Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on the preposterous “policy positions” of the candidates, which are, except for Ron Paul, exactly the same.  None believe in Climate Change, and all fall over each other endorsing policies that will radically exacerbate it.  All would further cut the absurdly low taxes on the rich while cutting programs for everyone else.  None would produce anything that approximates a balanced federal budget, though they all risibly claim to be fanatically opposed to  runaway “spending.”  All are opposed to Obama’s mild and incremental health care reform and see socialism lurking in the pathetically weak Dodd-Frank banking law.  All are opposed to environmental protection of any kind, and on social issues, all are somewhere to the right of the Taliban.  All, except Paul, are in favor of war with Iran and increasing our destructive support of an increasingly belligerent Israel.  All, except Paul again, think torture is the greatest thing since high-fructose corn syrup, of which they naturally are all in favor, too.

In short, every one of these “candidates” is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and yet the media treats them as though they are, well, fit to run for office.  Paging David Gregory…..  They’re not.   Romney, presumed to be the “electable” one, is thought of as such for no reason other than that he is blessed with the backing of the Republican Money Machine; no American has ever admitted to actually liking the guy.  It must be dispiriting to be a Fox-addled bible-thumper and come to the dawning realization that your party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your opinion; vote for Romney or be saddled with the Kenyan commie for four more years.

No wonder they flocked to such buffoons and cretins as Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Trump (!), and on and on.  When you’re both frothingly angry and willfully stupid, poor decision making comes with the territory.  The latest flavor (heh) is Santorum, the most universally despised and pathetically hopeless of them all.  Nonetheless, today the media is treating as worthy of discussion his momentary bounce into third place, as though his 18 point loss, kooky obsession with sex, and creepy stillborn fetus story aren’t inherently disqualifying.

Of course, it is nothing more than the deep conflicts of interests that plague our corporate media that force them to pretend to believe this is some sort of contest; they’re going to be buried in billions of dollars of advertising revenue even as they get to avoid tedious, expensive reporting on anything that actually matters.  Romney will, of course, be the nominee, and despite the fact that Obama is a lousy President, he’ll still lose.  But he’ll do so by a disturbingly small margin, owing to lazy reporting and the shallow, idiotic “balance” that favors the biggest liar in every race.

Despite the fact that Romney, in the eyes of the media, anyway, is seen as “moderate,” the positions he’s been forced to take in order to appeal to the looney “base” of the Republican party are indistinguishable from any other denizen of the Clown Car, but that is probably not why he’ll lose, unfortunately.  Nor will he lose because his tax returns will reveal that he pays less tax than a WalMart greeter, although in a just world, that too would be a deal-breaker.  Sadly, Romney will lose because A) He’s a Mormon, and B) He’s a Massachusetts “liberal.”  Rush Limbaugh said so.

That’s the bed Republicans, with a healthy assist from a brain-dead media, have made for themselves, and Romney is destined to lie in it.  The rest of us will just have to put up with ten months of unadulterated horseshit to get there.  Happy New Year.

Whenever I’m working out of town, it’s always a treat to listen to a different lefty talk station; when I was in Napa over Thanksgiving I tuned in daily to Green 960, a San Francisco-based Clear Channel station which, though lacking any local programming, has a good mix of national shows I don’t generally hear at home.  Of course, the signal is pathetic; you can get Rush Limbaugh blaring through your dental work but if you want to hear, say Randi Rhodes, the radio must be positioned just so and finely tuned to a minuscule range of the dial.

Still, the station, which used as one of its taglines “Occupy Your Mind,” was a welcome salve to my daily drudgery, beginning with Stephanie Miller in the morning and ending with Norman Goldman in the late afternoon.  Like KPOJ here, it was stuffed with advertising for everything from Home Depot to homeopathy, and must surely have been pretty popular in the famously liberal and long-commuting Bay Area.  Perhaps too popular.  It seems that Clear Channel, recently purchased by Mitt Romney’s old outfit Bain Capital (h/t Bradblog), just decided that that hot new phenom, Glenn Beck, and a bunch of other soundalikes would be a better fit for the 2012 election year on this vanishingly slim speck of the AM dial.

