Posted 5:48 PM by Scoobie Davis

Andrew Breitbart Throws Stones At ACORN from Sun Myung Moon's Glass House

(Updated below)
The right has been in a feeding frenzy since some hidden-camera tapes from right-wing operatives (don't call them journalists) were aired on Fox News. Clearly, the operatives cast a wide net, hoping that lower-level ACORN workers in field offices would make incriminating statements (here's an article on the nature of these sting operations and how people get caught up in them).

The operatives are now in the employ of Andrew Breitbart, a commentator for Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times. Breitbart was so outraged by alleged "deep corruption and unspeakable immorality at the ACORN housing division" that he wrote about it in The Washington Times. As an employee of the Washington Times, whether he knows it or not, Breitbart is contributing to Moon's attempt to legitimize his worldview to the world; Moon said, "That is why Father [Moon referring to himself in the third person] has been combining and organizing scholars from all over the world, and also newspaper organizations, in order to make propaganda." Since Breitbart used the pages of a paper devoted to promoting the Unification Movement's worldview to slam ACORN, I thought a comparison of ACORN and the Unification movement would be in order:


UPDATE: True to form, Moon's Washington Times has been prominent in spreading the smear that Department of Education official Kevin Jennings had covered up sexual abuse in a school where he had been a teacher.

Posted 12:38 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on ACORN and Its Critics
Later today

UPDATE I: I was working on some sticky HTML stuff. I should have the post done Saturday morning. Sorry.

UPDATE II: Sorry, I should have it up by Monday or Tuesday--technical stuff, etc.

Posted 5:14 PM by Scoobie Davis

Obama's Fox News Snub: One Ginormous Reason (Out of Many) Why It's Better That Obama, Not Hillary, Is President
Yesterday, President Obama broke a presidential record by appearing on five talk shows, there was a notable omission from the president's itinerary: Fox News. To no surprise, the response by the fair and balanced channel was swift and nasty. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace accused the Obama White House of being full of "crybabies" and berated them over their supposed "childishness" and "pettiness." On the Fox News Sunday panel, Wallace, Paul Gigot and Brit Hume berated Obama for not reaching out to as large an audience as possible by appearing on Fox. Wrong!

Snubbing Fox News is a Great Way of Reaching Out to the Right Kind of Fox News Viewer
The core of the Fox News viewership are those twenty percent of the American public that still had faith in George W. Bush after eight years. They are unreachable; they're the birthers, deathers, tenthers, and followers of assorted batshit conspiracy theorists. They the "heavy viewers" who watch the channel all day long.

However, by snubbing Fox News and generating publicity about the snub, Obama is reaching out to the causal Fox News viewer. As I noted a couple years ago, when prominent politicians snub Fox News, it generates publicity that lets the a casual viewer of Fox News that the channel is a political operation masquerading as a legitimate news outlet. This helps to delegitimize Fox with casual viewers and independent voters.

The White House statement diplomatically calling Fox News an "ideological outlet" whose operatives were "whining" over the snub was the cherry on top of great media victory over Murdoch, Ailes, Beck, Wallace, O'Reilly, Hannity, and the reason of the Fox News freak show.

Obama Versus Hillary Regarding Fox News
Recently, a PUMA blogger e-mailed me to see if I still thought that Obama is preferable to the Clintons. My answer: fucking-a right I do! This episode shows that Obama and his posse know the score: they put a foot to the asses of Roger Ailes and his lame-ass FNC operatives.

This is a stark contrast to when the Clintons were in the White House. They failed miserably when it came to the right's rat-fucking (I have posts on the Clintons' appalling ineptitude here and here). Worse, the Clintons did not learn any lessons from the past. During the 2008 campaign, even after there was no chance of winning the nomination, they gave credibility to the very miscreants--e.g., Ailes, Sun Myung Moon, Limbaugh, and Richard Mellon Scaife--who drove American politics into the gutter during the 90's (I have posts on this phenomena here and here). The Clinton campaign's cluelessness allowed them to work hand-in-hand with Limbaugh's Operation Chaos strategy to mortally wound Obama. Fortunately, Limbaugh's strategy failed--no thanks to the Clinton campaign.

There is simply no comparison between Obama and the Clintons when it comes to dealing with the hard right.

Posted 2:18 PM by Scoobie Davis

Posting Later Today
I promise

Posted 5:17 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
The rise of a new counterculture--a really lame counterculture

Posted 12:52 PM by Scoobie Davis

Pumping Up The Statcounter Stats
Here's the drill: whenever Playboy has a college conference pictorial, I rate the babes in order to pump up my traffic (because of horndogs looking for photos, pictures, video, and images). The latest issue of Playboy has the pictorial "The Girls of the ACC" (once again Hef ignored my plea for a pcitorial on the women of the Mid-American Conference). Anyhow, my ratings of the women:

Hottest: Jennifer Lynn of Maryland
First Runner-up: Sydnee Stone of Clemson
Second Runner-up: Alyssa Omlie of Virginia Tech

Honorable mention:
Stephanie Christie of UNC
Shayne Devereux of Georgia Tech
Alexandra Ford of Miami
Candice Maria of Duke
Shayna Taylor of Florida State
Connie Du and Noel Simone of Maryland
Carson of Wake Forest
Mya Matthews of Clemson
Ashley Smith of Georgia Tech
Jenna Arianna of UVA
Ashley Nicole of North Carolina State

Posted 10:22 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Glenn Greenwald on the Right.

