I’m not entirely sure what the lesson is supposed to be here, but as a child I would have been horrified to see an adult doing something this idiotic. What does killing some fish for no reason whatsoever have to do with ANYTHING?
(via reddit)
Like probably many of you reading this, I absolutely loathe Andrew Breitbart. Seeing him on TV turns my stomach sour the same way seeing Pamela Geller or that Koran-burning idiot with the Yosemite Sam mustache being given airtime does. Foul, hateful people. WHY do the major news outlets (non-Fox News, I mean) offer these distasteful, tacky creeps a platform to spout the lousy nonsense they KNOW IN ADVANCE they’re going to come on to these programs and puke at their viewers?
Breitbart is a KNOWN fabulist. A KNOWN practitioner of “creative editing” and outright DECEPTION. What is a guy like him doing on any supposed news channel? He’s not a serious person who has opinions worthy of respect, so why pretend that he is? He’s just a punk, like his dweeby, pimple-faced side-kick James O’Keefe.
Another person who causes me to wince when I accidentally see him on TV is anti-gay rights activist Tony Perkins, he of the respectable sounding hate group, Family Research Council. Giving an asshat like Perkins a national stage is like providing the same service for one of the most rabid witch burners in Salem, Massachusetts if there were cable news channels back in 1692. This is how history will remember a man like Perkins—if history marks him at all, which is doubtful—as an ignorant, hateful, intolerant religious extremist.
So why allow a malignant goofball like Tony Perkins the airtime and the credibility it confers upon him?
Was Noam Chomsky already booked???
CNN seems to me to be the most pathetic of all the cable newsers—grasping at straws as their ratings slide. Watching CNN recently, it would seem that a misguided management decision was made to do like a “reverse Fox News” using a lot of the same guests. Does the upper management at CNN really think that their audience (or potential audience members) want to see the same exact idiots they see on Fox News, albeit in an environment less welcoming than the joint owned by Rupert Murdoch?
Poaching some guest bookers from Fox News was hardly the innovation CNN needed to reinvent itself. Why not just have some random haters from the Free Republic boards on with Wolf Blitzer if that’s the sort of “sizzle” they seek…
And again, I ask CNN’s upper management, is the reason we don’t see America’s greatest living intellectual on your channel—but we do see an un-credentialed, perhaps deranged, rightwing racist gasbag like Pamela Geller—because Noam Chomsky is not taking your phone calls???
MSNBC is a lot better when it comes to the way they contextualize their guests, but you still have the likes of Orly Taitz appearing on the network. WHY?
Even if Chomsky is BOOKED SOLID, there are still options to Orly fucking Taitz!
But Andrew Breitbart always gets a pass on MSNBC—as does Pat Buchanan—and that always pisses me off. Just imagine how much BETTER the news would be—how much BETTER OFF AMERICA WOULD BE—if each and every time these two appeared on TV the “lower third” under their names read “Lying Fuck” or “Increasingly Senile Racist & Author.”
Some basic “truth in advertising.” Is that too much to ask of our cable news outlets? I can dream, can’t I?
Recently James Rucker, the co-founder of Color of Change waged a bit of a campaign to make sure Dylan Ratigan understood how offended he and others (raises hand) feel about seeing Andrew Brietbart on TV sans context other than his name and his URL. Not everyone knows who he is or what his greatest (s)hits as a Republican media assassin are. If they were told about just a lil’ bit of that history upfront, they’d be greatly assisted in their understanding of what they were watching and be much better equipped to properly evaluate the bullshit coming out of Brietbart’s lying pie-hole.
It’s almost like those cigarette labels with the pics of cancerous lungs. Why can’t America’s responsible journalists ALWAYS perform the same sort of service regards Mr. Brietbart and his fellow travelers?
Via Daily Kos:
As you may know, ColorOfChange members led the charge to ensure that Breitbart’s credibility and image weren’t sanitized by ABC News or the Huffington Post. After we saw Breitbart on Ratigan’s show, with Ratigan seemingly praising Breitbart as “smart” and a “sharp shooter who gets results,” we were deeply concerned.
When I spoke with Ratigan, he explained what he was trying to do. He quickly agreed that Breitbart was a race-baiter, dishonest, and undeserving of credibility—without question. And he frankly hadn’t thought about the legitimizing effect that having Breitbart on his show—without clearly labeling him as the race-baiter and deceiver he is—would have.
