No Bebop

I’m not sure how I attracted his attention, but Ghazala Khan of The Pakistani Spectator asked me to sit for an e-mail interview the other day. I expected to have a couple of my quotes picked up for a longer story, but he published the whole thing verbatim. You can find it here. I admit I considered brushing him off on the grounds that I’m hardly a leader in the blog community, but in the end I figured the author knew what he was looking for better than I did, and I suppose I could use a few more readers from Southern Asia, right?

E-mails, I get e-mails. Somewhere along the line I somehow got on some right-wing list, but my trusty spam filter reroutes them into the trash where they belong. The following screed managed to dodge the spam filter, however, and I’m presenting it for your delectation.

Dear Defender of the U. S. Constitution! FEBRUARY 1, 2010, is the beginning of real freedom in America! That was the day that I, on behalf of all Americans, filed our Opening Appellants Brief (AOB) in the Appellant Court against the Defendants-Respondents: supposed president BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, Vice-president Joe Biden, Secretary of the State of California Debra BOWEN, and others.On behalf of YOUR United States Justice Foundation (USJF), I respectfully requested a REVERSAL of the trial court judgment sustaining the Respondents’ “demurrer,” which means that the defendant in a case does not dispute the truth of the allegations in the lawsuit, but claims that there are not sufficient legal grounds to justify a court granting relief. I know that you already admire these great Americans that I represent in this historic lawsuit: Dr. Alan KEYES (Presidential candidate for the American Independent Party in 2008), Vice-Presidential nominee for the same party in 2008, Dr. Wiley Drake, and California Elector Markham Robinson. As you know, these are all great, patriotic Americans.At issue is the eligibility requirement of Barack Hussein Obama to serve as President of the United States!!I’ve received hate mail. I’ve had threats made against my life. I’ve been relentlessly ridiculed by the mainstream media. But yet I continue the fight to SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH!! America deserves the truth.YOU DESERVE THE TRUTH!!Please, CLICK HERE, to send your largest possible donation to help in this legal fight for the United States Constitution. As an American citizen, YOU have a right to know if Barack Hussein Obama is, indeed, an American citizen! Not only is it your right, it is a requirement of the U. S. Constitution for him to be a “natural born citizen to serve as President! Please, give generously, and please do so TODAY! This fight is extremely expensive (Mr. Obama’s lawyers have, according to published reports, already spent over $1.7 Million just to hide the truth from us and our allies in this confrontation!!)

Sheer comedy. There’s more, but it’s mostly redundant. The reason I present this is because I’ve noticed that grifters tend to ply their trade among the right-wing true believers far more than on the left. I’m on a lot of left-leaning mailing lists, and whenever they ask me for money it’s usually for something tangible, like a magazine subscription or earth-friendly clothes or coffee. The folks at CREDO occasionally ping me to get me to switch my cell phone service to them on the grounds that their company uses its profits to support liberal causes. I’d like to do it, but I like my iPhone too much.

Most of the stuff my membership on that right-wing mailing list sends me is just your garden variety calls for action, but grifters like the one I’m highlighting above are not uncommon. They peddle precious metals as a hedge against a collapsing dollar, and believe me, it doesn’t matter what the economy looks like, the dollar is always collapsing in these pitches, which are always designed to touch all the hot buttons that get wingnuts’ fun parts engorged. Funnily enough, I’ve never seen a pitch for precious metals designed to appeal to liberals — is it because liberals aren’t considered business-savvy enough to recognize a good deal? I’ll have to ask Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett. Or George Soros.

So why am I calling this guy, representing the United States Justice Foundation, a grifter? Because he’s asking for money from the people reading his missive to do something that is somewhere between inane and insane. Barack Hussein Obama is not the “supposed” president of these United States; he IS the president. He was duly elected by an indisputable majority of American voters and an even stronger majority of the Electoral College. More to the point, he is a natural-born citizen of the United States of America over the age of 35,  having been born in Hawaii in 1961. The governor of Hawaii has weighed in on this, as has the state’s cabinet officials in charge of vital statistics. The president has a birth certificate from Hawaii giving his place of birth as Hawaii, and there is no “alternative” birth certificate from Kenya, Indonesia, Atlantis, Krypton or anywhere else. Do you really think that a dozen presidential hopefuls from the start of the 2008 campaign wouldn’t have used lack of eligibility against Obama at some point if it had the slightest whiff of truth to it? Of course not.

So our little pal from the USJF is on a dishonest mission, aided in part by the fact that 58 percent of Republicans in the Research 2000/Daily Kos poll referenced in the previous post either believe firmly that Obama isn’t a native-born American or aren’t sure that he is. And that’s who his appeal for money is pointed at — people stupid enough to believe an untrue story, or at least stupid enough to believe that Fox News is a trustworthy source of news.

Our little friend announced he has filed a brief against the president, the vice president, the California secretary of state (?) to get to the bottom of this non-mystery. Sounds impressive to the uninitiated, right? Well, anybody can get enough general knowledge to file a brief in federal court by going on Google. What our USJF pal doesn’t tell you is that every single attempt to litigate Obama’s citizenship has been thrown out of court, mostly on procedural issues related to the fact that the people filing these things are batshit insane (Orly Taitz, white courtesy phone) and are incapable of writing a comprehensible brief in standard English. The screed I reproduced above is evidence of that. No court has even bothered to consider the notion that there is some sort of “real” Hawaii birth certificate that trumps the “fake” ones the state currently issues to people who request copies, to name just one of the birdbrained talking points of the birther movement.

The screed reproduced above also claims that Obama has spent $1.7 million “hiding” the “truth” about his birth certificate. Actually Obama has spent rather less than that; about $1.7 million less in fact, since the truth about his place of birth is easily discerned from Hawaii’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, or whatever agency keeps birth certificates on record. But that vision of frantic expenditures is designed to open wingnut wallets to the USJF while it pursues this chimera.

Similarly, he gives hope that his cause will be successful by claiming that the defendant “does not dispute the truth of the allegations in the lawsuit.” No, the defendant does not dispute the “truth,” in that the “defendant” (Obama) is probably not even aware this idiotic court action is taking place. If a court was ever to consider this stupid case, it would look at the birth certificate and rule for Obama, but no court, not even one where Clarence Thomas sits, is going to hear this case.

Given the complete lack of credibility the issue has, one wonders whether the USJF is just going through enough motions to justify their financial appeals on paper, in the hope that this fund-raising appeal can be repeated quarterly for the duration of the Obama presidency, keeping the principals behind the USJF flush in the process.

Meanwhile, a noisy minority of Americans will continue to insist that Obama isn’t a citizen because if he is, that means their lily-white version of America is a sham. Don’t believe me? Check out Tom Tancredo using dog-whistle calls to racism to denigrate the American election process at this very weekend’s tea party shindig.

The folks at Public Policy Polling grabbed themselves a headline the other week with a new poll claiming to show that Fox News Channel is the only network news operation that more people trust than distrust. The numbers were 49 percent trust, 37 percent distrust. CNN was at 39/41, NBC at 35/44, CBS at 32/46, and ABC at 31/46.

The poll also shows the breakdowns by partisanship — Democrats trust all those other networks but not Fox, and Republicans trust only Fox. That alone shows the weakness of this poll, and a commenter at Public Policy Polling’s blog points out some other weaknesses: “… the sample over-represents whites and those who are 45 and over. Acording to 2008 census estimates, whites account for 66% of the population, but 74% of this sample. Ages 45 and over account for 52% of the voting age population, but 63% of this sample.”