Posted 12:33 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Then and now

Posted 4:40 PM by Scoobie Davis

Dueling Obits: History's Liberal Bias Once Again Rears Its Ugly Head
Until now, I haven't written anything about the passing of Teddy Kennedy. There are two reasons: 1) I have been very busy; and 2) I couldn't write anything that wasn't already written.

That changed on Sunday when I watched Fox News Sunday. Host Chris Wallace and Fox News' vice president of News (and former Moonie Times operative) Bill Sammon essentially cribbed from a Newsbusters article bemoaning the alleged double standard regarding the New York Times obituaries for Kennedy and former senator Jesse Helms:

CHRIS WALLACE: I also want to talk about the media coverage of Ted Kennedy since his death this week -- not only the amount of it, which was extraordinary, but also the tone of it. And I want to put up the first paragraph of the New York Times story on Ted Kennedy's death. This was the first paragraph this week. "Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew acclaim and tragedy in near equal measure, and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night."

Now, here's the first paragraph of the Times story on the passing of Jesse Helms last year. "Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator with the courtly manner and mossy drawl, who turned his hard-edged conservatism against civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday."

Bill Sammon, I'm sure some people will be offended that I'm even making the comparison between these two men, but that is a striking difference.

BILL SAMMON: It is, and there's two ways to rectify that obvious double standard. One would have been for the New York Times to find something nice to say about Jesse Helms substantively other than his mossy drawl. The other, if you're going to go the -- and I think that's the preferable way to do it, because you want to -- when someone dies, you want to find something nice to say. The other way, if they wanted to be fair, would -- they would have had to put something in the Ted Kennedy lead about Chappaquiddick, about his demagoguery of Robert Bork being, you know, lunch counter America and back alley abortions and all that kind of thing. But they didn't. So either way you do it, it's unfair, and that was a striking example.

What bullshit. Kennedy and Helms were opposites. Kennedy was a man from a privileged background who fought for the underdog and for the expansion of civil rights. Helms was from a modest background but was a shill for predatory interests and fought against human rights. When Helms wasn't shilling for the tobacco industry and factory hog farms, he was promoting the neo-Confederate movement, Salvadorean death squads, tribalism, philistinism, and sterile fundamentalism (Helms helped Jerry Falwell become a national figure in the 1970's).

Helms was a classic "Dixie demagogue." Michael Lind succintly described Helms:

Having crushed the Republican and Populist parties, the oligarchs imposed a one-party dictatorship on the region, with secret state surveillance units and occasional collaboration between the police and the Ku Klux Klan. In its economy, the South was a banana republic, a commodity-exporting resource colony in which a "comprador bourgeoisie" of local landowners and local businessmen collaborated with investors in New York and elsewhere in fleecing the region.

To serve their interests, the old latifundist families and corporate elites hired "Dixie demagogues," who were to genuine populists like William Jennings Bryan what a Disney pirate is to a pirate. All of them were entertaining. Some began as entertainers, like musician-slash-flour miller W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who went from hosting the "Hillbilly Flour" radio show to the Texas governor's mansion in 1939. The "Dixie demagogues" denounced various supposed enemies of the white tribe, but with two exceptions -- Huey Long and George Wallace -- they never threatened the rule of the country clubs and courthouse gangs. Jesse Helms was one of these theatrical quasi-populists, an uncomplicated establishment conservative who parlayed a liberal-baiting radio show into a political career. Like other faux-homespun Southern conservatives, he employed rhetorical populism against blacks, homosexuals, liberals, professors, modern artists and "common-ists" in the service of his business backers, most noticeably North Carolina's tobacco industry.

History has a liberal bias because liberals like Ted Kennedy have promoted the campaigns that have expanded human rights while right-wingers like Helms cynically fought reforms that enfranchised his fellow Southerners.

The Public/Private Divide
Helms and Kennedy are opposites in another area: the public/private divide. On Rush Limbaugh's radio show this week, guest-host neoconservative Mark Steyn faulted some liberals for saying that Kennedy's public achievements make up for his failures in private life--namely his boozing and womanizing.

This is true. Although Kennedy fought for the poor and disenfranchized, his personal conduct was notorious. This is the mirror opposite of Helms, who despite his racist and reactionary views, was--by all accounts, the quintessential Southern gentlemen in his personal life. My response: if Kennedy boned an occasional barista on his own time, who the fuck cares? What matters is defending the rights of Americans in public policy (I previously discussed the issue of private versus public vice here) It comes down to this: If you were a Mississippi black in 1965 who were you going to depend upon, people like Kennedy or Helms? That's why history has judged Kennedy more favorably than Helms.

Posted 7:18 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Chick Tract
An apparent tribute to Billy Wilder titled, "Some Like It Hot." Enjoy.

Posted 3:50 PM by Scoobie Davis

Posting Later
I'm kind of busy. Quick note: since it came out a couple days ago that GOP gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonnell wrote some fucked-up things in grad school at Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network University (now Regent U.; watch Jon Steward on CBNU), his stock is going down.


UPDATE: Tom Schaller asks if the thesis is McDonnell's "Macaca" Moment?