Fox Not-News And the Reputation Of Bad Journalism

Everything I said about the failures of journalism during the Brian Williams exaggeration-and-lies fiasco remains true.  Especially as a follow-up revelation: that Bill O'Reilly, prime promoter of the Fox Not-News media charade, is himself caught in a web of falsehoods regarding his coverage of the Falklands War.  It's built up into a series of additional revelations that O'Reilly has fibbed and exaggerated his way through various news stories and major moments over the decades he's been paid as a journalist.

To wit:

• O'Reilly claimed to have witnessed deadly rioting - "bodies in the streets" - in Argentina during the Falklands War. While there were riots, none were lethal nor as bad as he claimed.  Adding to this fib has been O'Reilly's contention that being in Buenos Aries qualified him for being in "a war zone" even though the real war zone - the islands themselves - were hundreds of miles away.  There weren't any American reporters in that actual war zone during the firefights.
• O'Reilly claimed to have been at the house when a prominent figure in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories committed suicide in 1979.  The police reports from that incident never mentioned his being there (which would have been investigated, he would have been interviewed as a potential witness), and there's eyewitnesses and documentation O'Reilly was in Dallas that day (oh irony).
• A recent report that O'Reilly claimed to witness "nuns getting shot" in El Salvador during the violent civil war there in the early 1980s.  While nuns were killed, the only documented cases were in 1980, and O'Reilly didn't get there until 1981.

Making O'Reilly's struggles against the accusations more poetic is the reality that his channel has a poor reputation with truth-telling when it comes to reporting.  The channel repeatedly passes along unverified stories as factual, edits clips to distort statements by experts or political figures the channel openly despises, and places on-air people who are not experts on topics to discuss opinions instead of facts.

O'Reilly's not even the worst culprit: the bigger fact-denier has been Sean Hannity, who goes after ill-informed opinions that sync with his own rather than getting actual research and expert opinions.

Fox viewers tend to be the least-informed viewers among the three major cable news channels.  A lot of that is due to Fox News providing reports that tend to be false.  A lot of that is due to Fox News not really being news at all.

There's a push to get Fox Not-News to suspend O'Reilly for his exaggerations/outright lying about his professional career, but considering that cable channel thrives on exaggerations and lies, why expect them to punish him for it?  He's probably going to get a pay raise for this.

Addendum: there's a Washington Post article by Paul Waldman that simplifies the O'Reilly scandal in five easy-to-understand points.  Not only why O'Reilly lies...

So why not just say, “I may have mischaracterized things a few times” and move on? To understand why that’s impossible, you have to understand O’Reilly’s persona and the function he serves for his viewers. The central theme of The O’Reilly Factor is that (his) true America, represented by the elderly whites who make up his audience (the median age of his viewers is 72) is in an unending war with the forces of liberalism, secularism, and any number of other isms. Bill O’Reilly is a four-star general in that war, and the only way to win is to fight.

The allegedly liberal media are one of the key enemies in that war. You don’t negotiate with your enemies, you fight them. And so when O’Reilly is being criticized by the media, to admit that they might have a point would be to betray everything he stands for and that he has told his viewers night after night for the better part of two decades...

...but also why O'Reilly will never admit or acknowledge his lies...

Brian Williams got suspended from NBC News because his bosses feared that his tall tales had cost him credibility with his audience, which could lead that audience to go elsewhere for their news. O’Reilly and his boss, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, are not worried about damage to Bill O’Reilly’s credibility, or about his viewers deserting him. Their loyalty to him isn’t based on a spotless record of factual accuracy; it’s based on the fact that O’Reilly is a medium for their anger and resentments...

Welcome to the Fox Not-News War on Truth. They distort, you abide.

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The Saturnalia Wish List of 2014

'Tis the season to bring back the pagan rituals of our Roman ancestors!  'Tis the moment to slap Bill O'Reilly and the morans of Fox Not-News for their evil WAR ON SATURNALIA by breaking out the mulsum and wrapping the trees with togas!

And it's time to beg Saturn, the pagan God of the Temporal Vortex, to grant us boons in our dark hour of need:

1) Arrest warrants for every goddamn bastard responsible for the Cheney/Bush torture regime.  Especially Dick Cheney, who is out there lying and shilling for his regime of evil.  There is no excuse or justification for torture.  Ever.

2) That Rick "No Ethics" Scott's efforts to ignore the state's public records laws with illegal email accounts lead to felony charges.  PLEASE LET THERE BE FELONY CHARGES...

