The flatout funniest cartoon of the political (and Halloween) season.

The actual cartoon is here.

More NPR.

Because of all the noise that Fox News makes and the subsequent attention it receives, it is useful to now and again remember that, in the grand scheme of things, it is merely the loudest voice in a very small corner of the communications world. Here's a bit of perspective of that network's reach vs. the evil NPR which has become its latest straw man villain...

Keep in mind, O'Reilly may pull just over 3 million viewers a show, but Prairie Home Companion bests that by a million. Even Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me has as many listeners as Bill has viewers. Recently, O'Reilly's audience surged to over 4 million following the hissy fit on "The View." That's a regular week for Car Talk, listened to and loved by 4.4 million. Even gratingly twee This American Life (1.7 million) pulls just about the same numbers as Fox News superstar Glenn Beck.

Weeping for Juan.

I got a chuckle out of this note by writer Peter Grier in a Christian Science Monitor blog post this morning about the much overblown and eminently stupid firing of Juan Williams by NPR...

The bulk of [NPR funding] comes from affiliate stations, corporate sponsors, and donations from individuals made to feel very guilty after they tune in to hear "Morning Edition" and find out it is fundraising week.

True 'dat.

The firing was about as bungled an effort as you'll ever see, but the idea that seems to be taking hold that it will have big political implications seems nearly as silly as the act it self. Yes, it will surely fire up the base base (not a typo, consider the first an adjective), but does anybody really think there is any significant number of people out there who give a damn and will change their votes because of this? Does anybody think more than a small portion of the base base (see, it's easy once you get the hang of it) even knows what NPR is? The funniest stuff to come out of all this are letters and calls to stations around the country by true believers saying they will never "watch" NPR again. That'll teach 'em.

Honestly, Williams should have been fired long ago, not just because his role on Fox is in obvious conflict with the stated NPR standards but mostly because his analysis was the sort of mealy-mouthed pap that NPR already has more than enough of.

I am curious, I must admit, as to whether that $2 million contract with Fox that was signed the next day had been in the works for a while or was an in-your-face move. And, either way, how does somebody who thinks Juan Williams is worth a multi-million contract keep his job?

"...with the help of bullying Republicans and cowed Democrats..."

The excerpt above comes from today's exercise in fatuity by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. The column itself is about the brand new/same old kerfuffle about Clarence Thomas and the infamous confirmation hearings, a topic which is a waste of time except as an example of what it matters who sits in the White House which gives the media something to do while it ignores the corruption of our political system by big money and unchallenged misinformation and idiocy.

It caught my attention because it strikes me as a concise and perfect  explanation of our national politics these days. Indeed, there's an argument elsewhere in the Times this morning which touches on that issue, suggesting that it's time for the Dems to Boot the Blue Dogs, a concept that seems appealing on the surface but is probably not really wise.

Several of the so-called Blue Dogs (conservative Democrats who often vote with the GOP and make it almost impossible for their party to exercise its phantom "majority") are among the most likely to lose their seats ten days from now and, no matter who controls the House when the dust settles, their loss will weaken the Dems. Maybe such critters do vote for Republican positions more than those of their own party, but replacing them with folks who will always vote for the other side is clearly a losing proposition.

And, quite honestly, the "cowering" is mostly being done by the putative leadership of the party, reaching all the way into the White House.

"Meaningless," we will be told. "Liberal witch-hunting." Or, if that doesn't work, "They all do it." (Yes, that makes no sense, but we ran right past making sense many months ago). Also, Unions.

This little tidbit will be quickly dismissed or ignored as our Liberal Media Elite devotes its limited attention span to the "sexier" story which offers evidence that Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice for life, is probably only the second craziest person in his household, behind his wife, the Tea Party activist. Then again, since the Silent Justice is one of the people who decided that corporations were "people" and the massive influx of identified money into our elections is just fine and dandy, I think he has her beat no matter how many weird phone calls she makes.

We will get what we deserve.

From today's Christian Science Monitor. Original here. 

"If he survives, all our hearts will sink and the world will go dark."

While he calls "Tea Party candidates like Carl Paladino and Christine O'Donnell—`people we wouldn't ask home to dinner, except in a Dinner for Schmucks sense' " and says he'd love to see them lose, writer Tunku Varadrajan urges his fellow Libertarians in Utah to definitely vote for the equally nutty  Sharon Angle.