Since the typical Fox viewer is an older white person, therefore, it’s not surprising that PPP came to the conclusion it did. But let’s leave aside the question of whether this single poll is literally true — it does take a snapshot of the population on this question, and the results do have some illuminating qualities.

Of course, I need to spend a moment on the poll sponsored by Daily Kos and taken by Research 2000, a polling outfit whose bonafides are at least equal to Public Policy Polling. The Kos/Research 2000 poll targeted only Republicans, asking them questions about public policy. And here’s what the polling subjects told the pollsters:

• Should Barack Obama be impeached? 39 percent yes, 32 no, 29 not sure.
• Was Obama born in the U.S.? 36 percent no, 42 yes, 22 not sure.
• Is Obama a socialist? 61 percent yes, 21 percent no, 16 percent not sure.
• Does Obama want the terrorists to win? 24 percent yes, 43 percent no, 33 not sure.
• Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election? 21 percent yes, 24 no, 55 not sure.
• Do you believe Obama is a racist who hates white people? 31 percent yes, 36 no, 33 not sure.

This isn’t everything, but you can go read the cross-tabs for yourself.

Now, do I need to underline for you that, from the PPP poll, Republicans overwhelmingly consider Fox News the most trustworthy news source. Well, if you actually watch the network, those questions above have figured heavily in Fox’s coverage of the Obama era. And look at the results. Obama should be impeached, a plurality of GOP viewers said, and a significant number were at least open to the possibility. On what charge? Who knows, who cares. Just impeach the sumbich.

A strong majority doubts that Obama is a natural-born U.S. citizen even though this is an incontrovertable fact. Nearly two-thirds either think or are open to thinking that Obama is a socialist, though this is an absurdity promulgated by people who never took political science in school. A majority of those polled do not think Obama wants to protect the U.S. from terrorism — a completely unhinged notion not worthy of debate. Two-thirds think Obama is trying to keep the white man down — more idiocy. Nearly three-quarters are open to the idea that ACORN, a group nobody ever heard of before 2006 and only know about because of the heavy breathing of Fox News, has enough influence in the world to change the results of a presidential election.

In other words, Fox News Channel is a success. The people most likely to watch it have taken away exactly the message that the network has transmitted — and they consider the network trustworthy about news, particularly political news, as a result. Which makes it pretty funny that conservatives themselves are upset and offended over the Kos poll. Or at least somewhat embarrassed, which is the proper reaction.

Now let’s pause to connect the dots one more time before I get to the topic suggested in the headline of this post. Fox News Channel is considered the most trustworthy news source among the top TV networks, and its most likely viewers are wildly misinformed about the topics most covered by Fox. What’s more, their misimpressions are most likely transmitted to non-viewers of Fox, or at least those who don’t have a strong opinion one way or another, which helps explain the PPP poll.

So what are the implications of all this for newspapers? Simpler than you may think. Your average newspaper’s national and international coverage is directed by the news budget of the Associated Press. (Bigger papers have multiple wire services, but the AP is the 800-pound gorilla.) As a result, the daily Fox/conservative media hyperventilating about pimps and hookers at ACORN, Obama not having an “official” birth certificate, Sarah Palin’s latest Facebook posts, gay people in the Obama administration and so on, never turn up in the pages of your local newspaper first. When these faux concerns (or should I say Faux News concerns) do make the local paper, it’s because so much noise has been generated about them that the AP’s national staff feels it’s necessary to explain what’s going on. (The AP itself hasn’t been immune to transmitting spurious wingnut memes on its own initiative, but we’ll leave that aside for now.)

So here’s your late-middle-aged conservative American, a Rush Limbaugh fan who only watches Fox News Channel, and maybe the local news on his local Fox affiliate, and he’s a bit pressed for time lately, having to work 10-hour days because his company laid off a bunch of people in the current economic climate. Or maybe he’s had his own hours cut and he’s delivering pizzas 3 nights a week so he won’t have to give up his broadband connection or his golf weekends.

With his time more tightly budgeted, he picks up his local newspaper and he starts to notice that the national desk tends to cover Obama as though he weren’t a terrorist-loving socialist who wasn’t even born here. And they never published a single story about ACORN supporting pimps and ho’s. Once in a while the letters to the editor will mention these “issues,” but only after they’ve been in the “news” for months. Hmm, maybe I can put the $15 or $20 a month I spend on this rag to better use.

So is there a market for a local newspaper that reinforces the Fox News viewer’s world view? Hard to know. Most places have only one newspaper anymore, and a successful business plan requires that newspaper to appeal to the general interest. And not everybody is a Fox-certified wingnut. Fox draws about 3.5 million viewers, leading the cable news sector but well behind the 20 million or more who watch ABC, CBS and NBC, and also behind the 4.5 million or more who watch CNN and MSNBC. A general interest newspaper alienates the more moderate readership at its peril.

But I have no doubt that leaking newspaper readership is due in part to the traditional model of journalism having no way of reinforcing their most reality-challenged readers’ personal worldview, especially when doing so may require them to ignore the current state of affairs or contradictory factual information. There may be a localized market for such a thing, though the ongoing story of such conservative-biased newspapers like the Washington Times or New York Post demonstrates that it’s only possible to support those institutions when the owners have an agenda that trancends profit-loss statements.

But in a world where nobody is getting outraged over the growing evidence that Americans are being deliberately misinformed about their government and world events, it’s clear that the market for objectively reported news is going to continue to erode unless those purveyors of such objectively reported news — the newspaper industry — start pushing back against the trend line. Hard.

My headline is really all you need to know about the Supremes striking down most of the court’s precedents involving campaign financing laws. The idea that moneyed interests should be able to spread their cash around the election process like a Vegas winner procuring champagne and hookers for his entourage is no less repellent today than it was when Congress began passing measures to limit the influence of money on political campaigns.

Campaign finance laws, as difficult as they can be to enforce, are regrettably necessary. The idea that Big Insurance, Big Defense Contracting, Big Oil, Big Banking, Big Investing, Big Box Stores and any other big interest you can name has in history been unable to express its free speech rights in regards to political issues or anything else is a fraud. They can send out press releases under their own letterhead, they can force their employees to sit through briefings and video presentations promoting their viewpoint, they can write letters to the editor and op-eds, they can blog and Twitter about it to the exception of actually doing any productive work.

What they couldn’t do was spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns to enforce their viewpoints, either directly or by setting up astroturf and propaganda campaigns. There is a right to speak freely in the United States; there is no equivalent right to having politicians memorize your press releases. There is no equivalent right to have your viewpoint broadcast as the lead story on the 11 o’clock news. There is no equivalent right to have your viewpoint repeated at top volume in all media until it drowns out my viewpoint. Just because I don’t have $10 million to spend on advertising and political contributions doesn’t mean my viewpoint is unworthy of expression.

What the Supremes have wrought, unless Congress steps up and legislates their decision into irrelevance, is a public square where only billboards are welcome. Anybody who walks into that square with a hand-lettered sign expressing an alternate view from those on the billboards starts out as marginalized, worthy mainly of mockery, in the way the tattered speakers at the soapbox in Hyde Park are considered a cultural oddity. Or the LaRouchies at your local post office. They’ve created a public discussion where Exxon can spend to the skies supporting climate change deniers (as they’ve been doing for years ). Only now, they can explicitly attach their factually challenged propaganda to political candidates, regardless of the facts.

