Conservatives Are Stupid: Graduation Edition

From Media Matters

Jon Stewart Watches Fox News So You Don't Have To

Fox News is apparently in full panic mode over the election of Barack Obama. Run for your lives, wingnuts!

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Fox News Fear Imbalance

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Irrelevant

Crooks and Liars: "Irrelevant"

Rightwing dopes, in pictures.

Friday Funny

Bill O'Lielly and Geraldo Rivera arguing in half-speed slow motion. You're on the Slo-Reilly Factor:



hat tip to BoingBoing

Why Jon Stewart is the Most Trusted Name In News

You didn't see this on your local news last night, but you should have. Jon Stewart on Sarah Palin and the bogus gender card:



I saw this at one of my favorite blogs, Boltgirl on the Loose.

Obama To Go On O'Lielly Thursday

This is how to take on O'Reilly: Colbert on O'Reilly, January 18, 2007.

Obama is coming out fighting, going on Fox Noise Thursday night to debate Stephen Colbert's Papa Bear Bill O'Reilly.

I like the fighting spirit. But I don't want to give Fox any credit as a media outlet, though. They're the House Organ, the Pravda of the rightwing revolution, not a news organization.

Much better than going on Fox Noise is Obama's new radio ad, running in Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Iowa, touting his support for abortion rights and McCain's opposition. That appeals to the almost 70% of American voters who favor choice. It's good to see a Democrat attacking Republicans on this issue.

Friday Night Funnies

Suitable for all liberal audiences:



Suitable for Obama supporters:



Suitable for all sentient humans:

Falafel!

I read earlier today that Faux News blowhard Bill O'Reilly pushed an Obama campaign staffer and had to be restrained by the Secret Service.

Just now I read a Slate magazine piece on the same incident, which reports that people in the crowd were chanting "falafel!" to BillO.

A number of people shouted falafel, the word O'Reilly used in a racy set of telephone conversations with a young woman he was trying to seduce as he described a shower they might take together. He meant loofa, which is not a Middle Eastern delicacy but a bath item.

Falafel!

Bill O, In Song

This is hysterical. A musical performance of Mackris v. O'Reilly, the sexual harassment case which Bill O'Reilly quickly settled. The transcript of the recording of Bill O'Reilly's phone call is sung by baritone Charles Robert Stephens.


Excerpt from "Mackris v. O'Reilly", a baroque oratorio composed by Igor Keller. Libretto uses verbatim transcript of sexual harassment complaint brought against Bill O'Reilly in 2004.

Falafel Me This

Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Wikipedia: Falafel

What percentage of American falafel eaters are terrorists? The FBI thinks it's a connection worth pursuing. In 2005 and 2006, the FBI actually looked at grocery story sales in the San Francisco area to see if they would find terrorists because they were purchasing falafel ingredients. (And what of hummus?)

The CQPolitics article about the FBI tracking grocery store sales is not from the satirical newspaper the Onion. No, it is a statement of fact. The FBI actually looked at who bought the ingredients to make falafel in order to find Iranian terrorists.

Because falafel eaters....oh, never mind, it's so mindnumbingly foolish that it seems superfluous to comment on it.

Because really, falafel ingredients? Why didn't they look at, oh, I don't know, visas, flight schools, purchases of guns, ammunition and bomb-making materials, or bank records, just to name a few.

And shouldn't they have looked carefully at Bill O'Reilly, a self-confessed lover of the falafel (last line, paragraph 78)?

CQPolitics: FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

Blogtopia* RoundUp, Wednesday August 1, 2007

SI Neg. 95-9624. Date: 1995...Liddicoatitie (tourmaline family), Madagascar. ..Credit: Laurie Minor-Penland (Smithsonian Institution)
flckr

The 2004 election was stolen; conveniently for the vote-thieving Republicans, ballots in 56 of 88 counties have been destroyed, in violation of a federal order to preserve them.

Senator Stevens has been trying to weasel his way out of charges his house renovations were a sweetheart deal by saying "My wife and I paid every bill that was presented to us". Of course, there were probably many things that went unbilled, if you know what I mean.

CNN has given Laura Ingraham Paula Zahn's slot until Mrs. Dan Senor (the USRepublican spokesman in Iraq), Campbell Brown, takes over. At Hullabaloo, Dover Bitch remembers one of Ingraham's sycophantic interviews with Heckuva Job Rumsfield.

Speaking of Rummy, that psychopathic MF will testify in the Tilllman investigation by the House Oversight Committee today. I hope Henry Waxman rips him a new one. ACTION ALERT: Sign VoteVets petition to get Bush to release the Tillman documents he's covering up with a bogus executive privilege claim.

Home Depot (following Lowes) pulls its advertising from Bill O'Lielly's show. Or maybe they don't. Pressure is having an effect, for sure.

Oh. My. God.

I turn on the TV this morning and there is racist Michael Smerconish -- shaved head Philadelphia radio shock jock -- sitting in Imus's studio. Out with the old white male racist, in with the new white male racist! Those black and female faces on MSBNC in the days following the ouster of Imus were just token window dressing. Now we're back to GE's favorite form of news: conservative shock jock.

