Republican Stupidity of the Day

Fox News is the most trusted source for news in the country.

As the article points out, this is more due to uniformity of Republican thought than anything else.

"...conservatives and Republicans are more intense and united in their opinions of TV news than moderates and liberals. They trust Fox, and mistrust everyone else, more uniformly than the other groups mistrust Fox and trust everyone else. Likewise, in reverse, for news organizations other than Fox, which conservatives mistrust intensely and across the board." [emphaisis added]

A look at the data shows that both liberals and moderates distrust Fox on balance and trust other mainstream sources. However, conservatives only trust Fox, by a really large margin, and distrust every other network, by really large margins.

What we see is what anyone with at least the brain of a third-grader has seen for a long time: conservatives are becoming more and more partisan, more extreme, and more uniform in their views. Like the Republican members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, they are more and more willing to march in lockstep, always adopting the approved party line.

It's scary.

Republican Stupidity of the Day

Usually I wait until the end of the day to post these, because you never know if something more stupid may come along, but today there is a superb example early in the day, so why wait? From Brit Hume on Fox News, recommending a change of faith for Tiger Woods:

"The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith," said Hume. "He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of redemption and forgiveness offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger is, 'Tiger turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

What. An. Idiot. Huffington Post and Media Matters have the story.

Republican Stupidity of the Day

This actually happened yesterday. Coming out of the movie Avatar yesterday, I was confronted by an older man who looked at me and asked, "If they were going to choose a country, why did it have to be Americans that lost in the end?" Apparently I look like enough of a redneck that he felt I was a good person to ask. When I said I had not thought about that, he said that he wasn't sure what was wrong with this country, that we are not even a country anymore. As he walked away, I heard him tell his wife that he liked it up until the ending.

If I were to answer, I guess I would say first that Avatar is a strictly fictional fantasy based 150 years in the future. The military action in the movie is mandated by some future company, not the US government, so the bad guys are sort of a combination of a future Exxon plus a future Blackwater. If James Cameron had made the offending company, say, Chinese, the actors would have had to be Asian actors speaking Chinese, which would likely have decreased the popularity of the film, not to mention that Asian-Americans would question why Asians were cast as the bad guys. In other words, Cameron made choices with his audience in mind.

It's fiction, dude. Get over it. Oh, and I'm just assuming you're a Republican.