Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 08, 2011

Roland doesn’t know that “Fair and Balanced” has a whole new meaning in his business?

Two rats on a piece of cheese.

Faux News president Roger Ailes doesn’t like Sarah Palin.

The enemy of my enemy is someone I can get to hurt my enemy for me.

fox news is a joke.

…. yes. And we could not have beaten the Germans without him. Three quarters of Geman casualties in WWII were on the Russian front, albeit our materiel and our bombing of Gemany as well as our ground forces made us as necessary to him as he was to us. (Although, without the Russians we probably could have won, once we started nuking all of Germany’s cities.) My point being that dividing your enemies against one another, and keeping them divided, is no small thing. Especially in the case of modern American politics. And in this, the so-called Right has a great advantage. The so-called left can’t make up their minds as to where they want the ship of state to go. And they are left with looking like nothing more than the defenders of a status quo that nobody likes. The so-called Right has a much simpler agenda. They just want to smash the engine and prevent the ship from going anywhere at all, as they seem to think the ship is better off drifting with the tide. It is fundamentally easier to break something that to make it work. Destruction doesn’t require a coherent plan the way construction does. When your ideology consists of the belief that the nation acting together (i.e. the federal government) can never, will never, do anything right, then your purpose is clear: throw a monkey wrench into the works. Or, to switch metaphors, to geld and hogtie the nation so that all power will reside in the “private sector”: i.e. with those persons and other entities rich enough to dominate the country in the absence of any collective action to deal with them. We seem to forget that the “private sector” exists to serve all dollars equally, only the “public sector” seems capable of serving all people equally.

Is there a full moon? Must be, the Palin and Fox haters are on the loose and running wild again.

I have seen far more obvious efforts to balance a discussion on Fox than ever on MSNBC. While I cringe at every mention of religion on Fox, their approach to politics is far more rooted in reality than the Leftist day-dreaming and ranting on MSNBC.

Did anyone watch her in last night’s debate?!

Good comments, Doughfoot & Drome.

Let me merely add that the aim of the Teapublicans is to permit the rich to get richer at the expense of the commonweal. We are seeing a strong attempt to return America to its vicious, pre-union, Gilded Age, when a handful of men owned almost all the nation’s wealth, and the middle class was small and ruled by the rich.

This had its first success with Ronald Reagan, and the plutocrats have been pushing further in that vein ever since.

I repeat my frequent question: Where did all you liberals/leftists/progressives/socialists learn your anti-business prejudices? From your mother? Your church? School? University? And why does nobody ever answer this sincere question?

“Faux News is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who just happens to be a major contributor to Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns…”.Why are you addressing this comment to me?

DFTT

The larger a corporation becomes, the more anti-competitive it becomes. Monopolies, price-fixing, collusion, exploiting both labor and the consumer to siphon as much money as possible from communities into the pockets of overpaid executives and idle shareholders. They’re unaccountable to their customer base for quality-control or customer service, and by virtue of their power they’re the 800-pound gorillas who can get away with murder (sometimes literally) because forcing them into any sort of responsibility would be “bad for the economy.”

Commerce is based on the fair exchange of goods and services for money (or other goods or services). But when imbalances of scale allow corporations to skimp on the goods or services they provide because quality-assurance eats into their profit margins, the “Free Market” is broken.

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door; but corner the mousetrap market and they’ll pay through the nose for whatever cheap crap you can import from China. Your shareholders will thank you for it!”

@ pschearer -Google DOW Chemical’s Bhopal disaster, Love Canal, BP summer of ’11. We learned it from experience. Trust but verify like your hero used to spout.

Since everyone is down on Fox News, does that imply that the other News Stations are fair and balanced? If so, you need to be better read.

More like CNN, ABC, NBC, CNBC, etc.

I am a Progressive. I am not anti-business or anti-profit. What I object to is favoritism, how the game is tilted toward Corporations, the wealthy and influential. And the solution to that is eliminating campaign contributions, reversing the Citizens United decision and providing term limits.

Rupert Murdoch is one of those rich guys who contributes to everyone’s political campaign. He wants to be able to contact the “winner” and say, “I give money to help you win … and, now, this is what I want.”

What have you heard FOX lie about?

If Doughfoot got another life, what would he then do with the one he already has? Give it to you? Get your own life.

“Fair and balanced " is when you give equal time to a flat-earther and an astronomer; when you give equal time to an alchemist and to a chemist; when you give equal time to a homicidal maniac and to a psychologist.

I get all my judices through observation, experience, investigation, and deduction. Education, not indoctrination. People with political agendas assume they’re the same because indoctrination is what they would do. Education is teaching people how to think, not what to think.

I’m not a lawyer, but I work for them, in a capacity that allows me to see what goes on in litigation.

An ivdividual adverse to an individual is more or less a fair fight. A corporation adverse to a corporation is, again, more or less a fair fight. In both of these scenarios, you’ll get a reasonable approximation of justice, of a case being judged on its merits.

If you have an individual suing a corporation, or a corporation suing an individual, 95% percent of the time the stacking of the deck against the individual is an insurmountable obstacle. The individual is outspent and out-lawyered by the corporation (the two are not identical, but not unconnected) When the corporation is at fault (which is likely but not certain; I acknowledge a certain number of “nuisance suits”), it’s almost inconceivable that the corporation will be required to admit wrong-doing. There’ll be a confidential settlement, which the corporations write off as “the cost of doing business.” After all, they’ve got insurance for that.

It’s nearly impossible to bring a criminal complaint against a corporation, regardless of the willfulness of the wrongdoing. When an individual does successfully bring a corporation to a trial in a civil suit, the jury awards are likely to be huge, which is appropriate. In addition to real damages, the punitive damages run into the millions, because they’re intended to be punitive. You can’t imprison a corporation; it’s nearly impossible even to get them to change the way they do business. The only way to get their attention is to hit them where they live: in the pocketbook. And if a corporation has X-number of millions written into its budget to handle litigation, it takes a mighty big number to get their attention.

Then, of course, the lawyers (or our “litigios society”) are blamed for the “outrageous” jury awards…

As an individual, you have better chance suing the government than you do suing a corporation, at least if your interest is in seeing justice done rather than getting a settlement. “You can’t fight City Hall?” Child’s play. Try fighting Union Carbide or General Motors.

Pschearer asks why liberals, etc. are “prejudiced” against business. I’d like to ask him why he is prejudiced against people…

Seriously, businesses exist for the purpose of making money. That is an amoral (not moral, not immoral) function. But, without a government willing to restrain harmful capitalist endeavor, those without scruples quickly take advantage of others. Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt & Dwight Eisenhower understood this.

The current Republican agenda is to put power and wealth in the hands of a very few people with no restrictions. THAT is immoral, imo.