'TBH Politoons'
Thanks, again, Tim!
Baron Dave Romm
Talking Back to Hate Radio
By Baron Dave Romm
Responding to hate radio is an onerous task. Rush, Drudge and co. are preaching to the choir who listen to them for hours a day. They are lying, and most people, even conservatives, know that they're lying, and they need to hear the lies over and over and over to internalize their extremist views. Joe Conason's latest book Big Lies covers much of this material. Most people just ignore hate radio, hoping it will go away. Well, it hasn't, and now millions of Americans rely on these hopelessly biased sources for their news and opinions. They can't think by themselves, they need to be told what to say and feel. And they need to hear it over and over; this is what Berkeley researchers call cognitive closure. From the press release of the article Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition:
One of the Minnesota home-grown hatemongers is Jason Lewis. Personally, I never listen to him or the station he's on (the same radio station plays three hours of Lewis and three hours of Rush every day...). But some are taking action. The Jason Lewis Anti-Fan Club is being formed, urging people to listen and call in from the liberal perspective. The club's motto: "It's like fixing a clogged up toilet. Disgusting but necessary." Also, the club is taking a page from the right-wing playbook: Call the advertisers on the show and let them know that you're not going to buy their product if they advertise on such a program. Much radio advertising is bought in blocks, and sometimes the companies don't monitor just where their product is being pitched. A call to the VP of Marketing (you might have to wade through a few people to get the right one), with an example of the type of hatemongering associated with the show, might convince them to pull their ads.
You can use similar tactics for hate radio in your local area. Start your own anti-fan club!
Going to the Minnesota State Fair was a bit depressing, since I saw at least two smaller radio stations that I'd never heard of that were spewing the most gawd-awful junk. As one blogger, a self-confessed Reaganite Republican, put it: "The Patriot; talk radio for those who think Jason Lewis is too much a G-dless commie." The US is becoming Iran.
Dittoheads believe lies and they don't believe the truth. Right wingers are anal in defense of their lies. I used to say that "a conservative is someone who was improperly toilet trained". But that doesn't fully explain the pathological loathing of Coulter and others. Perhaps they were raped by their fathers? Counselling would help. Maybe meds. But until then, you have to match their vehemence, if not their scatalogical insults.
They're lying. They know they're lying, otherwise they wouldn't need to hear the lies over and over. You catch them in a lie -- and you will -- and shove it back at them, and they'll just sit there with a stupid grin on their face as they desperately pretend that their whole worldview hasn't come crashing down on them. You will never convince them, at least not in one conversation. Facts will not change their mind. You must match their passion on an emotional level. Remember: You're the good guys and, though they hate you, they are not the enemy. Is it worth arguing with people who get all their opinions from Pravda (aka Fox) and hate radio? Up to you.
Aside from simply lying, the Taliban wing of the GOP tend to use three different types of verbal gymnastics. When you make a valid, supported criticism of Bush or the oily Bush administration they:
1) Change The Subject, preferably to Clinton. They simply can't defent Bush or the neocons, so they just fall back on their standard rants from a decade ago, often with a newer twist; often a lie.
Counter: a) "Don't change the subject, let's stick to Bush." b) "Oh, so you're not even going to TRY to defend Bush!" c) "Geeze, you're soft on crime."
2) Use the "Everybody Does It" pseudo defense. Often a variant of the first defense, since their goal is to NOT talk about Bush and start ranting about someone else. They seek to mitigate their own crimes by pointing using others as similar bad examples. Don't let them generalize.
Counter: a) "Everybody does NOT do it, and certainly not to the same extent. You're making a bad analogy and letting some very bad people off the hook for some real crimes." b) "Oh, so you admit Bush IS a crook. Yes, you just compared Bush with people you insist are criminals. That makes him a crook too, right?" c) "You've been whining about other people for a long time, let's deal with the crooks in power now." d) Geeze, you're soft on crime."
3) Lastly, they resort to the "Are You Drunk?" personal attack. Mud slinging can take many forms. They will demonize you (or the person you cite). They don't dare try to counter the facts you've presented. Heck, I don't think they understand the facts against them.
Counter: I've got to admit, when it gets to the schoolyard taunting level, you might as well have fun with them. You're never going to win the argument. They are MUCH better at personal insults than you are, having spent more time listening to professional whiners like Rush and Drudge than they have talking to their family. You can say something like "are YOU on drugs?" or "were you raped by your father?" if you're in the mood for that sort of thing. But you MUST counter their emotional spew. "Oho, now it's personal insults. You're not even going to TRY to argue facts. That says more about you than about me."
