From MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” on 5-14-08.
Part 1
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Archive for the 'Opinion' Category
Because of what I do (talk radio or, as we like to call it at The H.O.R.N., America’s Liberal Voice, “Conversation Radio”), I spend a good deal of time (probably more than is healthy, really) thinking about the media in our country.
We liberals/progressives/decent human beings have been mostly disgusted with the media’s behavior for almost my entire adult life (N.B.: I’m 45). It’s worsened to a degree almost unimaginable in the last eight years and, since March of 2007 has managed to inflame both the partisans of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the rest of us liberals/progressives/decent human beings.
With the rise of the internets and particularly blogging, a new phrase entered the lexicon: “Mainstream Media.” It has hung on like white on rice, like a dog on a bone-wagon, like a duck on a junebug, like stink on, well, never mind. You get the point.
Some folks have periodically noted that the media are anything BUT “mainstream.” The media in this country are largely owned by a consortium or perhaps sextumvirate of some six major corporations. That gave rise to the term “corporate media,” which is accurate as far as it goes.
What it doesn’t do, however, is go all the way to the vile, bilious, throbbing heart of the problem.
Now, I think I’ve found the moniker many of us have been looking for. It dawned on me last night during “The H.O.R.N. Section,” when Peter Godbold, Jon Fox and I get together for an hour on the air and sort of free-form ideas, stories and even occasional outright silliness. You can hear the archives of the H.O.R.N. Section and every other H.O.R.N. program at http://www.whiterosesociety.org/ . The live streams are always available at http://www.headonradionetwork.com , among other places.
This idea, however, struck me as anything but silly. It came from my thoughts about Dennis Kucinich’s entirely accurate description of our healthcare crisis stemming from what he called “For-profit healthcare.”
And there it was: jiggling like an overburdened toxic waste dump glistening under a blistering sun: “The For-profit Media.”
It really encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the Timmehs and Tweetys and Becks and O’Reillys and Humes and Scarboroughs and Phlegmballs and SavageWeiners and “BUYGOLDNOW and spend it on our herbal erection concocktion! Use it while sleeping on a Swedish mattress developed by NASA and clean up the mess with a vacuum cleaner that picks up bowling balls” ads that litter the Fourth Estate. At the end of the day, in the final analysis, it’s the profit motive that drives everything we loathe about American media behavior. It’s behind Fox’s incessant, obsessive use of titillating imagery. It’s what drove CBS to hire Katie Couric for FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS a year (anybody know what Murrow made at the height of his career?). It’s what jams BritneyLindsayParis Shark Attacks on Missing White Girls onto our screens nightafternightafternightafternightafternight. It’s what keeps America dumbed-down and hyped-up.
So there you have it. Make free use of it. Beat ‘em over the head with it.
The For-Profit Media.
With any luck, we can make Timmeh and Tweety start hallucinating it in their AlphaBits.
*Bob Kincaid is the host of “Head-On with Bob Kincaid“, which is heard Monday through Friday, 6pm to 9pm eastern, on The Head On Radio Network. For streaming information, please visit http://www.headonradionetwork.com .
Earlier this month, at a conference in San Francisco, several renowned computer scientists warned that electronic voting machines remain vulnerable to computer hackers due to serious security flaws in the operating software, calling into question the integrity of a presidential election that is still seven months away, and all other elections in the U.S. where paper ballots have been replaced by these paperless electronic machines.
There wasn’t anything particularly new in the scientists’ revelations other than the fact that the magazine PC World covered the issue and several other mainstream news organizations.
Arguably, any mainstream coverage these days of election fraud, a topic of such national significance that it literally affects anyone who has ever cast a ballot, can be credited to a handful of hard core voting rights activists and muckraking citizen journalists who have made it their life’s mission to overhaul the way people vote and restore much needed integrity to the process.
The scientists’ warnings that this year’s historic presidential election can be tinkered with came on the heels of the publication of a groundbreaking new book, “Loser Take All,” click here a collection of eye-opening investigative reports into past issues of election fraud authored by voting rights experts, activists, and journalists, who used old-fashioned gumshoe reporting to expose the seedy side of the business of counting votes.
