The rise and fall of a Fox News fraud

from BoingBoing:

Fox News invited bullshitting fraudster Wayne Simmons to appear on its "news" programs over 100 times posing as a CIA operative. Based on his hawkish proclamations, the Pentagon hired Simmons as a shill analyst to propagandize for them. Now that Simmons has been exposed, arrested, and charged with with multiple counts of fraud, he will never appear on Fox News again, but the lies he told on the network will forever be regarded as gospel truth by fear-addicted Fox TV viewers.

From Rolling Stone:

Simmons claimed to have spent 27 years with the CIA, but Paul Nathanson, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said in a court filing that Simmons "never had any association whatsoever with the CIA." (The CIA declined to comment – as a rule, it never confirms or denies agents – but said it is "working closely with the Justice Department on this matter.") Instead, prosecutors say Simmons spent those 27 years doing just about everything else: He ran a limousine service, a gambling operation and an AIDS-testing clinic; worked for a hot-tub business, a carpeting company and a nightclub; and briefly played defensive back for the New Orleans Saints. Along the way, he accrued criminal convictions, including multiple DUIs, plus charges for weapons possession and assault, and an arrest for attacking a cabdriver in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007. "Fuck you, you can't do shit to me – do you know who I am?" Simmons told a cop, according to a police report, before insisting that he was CIA, and that the cabbie, who was Pakistani, had a bomb. A police dog found no explosives, and a CIA representative told the cops to take whatever actions they deemed necessary.

Watch a Baltimore protester hand Geraldo Rivera his ass, (along with the rest of the media)

from Daily Kos:

A protester in West Baltimore confronted Geraldo Rivera last night before he went to his live shot for Fox News. He went OFF on Geraldo, asking where were you before this?

Protester: You want to report that we're thugs and we're breaking shit down. You got these two black dudes protecting you (talking about Geraldo's bodyguards) from all these black folks. We're the ones that need protection! Report for us! You're working for Fox News. Adam Jackson just went on Sean Hannity....(Geraldo tries to get away) Why are you running away? Talk to me. Just talk to me. Listen, a black man can raise his voice and you don't have to be intimidated. (Geraldo mumbles something) Because I want you and Fox News to get out of Baltimore City. Because you are not here reporting about the boarded up homes and the homeless people on the MLK. You're not reporting about the poverty levels up and down North Avenue. Two years ago, when the 300 man march and we marched (street names), you weren't here. You're here for the black riots! You're not here for the death of Freddie Gray.

The unidentified protester then began saying he wanted to talk to Geraldo and pleaded for the cameras to be turned off before continuing:

I want the white media out of Baltimore City until you are here to report the real story.

His takedown of Geraldo and the media continued. Watch him passionately confront Geraldo Rivera to tell the real story:

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BANKY's SIMPSONS Intro still incredible!

War on Christmas - S#@t's Getting Weird Edition

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Watching Fox News makes people distrust science

A new study breaks down the media's effects on public perception of climate change
BY LINDSAY ABRAMS
from Salon

A "Fox & Friends" segment from January 2011 (Credit: Media Matters)

Now that science has more or less agreed that human-caused climate change is happening, some are devoting their efforts to figuring out how it’s possible that people can remain skeptics. Plenty has been written about the corrupting influence of conservative media, but a new study from researchers at the University of Arizona, George Mason, American University and Yale looks more closely at exactly how such programs manage to fuel their audiences’ denial.

Predictably, they found that the more exposed Americans are to conservative media, the less certain they become that climate change is happening. The problem, they discovered, isn’t just that programs like Fox News are sowing the seeds of doubt about climate change, it’s that they’re decreasing people’s trust in the scientists who say it’s happening. That’s 97 percent of them, for the record.

