Quite a lot has happened since we last turned to the antics of the Murdoch clan, so time for an update. First, let’s do a little score-keeping—last August we gave Rupert and James Murdoch six months in their current jobs. Well, I’ll take 50%, thank you very much, if you grant I was a bit off on the timing for James. Rupert, though, well, he’s still holding on, and in fact is giving signs that he wants to make a fight of this, depending on what this is, since there are about 84 things going on at once here. Rupert seems to be keeping potentially restless shareholders quiet by paying ridiculously high dividends. Whether this will prove to be a successful strategy over the longer term is questionable, but it has certainly worked up to now. The great thing about Murdochgate or whatever we want to call it is that it keeps on giving. Every time you think you’ve got a handle on it, something new emerges from the slime.
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Matt Mogk knows zombies.

Not personally, of course—only theoretically. “All zombie research is theoretical,” he reminds readers in his excellent Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies.

But as director of the Zombie Research Society, no one in the world knows more about the walking dead than Mogk. If anyone could give me insights about the looming Zombie Apocalypse, I figured it’d be him. I knew I had to talk to him. Full story »

Friend: Hey, Yogi, I think we’re lost.
Yogi Berra: Yeah, but we’re making great time! 

It’s probably clear to anybody who pays attention that I’m a rock & roll guy. But I was raised by my grandparents, two country folks who were born in 1913 and 1914 respectively and grew up through the Great Depression. There were two kinds of music in my house, country and gospel, and those aesthetics – the melodies and harmonies, the minor chord dips and the aching they signify, the constant battle between ignorant hope and blunt despair – they shaped my relationship with music in ways that will accompany me to my grave.

We listened to gospel quartets on Channel 12 Sunday mornings. The rest of the time, if there was music in the house, it was the likes of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Roy Acuff & the Smoky Mountain Boys or Cowboy Copas. Granddaddy and Grandmother liked to watch The Porter Wagoner Show (with Dolly Parton, of course) and Saturday nights meant Hee Haw, with Buck Owens, Roy Clark and some of Nashville’s greatest stars. Full story »

The smoldering ruin of Rush Limbaugh dramatizes one political truism: seemingly impregnable fortresses are most vulnerable to suicidal implosions. Despite decades of volcanic vitriol, no outside force had yet penetrated Rush’s propaganda bubble chamber, full of pretend entertainment. No doubt, the fall of the Dittohead Dynasty reflects both the gratuity of Limbaugh’s latest abuse and the wholesomeness of the victim. For the record, Sandra Fluke’s noble decency stared down a serial miscreant. After all, other fringe charlatans haven’t suddenly lost 140 sponsors, nor did some new-found Democratic charge deter Rush’s grotesque buffoonery.

Though the bully pulpit resides in the White House, shifty, snarling bullies still sneer their way to fame and fortune. Full story »

Like a bizillion other people, I’ve caught snippets of Night of the Living Dead on late-night AMC while channel surfing, but I’ve never stopped for more than a few seconds. There’s something so quintessentially “B-movie” about any given thee-minute segment of the movie that keeps it from being too enticing (and that coming from a guy who generally loves old B-movie monster pics, too).

But watch George Romero’s seminal zombie movie from start to finish and a creepy excellence somehow manifests itself. Night of the Living Dead rises up beyond B-movie status into something enduring and chilling—and like the zombies themselves, it just keeps coming at you. Full story »

I wonder what Rush Limbaugh will be talking about on his show this coming week? Ah, maybe this:

In a letter dated March 8, [celebrity lawyer Gloria] Allred, writing on behalf of the Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund, requested that Palm Beach County State Attorney Michael McAuliffe probe whether the conservative radio personality had violated Section 836.04 of the Florida Statutes by calling Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke the two derogatory words.

The statute stipulates that anyone who “speaks of and concerning any woman, married or unmarried, falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity” is guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree. Full story »

Following up on yesterday’s post about how unfair it is when progressives fight fire with fire…

One of the architects of the modern conservative boycott movement back in the day was the now-deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the “Moral Majority.” His strategy was simple. Identify those television and radio stations whose programming “promoted” a “liberal agenda” or “secular humanist” values, then leverage the purchasing power of the congregation to bully offenders into changing their programming. Sadly, this brand of thuggery (remember, this is generally the same crowd screeching right now about how “liberals” are “censoring” the “free speech rights” of the richest, most successful, most widely heard man in political talk radio) proved effective enough that it has now become a go-to weapon in the arsenals of interest groups across the partisan spectrum. Full story »

Seriously?

It seems that after several days of mounting public pressure, Rush Limbaugh has finally cracked. How else could you explain his attempt to move beyond this whole “hating on young women” debacle by continuing to attack young women? Today’s victim? Author Tracie McMillan, who represents another one of those awful “overeducated” young unmarried women Rush so emphatically resents. (More)

This one isn’t as vitriolic as the Sandra Fluke case, but it certainly makes clear that Rush is committed to the War to Keep ‘Em Barefoot and Pregnant for the long haul.

Limbaugh’s remaining advertisers have to be just loving this stuff….

I don’t know when the very first boycott of a product or company happened, but I suspect the tactic has been around in some form or another for a long time. I do remember the onset of the modern form of the practice, though. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, social conservatives began going after businesses who advertised on shows they didn’t approve of as a key part of their culture war strategy and they did so with a good deal of effectiveness. So much effectiveness, in fact, that a lot of people today (both conservatives and more progressive types like myself) routinely make purchasing decisions based on a company’s political behavior. (I miss Buy Blue, which made the process a lot simpler.)

A lot of conservatives this week seem to have conveniently forgotten their history. Full story »

Wherein I tear Rush a new bunghole, explain why I feel called to do so, and expose some of his supporters for being simpletons in their own words.