You can use their knee-jerk hatred against them. One of the latest smears is that the Dems are conspiring to lose the presidential election in 2004 (!) to make way for a run by Hillary Clinton in 2008. I generally just nod enthusiastically and say, "Hillary will make a great president." This sure makes Dean look better...
During the Shockwave show where I talked with the guy behind the Jason Lewis Anti-Fan Club, I read the How To Write A Letter To The Editor points from a previous Bartcop-E column. And then had a letter published the following week! Good timing on my part, eh?
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia with a radio show, a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. He reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E here, and you can hear the last two Shockwave broadcasts in Real Audio here (scroll down to Shockwave). Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air, and I'm collecting extra-weird stuff for a possible CD compilation.
He's Been Busy!
The Worried Shrimp
Reader Suggestion
Re: CA Recall
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
The Wall Street Poet
'When Mighty Nation Stoops To Folly'
As it becomes increasingly obvious that our invasion and occupation of Iraq is one of the most disastrous policy miscalculations in U.S. history, more and more people are asking who is most responsible for this fiasco. Wolfie, this poem is for you...
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Very nice weather.
Still having problems with mail.
Tonight, Monday, CBS begins the evening with a RERUN 'Yes, Dear', followed by a RERUN 'Still Standing', then a RERUN
'Raymond', followed by a RERUN 'King Of Queens', then a RERUN 'CSI: Miami'.
Scheduled on a FRESH Dave are Chris Rock and the Star Spangles.
Scheduled on a FRESH Craiggers are William H. Macy, Robert Rodriguez, and Suzanne Vega.
NBC opens the night with a RERUN 'Fear Factor', followed by a FRESH 'For Lu$t Or $' (which runs over 10 minutes), then a FRESH
'Meet My Folks' (starts at 10 minutes after the top of the hour).
On a RERUN Jay (from 8/14/03), are Kevin Costner, and the cast of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". (RERUNs all week)
On a RERUN Conan are Tina Fey, Jack and Kelly Osbourne, the Chieftains, and Earl Scruggs. (RERUNs all week)
On a RERUN Carson Daly are Donald Faison and Okapiec Triplets. (RERUNs all week)
ABC has 'NFL Preseason', where it's the Colts visiting the Broncos, then the left coast gets to suffer through an editted version of 'Gladiator'.
On a RERUN Jimmy Kimmel (from 7/11/03), are Johnnie Cochran, Alf, and the Ataris, with guest co-host Zach Galifianakis. (RERUNs all week)
The WB offers a RERUN '7th Heaven', followed by the FRESH, but pre-taped 'The 5th Annual Family Friendly Awards'.
Faux has a FRESH 'the O.C.', followed by a FRESH 'Parasite Hotel'.
UPN has a RERUN 'The Parkers', followed by a RERUN 'Girlfriends', then another RERUN 'Girlfriends', followed by a RERUN
'Half & Half'.
A&E has 'Biography' (Charlie Sheen), 'Cold Case Files', and 'City Confidential'.
AMC has the movie 'The Hunter', followed by the movie 'The Usual Suspects'.
BBC -
[7pm] 'Ground Force' - Manchester;
[7:30pm] 'Changing Rooms' - Guiseley;
[8pm] 'Red Cap' - Crush;
[9pm] 'Rebus' - The Hanging Garden;
[11pm] 'So Graham Norton' - Andie MacDowell;
[11:30pm] 'So Graham Norton' - Heidi Klum;
[12:am] 'Rebus' - The Hanging Garden;
[2am] 'Red Cap' - Crush;
[3am] 'So Graham Norton' - Andie MacDowell; and
[3:30am] 'So Graham Norton' - Heidi Klum. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Bravo has 'West Wing', followed by the movie 'Ghosts Of Mississippis'.
On a RERUN Jon Stewart is TBA. (RERUNs all week)
FX will be showing 'Nip\Tuck' every night this week, starting with the pilot tonight - in case anyone wants to catch up.
History has 'Modern Marvels', another 'Modern Marvels', followed by 'Wild West Tech', and another 'Wild West Tech'.
SciFi is all 'Stargate SG-1' all night.
TCM pays a 24-hour tribute to the phenomenal career of Kirk Douglas,
another Democrat and fabulous philanthropist.
