================================
FRI__3:06 PM 12/11/2009
Media Matters: With "Climategate" and Jennings smears, the right goes guerilla
The conservative reaction to President Obama's election is turning
downright Faustian.
As the rhetoric on the right has grown increasingly shrill, a few
conservatives have raised their voices in alarm, counseling their
ideological kin to step back from the abyss. Former Bush speechwriter David
Frum wrote in August that "the increasingly angry tone of incitement being
heard from right-of-center broadcasters" is likely to lead to politically
motivated violence. Not two weeks ago, conservative blogger Charles Johnson
articulated the reasons behind his departure from the right, citing
conservative support for "anti-science bad craziness" and "[h]atred for
President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies."
If the past week is any indication, those warnings have been roundly
ignored. The conservative media, in their quest to derail the president's
progressive agenda, have thrown their lot in with the grisly underbelly of
political activism -- dumpster-diving thieves, extremist hate groups, and
scam-artist videographers who sacrifice credibility for sensationalism and
value Web traffic over truth.
Take, for example, the hackers who illegally accessed email servers at the
University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and stole thousands of
emails. From Fox News on down to the conservative blogs, right-wingers have
seized on the stolen documents as "proof" that climate change science is a
"hoax" and attacked the global scientific consensus on climate change as a
"cult." As Media Matters explained last week, the emails show nothing of the
sort, and they are being wildly distorted. But the right not only
wholeheartedly embraced these illegally obtained documents, it actively took
steps to hide the fact that they were obtained by theft. Fox News spent an
entire week describing the emails as "leaked," "revealed," and "uncovered."
The conservative media critics at NewsBusters chastised the media for
"paint[ing] the 'stolen' e-mails not as laudatory whistle-blowing, but as an
unwanted impediment to the left's global warming agenda."
There were also new developments this week in another bogus "controversy"
being stoked by right-wingers: the ongoing homophobic smear campaign against
Department of Education official Kevin Jennings. Led by Andrew Breitbart and
The Washington Times, conservatives falsely accused Jennings' organization
of handing out explicit sexual materials to children, and smeared Jennings,
who is gay, as a "deviant," a "pedophile," the "buggery czar," and a
"mega-pervert." It was later revealed that the falsehoods upon which these
smears are based originated with a group called MassResistance, a
Massachusetts-based anti-gay hate group that purports to chronicle the
"brutal fascist tactics" of the "homosexual movement," and whose leader
compared the gay rights movement to Nazism.
Speaking of Andrew Breitbart, the Drudge-protégé and Twitter fiend received
some bad news this week. An investigation by former Massachusetts Attorney
General Scott Harshbarger into Breitbart's much-publicized videos purporting
to show ACORN aiding an undercover pimp and prostitute in tax evasion
determined that the videos contained no evidence that the organization acted
illegally. The report also found that the videos, shot by conservative
activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, "appear to have been edited, in
some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover
for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles' comments, which
makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are
responding." Perhaps he'll have better luck with his next project -- rooting
through ACORN's trash to find incriminating documents.
The newest right-wing smear centers on a deceptively cropped undercover
video shot by an anti-abortion activist at a Planned Parenthood office in
Wisconsin. The Fox Nation and other right-wingers claimed the video shows
Planned Parenthood trying to force women to have abortions. In reality, the
video is so heavily edited it's impossible to determine the context of any
of the Planned Parenthood staffer's supposedly damning statements.
These are the big stories for conservatives right now, and they're all based
on thievery, the smears of an extremist fringe group, and disreputable
hucksters with video cameras.
Now, it's probably not completely accurate to say that the right's embrace
of these types of people is a Faustian bargain -- after all, such an
arrangement typically involves the good being corrupted or seduced by the
evil. When it comes to the conservative media, which are already notorious
for slander and falsehood, it's more like the next step of a natural
progression. The real danger is that they are helping to mainstream these
fringe characters. The Washington Post published an op-ed by Sarah Palin who
used the -- ahem -- "publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research
center" as a pretext to lie and mislead on climate science. The Post
defended publishing Palin's op-ed by claiming that it didn't have time to
fact-check it and that Palin "is someone who stirs discussion."
And that's exactly the mindset these conservatives are preying upon: Forget
the facts; we just want eyeballs on the screens.
=================================================
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Warren Buffet: my class is winning the class warfare
================================
LINK:
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144388/america_without_a_middle_class_--_i
t%27s_not_far_away_as_you_might_think/?comments=view&cID=1382255#c1382255
Everything is going according to plan
Posted by: CaliJim on Dec 5, 2009 8:32 AM
In the mid 90's I had a customer who was writing a paper at the University
of California. The title of the paper was "The Latin-Americanization of the
United States".
