Kemstone's Journal

Listening to these Republican candidates talk about Obama, I often wish we actually had the kind of president they’re attacking. The paint him as some kind of progressive lion, zealously going after the super-rich on behalf of the working class, steadfastly holding to an ideology of civil liberties even if it compromises America’s safety, and systematically dismantling our empire abroad, all the while apologizing to the world for our previous transgressions. I don’t know who this person is that they keep railing against, but it’s not the Obama I know.

The fact is that the Republicans are banking on the majority of their base having a completely distorted view of the president thanks to conservative news sources like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. These media outlets have made a calculated decision to create their own narrative about who Obama is and what he wants to do, to emphasize every tiny little thing that supports that narrative and de-emphasize, ignore, or even outright lie about anything that doesn’t.

The Obama you see on Fox News is not a real person but actually a fictional character based on the stereotype of liberals that conservatives have in their minds. He wants to raise taxes, impose strict regulations on business, cut defense, eliminate gun rights, encourage more abortions and gay marriages, read terrorists their rights, and purge all religion from the public sphere. When the Republican presidential candidates talk to their debate audiences and the crowds at their campaign rallies about Obama, they’re talking about this guy, a radically liberal president who—unfortunately for them—doesn’t actually exist.

The real Obama hasn’t raised taxes. He’s far too timid to take the political risk. He’s cut taxes across the board and agreed to extend the Bush tax-cuts for two years. He says he’ll fight to let them expire next time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

As for the idea that he’s imposing crippling regulations on businesses, that is simply absurd. Barack Obama is the Goldman Sachs president. His entire financial team and his last two chiefs of staff have been Wall Street insiders, and according to internal memos it would appear that they dictate his every move in that area. The “historic financial reform” legislation that passed last year is widely acknowledged by bankers to be a complete joke. Not one of the people who caused the financial crisis of 2008 has been prosecuted for committing fraud, and Wall Street continues to thrive thanks to taxpayer bailouts (which Obama supported) while the rest of the country struggles.

I hear over and over again that Obama has drastically cut defense spending. Simply not true. Defense spending has increased every year since Obama took office, it’s just that the rate of increase has gone slightly down thanks to the cutting of a few strategically unnecessary projects like stealth-fighters designed to fight the Cold War. Some might say that it’s merely stretching the truth to refer to a slower rate of increase as a “cut”, but I call it lying.

And as for the whole general idea that Obama is weak on defense, consider his doubling-down in Afghanistan and the recent foray into Libya. He withdrew troops from Iraq but only because he was forced to under a treaty signed by the Bush administration which he tried and failed to renegotiate.

On gun rights, Obama has not lifted a finger to do anything about it, other than quietly write an op-ed on the issue after the Gabby Giffords shooting, in which he did not endorse a single reform that didn’t enjoy at least a 60% approval in polls. And afterwards he did absolutely nothing to attempt to initiate those reforms.

On social issues, one can point to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and pretend that Obama is the “fierce advocate” of gay rights that he claimed to be, but he dragged his feet on that issue for quite some time and he still refuses to publicly come out in support of gay marriage. And on abortion, what has Obama done? Nothing. He won’t even touch that issue with a ten-foot pole, so afraid is he of the potential criticism. But he will make it harder for young women to obtain birth control.

When it comes to the idea that Obama would rather read terrorists their rights than keep America safe, this is where the distance between the real Obama and the fictional Obama is at its widest. Not only has Obama continued the civil liberties abuses that began under the Bush administration, but he’s actually expanded them, to the point where now it’s written into the law that the president has the power to throw American citizens into prison without a trial purely on suspicion of ties to terrorism. He appeared to make a genuine effort to close down Guantanamo as soon as he took office, but when that failed he never brought the issue up again, and the prison remains open and could conceivably remain so for generations. He doesn’t do waterboarding anymore but he hasn’t prosecuted anyone responsible for that war crime, all the while bringing the hammer down on whistleblowers like Bradley Manning who dared to make the abuses of our military public. Finally, if you really want to know whether or not Obama is soft on terror, you can ask Osama bin Laden.