Aside from a tiny afterthought HD FM station, which can be heard by no one, there will be no liberal talk in the Bay Area, but a half dozen blasting AM signals devoted to the hate radio of the right.  Curiously, Clear Channel has chosen to leave Randi Rhodes on 960, sandwiched between Glenn Beck and Lord knows who in the noon-3:00 pm slot.  That’s some clever programming, if by “clever” you mean, “doomed to fail.”  Even to liberals like myself, Randi can be a skosh grating at times, and unlikely to win converts among the Beck fans.  More likely, she’ll receive a lot of hate mail and death threats and then be dumped after a month or two.  Mission accomplished.

Of course, such political moves are always presented as simple and necessary programming decisions, dictated from above by bloated and unaccountable corporations like Clear Channel, divorced of any negative impact on public service programming over the (once) public airwaves.  The station’s website, which is updated hourly with news all day, carries not the slightest indication that it will go out of existence in less than a month.  Thanks a lot, Bill Clinton, for that lovely Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was sold to the public as promoting competition.

Back in the glory days of self-interested media barons who used their outsized mouthpieces to advance personal agendas, there was at least personality behind the propaganda being catapulted.  You may not have agreed with Henry Luce, William Randolph Hearst, or the Chandlers, but they were people, with personalities, egos, and most importantly, life spans. Now, it’s just faceless, immortal behemoths dictating what we read and hear, responsive to no one but shareholders.  And, rather than lording over a few cities or a family of regional broadcasting outlets, media Goliaths like Clear Channel and News Corp span the globe, spouting the company line across platforms from book publishing to entertainment, bending governments to their will as they gobble up competitors and further narrow the range of acceptable opinion, always pulling it further to the right.

In dismissing the significance of the change, Talkers magazine explained that in such a liberal enclave as San Francisco, there isn’t really a need for liberal talk; talk radio thrives among the disenfranchised minority.  This is, of course, ridiculous; they’ve previously explained the complete absence of liberal talk in conservative areas because there aren’t enough liberals to listen to it.  But we’ll never know; being Clear Channel means never having to explain yourself.

It’s unlikely that the political complexion of the Bay Area will be much impacted by the loss of its sole lefty talk outlet, but given the rank misinformation pouring out of the many remaining righty stations, the level of the dialogue will be sorely diminished, and figuring out the truth that much harder.  But that’s the point, isn’t it?

No tendentious description of the phenomenon is required, nor is a detailed and boring historical context necessary, since they (like the poor) “have always been with us.”   But the sudden “surge” of poseurs, fakers, demagogues, deadbeats, and crooks stands out right now, as our vaunted world economy teeter-totters, and institutions – from colleges to banks to temples of journalism, and pinnacles of power – croak under the strain.

Here’s a partial list, culled from today’s headlines, of new and emerging Little Men.  Please feel free to add a name which may have been missed in this initial installment.  Step right up!  There’s room for everyone, and probably no end to it, once the battle has been joined.

Herewith:  The Little Men Of The Moment!

Silvio Berlusconi - the blessedly former prime minister of Italy.  The ultimate Mistero Buffo of Italian politics pledged to resign (and by God he did!) if a new, technocratic government now in formation can begin cobbling together a fiscal plan to prevent massive default by Italy, a member state in the Eurozone.  But like the magician/clown he is, some skeptical Burlesquecrony-watchers are wondering if this world-class fraudster and cockmaster will ever leave the stage (and, by God! – he hinted upon departing he might continue lurking behind the arras, in Milan).  What is not in dispute is Berlusconi has diddled and fiddled within his court of  whores and bunga bunga hangers-on, while failing, over twenty years, to do the job he was elected to do, so that Italy – more than Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland – may truly sink the European “common market,” and possibly, the world economy itself.  Basta!

Joe Paterno – the disgraced former head football coach of Penn State.  Whereas Berlusconi was not a great man, Paterno might have been, to the extent he fashioned a winning, and honorable, sports tradition.  He did win a lot of football games; ya gotta give him that!  Brought truckloads of money to Beaver Stadium too!  His teams won, or contended for, quite a few national championships.  And he did, judging by the loyalty of the Penn State community, demand and get excellence from his players, on and off the field, for over two generations.  Some of them actually read books; most graduated.  He did not, sadly, measure up when faced with an unavoidable moral dilemma.  He has experienced a great fall.  His catharsis, and that of Penn State, awaits.