The majority justices who fast-tracked the Citizens United case (and they did fast-track it, even giving the case a nearly unheard-of rehearing during their summer recess) either don’t understand what they have set loose or don’t care. But I’ll bet whatever you can put up that they know perfectly well that an unlimited spending environment for commercial interests during election campaigns is Good News For Republicans.

What are the Republicans in Congress saying no to in lockstep? Health care reform, loathed by big hospital chains and health insurers. Banking reform, loathed by Wall Street. Environmental regulations, loathed by Big Energy. If there are any commercial interests that benefit from such legislation passing, they’re small and diffuse in their interests. Indeed, the only people who seem interested in such legislation are Democrats — and in most cases, majorities of American voters.

Big business interests allied with Republican viewpoints already have a head start on catapulting their propaganda through the efforts of the supine Fox News Network, which expresses their viewpoints free of charge in knee-jerk fashion. Once Fox “mainstreams” such propaganda, other news outlets are more likely to mimic it — check this Philadelphia newspaper’s headline from Wednesday after the Massachusetts special election:

I’m sure that I don’t have to explain to the rest of you folks that Brown, as the 41st GOP member of the Senate, did not give his party the majority in a 100-member body. And this newspaper isn’t some kind of right-wing rag; it’s a basic general interest free sheet handed out near public transit.

Nevertheless, Exxon’s blather about climate change is no more factual than that headline. But thanks to the Supremes, they’ll soon be able to attach their fallacies to contenders for federal office.

Defenders of the decision are just as blinkered as the Supremes were in issuing it; this has been a particular hobby horse of George Will for years, and his argument has been no better than my headline. One defender of the decision yesterday was quoted on NPR as saying essentially that any citizen who thinks big companies are going to suddenly set up campaign shops with unlimited budgets are just foolish.

This is a straw man argument. It’s easy to argue with a wrong statement nobody has ever made. Try arguing with my thesis — that MONEY DOES NOT EQUAL SPEECH. If you say something that is completely wrong and put it on every billboard in America, pay a bunch of sympathetic think tanks to send their “experts” on every TV news show to repeat that wrong assertion, and put ads in every movie theatre in the country expressing that wrong idea, whereas I write a blog post in this spot demonstrating how you’re wrong,  I am right no matter what you do. Of course, because of the MONEY you spent, only the folks who come to this roadside commentary stand will know you’re wrong — everybody who saw any part of all that other stuff will think you’re right.

That isn’t how democracy works. Democracy depends on politicians, opinion-shapers and the American public coming to the right conclusions. Debate is how you do it. Debate that is skewed toward one side of the argument isn’t debate, especially in a country where a majority doesn’t often even vote. And a majority of the Supreme Court has just voted to give one side — the side that put them in their justice seats — the upper hand in political campaigns.

“Game Change,” the new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, has been lauded and pilloried from practically every quarter by now, and I’m mostly on the side of those who find it heavy on gossip and light on useful revelations. This Washington Post review, while a bit timorous in tone, pretty much captures my view of the book — it mostly restates the obvious, and where they come up with anything new, it’s all anonymous sourcing cloaked in the omniscient viewpoint, making it look to the less analytical reader like indisputable fact.

The widespread use of anonymous sourcing in this book is necessary simply because the folks they talked to make their livings advising and abetting political campaigns. Tying these folks’ names to their “revelations” would make it difficult for them to procure future clients, or at least any potentially successful ones. Certainly I’d Google anybody I planned to pay seven figures to make me a senator or the president: “Hey, it says here you woofed all over your last client and blamed him for losing the campaign. Is this what I can expect when my campaign is over and the paychecks stop arriving in your account?”

Let me say that if you had spent the last two years in the Peace Corps away from a regular news source, came home this week and decided to use this book to catch you up, you probably wouldn’t be severely misinformed; you’d probably just have a poorly formed perspective as to which portions of the campaign mattered the most. The point I think has been overlooked is that the widespread use of anonymous sources, in addition to all the obvious problems, results in a narrative that is skewed in the most Darwinian terms.

As most reviewers have noticed, the Obama campaign comes away largely unscathed, with only the occasional anecdote demonstrating more drama behind the scenes than the no-drama Obama campaign let on. The McCain campaign gets the benefit of the doubt early on, with the authors only too happy to perpetuate the tired “maverick” meme on his behalf; it’s only when his campaign begins spiraling toward certain defeat that the knives start coming out. (This is the period when Sarah Palin comes on board, but enough said about that.) Falling in line behind McCain is the Clinton campaign, which gets the same kind of negative spin in retrospect that it actually got in real time. Faring worst is the Edwards campaign, particularly Elizabeth Edwards, whose personal despair, justified as it was by her terminal cancer diagnosis and her husband’s affair, gets treated by the authors as a development just as important as the Palin clusterfuck, despite the fact that Edwards was only a candidate’s wife, not a candidate, and that her troubles were only remotely related to her husband’s candidacy.

In other words, the authors had no need to tell you who won; the treatment of the candidates in their book tells you everything you need to know. Obama beats Hillary and Edwards is never really in the game, and then Obama beats McCain and goes to the White House. The book presents a survival of the fittest scenario, abetted by the fact that the pecking order itself is probably responsible for the number of “sources” willing to wax negative on the candidate in question.

But just because Edwards disappointed the largest number of people doesn’t mean he didn’t have useful things to say in the campaign. Many pundits, co-author Mark Halperin among them, have mocked Edwards’ “Two Americas” narrative, but not only was it an astute observation, I’d argue that a photo-negative version of it propels the teabagger uprising.

Of course, this book isn’t about policy, otherwise nobody would be reading it. Certainly one could argue that Halperin, often mocked by bloggers for the tired gruel that used to appear in his conventional wisdom-dispensing column The Note on ABC.com before setting up a similar operation called The Page at Time magazine, wouldn’t have been a co-author of a book that emphasizes how policy propelled the presidential campaign. Such a thesis might have preempted any discussion about what a dragon lady Elizabeth Edwards really is. And then we might not have gotten columns like this one in which the knives are sharpened further.

Perhaps Heilemann and Halperin, unwilling to address useful questions about policy, might favor us with a book, or at least a column or two, on this topic, which I assure them is well within their specialty of political clothesline gossip. Why is it that Democrat John Edwards is a pariah in political society while Republicans Mark Sanford, John Ensign and David Vitter not only get to keep their jobs but are sought out for media interviews on political topics during which no mention is made of their problems? In case you’ve forgotten, Sanford added “hiking the Appalachian Trail” to the sexual lexicon, Ensign boffed an aide’s wife and had his parents bribe the aide and his family to keep quiet, and Vitter is the Senate’s foremost hooker aficionado and diaper fetishist. The answer to this question might itself be a game changer.

I’m not one to pursue my grudges in public ordinarily, but what follows is your basic consumer warning. Feel free to e-mail this to everybody you know, or at least everybody you know who may still have landline telephone service. I haven’t yet heard of this being applied to anybody’s cell phone bill, but I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility.

Once upon a time, everybody connected a phone modem to their computers to connect to this man’s Internet, bringing in data the way a coffee maker slowly drips brew into a carafe. Along came the miracle of technology called broadband, and in the semi-rural backwater in which I live, the first company to offer such high-speed access to the Web back at the beginning of the Aughts was my phone company, Sprint. (Sprint was originally a long-distance provider and is currently a cell phone service, but early on they came into ownership of a number of small landline phone companies around the country, including my local provider, United.)

