Glenn Beck slanders Charles Darwin

[Humphrey Osmond]

I've been following the primaries on NPR Radio, ...there has been a lot of influence by the TeaBaggers (mostly Sarah Palin), in the Republican primaries.

It seems to me that this may be a good thing, ...the shift to the right, and to the (let's be honest here, Palin?), stupid, ...may be a good thing.

I do think (well ...hope), that this shift will alienate the moderates in the GOP, and see them vote their conscience to the lesser of two evils.

I'd like to think that Marshall McLuhan would be nodding right now and pointing out the dark side of the "information age" that he saw coming...

Morning radio "shock jocks' and talk radio hack pundits without even a remote connection to (gasp!) journalism, political science, history, etc. ...rallying the electorate.

The mind boggles, Erasmus has been updated:

In the land of the blind, the loudest blind guy trumps the one eyed man.

[Jo van]

I don't really follow the politics there, but to comment on your hopes for stupidity to put people off,
I clung to that hope here, during our election.
I thought that the more Cameron spoke, the more people would realise he was an idiot,
particularly when he said that we needed to update our Nuclear Deterrent,
"because of the threat from China"...
...During the three way, televised "Leaders Debate"...
I thought "That'll do it!"
And look what happened...

A large proportion of the population aren't bad,
But they don't like to be made to think , and it's very easy to "push their buttons", all it takes is a couple of 'sound-bites' that they agree with, or can relate to.
Like the phrase "Broken Britain", very clever and memorable, and the added bonus of being alliterative.
It doesn't need to mean anything, people 'fill that in' themselves...
Sadly, I think that's all it takes....

[Humphrey Osmond]

I still think the pendulum is swinging a little too far into nutter territory, ...the Democratic Party campaign chief is actually happy about it:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-2 ... -says.html

[Jo van]

Hmmmm
I can see the problem.
When Blair finally got the Labour party into office in 97, a lot of people said he'd "sold out", because he,(and Mandelson) were so "slick" at "spin", and media manipulation.
But to me, all they did was beat the tories, at their own game.
Although the tories felt it was dishonest.

I felt sure that once they were in, we would see some truly left-wing policies,
to address the redistribution of wealth in some way.
I was disappointed, but they did do some good things, like started the reform of the Lords, minimum wage,
and ironically, transparency, with a freedom of information act. (it was this that led to their downfall, with the "MP's Expenses Scandal")

This time, the Tories did exactly the same thing, in reverse.
They pretended to be quite liberal...
Labour were completely honest...
Now they are savagely dismantling the welfare state, something they've always been ideologically opposed to.
Strangely, they're doing it as part of a coalition Govt., WITH the LIberals.


Maybe politics is all fought in the centre now, maybe both extremes know that, and have to be dishonest to win...?

Capitalism/Socialism, is a bit like theism/atheism really it seems, you either think that "Greed is good", or you think it's bad.
I'm not convinced I've ever changed anyone's mind, even with all the logical reasoning in the world, if someone thinks that the only driving force in humanity is SELF interest, I'm not sure you can ever change their mind.

I thought that AGW would, make people re-think. I thought that people would realise that this will effect the next generation, and that they wouldn't be able to insulate their children from it's effects, with all the money in the world.

But so far, I'm not encouraged.
Maybe they should have let the banks fail.... then we'd have seen some action, and some change.....?
I suppose there's always hope...
Have you thought of saying a little prayer....?

[Humphrey Osmond]

And thus, a new form of elected governance is born, it needs a new name.

Discjockocracy?

Radiobigotocracy?

Hmmm....

Ignocracy?

.......Yeah.

[belinda]

.
Isn't there a word already?

Spellings vary:

kakocracy or cacocracy...

.

[Jo van]

Media-ocracy...?

Celebritocracy....?

Liarocracy

[Humphrey Osmond]

catastrophrocracy

[verityone]

I believe the correct spelling is M O R O N...

[Jo van]

Someone pointed me at this great article today, and I thought it should be here.
(Many Thanks D! )
I think it's dead scary what seems to be happening in the USA., when I think of the glaringly obvious stupidity, of some of the players involved, Palin, O'Donell, and Glen Beck, and yet large swathes of the population seem to be persuaded by their sound-bite political rhetoric, it seems incredible, but I suppose it should come as no surprise, when a large proportion of the population here, have been persuaded that the cuts to public spending, are "the fault of the last govt." and nothing to do with the £1.4 trillion of liabilities of the banks, that we now underwrite, or the £800 Billion we put in to them.
It seems it's far easier to believe what you're told, than to actually bother to look into it, and decide yourself.

Check this:

This is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.

"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."

Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

Related Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview — In an Oval Office interview, the president discusses the Tea Party, the war, the economy and what’s at stake this November.

"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.

Related Matt Taibbi on the response to this article: "Rand's Medical Group: Obama Hypnotized Voters"

"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."

I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of sh*t. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.

Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized medicine." But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself — half of his patients are on Medicare — he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason. "Physicians," he said, "should be allowed to make a comfortable living."

Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon him in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear favorite to win in November. Ha, ha, you thought we actually gave a sh*t about spending, joke's on you. That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about issues — it's about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are ("radical leftists" is the term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... ?RS_show...