Todd's Mischief Blog

Yes. That is a Stones reference. Since the naming of Paul Ryan as the running mate of GOP Presidential nominee-apparent Mitt Romney, the Anybody-But-Romney crowd has quieted down its protests. It’s about time, considering that his last serious competitor, Newt Gingrich, dropped out of the race in May, and even the ABR crowd can’t get behind holdout Ron Paul. Still, as pleased as they are with the Ryan pick, and the unabashed conservatism he represents, they aren’t singing Mitt’s praises just yet. Oh, they’ve come around in just about every way imaginable. They’ve always praised his business experience. The flip-flopper and gaffe memes have been largely discredited. His lack of foreign policy experience is dismissed by citing the same of Reagan. Likewise, the Tenth Amendment is cited to put aside questionable aspects of his governorship in Massachusetts apart from RomneyCare. And even there, the ABR’s seem to now take Mitt at his word that he intends to do away with ObamaCare and are ev...

I don't think there was any question about which topic would dominate the Sunday shows this week. Pretty much every show was devoted to discussion of the Supreme Court's ruling on ObamaCare and trying to make some sense of Chief Justice Roberts' decision. While the blog-o-sphere and talk radio are lamenting that the bill is upheld, I think it is good to pause for a moment and take note that the liberals in Washington and the MSM appear like they've taken the loss. Case in point: on ABC This Week, CBS Face the Nation, and NBC Meet the Press, their respective guests, White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi all read from the same script refusing to acknowledge the High Court's determination that the ObamaCare mandate does constitute a tax. Even in the face of this legally set definition, all three vehemently insist that the tax is merely a "penalty," and one directed at the 1%, I might...

Yesterday , the right wing media was abuzz with the story of Deb Fischer, the Tea Party David who took down the establishment GOP's Goliath, Jon Bruning. So why would Nebraska Senator Mike Johanns take issue with that? “She's not going to get tangled up in Tea Party and everything else,” Johanns told the Omaha World Herald. “I just think she's going to be a very common-sense, practical conservative, and we need more of that here.” Conventional wisdom would say that Johanns isn't even making sense. How can the Tea Party candidate not get "tangled up" in the Tea Party? What is he talking about? Johanns is talking about reality. What's being billed as a Tea Party victory has almost nothing to do with the Tea Party. I'm not going to make many friends among those who claim victory after-the-fact, but the simple truth is that no Nebraska Tea Party groups made any official endorsements in the primary election. I don't doubt that there were many Tea Party...

I do two things every Sunday: I wash laundry, and I watch the morning news shows. The laundry makes everything is fresh and clean. the The Sunday shows just leave a mess behind. CBS Sunday Mourning could have done my little heart good with an exposé on the many problems with the FDA approval process. Unfortunately, they highlighted the wrong problems. Instead of focusing in on the sluggish approval processes that keep life changing and saving devices from patients in need of them, they zeroed in on 0.2% of people who receive a faulty FDA-approved implant. The voice of reason in the segment cautioned that a zero-risk system would lead to no medical progress, a far worse proposition. But CBS gave the final word to the brother of a man whose defibrillator implant failed—a man who, of course, thinks one failure is too many. Sadly, the final call was for a decidedly faulty government agency to do more. Bah! On the flipside of progress, CBS did do a fair examination of a potential new sour...

How awesome is THIS? In his quest to create an alternative media empire, it seems as though Glenn Beck has been adopting some of the practices of the existing one. This is far from the first time I've noticed it, but I'm in the mood to pick some low-hanging fruit, today. Today's case-study is an exposé on the atheist Reason Rally currently being held in Washington, D.C.filmed for The Blaze by one Billy Hallowell . In the video, not only does Billy attempt to highlight atheistic ire for Christianity, but to expose them as hypocrites. His production cites the Q&A section of the Reason Rally website , which states: Are we just going to use this opportunity to trash religion? No. This will be a positive experience... Indeed, in interview after interview, the atheists all uniformly mock Christianity and faith in general. I just have one problem--and this comes from the accompanying article--Billy specifically asked each of the interviewees to condense Christianity into on...

There are two things I do every Sunday: I wash the laundry, and I watch the morning news shows. The former is necessary, but I don’t know why I subject myself to the latter. Still, like so much dirty laundry, the news on Sunday leaves much to clean up. CBS Sunday Morning took note of a trend among GOP presidential candidates; they all rail against the failures European socialism on the campaign trail. But how does the rhetoric square with reality over there? Well, CBS found that if you cherry-pick your data, things are just fine across the pond. In fact, in <i>Northern</i> Europe, unemployment is lower than the US national average. So much for the pesky fact that the EU reported 10.1% unemployment in January. But why get bogged down in lots of boring numbers when you can simply choose to miss the point? That’s ultimately the route CBS took when they praised all the freebies Europe bestows upon its citizens—you know, the ones which are driving the Eurozone’s debt and that D...

There are two is one side s to every story News must have been pretty slow last Friday because the biggest story was about Arizona Governor Jan Brewer wagging her finger at President Obama on the tarmac when he paid a visit to her state. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the media managed to draw this story entirely from a single photo. Almost every version of the story makes a point of the fact that no one actually heard the two executives' exchange. Nevertheless, so eager was the legacy media to further the guise of Obama as the benevolent savior to the ungrateful hordes that they whipped up a story of Brewer's belligerence out of practically nothing. Cue the stream of commentaries and editorials decrying Brewer for her "hostility." As such, it should probably come as no surprise that the single photo driving the story is also edited.  No, there is no Photoshop chicanery, but the image that is most returned on Google Images has been strategically cropped. Th...

Glenn Beck doesn’t like to be accused of looking for “ booger bears ,” so I won’t. The top story today on Glenn Beck’s…well, almost everything is about proposed State Department form DS-5513, “Biographical Questionnaire for a U.S. Passport.” Glenn is weirded out by some of the questions that it asks—and there are some weird ones—but the speculation he engages in because of it sounds like a part of the FEMA camp conspiracy theory that he worked so hard to debunk .  “Why doesn’t Gov want you to have a passport?” his website asks. On radio, Glenn put it this way: “Who is it that won’t be qualified—or won’t be allowed to get a passport to leave the country?” That the form would only be issued to “some” applicants is not a relief to Glenn but a sign of the ominous because, as the form states, “failure to provide the information requested may result in … the denial of your U.S. passport application.” Ya think? “Who are they trying to trap here?” Glenn asks. Enemies of the president, he ...

No surprise, HuffPo has a lot of MB devoted to trashing the Restoring Honor Rally on their site, much of which read as though they had actually been written before the rally. There are so many articles, I won't bother linking to any but my favorite, a photo gallery entitled Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor Rally: The Most Ridiculous Messages . Unfortunately, this morning the article boasted 30 photos, but as of right now, that number has been culled to 20. I wish I'd thought to grab them all, just to show how non-ridiculous many of them were. For example, one missing photo depicts a pleasant, likely octogenarian lady, wearing a stars and stripes scarf and smiling for the camera. Totally ridiculous, right? Even though the folks at HuffPo have culled their selection to the most "ridiculous" I don't think they even hold a candle to The Best Anti-Glenn Beck Signs At The 'Restoring Honor' Rally . Anyway, I perused and participated in the flood of comments accom...