I’ve been their phone customer for going on 14 years and a happy broadband user for almost nine now, because they have provided good service, giving me what I couldn’t get elsewhere and responding quickly to service issues. I’m on my second no-charge broadband modem, for example, and I’ve only had two service outages in my entire history with the firm, one of which was combined with a power outage so I couldn’t have used the Web anyway.

Over time, Sprint spun off their landline assets into a company called Embarq, and despite the funny name the good service continued. They periodically analyzed my bill, called me up and said things like, “Hey, would you be interested in 5-megabit access for less than what you’re paying now for 768k?” Or, “We just cut the price of your broadband by $5 a month.”

Several months ago, Embarq merged, or was taken over more likely, by CenturyTel, a similar but smaller rural landline provider, and now my bills come from the merged entity, CenturyLink. And that’s where the story really begins.

My first couple of bills under the merged entity showed nothing to be concerned about, just my recent charges. But my latest bill, which arrived a couple of days ago, was $36 heavier thanks to something called “third-party providers.” Under this category was two bills from the following companies: OAN Services, touting something called “Instant 411″ for $14.95 a month, and Hold Billing Services, with a $20 bill for “CMI Exclusive.”

I never did find out what “Instant 411″ was, though I assume it is some kind of unnecessary information service that you can access by dialing 411 on your landline. Turns out when I Google “Instant 411″ my search window prompts “Instant 411 scam.” Apparently customers of AT&T and Verizon are also getting scammed by this company.

Even better is “CMI Exclusive,” which turns out to be a membership fee to a celebrity news website. Anybody with the slightest exposure to the regular news media knows that there is no shortage of free celebrity news in every medium from the New York Times on down to billions and billions of entertainment blogs. The idea that some weak-minded person would be stupid enough to pay $20 a month for a celebrity news website does not surprise me, but if I had to put together a business model for such an enterprise in this day and age, I’d tell the principals involved that Internet fraud would have to be a big part of the plan.

My first phone call, naturally, was to the newly minted CenturyLink to scream at them. They pleaded ignorance, they’re “supposed” to pass along such charges — indeed, CenturyLink passes along third-party bills “for your convenience,” as it says on the bill. They did offer to block my bill from further charges from these two vendors, but I was told I had to deal with both of them individually to get refunded.

This was an annoyance, of course, but I moved forward. OAN proved to be not too terribly difficult to deal with; after the usual period of holding in Beelzebub’s telephonic waiting room with a minimum of annoying hold music, I spoke to an operator who put up a bit of resistance, but when she tried to confirm an e-mail address that nobody in my family has ever held and I called her on it, she finally agreed to cancel the service and refund my money through CenturyLink. (The e-mail was “first-initial-last-name@eudoramail.com,” just for completeness’ sake. Nothing against Eudora Mail, but I have never even used the Eudora e-mail client, let alone signed up for e-mail service.)

Hold Billing Services proved to be a bit more devious. The name alone is a bit of a tipoff — “Do you wish to speak to billing services? Please hold” — and sure enough, they subjected me to a fairly lengthy wait on hold with no sound whatsoever. (My guess is that the no-sound technique prompts people to give up after a short time, thinking the call was dropped.) After going six rounds with a more determined operator who absolutely assured me that my wife signed up for their celebrity news service with open eyes and keen anticipation, I asked her to confirm my wife’s e-mail address. Sure enough, it was the same bogus e-mail used with OAN. When she tried to resist further, I suggested she send all future invoices for her service to that e-mail address instead of CenturyLink. At that point she finally agreed to cancel my “subscription.” I immediately demanded that she not only cancel but issue a refund, but she said I had to contact “billing” to get a refund.

So back into hold, this time with a message that if the call was interrupted I should call a different number than the one I originally called. Sure enough, the call dropped entirely. I punched in the new number and went back into voicemail hell. (Having a speakerphone helps in these situations, as I could go back to whatever I was doing before CenturyLink attempted to turn a Dyson vacuum cleaner on my wallet.) After a lengthy wait, again with the silent treatment in between, I got a guy with a pronounced Hindu accent. Apparently it’s OK at Hold Billing Services for native English speakers to try and convince you to keep the service, but if you want your money back a few misunderstandings are fine and dandy. The guy was more accommodating, however, and promised to issue a credit through CenturyLink.

Hold Billing Services apparently has a long history of this sort of thing, by the way. Note the safeguards checklist in this release and ask yourself when was the last time you even saw a listing for a 900- number.

Sound like I’ve been made whole? Maybe. Some of the Web postings I’ve read since encountering this double-barreled scam suggest that billings from these companies have been known to continue. And though each of them issued me a confirmation number, at least one posting told of the company disavowing any knowledge of such a confirmation number when contacted subsequently.

Now to repeat, this is probably not CenturyLink’s fault alone, as ATT and Verizon customers have also been victimized by these scammers. The cheats are simply piggybacking on established laws and policies that made it easy for MCI Long Distance to bill their services to Bell Atlantic customers. Nevertheless, there has to be some limit to this nonsense in the Internet age, when anybody can present bills to phone companies that appear legit after harvesting the info from faked websites. My wife apparently was the conduit for this bit of scamming, as she occasionally downloads puzzle games for her laptop, and she recalled giving our landline number to one such company. I’ve heard that you can get similarly phished from downloading ringtones, desktop pictures and icon packages, browser toolbars, those dress-up dolls you see in online ads, and other such non-essential effluvia.

I’m sending an old-school snail mail letter to CenturyLink as soon as I can harvest a useful address for it. In the meantime, be careful when folks from non-household-name companies ask for excessive amounts of information in exchange for that Tetris-lookalike game or a Susan Boyle ringtone. Especially be careful about your phone numbers; if they’re not required, don’t provide them, and if they are required, stop and ask yourself if the transaction is worth the possible hassle.

So who’da thunk that Fox News Channel would offer Sarah Palin a slot on their network? How about this guy? It is a bit like carrying coals to Newcastle though, isn’t it?

No, this blog hasn’t started stalking the metrosexual beat, nor is this a desperate attempt to institute some version of a blogospheric ladies’ night. There is actually a public policy reason for my placing this picture, which I stole from Cosmopolitan, on the blog. The naked guy, Scott Brown, was once a Cosmo centerfold but today is the Republican candidate for Senate in the Massachusetts special election.

Most people will just think this is funny, which is the proper reaction to it, and it has no impact on whether Brown is a worthy candidate for the U.S. Senate. But I have a thought experiment for you. Imagine if Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate in the very same election, had once posed for a nude centerfold in a national magazine. Within six hours of the Boston Globe (or more likely the Herald) publishing a story about it, Coakley would have had to drop out of the race and resign her job as state attorney general. Because this remains a sexist society, and the media shrieking would overwhelm everything in ways that it almost certainly won’t for Brown.

And to extend the experiment further, please stop by the Fox News Channel’s various outposts on TV and the Web, record the outraged reactions to Brown’s centerfold from the network that panders to conservative Christians, the kind of folks that force Wal-Mart to display Cosmo with only the magazine name showing, and stop back by here with links to such principled, not to mention fair ‘n balanced, criticism of Brown that you can leave in comments. I’ll wait in the bar while you folks do that, though I’m sure I’ll have to switch to Shirley Temples before long since this is a Republican we’re talking about. While you’re at it, imagine the tittering on “Fox and Friends” if this had been a Democrat of any gender.

