Pen-Elayne on the Web

Foxy Mocksy

"Parody is a form of artistic expression protected by the First Amendment. The keystone to parody is imitation. Mr. Franken is clearly mocking Fox." It's really nice to find a judge who actually understands a bit about comedy and satire. Takes me back to my old college days, it does. Goddess bless my liberal arts education, I actually took courses called Comedy and Satire toward credit requirements for one of my majors (English) but there are a lot of folks who can analyze the stuff intuitively without benefit of academia and it's great to see when someone Gets It Right. With Franken's victory I have removed the "Fair & Balanced" stuff from my subtitle and sidebar. By the way, Lis Riba (link at sidebar, keep trying until you connect!) has a couple interesting posts about how Fox's news site itself handled the report of this hearing. And I smiled when I checked out Amazon's current top-seller nonfiction list, thanks to a tip on Atrios' comment section. Franken at #1, Conason at #2, Hightower at #4, Palast at #5, Ivins at #6 (in pre-release), Moore's latest still holding pretty strong at #13, Weapons of Mass Deception at #15, Ehrenreich at #17, Alterman at #18, and lookie, Howard Zinn at #19! That's quite extraordinary, and certainly seems to put the lie to the meme that the country's become more conservative.