This morning as I was watching last night’s Craig Ferguson Show that we tape since we can’t stay up that late, his monologue struck a chord with me.

He stated that he’s been feeling rather depressed lately, and I have to admit that so have I, and I wonder if anyone else has been feeling the same.

I find it depressing to read the news every day and every day the news seems to be nothing but doom and gloom.

If it’s not articles about the Party of NO, it’s stories about Limbaugh’s and Beck’s latest bloviations, Sarah Palin’s Charismatic Apostolic Warriors taking over our government, the 244% increase in hate groups, unemployment, foreclosures, Americans suffering without health care, earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.

I’ve been thinking about the typical platitude of counting my blessings, and I do have innumerable blessings in my life, and focusing on the positives rather than negatives, and then I log onto the Internet and the depressing cycle starts again.

So, I started thinking of what I can do in my every day life to get around the blues and decided that I need an attitude adjustment.

Today is the day that I am starting my personal movement to cheer up, by finding at least one good news story every single day.

I have also decided to stop playing into the negativity by referring to Tea Party people as teabaggers, and instead calling them, well, Tea Party People or referring to the group as the Tea Party Movement.

I am going to try very hard to speak about Republicans, Palin, Limbaugh and Beck, et all, in a respectful manner, taking a cue from Van Jones and his graciousness in telling Beck that he loves him, even if it was tongue in cheek, but I think the man really meant it.

In other words, I’m going to try to play nice and not lower myself to the opposition’s level.

Have you ever gotten really angry with someone and blew up and told them off?

How did it make you feel afterward?

I’ve done that a few times in my life, and every single time I’ve regretted it afterward and I felt horrible and worse than I did about whatever offense occurred to bring on my anger or hurt feelings.

I’m taking the high road, or going to try my damnedest to do that, as it is healthier for my frame of mind.

My feel good story of the day is this one –

Veterinarian Wins Pay It Forward

Media Matters for America has named Glenn Beck the 2009 misinformer of the year. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fear monger. This charlatan is a danger in ways that we don’t even seem to realize. Beck has been whipping people into a frenzy based upon nothing but sheer speculation, deliberate distortions, and childish association games. He has proven what a conman with a flare for showmanship can truly do. He is the right wing’s own Professor Harold Hill.

My favorite musical of all time is The Music Man. If you’ve not seen this most charming gem then I would encourage you to go rent it the next time you’re making it a “Blockbuster night.” It’s about a con man who makes his living stirring up people’s emotions by painting a picture of disaster and horror that will be the result of some new thing in their small town, and the solution to this new danger is always the item he is selling. The musical ends with him having a change of heart about swindling people after he finds that he’s fallen for a local librarian who’s sharp observations have figured out exactly what his game is.

The character in the film, as potrayed by Robert Preston, is a delighfully entertaining and sympathetic figure. This is in stark contrast to Glenn Beck who is neither delightful nor sympathetic, but the reality is that Beck has been playing the same game as the main character in The Music Man. Nevertheless, the reality of the two figures is the same. As Media Matters puts it:

Glenn Beck’s well of ridiculous was deep and poisonous before he launched his Fox News show, but the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States — and the permissive cheerleading of his Fox News honchos – uncorked the former Morning Zoo shock jock’s unique brand of vitriol, stage theatrics, and hyperbolic fright, making him an easy choice for Media Matters’ 2009 Misinformer of the Year.

When he wasn’t calling the president a racist, portraying progressive leaders as vampires who can only be stopped by “driv[ing] a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers,” or pushing the legitimacy of seceding from the country, Beck obsessively compared Democrats in Washington to Nazis and fascists and “the early days of Adolf Hitler.” He wondered, “Is this where we’re headed,” while showing images of Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin; decoded the secret language of Marxists; and compared the government to “heroin pushers” who were “using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state.”

