Why Americans are so uninformed

Not sure if this says more about the media, or the markets.

Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America's cover is quite, well – different. This week offers a stark example. [...]

This is not an isolated incident, for perusing TIME's covers reveals countless examples of the publication tempting the world with critical events, ideas or figures, while dangling before Americans the chance to indulge in trite self-absorption.

Click over to see more.

It's easy to blame Time for dumbing down the public but they're in the thankless business of selling magazines. I'm not sure who reads Time in the paper version these days but my anecdotal experience is far too few Americans care about world politics anymore. Time's US cover stories reflect what they think the US market will buy. I'm not sure they're wrong.

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Blaming Obama

This takes Obama Derangement Syndrome to a new level.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

To be clear, the question specifically asked, "Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?"

In other words 73% of Louisiana Republicans don't remember who was president when Katrina hit NOLA. And people wonder why we can't have an informed debate on anything in this country anymore?

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Send in the creepy clowns

I usually ignore these sort of lame-ass stupid crackpot shots at Obama but this show of disrespect to our POTUS at a Missouri rodeo wasn't just an obscure and brief reference in some movie. This was a sustained charade at a family event with lots of children in attendance.

"The announcer wanted to know if anyone would like to see Obama run down by a bull," the posting said. "The crowd went wild. He asked it again and again, louder each time, whipping the audience into a lather."

Another clown then apparently joined the performance.

"One of the clowns ran up and started bobbling the lips on the mask and the people went crazy," the posting said. "Finally a bull came close enough to him that he had to move so he jumped up and ran away to the delight of the onlookers hooting and hollering from the stands."

Real lesson for the kids in civil discourse and tempered political disagreement there. Of course it's nothing new and not really worth making a huge deal over it. The main reason I'm mentioning it at all is because nobody has asked, "WTF is that broomstick in the photo all about?"

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Oh deer, overkill in Wisconsin

The militarization of local law enforcement reached a new low this week with the senseless slaughter of Giggles the fawn. In a scene reminiscent of a SWAT team raiding a criminal cartel's headquarters, nine fully armed wildlife cops and four local sheriffs descended on an animal rescue farm in search of illegal contraband -- to wit, one tiny baby deer. What happened next defied logic.

“I said the deer is scheduled to go to the wildlife reserve the next day,” Schulze said.

It was to go to a wildlife reserve in Illinois that allows the rehabilitation of deer. Schulze said agents corralled workers near the picnic area and then set out in search of the fawn.

“I was thinking in my mind they were going to take the deer and take it to a wildlife shelter, and here they come carrying the baby deer over their shoulder. She was in a body bag,” Schulze said. “I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘That’s our policy,’ and I said, ‘That’s one hell of a policy.’”

Granted, it apparently is illegal to harbor a wild animal in Wisconsin but they could have taken the poor little creature to the legal shelter themselves. Or fined Schulze and allowed him to transport it himself in the morning. Hard to see what was served by killing it. Fucking barbarians.

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A McBudget for the working poor

"McDonalds has partnered with Visa to launch a website to help its low-wage workers making an average $8.25 an hour to budget." If this sample McBudget wasn't so cruel and insulting, it would be so absurd as to be funny.



Have to love that it starts by assuming their workers need two jobs to make ends meet. Of course that ignores the fact that few of their workers actually clear even as much as $1000 in a month, much less are offered schedules that allow them to get a second crappy minimum wage job with enough hours to make up the difference. And apparently they believe all their workers live in the tropics and thus need no money for heat.

In response to an email from Think Progress asking how they came up with this work of fantasy fiction, McDonald's had this to say.

The samples that are on this site are generic examples and are intended to help provide a general outline of what an individual budget may look like.”

I'd suggest their CEO try to live on that budget for a month or two and then get back to us on how well it worked. Measuring on the stupid or evil scale, this farce goes off the chart on both.

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Koch attacks the messenger

When you're a mega-billionaire you don't need Fox News to shill for you against bad press. Instead, like the Kochs, you make up your own facts and launch individualized smear campaigns against legitimate journalists. Like this guy who wrote about the XL Pipeline.

In a rebuttal posted on its Web site, KochFacts.com, the company asserted that Sassoon’s story “deceives readers” by suggesting that Koch Industries stood to benefit from construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — a denial Sassoon included in his story. KochFacts went on to dismiss Sassoon as a “professional eco-activist” and an “agenda-driven activist.”

It didn’t stop there. The company took out ads on Facebook and via Google featuring a photo of Sassoon with the headline, “David Sassoon’s Deceptions.” The ad’s copy read, “Activist/owner of InsideClimate News misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods about Koch. Get the full facts on KochFacts.com.”

Not going to link to it but the website is impressive. It's a combination of presenting the material from every wingnut meme that gets passed around in viral emails by your crazy uncle but couched in the language of the well-educated and a collection of articles by their friendly fluffers in BigMedia. For instance this feel-good bit from the WSJ.

As part of their effort to position themselves as a credible alternative to Warren Buffett, the Koch brothers make two promises: We won’t string you along, and we won’t go hostile.

“We get a fair amount of calls,” Dave Robertson, president and chief operating officer of Koch Industries, said in a recent interview at Koch headquarters, an anonymous-looking compound surrounded by farmland on the fringes of Wichita, Kan. “We’d like to get more — and not just from Wall Street. There may be business owners out there who have need for capital for certain things and they’re not connected with the Wall Street bunch. We’d be happy to field those calls…. We feel we have the ability to assess the opportunity and respond very quickly.”

Desperate business owners and Koch's unlimited cash reserves. What could possibly go wrong?

I've always wondered how otherwise seemingly intelligent people could get suckered in by the crackpot con propaganda. Suddenly it becomes clearer...

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Hope I die before I get old

We go through this every ten years, olds blaming the youth for what's wrong with everything. The new gen blame the olds for fucking everything up. They want to change the world. The olds are threatened by change and yearn for the good old days when everything was predictable and made sense. To them. So it has been and so it shall be probably for as long as humans inhabit this planet.

Apparently, while I've been busy with real life endeavors, there's been a spate of hit pieces against the Millenials on the intertoobz. So graphic artist Matt Bors, (who turns out to be much younger than I thought), posts a great take on the latest interation of intergenerational warfare rendered in his own inimitable style.

Via Atrios who rightly reminds the crackpot cranks, "And, no, olds, you would not be able to work yourself through college without help or debt today. Public university used to be free or cheap, it no longer is."

Seriously. This new generation has been so screwed by the olds, don't see how anyone can blame the kids for anything. They have every right to be pissed off.

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What year is this again?

I'm hearing this Cheerios commercial has unleashed a firestorm of racism. I saw it for the first time the other night and didn't even notice the couple was interracial. People are so weird.

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Crumbling infrastructure is our national shame

Miraculously no one was killed when that bridge went down in Washington state this week. It's unlikely we'll be so lucky the next time and there will be a next time because we can't get the funding out of DC. The chart shows our national neglect of our critical infrastructure.



You might have thought the horrifying bridge collapse on I-35W in Minneapolis in 2007 would have been a wake up call, but no. At a time when one in nine of our bridges are deficient in some way, Republicans continue to block all infrastructure spending simply because they see it as win for Obama and they're still trying to squash our economy for their own politcal gain in the next election.

It's stupid. Hell it's evil. We could put people to work rebuilding our roads and bridges and as Atrios said, replace aging waterlines in our cities. Those are so ancient, they're busting open all over America.

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