The researchers took a nationally representative sample of Americans who were quizzed, by phone, on their media diets and their belief in climate change on a scale from 0 (extremely sure global warming is not happening) to 8. They controlled for variables like race, income and education level. Almost 2,500 people were surveyed in 2008; 1,036 were reinterviewed in 2011. They also analyzed the climate change coverage across Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal during that period.

The study’s lead author, Jay Hmielowski, explained in an email that his team found a 13 percent decrease in the amount of trust between people who do not watch or listen to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh and the programs’ most loyal devotees. Those who watched or listened to left-leaning and mainstream news sources — CNN, MSNBC, NPR and network news — experienced the opposite effect: They were more likely to trust scientists and thus be more certain that global warming is happening. The researchers were able to show that this influence occurs over time, as the years of tuning in accumulate.

“I would say that our findings show that the attack on science seems to be working,” said Hmielowski.

How do Rush and friends do it? The study’s authors break down research demonstrating how conservative news outlets claim there’s a lack of scientific consensus about the reality of climate change. Studies have found, for example, that Fox News airs more stories about evidence that appears to disprove global warming or featuring climate change skeptics than stories that accept the reality of climate change. In so doing, write the authors, they “have served to marginalize scientists in general and climate scientists in particular.” Both liberal outlets like MSNBC and mainstream channels like CNN are much more likely to emphasize that global warming is real and caused by human activity.

Conservative news programs, the authors hypothesize, create a rapport with their viewers based on a shared ideology. “Because people’s knowledge of most scientific issues, including climate change, is relatively limited,” they write, “the salient values used to judge trustworthiness are likely to be general rather than specific (i.e. based on agreement and sympathy rather than on carefully reasoned arguments or direct knowledge).”

The researchers don’t seem to be giving members of the general public a lot of credit for our ability to digest information or form our own opinions. But, they explain, climate change is complex and difficult to directly witness. The news media, on the other hand, speaks our language, and is a much more pervasive force in our daily lives. Is it any wonder that it’s able to have such a salient effect on our biases?

Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainability. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com.

DO FOX NEWS VIEWERS REALLY HAVE ‘AN IQ THAT IS 20 POINTS LOWER THAN THE U.S. NATIONAL AVERAGE’?

from DangerousMinds

We’ve known for a long time that Fox News has the oldest cable audience (average age 65) and we know, too, that Fox has the dumbest and most misinformed audience. But are they really THIS DUMB?

A PRWeb press release reposted on Yahoo News, “Intelligence Institute Study shows Fox News viewers have an IQ that is 20 points lower than the U.S. National average.” is currently quite high on the hit parade at reddit/r/politics. I’d like to believe that’s true, but it’s very obviously a prank.

Although it admittedly does feel “true enough” to be plausible for a moment (or even two moments) if you do a search for “The Intelligence Institute” and “lead researcher, P. Nichols” you don’t come up with much. In this case, just a bunch of people who are either gullible lefties who want to believe this is true, reposting it frantically, or else people who simply find the writing hysterically funny.

I wonder who paid PRWeb to post this:

The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence.

Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group.

One test involved showing subjects a series of images and measuring their vitals, namely pulse rate and blood pressure. The self-identified conservatives’ vitals increased over 35% when shown complex or shocking images. The image that caused the most stress was a poorly edited picture of President Obama standing next to a “ghostly” image of a child holding a tarantula.

Sweet Jeebus is that droll. But it’s still totally plausible isn’t it?

Test subjects who received their news from other outlets or reported they do not watch the news scored an average IQ of 104, compared to 80 for Fox News viewers.

Admittedly. if they said the Fox News watchers had IQs of around 90, I could totally see that, but 80?

Lead researcher, P. Nichols, explains, “Less intelligent animals rely on instinct when confronted by something which they do not understand. This is an ancient survival reaction all animals, including humans, exhibit. It’s a very simple phenomenon, really; think about a dog being afraid of a vacuum cleaner. He doesn’t know what a vacuum is or if it may harm him, so he becomes agitated and barks at it. Less intelligent humans do the same thing. Concepts that are too complex for them to understand, may frighten or anger them.”