The reality is that Beck has been looked upon by the left as ridiculously eccentric, but the reality is by far more serious. Many of us watch this con artist with bemused smirks and roll our eyes. The average viewer of Beck’s program often buys into his routine hook, line, and sinker. In fact the right wing views any of us who look upon Beck as a joke look upon us with the same attitude for exactly the same reasons. Jonah Goldberg’s cheer leading is a prime example:

[M]uch of the anti-Beck backlash (He’s an extremist! He’s paranoid! He’s hate-filled!) from the left is hard to take seriously. First, this is a crowd that lets Michael Moore and Janeane Garofalo speak for them, and that celebrated the election of unfunny man Al Franken to the Senate. If you think it’s racist to oppose Obama’s health care reform efforts, it goes without saying that you’ll think Beck is an extremist. This is what liberals always say about popular right-wingers, including Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley. For over 20 years liberals, including Presidents Clinton and Obama, have insisted that Rush Limbaugh is everything from an unpatriotic hatemonger to an enabler of domestic terrorism. It makes sense that they’d give Beck the same business.

You may be wondering if Beck is the “Music Man” then what is this Pied Piper of Hamelin selling? It seems the money is in using his influence to start a gold rush. Ironically, FOX News doesn’t seem to approve of this. As DailyFinance puts it:

Like other news organizations, Fox News prohibits its on-air personalities from making paid product endorsements. But it makes an exception for its commentators who are also radio hosts, who are allowed to perform live reads, says Joel Cheatwood, senior vice president for development.

“When we hired Glenn at Fox News, we hired him with the understanding that he had a well-established, burgeoning radio business, and we had to be accepting of certain elements of that,” Cheatwood tells DailyFinance, noting that Beck’s relationship with Goldline dates back to his time at HLN, CNN’s sister network.

The same understanding applies to Don Imus, who recently started simulcasting his radio show on Fox Business Network. (An MSNBC spokesman says his network has a similar policy in place, while a spokeswoman for CNN said only, “CNN/US anchors and correspondents are prohibited from participating in any paid endorsements of products and services.”)

But the exemption is meant only to apply to live reads, not to the kind of broader spokesmanship Beck, to all appearances, provides Goldline. In particular, Beck’s ubiquity on the Goldline website is not in keeping with Fox’s rules. A Fox spokeswoman said the network’s legal department is taking up the matter with Beck’s agent, George Hiltzik.

So what, if anything, has FOX News done to address this issue? Politico answers that question.

Beck endorses Goldline International, but last week, Fox requested that he clarify his relationship with the firm, prompting it to tweak its trumpeting of Beck’s endorsement. Goldline removed an identification of Beck as a “paid spokesman” from its website, but left the rest of the site – which prominently features his endorsement, photo and a radio interview he did with the company’s president Mark Albarian – intact.

Removal of the “paid spokesman” language from Goldline’s site brought his arrangement with the company in line with a network policy prohibiting “on-air talent from endorsing products or serving as a product spokesperson,” according to Joel Cheatwood, a Fox News executive.

“We asked for clarification. We got it. We’re satisfied. It’s a dead issue,” he told POLITICO.

On Thursday, the network also indicated it would ask Rosland Capital, another gold retailer, to remove from its website the logo for Bill O’Reilly’s Fox show, the O’Reilly Factor, which Rosland features along with an audio clip of O’Reilly urging listeners to buy gold because “The U.S. Dollar is under attack!”

Fox’s concern was that O’Reilly’s endorsement of Rosland was specific to the radio show he no longer does, and Rosland is not a sponsor of his television show.

Rosland spokesman Steve Getzug said the company had not heard from Fox but was already “in the process of pulling the reference down as part of an overall update of Rosland’s website.” He called the O’Reilly endorsement “dated” and said “it’s been a while since the company has updated its website.”

Beck’s critics have not suggested that he was actually influencing the price of gold, which had been rising steadily until this month, by encouraging his fans to buy coins from Goldline.