The premise of the paper was that the rich and corporate interests were
aligned in an effort to eliminate the middle class in our country, while
greatly increasing the incomes and wealth of the tiny "elite" percentage of
the population. The result would mirror the Latin American model of a tiny
minority that owned or controlled the vast majority of everything, a tiny
middle class struggling to hang on, and a large and rapidly increasing
"underclass" of poor who would literally have to do whatever they could to
survive. Literally, a return to the Feudal system of lords and serfs.
I read his paper and we had many discussions regarding it...and I have to
admit that I thought it was a bit extreme in it's predictions at the time.
Now, of course, it's clear that he was a prophet - and that things have
proceeded exactly as he predicted they would. Wages have been systematically
held down, benefits have been reduced and/or eliminated, jobs have been
systematically shipped overseas (often with tax benefits to the corporation
for every job that was eliminated in the US), taxes for the rich and
corporations have been vastly reduced and funding for education, health care
and other essential services are no longer adequate to do what needs to be
done. The rich get richer and richer, while the corporations get more and
more powerful and arrogant.
I've already advised both of our kids to move to New Zealand or Australia if
they can...where minimum wage is $12-13 an hour and they get free health
care - which is exactly how it should be here.
Ironically, a fairly large percentage of the population has been conned into
going out in force and supporting the very policies that are harming
them...by distortions, manipulations and outright lies regarding unions,
increasing wages, raising taxes on the rich and corporations, health care
reform and restrictions on the powers and rights of corporations. These have
been sold by highly paid spokespersons like Limbaugh, Beck and others, who
get their funding from the same rich and corporate interests who are
benefiting.
Unfortunately, nothing has been done to rein in the financial abuses by the
banks, insurance companies and other multinational corporations - even after
the wholesale collapse of our economy.
I'd love to be able to end with some uplifting and encouraging comment...but
the best I can do is to repeat the quote by Warren Buffett “There’s class
warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war,
and we’re winning.”
Unfortunately, nothing has been done to rein in the financial abuses by the
banks, insurance companies and other multinational corporations - even after
the wholesale collapse of our economy.
================================
LINK:
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144388/america_without_a_middle_class_--_i
t%27s_not_far_away_as_you_might_think/?comments=view&cID=1382255#c1382255
Everything is going according to plan
Posted by: CaliJim on Dec 5, 2009 8:32 AM
In the mid 90's I had a customer who was writing a paper at the University
of California. The title of the paper was "The Latin-Americanization of the
United States".
The premise of the paper was that the rich and corporate interests were
aligned in an effort to eliminate the middle class in our country, while
greatly increasing the incomes and wealth of the tiny "elite" percentage of
the population. The result would mirror the Latin American model of a tiny
minority that owned or controlled the vast majority of everything, a tiny
middle class struggling to hang on, and a large and rapidly increasing
"underclass" of poor who would literally have to do whatever they could to
survive. Literally, a return to the Feudal system of lords and serfs.
I read his paper and we had many discussions regarding it...and I have to
admit that I thought it was a bit extreme in it's predictions at the time.
Now, of course, it's clear that he was a prophet - and that things have
proceeded exactly as he predicted they would. Wages have been systematically
held down, benefits have been reduced and/or eliminated, jobs have been
systematically shipped overseas (often with tax benefits to the corporation
for every job that was eliminated in the US), taxes for the rich and
corporations have been vastly reduced and funding for education, health care
and other essential services are no longer adequate to do what needs to be
done. The rich get richer and richer, while the corporations get more and
more powerful and arrogant.
I've already advised both of our kids to move to New Zealand or Australia if
they can...where minimum wage is $12-13 an hour and they get free health
care - which is exactly how it should be here.
Ironically, a fairly large percentage of the population has been conned into
going out in force and supporting the very policies that are harming
them...by distortions, manipulations and outright lies regarding unions,
increasing wages, raising taxes on the rich and corporations, health care
reform and restrictions on the powers and rights of corporations. These have
been sold by highly paid spokespersons like Limbaugh, Beck and others, who
get their funding from the same rich and corporate interests who are
benefiting.
Unfortunately, nothing has been done to rein in the financial abuses by the
banks, insurance companies and other multinational corporations - even after
the wholesale collapse of our economy.
I'd love to be able to end with some uplifting and encouraging comment...but
the best I can do is to repeat the quote by Warren Buffett “There’s class
warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war,
and we’re winning.”
Unfortunately, nothing has been done to rein in the financial abuses by the
banks, insurance companies and other multinational corporations - even after
the wholesale collapse of our economy.
================================
Monday, December 7, 2009
A GOP Win-Win Predicament
The loss of the last presidential elections in 2008 turns out to be a gift and a blessing for the Republican party.
The Obama administration will continue to put more money into the pockets of the already superrich banks, companies and billionaires in this country and in the process they will make sure that the next thirty years at the helm of the USA will be for the Republicans.
Bless them.
The Obama administration will continue to put more money into the pockets of the already superrich banks, companies and billionaires in this country and in the process they will make sure that the next thirty years at the helm of the USA will be for the Republicans.
Bless them.
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