Fox News Is In The Pocket Of The Republican Party

Here's where you're wrong ...

I've been wanting to share this for some time. I guess this blog is the perfect forum.

I'll start by asking a very weighted question: During the 2008 presidential campaign, which cable news organization was more pro-McCain and anti-Obama than any of its cable news competitors?

Answer: Fox News

I can already see the satisfaction dripping off of you smug jackasses on the left; and I can hear the tendons popping in the clenched fists of those on the right ready to fight for their beloved news station. Don't get comfortable in those positions. I'll reverse them shortly.

The key to my question was the phrase "than any of its cable news competitors." In general, the media has a heavy left bias. And yes, I'm asserting this as fact. Just spend a weekend flipping through channels. It doesn't take a genius to spot the slanted reporting (or just as often, the lack of reporting). And the study we're about to dig into backs up this assertion. With this liberal slant as a foundation, Fox could simply enter the game being completely neutral and  they'd appear to be hyper-conservative when compared to the rest. This is exactly what the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found.

Quick background: the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has strong ties to the very liberal Columbia University. Don't expect them to say out loud that Fox is the only fair cable news organization. I think there's something in their marrow that actually prevents that. Do give them credit, however, for reporting all the actual facts and figures of their studies on their website. A savvy reader can find some interesting information there.

In this study, which was published in Oct '08,  PEJ took a look at how various media outlets covered the general election. A big part of their study focused on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and how much positive, negative, and neutral coverage each major candidate received during the campaign on those channels. Then they compared these numbers with what they found in the media in general.  What they found IN WORDS was, at a high level, that MSNBC was more liberal (pro-Obama) than the media in general and that Fox News was more conservative (pro-McCain) than the media in general. BUT, let's take a look at their facts and figures instead of comparing these outlets to the overall liberal media (flip to the second page of that study I linked to above):

• Media Overall
• McCain - 57% Negative, 43% Positive/Neutral
• Obama - 29% Negative, 71% Positive/Neutral
  
• MSNBC
• McCain - 73% Negative, 27% Positive/Neutral 
  
• Obama - 14% Negative, 86% Positive/Neutral
• CNN
• McCain - 61% Negative, 39% Positive/Neutral
  
• Obama - 39% Negative, 61% Positive/Neutral
• Fox News
• McCain - 40% Negative, 60% Positive/Neutral
• Obama - 40% Negative, 60% Positive/Neutral

Anything jump out at you there? Does any one news station appear to be more (wait for it ...) "fair and balanced" than all the others? Hmmmmm. Yep, right there at the end. Fox News is the only station that even came close to balanced reporting of the two candidates during the campaign. And they didn't just come close, they had the exact same amount of negative reporting for both candidates. I've even done them a bit of a disservice when it comes to the accusations that they're a far right-wing news outlet by combining the positive and neutral figures. If you take a look at the numbers, they actually reported more positive stuff about Obama than they did McCain (25% to 22%). How dare them!!

If you read the actual report, they try to pitch CNN as being the most centrist of the news organizations. Again, they're doing this by comparing these organizations to the media overall, which is liberal. But the numbers don't lie. Just take a look above and you'll see that there's nothing centrist or fair about CNN's reporting.

But I don't hold too much of a grudge against PEJ for their inaccurate interpretations of their own numbers; their roots being far left and all. Hell, they'd probably lose funding from Barbara Streisand and cause Sean Penn to threaten defection again (would that freakin' guy just leave already?) if they actually said out loud what their numbers show. Facts, figures, truth, and logic just don't factor into the left's agenda. You do have to give PEJ credit for reporting the numbers behind their findings, at a minimum. You sure as hell wouldn't have gotten this information by watching MSNBC.

By the way, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found the same thing in their study, but I figured I'd start with the PEJ information since they're more liberal and less inclined to tilt any numbers to favor Fox News. Also, it's unlike me to not back up my rants with facts and figures, but I ran across another study that's monitored these stations since the election, and the outcome was similar. Fox wasn't right down the middle and did lean slightly to the right in their coverage, but only by a couple of percentage points. Everyone else was way off to the left. Unfortunately, I can't find the link at the moment so you'll just have to take me at my word on that. Or not. I really don't care which.