3) That some goddamn common sense and awareness of their voting base's needs wake up the Democratic leadership to run campaigns for all offices at all levels - federal AND state - and in all districts for 2016.  The pitiful turnout efforts this year sucked rhino.

4) That the movies of 2015 - Age of Ultron, Jurassic World, Fury Road, Tomorrowland, Star Wars VII, and the third Sharknado (maybe) - rock the f-cking house.

Seriously, Lord Saturn, they should have had this Falcon in stores for Christmas THIS YEAR...

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Serious Ways To Celebrate Saturnalia (updates)

While the philistines at the FOX Not-News channel wage their ungodly war on the pagan festivities, it might behoove me to pass along some tips on how to honestly and sincerely celebrate the Roman winter solstice holiday known as Saturnalia.

1) Decorate your home with sun and moon iconography.  Apply garland wreaths where appropriate.

2) Hang out with Vestal Virgins.

2a) (update) In the possibility you cannot locate any Vestal Virgins to hang out with, you have a good excuse now to travel over to Rome, Italy and ask around for one.  Hell, this is a good time for Rome to set up a Vestal temple for the tourists...

3) Decorate all trees on your property.  They don't have to be the traditional triangle-shaped fir trees, any trees will do.  For those of us in Florida, we've been decorating palm trees for years...

image from the Minimalist Sweet Home website

Update: that photo isn't showing anymore!  The link might be broken.  Let's try this one...

from the Jen On The Edge blog

4) Drink Roman-styled wine.  There's a version called mulsum which mixes honey into the wine.  Should be interesting around bears...

5) Give small presents.  Nothing large or ostentatious.  Maybe a set of keys to a new electric-powered car.  ...what?

6) GO TO ANY TEMPLE OF THE GOD SATURN AND LIGHT A CANDLE TO EARN HIS FAVOUR.  If you can't find a temple, trick your local churches into funding a charity that you'll secretly use to build one.  That oughta learn 'em, stealing the winter solstice and all...

7) Gamble.  It's allowed during this festive period.  But do it in legally-approved areas like Hard Rock Casinos on local tribal lands or Las Vegas.

7a) Gamble using other people's money.  See 6) for hints.

8) Sing classical Roman ditties.  If you don't know any classical Roman ditties, sing "Louie Louie" off-key and no-one will notice.

9) Greet everyone by saying "Io Saturnalia!"  Now here's the tricky thing about the Latin language: they didn't have a letter J to represent that phonic in the western tongues, so they doubled it to the letter I.  It's really Jo Saturnalia! being said.  And the Romans pronounced the J not like "jay" but like "yo".  So it should sound like YO SATURNALIA (akin to YO ADRIAN).  But type it IO SATURNALIA.

9a) Do this early and often around Bill O'Reilly until he goes batsh-t insane.

10) Enjoy the holiday season no matter how and why you celebrate it.  If you're Christian, Hebrew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Shinto, Pastafarian, what have you.  THIS IS A TIME TO CELEBRATE, TO REFLECT, TO ENJOY FAMILY AND FRIENDS TO THE UPMOST THAT WE CAN.

This message brought to you by a faction of the Unitarian Jihad.

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Io Saturnalia!

Tis the season to remember your Latin!  ...which means that I should write that as Satvrnalia: no U in the alphabet, and I am already substituting the I for J for the Jo part of Io Satvrnalia.  (label/tag will remain with the U because, well, modern Intertube traditions and all that).

This video is but a tourist-y Disney-fied version of Satvrnalia of course (the Romans were a bit more into the, ah, festive parts of festivities), but it's as best a representation of the holidays I can find.

So find a fellow Pagan and together tell Bill O'Reilly to STOP his War on Satvrnalia!  Io!  Io Satvrnalia!

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It's Cheap, It's Easy, It's Winners And Losers the 2012 Elections Edition

What can I say?  I'm swamped with getting more NaNoWriMo done...

Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post.  The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.

Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts.  Arithmetic, bitches.

Next, the guy making xkcd will chart with unnerving accuracy the flow of Karl Rove's tears.

Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver.  Arithmetic.

Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?

Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base.  Like Pennsylvania.  Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted).  Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward.  Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught.  In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.

Winners: Obama's ground game crew.  Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters.  This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts.  If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression.  If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions.  If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours.  It worked.

Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.  They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party.  As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother".  Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are).  Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority.  Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.

Losers: Rick Scott.  Thanks to his voter suppression efforts, our state was even more ill-prepared for the election turnout than in 2000, making us more a laughing stock than we were back then.  Also, 8 of the 11 amendment ballots he and his legislative buddies pushed onto the election suffered major rejections, especially the amendment that tried to Court-Pack the state judicial system to make it more partisan (the amendments that passed were three tax exemption ballots for veterans, widows of veterans and first responders, and low-income seniors: I argued against them mainly because of their origins, the revenue cuts may prove minor given how these changes benefit a slight minority of the populus).  Better still, the effort to get three State Court Justices voted off the bench - a clear attempt at forcing vacancies that Scott could fill with cronies - came back with all three judges getting 3/4ths of the vote to RETAIN, a huge slap in the face to Scott.
In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election.  If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...

Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates.  Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law.  Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.

Winners: Women.  Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level.  Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress.  Guess what, pundits?  There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.

Losers: Senate Republicans.  Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren).  The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.

Winner: Me.  The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots.  Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan.  Wow.  Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks...  wait, don't go!  Sniff, it gets so lonely here...

Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later.  Hi, Mitt.

Winner: Barack Obama.

And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:

Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"

Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer.  What you all get for your value, dawgs?  NOTHING!  ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!

Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs.  There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves...  I'm serious.  Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...

Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night.  The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that.  This is democracy in action.  While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so.  And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.

Did I miss anyone?

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The Rump Parliament of Media

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!  - Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament

In the aftermath of this 2012 election, one of the most obvious results of last night was how the conservative columnists and media darlings sitting at the head of the American political commentary were so utterly and completely wrong about how the election was going to play out.

To quote Conor:

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.

Those audiences were misinformed...

Each of those talking heads/columnists have been publicly exposed for putting personal viewpoints ahead of the facts and sticking to fantasy of their narrative - they are more invested in a close horse-race in order to keep ratings high - rather than doing the hard work of actual journalism - which would have involved research, genuine analysis, and more than likely direct interviewing of key people which in this case would have been a decent sampling of Honest-to-God voters.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that these media types - isolated in their offices, traveling in hermetically-sealed limos, chatting with each other in closed studios - are truly in a bubble of their own making.  They can't perceive the world outside that bubble and think that Real America - some idealized majority among us 300 million -  is just like them: pining for the era when America saved everyone during the Cold War, our Dollar was golden and Reagan their God.  Just look at Peggy Noonan's insistence that she could see the Real America, simply because she saw so many yard signs for Romney as she rode down the streets of Florida... without realizing that a low-staffed Romney ground game had little else to do BUT put yard signs everywhere they could.  Or that Obama yard signs kept getting stolen by spiteful Romney supporters. 

This shouldn't be too surprising when the Republican leadership during the Bush the Lesser years embraced the idea that their belief, and acting on that belief, would force the Real World to bend to their will.  Again to Conor:

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood's convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama's America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

Each of the people named by Friedersdorf - including Rush Limbaugh, who wasn't named but is part of the same problem - are now conservative columnists and radio hosts who came of age in the shadow of Reagan.  None of them seem to grasp that it's not 1985 anymore.  It's been 30 years since the heyday of Saint Ronnie's regime and yet the likes of George Will and Noonan and seem to think that most of America's problems can be solved the same way (unlikely: the problems we have now stem from what happened in 1985...) and with the same leadership (a solid conservative manly, religious, and devoted to deregulated economics).  These columnists and permanent guests on the talk show circuits have a problem accepting the slight possibility that a non-Republican could lead this nation: these are the same people who had problems accepting Bill Clinton, focusing more on his flaws than his skills, and it's only 10 years after he left that they're finally grokking why a majority of Americans still think well of Clinton and his presidency.

Their failure this weekend to stick to the facts, the whole-hearted way they gleefully predicted a Romney landslide as though he would be yet another Return to Reagan-ism, brings to the fore just how out-of-touch these self-appointed judges of Real America really are. This is the breaking point of "Epistemic Closure", the groupthink of people who haven't the need to think for more than 30 years...

