I Am Officially Disgusted

Ok, I was watching Hannity on Fox News (So you don't have to). And I am disgusted by the new GOP strategy to defeat health care reform. Now they are claiming there is not problem. The new claim is that only 7,000,000 people are uninnsured and that the US has the best health care in the world. If that is true, then why are we 50th in life expectancy (just ahead of Albania), and why do we pay so much per capita? But I digress. There are many things to say about the current health care system in the U.S., and you can disagree about the cause of or the solution for the problems with our system, but to deny that there is a problem is either due to delusion or dishonest.

Don't Panic

Democrats and other Obama supporters are a skittish bunch. Every time a tracking poll shows Obama's lead down a point, we are sure it is a trend. If his lead goes up a point, we are sure it is just staistical noise. As a Red Sox fan, I had many years of experience in this area of emotional masochism. The latest point on my graph of pessimism would have to be FoxNews new poll, which showed Obama's lead down to three from his nine point lead only a week before. Panic set in.

But then I, and others, checked the internal numbers, and discovered that the later poll had a much smaller democrat to republican ratio than the earlier poll. Doing some basic math shows that if they had used the ration from the earlier poll, Obama's lead would have been seven points (50-43) instead of three.

Now many of us would like to believe this is another example of Fox bias (as if we needed another one). But as Nate Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com correctly points out: Fox News has never weighted for party identification, so this is simply the luck of the draw. The fact that Fox hasn't pointed out the difference is, however, the example we are looking for.

ALERT - Fox News Unfair

Trivia question: What candidate recently accused the Fox News Network of demonstrating an unfair bias against his or her campaign?

A. Hilary Clinton
B. Barack Obama
C. John Edwards
D. Fred Thompson

Answer: D. Don't you just love watching Right-wingers eat their own?

I Wonder What O'Reilly Thinks Of This

Bill O'Reilly over at Fox News likes to complain of the coarsening of American culture. I can only assume he is proud of his own company. So I had to wonder what he would think when the Fox News.com website had this as its Breaking News headline this morning: "Body of Illinois Police Sergeant's Third Wife Being Exhumed: Watch Live."

Watching an exhumation. Entertainment? News? One step above a snuff film?

UPDATE: They have already taken the headline down. Maybe someone over there has a soul.

OJ Mania

We have officially hit rock bottom. Yesterday, while flicking through channels, I noticed that Fox News had on the helicopter pilot who followed OJ's white Bronco during the famed "chase." He was commenting on OJ being released on bail. Insane.

Fox News and Fuhrman's Chutzpah

Back in 2005, Newshounds noted the rehabilitation of Mark Fuhrman on Fox News, so I won't go into it. But I have to say, it takes a lot of chutzpah for Fox to put Fuhrman on the air to analyze the current armed robbery case agains OJ Simpson. Let's not forget that Fuhrman was caught lying on the stand during OJ's murder trial about using racial epithets. As one of the lead (if not the lead) detectives on the murder case, his lying and racist language was very harmful to the prosecution's case. So now he's analyzing the case against the very person he was instrumental in letting go in the first place. He would seem to have an incredible conflict of interest.

I have the same problem with Ron Goldman's family being called upon to comment on the armed robbery case. Is theere any way they can be unbiased analysts?