Smerconish's guest is the mad Camille Paglia, who is nervously babbling that our education system is failing boys and that we should allow them to go straight into factory jobs. Factory jobs? What factory jobs? What parallel universe does she live in?

The only good thing about having Paglia on television is that she talks so fast you can't understand her. And she's such a period piece. She announces that she's a Madonna feminist. Does that mean she is going to Africa to adopt a baby? Sheesh.

I read on dailykos last week that the major corporate media was encouraged to take control of the news by Karl Rove in 1999. I guess Rover was very persuasive.

dailykos: Rove Met With Jack Welch in '99 to Create Media Cartel. W/Poll

Patricia Goldsmith, Smirking Chimp: Restore Fairness, Return to Reality

[] As Rep. Louise Slaughter said in a 2004 interview with Bill Moyers, after fairness was defeated,

AM radio rose. It wasn't even gradual, Bill. I mean, almost immediately. And I should point out to you that when we tried to reinstate [the fairness doctrine] again in '93, one of the reasons we couldn't was that Rush Limbaugh had organized this massive uprising against it, calling it "The Hush Rush Law."

Slaughter goes on to explain that the law wouldn't have hushed Rush-that would take more than an act of Congress, I'm afraid-but it would have mandated that time be given to people who represent other sides of any issue discussed by Limbaugh. The same is true for Hannity, O'Reilly, and even Imus. They just wouldn't have the airwaves all to themselves the way they do now.

[]

[I]n 1999 Karl Rove reached out to GE Chairman and CEO Jack Welch, promising radical deregulation for the broadcast industry (GE is the parent company of NBC). This fit right in with some of Welch's thoughts and ambitions. He had long felt that the news division at NBC wasn't living up to its full profit potential. According to a a must-read article, "The Media Cover-up of the Gore Victory Part Four: Democracy, General Electric Style," by David Podvin and Carolyn Kay, that conversation led to some important changes:

Toward that end, Welch said that he would finally deal with a longstanding grievance of his: the ludicrous idea that news organizations should be allowed to operate in conflict with the best interests of the corporations that own them.

. . . The new dimension that Welch introduced was the concept that mainstream media should aggressively advance the political agenda of the corporations that own it. He did not see any difference between corporate journalism and corporate manufacturing or corporate service industries. . . .

In general, he saw corporate news organizations as untapped political resources that should be freed from the burden of objectivity.

. . .

He began to aggressively, but very discreetly, evangelize the gospel of corporate media as a corporate lobbying tool.

. . .

Welch told associates that he enlisted two members of the GE board to assist him in shaping the coverage of the election by other news organizations. . . . They quietly encouraged the executives of the mainstream media organizations to rethink the relationship between news divisions and business organizations.

And a cartel is born. A cartel can be a group of corporations within one industry who meet to set prices.

So, MSNBC, owned by NBC GE, has performed an elaborate corporate charade in firing Imus, but has gone back to furthering its corporate interests by putting a conservative on the air to shape the news in its corporate interests. Wow.

Next!

Time to get ALL the sexist, racist crap off the airwaves. Media Matters compiles some of the filth of Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson, and gives the contact information for each network.

Media Matters for America: It's not just Imus

Rethugs Had a Boom-Boom Room?

Must.... reprint.... speculation from right-wing National Journal:

DC Sex Scandal About To Break?

Sometimes we read too many political clips and overlook some amazing things staring us in the face. Among those in Monday's edition, this little factoid, culled from Sunday's San Diego Union-Tribune blockbuster digging deeper into the Duke Cunningham's relationship with "co-conspirator No. 1," a.k.a. lobbyist Brent Wilkes.

According to the U-T, Wilkes also "ran a hospitality suite, with several bedrooms, in" DC -- "first in the Watergate Hotel and then" in a Capitol Hill hotel.

Come again? A "hospitality suite with several bedrooms"?

Talk about raising more questions, including:

-- Why does a lobbyist need a "hospitality suite with several bedrooms"?

-- Who uses those bedrooms and for what?

These lobbying scandals involving Cunningham and Wilkes and Abramoff are looking more and more like a bad movie script every day. Except with one difference from the movies: this stuff actually happened.

Season's greetings! (I'm trying to make the Bill O'Reilly enemies list with all these Christ-less Xmas endings. Will continue until January 1 or until I (or you, my loyal readers) get bored.)

Jeff Gannon, Presstitute

I have dubbed Jim/Jeff Guckert/Gannon "The Presstitute".

For obvious reasons, as his occupation immediately preceding his tenure in the White House briefing room was prostitute.

You say prostitute, I say presstitute, let's call the whole thing off!

Kind of like Bill O'Reilly & his falafel.

What is it with those wingnuts anyway?

Disinformation

The 2004 Falsies Awards: Remembering the people and players responsible for polluting our information environment.

Interesting list of media foibles in 2004. But where is the New York Times Ahmed Chalabi-loving Judith Miller? Bob (Traitor) Novak? The media's fawning coverage of the Swift Boat Liars? Bill O'Reilly buying back the tapes of his you-say-loofah I-say-falafel conversations? Actually, Faux News Channel alone could fill an entire Top Ten list.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Apropros of Nothing

Do you think Bill O'Reilly handled his falafel before he interviewed George W. Bush?

Inquiring minds want to know.