He continues, “Fox News’ content is presented at an elementary school level and plays directly into the fears of the less educated and less intelligent.”

The researchers said that an IQ of 80 is well above the score of 70, which is where psychiatrists diagnose mental retardation. P. Nichols says an IQ of 80 will not limit anyone’s ability to lead happy, fulfilling lives.

The study did not conclude if Fox News contributed to lowering IQ or if it attracts less intelligent humans.

Sputtering with laughter on this end…

P. Nichols concludes that he wasn’t shocked by the studies’ results, rather how dramatic their range. “Several previous studies show that self-identified conservatives are less intelligent than self-identified moderates. We have never seen such a homogeneous group teetering so close to special needs levels.”

It’s the sort of thing that could have been written by jokesters on either on the right or from the left, it’s hard to tell what the motivation was here. I expect we’ll find out soon. Since it’s actually funny, I don’t think this is likely to turn out to come from a conservative prankster, but maybe it was.

More info to this study can be seen here:

P. Nichols

The Intelligence Institute

202-656-1746

Email Information

The email information leads nowhere, but if anyone calls the number and gets someone on the line, leave what happens in the comments [at DangerousMinds].

The War on Christmas: Friendly Fire Edition

John motherfucking Stewart, and his writers, killing it on the topic of the day, undeniably destroying any foolishness and idiots for talking absolute bullshit.

Continued below (the knock-out) :

BONUS: (from the same episode):

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Great reason to see THE LORAX next weekend

Probably one of the earliest, best environmentally and corporate greed conscious children's stories ever told, one that I have read to my son too many times to remember, is now a Hollywood movie. I hear the story has been changed in some major ways, but let's hope it stays true to Theodor Geisel's (Dr. Seuss) original intent. I'll be there next saturday with my boy cheering on the Lorax (I hope Danny DeVito as the voice does not play down his important perspective).

from the Huffington Post

Fox Business Network is targeting another children's movie for allegedly brainwashing children with liberal ideas: "Dr Seuss' The Lorax."

The network first slammed "The Muppets" in December. Host Eric Bolling had insisted that the movie, which features an evil oil baron, was part of Hollywood's vendetta against oil companies.

On Tuesday, host Lou Dobbs railed against "The Lorax," along with the Japanese children's film, "The Secret World of Arrietty." "Hollywood is once again trying to indoctrinate our children," he warned. He claimed that the movies were "demonizing the 1% and espousing green energy policies."

Dobbs said "The Lorax" was about "a woodland creature that speaks for the trees and fights rampant industrialism." He replayed a clip of the Lorax demanding to know who chopped down a Truffula Tree.

He compared the movie to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which he said "forever tried to pit the makers against the takers," and President Obama's calls that "everyone should pay their fair share."

"The President's liberal friends in Hollywood targeting a younger demographic using animated movies to sell their agenda to children," he alleged.

His guests, radio hosts Dom Giordano, Matt Patrick and Steve Cochran, agreed.

"What we're doing is creating Occu-toddlers," Patrick said. He directed parents to "buy huge tubs of popcorn, ram it in your face," leave the litter behind and walk out of the movie.

Watch the full segment below.

SICK FUCK WARNING - WATCH THESE FOLKS AND HAVE A BARF BAG NEAR BY



HOW PEOPLE CAN BE SO RETARDED IS BEYOND MY COMPREHENSION

Slimy Grinning Scum Piece of Shit, Guilty As Fuck, Conservative "film maker" Passes Out Bongs To Occupy Wall Street Protesters to Discredit Movement

from MEDIAite

Conservative filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney was spotted at Occupy Wall Street allegedly passing out bongs and Che Guevara rolling papers to demonstrators.

