Just some parting shots

Blogfading?

It seems that the urge to post has faded for the time being. Maybe the bombardment of stupidity, corruption, and arrogance from the current administration has overloaded my circuits. I might be back. I might not. Here's hoping that some semblance of sanity will return to the political scene.

The Republican platform in a nutshell

Or is it a wingnutshell?

The liberal leanings of the knowledgeable

An investigative reporter for MSNBC recently found that of journalists who contributed money to politicians or political organizations, the vast majority gave to Democrat and liberal causes. Despite the rants of the wingnut right about the bias of the Librul Media, it seemed to me that this should only be natural and expected, considering what they do. A commenter to a NY Times blog pretty much summed it up.

It’s true that many college professors, journalists, scientists, ethicists, philosophers, teachers, free-lance writers, lean to the left. It’s also true they have a higher aggregate IQ than the general populace. (hmmm…)

It’s also true that people who make a lot of money (lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, etc.) were usually more liberal, and as their assets grew, they moved against their ethics and logic to the right to protect their pocketbooks. Human nature.

Those who were born rich, and stay that way, tend towards the right. Gun toting loonies who don’t like diversity also tend towards the right. Religious fundamentalists lean way right. People who make tortured unsustainable arguments often confuse being right wing with patriotism (uh, RLJ?) Voters who still support Libby, a convicted criminal, Gonzales (is Fredo really dirty, mommy?) and think Rumsfeld and Feith are great military minds are certainly on the right. They generally don’t work as reporters either. (their SAT scores on the writing section weren’t all that nifty, so…well,you get the picture.)

Are all GOP supporters stupid? No. Most of the rich ones just pretend to be, to allow them the luxury of pretending ethics don’t matter. Is it coincidence that the states that still allow corporal punishment in schools are almost without exception the Red states? Red necks who think beating your children is a “good thing” generally vote right.

So am I supposed to be surprised that most reporters, who are some of the brightest and most loquacious citizens, tend to lean left? The reality is that mainstream media is centrist most of the time, as most good reporters are scrupulous in leaving personal bias out of the equation. The exception tends to be on the right, where Fox is obviously partisan. (whereas corporal punishment of Fox reporters is tempting, we know better.)

Check out the Center for American Progress latest report on talk radio, and the overwhelming bias of right wing propaganda. Can I see a study of nationally syndicated talk radio hosts and their political contributions? (Please include the multiple appearances of right wing politicians like Mr. Sessions, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Snow)

— Posted by Holcombe Hurd

Source: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/campaign-cash-reporters-as-donors/

Depends on who you are

Is terrorism only in the mind of the beholder? ..or of the press?

If you don't live in Texas, chances are you're not aware of William Krar. You may not know that an FBI raid on his property in April 2003 netted more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs, and nearly two pounds of sodium cyanide, along with antigovernment and white supremacist literature.

Krar's case 'ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal,' terrorism expert Daniel Levitas told the Christian Science Monitor in December 2003. Yet 'outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown,' the Monitor reported, noting that there had been 'two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.'

Now suppose Krar had been a Muslim. Does anyone doubt that this story would have topped the national news, making his name a household word?

Source: Ethics Newsline from the Institute for Global Ethics

The Simpsons takes on the MSM

In it's recently released 400th episode, The Simpsons writers take shots at Fox News and the rest of the media. Only a cartoon could get away with this fragging. Let's hope they keep it up. One of the lines:

Friends, the press and the government are in bed together in an embrace so intimate and wrong, they could spoon on a twin mattress and still have room for Ted Koppel. Journalists used to questions the reasons for war and expose abuse of power. Now, like toothless babies, they suckle on the sugary teat of misinformation and poop it into the diaper we call the 6:00 News. Demand more of your government. Demand more of your press.

See a video clip at Think Progress - The Simpsons v. the media.

Attacking the W of mass deception

Al Gore decides to lay it on the line with a blistering assessment of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America.

In "The Assault on Reason" Al Gore excoriates George W. Bush, asserting that the president is "out of touch with reality," that his administration is so incompetent that it "can't manage its own way out of a horse show," that it ignored "clear warnings" about the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that it has made Americans less safe by "stirring up a hornets' nest in Iraq," while using "the language and politics of fear" to try to "drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest."

The administration's pursuit of unilateralism abroad, Mr. Gore says, has isolated the United States in an ever more dangerous world, even as its efforts to expand executive power at home and "relegate the Congress and the courts to the sidelines" have undermined the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The former vice president contends that the fiasco in Iraq stems from President Bush’s use of "a counterfeit combination of misdirected vengeance and misguided dogma to dominate the national discussion, bypass reason, silence dissent and intimidate those who questioned his logic both inside and outside the administration."

He argues that the gruesome acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq "were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity — encouraged, authorized and instituted" by President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. And he writes that the violations of civil liberties committed by the Bush-Cheney administration — including its secret authorization of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail messages between the United States and other countries, and its suspension of the rights of due process for "enemy combatants" — demonstrate "a disrespect for America's Constitution that has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of democracy."

Similar charges have been made by a growing number of historians, political analysts and even former administration insiders, and President Bush's plummeting approval ratings have further emboldened his critics. But Mr. Gore writes not just as a former vice president and the man who won the popular vote in the 2000 election, but also as a possible future candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 race for the White House, and the vehemence of his language and his arguments make statements about the Bush administration by already announced candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton seem polite and mild-mannered in contrast.

And yet for all its sharply voiced opinions, "The Assault on Reason" turns out to be less a partisan, election-cycle harangue than a fiercely argued brief about the current Bush White House that is grounded in copiously footnoted citations from newspaper articles, Congressional testimony and commission reports — a brief that is as powerful in making its points about the implications of this administration's policies as the author's 2006 book, "An Inconvenient Truth," was in making its points about the fallout of global warming.

...Doubts about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction were sidestepped in the walk-up to the war: Mr. Gore says that uranium experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee told him "there was zero possibility" that aluminum tubes acquired by Saddam Hussein were for the purpose of nuclear enrichment, but felt intimidated from "making any public statement that disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by President Bush."

And the Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's pre-invasion recommendation that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for a successful occupation of Iraq was similarly dismissed. "Rather than engaging in a reasoned debate on the question," Mr. Gore writes, administration members "undercut Shinseki for disagreeing with their preconceived notion — even though he was an expert, and they were not."

Moreover, Mr. Gore contends, the administration's penchant for secrecy (keeping everything from the details of its coercive interrogation policy to its National Security Agency surveillance program under wraps) has dismantled the principle of accountability, even as what he calls its "unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception" on matters like Iraq has made "true deliberation and meaningful debate by the people virtually impossible."

Mr. Gore points out that the White House repeatedly implied that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Iraq, when in fact no such linkage existed. He observes that the administration "withheld facts" from Congress concerning the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which turned out to be "far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the president."

And he contends that "it has become common for President Bush to rely on special interests" — like those represented by the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi before the war, and ExxonMobil on the climate crisis — for "basic information about the policies important to these interests."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/books/22kaku.htm