On Friday FOX ran a full page ad in the Washington Post stating that CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC did not cover the 9/12 teabagging event in Washington, D.C..
CNN, which did cover the event, as we all very well know, will have none of FOX's distortions.
According to CNN's Rick Sanchez, there is a difference between promoting and covering an event. CNN covered the news. FOX promoted it.
When lawmakers oppose transformational health care reform or lie about it by calling it a "government run program" that will create death panels and impose tax-payer funded abortions, they show cruel contempt for many of their constituents. These lawmakers are especially heartless toward those who are suffering from lack of decent health care. And those who will go bankrupt in attempt to get well. Politicians who rail against health care reform are most likely shilling for the insurance companies.
Anti-reform politicians prove that they approve of the insurance company death panels that do indeed exist, as we can see below.
To learn who is contributing to your U.S. elected officials, go to OpenSecrets.org.
During her career, Senator Kay Bailey "government take-over" Hutchison received $937,340 from the health professional industry. She has received $257,849 from health care professionls this year alone. My U.S. House Rep. (TX-7 Houston) John Culberson received $10,600 this year from Pharma and Health Professional groups.
A for-profit health care system run by monopolies with no competition is wrong. It is immoral, un-American and undemocratic. For some, it is also a death sentence.
When one goes to alternative sources for news and information on the evil doing Internets, one is likely to discover a whole host of information that will routinely never make it to the local, national evening news or cable TV.
The posts below, for example, are certainly fit to print and air but somehow, because of the powers that be in the corporate owned media, much of it has been fed through the buzz saws and the shredders of the gatekeepers who control particular messages and agendas.
Thanks to the interactive Internets and You Tube, bloggers can disclose news that is largely unnoticed or ignored in the mainstream.
Halliburton/KBR Rewarded for Deaths of U.S. Troops.
According to an article written by Jeremy Scahill for The Nation magazine, Kellogg Brown and Root received bonuses for work that had in fact killed American troops.
First, from the Texas wing of The Party of Torture and Tax Cuts.
Senator John Cornyn, prominent member of the Party of Torture and willing player in the Bush Administration's
Journey to Depravity must think Democrats are quaking in their boots because, according to The Huffington Post he attempted to bully and blackmail them on the torture issue.
Cornyn apparently prefers to sweep the recent revelations of torture under the rug. That or pin the blame on Democrats who served on the Foreign Intelligence Committee at the time, and/or stick it to low level military and CIA officers at the bottom of the torture chain of command.
If Democrats insist on probing the Bush administration's program of detainee torture, they'd better be careful, a senior Senate Republican said Tuesday, because they might find blood on their own hands as well.
"To sit quietly and to let this happen and then to come back later and say people ought to be prosecuted criminally, not just here in the United States but perhaps internationally, to me is inconsistent, to say the least," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Lately we have been hearing a lot of squawking and screeching emanating from the conservative right wing about a revolution.
This is rather perplexing given that we recently had an election in which the elected President won rather substantially without the need for voter caging, voter suppression, election fraud, recounts, recount shut downs, lawsuits and the Supreme Court. Nor was it necessary to bring in the likes of a Swift Boat attack machine and a corrupted Secretary of State (R-OH) to deliver a win in a razor thin, close election.
And despite all of the problems we face in these dire and stressful times the President's approval ratings remain in the 60's. Today it is at 67%. Today an ABC/Washington Post poll also reveals 65% trust President Obama to handle relations with Muslim nations.
So, what is the problem? Why is a revolution necessary now?
Thanks to shoddy work done on the cheap, no doubt. According to a separate report, Houston based KBR is also hiding its money in an off shore tax haven to avoid paying its fair share of U.S. taxes.
What a fine, stand up firm.
Diarist Meteor Blades over at Daily Kos wrote an expose about KBR's appalling faulty electrical work in Iraq.
"It was horrible -- some of the worst electrical work I've ever seen," said Jim Childs, a master electrician and the top civilian expert in an Army safety survey. Childs told CNN that "with the buildings the way they are, we're playing Russian roulette.
Oh what a stunning surprise. The architects of trickle down baloney and black magic misery give the President a failing grade. The liars ignored the fact that their grading is based on a discredited Wall Street Journal Survey.
These very same go-to bitches for the sound, solid and endless profit spewing machines of Enron, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, AIG and the Bank of America actually believe they can credibly weigh in on President Obama.