But some financial analysts and precious metals experts did tell POLITICO that potential gold investors would be wise to look into bullion or exchange traded funds intended to track the price of gold, rather than the coins sold by Goldline and a handful of other firms that advertise on Beck’s shows and those of other conservative talkers. That’s because those firms focus on collectible or antique coins, which they sell for many times the value of the intrinsic gold and promote as being exempt from a potential government seizure of gold like that which occurred under Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Beck has suggested that gold coins are a good buy now because President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are steering the economy towards disaster.

And that feedback loop – Beck stoking fear of economic collapse, hyping gold as a hedge against collapse, and endorsing a company selling gold – prompted liberals from the watchdog group Media Matters to MSNBC host Keith Olbermann to Comedy Central’s faux-news hosts Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to allege a glaring conflict of interest.

It’s also intersting to note how many other right wing radio show hosts endorse gold too. Consider this other article from Politico:

For years a certain strain of conservative thought has held that there was one sure hedge against economic depression, civil disorder and liberal rule – gold. Now that belief has led to a kind of harmonic convergence between ideology and commerce.

Anyone tuning in to conservative talk radio or Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck shows is bombarded by commercials for gold, mainly in the form of collectible coins, with announcers intoning that inflation and deficits caused by big government spending are devaluing the dollar and making gold the best investment money can buy.

The dire tone sounded in the ads often echo the occasionally apocalyptic economic forecasts of the shows’ hosts, many of whom have endorsement contracts with the gold retailers, appear in their ads, or have had their executives as guests to trash the economic course set by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, and to preach the attractions of gold.

“There’s a natural synergy between conservative talk radio listeners and gold,” said Michael Smerconish, a Philadelphia-based conservative-leaning talk show host who signed a deal to endorse Goldline International, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based retailer when his show entered syndication in January.

And it’s become an increasingly profitable synergy for everyone involved – the retailers, the networks and an array of hosts including O’Reilly and Beck, as well as radio talkers Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Miller, Fred Thompson and G. Gordon Liddy.

This year, Goldline boasted it had become “the exclusive gold and precious metals company” of both Levin’s show and the one hosted by Thompson. Other Goldline endorsers include Beck, Ingraham, Miller and Lars Larson.

It would seem that Glenn Beck has indeed followed the path of Professor Harold Hill. However, instead of playing the nickel-and-dime games of selling instruments for boy’s band, Glenn Beck has struck gold! It makes me wonder what other advertisers are benefiting from the fear mongering we see on the right wing. How many other cons are the being sold to viewers of FOX News and listeners of right wing radio? Are they really crazy? Like a FOX!

Chernynkaya wrote a wonderful article regarding the way the media has being covering health care reform and the debates that have occured as a result of it. I would recommend the article to anyone. In fact I think it should be printed, emailed, and shown to anyone and everyone you encounter this Holiday Season. It’s that good and certainly that important.

In reading some of the responses to her article I was reminded of something I read a few months ago. I found it on The Daily Beast. It was written by an unknown blogger that goes by the moniker “mzkitti” and says it’s “[f]rom CJ.” My best guess for that is Citizen Jane Politics, but I’ve not seen this posted there before. It was a response posted to someone who was defending Glenn Beck and Fox News. The article was The Real War on Fox, which is worth a look as well.

From The Daily Beast:

mzkitti

From CJ
Beck or Fox News fair and honest and on what planet would that be?

By legitimizing Fox News as a news organization, reporters and commentators are enabling the network to continue conducting a massive conservative political campaign under the guise of journalism. In the process, they are permitting Fox News to dominate the national discussion by spreading smears and lies — smears and lies that become conventional wisdom. They are also defending an organization that has nothing but contempt for journalistic standards — hence undermining their own profession and the public interest at the same time.

Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press. Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it was treated as such by our nation’s media.