Dear Comcast Cable Company Overlords:

Over the past couple of months, you have been moving toward a purchase of NBC/Universal, the entertainment arm of General Electric Corp. You’re pretty close to succeeding, subject only to whatever antitrust scrutiny is still left after the one-two punch of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the second Bush administration. Apparently GE wants to be rid of NBC/U almost as badly as you want to buy it, for reasons that are probably best understood by watching “30 Rock” regularly.

Anyway, lefty bloggers like me tend to be reflexively opposed to anything like further consolidation of the communications industry, particularly since the ongoing trend over the past 40 years has taken us from dozens of power centers for the news industry to maybe seven or eight — I haven’t done the math, but I’m pretty sure I’m close enough for government work, and in the end this will be government work.

But I’m offering you guys a big opportunity to buy my acquiescence in this matter. As an internationally accessible opinion shaper, my opposition to your corporate schemes could turn the heads of literally hundreds of people and cause at least two or three minor uprisings of the common people to erupt outside the various corporate headquarters involved in this deal. But if you just promise to put me in charge of NBC/U, I’ll cheerlead shamelessly for your big giant purchase.

Yeah, I know: ha ha, ho ho, let’s see what the other Today.com blogs are saying. But hear me out. It’s one thing to wring concessions out of GE when NBC/U is in its current desperate straits — dropping ratings, hardly any buzzworthy shows, no indication this ship is going to steer away from the oncoming reef and avoid being sunk. It’s another thing to actually take possession of such an entity and have it continue on its current course.

So you need somebody like me to call bullshit on some of the epically stupid groupthink decisions that have been made in recent years at NBC/U, particularly when it comes to prime-time television. This week’s big controversy regarding Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien is a case in point.

For starters, it should never have gotten to this point. They did, after all, write a book about the last late-night war, and then as now it started out as an internecine war at NBC. Leno was the popular permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson,” considered the mainstream choice for the future, and David Letterman was the 12:30 guy on NBC with a decade’s worth of strong buzz — and not incidentally, the friendship of Johnny Carson. Leno won, as we all know, the buzzworthy Letterman set up shop at CBS in competition with Leno, and except for a few bursts of high viewership, Letterman spent a decade and a half as the second most popular late-night host.

Several years ago, Conan O’Brien began agitating for more visibility at NBC and began shopping his options around. NBC had a ratings lock on late night between Leno and O’Brien, which might be considered small potatoes compared to the benefits of leading in prime time, but nevertheless offers a sweet profit cushion for the rest of the schedule. NBC asked Conan what he wanted, and he said “The Tonight Show.” Fearful that Conan would do as Letterman did, they sat down with Leno and worked out a succession schedule that led to the current situation.

I prefer Conan to Jay myself, but this was idiocy. At no time did the Leno-led “Tonight” show any ratings weakness against Dave. Over a decade and a half, the audience for post-11:30 p.m. TV preferred Jay in significant numbers — a million to a million and a half more viewers a night — and showed little inclination, except once in a blue moon, to switch over to Dave.

Jay appeared to be OK with handing off the baton, but as his final show approached he started feeling cast aside and began entertaining further TV offers, which some say included proposals to keep him at 11:35 p.m. on a different network. So NBC rushed into the breach and offered him 10 p.m. across the board. Another idiotic move.

Here’s what should have happened. Six years ago, or however long ago it was that O’Brien began entertaining offers, NBC should have offered him some alternatives — but they should have stressed that, with Jay at #1 with no signs of weakness, that “Tonight” was off limits until Jay wore out his welcome, retired of his own free will, etc. If that meant “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” switched from 12:30 a.m. at NBC to 11:30 p.m. at ABC, then the suits at NBC should have cried a few crocodile tears and thrown him a lavish farewell party.

Because if history is any guide, making your name in the 12:30 slot is a lot easier because you can do things the suits won’t stand for at 11:30. Anybody notice that Conan’s Masturbating Bear didn’t make the transition to “Tonight?” The dirty little secret is that practically any low-profile entertainer can be the 12:30 talk show host, right, Jimmy Fallon?

NBC’s brain trust simply wasn’t man enough to admit that one network can’t be the home of two 11:30 talk show hosts, any more than one network can be the home of both NFC and AFC football. And that the skill set of an experienced late-night talk show host isn’t transferable to other parts of the schedule. And that trying to contain two popular 11:30 talk hosts at the same network might actually harm the network.

Which has happened in spades. Leno’s 10 p.m. show, leave aside the fact that it’s been pretty bad, shrunk the 10 p.m. slot from prime-time viewership levels to late-night levels. This has been death for NBC’s affiliates, who have nearly all reported 11 p.m. news ratings drops since folks tend to leave on the news show that follows the last show they watched. And Leno guarantees NBC third place every night at 10 (Fox doesn’t program at 10, their affiliates put on the news at that time).

NBC was stupid to revive what has essentially been a rerun of “The Late Shift.” They should have been prepared to bid goodbye to either Conan or Jay when the two men’s interests collided, given that there was no indication either one of them could do well in anything but a late-night talk show. Remember, Letterman’s show began as a morning talk show, which was worshipfully reviewed but avoided like the plague by the housewives and elderly folks who watch morning TV. Letterman’s star only began to rise when he was put in front of the proper audience. Ditto for Glenn Beck, who had the absolute lowest-rated show on any of the three cable news networks when he was on CNN Headline News. Moved to the fever swamps of Fox, his ratings went up by a factor of 10.

And the decision to strip Leno at 10 p.m. was corporate stupid on the levels of the Edsel. It will take NBC years to rebuild its schedule once they boot Leno out of 10 p.m., and you can bet in the short term they’ll have to repurpose shows from the Universal cable channels like USA and SyFy to get where they need to go. While they’re at it, they need to cut “Law & Order” back to one hour a week, though you can bet they’ll actually expand it across the schedule in the short term.

So Comcast, this is your big chance to put somebody who’s actually thought about these things in charge, as opposed to simply leaving the current idiocracy in charge or tapping some Comcast apparatchik who’s done nothing more than kiss the right asses at the right times in full view of the main Comcast overlords.

… but I have an alter-alter blog ego that commands a lot of my time during the latter part of the year. In the current media environment, I’ve said more than I care to about Sharia Plain (hat tip Roger Ailes, it’s an anagram) and health care isn’t anywhere near the home stretch yet, so fretting about the so-called “centrist” Dems who are doing as much as the GOP to scuttle reform isn’t doing anything but using up my diminishing supplies of brain cells to no good end. I’ll be back on this soapbox at some point, and hopefully posts will start to occur with more frequency than they have recently. Till then, have a happy Thanksgiving. Oh, and for you folks at Technorati: FW8BFV7YJR8E

This past week’s elections were widely chewed over, nearly as much as 2008, when a president, most of Congress and thousands of state legislators and governors were up for election. This was mainly at the behest of the right-wing media, which is desperate to shake the loser image their side has over the past two federal elections, and they’ll take the election of two Republican governors on mostly likeability and local issues grounds to do their “U-S-A!!!!” dance. (Of course, they will argue the two special congressional elections that went for Democrats are meaningless, when they deign to mention them at all.)

The big buzz out of all the coverage, particularly the mainstream media, has been the significance of the independent voter. It’s a reasonable conclusion; in the gubernatorial elections, independents broke hard for the Republican candidates. Unfortunately, the resulting analysis of this situation has been half-baked at best, with pundits describing independent voters as some sort of cohesive political force whose turn to the GOP is some sort of harbinger for the real elections next year. This isn’t quite insane, but it is silly.

