The Constantine Institute for Advanced Media Studies

Glenn Beck's Nazi Fans

2009-12-07T19:29:00.001-08:00

After an ADL report says Beck may foment violence, I visit racist Web sites to see if their denizens are listening

By Alexander Zaitchik | Salon | Nov 20, 2009

It's been a busy week for Glenn Beck watchers. On Monday, the Anti-Defamation League released a report warning of the paranoia and stridency that increasingly define the conservative grass roots. It echoed an April report issued by the Department of Homeland Security, but unlike the DHS report, the ADL named names, and fingered Beck as the figure most responsible for the unhinging of the right.

"Beck has acted as a 'fearmonger-in-chief,' raising anxiety about and distrust towards the government [which] if it continues to grow in intensity and scope, may result in an increase in anti-government extremists and the potential for a rise of violent anti-government acts," the ADL wrote.

Amazingly, just after the ADL report's release, Sarah Palin responded to a question about a possible Palin-Beck ticket by refusing to rule out Beck as a running mate. She praised him effusively, describing him as "bold, clever, and very, very, very effective."

Effective at what, exactly?

Earlier this week, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post detailed several instances in which Beck has welcomed onto his shows guests with ties to groups that traffic in white supremacy, neo-Confederate secession, and anti-Semitism. Stein's reporting was a good start, but it would take a chalkboard the size of Idaho to fully map out Beck's racially paranoid guest list.

But Beck insists his critics are imagining things, that he does not engage in racial fear-mongering, that a string of guests with ties to hate groups do not form a meaningful pattern, and that he's not a racist. It occurred to me the other day that if you really want to know whether Beck and his guests are blowing racial dog-whistles, it's best to ask a dog.

I decided to reach out to Don Black, the avowed white nationalist who runs the Web site Stormfront.org, the country's leading "Discussion board for pro-White activists and anyone else interested in White survival." But Black hung up on me. I next tried to get in touch with David Duke, the former gubernatorial candidate and current head of the European American Unity and Rights Organization. Duke, too, had little interest in talking to me, likely because of my past association with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of white supremacist groups.

Unable to get through to the highest-profile spokesmen of the racist grass roots, I took a page from the other side and trawled their Web sites for insight. I scanned Davidduke.com and Stormfront.org to see what they had to say, if anything, about Beck. Admittedly, this method is not scientific, and certainly folks on the left don't like it when righties cherry-pick an extreme comment from Daily Kos or the Huffington Post and pretend the whole site can be summed up by such extremism.

On the other hand, Stormfront.org isn't a media organization but a self-described discussion board. And when it comes to Beck, the discussions are fairly positive. On both David Duke's Web site and Stormfront, Beck's July 28 claim that President Obama harbors a "deep-seated hatred of white people, or the white culture" was met with attention and appreciation.

Duke was heartened by the discussion it generated, and placed it in a larger context. "A lot of stuff is happening in the world of race relations and little of it points towards a post-racial society," Duke noted. "Beck is steadily losing advertisers, but his viewers seem to be sticking with him ... White desperation is manifesting itself in various forms."

Beck's charge that the president hates white people sparked a more expansive discussion at Stormfront.org. Some participants saw Beck as an important ally in the White Nationalist cause. Others were skeptical, viewing him as a clueless conservative version of Lenin's "useful idiot." But some of Stormfront's most active members generally agreed that, whether he was fully conscious or not, Beck was nudging his audience toward an embrace of racial consciousness.

"Glen [sic] Beck can be useful," said one frequent Stormfront contributor who posts under the name SS_marching. "When Glen beck said 'Obama Has A Deep-Seated Hatred For White People' he is able to reach a much wider audience than we can. They will [be] predisposed to the idea and the next time Obama pushes an anti-white policy they will see it as such."

Stormfront member PowerCommander agreed. Beck, he wrote:

"seems to have ignited a flame under the asses of some folks with similar ideas by pushing the right buttons. It appears as if the current regime [is] directly blaming GB and fox news for throwing a wrench in their machine. Is Beck's rambling getting America fired up and ready to fight? Has Beck told enough of the truth to start something bigger? Even an engine needs a starter to get fired off and go down the road."

Thor357, a Stormfront sustaining member who has posted on the site more than 3,500 times, had this to say:

"Glenn Beck and Alex Jones [a controversial conservative media figure who believes 9/11 was an inside job] are the front line in the war of Ideals we grapple with, they are far from perfect and are somewhat compromised. But every person in the last 2 years that I have introduced to the WN [White Nationalist] Philosophy have come largely from Alex Jones, Glen Beck and the Scriptures for America founder Pastor Pete Peters ... Baby steps are required for people like these, but the trio Beck, Jones, Peters are the baby food that feeds potential Nationalists… Glenn Beck is not far behind as his Mormon background indicates to me as most Mormons I have met are not friends of Jews like the Church was years ago. Most Mormons I know are arming themselves, with guns, bullets and food."

Later in the same discussion thread, Thor357 added:

"I have talked to 6 people in two days because Glenn Beck woke them up, it's amazing how angry they are. They are pissing fire over Obama, this is a good thing. Now I educate them. If out of 100 of the Glen Beckers I keep 20 then I have won 20 more to cover my back side. I never lost the 80 as they never were."

Carolina Patriot, whose member picture features a kitten aiming an assassin's rifle, was conflicted but admiring:

"Every now and again when an infomercial takes the place of hunting or fishing, I'll turn over to Glenn Beck if he's on and watch his show. Sometimes it is amusing, sometimes it is informed, and sometimes, I think he comes to SF [Stormfront] to steal show idea's"

UstashaNY offered up an analogy to substance abuse, with Beck as the soft-stuff hook:

"Beck, Dobbs etc. are like gateway drugs. If it wakes up one person to learn something about whats really going on and that person does the research, looks deeper and deeper into WHO and WHAT is behind all of this, then its a win for the movement. NOBODY in the msm is reporting the stuff Beck does, let him keep talking. It will wake people up, believe me… He is more of a help to us then you may think. Until we have a REAL voice in the msm, guys like him and Dobbs are a stepping stone right into our laps. Its only a matter of time..."

Even those who don't think Beck understands what he’s doing appreciate his instincts. According to WhiteManMarchesOn88:

"There is no doubt that Beck is not a WN [white nationalist], but I have to agree that he does raise a lot of really good questions that do promote White survival. I'm sure he would go a lot farther with a lot of his questions, but ZOG [Zionist Occupied Government] would more than likely kick him off television if he did."

ZOG or no ZOG, Beck is clearly doing something right from the point of view of the average white nationalist.

"By no means do I think [Beck] is aware of the racial issue, and for the moment that is ok," wrote Stormfront member QHelios. "He is stirring the pot, and I thank him for that."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/11/20/glenn_beck_and_stormfront/

Cancer: Cured! McCarthy: Crucified! Jews: Demonic! Studies in Crap digs up Wichita's The Defender

2009-11-06T22:42:00.000-08:00

By Alan Scherstuhl in Studies in Crap
Nov. 5 2009

The Defender Magazine

Representative Quotes:

"History will give [Senator McCarthy] a rightful place above all inferiors." (February, page 2).

"[The American Medical Association] hopes to have a blitzkrieg going -- the objective being to exterminate all of the minority healing professions by 1958." (September, page 2)

Liberty weeps. In 1955, when the United States senate dared to censure its anti-communist inquisitionist Joe McCarthy, few Americans heard the spirited nonsense roared by Wichita evangelist Gerald B. Winrod in The Defender, his monthly journal of sermons and horseshit. Only Winrod dared call the censure "crucifixion."

In The Defender, " ... Talk of serpents summoned by Jewish magicians in ancient Babylon leads right to Jewish 'tentacles' shaping American life: They control radio, TV, an 'invisible government,' and an ADL as powerful as the FBI. Groff detests the Talmud, that expansive archive of rabbinic thinking, almost as much as he adores repetitive synonyms. 'The contents of the Talmud explains why the Jews are strange, different, and odd' ... "

That means that some of Winrod's predictions turned out to be wrong, such as when he claims that McCarthy's speech in response to the censure "will be studied as a political and literary masterpiece in high school and college textbooks of the future," which just goes to show you that even time itself has a liberal bias. Hazarding why even Eisenhower turned red, Winrod speculates on powers greater even than presidents:

"It is now known that during all the months that the White House was maneuvering things against Senator McCarthy, the Time and Life publishing outfits had one of their key men stationed at the President's elbow."

CONTINUED

http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2009/11/cancer_cured_mccarthy_crucifie.php

David Horowitz Hosts Dutch "Scholar" who Faces Prosecution for Inciting Race Hatred

2009-11-04T14:29:00.000-08:00

Controversial Dutch Pol Renders His Message
By Bryan Schwartzman
http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/19909/
October 29, 2009 Bryan Schwartzman

Geert Wilders

A controversial Dutch lawmaker and fierce critic of Islam received an overwhelming positive response from a largely Jewish audience in Center City, just days after several dozen students protested outside Temple University, the parliamentarian's first local stop. Both events took place under tight security.

Geert Wilders, the leader of the Netherlands Freedom Party, has angered Muslims by claiming that terrorism and violence are central components of Islam, as opposed to products of an extremist, fringe subset.

Wilders is facing charges of incitement to hatred in his native country for producing a short film called "Fitna." The documentary has been widely viewed on the Internet, and essentially argues that the West is under siege from radical Islam.

Wilders, who has called for limiting Muslim immigration to Europe, has portrayed himself as an advocate of free speech. He's even become a darling in certain conservative circles.

"I have nothing against Muslims. I do have a problem with Islam," said Wilders to a burst of applause during an Oct. 22 speech held at the Union League of Philadelphia. "The Koran is an evil book; it calls for murder, terror and war."

Attended by about 200 people, the speech served as the inaugural event for the David Horowitz Freedom Center--Philadelphia. Formed less than a year ago, the local center is meant to serve as the East Coast headquarters of the Los Angeles-based organization run by Horowitz, a one-time liberal turned conservative firebrand. Horowitz is the editor of the right-leaning Web site www.frontpagemagazine.com.

According to its mission statement, the Philadelphia center will focus on campus activity and academic freedom by helping ensure that critics of Islam -- as well as pro-Israel speakers -- are allowed to offer their viewpoints without being quashed.

Wilders' Temple speech drew a number of protesters, including Jewish students, and created a controversy on campus as to whether or not he should have been permitted to speak at all.

Some of the proceeds from the Union League event will go toward Wilders' legal defense back home, said Horowitz.

The issue of how to relate to Muslims in America -- and Islam, in general -- has proved a divisive one for the Jewish community. Those on the left have, for the most part, advocated dialogue and engagement, while the right has espoused a more confrontational line. The same can be said for Israeli relationships with Arabs in the Mideast.

Theory Works Both Ways

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, who directs the Department of Multifaith Studies and Initiatives at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, did not attend the speech.

But she said later in an interview that it can be highly misleading to highlight individual quotes from the Koran -- as Wilders' does -- and call it representative of Islam in totality.

Using that same theory, back in the Middle Ages, Christian leaders would pore through the Talmud to pick out passages to be used against Jews.

Said Fuchs-Kreimer: "Judaism is a very diverse, evolving religious civilization. The same is true of Islam."

The Myth of Fox News' Ratings Spike

2009-11-04T05:35:00.000-08:00

By Eric Boehlert
Huffington Post
November 3, 2009

Fact: The breathless claim that Fox News' ratings recently spiked thanks to the White House's public critique is bogus hype -- hype that Fox News and the Beltway press have relentlessly pushed.

It's just not true.

No matter how many times reporters and pundits made the claim, a detailed analysis of Nielsen ratings numbers clearly indicates that in the two weeks after the White House in mid-October sparked a media controversy by claiming Rupert Murdoch's channel was not a legitimate news organization, Fox News' ratings did not soar or go "through the roof." In fact, not only did Fox News' overall ratings not soar, they experienced no significant increase at all. Instead, in the two weeks following the initial verbal jousts with the White House, Fox News' total day ratings virtually flatlined.

Another example of the Beltway press not letting the facts get in the way of a good story? It sure looks that way. In this case, we saw nearly universal agreement among media elites that the White House decision to publicly call out Fox News was monumentally dumb, thin-skinned, short-sighted, and uncivil. (Paging the etiquette police!)

Everyone said so. Therefore pundits were certain that Fox News' ratings were way up and that Obama and his aides had made a huge tactical blunder. The ratings angle simply provided statistical ammunition for what the Beltway press corps already knew to be the truth: Fact-checking Fox News, in the immortal words of The Washington Post's CW-loving Sally Quinn, was "absolutely crazy."

Except it turns out none of that was true. There was no viewer stampede toward Fox News.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/the-myth-of-fox-news-rati_b_343563.html

Should Modern Warfare 2 Allow Us to Play at Terrorism?

2009-11-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

Leaked footage of a controversial airport level in Modern Warfare 2 has caused a wave of controversy online...

Modern Warfare 2: could you shoot this man? You may be about to find out...

Guardian | October 29, 2009

The video is a few minutes long, but it might just be the most important game footage to be seen this year. It's a bootleg of a single mission from Modern Warfare 2, the much-anticipated first-person shooter, certain to be the winter's biggest selling game. It shows the player joining Russian terrorists on a bloody rampage through an airport building; civilians are gunned down as armed men run through the departures lounge, and it's evident that the player is firing too. In one alarming moment someone is shown dragging an injured person across the concourse – the player shoots them both dead.

Released onto the internet earlier this week, the blurry footage has already provoked a media backlash, a Mirror headline proclaiming, "leaked level makes light of terrorist atrocities." Many see in it harrowing evocations of last year's Mumbai terror attacks in which over 170 people were killed. For a while, it wasn't clear whether the sequence was genuine, but yesterday, Activision released a statement confirming its authenticity:

"The leaked footage was taken from a copy of game that was obtained illegally and is not representative of the overall gameplay experience in Modern Warfare 2. Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 features a deep and gripping storyline in which players face off against a terrorist threat dedicated to bringing the world to the brink of collapse. The game includes a plot involving a mission carried out by a Russian villain who wants to trigger a global war. In order to defeat him, the player infiltrates his inner circle. The scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism.

"At the beginning of the game, players encounter a mandatory 'checkpoint' in which they are warned that an upcoming segment may contain disturbing elements, and they can choose not to engage in the gameplay that involves this scene."

So what should we make of all this?

Clearly, once again, we will be confronted with difficult questions about the role and duty of videogames as an entertainment form. To some commentators, videogames by their very nature, 'make light' of anything they portray. This is partially about semantics; the interpretation of the word 'game' as something fundamentally frivolous. Partly, too, it is about the legacy of videogames as a pastime for children, for teenagers – not for adults.

And then interactivity itself brings in complex moral questions. If a movie were to depict a terrorist outrage, the viewer takes no active part. But in a videogame, you're engaged and complicit. The participation is the entertainment, and that's always going to be problematic. Activision's argument about seeking to portray the depths of the terrorist cell's immorality in order to stir the player's emotions is sound to a point – it's an established narrative device. But as Tom Hoggins asks in his Telegraph feature, is it really necessary for the player to throw grenades? And wouldn't similar revulsion be elicited if the player were placed into the shoes of one of the victims? This would, after all, reflect the wonderful opening sequence to the original Modern Warfare, in which the player takes on the perspective of a prisoner who is bundled into a car and later executed.

This is also not the first time that the Call of Duty series has forced the player into a morally troublesome sequence. There is at least one moment in Call of Duty: World at War (admittedly created by a different development studio, but still part of the CoD lineage), in which the player has no choice but to shoot a group of unarmed enemy soldiers in order to complete a mission objective. Is there an agenda here to push the boundaries of acceptability in shoot-'em-ups? It's a brave move if there is.

On top of it all, context itself is a problematic notion. In this case it appears both vital and valid. What we're robbed of when viewing this illicit footage is what happens before and afterwards, the exact nature of the scene, and the authenticity of the player's involvement. It's certainly far too early for tabloids to be bandying accusations about – but then, when did that ever stop them?

The problem is, context can easily become an excuse to portray wanton violence. In the PlayStation title Driver, for example, the gamer is ostensibly controlling an undercover policeman posing as a criminal, but this backstory is immaterial to the game action, which involves stealing cars, smashing other vehicles out of the way – and having lots of fun in the process. That's a very different game, and a very different circumstance, but it's an example of how the framework can be bent to suit the core game dynamic.

I'm also not sure about Activision's plaintive claim that the scene can be skipped. It's something of a cop-out, a side-step, rather than a pertinent justification. The point is, it's there – the developers put it there. It is an intended element of the whole experience.

Responsibility is the underlying theme in all this. I think this is the deciding factor. Infinity Ward is an excellent developer, it uses narrative in a mature and sophisticated way. Witness the nuclear explosion sequence and the apparent death of Captain Price in Modern Warfare; these are moments of sheer emotional resonance, which would have been fumbled by most studios – indeed they wouldn't even have been attempted by most studios. Both moments work perfectly within the game's depiction of a desperate global battle. I'm certain that will be the case here. This development team has no need for cheap controversy, it doesn't have to appeal to the basest instincts of nihilistic teen gamers looking for a few cheap sick thrills.

That is why this blurry, inconclusive footage is so important. The scene portrayed may well represent a statement of intent: this is what games are capable of now – unsettling us with powerful imagery, backing us into difficult situations, toying with our moral certainties. It is an 18 certificate game. We must be trusted to test ourselves against this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/29/games-gameculture

Climate Cover-Up: A (Brief) Review

2009-10-31T21:24:00.000-07:00

RealClimate
20 October 2009

We often allude to the industry-funded attacks against climate change science, and the dubious cast of characters involved, here at RealClimate. In recent years, for example, we’ve commented on disinformation efforts by industry front groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and a personal favorite, The Heartland Institute, and by industry-friendly institutions such as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and other media outlets that assist in the manufacture and distribution of climate change disinformation.

When it comes to the climate change disinformation campaign, we have chosen to focus on the intellectually bankrupt nature of the scientific arguments, rather than the political motivations and the sometimes intriguing money trail. We leave it to others, including organizations such as SourceWatch.org, the sleuths at DeSmogBlog, authors such as Ross Gelbspan (author of The Heat is On, and The Boiling Point), and edited works such as Rescuing Science from Politics to deal with such issues.

One problem with books on this topic is that they quickly grow out of date. Just over the past few years, there have been many significant events in the ‘climate wars’ as we have reported on this site. Fortunately, there is a book out now by our friends at DeSmogBlog (co-founder James Hoggan, and regular contributor Richard Littlemore) entitled Climate Cover Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming that discusses the details of the contrarian attacks on climate science up through the present, and in painstaking detail. They have done their research, and have fully documented their findings, summarized by the publisher thusly:

Talk of global warming is nearly inescapable these days — but there are some who believe the concept of climate change is an elaborate hoax. Despite the input of the world’s leading climate scientists, the urgings of politicians, and the outcry of many grassroots activists, many Americans continue to ignore the warning signs of severe climate shifts. How did this happen? Climate Cover-up seeks to answer this question, describing the pollsters and public faces who have crafted careful language to refute the findings of environmental scientists. Exploring the PR techniques, phony “think tanks,” and funding used to pervert scientific fact, this book serves as a wake-up call to those who still wish to deny the inconvenient truth.

There are interesting new details about the Revelle/Singer/Lancaster affair and other tidbits that were new to me, and will likely to be new to others who been following the history of climate change contrarianism. Ross Gelbspan who has set the standard for investigative reporting when it comes to the climate change denial campaign, had this to say about the book:

absolutely superb - one of the best dissections of the climate information war I have ever seen. This is one terrific piece of work!

There is an important story behind the climate change denial effort that goes well beyond the scientific issues at hand. Its not our mission at RealClimate to tell that story, but there are others who are doing it, and doing it well. Hoggan and Littlemore are clearly among them. Read this book, and equally important, make sure that others who need to do as well.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/climate-cover-up-a-brief-review/

Pew Confirms: We're Turning Into Media Tribes

2009-10-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

Posted by Charles Cooper
Coop's Corner
October 29, 2009
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/10/29/blogs/coopscorner/entry5454217.shtml

Here's a headline. The latest Pew survey informs us that Fox News is viewed by Americans as the most ideological news network of them all. Well, duh. The shocker, I suppose, was that 14% said Fox was "mostly liberal." ...

Snarky asides notwithstanding, the data also testify to our propensity to watch news networks which reconfirm preexisting political biases. Consider the following points I lifted from the Pew report:

• Ideology plays a role in how Americans view the networks. 57% of liberals say that Fox News is mostly conservative, compared with 46% of moderates and 44% of conservatives.

• 48% of conservatives find MSNBC to be mostly liberal, compared with 31% of moderates and 29% of liberals.

• 51% of conservatives say CNN is mostly liberal, while 33% of moderates and 28% of liberals agree. (The report found "comparable ideological differences in perceptions of the ideologies of NBC News, ABC News and CBS News.")