Jon Corzine – resigned CEO of MF Global, former Democratic governor and senator from New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs honcho.  Corzine took a mere year and a half or so to capsize MF Global, which traced its lineage to the sugar trade in late 18th century England.  Corzine bet on sovereign debt and lost.  Big.  MF Global under Corzine, a darling of Democratic big wigs, reported a nearly $192  million quarterly loss after betting on European government bonds.  At the end of October the company’s credit rating went to junk, and it filed for Chapter 11.  About a thousand Wall Street wizards went out on the dole.  Just like that.  MF Global’s demise has been logged in as the 8th largest bankruptcy in American history.  Corzine, a little man posting big losses, appears to have a few little Democratic Party leaders around him, saying:  “sssshhhh.”

Bill O’Reilly – reigning Fox News gasbag.  O’Reilly, a little twit with global reach, has been enjoying a two months-long perch on the New York Times bestseller list with a book he “wrote” on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, the “no spin” king’s tome has been banned from the shelves of the Ford’s Theater book store, operated by the National Park service.  Ford’s Theater was where Lincoln was shot by the mad thespian, John Wilkes Booth.  Among numerous errors cited in the book, O’Reilly asserts there was an Oval Office in Lincoln’s White House, when in fact the executive suite was not built until 1909, when, presumably, there was a federal budget surplus.  In another egregious error, O’Reilly for some reason had Honest Abe “furling” his brow sometime before he was shot (he might have been furling about the feckless Gen. McClellan).  Everyone knows a man would “furrow” his brow, not furl the damn thing, whatever the situation, right?  This flap from Ford’s Theater appears to be a collection of minor quibbles to the author.  O’Reilly’s publisher says the little man is working on another quickie about presidents, to be written in a “narrative, novelistic fashion.”  O’Reilly responded to the Ford’s Theater critique by saying, “Enemies are trying to hurt my book.”

Rick Perry - governor of Texas and Republican presidential candidate.  Perry doesn’t know which federal departments he wants to shut down, but he does know he wants American foreign aid under his administration to start with no money.  Way to go, little man!  Perry may seem drunk at debates he’s appeared in, but it’s just the best a little man from Texas can do.  What can you expect from a guy who used Whiteout on a rock at the entrance to his family’s vacation retreat, but can’t remember why exactly?  Also, such a little man should be cut some slack if he thinks real, light amber New England maple syrup might work as a companion to barbecue sauce!

Michael Bloomberg - mayor of New York.  Well now he’s done it!  There’s a lot of talk in the city about how bored Bloomberg is with his job; and a guy I know who was hanging around Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning while the cops were mopping up says simply that Bloomie will run for prez as an indie and pull close to 20 percent, drawing the indie vote,  while cutting into Obama’s hide.  Result:  one crazy Republican president, unless it’s Willard the flip-flopper.  Maybe Bloomie will turn out to be a little big man.

Karl Rove – formerly Bush’s brain.  During an appearance at Johns Hopkins recently, Rove, evidently exasperated by taunts from OWS protestors and other unsavory characters, actually challenged one (or all) of them to a fight.  This does not compute.  It’s just hard to imagine this dweeby little man stepping up to his own challenge.  Bombast knows no bounds.

Rush Limbaugh – radio bombasterbasta! – par excellence.  This week the little man of the airwaves used every slur in the book to denigrate the OWS protesters, particularly those evicted from Zuccotti Park, since Tuesday was not a slow news day, and therefore an opportunity for el Rushbo to spike his sagging rating a tad.  Limbaugh spent minute after minute on one of his shows this week obsessing about the OWSers’ tendencies to spew precious bodily fluids all over public spaces across America’s fruited plain, just to call attention to their sad state, which to dittoheads means they’ll have to move back home with Mom & Dad when it’s all over – as a spent force.  Only a man with a little whatnot could stoop to that.

Well, there you have it!  But there are many other candidates to be nominated, to say nothing of the untold millions of Honorable Mentions, past and present.  Step right up.  Tell the nation who you’d like to see on the Pedestal of Heroes in this category.