Some other interesting findings in the PEJ study:

• In significant part, left-slanted reporting magnified the direction of the polls.
• Network news stations are slightly less biased than their cable counterparts, but still tilt heavily to the left.
• Network morning news stations lean farther left than their evening news counterparts.
• The 13 newspapers in the study slanted heavily to the left. The only outlet farther left than these newspapers was MSNBC.

So there you have it. Yes, Glenn Beck is theatrical and annoying. Yes, Bill O'Reilly can be an arrogant jerk. But, like it or not, Fox News is the only station available to us that comes anywhere close to providing balanced reporting. If you're a leftist wingnut and enjoy having your choir preached to, tune into CNN, MSNBC, or pretty much anything other than Fox News. If you care about fair news reporting, you've really only got once choice. The numbers don't lie. And the numbers came from the left. Unless you can find a reputable study that shows something contrary, there's really no point in debating.

Finally, I've pointed liberal friends to this study before, and the couple whose brains actually function here on Earth  (a) recognized  that the numbers are difficult to argue with and (b) became pretentious and tried to throw me a curveball by claiming they agreed, and that's why they watch the BBC to get their news. According to one, "The BBC is the only real fair and reputable news organization.". Just to save you some time ... if you scrape the bottom of your bulls$#t barrel and the liberal go$%amn BBC is all you can come up with, just stop talking and stick your head back up your a$$ because the BBC is just one more thing in a very long list of items that I know much more about than you do.

UPDATE 1/22/10: Found this graphic concerning the recent upset in Massachusetts by Senator Scott Brown. After the results were in, all news stations apparently aired Martha Coakley's entire speech. Scott Brown's speech was cut short, though, by everyone other than FOX. Here are the results provided by johnnydollar.us.

Obama Is Not A Socialist

Here's where you're wrong ...

I've seen many bloggers reference an article on the Washington Post website by Billy Wharton, editor of Socialist magazine, as definitive proof that Obama is not a socialist. These bloggers are idiots.

First, one needs to understand that "socialism" is not some set-in-stone economic system. It's a loose interpretation of many economic theories that share some similarities. Different socialist theories have been bouncing around and evolving for nearly two hundred years. Self-proclaimed socialists, to this day, argue about how their systems should be established.  They agree there should be some sort of social intervention, but often oppose each other when determining the degree and methods.  The article referenced above simply proves that Obama doesn't practice Mr. Wharton's brand of socialism. That's it.

Now, I'm not going to go all out here and claim that Obama is a full-blown socialist. I don't know that he's not, but I don't think there's enough proof out there to claim that he'd throw out capitalism altogether.  There is no denying, though, that Obama has many socialist tendencies. These tendencies validate the "socialist" label that many have stuck to him.

Let's examine that for a second. Let's say, for instance, I had a tendency to set things on fire. Not all the time, mind you. Just once every blue moon. Let's also say I was a fireman. It would be perfectly acceptable to call me an arsonist. It doesn't matter that I put out fires for a living. My firebug tendencies would validate the arsonist label.

I also know vegetarians who eat fish, but still call themselves vegetarians. Point being, we're most often defined for what we do, not what we don't do. You don't get to change the rules just because you don't like them.

And let's face it ... socialism is a "dirty word" here in America. Calling Obama a socialist prompts about the same reaction as calling him a jackass in many contexts. If you say this to someone who likes the guy, their knee-jerk reaction is to defend him, regardless of whether or not the charge is true.

So let's ignore the jackass context and actually examine this for a bit. At a really, really high level (you could easily lecture an entire semester about socialism ... I'm keeping it simple here for the common folk), socialists believe that in a capitalist society, all business owners and boards of directors exploit the hell out of the working class and concentrate all the money and power within their ranks. They believe that capitalism does not provide equal opportunities to its citizenry. Socialists (again, I realize I'm really generalizing here) think that this inequality should be rectified through some sort of intervention. They disagree on how, but generally they believe that all of us should be on roughly the same economic footing (often with the caveat that this be based on how much you contribute to society, but there is much disagreement about how this "level of effort" be determined). They believe that our factories, tools, infrastructure, raw materials, monetary capital, etc, should not be owned by those that created or found them, but rather by the government or the workers themselves. They typically also believe that resources should be allocated equally to all citizens by the government.

