Misinformation

On Sunday, John Stewart went on Fox News and claimed that Fox viewers are the "most consistently misinformed media viewers."

Politifact looks at some polling data and calls this claim false. (HT: Andrew Sullivan.)

I read the Politifact article and I have only one word: bullshit.

The devil is in the details, folks. While Fox viewers have demonstrated a high capacity for answering questions like "who is the Vice President," "who is the British Prime Minister," and "which political party controls the US House of Representatives" that wasn't the kind of thing Stewart was talking about.

These are all current events questions, and those only tell part of the story of viewers being misinformed. To gauge the true level of mininformed viewer, you have to go into the narratives.

Questions that may prove Stewart correct, on the other hand:

1. Barack Obama was born in what country?
2. What religion does Barack Obama follow?
3. Has Barack Obama increased federal income taxes?
4. Did Barack Obama sign into law the bank bailout, known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program?
5. Is the Dow Jones Industrial Average higher or lower than when Barack Obama took office?
6. How many women is New York Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner accused of having sex with?
7. Radical Islamic fundamentalists are planning to build a victory mosque at what location in the United States of America?
8. How many state governments operate under Sharia law?
9. How many United States Supreme Court Justices are Muslims?
10. True or False: The majority of United States Democratic office holders are members of the Communist Party.
11. In what Midwestern state did public sector union members riot when their Republican governor eliminated their right to collectively bargain in early 2011?
12. How many states have outlawed Christmas-themed displays on private property?
13. Which United States President famously included Death Panels in their proposed health care overhaul?
14. What foreign nation did Sarah Palin claim to see from her house?
15. Would a Federal income tax rate of 37% be an increase or a decrease for most Americans?
16. What year did the United States Supreme Court overturn Barack Obama's ban on gun ownership?
17. Earlier this year, Barack Obama sided with violent Muslim Brotherhood protesters to overthrow the pro-American leader of what Middle Eastern nation?
18. Operatives of ACORN were convicted of voter fraud in how many states?
19. Which former United States President signed a law granting amnesty to illegal immigrants if they entered the country before 1982?
20. In what year did Barack Obama sign a Presidential Order creating the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)?

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Play On

I guess we can't even watch a 22 year old from Northern Ireland turn in one of a sport's performances of a lifetime without a bunch of Americans acting like spoiled children having a temper tantrum.

First of all, I hope the broadcaster learns that this is what happens when you try to please that loud but small population of thin-skinned, overreactive, and hyperdefensive grown up American babies who mask their lack of faith in God and Country by wrapping themselves in a flag. They'd rather spend their time yelling at others for some imagined slight against God and Patriotism than realize they're watching something special happen on live television. You will not be able to please these people until the only golfers invited to participate in the US Open renounce their home nations and recite odes to American exceptionalism before teeing off. You should not apologize to these people, you should tell them to STFU because that's what needs to happen to folks who get offended over some B__. S__.

Second, WTF are you doing with that kind of intro anyway? You know how you lead into a sporting event like the US Open? With pictures of the golf course, highlight reels from the week, and maybe some shots of kids having a great time in the summer. It ain't like Congressional isn't scenic.

Maybe some production assistant got confused. The US Open Championship is not like a World Series, or Super Bowl, or BCS National Championship. It is an open golf tournament. I've always found the US Open so rightly culturally named because, you know, the United States is in the "Free World," we're the "melting pot," and we have a Statue of Liberty to welcome the huddled masses of the world. That the United States should host an Open as one of the sport's 4 major events, where anyone who qualifies in the sport can be eligible to participate, with winners determined by the skill of their game, is incredibly appropriate.

The event itself is exceptional. The players are exceptional. The course is exceptional and, on Sunday the storyline was exceptional. The background for the course is the Capitol Dome in Washington. People who watch golf on television were tuning in because of those things.

Where, exactly, was the need to add any rah-rah to the stupid TV intro? Hell, that's when the majority of Americans watching the event were making themselves a sandwich. How did you screw this up? It isn't like more people were going to tune in due to your "savvy" marketing, or somebody would be flipping channels and think "Oh, the Pledge of Allegiance, I should watch golf on TV for my country."

