Conservatives Are Stupid: Graduation Edition

From Media Matters

Religious Crackpots

The Daily Show covers two crackpot religious leaders, one of whom describes Obama as the Antichrist, the other as Hitler. Funny until you realize that these two whackjobs have been featured on CNN and of course Fox Noise.

Even scarier if they've gotten federal funds for their "faith-based" evangelism.

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

Unusual Suspect

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

Duh

Rob Bennett for The New York Times

Rachel Maddow on the set of her new program for MSNBC.

America is a liberal country (sorry Jon Meacham, you are eight ways of wrong). Put a wicked smart liberal on TV, people watch!

NYTimes: Fresh Face on Cable, Sharp Rise in Ratings

Drunk Broke America

President AmericaFucker
yahoo

Ultimately, it is a good thing that it's all out on the table before the election, but really, media? The guy has been a MISERABLE FAILURE since Day 1. Nice of you to notice.

IOKIYAR

The corporate media was quick to run the National Enquirer story about John Edwards' affair. The same publication runs essentially the same story about Sarah Palin: silence. Same publication, same journalistic standards, one story trumpeted from coast to coast, the other ignored. This week the National Enquirer is reporting that Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband's business partner. The family values/rank hypocrisy party strikes again.

IOKIYAR

National Enquirer: SARAH PALIN LOVER REVEALED!

I Am Touched

John "Great Orange Satan" Boehner just regretfully told George Stephanopoulos that he is sacrificing his longheld beliefs in the free market.

To give his rich campaign contributors $700,000,000,000. Wow, what a sacrifice.

I am touched. Truly touched. In the fucking wallet touched.

Spineless Media

I am watching George Stephanopoulos interview Hank Paulsen.

I wonder, where is the room where TV journalists go to have their spines removed before they can appear on TV?

Is there a room somewhere littered with the vertebrae of the media?

Ron Fournier Fournicating for McCain - Again

Never forget that AP's Ron Fournier interviewed for a job with the McCain campaign. Since then he's been working for the man anyway. Today's Fournication:

yahoonews: Poll: Racial views steer some white Dems away from Obama

Fournier is such an asshole. I'd like to meet him and like that scene in "Die Hard", walk up to him and punch him in the nose. (Sometimes words just won't do.) For those with more patience, Al Giordano rips into this piece and good over at The Field.

Al Giordano, The Field: The AP’s Ron Fournier: Racial Arsonist and Unethical Journalist

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks - many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

- Ron Fournier, Associated Press, September 20, 2008


Theorem: The amount of time conservatives spend talking about the Bradley Effect is inversely proportional to the fortunes of their candidate.



- Nate Silver, September 19, 2008

Today's AP story wasn't exactly about the so-called "Bradley Effect" or "Wilder Effect," a popular theory in the 1980s and 1990s that posited that some white Americans lie to pollsters claiming they will support African-American candidates but vote then against them in the secrecy of the ballot box.

The theory - if it was true back then - has been very thoroughly disproved in recent years, and today we'll walk you through all the documentation you need to debunk it when asked about it by others.

But with the McCain-Palin ticket sinking in the polls, and the financial crisis sucking the oxygen out of the culture war "issues" on all sides, with the economy now front and center as the dominant campaign issue, we're hearing increasing mention of the so-called "Bradley Effect," the so-called "Wilder Effect," the so-called "Bradley-Wilder Effect" (all names for the same 20th century theory).

And now, the Associated Press and its unethical reporter Ron Fournier are transparently attempting to turn the November election (and, if their attempted arson is successful, its aftermath for years to come) into a wedge to divide, polarize and set back race relations in the United States of America more than four decades.

Everybody take a deep breath and repeat after me: The race card is not working. It's not going to work. And we're not going to take the bait being dangled out in front of us by racially prejudiced provocateurs like Fournier: he wants us to spread his gasoline to make his arson fire bigger; we're going to hose water on it - and on him - instead.

Cindy McCain Drug Abuse Story Up on WaPo

Murky.

Editor & Publisher: UPDATE: The Case of the Missing 'Post' Posting (Probably) Solved!

It looked like 1) just a technical glitch or hacking 2) the usual case of a news outlet pulling back a story to do more checking 3) someone pushed a button too early on a story being held for a later date 4) a bombshell report was killed because of pressure from a presidential campaign 5) none of the above.