There is no such thing as a typical independent voter in the United States. Many of our cable news shouters, as well as our editorial page bloviators, are quick to conflate independent voters with centrists. There is no evidence to suggest this has any validity. Consider our two “independent” U.S. senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Sanders is an actual self-described socialist, while Lieberman caucuses with Democrats and votes with Republicans. See any continuity of belief systems there? (I’ll let others characterize the two men further.)

I’ve followed elections for longer than I care to admit, and here are a few things I’ve noticed about independent voters. It’s true that, in general, they have no great love for either the Democratic or Republican parties. Indeed, I tend to agree with that assessment. But for every independent voter, there’s a different reason why this is so — and few of those reasons have to do with political science.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people who describe themselves as independent voters actually aren’t anything of the kind. They have easy-to-characterize political beliefs, from wild-eyed liberalism to batshit Glenn Beck followers. The realities of following a particular party’s banner, however, don’t suit them for one reason or another, usually because maintaining a broad-based party requires compromises that either don’t interest them or actively repel them. (NY-23, anybody?) My own wife switched from Democrat to Independent after years of seeing her preferred candidates for federal office lose in the primary. She asked what was the point of having a primary vote if it didn’t mean anything. I don’t completely agree, but I do understand.

Of course, at this point I’m talking about independent voters who actually do have coherent political beliefs. I’d say the majority of independents are either frustrated Democrats or Republicans. There may even be a few independents who are actively centrist — people who still think both parties have important things to say. This notion, however, seems to have overwhelmed the punditry, despite the fact that it isn’t a true reflection of who independents are.

But a significant number of registered independents are simply independent of Beltway definitions of what constitutes a political world view. There are folks who would be solid Democrats in most of their beliefs, except they don’t like social minorities. There are liberals who prefer the Republican view of small government and military adventurism. There are folks who are fixated on a single issue, like abortion, war, immigration or gun control, who don’t want to compromise their vision and therefore have little use for politicians who will give ground on those pet beliefs. There are folks who register independent just to get out of voting in primaries in general. And there are independents who don’t even register to vote.

What pundits are clumsily recognizing this week is that independents are far more likely to be swing voters than are registered Democrats or Republicans. The deepening polarization of the electorate and the purification of party rosters has seen to that. So if independents are choosing Republicans in half of a very small number of closely watched off-year elections, where last year independents chose Democrats in hundreds of federal elections, it may be a trend, or at least a harbinger. But considering Virginia has chosen its governors from the opposite party of the president for at least 20 years, and that normally Democratic New Jersey simply hated Jon Corzine’s guts, I wouldn’t want to make any predictions based on such a small data set.

Indeed, NY-23 would be a far more significant result, assuming you ascribe much weight to Tuesday’s results, which I don’t. After all, a Democrat won that seat for the first time since before the Civil War. And this despite the attention of national Republicans who did everything possible to prosecute the election on national issues. You had Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck calling out the teabagger horde to smack down both a Democrat and a popular Republican candidate who was perceived to be too liberal. They did make a third party candidate look pretty good — but New York state has a Liberal and a Conservative party in addition to Dems and Republicans, and in most cases the Libs endorse the Dem and the Conservatives rubber-stamp the GOP. In this case they didn’t — and in doing so, the so-called “braintrust” of the teabaggers helped elect the Democrat. In the wake of the election, the teabag contingent professes its efforts a “success” and plan to widen their effforts. If I were a Democratic candidate, I’d be working to make sure teabaggers were doing exactly what they did in NY-23 to my opponent.

Notice how news coverage of health care reform no longer talks about “whether” there will be a public option, but “what kind?” How could that be? Only the loony left was interested in that, while the sober, bipartisan minds of the U.S. Congress were busy trying to strike deals for Republican votes with more “moderate” proposals.

Well, for starters, the “loony left” polled at anywhere from 55 to 80 percent when pollsters asked whether the health reform bill should contain a public option. And once the teabaggers shouted themselves out, the real majority of Americans began making themselves heard. And their concerns — losing their health care with their jobs, not being able to keep their health care unless they turned over their entire unemployment check to the insurance company, not being able to get the care they paid for over a lifetime once something actually became wrong with them — were far more real than the teabaggers’ unfocused complaints about violating the Tenth Amendment, creeping socialism, and the president’s birthplace. Not to mention their implied faith in the pirates that run the health insurance scam in the United States.

Funny story about the health insurers. A couple of weeks ago, they overplayed their hand by ginning up defective studies claiming that health care reform would raise everyone’s premiums. This kind of thing worked pretty well in 1993 (see bought-and-paid-for think-tank apparatchik Betsy McCaughey) but the faster news cycle — plus the fact that we’ve seen this game of three-card monte before — not only debunked the studies but allowed room for folks to question their motives at length. This made the studies radioactive to health reform opponents, and cleared the way for a more sober consideration of the public option.

This is not to say we’re going to get a good bill, however. Neither house of Congress appears to have a solid majority for the kind of balls-out public option that really will push the cost curve and bring the entire population under the coverage umbrella. Right now the discussion is over “triggers” and “opt-out.” One of these two useless fig leaves may be necessary to get a health reform bill through the Congress, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

“Triggers” means they’ll create a public option but hold it in abeyance until some future date when it becomes clear even to politicians with six figures’ worth of health care/health insurance/pharmaceutical money in their re-election accounts that the reform bill hasn’t made any headway. This is an exceedingly bad idea because tripping the trigger will require legislation, the story will be mostly ignored by the media because it won’t involve kids stowing away inside a weather balloon, and therefore will be easy for lobbyists to kick down the road further, with the help of still more campaign money. If there must be a trigger, here’s a good one: The public option kicks in when U.S. health care costs per capita reach double those of Canada, France, Japan, the U.K. and Germany.

Then there’s the “opt-out” proposal, under which they’ll pass a public option but states can opt out of it. This may actually be more insane than triggers; consider that if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had an “opt-out” provision, there’d still be whites-only lunch counters in Alabama and Mississippi, and possibly Texas as well. And since there still are a fair number of Republican governors in the U.S., hardly any of whom are profiles in courage when it comes to resisting the brain-damaged entreaties of the core Republican base voter, we can expect a significant number of states to opt out of health care reform. Which will do a number on any effort to bend the cost curve or get everybody insured. Not to mention it will guarantee a permanent campaign against further health care reform, as the retrogrades band together with the moneyed health interests to get all 50 states to opt out.

Last week folks in the Democratic party finally, much belatedly, got behind the best possible description of what health care reform needs to be: Medicare For Everyone, or Medicare Part E. Can you name somebody over 65 who doesn’t have health insurance? Of course not. So why stop there? One of the important points of health reform is to insure everyone. Then there’s the need to do away with all the silly administrative games: pre-existing conditions; “experimental” treatments; the subrogation game, in which multiple insurance companies play hot potato with people’s health bills; and the ever-popular recission, in which people’s entire policies get canceled the day they show up with a condition that’s expensive to treat.

