[Via Business Insider.]

Last week, the Daily Show caught Sean Hannity passing off old tea-party footage as representative of the (much smaller) crowd at recent protest against healthcare. Today, it's Think Progress pointing out the sleight-of-video: These shots of what is allegedly "HAPPENING NOW"—"Sarah Palin continuing to draw huge crowds" according to "video just coming into us"—really look like campaign rallies. Especially the people waving McCain-Palin signs and wearing McCain-Palin shirt. Could crazed Palinites have pulled their "Country First" signs and campaign T-shirts out of the closet in an effort to relive the glory days of '08? Yes, they could have. Does Fox deserve the benefit of the doubt on this score? No. It does not.

Also, the footage features Palin wearing her "up-do," which she seems to have abandoned of late, to judge by her appearances on Oprah and Sean Hannity:

[Image via the Nazi Documentation Center of the City of Cologne.]

There is a scandal about the NEA, because it's 1990, hooray! Did the NEA give grant money to a lady who showed her vagina to people? Or to a gay man who takes pictures of gay butts, again? No, this time it is totally not about censorship, at all. It is about FREEDOM. Because Obama is turning the NEA into a fascist propaganda machine!

In a conference call with some artists, the NEA's head communications director encouraged artists to make art about Public Service. This is also what Goebbels did.

But if your answer to that question up top is "yes" then you will not understand this scandal, and if your answer to that question is "no the government should never give money to artists at all unless they promise to only make velvet paintings of puppies or those Magic Eye pictures maybe" then you will find this all to be a terrible thing. And if you don't give a shit about the NEA but just want to lob a cheap shot at a soft target in order to score political points and get a scalp, then you might be a conservative blogger.

The diabolical alliance between Obama and his art-gangsters was struck in two shadowy conference calls last month, one allegedly hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the other by the NEA-funded Americans for Arts. Both calls invited artists to discuss ways to "make change happen" and featured representatives from the White House's Office of Public Engagement.

Drudge calls them "propaganda" calls, and hints darkly that someone lied or something about who sponsored them. It's unclear whether these were simply random conference calls hosted by artist-activists and nonprofits at which representatives of the White House and NEA appeared, or whether they were actual White House-directed efforts to get a bunch of artists on the phone. Patrick Courrielche, a blogger at Breitbart's Big Hollywood, thinks it's the latter: "What appears to be emerging is a concerted and deliberate effort by the White House and the NEA to encourage the art community to create issue specific art."

Oh dear. If Obama's way to ram healthcare legislation through is to convince artists—the group of Americans who collectively wield the smallest conceivable quantum of influence over anything, at all—to, um, do art stuff in favor of it, we are all screwed. If his idea of propaganda is a mixed-media show about the insurance industry at a community center in Deerfield, Illinois, then he's the least competent fascist in the history of fascism.

We should say that we are somewhat sympathetic to Courrielche's position. If this is indeed a White House-led effort—and there's no clear evidence that it is—it is wrongheaded. Even the suggestion that NEA money could be doled out to artists based on political criteria should be avoided, and any artist worth the name ought to feel uncomfortable about joining any conference call at all, let alone one that features Kal Penn in his duties as White House liaison to the arts community. Courrielche's initial post on the subject at Big Hollywood is actually thoughtful, well-considered, and largely devoid of hyperbole. His second post claims to uncover a thicket of lies and rants about propaganda. Hey! That's also the one Drudge linked to. What do you know?

Anyway, plenty of artists obviously support Obama's agenda, but because they are just artists and nobody pays any attention to them, they are powerless to do anything about it. Now let's hope they go back to taking pictures of urine-soaked crucifixes and men with whip-handles up their assholes, so crazy wingnuts will have more interesting things to be outraged about.

Media Matters has compared the entire exchange to Fox News' take:

Steve Doocy says, "He was downright rude—somebody asked him a question, and he said on what planet do you spend most of your time? And then to somebody else, he said trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table."