Delighted as I am by the relentlessly cascading developments surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s beleaguered empire, I don’t share the optimism of worthies such as Eliot Spitzer who think  Foxworld ought to now be investigated by the DOJ under FCPA, the pretty straightforward Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that News Corp has evidently repeatedly violated.  For a lot of reasons, that sort of obviously reasonable thing could never bear fruit here, in the unlikely event that it even happened in the first place.  You see, despite the paranoid rantings of water carriers like Tucker Carlson who blame the Liberal Media for Rupert’s woes, News Corp, with FOX as its ruthless enforcer, has effectively cowed that same Liberal Media into acquiescence, if not outright emulation, of both its shoddy journalism and corrupt relationships with politicians.  Just as in the UK, politicians from both sides of the aisle are well accustomed to the ritual ring-kissing of Master Rupert, the Clintons being just one especially egregious example, and with few exceptions, the purportedly legitimate media supinely and routinely embrace FOX as one of their own; a self-destructive and aberrant choice that redounds only to the benefit of FOX at considerable expense to their already tattered credibility.

Like it or not, America is now invested in FOX, and though the investment is thoroughly underwater, we’re still unwilling to just turn it over to the bank.  For years, utter BS sold mercilessly on FOX, about everything from Clinton’s many murders to weapons of mass destruction and the climate change “hoax” have been soberly presented as “one side” of a supposedly insoluble political argument, never mind the facts.  Proven falsehoods about matters great and small are now “out there” in the bloodstream of American politics, and the dumb and shameless media stars who promoted them, despite their counterfactuality, fear the wrath of FOX far more than they fear the wrath of their deceived audiences.  After all, if nothing else FOX serves as an employer of last resort for the journalistically disgraced, a fact of which, say, Fred Hiatt couldn’t possibly be unaware.

All this creates a serious conundrum for anyone who might deign to go up against Murdoch’s empire…..  First, one can expect a ferocious onslaught of contemptuous smears from FOX itself as a matter of course; then, a tut-tutting, insidery dismissal from Howie Kurtz et al; this followed by synthesized roars out of the Professional Right from Limbaugh on down; and finally capped by the Obama DOJ or FCC giving Rupert everything he wants anyway.  Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, they used to say, and ol’ Rupert has figured out a way to once again prove this truism well into the digital era.  Amazing what money by the bucketload can buy, isn’t it?

So, despite the lurid revelations and widespread public disgust with News Corp and its erstwhile acolytes across the pond, it would be foolish to hope such a mass awakening could ever happen here; it would simply embarrass too many Serious people in the media who have, out of either cravenness or stupidity, swallowed the FOX ethos hook, line, and sinker, and aren’t about to admit their mistakes because of some petty whining about bribery and whatnot.  Those few in the position to meaningfully challenge what News Corp has wrought through its lies and slipshod hackery have, by and large, embraced or at least not forthrightly countered its post-reality notions about the world, from President Obama on down, and therefore are and will continue to take the Fifth.

Rupert may have lost a few billion here and there, but as long as he has FOX, he still has America.

More’s the pity.

First, we have Sarah Palin’s novel notion that Paul Revere rode around Massachusetts sporting an NRA bumper sticker on his horse, ringin’ bells and raisin’ hell to “warn the British” about something or other, a delusion so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that even Fox News’ Chris Wallace could barely stifle a chuckle over it.  Surreally, this got Michele Bachmann’s well-teased dander up, leading her minions to solemnly proclaim that Caribou Barbie was insufficiently “serious.”  Before Allen Funt could pop out of the bushes, along came Tim Pawlenty with a “plan” that makes George Bush look like a hippie, and not incidentally would increase the deficit by several trillion.

Not to be outdone, Herman Cain then became the first Republican to propose stimulative infrastructure spending of suitably millennial  proportions; our own Chinese wall to keep out the Mexicans, complete with an alligator-infested moat, to predictable cheers from his addlepated supporters.  In case this idea sounded like too, well, constructive, he hastened to add that no Mooslims would serve in his cabinet, but he might hire a gay or two because they would potentially be a fashionably dressed bulwark against creeping Sharia.  Later, after that, he backtracked a bit…  Mooslims could serve, if they took a loyalty oath over a pizza that resembled the Blessed Virgin.

