Labels: Fox News, Nelson Mandela, wingnuttia

The reason pepper-spray ends up on the Scoville chart is that – you probably guessed this - it’s literally derived from pepper chemistry, the compounds that make habaneros so much more formidable than the comparatively wimpy bells. Those compounds are called capsaicins and – in fact – pepper spray is more formally called Oleoresin Capsicum or OC Spray.

But we’ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious.

Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison. That we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry. So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice – and certainly, it’s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup - it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.

My own purpose here is to focus on the dangers of a high level of capsaicin exposure. But as pointed out in the 2004 paper, Health Hazards of Pepper Spray, written by health researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the sprays contain other risky materials:

Depending on brand, an OC spray may contain water, alcohols, or organic solvents as liquid carriers; and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or halogenated hydrocarbons (such as Freon, tetrachloroethylene, and methylene chloride) as propellants to discharge the canister contents.(3) Inhalation of high doses of some of these chemicals can produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.

Their paper focuses mostly, though, on the dangerous associated with pepper-based compounds. In 1997, for instance, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco discovered that the “hot” sensation of habaneros and their ilk was caused by capsaicin binding directly to proteins in the membranes of pain and heat sensing neurons. Capsaicins can activate these neurons at below body temperature, leading to a startling sensation of heat. Repeated exposure can wear the system down, depleting neurotransmitters, reducing the sensation of the pain. This knowledge has led to a number of medical treatments using capsaicins to manage pain.

Its very mechanism, though, should remind us to be wary. As the North Carolina researchers point out, any compound that can influence nerve function is, by definition, risky. Research tells us that pepper spray acts as a potent inflammatory agent. It amplifies allergic sensitivities, it irritates and damages eyes, membranes, bronchial airways, the stomach lining – basically what it touches. It works by causing pain – and, as we know, pain is the body warning us of an injury.

In general, these are short term effects. Pepper spray, for instance, induces a burning sensation in the eyes in part by damaging cells in the outer layer of the cornea. Usually, the body repairs this kind of injury fairly neatly. But with repeated exposures, studies find, there can be permanent damage to the cornea.

The more worrisome effects have to do with inhalation – and by some reports, California university police officers deliberately put OC spray down protestors throats. Capsaicins inflame the airways, causing swelling and restriction. And this means that pepper sprays pose a genuine risk to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions.

And by genuine risk, I mean a known risk, a no-surprise any police department should know this risk, easy enough to find in the scientific literature.

Labels: Fox News, police state, That Woman Is An Idiot, torture

...whenever the right pulls out ACORN to try to discredit anything, they have automatically lost the argument.

Labels: assholes, fear and loathing, fearmongering, Fox News, hack journalism, right-wing hatemongers

Labels: Alan Grayson, Democrats with balls, Fox News, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class

House Republicans announced Wednesday they plan to force a floor vote on defunding NPR in response to the firing of analyst Juan Williams last month.

House GOP Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) and Rep. Doug Lamborn (Colo.) said that cutting funds to the publicly subsidized news organization was the winner of the conference's weekly "YouCut" contest, in which the public votes online on spending items they want eliminated.

"When NPR executives made the decision to unfairly terminate Juan Williams and to then disparage him afterwards, the bias of their organization was exposed," the two Republicans said in a statement. "Make no mistake, it is not the role of government to tell news organizations how to operate. What is avoidable, however, is providing taxpayer funds to news organizations that promote a partisan point of view. Eliminating taxpayer funding for NPR is precisely the kind of commonsense cut that we have to begin making if we want to fundamentally alter the way business is conducted in Washington.”

Labels: assholes, Fox News, Republican brownshirts, Teabag America

Labels: corporatism, Fox News, MSNBC, opinion journalism

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Labels: Fox News, government for sale, Greedy Republican Bastards

Labels: corporatism, Fox News

Here's a chapter in the culture wars that no one saw coming: Sarah Palin and Fox News facing off against '80s rap star and actor LL Cool J.

Popular conservative blogger Allahpundit tweaked liberals who accuse Tea Party supporters of racist sympathies, saying they'll be "shocked to find the alleged Grand Dragon of the tea-party movement making chitchat with a hip-hop legend."

The problem is that no such chitchat was produced for the Palin show. LL Cool J, star of "NCIS: Los Angeles," tweeted Tuesday night: "Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW."