Here's his reasoning.

"An awfully low threshold." A follow-up...

To this...

...and the Comments thereon.

From today's Ombudsman column in the Washington Post:

Yes, Miller was trying to be provocative. But "Non Sequitur" followers expect that. And there's a difference between provoking anger and provoking readers to think.

Surely some may be displeased by "Where's Muhammad?" But unlike with the Danish cartoons, it's hard to imagine it would incite protests. Miller intentionally did not depict Muhammad, and the cartoon is not a blasphemous attack on the prophet. If anything, it's a powerful and witty endorsement of freedom of expression.

Post editors believe their decision was prudent, given the past cartoon controversies and heightened sensitivities surrounding Islam. But it also can be seen as timid. And it sets an awfully low threshold for decisions on whether to withhold words or images that might offend.

Go read it all.

It is exactly this simple.

America is a 300 lb, bearded, diabetic man. Accept it.

Non Sequitur indeed.

This is the Non Sequitur cartoon which was supposed to be run in the full-color weekend comics sections of U.S. newspapers today...

The original is here.

Many papers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer refused to run it and ran an older strip in its place. This is what cartoonist Doug Wiley has to say about that:

Yours along with many other papers across the country were afraid to run this cartoon. In doing so, it is rife with irony, as it is obviously satirizing the paralyzing fear in media of anything regarding Islam. Cowards indeed.

For those of you whose paper ran the alternate edition, I strongly suggest you contact the editor and voice your opinion on the matter. They are the ones who need to hear it, as they are the ones who made the decision.

I urge others to join me in doing just that.

Wherein I defend my position.

I was challenged, sorta, by a friend of mine over on the Liquid Diet blog last week for a passing reference in a joking post about a local beer drinking group in which I used a Tea Party as an example, suggesting that I have kept shifting my position on who is behind that particular scam.

He was wrong.

Frank Rich in this morning's New York Times:

[L]ocal chapters of Tea Party Patriots routinely received early training and support from FreedomWorks, the moneyed libertarian outfit run by the former Republican House majority leader and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey. FreedomWorks is itself a spinoff from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a pseudo-grassroots group whose links to the billionaire Koch brothers were traced by Jane Mayer in her blockbuster August exposé in The New Yorker.

I have said all those things and more in this space in the past. Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks organization were instrumental in forming the Tea Party into a political entity rather than a ragtag bunch of protesters. The Tea Party is essentially a FOX News TV show because the network (which has, amazingly, four potential GOP presidential candidates on its payroll) does everything it can to prop up their events. The Koch brothers are the money behind much the Tea Parties and much of the right wing movement.

None of those three positions are contradictory nor preclude the accuracy of any of the others. Nor are they wild and crazy fantasies propagated by the left.

Here's an analysis of the economic involvements of the Koch Brothers (and George Soros, who was also mention in my Liquid Diet post) in contemporary politics.

Here's is the much talked-about Jane Mayer expose in the New Yorker.

This is a "free market" site on Armey's involvement in the Tea Party movement.

And, finally, from Politico last week:

News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, contributed $1 million this summer to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has been running an aggressive campaign in support of the Republican effort to retake Congress. It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a GOP-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.

Here deponent doth rest his case.

Coming tomorrow, if all goes well...

...and it rarely does, do it?

Anyway, the plan is for my quick overview of the 2010 Fall TV season, with a focus on the newer shows.

It ain't pretty.

News you won't be hearing much about.

Because, you know, the GOP certainly doesn't want voters to know this, the Tea Party doesn't believe a word of it and the political press hates stuff that messes with the storyline they've already concocted. The Democrats? They're probably scared spitless to say or do anything (their default mode of late) and the White House will find some way to make all very boring and easy to dismiss.

A familiar figure has something to say about the new GOP "Pledge to America."

NOTE: This idea was stolen from John Cole at Balloon Juice because it is so freakin' perfect. Plus, let's face it, I have very little shame.

Oliphant Nails it in a single panel.

The original is here.

How Newt Gingrich might never have happened.

