Osborne Ink || News that's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.

Kristol Quoted

Mar 10, 2010 Chris Wallace, Faux Noise Channel, Faux Noise™, Willam Kristol, neocons, wingnutosphere

An exercise in surrealism via ThinkProgress:

WALLACE: Bill, you certainly are an expert in this area. The two leading candidates seem to be the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and the original prime minister [Ayad] Allawi. From the U.S. point of view, who would we rather see?

KRISTOL: I honestly don’t know.

Kristol, of course, follows with flummery about how he just knows the election is a good thing; yet he never actually says the name of either candidate even though Wallace has just used them, and certainly never deigns to offer much of an opinion on either of them.

But to address the eloquent ignorance of William Kristol as an “expert” is just too much for words. He’s the most consistently wrong human being on television. He’s the man who suggested Sarah Palin to John McCain, said there would be no religious violence in Iraq months before the religious violence began, and occasionally says things that are the opposite of true.

The real question is why Kristol still gets asked to come on television, even right-wing television. You would think he would be among those purged for the Bush failure; you would imagine a sane, sensible right-wing media machine would stop using someone so tainted with fail.

But if you thought that way, you wouldn’t be a conservative.

Noise Machine Takedown

Mar 4, 2010 Faux Noise Channel, Faux Noise™, Jon Stewart, nontroversy

Jon Stewart skewers the Faux Noise fear factory.

Morning Awful

Feb 17, 2010 Defense Procurement, Faux Noise™, Morning Awful, Ted Kennedy

Do you remember when the right erupted over the CBS docudrama about the Reagans? It turned out to be a somewhat oversimplified telling of St. Ronald as good-hearted, if slightly confused old man. This is brought to you by the maker of Kiefer Sutherland’s torture porn TV show.

There is good news this morning however. From the Wall Street Journal, a tale of how one soldier’s life was saved by a Kevlar helmet. The Army’s decision to adopt Kevlar protection came in 1978 under the Carter administration. In fact, a lot of weapons we take for granted in the modern military were designed at his initiative: the AH-64, the Humvee, the M-1 Abrams and the M-2 Bradley were already in development when Reagan was inaugurated. Likewise, current procurement is helicopter-heavy and mine-resistant only after years of resistance from Donald Rumsfeld. The more you know!

Narcissus Pronoun Nontroversy

Feb 16, 2010 Faux Noise™, Obama smears, Obama's communication strategy, Permanent Campaign, language, nontroversy

In the continuing quest to promote their “narcissist” meme, Faux Noise has been counting the number of times the president uses the first-person singular pronoun in his speeches. Of course, they do this without context or comparison. Mark Lieberman makes quick comparative studies of speeches by Palin and John Boehner and finds (unsurprisingly) that this new line of linguistic attack blows up in their faces:

Satire aside, let me emphasize again my conviction that these numbers are meaningless without further context and analysis, except perhaps as an index of pundits’ idiocy or malice.  Such proportions vary widely with formality, interactivity, and other obvious factors — and there are several different sorts of I and we, as James Pennebaker explains in his post “What is ‘I’ saying?“, 8/9/2009.  But those who think that such counts and rates are a useful measure for one public figure should be honest enough to try the same metric across the board.

Of course, Faux Noise keeps hitting on the idea of Obama’s “permanent campaign” mode as something unprecedented and unnecessary even in the face of their very own 24-7 campaign of noise and nonsense. The White House seems even less interested in the Beltway village than before:

“We ran everything through one strategic filter – how does this help us win the election?” said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, who held the same title during the campaign. “Anything that didn’t help us do that, we didn’t do.”

[...]

The emphasis on impact is reflected in the 10 interviews Obama has chosen to do so far this year – three with high-profile television anchors, including an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric that was broadcast live before the Super Bowl; four interviews with prominent national magazines; a national radio interview; and the online YouTube interview that incorporated questions from the public.

The 10th interview, with the Bloomberg subsidiary Business Week, was the only one the president has done this year with a reporter who regularly covers the White House, a group often more familiar than anchors or other high-wattage interviewers with the daily ups and downs of the president and his policies.

But it’s all grist for the mill, right? Obama controlling his message is “controlling the press oh noes!” and his speeches are narcissistic because, well, just because. And our permanent campaign to fill our viewers’ heads with bullshit is no reason for the president to step up his game. See how that works?

A Visual Representation Of Cognitive Dissonance

Feb 10, 2010 Cognitive Dissonance, FBN, Faux Noise™

Fox News has always gone for the tabloid sexy stuff. Not that I object to the idea; it’s Huffington Post’s business model, too. But watch this amazing video from Media Matters:

As it happens, I’ve already commented on this story. Employees looking at porn at work is a huge problem throughout the white-collar world, but for some reason the problem only seems to get noticed by Faux Noise whenever government employees are involved. This video just raises FBN to the level of meta-hypocrisy.

Dave Ramsey is a right-wing nut, but I read his book and have listened to his show and found it valuable. It’s too bad, really; he ought to have been on TV years ago, but wound up on the worst possible channel for getting across his message about personal finances. America wouldn’t be where it is today if we’d been listening to him on credit cards — or asking his opinion on NINA loans.

Dear Glenn Beck: The Meaning of “Barack”

Feb 5, 2010 Culture Wars, Faux Noise Channel, Faux Noise™, Glenn Beck, Kulturkampf, Obama Derangement Syndrome, Obama antichrist, Obama smears, Obama's middle name, Scare Words, progressives

Okay, that’s it Glenn. You’ve gone too far:

BECK: He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.