The evidence supporting such a reality is overwhelming. To begin with, Fox News CEO Roger Ailes has described his station’s confrontation with the Obama administration as “the Alamo.” Fox News senior vice president Bill Shine said Fox was “the voice of opposition.” In other words, the entire operation has an explicit political agenda, not just a few hosts. There is no separation between Fox News’ “opinion” programming and its “news” programs. Bret Baier’s Special Report, the closest show Fox News has to a straight newscast, portrays Obama in a negative light 77 percent of the time, according to a recent study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

But the story goes well beyond the conservative bias Fox News has historically reflected. Like all major political entities, Fox News is now coordinating grassroots (or, more accurately, astroturf) political activities, lobbying for or against legislation, and fundraising for conservative causes. The network called April’s protests “Fox News Tea Parties.” It encouraged people to attend town halls last summer and then broadcast only the statements of those who opposed Democratic health care proposals. The 9/12 rally in Washington was the work of Beck, who claimed that 1.7 million people showed up (it was actually closer to 70,000). A video soon emerged of one of the station’s producers coaching marchers before a live “report” from the scene.

Fox news routinely implores its audience to call Congress and oppose progressive legislation. Fox’s Dick Morris and Mike Huckabee have both used Fox News airtime to encourage donations to conservative political action committees.

Again, these are unambiguous campaign activities, not the work of a news organization. It is no wonder that Fox’s new website, FoxNation.com, has repeatedly cheered legislative developments it favors as a “Fox Nation Victory!”

Fox News relishes its newfound activism. “The conservative media is winning now,” Bill O’Reilly said on September 17. “They’re damaging the president of the United States.” But the damage Fox News causes isn’t just political. Every day, it undermines serious journalism, misleads millions of Americans, and distorts our national discussion on crucial issues. Fox News represents an attack on democracy itself.

Much of the channel’s “reporting” takes the form of obsessive and factually inaccurate efforts to smear progressive organizations and discredit Obama administration officials. To give you a sense of priorities: over a three-year period, shows hosted by Sean Hannity and Beck mentioned ACORN 1,502 times, saying it was a corruption scandal. By contrast, their programs mentioned Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, Jack Abramoff, and Bob Ney 109 times combined.

Fox is currently conducting a witch hunt against administration members. After Van Jones resigned, Hannity told a crowd, “We got rid of one, and my job starting tomorrow night is to get rid of every other one.”

Exposing improper conduct is one thing. Inventing it is another. Fox News breathlessly reported claims that an ACORN employee had murdered her husband without confirming the story. It wasn’t true. Similarly, Hannity reported that Department of Education official Kevin Jennings had concealed the “statutory rape” of a high school student. It was soon revealed that the student was 16 at the time (the age of consent), and by his own account had not engaged in sexual activity with his fictitious assailant. Hannity never apologized.

Fake stories like these are what Fox News is built on. Health care reform will create death panels? False. Cass Sunstein believes in mandating that people become organ donors? False. John Holdren advocates for “compulsory abortion and sterilization,” as Hannity put it? False. Fox reported them all as fact — and the list goes on.

Never in American history has a media organization this powerful been so willing to misrepresent reality in order to achieve a political goal. The right-wing press ran a similar campaign targeting Bill Clinton in the 1990s, but for most of that time period, it lacked the national, real-time reach and impact Fox now possessed.

The impact of Fox News’ long campaign of misinformation should concern any citizen. Fox has repeatedly misinformed its viewers on everything from the non-existent connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to the contents of health care reform legislation. Such misinformation can have serious consequences, and Fox News should be called out for propagating it.

There is nothing wrong with the White House standing up to its most powerful, unprincipled, and self-declared political opponent, one that clearly started this fight. And beyond politics, there certainly isn’t anything wrong with exposing an organization that unapologetically harms our democracy by poisoning our national discourse with falsehoods on an hourly basis.

