Welcome to the Pants on Fire Project, a non-partisan effort to debunk all the liars and the lies that pollute the American political process. Here, as a kick-off, Rachel Maddow shares some perspective on the right-wing echo chamber:

Where do we go from here?

Question: I’m calling from a national research firm. We’re conducting a survey and I’d like to ask you a few questions about issues that affect people here in Wisconsin. This will only take a few minutes of your time and no one will try to sell you anything as a result of this survey. May I speak with a male/female 18 years or older who lives at this address and is now at home?

Answer: What address? This address? The laundromat? I’m folding a load of tidy-whities, dude. Just a minute… anyone here want to talk to some survey weasel? Sorry duder. Everyone’s busy, and nobody’s home. Did I tell you it’s the laundromat?

The above exchange or one like it would take place 460.3 times out of every thousand polling contacts if polling companies used lists that included all cell phone numbers and landlines. Household polling is no longer meaningful. Nobody’s home except my dad and he had a stroke.

In 2008, a study found that polling results including cell phone users leaned about 5% more in a progressive direction than polls relying on landline contact alone. Public polling is a black art, the goal of which is to trend toward the midline of all other poll results while ultimately predicting more “wins” than the competition. Public polling of political races is a profit center for polling companies. They want to get it right, and to get it right they want to do it like the competition does it.

The results this year should shake up the industry, since the polls themselves seemed based as much on media noise as on genuine public opinion and are skewed far from the most likely outcomes. When Russ Feingold wins his Wisconsin senate seat, the polling companies will have to congratulate him on a big come-from-behind victory. In fact, the results have been only in doubt due to the noise in the system from the propagandists, noise that doesn’t much influence voters, but that creates the static impression paid for by the propagandists.

Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview

Plutocrats and the Internet

Cheap Debt for Corporations Fails to Spur the Economy

Ron Johnson: Liar, Cheat, Scammer, Asshole, Oil Spill Profiteer, etc.

September 20, 2001

Guns for a penny!

Are black people like the New Black Panthers preventing you from voting? Is ACORN still stealing your elections? Are black people like Shirley Sherrod and Eric Holder treating you unequally?

Do the Muslims want to conquer your country and celebrate over your stinking Christian corpse? Is Muslim triumphalism and the Ground Zero Mosque just about the last straw? Are you afraid of invading, marauding Latino armies coming to steal your property and rape your women while their Marxist allies in Government (led by a black Muslim President) take away your God given guns?

Is that what’s troubling you, Friend?

(This blogular moment inspired by Glenn Greenwald… via GP)

Hat tip to Terry Canaan for turning me on to this little bit of cultural dreck. Canaan hopes that Dr. Laura becomes the first of a parade of talk show hosts who deprive us of the right to listen to their onerous mutterings by going on strike. Buh-bye Laura. Buh-bye Rush. Buh-bye Glenn. We can only hope that Laura, Rush and Glenn go all John Galt on our unappreciative asses and recapture their first amendment rights together in a bunker out west somewhere while we’re forced to watch re-runs of Barney and Friends to somehow fill the void. (We should be so lucky as to have the Schlessinger doing Eva Braun to Glenn Beck’s Adolph videos put up on YouTube while we wait for the propagandists’ strike to end).

According to Source Watch, “Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a US talk show host.” That’s it. None of her seventeen year history as a relationship adviser and right wing watchdog of American morals is reflected in that brief one-liner.

Wikipedia is more expansive. The Schlessinger entry there today includes:

At its peak, The Dr. Laura Program was the second-highest-rated radio show after The Rush Limbaugh Show, and was heard on more than 450 radio stations. In May 2002, the show still had an audience of more than 10 million, but had lost several million listeners in the previous two years as it was dropped by WABC and other affiliates, and was moved from day to night in cities such as Seattle and Boston. These losses were attributed in part to Schlessinger’s shift from giving relationship advice to lecturing on morality and conservative politics. Pressure from gay-rights groups caused dozens of sponsors to drop the radio show as well. In 2006 Schlessinger’s show was being aired on approximately 200 stations. As of 2009, it was tied for third place along with The Glenn Beck Program and The Savage Nation.

On August 10, 2010, on a call with an African-American woman who was seeking advice concerning her own interracial marriage, Schlessinger used the word “nigger” eleven times, saying that mention of the term did not constitute racism. She told the caller that she had the right to say the word because black comedians and actors on HBO say it, and cited a previous race-related comment made by her that was “funny” (and was made to her bodyguard, a black man). She also claimed that black people voted for Barack Obama for President on the basis of skin color, as an example of blacks as well as whites making judgments based solely on skin color. She apologized for doing the “wrong thing” a day later.

On August 17, 2010 Schlessinger announced the end of her radio show during an appearance on Larry King Live, saying that her motivation was to “regain her first amendment rights.”

Media Matters has a good report with an interesting comment thread that follows.

Or. you could check out the Atlantic article on Netanyahu’s threat to poison the planet with a radioactive cloud of fallout from his planned raid on Iran. Let’s see, on the one hand we could waste time yakking about the bandwidth sucking antics of a totally botoxed blonde bimbo, or on the other hand we could seek to inform ourselves and influence international diplomacy enough to avoid a lingering death by radiation poisoning.