Ratigan’s core issue is exposing the corruptive nature of corporate dollars in politics (which I, and many ColorOfChange members would agree is a critical and important endeavor). Ratigan’s goal in interviewing Breitbart was to ask him why he chose targets like Sherrod or the NAACP, while Breitbart and the Tea Party activists he defends seems to agree that banks and corporations with undue influence over government are actually the ones destroying our country. It’s an important criticism of Breitbart. Ratigan’s goal was to keep the conversation there, and he believed that if he focused on Breitbart’s penchant for race-baiting and deception, it would simply trigger Breitbart, and he’d end up in the same conversation others have where Breitbart goes on a rampage and the conversation goes nowhere.
Moving forward, Ratigan said that if he deals with Breitbart at all in the future, it will be with the explicit disclaimer that Breibart is someone who deceives and race-baits. Ratigan recognizes and respects the argument that there’s a problem with giving Breitbart a mainstream platform, and he’s committed to making sure that his show is not used to lend Breitbart the appearance of legitimacy and credibility.
Breitbart, not surprisingly, is completely unapologetic. Can’t expect a racist to give up that white robe so quickly. However, I give Ratigan and his producers credit for being receptive to this at all… too often, these kinds of issues are raised by liberals and dismissed out of hand. I’d rather that MSNBC acknowledge that people like Breitbart (and network regular Pat Buchanan, come to that) really have no right to expect a national platform for their racism and hate. I doubt very much that Ratigan or the suits at MSNBC have any idea the message it sends to people of color. But I’ll take this incremental step gladly and keep pushing for more.
Nice work James Rucker and Color of Change! The repercussions of this victory are still to be felt for some time.
They spelled “cuntry” wrong!
Did you read about Sarah Palin’s utterly shameless tweet today?
TPM quipped:
It’s unclear why she thinks photos of bin Laden’s corpse will scare suicidal terrorists.
Who says she’s capable of thinking at all? Certainly I’ve seen no public evidence that Mrs. Palin is able to engage in critical thinking. But who cares about Sarah Palin anyway? I don’t and I’m bored with writing about her, but her tweet is one of the lamer, dumber examples of a Republican lemon-face trying oh so obviously and desperately to spin the killing of the most wanted terrorist in history against President Obama.
Sarah Palin: The incredible shrinking woman. I will admit that watching her flounder for attention now that the bloom is off and the public is starting to tune her out has been kinda fun to watch…
Irish comedy genius Graham Linehan, speaking certainly with MY full approval, tweeted the following to his 94,000+ Twitter followers:
#Nailed it.
Someone who follows him rejoined “Show us your tits first” and I think this is about where the level of discourse around the Republicans should be, which is to say, pointing at them and laughing.
But where was I? Oh yeah:
Jealous much, Republican’ts?
Of course they are—they can barely stand it—and it’s such a delightful farce to watch these craven shits lashing out like the angry losers they truly are. Even some die-hard Fox News viewers are (probably) starting to suspect what everyone else has known all along: THESE PEOPLE ARE SCURRILOUS FUCKS.
How many times does it take being exposed to the obviously insincere Eric Cantor, for instance, before even a complete idiot would intuit “This fuckin’ guy doesn’t believe a damned word he’s saying. He’s lying through his capped teeth.”
But anyway, back to the whole killing Osama bin Laden thing. The single stupidest, lowest IQ conservative conspiracy theory came from—ya don’t say—batshit crazy racist cat lady Pamela Geller, she of the brain-damaged Atlas Shrugs blog. (Read it if you dare, but as you do, consider the fact that this complete LUNATIC is a frequent commentator on Fox News! As if drivel like THIS IDIOCY has any merit or is in any way worthy of respect or discussion? Seriously Roger Ailes? Seriously??? Pamela Geller believes any damned thing she wants to believe, as long as it fits into her twisted prejudices and irrational foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of Obama, Democrats and Muslims. It would be pointless for me to give her insipid, dimwit conspiracy theories any space here since she’s so mean-spirited, repulsive and beneath contempt. I mean… yuck!).
Steve M., writing at my new favorite political bookmark, No More Mister Nice Blog had this to say about the myriad shameful, embarrassing ways the Republicans are comporting themselves. I think he makes a powerful case here for who America’s real enemies are:
Republicans are responding to this the way they respond to everything: by seeking to divide America and undermine Democrats and liberals. They do this for the same reason the scorpion stings the frog in the fable: it’s their nature. They will continue trying to divide America until we wake up and realize that they hate America—or at least they hate any America in which we don’t turn over all the power to them. They’ll undermine and weaken that pluralistic America until we finally recognize their disloyalty and marginalize the dividers.
We should have expected them to try to deny Barack Obama credit for the fact that bin Laden was located and killed on his watch, and to try to shift the credit to George W. Bush. We should have expected them to use the incident to reopen the debate about torture.