Well, yes. Except the "somebody who asked him a question" actually asked about his "Nazi policies," and he made the dining room table remark to the same LaRouchite idiot. The best part is when they play only Frank's response, making it look like he's straight-up yelling at voters, and then cut to a shot of an entirely different woman in a pretty hat to make it look like he was addressing her, and not the one who was carrying a picture of Obama made up to look like Hitler.

Edelman memo.

Stalinist propaganda.

Edelman memo.

Military-industrial complex propaganda.

Edelman memo.

Hitler Youth propaganda.

In a regulatory filing today, Sinclair executives admitted that they don't have enough cash on hand to meet the company's debt obligations, and that creditors could force the company into bankruptcy. It lost $85 million in the first quarter, owing largely to the cratering in automotive and retail advertising. It's got roughly $11 million in the bank and $1.3 billion in outstanding debt.

Sinclair is run by right-wing ideologues who refused to let the company's stations air a Nightline broadcast that recited the names of the Iraq war dead (there were just 700 at the time), insisted on pre-empting network programming two weeks before the 2004 election to air Stolen Honor, a "documentary" accusing John Kerry of betraying Vietnam POWs, and gave executive Mark Hyman a platform for commentaries that accused NPR of "aiding and abetting the enemy" for reporting on civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

The upside of the total decimation of the broadcast media business is that people like that will lose their jobs. Sinclair has scheduled a conference call with its creditors today at 3 p.m.

According to the official White House portrait/baseball card of Bo, the Portuguese Water Dog's favorite food is "tomatoes – or toys." Something was off. Tomatoes? Really? Isn't there something about dogs and tomatoes?

So we took to the internet, and sure enough—they're poison!

Tomatoes and even raw tomatoes contain a chemical called glycoalkaloid solanine, which is very poisonous to animals. You may find this strange since humans eat tomatoes all the time and they are considered very healthy food. However, they should not be fed to animals because can cause them digestive problems.

Shocked as we were to learn that the mild-mannered Obamas, this portrait of a happy, well-adjusted family, are slowly killing their own pet, we kept our cool. We know better than most that you shouldn't trust what you read on the internet. So we rang up Tony Knight, a professor at Colorado State University's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. And what he told us made our blood run cold.

"Tomatoes belong to the same family as nightshade," he said. "Mother nature didn't design dogs to eat them. One or two tomatoes is not going to do anything to a large-sized dog, but no—they're not a good food. The glycoalkaloids could cause colic and bloating—they stop the activity of the intestinal tract."

There could be no longer be any doubt. Bo's life was in danger. We had to warn him! But how? First, we needed to call the White House. Maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe they just didn't know the toll those tomatoes were taking on the poor beast.

And that's when the bottom fell out.

"Bo does not eat tomatoes," a spokeswoman for the First Lady told us. What? But the baseball card—you said... it clearly states that... how can he not eat tomatoes when you said his favorite food is tomatoes!? What kind of Kafka-esque nightmare were we in? War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Eating Tomatoes is Not Eating Tomatoes.

It was all a joke, they say. When Bo first came to the White House, back in April, Obama ad-libbed a little zinger to the press: "The only concern we have is apparently Portuguese water dogs like tomatoes—Michelle's garden is in danger," he said. So when the White House ginned up its latest propaganda campaign to foist Bo on the American people just like they're doing with Communism, they inserted a little joke in there—"Favorite food: tomatoes—or toys"—for the greater glory of the Anointed One, to remind us all how funny he is.

So Bo does not eat tomatoes. Never has. Never will. And that's the story of how we spent an hour-and-a-half trying to get a goddamn veterinary expert on the phone because of a grand and diabolical lie told by your government. Now we know exactly what it's like to be Iranian.

Which it probably is! But the Internet is full of fake shit, which people mostly (if they're smart) just ignore. Last July, when Iran docotored a missile test photo to make it look 33% scarier, it ended up on the home page of the New York Times, a place that has a general disregard for fake shit.