• Regular Fox News viewers are more likely than those tuning into other news networks to see those networks as mostly liberal. 48% of regular Fox viewers say the network is mostly conservative. They also believe that featuring hosts of cable news programs with strong political opinions is a good thing. (Bill O'Reilly, you still have a job);

• At the same time, regular viewers of Fox News think the media's in the tank for the administration. About 45% say the press is not sufficiently critical of the president, compared with 15% of regular MSNBC viewers, 23% of regular CNN viewers and 21% of regular nightly network news viewers;

With conservatives settling in at Fox and liberals congregating around CNN and MSNBC, it's interesting to consider what this suggests about Americans' willingness to consider opposing points of view. To be fair, how many people are interested in having their entire world views challenged after a hard day at the office - especially by a talking head shrieking about high crimes and misdemeanors? Hmm. Maybe that explains Jon & Kate Plus Eight.

Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South

2009-10-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

Billy Graham, political operative
by John G. Turner
www.christiancentury.org
October 06, 2009

Graham and the Rise of the Republican South
Steven P. Miller
University of Pennslyvania Press, 320 pp., $29.95

Miller has written a political biography that shines fresh light on Graham's political machinations, navigation of the civil rights movement and boosting of the Sunbelt South.

"Now Watergate does not bother me," sang Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ronnie Van Zant in the unofficial Alabama state anthem, "Does your conscience bother you?" When the Watergate break-in turned into a presidency-threatening scandal in 1973, it clearly bothered Billy Graham's conscience. Condemned as a "court prophet" and criticized as a Republican stooge, Graham regretted his political alliance with Richard Nixon. Nevertheless, he refused to call for Nixon's resignation and instead blamed the president's sins on the nation's loss of a "moral compass."

"There's a little bit of Watergate in all of us," the evangelist intoned on several occasions.

As "America's Preacher," Billy Graham was the most famous religious figure in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. Steven Miller, who grew up in a "rural Mennonite congregation" with "evangelical instincts," has written a political biography that shines fresh light on Graham's political machinations, navigation of the civil rights movement and boosting of the Sunbelt South.

Graham's moderation on issues of race and civil rights is well known. Graham haltingly but then definitively desegregated his southern crusades in the early-to-mid 1950s, condemned racist violence at Little Rock and invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at his 1957 New York City crusade. Within a few years, however, Graham criticized King's strategy of civil disobedience as lawless, condemned "extremists on both sides" of the civil rights struggle and called for a moratorium on protests. At best a mild prophet of racial justice, Graham quickly became a proponent of moderation, civility and gradualism, an evolution that cost him black support and attendance at later crusades.

Miller does not satisfy himself with the easy job of poking holes in the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's mythic accounts of Graham's civil rights contributions. Instead, he contends that Graham's "politics of decency" provided "an acceptable path upon which white southern moderates could back away from Jim Crow."

Those moderates flowed into Richard Nixon's emerging "silent majority," steered by none other than Graham. Miller does not portray Graham as politically naive; nor does he suggest that he was simply used by Nixon. Instead, Graham emerges as a shrewd political operative in his own right, dedicated to the success of Nixon and the GOP despite his regular professions of nonpartisanship. Graham regularly undertook political assignments for Nixon, maneuvering against Demo cratic senator Albert Gore Sr.'s 1970 reelection bid and discouraging George Wallace from campaigning for the White House in 1972. Graham's politics of decency played a central role in the emergence of the reliably Republican South. Graham's constant calls for law and order in the wake of civil rights protests and urban unrest prefigured Nixon's 1968 campaign, and his willingness to openly help Nixon court the southern evangelical vote tilled the soil for Jerry Falwell and other Christian right activists.

Chagrined by Watergate, Graham distanced himself from Nixon and pledged to stay "a million miles away from politics." He did not abide by that pledge, though he became more circumspect. One of the most original sections of Miller's book is his discussion of Graham's post-Water gate political career. The evangelist maintained a cordial but distant relationship with Jimmy Carter, developed an intimate friendship with the Bush family, and sympathetically responded to Bill Clinton's personal travails (a reaction that in some respects mirrored his response to Watergate).

Miller concludes that most "portraits of Graham have exaggerated the nature of his depoliticization." Though he distanced himself from the Christian right, he remained a quiet Republican activist. For this, evangelicals, other Christians and all Americans should be grateful. As shriller and sometimes hateful voices became identified with political evangelicalism, Graham emerged as a more irenic elder statesman. He never claimed the mantle of a prophet, and he certainly lacked consistency on the central issue of race relations. Yet when louder and angrier voices on the right further polarized American politics and sullied the image of Chris ianity in the minds of young Americans, Graham "modeled an important yet underappreciated strand of American conservatism that learned to speak a compassionate language of post racialism and international humanitarianism."

Moderate voices always anger those on the political and religious left and right, but there were far worse alternatives to Graham's politics of decency. Similarly, religious and political progressives may not appreciate Rick Warren's opposition to gay marriage, but Warren serves as a far more constructive representative of contemporary evangelicalism than many of his more conservative counterparts.

On the other hand, for all of Graham's political and personal decency (to which there were occasional exceptions, such as when he made anti-Semitic comments that were caught on tape at the Nixon White House), his political theology ultimately proved bankrupt. Graham's political thought revolved around what Miller awkwardly terms "evangelical universalism," which em phasizes social change through individual regeneration and subordination to governmental authority. Graham was an evangelist without parallel in his era, but it would be hard to argue that those myriad conversions produced a more just or moral nation and world—and Graham's emphasis on electing "Christian statesmen" proved problematic for obvious reasons. Moreover, subordination and obedience were hardly a recipe for needed social change on issues like race.

In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," King termed the southern church "a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion" rather than a "thermostat that transformed the mores of society." Graham could be both and was often somewhere in between; he was thus an ill-fitting actor in morality plays like the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal. That Miller captures Graham's complexity is one of the chief virtues of this even-handed and probing political profile.

Before we condemn Graham for his moderation and political hypocrisy, we would do well to remember his own—admittedly self-serving—Watergate-era warnings against hubris and self-righteousness. Graham is hardly the only American religious leader to be awestruck by powerful politicians, to make false claims of political neutrality and to say embarrassing things behind closed doors. There's a little bit of Billy Graham in most Christians who involve themselves in the political process.

John G. Turner teaches modern American history at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Bill Bright and Campus Crusade: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press).

http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=7857

Obama's Struggle to Expose Fox News As GOP Propaganda Arm

2009-10-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

By Robert Paul Reyes
NewsBlaze
October 25,2009

Fox News is the propaganda arm of the GOP; its primetime lineup is on a mission from God to destroy the Obama administration. Sean Hannity's reason d'être is to vilify, castigate, and criticize Obama. Glenn Beck is slightly more nuanced in his attacks, calling Obama a racist who hates white people.

The president tolerated the relentless attack from the Fox News network with remarkable patience, but he finally decided to fight back against the Fair and Balanced Fox News steamroller.

The White House stated that Murdoch's network is "not a news organization" but rather "the communications arm of the Republican Party. I don't know why Republicans have their panties in a twist over this statement, it's as undeniable and as incontrovertible as declaring that "the sky is blue and the sun is yellow."

President Obama is wise to attack the Fox News leviathan directly, it sends a clear message to the public that the fair and balanced network has as much legitimacy and credibility as talk radio.

The White House isn't confining its assault on the cable news network simply to words; it's refusing to provide key administration officials to appear on Fox News programs.

The Obama and Fox News war is an entertaining spectacle for the public, and it benefits both warring factions. The Obama/Fox News tiff attracts as many viewers as a balloon boy or a missing young white girl. Obama also gains from the epic battle, it appeases the left wing of his party and it serves to deflect charges that he's a softy.

Obama's blitzkrieg won't dampen the love of right-wing nut jobs for the cable news network, but it might convince many normal Americans that Fox News is as reliable as a British tabloid.

Robert Paul Reyes is a NewsBlaze writer on Politics, Pop Culture and Pointless Pontificating. Contact him by writing to NewsBlaze.

http://newsblaze.com/story/20091025120249reye.nb/topstory.html

New Book Exposes Pedophilia, Government Officials and Cover-up

2009-10-25T19:50:00.000-07:00

American Chronicle
September 04, 2009

A nationwide pedophile ring, run by a pair of Republican powerbrokers, had access to the highest levels of our government, connections to the CIA, and used venerable Boys Town orphanage as a pedophilic reservoir.

http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-book-exposes-pedophilia-government.html

Nick Bryant´s writing has recurrently focused on the plight of disadvantaged children in the United States, and he´s been published in numerous national journals, including the Journal of Professional Ethics, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, and Journal of School Health.

Also see: "Robert Wadman's Perjury Party"

The Franklin Scandal : a new documentary and book on the Franklin Cover-up by Nick Bryant:

Documentary Trailer, Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqA4Shsjhk

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uLvY3oHCiA

http://www.franklinscandal.com

DUPING LIBERALS THE WAY FOX DUPES MODERATES, PACIFICA'S AMY GOODMAN PROMOTES CIA MIND CONTROL TORTURER

2009-10-24T21:16:00.001-07:00

Amy Goodman, unabashed admirer of CIA mind control pioneer Robert Jay Lifton
By Alex Constantine (Repost)

In case you were still wondering, Amy Goodman is not credible.

CIA Mockingbird-journalist followers are used to taking spoon-fed information and this has turned them into credulous dupes.

The funny thing is, they don't know it.

An animal that runs in herds doesn't think about where it is being led. It follows without question. So do the listeners of Democracy Now!

I'll introduce a sub-title at this point because this is too significant for the body of this complaint - this brick wall of words that should have graffiti painted over it in bold, red letters: Robert Jay Lifton is Responsible for Much of the Illicit MKULTRA Experimentation Conducted by the CIA - a Scaife-Funded Torturer Highly Praised by Amy Goodman

This is a particularly offensive act by Amy.

She is an unabashed fan of Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, who is passed off on Democracy Now! as a concerned establishment liberal of some kind, his paper-thin CIA cover story. Dr. Lifton is in fact a guiding light of the far-right, Mockingbird Scaife-funded American Family Foundation, a CIA front. Confused? This far-right-left-wing-CIA-anti-CIA doctor isn't confused politically. He's a manager of perceptions. Suspend disbelief for a moment and the contradictions aren't so glaring. Amy Goodman takes him at his word. Research his past, dig a little (a few minutes on the Internet), and you will find that Lifton is responsible for thousands of atrocities committed against hapless American citizens, tortured in unconscionable CIA mind control experiments initiated by Lifton himself as a founder of the Human Ecology Fund.

The Fund disbursed grants for classified experimentation code-named MKULTRA, an ambitious program that explored the uses of electric shock, LSD, bio-electronics, torture, depatterning (the desctruction of the mind in order to rebuild it), "coercive persuasion" and other forms of mind control atrocity in the 1950s and early '60s.

And that takes some doing.

His famous study, The Nazi Doctors, was written for the CIA. It is, viewed one way, a prescription for CREATING Nazi doctors. It fails to name names.

From the Democracy Now! people, however, we learn none of this. And that is especially galling - Goodman is intentionally keeping the truth from her listeners.

Lifton is PRAISED: "Robert Jay Lifton, distinguished Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as well as a visiting psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. He is also the author of several books. His latest book is Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World."

You can almost hear the depths of her awe in the clipped speech and the intensity of her delivery. It's a voice that grows more grating every day to my ear. She can ACT, but not so well. This is Amy Goodman's take on one of the most notorious CIA officers in American history.

Information on Lifton can be found The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, (J. Marks, p. 128), Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A. 1995 (Alex Constantine, p. 58), Journey Into Madness (G. Thomas, pp. 344-5, 376).

If you have ever read about the fascist excesses of MKULTRA, consider that the Human Ecology Fund's co-founder, Dr. Lifton, made them all possible.

He is widely considered a "cult expert." In fact, his writing on cults for Scaife's AFF is easily refutable CIA disinformation, CRAP, his stock-in-trade.

Lifton's writing on mind control is also crap and a cover story that conceals widespread and ongoing illicit experimentation by the CIA, the subject of numerous books on the topic ignored by the media-at-large ... and by Pacifica and The Nation, which have foisted this pariah upon the Left without so much as a mention of his past.

Pacifica managers and board members are old enough to recall the release of LSD upon an unsuspecting world by the CIA in the mid-'60s to DISTRACT, DISORIENT, DISCREDIT AND DEFUSE THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT, a case I make supported by Army biowarfare documents.

That was the work of Ms Goodman's beloved Robert Jay Lifton.

Once again, paying Pacifica listeners have been fed deliberately misleading information that serves the CIA - on the basis of such frauds, the network has thrived.

I am publicly condemning Pacifica and Amy Goodman.

Let them respond.

(Copies of a version of this complaint were sent privately to every member of the board at KPFK, the Pacifica outlet in Los Angeles. Not one denial came back.)

White House Should Engage Fox, not Ignore it

2009-10-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

By Doug Stone
Minn. Star Tribune
October 20, 2009

... President Obama did interviews with all the networks’ Sunday shows last month except Fox. His communications director told The New York Times that “as they (Fox officials) are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” She also called the network an “arm of the Republican Party.”

Administration officials continued to blast the network in talk shows last weekend although they indicated, according to the Washington Post, that members of the administration would be allowed to appear on Fox in the future.

The administration’s stance struck me as rather childish, like the youngster who didn’t get his way so he took his ball and went home. In Washington politics is a blood sport. The way to deal with the conservative commentators and the factual distortions and accusations that the White House so dislikes is to confront them, not run from them.

Have administration spokespeople all over the Fox airwaves, challenging the commentators with reasonable arguments, facts and persuasion. Show the Fox audience, which by the way contains at least some moderates who might be sympathetic to the President, that Obama is not the monster he is sometimes made out to be by the right. He is, in fact, a bright, thoughtful, restrained man.

And when you have the best presidential communicator in years, put him on Fox up against the Hannitys and Becks and O’Reillys.

As David Carr of The Times points out, “When he (Obama) eventually sat for an interview with Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly two months before the election, it made for great television.”

It is far more difficult for the Fox commentators to throw mud at the President when he is sitting with them in the White House or on the set of their show or live via satellite than when he refuses to engage them.

In my work, I have always advised leaders and officials not to say “no comment,” but to engage in a discussion or rebuttal if attacked or criticized. In the modern era of 24-hour television and the Internet, failure to respond is seen as an admission that the critic is right. Officials often are resistant to such responses because they don’t want to get “in the gutter” with their critics. But responses can be thoughtful, factual and persuasive. They don’t have to have the same tone as the critic.

Fox, which relishes its role as the not-so-loyal opposition, has seen its ratings climb this year. The President and his aides do themselves no good by boycotting Fox and its commentators. Obama is better than that and bigger than that. And he can show the country that he is by using his own great debating and oratorical skills to engage the network which conservatives love, rather than ignoring it.

http://www.startribune.com/yourvoices/65099897.html?elr=KArks7PYDiaK7DUoaK7D_V_eDc87DUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU

Meet author Jerry Brown: The "philosopher prince" as CA governor again?

2009-10-23T12:12:00.000-07:00

"As you observe modernizing projects in the world today that are operated by multinational corporations without much interference from national governments, do you see fascistic elements there? There are certainly enormous changes imposed without the consent of the governed." - Jerry Brown

Posted By: Carla Marinucci
SF Chronicle Politics Blog
Oct 22, 2009

State Attorney General Jerry Brown's past life as the liberal host of the 90s' We the People radio show came in for a good look this week -- so now's a good time to re-introduce you to author Jerry Brown, whose '90s book "Dialogues" also contains a few memorable quotes that may end up in some 2010 gubernatorial campaign ads.

The "philosopher prince" expounds?

With 40 years in state politics, there's a lot of colorful history, quotes and possibly controversial material out there in the public domaine regarding Brown, the politico whom author Robert Pack called "the philospher prince."

Brown's 1998 book, Dialogues (Berkeley Hills Books, $14.95), is an example: it's his hand-picked collection of deep conversations with some leading academics, activists and intellectuals of the day.

Brown's prologue promises that "you will find that each dialogue illuminates the paradoxes of progress, and opens up cracks in the certitudes of our modern world view."

That's a tall order, but with a used copy going for $8 on Amazon, we went for it. The jacket blurb gushes that Brown "has reevaluated and attacked entrenched ideas, forging a political philosophy that transcends conventional boundaries."

But Dialogues -- along with the recent story on We the People by the Sacramento Bee's reporter Jack Chang -- both dramatize how the 2010 campaign may be a blast from the past. It will work both ways -- for Brown fans, the material illustrates the intellectual curiousity and independence that they say set him apart in the current pack of pols. For conservatives, it's more proof he's still that ultra-liberal, wacky "Moonbeam'' character.

So here's some snippets of vintage Brown's "Dialogue" comments and questions to the big thinkers -- long before he had to worry about mundane stuff like crime and punishment as the state AG, or talking to Average Joe Voter in his next campaign for governor:

*To author and philosopher Noam Chomsky:

*"How would you compare the propaganda system in the so-called free world to an authoritarian system? What are the differences?''

*To Alice Walker, prize-winning author of "Color Purple":

*"Many people are proposing education is the answer. They say it's the answer to poverty; it's the answer to other problems. And yet, in many respects, education is a deeper embedding of alienation."

*"Is whatever left of civil rights, liberalism, activism, whatever, is it now so domesticated that violence and repression aren't needed?"

*To Judi Bari, late "Earth First!" enviromental activist:

*"None of us is an isolated monad with this bundle of private property rights outside the fabric of these larger obligations. So I very much believe that it's time to take another step in the evolution of capitalism. Right now, I don't think the federal government can make that happen...it can't even operate what it owns, so that's not the answer. But we're on a track of real destruction socially and ecologically and we have to understand that as clearly as we can in order to come up with a better set of rules."

*To Wolfgang Sachs, author and enviromental researcher:

*"As you observe modernizing projects in the world today that are operated by multinational corporations without much interference from national governments, do you see fascistic elements there? There are certainly enormous changes imposed without the consent of the governed."

*To Suzanne Arms, natural childbirth crusader, photojournalist and author:

*"There is a massive propaganda system that is invading our unconscience, and its message is what you're talking about ... romanticism."

*To Lt. Col Dave Grossman, author:

*"During the Gulf War, we saw green missile flashes broadcast on CNN. We didn't see Iraqi people, human beings, young boys, many of them Christians, buried alive by vehicles driven by America GIs. If we'd gotten that picture, we might have had a very different reaction to this very popular war."

*"We are exposed to death and violence in so many forms, movies, television, video games. Even our president takes out television commercials to show how committed he is to killing criminals. You might say we have a stronger fascination with death than ever before."

*To Sister Helen Prejean, anti-death penalty activist and author of Dead Man Walking:

*"Over the centuries, there has persisted the sense of an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, a belief in rightous vengeance, a primordial feeling that the killings of criminals will balance the scales of justice...we are faced with the question of the death penalty nearly every time we vote, either in specific crime-related measures, or by candidates promoting their stand for or against capital punishment. This question is nothing less than a test of our humanity, of how we see ourselves and others and how we define the role of the state.''

*To Paolo Soleri, author and architect:

*Paolo, I want to talk a little bit about your idea of the omega seed."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=50095

Betsy McCaughey and the Media

2009-10-18T13:09:00.000-07:00

" ... [The New Republic] owner Martin Peretz still stands by her ... "

by Jamison Foser
Media Matters
October 05, 2009

The New Republic's Michelle Cottle examines "the never-ending lunacy of Betsy McCaughey," including a lengthy examination of the largely-forgotten hilarity and insanity that marked McCaughey's time as Lieutenant Governor of New York.

Cottle's article seems to be part of TNR's continuing efforts to make up for inflicting McCaughey's lies on the rest of us in the first place. Just this morning, for example, Politico's Michael Calderone quotes TNR editor Franklin Foer saying of the magazine's publication of McCaughey's falsehood-riddled attack on the Clinton health care bill "an original sin that I hope we can expunge."

Cottle pulls few punches in her profile of McCaughey, beginning with a description of Brookings Institution scholar Henry Aaron's opening statement during a recent debate with McCaughey, which Aaron used to make clear his opponent's dishonesty:

So it is that Aaron finds himself standing in the Crystal Ballroom of the Doubletree Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, running through PowerPoint slides that detail--quote by excruciating quote--McCaughey's reputation as among the most irresponsible, dishonest, and destructive players on the public stage. He starts with Politifact.com's categorization of her commentary as "Pants on Fire," followed by New York Times articles debunking her assertions, followed by complaints from economist Gail Wilensky (adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign and head of Medicare financing under the first President Bush) that "these charges of death panels, euthanasia and withholding care from the disabled give rational, knowledgeable, thoughtful conservatives a bad name." Next comes a denunciation of McCaughey's "fraudulent scare tactics" by John Paris, professor of bioethics at Boston College; AARP executive vice president John Rother's protest that her statements are "rife with gross--even cruel--distortions"; a scolding editorial by The Washington Post about McCaughey's characterization of White House health policy adviser Ezekiel "Zeke" Emanuel as "Dr. Death"; and, to wrap it all up, Stuart Butler, vice president of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, expressing dismay that the "personal attacks on good people like Zeke are outrageous. There are real policy issues that should be debated vigorously, but slandering a good person's name is beyond the pale." At one point, the debate moderator felt moved to reach over and give McCaughey's hand a comforting pat.