Meanwhile, Democrats again demonstrated their lameness and political ineptitude by calling loudly for the resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner, politely ignoring the whoremongers (and just plain whores) on the other side of the aisle.  The Republican leadership has its flaws, but stupidity is not among them, so they largely (and wisely) stayed mum, perhaps partly out of envy.

Then, along came the Frothy Mixture, and I was finally moved to type.  For sheer loathsomeness and anti-electability, no one beats the repulsive and crazy Rick Santorum:  Palin minus the brains, Newt minus the popularity, Pawlenty minus the sex appeal, and Mitt Romney minus the principles.

Behold today’s brief exchange after a “discussion” about climate change, which he naturally considers a liberal plot, with, naturally enough, Rush Limbaugh (h/t Mother Jones…):

Limbaugh: I have a minute and a half. You ever ask yourself where the American people are politically? Do you ever fear the American people just maybe want a European socialist country, that they’d rather be dependent on government? Does that worry you?

Santorum: Does it worry me? Well, you know, Rush, ’cause you combat it every day with the popular culture and the media and academic institutions, that gets pounded away every day into the minds of our young people, and I don’t know how many times I’ve listened on your show where people said, “You know, you opened, the scales fell from my eyes. It’s finally making sense to me. I understand all of these lies I’ve been told.” You tell people lies enough and you indoctrinate them enough, of course I’ve got grave concerns and that’s one of the reasons I’m doing this is because I think we need — look, the person who’s been able to win the presidency since the age of television has had one thing in common. They’ve been the best communicator in the race. We need someone like a Rush Limbaugh who can communicate and can touch the soul of Americans and can reach out across the radio and television and paint a vision that helps drop those scales, that can remind people what a great country we are and that it’s a great country because we believe in free people and the ability of free people to provide for themselves, their family, their community, and the God they love. That’s what America is about, and we can with get back to that. We need to begin to believe in ourselves instead of the having someone tell us that they need to believe in him, the anointed one to provide for them.

Limbaugh: Rick, thanks for your time. Your passion is infectious. It really is.

And there you have it.  Santorum went on Limbaugh’s show to promote…  Limbaugh.  Even he is too embarrassed to endorse himself, and for good reason.  Not for nothing did Pennsylvania voters turn his useless, cuckoo corpus out of the Senate, along with his stillborn fetus in a jar that he carried around in his minivan, and not for nothing did he get his richly earned Google Problem.  The guy is stupid and crazy enough, but Republicans hate him anyway.  Go figure.

I guess Obama can be as lame, ineffective, and as big of a sellout as he wants, and get away with it.  Kind of like being, as Jon Stewart put it, the thinnest kid at fat camp.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

UPDATED BELOW: (UPDATE V: SUNDAY)

Well, it seems that yet another mysterious “lone wolf,” acting completely spontaneously of course, has shot recently reelected Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson parking lot.  In the head.  Coincidentally, Sarah Palin has suddenly removed her infamous, crosshair-dotted congressional map from her website, and Giffords’ Teabagger opponent Jesse Kelly has, just as coincidentally, also scrubbed reference to a campaign event billed thusly:  ”Get on Target for Victory in November.  Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office.  Shoot a Fully Automatic Rifle With Jesse Kelly.”  The Memory Hole is filling up fast, but MSNBC helpfully posted the video above from March of last year, when Giffords’ office doors were shot out by a teabagger yahoo.  Notice how the pudgy and brainless Chuck Todd and his bimbo sidekick both try to blame Giffords for drawing attention to the fact that the right is well, violently crazy, even when she was, unfortunately, doing no such thing.  The blue dog-ish Giffords slips easily into the “both sides do it” meme at the rather pointed direction of her interviewers, not knowing she would be, at least reportedly, assassinated in less than a year.

We do have a problem with political violence in this country, and it comes from one side of the aisle, period, the side that is most naturally violent, antidemocratic, and authoritarian.  The side that revels in war and torture.  The side that brings guns to political rallies.  The side that routinely declares that vast swaths of the American people are unworthy of voting because they’re less than fully American.  The side that immediately turns to “Second Amendment Solutions” when they deservedly lose elections.  Fox made the bed, and now Gabrielle Giffords is lying in it, along with several others.  This isn’t complicated.

