Perfect Fox hed of the decade

Do you figure there was a contest or something at Fox? With a week of parking in the executive spot next to Roger Ailes's for the first one to get "penis," "gay" and "your tax $$$" into the same hed?

The federal government helped fund a study that examined what effect a gay man's penis size has on his sex life and general well-being.

And should we lynch anybody in particular, or just string up the usual suspects? Let's ask Fox readers to comment!*

Obama must be thinking about switch hitting, huh? I don't blame him. That wife of his would make me cringe thinking about her going into the residential area of the White House.

Seriously, who ever authorized this study should be put in prison for fraud and wasting tax payer money.  They should should forced to refund all money and then their citizenship should be removed.

It's no freaking WONDER that the country is on fire with anger at this administration! This kind of press is going to get him run out of town on a rail BEFORE 2012!

You can bet Bawney Fwank has wowked wong and hawd to keep dis pwogwam awive, too

Measuring a gay man's pe nis is just as stupid as spending millions to teach men in Africa how to wash theirs, tread mills for shrimp and the effect of booze on prostutes in China. Whoever decides these things needs some serious mental help. And kept away from the tax dollars.

The next civil war is closer than we all think.  Things like this just add sparks to an already overly fueled up societal divide

Americans do not deserve to have the money they worked hard for be STOLEN by homosexual professors looking for a free ride & young men.  Go ahead.......You donate "YOUR MONEY" to this cause & study it all you want if you're "behind" it.  The rest of it should focus our efforts on hunting down the guilty persons involved in this theft.

Slavery was wrong and the Africans should have been returned back to Africa. If they had been, America woulld not be in the sad evil shape it is in today. The Blacks have been a curse upon America.
 
Well, that was amusing, wasn't it? It hardly seems fair to point to this graf in the Fox story:

Though it's difficult to trace exactly how much federal funding went to the project, the study was one of many linked to an $899,769 grant in 2006. The grant was administered by NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse, and went first to a group called Public Health Solutions and a researcher with the National Development and Research Institutes before going to individual researchers.

A grant in -- 2006? That may or may not be somehow related to results of a survey conducted in 2006, presented at a conference in 2008 and published online Jan. 13, 2009? A full week before the Kenyan Muslim socialist formally launched his campaign to destroy America?

Fox, to put it politely, is being a bit disingenuous. It's impossible to "trace exactly how much" of YOUR $$$ is involved. But from the acknowledgements, it appears that the paper's first author was supported "in part" by a postdoctoral fellowship through the agencies Fox mentions. So we've gone from $900,000** to a fraction of a postdoc, paying for some unspecified activity or another, in one easy step.

That's a short way of saying that some federal agency, under a Republican executive and legislature, approved some amount of money that (directly or indirectly) helped cover some part of the cost of a study that sheds some light on human sexual behavior. And those first two aspects -- it's from an earlier period in American political life, and it's probably a lot closer to a few months' rent than to a million dollars, whatever it's paying for -- risk obscuring the third. This is one of the things grownup societies do. We provide funding for stuff that makes us, as a whole, smarter. Even if it's about things we don't like or understand or expect to gain from personally.

Notwithstanding the patently criminal sleaze now being dissected in the UK, this is the real damage the Fox empire does. You'll note from the comments -- hello, agenda-setting function of mass media! -- that people remember what they're told about. Monday's gem isn't just about one reporter ginning up a single bogus story handed to him by a pressure group. It's about what science is: a librul plot to serve the gay Kenyan conspiracy by wasting your money on foreign hookers and shrimp aerobics.

When people call to ask why you aren't covering this story, ridicule them.

* 3,800-plus as of this writing. But who's counting?
** It's $9 million at the National Review Online. Buckley's going to spin himself up to the surface before long.