef? It would cost about 30 cents more per pound, or 7.5 cents more for a Quarter Pounder from McDonald's. Imagine two lines of burgers, one labeled "ground chuck, fully tested" and the other "assorted beef byproducts from untested facilities known to routinely violate safety standards." Would you pay a few pennies extra for the former?..."

Carl Pope
Corporate profits still trump public safety
Sierra January/February 2010

What If FOX News Is Wrong About Global Climate Change? #2

Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists


WASHINGTON — Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas — in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans — appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest , encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline...

Read more @ McClatchy News.


A Fox News memo posted by FishbowlDC on November 23 acknowledged "a series of mistakes on FNC in recent months" and stated that in the future, "there is zero tolerance for on-screen errors" and "[m]istakes by any member of the show team that end up on air may result in immediate disciplinary action against those who played significant roles in the 'mistake chain,' and those who supervise them ... up to and including termination":

Read the memo...

What's Your Definetion Of Courage?

"I'm not that courageous. I do what I do because I'm afraid to not do what I do. That's not courage...."


"I shudder to think of what I might have been if I had not been born with cerebral palsy."

Art Honeyman
1940-2008

Read more...

The Politics Of "Concern"

"I'm concerned for the global population, for everyone. No one is really paying enough attention. It's hard to make everyone aware of what's going on because of our unsustainable ways. Africa's tallest mountain, Kilimanjaro, now has no snow."

Hannah Teter
Gold-medal Snowboarder


"...Environmentalists are keen to establish a new energy order, but they don't have a whole lot of allies. At the DWP solar workshop, for instance, the only other identifiable constituency was workers from the union halls who wanted to make sure they got in on the action of building all that solar infrastructure. But labor is far from unified on the issue. In March 2009 a bond measure for solar projects was defeated after other unions opposed the monopoly on jobs it would have given to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Getting the West off coal this decade is an enormous undertaking. It will require politicians following up on their lofty pronouncements; relentless, informed organizing by grassroots activists; constant legal pressure; and (two words not often seen together) bureaucratic creativity..."

Paul Tullis
The West Without Coal
Sierra January/February 2010