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–The number of Americans (18 percent) who mistakenly think Pres. Obama is a Muslim, according to a Pew Research poll conducted before his comments on the Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan. A Time Magazine poll taken after his comments showed 25 percent of Americans now think Obama is a Muslim.

Personally, if I had $100 million to build a mosque that promotes interfaith tolerance, I would not build it in Manhattan. I’d build it in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. That is where 9/11 came from, and those are the countries that espouse the most puritanical version of Sunni Islam — a version that shows little tolerance not only for other religions but for other strands of Islam…That resistance to diversity, though, is not something we want to emulate, which is why I’m glad the mosque was approved on Tuesday. Countries that choke themselves off from exposure to different cultures, faiths and ideas will never invent the next Google or a cancer cure…

— Thomas Friedman, author and New York Times columnist

Here’s a story we doubt you’ll see reported on FOX News. AlterNet recently completed a year-long investigation into so-called “gaming the system” at the content aggregator, Digg. A Yahoo group calling itself the Digg Patriots (whose site has since been taken down) figured out how to rig Digg’s voting. If you don’t know, at Digg [...]

e careful what you provoke, Tea Party exploiters. Florida governor hopeful Rick Scott recently discovered it’s one thing to gin up the teabagging crowds, and something else to be on the receiving end of all that anger.
Scott made millions as CEO of Columbia/HCA. The hospital chain founded by the Frist family (as in former Senate [...]

he great thing about having Facebook friends who watch Glenn Beck is that you don’t have to. It’s like having Jon Stewart in your news feed, only not nearly as funny.
Three presidents in recent history missed the Arlington ceremony: Reagan, Bush, and Bush.
That’s how I know that the big tea bagging deal at the moment [...]

This episode shows the perfection of the right-wing propaganda apparatus. First, they convinced their base to mistrust corporate media, in part by framing it as the “liberal media.” Now right-wing propagandists like O’Reilly can be proven to be lying, as Huffington Post did here — but his viewers will never see the proof because, as noted, they have been trained to avoid legitimate news outlets.

Just days after a poll found Fox News to be the least trustworthy among the cable channels, a new poll from NBC News — not teaming this time with Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall St. Journal — finds that around three-quarters of self-identified Fox viewers believe the four big lies being promulgated by the GOP about health-insurance [...]