Charles Pierce, at Altercation:

In 1994, I had to fly to Mississippi the day after the Republicans took over the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time since God was a boy.  Jeebus, were people there happy. There was barely enough bourbon at Hal and Mal's to make life marginally tolerable. This upheaval was led by Newt Gingrich, a former backbench bomb-tosser who, only four years earlier, in an election almost nobody watched and even fewer people remember, came within 978 votes of losing his seat to a Democrat named David Worley who got submarined by his national party, a decision that should have some people still hanging by their thumbs in Washington. Two years later, he almost lost a giftwrapped primary to someone named Herman Clark. On that day in 1994, when everybody—and I mean everybody, read some of the tripe that was written back then, I mean, seriously, there were folks at Time who were picking out silver patterns—was calling Newt a visionary intellectual leader for the new century or some such rot, I was wondering how the new Churchill could be someone who was life-and-death with David Worley and Herman Clark back home in consecutive elections. And that was before we all knew about his mad wife-dumping skillz.
  
Well, it seems that the momentum of conservative bullshit has caught up with Newt, and maybe gone past him. The Right has constructed an entire self-contained political BioSphere. It has its own science; every single GOP senatorial candidate in New Mexico, New Hampshire, and New York is a climate-change denier. It also has its own history. This is what's driving the intellectual side of the coming election. This history has its Ur-texts; Charles Murray's The Bell Curve is one of them. But things have really been heating up over the past decade, as rightwing designer history from rightwing design shops found its mass audience. The weird signs accusing the president of being a fascist and a socialist simultaneously can't be understood without reading Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg's hawk-a-loogie doorstop from a few years back. Along with gold swindlers and glycerined tears, Glenn Beck's bunco schemes include the construction of his own personal animatronic Founding Fathers, all of whom speak in the voices Glenn hears in his head. 
 
This is not really about creating a counterhistory, though. This is about creating a simulacrum of history, just as Gingrich is a simulacrum of a historian. It's about creating a salable narrative that can put a faint intellectual gloss on what you are prone to believe anyway. Narratives are more malleable than actual history is, and more easily dispensed once you achieve the political power for which you created the narrative—and, ultimately, this self-contained political universe—in the first place. So, when Newt recently summoned up his professor's voice and accused Barack Obama of acting out of "a Kenyan anti-colonial worldview" that the president imbibed from his late father, he borrowed the trope from a piece in Forbes by the noted charlatan and Mark Warren-fearing coward Dinesh D'Souza, which is rather like getting your drinking water from one of those pig lagoons in North Carolina, but never mind.The important thing to watch was how a rather, ahem, unique view of history went so smoothly from a reputed conservative thinker to an allegedly intellectual Republican politician and thence to a public so credulous that it may be well on its way to electing an entire Congress full of walking, talking produce.
 
Twenty years ago, 978 votes would have meant the end of Newt Gingrich's political career. People should remember that. P.S—And, to my friend, Greg, a limited rebuttal, aimed specifically at his final paragraph, and this conclusion: "We have to put processes in place to prevent it happening again in the future, to be sure, and be vigilant about that." There has been no indication that the current administration is prepared to do either the former, or the latter, and especially not the former. In fact, it recently won a famous victory in federal court in which it argued that it has been right to do precisely the opposite. Which, alas, disgusts me.

Double entendre.

"The wearisome preoccupation of the elderly..."

From Rain Gods, by James Lee Burke, which I am currently reading, a thought that seems pertinent to the day....

The wearisome preoccupation of the elderly---namely the conviction that they had already seen the show but could never pass on the lessons they had learned from it---was not unlike Cassandra's burden, except the anger and bitterness of old people was not the stuff of Homeric epics.

This is good advertising?

I keep seeing adverts on TV these days in which the central character, call him or her the "hero" since that person's actions are what the spot is all about, behaves like a real asshole.

In a Sprint commercial, a doctor, busy texting while his football player/patient worries about his injured leg, callously tells him the leg is shattered but not to worry since he, the doc, has cheap texting services.

In a Direct TV commercial, a waitress wrings a dishtowel into the drinks of a table full of patrons who are watching a football game (The Eagles, at least in this market) because she feels they are self-centered jerks.

These things are supposed to inspire me to buy the products they promote? How exactly? What the hell are they thinking?