Now, let's examine the man to see how he matches up:

(1) He supports a single payer health care system. Period. If you think otherwise, you're wrong. Without mixing words, he has been quoted as saying:

• "If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system" 
• "I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out ..." 
• "I happen to be a proponent of single-payer universal health care coverage."   
  

So I think we should take him at his word. A single-payer health care system would have our government providing equal levels of health care to all it's citizens, regardless of their status, wealth, etc. This is a socialist idea.

(2) Obama believes we should redistribute the wealth in this country. If you think otherwise, you're wrong. During the infamous Joe the Plumber episode, Obama plainly said "When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody." Again, we'll take him at his word. Taking wealth away from those that have it and spreading it around to those that don't is a socialist idea. Bottom line. 

(3) Obama has often associated himself with socialists and communists. This is a sticky topic, I know, because it doesn't necessarily speak directly to his beliefs. In my simplistic, common sense view of the world, however, a person typically surrounds himself with like-minded people. For instance, I'm not a racist so I don't surround myself with racist people. Do I know some? Sure. But I don't actively seek them out, surround myself with them, or look to them for advice. So that it doesn't appear I'm trying to equate being socialist with being a racist, I'll use religion as an example. I'd argue that if you were, say, a Christian, you wouldn't surround yourself with people of a polar opposite belief. You'd likely have many more Christians in your inner circle than atheists.   So let's look at who he surrounds himself with:

• In his book "Dreams From My Father ...", he says "... I chose my friends carefully ... the Marxist professors" when referring to his time at Occidental College.
• In the same book, he spoke of the "socialist conferences I (he) sometimes attended at Cooper Union."
• His mother was described by her friends as being a "communist sympathizer." 
• Frank Marshall Davis, an admitted member of the Communist Party USA, was an important influence on Obama when he was a teen.
• Obama's half-brother and best man, Abongo Obama, has been identified as Marxist.
• Alice Palmer (who traveled to the Soviet Union to attend the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) personally picked Obama to succeed her in the Illinois Senate.
• Obama was endorsed by the Communist Party USA for President.
• Obama endorsed self-described socialist Bernie Sanders for U.S. Senate.
• Obama's former church in Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ, preaches black liberation theology, which encourages using Marxism to combat poverty.
• Obama often worked with the Democratic Socialists in Chicago and was endorsed by them.
• The band (The Decemberists) that Obama chose to open his Oregon rally is named after a communist revolution and often opens shows by playing the Soviet National Anthem.
• Obama has close ties to Bill Ayers (co-founder of Weather Underground, a communist revolutionary group and terrorist organization).
• After being elected President, Obama appointed Van Jones, a self-described communist, as his special adviser on green jobs, enterprise, and innovation.
  

So it certainly seems that for the better part of his personal and political life, Obama has surrounded himself with socialists and communists. He has sought their guidance and embraces their ideals to point that they have often endorsed him for political office.

(4) I won't go deep into all of the bank bailouts and such here because, in many cases, Obama is supposedly handing out loans to these companies and expecting repayment. Some have paid the money back, some never will. In many cases, the government is trying to control these companies (salaries, etc) even though, technically, it has no controlling interest. Regardless, from a purely socialist standpoint, the most glaring example is the 60% ownership the US Treasury has in General Motors. In other word, our government now owns one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world. This is an example of socialism.


So bottom line, whether you prefer to call Obama a socialist, or socialist-like, or socialist-lite, there's no denying that he has socialist leanings. There's no denying that he's a socialist. If you don't agree, you're wrong, you have no common sense, and you're a mouth breathing idiot. If you don't agree, your entire argument hinges on completely ignoring what the man himself has told us, which is just stupid. No one is going to advocate complete government control of businesses and complete redistribution of wealth overnight. This will occur over a long period of time, by slowly taking over "troubled" businesses. By implementing a single payer health care program. By taxing and penalizing wealthy Americans and spending the money on programs that benefit the poor. Obama has been doing and advocating these very things since he took office. He is taking this country in a terrifying direction and we need to put the brakes on in the 2010 midterms.

