Limbaugh now merely a parody of himself

I stopped getting angry at anything at comes out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth long ago. But that doesn't mean that I'll stop pointing it out.

During one of his latest tirades, well documented as always by Media Matters, the drug addicted, bloated one dropped the curtain to give us a deep look into the commode that passes for his soul to reveal his MO for the length of the Obama administration (let's hope it's 8): that he hopes Obama "fails."

All I can say is this: Typical.

I find it pretty stupefying how quickly Repubes have changes course in just over 30 days since Obama took office. For eight years, they whined, sniveled and complained about liberals and progressives "rooting for Bush to fail in Iraq" (among other places), yet now they openly despise Obama while shamelessly rooting for his policies to fail. Talk about Party Before Country.

As much as I despised Bush's policies in Iraq (and will go to my grave with the unflinching belief that our misguided war was and is a wast of taxpayer money, not to mention all of the bloodshed), I never, EVER hoped that our military would fail. I think Bush led us down many disastrous roads, but I do believe that he believed he was doing the right thing for the country and the American people. Well, that's not entirely true, though - I think the last six months of his presidency (and especially during the last three), when he knew Obama was going to be president, Bush quietly did all he could to make sure that Obama got handed a big steaming turd on January 20, 2009.

I do support Limbaugh's right to say what he says, and quite frankly I hope he keeps on saying it. Hey, God bless him - it just reaffirms my belief that Obama is doing something right if he's driving Limbaugh nuts.

I also wouldn't be surprised to see Limbaugh's ratings go up, not down; so many conservatives now feel under siege because Obama is president - you know, that they've losing their country, and blah blah blah.

However, I do think that the government should step in and do something to promote a diversity of voices over our radio airwaves. NO, I'm not advocating that anyone should have his or her "microphone taken away" (already a trite right-wing talking point), but the government should do all it can to strongly encourage companies to provide a diversity of voices on their airwaves. Actually, no, the government should REQUIRE a diversity of voices. I'm sick and tired of right wingers whining about the phantom "liberal media."

I wrote about his last fall before the presidential campaign got into high gear, but perhaps it's best to remember one of Sun Tzu's maxims from The Art of War: It is wise to present your greatest strength as your greatest weakness, and that's precisely what Republicans have been doing for the last 40 years with regard to our mainstream media. (Thanks once again, President Nixon.)

If you think I'm exaggerating, go back and find some Sarah Palin interviews from last fall's campaign - whenever bad news came out, she just went on the offensive, bashing the "liberal media," which is always red meet for the drooling drones on the right.

Anyway, Limbaugh is simply a modern-day Joseph Goebbels, although thankfully many more Americans dismiss Limbaugh than Germans dismissed Goebbels.

By the way, if you're one of the few liberals left who doesn't support and visit Media Matters, I strongly encourage you to do just that. The folks over there are doing tremendously effective and important work.

I'll be back later this evening with lots more, so please check back. (And, as usual, there I'll have lots to share on Sunday.)

Weekend Cartoons, post-holiday edition

I have so much to get to tonight, so I'll make these quick. It was a pretty eventful weekend in the world of politics since last Friday, and I've got a ton of video and even more wit and wisdom ;) to bring you, so I won't offer too many comments about the cartoons this week.

On to the comics - less than 21 days now - three weeks from this morning we'll go to the polls.

Suddenly, I have a bunch of good Halloween costume ideas, inspired by the cartoon above. Hey, part of the beauty of an economic collapse is keeping one's sense of humor.

Voter fraud is one of the biggest frauds perpetuated on the American people by the Right, and ACORN is merely the latest tool by the right to stoke fears of a "stolen election." Pretty ironic, considering it's the Right that's been doing the thieving of elections lately. This reminds me of Tzu's The Art of War, where Tzu theorizes that a principle tactic of warfare (in this case, political warfare) is to present your biggest strength as your biggest weakness to your enemies, and that's precisely what Republicans are doing these days - using bogus claims about voter fraud to distract from the real threat to our elections - the possible hacking of our voting machines, and the GOP's voter suppression tactics. Much more on this in the coming days.

It's beyond outrageous that AIG, after being bailed out by American taxpayers, goes on a jaunt to a California spa, where the company blew over $400k. And this isn't just a rumor - it's a confirmed fact. More on this a bit later.

Lost in the bailout and the merger of all the banks, both investment or otherwise, is the danger that there will be so few banks, they will be "too big to fail," meaning that when these larger, more powerful banks inevitably fail again, who will have to bail them out... again? C'mon, I don't really need to say it, do I?

