Fox is kicking off 2009 the only way it knows how, by continuing to serve as the GOP’s mouthpiece. That’s just what Chris Wallace did yesterday on Fox News Sunday while pretending to hold a “fair and balanced” discussion about the Employee Free Choice Act with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
Wallace referred to the Employee Free Choice as “Big Labor’s top priority,” repeatedly dubbing it “union card check.” Wallace also continued to push the false notion that Employee Free Choice would do away with secret ballots. Fox’s overt use of Republican talking points to fearmonger about Employee Free Choice is certainly nothing new, but what happened on Fox News Sunday is alarming for two reasons.
First, Hoyer wasn’t nearly clear enough in explaining that the Employee Free Choice will NOT deny anyone the right to a secret ballot; all the act does is give workers the alternative of forming a union by signing union cards. I repeat, Employee Free Choice means just what its name implies: workers can either hold a secret ballot election or form a union if a majority of employees sign up for one.
Second, Hoyer’s failure to articulate this point enables Fox and the Republicans to control the false frame, which suddenly gives credence to the GOP’s otherwise ludicrous Save Our Secret Ballot initiative. This movement, backed by Big Business, is attempting to amend state constitutions to “guarantee” the secret ballot under the guise of protecting workers’ rights. Consider it a preemptive shot across the bow of Employee Free Choice, which would be federal legislation once Congress passes it this spring (as Hoyer suggested).
Seems like the War on Christmas comes earlier and earlier every year. So with less than three weeks of War on Christmas shopping left, all God-loving Christians must be sure to remember what this season is truly about: intolerance for those different from you, paranoia, a perpetual sense of victimhood, narrow-mindedness, and religiously-correct commercialism.
Merry War on Christmas, everybody! And yes, Virginia, there really is a Bill O’Reilly. Sorry about that.
Maybe part of the reason Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes “despise” bigoted FOX bully Bill O’Reilly is because O’Reilly dwells in the land of delusion. As Think Progress notes, O’Reilly declared on his radio show yesterday that “there’s certainly no proof” of any mistreatment at Guantanamo. That, of course, flies in the face of evidence from the Red Cross, which documented “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees. Then there were the FBI files that detailed torture tactics, not to mention the fact that the U.S. even acknowledged the torture that went on at Gitmo.
Never one for objectivity, O’Reilly purposely limited his knowledge of Gitmo to his two tours of the facility that offered an even more limited view of what actually occurred there. Why? Because O’Reilly is desperate to defend the Bush administration and its disastrous policies to the bitter end, especially if it means attacking Obama’s plans for Gitmo in the process.
Last week, Bill O’Reilly was trying to make some point about how the feared “secular progressives” have turned San Francisco into a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. To “prove” this point, he sent his personal douche/stalker/producer Jesse Watters to explore the city to give a “fair & balanced” appraisal of why San Francisco could not be anything but a sin geyser splattering its moral depravity over the glistening purity of “traditional” (meaning white, Christian, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, terrified, ignorant) America.
I figured I’d write about this to provide a little local favor. Because, you see, I’m actually from the San Francisco Bay Area. I lived in a suburb of the Berkley/Oakland area since the age of three and went to high school in Oakland. During that time, I visited SF frequently, usually to go to concerts and sometimes for shopping, restaurants, or theater with my family. After graduating from college, I moved back to the bay area, where I lived in SF and worked there for about two years.
That’s why I feel I can say with authority that O’Reilly and Watters are either complete idiots and/or are shamelessly lying to their viewers in this ridiculous “story” about SF. And they are lying to their viewers because they believe with all their rotten hearts that FOX viewers are ignorant imbeciles.
Ever willing to be the Republican party’s mouthpiece, FOX News is now trumpeting right-wing talking points on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). On FOX News Sunday, Chris Wallace used the Democrats’ secret ballot regarding Lieberman last week to frame the ongoing debate about EFCA. “Why is a secret ballot okay and desirable for Congress,” Wallace asked Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), “but you want to take it away for workers?”
This is a bogus comparison for a number of reasons. For starters, it suggests the false notion that EFCA would deprive workers seeking to unionize from using a secret ballot. According to Rep. George Miller (D-CA), EFCA would not only preserve the current right to unionize through secret ballot, but it would also provide workers the option to form a union if a majority signs a petition. Secondly, this comparison is ludicrous because the Lieberman vote was pretty much kabuki, in that the outcome had already been predetermined. So Wallace’s comparison wasn’t like comparing apples to apples, or even apples to oranges — it was more like comparing apples to a steaming pile of shit.
FOX News never met a community organizer they didn’t hate. Desperate to exacerbate the GOP’s recent attacks on ACORN, FOX is fueling the fire of misinformation about the nation’s largest grassroots community organizing group. They attacked ACORN’s Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis last Thursday for endorsing Barack Obama in a video, claiming ACORN should not be allowed to make public endorsements since they are partly government funded. Once again, however, FOX is dead wrong.