As a segue into things to come, I'll leave you with this great quote. If this doesn't wake you up and sound the alarms, nothing will.

"One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it." - Ronald Reagan

Obama Has A Mandate For His Radical Policies

Here's where you're wrong ...

The average person in America has a memory about as long as the media wants it to be. Obama was not a superstar throughout this entire last election. Obama barely squeaked by Hillary during the Democratic Primary. That debacle rocked on until June 2008 with no clear winner. Then, during the general election, he and McCain bounced back and forth in the polls until September. In fact, McCain was ahead in many polls in early September.

Then ... the banks collapsed and the already slow economy went completely to sh#t. This was the real turning point for Obama. People were scared and looking for a way out. McCain, up to that point, had abandoned whatever moderate viewpoints he once had and was looking a lot like a Dubya clone. He kind of went off the deep end to the right, which pissed off a lot of moderates and independents who had backed him up to that point. He was also hampered by his ridiculous choice for VP candidate. The conservative media seemed to love her, but I've yet to meet an intelligent conservative that liked her. Don't get me wrong. I'd love to stuff dollars into Palin's g-string, but that loopy b#tch has no business anywhere near the White House. If the Republican Party continues to rally around her (as it seems they're doing) and picks her as their 2012 candidate, get ready for for 7 more years of Obama.

So, what does McCain do when the banks collapse? He runs back to Washington and helps push through that ridiculous stimulus package, successfully pissing off the rest of the independents and conservatives who hadn't abandoned the guy already. When it was time to vote, I don't know a single person who was excited to vote for McCain. Many I know didn't vote at all. The rest voted apathetically, just hoping there was some way to keep Obama out of the White House.

The interesting thing to point out here is that, even with Palin and his dramatic shift to the right, McCain was still slightly ahead in early September. There were no chants for Obama the superstar at that time. The bank collapse pushed people over the edge, there was a knee jerk reaction that it was George W's fault, and McCain looked an awful lot like George W. Obama was the only person offering a dramatic change so many jumped on the bandwagon and started treating him like the golden child. It's really that simple.

People were tired. We'd had 8 years of a bunch of idiot Republicans ruining the country (well, 6 to be fair since they got their a%s handed to them in the 2006 elections). The Gingrich/Dole Republicans of 1994-2000 successfully balanced the federal budget and generally had a good run in the 90s. It was tapering off at the end of the Clinton era, but this manageable situation was handed to George W in 2000. He had the White House and Congress for 6 years and proceeded to loot our coffers worse than, even, any Democrat had in history (this is a topic for another day). We had a war still going on that everyone was tired of and the worst economic crisis we'd faced since the Great Depression. The Republican nominee was a weak one, and Republican turnout at the polls dropped from 2004 levels to only 28.7% because they hated their candidate. The liberal media was salivating on itself to give praise to Obama, and I'm sure there was much infighting among the top networks about who'd get to take him his slippers each morning. Given all this ... Obama won only by a whopping 7%. This guy should have won by a landslide. Given the same situation and the amount of money Obama spent on the election (much of it obtained illegally from foreign entities ... again, another topic), I think I could have won by a landslide; and there are pictures of me in college dressed as the bumblebee from Blind Melon's "No Rain" video that would have been plastered all over MSNBC, I'm sure.

This is/was not a mandate, ladies and gentlemen. This was a bunch of people pissed off at George W. Bush, a bunch of people pissed off at a Republican Congress that spent money like Democrats, a bunch of people pissed off at a war we should have already been rid of (and arguably should have never started), collectively voting (or staying home) to punish the Republican Party.

If Obama continues to push his radical agenda thinking he has some sort of mandate, I can only hope the country wakes up and balances out Congress in 2010. If not, we are about to repeat some mistakes that many countries have made before us. What an embarrassing way to weaken our country.

The Stimulus Package Is Helping America

Here's where you're wrong ........