And lastly, there’s the matter of religion. Newt Gingrich told a crowd of supporters that as soon as he takes office, he’ll repeal every single anti-religious act passed by the Obama administration. That shouldn’t take long, as no such acts have been passed by the real Obama. The fictional Obama is the one carrying out this “war on religion” we keep hearing about. After all, that guy is secretly Muslim and born in Kenya, and obviously on a crusade to undermine America’s Christian moral foundation.

Running against a fictional character may work for the Republican candidates in the primary, but it’s going to blow up in their faces if they try that in the general election, which is exactly what Obama is counting on. If Mitt Romney accuses Obama in a debate of raising taxes, Obama will be poised and ready with the facts to prove that he has not. The same goes for the accusation that he’s cut defense, gone after gun rights, and so on. The major political advantage Obama has garnered for himself by going against his liberal base time and again on nearly every single issue is that the Republicans can’t make a fact-based attack on him for doing any of the things that liberal presidents are normally criticized for doing. The best they can do is say that he talked about doing such things in the 2008 campaign.

If they’re forced to run against the real Obama, there are plenty of things to criticize him for, but they are guilty of those same things themselves. Romney could expose every last way in which Obama has been a puppet of Wall Street, but he knows quite well that he’s running to be the next puppet of the very same interests.

But the truly funny thing is that aside from his ties to the financial industry, most conservatives would like the real Obama if they knew who he was. If you just changed the D in front of his name to an R and read off a list of the actions he’s taken since his term began, they’d understand him to be a moderate who is slightly left-of-center on some issues but right-of-center on most.

The real Obama governs like a moderate Republican of former days, before the party drifted off to its right-wing fringe. The real Obama would win a national election against any of these clowns the Republicans have put forward in this primary, and they know it. That’s why they have no choice but to run against a fictional character instead, and it’s why they’re going to lose the general election when the curtain is pulled back and independent voters get a good look at who Obama actually is.

The Iowa caucuses were last night, and after months and months of exciting horse-race politics in which nearly every single Republican candidate surged to front-runner status and then fell back again, the winner was the guy everybody originally thought would win.

Mitt Romney came in first place ahead of Rick Santorum by just 8 votes. The narrow margin made the night as dramatic as the rest of the race has been so far, but like the entire presidential electoral process in general, it was mostly inconsequential. Santorum only did so well because his popularity happened to peak at just the right time, but like every other alternative-to-Romney candidate in the field, his numbers will plummet once people start paying more attention to him.

And so as early as January 5, with only one primary contest finished and ten months to go before the general election, I can boldly pronounce who the winner of the 2012 election will be: Wall Street, and the rest of Corporate America.

It’s all over, folks. The corporate plutocracy that owns the media and our politicians now has this one in the bag. They already own Barack Obama, and they’ve owned Mitt Romney for quite some time. Both of these guys have demonstrated that they will do whatever the big corporations want them to do, with a few minor exceptions Obama has to make for political reasons (e.g. the consumer financial protection bureau).

The choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is a choice between two different brands of the same product. It’s like being offered Pepsi or Coke when what you really want is orange juice. (Or more accurately, it’s like a choice between Coca-Cola and Royal Crown Cola, both of which are owned by the same company.)

The powerful financial interests which make up the establishment would call the shots no matter who gets elected, be it Obama, Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, or almost any of the others. There are only three candidates in the entire race who would not be beholden to them: 1- Rocky Anderson, who is a third-party candidate and therefore has no chance, 2- Buddy Roemer (a.k.a. “who is that?”) and 3- Ron Paul.

Yes, the last best chance for real change in 2012 was a Ron Paul victory in Iowa. He was the only real threat to the establishment, but they were able to snuff it out in Iowa. Unfortunately, he was too easy of a target.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s a lot to dislike about Ron Paul. Those racist newsletters are a disastrous reflection on his character and his obvious lies to pretend he knew nothing about them made it clear that he’s not quite as honest as he seems. His die-hard libertarianism, if fully implemented, would be a disaster of epic proportions.

