Rachel Maddow pretty much destroys Fox and their embrace of the Sherrod controversy, and subsequent (and ongoing) blatant hypocrisy.

When the Brietbart injected this bullshit into the mediasphere, Fox couldn’t contain their glee, and led the charge to get Sherrod dismissed. Their full court press was positively frothy. But we shouldn’t be surprised that, once the whole thing blew up, and people saw the whole, unedited tape, and it became clear that Sherrod’s speech was in no way racist, Fox changed their tune — this time, tut-tutting that the Obama Administration had jumped the gun in firing Sherrod, and expressing outrage at anyone would rush to judgement without getting the facts straight.

We’ve been through years of this with the doofuses at Fox, but it still astonishes me that they are so craven and so clearly uninterested in actual journalism.

No, I’m pretty sure there isn’t. (There’s another rundown over at Scalzi’s place, in case you weren’t keeping up.)

Constance McMillen has showed some rural fucktards in my home state that bigotry is really expensive. McMillen, for her part, has moved down the road to Memphis.

Last month, Texas Lt. Gov. Dewhurst insisted publicly that Phoenix, Arizona was second only to Mexico City in kidnappings.

Some journalists investigated, and found that (as expected) this was horseshit, and then said so, which irked Dewhurst.

“This is regrettably a new low for the Austin American-Statesman and for this particular group,” Dewhurst told NPR. “It shouldn’t be in the newspaper. It should be on the editorial page. I mean, for heaven’s sake.”

No, buddy, I don’t think so. Fact-checking politicians is exactly what belongs on the FRONT page, right where the American-Stateman put it. We live in a world where it’s astonishingly easy to do basic research; maybe you should try that before you go shooting your mouth off for political gain.

Democrats.

He totally nails it in Lara Logan, You Suck. In case you missed the context, Logan has become the de facto voice of “establishment” journalism that is shocked — Shocked! — that Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings included the damning and insubordinate comments that sank General McChrystal’s career in his recent story.

Some choice bits:

Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn’t mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here’s CBS’s chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that’s killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag.

and

See, according to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn’t even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass! Why? Because there is an “element of trust” that you’re supposed to have when you hang around the likes of a McChrystal. You cover a war commander, he’s got to be able to trust that you’re not going to embarrass him. Otherwise, how can he possibly feel confident that the right message will get out?

True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth — spending $4.7 billion on P.R. in 2009 alone and employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department — but is that really enough to ensure positive coverage in a society with armed with a constitutionally-guaranteed free press?

And true, most of the major TV outlets are completely in the bag for the Pentagon, with two of them (NBC/GE and Logan’s own CBS, until recently owned by Westinghouse, one of the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturers) having operated for years as leaders in both the broadcast media and weapons-making businesses.

But is that enough to guarantee a level playing field? Can a general really feel safe that Americans will get the right message when the only tools he has at his disposal are a $5 billion P.R. budget and the near-total acquiescence of all the major media companies, some of whom happen to be the Pentagon’s biggest contractors?

Taibbi makes another point:

[T]he reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she’s like pretty much every other “reputable” journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you’re covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard?

Go read the whole thing. Really. (HT: @wilw)

The new Texas GOP platform apparently includes provisions cementing their opposition to all porn, all adult-oriented businesses, sodomy, blow jobs, gay marriage, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the income tax, anything to do with early childhood development programs, and (basically) the Supreme Court as well. Oh, and it cites the Bible as a reason to continue mollycoddling Israel.

There are two ways to interpret this.

It’s possible that the GOP are genuinely interested in making all the planks of their platform come true, and that they really are this ignorant, mean-spirited, bigoted, and theocratic. If that’s the case, we should run them all out of town on rails, because pretty much nothing in the platform is at all compatible with “land of the free, home of the brave.”

On the other hand, a more likely scenario is that the powers that be in the GOP don’t give a shit about any of this beyond using it to scare uneducated electorate into voting their way, and as a means to direct debate away from the actual agenda of the GOP — i.e., protecting wealthy interests. I’d argue that this is even worse, because it means they’re absolutely courting mob rule tactics in order to pursue antidemocratic goals, in which case they still ought to be run out of the state on rails.

In either case, progressive-minded voters statewide should insist that GOP candidates address this platform completely, explicitly, on every point, and as often as possible. Seriously.