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April 26, 2010


Danube of Thought

The right wing spent months pointing out that Obama sat through year after year of sermons in Wright's church...

Which would seem to prove that whatever he is, he's no Christian.

Danube of Thought

why can't his ideological opponents field a media they feel is adequate?

Perhaps because no one knows what it means to "field a media."

Captain Hate

So what explains the different treatment?

Hussein vs Herbert.
Indonesia vs Texas.
Anti-Israel vs Pro-Israel.

Sensing a trend?

Danube of Thought

The reality is that there is a surfeit of conservative media, but a shortage of conservative readers.

Sixty percent of Americans call themselves conservative. Are they mistaken?


--if Ezra's worldview is "disastrously inadequate'' why can't his ideological opponents field a media they feel is adequate?--

Well at least bunker is honest (or perhaps careless) enough to tacitly admit that the main stream media we do have is "fielded" by his idealogical soul mates.

Danube of Thought

Plus, they should also realize WHY they fail in the daily newspaper and weekly magazine business...

As opposed to all those thriving daily newspapers and weekly magazines?



Does this question apply to every business in our country?

JM Hanes

"The reality may be that Americans know what the conservatives flavors taste like and freely chose to reject them."

Yeah, that's why the NYTimes' circulation is growing so fast, and FoxNews is struggling to attract viewers. That's probably why the Democrats will be routing Republicans in November too.

Danube of Thought

Investors Business Daily:

In early August 2008, just before our series kicked off, the IBD/TIPP Poll asked Americans if they agreed or disagreed with the statement: "The U.S. is evolving into a socialist state." Only 25% agreed, while 42% disagreed (see chart). Democrats shrugged off the possibility 46% to 20% and Independents by 39% to 23%.

Even Republicans disagreed (39%) more than they agreed (35%).

By the following March, however, after the new administration had settled in and the government was taking an ownership stake in the U.S. auto industry, more Americans (39%) suddenly agreed than disagreed (36%) that socialism was on the march.

Republicans had swung 63% to 21% and Independents 47% to 29% into the "agree" column. Interestingly, Democrats disagreed more (53% to 13%) than they did when asked seven months earlier. A month later, Americans were split.

IBD/TIPP asked the question again this month, and those who agree the U.S. is evolving into a socialist state have again opened up a three-point lead (41% to 38%).



If I understood correctly, bigshots in the media you guys "field", like Anderson Cooper, know what conservative flavors taste like: my balls.

But while that sort is down there jockeying (as it were) for a taste, mainstream Americans are up on our level hearing and seeing the conservative message - and liking it.

Danube of Thought

The results of the April 2010 Battleground Poll show nothing has changed. Fifty-nine percent of Americans in the latest Battleground Poll call themselves conservative; two percent of Americans call themselves moderate; thirty-four percent of Americans call themselves liberal; and five percent were either unsure or refused to answer. Remove the “Unsure/Refused” and sixty-two percent of Americans are conservative. Stories from the establishment media, like USA Today and the L.A. Times, conveniently miss the story about the April 2010 Battleground Poll.

Sixty-two percent epistemically closured. Wow.


President Obama says he wants to rebuild the foundation for America. He doesn't really give a lot of details. In the meantime, he spends like crazy on various government programs, chooses specific companies to purchase, specific bondholders to punish, specific companies to support, and specific industries to villify.

What are people supposed to think? If people get it wrong, it's hardly their fault. We've got an unknown entity in the White House, and there is no evidence he knows what he's doing.


LOL, bgates.

JM Hanes



That's probably why folks on the left still spend their time obsessing about conservatives. What else have they got to talk about? Funny how smart the American people were before Obama's poll numbers started to tumble.


Good point, JMH. I do believe that's one big reason we need to keep hearing about what idiots conservatives are for calling Obama a socialist. His most ardent supporters don't know how to describe him since "pragmatist" ran out of steam.


"Sixty-two percent epistemically closured"

and DoT that was before Obamacare kicked in.

Jane says obamasucks

Oh good, democrats are losing everywhere and bunkybister comes in and tells us what conservatives should do to to be better off.

I think your side needs your help more than our side. Please, go help them.

Melinda Romanoff

Sorry, but the 9th district just passed around the ATM pin code against Wal-Mart.

Who's next? (Here's a hint, don't donate to Republicans openly.)


Mel, it sure looks to me like the typical soon to be overruled, bit of Ninth Circuit merde.

Danube of Thought

The class action continues as a bizarre fiction, aided again by the zanies on the 9th Circuit.

Richard Cook

Tom: I like your casting this using one of the favorite paradigms of the left, viz., that minorities cannot be racist because of the white cultural hegemony of American society. Righties cannot be epistemically closed, becaue we're beaten down with the liberal hegemony! [It's so satisfying to be the counterculture.]

Frau Argwohn am Montag

A blistering dissent! From Mel's link:

"Judge Sandra Ikuta wrote a blistering dissent, joined by four of her colleagues.


Judge Ikuta is not even on Obama's long list.