Asked whether his daughter had any enemies, Spencer Giffords replied, “Yeah.  The whole Tea Party.”  Father knows best….   When we find out that the 20-something shooter was a devotee of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh who believed that Obama was going to take his guns away, expect no one to be surprised except, perhaps, Chuck Todd.

More later on this CHNN station, and on CHNN news overnight.

UPDATE: Big surprise….  Rumors of Gifford’s death were at least somewhat exaggerated by our thorough, responsible mainstream media.   She appears to have come out of surgery alive and “responding to commands.”  (What, they’re already bossing her around?)  Federal Judge John Roll was among the six or so killed, along with a child under twelve.  The shooter’s name is Jared Lee Loughner, 22, who has some vague “law enforcement” background.

UPDATE II:

Knock me over with a feather; from HuffPost’s Sam Stein:

(Bold added by CH)

There will be, in the next few days, painstaking efforts to uncover and understand the background of Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged shooter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. And right now reporters are generally going off of bits of information taken, primarily, from Google searches.

The most illustrative window is Loughner’s YouTube account, which appears to be hub of anti-government zealotry, obsession over currency and language standards, and, to put it bluntly, outright paranoia.

“In conclusion, reading the second United States Constitution, I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications: the government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” he writes in one video posting. “No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver! No! I won’t trust in God!”

Here is a link to Loughner’s YouTube site.

There are also some biographical details that can be culled from the page. Loughner attended Mountain View High School, Northwest Aztec Middle College, and Pima Community College. He also appears to have been in the armed forces, at one point in time.

“Every United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix is receiving one mini bible before the tests,” he writes in one video. “Jared Loughner is a United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix Therefore, Jared Loughner is receiving one mini bible before the tests.”

If this guy isn’t a teabagger, then I’m Rudy Giuliani.

UPDATE III:

Arizona’s Cocktailhag-in-Chief Jan Brewer has this to say, on Fox News of course:

Brewer said law enforcement and government at all levels have a “shared determination to ensure justice is fully served.”

“I am just heartbroken,” Brewer said. “Gabby is ore (sic) than just a colleague, she is a friend. She has always been a noble public servant … It’s an unbelievable tragedy that the people of Arizona experienced today, one of which of course in our worst nightmares we never would have imagined.”

She added that the shooting is not something that shows favor for the state, but that the incident doesn’t represent the vast majority of sentiment among Arizonans. As is the case elsewhere, “We have disturbed people in our community that do terrible, violent things.”

I would add that she doesn’t show a lot of “favor for the state,” as they evidently say in Fox-ese, either, and that pretty much all of her supporters are, well, a little disturbed, if you’re going to get technical about it.  At least she (presumably) got through her statement without any embarrassing minute-long pauses.  On Fox anyway, she is growing in office.

UPDATE IV:

Somebody gets it.

UPDATE V: (Sunday) Rebecca Mansour, Sarah Palin’s spokesmodel, informed us that the gunsight images Palin removed from her website were, contrary to what you’d think given Palin’s ostentatious gun-worship, not gunsights at all, but, get this….  SURVEYOR’S MARKS!  Those surveyors, you know, are always reloading those thingamajigs they use, and not just to perforate Bullwinkle with a varmint rifle, but to perhaps “survey” certain congressional districts.  The most hardened Palinbot will never believe such risible hooey, but there it is.  As Tbogg would say, “Shut up, Dumb Lady.”

UPDATE VI: The right wing fainting couch is filling up, due to Pima County Sheriff Gupnick’s accurate comments above.  Get a load of this steaming pile from local right wing hate talker Jon Justice (!)…

I feel incredibly bad for our brave Pima County Sheriff’s Officers who have to serve under Clarence Dupnik. Within hours of the horrific shooting that took place at the congresswoman’s event Dupnik was telling local media that talk radio and the media was partly to blame, only to repeat his statements again during the press conference that was receiving national attention. We have no idea at this point the motivation of this murderer’s act. Yet Dupnik took his moment in the spotlight to drive a political wedge into the event. They were reckless and dangerous statements made by someone who should have known better. He should have been using his time to help bring the community together. Instead his statements made Tucson appear to be a city full hate, bigotry and vitriol. To say, as Dupnik did, that comments made on the airwaves essentially motivated this person to commit this crime is exactly what he blamed talk radio of doing, inciting through pure rhetoric. It was complete misuse of his power and he owes the media in town, TV and radio, an apology for his horrible comments in the middle of such a tragic day. He should step down immediately from his position as Pima County Sheriff.

