Baseless and Unfounded? No Problem for ABC News!

Every now and then, when you hear traditional media whine about how bloggers and online news gathering organizations don't have the journalism sack to deliver a quality, well-researched story, you might quite naturally begin to feel little sorry for the old-timers as you watch them stagger like wounded dinosaurs, the life draining from their collective bodies.

And then, like a ray of bright summer sunshine, an outfit like ABC News comes along to remind us that we can still see triceratops in the museum, so extinction can sometimes be a good thing.

Via Media Matters comes an interesting commentary on the boy reporter Dan Harris, who, while reporting online about the faux-issue of President Obama's recent speech to school students, actually allowed a nugget of truth to escape from his kisser:

While the media loves a good fight -- even when the charges are unfounded -- there may be more to conservatives' complaints that play into larger concerns about the president on health care reform.

And that's the dirty little secret of media today - it's about the fight, not the substance.

Instead of delivering some of the hard-hitting journalism that separates fact from fiction, Harris (and others like him) are content to hand oversized mallets to participants, then sit back and provide the commentary as both sides proceed to Tom & Jerry each other for entertainment purposes.

Does anyone remember when facts mattered?

Rush Remains a Big Fat Idiot

No one has stood out as a more bloviated sheep bleating disproved conservative dogma than Rush Limbaugh. I'm not sure why people continue to be surprised by this after all of these years - you buy your ticket, you take your ride, y'know?

Putting aside the fact that he has been vocal in his hope that both President Obama and the financial stimulus initiative fail, Rush has everything to gain by continuing to fan the anti-tax faction of die-hard political conservatives, both in maintaining his core audience and holding on to a large portion of his amassed wealth.

Rush doesn't really want a cerebral discussion of the actual tax policies, because he (and his ilk) come out on the losing side of the equation, as the fiscal policies of the previous eight years has demonstrated. When you don't have any good (or actual) ideas, it seems, pull out the Rove playbook - tell a lie, and repeat it over and over until people believe it's true. That's the approach Limbaugh has taken with Obama's plan to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire.

Media Matters reports that on his February 23 radio show, Rush falsely claimed that taxes on most small businesses would increase if the Bush tax cuts went away. Conversely, the Tax Policy Center has opined that in 2007, only 2% of tax returns that reported small business income were in the top two income brackets.

This is a familiar refrain, heard recently expoused by Mitch McConnell, conservative wingnut from Kentucky, but it was also part of the failed McCain campaign that was refuted by then-candidate Obama.

I'd like to see Limbaugh's raw data that he's using to derive his talking points. Transparency is a good thing, so Rush, show us how your sausage is made, because your view doesn't seem to be substantiated by, you know, the truth.