Unlike the reportage leading up the invasion of Iraq, which relied heavily on anonymous sources who spoon fed mainstream reporters wild tales of Iraq’s vast weapons cache, lapped up by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and printed as fact, the reports about stolen elections, the massive purge of minorities and poor people from voter rolls, in “Loser Take All” is backed up by smoking gun evidence in the form of documents and on the record accounts from public officials and behind-the-scenes executives employed by e-voting companies.
Perhaps no one has been passionate about this issue or has worked as hard to attract mainstream attention to the cause than bestselling author Mark Crispin Miller and blogger Brad Friedman, who co-authored an essay for the book with voting rights advocate Michael Richardson.
Well before anyone understood what election fraud meant, Miller, also a professor at New York University, and Friedman, whose BradBlog website is the go-to place on the Internet for comprehensive coverage on voting issues, were sounding early warning alarms and educating the public about voting machines plagued with software bugs, the ease at which hackers can bust into the system and change the vote count for candidates, such as George W. Bush, and place him ahead of Democratic challenger John Kerry in states such as Ohio.
Miller, who wrote extensively in his book “Fooled Again” click here about the theft of countless votes cast during the 2004 presidential election–in Ohio and many other states– were stolen from Kerry and handed to Bush, said in an interview that the 2008 election can be stolen “through pre-emption of innumerable votes, as well as through the use of e-voting machines, both paperless touch-screen machines and op-scans.”
“It’s safe to say that the entire federal government, insofar as it’s controlled by BushCo’s appointees, has been diligently working to suppress all but those votes that will support the [Republican] party,” Miller said. “The [Veterans Administration], for example, has announced that it will not help badly injured veterans register to vote since those who’ve been thus damaged by Bush/Cheney’s war aren’t likely to be big McCain supporters.” MORE
When my mother died last year, at 93, her loss wasn’t just personal in the way a parent’s death always is. After my aunts and uncles and then my father died, she’d been, for the past fifteen years, my last direct family link to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. For me–a cradle Democrat–losing that connection meant a rite of passage all its own.
Mother never met Roosevelt, but to her his achievements defined Democratic politics–American politics, really–for almost half a century. Like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, I was born in 1946, the year after FDR died, and though my generation has acquired its own (mixed) reputation, all of us know how much we’re the progeny of his generation and his legacy. Our 1960s Presidents, JFK and LBJ, mimicked his triple-initial moniker and were always being measured against him–Kennedy most often for his elegance and eloquence, Johnson for his programs. And when ’60s students began calling themselves the New Left, it may have distinguished them from the Old Left–but perhaps it also evoked the keystone of all postwar American politics, the New Deal.
The power of FDR has always been such that even conservative counterrevolutionaries had to be careful how they disavowed him and his programs. By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan–who’d voted for Roosevelt four times–knew exactly whose jaunty, upbeat style to mimic, even as he played Brutus to Roosevelt’s legacy. After GOP Jacobins captured control of Congress in 1994, their doughy Robespierre, Newt Gingrich, claims he consciously modeled his agenda on FDR’s Hundred Days–and in recent years he unabashedly declared Roosevelt “the greatest President of the twentieth century.” MORE
Seventy-five years ago, facing the catastrophic, worldwide failure of the free market, Franklin Roosevelt launched what is perhaps the greatest democratic experiment of the twentieth century. Touching nearly every aspect of American life, the New Deal transformed banking, business, labor, agriculture, arts and literature, urban and rural landscapes and, of course, the relationship of citizens to government itself. Today, decades of conservative rule have jeopardized much of the New Deal’s legacy. Many of its reforms and regulations have been gutted, and much of the infrastructure it built crumbles from neglect. Yet the New Deal endures, not just in institutions like the FDIC and Social Security but in the very idea that where and when there is crisis government should rise to the challenge for the good of the common people. How can a look back help us confront the challenges of the present–from the tangled housing, credit and financial market crises to global warming to the small-mindedness of public policy and debate today? What is the unfinished business of the New Deal? And what can we learn from its failures and limitations? On this historic occasion we asked an esteemed collection of activists, writers, scholars and artists to reflect on the “usable past” of the New Deal. Their answers follow. MORE
From The International Herald Tribune
How can one feel sorry for James Cayne? The potential losses of the chairman and former chief executive of Bear Stearns must rank up there with the biggest in modern history. The value of his stake in Bear Stearns collapsed from about $1 billion a year ago to as little as $14 million at the price JPMorgan Chase offered for the teetering bank on Sunday. Still, Mr. Cayne was paid some $40 million in cash between 2004 and 2006, the last year on record, as well as stocks and options. In the past few years, he has sold shares worth millions more. There should be financial accountability for the man who led Bear Stearns as it gorged on dubious subprime securities to boost its profits and share price, helping to set up one of the biggest financial collapses since the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s. Some might argue that he should have lost it all.