Third, the superstar under the microscope Sunday, like last year's US Open champion, was not from the United States. Just a quick look at the final leaderboard should tell you all you need to know about how much worldwide talent was in play Sunday: there were two Americans in the top 10 finishers - the same number of South Africans.

So of course, let's pick the broadcast of this event to fight our culture war battles over. Folks, not every televised sporting event needs to begin with a tear-jerking tribute to HOW AWESOMLY ASS KICKINGLY BADASS AMERICA (F__ YEAH!) HAS ALWAYS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE ZOMG!!! Sometimes, especially on championship days that could end up very special, you can let it be about the beauty and skill at which the game is being played, and the joy those things bring to players and fans of all nations.

But that might just be too simple.

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The Show Horse

Finally, some intelligent and thought-provoking analysis regarding the Only News Story of the Year.

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"The United States of Stepford"

Maitri puts American puritan cultural hypocracy on blast. In a just world, this would be more than a t-shirt slogan:

Get over it, you frustrated, misprioritizing tensionball of a nation just waiting to burst.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey quotes Glenn Greenwald, who's also calling for a realistic perspective.

You know who's not calling for perspective? GOP Chair Reince Preibus. But I've got two words and four letters for RP: David Vitter. STFU.

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Zombie Alert in Georgia

New Orleans has Treme shut down whole city blocks for filming. In Georgia, they shut down whole state highways in metro Atlanta to film their local drama The Walking Dead.

At least it isn't The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Though if they needed to shut down a highway for scenes, I'm wondering why they didn't use I-16 around Metter or US 441 around Irwinton. There would be far less traffic to divert either place.

But round McDonough? That's just zombnoxious.

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The Credibility Gap Widens

From the same people that brought you the terrifying GROUND ZERO MOSQUE, the thrilling KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM, and 2009's storytelling masterpiece, DEATH PANELS FOR GRANDMA, comes this May's Blockbuster Culture War Hit:

ALL BLACK RAPPERS ARE SCARY THUGS!

Follow Sarah Palin, Warrior Princess, and Karl Rove, Boy Genius, as they take the fight to those who seek to destroy gentle, homogenous American culture.

This summer in the GOP, COMMON is just a little too close to COMMUNIZM!


This film has been rated BS by the Reality Based Association of America.

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Not Exactly News

I'm glad someone finally did a study to prove Chris Rock was right.

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Dead Malls & Bad Pizza

Or, Sbarro's.

I remember eating at Sbarro's once upon a time long ago. I remember eating various foods in malls long ago.

Hell, when I grew up even into my college years, a trip to the mall was the highlight of the weekend. You left your air conditioned home, got in an air conditioned car, drove several miles to a giant air conditioned building surrounded by a parking lot big enough to host a traveling county fair.

Though, as this unsustainable economic model has been proven unsustainable, it is no surprise that the businesses that depend on the mall-based, captive audience for their economic success are suffering.

Maybe they'll just blame the President for their economic woes, instead of the fact that their customers are taking their dollars elsewhere for different products in different locations.

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Tu Quoque

Newsflash: human beings still prone to outbursts of violence, threats of violence, advocacy of violent policies and behaviors, and extreme cases of government sanctioned violence - regardless of religion or political affiliation.

One of the dumbest things about stereotyping and demonizing one group of people for a universal human flaw is the cognitive dissonance required to ignore your own demographic's similar behaviors.

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Religion of Peace

A stated reason behind a stoning death in Pennsylvania provides additional evidence that that no one religion holds a monopoly on stoning sinners to death.

Of course, if the perpetrator had been of another religion - you know - that one that is consistently demonized in American popular culture, you'd likely hear about this as a top news story on every outlet across the country.

And so no one's confused, the other religion I'm talking about being demonized in popular culture isn't Wicca. Though, apparently, it is OK to demonize Wicaans in the workplace.

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Actual Wasteful Spending

Oh, the week after the Super Bowl. The hangovers; the football-addicted scouring the internet for just-one-last-article about this year's sport before the long, dreary exile into Basketball and Baseball seasons; and the never-late this is all bread and circuses screeds against the Super Bowl's super excesses.

