Watching the conservative echo chamber in action is a frightening experience that most people don’t have to stomach on a daily basis.

The latest misinformation parroted by the rightwing machinery is that President Obama is buying votes on health care with judicial nominations.

As usual, it all starts with just a simple question. This time the ultra-conservative Weekly Standard got the ball rolling.

Read the entire story on Examiner.com

Almost all politicians stretch the truth, or outright lie, to convince people that what they’re doing is for their benefit. But what’s happening right now regarding a possible parliamentary move by Senate Democrats to use reconciliation to pass health care reform is just too much.

There are so many Republican lies whizzing across the media landscape about reconciliation it’s hard to keep up. The two biggest whoppers that GOP Senators and Fox News are disseminating are that Republicans would never dream of using reconciliation to thwart a filibuster, and that the use of the existing reconciliation rule (created in 1974) is the so-called “nuclear option.”

Republicans and Fox News are counting on no one looking at the public record and uncovering their blatant fabrications. If you look, you’ll see that Republicans have used reconciliation way more often than Democrats have. In fact, in the more than 20 times it’s been used, Republicans are on record with using reconciliation 17 times.

Most recently the GOP chose reconciliation to pass the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 and the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005.

And as far as the so-called “nuclear option” is concerned – that has absolutely nothing to do with reconciliation – nothing, nada, zip, zilch.

It was Republicans who coined the “nuclear option” phrase back in 2003 when they threatened to change Senate rules outlawing the filibuster. They were pissed at Democrats who were trying to filibuster judicial nominees. It had nothing to do with reconciliation.

Watch this video. Stop watching Fox News. Think. Read. Research. Be critical. The information is there. “The truth is out there.” — Fox Mulder

President Obama appears to have finally realized that Republicans will never support any effort to reform health care. On Wed., Obama is expected to release a plan to pass health care reform. According to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, the president would like Republicans to not filibuster the bill in the Senate and allow a simple up-or-down vote, but that’s not going to happen.

Now Republicans know they have lost this battle and they’re freaking out. One can only hope there’s a special place in hell for these so-called Christians who lie through their teeth.

The mainstream media often refers to the Tea Party spectacle as a “movement.” It isn’t.

A CBS News poll shows that Tea Party “members” are actually pretty dumb. Tea Party people believe that President Obama has already raised taxes – he hasn’t. One-third of Tea Party people think Obama favors the poor – that’s code for blacks and other minorities – and there’s no basis for that belief in anything Obama has done or said. If anything, Obama favors Wall Street bankers and corporate fat-cats more than he does poor people.

Who’s to blame for the federal deficit? Only 7 percent of Americans say it’s Obama’s fault, but 19 percent of Tea Partiers blame him. Forty-one percent of Americans put the problem squarely on Bush’s while only 16 percent of Tea Party people do.

These so-called patriots hate the government. Ninety-one percent of Tea Party identifiers are dissatisfied or angry at the United States government.

Not surprisingly, most Tea Partiers live in the South.

“Tea Party identifiers are overwhelmingly white – 95 percent are white, compared to 77 percent of Americans,” the poll said.

If it’s a “movement,” not many people have no knowledge of it. Fifty-five percent of Americans have not even heard of the Tea Party. Only 19 percent of Americans claim to know a lot about the Tea Party.

And among those who’ve heard of the Tea Party, 42 percent said it doesn’t reflect most Americans’ values with 21 percent are unsure.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that Sarah Palin may just be the smartest politician in America today.

Well, he didn’t say that exactly. What he did say was that while liberals, including White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, were yucking it up over Palin’s hand-scrawled Tea Party cheat sheet, she was building her base.

“You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing if not cunning, had sprung a trap,” Rich wrote. “She knows all too well that the more the so-called elites lampoon her, the more she cements her cred with the third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not have been speaking aids but bait.”

Maybe Rich is right, perhaps Palin is just playing the fool to pander to American goobers who relate to her while baiting the liberals into acting like elite assholes. If so, she’s one hell of an actress.

I think Palin is the real deal. I think she’s as ignorant on the issues as she appears to be because she knows that her base doesn’t care. Palin followers don’t care that she campaigned as governor of Alaska on the so-called “bridge to no one” and then claimed to say “no thanks” when running for vice president.