Video blogger Joey Boots caught Maloney purportedly distributing the drug paraphernalia at the demonstration and interrogated him about what he was doing with the items. “Do you have bongs and marijuana leaf pictures and stickers and Che Guevara?” Boots grilled Maloney. “Are you giving it out? Do you have it in that backpack?”

“Over there they gave out bongs,” exclaimed an Occupy Wall Street protester. “He’s like, ‘You answer, here’s a bong.’ Trying to get that one shot. All they had was bongs, peace signs with marijuana and Che Guevara rolling papers. Three things when Fox News gets it, they’ll just clip that then it’s just like protesters accept it.”

“Are we going to expect to see those pictures on Fox News?” Boots yelled out.

“I don’t know if they’ll pick it up, maybe you’ll see it on CNN,” responded the rabble-rousing conservative filmmaker. “I’m giving them away because I’m a nice guy and I like giving stuff away.”

Maloney is most notable for producing the James O’Keefe-esque documentary Indoctrinate U about political correctness at American universities.

Watch Maloney get caught on tape apparently trying to punk protesters below, via JoeyBoots.com:

Occupy Wall Street Activist Slams Fox News Producer In Un-Aired Interview

My favorite clip of the day.

here's the whole "Exclusive" story from The New York Observer:

Even if Geraldo Rivera was at the Zuccotti Park yesterday, Fox News has generally been a tad dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Foxnews.com (as of this writing) has no coverage of this national event on their front page stories. (Hard to imagine for a network that was so gung-ho about the Tea Party!) Red Eye‘s Bill Schulz went out to try to “prank” the protesters. Bill O’Reilly sent a producer minion out with the same mission: to belittle OWS’s cause by cutting up interviews to make people sound stupid.

Well, here is an interview that Fox News filmed, but doesn’t want you to see. The segment was shot on Wednesday for Greta van Susteren‘s show, (though it looks like the same producer from this O’Reilly segment questioning Michael Moore‘s anti-capitalist agenda) though the decision was made to leave it on the cutting room floor. The reason should be obvious pretty quickly.



The speaker giving Fox News the buisness is Jesse LaGreca, a vocal member of the Occupy Wall Street protests. This video comes courtesy of Kyle Christopher from OccupyWallSt.org‘s media team.

Now, no news organization is under obligation to air every interview they’ve filmed, especially when it makes them look bad. But you’d think that a “Fair and Balanced” network (that tells an interviewee that they are here to give them fair coverage to get any message they’d like to get out) would try to include at least a couple of opposing viewpoints to Mr. Shulz’s smarmy jokes or O’Reilly’s “infiltration” of the camp.

The ball is in your court, Fox.

Updated 10/3 11:00a.m.: Now with transcript of the video

Fox: Jesse, so Ray, your partner here, your ..

Ray: comrade.

Fox: Your colleague, she’d seen the protests in Greece and Europe and elsewhere. Did you guys take your cue from that? Are you hoping to cite certainly what was a lot of the tension, if not police activity. I know over the weekend there were over 100 arrests and you guys got things fired up. Are you taking your cues from the international movement and how do you want to see this? If you could have it in a perfect way, how would it be?

Jesse: Well I don’t know, its really difficult to answer questions leading to those conclusions. I’d say that we didn’t take our cue leading off of anybody really. It became a more spontaneous movement. As far as seeing this end, I wouldn’t like to see this end. I would like to see the conversation continue. This is what we should have been talking about in 2008 when the economy collapsed. We basically patched a hole on the tire and said let the car keep rolling. Unfortunately it’s fun to talk to the propaganda machine and the media especially conservative media networks such as yourself, because we find that we cant get conversations for the department of Justice’s ongoing investigation of News Corporation, for which you are an employee. But we can certainly ask questions like you know, why are the poor engaging in class warfare? After 30 years of having our living standards decrease while the wealthiest 1% have had it better than ever, I think it’s time for some maybe, I don’t know, participation in our democracy that isn’t funded by news cameras and gentlemen such as yourself.