But he’s not running for dictator. He’s running for president, and the president does not have nearly the kind of power it would require for him to implement his entire agenda. He would try to eliminate the department of commerce, of education, of energy, the EPA, and so on, but Congress wouldn’t let him. There would be bipartisan opposition to all extremist legislation he proposes, and while a few Republicans would take his side in some fights, the vast majority are owned by the establishment and the establishment would make defeating him their top priority.

On the other hand, there are certain things the president has the power to do all on his own without approval from Congress. He could and would stand against the military industrial complex and get our troops out of Afghanistan immediately, saving billions of dollars of the national budget currently being wasted. He could end the war on drugs, freeing up law enforcement to focus on more serious crimes and deal a death-blow to the cartels. Finally, he could aggressively go after and prosecute every single one of those Wall Street bankers who committed the fraud that crashed the economy and then walked away with millions in taxpayer-funded bonuses.

But this is all a fantasy. Ron Paul would never win the Republican nomination, though I think he’d probably stand the best chance of beating Barack Obama because unlike any other Republican he actually appeals to liberals for the reasons stated above. No progressive is going to vote for Romney, but plenty would be tempted to vote for Ron Paul.

At the very least, a Ron Paul nomination would turn the establishment media on its head. The mainstream media, owned by the same corporations that own the government, would throw everything they have at Paul including, possibly, rational arguments over policy! There would be a real debate over things like the proper extent of the role of government in people’s lives, and conservatives would look at his extreme views and be forced to acknowledge that it should at least play some role. There would be a real discussion over the efficacy of the war on drugs, and if enough people look at the statistics it might finally tip the scales against prohibition, an obviously failed and counter-productive policy. Finally, we’d have a real debate over the wars, and with the Democratic candidate in favor of them and the Republican candidate against, people would have to consider their own opinion instead of just accepting the default position of their team.

But the best thing about the imaginary Paul vs. Obama scenario is that Fox News and the rest of the conservative corporate media would take Obama’s side. After all, he’s a part of the establishment and Paul is not. It serves their purposes to be against Obama now because they are still hoping for a more corporate-friendly president, but if Paul were to be the Republican nominee all that nonsense about Obama being a socialist left-wing radical would go straight out the window and the likes of O’Reilly and Hannity would be talking night after night about how Obama has actually been governing pretty much like a moderate Republican.

Sadly, none of that will happen now, so the establishment can rest easy. There will be no real change this year. The middle-class continues to be squeezed and squeezed but the tipping point has not yet been reached and that slowly roasting kettle will not boil over. In 2011 many people finally took to the streets in a genuine rebellion against the establishment, but that political energy will be absorbed by the election as people eventually accept a candidate and line up behind them. Instead of fighting for real change, most of these people will be fighting to re-elect Obama for the sole reason that they believe Romney will be far worse. But in reality, it will make almost no difference.

The American presidential electoral process used to have the potential to bring about change, but ever since the government has been completely absorbed by the corporations and all of the candidates bought by the same interests, it’s become little more than a sideshow—a useful distraction for the politically-active to direct their energy away from actually fighting for real issues. It’s only January, but the election is already over. The 1% win. The rest of us lose.

So much has been said and written about the absurdness of the reaction of the right-wing media to the shootings in Arizona that it’s almost useless to add my voice to the choir. But because this is so important I’d feel remiss if I didn’t just briefly register my own strong agreement.

Whether it’s Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly or anyone else on a long list of right-wing pundits talking about the shooting, they’re all basically making the same two claims which they fail to notice are blatantly inconsistent with one another:

1- We can’t blame those who engage in violent political rhetoric for the shootings because the sole responsibility lies with the shooter and not his potential influences.

2- Anyone who claims that political rhetoric played a part in the shootings is grossly irresponsible because their finger-pointing might lead to violence.

Which is it, Sarah? Do words have consequences or don’t they? Bill—when is political speech just a free exercise of the First Amendment and when is it “flat-out reprehensible”?