I'm with Ta-Nehisi here: time to fire the pundits.  We don't need a term limit for elected officials, we can just vote them out if needed.  No, it's time to retire some of these self-indulgent out-of-touch media elites who have sat too long in the television studios (here now to James Fallows):

Remember, these people's claim to fame -- especially in the case of (in their respective primes) Barone, Morris, and Rove -- is that they know something special about politics. If they are putting their names behind these predictions, presumably they would like us to take them seriously. We'll see what happens in the next day or two: If they are right, all appropriate credit. But if they are not, this should be remembered, rather than just blown off. And similarly, if the "quants" who are unanimously predictable a sizable Obama win prove to be wrong, they should be made to explain.

They should be fired.  They should resign if they have any true perspective on the world around them.  But ah, the temptations of those six-figure speaking fees and seven-figure book deals...

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The Failures of Barack Obama

This has been coming up as a talking point for the wingnuts in the social media: that President Obama is a failure; that his policies are failing; that he's an embarrassment to our foreign allies, etc.

Here's a post this morning from a colleague of mine from TNC's Lost Battalion Horde, Geoffrey:

Random right winger I have been jawing with for a week.

I know, listen to the ProTips.

"Anyone supporting Obama is doing so because of ignorance or pure ideology. By any rational measure he has simply been a terrible president. The economy is terrible, the country is more divided than ever, and our foreign policy is in shambles."

This has been floating out there for awhile, and it angers me up every time I see it, because it's clear the person writing this has not really paid attention to what's really going on.  The willful ignorance, it burns...

So here, for all the Fox Not-News viewers who need a boot to the head to let them know just exactly what's going on in the Real World, I present to you the Failures of Barack Obama.

• Obama failed to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.  Oh, wait...
• Obama failed to save the auto industry.  Except that he pushed for the policies that did stave off bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler and kept linking industries such as the parts-makers dependent on the automakers going, essentially re-starting the entire automobile market and presiding long enough for both GM and Chrysler to pay back their loans.
• Obama failed to end military operations in Iraq.  Except that Obama upheld the existing treaty we had with the Iraqi government to exit all combat troops in 2010, to where our small presence in that war-stricken nation is for ongoing rebuilding efforts (the least we could do considering we invaded in 2003 under false excuses by the liars in Cheney's office).
• Obama failed to bring harmonious relations back among our major allies - especially our allies in NATO such as England, France and Germany - after the foreign relations miscues of the Bush the Lesser administration.  Just don't pay attention to the fact that Obama gets thousands if not millions to turn out at rallies when he goes overseas, that our political allies in Europe and Asia work well with Obama, that a majority of our allied nations would like to see Obama get re-elected... and that our allies and their citizenry are kinda horrified by the idea of a foreign policy fool like Romney getting anywhere near the White House...
• Obama failed in Libya.  As long as you think a simple enforcement of a no-fly-zone (which is as much as our NATO allies closer to the ground would have accepted) to give the Libyan rebels breathing room to free their own nation - brothers doin' it for themselves, bro - from a violent dictator was a bad idea.
• Obama is currently failing to act in Syria.  Considering that a THIRD invasion of a Middle Eastern Islamic nation would be a foreign policy debacle, that we don't honestly have the manpower to open another battlefront while Afghanistan is still a major military operation, that something of this scope requires our nearby allies like Turkey and other NATO nations to make direct efforts even they can't afford to make at the moment...  Expecting someone to just "bomb bomb bomb" everything and call it a win is not sensible foreign policy.
• Obama is failing to stop Iran's nuclear program or overthrow it's brutal theocratic regime.  Except that Obama's economic sanctions are kinda working to where the Iranian economy is in worse shape than Greece's.  And again, is opening a THIRD invasion of a Middle Eastern a good idea?  Because simply bombing Iranian sites will most likely escalate into a ground war...
• Obama failed to create jobs.  Considering every jobs bill proposal he brought to Congress was shot down by obstructionist Republican congressional leaders, then yeah it's totally Obama's fault for sticking to the system of checks and balances in the Constitution requiring such bills be left to the Legislative Branch.
• Specifically, Obama's unemployment numbers during his first term NEVER got under 8 percent, the fiend.  Except that recent numbers adjustments for September 2012's reports found the official unemployment rate - the same rate George W. Bush went by - dropped to 7.8 percent.  As long as we also don't overlook that Obama's tenure saw consistent and large-enough private sector job growth that recouped all the jobs lost under Bush the Lesser's tenure, and as long as we don't note the fact that the public sector job losses - thanks to Republican-led efforts to cut back on social services and government offices - is keeping our unemployment rate an extra 1 percent higher than it would be...
• Obama failed to fix our broken health care system.  Simply by getting passed in the 111th Congressional Session a major health care overhaul called ObamaCare that is based on REPUBLICAN reform proposals of the 1990s.  An ObamaCare package that for the most part stood up to Supreme Court scrutiny and is already showing positive effects on our nation's health care coverage.
• Obama failed on gay rights.  Which is a shame because repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell has proven one year later after Obama's efforts that having Gays in the military does not harm morale or service one whit, and it was a real shame when Obama spoke out this May that he now supports gay marriage because it showed how pro-people he is...
• Obama failed to do much of anything for women's rights.  Except pass the Lily Ledbetter Act enforcing equal pay in the workplace, promoting two women to the Supreme Court making that august body more reflective of the gender population of our nation, stood in defense of Planned Parenthood when the House Republicans sought to nuke it, argued for affordable access to birth control, and openly spoke about how "women are not an interest group: they're half the country and its workforce."
• Obama failed to make the 2011-2012 Congress do much of anything, which led to the 112th Congressional Session to be the WORST EVER CONGRESS.  Except it's not the President's job to make Congress work: it's the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader's job.  And there's not much Majority Leader Harry Reid could do with a cloture/filibuster system being abused like Punch-and-Judy dolls by obstructionist Republican Senators (Cloture motions have DOUBLED since Obama took office).  Here's a graph by the way of the number of bills passed by the 112th.  Every other Congress since 1947 passed at least 300 bills: the 112th Congress never even came close.