Really.  These guys may have small dicks, but they’ve got awfully big balls.

Koppel targeted Fox News and MSNBC, comparing them to bling-addled boxers in the big media ring, glaring at each other from their respective neutral corners, and then raining rhetorical spitballs, as they move, night after night, to the center of the big canvas:  American cable television.

Typically, there’s been a lot of reaction.

Sssssnnnnnnorrrrrrrre !!!

Koppel furrowed mightily about the underlying threat to the Republic if trends (in place and quite profitable for a helluva long time, thanks) continued, led by O’Reilly/Olbermann, Beck/Maher, Limbaugh/Stewart food fights.

BUT !!!!

It may be The Big Media Story is way ahead of Ted and all these other clowns, at least in terms of the dire state of cable itself.

From the Financial Times, 11/18/10:

“The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.” *

• Total number of subscribers to cable and satellite in the third quarter:  down by 119,000
• Compared to gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009
• Net falloff in subscribers in the third quarter of 2010:  741,000

“The figures suggest that ‘cord-cutting’ – one of the pay-TV industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.”

• Online subscription services now priced at $7.99 per month (Hulu and Netlfix)
• Hulu’s revenue up over $130 million this year compared to last (Hulu owned jointly by News Corp., Disney, and NBC Universal)

“Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.”

* Source:  SNL Kagan

In this astonishing video, multimillionaire radio and TV Huckster Glenn Beck speaks, solemnly and with laughably faked empathy, to a bunch of rubes about how “we” are going to have to make deep sacrifices to pay off the Republican debt that faces the country.  ”We” might lose our pensions.  ”We” might lose our jobs.  ”We” might even lose our homes.  It’s time to take our “medicine,” but at least we have “each other.”  Really.  He said that, and not as a laugh line, either.  Now, Fox watchers believe a whole lot of really stupid things, but if they believe that Glenn Beck, who made in excess of $30 million last year and is a global celebrity, is going to be sharing a shelter bed with them in the coming apocalypse, one has to marvel that they are capable of walking down a street without hitting a telephone pole, let alone have spare money to throw away on overpriced gold coins.

Long ago, Republicans realized that their rich-coddling, militaristic, and elitist policies harmed the great majority of Americans, so they cannily cast about for some stupid people to bring along for extra votes, and they found them in abundance; racists, Jesus freaks, and gun nuts, few of whom will ever see any  benefit for doing so, began to vote Republican when the GOP directed, with decreasing subtlety, their appeals to them.  When Nixon spoke of “regional discrimination,” Bush spoke of “Armies of Compassion,” or Reagan launched his campaign in the ironically named Philadelphia, Mississippi, the right voters got the message without requiring them to elaborate in a way that might offend the smarter.

Trouble is, to which Glenn Beck accidentally alluded in the clip, that when you validate and empower the stupid, they start feeling (with some justification) better about themselves, and thereby conclude that their even stupider ideas are pretty good, too, and thus ought be implemented as well.  All Nixon, Reagan, and even Bush had to do was make a few signals to the stupid and then quietly go about their business, which of course was always more focused on the money end, and they could have ridden the tide forever.  Trouble was, Bush looked a little too good in his dunce cap/ flight suit, and was so alarmingly less qualified for office than virtually all of his predecessors, that he actually decided to give the stupid much of what they’d always wanted, if only to (barely, as it turned out…) gain a real election in 2004, and we’re still living with the consequences of his “success” at this malevolent  but undeniably expedient endeavor.

Bush’s loud, proud embrace of his own stupidity was initially a diabolically clever means of humanizing an arrogant  underachiever who was both a legacy at Yale and Harvard and scion of a wealthy and powerful family, but still could barely utter a grammatical, much less substantive, sentence, and, unfortunately, it worked.  People obviously didn’t think he was smart, but they nonetheless wanted “to have a beer with him,” as the ever-fawning media put it.  (Yeah, right.  More like “I’ll have what he’s having”…)  Pundits from Peggy Noonan to Maureen Dowd waxed lyrical about the uncomplicated Manliness his stupidity revealed; choking on a pretzel was all in a day’s work for a guy who couldn’t pronounce “nuclear,” although he used the word constantly, and throughout his disastrous terms a supine media dutifully translated such obviously affected non-words as “wudn’t” and “idn’t” into fit-to-print Queen’s English for the newspapers.

