Propaganda
mikethemadbiologist | February 23, 2007Beta test version of Conservapedia graphical interface. Isn't he reassuring?
I feel bad for John Stewart and Stephen Colbert because when idiots unintentionally parody themselves, their gigs will be up. Conservapedia is going to be the gift that giving...for bloggers anyway. Here's what it says about the Holocaust (and, yes, this is the entire entry):
The Holocaust was the massacring of the Jewish race during World War II. The Germans are not to blame for this but the Nazi[s] are. Besides 6 million Jews dying, 3 million Christians were killed also along with many priests and nuns. This is…
mikethemadbiologist | February 21, 2007
Can someone explain to me why the Nevada Democrats want to host a primary presidential debate on Fox News?
I guess the Nevada Dems are rewarding Fox News for its fair and unbiased portrayal of Democratic...aw, fuck it. This is so stupid, you can't even mock it with sarcasm. I had thought that after the 2006, the establishment Democrats had removed the giant "Kick Me" sign welded to their collective posterior.
Oh, and here's a description of the hatchet job Fox News did to the Democrats the last time Fox News hosted a Democratic debate:
For an example of how disrespectful and…
mikethemadbiologist | February 14, 2007I know, I know: dog bites man. Anyway, I received this note from a colleague who attended a Seattle screening of Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos:
...There were lots of ID folk in the audience, since the Discovery Institute is here in Seattle. So we had some pretty antagonistic questions. But what was really amazing is that Discovery Institute folks secretly tape recorded the whole event and posted a podcast with edited segments to their website, taking Randy's comments out of context and making it look as if he was retracting the claims in his film.
Talk about slimy tactics! I've never…
mikethemadbiologist | February 7, 2007I hate being right, but I knew the Mighty Conservative Wurlitzer was going to slime Amanda and Shakes. Before I get to a detailed discussion of the NY Times article about the whole blogger kerfuffle, I have a very simple question.
What if Amanda and Shakes, rather than being campaign bloggers, had taken important administrative, behind-the-scenes jobs with the Edwards campaign?
Seriously, both parties have had all sorts of people as campaign workers. So why are bloggers a big deal? If they were doing a bad job, then they should be fired because of their shoddy work. But many campaign…
mikethemadbiologist | February 6, 2007Over at Hullabaloo, Tristero describes this conversation with a respected journalist about the manufactured smear of CBS reporter Lara Logan's coverage of the Haifa Street battle:
Well, recently, I was at dinner with a friend who is a major journalist at a major media outlet in New York City. (I will not identify the person further, including whether my friend is male or female, or what kind of media s/he works for - video, print, or online). In the course of the conversation, I brought up the Lara Logan video and s/he said, with certain authority, "I know about that. Y'know, there's a lot of…
mikethemadbiologist | January 22, 2007A few days ago, I posted about the conservative dogpile over at the Weather Channel because one of their bloggers had some very scathing comments about global warming denialists. I found this post by a self-described "literature guy" which makes two very good points.
First, he makes a very good point about expertise and trust (italics mine):
Read posts by people who are angry that Dr. Cullen has made the monumentally unremarkable statement that anti global-warming dogma is junk science and that meteorologists--who have as much right to offer authoritative opinions on climate change as Imams…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2007A few weeks ago, climatologist and Weather Channel blogger Heidi Cullen suggested that:
I'd like to take that suggestion a step further. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming...
Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy.…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2007...you know the wheels have come completely off. Said Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson:
You talk about the hostile enemy, obviously being Iraq, but hostile enemies right here on the home front. Yesterday Senator Ted Kennedy, proposing that any kind of a troop surge should mean there should be congressional approval of that. A lot of democrats not coming to his side on this. But obviously this is not going to be an easy sell on Capitol Hill, even if it's not an easy sell to the American Public.
That meat popsicle called Kennedy, an elected Senator, an enemy of the U.S. Not an idiot, or a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2007White House spokesvermin Tony Snow yesterday just propelled us a little bit further down the path of either tyranny or impeachment:
"You know, Congress has the power of the purse," Snow said, then added: "The President has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way."
No, he doesn't. If Congress does not allocate funds for a troop increase, then the president is illegally using money appropriated for another purpose. It's that simple, although Senator Kennedy laid it out far more eloquently. Snow also said that he doesn't "want to play junior…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2007Suppose you were a very large media corporation, and you found out that some of your radio subsidiaries were espousing specific acts of violence toward other people (last I checked, that's called terrorism). You would:
1) Fire the offending parties.
2) Offer some mealymouth bullshit explanation ("If anyone was offended...").
or...
3) File a lawsuit against the blogger who posted mp3s of the offensive clips.
Well, the Disney corporation picked option number three. Disney-owned California radio station KFSO, in its effort to capitalize on right-wing hate radio, gives a microphone to some…
mikethemadbiologist | November 29, 2006There was a time when think tanks on occasion actually thought. Not so, at the conservative Hoover Institute, where Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer slimed Pelosi, claiming she had to explain why her family's vineyard does not use union employees. Schweizer claimed Pelosi was a hypocrite.