According to Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party in New York that created Lewis’s video, “ACORN is not a c3 non-profit. Quite the opposite — it has long fought to engage low-income Americans in politics, and its political action committee has long endorsed candidates for president on down to dog catcher in the attempt to hold politicians accountable to working people.”
Working Families New York has fought successfully for a minimum wage hike, paid family leave, and to extend healthcare coverage, among other recent campaigns. And as Cantor points out, voting the Working Family line for Obama (which ultimately is added to the total number of Democratic votes under a New York provision that allows two parties to endorse the same candidate) conveys a message for real progressive change.
Lewis is the co-chair of the Working Families New York, just as ACORN has many members who belong to other organizations fully capable of making public endorsements. ACORN also has numerous political action committees at the state level working directly on various electoral races. Not to mention ACORN Votes, a federal PAC that endorsed Obama back in February.
Yesterday, Stuart Varney was the substitute host on Fox’s “premiere business news” show, “Your World with Neil Cavuto.” During what quickly morphed into an hour-long Obama smear-feast, Varney implied that the Obama campaign kicked reporters from three newspapers off its campaign plane because their editorial boards endorsed McCain. (I haven’t heard a word on this show about the reporters McCain has kicked off his plane — here and here.) Unfortunately for Fox, the interview didn’t go quite as planned.
UPDATE: Varney introduced his guest, Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News with this:
“Kicked off the Obama plane. Reporters from three newspapers are getting the boot just days before Election Day by the Obama campaign. Those papers are the New York Post, the Washington Times and the Dallas Morning News. The Obama campaign says it simply doesn’t have enough room on the plane to meet demand. But, considering all three papers have endorsed McCain, is something more sinister going on here? Reaction now from Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News who was just given the boot from the plane.”
After several seconds of opening banter Varney asked, “You think flat out you were kicked off the plane because your newspaper endorsed the opposition?” (Don’t you love that? The “opposition?”)
Slater:
“Stuart, I have no evidence of that. We were not told that. We don’t believe that. We know that we did endorse John McCain. Ah, in fact, I think it’s entirely possible that there simply wasn’t enough room. … I really don’t think this was a function of the endorsement. I think this was a function of their decision to have a mix in the final days of this campaign which worked more to their advantage - more network people, more outreach, ah, possibly some other folks.”
Oops. Though this short segment didn’t go as planned, Fox managed to push a lot of buttons: They’ll repeal the Fairness Doctrine; the First Amendment restricts the freedom of speech of kings and queens (wah, wah); will Obama govern like a Socialist Commie dictator?; he hates America, and freedom of speech is out the window. When you don’t report the sleaze that the Republicans are doing and have done, you can get away with dumping on “the opposition” like this.
FOX News is in the desperate throes of backing a losing party. Despite what Megyn “Obama’s Baby Mama” Kelly would have you believe, FOX has been the GOP’s mouthpiece throughout this election, viciously maligning Barack Obama while pushing the party’s conservative agenda. (For proof of just how much slander they have spewed, check out FOX Attacks Obama, FOX Attacks Obama 2, or FOX Attacks Obama Just Like Kerry.) In fact, I hold them as responsible as McCain’s most bigoted supporters for stoking the racial prejudice and xenophobic hatred that we’re now seeing in campaign events across the country. Amazingly though, the Obama campaign has begun calling out FOX for their loathsome media bias.
First, Obama criticized FOX on national television during the third presidential debate. Then, in an interview for The New York Times Sunday magazine, Obama told Matt Bai, “I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls.” And now we have Obama staffers confronting FOX on their own network. Just watch as Bill Burton remains unflappable during this heated exchange with Kelly, who completely loses her cool.
In response to McCain’s ludicrous attack on Obama for being “the Redistributor” of wealth — an attack FOX has of course perpetuated and exacerbated with their Joe the Plumber socialist nonsense — Burton calmly tells Kelly: “This is a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of FOX News, the Drudge Report and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months.”
It is, as Burton says, a fake news controversy. Even conservatives like George Will have said that 95 percent of the government’s job is to redistribute wealth. But in a hopeless attempt to paint Obama as a Socialist, the Republicans and FOX News alike are on the verge of losing a crucial ideological battle on free market fundamentalism, which is probably why Burton’s composure causes Kelly to become choleric.
FOX isn’t merely rearranging the deck chairs on the GOP’s Titanic anymore. They’re violently throwing those chairs at everyone trying to make their way to a lifeboat.
On October 12, FOX News’s Eric Shawn interviewed FOX contributor Liz Trotta on the topic of the economy. Trotta is well-known as an abrasive, bullying type and she was in rare form as she urged the GOP candidates to go after Obama and Biden with a vengeance.
A couple of days later Sarah Palin appeared on Rush Limbaugh to complain that she wasn’t getting a fair shake in the press. She then noted that she has “nothing to lose” by continuing her thoroughly debunked “guilt by association” talking points.
This video compares the raw original broadcast to the video made available on the FOXNews.com story claiming that the crowd reaction was “mixed.” The FOX News video not only had poor audio quality, making the boos hard to discern, it also completely edited out the video from when the boos were loudest.