Cottle concludes that McCaughey's refusal to acknowledge her own dishonesty is what makes her infuriating:

Since her earliest days in the spotlight, McCaughey has presented herself as a just-the-facts-please, above-the-fray political outsider. In reality, she has proved devastatingly adept at manipulating charts and stats to suit her ideological (and personal) ambitions. It is this proud piety concerning her own straight-shooting integrity combined with her willingness to peddle outrageous fictions--and her complete inability to recognize, much less be shamed by, this behavior--that makes McCaughey so infuriating.

I don't think that is actually what makes McCaughey infuriating. There are plenty of liars in the world who nobody gets worked up about -- because their lies don't drive major media coverage about an important issue. That's what's infuriating about Betsy McCaughey: major news organizations give her a platform. They run her op-eds, they host her on television, they quote her, they allow her falsehoods to shape the public debate about health care. They do this despite knowing that she's a liar.

That's what's infuriating: that someone whose defining quality for the past 15 years has been her dishonesty about health care reform should be granted a role shaping the debate over health care reform by major media outlets. And, unfortunately, Cottle doesn't address that issue at all. How did TNR come to publish McCaughey in the first place? Don't they employ fact-checkers? Shouldn't they? How do her false claims continue to make it into print? Why do television news shows book her? What does it say about the news media that they grant McCaughey a platform? That's the important part. If McCaughey was just another crackpot spouting off lies and conspiracy theories while nursing a cup of coffee at the local diner, nobody would care.

But she isn't. And as Calderone notes, TNR owner Martin Peretz still stands by her:

"I do not think Betsy is an intellectual fraud. Not at all," Peretz wrote in an email.

"I have not read the Cottle piece and I do look forward to doing that," he continued. "But the issue that McCaughey went after was one of the most intricate and economically challenging ones that America has faced, as we can see from the present debate."
...

Also, Peretz wrote, "their [the Clinton administration's] worst tactical error was to do up what was I think [was] an eleven-page memo 'rebutting' the New Republic article, a sign of its importance and weight."

The owner of a magazine that published a deeply dishonest attack on the Clinton health care reform efforts thinks it's appropriate for him to lecture the Clinton administration on why they were unsuccessful in combatting the lies he published?

That's the story here. Not Betsy McCaughey's shamelessness -- the irresponsibility of the news organizations that promote her, and the arrogance of someone who lectures others for failing to properly clean up his own mess.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200910050009

Wingnuts are too Stupid to win their Fake Civil War

2009-10-17T23:08:00.000-07:00

Excerpt By Stanley Crouch
NY Daily News
September 21st 2009

... We can hear the intellectually rabid pit bulls of fringe right-wing hate radio or watch them go for it with all of the counterfeit heat one can pay for at Fox News.

The Washington demonstration - which seems to have been bought and paid for by the drug and insurance lobbies - let us see that there are always people available to be had.

All one has to do is play the real card that shakes everyone up at the table. It is not the race card. That is not all-American enough. It is the self-pity card. Self-pity may be the actual religion of the fringe and can be found in any people on the intellectual margins of society. There is a plot to deprive them of something essential. Government is out of hand. All facts are manufactured by liberal interests. ...

When I was growing up in California, the John Birch Society made the most noise on the right and had its followers convinced that America was becoming so weak and indecisive that one day people would look up to see Communist troops parachuting into their backyards. This has not been new since the 19th century, only those about whom the true believers should be paranoid have changed or changed colors or politics. But they are still there to do Americans in and hysteria is the only choice left.

Hysteria is always the wrong choice. It echoes through the intellectual graveyard of real ideas. ...

These people appropriately dubbed "wing nuts" are heading for another Gettysburg. They will not be shot down, however. They will simply be ignored as soon as the nation decides to move on to democratic business.

More: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/09/21/2009-09-21_wing_nuts_are_too_stupid_to_win_their_fake_civil_war.html#ixzz0UGUbKoRP

Administration Fights to Protect Secret Propaganda Budget

2009-10-17T21:04:00.001-07:00

By DAVID ROGERS
Politico
10/15/09

The Pentagon's Information Operations arm trips up over basic information, like how much it costs.

Just months ago, the Defense Department said it needed $988 million to help win hearts and minds in the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. When the House cut this by half in July, top-level officials landed on Capitol Hill, pleading their case but also making a startling admission: Their budget needs for 2010 are actually $626.2 million — more than one-third less than first estimated.

Even at the Pentagon, an error of that size gets attention. “That $988 million number stuck, to our regret,” a defense official told POLITICO. And one man who hasn’t forgotten is Rep. John Murtha, who chairs the defense appropriations panel that funds the IO budget.

“The information war is off to a bad start with bad information,” the Pennsylvania Democrat laughed Wednesday in an interview. “They all said the same thing: ‘We made a mistake. We realize that we fumbled the ball.’ And they were very apologetic. Everybody is. But they go back and say, ‘This is very important.’”

Indeed, combat commanders, beginning with Army Gen. David Petraeus, have stressed IO programs as a key factor in winning popular support in Iraq — and now hopefully in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The level of concern about losing the money is real enough that the Pentagon and State Department have mounted a full-court press to stave off cuts.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn and Jack Lew, an old hand in the House and now deputy secretary of state for management and resources, have all raised the issue with Murtha. With an eye toward upcoming House-Senate talks on defense spending, Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, met with Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) on the issue last week.

The great problem is that the numbers mix-up only adds to the misgivings of an old-school Marine like Murtha, who views the ever-expanding IO budget as a hangover from Donald Rumsfeld’s years and a propaganda machine ill-suited for uniformed military.

“I just don’t like the idea that the military is in the propaganda business,” he told POLITICO. “I don’t like it.”

Murtha’s preference is that the State Department take more of the lead, although he admits State can’t ramp up fast enough to handle the task this coming year.

“They’re going to have to depend on the Defense Department,” he said. “The problem with the Defense Department is they’re not only willing to take care of it; they will push you right aside in order to take care of it.”

This aggressive style was Rumsfeld’s trademark as secretary of defense for most of George W. Bush’s presidency and as an early champion of the IO programs.

Pentagon documents describe the mission broadly, running from electronic warfare to psychological operations. Major portions of the budget are classified, but it has made headlines before for allegedly paying to plant stories in the overseas press that are favorable to U.S. policy in Iraq, for example.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28314.html

Pro-Obamacare Republicans in the Pay of the Health Industry

2009-10-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
October 14, 2009

As the White House dismissed the insurance lobby's critiques of the Senate health care bill as self-serving corporate disinformation, President Obama used his weekly radio address to laud four former Republican officials for supporting the push for "reform." But Obama failed to mention that these pro-"reform" Republicans -- whom he lauded for "ris[ing] above the politics of the moment" -- are all in the pay of the health care industry and could personally profit from "reform."

Former Republican Health and Human Services Secretaries Louis Sullivan and Tommy Thompson, along with former Senate Majority Leaders Bill Frist (a doctor) and Bob Dole, received plaudits in the president's weekly radio address for exhibiting "the spirit of national purpose" and for understanding "that health insurance reform isn't a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, but an American issue that demands a solution."

Media outlets dutifully carried the Democratic story line: Four important Republicans are backing Obama, but GOP lawmakers remain in lockstep for partisan political readings.

Obama, along with ABC News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and nearly everyone who reported on the GOP support for Obamacare, left out the salient detail that these pro-"reform" Republicans are lobbyists, consultants and directors for the drug companies, hospitals and other health care corporations that stand to profit from Obama's reform.

Thompson, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, served four years as President George W. Bush's HHS chief. Now Thompson is a health care consultant at the lobbying firm Akin Gump, whose clients include insurer Aetna, many drug makers, device makers and hospitals.

Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals are sure to see profits improve from a bill like the current Senate measure. Health insurers like Aetna are walking a fine line between disaster (a government option for health insurance) and a corporate dream come true (the individual mandate). It's naive to imagine Thompson doesn't have his clients' interests in mind in endorsing Obamacare.

Sullivan was George H.W. Bush's HHS secretary in the 1990s. In 2008, Sullivan made $220,000 as a director for four health care companies, including the biotech firm Biosante Pharmaceuticals, where he was chairman of the board, according to Forbes. His total 2008 compensation from these companies (with options and other non-cash compensation) was more than $1 million. He has recently served as a director at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Cigna.

These companies all stand to profit from "reform" legislation that would mandate health insurance, subsidize private insurance and provide more drug subsidies. They are paying Sullivan, and Sullivan is supporting "reform" legislation.

Sullivan leveraged his public service into a private fortune helping big drug makers and insurance companies boost their profits. He is precisely the sort of revolving-door corporate consultant whom candidate Obama accused of corrupting the political system. But now he is on Obama's side, so Sullivan is a "distinguished leader" exhibiting "the spirit of national purpose," in Obama's words.

Frist is a partner in a private investment firm that bets on health care companies -- and on regulation. The firm's Web site reads: "With deep expertise in the healthcare reimbursement and regulatory environments, the Cressey & Company team has invested in almost every for-profit niche of healthcare."

So Frist gets rich by helping pick the health care companies that will get rich. Now he's backing Obamacare -- and winning praise for it.

And Dole, as this column discussed last Friday, is a health care lobbyist for the downtown firm Alston & Bird, which represents drug makers and insurers. The media have something of a blackout on his conflicts of interest, instead using him to cudgel the current GOP leadership for lacking this sort of "bipartisanship."

All of these pro-"reform" Republicans would say their support for Obamacare is not related to their financial interests. But the White House has declared the profit motive sufficient to discredit criticism of "reform." White House aide Linda Douglass (the woman who called in August for citizens to report "fishy" e-mails about proposed health care regulations) dismissed a recent critical report by health insurers as "distorted" and "dishonest," stating: "It comes on the eve of a vote that will reduce the industry's profits."

But Obama has been holding out as heroes these four Republicans supporting a plan that will likely enhance their personal profits. Maybe ulterior motives only matter if you're opposing the White House.

Timothy P. Carney, The Examiner's lobbying editor, can be reached at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. He writes an op-ed column that appears on Friday.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Pro-Obamacare-Republicans-in-the-pay-of-the-health-industry-8379285-64125832.html

The CIA/Media War Against 9/11 "Conspiracy Theorists"

2009-10-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

Some of the most vociferous critics of 9/11 "conspiracy theories" move on to engage in ridiculous conspiracy theories themselves. Fox News, for instance, has promoted Birthers and finds the Executive Office involved in a slew of lucicrous "socialist-Nazi" plots - employing rhetorical tools of McCarthyism and Holocaust denial. Ridicule is their most effective tactic. Others include reductio ad absurdum, lumping legitimate research with conspiratorial garbage (Birther claims, for instance) planted on the web by the far-right and intelligence assets, also unbridled disinformation. - AC

* Ramon Gilsanz, Contributor to the NIST 9/11 Study, Changed His Story/Vanishing Reports

* National Geographic Special Marginalizing 9/11 Truthers Brought to You by Rupert Murdoch and the CIA

* Kathy Shaidle, UnTruther & Unabashed Racist

* WHY IS THE 911 "FRINGE" MOVEMENT SO MAINSTREAM?

* "THE PATH TO 9/11" (PART 8): Southeastern Asset Management (SAM), Longleaf Partners and Perception Management TV

* The BBC, Amazing Pederast James Randi and CIA Mind Control

* Invisible History, Afghanistan's Untold Story, is no Conspiracy Theory

* Vincent Carroll's Lazy-Man's Guide to 9/11

* Letter to the NYT - 9/11 and the “War on Terrorism”: Facts and Myths

* CIA Infiltration of Pacifica - Larry Bensky's Hang-Ups

* Who Owns NEW SCIENTIST?

* Dr. Patrick Leman, New Scientist's Debunker of Conspiracy Theories, and the NAZI History of the Nuffield Foundation, which Funds Dr. Leman

* Who Killed Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake? Also: TCI/Heritage Communications' Jim Cownie, News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch & the "Paranoia" of Theresa Duncan

* Film Targets JFK Conspiracy Theories & the Boston Globe's Reviewer Alex Beam Reviles 9/11 Truthers, too (Update: BOSTON GLOBE'S ALEX BEAM - SON OF A NAZI/CIA COLLABORATOR - DEFLECTS ATTENTION FROM HIS OWN FAMILY BY WRITING ABOUT QUISLING FRANCES GOULD)

* Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi Terrorizes 9/11 Truthers Also: Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is Mentally Ill and will Only be Hunter S. Thompson in his most Far-Fetched Dreams

* Fascism is Inherently Conspiratorial - Response to Dallas Observer

* Peter Roff - a Sun Myung Moon Cultist - Attacks "Fringe" 9/11 Truth Movement in US News & World Report

* Establishment Media Debunkers of Conspiracy Research - Who are They? (Part One): RM Scaife Concubine Emerson Vermaat

* Establishment Media Debunkers of Conspiracy Research - Who are They? (Part Two): Lev Grossman, the Time Reporter who Hated V for Vendetta

* Commission Atty. John Farmer Claims 9/11 was the Result of "Massive Bureaucratic Failures"

* Homeland Security Links 9/11 Truthers to Taliban (2007)

* The Media 9/11 Debunking Machine is now a Smoking Gun

Opus Dei Unleash the Dragons

2009-10-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

The Olive Press
September 30, 2009

IT will feature some of the cream of British cinema and is expected to be one of the big Hollywood blockbusters for next year.

But the film There be Dragons – directed by Roland Joffe and starring Charlie Cox, Charles Dance and Derek Jacobi – is extremely unlikely to be popular in Spain.

Based on the shady Catholic organisation Opus Dei, it tells the story of its founder Spaniard Josemaria Escriva, who was a close friend of former dictator Francisco Franco, as well as South American pariah Augusto Pinochet.

It has already been accused of being a 20 million euro propaganda vehicle for the secretive organisation, which has close links to the Vatican, as well as strong support in Spain.

It has also emerged that the film has received funding from Opus Dei members in a bid to counter its portrayal as a group of self-flagellating schemers as seen in 2006 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code.

Joffe, who directed the Mission and the Killing Fields, recently confimed that the film – set for release in 2010 – has received substantial financial backing by Opus Dei member, the independent Hollywood film producer Heriberto Schoeffer.

Consulting at least one Opus Dei priest during its 13-week shoot in Argentina, it is said to heavily promote the organisation, which is allegedly behind numerous big, controversial infrastructure projects in Spain.

One former member of the organisation, who lives in Argentina, explained that the film is “dark Dei propaganda”.

So right-wing was the script, that it was initially rejected by Hugh Hudson, the director of Chariots of Fire, as he deemed it to be too “pro-Franco”.

Dictator Franco was a supporter of both Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War and his regime was linked to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 Spaniards during his 40 year regime.

Yet director Joffe has vehemently maintained that his film is not a propaganda tool for the organisation. He says he was given complete creative control before filming began and that it is not pro-Franco.

However, the controversial film depicts the life of Spaniard Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer during the turbulent Spanish Civil War.

Amid claims of corruption and scandal – compounded by Dan Brown’s notorious bestseller, The Da Vinci Code – Opus Dei and Escriva are both still shrouded in mystery.

The facts about Escriva’s life are thin on the ground. Born in the historic Aragonese town of Barbastro in 1902, he was ordained a priest in 1925, before going on to study Law at Madrid University.

He was the second of six brothers, three of whom died young, and his father was a failed businessman, who later was declared bankrupt. He dealt in fabrics and chocolate and died when Escriva was just 22 years old.

One has to journey back almost 81 years to discover how one moment of enlightenment was the catalyst behind one of the world’s most influential religious movements.

It was on October 2, 1928 in Madrid, Escriva had just begun his routine prayer ritual when he saw God’s work laid out before him. His vision consisted of two latin words; Opus Dei, meaning “work of God”.

He suddenly believed that people could achieve holiness – and even sainthood – if they stuck to a strict regime of religious practices.

This involved allegedly wearing a cilice, or undergarment, made from rough cloth or animal hair or even barbed wire.

Sometimes known as a “hair shirt”, this contraption pricks into the wearer’s skin, constantly reminding them of the importance of repentance and atonement.

According to Wikipedia, if worn continuously it could form a breeding ground for lice.

Incredibly it has been endorsed by Popes as a way of following in Christ’s footsteps after his crucifixion. “Let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me,” Jesus once said.

So sure was he of this route to sainthood, that he set about, like the missionaries in Africa, to convert anyone in Spain prepared to listen.

Escriva devoted the rest of his life’s work to preaching these methods – a fact that was recognised by Pope John Paul II when he canonised Escriva in 2002.

Insisting that he gave to this mission entirely, he stated: “He worked especially among the poor and the sick languishing in the slums and hospitals of Madrid.”

However, in 1936, Escriva, played by London actor Charlie Cox in Joffe’s film, was forced to flee Spain after Republican forces targeted him.

He made a dramatic escape across the Pyrenees – the inspiration behind the forthcoming movie – but returned three years later aftern Franco had established his dictatorship.

And it was during the Caudillo’s reign that Opus Dei flourished and spread throughout Spain.

By 1945, the organisation was getting international recognition as well as suspicious glances from other religious groups.

Accusations over Escriva’s support for fascist regimes plagued his legacy. One early critic was leading Jesuit, Wlodimir Ledochowski, who told the Vatican that he considered Opus Dei to be “very dangerous for the Church in Spain”.

He cited its “secretive character” and called it “a form of Christian masonry”.

Yet the growth of Opus Dei continued unaffected and, by 1946, Escriva made the bold decision to move the organisation’s headquarters from Madrid to Rome.

Just four years later, Opus Dei’s meteoric rise in religious clout was officially recognised by the Vatican when Rome granted its recognition as an “institution of pontifical right”.

By the time of his death on June 26 1975, Escriva, 73, had succeeded in creating and nurturing a hugely influential religious group that consisted of 60,000 members from five different continents.

Nevertheless, accusations surrounding Escriva’s support for fascist regimes continued to plague his legacy.

In his later years, it is alleged that Escriva became extremely close to the torturous regime of General Pinochet’s Junta in Chile during the height of its dictatorial power.

And, while being considered for sainthood, an Opus Dei priest revealed Escriva once told him: “Hitler couldn’t have been such a bad person. He couldn’t have killed six million people – four million at the most.”

Opus Dei has since fought back against the accusations that it is just a secret society for religious fundamentalists and right-wing extremists.

It has pointed out that, while many of its members are conservative, there is still a handful of liberals, including the Italian Democratic party senator Paola Binetti, who famously admitted she occasionally wore a cilice.

In the UK, former Labour cabinet minister Ruth Kelly is reported to be a member, while in Spain various bullfighters and athletes are members, as well as former president Adolfo Suarez.

In Spain the organisation is divided into ten regional delegations, each controlled by their own boss. Overall control for Spain is in the hands of Ramon Herrando Prat de la Riba.

Joffe’s film concentrates mostly on Escriva’s early years during the 1930s and, in particular his “Indiana Jones” style escape from Spain with the Republicans in hot pursuit.

The cast for There Be Dragons is clearly impressive. As well as the British talent, it also includes Ukranian Bond girl Olga Kurylenko as the love interest.

The only problem is few Spaniards are likely to love it.

http://www.theolivepress.es/2009/09/30/opus-dei-unleash-the-dragons/

A Media Failure Compounds the Financial Failure - The press is still missing the story of fraud and economic decline ahead

2009-10-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

By Danny Schechter
Oct 12, 2009

We know that Wall Street has not learned much from the crash it helped instigate. We know that our government, whatever its stated desire to clean up the markets and reform the financial behemoths, lacks the willingness and perhaps the clout to rein in the real power centers. We are not sure if they have been “captured” by them, or just lack the guts to take on institutions and individuals that helped fund their rise to power.

But do we know that, even now, much of our media, despite the sheer volume of coverage, may be missing the real story? Do we know that if we want to find missing facts and the real context we have to turn away from the failed media system that never really investigated the failed financial system?

Top Down

The Project on Excellence on Journalism released a study charging “that the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama administration and big business, with coverage reflecting the concerns of institutions more than the lives of everyday Americans.”

Why is this? I asked several journalists in making a film and writing a book about the financial crisis as a crime story. A number agreed that the media itself is “embedded” in the culture and narratives of Wall Street, like reporters embedded in Iraq. They lack the ability to be critical of the sources they rely on. They bring little perspective and context to their work.

Max Wolff who works in the financial industry, and also teaches about it, shared his view as we stood outside the New York Stock Exchange:

“I think the media mostly did unpaid press releases for various businesses looking to sell financial products and while that made sense given the advertising driving the media, they became cheerleaders instead of critics and that took out of the discussion a critical voice that would have helped people realize what was going on, stop it before it got too big, and deal with the crisis in a way that was relatively transparent, democratic, and broadly beneficial as opposed to quiet and partial and very muddy and unclear.”

I pressed him to reflect on why, “It seems like there is still a tendency to amplify rumors on one hand, and then try to reassure that everything is o.k., while at the same time telling us that the world is about to end.