Two things to note:
1) Pelosi pays better wages than the union vineyards.
2) By law, Pelosi is not allowed to even suggest to her workers that they organize. She can only negotiate with a union once it is formed.
When confronted with this by a TV news station, Schweizer refused to return phone…
mikethemadbiologist | November 27, 2006To avoid possible brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that Sebastian Mallaby's columns only be read using the StupidVu 9000
Someone needs to tell Bush that when I wrote a post titled "Democrats Crush GOP; Bush Declares 'Mandate'", I was joking. Now that El Jefe Maximo has psychologically disinvested from the Iraqi Occupation, he has decided that the message the American electorate sent in the 2006 elections was "You've done such a great job with foreign policy, FEMA, and the budget deficit, we would really like you to screw up Social Security."
Really, Bush is once again, after…
mikethemadbiologist | November 16, 2006For you younguns, in the 80s, the USDA decided to define ketchup as a serving of vegetables so it could skimp on subsidized meals for needy schoolchildren. Well, the USDA has decided to stop using the word "hunger" and replace it with "very low food security." Here's some statistics on "very low food security":
Some are not happy with the Orwellian double speak:
Anti-hunger advocates say the new words sugarcoat a national shame. "The proposal to remove the word 'hunger' from our official reports is a huge disservice to the millions of Americans who struggle daily to feed themselves and…
mikethemadbiologist | October 29, 2006Billmon has a superb post on the failures of journalism due to Compulsive Centrist Disorder:
But no one in the corporate media, to my knowledge, has even come close to putting an accurate lead on the story -- which would look something like this:
Faced with the likely loss of one if not both houses of Congress, the Republican Party has embarked on a massive, last-ditch effort to smear Democratic challengers in competitive districts across the country.
The resulting campaign has completely demolished whatever minor restraints remained on the use of lies and distortions in political attack ads…
mikethemadbiologist | October 27, 2006Lance Mannion notes that Rush "Big Pharma" Limbaugh uses words in the same way creationists do: as weapons. From Mannion (italics mine):
Fox's offense was making campaign commercials for candidates who will vote to expand and fund stem cell research, but Limbaugh doesn't care about that. What he cares about is that those candidates are Democrats who will also vote to make it harder for rich white guys like Rush to get away with whatever they want to get away with.
Rush's anger and outrage are real; the words he used to express them weren't. This is why if the Republicans find a disabled…
mikethemadbiologist | October 16, 2006I was reading this LA Times story about the quashing of intelligent design creationism in Michigan, and I was stunned by this (italics mine):
Richard Thompson, leader of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, said intelligent design should have a home in science classes. The center describes its mission as defending the religious freedom of Christians.
"It would make students more knowledgeable about science and more interested in science," he said in a phone interview. "Evolution is a theory. It's not a fact."
Evolution is a theory--in the scientific sense of the word. I am certain…
mikethemadbiologist | October 12, 2006Or maybe this post should have been titled "Faith-based initiatives = anti-Semitism." (I'll get to that) Keith Olbermann has a story about David Kuo's new book, Tempting Faith. Kuo worked in the Office of Faith Based initiatives in the White House and has impecable evangelical credentials. Essentially, Kuo's book details the White House's cynical use of the 'religious' right, supporting what Tucker Carlson previously claimed.
Watch the whole clip. But this quote jumped out at me:
Kuo says they tried to prove their political value by turning the once-bipartisan faith-based initiatives…
mikethemadbiologist | September 28, 2006
This transcends absurd: Republican Rep. John Boehner, the House Majority Leader, stated on national television that Al-Queda and Saddam Hussein were linked, even though President Bush himself has admitted no connection. Keep in mind, Boehner isn't some councilman in a podunk little town. He is one of the most influential members of Congress. And he is utterly delusional. On behalf of the Coalition of the Sane, I ask, can we please have our country back?
mikethemadbiologist | September 28, 2006...a Jewish grandmother. Barbara Boxer did a wonderful job of preventing the standard Fox 'News' modus operandi of ending an interview of a Democrat with a Republican talking point. Like you're ever going to get the last word in against a Jewish grandmother....
(link here. By way of Oliver Willis)
mikethemadbiologist | September 27, 2006And one of my favorite liberal wonks was wearing glasses while doing so. That has to hurt. Seriously, Waldman did a brilliant thing: he shifted the discussion onto his terms. Instead of the storyline being "liberals are mean to Bill O'Loofa O'Reilly", it became "why can't conservatives respond to criticism in any other way than crying 'Smear'"? Nicely done.
(link here)
A completely unrelated aside: Our Benevolent Seed Overlords want a picture of the Mad Biologist for their own nefarious purposes. So I ask you: what do you think a Mad Biologist would look like? Click here to offer your…