But there’s more. Fox Nation, right-wing bloggers, and others are currently braying about this story from Britain’s Daily Mail:
Obama took SIXTEEN HOURS to make up his mind about Bin Laden mission
Barack Obama kept military commanders hanging by declaring he would ‘sleep on it’ before taking 16 hours to give the go-ahead to raid Bin Laden’s compound….
Really? The mission was successful, and this is the straw they grasp at? A delay of less than a day?
Let me put that in context. It took 1,306 DAYS for George W. Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld for his sheer inability (or willful refusal) to cope with the chaos of Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, and for his stubborn insistence on a level of troop strength inadequate to quell the chaos and restore order—that’s 1,306 DAYS from the first reports of looting in Iraq (April 12, 2003) through the worst of the insurgency and to the day (November 8, 2006) Rumsfeld stepped down.
(Or perhaps, like Maureen Dowd, you’d like to count it down from Tora Bora: “A pigheaded Donald Rumsfeld, overly obsessed with a light footprint, didn’t have the forces needed at Tora Bora to capture Osama after the invasion of Afghanistan.” In that case, it’s 1,787 DAYS from the conclusion of the Battle of Tora Bora, on December 17, 2001, to Rumsfeld’s resignation.)
So who’s the real hesitator?
But that’s not enough divisiveness for Republicans and rightists. Bloggers, led (as Little Green Footballs notes) by the grotesque Pam Geller, are advancing anonymously sourced reports from shady rumor-purveyors that the bin Laden mission happened over Obama’s objections, in a “military coup” of sorts, and took place only because CIA director Leon Panetta gave the OK without waiting for Obama’s approval.
Maybe this scurrilous nonsense is coming from people at the far margins of the right. Or maybe it’s not—maybe it’s being injected into the debate by people close to the centers of mainstream Republican power, because they can’t bear to have a country that’s not divided, with powerful Democrats widely despised and mistrusted. In any event, the nonsense is being regurgitated at such sites as CNN contributor Erick Erickson’s RedState and the well-connected Pajamas Media. It’s part of the mainstream of Republican commentary. It’s a disgrace from a disgraceful party.
Well put, brother. Amen to that.
Note to Gov. Scott Walker: You should really,really make an effort not to do this face so often in public, because it’s just too easy for bloggers to find images of you looking stupid, forlorn and like you’ve had your ass whipped.
Wisconsin’s District 94 Assembly seat has been held by Republicans for some sixteen years, but last night it was won by a Democrat running a campaign openly disdainful of Gov. Scott Walker and his clownish, heavy-handed attempts to end collective bargaining rights for public employees in the state. Democrat Steve Doyle, a labor-supporter, smashed his opponent, Republican John Lautz in a 54% to 46% bludgeoning. This was a special election, called to replace Mike Huebsch, a GOP incumbent who was appointed Walker’s secretary of administration, and has was seen by many as a symbolic referendum on the unpopular Gov. Walker himself.
If this is anything to go by—and obviously it is with such a lop-sided margin—the statewide effort by progressive activists to remove eight Republican senators just got a major shot in the arm. Every elected Republican in Wisconsin’s government—not the least Scott Walker himself—has to be pissing themselves in terror of what is to come.
So far, the recall effort has been going great, already easily making the quota of signatures for six GOP senators to face recall by Monday’s deadline. You piss in the wind, it comes back to hit you in the face. That’s the way it works. That’s life. That’s karma. The Wisconsin GOP, I think, is going to get what it deserves, a right thrashing! It’s going to be a hot July in Wisconsin, something tells me…
What’s that line about “Don’t quit your day job?” I give Huebsch, like Walker himself, sometime until mid-2012 before he gets thrown on the scrap heap of history with the rest of the Wisconsin Republican party.
If you live in Wisconsin, you can volunteer for the Walker Recall. He has to be in office for one year before a recall against him can come into play, but that gives activists several months to organize a Bronx cheer for this nitwit. If you are from outside of the state, you can donate some money to the Walker Recall efforts at the same site.
Rush Limbaugh laughed at media outlets who missed the obvious sarcasm of his praise for Obama’s military leadership, but he seems to be oblivious himself to the irony that in this instance—uniquely so—certain people were willing to actually give this lardass blowhard the benefit of the doubt that for once he might not be behaving like a total asshole.
As if. And how could anyone be taken in by this? That’s shameful. All it took was watching it, nothing more! I suppose that’s too much to ask?