The above cartoon pretty much says it all, and believe it or not, Bush will be laughing all the way to the bank. Our lying, conniving, thieving, incompetent murderer of a President (and if you think that last adjective is too harsh, why don't you ask the Iraqi people?) will soon ride off into the sunset, having crippled America's economy and standing in the world. And what will he have to show for it? Just a billion dollar library, and speaking fees out the ass. Bonus: He'll certainly pardon the many thieves and profiteers on his way out the door, unless the Democrats stop him. Which, of course, means that he'll get away with it, considering the feckless and pathetic nature of the Democratic "leadership" in Congress.

Remember our budget surplus in 1999-2000? Yea, I don't, either. But, his millionaire backers got their tax cut - thank God. Our unborn children and grandchildren will undoubtedly be eternally grateful, generations from now, for all of the debt that Bush has saddled us with. And those absurd tax cuts? The old McCain (no pun intended) of 2002-2003 was opposed to them because of how they favored the rich. The "new" McCain? He wants to make them permanent. Flip flop much?

I sure as hell hope that the moronic notion of electing someone we want to have a beer with is as dead as the telegraph. Certainly there are much more crucial criteria in selecting a president. Sarah Palin is merely the latest example of this philosophy backfiring. Most people loved her at first blush, but her résumé withstood scrutiny for about as long as a Paris Hilton jail sentence.

This is an important issue, but the political reality is that most Americans care about their own self interests first, and foreign affairs a distant second. (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, anyone?)

So much for the much-ballyhooed global economy and all its benefits.

The right's castigation (and even the McCain campaign, right before the debate) of Gwen Ifil right before the vice presidential debate paid off big time - a widely respected journalist let Palin get away with doing and saying pretty much whatever the hell she wanted during the veep debate. Certainly the right would have cried from the debate until the election if Ifil had actually done her due diligence and asked tough follow-up questions, as any moderator should, of all the candidates during these debates.

The sad, pathetic truth - 159,000 more jobs were lost in September, and over three million manufacturing jobs have been lost during the Bush presidency, an inconvenient fact that Obama should mention repeatedly in the final days of the campaign.

McCain's gaffe will go down in presidential debate history as one of the more stupid, and also indicates the utter contempt he has for Obama as a person.

I included this cartoon because I so vehemently disagree with it. Anyone who thinks that the media is simply fawning over Obama hasn't been following the media closely for the last two years. McCain was given a veritable free ride during much of the Democratic Party primaries when Hillary and Obama were slugging it out. Lest we forget, McCain so famously called the mainstream media "his base."

I will go to my grave firmly believing that the price of gas is plummeting because Big Oil is so desperate to get McCain elected. (And I'm not naïve enough to believe that idea is a groundbreaking idea, but it certainly is based in political fact.)

I hope OJ goes to jail for the rest of his life, and that the homeboys run a train on him. Daily.

I believe that privatizing Social Security is one of the dumbest ideas the Right has ever had, and I'll always oppose it. But, I also know the Right won't rest in fighting for this moronic idea, either.

Because of our addiction to foreign oil, we are funding the likes of Chavez, Putin and the terrorists who rule Saudi Arabia, as well as Iran, etc. The only way to stop it is renewable energy. I find it more than a little ironic (and tragically comedic) that Bush rails against these terrorist states, (sans Saudi Arabia) yet we keep buying their oil and boosting their economies. One of many moronic contradictions of the Bush years.

This may not be as true as it was last week, but we certainly aren't out of the woods regarding our economy - the fundamentals of our economy are still the same, but the $700 billion BAILOUT (Calling it a Rescue Package is simply a b.s. PR tactic) is merely serving as a deodorant until after the election. Put another way, I firmly believe that the Bushies are merely trying to buy enough time to keep this thing together until after the election, in the hopes that McCain gets elected in 20 days.

Once the roof falls in, Bush will be back at his "Ranch," playing windshield cowboy, laughing with his millions in the bank. He'll have his $1 billion library and his rich speaking fees - disastrous war and wrecked economy be damned. He'll then start his "legacy building" tour, where he'll undoubtedly whitewash any wrongdoing by his administration. Oh, and the pardons! Boy, how there are going to be pardons - Bush is going to make Mark Rich look like Princess Diana by the time he gets down handing out his many pieces of justice-flavored candy in the days before Jan. 20. Bank on it. (But make sure it's a solid bank.)

Debunking the b.s. lie about our media

I really don't know what happened to Lou Dobbs, but he's become the biggest braying jackass on a once great network. To hear Dobbs, the most notorious walking, talking xenophobe on a network not named Faux Noise Channel say that the media is largely "liberal" is a joke of the highest order (this footage is from a week or so ago). It's also worth noting that Dobbs has a partisan history going back to his earliest days at CNN, where he hosted Moneyline, later leaving the network after refusing to interrupt his precious show to air a speech delivered by President Clinton at Colombine just days after the shootings.

