Thank you Campbell Brown

Apparently CNN Election Center's Campbell Brown is the only news anchor with the decency and the courage to denounce the ignorant claims that are still being made about Senator Obama's race and religion, namely, the allegations that the Illinois senator is a muslim and most recently, that he is an arab.  While McCain did correct his thinking impaired supporter and say that his opponent was not an Arab, he followed up by explaining that Obama was a "decent family man." 

While the news outlets were quick to show the exchange they were even quicker to point out how McCain denounced these comments.  What most of them failed to do was denounce the idea that being an Arab or a Muslim is itself a negative  trait.  This racism in the country and the media cannot stand if America is to live up to its founding principles.

So congratulations Campbell Brown.  Keep up the good work, at least one MSM anchor is.

Overt and Covert Racism

After far too much complacency by all parties involved I was thrilled to see Representative John Lewis' remarks last week about the tone of the McCain/Palin rallies and their campaign. The most upsetting thing about his remarks is the response they have received by McCain's camp and most of the media. At the same time that images like the Obama bucks are making their way into GOP publications and website the McCain campaign has the audacity to act the injured victim in this and denounce the honest words of John Lewis as "shocking and beyond the pale."

The facts are these:
1) McCain cannot win this election without a strong turnout at the polls by the ugliest aspects of America, namely the racists and biggots of this country that are too ignorant and hateful to help themselves and their country move forward.
2) For every action Senator McCain takes to "rein in the hateful element at his rallies" Governor Palin gives as many if not more speeches that stir up that sentiment he is purportedly disagreeing with.
3) McCain's "denouncements" have not even denounced the racist tenor of his supporters. Case in point, when the slow witted woman in the red shirt stuttered through her idiotic comment about Senator Obama, John McCain's response was that Obama was not an arab and was in fact a decent man. He failed to address to more serious problem with his supporters and their overwhelming belief that arabs are not decent people and are, due to their ethnicity, horrible dangerous people who do not love their families.







So given these facts the climate of this campaign will only get worse and America should be ashamed of itself for treating 3.5 million of its citizens (who are of Arab descent) with this kind of hatred and distrust. It seems to me that if you're going to go after Senator Obama for having a fundraiser at Bill Ayers' house or for serving together on a board dedicated to reforming education then perhaps you should make sure that your own supporters don't own a bunch of white sheets and hoods.

The Debates Part 1

presidential debates,obama,mccain,donna brazile,paul begala,wolf blitzer,cnn,pbs,c-span

Well, hopefully I wasn't alone in watching the first Presidential Debate away from the jabbering nonsense filled cable news channels. PBS had, in my opinion, the best coverage of the debate as they had the fewest graphics on screen and I get an HD version of PBS.  C-Span was going to be my first choice but even they had a big graphic in the middle of the screen while PBS only had a faint watermark on the bottom right.

I couldn't help but pop over to the cables noise networks to see what intricate idiocy they had come up wih and CNN, you won hands down.  Not only did they have a FoxNewsish "live opinion tracker" that Frank Luntz has gotten so good at displaying, but they also had 6 pie charts that allowed 6 CNN experts like Paul Begala, Donna Brazile and some other CNN pundits give the canadidates plus/minuses throughout the debate.  The sole issue of interest here was the enormous amount of deviation between the pundits.  While some gave the candidates 3 or 4 pluses each and about as many minuses, Donna Brazile felt that McCain had over 15 pluses and Obama more than 20.  What CNN didn't realize was that any quantification of opinion is quite meaningless without some standardization.  Perhaps if Wolf had chosen the moments for them to pick, or the question that they should judge it would have made some sense.

So CNN, thank you for dumbing things down lower than even FoxNews. 