Here’s a brief update regarding 24:

Yes, I watched all 192 episodes plus the two hour feature film. Yes, I’m still thinking about writing about the women of 24, and I may after I’ve finished watching the BBC’s MI-5, an espionage series with good stories and reasonable scope, and Ultraviolet, a vampire series that seems to have died after only six episodes.

I’m enjoying these video equivalents of trash novels, although the 24 marathon was simply excessive. I wonder if Mike Hammer would kick Jack Bauer’s ass?

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it’s a letdown, they won’t buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.
–Mickey Spillane

The cliff-hanger ending keeps the kids coming back, but 192 cliff-hanger endings pretty much deflate the currency. More about some of this later, I’m sure…

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On a more meaningful note, I recommend Juan Cole’s essay in Salon, Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, and, for balance, Carolyn Glick’s rebuttal in the Jerusalem Post, followed by Cole’s long blog post, The Closing of the Zionist Mind, wherein he takes another kick at the cat.
* * *
Listening now to Allen Ruff’s interview of Henry Giroux regarding Giroux’s new book, Youth in a Suspect Society.
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In this season of information overload, of Wikileaks and Shirley Sherrod, doomsday scenarios and dirty laundry, it’s easy to let important newspaper feature writing slip through the cracks. The Washington Post Top Secret America investigation by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin is one of these. Bookmark it! Read it, look at the great graphics, talk it up.

“You could spend hours trolling the site, and that’s precisely the point. The Post has a rich tradition of crack investigative journalism, but it’s been slow to deepen its storytelling through digital tools. This is by far the most detailed, comprehensive online data visualization we’ve seen from a newspaper. Hat’s off to the Post for finally figuring out how to exploit, instead of feel exploited by, the Internet.”
– Suzanne Labarre, Co.Design

…if you sit in front the fucking boob tube five days or more per week and let this garbage – and I don’t care if it’s “right” or “left” garbage – pour all over your soul, what the hell are you doing to your brain? What are you conditioning yourself to?
– Yule Heibel, “No wonder we’re hosed…“

“Jack Bauer is a true patriot.” That’s a statement overheard from a conversation between two politically-naive guys a few years ago, a sentiment that blurs the boundaries between a real person and a fictional character. For eight years Fox Television, a tentacle of the “entertainment” branch of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, administered a steady dose of adrenaline via the pulse-pounding weekly drama of Jack Bauer and his fight against evil-doers. In a self-congratulatory press release distributed March 26, News Corporation said, “While the series gained global recognition, Sutherland’s portrayal of the legendary character [Jack Bauer] penetrated the American psyche like no other dramatic television character to become part of the English lexicon.”

Whatever. Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer sure punished a whole bunch of bad guys. One premise of 24 was that there are among us some people, like Jack Bauer, whose integrity and moral compass are so true that they may be permitted frequent ethical lapses in order to combat evil. The show served up this message on a fist-to-the-face blood and guts pizza with a side of soft core S&M. Every episode contains bondage scenes, men and women with their hands bound behind their back, gagged, tied to a chair, cuffed to a railing, immobilized face on the floor with a boot between the shoulder blades. Every episode contains brutality and physical torture, some inflicted by government employees with medical kits and electric shock devices, some by agents using fists, blades, bullets and makeshift tools like 120 volt AC. The bad guys, of course, duplicate the entire panoply of pain, terrorizing the country and avenging themselves on their enemies.

Another important premise of 24 was that in American diplomacy “the end justifies the means,” and the means are administered by extra-legal methods through the agency of a security apparatus, the Counter Terrorist Unit. Justice Brandeis would have been appalled:

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent, teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution. — Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead vs. the United States, 1928

24 seeks to advance the argument that indeed government MAY commit crimes to achieve a greater good. Whether the terrorists intend to kill millions through release of a virus, or by melting down nuclear reactors, delivering nuclear warheads to an urban center by launching a missile or carrying in a suitcase, every righteously fearful person must agree that justice can be compromised if it will save American lives to do so. Characters in the 24 narrative who oppose torture and a suspension of human rights are painted as cowards, or–at best–hypersensitive women who can be expected to shudder at the sight of all those compound fractures.

Next: Fox Torture Porn, the Women of 24

Seasons one through seven of the Fox fantasy “24″ are available in their entirety for commercial free streaming from Netflix. The last season, number eight, will presumably be available someday. For eight years I avoided exposure to this pestilential propaganda, but now that it’s been wrapped up, I’ve made a commitment to my atavistic inner tough-guy to watch all of it right here at my desk. It won’t be easy. Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack Bauer, a character so one dimensional that it requires an actor with Sutherland’s skill to project all that anger and angst and to lard it with supercilious self-righteousness. The format, a whole season taking place over a single day has one major challenge in addition to Sutherland’s execrable acting skills: wardrobe. Costume changes are few and far between. One can but imagine the body odor.

I don’t have a good excuse for watching the world according to Fox, but then neither do I have an excuse for listening to Rush Limbaugh unless it’s simply to gauge the drift of the risible right. Call this a study of how the Cheney-Rove administration enlisted Rupert Murdoch to help stretch American values to include torture and to bury the Bill of Rights.

I’m about half-way through season one. So far I haven’t been converted. Water boarding is still not on my list of approved interview techniques. Of passing interest to me is that season one bad guys were forged in the crucible of the war in the Euro-zone formerly known as Yugoslavia. The Iraq/Afghanistan wars were still in the future when the series was first scripted.