Apparently you have zero responsibility when you call someone a “baby killer” dozens of times on national television and someone actually goes out and kills the person, but anyone who calls you out on that is terribly irresponsible because they’re fomenting violence? Apparently when anyone on the right talks about “second amendment remedies”, being “armed and dangerous”, or says that conservatives should, “not retreat, instead reload” those words couldn’t possibly have any real-world consequences, but if anyone suggests that they might, those words could have terrible consequences indeed.

I’m not saying Loughner was actually influenced by the rhetoric alluded to above (the best possible explanation so far is that he took his inspiration from the Sovereign Citizens movement), but to flat-out exclude the mere possibility that he was and immediately pounce on anyone making that suggestion is the epitome of intellectual dishonesty.

Of course these people had a game plan all along. They knew that it was only a matter of time before some right-wing nut actually took all these violent metaphors seriously and started shooting people. They had to think of their response ahead of time.

The proper, human response would be to say, “We don’t believe that our words played a part in this tragedy, but we have to acknowledge the possibility—however small—that they did. It makes us sick to think that our choice of rhetoric was in any way related to this, and while we don’t think it was we recognize that we just can’t be sure. And for that reason, we would like to offer our sincere and profound apologies to the victims and their families. We will do our best to avoid using language that might be misconstrued as a call to violence in the future, and call upon all of our colleagues to do the same.”

Instead, their response is twofold. First, claim complete and total innocence of any responsibility and fiercely express righteous indignation at anyone who suggests otherwise. Second, do everything you can to disavow the shooter and make your audience believe that he was actually a left-wing nut-job (which in this case they’re doing by grasping at whatever straws they can: he smoked pot, he read a book by Marx, etc.) and so if anyone influenced him to commit these violent acts it was radical leftists.

The right-wing media blames the left. The mainstream media blames both sides in a desperate effort to come across as neutral. Cenk Uygur does a great job of laying out the case that both the violent rhetoric and the violence itself comes almost exclusively from the right:

Your conservative, Fox News-watching friends and family members have already been imbued with the idea that political rhetoric is completely harmless unless it comes from the left. It should be incredibly easy to point out the blatant contradiction in this claim. Granted they can usually summon enough powers of cognitive dissonance to prevent your point from registering, but this one might be too obvious even for them. Either political rhetoric has consequences or it doesn’t. You can defend one of those positions, but not both.

I will try to make this as brief as possible because I want to increase the likelihood that people will read it. If you agree with my assessment, I hope you’ll spread this around the internet far and wide, because this is a conversation that needs to happen NOW if it happens at all. Running a progressive candidate against Barack Obama will require a year of fund-raising, and the Iowa caucus is a year away.

I never thought I’d advocate challenging Obama in the 2012 election, but I also never thought that after two years of a Democratic president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, things would still be this bad.

Foreign policy-wise, the troops are still in Iraq and our presence in Afghanistan has escalated. The prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base are still open. The torturers have not been punished nor even investigated, and the president has now claimed the power to execute American citizens suspected of terrorism without due process of law.

Domestically, our government is still illegally spying on its citizens. Private health insurance companies still have no competition to prevent them from profiting by letting people die. Wall Street is continuing the practices that crashed the economy and unless more measures are taken it’s only a matter of time before the second crash comes. The climate change issue has gone completely unaddressed and Big Oil and Coal can continue to rake in record profits. And now, the national debt and deficit will continue to sky-rocket for a minimum of two years as the completely un-necessary and un-stimulative tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans are extended. Presumably, this decrease in revenue will be balanced by decreases in spending, and it looks like Social Security is first on the chopping block.