We still don't know for certain, but The Washington Post says it had something to do with an unedited caption to a video that should not have gone up. But what about the video itself? And a separate documents file?

WaPo: A Tangled Story of Addiction
Consequences of Cindy McCain's Drug Abuse Were More Complex Than She Has Portrayed

You Won't Read This Story In the Washington Post Today

It's been scrubbed. (Of course, their IBM Selectric tech team couldn't figure out that if you were going to pull the article, you needed to pull all the places where the article got archived, like The Google [right now it's the last result on page 1, and that will change as more blogs cover this story] and Yahoo Buzz!. And their own website, which still has an active link to the scrubbed story, which people have been leaving comments on.)

What story, you ask? Tom Gosinski, the former director of government and international affairs for the American Voluntary Medical Team, a nonprofit organization headed by Cindy Hensley McCain, gave a videotaped interview (two excerpts from YouTube are at the end of this post) to the press yesterday alleging that John McCain used his Senate staff and position to cover up his wife's drug use, and that he intervened with the Drug Enforcement Agency to prevent her being prosecuted.

Basically, Cindy McCain was stealing pain medication that was supposed to be going to the children her charity served. She had a huge painkiller addiction (taking 30 to 50 pills a day) and started forging prescriptions on the prescription pads of doctors who volunteered for the charity, and because she was taking so many, used the names of her employees to get even more pills. Gosinski found out she had forged his name on a prescription, complained and got fired.

McCain has always claimed he didn't know about Cindy's drug abuse, but Gosinski says this is nonsense as he picked her up from the hospital in 1991 after she overdosed. Gosinski also says McCain through his Senate office got Cindy McCain a diplomatic passport, which allowed her to pass through Customs without having her bags searched. After Gosinski got fired, McCain got a political buddy of his, Maricipa County Attorney Rick Romley, to open an investigation into Gosinski. So Gosinski, the man whose name was forged onto prescriptions so Cindy McCain could get drugs illegally, he gets investigated; John McCain used his position and influence to shut down the investigation of his wife, the actual criminal. If she hadn't been married to a Senator, she would have gone to jail, as Arizona has some of the harshest mandatory minimum sentences for drug use in the country.

Not exactly the rosy picture the Republicans painted of the McCains at their disgusting convention last week.

And it looks like McCain is still wielding his powerful position to keep the truth about his wife's abuse out of the public eye.


Matt Stoller, OpenLeft: Did McCain Tamper with the Drug Enforcement Agency to Protect His Career?

dailykos: Whistleblower Says McCain Hid Wife's Drug Abuse

Stop the Presses

Foreign Affairs Parody cover, from Panopticist via BoingBoing

"On Russia: I can almost see it from my desk"

Get A Shovel

Joe Scarborough's shilling for McCain on MSNBC tonight is interrupted by Keith Olbermann: "Jesus, Joe. Why don't you get a shovel."



The media is working overtime for their man, Telecom John.

Presstitute of the Year: AP's Ron Fournication

flickr, user hyku: WOMMA Research Summit - Ron Fournier

AP's Ron Fournier, hereinafter Ron Fournication, has been awarded this blog's coveted Presstitute of the Year award for this actual AP article:

Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence
By RON FOURNIER, Associated Press Writer – Sat Aug 23, 2:12 am ET

Fournication has rocketed to the top of my list of Republican presstitutes masquerading as journalists. It was just a few months ago that he won his first Presstitute of the Day award (when he said Obama was "bordering on arrogance" for making a joke, and that Barack and Michelle Obama ooze a sense of entitlement. That would be the one house Obamas, not the dozen houses worth $13,000,000 McCains.) And when Pat Tillman was killed, he was ready to carry the Bush Administration's lies, and even emailed Karl Rove: "Keep up the fight." And now he's won the annual Presstitute award, and it isn't even Labor Day.

To properly tell this story, I must indulge in some internet shouting (ALLCAPS on the 'net is SHOUTING). Ron Fournication INTERVIEWED FOR A JOB WITH THE McCAIN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN. Ergo, he is not an impartial journalist. He picked a side. John McCain's side.

If there still existed something as quaint as "journalistic ethics" he would be barred from covering the presidential campaign. Instead, AP put him in charge of their Washington Bureau, and the man who once interviewed to work for John McCain is working for McCain by putting out slanted article after slanted article, all favoring McCain and heaping abuse on Obama.