“We get a wild volatility, with a blind set of stories: everything is fine, nothing to see here, remain calm—or, if you don’t do x, y, and z then tomorrow life as we know will come to a screeching halt, water won’t come out of your faucet, electricity won’t come on, and you will live the rest of your life regretting that you just didn’t listen to me when I told you what I wanted.

“And that is a bad way conduct a social discussion. And it makes the public more scared and quite reasonably less confident in leadership, whether that is corporate leadership, politicians or the media itself.”

Buried Problems

The tendency on the left is to bash the frenzy of free market hype on Fox but not look too carefully at other channels and mainstream media outlets.

Often, even when they run good stories, they don’t probe deeply enough. The Naked Capitalism blog offered up one recent example in the New York Times:

“The New York Times features a generally very good piece, ‘Buyout Firms Profited as a Company’s Debt Soared,’ by Julie Creswell that falls short in one important respect: it fails to call a prevalent and destructive practice of private equity firms by its proper name….

“George Akerlof and Paul Romer called that activity ‘looting’ in a famous 1993 paper and depicted it as criminal: Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.”

Conservatives like Peter Schiff, who was literally laughed off Fox News when he warned of the coming meltdown in 2006 (the year I did the film “In Debt We Trust”), says media institutions have centrist biases that genuflect to the status quo.

“A lot of the media I appeared on were kind of captured by the industries,” he told me. “You know everybody that comes on television is working for government or working for Wall Street. They all have invested interests. They are all trapped inside the bubble and so, from their vantage point, they don’t know they are in a bubble.”

Right now, many media outlets are reinforcing the idea that a recovery is underway, pointing to a rise in the stock market and some signs of improvement, even as joblessness continues to climb along with bankruptcies and foreclosures.

The dissents of informed analysts like Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, and George Soros are heard but marginalized. The signs of another collapse tied to an insolvent banking sector are discussed in the financial blogs but not yet on TV.

And the crime angle that I investigate is still seen as minor, except in all the stories about Bernie Madoff or the corporate lawyer Marc Dreier just profiled by 60 Minutes, which wanted to get him to be more “emotional” (that is, cry for the camera).

These “poster boys” for corporate crime get the visibility while reports on pervasive “epic” fraud in our financial institutions are buried in trade outlets like Information Week which notes “Seventy percent of financial institutions in the past 12 months have had cases of insider fraud, a new survey says.”

Kelly Jackson Higgins reported, “A former Wachovia Bank executive who had handled insider fraud incidents says banks are in denial about just how massive the insider threat problem is within their institutions.

“Meanwhile, the economic crisis appears to be exacerbating the risk, with 70 percent of financial institutions saying they have experienced a case of data theft by one of their employees in the past 12 months, according to new survey data.

“Shirley Inscoe, who spent 21 years at Wachovia handling insider fraud investigations and fraud prevention, says banks don’t want to talk about the insider fraud, and many aren’t aware that it’s an ‘epic problem.’”

Epic problems are often buried problems. No wonder most of us don’t know about them and are not as outraged as we deserve to be.

News Dissector Danny Schechter has made a film and written a book on the “Crime Of Our Time.” (News Dissector.com/plunder.) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/23782/

Beck Continues Long History of Invoking Nazis by Comparing Fox to the Jews During the Holocaust

2009-10-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

Media Matters
October 13, 2009

During the October 13 edition of his radio show, Glenn Beck likened the Obama administration's treatment of Fox News to Nazi persecution of Jews, telling other media outlets: "When they're done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something," it would be like "[t]he old, 'first they came for the Jews, and I wasn't Jewish.' " Beck has a long history of invoking the Holocaust, the Nazi Party, and Adolf Hitler to smear the Obama administration, other progressive individuals and organizations, and the media; indeed, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) previously criticized Beck for comparing Al Gore's efforts to raise awareness of global warming to the Holocaust.

Beck has repeatedly compared Obama to Hitler, claimed his policies are leading America toward Nazi Germany

"This is what Hitler did with the SS." Discussing Obama's call for a "civilian national security force" -- which was a reference to expanding the foreign service, AmeriCorps, and the Peace Corps -- Beck said on the August 27 edition of his Fox News program: "I'm finding this -- this is the hardest part to connect to. Because this is -- I mean, look, you know, David [Bellavia, former Army staff sergeant], what you just said is, you said, 'I'm not comparing' -- but you are. I mean, this is what Hitler did with the SS. He had his own people. He had the brownshirts and then the SS. This is what Saddam Hussein -- so -- but you are comparing that. And I -- I mean, I think America would have a really hard time getting their arms around that."

Beck: "I'm not comparing" Obama to Hitler, but asked his audience to "please read Mein Kampf" and learn from Germany's mistakes. On the August 12 broadcast of his radio show, discussing Obama's position on health care reform, Beck stated: "I am not comparing him to this, but please, read Mein Kampf for this reason. If you read it now, you see that Hitler told you what he was going to do. He told the Germans. It outsold the Bible. Germans read Mein Kampf, but what did they do? They didn't listen. 'Oh, he doesn't mean that.' 'Oh, he's just saying that to appeal to X, Y, Z.' All of the same lies we're telling to ourselves. 'No, that's crazy. Nobody would actually do that.' They buried their heads in the sand, and then it became too late. Please, America, take this man for what he says."

Beck cited Hitler to attack Obama, claim "[e]mpathy leads you to very bad decisions." During a discussion of Obama's statement that he would consider "empathy" in choosing a Supreme Court nominee, Beck drew a parallel to Hitler on his May 26 Fox News show: "Finally -- well, he wasn't the president. He was the chancellor, Hitler, decided that it was the only empathetic thing to do, is to put this child down and put him out of his suffering. It was the beginning of the T4, which led to genocide everywhere. It was the beginning of it. Empathy leads you to very bad decisions many times."

Beck told Newsmax: "I fear a Reichstag moment." On September 29, conservative news website Newsmax.com reported of its interview with Beck:

But his real worry is that many Washington elitists really don't like our form of government and want to see it abolished.

"I fear a Reichstag moment," he said, referring to the 1933 burning of Germany's parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed on communists and Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional liberties and consolidate power.

"God forbid, another 9/11. Something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced."

Beck links health care reform to Nazis, suggests reform would kill elderly and newborns. On his August 6 radio show, Beck suggested that health care reform would lead to the eugenics programs undertaken in Nazi Germany, saying that "three people in the White House are in love with eugenics" and that reform would kill the elderly and newborns.

Beck compared car dealership closures to Nazism, warning "at some point, they're going to come for you." While discussing the closures of auto dealerships under the bankruptcy deals of GM and Chrysler, Beck said that the "poem that keeps going through my mind" is "First they came for the Jews," adding, "Gang, at some point they're going to come for you."

Beck compared auto bailouts to the actions of German companies "in the early days of Adolf Hitler." While discussing the auto company bailouts on the April 1 edition of his Fox News program, after stating, "I am not saying that Barack Obama is a fascist," Beck said, "If I'm not mistaken, in the early days of Adolf Hitler, they were very happy to line up for help there as well. I mean, the companies were like, 'Hey, wait a minute. We can get, you know, we can get out of trouble here. They can help, et cetera, et cetera.' "

Beck compared TARP to "what happened to the lead-up with Hitler." On the April 21 edition of Fox Business' Money for Breakfast, Beck said of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, "This is not comparing these people to the people in Germany, but this is exactly what happened to the lead-up with Hitler. Hitler opened up the door and said, 'Hey, companies, I can help you.' They all ran through the door. And then in the end, they all saw, 'Uh-oh. I'm in bed with the devil.' They started to take their foot out, and Hitler said, 'Absolutely not. Sorry, gang. This is good for the country. We've got to do these things.' And it was too late."

Beck said "the Germans" during Hitler's rise "were an awful lot like we are now." On the June 10 edition of his Fox News program, Beck stated: "I think the Germans, however, were an awful lot like we are now. We're kind of living in a denial, like, 'No, no, that can't really be happening. No, that really -- I" -- you don't want to believe some things, but you have to. You have to actually think about them."

Beck airs photos of Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, asks, "Is this where we're headed?" On the April 2 edition of his Fox News program, while teasing the next day's show, Beck asked, "Is this where we're headed?" while airing photos of Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Vladimir Lenin.

ADL rebuked Beck for repeatedly smearing Gore as a Nazi

Beck repeatedly compared Gore to a Nazi propagandist. Beck has repeatedly likened Gore to a Nazi propagandist for speaking out about global warming, notably comparing Gore to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Beck also suggested that by giving a speech to students, Gore was trying to "indoctrinate the kids" like the "new Hitler Youth" and said of Gore's 2006 Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth: "It's like Hitler."

In 2007, ADL rebuked Beck's smears of Gore. On May 2, 2007, the ADL issued a press release condemning Beck's April 30, 2007, statement that "Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world." Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor, said of the remark, in part: "Glenn Beck's linkage of Hitler's plan to round up and exterminate Jews with Al Gore's efforts to raise awareness of global warming is outrageous, insensitive and deeply offensive."

Beck has also invoked the Holocaust to smear progressive organizations

Beck has also attacked progressive organizations as "brownshirts." Beck has repeatedly attacked the "brownshirts" at ACORN and "their henchmen" at the Service Employees International Union.

Beck has also invoked the Holocaust to criticize the media

Beck compared Fox News to Jews during Holocaust, other news organizations to silent bystanders. On the October 13 broadcast of his radio show, Beck compared Fox News to the Jews during the Holocaust, telling other media outlets, "When they're done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, 'first they came for the Jews, and I wasn't Jewish.' " He went on to say, "When they're done with Fox and talk radio, do you really think they're going to leave you alone if you want to ask a tough question? ... If you believe that, you should open up a history book, because you've missed the point of many brutal dictators."

Beck compares media portrayal of "tea partygoers" to Nazi portrayal of "complainers,"
On the August 11 edition of his Fox show, Beck compared the media's portrayal of the "tea partygoers" to a Nazi propaganda poster portraying "complainers" about Nazi policies, saying, "This is a poster of what you see every day now in the news media making the complainers, the tea partygoers, look somehow rotten."

Beck not alone in invoking Nazis to smear progressives

Numerous conservative media figures have invoked Nazis to smear progressives. Media Matters for America has previously documented the conservative media's invocation of Hitler and the Nazis to smear the Obama administration, Democratic officials, and progressive policies.

- C.S.

http://mediamatters.org/research/200910130061

Obama & Right-Wing Illiteracy

2009-10-14T11:07:00.001-07:00

From "Today in Attempting to Read Tiny Minds," SLOG website, posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Oct 13, 2009, re a message cut into the green of a golf course in Massachusetts by a right-wing "bigot," or "patriot," "[as] they're known on Fox News":

" ... I [swastika] Obama? Um... what does that mean? Is it supposed to be a riff on that "I [heart] NY" campaign and its tens of thousands of variations? My boyfriend has an "I [club] Hippies" shirt. But hearting/loving and clubbing are things a person does; one is a feeling, the other an action. You can't "Nazi" someone the way you can "heart" them or "club" them. Unless... are the vandals making an admission here? Are they telling us that they're trying to make Obama out as some sort of Nazi? That this Nazi meme is something they're doing to him, that they're running around sliming the president by making a patently false and politically inflammatory accusation? That would make it an admission of guilt or evil intent on their part. ... "

CONTINUED

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/10/13/today-in-attempting-to-read-tiny-minds

Post Editor Who Spoke Out Against Racist Cartoon is Fired

2009-10-08T16:40:00.000-07:00

By BET.com Staff
Oct. 8, 2009

The New York Post editor who spoke against a racist cartoon in her paper that likened President Obama to a dead chimpanzee has been fired from her job.

Officials at the Rupert Murdock-owned tabloid issued a statement to the Huffington Post saying that Sandra Guzman had been released because Tempo, the monthly in-paper insert she edits, had been nixed.

But some at the paper believe that the editor had been in the newspaper’s dog house ever since she blasted the decision to run a cartoon that sparked a national controversy five months ago. In February, renowned cartoonist Sean Delonas drew a satirical piece for the Post showing two White police officers standing over a dead chimp riddled with bullet holes; one of the officers had a smoking gun in his hand. “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says to the other.

Black leaders and others were outraged at the cartoon, particularly because Obama was widely viewed as the author of the stimulus bill.

At the time, Guzman wrote a note to fellow journalists saying, "I neither commissioned nor approved it. I saw it in the paper yesterday with the rest of the world. And, I have raised my objections to management."

Several of Guzman’s colleagues, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said her firing seemed like payback.

"I think ever since then, she has been on their sh*t list and they were trying to look for a reason to get rid of her," a Post employee told Huffington.

http://www.bet.com/News/National_NYPost_Editor_Who_Spoke_Out_Against_Racist_Cartoon_Fired.htm?wbc_purpose=Basic&WBCMODE=PresentationUnpublished&Referrer=%7B0471DDF0-D0D8-48A8-9E30-ADD40CBE0269%7D

Is Glenn Beck the Imperial Wizard of Modern Know Nothingism?

2009-10-06T10:34:00.000-07:00

Tim McCown
Philadelphia Progressive Examiner
September 13, 2009

One of the greatest radio demagogues of all time, before Glenn Beck, was Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930's. At one time he had a following of perhaps 30 million Right Wing sympathizers. He initially supported FDR until it began to dawn on him that FDR was not making "the right kind of changes." His magazine Social Justice was banned from magazine racks under the Espionage Act. At the end he was essentially a Nazi sympathizer. Coughlin accused Roosevelt of "moving this nation towards International Socialism."

Know Nothingism was a nativist American political movement. It began because of popular fears that the country was being over run by immigrants. hey feared American culture and traditions were being lost. They wanted immigration and naturalization of all immigrants stopped. These immigrants were the Irish.

The Know Nothings began in the 1840's and Father Coughlin believed Democrats were moving the nation into the Socialist camp in the 1930's. So what is new? At the speed the Left is making us Socialist none of us will be around to know.

Glenn Beck's Modus Operandi as Jonathan Schwartz notes on Tiny Revolution is to "Locate the most extreme statement by anyone on the other side, hype it as much as you possibly can to your side as embodying the true spirit and goals of your enemy." His use of lies, distortion and innuendo is effective unless you think through the point that he has virtually no facts. It is just a false play on raw emotion.

I look at Beck and others on the Right and I see a bunch of racist bigots hiding behind the language of the Constitution and freedom. Lets face it, Beck didn't get all wound up by the security forces in Afghanistan acting like they were at a Fraternity Toga party, yet the world was coming to an end because some members of ACORN acted absolutely stupidly and told someone how to run a brothel.

The difference here is that ACORN registers African Americans to vote. This is a Democratic Party constituency. So we seek to discredit ACORN in hopes of suppressing the Black vote since you can't have Poll taxes and other Jim Crow laws. ...

CONTINUED

http://www.examiner.com/x-3629-Philadelphia-Progressive-Examiner~y2009m9d13-Is-Glenn-Beck-the-Imperial-Wizard-of-modern-Know-Nothingism

Carlisle, PA: Director Carl Colby, Son of Late CIA Chief William Colby, to Speak at Dickinson College

2009-10-04T19:23:00.000-07:00

Carl Colby testified at the preliminary OJ Simpson trial (the latter was framed by the CIA and Mafia). The press covering the pre-trial failed to note that Carl is the son of late CIA Director William Colby, a veteran leader of the Phoenix Program. When Carl - who lived next to Nicole Simpson for a spell - testified against OJ Simpson, there was an embarrassing moment of silence interrupted by a few gasps in the countroom when he made a racist comment: Colby admitted that he once called the police on Simpson for no other reason than he's black and Colby spotted him in the neighborhood. Very suspicious ... Carl, of course, is a CIA propagandist, obviously:

: ... The documentary ... will utilize the controversial and professional life of William E. Colby as a prism through which to chart the evolution, from World War II to the present day, of the intersection of the CIA and America’s constitutional values. ... "

And it isn't a comedy:

Film director and producer Carl Colby will visit Dickinson College to discuss a documentary he is making about his father, the late Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William E. Colby. The presentation, which is free and open to the public, will be held Friday, Oct. 9, 3:30 p.m., in the Stern Center Great Room, West Louther Street, between West and College streets, in Carlisle.

Carl Colby is an Emmy Award-winning documentary film director and producer with more than 40 documentary films to his credit. William E. Colby served as director of the CIA from September 1973 to January 1976. He died in May 1996 at age 76 after he collapsed and drowned while canoeing in Maryland.

The documentary, the working title for which is “The Colby Project,” will utilize the controversial and professional life of William E. Colby as a prism through which to chart the evolution, from World War II to the present day, of the intersection of the CIA and America’s constitutional values.

This program is sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. For more information, visit www.clarkeforum.org or call 717-245-1875.

http://www.cumberlink.com/calendar/events/index.php?com=detail&eID=6363

BOOK REVIEW: 'A Bomb in Every Issue' by Peter Richardson

2009-10-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

Short, explosive, unforgotten: The story of Ramparts Magazine and its lingering influence long after it was gone.

Short, explosive, unforgotten: The story of Ramparts Magazine and its lingering influence long after it was gone.

By Erik Himmelsbach
latimes.com
October 2, 2009

Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. That's the stuff of myth, but Ramparts pulled it off.

Published for just 13 years, the San Francisco magazine not only blew the cover off the biggest stories of its era, it also helped set the ideological agenda for its core demographic, the New Left, and forced the mainstream press to follow its lead. At its peak in late 1967, circulation reached 250,000 -- proof, notes Peter Richardson in his lively history of the magazine "A Bomb in Every Issue," that "mainstream media techniques could be used to advance leftist politics."

Yet less than a decade later, Ramparts was history, taken down by the usual stuff that eats away at organizations: financial strife and power struggles. Richardson compares the trajectory to that of a highflying rock band: "It blew minds, launched solo careers, and spawned imitators," he writes.

Also like a rock band, Ramparts was very much a creation of its time, and when that time passed, its creative evolution couldn't keep up.

Ramparts launched quietly in 1962, started by an idealist named Edward Keating to challenge the traditional dogma of the Catholic Church. That same year, Keating recruited young Bay Area journalist Warren Hinckle, a hard-drinking, eye-patch-wearing wild man with a sense for the sensational. Part muckraker, part P.T. Barnum, Hinckle initially was a writer, then served as promotions manager before taking over as executive editor.

Hinckle understood the value of controversy. Ramparts got its first taste in 1965, after it ran an interview with German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose play, "The Deputy," accused Pope Pius XII of failing to challenge the Nazis during the Holocaust. Readers were outraged and the magazine had the buzz it wanted. By mid-1965, Ramparts had ditched Catholicism for good.

Hinckle brought in fellow travelers such as art director Dugald Stermer, who gave Ramparts its stylized look. Robert Scheer became its editorial soul. By the time Scheer was named managing editor in October 1966, Richardson writes, "the magazine had found its voice, identified its causes and joined the battle."

The battle was also taking place internally, Richardson notes, as Hinckle wrested control of the operation from Keating. Opinion soon gave way to investigative reporting. A 1966 exposé, about the CIA using the Michigan State University campus to train the Saigon police, put the staff on the agency's radar.

Two years later, Scheer and Stanley Sheinbaum broke the bombshell that the agency was secretly funding civilian organizations such as the National Students Assn. It was a major moment for the New Left.

When Ramparts broke a story, Hinckle made sure everyone knew about it; he took full-page ads in the New York Times to trumpet the scoops. There was much to trumpet: The magazine published Eldridge Cleaver's prison diaries, championed his release from prison and hired him as an editor when he was freed.

Ramparts also began covering a small militant group across the Bay called the Black Panthers, formed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966. Suddenly, the militants became international revolutionaries. "Ramparts made celebrities of the Black Panthers and their star power increased the magazine's cache," Richardson writes.

The hits just kept on coming. Ramparts was the first magazine to publish New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, and it got the U.S. rights to the diaries of Che Guevara, since, as Richardson points out, it was the one American outlet Fidel Castro trusted with these writings.

But Richardson is also quick to dispel the mythology surrounding Ramparts: In spite of chronic financial issues, Hinckle was an egregious spendthrift whose devil-may-care attitude often put the magazine in peril. And in spite of its radical cred, Ramparts attitude toward women and sexuality left a lot to be desired. A sample headline tease from 1968 read: "Breaking the Faggot Barrier in Men's Clothes."

Richardson traces Ramparts' downward spiral to its coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Sparing no expense, Hinckle sent 10 staffers to cover the tumultuous events. Though the daily Ramparts Wall Poster was a valuable resource, it failed to tell the entire story -- that the staff was complicit with organizers such as Tom Hayden and knew in advance of Hayden's plan to confront Chicago police.

"We didn't dare touch the one big story that was ours exclusively: how a relatively small group of American radicals had made common cause with the enemy and was leading the left toward self destruction and nihilism," Sol Stern recalls.

The left imploded after Chicago. By early 1969, Ramparts declared bankruptcy. Scheer replaced Hinckle in the top spot but lacked the charismatic firepower to lead the staff through lean times. When he offered Susan Sontag $1,500 -- the entire monthly editorial budget -- for a piece on Sweden, the staff was outraged. He was ousted in a coup led by David Horowitz, who sought to reshape Ramparts as a collective.