“But wait,” you might say, “didn’t he sign a measure strengthening registration and reporting requirements for lobbyists?” Yes, you can easily rattle off a long list of small-ball accomplishments that we could never have expected from a Republican president, but most of these things can be done or un-done with the stroke of a pen. When it comes to the fights that really count, the things that go to the heart of the broken system, this president has consistently maintained the status quo.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Obama’s advisors started talking about how the tax-cut deal he struck with Republicans would actually be good for the country. Fox News commentators are actually praising Obama for finally “admitting” that tax-cuts for the rich create jobs, and because Obama has now made Bush’s economic policy his own, he has no choice but to defend it. It’s absurd to think he’ll fight to let them expire in two years if he wasn’t willing to do that when he still had wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Democratic president will now be pushing for Republican policies and defending them with Republican talking points. Presumably, we’re going to start hearing him agree with his deficit commission that cuts need to be made to Social Security.

At this point, it has to be acknowledged that unless we issue a primary challenge to Obama, we will essentially have two Republican candidates in 2012.

The objection to this strategy is clear: A primary challenge is likely to fail and it will only weaken Obama and hurt his chances to win the general election. And wouldn’t a Republican president be worse?

Until last week I would have agreed with you. But then I asked myself this question, and I hope you’ll ask yourselves the same:

Which is worse for America? A Republican president who tries to implement Republican policies which progressives and the majority of Americans can rally against to stop those policies from going through? Or a Democratic president who acts as though he has no choice but to implement Republican policies, in which case the progressive movement is fractured and there is not enough unified opposition to prevent them from going through?

Ideally, a primary challenge would result in a true progressive in the White House who will finally draw lines in the sand and be willing to take sides with the American people and against the upper class. But if not, it’s beginning to look like a second Obama term would actually be worse for America than a Republican.

I’ve been focusing a lot on Fox News lately, but this clip from Monday night’s Daily Show is too good not to share:

Fox News plays guilt-by-association at every possible turn, and now they’ve been playing the game with Imam Rauf to make the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” seem sinister. They tie him to the Saudi prince Alalweed bin Talal without mentioning the name of the prince, lest any of their viewers actually look him up and discover that he owns 7% of News Corp. (the second largest share behind Rupert Murdoch), the company that owns Fox News.

If the Ground Zero Mosque is a sinister terrorist plot because you can follow some of the money back to a Saudi prince, then by Fox News’s own logic, Fox News is a sinister terrorist plot as well!

Why anyone takes Glenn Beck seriously is beyond me. Here’s him invoking the attacks of 9/11 to shill for Goldline, his biggest sponsor:

Here is a guy with a clear financial interest in making people think that civilization is about to collapse. Of course he’s going to go over-the-top and constantly tell everyone that the sky is falling, that Barack Obama is destroying the country, that the communists are taking over, the Muslims are invading, and that our only defense is to be ready to take up arms against the government and bring down the system.

Of course, once the system is toppled you’re going to need some sort of currency, and paper money won’t be worth anything.

However, here’s a thought that just doesn’t occur to people:

What makes you think that if civilization collapses, gold is going to be worth anything either?

Currency only has value insofar as people agree it has value. Without a system in place to guarantee that value, paper is just paper and you might as well wipe your ass with it.

But what are you going to do with gold? They’re just shiny rocks, after all. Just as useless as paper if not moreso (you can’t even wipe your ass with it).

Sorry, Glenn Beck viewers who think they’ve made some kind of incredibly wise investment and are now safe and secure should civilization crumble, but you’ve wasted your money. The human race is past the time in its history when everyone agrees that these shiny rocks have value.

If I’m living in a post-apocalyptic world and Glenn Beck comes to my farm asking to trade some of his shiny gold coins for food, I tell him to get lost unless he can offer something of real value.

Food, labor, and guns will be the only real forms of currency in that world. At least Glenn Beck’s viewers have plenty of that last one.

You’ve probably heard the news already:

WASHINGTON — With Republicans hoping to recapture a number of statehouses in November, the media conglomerate headed by Rupert Murdoch is inserting itself into the races in bold fashion with a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association.

Yes, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News as well a few print outlets, has given a million dollars to help republicans get elected. This completely contradicts the whole “Fair and Balanced” façade that Fox News has been trumpeting since its inception to great effect. People who watch Fox News religiously actually believe that it’s not conservative propaganda, that it really provides a balanced political perspective. Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it.