Palanistas really believe that being the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population 6,700) and the governor of Alaska for a few months gives her international bona fides, because you know, Russia is right there.

They just don’t care.

These are the same people that voted for George W. Bush because he seemed like someone they’d like to have a beer with at a backyard BBQ.

And this is what has liberals so riled up.

For the left, it’s inconceivable that anyone could look at Palin and see the next president, but her base certainly does.

While Rich is right, the Obama administration should spend less time poking fun of Palin and more time ripping into Wall Street fatcats, Palin’s success is not their fault.

Palin’s a rising star in politics for the same reason Glenn Beck has millions of viewers in a pretty crappy time slot – millions of Americans just don’t care about politics. And because they don’t care, they don’t take the time to understand really complex problems, and so they gravitate towards people who appear to offer “common sense solutions.”

Palin says those words over and over again – “common sense solutions.”

Beck mocks liberals and other intellectuals for claiming he’s stupid, or you’re stupid, because you just don’t understand. Beck then proceeds to break it down for his viewers. Sadly, his viewers really don’t understand the issue, and therefore think Beck makes perfect sense – intellectual heads explode.

Palin panders to that huge swath of America that thinks politics is stupid, politicians are crooks and all that’s needed are some simple “common sense solutions” to fix the whole kit and kaboodle.

The problem is that many of the problems this nation faces are not simple. Health care, two wars, energy policy, the economy, terrorism, and the list goes on are not going to be solved with simple sound-bite solutions, and as far as common sense goes, that’s subjective.

Democrats need to stand for something and stop wavering. They need to come out strong against greed and corruption. They need to stand by the average American and say we’re here to help you and not them. For some reason Democrats don’t do that. They’d rather position themselves with the Wall Street executives and corporate fatcats while the Palinistas and Beckheads write them off as elite assholes.

But Democrats just aren’t going to win over Palin supporters – it’s impossible. What they need to do is focus on the huge majority of Americans who really do get it. It worked in 2006 and it worked in 2008, but making Palin jokes, that’s not going to cut it.

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Read Rich’s column “Palin’s Cunning Sleight of Hand.”

Sarah Palin has achieved what Ralph Nader never could – she’s the leader of a populist revolution. Palin is successful because she appeals to the lowest common denominator and progressives, like Nader, appeal to high level intellect.

Palin sees the world in black and white. She often refers to her “solutions” as simple and common sense. Palin’s for freedom, free markets and lower taxes. These are easy concepts for her to sell because Palin avoids detailing any proposals that would actually solve any of the problems this country faces. Her speech at the tea party convention last weekend was a series of poorly written slogans and catch phrases. She told the audience everything they wanted to hear.

Progressives on the other hand see the world in shades of gray. They understand that health care reform is a complex problem, the solution therefore is necessarily complex and requires more than three words to explain and understand.

I’m not saying that all Americans are stupid, but 300 million collectively are not that intelligent. And the anti-intellectual streak that permeates our culture makes it difficult to explain complex problems. Some things are require more than “Got Milk?” marketing tricks. Also, unfortunately critically thinking is just not taught in most high schools – that’s hurting us as the world becomes much more complicated and politicians hone their ability to lie.

But rather than offer counter proposals and honestly challenging the Democrat’s health care reform, conservatives resort to slogans and misinformation. They call the president a communist. They accuse Democrats of nationalizing health care and setting up death panels. It’s easier for conservatives to just push American’s buttons. Communist. Socialist. Death panels. Prominent conservatives today are just not honest brokers in the nation’s political discourse.

So when it comes to global warming, health care reform, unemployment and fixing the economy, progressives are labeled as pointy headed intellectuals while conservatives mock them and spread lies appealing to their base’s base instincts.

Rather than trying to “reach across the aisle,” Democrats should just go it alone. If Republicans want to filibuster their legislature – let them. They held up civil rights legislation in the ’60s for almost three months.

Force Republicans to bring our legislative process to a halt and see how that works out for them. While they might not succeed, if Democrats truly embrace the progressive agenda and educate the people about their policies, enough people will get it and those that don’t – oh well.

