Four Things

The way I see it, this graph boils down to four things:

Perceived level of understanding is a dangerous thing. But then, we knew this.
Self-identifying independents of 1993 were largely moderates. Today, they are (apparently) the far right that finds the GOP not-quite-lunatic-enough and (probably) some fraction of former GOPers who are horrified by that party today. A “voted-X in last election” cross-tab would’ve helped here. A lot.
The epistemic loop seems entirely responsible for the shift in initial wrong-ness, and misperception among Democrats that also has to be corrected through painstakingly slow re-education and gradual convincing. Lots of Democrats were buying into the Death Panels horse-shit too, after all, they heard it on the news, so the news-givers must be making at least a casual effort at factual correctness instead of merely reporting what various “sides” said. Right? Right? It is a mortal lock that these Democrats are older, and came of age with Walter Cronkite. They implicitly trust what they hear on TV, even if it’s on FOXnews. You can (eventually) convince them otherwise, but only with a lot of work; and research shows they still marginally believe the wrong fact if it comes first, even when said people realize the initial fact is misinformation. This is why primacy in the race to inoculation in the messaging war matters so goddamned much, and yet the Democrat categorically refuses to use it.
Nearly 80% of Republicans self-identifying as “not knowing much” about healthcare reform knew that there were going to be Death Panels. More than 80% who “knew a lot” thought that as well. This is FOXnews, Rush, Beck, and Drudge (aka the MSM’s assignment editor). No other explanation for it.
The Facts Do Not Matter

Full report (PDF link) here.

The Fucks Don’t Matter

You need simple proof that the facts don’t matter? Doesn’t get much more simple than this.

Dick Cheney, on the floor of the Senate tells the cheerfully collegial Pat Leahy “Go fuck yourself.” Here’s how Cheney described this incident yesterday:

“You’d be surprised how many people liked that. That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.”

Bill Kristol says:

“[telling Leahy to go fuck himself is] a beautiful statement, really, of justice. […] Dick Cheney is going out [and] defending justice in the end.”

Joe Biden, on the other hand, says “This is a big fucking deal” with glee, not with malevolence or personal animus, in regard to the signing-into-law of health care reform.
Bill Kristol says:

“This is one of the most despicable moments in American politics in our lifetimes.”

Repeat after me: The FACTS DO NOT MATTER.

Factual Fail

Couldn’t agree more on the myth of the drunken poor (emphasis added):

over 72 percent of adults whose family incomes are at least four times the federal poverty level drink alcohol. The figure for adults whose families make less than the poverty threshold? 45.2 percent.
[…]
These surprising figures counter the prevalent misconception that poor people drink too much, forfeiting well-paying jobs in exchange for lazy afternoons in front of the TV, beer bottle in hand. Rush Limbaugh’s suggestion that Americans on food stamps “buy Twinkies, Milk Duds, potato chips, six-packs of Bud, then head home to watch the NFL on one of two color TVs” is more than factually incorrect (food stamps can’t be used to purchase alcohol anywhere in the country); it’s another disturbing example of conservative propaganda that blames poverty on the poor. The sole function of this dangerous rhetoric is to dissuade middle- and upper-class Americans from examining the flawed social structures and policies that both cause and perpetuate poverty across the nation.

From that promising start we go right into Why We Fail:

we progressive advocates do have something powerful on our side that Limbaugh and other conservative personalities lack: facts.

How many times does the fact that facts don’t matter, at all, have to be shoved into our collective faces before we realize it? Let’s all have a Dr. Sean Maguire moment together:

The facts don’t matter
The facts don’t matter
The facts don’t matter
The FACTS DO NOT MATTER

In the modern rhetorical war, taking place in the context of the modern MSM, the facts are a hindrance to be overcome. The modern GOP proves that simple truth above all else. Nuance, reason, adherence to “the facts” simply doesn’t play and wont play anywhere in the foreseeable future. Short, rhyming slogans, preferably divorced from all meaning and aimed directly at the limbic brain are what will carry the day. Every time. Until the Democrat realizes that, and plans accordingly, they will fail. Every time.

On a recent Friday night, a couple hundred [MSM media] influentials gathered for a Mardi Gras-themed birthday party for Betsy Fischer, the executive producer of “Meet the Press.” Held at the Washington home of the lobbyist Jack Quinn, the party was a classic Suck-Up City affair in which everyone seemed to be congratulating one another on some recent story, book deal, show or haircut (and, by the way, your boss is doing a swell job, and maybe we could do an interview).

Mark Leibovich, for the NYT, explaining (without trying to) why our Church of the Savvy is so irretrievably fucked up. This is why we invaded Iraq. This is why W. Bush was “elected” the first time. This is why brazen lies are treated as fact, and Meet The Press still refuses even a cursory, days-later and little noted review of the spew that emanates from its own festering maw. This is why they like shit like this and this, and hail it as the very paragon of their output. This is why Sally Quinn is merely the Mike Allen of the ‘90s, just like the execrable Mark Halperin was the Mike Allen of the Aughts. This is why the MSM just loves to write adoring articles about their own Kewl Kids, especially if same just look to the Drudge Report as their assignment editor whilst publically moping about the Liberal Bias in their industry. This is why.

Hot out there

By my gauge, it’s currently 86° in sunny Boston, MA. NOAA says we goin’ to 92° (though that figure clearly represents a government takeover of weather forecasting). Today’s low will likely turn out to have been 57°, four degrees above the average high.

This is all terribly embarrassing for the climate change deniers. I’m sure they will be called to account for this deviation from their unsubstantiated by any data ever collected anywhere “nothing’s changing” stance. How can “nothing’s changing” possibly account for the fact that it is warm today? I demand to know. ‘Merica demands to know. Also, Al Gore is fat.