But that’s not how it works. The ongoing bailout of the financial system by the Federal Reserve underscores the extent to which financial barons socialize the costs of private bets gone bad. Not a week goes by that the Fed doesn’t inaugurate a new way to provide liquidity — meaning money — to the financial system. Bear Stearns isn’t enormous. It doesn’t take deposits from the public. Yet the Fed believed that letting it implode could unleash a domino effect among other banks, and the Fed provided a $30 billion guarantee for JPMorgan to snap it up.
Compared to the cold shoulder given to struggling homeowners, the cash and attention lavished by the government on the nation’s financial titans provides telling insight into the priorities of the Bush administration. It’s not simply a matter of fairness, though. The Fed is probably right to be doing all it can think of to avoid worse damage than the economy is already suffering. But if the objective is to encourage prudent banking and keep Wall Street’s wizards from periodically driving financial markets over the cliff, it is imperative to devise a remuneration system for bankers that puts more of their skin in the game. MORE
The Federal Reserve’s announcement of an open-ended bail-out for Wall Street’s endangered financial firms and banks opens an ominous new chapter in what might be called “market socialism with American characteristics.” If Washington tries to do something for “losers” who are ordinary citizens, financial titans complain about violating free-market principles. When the titans themselves are going down, they rush to their patrons at the central bank and demand extraordinary relief. Government must save the big money, we are told, for the overall good of the economy. Thus, the financial system’s reckless losses–approaching $1 trillion but probably far more–are being “socialized,” dumped on the public, the very people victimized by its snares and falsified valuations.
Put aside the obvious hypocrisy and greed. This nation is on the brink of a historic catastrophe. It requires emergency responses from the federal government on a scale not seen since the Great Depression and the New Deal, the subject of this special issue. Yet the rescue party is composed of the same people who co-wrote this disaster. They are, first, the financiers who indulged their own appetites for extreme wealth and enlarged a financial system of esoteric fakery that inflated prices and profits. Second, the close collaborators were the Federal Reserve and other authorities who blessed this dangerous concoction and declined to enforce prudential standards. MORE
We can afford to bail out these investment banks but we don’t have the money to finance SCHIP? Do I have that right? I realize to a neocon that makes perfect sense. To me it means these people need to be measured for straight jackets!
Or a special place in hell.
~Susan~
From Washington Post:
By E. J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, March 18, 2008; Page A19
Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.
The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost “confidence” in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another’s portfolios.So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can’t have that. It’s just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are “too big to fail,” because they could bring us all down with them.
Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don’t expect these people to trade in theirBMWs for Saturns, do you?
In a deal that the New York Times described as “shocking,” J.P. Morgan Chase agreed over the weekend to pay $2 a share to buy all of Bear Stearns, one of the brand names of finance capitalism. The Federal Reserve approved a $30 billion — that’s with a “b” — line of credit to make the deal work.
Editorial Continues @ Sourced Site.
Oklahoma Representative, Sally Kern, in a resent meeting with some of her constituents, equated homosexuality with terrorism and malignant cancer. She was recorded saying that “Homosexuality is a bigger threat to our nation than terrorism or Islam.” She continued that “According to God words, it is not the right kind of lifestyle….Gays are infiltrating city councils…. It’s deadly and its spreading, and it will destroy our young people, and it will destroy this nation.”
A letter to Sally Kern from a senior in high school in Oklahoma
Today my nephew attempted to deliver a letter to Sally Kern but was stopped by a highway patrol man. With his permission I am distributing the letter to all news stations and thought I would include it here.
Maybe we can all stand to learn a listen from this smart, loving, young man. He more than most has reason to hate. He lost his mother, my sister, in the Murrah Building bombing.