But even as Ramparts faded, Richardson notes, its influence was seen in better-funded operations such as Rolling Stone, "60 Minutes" and even the New York Times, which published the Pentagon Papers in 1971 -- an instance of Ramparts being beaten at its own game.

Meanwhile the magazine chugged along, serving as a political forum for radical celebrities like Jane Fonda and John Lennon, until it died in 1975. "Toward the end of its life, it was competing not only with established outlets but with upstarts created or at least partly in its own image," Richardon writes.

Yet we're still talking -- and writing -- about Ramparts today because it did change America. In addition to birthing a generation of thoughtful writers like Scheer, Stern and Seymour Hersh, its existence forced the press to keep the power structure honest and for all of us to question authority -- which is, no matter what anyone tells you, the benchmark of a healthy democracy.

Himmelsbach is a Los Angeles writer and producer.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-book2-2009oct02,0,3811710,print.story

Max Boot: Apologist for War Crimes

2009-10-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

Boot's commentary amounts to vulgar apologetics for egregious war crimes.
By Max Kantar
www.palestinechronicle.com

The recent publication of the UNHRC's report on Israel's December-January assault on the Gaza Strip, also known as the Goldstone Report, has elicited some rather hysterical reactions from Israel's leading apologists. Perhaps among the most desperate of the attempts to deflect legitimate criticism of Israeli war crimes is an article entitled, "The Goldstone Report," [1] written by Max Boot. Boot is an award winning author, distinguished journalist, and served as an editor for the Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal during the 1990s. He is currently a senior fellow for National Security Studies at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations.

In his article, "The Goldstone Report," published under his daily blog at Commentarymagazine.com, Boot repeatedly struggles to divert attention from the overwhelming amount of documentary evidence compiled in the UNHRC report (and in other relevant independent findings as well) which implicates the Israeli government in a large number of war crimes committed throughout the duration of "Operation Cast Lead."

Not only is Boot's commentary extremely superficial and desperate as an analysis of the Goldstone Report, but it is indeed contemptuous in regard to the intellectual and moral capacity of his readers. It would seem that responding to or refuting such intellectual defecation might suggest that reasonable arguments have been put forth by Boot, giving his nonsense some sort of legitimacy. Nevertheless, this author found it to be even more maddening to allow such vulgarities and perversions to go unchecked. What follows is a brief exposure, step by step, of the bankruptcy of Mr. Boot's analysis.

Israeli Repression of Dissent

While he criticizes the mentioning of Israeli repression of dissent during "Operation Cast Lead," Boot makes no attempt to refute the fact reported in the Goldstone Report that 715 people, mostly Israeli-Arab citizens (as well as some non-citizen, Palestinian "residents" of occupied East Jerusalem) were arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli government for exercising their rights to free speech. Instead he dismisses the protestors as "unruly" (why were they unruly?) and points his finger at the lack of free speech in neighboring Arab states. It is true that the Arab states are much less open and permissive than is the case in Israeli proper (excluding the occupied territories where Israel's human rights record is by far the worst in the region) but it is unclear to the reader why this has anything to do with Israeli state repression of dissent. At any rate, Israel's imprisonment of 715 dissenters during its attack on Gaza was hardly a focal point in the Goldstone Report. Boot simply is attempting to take attention away from the extensive documentation of Israeli war crimes by making ideological assertions about "Israeli democracy," appealing to brainless readers who are searching not for truth, but for empty rationalizations aimed at preserving a benevolent image of The Holy State.

Boot then goes on to make apologetics for the fact that Israel is currently holding, according to the Goldstone Report, 8,100 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel, including nearly 400 children. Boot claims that unlike Egypt and Saudi Arabia, "all" of Israel's Palestinian "prisoners are behind bars because they are suspected of involvement in terrorism." Where is Boot's evidence for this claim? Of course, it's ridiculous and nothing more than a purely ideological statement. There are literally thousands of pages of human rights reports--many from Israeli groups--documenting the unlawful detention of nonviolent Palestinian activists and other civilians who took no part in any hostilities. Israel also routinely kidnaps, imprisons, and tortures Palestinian youth who are often arrested for throwing pebbles at heavily armed occupying forces.

Furthermore, it is in violation of international law to imprison children in adult prisons. It is against international law to torture prisoners. It is also illegal under international law (the Fourth Geneva Convention) to transport prisoners to prisons or detention centers outside of the occupied territory in which the arrest takes place. Boot also forgets to mention that under international law, people living under foreign military occupation have the right to armed resistance against the occupiers and such resistance, if targeted at the occupying forces, is not "terrorism."

Readers might also recall as to how the South African Apartheid regime also called all of its Black prisoners "terrorists" or "suspected terrorists." Nelson Mandela was one of them. Historically, all tyrannical regimes make such claims to justify their repression of dissent and legitimate resistance. Why is Israel any different? Why would rational people expect it to act differently? Why are the Palestinian grievances not creditable or legitimate?

At any rate, B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and Amnesty International, among other countless other human rights groups, have extensively and exhaustively documented Israel's illegal imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians who have nothing to do with carrying out terrorism or conspiring to carry out terrorism against Israel. The fact that Boot spends so much time musing on the issue of prisoners is simply a reflection of his desperation; the report was not even about the issue of prisoners.

Targeting Civilians

Boot dismisses the Goldstone Reports' criticizing of Israeli attacks against Hamas civil society infrastructure, such as the legislative council building, on the grounds that the allied forces attacked the Reichstag during the Second World War. Why go back to WWII for a comparison? What if the Palestinians bombed the Israeli Knesset? What would Boot think of that? Would he proclaim it to be legitimate on the grounds that the allies bombed the Reichstag? What if Iraqis bombed the halls of Congress in Washington DC? Would that have been legitimate on the same grounds? The truth is, that even so, the Palestinians would've had a much stronger case for doing so: they are being militarily occupied and have been for over forty years. Millions of Palestinians are also being forcibly kept from returning to their homes.

Of course, no party has a right to attack civilian objects or target civilians. Boot and people like him dismiss international law only when politically or ideologically serviceable. It takes real discipline not to recognize such hypocrisy.

But why should one limit their criticism of the Goldstone Report for its denunciation of the Israeli targeting of Hamas' legislative buildings? What about the UN schools Israel attacked, bombed, and dropped white phosphorous on? What about the children who were literally incinerated by white phosphorous dropped from the skies by the IAF? What about the scores of mosques it attacked? What about the ambulances? What about the health clinics? What about the civilian homes? What about the women and children holding a white flag whom IDF soldiers gunned down? What about the precise drone strikes on Palestinian civilians? What about the bombings of schoolchildren during the middle of the day as classes were letting out and children were walking in the streets? All of these instances were documented in the report. Were these legitimate by Boots' standards? Should international law be dismissed in each of these cases, too?

Targeting Civilian Police Officers

Boot also ridicules the Goldstone Reports' conclusion that Israeli attacks and killings of Palestinian civilian police officers were unlawful, but he gives no reason as to why such attacks should be considered legitimate. In fact, those police officers were the ones responsible for maintaining law and order in Gaza and actually arrested several rouge terrorists firing rockets into Israel during the ceasefire period, which Hamas scrupulously observed, as was documented by an official Israeli report on the ceasefire period that preceded Israel's attack on Gaza. [2]

Anyhow, we do not need to debate the legitimacy of Israel's targeted killings of civilian police officers in Gaza because there is a unanimous consensus among experts in international law and human rights groups. Readers of The Palestine Chronicle informed of this [3] back in January:

In the opening days of Israel's aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip, its main targets were police stations and officers. For civilian police officers to be considered legitimate military targets, they must be directly engaged in hostilities, in this case, towards Israel. No evidence has been presented by Israel, or anyone else, that even reasonably suggests that the police officers in Gaza fall into this category. Therefore, the police officers that were targeted and murdered by Israel were clearly civilians: not lawful military targets.

Here are a few authoritative sources cited at the time [4] which articulate the illegality of such strikes:

"The First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions establishes two conditions that must be met for an object to be considered a legitimate military target: it must effectively contribute to military action and its total destruction or partial neutralization offers a clear military advantage." - B'Tselem, Dec. 31, 2008

"Police were not combatants and could not represent legitimate targets unless actively engaged in hostilities...it was Israel's burden of proof to show [that] the police they targeted were, indeed, Hamas militants." - Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch (Middle East & North Africa Division), January 7, 2009

"Police members who do not take part in any hostilities are not considered legitimate military targets under international humanitarian law and must not be deliberately targeted." - Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, December 28, 2008

"Police stations, police officers and law enforcement officials are classified under the international law as civilians, and targeting them as such while they were not engaged in military action constitutes a violation of the international law." - Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, December 27, 2008.

"[The Israeli Air Force] bombed the main police building in Gaza and killed, according to reports, forty-two Palestinians who were in a training course and were standing in formation at the time of the bombing. Participants in the course study first-aid, handling of public disturbances, human rights, public-safety exercises, and so forth." - B'Tselem, December 31, 2008

It Was a Massacre, Not a War

We might also take note that the Goldstone Report is entirely consistent with all of the other reports regarding Israel's attack on Gaza. The world's leading human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch - groups that are quite independent of constraints from either side--issued reports well before the UN report was published and had eerily similar findings. A whole slew of local and regional rights groups, including many Israeli groups, also reached the same conclusions. Are we honestly supposed to believe that along with the UN, every human rights group in the world is simply anti-Semitic, bent on defaming Israel for its own sake?

It is also important for serious people to be clear about what happened in Gaza. It was not a "war" or "an armed conflict." There were virtually no battles or military showdowns between Hamas militants and the IDF. All one has to do is take a look at what Israeli soldiers are coming out and saying now in, Breaking the Silence. [5] In Breaking the Silence, Israeli soldiers talk about how they encountered virtually no armed resistance during the ground invasion of Gaza during "Operation Cast Lead."

Commanders warned soldiers about "suicide bombers," "snipers," and "women carrying explosives" but according to the testimonies of soldiers, "none of [these reports] ever materialized" and soldiers "never ran into any" such people. In fact, some Israeli soldiers were so intent on fighting and so disappointed of the lack thereof that, according to one testimony, "One guy said he just couldn't finish this operation without killing someone. So he killed someone...."

Soldiers testified to "all [the] destruction, all [the] fire at innocents...the hatred and the joy of killing...There's nothing to hold you back. They're just Arabs." Many soldiers were emphatic about the "tremendous" and "insane" amount of "fire power" employed by the IDF and how there were "no innocents," when it came to shooting people, that they were given permission to open fire "even at most people who definitely aren't terrorists."

Another testimony noted that entire neighborhoods were totally flattened without regard for civilian life and property. "What is a suspect spot? It means you decided it was suspect and could take out all your rage at it." Soldiers were ordered by their superiors to specifically "target mosques" and to shoot at everyone, "even an old woman--take her out."

Israeli warplanes flew more than 3,000 flights over Gaza in the course of twenty-two days and not one aircraft was downed, damaged, or even scratched. Soldiers noted that the destruction in Gaza "was on a totally different scale" than anything "previously known," that "the ground was....constantly shaking" from all of the incessant Israeli fire and bombing.

Every independent report that has surfaced since "Operation Cast Lead" illustrates how virtually every single piece of infrastructure and every population center that the IDF targeted was a civilian object or civilian center. Out of all of the exhaustive research, study, fieldwork, interviews, and documentation, no independent report has found any of the Israeli propaganda lines to be true. None of the ambulances or hospitals were hiding Hamas fighters; none of the schools were being used to launch attacks on Israel; none of the mosques were hiding weapons; no evidence was ever found that suggested that Hamas fighters used civilians as human shields, which was the main Israeli claim to justify its indiscriminate killings, a justification which even if it was true--which it isn't--wouldn't rise up to the standards of the international laws of war. In fact, each study has revealed that the exact opposite was true, that it was Israeli soldiers who systematically used Palestinian civilians as human shields, occupying their homes and shooting people from the cover of civilians and civilian homes. Soldiers have since testified as to the extensive and quite diverse use of Palestinian civilians as human shields in Breaking the Silence reports.

Finally, let's look at the results of what happened. According to rigorous studies--studies which documented by name and legal status, each person who was killed--carried out by The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights [6] as well as by the Israeli group, B'Tselem, [7] roughly 1,400 Palestinians were killed in Israel's twenty-two day assault, overwhelmingly civilians. In fact, if we accept basic principles of international law and count the civilian police officers in Gaza as civilians, then the percentage of civilian deaths among Palestinians in Gaza reaches upwards of 85%, literally. On the Israeli side, thirteen people were killed, just three of whom were civilians, and at least three others of the thirteen were killed by friendly fire in Gaza. So we have roughly 1,000 Palestinian civilians killed versus three Israeli civilians killed. Including all deaths, the ratio is more than 100-1. No matter how you break it down, the only way one could characterize what happened is by calling it a massacre, plain and simple.

And as for those Palestinian fighters or "militants" whom everybody seems to agree are worthy of receiving an automatic death sentence from the Israeli military machine, we might do well to recall the timely words of British Parliamentarian, Gerald Kaufman (whose extended family was largely exterminated by the Nazis) who ridiculed Israeli self-congratulation over its killing of supposed Palestinian militants by saying that "I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants."

The Comparison with WWII

Boot is quite right when he notes that by the standards of the international laws of war, that the allied powers during WWII certainly did commit extensive war crimes when they deliberately targeted civilians and civilian objects while fire-bombing cities in Germany and Japan. There is no doubt about that. The fact that he is unable to comprehend this is further evidence of how his ideological commitments take precedence over international law and the principle of universality.

But what is most disturbing here is that Boot derides the fact that in the Goldstone Report, Israel's alleged crimes were equated with alleged Palestinian crimes, that the report assessed the facts using international law as a standard for both parties. He then makes an implicit comparison between the Nazis and the Palestinians, noting that it is unfair to equate Hitler's crimes with the allies' crimes because Hitler's were much worse, implying that it is wrong to equate Hamas's killing of three civilians and a handful of invading soldiers with Israel's slaughter of 1,400 Palestinians, including over 300 innocent children on the basis that Hamas's crimes are much worse. In light of the most bare and uncontroversial facts about the Gaza massacre, it is beyond comprehension how Boot could compare the feeble and virtually inconsequential actions of the leadership of a besieged and occupied people with the Nazis and Adolph Hitler who systematically murdered six million defenseless Jews. This is even more perplexing when considering it in the context of an Israeli massacre of over 1,000 civilians in a twenty-two day period, which was far more Nazi-like than anything the Palestinians could ever contemplate.

Furthermore, where is the context of these events in Boot's commentary? The Palestinians are living under a horrifically brutal foreign military occupation and have been for over forty years. For years, Gaza has been subjected to a draconian economic blockade--literally, an "act of war" under international law--denounced as "collective punishment"--a major war crime—by every relevant commentator in the international legal community. Boot ridicules the UN's labeling of Gaza as "occupied territory" in light of Israel's 2005 removal of its troops and settlers from the Strip. Boot is so far out of the mainstream that he hasn't read the tirelessly documented and examined UN reports, legal analyses, and rights groups' reports which all categorically label Gaza as "occupied territory" despite the so-called "disengagement." [8] The best example of such a study is the report and analysis, "Disengaged Occupiers: The Legal Status of Gaza," authored by the Israeli group, Gisha: Legal Center For Freedom of Movement. [9]

At any rate, it's irrelevant because the West Bank and Gaza Strip constitute one territorial entity according to the Oslo "peace process" agreements as well as the International Court of Justice's 2004 ruling. There is no controversy on this issue whatsoever as far as the relevant bodies of law and monitoring are concerned.

Right of Return

Finally, Boot also castigates the report for making note of Israel's continued barring of refugees to return to Israel and/or the occupied territories. Boot is again way out of the mainstream on this one too. The 13 th article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly states "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." UNSC Resolution 194 (passed with US support) specifically makes it the legal right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. Every human rights group is unanimously in agreement on this issue. There is absolutely no controversy regarding the legal right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

Even though it is well known that a full Palestinian return may be politically impossible, this does not give anyone a right to dismiss this score human right of Palestinians as irrelevant or illegitimate as an issue to be negotiated upon with Israel. When Boot dismisses the Palestinian right of return as something that would "destroy Israel demographically," it is nothing more than a wildly racist statement.

Conclusion

Boot's commentary on the massacre in Gaza amounts to some of the most vulgar apologetics for egregious war crimes that one could imagine. Even the smallest amount of common sense and the most cursory glance at the documentary record and international law reveals this to be true.

Instead of making obscure rationalizations for murdering innocent people, Boot and other apologists for American and Israeli crimes should denounce all war crimes, demand justice for the victims, and applaud the fact that global civil society has erected a body of international law designed to minimize the suffering of civilians during armed conflicts and to establish basic norms and laws regarding fundamental human rights.

- Max Kantar is a freelance writer. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: maxkantar@gmail.com

Notes:

[1] Max Boot, "The Goldstone Report," Commentary Magazine, September 16, 2009.

[2] Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center, "The Six Months of the Lull Arrangement," December 2008, 2, 6, 7.

[3] Max Kantar, "The Massacre in Gaza: Check the Facts," The Palestine Chronicle, January 14, 2009.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Breaking the Silence: Soldiers' Testimonies from Operation Cast Lead, Gaza 2009. All of the following quotes in this paper from Israeli soldiers were found in this compilation of testimonies.

[6] "Palestinians: Final Gaza Toll shows 960 civilians killed," Ynet, March 12, 2009.
[7] B'Tselem, "B'Tselem's Investigation of fatalities in Operation Cast Lead."

[8] Jake Hess, "Palestine since disengagement," Znet, August 24, 2007. This article includes several citations of rights groups and UN officials categorizing the Gaza Strip officially as "occupied territory" despite Israel's "disengagement."[9] Gisha, "Disengaged Occupiers: The Legal Status of Gaza," January 2007, 64, 65, 71.

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15447

Melissa Scott, Porn Star Turned Televangelist

2009-10-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

US Evengelist Melissa Scott Was Porn Star Barbie Bridges

MORE porn and religion now as US televangelist Melissa Scott confesses to Marie Claire that she once worked in the porn biz, notably as Barbie Bridges.

Says her website: PASTOR MELISSA SCOTT is the Pastor and Teacher of the University Cathedral in Downtown Los Angeles.

Employing a research-laden approach to the analysis of God’s Word in the Old and New Testaments, Pastor Melissa Scott unfolds and presents her teaching in context with history and the sciences.

A natural linguist with command of twenty languages, she digs deeply into her vast collection of ancient manuscripts to find and communicate the purest understanding of what the original inspired writers of the Bible had to say.

And what of the porn? And the church?

Four years ago, she lost her husband, Dr. Gene “Doc” Scott, the wildly popular “shock jock of televangelism” — nearly 40 years her senior — to complications from prostate cancer. In his heyday as pastor, Doc Scott reportedly collected $1 million a month in donations and amassed an empire that included two horse ranches, a 35,000-square-foot mansion in Pasadena, a private plane, and a collection of luxury cars. ...

CONTINUED: http://www.anorak.co.uk/media/2009/05/us-evengelist-melissa-scott-was-porn-star-barbie-bridges/

(Thanks to VictorSRMoore for the lead.)

UK: Labour Party Declares War on Rupert Murdoch

2009-09-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

Brown fumes at Murdoch's sabotage of his big moment
Labour declares war on The Sun as it ditches support for party after 12 years
By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
Independent
1 October 2009

Gordon Brown struggled to maintain his political fightback yesterday as his allies accused the media magnate Rupert Murdoch of "sabotaging" the Labour conference.

Mr Brown's hopes that his conference speech on Tuesday would provide a springboard for a recovery were dashed a few hours later when The Sun newspaper announced it was withdrawing its support for Labour after 12 years and would endorse the Conservative Party at next year's general election.

Senior Labour figures circled the wagons to protect Mr Brown and declared war on the newspaper. But they were deeply frustrated that the controversy denied the Prime Minister the momentum he hoped for. Among Labour MPs, there was renewed speculation of a third attempt to oust Mr Brown when parliament returns from its summer break on 12 October.

Mr Brown's anger boiled over in a television interview with Sky News, also part of the Murdoch empire. After Adam Boulton, its political editor, suggested that Mr Brown's keynote speech had revealed no political philosophy, the Prime Minister told him: "You are sounding a bit like a political propagandist yourself."

He complained that Mr Boulton seemed to "obsess" about the Labour leadership issue, saying: "You have not given me the chance to talk about the economy." Insisting that he would not stand down before the election, he said: "I have got a job to do and that's the job I am going to do."

As the interview ended, a clearly livid Mr Brown started to storm off while the cameras were still rolling but forgot that he still had a microphone clipped on his jacket and had to sit down.

Labour's strategy to focus on policy differences with the Tories was blown off course by The Sun's deliberate and successful attempt to set the conference agenda.

Mr Brown said: "Obviously, you want newspapers to be for you. We would have liked everybody to be on our side, but the people decide [the election]. I've got an old-fashioned view that you look to newspapers for news not opinions."

Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of the Unite union, won the biggest cheer of the day when he ripped up a copy of yesterday's edition of The Sun at the podium. He told delegates: "We don't need an Australian-American coming to our country with a paper that has never supported any progressive policies from our party, including the minimum wage, telling us how politics should be run in this country."

Harriet Harman, Labour's deputy leader, told the conference: "I am speaking to you this morning about something The Sun knows absolutely nothing about: equality. The nearest their political analysis gets to women's rights is Page 3's News in Briefs. We are all angry about The Sun this morning but I say to you: don't get bitter, get better."

Pro-Labour adverts attacking the newspaper appeared on Google. Labour denied responsibility and the ads were later taken down.

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, said: "I don't think the readers want The Sun to set on New Labour. The last thing that Sun readers want is to see their newspaper turned into a Tory fanzine."

Labour advisers insist the newspaper's long-expected conversion to the Tories would have less impact than its decision to come out for Labour in the run-up to the 1997 election. One strategist said: "Forty per cent of people don't read newspapers now, after the growth of the internet and 24-hour news channels."

A jubilant Mr Cameron welcomed the paper's support, but insisted he would not become complacent. "I think they have seen the Government is exhausted and out of ideas and they see a regenerated, refreshed Conservative Party ready to serve," he said.

Mr Brown faced further accusations of dithering over whether he would bow to Sky's campaign for a series of televised election debates with Mr Cameron and the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg. In a BBC interview, the Prime Minister admitted he had made up his mind but refused to say what his decision was. One Cabinet minister said: "I wish he would just get on with it and say yes."

Lord Mandelson said Labour's attitude to debates was "positive" and that it would now begin to consider how they might be organised.

Sky News had some better news for Mr Brown last night. A YouGov poll for the TV channel suggested that Labour has halved the Tories' lead during this week's conference. It shows the Tories on 37 per cent, Labour on 30 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 21 per cent and other parties on 12 per cent.

The survey found 47 per cent of people believe Mr Brown should be replaced while 38 per cent think he should stay on. Some 64 per cent believe he is doing badly while 32 per cent are happy with his performance.

* Gordon Brown lost his cool in a live television interview yesterday as his leadership was called into question.

The Prime Minister accused Sky News's political editor, Adam Boulton, of appearing to "obsess" about his personality, and complained that he was not being allowed to discuss the economy. As Boulton repeatedly asked whether he would join a televised debate with David Cameron, Mr Brown protested: "You are sounding a bit like a propagandist."

The moment the interview ended, he tried to storm off without realising he was still attached to a microphone.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brown-fumes-at-murdochs-sabotage-of-his-big-moment-1795732.html

How Fox News Turned Mark Sanford into a Democrat

2009-09-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

" ... Murdoch's Fox News enjoys one of the highest network ratings of all. Millions of Americans eagerly tune in to Fox to hear the latest duplicitous lies, slanders and deceptions. When Fox reported on the strange and adulterous behavior of the Governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, Fox put a “D” after his name so viewers would think he's a Democrat. These kinds of distortions are standard for Fox. ... " - "Misguided Revolution: Anti-Government Extremists Mistake Their Enemy," by Jon Faulkner

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Misguided-Revolution-Anti-by-Jon-Faulkner-090921-62.html

Cal Thomas, a Purveyor of Hate in Religious Disguise

2009-09-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

Jay Bookman
blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog
September 29, 2009

Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, writing in the Washington Times, today offers an ugly, despicable attack on all Muslim Americans, whom he accuses of “the undermining of this nation from within … through deception, putting on a peaceful face while subtly plotting ways to bring America down.”

As his sole piece of evidence, Thomas cites statements at a public prayer rally of Muslim Americans in Washington, at which a Brooklyn imam lauded American freedom, telling the crowd that “What we’ve done today, you couldn’t do in any Muslim country. If you prayed on the palace lawn there, they’d lock you up.”

But on Facebook, Thomas points out, that same imam has written that “Democracy is not revelation, and democracy does not equal freedom, for in democracy you have apartheid, you have slavery, you have homosexuality, you have lesbianism, you have gambling, you have all of the vices that are against the spirit of truth; so no we don’t want to democratize Islam, we want to Islamize democracy.”

To Thomas, an evangelical Christian, this statement constitutes proof that the imam in particular and Muslim Americans in general are trying to destroy America from the inside, using terrorism as a weapon. Yet the truth is that on an almost daily basis, socially conservative Christian leaders employ almost identical rhetoric as the socially conservative imam.

They too decry the excesses of American freedom that lead to tolerance of gays and other perceived vices — the difference is that in their case, they seek to “Christianize” rather than “Islamize” democracy.

Thomas of course sees nothing dangerous or wrong with that at all. (For the record, neither do I. I disagree with them, but they have every right to say those things and in no way endanger our country by doing so. The same is true of the imam.)

“Are we being infiltrated and surrounded by people who want us dead and our country destroyed?” Thomas asks in his column, raising a question that he lacks the guts to answer. “Try a little experiment: Google “Islam near” and then type in the name of any city or town. When I tried the small town of Bryn Mawr, Pa., outside Philadelphia, 10 Islamic-related sites came up. In larger cities, there are as many, or more. Deception is part of the terrorists’ battle strategy.”

So the presence of Islamic related sites is evidence of a terror conspiracy? What Thomas seeks is the marginalization and rejection of Muslim Americans, the very process that in European countries has made their Muslim communities more prone to radicalization. He seeks to create the very thing he claims to despise.

It’s useful to recall that after the fall of communism, this very same Thomas called for a “cultural war crimes tribunal” in which many of his fellow Americans would be forced to answer for their opinions. At those trials, he wrote, “people from academia, the media, government and the clergy who were wrong in their assessment of communism would be forced to confront their mistakes.”

Sounds just like democracy, doesn’t it?

In 2003, this stalwart defender of democracy again called for a domestic war crimes tribunal, this time to bring to account “scores of false media prophets who predicted disaster should the U.S. military confront and seek to oust the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein.” This was in those short heady “Mission Accomplished” days right after the invasion of Iraq, before most Americans truly understood that we were not being greeted with roses and chocolate.

“The purpose of a cultural war crimes tribunal would be to remind the public of journalism’s many mistakes, as well as the errors of certain politicians and retired generals, and allow it to properly judge their words the next time they feel the urge to prophesy…,” Thomas wrote. “All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent.”

The mindset of people such as Cal Thomas is far more undemocratic and dangerous than that of most of the Muslim Americans whom he seeks to smear.

http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2009/09/29/cal-thomas-a-purveyor-of-hate-in-religious-disguise/?cxntfid=blogs_jay_bookman_blog

Pacifica's CIA Problem: Larry Bensky's Hang-Ups

2009-09-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

A Veteran KPFA Programmers Censorious On-Air Tactics & Guests Who Fail the Smell Test

On his November 9, 2003 broadcast of "Sunday Salon," Pacifica's Larry Bensky (a veteran of the CIA's Paris Review literary "culture wars" propaganda front) heaped scorn on a caller who asked, innocently enough, if Paperclip Nazis had any influence on the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s. KPFA's Bensky ridiculed the caller, apparently unaware that McCarthy travelled with old guard Nazis and fascists in the intelligence community, and the hysteria was their group effort.

The caller really irked Bensky. He fell into a fit of rage - a "snit" - an invaluble, tried-and-true prop in the mass opinion formation business.

The caller attempted to explain himself, stammered, but Bensky hung up, insisting hotly, "nothing is really certain," after all - the mention of Nazis suddenly led him to question the sum of human knowledge - spitting condescensions at the poor caller’s suggestion that the German and East European imports, secretly sponsored by the CIA and the military’s Operations Paperclip, Sunrise, etc., might have influenced the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s.

He went on to criticize nameless individuals who have discussed Nazis over Pacifica airwaves (Alex Constantine, for instance - I'm guilty), blamed these lunar mollusks for inventing capricious and arbitrary conspiracy theories that interfered with his own sober, responsible, balanced news reporting. ...

Bensky was unaware that Joseph McCarthy, the eye of the sturm und drang, was a hands-on Nazi collaborator, having freed Germans interred by the Allies at the end of the war. The late Mae Brussell: "Senator Joe McCarthy's two strongest supporters [in his Senate campaign] were Frank Seusenbrenner and Walter Harnisfeger. Both admired Adolf Hitler and made continuous trips to Germany…. Before he went after the Commies in the State Department, he had to release a few of Hitler's elite nazis lingering in the Dachau prison camp…. In 1949, during congressional hearings on the Malmedy Massacre … McCarthy invited himself to take over the entire testimony. He wasn't satisfied until the prison doors flew open. The most detestable and ugly battle of World War II, an assault upon Americans and civilians in Belgium, was ignored. Hitler's precious Generals Fritz Kraemer and Sepp Dietrick, along with Hermann Priess and many others, were free. With that business finished, McCarthy took on Robert Morris as chief counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Morris' earlier training in Navy Intelligence in charge of USSR counter-intelligence and psychological warfare could be utilized well by Senator Joe. Particularly the psychological warfare part. After McCarthy died, Morris moved to Dallas, Texas. He was a judge, and became president of Dallas University…."

One Nazi in particular, Nikolai Poppe, made a massive contribution to the right-wing furor over communism in the States. Poppe was a spy attached to Himmler's SS, assigned to the confiscation of Jewish property, director of the Wansee Institute (a think-tank that conducted studies on the USSR for the SS). In the postwar calm, Poppe went on to become a scholar at the University of Seattle, a well-known author on Tibetan Buddhism, a CIA expert on Mongolia.

Nazi Poppe participated in the most important case in McCarthy's alcohol-soaked career as an anti-communist. "No influence?" Bensky's scornful refutation is met directly by Christopher Simpson in Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988): "An incident during Poppe's career in the 1950s illustrates the DELICATE INFLUENCE that certain Nazi collaborators have had on domestic politics in the United States. Early in the McCarthy era, Professor Owen Lattimore, the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University and a longtime advisor on Asian affairs to the State Department, was brought before a congressional investigation committee to face accusations of espionage and running a "communist cell" in the Institute for Pacific Relations. McCarthy, whose allegations were already drawing criticism from Democrats and even a few Republicans, had pledged that HIS ENTIRE ANTI-COMMUNIST CRUSADE WOULD "STAND OR FALL" on the supposed proof he had in the Lattimore case....

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/04/pacifica-voice-of-controlled-left-larry.html
***
During an on-air KPFA listener conference in 1999, Joseph, a black activist, complained to Mary Berry, then Pacifica board chairperson, about Larry Bensky's tactless approach to censorship -- insulting and hanging up on callers, talking over their comments, muttering under his breath and every other conceivable means of giving them the brush-off. Bensky had been fired by the station, but Ms. Berry was considering him for re-hiring. Joseph, however, was adamant in his criticism of the talk-show host and contested Bensky's reinstatement.

http://www.radio4all.org/fp/mfb-callin.htm
***
KPFA On-Air Appearance of Mary Frances Berry and Lynn Chadwick
5/5/99

Joseph: ...You know, for all the piety that Larry Bensky has about censorship, we feel that when it comes to authentic, legitimate, responsible intellectual criticism or comment or question regarding issues -- especially those issues that affect the black community -- that Larry Bensky has shown an historical pattern, especially on Living Room, of dismissing, summarily preempting, censoring, cutting off, diverting, subverting ethnic points of view he doesn't like no matter how short the question or comment, no matter how civil. And he either shields certain guests from legitimate authentic black criticism or accountability -- or when the guest is even resonant to a certain question from a black perspective, especially a black guest, like Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Bensky will interpose and preempt the guest's answer with his own and abruptly move to the next question.

MFB: Right. I understand.

Joseph: You've been told about this. I said an older black woman called -- I certainly don't know her at all -- when you were on with Nicole Sawaya. And, you know, you unintentionally, I am sure -- you unintentionally sort of plied her off with platitudes about, you know, keep on listening...Many of us Bay Area blacks have to live with these people like Larry Bensky or Michael Krasney, you know, at KQED....And apparently an intelligent, articulate white woman who called and complained about the same sort of thing -- not only with regard to minorities and women -- but also with regard to those views who are more progressive than Larry Bensky's, who he censors or dismisses.
------------------
[Listeners notice]
http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/09/1645150_comment.php
IndyMedia News Section
by Fred Sunday, Sep. 14, 2003 at 12:00 PM

... The other issue not addresed here is the level of denial in the US about what it is that we're doing. It's a whole mentality. The ways to maintain their denial include all sorts of bizarre arguments ... like Larry Bensky's absurd argument this morning to keep people quiet about the voting machine scandal - "Now if you have a candidate polling with a 5 point lead going into the election and he loses with a 3 point loss, he's going to raise high hell . . . . right?" Luckily his guest corrected him....
-----------------
Larry Bensky Welcomes a Peoples' Temple Death Squad Leader to the Airwaves in "Concerned Liberal" Drag

By Alex Constantine

Media fraud, opinion formation, deliberate abuse of the public airwaves ... these are highly unethical when engaged in by a corporate media outlet, unconscionable in a listener-supported radio station. Yet the officers and board of KPFK-FM allow certain talk show hosts in the station's employ to defraud its listeners on a routine basis.

My complaints and those of other listeners and even Pacifica programmers have fallen on deaf ears, and the abuse continues.

Racial separatist Ron Karenga, promoted as an icon of the left by some KPFK program hosts, is a CIA-FBI cut-out who served time for physical assault and rape, and was involved in the disruption and assassination of Black Panthers. He was a provocateur.

Another of the CIA liars who have been welcomed with open arms at Pacifica was Hugh Fortsyn - an extortionist and collaborator in murder as a lieutenant of Jim Jones in California. How much listener support would KPFK draw if its listeners knew that a CIA death squad leader – disguised as a concerned liberal Christian – was promoted by Larry Bensky, a senior programmer based at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, over THEIR airwaves, repeated over KPFK's transmitter?

On the November 16, 2004 broadcast of "Sunday Salon," an admiring Larry Bensky - shills at Pacifica always seem to fawn over covert operators - shared the microphone with Reverend Hugh Fortsyn, formerly an assistant to Jim Jones at the genocidal Peoples Temple, a CIA mind control operation.

Seductive Poison

Mr. Bensky was highly sympathetic to Rev. Fortsyn's claim that the CIA had no role in Jonestown apart from infiltration and harassment of the church - a blatantly FALSE claim first made by Jones himself to obscure the true sponsor of the Temple, distance himself from the Agency, and con progressives into supporting his activities.

Pacifica's Larry Bensky sneers at any mention of fascism on his program, and most especially despises the "conspiracy theorists" who trace CIA connections to Jonestown, the Kennedy assassination, etc.

Most listeners, of course, have never heard of Hugh Fortsyn, and had no way to guage the disinformation planted on Bensky's "Sunday Salon."

THE CULT THAT DIED, a book on Jonestown penned by George Klineman, Sherman Butler and David Conn (G.P. Putnam, 1980, a book of some but limited insight into intelligence connections at the Temple), offers a graphic profile of the reverend. We find that Fortsyn participated in a murder. The victim was Chris Lewis, an ex-con, heroin addict and a Jones bodyguard who trained agents of the Temple in breaking, entering and fencing stolen goods. (The break-ins were conducted around the Bay area - largely for the purpose of gathering information useful to Jim Jones, although personal belongings were also stolen to disguise the true nature of the crimes.)

Chris Lewis was gunned down by two assailants outside a Peoples' Temple thrift shop on December 10, 1977.

The murder was used to frighten and control Temple parishioners who refused to cooperate with Jones.

Wade and Mabel Medloc, for instance.

Two weeks after Lewis was shot and killed, Marcelline Jones, another assistant to Jim Jones, ordered the Medlocks to move to Jonestown in French Guyana. The Medlocks refused.

"What happened to Chris Lewis will happen to you," Marcelline told her. Rev. Fortsyn repeated the death threat a few days later. "You know what happened to Chris Lewis?" Fortsyn threatened him.

The Medlocks responded by suing the Temple, accusing Jones, Fortsyn and others of attempting to extort $135,000 in real estate from them. In the lawsuit, two members of the Peoples Temple, Jim Crokes and Jim McElvane, were identified as the killers of Chris Lewis.

Police never questioned these two, known to Temple insiders as participants in the Temple death squad, the "Angels of Death."

Rev. Fortsyn is an accomplice in the murder, legally speaking, at the very least, since he obviously had knowledge of it that he has not shared with police. The threats that Reverend Fortsyn made against the Medlocks in a failed effort to exort their wealth would suggest that he knows much more than he admits, that he was, in fact, involved in the deep corruption at Jonestown.

Bensky himself has reviled as lying fools any listeners who have called to share information on CIA involvement in fascism, a connection he finds ludicrous and rejects with extreme unction.

But then fraud is a staple of KPFK programming ....

http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/06/cia-infiltration-of-pacifica-part-three.html
-------------------
http://www.democrats.com/preview.cfm?term=September%2011%20Opinions

Left-Wing Journalists Attack Those Who Question Bush's Role in 911
10-Jun-02
September 11 Opinions

Bev Conover writes, "Gangway for the self-appointed gatekeepers of the left who are on a crusade to spin, smear, attack, and label as loony anyone who won't accept the official line that the events leading up to and surrounding September 11 are nothing more than a series of coincidences and intelligence failures. This cabal of lily-livered leftists, ensconced in their ivory towers, have decreed we are bad kiddies for even suggesting that the Bush administration was complicit in or took advantage of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the baddest of all is Michael C. Ruppert, who publishes From the Wilderness." Conover cites Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive, Norman Solomon of the Institute for
Public Accuracy; David Corn of The Nation, Michael Alber of Z Magazin, Steve Rendall of FAIR, Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates; Larry Bensky of Pacifica Radio, and Noam Chomsky of MIT. Why are these folks attacking those who want the truth? ...
----------------------
http://www.oilempire.us/saudi.html
Neo-con Pacifica
By Joseph Wanzala

Thus (see below) we have a leading KPFA/Pacifica voices (inadvertently) furthering a neo-conservative agenda. Larry Bensky recently interviewed Gerald Posner and Amy Goodman interviewed two authors (Peter Lance and Richard Miniter) whose books both pushed the 'Saudi Arabia did it' thesis though the emphasis was more on the supposed failure of the US intelligence agencies to do their job. These sort of developments show how problematic it is for Pacifica and progressives in general to marginalize so-called 'conspiracy theory' researchers and instead develop a preference for 'safe'
journalists like Posner and Lance. What good is Pacifica if middle-of-the-road watering holes like 'Salon' can make more incisive contributions to one of the most critical questions facing progressives than anything one might hear on Democracy Now? I think it is clear that the overbearing concern of many leading Pacifica commentators - including Bernstein, Bensky and Goodman not to be seen as 'marginal conspiratologist' is having the effect of leading Pacifica into the intellectual arms of the neo-cons. There is now a community of investigative researchers who have raised critical questions about 9-11 and the criminal nature of state power in general but who have been declared 'beyond the pale' by the left establishment. Therefore the general thrust of their work is rejected. Since no other progressive journalists seem to be doing their own original work on this question - they turn to
establishment/mainstream journalists safe in the knowledge that they will not be attacked for putting out the wrong message. I think this is a very dangerous trend and I hope that we can begin to see a change in attitude from progressives to the extent that (they/we) recognize the dangers in the trend I have laid out above and which is discussed further below.
-----------------
Shiu Hung: "Bensky will continue to shovel out his lineup of so-called experts to further marginalise the 9/11 skeptic position and needlessly continue to prop up the official story as the gospel truth. His show, Sunday Salon has recently featured Gerald Posner with his new book: Why America Slept? And Chip "John Foster" Berlet¹s ridiculous comments concerning US air defense¹s stand down on 9/11. According to Berlet, the Stand down was because the Pentagon didn¹t want to bother the East Coast Corridor suburbanite¹s with loud jet noises. Practically every expert guest Bensky had on since 9/11 repeats the official lies and disinformation...."
----------------
http://www.questionsquestions.net/topics/gatekeeper_recent.html

9-11 Coverup At Pacifica Radio!

Hear Larry Bensky of KPFA attack 9/11 skeptics with ad-hominem smears, 27
Apr 03 (audio):
http://www.radio4houston.org/911/audio/LarryBenskyAttacks911Research-2003042
7.m3u
----------------
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs0209/1120_gunaratna.html

Pacifica's Larry Bensky gives airtime to RAND Corporation shill

On October 13, 2002, the day after the nightclub bombing in Bali which killed nearly 200, KPFA's Sunday Salon hosted "international terrorism expert" Rohan Gunaratna in an hour-long interview with commentator Larry Bensky. Gunaratna expounded on themes that were consistent with his other media appearances, insisting categorically that only al Qaeda could have been behind the bombing, and -- echoing a kind of pseudo-critique that has become a staple of what one might charitably call an "antiwar-lite" Left establishment -- argued that Bush's focus on Iraq is objectionable simply because it threatens to interfere with escalating the "War on Terrorism" (this "critical" viewpoint, by the way, can also be found in a number of recent publications by the Council on Foreign Relations). Another common theme typical in Gunaratna's media appearances is his claim that the spread of terrorism can be blamed on such outmoded conceits as "tight limits on how intelligence and police officials can gather evidence against suspects, a strong civil liberties tradition and easy access to education and welfare provision". One thing of note about Gunaratna's appearance on Pacifica Network's KPFA is that Bensky chose not to open up the lines for call-ins,so there was no opportunity for the KPFA audience to challenge him.