I would just like to take a quick moment to thank the many, many readers that took the time to read my previous post about Carbonite’s initial lukewarm stance on supporting Rush Limbaugh with advertising dollars and CEO David Friend’s subsequent reversal (not that I caused it, but hey, it sounds good lined up like that). I’m still new to sharing my own insights to a potentially wide audience, so reaching just that many of you was, to me personally, a big deal. Thank you. To those of you who thoughtfully commented in agreement, thank you for making your voices heard. Many of you spoke more eloquently about the subject, and more pithily, than I could or did. Full story »

Update from Carbonite @ Facebook/Carbonite Website:

A Statement from David Friend, CEO of Carbonite:
“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show.

We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”

That’s a step in the right direction, Mr. Friend.  Iff only you hadn’t supported his massive assortment of egregious gaffes with your advertising dollars in the first place.   Sadly, you remain silent on those matters.  Perhaps if you had a black child you would suddenly get it? What other children would you need to have before you understand the damage Limbaugh does with the nature of his discourse? To top it off, you also perpetuate the myth that Limbaugh’s Saturday comments constitute genuine apology.

Original Story

On Friday, March 2, 2012, David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, an online data backup company that has earned kudos from Inc. and PC World for company growth, ease of use and affordability had this to say: Full story »

Andrew Breitbart is dead at 43.

The fair-and-balanced corporate media is in full swing, calling him a “conservative blogger,” which is true; a “conservative activist…[and] an influential voice in US Republican politics known for his attacks on liberals and Democrats,” which is true; and a “US conservative author and activist known for publishing embarrassing sting videos of left-wing groups,” which is at once true and pathologically deceptive.

For instance:

• In 2010, he posted two videos excerpting a speech by Shirley Sherrod, then Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA, at an NAACP event. The videos were edited together in a way that made it appear Sherrod was saying things she never said or meant, but the result was Sherrod being fired. Once the entire speech was made available, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was compelled to apologize to Sherrod and offer her a new job. Full story »

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Oh, the horror…. Full story »

The more I watch modern politics (and economics and the culture wars and science “debates”) the more it all reminds me of pro wrestling. You know how it goes. Tough match, back and forth, both the good guy (the “face”) and the bad guy (the “heel”) getting their licks in, and then at the decisive moment either the heel “accidentally” knocks the ref down or his manager distracts the ref or something. While the zebra is looking the other way, the black hat clocks the crowd favorite with a steel chair. Ref turns around. 1…2…3…and we have a new champion! Lather, rinse, repeat.

Which brings us to the breaking story surrounding The Heartland Institute and the revelation of all kinds of incriminating internal documents that, in a nutshell, prove that everything climate scientists have been saying about them is true. Full story »

I hope you made the time to read Wufnik’s post from Friday. Entitled “Surrounded by people ‘educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought,’” his analysis of our culture’s “active willingness to be deceived” represents one of the iconic moments in S&R’s history. If you didn’t see it yet, go read it now.

In addition to the questions the post explicitly addresses, it also raises other critical issues that deserve equally rigorous treatment. One point for further consideration, for instance, lies in his use of the word “educated.” I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to suggest that our society is, by a variety of metrics, more educated than perhaps any society in history. Those metrics would include factors like “number of people who attended college.” At the same time, we are significantly less educated if we pay more attention to factors like the much harder to quantify “capacity for critical thought.” Full story »

I read a lot of books, which means I also read a lot of book reviews. And some are classics. They’re essays of a certain type, after all, and there are great essays, so why not great book reviews? John Banvilles’s take-down of Ian McEwan’s Saturday in The New York Review of Books several years ago is already legend. Going back further, it’s hard to imagine a better piece of essay writing than Paul Fussell’s review of The Boy Scout Handbook (to be found in the collection of essays bearing that same name). And perhaps topping the list of all-time classics is Peter Medawar’s well-deserved destruction of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (collected in a book of Medawar’s essays, Pluto’s Republic), back when people actually read, or claimed to read, Teilhard, in 1961.
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When you come down to it, we’re surrounded by morons and fools, many of whom are our leaders–political, cultural, media, whatever. Opening a newspaper or turning on the television in modern America often is like diving into an oil spill. So it’s time once again to remind ourselves of their transgressions, which we have the Buffalo Beast to do for us, so we don’t have to waste time trying to keep track ourselves. Once again, here is their annual list of the 50 Most Loathsome Americans in 2011. It’s got Megyn Kelly (pictured, number 45) on it, and all the Repubican presidential candidates, and Rupert Murdoch is way up there at number 2, bless his heart. And The Donald, of course.

Yesterday I attempted to shed a little light on the PR crisis strategy behind the Komen Foundation’s sudden Planned Parenthood “backtracking.”

Contrary to what Komen’s highly-paid PR crisis hacks and gullible headline writers at newsdesks around the nation would ask you to believe, The Susan G. Komen Foundation does NOT promise to fund Planned Parenthood in the future. They promise to let PP APPLY for grants in the future. Applying and receiving are different things, as anyone who ever applied and got rejected for a job ought to know. Full story »

One of the many factual errors, misunderstandings, and misleading claims (I counted at least six) in a Wall Street Journal commentary denying human-caused climate disruption was that only four of the 16 co-signers had published on climate science, and only one has published anything significant on the topic recently. Many of the others were not even scientists (including celebrity aerospace engineer Burt Rutan), but rather engineers or physicians who were misidentified as scientists by the Journal‘s editorial page editor.

Today, the Journal published a response by 38 climate scientists to the commentary as a letter to the editor. This continues a pattern at the Journal of refusing to grant equal space and prominence to refutations of factually deficient commentaries. Full story »