Mark Cuban inadvertently reveals massive Twitter conspiracy

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment
So, what, it's like a TV Guide or something?

So, what, it's like a TV Guide or something?

The big news in news that covers the news is that robber baron of the DeBordian Spectacle Rupert Murdoch has threatened to opt out of Google, walling off all News Corp  properties from the search engine’s webcrawlers and generally ensuring that nobody gets anything he makes for free. That’s cool. If Murdoch really thinks that the traffic driven to his various internet properties—which include WSJ.com, FoxNews.com and the purchased-in-a-manner-analogous-to-getting-wasted-and-going-home-with-a-fat-girl Myspace—isn’t worth the irritation of knowing that Google is indexing them for free, he’s welcome to hitch his wagon to Bing. As Weston Kosova of Newsweek sarcastically points out, people are totally going to search for “Sarah Palin teeth vagina” on Google, see what comes up, and then head on over to Bing to see if maybe News Corp has anything else. It’s a terrible idea if you intend to use the internet as a tool to disseminate your news reporting, but if you only see the internet as a way to advertise the other media outlets through which you disseminate your et cetera, it’s great. Murdoch’s problem with Google is that it doesn’t tell anyone about his products without also giving them a way to access them for free. His frustration captures the irony of the internet’s relationship to newspapers and television; it increases their circulation exponentially, while simultaneously making increased circulation almost valueless. It’s a real pickle, and it explains why, six months ago, every conventional news outlet in America couldn’t wait to tell us about Twitter.

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Friday links! Nation of fops edition

By Dan Brooks in books, conservative liars, counterculture, glenn beck, health care, health insurance reform, hipsters, oppositional culture, Reactionary Populism, rumormongering, sarah palin, specious trends, widespread dumbening 3 Comments
Heavens! I shall be late for the book-signing!

Heavens! I shall be late for the book-signing!

It’s Friday, November 20th, and it is on such crisp, bright autumn days that our nation should pull on its jodhpurs, bundle itself in its most worsted wool, hike to the crest of the nearest hilly meadow and take a long, hard look at what pussies we’ve become. Mammograms, books, movies about vampires, books by vampires—one look at the news of the day tells us that the whole country is beset by dandyism. If we’re not debasing ourselves with effeminate pursuits like reading and getting cancer screenings, we’re shrieking in outrage at the latest public perfidy and then doing absolutely nothing about it. Ours is an era in which scoundrels run roughshod, and the righteous must content themselves with their indignation. Some might call it a more civilized society, but I—having left my mountain fortress for temporary lodgings in the comparatively urban Castle Faswell, where I am dogsitting—know that the company of strangers is not an obligation to be borne, but an opportunity to be seized. Strangers are morons, as all polls and YouTube comments sections indicate, and they must be corrected. What does Stringer Bell Faswell, excitable labrador, do when he is confronted with a stranger? He leaps into the air and licks him on the inside of his gaping mouth, or bites him on the ear, depending on the quality of his character. No dandy Stringer Bell, and the rest of us fops might take a lesson from him. When a fat morning radio DJ who has found Jesus and therefore gets to be on television gibbers lies from his greasy lips, must we simply press our handkerchiefs to our mouths and swoon? Or can we draw our rapiers, which we presumably have in this analogy although the time period is kind of fuzzy, and challenge him? The truth is in fashion no matter how ruffly our shirts, and I, for one, demand satisfaction. In the meantime, though, I guess I’ll just keep doing the blog.

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As of Monday, Fox News is not a news organization

By Dan Brooks in conservative liars, corporatocracy, health care, health insurance reform, help me kill zombies, Reactionary Populism, representative democracy, the crank factor, widespread dumbening 5 Comments
Simple, unvarnished facts, people. You decide.

Simple, unvarnished facts, people. You decide.

When the White House first announced that it would be treating Fox News as an opinion outlet rather than as an objective news organization, it raised a lot of thorny questions. How, exactly, do you define objectivity? High school journalism textbooks are full of charts and bulleted lists, non of which mix serif and sans serif fonts, but any regular reader of the New York Times knows there’s objective and there’s objective, and never the twain shall meet. The problem is that bias is usually a sin of omission; what slants a story is not what you say, but what you don’t. When your annual Christmas card reports that I threw up at your wedding, that’s bias, because it neglects to mention that I also made a very nice toast. It’s exceedingly difficult for me to prove that your Christmas cards display a consistent anti-Brooks bias, though, because one can’t really prove a negative. Sure, you didn’t mention my toast, but you didn’t mention what color jacket your uncle was wearing, either, or what the temperature was, or which year the Inca empire experienced its first flu epidemic. Bias is usually absence, and the scope of absence is, by definition, infinite. Every once in a while, though, somebody straight-up lies. Fox News did it last week, and the public outcry has been far less that it should be. Video after the jump.

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Snake that controls Sarah Palin’s body worried about new dollar coins

By Dan Brooks in conservatism, conservative liars, health care, health insurance reform, Internet, populism, Reactionary Populism, rumormongering, snake that operates sarah palin 9 Comments
The inexperienced but determined snake that controls Sarah Palin's body

The inexperienced but determined snake that controls Sarah Palin's body. (Not pictured: body)

Since August, when Sarah Palin was eaten by a Grue as a result of staying in a darkened area too long while studying foreign policy, a replicant version of her body has been operated by a funny snake. We know this. What you may not know is that the snake finally finished writing that book—which is currently being edited to remove numerous and baffling references to the warmth of field mice—and he is now free to pilot Sarah Palin’s body around the country, collecting multi-thousand dollar speaker fees and making his views known. Like most snakes, the one controlling Palin’s body is friendly and inquisitive, and spends most of his time scanning the ground in search of candy and coins, which he hopes to barter for social acceptance. In that capacity, he’s discovered a possible left-wing conspiracy and a change in our minting policy that may shock and disturb you.

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Michele Bachmann uses Fox to tout fake “Super Bowl of freedom”

By Dan Brooks in conservatism, conservative liars, corporatocracy, health care, health insurance reform, obama, Reactionary Populism, representative democracy, the crank factor, town hall meetings, town hall protests, widespread dumbening 2 Comments
The longer you look at this picture, the more her facial expression ceases to be a smile. Seriously. It's like one of those Magic Eye things.

The longer you look at this picture, the more her facial expression ceases to be a smile. Seriously. It's like one of those Magic Eye things.

Now that Sarah Palin has been eaten by a grue, the mantle of Person In the Republican Party Who Might Actually Believe That Stuff  has been taken up by Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann. You may remember Bachmann from her bizarre assertions about the US Census and its possible role in a massive government conspiracy—something she stopped talking about after a census worker was killed in Kentucky. Like Palin, Bachmann believes in an American People whose will is diametrically opposed to that of the federal government—particularly the Congress part of the government, which she, bafflingly, is a part of. Also like Palin, her signature issue has become health care reform. Despite polls showing that most Americans favor a public option, Bachmann knows that “real, freedom-loving Americans” oppose the government “taking away [their] health care.” To make their voices heard, she’s taken it upon herself to organize a protest on the steps of Capitol Hill at noon today, at which she encourages protestors to enter their congresspeople’s offices and demand that they vote against health care reform. “This is the Super Bowl of freedom, this week,” she says. How can Michele Bachmann find the resources and communication apparatus to organize such a Super Bowl, in which an abstract concept competes with another, unnamed abstract concept on a week’s notice? Well, fortunately there’s Fox News:

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