Frau Argwohn am Montag

Judge Sandra Segal Ikuta in Wiki:
"She was nominated by President George W. Bush on February 8, 2006 to fill the seat vacated by Judge James R. Browning, who took senior status in 2000. Previously, Carolyn Kuhl had been nominated to that position, but she had been filibustered by Senate Democrats for a year until December 2004 when she withdrew her nomination. Ikuta was voted unanimously out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 26, 2006, and confirmed 81–0 by the U.S. Senate on June 19, 2006. She was the sixth judge appointed by Bush to the Ninth Circuit.

Ikuta now works alongside her former boss, Judge Alex Kozinski, for whom she clerked from 1988–1989. He testified on her behalf at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination."

It looks like GWB was trying to rehabilitate The Ninth Circus Court.

Melinda Romanoff


Sorry to be obtuse in the earlier post, I thought you, and others interested, would be interested to know that the current proponents of Modern Portfolio Theory (I have other names for this, none good) believe that commodities are now an asset class unto themselves, like stocks. Consumables as an asset are a bit "unusual" and, I believe, are the sole reason propping up the price of crude and the respective distillates. These are also known as the "crack" because the distillation process is known as cracking crude.

Not trying to be cryptic, just another dose of shorthand.

I'll try to remember that, again.


Got it. Thanks.

BTW narciso writes more clearly every day. So I was kinda joking.


And when Obama produces a birth certificate,

Problem is, he didn't.


I recently read a piece discussing the growing disparity in income. Of course the usual liberal bromides were used to explain it, but I couldn't help but think it has a lot more to do with the privileged getting insider access to politicians (and vice versa) than any desire by the wealthy to "cheat" the poor.

In fact the large number of wealthy people who tend to be liberal should give one pause. It makes me think, what's their angle? And I think I've figured out what it is. Once you're wealthy, you want the government to come down hard on anyone who has the temerity to challenge you by becoming equally wealthy.


Dot writes: ``Sixty percent of Americans call themselves conservative. Are they mistaken?''

Apparently, they don't read, though they're voracious talkradio listeners and cable-TV viewers.

I'm not the one suggesting the media are liberal, you guys are! lol...

I merely point out that the conservatives' "liberal media" shibboleth doesn't quite add up.

Again: if most Americans are conservative and America is a free country with no restrictions on starting or operating newspapers, why aren't conservatives happy with the news media the free market has produced?

My view is that conservatives are plenty smart, plenty rich and plenty capable of building and maintaining media empires, as so many from Conrad Black to Rupert Murdoch and Sinclair and have done. The Wall Street Journal is arguably the most influential newspaper on the planet and it's most ideologically identifiable content is not just conservative, but rigidly right-wing (with eccentric caveats on issues like drug laws and immigration). Unassailably right-wing columnists from Charles Krauthammer to George Will, Mark Steyn and even the execrable wingnut welfare baby Jonah Goldberg, whose callow screeds find ink weekly in the Los Angeles Times.
If newspapers were "in the tank" for Obama and liberals in general, why do they spend their money on publishing columns by the president's fiercest and best-known critics?
For the purposes of discussion, I'm happy to stipulate either proposition: the media have a liberal bias (since, ultimately, there's no objective measure of that). But if that's your position, you do need to explain why conservatives fail to produce a news media they approve of. Conservatives seem to believe they are more rational, more disciplined and more capable than liberals, yet they also seem to believe they are victims of liberal success in the news media. It's a free country. Americans get the media they demand. If the media's liberal, it's because conservatives don't spend enough time reading newspapers to support one with a worldview they like. Same for TV. If the networks have survived all these years as bastions of liberalism, it's because that's what customers demand.
Or not. If conservatives actually do support broadcast and print media they like, then the intellectual dishonesty is in declaring the media liberal.
Really there's no mystery here. Most conservatives know "their" media is second class. They know the conservative New York Post (not far in circulation from NYT) is mostly a gossip rag, while the liberal NYT is a real, professional newspaper. They also know that Fox News Channel is commentary driven. Its main draws are people who come on and give ideologically narrow views on the world. The news is shoehorned in between this commentary, whereas the "liberal" media does the opposite. It reports news, then shoehorns the commentary between that.
The intellectual dishonesty and pathetic bellyaching of conservatives over the media used to disgust me, back when the GOP had full control of the house, senate, white house and supreme court. Now I'm just amused. It was quite fund to watch the right's intellectual dishonesty about the media undermine its ability to deliver its message when the economy turned south, the wars went unwon and popular culture shifted more heavily against homophobia and religious demagoguery. The more observant conservatives, the David Frums, David Brooks, George Wills, knew the movement had to shift away from the Rove resentment/paranoia formula to something a less oriented toward keeping a majority self-contented and more oriented toward winning back support from moderates outraged by Bush's failures and the party's inability to take responsibility for them.
At the same time, the wingnutosphere allowed paranoid conspiracy theories and the worst sort of blame mongering demagoguery to flower, giving wingnuts a soothing sense of ideological proportion wildly at odds with their paltry and dwindling political weight. And the rallying cry of this feckless pack of self-pitying caterwaulers? The liberal media, academia, Wikipedia, Hollywood and so on are out to get us.
And so it goes today…The conservative movement could be making an essential, salutary contribution to public debate. Instead, it's too busy spinning insane theories about Obama's secret plan, secret history and secret friends, and endlessly whining about how badly they've failed to make their point in the schools, news media and public life.
Perhaps if the conservative media were willing to shed this myth of media victimhood, it could focus more attention on crafting its messages and speaking to moderates in a way that was a little less focused on rigid ideological self-congratulation and more on explaining the relevance of conservative ideology.