Here’s the complete transcript of a debate between me and @GregWHoward on Twitter. It’s almost 2010 and this is how far we’ve come in the health care global warming debate.

This exchange took place today. I started the debate, unknowingly, by criticizing a stupid joke. I retweeted an update by @GregWHoward with the hashtage #DumbestJokeEver and then the following “discourse” ensued.

–

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

ME: RT @GregWHoward: Let’s see how many libs really believe CO2 a pollutant and do us a favor by not breathing anymore. #DumbestJokeEver about 2 hours ago from web.

@GregWHoward: @svendarko Who said I was joking abt libs not breathing any more to cut CO2? #tcot #p2 #ocra #sgp #ucot 40 minutes ago from UberTwitter in reply to svendarko

ME: @GregWHoward Spoken like a true pro-lifer. Proponent of anything that results in liberals being dead. #tcot #p2 36 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to GregWHoward

@GregWHoward: @svendarko I just want libs to practice what they preach. If CO2 harms planet, stop breathing #p2 #tcot #ocra #sgp #ucot #hhrs 17 minutes ago from UberTwitter in reply to svendarko

ME: @GregWHoward It’s not the CO2 from breathing that’s the problem but from burning fossil fuels. #duh #climate #tcot #p2 13 minutes ago from web in reply to GregWHoward

@GregWHoward: @svendarko Still expect libs to do their part to improve man’s lot by dropping dead #p2 #tcot #ocra #sgp #ucot 3 minutes ago from UberTwitter in reply to svendarko

END TRANSCRIPT

Twitter can be a creepy place.

Global warming, environmentalism and Al Gore were topics up for discussion at the Accuracy in Media’s 40th Anniversary conference today in Washington, D.C. The most outspoken speaker was Ireland’s Ann McElhinney. McElhinney has made a movie debunking Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” She said that she loathes anything natural and that environmentalists “just don’t like humans.”

“I hate natural,” she said. “I don’t want anything natural in my own life. Anthrax is natural. Cancer is natural. Tuberculosis.”

McElhinney and her husband made a movie called “Not evil just wrong” claiming that global warming is actually good, and that if we try to stop it 100 million people will die. The movie trailer claims that environmentalists want to send humanity back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague.

“I want my whole life to be as unnatural as possible,” McElhinney said. “I hate Whole Foods.”

In her film’s trailer, one person says that he doesn’t think it’s a bad thing if the Earth warms up and that in fact “ice is the enemy.”

Also speaking about global warming was Climate Depot Executive Editor Marc Morano.

“The bottom-line is carbon-based energy has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind in the history of the planet,” Morano said. “Life used to be nasty, brutish and short until it came along.”

Accuracy in Media is a non-profit conservative media watchdog organization.

If you enjoyed this article, please click the “Subscribe” button at the top of the page to be notified when new stories are published.

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“Not evil just wrong” is a film attempting debunk Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth“
Accuracy in Media is a conservative media watchdog.

When Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan came to office, they created a $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. The idea was to use money to leverage change. The administration would put a pile of federal money on the table and award it to a few states that most aggressively embraced reform.

Read Brooks’ column “The Quiet Revolution“

Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan — and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending — growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.

Read Krugman’s column

It doesn’t matter which one you pick, whether it’s Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, the self-appointed leaders of GOP continue their gay-bashing as they try to take down another Obama appointee.

Beck and Hannity call them “czars” – under the Bush administration they were called presidential appointees. The current target is Kevin Jennings, the director of the Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Jennings alleged met a student 21 years ago about being involved with an older man.

Check out the Media Matters for America story about this.

Now that William Safire has succumbed, the only reasonable conservative worth listening to is David Brooks. Brooks takes on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly in his column today.

What I take away from Brooks’ column is that he thinks these “men” are merely entertainers creating the illusion of real political power while the Republican party pees its pants every time one of these shock-jocks takes a poke at the party.

He’s undoubtedly correct.