Fox: But, uh, yeah well, let me give you this challenge Jesse.

Jesse: Sure.

Fox: We’re here giving you an opportunity on the record […] to put any
message you want out there, to give you fair coverage and I’m not
going to in any way

Jesse: That’s awesome!

Fox:…give you advice about it. So, there is an exception in the case, because you wouldn’t be able to get your message out there without us.

Jesse: No, surely, I mean, take for instance when Glenn Beck was doing his protest and he called the President, uh, a person who hates white people and white culture. That was a low moment in Americans’ history and you guys kinda had a big part in it. So, I’m glad to see you coming around and kind of paying attention to what the other 99 percent of Americans are paying attention to, as opposed to the far-right fringe, who who would just love to destroy the middle class entirely.

Fox: Alright, fair enough. You have a voice, an important reason to criticize myself, my company and anyone else. But, let me ask you that, in fairness, does this administration, President Obama, have any criticism as to the the financial situation the country’s in…?

Jesse: I think, myself, uh, as well as many other people, would like to see a little but more economic justice or social justice—Jesus stuff—as far as feeding the poor, healthcare for the sick. You know, I find it really entertaining that people like to hold the Bill of Rights up while they’re screaming at gay soldiers, but they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that a for-profit healthcare system doesn’t work. So, let’s just look at it like this, if we want the President to do more, let’s talk to him on a level that actually reaches people, instead of asking for his birth certificate and wasting time with total nonsense like Solyndra.

BY THE WAY for anyone who tells you the goals have not been made clear, you decide: Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

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‘SUPREME SATAN’: RUPERT MURDOCH THROUGHOUT THE YEARS

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds:

With the entire world talking about Rupert Murdoch today—even Fox News got around to mentioning the News of the World phone-hacking scandal three days after everyone else covered it—BBC documentarian Adam Curtis had a dig through the Beeb’s archive to see what lurked there that might shed some new light on Murdoch’s career. He found some real gems:

Following the principle that you should know your enemy, the BBC has assiduously recorded the relentless rise of Rupert Murdoch and his assault on the old “decadent” elites of Britain.

And I thought it would be interesting to put up some of the high points.

It is also a good way to examine how far his populist rhetoric is genuine, and how far its is a smokescreen to disguise the interests of another elite.

Curtis has posted eight video clips of varying length and they are absolutely fascinating. I’ve not seen much footage of Murdoch in his 30s and 40s and 50s and some of it is revelatory, especially hearing Murdoch describe himself as some sort of moralist or populist crusader in the Panorama episode titled “Who’s Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?” It’s interesting to hear how he felt about himself when he was younger. I can’t embed the clips, but I highly recommend taking a look if you have any interest in Murdoch.

More on Murdoch from Curtis:

The British establishment decided Murdoch was not a gentleman. And then he did something much worse. He announced he was going to publish the memoirs of Christine Keeler in the News of the World. Keeler was a “model” whose liaison with a government minister John Profumo in 1963 had ruined Harold MacMillan’s government.

But since then Profumo had redeemed himself in the eyes of the establishment by going off to work for a charity in the east end of London. So when the News of the World published the sordid details of the affair, the whole of London society was scandalised. Murdoch was unearthing a scandal that should have been dead and buried, and destroying one of their own.

And, they said, he was doing it with the sole interest of lining his own pocket. Murdoch was seen as sleazy and destructive.

And this is where his monstrous image began. The man who had first taught Murdoch journalism on the Daily Express in the 1950s summed it up:

“The trouble is - Rupert was regarded as the Supreme Satan”

It’s worth noting that when you consider the general fear and mistrust of Murdoch that has clearly been on display since the late 1960s, he’s got a gazillion times more power, money and influence now. If these observations were true about him then, they are far truer today, that’s for sure

Confounding Fathers The Tea Party’s Cold War roots.