-- Alex Constantine

L.A.: The Struggle for KPFK, 2009 - Turning Back Ian Masters and Creeping "Intelligence Community" Encroachment/Board Election Endorsements

2009-09-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

Dear friends and political acquaintances:

Michael Novick is a good guy in this fight. Please read his important commentary pasted in below. Please forward to those who may benefit from his perspective and especially to those who are voting in the KPFK Local Station Board elections by the deadline of Oct 15.

Mike is a very well respected individual in the activist community. I've known him for over 20 years. He really knows what's going on, especially in regard to the deception employed in the LA Pacifica community about what's happening at Pacifica radio and the degree with which this deception has pulled the wool over many Pacifica listener-sponsors eyes (and ears) not only in LA but especially in other signal areas who would normally recognize such operations.

I believe many of the Pacifica listeners and activists outside of LA are basing their understanding of Grace Aaron's agenda (with husband & KPFK Local Station Board candidate Ken Aaron) and those of whom are behind her, on very limited information and a narrow analysis of Pacifica's history.

Ian Masters KPFK program, Background Briefing, is the key to understanding what is in store for the entire Pacifica chain of stations (KPFk - Los Angeles, KPFA - Berkeley, WBAI - New York, KPFT - Houston, WPFW - Washington, DC). Their intention is to make Ian Masters a Pacifica syndicated national Pacifica star, sort of following the model when Amy Goodman's Democracy Now was launched during a similar putsch in '95--'97 at Pacifica's stations by the same political forces in LA, Berkeley & Wash DC. However, Ian Masters' program is a very sophisticated and clever propaganda outlet for the US national security state in its effort to reinforce US military and intelligence policy. In other words, deception reigns on Background Briefing and has been key to the continued manipulation and containment of Los Angeles political intelligentsia, especially in the entertainment community (a primary target of intelligence community influence).

Within this effort, spearheading Masters' program to Pacifica National is their parallel objective of forcing on all of the stations more uniform content and in order to do that they will remove many of the important programs that have existed on a single Pacifica station, some for decades. Two of those targeted for removal I believe are: Radio Intifada at KPFK and Taking Aim at WBAI in New York.

Additionally, this political operation is dedicated to transforming Pacifica into largely a non-profit corporation and foundation-funded outlet, thereby avoiding any shred of accountability to it's listener-sponsors who should be the only source of the network's income. These foundations have a liberal and even "progressive" veneers but are in actuality adjuncts for US propaganda operations, military and economic destabilization operations and phony or limited (hang out) investigative journalism through NPR and PBS, among other sources.

The other critical objective of this political operation behind Grace Aaron is the reversal of the democratization of the local boards (listener-elected) and a return of Pacifica's governance structure to an appointed local board model.

Thank you very much for your interest and commitment to protecting Pacifica from those who seek to transform the network into another vapid and useless voice for the (phony) Democratic Party.

Jonathan Markowitz
----------------------
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 12:09 AM
Subject: Endorsements in the election for KPFK Local Station Board
From: "Michael Novick"
To: "laamn"
Cc: change-links@yahoogroups.com

Michael Novick
Sept 22, 2009

The war of words in the Local Station Board (LSB) elections for KPFK and other Pacifica radio stations is heating up. An open letter from Jim Lafferty, host of The Lawyers Guild (as well as a staffer at the National Lawyers Guild chapter in L.A. and a former interim station manager at KPFK) and a vicious counter-attack from Ian Masters, host of a double-serving of "insider analysis" by intelligence community honchos and academics, Background Briefing and Live from the Left Coast, are the latest salvos in a struggle over the direction of the station and the network that are some of the most valuable assets of the so-called left or progressive movement. As in any election, there is no possibility of bridging the gap -- decisive and exclusionarychoices must be made by everyone, no matter how much we may hate the in-fighting, name-calling, and finger-pointing that passes for debate when the left forms up its circular firing squad.

And in fact, in this election, the choice is clear. One side, the side of current LSB member and acting Executive Director of Pacifica Grace Aaron, of her husband Ken, a candidate for LSB, of Ian Masters and other staffers and hosts, is committed to purges, bannings and to 'rule or ruin' Pacifica as an adjunct of the Democratic Party under the mantle of 'fiscal responsibility'. The other side, supporting a platform of a few key principles including loyalty to the Pacifica mission, has backed a list of grassroots activists from various communities around the KPFK listening area who have signed on to the following points of unity:

* Implementing the core values of the Pacifica Mission: voices by and for people not commonly heard in the mainstream media

* Greater autonomy and local decision-making for our radio station

* Fiscal transparency and responsibility: people, not corporate underwriters, supporting people's radio

* Local, diverse, multilingual, and young voices from and for our communities

* Spanish language programming to bring progressive messages to Spanish language communities

* Effective, participatory governance that is accountable to listener-sponsors and responsive to the diverse needs and interests of the Southern California listening community

I have endorsed these principles, although I am not running for anything myself. I have worked -- both in the context of KPFK/Pacifica and in the broader social and political movements of southern California -- with a number of the candidates who have endorsed those principles as the basis of their campaign and as their commitment of accountability to the listeners. At www.takebackkpfk.org, you can see the list with the "official" voting order. I am making personal endorsements here, and giving my personal knowledge and experience of many of these candidates. (A word about my own qualifications to make such endorsements -- in addition to being a participant in almost every major coalition effort in Los Angeles since I arrived here in 1982, I was elected at a KPFK town hall meeting as a listener member of the News Director search committee some years ago, participated in efforts to rewrite the Pacifica bylaws, and was an elected listener member and elected chair of the KPFK interim Program Council.)

Khallid Al-Alim, a current member of the LSB despite efforts to keep him off, is a parent activist in the Coalition for Educational Justice whom I have worked with as a former member of CEJ myself and as a 'chapter chair' (shop steward) in United Teachers Los Angeles. Khallid's name is printed on the ballot -- but you must vote for him as a write-in, because his nominating petition was ruled invalid. I urge you to vote for Khallid (as a write-in on the bottom of your ballot) and ranked number one to insure him the strongest possibility of getting elected under the circumstances that some people may unwittingly vote for by marking the line by his name and thereby waste their vote. Khallid is a survivor/resister of police brutality
by the LAPD which resulted in a police-prosecutorial frame-up; based on that first-hand experience, he has also worked with me in the Jericho Amnesty Coalition to Free All Political Prisoners, defending Mumia, Leonard Peltier, the San Francisco 8 and other victims of injustice and political incarceration.

Lawrence Reyes of the Puerto Rican Alliance, a listener-member of many LSB committees, another ally in the Jericho Amnesty Coalition to Free All Political Prisoners, was singled out for particular vituperation by Ian Masters, probably because Lawrence has been one of the most outspoken and principled internationalist opponents of imperialism, war and colonialism. He, too, is a parent of a LAUSD student, a social worker and union member, a community cultural activist who has brought artists, dancers, exhibits and speakers to Los Angeles to educate the community about the Puerto Rican people and their struggle against US colonialism. Lawrence has fought long and hard for the interests of the listeners, for the needs and voices of the communities of poor, oppressed, working and struggling people in Los Angeles and southern CA to be heard on the air and in the governance of the station and the network.

KPFK and Pacifica have been built with the blood, sweat and contributions of volunteers and listeners like Lawrence, and the station and foundation must not be hijacked by a cabal of well-funded Democratic Party partisans to serve their own narrow interests. Lawrence's experience and commitment means he would be a bulwark on the Board against any abandonment of Pacifica's mission, and a spark plug for maintaining the relevance and connection of the station and its programming to a new generation of young people, in the growing demographic groups of
southern California.

Chuck Anderson is stalwart in the struggle for peace, civil liberties and justice. Like me a grandfather, he retains a connection to younger people just coming in to such struggles. Based in Orange County, he is tireless in his efforts to reach out and organize, to connect with the Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim communities, to oppose the USA PATRIOT Act and other manifestations of a police state, and to struggle for democracy within Pacifica, as well as grassroots community activist access to the airwaves.

John Parker may be the best known of the candidates endorsing the principles noted above. He is a leader of the International Action Center, and has been involved for many years in struggles for social and economic justice, against racism and US wars of occupation and aggression, in the effort to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners, and in fighting for the interests of working people. He would bring valuable skills in coalition building to the station board.

Ruby Medrano has a long history of activism and grassroots community work, particularly in East Los Angeles, going back to work with the United Farm Workers. She has many years experience with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. She has also been a leader and activist in the Democratic Party, which honestly is not my cup of tea, but unlike the Aaron slate, she is not trying to turn the station and network into the voice of the Democratic Party, and is willing to work in coalition with others to ensure that KPFK and Pacifica remain committed to free speech and a broad airing of diverse views and debate.

Cuco (Refugio Ceballos) is a danzante with the Danza Azteca Cuautemoc, those tireless multi-generational cultural/political/spiritual workers whose commitment to resistance, internationalism, healing and decolonization inspires and amazes marchers and on-lookers alike at protests around the southland. Cuco is a member of the community board and a teacher at Tia Chucha's in the north Valley, and he was also involved in community efforts to roll back the horrible budget cuts at LAUSD and to create a liberation school effort when LAUSD slashed summer school classes earlier this year. His commitment to educating and making space for young people is unquestionable.

Tej Grewall is an intellectually-curious young woman of Indian descent who does street level radio journalism as a volunteer, working with the "People Without Borders" collective at KPFK and also serving as a listener-member of the LSB's Outreach Committee helping build the audience and the station's connection to new, younger listeners like herself. She has been on Dedon Kamathi's "Freedom Now" and out on the streets participating in and covering protests for educational justice or against genocide in Africa.

Luis Garcia is a former member of the "Local Advisory Board" under KPFK's and Pacifica's former system of governance. He has been a strong advocate for Spanish-language community-based programming on KPFK. I worked with Luis, who is a former probation officer and a "pragmatic prison abolitionist" and member of Families to Amend California's Three Strikes (FACTS) in the Criminal Justice Consortium years ago, and more recently in CURB, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, in the effort to slash spending on the prison-industrial complex and release non-violent offenders from brutal and corrupt prisons into community diversion and reintegration programs.

Ian Johnston (c) is a current member of the LSB and participant in LSB and PNB committees who has long roots in the Venice community and has been an activist against CIA criminality and the use by the Bush regime of 9-11 to carry out war and repression. He is a former volunteer board operator and sometime programmer/producer of "Another World View is Possible." He is running for re-election to the Board as a strong advocate for listener access to the airwaves and the board meetings, and against making the station and network a sounding board for partisan, state or "intelligence community" operatives.

Three other candidates who have endorsed the same principles as the ones I have mentioned here are Fred Klunder, Dutch Merrick, and Sandi Stiassni, but I have no first-hand knowledge or shared political practice with them aside from hearing them speak on-air or in person. I join in endorsing them based on their commitment to the principles and their endorsement by people I know and trust from common work over a long period, such as Leslie Radford, Sherna Gluck, Bernie Eisenberg, and the candidates with whom I have stronger connections.

This election is vital -- that sounds like a cliche, but in this case I believe it to be true. My analysis, which I believe has been proven out over a number of years, is that "corporate liberal" forces affiliated with the national Democratic Party had taken over and were prepared to bankrupt and destroy Pacifica a decade ago. That was made possible because too many on the "white left" did not respond when the Pacifica purges began with attacks on revolutionary-minded, grassroots community oriented programming by people of color, such as Dedon Kamathi, Family Tree with Kamal Hassan, Jan Robinson Flint and other Black programmers, Ron Wilkins' Continent to Continent, Miya Iwataki of East Wind, American Indian Airwaves, homeless radio producer Michael Taylor, who drew the attention of L.A. to Mumia Abu-Jamal when few on the west coast were aware of his existence, and others. That failure to act paved the way for the complete takeover and makeover, so that by the time they came after Amy Goodman, Dennis Bernstein and Larry Bensky, it was almost too late to act. I am
convinced that the Democratic Party forces that had control at that time, via a self-perpetuating board of Pacifica financing itself and national operations out of revenues from commercialization of the stations' "sideband" frequencies, would have bankrupted the foundation and stations through endless lawsuits -- except for the
fact that Bush stole the 2000 election. At that point, needing to keep Pacifica alive for their own purposes, they backed down, settled the lawsuit, created a joint interim Board that adopted restrictively-'democratic' bylaws, and grudgingly agreed to allow a certain number of grassroots community voices of people of color back on the air. Now, with the Democratic Party enjoying control of the White House, the Congress and Senate, these same forces are prepared to break the social contract and coalition that has sustained KPFK and Pacifica as free-speech community oriented media outlets. They want to rule or ruin, with all power and access in their own hands.

They plan to seek foundation funding and underwriters, big ticket donors and thereby free themselves from concern about or accountability to the listeners. They are following the same strategy of purging programmers and staffers of color who do not toe their line, such as Bernard White in NY and Jerry Quickley in L.A. If you want the station and the network to survive in any meaningful form, let alone to thrive as a breath of fresh air politically, culturally and artistically, you must vote for the list of candidates I have named. Otherwise, KPFK will be doomed to increasing irrelevance, its audience shrinking and aging, its airwaves alienating rather than inviting the new generation of young people in struggle for a better, freer future, for liberation and decolonization.

-- Michael Novick, editor "Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education" Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART) 310-495-0299

Study Details Mainstream Media's Biased Reporting on ACORN

2009-09-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

Summary: Our analysis of the narrative framing of the ACORN stories demonstrates that -- despite long-standing charges from conservatives that the news media are determinedly liberal and ignore conservative ideas -- the news media agenda is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign, even when there is little or no truth to the story.

ISS - Institute for Southern Studies
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/09/study-details-mainstream-medias-biased-reporting-on-acorn.html
Facing South

ACORN, a community-based advocacy group for low- and moderate-income families, has been in the news in recent weeks thanks to an undercover video in which two employees in the organization's Baltimore office appear to offer unethical advice on home loans, tax evasion and disguising identities of underaged sex workers to two conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute. The organization has fired the workers and hired a former Massachusetts attorney general to conduct an internal review. It's also suing the filmmakers for illegal taping under Maryland law.

The media scrutiny of the 500,000-member group continues today, with reports that a leading Senate Republican, Charles Grassley of Iowa, has called on the Internal Revenue Service to look at how ACORN has transferred charitable and government funds meant for the poor to political and profit-making arms of the group. Those transactions occurred before a change in the group's leadership last year.

This is not the first time ACORN has found itself in the media spotlight: The organization first became a high-profile story during last year's presidential campaign when Republican candidates and other conservatives attacked the group and tried to link it to Barack Obama, with GOP presidential candidate John McCain charging hyperbollically in an October debate that the group was "maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

Now a new study documents serious problems with the way major media outlets have handled the ACORN story.

Titled "Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong," the independent study of coverage by 15 major news organizations was authored by Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and Christopher Martin, a journalism professor at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

They trace the latest uproar over ACORN to the White House firing of David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, for failing to help GOP election prospects by prosecuting alleged instances of voter fraud by the group. At the time ACORN was involved in a major voter-registration drive in the state.

Dreier and Martin note that after the House Judiciary Committee released over 5,000 pages of documents last month detailing the central role former Bush senior advisor Karl Rove played in Iglesia's termination, nearly every major news organization reported on the documents' release:

...[B]ut none of them -- including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal -- mention that Rove was specifically focused on attacking ACORN for its voter registration efforts in New Mexico and other states, even though ACORN is mentioned frequently as a Republican target in the investigative documents.

The study points out that while ACORN has long been involved in efforts to improve housing, wages, access to credit and public education, the focus of most news stories about ACORN -- what the authors call the "story frame" -- was voter fraud:

The "voter fraud" frame appeared in 55% of the 647 news stories about the community organization in 15 mainstream news organizations during 2007 and 2008.

But at the same time, many media outlets failed to distinguish allegations of voter registration problems from actual voting irregularities, and between allegations of wrongdoing and actual wrongdoing.

For instance, 80.3% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required under law, while 85.1% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to note that ACORN took action when it became aware of the problems. And 95.8% of the stories failed to provide deeper context -- "especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of 'voter fraud' to dampen voting by low-income and minority Americans."

Interestingly, the study found that local newspapers were more likely to verify facts with county election boards and thus were less susceptible to the politicized "voter fraud" frame than national news outlets.

http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/09/study-details-mainstream-medias-biased-reporting-on-acorn.html

Ad in Harvard Student Paper Causes Outrage

2009-09-25T12:55:00.000-07:00

Jeff Greer
September 09, 2009

The Harvard Crimson finds itself at the center of controversy this week after publishing an ad in Tuesday's newspaper that questioned the existence of the Holocaust, the Crimson reports. The ad, which was submitted by the founder of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, Bradley Smith, will not run the rest of the week, as was previously scheduled.

The ad asked readers to "provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz." It prompted an overwhelming outpouring of outrage, from campus group leaders to individual undergrads. A joint letter signed by 30 undergraduates said, "Some of us are the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and were deeply hurt by the implication that those stories passed on to us of our past—of lives lost and families destroyed—were all lies concocted by a vast Jewish conspiracy."

In a statement on the Crimson's website, Crimson President Maxwell Child blamed the advertisement's publishing on oversight and miscommunication.

“Unfortunately, with three weeks of vacation between submission and publication, that decision fell through the cracks," Child writes. “While running the ad was not our intent, we accept responsibility for our failure to carry out the planned cancellation."

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2009/09/09/ad-in-harvard-student-paper-causes-outrage.html

Pat Buchanan's Race Baiting

2009-09-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

By Tanya Acker
08/31/2009

I spend a fair amount of time sparring with those who fall along various points on the right-wing spectrum, so I should not have been surprised by the interesting constellation of venom in Mr. Buchanan's recent essay, Populist Right Rising. In it, Mr. Buchanan posits an end to the "Age of Obama," that epoch having been abbreviated by a resurgence of white, right-wing rage. It is a rage that has been much on display of late during the town halls taking place across the country, and it is a rage with which, according to Mr. Buchanan, much of America empathizes.

As evidence of that empathy, Mr. Buchanan relies upon a Pew poll, in which he claims 61% of those polled believe the town hall protestors are "behaving properly." This alleged identification with the town hall protestors (who have taken to bringing firearms to presidential events and accusing the advocates of health care reform of genocidal tendencies) is apparently premised, according to Mr. Buchanan, on the notion that the protestors "look and talk just like them." The American public is therefore doing nothing more than showing its loyalty to its own, much as it did during the 1968 Democratic Convention when "the country sided with the Chicago cops" who confronted the antiwar protestors and "gave them a good thrashing." ...

Mr. Buchanan's fluency in the techniques of partisan race baiting is so well known that it deserves no comment here. ... Mr. Buchanan goes on to say that the GOP was not hurt when "by four to one, its senators voted against "Ms. Affirmative Action" (that would be Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in case you were wondering). Such a spiteful reference to the High Court's newest Justice is probably among the more banal of Mr. Buchanan's race-baiting tactics. ...

Full story: http://www.thegrio.com/2009/08/i-spend-a-fair-amount.php

Hal Turner Trial Update

2009-09-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

Trial Over Blogger's Alleged Death Threats Against Chicago Judges Moved to Brooklyn
By Mark Fass
New York Law Journal
September 23, 2009

The trial of a New Jersey man who allegedly threatened on his Web site to assault and murder three judges on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has been moved to Brooklyn federal court.

Defendant Hal Turner, a popular blogger known for posting vitriolic diatribes against gun control, immigration and abortion rights, published several entries advocating the deaths of Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, the prolific Judge Richard Posner and Senior Judge William Bauer, for their decision upholding the dismissals of several cases challenging handgun bans in and around Chicago.

"Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty," Mr. Turner wrote on June 2. "These Judges deserve to [be] made such an example of as to send a message to the entire judiciary: Obey the Constitution or die."

Mr. Turner also posted the judges' photographs, phone numbers and work address, as well as a map of their courthouse that specifically pointed out three "anti-truck bomb barriers."

Mr. Turner faces a maximum of 10 years if convicted of "threaten[ing] to assault, kidnap, or murder, a [federal judge] with intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with [the judge] or with intent to retaliate against [the judge] on account of the performance of official duties," in violation of 18 USC §115(a)(1)(B).

The chief justice of the Northern District of Illinois assigned the case to District Court Judge Donald Walter, a visiting judge who normally sits in Shreveport, La.

Judge Walter then granted the defense's request for a change of venue, transferring the case to Brooklyn.

In agreeing to move the case, the judge cited the February 2005 murders of Chicago federal Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's mother and husband.

"Although the motion (for a change of venue) makes no reference to the recent tragedy in which the husband and mother of a member of the District Court for Northern Illinois were slain, the court takes notice of it and the widespread media coverage devoted to it," he said. "Memories are not so short as to erase the event from the public mind."

Mr. Turner also cited those murders in his June 2 post, but for a different proposition.