Anyway, what's been most evident since John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate is the Republicans' return to their dog-eared playbook of Richard Nixon, which on page one says, "Slam the media for being overly liberal whenever there is news that's unfavorable to us."

And it's been parroted by every single Republican ever since when unflattering or bad news (much less a scandal) has befallen someone with an "R" behind his or her name.

I was listening to Thom Hartmann the other day, and he brought up an excellent point about Sun Tzu's centuries-old famous tome, The Art of War. The world-famous work deals with the art of military strategies and warfare. As Hartmann mentioned, in it Tzu reasons that a principle tactic of warfare is to present your biggest strength as your biggest weakness to your enemies, and that's precisely what modern-day Republicans are doing with our mainstream media - decrying the presence of a phantom "lib-rul media" whenever there is unfavorable coverage of their party or their candidates. Not only is the presence of a "liberal media" a fallacy, but it's unarguably on of the GOP's largest strengths.

To wit, there are over 1,000 radio stations in the United States that offer predominately conservative programming. How many liberal/progressive stations are there? Less than 100; and according to Hartmann, there are 70-80 He should know, since he's arguably the premiere liberal radio voice in the United States, and he has had a very difficult time getting on terrestrial radio stations in some leading media markets primarily because there are no stations to get on. The tide is starting to turn ever so slightly, but it largely favors hate conservative radio.

Some other interesting facts:

• Every major television network in the United States is owned by a multinational corporation - CBS, NBC, Fox Network, ABC, CNN, Fox Noise Channel, Clear Channel Radio, Comcast, and on and on. These giant corporations could hardly be considered Democratic (large D) leaning companies.

• One of the most visited Websites on the Internet, and the most visited political Website is The Drudge Report. According to his Website, here are the stats from the last year: "27,151,658 IN PAST 24 HOURS, 723,014,663 IN PAST 31 DAYS & 6,455,462,513 IN PAST YEAR." (And no, I'm not linking to Drudge's GOP tip sheet Website.)

• Faux News Channel is the most watched news channel in the United States, by far, whether on cable or on regular TV.

• The top three most listened to radio talk show hosts in the United States are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael "Savage" Wiener, in that order - hatemongers all, and most importantly, purveyors of GOP talking points, and often, lies and hate messages of their own.

• As far as newspapers go, there are plenty of them out there of all stripes, but the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall St. Journal has the second highest circulation in the United States, just behind USA Today; the WSJ's circulation is just over two million per day.

Some other newspapers...

#1 - USA Today - owned and operated by Gannett.

#2 - Wall St. Journal - see above.

#3 - The New York Times - owned and operated by the Sulzberger family - liberals by anyone's definition.

#4 - The LA Times - corporate owned and operated.

#5 - The Washington Post - also a liberal paper.

#6 - The New York Daily News, owned and published by Mort Zuckerman, whose conservatism is well known.

#7 - Chicago Tribune - a traditionally conservative paper operated by the Tribune Company.

#8 - The New York Post - a Rupert Murdoch rag - what is understood, needn't be discussed.

#9 - Long Island Newsday - is about to be purchased by Cablevision. Hmm, a newspaper that's going to be owned by a cable company. Just wondering where those loyalties lie?

#10 - Houston Chronicle - owned by The Hearst Corporation, a huge media conglomerate, and it's no mystery where that company's loyalties lie.

Other highlights...

#11 - San Francisco Chronicle owned by Hearst.

#12 - New York Newsday - See #9.

#20 - The Philadelphia Inquirer is now controlled and effectively owned by the insipid Brian Tierney, the CEO of Philadelphia Media Holdings. He is a well-known conservative "commentator" and also a failed GOP campaign manager. This same company also owns the only other major Philadelphia daily newspaper, the Philadelphia Daily News.

As you can see, it's quite obvious that you can find liberal and conservative media outlets if you look hard enough, but with the exception of newspapers (where it's relatively balanced, but a medium that's rapidly declining in circulation and reach), our media is anything but "lib-rul," despite what Repubes would have all of us believe.

As I've mentioned, Republicans just slam the media the minute some bad news hits - we are seeing it on an almost hourly basis with McCain, and especially with Sarah Palin. Their strategy is simple - just cry "liberal media," and said media outlet(s) will quickly fold under the scrutiny. If history has proven one thing in the first decade of this century, it's that virtually all outlets in the media go soft the minute they are accused of being "liberal." And when that doesn't work, just spread lies - it never takes them long to go from a conservative pundit/commentator/columnist to the mainstream media; just in the past few days, examples abound of conservatives doing just that to try and steer press coverage toward McCain.

The truth is, it's the media's duty to scrutinize all candidates, no matter what party they are from, including independents.