As for Beck, I’m trying to get through his book “Common Sense.” It’s a difficult book to read. It’s full of sentences in all-caps and exclamation points. When you can’t write very well, you have to use these tricks to create the feeling that you’re outraged. Beck should look up how to use active verbs and descriptive nouns, but I digress. What also makes it a hard book to read is that I’m also reading Hemingway, so when I have to choose which book to read, Beck tends to lose.

But kudos to Brooks for standing up against Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and O’Reilly. They all do a disservice to the political discourse in this nation and should not be given even the illusion of any real political power. They’re entertainers.

Glenn Beck’s Common Sense on Amazon
Al Franken’s Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot on Amazon
Bill O’Reilly books on Amazon
Sean Hannity’s book Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism on Amazon

It’s says a lot about the United States of America that someone like Glenn Beck can be, well, Glenn Beck.

He’s undoubtedly one of the most outrageous entertainers on television. Just a few months ago he called President Obama a racist with a deep-seated hatred of white people. He helped organize a rally on 9.12 in Washington, DC of approximately 75,000 people (Beck didn’t attend). And he’s got this book called “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.”

I’ve only read the note from the author, but there’s plenty to write about in just these three pages.

Beck starts of with writing about Thomas Paine – one of the much-heralded “founding fathers.” Paine wrote the 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense” calling for independence from Britain. Beck portrays Paine as a commoner who was just fed up with the status quo.

“For two years [Paine] worked hard and watched as his fellow colonists grew tired of the British oppression. Then he decided to act. Using his contacts in the publishing industry, Thomas Paine anonymously released a pamphlet that made the case for revolution …”

Of course, Paine wasn’t simply just a fed up bloke tired of toiling in the hot sun under the oppressive rule of the British Empire. While living in London, Paine was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote him a letter of recommendation to move to the colonies in North America. That was 1774. In 1775 he became the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Paine was also an inventor and civil engineer.

Beck is trying to equate his modern day call for a revolution with that of Paine’s. The way Beck sees the world, he and Paine are one in the same – just regular guys trying to spread truth with plain language and common sense.

But of course, neither Beck nor Paine are, or were, just regular guys, and America’s independence from Britain wasn’t a revolution. Too often Americans – patriots like Beck – overstate the so-called American “revolution.” The war against Britain was a war for independence, but it has none of the telltale signs of a revolution.

You know you’re looking at a revolution when there’s a fundamental change in power that takes place rather quickly. That didn’t happen after the colonists booted out Britain. What did happen was the same elite colonists remained in charge. The only difference being that before the war they were paying taxes to the King of England. Poor colonists were still poor. Most people couldn’t vote. The concept of democracy didn’t really take root until the 1820s when Andrew Jackson road that wave into the White House.

If the war against England in 1776 was a democratic revolution, it sure was a slow one. Women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. Blacks temporarily got some rights following the Civil War only to have them taken away by Jim Crow laws and other tactics until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

And that’s where Beck goes next when he quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. three times in five paragraphs. I guess Beck sees the Civil Rights Movement as another revolution, again, it wasn’t. But like King’s reliance on non-violence in the face of violence, Beck cautions the reader of his book to not resort to guns and killing after hearing him break it down for them in the next 160 pages.

“As you read the details of the immense harm that both parties have done to our country, you might find yourself wondering what can be done to change our course. I lay out several options, but I want to be clear that none of them includes violence.”

So no immense violence after hearing the details of the “immense harm” done to our government by the political parties.

And here’s his call to action.

“If you believe that it’s time to put principles above parties, character above campaign promises, and Common Sense above all – then I ask you to read this book, declare yourself a creative extremist, and then pass these words along to other who may agree with something else that Martin Luther, Jr., once said:”

The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.

So wait, politicians are supposed to break campaign promises? That is a common sense approach to politics, tell people what they want to hear and do whatever you want once elected. Wait, how’s that different than what we have? I guess I have 160 pages to find out.

Glenn Beck’s Common Sense from Amazon
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense from Amazon
Thomas Paine Wiki
Glenn Beck Wiki

David Brooks wrote today about race. He said that the 9.12 tea bagger protesters actually mingled with a group of African Americans who happened to be in the nation’s capitol celebrating their culture. For Brooks that anecdotal story of white folks and black folks hanging out is proof that race isn’t an issue.

