I'm not disagreeing with you, because I don't know, but is it true that you can only get your protein-carb ratio high enough by eating meat? I'm looking at my totals today (on a vegan diet), and I'm at 104 grams protein, 28 grams sugar, and 46 grams (estimated) starch. (And I'm not shooting for high protein or low carbs, just low fat.) There are a lot of very high protein, low carb meat substitutes out there. They may not be appetizing to everybody, but I don't think they differ much from meat, nutrition-wise, except for much lower fat.

I have yet to see a very persuasive medical argument for meat. But I'm listening, and if somebody needs meat to be healthy, I wouldn't profess to be in a position to tell them what to do. Far more common, in my experience, is the "I don't think about it, and I'm not going to think about it" approach. Which is fine for 90-year olds; they can have all the slack they want on just about anything. For the rest of us? Not so much.

I doff my hat to you, sir. You are as wrong as could be, on every major point, but you distinguish yourself from 99.9% of your conservative compatriots by exhibiting both intelligence and literary grace. I wish I could dissuade you from the ungrammatical and unpoetic use of "Democrat" as an adjective, but that is a quibble, and I'm sure a hopeless one. Thanks for helping to elevate the tone -- itself perhaps a Quixotic ambition.

BTW, I would not assume you were male if you were not obviously literate enough to know which Latin gender to adopt.

If Fox isn't a news channel, then why do I hear accurate news?

Hmmm, what are the possibilities?

     1. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

     2. One hears what one wants to hear. (Some more readily than others.)

     3. You attribute non-dictionary meanings to the term "accurate," or "news," or both.

     4. By remarkable coincidence, you only tune in to Faux when they happen to be reporting on things with no political valence whatsoever.

     5. You're not actually tuned to Faux.

I think that about exhausts the workable hypotheses.

Violating my solemn oath never to respond to right-wing trolls, I just could not resist congratulating you on your belated realization that the function of journalism is not to "be a cheerleader for those in power." But putting that truism in the same paragraph with an assertion that Faux is "the ONLY legitimate nationwide TV news channel" proves that you (1) slept through the last administration, (2) are trolling for laughs, or (3) are engaging in psy-ops on behalf of the GOP by trying to poison this discussion before it gets off the ground.

The third possibility intrigues me, especially now that we are hearing confirmation in other contexts of what I've long suspected -- not everybody posting in discussions like this one is doing it recreationally, or without compensation.

The fact that there are people in mainstream "journalism" who think of Fox as a "news channel" -- or pretend to -- simply boggles my mind. But I guess it's par for the current ill-fated course. The older I get, and the more I see, the more radically I find my understanding of American politics shifting to the left. When "Manufacturing Consent" was new I had a very hard time wrapping my head around it. Now it seems tame, even quaint, and Chomsky seems like a veritable prophet -- without honor, just as the scripture says.

I would not weep to see them all swept away -- the NYT, the "news" networks, all the consensus-reality hucksters who cheered us into the Iraq debacle like it was a game. The only public service they provide is paying reporters to gather news -- and they permit so little of the reality of our public life to reach the masses that their dominance in the newsgathering field is a mixed blessing at best. I say give your ears and your subscription money to your favorite independent media source -- including enterprises that are trying to fill this newsgathering function -- and tell the MSM -- all of them -- to shove their high journalistic self-regard where the moon don't shine.

All that said, I would never make the mistake of lumping the others with Fox. It's in a class by itself -- a fraud, a sham, a travesty, a bunch of actors performing propaganda pieces in which they pretend to be journalists. It would be funny, I mean really funny -- if so many people didn't fall for it.