pinecone paradise

The puppy is just like Super Grover and the dog is just like Kermit the Frog.


Well, I wasn't the hugest fan of Al Franken before, but after going to four bookstores yesterday (and buying potential thesis-topic books) and then ending up in one that is small and independent but never has exactly quite what I want, and spending an hour there waiting for the movie to start, I decided, well, what the hell. I'll buy and read Al Franken's book. Especially because I'd read the beginning on Salon.com and found it very funny.


And, after spending all day reading it (other's taking a shot at it now) instead of my potential thesis-topics books, I must say that I highly recommend it. It's about goddamn time someone decided to call these people out on the multitude of lies that they spew. (The book is called "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right".)


I was skeptical at first. I thought things like "how could someone really write an entire book that was just all lies and still have a successful career?" and "Al Franken probably has his own agenda and will be sort of untruthful too" and "how bad could the lying problem possibly be?" BUT. Then I read the book. And now I'm trying to find some way to trick my family into reading it too, and so they'll see why Bill O'Reilly should not be taken seriously (shut up! shut up!) and why Fox News is bad bad bad and that the media doesn't have a liberal bias, etc.


It's really satisfying, in a way, to read about all this stuff being set straight. At the same time, it's disturbing how much lying there is. More people need to spell out exactly how saying "american families will get an average of $1,100 from this tax cut" is, while technically true, not true at all considering that the average is an AVERAGE, meaning that rich families will get several tens of thousands of dollars back while lower-class families will get about $300 if any at all. Also, there were those bold-faced lies Bush told - over and over again - about the vast majority of the cuts going to people at the bottom of the ladder. Simply not fucking true. How can he get away with this?