Guys, when Americans get tired of watching the Super Bowl, they'll stop watching it. They'll stop hosting Super Bowl parties, and they'll stop using it as an excuse to hang out with their friends and family. When folks get tired of paying small fortunes for tickets to that game, they'll stop going. When taxpayers stop wanting to subsidize this event, they'll elect new representatives.

Until then, it is the only near-universal American Bacchanalia, a Carnival event for even the most stiff-collared Americans to celebrate a little something. And like all events for mainstream American popular culture, it must be an extravagant, over-the-top spectacle dripping with marketing and product placement. That can get expensive, after all.

Are you not entertained?

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The Panic Diet

Leaving Egypt to the Egyptians for a moment, why don't we extend the spirit of introspection and consider some of the more troublesome traits affecting our own culture?

After all, we have plenty of "political, economic, ethical, legal, and chemical" questions of our own to address. Starting with what the hell that is we're putting in our mouths. Do you really know where your food has been?

Now don't get me wrong, I ain't going vegetarian. Meat is too tasty. But I don't eat as much meat as I used to. Especially from fast-food establishments. I haven't eaten at Taco Bell in years, and my long-past experience with their food makes me wonder why anyone else still does. I mean, after one bite, even years ago, did anyone need a lawsuit's publicity to tell us that wasn't really meat in their products?

It is times like these that I realize that there are a lot of folks I share a country with that don't give a passing thought to the food they put in their mouths, where it came from, or what it does to their bodies. What are their motivations causing them to fill their bellies with some artificially flavored protien paste? Response to advertising? Convenience? The food looks tastier in the commericals for a reason. The locations are set up where they are for a reason. Branding works for a reason. But doesn't reality set in once you open the bag you recieve from the drive-thru? Doesn't the whole sham come undone when you taste the blandness and chew? How about later, when you can't sleep and are taking prescription antacids for heartburn? When, in the course of the consequences, do you learn?

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Dancing With the Streetcar That Brung Ya

Here is a nice write up about the dynamics of mass transit. (HT: Jeffrey) But while author Jeff Schwartz is absolutely right in an altruistic sense, he's not looking at things like a cold-blooded sausage maker.

What do we want? Streetcars and mass transit connecting neighborhoods around New Orleans; viable transportation alternatives that make economic sense.

What did we have? Two and a half streetcar lines.

What are we supposed to get? One-and-three-quarters more streetcar lines than we had previously (half on Loyola Ave, half on Elysian Fields, and a long run down Rampart/St. Claude).

So why not run the line all the way down Rampart/St. Claude, into neighborhoods that desperately need investment and populations that need better transportation? Why run a costly spur down Elysian Fields to the River?

Because that's where Frenchman Street, with its famous nightlife drawing folks from all over the city, can be found. Because Elysian Fields-at-the-River is the door into the part of the French Quarter where you want to be. Because there is a money-generating city region that is already developed and sitting right there, and the powers that be want to squeeze. This don't rocket surgery to figure out.

Because without the spur down Elysian Fields, no streetcar line runs down Rampart/St. Claude in the near future, period. This conversation regarding development options remains academic, dreaming of what could be if only. But they ARE running that spur down Elysian Fields, which means we increase our streetcar activity in very meaningful ways.

And maybe, when people see how this works, extending the lines all the way down Rampart/St. Claude to the IHNC, and all the way up Elysian Fields to the lake, won't look like such big risks for the city to take.

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Calvinball Theology

Fascinating stuff, and a lot of it.

HT: Daily Dish.

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Stop Digging

If you want to get out of that hole. Or, more specifically, stop talking yourself into an argument that you can't win.

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Zombie Popularity

Professor Kat isn't content to just watch zombie TV, no. She breaks down the cultural appeal from an academic standpoint.

When I was growing up, a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction had to do with what happened when the governments of the world finally nuked each other. Mad Max, War Games, Terminator, Red Dawn.

Fast forward to today. Anybody notice that post-apocalyptic fiction post-Cold War has a lot to do with the failure of systems to contain crises? From zombie fiction like World War Z and the Walking Dead, to macabe fiction like The Road, even to the entire Harry Potter series - disaster is coming and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

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This

Because sometimes you just have to write down a list of things you think. Cliff sits on his porch on Veterans Day.