Glenn Beck’s view of American history stems from the paranoid politics of the fifties.

by Sean Wilentz
from the New Yorker

A few months ago, the cable-television and radio host Glenn Beck began his Fox News show with one of his favorite props: a pipe clenched between his teeth. “I’ve got my pipe,” he told his audience, his speech slightly muddled by the stem, “because we’re going to speak about schoolish kind of things.” The theme of the day was “Restoring History,” and Beck, looking professorial in a neat dark blazer and a pink button-down shirt, began the lesson by peering at a stack of history textbooks and pronouncing them full of falsehoods, produced by “malicious progressive intent.” Progressives, he explained—liberals, socialists, Communists, the entire spectrum of the left—“knew they had to separate us from our history to be able to separate us from our Constitution and God.” For the next hour, Beck earnestly explained some of the history that “is being stolen from us”: the depression of 1920, for example, or how conservative economics saved the nation from the “near-depression” of 1946—crises that progressives don’t want you to know about. “You’ve been taught one lie, I think, your whole life,” he said.

For the fractious Tea Party movement, Beck—a former drive-time radio jockey, a recovering alcoholic, and a Mormon convert—has emerged as both a unifying figure and an intellectual guide. One opinion poll, released in July by Democracy Corps, showed that he is “the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters,” seen not merely as an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh, but as an “educator.” And in the past few months Beck has established his own institute of learning: the online, for-profit Beck University. Enrollees can take courses like Faith 102, which contends with “revisionists and secular progressives” about the separation of church and state; Hope 102, an attack on the activist federal government; and the combined Charity 101/102/103, a highly restrictive interpretation of rights, federalism, and the division of powers.

During the “Restoring History” episode, Beck twice encouraged viewers to join his Web seminars, where they can hear “lessons from the best and brightest historians and scholars that we could find.” The B.U. faculty consists of three members, including one bona-fide academic, James R. Stoner, Jr., the chair of the political-science department at Louisiana State University; the other two are the head of a management consulting firm and the founder of WallBuilders, which the Web site calls “a national pro-family organization.” Beck himself often acts as a professor, a slightly jocular one, on his Fox News program. Surrounded by charts and figures, he offers explanations of current politics and history lessons about the country’s long march to Obama-era totalitarianism. The decline, he says, began with the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, in particular with the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, when both the Federal Reserve System and the graduated federal income tax came into existence. “Wilson,” Beck told his radio audience in August, “just despised what America was.”

Beck’s claims have found an audience among Tea Party spokesmen and sympathizers. At the movement’s Freedom Summit in Washington last September, one activist told a reporter, “The election between Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in 1912 was when it started going downhill.” And in April an angry member of the Tea Party Patriots group from Cape Fear, North Carolina, claimed on the group’s Web site that “the very things you see happening in this country today started with the Wilson Administration.”

At a Tax Day rally this past spring, the veteran conservative organizer Richard Viguerie described the Tea Party as “an unfettered new force of the middle class.” And, indeed, calling Obama a socialist in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson is audacious enough to seem like the marker of a new movement—or, at least, a new twist in the nation’s long history of conspiracy-mongering. In fact, it marks a revival of ideas that circulated on the extremist right half a century ago, especially in the John Birch Society and among its admirers.

Beck’s version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch. The political universe is, of course, very different today from what it was during the Cold War. Yet the Birchers’ politics and their view of American history—which focussed more on totalitarian threats at home than on those posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China—has proved remarkably persistent. The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.

The early nineteen-sixties were a turbulent time in American politics, for the right wing in particular. In the South, racist violence against civil-rights workers was constant, deepening sectional splits in the Democratic Party that would in time deliver the once solidly Democratic South to the Republicans. Southern elected officials, in support of what they called “massive resistance” to civil-rights laws and judicial rulings, resurrected the ideas of nullification and interposition, which claimed that individual states could void federal laws within their own borders. Others focussed on what they considered a fearsome Communist menace inside the United States. General Edwin A. Walker caused an enormous stir when he resigned from the Army in 1961, after President John F. Kennedy’s Pentagon reprimanded him for spreading right-wing propaganda among his troops and accusing prominent American officials of Communist sympathies. Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat from South Carolina, spoke for many on the far right when he declared that various modestly liberal domestic programs “fall clearly within the category of socialism.”