Then there’s the need to make a dent in the phenomenon of medical bills bankrupting ordinary Americans — some 60 percent of all bankruptcies are primarily caused by mounting medical expenses. Check out Sen. Al Franken evicerating an industry flack who tried to claim that medical bankruptcies would go up if the U.S. passed health insurance reform:

Folks, I remain convinced that straight-up single-payer is what the U.S. needs to get to real health care and health insurance reform. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed too many interested profit centers to grow up in this country; instead of moving toward sustainable reform, we’ve actually been moving in the opposite direction for some 30 years now. Been to a hospital lately? It used to be that everybody in the hospital worked for the hospital, and while the doctors had private practices, they were beholden to the hospitals in terms of quality care and ability to make money treating patients. Today’s hospitals are like shopping malls — practically every department of the hospital is a separate private enterprise cost center and a separate medical practice. You can go to a hospital that’s “in the network” yet be treated by doctors who are outside the network. (That happened to me personally.) Even the emergency room doctors are an external practice. And who do you think pays for the byzantine reams of paperwork that are generated by dozens of cost centers under a single hospital’s roof?

Meanwhile, the hospitals tolerate this situation because if the doctors don’t like the hospital, they can withhold services and even go into competition with the local hospital to drive it out of business by cherry-picking all the profitable treatments and surgeries in their own shiny new outpatient centers. If the doctors aren’t rich enough to undertake such a thing themselves, there are any number of medical provider chains who would be happy to underwrite such a move.

The political conservative sees nothing wrong with any of this because it’s market-based private enterprise. Unfortunately, patients do not have any ability to harness the power of the market. You don’t shop for an emergency room or the best place to have an appendectomy; you get rushed into whatever facility will take you in a reasonable amount of time. This is why EVERY advanced democracy in the world has downplayed or regulated the amount of private enterprise in the health care system. The U.S. needs to get to that point, but it’s going to take years and years of political struggle to get within a country mile of where everybody else is.

The big story in media circles this past week — if you leave aside the “balloon boy” — was Anita Dunn of the White House communications shop committing the unpardonable sin of clearly explaining what function Fox News Channel serves in the world of reporting political news.

The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.

On what planet does anybody dispute this in the year 2009? The network has been in business for 13 years. It got a providential boost from coming along just as the Whitewater non-scandal morphed into all-Monica, all the time, and matured on its slavishly pro-Bush coverage of the 2000 election, particularly the Florida recount phase. (The so-called “liberal media” was mainly responsible for fluffing Bush while making up fake nonsense about Al Gore — Bob Somerby hosts the archive on that lowlight of journalistic history.)

And yet the defense of Fox News hasn’t been limited to its own air or even its media allies and wingnut bloggers. The mainstream media has been historically averse to calling Fox what it is, with everybody from the Washington Post to New York magazine painting this as “Obama’s war on Fox.” This is like saying that simply expressing the equation 2+2=4 is somehow a “war” on new math.

Apparently a lot of media types wet themselves when forced to consider the possibility that Fox News, as an institution, is a $4 billion in-kind contribution from News Corp. to the U.S. Republican party. They mewl that just because the period between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. isn’t hosted by Beck, Hannity or O’Reilly and is structured more like real news — and that folks like Shepard Smith and Major Garrett report things that aren’t by definition insane — that this somehow makes Fox “just like” CNN or MSNBC.

It does nothing of the kind. This is because Fox’s opinion personalities completely ignore anything the daytime news reports say if it doesn’t comport with their agendas. (One would argue that Beck ignores pretty much anything that doesn’t originate with the voices in his head, but I don’t have time to pursue that line of thought.) When a Fox reporter gives a report at 4 p.m. on a Monday explaining that the health reform proposals do NOT create “death panels,” but Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly continue to repeat the canard night after night for weeks on end, which of these two contradictory messages do you think will connect with Fox audiences? Just because you can show that Fox occasionally airs fact-based reports — and that some of their criticisms of Obama are reasonable — does not excuse the orchestrated opposition based entirely on ideology that arises from the totality of their news coverage and opinion programming. If Fox were merely an outlet for conservative news gathering it would be one thing, but as Anita Dunn expressed clearly this past Sunday,

Obviously, there are many commentators who have conservative, liberal, centrist, and everybody understands that. But I think what is fair to say about Fox and certainly the way we view it is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party.

Besides, the idea that Fox has a respectable news operation is itself a myth. Ex-Fox-employee Charlie Reina described the “news gathering” process at that network several years ago for Romanesko’s page at Poynter.org (it seems to only be available at Sourcewatch now):

The roots of Fox News Channel’s day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel’s daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it. …

The sad truth is, such subtlety is often all it takes to send Fox’s newsroom personnel into action — or inaction, as the case may be. One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be ‘whining’ about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent’s report on the day’s fighting — simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.

These are not isolated incidents at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom makes a move unmeasured against management’s politics, actual or perceived. At the Fair and Balanced network, everyone knows management’s point of view, and, in case they’re not sure how to get it on air, The Memo is there to remind them.

Fox News relentlessly pushed the talking point that Obama was personally cratering the stock market from his inauguration until just a couple of months ago — about the time the market started rising again. When the Dow hit 10,000 the other day for the first time in about a year, how did Fox reconcile their previous stance with Obama apparently goosing the stock market 3,000 points from its low? Why, they began talking about the “Bush recovery.”

Sen. John Ensign is under a criminal investigation because he is believed to have bribed the husband of the woman he was having an affair with by getting him a good job with a lobbying group and giving that firm preferential access to his office. Is Fox giving him the full Lewinsky? Of course not, he’s a Republican. But I’ll bet you know who Kevin Jennings is, since he works for Obama, though most of what you know about him is false because Fox doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good smear.

No wonder self-identified Fox News viewers scored near the bottom in a Pew Research Center survey of how much people knew about current events. (The O’Reilly Factor actually made the top four, a bit of an outlier for the whole network, but then O’Reilly occasionally play-acts the part of an independent and actually hosts the occasional liberal guest who is capable of facing him down. Nevertheless, Daily Show/Colbert viewers tied with newspaper websites for best-informed viewers, well ahead of any of the cable news networks.)

So the idea that Anita Dunn hasn’t been watching this 13-year history, hasn’t been watching the unrelenting Fox hostility to every Democratic presidential candidate ever to declare since 1996, hasn’t noticed the preponderance of criticism to her boss reaching back to Super Tuesday 2008 (about the time it began to look like he might be nominated), is just too ridiculous to countenance. That actual professional journalists in the employ of Time, Washington Post, U.S. News/World Report, New York magazine, Mediaite.com and a number of other not-insane sources could credibly argue that the Obama administration should NOT be treating Fox News as a political adversary rather than as a news source shows that they’ve been out of school too long. How could so-called news people not notice that there is no criticism of Obama too unhinged to be promoted by Fox News?

When Dunn says the Obama administration plans to engage Fox as an entrenched adversary rather than a news organization, it’s no different than a military field commander noting that the ragtag band of rebels he was sent to contain was actually a well-financed military regiment taking orders from a foreign government — and adjusting his tactics accordingly.

I will admit my initial reaction to Barack Obama becoming the latest Nobel peace laureate was in the neighborhood of “WTF?” The more vitriolic reaction is widely available across the servile right-wing media and blogs, so I won’t bother you with it. Instead, I will point you to Glenn Greenwald , whose skepticism is the best possible summary of liberal misgivings regarding the award. While you’re at Salon, however, read Joan Walsh’s defense of the award, paying particular attention to the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize has, in the past, been awarded to people whose efforts had yet to bear fruit. Aung San Suu Kyi, for example, remains under Burmese house arrest 18 years after receiving the award, no closer to her objective. Walsh adds several other examples.