“These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.”

Wow, so you’re saying that black people can wax eloquent too, just like whites, even though blacks come from a polar opposite of whites in terms of politics and culture. Yeah there’s no way an African American could have to deal with anything remotely similar to whites – total opposites – like black and white.

But you see these people didn’t start beating each other, so to Brooks racism isn’t an issue any more around here.

“There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.”

Yep, nothing to see here, no racists. Nope. None. Immigration!

The real problem is those damn militant progressives trying to drop the hammer on the working man like they always do.

“And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.”

Yeah those left-wing fascists are ruining this great nation. It’s not those right-wing-pro-business-overt-capitalists who’ve been running the country since at least the eighteenth century. It’s those damn liberals and their filthy welfare, and their all like totally militant about it too. First it’s Social Security, then it’s Civil Rights and Medicare and now they those militant fascists want to provide health care to everyone – even blacks.

“Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.”

Yeah Obama screwed up the economy back in 2007, became President in 2009, then maniacally instituted a federal takeover of all industry. Total commie bastard move.

“Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.”

See, it’s always been this way. Well, of course, most of the stuff blamed on Obama actually started during the eight years George W. Bush ran the nation and none of these particular “progressives” gave a crap, but hey it has nothing to do with skin color, it’s just that Obama really pisses off a lot of people for no apparent reason. It’s not that he’s black though, because the tea baggers would have been protesting Bush’s expansion of the federal government, rising health care costs and sinking wages, but there just needed to be some match to ignite the fire in their bellies. What’s different? Hmmmm

“What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.”

Wait, so the news media is populist and the tea baggers are progressive? I’m confused, I thought the news media were liberals and the tea baggers were conservatives, now they’re “militant progressives.”

“‘One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,’ the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. ‘The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.’”

I’m sorry but to refer to progressives as “elite” is too funny. Now sure there are progressives who are part of the elite, but real progressives and liberals are not part of the elite. Not if you define the elite as people who have all the real power in the nation, they certainly aren’t progressives. All throughout history the Establishment has violently crushed any and all leftist outbursts.

Now it’s true, as Brooks points out in his column, that during Andrew Jackson’s tenure as president, there was a strong push for more democratic control of government, but a) Jackson didn’t create that desire b) most people in the US couldn’t vote – so to overstate this fervor for democracy ignores the fact that blacks, Native Americans, women and anyone else that didn’t own land couldn’t vote.

But for Brooks these African Americans who mingled with these so-called progressives on 9.12 without murdering them is proof that race isn’t an issue. Nothing to see here.

“It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.”

I got your deep and old – right here.

Read Brooks’ column

TIME’s cover story with Glenn Beck is a grotesque attempt at journalism. The magazine is hoping to ride Beck’s coattails in pandering to right-wing extremists. Not that it’s surprising, the bulk of mainstream media spend most of their time chasing the latest fad rather than doing honest journalism. It’s sad but expected.

Read Greg Mitchell’s analysis of the Beck story in TIME
The TIME story about Glenn Beck

It’s stupid to go on and on about the number of people who demonstrated in DC on 9/12.

Certainly there wasn’t 2 million people roaming the streets of Washington, DC, as radio host Alex Jones and other people are alleging. I mean, come on, the Washington Times reported that organizers expected between 25,000 and 50,000 people. Are we really supposed to believe that the city of DC, and the organizers, could have handled 2 million people just dropping by when they were planning on 25,000?

But if you want to get into the futile numbers game, recall back on Feb. 15, 2003 when millions of people did take to the streets. All across the world people protested the pending US invasion of Iraq. There really were millions of protesters.

Now it’s true that some of the largest protests were in Europe, but there was some big ones in the US too – despite state-sponsored suppression of free speech.

In New York, the protesters were denied a permit to march to the United Nations building because the police were concerned they wouldn’t be able to control the crowd. The organizers were forced to have a stationary protest, but the throngs of people walking to the rally area constituted a pseudo-march stretching some 20 blocks down First Avenue. The estimates are that between 300,000 and 400,000 people attended this demonstration in Manhattan.