Meanings of barack and derivations: to kneel, to bless, to invoke blessings, to sanction, to be blessed, to enjoy or find pleasure or delight, to ask a blessing, to seek a blessing, to be praised, to be sublime.

A bierka is a pool or small pond, which is a sacred item in desert cultures. Check the Old Testament and you’ll find that Hebrews had some harsh treatments for anyone who poisoned a well; it was considered a crime against humanity.

There are other nouns based of the root barak: blessing, benediction, bounty. There is a negation meaning “misfortune” or “bad luck.” There are several parts of speech made from the root: when an Arab needs congratulations, you should say mabrook.

This information comes from from my taxpayer-supplied copy of the Hans-Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, which still smells of Kuwaiti sand.

Glenn, I understand your problem: you are a clown with a circus. You are forced to top yourself each and every weekday. Every morning, you must pray to god for inspiration to top the boiled frog episode. This would just be entertainment if not for the fact you serve a rotten agenda: to rally racists, idiots, lunatics, and otherwise good Christians to the banner of the Republican Party.

Not that I mind; you’re helping to marginalize your own side. But along the way, you’ve stolen the act of every wacknoggin in the history right-wing media from Alex Jones to Father Coughlin, and now you’re channeling Jack Van Impe. You never know what the hell you’re talking about because your reading list consists of John Bircher paranoia, Atlas Shrugged, and — apparently — Hal Lindsey. Not a far stretch for someone who believes in golden plates and spirit-wives, I know — but still, it would all be fine except for the part where you constantly fill the heads of millions with this kind of dangerous garbage.

Glenn, you’re pandering to religious extremism and invoking the culture wars somewhere they absolutely don’t belong. I get the timing, because religiosity is hot: first there was Brit Hume, then Rush Limbaugh, and of course we have the highly-questionable testimony of Tim Tebow’s mom coming up in the midst of the f***ing SuperBowl this Sunday.

But this is really, really dangerous. You are telling your cult of worshipful know-nothings that the president serves the dark side, and by doing so you encourage very un-Christian divisions. Fear and hate are the tools of darkness. The truth is that YOU serve the dark side, Glenn. Your entire line of attack on Obama is psychological projection, like when you call Obama a “racist” and then pander to racism.

In fact, as long as we’re on the subject of things you project, consider your employer’s cozy relationship with the Chinese communist party. Hey, look — I connected YOU to actual, living, breathing, non-imaginary commies in one step — and without a chalkboard prop to make people think I maybe know what the fuck I’m talking about.

As long as I’m on a roll: the president might have changed his name to Joe Wilson or Bobby Jindal; but he instead chose to keep his birth name “not (as) some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.”

Get that, Glenn? Barack Hussein Obama kept his name because America is already enlightened enough to vote for a black man with a funny foreign name. Which just goes to show that you’ve already lost. The most you and your colleagues in the wingnutosphere can hope to accomplish is to make it as likely as possible to come to violence — just like the fight against progress did in the 1860s and 1960s.

Oh, which reminds me of one other thing: I’m sick of you pretending to know what “progressive” means. You’ve filled up endless hours of airtime with horse manure about a movement you don’t understand one tiny bit. I’ve done a better job of explaining the history of the progressive movement in a five-minute rock video than you have done in your entire career:

We’ve all been in those mind-numbing, stomach-churning, sleep-inducing conversations with people whose brains seem to be smaller than their mouths. They’re always endlessly long, painfully agonizing and hopelessly futile. I’d attempt to get past the screeners and tell you all this myself, Glenn, but it would be pointless. Just grow the hell up, you stupid racist bastard.

H/t to Simon Malloy at Media Matters

Your Liberal Media At Work

Dec 9, 2009 Faux Noise™, global warming

I’m told the UK Telegraph is a conservative-right newspaper, which explains why they’re covering this. It’s an astroturf “shadow conference” going on in Copenhagen:

Svensmark is a longtime denialist. Solar radiation does indeed affect climate, but Earth is currently at a century-long low point in the solar cycle. In other words, if solar radiation affects global temperature a lot, then we are in for some new record high temperatures. Which makes denialists the equivalent of the special-needs kid who won’t take off his sweater and coat even in a sweltering room.

The Telegraph fails to report that Morner also claims to be an expert in dowsing. Kinda like this guy. Credible!

Geothermal activity, eh? Odd that no one can find the geothermal vents that are responsible, or point to a new upwelling of geothermal vents. But here’s what I find interesting about Ollier: I can’t find a lot of good references on the ‘net, though I can see his tracks in the astroturf “dissident” movement. One source said he was “retired,” which is probably another way of saying he works for the oil industry.

That would the Ian Plimer who refuses to debate Monbiot. He’s a “scientist” who’s afraid to debate a writer. As for his claim about volcanoes, it’s true they affect climate — eruptions cool the planet. They also emit CO2, but:

And now the pattern is complete:

As revealed in Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

The Usual Suspects. Which brings me back to this item, now verified:

There has apparently been more than one attempt, but the story today is climate science on the defensive instead of “desperate oil and gas conglomerates pay for Watergate-style break in.” SwiftHack is a story Teh Librul Media™ won’t do on their own, but climategate just shot through their stovepipe like cabbage through a rabbit. Some “liberal” media.

John Stossel Is A Tool

Dec 7, 2009 ACORN, Ayn Rand, Faux Noise™, John Stossel

Obama Versus Teh Librul Media™

Nov 25, 2009 ABC, Faux Noise Channel, Faux Noise™, Rupert Murdoch, Teh Librul Media™, The New York Post