STARTing to sink in

I suppose this qualifies as PAM; Spencer Ackerman over to the Washington Independent has finally noted that even if you manage to keep Dick Lugar aboard the START train, you still have to find seven other GOPers willing to vote with the President on anything:

that acrimonious tenor is likely to flip some of the [relatively few GOP] yes votes [on arms reduction under W Bush for fuck’s sake] to either no votes or abstentions, however striking the hypocrisy.

Indeed it is. Now, of course, this isn’t considered to be the result of faulty logic or lousy governance on the part of the GOP, mind you. Oh no, definitely not that. They’re just playing the game and trying to win the day, politically. All that matters is what happened five minutes ago, and that’s only for the next 15. What we have here is plainly, plainly a failure on the part of The Democrat:

It’s just not clear yet [if the GOP votes will be there]. If not, it won’t just be an indictment of the Obama administration’s legislative acumen.

I guess we’re supposed to celebrate the “won’t just be” part of that. Strikingly bad construction. Rest assured that we shall never, ever see an article that systematically attacks the GOP’s stunning and repeated hypocrisy and categorizes the brazen lies, all of which is made worse by being lies and hypocrisy in service of nothing; they have no policy ideas to offer that go beyond a four word, rhyming phrase, and they never do. Because they aren’t required to. Nihilism works because it’s allowed to work by the Washington media establishment. At least it is when it’s coming from the GOP. And, in this case, it’s a brazen hypocrisy that threatens us all, directly and existentially. This ain’t kids with dirtbikes, these are actual fucking hydrogen bombs. And it’s a brazen violation of what was supposed to be a long-respected construct that “politics ends at the waters edge” when it comes to granting the President reasonably wide leeway on foreign policy, and especially when it comes to nuclear foreign policy.

START is a dead letter under a Democrat. Period. May not even get out of committee. That’s what the MSM should be looking at, day after day, 24/7: how can the country’s governance be this fundamentally broken? Instead, we’ll get plucky dogs and Clinton’s penis.
The Democrat should be hollering today and every day about the thousands, thousands of potentially loose nukes that are now going to be sitting around, just waiting to find a use. And putting it all on the GOP’s doorstep. We’ll see none of that. Instead, Obama will just stroll into the messaging buzz-saw. Again.

Whether a loss of, say, 19 House seats and 3 Senate seats [by the Democrat in 2010] would be regarded as a “win” by the media is hard to say

Nate Silver, funniest man alive.
What is hard to say is: if The Democrat were to somehow post a net win of 19 House and 3 Senate seats, would that be regarded as a “win” by the media. I think the answer is pretty clear.

Terrible news for the Democrat

All that back-room, closed-door, no-debate, unconstitutional wrangling has produced this epic fail of an outcome:

CBO has finished its work [scoring the “fix” sidecar and final healthcare reform bill] and will release the official preliminary score later today. But here are the basic numbers: The bill will cost $940 billion over the first 10 years and reduce the deficit by $130 billion during that period. In the second 10 years – so, 2020 to 2029 – it will reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion. The legislation will cover 32 million Americans, or 95 percent of the legal population.

To put this in context, that’s more deficit reduction than either the House or Senate bill, and more coverage than the Senate bill.

But, by all means, let’s talk about the horror of “deem and pass” some more. Likewise, let’s attack and mock folks with Parkinson’s disease who currently can’t get insurance or afford treatment. Why can’t they all just exhibit some ‘Merican can-do attitude and Go Die in the Streets? And, for God’s sake, keep the Guvmint out of my Medicare!

Islands in the stream

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has put out an analysis of MSM’s business model and its prospects. A few grim highlights:

We estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30 percent, which leaves an extra $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves, we predict more cuts in 2010.

$141 million of nonprofit money has flowed into new media efforts over the last four years (not including public broadcasting). That is less than one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources alone.

[~79% of internet users never click on an ad, so:] Advertising during the year declined for the first time since 2002, according to data from eMarketer. Updated August projections put the declines at 4.6 percent, to $22.4 billion in total revenues.

Under the heading “Thrilling news for the New York Times’ upcoming paywall model,” you have:

Only about one third of Americans (35 percent) have a news destination they would call a favorite and even among these users, only 19 percent said they would continue to visit if the site put up a paywall.

But it seems the peeps do like opinion television, day night or otherwise:

At night, when cable is dominated by ideological talk shows, Fox grew by nearly a quarter to an average of 2.13 million viewers at any given moment. MSNBC rose 3 percent to 786,000, while CNN fell 15 percent to 891,000 viewers….

In daytime, CNN was up 9 percent over 2008 to an average of 621,000 viewers. But Fox daytime viewership grew again by almost a quarter, to roughly twice CNN’s audience (1.2 million viewers). MSNBC, relying on NBC news people more than talk show hosts, fell 8 percent to 325,000 viewers.

So, MSM, I guess this is it. You’re going to die. Before anyone start dancing on their grave, though, consider a future in which the Glenn Becks and Bill O’Reillys of the world (and their left of center counterparts) are all that’s left on cable news stations…and in which 80% of the content the blogosphere, notably including (in a roundabout way) this very post, is:

ongoing analysis of more than a million blogs and social media sites finds that 80 percent of the links are to U.S. legacy media.

So, in five years or so, we’ll all just be reblogging some crap O’Reilly said last night. And calling that news.

Jiminy. In the finest tradition of the blogosphere: I proclaim that I don’t know what it is, but something’s got to be did. Doubtless there will be an app for that…