How wrong is Fournication's "analysis?" Just look at the statements on Biden by REPUBLICAN Senators:

Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska: “Joe Biden is the right partner for Barack Obama. His many years of distinguished service to America, his seasoned judgment and his vast experience in foreign policy and national security will match up well with the unique challenges of the 21st Century. An Obama-Biden ticket is a very impressive and strong team. Biden’s selection is good news for Obama and America,”

Richard Lugar, R-Indiana: "I congratulate Senator Barack Obama on his selection of my friend, Senator Joe Biden, to be his vice-presidential running mate. I have enjoyed for many years the opportunity to work with Joe Biden to bring strong bipartisan support to United States foreign policy."

Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania: "No one on the Democratic side knows more about foreign policy than Sen. Biden," Specter said. "He's been an articulate spokesman on the subject. He also knows about domestic policy. He's been a leader on crime control."

Finally, not only are Fournication's articles solidly pro-McCain, anti-Obama, and anti-truth, he is for sale. Lindsay Beyerstein documents that Fournication is available as a speaker through the "All American Talent & Celebrity Network" (you can't make this stuff up) for $10,000 a pop.

Firedoglake has the links to let you take ACTION: Tell AP To Remove Ron Fournier From the Presidential Beat

Newshoggers: Ron Fournier's ASS Press

firedoglake: Karl Rove's Little Hot Soup Nazi

Sourcewatch: Ron Fournier [aka Fournication]

Obama Framed

Go watch this presentation on the media's framing of Barack Obama by Michael Shaw at BAGNewsNotes.




BAGNewsNotes: ObamaPhobia: BAGnewsNotes NetrootsNation Presentation '08

Ron Fournier: The Rat We Smelled Is Indeed A Rat

Hacktactular!

Ron Fournier was for sale before he took over the Washington Bureau of the AP. He interviewed with the McCain campaign in 2007. We should not be surprised at how biased of his coverage of the 2008 campaign is. We've seen his ideological slip, and it's conservative Republican.

We were right: AP Must Fire Ron Fournier

Politico: One of Fournier's job options: McCain

dday at Hullabaloo: Media Industrial Complex

dailykos: Ron Fournier (AP Hack) Was Negotiating McCain Campaign Position

You can not negotiate with a campaign for a job, then report on it as a "neutral observer" unless you have no standards at all. We should apply pressure on the AP to do the right thing and fire him now. More importantly, his colleagues in the profession should be leading this fight. He not only writes, but assigns stories.

Everything the AP says and does between now and November is utterly tainted by Fournier not disclosing his conflict of interest.

Novak Diagnosed With Brain Tumor

Chicago Sun-Times: Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak says he has brain tumor

Maybe he really didn't realize he hit the homeless man with his car last week.

Corporate Media Misleading

Third World Traveler

I've briefly summarized these posts about the horrible media coverage of politics we get here in the old U S of A. Click on the links and read the entire articles because I'm just giving you a flavor of these pieces.

Here's something you'd only read from the international press: Obama impresses a reporter for the Jerusalem Post; while McCain & Bush are surrounded by aides when interviewed, Obama goes solo and understands the nuances of Middle East issues.

Devastating critique of the media by Digby; these two passages are my favorite:

After watching them have a mass four year orgasm over George W. Bush standing on a pile of rubble with a bullhorn saying "Ah hear you. And the people who did this are gonna hear from us real soon! yuk, yuk" like he was reciting Shakespeare's Henry V St Crispin's day speech, it's a little bit hard for me to take seriously the idea that they have anything but a bias toward cheap, shallow ignorance (which naturally favors movement conservatism.)

The problem with our media isn't that they like or dislike a politician that we also like or don't like. It's that they treat politics like a celebrity game show and it makes it very difficult for the people to even know what their interests are, much less who best represents them.

In a ridiculous article spammed out to all the media outlets who use AP, two "journalists" declared that the U.S. is winning the war in Iraq. JurassicPork at Brilliant at Breakfast let's 'em have it:

I read the news today, oh boy. The Yankee army has just won the war.

Imagine my surprise when I clicked on this article entitled “Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost” that began with this breathtakingly ballsy sentence: “The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.” Well, gee, there are very few people who would like to believe that more than yours truly. Still, I wanted to see who’d drawn up this analysis but after several paragraphs it was obvious that this “analysis” was cooked up by the same two guys who wrote this article, Robert Reid and Robert Burns.