To keep up the façade, News Corp. needs an excuse:

But News Corporation executives said the political priorities at the Republican Governors Association and its emphasis on low taxes and economic growth dovetailed with the company’s own concerns. “News Corp. has always believed in the power of free markets, and organizations like the R.G.A., which have a pro-business agenda, support our priorities at this most critical time for our economy,” said Jack Horner, a company spokesman.

Right—it’s not that you support one political party over another, it’s that you support one political party’s agenda over the other. Nuance, people.

I can just imagine the Fox News people saying, “Look, we’re perfectly willing to report favorably on democrats, but only if they push for policies we like.” See—fair and balanced.

What Fox News and its audience don’t seem to understand is that to actually be “balanced” you have to give equal treatment to different perspectives, not just different parties. If you give the perspective from the Republican Party and then the perspective from the Democratic Party, that’s not balance—especially because there are so many people to the left of the Democratic Party in this country because that party has moved so close to the center. The same can’t be said for the Republican Party anymore, as Fox News has pushed it to the right-wing fringe.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s a free country and we believe in freedom of speech. If you can make a lot of money by presenting the news through a conservative-tilted lens, then go ahead and have at it.

Just don’t pretend that you’re fair and balanced. Don’t repeat the bullshit “We report, you decide” lie over and over again when you know damned well that you’ve already decided long before you report.

If you get all of your news from Fox News, fine. That’s great. I hope you enjoy it. Just don’t act like you’re well-informed or that you have a balanced perspective. All you’re doing is reinforcing the opinions you already have, and maybe that’s what you’re after. Maybe you have no interest in trying to look at things differently. All I ask is that you admit it, and recognize how that makes your opinion less legitimate than those of us who really do have an open mind.

I have reason to believe that some readers of my blog are conservatives who watch Fox News and are fans of Bill O’Reilly. Since they know I’m a fan of Rachel Maddow, the fact that Bill O’Reilly has recently taken to criticizing her might make them feel that they can more easily dismiss what I have to say, seeing as how she’s just a “far-left loon” who engages in “paranoid, dishonest rants” based on no evidence.

Now while I do think Bill O’Reilly genuinely believes what he says and that he has been somewhat unfairly demonized on the left, he just refuses to see the truth here. The accusation that Rachel has been making against Fox News and which I’ve been making on my blog is that Fox News deliberately hypes up stories—often based on misleading evidence—in order to push a false narrative that black people are trying to redistribute money from white people to minorities.

Rather than insist that black people really are trying to take money from white people, O’Reilly simply claims this is ridiculous and Fox News would never report negatively on black Americans.

O’Reilly viewers: if you want to be intellectually honest, you have to watch Rachel Maddow’s rebuttal:

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

This is how media works. Conservatives spend decades accusing the media of rampant liberal bias, so the mainstream media moves to the right in order to deflect those accusations. Now that liberals are finally fighting back and calling out conservative media for its bias, they’re not sure what to do with themselves.

If Bill O’Reilly is as intellectually honest as he claims to be, he probably recognizes somewhere deep inside himself that Maddow is right. Hopefully, he’ll catch himself before he pushes another “the blacks are coming for your money” story.

In my “There Is No Immigration Crisis” article from last Wednesday, I wrote the following:

Republican politicians still think it’s the mid-1980s and that getting people all riled up about illegal immigrants is a great way to win elections. If stories that support their portrait of Mexican immigrants as violent criminals can’t be found, conservatives simply invent them.

Well, I didn’t even know how right I was. I recently learned that the Tea Party Nation has a forum on their website calling for people to send in stories about how they or their businesses have been harmed by illegal aliens. Also, they’d really like to see photos or videos of illegal immigrants doing bad things.

I had to see this for myself, but when I went to the Tea Party Nation’s website I found that I couldn’t access that page unless I was a member. Ah hah…I see. Well, they don’t know who I am so there’s no reason I can’t become a member. I signed up, making sure not to include the URL for my blog or my Twitter name, as a quick glance at either of these accounts would reveal to them that I am in fact the Enemy. All I gave them was my name and location, and a few hours later I was in.