When contacted by Yahoo! News for comment, a Fox News spokesperson explained that LL Cool J had been informed in 2008 that the interview was planned as a segment for "Real American Stories"--though of course the network couldn't have known at the time that Palin would be hosting.

Update: Looks like the confusion isn't limited to the hip hop genre. Toby Keith's publicist tells the New York Times that Keith has never done an interview with Palin and she had no idea he was being used in the Palin special. She believes that Fox will be recycling an interview Keith gave Fox in 2009.

Labels: Fox News, Sarah Palin, utter horseshit

Labels: captive audiences, fitness, Fox News

What's most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in many other countries that do have a free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he's doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, "fair and balanced" is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media's role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes fair play. But it's a demonstrable deceit that no longer deserves equal time.

Whether the White House engages with Fox is a tactical political question. Whether we journalists continue to do so is an ethical one. By appearing on Fox, reporters validate its propaganda values and help to undermine the role of legitimate news organizations. Respectable journalists—I'm talking to you, Mara Liasson—should stop appearing on its programs. A boycott would make Ailes too happy, so let's try just ignoring Fox, shall we?

Labels: Fox News

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

So now GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC.  You don't have to agree with the reader's view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced.  Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive."  Katie Couric said that when she was at NBC, "there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations" not to be too critical of the Bush administration.  MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government.  And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE.  The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government.  Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations "report" on the government -- driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional.  GE's forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.

* * * * * 

On a very related note:  this week, former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe was a guest-host on MSNBC's Countdown while Keith Olbermann is on vacation.  When Olbermann is there, Wolffe is a very frequent guest on Countdown, where he is called an "MSNBC political analyst" and comments on political news.  All of this, despite the fact that Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.," the corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, its President and CEO.  According to the Press Release they issued to announce Wolffe's joining the company:

Labels: Bill O'Reilly, corporatism, Fox News, Keith Olbermann, mainstream media, MSNBC

Their real problem is that they can't stand that they have been bested. That the Harvard Cum Laude Math major they dismiss as a clown has bested them. The one man who will call Rush Limbaugh a big, fat idiot and do the research to back up his assertion with empirical data and never dream of apologizing for it - the man who wrote a best seller about the right wing titled Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - now has the bully pulpit of a Senate seat. And that is an achievement that not one of those braying jackasses could ever hope to achieve. And the bile it causes them to choke on makes my heart sing. I wonder of it is possible to overdose on schaddenfreud, cuz I think I am about to lose consciousness...

Joe Conason spent some time in the fever swamps documenting the deranged attacks of the right-wing noise machine against his friend. I thank him for doing so because it means I didn't have to.

Sadly, the most notorious Franken antagonist, Bill O'Reilly, was absent from the airwaves on the evening of Franken's victory. Demure guest host Monica Crowley seemed bemused by the Minnesota outcome. But Glenn Beck, in his semiliterate way, heaped on enough abuse to keep Billo's fans satisfied for the moment. "It shows how crazy our country has gone," he began. "It shows that we've lost our minds. It's like we've slipped through a wormhole. It's like, this look likes the country I grew up in, but no -- Al Franken would never be a senator ... We have entered a place to where there isn't statesmanship anymore."

The tenor of the Fox attacks grew more feverish with the ranting of Brian Kilmeade, who judged Franken "barely sane if you read his books, and quite angry in every facet of his life." Kilmeade went on to describe the new senator as "hateful," "evil," bitter," and "maniacal," and again as "angry." Sean Hannity echoed Fox's other amateur shrinks, saying, "This guy, Franken, he's not all there."

So did R. Emmett Tyrell, the Human Events columnist and former editor of the American Spectator, who appeared to confuse Franken's portrayal of a fictional character with the former comedian's own personality, and went on to predict that he will need "anger management counseling" during his Senate term. "He was weird on 'Saturday Night Live' in the 1970s, on which he popularized a goofball character named Stuart Smalley, a self-help guru who repeated over and again, 'I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!' ... My guess is that the Stuart Smalley character is the essential Al Franken, a weirdo."