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Puttin' On Airs

Timothy Noah at Slate thinks the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear should not be held because it smacks of elitism. He thinks it pokes fun at ignorant people like Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck's followers. And you know how ingorant people chafe at those elitists laughing at them.

How patronizing.

First of all, the Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck's followers, and other members of the activist right aren't stupid or ignorant. There is no biological reason for their lack of knowledge, as a movement. And they aren't ignorant, as they have been able to memorize entire universes of knowledge. If they were ignorant or stupid, it would be just plain mean to make fun of them, since they'd have no control over what they thought, bless their hearts.

However, willfull ignorance can be made fun of mercilessly, and is hardly an elitist gesture. As a matter of fact, doing so is incredibly important to moving politics forward. That's why it is a moral wrong to bully the kid with learning disabilites, but it is an essential cultural trait of functioning democracies to have individuals demonstrate in and to the public that the emperor has no clothes.

And let's face it, it isn't "elitist" to expect someone who considers themselves an expert on a topic to have at least basic reality-based working knowledge of said topic. It is high time this nation stopped turning its back on established history and fact because accepting established history and fact is somehow snobbery.

Die-hard members of any political movement are acting in willfull ignorance of at least some facts that either discredit their own arguments or they don't agree with. The thing is that right now, on a scale far greater than the politically correct mavens of the 80s and 90s, many Tea Partiers and the Glenn Beck followers of the world aren't just being willfully ignorant, they're actively celebrating it in front of the video cameras. They're so proud of their willfull ignorance, that they have become the elitists of a different universe. And they aren't content to just talk about it amongst themselves, they want to lecture everyone they know about it.

And the stuff they're lecturing the rest of us about are whoppers, let me tell you. Exposing them as whoppers is not "elitist."

I wouldn't take you seriously if you told me the Ohio State Buckeyes were still undefeated in football, so how can I take you seriously if you tell me the Supreme Court allows local school boards to inject religious doctrine into public schools; or not one drop of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the hurricanes of 2005; or that only Muslims can be terrorists; or that our President is a secret Kenyan anti-colonialist, who wasn't elected in free and fair elections in this country? That these are the same people who claimed the Dow would hit 30,000, that we would be "welcomed as liberators" in Iraq, and that we should do something about those pesky illegal immigrants who clean their homes.

Credibility, credibility, credibility.

But the problem does exist when your regular American-consensus conservatives start buying into these falsehoods, or when the media lets folks get away with those kinds of falsehoods without challenge. I expected real conservatives to be appalled by O'Donnell's butchering of concept, fact, and history, but that is just not happening.

We are now witnessing a wholesale destruction of the concept of historical fact, where self-proclaimed experts can say whatever they want, and people will believe them (or at least defend them) if it lines up with their political beliefs. That's not good, and it isn't OK when anyone does it.

Which brings me back to John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. At this point, satire and mockery are your last major outlet defenders of cultural democracy.

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Got Make Believe?

Now that we've witnessed Constitutional constructionists who don't know what's in the Constitution and Christians who don't know what the Bible says, we are exposed to history textbooks that make up history.

Shocking, I know.

We're back in the land of if-you-don't-like-the-facts-make-up-your-own.


Alternate title for this post: "They're climbing through your textbooks, they're snatchin' your people up."

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OH NOES THEY BE STEALIN OUR SIGNZ

There is some sort of rampant political yardsign stealing epidimic taking place in Georgia. They've set up surveillance. Some places are even offering rewards for information. And at least one enterprising individuals is selling "Sign Thief Repellant", a gooey mixture of bird gel and fox urine.

Because nothing says political involvment like the pee of small woodland creatures.

My first thought questions the deep and disturbing necessary psychoses present in the minds of those individuals who are so offended by your political yard sign that they would creep through the middle of the night to steal it out of your yard.

And while I know that having your yard sign stolen pisses you off something righteous, my second thought concerns those individuals so dedicated to their candidate that they would shell out cash money to make their yards smell like fox urine.

I wonder if the first generation of this product used cat pee and was found to be too offensive.

Though I absolutely understand that the likelihood of sign-stealers only sets up made-for-YouTube moments of pie-in-the-face pranksterism. I cannot wait for the inevitable "Sign Steal Fail" to show up all over the internets.

Someone's celebrity is about to be made, people. Keep your eyes on the signs.

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