So you see, that's a lot of Failures on Obama's part.  As long as that's how you ignorant morans define Failure, you think?


What I said in the comments to Geoffrey's post:

By any rational measure we would recognize that our allies respect us more with Obama than during the Dubya regime: by any rational measure we would be celebrating Obama's decision to bring Bin Laden to justice the way millions of Americans wanted since even before 9/11: by any rational measure we would be celebrating our ending a military occupation of Iraq as a success: by any rational measure we would note that the economic woes are due to a Congress that is literally THE WORST EVER, failing to consider even ONE JOBS BILL even one that would help get veterans of our current wars off unemployment: by any rational measure we would recognize the country's divisiveness is due to unelected blowhards like Limbaugh, Beck, and the Birthers whose rage against Obama is based purely on emotion and willful ignorance. If Obama is a failure, then by GOD let us fail with him for FOUR MORE YEARS. 

GET THE GODDAMN VOTE OUT, DEMOCRATS.  GET THE GODDAMN VOTE OUT, INDEPENDENTS.  AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.  DO NOT VOTE FOR ROMNEY.  DO NOT VOTE FOR ANY GOP CONGRESSPERSON UP FOR RE-ELECTION, BECAUSE IT IS CONGRESS' FAULT OUR ECONOMY SUCKS, NOT OBAMA'S.  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD...

All comments welcome as long as you can use curse words as effective as BRIAN BLESSED.

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As Fox-Not-News' War On Saturnalia Continues Unabated

...I mean, seriously, I can't find any Greco-Roman pagans who even know what Saturnalia is, for Athena's sake...

I just wanted to make this observation about the ongoing disaster that is the GOP 2012 Primary race.  All the insane debates, the rise and fall of various wingnut candidates all because Mitt Romney is a flavor most primary voters didn't like the last time he ran in 2008...  I mean, we've gone from Trump to Bachmann to Perry to Cain and now Gingrich of all people is in the lead in Iowa and even now Gingrich's lead may be slipping to where Ron Paul is surging...  All of this, all of the crazy going on, it made me realize this:

Doesn't the 2012 Republican primary race look and feel EXACTLY like Monty Python's Upper Class Twit of the Year decathlon?

 
I know, I know.  This is awfully Classist of me to wage such bitter, savage rage against a select group of idiots who can't realize their grandstanding on the debate stages highlight exactly how elitist, out-of-touch, and flat-out insane they really are.

And I honestly do not encourage this year's grouping of Upper Class Twits uh Republican Presidential candidates from shooting themselves in order to win the Upper Class Twit award uh the Republican nomination.  Mostly because it would be a waste of bullets when a humiliating Electoral College result (I mean, at this rate the Republican candidate will get only South Carolina, Texas, and Idaho this November) would be more satisfying.

Now I understand why Huckabee and Christie and Daniels refused to sign up this round.

Having typed this, I just want to say to all Greco-Roman pagans out there Io Saturnalia!

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