[6am] 'Act of Love' (1953);
[8am] 'Two Weeks In Another Town' (1962);
[10am] 'Cast A Giant Shadow' (1966);
[12:30pm] 'The Way West' (1967);
[3:00 pm] 'A Gunfight' (1971);
[4:30 pm] 'Spartacus' (1960);
[8pm] 'Champion' (1949);
[10pm] 'Paths Of Glory' (1957);
[11:30pm] 'The Big Sky' (1952);
[2am] 'Lust For Life' (1956); and
[4:15am] 'The Hook' (1963). (ALL TIMES EDT)
Loki, a six-year-old Staffordshire Bull Terrier, leaps over a jump with a tennis ball in his mouth during a 'Fly Ball' competition in Sydney, August 24, 2003. Fly Ball, invented in Australia, is a game for dogs whose owners teach them to negotiate an obstacle course as fast as possible, retrieve a ball and outpace the competition.
Photo by Will Burgess
The Information One-Stop
Moose & Squirrel
Marks 83rd Birthday
Ray Bradbury
Science fiction author Ray Bradbury celebrated his 83rd birthday with a wish that one night, 100 years from now, a boy will stay up late reading "The Martian Chronicles" with a flashlight under the covers in his home on the Red Planet.
"That's the dream I have and that's the reason I'm here," the author of the 1950 classic said during a birthday party organized Saturday by The Planetary Society.
The space exploration advocacy group presented the Los Angeles writer with a mammoth birthday card printed with messages from 4,000 well wishers. Actress and unabashed fan Angie Dickinson gave him a big kiss. Director Peter Hyams, whose movie version of Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" is due in April, called him a "national treasure." Sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson asked for an autograph.
Actress Nichelle Nichols pinned a "Star Trek" badge on his lapel.
"Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me to go out on the lawns of summer and hold my hands out and say, 'Mars, take me home.' And I have never been back," Bradbury said.
Ray Bradbury
Serves As Auctioneer
Meryl Streep
Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep served as auctioneer to help sell artwork — including her husband's — to benefit survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.
Streep took the stage before a crowd of about 1,500 on Saturday for the black-tie benefit for Arts for ACT, the annual auction for Abuse Counseling and Treatment.
The auction raised $296,795. Including ticket sales and a silent auction, the fund-raiser exceeded $400,000, ACT's executive director Jennifer Benton said.
Meryl Streep
Two Tibetan men spin the prayer wheels outside the Tsethang monastery as they offer prayers in Tsethang, a historic town in the Yarlung Tsangpo valley where the earliest Tibetan kings reigned some 1,300 years ago. Tibetans are hoping Chinese President Hu Jintao may relax Beijing's hardline policy on Tibet as the government launched a media campaign Thursday to promote its position on the region
Photo by Goh Chai Hin
Makes Plea for Chechen Refugees
Angelina Jolie
Oscar-winning actress and "Tomb Raider" star Angelina Jolie made a personal plea to the Russian government Sunday not to force thousands of Chechen refugees in Ingushetia to return to their war-torn homeland.
Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, also added her voice to appeals for the release of a Dutch aid worker kidnapped a year ago in Dagestan, just east of Chechnya.
She was speaking at the end of a four-day visit to Russia, including Ingushetia, which is home to about 80,000 Chechens who have fled fighting and abuse from soldiers but are now under pressure from Moscow to go home for a local leadership election.
Angelina Jolie
Kucinich Talks Farm Policy
Willie Nelson
Country singer Willie Nelson hooked up with Rep. Dennis Kucinich on Saturday to help the Ohio congressman pitch his plan to help family farmers.
Kucinich, who is facing eight others in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he wants to end agricultural monopolies, including banning meatpacker ownership of livestock, and require country-of-origin labeling on agricultural products to help farmers compete in a market that he said continues to crush them.
Nelson plans to put on a concert for Kucinich in Iowa, where precinct caucuses launch the presidential nominating season. That concert was postponed from September until later in the fall. Another concert is scheduled for Cleveland.
Willie Nelson
Kucinich for President
Moves Up Season
ABC
ABC has moved up the premieres of its Tuesday comedies by a week to Sept. 23 to avert potential second-episode conflict with the California recall election Oct. 7, a Tuesday.
Freshman "I'm With Her" and sophomore "Less Than Perfect" were scheduled to debut Sept. 30, but now they'll bow on the night the 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. anchors -- "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" and "According to Jim," respectively -- kick off their new seasons Sept. 23.
ABC
In The Kitchen With BartCop & Friends
Not Relatd To Marlon Brando
Courtney Love
Attempting to quiet an international media buzz, Courtney Love's mother said the rock star widow is not Marlon Brando's granddaughter.
Linda Carroll, 59, became the focus of attention last week when a story surfaced in a London newspaper that Brando was Love's grandfather by virtue of a brief liaison with Carroll's mother, novelist Paula Fox.