Speaking for Pajamas Media, Rick Moran called Franken "a bat guano crazy liberal" and gloated over the "rabid, unbridled, hateful partisanship" that will bring both the senator and his party to grief. "It is a pathological, almost clinical condition that will explode from time to time in bitter denunciation of the opposition, supplying bloggers and commentators with a cornucopia of material," wrote Moran with grim satisfaction, adding that "Franken's psychosis" includes a pathological hatred of Christians and particularly Catholics (which may come as a shock to his Catholic wife, Franni).

Then there was Limbaugh, the capo di tutti right-wing capi, who warned with pithy brevity that the 60th Democratic vote in the Senate is "a genuine lunatic."

Calmer but no less nasty was the assessment of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which insisted that the Democrat had somehow hijacked the Senate seat from the rightful Republican victor. "Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election," said the editorial, without deigning to mention that Republicans in Minnesota, including the governor, had effectively vetted the recount and canvassing from Election Day forward, up to the final Supreme Court decision.

The WSJ is simply spouting bullshit - par for the course for an organ of the Murdoch noise machine. No one in Minnesota thinks the election was stolen. Sara Janacek, a leading conservative voice in Minnesota told the Washington Post that those accusations are false. "The state media -- and a majority of the public -- do think Franken's election was legitimate," she said. "We had an open and very public recount process."

Let the critics sneer and underestimate him. He will, in the meantime, study issues from every angle and be diligent about the job that has been entrusted to him. He is there in large part to honor his friend Paul Wellstone, whose seat he now occupies. He is not mean, crazy or frivolous and his election was legitimate, and those who want you to think otherwise are neither as stable nor as smart as he is, and I base that on the public behavior of both Franken and those who hate him.

Fox, of course, has a vendetta against the guy. Have you forgotten this?

Aug 23, 2003 | His voice full of amused contempt, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin refused Fox News' request for an injunction against author and comedian Al Franken's new book on Friday. "There are hard cases and there are easy cases," said Chin. "This is an easy case. The case is wholly without merit both factually and legally ... It is ironic that a media company that should seek to protect the First Amendment is instead seeking to undermine it."

The hearing couldn't have gone better for Franken, who is being sued by Fox because the network claims his new book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," violates Fox's trademark of the phrase "Fair and Balanced." Fox had sought to block Franken's use of the phrase pending a trial for trademark infringement, in which it hoped to win compensation for damages.

But Chin's ruling suggested there might not be a trial. Besides rejecting Fox's petition for an injunction, Chin practically invited Franken's lawyers to file for dismissal. And he hinted that if it pursues its lawsuit, Fox may lose the very trademark it's trying to defend -- a trademark that, according to the suit, Fox has spent $61 million promoting.

It is always important to consider the source when someone is attacking someone else, and in the case of Senator Franken that admonishment has never been more true or more important.

c/p @ They Gave Us a Republic

Labels: Fox News, Senator Franken, Slate

Labels: Fox News, hysteria, Jon Stewart, wingnuttia

Labels: Fox News, liars, vote suppression

Labels: Fox News, John McCain, right-wing hatemongers, wingnuttia

CAVUTO: Now, Jonathan, you're not calming down, right?

HOENIG: Neil, I'm not. In fact, both Joe Biden and Barack Obama have made it very clear that they support socialized health care. In fact, they think that health care is a right. And I think it shows a real ignorance as to what a right actually is. I mean, a right is right to action; it's not to a freebie from someone else. And I know it sounds kind of curt in this age of political correctness and altruism, but why should I be responsible for paying for Joe Biden's brain aneurysms?

MARC LAMONT HILL (Fox News contributor): Ouch.

CAVUTO: All righty. I'll leave that alone.

Labels: Fox News, idiocy, wingnuttia

Labels: Fox News, idiocy, wingnuttia

Labels: Fox News, liars, Tony Snow

Fox News's newest contributor, to be announced today, may surprise the liberal crowd: former Clinton White House lawyer Lanny Davis.

"Fox has always treated me with respect and given me a chance to express my point of view," Davis says of the network that the Democratic candidates refused to grant a debate out of concern that it favors Republicans. He will be a frequent guest, along with such Fox stalwarts as Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich.

A relentless surrogate for Hillary Clinton, Davis says, he felt "ganged up on" during appearances on the other cable channels. He says that Clinton was "demonized" by MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, and that CNN's primary-night panels were tilted toward the Obama side.

Labels: DINOs, Fox News, hypocrisy