The channel knows what it’s up against. “If they repeat this long enough,” said Fox News’ Bernie Goldberg on Monday, “and often enough — that Fox News is not a real news organization, it’s an arm of the national Republican Party, it’s not to be taken seriously — if they say that long enough, it might become part of bloodstream of the American culture.”

Fox News’ own media analyst got the story right, while so many others in the media are still getting it wrong. For once, the channel was actually breaking news, even if it is merely the simple truth.

As for myself, I give a pass on FOX News to NOBODY! If someone working for FOX News thinks of himself/herself as a journalist trying to report the news then SHAME ON THEM! They should KNOW better! If they really do have integrity they will walk off the set on live television.

I REFUSE to watch FOX News. If I want to know what they are saying I go to Media Matters for America. FNC is the single greatest threat to this country there is right now.

Also, The book I recommend the most over any other is by David Brock. The book is The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. Get this book! It is a must read for everyone! If you can’t find it I have the unabridged audio version of it. I’d be happy to let anyone listen to it. Even if you heed nothing else I say, heed my words about this book.

Faux News is now spinning a new breast cancer screening study that suggests women should wait until their 50’s to get mammograms. Faux News is accusing the white house of trying to ration healthcare because this was a government sponsored study.  HHS Director Kathleen Sebelius has reiterated “our policies remain unchanged”.

Dan Pfieffer white house communications direct writes in his blog.

“One of the hallmark tactics from opponents of health insurance reform has been to grab onto any convenient piece of information and twist it into some misguided attack on reform, no matter how unrelated it may actually be.  The hope appears to be that some media outlet will give them unchecked airtime under the banner of covering the “controversy.”  Today they’re going back to that playbook again, and Fox News obliges them with the headline “Critics See Health Care Rationing Behind New Mammography Recommendations.”   The story refers to new recommendations from the independent U.S. Preventive Services Task Force:

“Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill are blasting new guidelines from a government task force that recommends against routine mammographies for women under 50,  questioning whether they are tantamount to health care ‘rationing’ in the fight against the No. 2 cancer killer in U.S. women.”

There’s only one problem: the recommendations of this task force would actually be used to provide access to effective preventive services for free or at low-cost. The USPTF would have no power to deny insurance coverage in any way.   The line of attack is actually somewhat ironic, because one of the guiding principles of reform from the very beginning in March has been to invest in significantly increased effective preventive care, something these “critics” never seemed to care much about over the past 8 months.”

The basis for the new recommendations are somewhat dubious conclusions in my opinion.

Some of the logic in the study is downright playing Russian roulette with women’s lives.

“The new guidelines balance these risks and benefits, scientists say.

The probability of dying of breast cancer after age 40 is 3 percent, they calculate. Getting a mammogram every other year from ages 50 to 69 lowers that risk by about 16 percent.

“It’s an average of five lives saved per thousand women screened,” said Georgetown University researcher Dr. Jeanne Mandelblatt.

Starting at age 40 would prevent one additional death but also lead to 470 false alarms for every 1,000 women screened. Continuing mammograms through age 79 prevents three additional deaths but raises the number of women treated for breast cancers that would not threaten their lives.”

Three percent sounds too high for me because that’s tens of thousands of woman a year who die in their ’40s because of breast cancer.  If that one person breast cancer screenings saved was your friend, your mother, your aunt, your grandmother or even your daughter I guess they would think differently.

Most woman know a friend, mother, grandmother, aunt or even daughter that has contracted breast cancer many times in their 40’s or younger. My mother-in-law waited to long to get a mammogram and passed away from breast in her 40’s and even though my wife is in her 30’s she gets regular mammograms because of her family history.

The sad part is I think a big reason even many breast cancer support groups are fighting for earlier guidelines is because the procedure is so damn painful for most woman.  For that reason some doctors may be rationalizing this decision.  The medical profession should be focusing on more comfortable and accurate methods to screen for breast cancer.

It is utterly irresponsible for Faux News to try and politicize this new study when it has not been an accepted guideline.