Having successfully infiltrated the Tea Party Nation I went back to the link to the page in question, entitled “The horrors of illegal immigration” and discovered the truth for myself. Here is the entire message—the one they only want their members to see:

The drum beat for Amnesty is here. The Obama Regime and the drive by media are pushing Amnesty with stories about illegals who are just here “to make a better life” for themselves. The media is ignoring stories of the horrors if illegal immigration. At TPN, we want to highlight some of these stories. We need your help.

We have set up a forum for stories of illegal immigration. If have been the victim of a crime by an illegal, or if your business has gone under because your competition uses illegals, or if you have lost your job to illegals, we want to know about it. If you have photos and videos of illegals or their supporters doing outrageous things (like burning the American flag or putting the Mexican flag above ours, or showing racist posters), please share those as well.

We need to get the true story out about illegal immigration and we need your help to do it

Stop by and contribute. Take the time to read some of the other stories and share them. We must stop illegal immigration. The future of our country, for our children and our grandchildren, depends on it.

Note to Mexicans: If you want to make some quick cash, you can shit on the American flag while a conservative video-tapes it, but keep in mind that it’ll be all over Fox News for weeks.

The worst part is that conservatives will read this and not even give the slightest thought to what a dishonest, disgraceful tactic this is. The reason we hear so many stories about illegals just trying “to make a better life” for themselves is because most illegals really are just trying to make a better life for themselves. They have no interest in committing crimes and risking deportation. They’re certainly not going to be marching down the street burning flags left and right.

The thing about conservatives is that they project the things they do onto other groups. The fact that they want images of Mexicans “showing racist posters” is extremely telling. They have no qualms about letting their own people hold up racist posters at their rallies, but it doesn’t register to them that the idea of a Mexican holding up a poster slurring white people is absurd. They apparently live in this alternate universe in which illegal immigrants all rally together holding up signs saying, “Suck it, gringos—We’re here for your jobs!”

The alternate universe they live in is of their own creation. Nobody is less conscious of confirmation bias than they are. They ignore all facts that contradict their pre-existing beliefs and dismiss everything liberals say simply because they’ve decided that liberals must always be wrong. But if they get their hands on anything at all that confirms their biases—even a heavily-edited, out-of-context video—they will leap all over it and shout from the rooftops: “See! See! We were right all along! Told you so! We told you so!”

Then when the video is debunked they just say “whatever” and wait for the next thing.

And apparently if the next thing doesn’t come quickly enough, they go out searching for it. It’s as though a detective were to say, “Bring me all the evidence you can find, but only if it implicates our top suspect. If you can’t find any, just plant some.”

But definitely stay tuned for photos and videos that appear to show illegal immigrants doing bad things, because you can be sure they’re coming. At least now when your Fox News-watching relatives hit you with it, you can tell them why it appeared in the first place.

Due to some unexpected social activity (Tuesday night in Celle) I’m a little behind on my news-intake schedule. I don’t want to write about Wikileaks and the Afghanistan documents until I’ve gotten a bit more analysis, so today I’ll just make the quickest comment I’ve made so far and save the heavier stuff for the weekend.

A small opportunity now exists for Obama to push back against the perception that his administration has Foxnewsophobia. Helen Thomas was a member of the White House Press Corps (all those journalists who sit in on the daily briefing and press conferences) for decades and had a prime seat in the front row until controversial comments about Palestine forced her to step down. Now that seat is empty.

The two biggest contenders for who to take that seat are a reporter from National Public Radio or a “reporter” from Fox “News”. Given all the backlash from last week’s Shirley Sherrod debacle, you’d think it would be a no-brainer to give the seat to NPR.

My guess is they give it to Fox News and continue with their bullshit strategy of trying to appear as centrist and moderate as possible by constantly lending credibility to the network that spends nearly all of its time attacking them. After all, if they give it to NPR instead of Fox News, what would Glenn Beck say?

Luckily, you can make your voice heard. Signing this petition will basically say to the White House: “If you give the seat to Fox News, you suck.”