As of September 2009, about 14.5% of the $787B dollar stimulus package has been spent. 14.5%. That's it. This is just more proof of how inept our government has become. If you'll remember, this legislation was passed with such urgency that NOT ONE member of Congress read the bill in its entirety before voting on it. This money was supposed to be quickly directed to "shovel-ready" jobs (according to the always brilliant Harry Reid) in order to stave off the rising unemployment rates in our country; but our government is so riddled with layers and layers of bureaucracy that it can't even spend money efficiently. How f%#ked is that? Almost a year later, the urgency has disappeared as they bumble around trying to figure out how to spend it all.

Where has this money gone? Well, imagine the same morons who can't figure out how to spend money trying to track its whereabouts. It ain't happening. The best source of information I've found so far for tracking this out of control spending is Propublica. You can visit their site for a full breakdown, but looking at some of the top recipients, you'll see the following:

• Health and Human Services - $35B (Enough to have paid 350,000 people $100,000) - These guys have a junk website that's difficult to navigate, but as far as I can tell much of the money has been spent enforcing Obama's electronic record keeping initiative. Whether this will benefit our economy or not will not be known for quite some time, but for now, at least, this money has gone largely towards non-stimulus related, and sometimes downright egregious spending. We're basically outfitting our medical facilities with shiny new computer systems. This may have saved a few IT jobs in hospitals and sales rep jobs at reseller outlets, but the big recipients here are the foreign entities who manufacture most of our computer equipment.
  
• Department of Education - $23B - This money has been spent largely on Pell grants and school modernization. I'm not arguing that these aren't worthy things, but they have nothing to do with our immediate economical problems and have no reason to be in a federal stimulus package.
• Department of the Treasury - $1.2B - Has been spent mostly on paying people who get Social Security $250. People love free money. This will become a common theme with this blog, I'm sure. It has also gone towards Native American assistance, grants for state housing credits, and grants for people with "green" facilities. Again, not a lot of job creation or economy stimulating here.
• Department of Labor - $32B - Most of this money has been spent educating workers. This has almost no impact on job creation, and it's not the government's responsibility to educate workers.

I could go on and on here, but the rest of the picture shapes up pretty much like the first part of it. Again, check out Propublica for more information. You'll have to check out the recipients' sites to find out how they're spending it. Again, I'm not arguing about whether or not any of these things are worthy causes. I'm arguing that most of the money has been spent on "non stimulating" things. So if you want to chime in with some dip#$it argument about how Native Americans get the shaft and deserve money, or how your local schools need new computers, just save your breath ... and close your mouth while you're breathing. You look like an idiot.

Basically, what's happened here is that the administration has handed out (printed up) billions in cash to agencies/entities who then just spent it arbitrarily on whatever the hell they wanted.  Worse yet, they've demanded no accountability so it's damn near impossible to see where all our tax money is going. Brilliant.

When all the number crunching is done, a tiny fraction (3-5% ... it's impossible to say exactly because much of the spending is unaccounted for) has actually gone towards job-creation and economy building.

"But the economy is turning around," you say. First, put down the Kool-aid. That sh%t's bad for you. Just think about it for a second. 14.5% of the total stimulus package has been spent, and only about 3-5% of that has been towards things that could actually stimulate our economy. We're supposed to believe that this tiny amount has immediately turned around one of the worst economic periods we've faced since the Great Depression? Come on! If you truly believe that, go ahead and fill out a 2012 absentee ballot for Obama because you are incapable of rational thought and clearly an ideologue.

The Congressional Budget Office predicted in February 2009 (around the time Obama was pleading for another $800B) that the economy would start to rebound by the end of 2009 whether or not Congress jammed a stimulus package down our throats (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/102xx/doc10255/06-02-IMF.pdf). Hey look, it's the end of 2009 and the economy is starting to rebound ... even though most of the stimulus package hasn't been spent. Now who could have seen that coming?

Obama promised unemployment wouldn't top 8% if we gave him another $800B. We did, and now unemployment has topped 10%. This stimulus package has done nothing but make some people rich and devalue the hell out of the American dollar. Worse yet, to stabilize our currency, we'll likely soon experience crazy inflation and super high interest rates like we had when Carter was in office. I am a rocket scientist, but it doesn't take one to figure this out. This is common sense. Just study a bit of history ... you don't even have to go back that far so you'll likely not even miss Desperate Housewives while doing your research.