That alternative universe of theirs must have become an insane asylum during the W. years.
And the gates of the asylum swung open this week when the looney tunes marched out in full lock step support of its collective whackonomics.
Check out the right wing looney tunes shows over at Daily Kos.
These morons unashamedly got it wrong for over a decade. Why on earth would they get it right today? The same twisted and failed ideologies continue to underpin their whackonomic make believe.
Please pour yourselves a little glass of your preferred beverage of relaxation, get out the popcorn, if you like, sit back and enjoy the show.
First, the ground rules: Jackass awards are not exclusive to the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh or propagandists for right wing and conservative thought. A jackass is viewed as one who is either arrogant or stupid enough to believe he/she can get away with fooling, lying to and/or willfully misleading others. In other words, any person who holds a position of influence whether one is a politician, elected official, community, or business leader, and this includes all media pundits, anchors and spokespersons for all of the above, who arrogantly or stupidly insults the intelligence of those they do, or hope to influence, is a jackass.
A jackass is also one who refuses to accept or lies about certain realities such as:
The simplest explanation for why America's reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as "socialist" ("fascist" can't be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. "There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few," the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn't seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.
This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their '20s predecessors once floated stock purchases "on margin." Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.'s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country's wholesale flight from reality.
Finally, a jackass is one who wants to revert to the same old failed and stupid policies that got us into this economic meltdown in the first place.
This is a work in progress, folks. The updates follow at the bottom.
Next time a politician extols the virtues of trickle down economics put your hands over your ears and yell NO, NO, NO. Whether they know it or not, any politician who pitches the spin that unfettered fat cat wealth will trickle down to the masses is lying. Nothing is trickling anywhere. The fat cats are not spending their gazillions. They are hiding and hoarding their money for themselves.
It seems that the biggest fat cats of them all in this country and others, those who despise paying their taxes above everything else, have found safe havens in which they have hidden their treasures from the feds. A once renowned Swiss bank helped them do it. The whistle blower who outed the scheme at a U.S. Senate hearing last July, had feared for his life. He now lives in a
witness protection program. The article reveals how the Senate hearing had all of the trappings of a Mafia movie.
Kieber, declared a fugitive by Liechtenstein, is living in an undisclosed location, reportedly as part of a witness protection program, after providing information to government officials in England, Germany, the United States and other countries on their citizens who hid billions in wealth through the bank. The German government has admitted to paying him millions for the data.
In his videotaped testimony, Kieber described stumbling across the bank's secrecy schemes while working on a document conversion project several years ago.
"Going through thousands of documents. . . I got the very clear picture" of the "tricks" employed by the bank to help clients dodge tax collectors, creditors, even "international law enforcement agencies," he said.
Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight made a very interesting observation in his article about Tim Geithner and the bank bailout.
At the end of the day, a great deal of the debate between liberals and conservatives is about how to apportion wealth. It seems so banal to talk about it that way, and so we put all sorts of window dressing on it, but that's really what it's all about. But on this issue of the banking crisis -- and to a lesser extent this was true of the stimulus -- there is a much larger delta on the aggregate amount of wealth that the United States stands to gain (or lose) than on how that wealth is distributed. Over the next 6-18 months, the outcomes for everyone from the top of the economic ladder to the bottom rung are very strongly correlated.
Hats off to the banal and obvious.
We have always known the Republicans traditionally embrace the belief that the rich deserve to get richer. If the rich get richer everyone will benefit b/c the wealthy will toss a few cake crumbs down to the not-rich and voila! we will all be dancing in the golden paved streets together. As far as I am concerned this ideology should be called Trickle Down Voodoo Arts. Unfortunately it is glaringly apparent to most of us how this Republican black magic works. It is for, by and of the rich.
If we think of Republican lawmakers' collective behavior through this very difficult financial period we can see how all of their posturing, grandstanding, pontificating, temper tantrums, clown acts and faux rage over the stimulus package is all about fighting to maintain the Trickle Down status quo.
For the last few weeks we have been listening to wall-to-wall coverage 24/7 about the flamboyant governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, and pay-to-play politics. As we all know by now the Illinois governor is charged with criminal conspiracy for attempting to sell President Elect Barack Obama's U.S. Senate seat. Rod Blagojevich is clearly another crooked and arrogant politician who thinks he is above the law. But at least this one found himself impeached by the Illinois House.