Elizabeth
Rep Kern:
On April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City a terrorist detonated a bomb that killed my mother and 167 others. 19 children died that day. Had I not had the chicken pox that day, the body count would’ve likely have included one more. Over 800 other Oklahomans were injured that day and many of those still suffer through their permanent wounds.
That terrorist was neither a homosexual or was he involved in Islam. He was an extremist Christian forcing his views through a body count. He held his beliefs and made those who didn’t live up to them pay with their lives.
As you were not a resident of Oklahoma on that day, it could be explained why you so carelessly chose words saying that the homosexual agenda is worst than terrorism. I can most certainly tell you through my own experience that is not true. I am sure there are many people in your voting district that laid a loved one to death after the terrorist attack on Oklahoma City. I kind of doubt you’ll find one of them that will agree with you.
I was five years old when my mother died. I remember what a beautiful, wise, and remarkable woman she was. I miss her. Your harsh words and misguided beliefs brought me to tears, because you told me that my mother’s killer was a better person than a group of people that are seeking safety and tolerance for themselves.
As someone left motherless and victimized by terrorists, I say to you very clearly you are absolutely wrong.
You represent a district in Oklahoma City and you very coldly express a lack of love, sympathy or understanding for what they’ve been through. Can I ask if you might have chosen wiser words were you a real Oklahoman that was here to share the suffering with Oklahoma City? Might your heart be a bit less cold had you been around to see the small bodies of children being pulled out of rubble and carried away by weeping firemen?
I’ve spent 12 years in Oklahoma public schools and never once have I had anyone try to force a gay agenda on me. I have seen, however, many gay students beat up and there’s never a day in school that has went by when I haven’t heard the word **** slung at someone. I’ve been called gay slurs many times and they hurt and I am not even gay so I can just imagine how a real gay person feels. You were a school teacher and you have seen those things too. How could you care so little about the suffering of some of your students?
Let me tell you the result of your words in my school. Every openly gay and suspected gay in the school were having to walk together Monday for protection. They looked scared. They’ve already experienced enough hate and now your words gave other students even more motivation to sneer at them and call them names. Afterall, you are a teacher and a lawmaker, many young people have taken your words to heart. That happens when you assume a role of responsibility in your community. I seriously think before this week ends that some kids here will be going home bruised and bloody because of what you said.
I wish you could’ve met my mom. Maybe she could’ve guided you in how a real Christian should be acting and speaking.
I have not had a mother for nearly 13 years now and wonder if there were fewer people like you around, people with more love and tolerance in their hearts instead of strife, if my mom would be here to watch me graduate from high school this spring. Now she won’t be there. So I’ll be packing my things and leaving Oklahoma to go to college elsewhere and one day be a
writer and I have no intentions to ever return here. I have no doubt that people like you will incite crazy people to build more bombs and kill more people again. I don’t want to be here for that. I just can’t go through that again.
You may just see me as a kid, but let me try to teach you something. The old saying is sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you. Well, your words hurt me. Your words disrespected the memory of my mom.
Your words can cause others to pick up sticks and stones and hurt others.
Sincerely
Tucker
By Nancy Keenan at Huffington Post
It was a late night last night for the U.S. Senate. In the past, when anti-choice politicians controlled the process, that would have meant something dreadful would have happened to women’s freedom and privacy.
Previous Congresses were famous for votes at 3 a.m., hoping their shenanigans would go unreported and slip under the public’s radar screen.
But, pro-choice Americans, I am pleased to report different news: Last night, the Senate rejected two anti-choice amendments, but the razor-thin margin by which we won these votes is a reminder of why elections matters.
To what amendments am I referring?
Well, you can depend on anti-choice politicians to lack creativity and imagination, and last night was no exception.
In a blatant attempt to entangle the budget resolution in anti-abortion politics, Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) offered an amendment intended to codify a controversial Bush administration regulation, put in place in 2002, which allows states to make an embryo or a fetus — but not a pregnant woman — eligible for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The amendment failed 46-52. Last year, a coalition of pro-choice and pro-life senators defeated a similar Allard proposal — but last night we picked up a few new senators. The tide is moving in the right direction! More…
The roll call of the Boxer Amendment that extends coverage to pregnant women through SCHIP can be found here.
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