As near as we can tell, this crowd photo first showed up on a blog belonging to an Iranian photographer (that's because one of the only English words on the site is "Photographer"). And now Boing Boing and Gizmodo and DailyKos and everyone else is reprinting it as if it is a revelation that has effectively changed the debate about Iran and its theocratic regime.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Of course, we also know nothing about this particular image. Was it printed in a national newspaper? Dropped in a leaflet? Ginned up on someone's home computer? Who knows! And, probably who cares. You don't need a clumsily manipulated photo to know that the Iranian regime engages in propaganda.

Either way, this little episode is not really a big deal. Except, it's kind of depressing to see the same knee-jerk Internet hysteria that gripped the U.S. during last year's presidential election (backwards B!) now become The Way We Make Social Media Matter Now.

All the attention to the Iranian crowd photo has overwhelmed the site it was originally posted on. Or Iranian security has taken it down. But here's a screencap of the text describing it. Anyone who can translate, please let us know in comments what he/she said about it:

Update: Commenter MarkFL offers this kinda translation of the text:

It's basically saying that this image was published on the front page of كيهان (Kayhan), which is one of the main Iranian newspapers. Kayhan is very loyal to Ahmadinejad, so it's not really a surprise that they would try to make the number of his supporters larger.

Here's Wikipedia (because I'm not even going to pretend like I'm a sudden Iranian media expert) explanation of Kayhan, which says the paper is controlled by the Iranian government.

Another update: An Iranian reader kindly sends in this translation:

At the very top of the paper: "People's Support in Tehran for Ahmadinejad"
And main text: "And another interesting debate which was about to be hidden from our eyes. Yesterday in Keyhan paper (state paper) in the first page had this photograph and in this manner he tried to publicise a massive support for himself. It's obvious that the image must have had a white margin around it which they decided to fill with protesters. I hope that we always move in the direction of truth with eyes on precision even if we feel our interests are threatened."

The official Korean Central News Agency said the TV journalists at their trial had admitted criminal acts.

It said they were "prompted by the political motive to isolate and stifle" the North's system "by faking up moving images aimed at falsifying its human rights performance and hurling slanders and calumnies at it."

As if hurling slanders weren't imperialist enough, they had to start tossing calumnies as well! They couldn't do it from afar; they had to sneak into the people's paradise, "for the purpose of making animation files to be used for an anti-DPRK (North Korea) smear campaign over its human rights issue." Animation files, as you know, require espionage. Just as reporting on human rights violations is equivalent to a smear campaign.

Other stories from the Korean Central News Agency today:

• Japanese Reactionaries Accused of Agitating Reinvasion of Korea
• Kim Jong Il's Exploits Praised
• Reason Why He Left Stick in Car

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.This is by Kevin Roberts of Saatchi & Saatchi. Come on, Kevin Roberts. Gross.

[Paper via Adfreak]

From the Kids Section, of all places:

Somali pirates don't wear ruffled shirts and have parrots on their shoulders; they are dangerous criminals. In fact, there never were pirates who looked like the swashbuckling characters from today's toys and movies. The pirates who terrorized ships off America's coast 250 years ago were also violent thieves and were widely feared and hated.

Ahem, there absolutely were pirates who looked like the swashbuckling characters from today's toys and movies, thank you very much. Now go kill Santa why don't you?

In the piece, Rosenberg, who oversees Google's product management, says little that is surprising about Google's strategy:

This means that every fellow citizen of the world will have in his or her pocket the ability to access the world's information. As this happens, search will remain the killer application. For most people, it is the reason they access the Internet: to find answers and solve real problems.

What marks the essay is the pervasive reek of superiority — that Google knows best, and that Googlers can impose their values on the world. Take Rosenberg's discussion of "content," as Googlers are apt to call creative expression in text, video, and images:

Of course, the greatest user experience is pretty useless if there's nothing good to read, a truism that applies not just to newspapers but to the web in general. Just like a newspaper needs great reporters, the web needs experts. When it comes to information, not all of it is created equal and the web's future depends on attracting the best of it. There are millions of people in the world who are truly experts in their fields - scientists, scholars, artists, engineers, architects - but a great majority of them are too busy being experts in their fields to become experts in ours. They have a lot to say but no time to say it.

Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet's continued growth, because without them we will all sink in a cesspool of drivel. We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way. We need to make it easier for a user who sees one piece by an expert he likes to search through that expert's entire body of work. Then our users will be able to benefit from the best of both worlds: thoughtful and spontaneous, long form and short, of the ages and in the moment.

We won't (and shouldn't) try to stop the faceless scribes of drivel, but we can move them to the back row of the arena. As Harry Truman said in 1949, "We are aided by all who want relief from the lies of propaganda - who desire truth and sincerity."

Who doesn't like truth and sincerity? But one of the wonders of the Web is that publishing no longer requires the traditional filters of traditionally determined "experts." Who will Google's algorithms privilege as an expert? The likes of Rosenberg, whose career before Google was marked by the baroque failures of @Home, a broadband service which ended in bankruptcy in 2001, and eWorld, an Apple-owned Internet service provider which shut down in 1996? Or his friends?

The point is that these kind of decisions can't be made by computers. They will be made by humans — in the Googleplex in Mountain View, in London, in Zurich, Sydney, and the rest of Google's lookalike, kindergarten-colored offices around the world. Rosenberg has at last made Google's goal clear: Not just organizing the world's information, but dictating it.

The Grammy Awards performance gave the New York Times a news hook on which to hang the issue. The paper noted that the tiger icon featured in the video for M.I.A.'s 2007 hit "Bird Flu" bears a striking resemblance to the logo for Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, described by the FBI as "among the most dangerous and deadly extremists in the world," pioneering suicide bombing techniques and killing world leaders. You can compare the logo above, from the video, with the group's logo below.

The paper also quoted Sri Lankans who say M.I.A., whatever her artistic merits, glorifies the Tigers. Her father is a leader in the Tamil separatist movement.

The thing is, M.I.A. is far from the first rapper to toy with paramilitary or violent imagery. Public Enemy had the Uzi-toting S1Ws; N.W.A.'s first mass album cover had a member of the rap group pointing a gun at the camera; Ice Cube dabbled in the Nation of Islam, incorporating some themes into his music; MC Ren did a song about ethnic cleansing in America. The cartoonish extremism mainly served to help make the music appealing to suburban white kids, but, as the cliche goes, that was before 9/11.

With terrorism perceived as a bigger threat these days, M.I.A.'s music will draw harsher scrutiny. But it will be hard to take her too seriously as a terror apologist now that she's marrying into a very rich family and is cashing big corporate checks from MTV and her record company.

(Below, find a critical cover of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" by Sinhalese rapper DeLon.)

Back in September, the Defense Department's inspector general launched a probe into the relationship between the Pentagon and various retired generals acting as television pundits. According to an explosive New York Times piece that didn't go anywhere because no one on television was willing to give it any play for entirely obvious reasons, all these military commentators on your TV news were all Pentagon mouthpieces delivering straight-up propaganda. (Shock! We know!)

The report on this terrible practice will go out at 4 p.m. today, thus making it officially the very last time that Bush will release documents as everyone goes home for the weekend. He will be missed.

We recently put 2-1 odds against the long-term survival of the Herald, partly because the local economy is so real-estate driven that you couldn't possibly pick a worse time to be selling the paper (McClatchy has to, because it's broke). But! We didn't consider the possibility that the most reviled businesses in the state would team up to turn a major metro paper into their own propaganda sheet!

It all makes perfect sense, though. Ron Burkle backed Radar partly so he'd have a friendly gossip outlet. Same with Jared Kushner buying the Observer, which is one of NYC's leading real estate news outlets—Kushner's own industry. Likewise, when the billionaires Eli Broad and David Geffen were each talking about buying the LA Times last year, it was clear that part of the result would be friendlier coverage for, at least, their friends.

But those are all relatively subtle. This Miami thing is brazen. There's no reason—none!—that a freaking sugar industry exec would have an interest in buying a dying newspaper, except to make sure they get some friendlier coverage for their ongoing rape of Florida's environment.

"Trump, Rumsfeld Buy NYT In '09." Watch for it! [via Romenesko]