Sorry Tina Fey

Let me just tell you right now that this has been a tough idea to put down in words. I'll start out by apologizing to Tina Fey for even mentioning her here with all the douche bags of cable news and the kinds of political spin. That being said, she was superb in her impression of the Alaskan Governor on the season opener of SNL. I agree with Chevy Chase and hope that Fey does "descimate" Palin.
Frankly, it was a skit we all saw coming since Jon Stewart introduced McCain's choice for VP as the co-creator of the hit show 30 Rock. That being said, I would think that on a day with as bad financial news as Yesterday, perhaps the news media should have been covering news stories instead of each showing the same clip of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. It would have been bad enough for the clip to only air during those awful segments by Jeanne Moos, the ones that are repeated over and over throughout the night, but then CNN Election Center and AC360 each had a segment on it so not only was there the actual segment where he and Erica Hill bantered about the skit, but of course they had to promo it the requisite 2 or 3 times.
It's really too bad, because it was a very funny sketch but CNN is not supposed to be E!'s "The Soup" or some VH1 special called "I remember the SNL sketch." Give us some real news please and leave the playbacks of comedy shows to the comedy shows, or at the very least, limit it to once per evening.

Cynicism vs the Palin derangement syndrome

Watching Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday I was thrilled to see Bill take John Fund to task for being a cynic.  In Bill's words that meant the people like John and David Brooks who "know better but know that the 'stupid people' don't," so they make arguments that appeal to the misinformation that is already out there.  The issue came up during a discussion about Charlie Gibson's interviews with Sarah Palin in which she was flumoxed about the Bush Doctrine.  John Fund was trying to pretend that he didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was when Bill interjected and accused him of being a cynic in an effort to downplay Sarah Palin's giant gap in foreign policy knowledge.

The new catchphrase from Fund was the "Palin derangement syndrome" which he attempted  to explain was attacking  someone new to the national stage.  This is yet another GOP talking point that they are probably trying to get out on the cable news channels and the blogosphere to let it echo around and hopefully increase its prominence to the point that it might start being used by cable news show hosts or, they are praying, by the evening news anchors.  It is disengenous and outright false as Palin has been coddled despite her lack of knowledge on all things outside of Alaska.   

Props to Janeane Garofalo for sticking up to John Fund and calling him out on his bullshit.  And thank you John Fund for reminding me why I created this blog in the first place.  It is because of talking heads like you that spew bullshit that I am driven to write about it no matter how few are reading.

ClintonDems.com are a bunch of cowards

A little break from the usual attack on pundits to focus on a wolf in sheep's clothing.

I did something against my better judgement to day and created an account at ClintonDems.com. I was intrigued about a group of people who could seem to be so adamantly in favor of Hillary's run for the nomination and so vehemently opposed to another Democrat, the junior senator from Illinois, Mr. Barack Obama. I couldn't seem to grasp how someone could support someone for President and yet seem to disagree with every policy she championed. Do these people not know what Senator Clinton's stances on things like abortion and health care are? Do these people hate Obama so much that they would give the country over to the right wing machine for another 4 years? And then it hit me, these people aren't democrats, Clintons aside, and they never were. If, and this is a big if, the people at ClintonDems.com ever did vote for Hillary in the primaries it was only because one of their leaders like Rush Limbaugh told them it would be a good way to mess with the Democrats.

In my attempts to figure out who these people were I submitted a post entitled "ClintonDems.com = Republican pawns" because after reading over a few of the diaries on the website, I quickly noticed they were not just pro-Hillary but were actively pro-McCain/Palin. When I logged back in to see if my post had generated any comments, I found that I couldn't log in. I tried searching for my post and to my surprise it was gone; so were the comments I had posted on other posts.

This site is so afraid of people exposing them for the Republican hacks that they are that they delete accounts of anyone who doesn't post an article called Biden likes lipstick too. So I did what any stubborn red blooded American would do and I recreated my account, added another post about them being afraid of dissent and waited for the comments to come in and the account to be deleted. This time, I saved a copy of the post and waited for them to delete the account and then reposted. I may do it a few more times to keep them seeing a little bit of real democratic thinking.

Ed Rollins is a sack of shit

Yesterday CNN ran a "commentary" by Republican strategist Ed Rollins about Barack Obama's choice for VP. In his pathetic attack piece Rollins tries the current Republican ploy of dividing the democrats and angering Hillary's supporters. It is exactly this kind of shitty journalism that makes these pundits so putrid. Perhaps if Ed Rollins had something critical to say about McCain/Palin, or Paul Begala some interesting comment on Obama/Biden it might make some sense to have these wind bags on television, but since all they do is spout out some little "zinger" that Rove emailed to them it doesn't make any sense for us to listen to them. CNN, please stop paying them and get them off the air. Try giving the American real news for a change instead of the constant speculation that passes for news these days.