There was another 20,000 or so in Seattle. I was at this rally and it seemed like hundreds of thousands, but even 20,000 in a city the size of Seattle looks like a lot of people. In San Fransisco about 150,000 people protested the invasion of Iraq.

All of these protests took place when public opinion polls were showing support for the war with Iraq at more than 60 percent.

But you see, it doesn’t matter how many people rally in the streets and how many polls say the nation is for this or against that, because the people aren’t in charge of jack. Everyone has been fooled into thinking that this is a representative democracy – representing the will of the people. It is not now and it has never been.

Let’s face it, this country was formed to be a republic. The idea was, according to James Madison, that virtuous men would fill Congress and the White House and make the right choice for America. That’s called a republic. Unfortunately the virtuous men turned out to be lawyers, bankers, lobbyists and other hucksters.

But that was the plan – a republic. For instance, there was no interest among the founders of this country in the popular election of the president – hence the compromise between state legislators and members of Congress to figure out who will decide who will be the president. This compromise resulted in the goofy electoral college system we have today. And go figure, under the watchful eye of our much heralded founding fathers, no one even bothered to record the popular vote for president until the 19th century.

You see the goal of forming a strong central government, legitimized and empowered by a constitution, was to provide an effective means to control wealth. It just so happened that during Andrew Jackson’s reign in the 1830s, there became a strong desire for more representation of the people (i.e. democracy), and so the Establishment yielded the illusion of power via the ballot box to the people, well, some of the people. But even today when everyone is supposed to able to vote, if you think your vote matters, you’re just not paying attention.

There’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that if millions of liberals protest a war, or millions of conservatives protest health care reform that these outbursts will have any meaningful impact on the political process. When the debate over health care reform ends, no substantive change for the people will have happened, but rather just another shuffling of the deck with corporations, capitalists and the Establishment firmly in charge of the wealth and power in America.

But I guess that’s what conservatives want, so historically the Establishment, or the right, have been winning most of the political battles while the liberals just keep losing one right after the other. It makes sense though, liberals, not Democrats, favor civil rights and equitable redistribution of the wealth, while conservatives, such as Republicans, Democrats and people incapable of abstract thought, favor corporations, capitalists and the Establishment.

Feb. 15, 2003 anti-war protests around the globe

It’s hard to believe that a lunatic like Glenn Beck can actually have this much influence with Obama’s administration that people are actually being fired and demoted over what he says on his show, but it’s really happening.

Maybe it’s all just a coincidence that Obama’s man in charge of creating green jobs is fired after Beck attacked him on his show. It’s probably just a fluke that this guy over at the National Endowment of the Arts is demoted after Beck pinpoints this pinko-commie-bastard with his laser of doom.

I doubt it.

This is how the Democrats achieve political victory. They cave to right-wing extremists on every issue until they’re voted out of office. I guess I don’t have the political intelligence to figure out how their strategy leads to implementing a liberal agenda. They are supposed to liberals, right?

Read the Huffington Post story about Beck’s latest victim

WASHINGTON — A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office, a culmination of a summer-long season of protests that began with opposition to a health care overhaul and grew into a broader dissatisfaction with government.

Read the complete New York Times story

If you ask the founder of the conservative Media Research Center what he thinks of the media, L. Brent Bozell III will say that news coverage has an overt liberal bias. If you ask me, that’s bunk, the reason journalism sucks has nothing to do with political ideology, but just plain old incompetence.

The root of the problem is corporate consolidation of the media. The bean-counters expect 20 percent profit from an industry that in a good year can turn out 5 percent, maybe ten.

The only way to get those huge profits is to track the least expensive and most outrageous “news” story. Last month’s town hall meeting coverage provides a perfect example.

Certainly there was plenty of reasonable debate taking place in town hall meetings everywhere, but that’s boring. The cheap thrills were found in taping the wackos representing a small percentage of the population, giving the impression that there’s widespread outrage over health care reform. There isn’t.

Bozell’s argument for a liberal bias in the media holds no water. Leading to the war with Iraq, the “liberal” media duckwalked in lockstep with the Bush administration and did nothing to challenge the president, in fact, they paved the path to war by not providing a valuable check on the Executive. The New York Times and the Washington Post issued apologies for their failure after-the-fact.