It is nice to know some states have lawmakers who have an ethical spine where such blatant corruption and beyond the pale pay-to-play politics are concerned. Too bad Texas is sorely lacking in this area. But one has to remember the Party that is running the state at this time, although not all Democratic politicians would receive A's in ethics and integrity departments either.
When the Blagojevich scandal broke, several of the cable TV talking heads and pundits appeared especially outraged by pay-to-play politics and so I promptly sent off an email to MSNBC and CNN and suggested that if they are so livid about pay-to-play, they ought to send their research staff down to Texas to see how it works in a state where purchasing elections and pay-to-play is business du jour. Apparently other folks from around the U.S. contacted the media with the same request. Chris Matthews of Hardball responded with a chart that listed the most offending states. Texas is among them.
Today is my son's birthday. He is working for the Obama campaign as a field organizer in southwestern Va. This diary is written in honor of his birthday and for his hard work on the campaign trail.
What is it about Republicans and their knack for choosing unqualified and bungling candidates on the top or bottom of their tickets?
It appears that 2008 is no different from 2004 in terms of choices where the worst of the worse of Republican candidates are concerned. History will prove, in no uncertain terms, that W. is the worst president in recent times. His ratings are plummeting downward, especially since the financial melt down on Wall St. Whether Republicans care to admit it or not the GOP delivered three extraordinary calamities since 2000: 9/11, Iraq and the Wall Street crash of September 29, 2008.
Is John McCain really a different kind of Republican? Let's hear what CNN's Jack Cafferty has to say about McCain and the current financial disaster on Wall St.
The reichtwing keeps underestimating Michael Moore and it keeps backfiring on them. At the least, you'd think they would have learned to send a mouthpiece with more intelligence than CNN's Wolf Blitzer to challenge Moore. Learn? Yeah, right.
In a revealing and important CNN poll, for the first time ever a majority of Americans, 56%, do not believe that gays can change their sexual orientations even if they wanted to (and why the hell would y'all want to?). That's an amazing 20 point increase from 1998 when only 36% believed gays truly were, well, um, gay (as opposed to confused, experimenting or, oh I dunno, just rebeling).
20 POINTS in just 9 years - wow! That's an impressive increase. At a time when our President's bigotry promotes homophobia and unscientific ideas on homosexuality (and everything else), this number is another movement towards equality and acceptance.
And it's not simply a case of Americans giving up on trying to "save the queers" though I have no doubt that some did just that. The rest of the poll indicates there has been a signficant change in the public's opinions on homosexuality since the 70's when only 13% of Americans actually believes gays were born gay.
The simple fact that Americans are beginning to see that there is a hard-wired cause of homosexuality is progress. For one thing, if there is a biological basis for homosexuality and not bad parenting or an abusive childhood, then under religous doctrine God not Man created gays to be gay.
That will have IMHO a significant impact on the treatment and attitudes towards gays because someone who is seen as one of God's creations is viewed significantly better and humanely than someone who is thought of as the byproduct of Man's social failures.
This shift in attitudes moves us away from that dangerous idea - which at its most benevolent was misguided and paternalistic and which at its worst was hateful arrogance and bigotry - that gays were simply "acting out" and needed "tough love" or to be "fixed."
Gays were in fact just being themselves. And now that Americans are realizing that gays can't be changed, that there is no "fix," then they have to figure out something else to do with gays.
Oh my god. Are we going have to (gasp) learn how to live with gays!
We're going to be liveblogging the second debate (heck, I imagine we'll probably end up doing all of them) over at The Texas Blue, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. Who are my other compatriots that will be keeping tabs on these guys live?
As I was channel surfing on the radio headed toward work, I tripped across Dallas right-wing propaganda station KSKY (660 am) and heard Mike Gallagher claim that Lynne Cheney "beat the tar" out of CNN's Wolf Blitzer when she impugned the reporter's patriotism.
Since when are reporters supposed to be flag-wavers instead of objective reporters, as Blitzer was at least making an effort at doing?
Evidentally, Gallagher, like those he has repeatedly voiced support for, feel that reporters are supposed to be nothing more than cheerleaders for the current administration regardless of how wrong its policies are.
More below.
What the Traditional Broadcast Media needs right now is threefold-
1. Steady Doses of Olbermann
2. Less O'Reilly
3. More Jack Cafferty.
Olbermann's and O'Reilly's respective ratings are taking care of items 1 and 2, and now the intertoobz have given rise to a campaign to take care of the Cafferty Deficiency on CNN.