Captain Hate

blunderbuster's heroine and kindred subgenius, Cuntessa Brewer, showing the high level journalism being practiced at MSDNC @ LUN

nathan hale

As I live and breath I come to the conclusion that MSNBC, the network with the chickens head
cut off was what Chaveysfky prophesied nearly
35 years ago. I mean it is like Mos Eiseley over there,


LUN is a first rate analysis of why the public unions and ACORN are rallying for this bill.

Under the rhetoric of evil Wall Street and complaints about Citizens United and corporations having a say about politics lies the essential truth of the bill.

It gives one more highly effective means for politicians and cronies to control corporations.


I thought Jim DeMint's take on the financial services bill last night was fascinating. DeMint said things were progressing in a bi-partisan fashion until Obama called Dodd to the WH and told him to stop negotiating with republicans which is when Dodd pulled back and wrote his own bill.

The idea of Obama dictating to congress is really breathtaking. And the fact that they do what he says even more so.


Jane, I'm always thinking blackmail. The DNC or whoever must have stuff on most of the Dem. congressmen. I can't figure why Webb and Warner of Virginia would vote for some of this nonsense.


Bunkerbuster, is it your view that markets, societies and cultures and their institutions are frictionless and infinitely and immediately fluid and that there is no inertia in them?
If so then what would have been the point of Gramsci's and Alinsky's infamous but effective methods of transforming them?
The academy is undeniably left wing as is Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general. Liberals and leftists have openly targeted institutions they intended to remake. Once there they tend to promote those whom share their views and do their best to crowd out those who don't. Leftism is an idealogy; conservatism is not so the tendency to promote and reject those of an opposite viewpoint is considerably stronger when the left dominates an institution.

Societal and cultural pressures are just as powerful as markets so your left wing faith in the perfect efficiency of the media market is quaint but, whats the term I'm looking for? Oh yeah, one of your favorites, 'intellectually dishonest'.

Captain Hate


Having the goods on Dodd wouldn't take a lot of digging. The lack of interest for somebody as obviously on the take as he has been for years was an early marker on how in the tank for donkeycrats the MSM has been.


Ahhhh so that's the secret - fielding media based on ideology.

We should get right on that!

Ann says Obama Sucks!


The following is an excellent example. The good news is it appears they are really afraid of the right wing media and Glenn Beck and "BECK POWER"!

Matthews Urges James Cameron to Trash 'Dangerous' Global Warming Deniers in 'Right Wing Media'

Captain Hate

Reading the transcript of Tweety and Camoron made my head hurt. It's hard to comprehend that level of arrogant stupidity.

Ann says Obama Sucks!

Sorry, Captain.

I don't normally waste my time on tweety but I found it so scrumptious that he is so bedeviled by Glenn Beck.

Captain Hate

That's ok, Ann; Laura Ingraham is skewering those two dumbbells now so I appreciated the heads up. I really wish that poisonous snake would've taken a chunk out of Cameron instead of being killed to protect his further douchiness; all in the name of Mother Gaia, of course.

nathan hale

Dennis the Peasant does a gentle skewering of
Yglesias, as compared to his previous offerings

Army of Davids

The wise McGuire crowd is needed on the Dodd Bill.

It is important legislation.

The Dodd Bill.

Schumer is the Senator to watch. He has received 3 X as much money from Wall Street as any other Senator.

He also is comfortable using the homosexual slur “tea bagger” against taxpayers.



Of course not. "infinitely'' "immediately'' "frictionless'' These are the straw in the man.

But take out the straw and you're dead right. If the news media and academia are "liberal" its because they are a product of the American media market, society and culture. As I made clear in my previous comment, the NYT is successful because it more broadly reflects the views and interests of its readers.

Ig writes: ``the tendency to promote and reject those of an opposite viewpoint is considerably stronger when the left dominates an institution.''

Hollywood 10 ring a bell? Dalton Trumbo? Elia Kazan? Are you ignorant, or in denial? Conservatives don't just reject, the aggressively censor and oppress. Liberals have never tried a stunt like that, and never will...


I don't mind the Liberal Cocoones. I routinely encounter AGW libs who have yet to hear of the CRU scandal.

Fish in a barrel.

/bunker: look up the word "Monopoly" and get back to us with a new set of fallacies to debunk.

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