But none of these anecdotal examples of conservative bias proves the media has any particular bias at all. What it means is that the news media is grotesquely incompetent. Sure there are overtly biased “news” organizations on cable TV. Fox is obviously a right-wing propaganda machine and MSNBC is now unabashedly liberal (it’s worth noting that back in 2003 MSNBC was clearly ideologically right-of-center).

If the responsibility of a journalist is to provide all sides to a story (yes, sometimes there are more than two), there can be no doubt that the news media, particularly broadcast news, is utterly failing. It’s failing because telling all sides of a particular story is difficult, expensive and not always the most exciting to watch on TV.

So to get viewers or readers – to make lots of money – journalists are in a race to the bottom and our supposedly representative form of government is failing. Extremists, liberal and conservative, know that if they scream loud enough and burn enough people in effigy, someone will point a camera at them and they’ll dominate the news cycle – creating the illusion of widespread outrage.

It is interesting that conservatives are far more effective at changing policy with this strategy than liberals. My guess is that while most journalists are politically left of center, most executives that run these corporate media conglomerates are not. So we’re left with a corporate-controlled incompetent news media that is failing as the unelected fourth branch of government. To solve this problem, the FCC must reinstate rules about media ownership to break up media conglomerates and put the power of the press back in the hands of the people rather than the MBAs.

Updated Aug. 11, 2009

The Media Research Center is a conservative non-profit organization founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell III.

This dossier is a living document set to better understand this group, its members and its motives.

News coverage
Muckety.com has a story dealing with the money flowing into the Media Research Center here.

Who’s involved.

L. Brent Bozell III is the founder and president of the Media Research Center. In the introduction to the Center’s 2008 report, Bozell wrote that “only two of 69 TV network news segments on Palin were positive.” But wouldn’t a positive story about Palin be biased too? Oh right, it’s the liberal bias that’s a problem.
David Martin is executive vice president.
Danette Williams is the Center’s executive assistant to the president.
Cheryl Michener is the director of financial operations.
Robert Knight is the director of the Center’s Culture and Media Institute.

The Center’s Business & Media Institute Board of Advisors “The MRC’s Business & Media Institute provides commonsense explanations in defense of businesses and the free market,” according to Bozell’s 2008 Center report.
Herman Cain is the BMI National Chairman, former President & CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, Inc., the president and CEO of T.H.E. New Voice, Inc.
David All is the president, The David All Group, LLC, the founder of TechRepublican.com and co-founder Slatecard.
Dr. Donald Boudreaux is the chairman, Department of Economics, George Mason University
John Drescher is the executive director, TechNet Northwest
Dr. Richard Ebeling is the oresident, Foundation for Economic Education
Dr. Jeffrey Herbener is the chairman, Department of Economics, Grove City College
Dr. Felix Livingston is a professor of Economics and Business, Flagler College
John R. Lott, Jr is the senior research scientist, University of Maryland College Park
Donald L. Luskin is the chief investment officer, Trend Macrolytics LLC, contributing editor, SmartMoney.com and contributing editor, National Review Online
Dr. Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow, Cato Institute
Duane Parde is the president of National Taxpayers Union
Chris Roush is business news blogger at Talking Biz News
James Shumaker is a term associate professor, University of N.C. School of Journalism and Mass Communication Director, Carolina Business News Initiative
Grace-Marie Turner is the president and founder, Galen Institute
Dr. Elizabeth Whelan is the president of the American Council on Science and Health
Dr. Walter E. Williams is a John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Dr. Gary Wolfram is Munson Professor of Political Economy and Professor of Economics, Hillsdale College

The Center’s Culture and Media Institute Board of Advisors
Jan LaRue, Esq. is a former chief counsel for Concerned Women for America
Thomas Lickona, Ph.D. is the director of the Center for the Fourth and Fifth Rs (Respect and Responsibility), State University of New York-Cortland
Michael Medved is a nationally syndicated radio host, best-selling author and film critic
Marvin Olasky, Ph.D. is the editor of World magazine and provost for The King’s College in New York City, New York