But all this time the rubes were watching, and now they want more, much more.  Having seen one of their own bestride the earth like a Colossus, torturing, bombing, punishing, and sneering all the way, why not now move to eliminate, once and for all, the hated smarties, and then, dummies will finally Rule the World, under the leadership of professor/doctor/whatchamacallit Glenn Beck, oracular Rush Limbaugh, and Haiku authoress Sarah Palin?   Well, because that’s a little too stupid.  Big GOP donors don’t work for free, you know, and somebody’s got to pay for that Free Market, after all.

So today Republicans, to great fanfare, released their “Pledge to America,” a tired, rehashed pile of manipulative, war-mongering horseshit written by a lobbyist that only aims to increase the wealth of the wealthy and the suffering of everyone else, returning to the traditional Republican ignoring of the stupid, and it went over like a fart in church, literally.  Only the wealthiest of the religious nuts like Gary Bauer found much to love about it; Erick Erickson, Laura Ingraham, and many others denounced its lack of emphasis on something they call “moral values,” while remaining guardedly optimistic about how much cash the rich (like them) were slated to rake in if it became law.

Beck, of course, amply demonstrates that the stupid on which Republicans have long depended  has now gotten a bit out of hand….  How can Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, et al survive if we really went back to 1908 tax levels?   Is it considered smart to tell a lot of stupid people that imminent loss of their jobs and homes, if they haven’t lost them already, is somehow a good thing?

It’ a long way from “Morning in America,” it seems, but in the end you have to dance with the ones that brung ya.  Good luck with that.

- Frank Rich

- N.Y.T., 8/22/10

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html?ref=opinion

It’s sad, sort of, to see yet another righty gasbag admit, publicly, that personal beliefs have nothing to do with it; it’s not the principle of the thing, it’s the money.  How can such galling admissions of rank careerism and lack of conviction sit with their audiences, who must go on believing them anyway?  Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, and all the rest have repeatedly admitted that their paycheck and fame is all that matters to them, which is fine if you’re, say, Lindsay Lohan, but considerably more problematic when your demented vitriol is absorbed, and increasingly acted upon, by millions of Americans every day.

When Ed points out that despite having 95% of the radio dial in the places where they don’t have 100%, not a single one of the thousands of righty blabbermouths has criticized Dr. Laura, Heidi ducks the question by invoking the magic of the market.  Really.  She thinks, or at least says, that this right-wing imbalance has something to with what advertisers want, when any fool could see that bloated, once-illegal media monopolies benefit substantially from pounding audiences with such rich-fellating nonsense as Heidi’s, whether or not GoldLine coughs up a few bucks to subsidize it.  When Rush Limbaugh comes right out and says that one’s vote ought to be proportional to one’s wealth, it’s easy to see how and why Heidi has a recession-proof job.

The same “market” mentality also shows why Rupert Murdoch was willing to flush hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet to launch Fox News, and billions to buy the Wall Street Journal in an era when national print media outlets can be had for a dollar. Right-wing journalism doesn’t need advertising, it is advertising.   What it sells, all day long, is the propaganda of top-down class warfare, and that takes some doing in the most unequal democracy on earth, so this kind of demonization of lessers and exaltation of betters must be ladled out to the lower orders with every syllable spoken on the once-public airwaves.

Sadly, but obviously of no concern to Dr. Laura or Heidi, a lot of innocent people whose only mistake in life was to be black, brown, Muslim, poor, gay, liberal, working class, middle class, unemployed, or worse than all that, not even nationally syndicated, must now endure the slings and arrows, and even legal or violent repercussions of the loose and ill-willed talk of a bunch of mendacious money-grubbers who are laughing all the way to the bank.

If anyone could make a better argument for the breakup of media monopolies and the return of the Fairness Doctrine than Heidi Harris just did, I don’t know what it would be.