Also note that the popular talking point about the deadline for nominations being Feb. 1 meaning that Nobel’s committee judged Obama on 11 days in office is completely, idiotically, false. The proclamation specifically refers to events, like the redirection of American foreign policy, that took place after Feb. 1. Ezra Klein makes good points about this redirection of emphasis to the multilateral approach, as well as Obama’s built-in advantages in this regard.

As for me, well, my basic stance is to side with those who think the award says more about the Nobel Committee than it does about Obama. But the awards ceremony gives him another chance to address the entire international community, and those speeches have not only been personal milestones for him but they also serve as an excellent advertisement for the best of what America stands for in the world.

So let America’s right wing side with the Taliban and Hamas against American interests. (In fairness, at least one Hamas guy praised the prize. Also note in that link the futile attempts of reasonable conservatives to head off the unhinged reactions to the prize.) In the grand tradition of fake wingnut outrages that are factually insupportable but are constantly repeated because the wingers think they’re pissing off liberals, I support anything that leaves the wingnutosphere seething and spewing impotent and pointless rage. UPDATE: Keeping in mind the core principle of wingnut dogma that Obama is a self-obsessed spotlight chaser, note that the White House website, one day after the award, carries nothing about it on its front page. FURTHER UPDATE: By far the stupidest op-ed on this topic was carried today (10/16) by the Washington Post: “An Unconstitutional Nobel” by Ronald D. Rotunda and J. Peter Pham. Yes, it’s unconstitutional for a sitting president to receive the Nobel Prize, say these two giants of wingnuttery, ignoring the two previous presidents who accepted one and a third who was awarded his after leaving office. Lest you mistake this for reasonable debate, Rotunda is a denizen of what passes for conservative intellectual circles these days — George Mason University, the Cato Institutute and Chapman University School of Law. The latter institution was compared by one of the op-ed’s online commenters to DeVry Technical School — probably because conservative radio talker Hugh Hewitt is a professor of constitutional law there and John Yoo, the Bush administration’s justifier of torture, is a visiting scholar. Rotunda is also a climate change denier, as depicted at ExxonSecrets.org. And Pham is a co-author of such articles as “Give War a Chance,” which basically vouchsafes the notion that the U.S. is and must always be at war with the Scary Brown People™ lest we vanish from the face of the earth. One would assume from his curriculum vitae that his interest in a prize for peace would be somewhat beneath his interest in, say, the footie scores in the back of the Daily Mail. Their complaint — that Obama is somehow accepting an “emolument” from a “foreign power” — somehow manages to overlook the fact that Obama is giving the cash portion of the prize to charity. Boneheads, but what do you expect when somebody wet-dreams the topic first and then slaps together copy to support it. I guess I should call up George Mason and demand my full professorship simply on the basis of being better able to conduct research on a topic that’s less than a week old than one of its sitting scholars.

Does anybody remember this? Soccer mom Meleanie Hain was briefly a wingnut cause celebre last September when she started carrying a pistol to her daughter’s soccer matches. The county sheriff in her central Pennsylvania community lifted her concealed-carry permit in the wake of the publicity, but a county judge overruled him and returned her permit.

In a question-and-answer session with The Patriot-News about the case, Hain said she carried a gun because she never knew when she might need it.

Her move was controversial, of course. People taking their kids to play in soccer leagues in what are supposed to be safe suburban enclaves are not thinking that they might need to grab their piece at any moment. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be taking their kids to play soccer. The whole idea of the retreat to the suburbs is in pursuit of elbow room, homogenous surroundings, “better” schools and, not necessarily in this order, safety — the kind that is achieved by not living in the big bad city, or what Atrios likes to call an “urban hellhole.” That’s his satirical reference to his South Philly neighborhood.

Naturally, the Second Amendment crowd was on this like flies to sherbet. Hain was a modern pioneer, a constitutional hero, and all the other compliments wingers like to pay to people who think their right to own and wield a surrogate penis supersedes their responsibility to act with common sense. And carrying a pistol to a child soccer game (Hain’s daughter, the family soccer player, is 5; the link takes you to a story where they’re pictured together, Mom lovingly displaying her Glock on her hip) falls way short of common sense, never mind common courtesy.

Ah, but this happened last year, Sal; your news reflexes getting a little rusty? Why no, actually, there was a development in this story yesterday.

Gun-carrying soccer mom Meleanie Hain, who died with her husband in an apparent murder-suicide, had been separated from her husband and was considering filing a protection-from-abuse order against him, her lawyer said today….

Some neighbors told the Lebanon Daily News they heard or saw the children — a 10-year-old boy and girls ages 2 and 6 — running from the house and screaming “Daddy shot Mommy!” shortly before the 911 emergency center was alerted at 6:20 p.m.

This is a flat-out tragedy. But it’s also a preventable tragedy, which is the real point of me picking this story to feature. The gun fetishists who are out to repeal every sensible instance of gun control (legalizing the packing of heat in taverns? Say hi, Arizona!) fetishized this woman and made her a minor celebrity despite — or more likely because of — a shaky grasp of the concepts behind self-defense and lack of knowledge about gun safety:

A gun in the home increases the risk of homicide of a household member by 3 times and the risk of suicide by 5 times compared to homes where no gun is present.

While handguns account for only one-third of all firearms owned in the United States, they account for more than two-thirds of all firearm-related deaths each year.

A gun in the home is 4 times more likely to be involved in an unintentional shooting, 7 times more likely to be used to commit a criminal assault or homicide, and 11 times more likely to be used to attempt or commit suicide than to be used in self-defense.

There’s more, particularly in regard to what happens when the children you’re supposedly protecting with firearms get their hands on them, but I believe my point is made.

This tragic story also underlines the irresponsibility of right-wing house organs who simply grab onto any factoid that promises to validate their worldview like some shiny object and trumpet it to the skies (Obama is indoctrinating our children into socialist ideas, anybody?) without giving it the slightest bit of analysis. When I heard about Hain for the first time last year, I immediately thought, “Just what in the HELL does this woman think she has to defend herself against?” Folks, when I see a common-as-clay soccer mom packing heat, I wonder what her home life must be like.

Yeah, click that last link. Domestic violence remains a scourge, and a combination of lax gun laws and a societal presumption that unlimited gun ownership is a birthright leads us to the parade of casualties recorded in the statistics I have provided here this evening.

I doubt this tragedy will ripple across the wingnutosphere the way the original story of “plucky soccer mom packs a Glock” did, because the predictable damage gives the lie to their cherished notions about Americans as armed cowboys administering rough “justice” to unnamed “evildoers.” The old bumpersticker line, “An armed society is a polite society,” is bullshit, for all the reasons I’ve listed in this post. An armed society is Baghdad, or Roaring 20s Chicago, or Compton, Calif., in the late 80s. Meleanie Hain was not Dale Evans — she was a woman who was acting out in service of her individuality, and if I could play armchair psychologist for a moment, I’d bet she was concealing what turned out to be a deadly secret even then. (At this writing, police aren’t saying which of the two was the shooter.) She needed sympathy, but it was for something other than being a Second Amendment champion. Now it’s her orphaned children that really need that sympathy.

UPDATE:  Police now reveal Mr. Hain shot Mrs. Hain while she was on a video chat with a friend. The friend got to witness the entire thing, which was not captured to a file and therefore will not turn up on Smoking Gun or YouTube. For posterity, I will note that while a county judge restored her concealed-carry permit, he also said this:

The judge who restored Meleanie Hain’s concealed-weapon permit last year questioned her judgment and said she had “scared the devil” out of other parents at the soccer field.

As did most sensible people, Your Honor.