From her Facebook page:
by Sarah Palin on Sunday, May 1, 2011 at 11:30pm
Americans tonight are united in celebration and gratitude. God bless all the brave men and women in our military and our intelligence services who contributed to carrying out the successful mission to bring Bin Laden to justice and who laid the groundwork over the years to make this victory possible. It’s a testament to the hard work and dedication of these brave Americans who relentlessly hunted down our enemy.
This is a victory for the American people, for the victims who were heartlessly murdered on September 11 and in Al Qaeda’s other numerous attacks, and for all the peace-loving people of the world.
May God bless our troops and our intelligence services, and God bless America!
- Sarah Palin
What a cunt! She left out George Bush!
The Shiloh Baptist Church, the historic African-American house of worship attended by the Obama family on Easter Sunday (and that has been visited in the past by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush) has received more than 100 threatening phone calls and messages since Sean Hannity’s Monday night broadcast on Fox News:
The Rev. Wallace Charles Smith said the church has received more than 100 threats since Fox News channel’s Sean Hannity aired a tape Monday of a speech Smith gave in January 2010 at Eastern University in Saint Davids, Pa.
“We received a fax that had the image of a monkey with a target across his face,” Smith said. “My secretary has received telephone calls that have been so vulgar until she has had to hang up.” …
On Sunday, Obama and the first family visited the church, founded in the 1860s by former slaves. On Monday, Hannity aired a clip of a speech Smith gave when he served as president of Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
“It may not be Jim Crow anymore,” Smith says in the videotape. “Now, Jim Crow wears blue pinstripes, goes to law school and carries fancy briefs in cases. And now, Jim Crow has become James Crow, esquire. And he doesn’t have to wear white robes anymore because now he can wear the protective cover of talk radio or can get a regular news program on Fox.”
Sean Hannity’s Neanderthal audience sorta made the good Rev. Smith’s point for him, don’t you think?
Then, being the crass, small-minded scumbag asshole that he is, Hannity e-mailed the Washington Post on Wednesday, writing that he’d requested comment from Rev. Smith and had offered him “an open invitation to explain his comments on our show and he refused. We played his own words in full context but now it’s time for him to explain.”
So he can get a thousand threats and pictures of monkeys in cross-hairs sent to his office next time? I’m sure Rev. Smith will get right on that, you racist frat-boy bully…
Personally, I think it’s time for the SEAN HANNITY to “explain” his ratings-driven race-baiting but I won’t hold my breath for that. This motherfucker claims to be a patriot and love his country. Sean, where is the love?
Shiloh Baptist Church receives threats after comments from Sean Hannity (Washington Post)
Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer, where 140 million people shop each week, is not seeing much of a recovery for the U.S. economy. The low-price behemoth has now seen seven straight quarterly declines in sales figures. According to the company’s CEO, it’s because their customers—who let’s face it ARE America—are simply too damned broke to buy much anymore. From CNN/Money:
Wal-Mart’s core shoppers are running out of money much faster than a year ago due to rising gasoline prices, and the retail giant is worried, CEO Mike Duke said Wednesday.
“We’re seeing core consumers under a lot of pressure,” Duke said at an event in New York. “There’s no doubt that rising fuel prices are having an impact.”
Wal-Mart shoppers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, typically shop in bulk at the beginning of the month when their paychecks come in.
Lately, they’re “running out of money” at a faster clip, he said.
“Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month even more than last year,” Duke said. “This end-of-month [purchases] cycle is growing to be a concern.
I must say that I’m far more inclined to trust Wal-Mart’s sales figures as a barometer of the economy’s health than the suspect reports put out by the government. They’re a public company, they can’t get away with lying with impunity the same way Uncle Sam can…
Doesn’t this make you wonder: How much more do the working class and the poor still have left to lose before things start to get really, really hot for Republican politicians? Even online loans have become a resort to many struggling to make ends meet. Imagine that you are the parent of a handicapped child, you can’t find work, you have no health insurance, first fuel and now FOOD is out of your reach? The people who are making decisions to reward billionaire racists like Donald Trump with tax cuts while your family suffers, well, they do have street addresses…
Normally, I am not one for violence, but this position is—how shall I put it—evolving. As the Republican pols around the country continue to cut the social safety nets that allow our society to rise above the barbaric, I sure hope to see the sight of hungry, angry mobs showing up with pitchforks and torches at their homes for a lil’ chat.
What do they expect them to do, just roll over and die?
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Mad Max in American: Our Republican Future?
It’s just pure comedy. Not to be missed.
Up is down to these people. How do their teeny-tiny little minds deal with concepts like “gravity” or the Earth revolving around the Sun when they get all their news from Fox and WorldNet Daily?