Indeed, the breezily optimistic opening line was immediately deflated with the next sentence: “Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years.” Considering that our involvement in World War II lasted just over four years against two awesome war machines across two continents, it would seem to me that this 5½ year-old war isn’t close to being over if we have several more years of terrorist and insurgent activity to look forward to.

Yet, to Burns and Reid, the insurgency is (let’s all say it together, people, with feeling and harmony) in its last throes. So how have we beaten or won over the insurgency that we’d created by disbanding the Iraqi Army?

They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

So we’re buying their loyalty with cold hard American taxpayer dollars and political favoritism. Yeah, that’s certainly a firm foundation for a lasting, peaceful alliance.

Department of Misleading Headlines

CNN.com: Poll: 'Sharp reversal' for Obama with Latino voters

Reversal. Obama's gone backwards, right?

Here's the first sentence of the story:

A new poll released Thursday shows overwhelming support from Latinos for Sen. Barack Obama over Sen. John McCain.

Is it backwards day at CNN? Yes means no? White means black?

AP Must Fire Ron Fournier

Fire this Republican cheerleader

Media Matters for America: The AP has a Ron Fournier problem

We wrote about Ron Fournier's inappropriate emails to Karl Rove here. You can read the emails in the House Oversight Committee report (pdf file) here on page 23.

Karl Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line "H-E-R-O." In response to Mr. Fournier's e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, "How does our country continue to produce men and women like this," to which Mr. Fournier replied, "The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight."

When confronted with the fact of his cheerleading, Fournier claimed (a) the emails were just "too breezy" in tone, and (b) that he was researching an article on Pat Tillman's death.

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters has discovered that the second claim cannot be true, as Ron Fournier never wrote an article about Pat Tillman:

Yet according to a search of Nexis, Fournier didn't write any bylined articles about Pat Tillman's death in April 2004. Or ever, for that matter. That means Fournier wasn't reaching out as a reporter to Rove for information, quotes, or context about the sad Tillman story. Fournier didn't need Rove to be a "source" for the Tillman story because Fournier wasn't covering the Tillman story.

Instead, Fournier seemed to be using the Tillman story as an opportunity to initiate contact with Rove and let him know that Fournier was on his side, and to urge Rove to "keep up the fight."

Read the entire article at Media Matters to see Fournier and AP's history of Republican cheerleading. Fournier isn't an objective journalist. Here's just one odious example of his bias:

For instance, in the months before Fournier was privately bonding with Rove and urging the White House to "keep up the fight," this was the lead Fournier wrote for a straight-ahead news article about then-Democratic front-runner Howard Dean receiving Al Gore's endorsement:

Dean hopes the coveted endorsement eases concerns among party leaders about his lack of foreign policy experience, testy temperament, policy flip-flops, campaign miscues and edgy anti-war, antiestablishment message.

Gee, not many Rovian talking points embedded in that AP article, eh?

You can let AP know what you think of their Republican plant Ron Fournier here at their contact page. I'm sure if the AP fires him, he could very quickly get a job with the McCain campaign. For writing stuff like this:

The fact is, Fournier's McCain love runs deep and goes back years. In 2004, when McCain wasn't even a candidate, Fournier praised him in print as "a former Vietnam War hero who emerged from his 2000 defeat as one of the nation's most popular politicians, beloved by independent voters and courted by both presidential candidates."

The next year, while reviewing the possible 2008 presidential field, Fournier insisted the Arizona senator was "favored by a majority of Democrats and independents who would vote in a general election."

But that breathless claim had no factual basis.

McCain Is Confused by The Modern World. Again.

HuffPo: McCain Defends Czechoslovakia, A Non-Existent Country -- Again

At a press availability today [actually, yesterday], John McCain expressed concern about relations between Russia and a country that hasn't existed for quite some time. According to a rough pool report transcript, he said:

"I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia. Apparently that is in reaction to the Czech's agreement with us concerning missile defense, and again some of the Russian now announcement they are now retargeting new targets, something they abandoned at the end of the Cold War, is also a concern."

Czechoslovakia, of course, split into two separate countries in 1993.

Two countries now. The Czech Republic and Slovakia.

I've already gotten used to calling Tampa Bay the Rays instead of the Devil Rays. Took me about 3 months. In 15 years McLame hasn't sorted out the two countries that once made up Czechoslovakia.

But he crashed some planes and was a prisoner, so he's qualified to be President, according to your in-the-tank corporate media. BBQ and sprinkles, anyone?