Continue reading HERE

The FOX NEWS scam I discovered!

You're hearing it first here, at least as far as i know and i'd really appreciate it if some one forward this blog post to an investigative journalist who knows there shit. But as far as I can tell FOX news holding onto the ratings they have is a scam, in the truest sense.

Last week i was staying at a friends house out on Long Island, and to my dismay, every time we turned on a television set in any room in his huge house with huge flat screen TVs , FOX news came on, it was in fact the de-facto, default start up channel on each and every set!

I was disgusted and made a few calls to the cable operator, Cable Vision, iO, or Optimum, all the same company according to the technician who i eventually got on the line after calling 1-866-541-0548.

SO what i found out was that this cable company remotely rebooted all my friends TV's from their headquarters earlier in the year, and at that same time all customers got a new pre-set start up channel: motherfucking, racist, xenophobic, America hating, Obama Bashing piece of shit, FOX NEWS!

So what does this tell me, that either the owners of the cable provider are conservative assholes or FOX has paid them off and probably many other cable providers (did i forget to mention that this particular provider happens to be one of the largest in the country?) and this has helped them get those hard to believe high ratings for such disgusting programing (can't really be called "news"). Or at the very least so many more ignorant viewers. I believe this to be the case.

Now the fact is you can re-program each individual set top box to start up on any channel you like, but it's a bit of a pain, and takes several minutes for each individual set, if you could even figure it out.

Now how many people do you think actually go through the extra effort to adjust this? And how many do you think just end up leaving it on that channel because it was on already, pre-set by the cable provider?

Particularly after reading just the other day that Fox News viewership is mostly people over 65 years of age. This statistic alone is that which gives them the artificially inflated credibility with the Amerikkkan people they now seem to have, at least according to Fox and the idiots in the Tea Party.

Someone please look into this further, I feel there is a serious story here.

And call this cable provider, as i did and complain about how horrified you are by this despicable practice, if not totally disconnect from them.

Novice level monster on Fox News fails to defeat atheist

In this Fox News segment about the recent U.S. District Court decision banning the National Day of Prayer, Dan Barker (author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists) handily parries a Fox News announcer's clumsy blows.

Unless the Fox News character learns how to devour his prey like the Ayperobos and Ghargatulas who command the prime slots on Fox News, he won't be long for the network.

from BoingBoing

where America stands as a country

This is probably the most neatly compact and lucid explanation of where America stands as a country as I have seen in many a moon. From Daily Kos:

Here’s the thing that modern advocates of the filibuster always seem to forget: because doing nothing represents a policy choice, votes in Congress are choices between two different policy positions. There’s no good reason why one side should need 41% to prevail, while the other side needs 60%.

Take the public option, for example: If you vote for the public option, you’re voting to give the public the option to buy insurance from a not-for-profit with the scale to negotiate good rates. If you vote against the public option, you’re voting to require everybody to purchase health insurance from private institutions.

There are reasonable arguments for and against each position. But there really isn’t a reasonable argument why one position should require 60% support and the other position should require 41%.

Isn’t it ironic that those carrying the banner of freedom and liberty would base their entire political strategy around minority rule?

thanks Dangerous Minds

and here Democracy Now discusses
Healthcare Summit Ending in Deadlock;
Single-Payer Advocates Excluded

This is where it begins to get really fucking sickening...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Fox News: The New Liberals
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Fox News: The New Liberals
Fox News turns into the liberal media by defending protesters, criticizing the president and shoving its values down America's throat.