The source of the information was said to be Carroll's memoir about her childhood, to be published in 2005 by Doubleday.
"First of all, it's crazy, it's not true," she told the (Corvallis) Gazette-Times. "Second of all, my book doesn't say that."
Courtney Love
Beaters walk during a religious procession in Guardia Sanframondi, south Italy, August 24, 2003. Every seven years people of the little town in south Italy hold a religious feast in which hundreds of hooded penitents, dressed in white habits form a procession to honor the Virgin Assunta. The men whip themselves with iron chains and a 'sponge,' a piece of cork with nails in it, while the women tend to their wounds with vinegar so the men don't feel the pain. All the penitents hold a little crucifix in their left hand as an aid to their meditation and prayer.
Phot by Max Rossi
Floetry, Missy Elliott Top Awards
'Lady of Soul'
Neo-soul duo Floetry, rapper Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliot and singer Heather Headley took home the most awards Saturday at the 2003 Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards.
Floetry was honored for best single by a group, "Say Yes," and best album by a group for their "Floetic," as well as best new group.
Elliott won twice, in best song of the year and best music video for the raunchy "Work It."
Headley's "He Is" won her honors as best new solo artist, and her album "This is Who I Am" was named the best solo effort of the year.
Other winners included Dorinda Clark-Cole for best gospel album and Erykah Badu for solo single with "Love of my Life."
Badu also took home the 2003 Aretha Franklin "Entertainer of the Year" award, and Vivica A. Fox was chosen for the 2003 Lena Horne Award honoring career achievement.
'Lady of Soul'
Formerly 'The Vidiot'
A Halliburton Subsidiary
'The Bob Hope Dining Facility'
The spirit of Bob Hope, the late legendary entertainer and darling of the US military, provided some light relief for beleaguered American soldiers in Baghdad when his name was lent to a huge new canteen in their heavily-fortified airport base.
As hungry troopers queued here Sunday, an army brass band played "Thanks for the Memory," Hope's theme song, played almost every time he made one of his countless appearances on US army stages across the globe.
The soldiers unloaded their weapons as they entered the massive white tarpaulin and steel structure that seats 2,500 and can serve up to 8,000 meals in each of its four daily sittings.
The 180-strong team who cooked and served the food were almost all Indians employed by subcontractors for Kellog Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, an oilfield services and construction company formerly run by US Vice President Dick Cheney.
For the rest, 'The Bob Hope Dining Facility'
A wolf walks in an outdoor enclosure at a game park in Gross-Schoenebeck, some 40 kilometers north of Berlin, August 14, 2003. A century after hunters killed the last wolf in Germany, the stealthy creatures have returned across the Polish border to settle in Saxony's Lausitz region.
Photo by Arnd Wiegmann
Faked Her Own Death
Misty Quackenbush
Misty Quackenbush, 27, of Cortez, was supposed to have been sentenced July 11 to four years in prison on her guilty plea to distribution of methamphetamines.
Instead, she allegedly placed personal identification in an abandoned pickup near a reservoir, doused the truck with blood of unknown origin and fled, officials said.
About four weeks later, former Montezuma County Deputy Brandon Brown, now a Texas lawman, spotted Quackenbush in Shamrock, Texas, some 600 miles from Cortez. Brown had read about her supposed death.
Quackenbush was sentenced Friday in Durango to five years in prison — the original four plus one for jumping bail.
Misty Quackenbush
Group Probing Ahnold's Father
Gustav Schwarzenegger
It's just a tiny typewritten line tucked away in an immense archive, but it sheds further light on the Nazi past of Arnold Schwarzenegger's father.
The brief entry in one of millions of documents stored at the Austrian State Archives shows that Gustav Schwarzenegger, the late father of the film star now running for governor of California, was a volunteer member of the Sturmabteilung, or SA — the notorious Nazi storm troopers also known as brownshirts.
The father's Nazi Party membership and combat record in the German army are not new, and his son's dismay about it is well known. The revelations of SA membership that emerged a week ago add another strand to the murky story.
The "SA 1.5.1939" listing shows that the elder Schwarzenegger joined May 1, 1939, the year after Germany annexed Austria and six months after the brownshirts played a crucial role in the bloody Kristallnacht riots.
For the rest, Gustav Schwarzenegger
Austrian State Archives
Simon Wiesenthal Center
'Ark of Darkness'
"The Ark of Darkness", a Political/Science-Fiction work, in tidy, weekly installments (and updated every Friday).
The Ark Group reunites and Flazer fulfills his destiny.
'The Osbournes'
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 5
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 4
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 3
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 2
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 1