"Apparently," Mr. Turner wrote, "the 7th U.S. Circuit court didn't get the hint after those killings. It appears another lesson is needed."

Judge Walter will now come to Brooklyn as a visiting judge to hear the case.

The trial is scheduled to begin Nov. 30.

The Chicago prosecutors assigned to the case, William Hogan and William Ridgeway, will try it.

Mr. Turner also faces similar charges in Connecticut state court, for urging his blog's readers to "take up arms" against the state legislature.

Changes of venue are uncommon in federal court; several Eastern District officials yesterday said that they could not recall a case being transferred either in or out of Brooklyn.

But Mr. Turner's attorney, Michael Orozco of Bailey Orozco in Newark, said the decision to move the present case was an obvious one.

"You have a New Jersey defendant whose actions were only done in New Jersey who is being charged in Chicago with threatening Chicago judges," Mr. Orozco said. "The chief judge recused every single judge. There's no way they can have any judges there hear this thing fairly."

Mr. Orozco said that he was not worried about trying the case in the "melting pot of New York."

"Mr. Turner is not a hate-filled man," Mr. Orozco said, "regardless of what content people want to bring out that he has said in the blogs."

http://www.nylj.com/nylawyer/news/09/09/092309i.html?hbxlogin=1

Glenn Beck: No Stranger to Right-Wing Radicalism

2009-09-23T01:26:00.000-07:00

by David Neiwert
2009-09-21 11:44 Media Literacy/Bias|Newswire
Crooks and Liars

The centerpiece of Glenn Beck's incessant attacks on "White House czars" like Van Jones, as well as his attacks on ACORN, is his claim that this is all about rooting out the deep-seated radicalism within the Obama White House -- and ultimately, the deep-seated radicalism of Obama himself. He's been quite explicit about this.

But what about Glenn Beck himself? Beck has shown a powerful affinity for right-wing radicals dating back at least to his days at CNN's Headline News, when he declared his sympathy for the John Birch Society (in its campaign to stop the non-existent "NAFTA Superhighway") and warned that Al Gore's real purpose behind his "global warming campaign" was to install a global government. (Back then, it was Gore, not Obama, who was just like Hitler.)

It's only intensified since he left CNN for Fox. Given the freedom to let his fetid imagination run amok, has quickly amassed a massive record of mainstreaming ideas and talking points from the genuinely radical right of American politics. (The accompanying video gives you a 17-minute compendium of Beck's extremist rhetoric.)

We noticed this back when it first surfaced amid a raft of other Beck wingnuttia. This week, Alexander Zaitchik in Salon published a devastating rundown of perhaps the foundation of Beck's radicalism: His ardent adoption of the ideology espoused by W. Cleon Skousen, one of the most radical of the old "Church-Birch Connection" gang of LDS elders who spread Bircherirsm throughout Mormon-land. (I remember seeing The Naked Communist on the bookshelf of many of the Mormon homes I grew up around in southern Idaho, including several in my family.) Salty City Sinner noticed the Skousen connection back in March too.

Skousen, as Zaitchik explains, was so far out on the fringe he even made the Birchers nervous:

W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

Beck not only avidly endorsed The 5,000-Year Leap on his program -- it was one of three texts he told everyone who watched his show to read as part of "The 912 Project," since the very phrase "912" came from Skousen (whose book details the "9 Principles" and the "12 Values" Beck employs). He also wrote the foreword to is newest edition, in which he told readers it was "divinely inspired" -- something repeated in his blurb for the book:

"I beg you to read this book filled with words of wisdom which I can only describe as divinely inspired. You will find answers to questions plaguing America, and more importantly you will find hope. I know I have!"

Beck also promoted The 5,000 Year Leap on the 912 Project Blog, and listed his "12 Values" on the Fox News site. Lawdy, when the first "912 Project" aired, it was truly a sight to behold.

The result, of course, was that Skousen's book shot up the bestseller charts:

On Friday, after several days in the top 10, "The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, Principles of Freedom 101" leaped to No. 1 on Amazon.com's list of Bestsellers in Books.

"Everyone should read this book," the conservative talk show host said as he passed out copies during a recent broadcast. On his radio program Friday evening, Beck touted the book's climb to No. 1.

Skousen published "The 5000 Year Leap" in 1981, nearly 25 years after he published "The Naked Communist," a national bestseller that has sold more than 1 million copies.

Just how far out on the far right was Skousen. As Zaitchik explains, some of movement conservatism's leading poohbahs fled screaming from him:

"The Naked Capitalist" does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited "Tragedy and Hope" author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen's interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen's latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary." Skousen not only saw things that weren't in Quigley's book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there -- namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."

Hey, it may be that Glenn Beck is uncovering true radicals within the Obama White House -- though all we've seen so far is a McCarthyite smear job of Van Jones and his fellow "czars" and some videotaped corruption within a community-volunteer organization that has no official or other connection to the White House.

But what about the far-right radicals lurking in Glenn Beck's own closet? It might be time to take a longer and deeper look.

article originally published at Crooks and Liars.

http://reclaimthemedia.org/media_literacy/bias/glenn_beck_no_stranger_rightwi2139

Glenn Beck's Remaining Advertisers in England Under Attack

2009-09-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

By James Moore
Independent
September 22, 2009

Although Glenn Beck's show has been deserted by 62 of America's corporate titans, the likes of Tesco, Diageo and Kellogg's UK continue to advertise during the programme when it is screened on the Sky TV platform in Britain.

He is the baby-faced television assassin who makes even his colleagues at the notoriously right-wing Fox News Channel look like simpering liberals. But while Glenn Beck's show has been deserted by 62 of America's corporate titans, the likes of Tesco, Diageo and Kellogg's UK continue to advertise during the programme when it is screened on the Sky TV platform in Britain.

Beck has sparked controversy in the US by accusing Barack Obama of racism and claiming that the President has "a deep-seated hatred for white people". His incendiary comments have been blamed for adding an ugly undertone to US political debate and prompted the pressure group Color of Change to call for an advertising boycott of his show.

So far, the call has been heeded by blue-chip companies including Wal-Mart, which owns Asda in the UK, the telecoms giant AT&T, Campbell's soups, Bank of America and Capital One. More are expected to follow suit this week.

Last night, James Rucker, the executive director of Color of Change, urged British companies to follow the lead of their American counterparts.

He said: "What we would hope to see in the UK as we see here is companies exercising some sense of corporate responsibility. We are all for freedom of speech and ideas but what Beck is doing is using advertisers' dollars to present distortions that are often racially divisive as fact on what is a mainstream news channel."

In response, Tesco, which has also faced controversy in the US over labour practices at its Fresh&Easy chain, said: "We are clear that the placing of our advertising is not a statement of support or otherwise for the programming content on the channel. In common with many other businesses, Tesco buys advertising space, often as a package, across a range of channels and time slots."

Kellogg's UK said it would review its advertising on Glenn Beck. Diageo, which uses the show to advertise Guinness, did not return calls.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tesco-and-diageo-attacked-for-ads-on-divisive-show-1791232.html

Media Magnate among the Backers of Michael Moore's Anti-Capitalism Screed

2009-09-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

Re Moore backer John Malone (and TCI, Liberty Media, Fox News, Cato Institute, etc.), see: "Media Mafia (Part Five): The CIA/Mafia's Rupert Murdoch, Jim Cownie, et al"

Overture's John Malone is a master of the tax-free deal, a champion of unfettered free markets and completely disdains government and most federal regulations. And, yeah, Moore is OK with that.

'Capitalism: A Love Story' won't be a 'Sicko'
By Joe Flint
LA Times
September 17, 2009

He's been labeled a monopolist. Al Gore called him "Darth Vader." He's a master of the tax-free deal, a champion of unfettered free markets, completely disdains government and most federal regulations and has expressed a fondness for Rush Limbaugh. Earlier this summer he was slapped with a $1.4-million fine by the Justice Department for illegal stock purchases.

Sounds like the perfect target for a scathing Michael Moore documentary, no? It might be, if it weren't for the fact that he's also Moore's latest financial backer -- cable magnate John Malone.

That's right, Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" is being co-financed and distributed domestically by Overture Films, which is a unit of Malone's Liberty Media. Moore, who has been railing against Big Media during press junkets promoting the movie, is, in fact, in bed with the Goldman Sachs of the media world.

Liberty, which also owns satellite broadcaster DirecTV, has a stake in satellite radio operator Sirius XM, a big chunk of Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp., the Atlanta Braves and a piece of the Denver Nuggets. Malone, considered the father of the modern-day cable industry, himself has a piece of cable programming giant Discovery Communications, on whose board he sits.

Obviously, there is a little something ironic about Moore's cinematic screed against capitalism being backed in part by one of the country's richest and most avowed capitalists. Then again, Moore is nothing if not a paradox. Although he still has close ties to Michigan and has positioned himself as the voice of the common man, Moore is also a shrewd negotiator when it comes to his vested financial interests. On his last film, "Sicko," he received half of the documentary's gross profits, as detailed in a Los Angeles Times story in 2007.

While Moore relishes the spotlight, Malone keeps a relatively modest profile. Although he's amassed a fortune, he's not flashy. Malone has been known to go home for lunch with his wife and once told the New Yorker that while his children will not go wanting in this world, he plans to leave the bulk of his estate to charity.

Moore, through a spokesman, isn't making any apologies for having one of Malone's companies as a backer of his film.

"The movie is about how people make their money -- and specifically criticizes the beast, our out-of-control economic system . . . and for those folks who make their money in ways that don't exploit or hurt others -- then they should be giving a lot more back in tax dollars to help support a more just and fair society," Moore said. "People like John Malone, myself and others who have been blessed, we all ought to be in a 70% tax bracket with the money being used to provide such important services as a real universal and affordable single-payer healthcare system."

Although it's unknown whether Malone would agree with Moore's belief that the wealthy "should be giving a lot more back in tax dollars to help support a more just and fair society," it's reasonable to believe that the cable pioneer hopes the filmmaker's movie will do well enough at the box office to make a decent return on Overture's investment.

joe.flint@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-malone17-2009sep17,0,5524743.story

Glenn Beck's Mentor

2009-09-17T18:37:00.000-07:00

Also see: "Mitt Romney's Mentor was Mormon Bircher Cleon Skousen"

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life ...

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik
Salon
Sep. 16, 2009
[Thanks to VictorSRMoore for the lead]

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Willard Cleon Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1940. His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.

After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. "The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government."

During his stint as police chief, Skousen began laying the groundwork for his future career as a professional anti-communist. He published a bestselling expose-slash-history called "The Naked Communist." In the late '50s, America's far right began to bubble with organizations peddling stories about the true state of the Red Menace. Groups like the Church League of America and the John Birch Society organized to channel, feed and satisfy Cold War paranoia. Members of these groups were the original postwar "domestic right-wing extremist threat." Then as now, they were very much on the government's radar.

After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America's enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen's friend and employer Fred Schwarz as "an opportunist," the likes of which "are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally ... Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm."

How did Skousen become an expert on communism? He claimed, as his apologists still do, that his years with the FBI exposed him to inside information. He also boasted that he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover. But both claims are open to question. Skousen's work at the Bureau was largely administrative, according to Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen's nearly 2,000-page FBI file. "Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters," says Lazar.

Skousen also trumpeted the insight he says he gained researching "The Naked Communist." But this research was as shaky as his résumé. Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets "50 suitcases" worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation's supply of enriched uranium. This he told thousands of audiences across the country, sometimes giving five speeches a day.

When Skousen's books started popping up in the nation's high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau's answer was an exasperated and resounding "no." One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen's "The Naked Communist," said the Bureau official, is "another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."

Two years on the circuit made Skousen a nationally known figure. Aligned with the Birchers and Schwarz, he also founded his own Utah-based far-right organization, the All-American Society. Here's how Time magazine described the outfit in a December 1961 feature on what it called the "rightwing ultras":

The All-American Society, founded in Salt Lake City, has as its guiding light one of the busiest speakers in the rightist movement: W. Cleon Skousen, a balding, bespectacled onetime FBI man who hit the anti-Communist circuit in earnest in 1960 after being fired from his job as Salt Lake City's police chief ("He operated the police department like a Gestapo," says Salt Lake City's conservative Mayor J. Bracken Lee). Skousen freely quotes the Bible, constantly plugs his book, The Naked Communist, [and] presses for a full congressional investigation of the State Department.

By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends."

When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's dwindling corporate clients dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from "any individual or party" that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled "The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society," was the nation's most prominent Birch defender.

Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power.

In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called "Tragedy and Hope." Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. "Tragedy and Hope," Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley's book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called "The Naked Capitalist." Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America's NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen's nephew Joel).

In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

"The Naked Capitalist" does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited "Tragedy and Hope" author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen's interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen's latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary." Skousen not only saw things that weren't in Quigley's book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there -- namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."

Skousen was unbowed. In 1971, he founded the Freeman Institute, a research organization devoted to the study of the super-conspiracy directed by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. (The institute later changed its name to the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which has offices in Malta, Idaho, and continues to publish Skousen's books, including Glenn Beck's favorite work of history, "The 5,000 Year Leap.")

By the end of the 1970s, the death of Skousen's biggest allies within the Mormon church hierarchy cleared the way for an official disavowal of his work. In 1979, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball issued an order to every Mormon clergyman in the U.S. stating "no announcements should be made in Church meetings of Freemen Institute lectures or events that are not under the sponsorship of the Church. [This] is to make certain that neither Church facilities nor Church meetings are used to advertise such events and to avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said during such lectures."

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP.

"Skousen worked to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity," says Rob Lauer, a leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. "By arguing that biblical principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right political establishment over the past 25 years."

In 1981, Skousen published "The 5,000 Year Leap," the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn't that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan's second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text "The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, "The Making of America" explained that "[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains."

Skousen spent the 1990s in semi-retirement. He spoke occasionally around the country and welcomed visiting politicians to his Salt Lake City home on Berkeley Street. His death in January 2006 was little noticed outside Mormon circles. If LDS members debated his legacy, it was in mostly hushed tones. But by then, he was already poised for a posthumous revival.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Glenn Beck's first public reference to anything Skousen seems to have occurred in 2003. In his memoir-cum-manifesto, "The Real America," was a chapter titled "The Enemy Within." It consisted of a list titled "Communist Goals of 1963." The list was originally published in Skousen's 1958 book "The Naked Communist," and was submitted to the Congressional Record by Florida Rep. Albert Herlong Jr., whom Beck identifies as the author. Beck asked readers of "The Real America" to ponder Skousen's list, then "check off" those goals already achieved by America's new enemies within. Replacing communists in Beck's view: "liberals, special-interest groups, [and] the ACLU."

It would be another few years before Beck really started boosting for Skousen's books. Apparently, around about 2007, a friend of Beck's sent him "The 5,000 Year Leap." In the column linked here, Canadian newspaper columnist Nigel Hannaford says the friend was a Toronto lawyer. Paul Skousen, Skousen's son, endorsed the outlines of the tale to Salon by e-mail, without giving dates: "As I understand it, Glenn Beck was given a copy of FYL by a friend in Canada. When Beck read it, suddenly the effusive and disembodied principles of freedom that he had been trying to dig up and put together all came together and he could make sense of them. He was so excited about the clarity it brought that he began mentioning it on his show."

Whatever the circumstances, Beck really began touting Skousen in the latter half of 2007. The first brief mention of Skousen in the online archives of Beck's radio show is Sept. 24, 2007. Less than two months later, Beck interviewed conservative pundit David Horowitz on his radio program. He asked him, "Have you ever read any Skousen? Have you read -- do you remember 'The Naked Communist'? I went back and reread that, it was printed in the 1950s. I reread that recently. You look at all the things the communists wanted to accomplish. It's all been done." Horowitz agreed.

The very next week, Bill Bennett appeared on Beck's radio program and received the same question. "Are you familiar with Skousen?" asked Beck. When Bennett replied yes, Beck gushed. "He's fantastic," he said. "I went back and I read 'The Naked Communist' and at the end of that Skousen predicted [that] someday soon you won't be able to find the truth in schools or in libraries or anywhere else because it won't be in print anymore. So you must collect those books. It's an idea I read from Cleon Skousen from his book in the 1950s, 'The Naked Communist,' and where he talked about someday the history of this country's going to be lost because it's going to be hijacked by intellectuals and communists and everything else. And I think we're there."

Beck continued to mention the book during 2008, but his Skousen obsession really kicked in as the 912 concept began to take shape. Even before Obama's inauguration, Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen at the center. On his Dec. 18, 2008, radio show, one month before Obama took office, Beck introduced his audience to the idea of a "September twelfth person."

"The first thing you could do," he said, "is get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' Over my book or anything else, get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. 'The 5,000 Year Leap' is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise … Make that dedication of becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year."

By then, the Skousen family was ready to respond to the Beck-inspired demand. "We as a family," Paul Skousen told Salon, "were preparing to publish another edition, so I contacted his office with the request that Glenn write a foreword. He was gracious and kind and did just that. That is the version we're now publishing.

According to James Pratt of PowerThink Publishing, publishers of the new 30th anniversary edition of "Leap," which has the Beck foreword, it was intended to replace the version that the Beck show was already touting via links on its Web site. Pratt claimed in an e-mail to Salon that the previous version was not authorized by the family. "It was presumed by Mr. Beck and staff that copyright authority was in effect with that edition, and as an author I must say, I had also assumed the same thing ... I was more than a little surprised this was going on, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of copies."

PowerThink secured the agreement of the Skousen family to create the current edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," which was first published on March 1, 2009. Pratt says that a federal lawsuit "is in process, to secure the copyright authority in an 'authoritative' way" to stop anyone but PowerThink from publishing the book.

In March, with the new book available, Beck invited Skousen's nephew Mark onto his Fox show, where the two men discussed splitting up the United States. (Mark would later say that between commercials, Beck told him that a friend had sent him "Leap" and that the book "changed his life.") A week later, Beck issued his famously maudlin announcement introducing the 912 Project. The teary-eyed performance was accompanied by a clarion call for all 912ers to buy " Leap." "I beg you to read this book filled with words of wisdom which I can only describe as divinely inspired," wrote Beck in his introduction to a recent edition. The result has been a publishing earthquake: More than 250,000 copies have been sold in the first half of 2009. James Pratt, the book's publisher, says Beck "has done more to bring the work of Dr. Skousen to light than any other individual in America today."

"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students [and is] the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

-- By Alexander Zaitchik

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/print.html

Why Is National Geographic Still Advertising with Glenn Beck?

2009-09-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

Also see: "Media War on 'Conspiracy Theorists': National Geographic Special Marginalizing 9/11 Truthers Brought to You by Rupert Murdoch and the CIA": " ... The National Geographic Channel ... is primarily controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. ... "

by SolveClimate Staff
Sep 15th, 2009

Fox News personality Glenn Beck has been on the radar of progressive groups for some time.

In August, the organization Color of Change organized a boycott of his show's advertisers after Beck, known for his incendiary comments, said on Fox News that he believed President Obama was a racist.

Beck has also used inflammatory rhetoric to advocate against the passage of clean energy legislation and to deny climate change, even hosting a 2-hour CNN special in 2007 on global warming, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, that was dominated by climate change doubters and deniers. I asked Karl Frisch, senior fellow with Media Matters for America, a long time Glenn Beck critic, to tell me a little about the history of Beck and environmental issues.

“I hate to use the word history with Glenn Beck because he gets history and science so completely wrong,” said Frisch. “Glenn Beck is one of the leading champions of science denying in the media today. He confuses climate for weather, he misrepresents scientific reports, he routinely hosts climate science deniers and he shows no shame about doing so.

"You have to put that in the proper context of a man that is so consumed with conspiracy theories and malicious style rhetoric that this would be expected. His climate science denial is just an extension of his paranoia that everyone is out to get him and take away his liberty and freedom.”

Still, Beck was mostly just another irritant to the climate activist community — until recently.

This summer, Beck took to the airwaves levying charges of racism and communism against Van Jones, the green jobs advisor with the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Beck also lambasted Jones for signing a petition of the 9/11 Truth Commission. Jones, in addition to being a Yale graduate and a best selling author on the green collar economy, was the co-founder of Color of Change (though he hadn’t been part of the organization since 2007 and was not involved in the recent campaign against Beck) and co-founder of the environmental justice organization Green for All.

After several weeks of attacks by Beck and others, which some think were masterminded by the anti-green jobs group Americans for Prosperity, Jones resigned his White Houses position over Labor Day weekend, bringing environmentalists fully into the fight against Beck and Fox News as his benefactor.

According to Color of Change, since the boycott began, Beck has lost more than 60 advertisers and half the show’s ad revenue along with it, representing $568,000 per week in lost revenue for Fox.

“Companies that have recognizable brands, it’s hard for them not to be accountable at the end of the day to the people who buy their products and services,” says James Rucker, executive director of Color of Change. “Consumers can get advertisers to do what they should do on their own.”

But there remains a list of stalwart supporters that have stuck with Beck. One advertiser in particular is galling to some in the environmental movement: The National Geographic Channel.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, is a 50% owner in the National Geographic Channel, so the affiliation makes sense from that perspective, but the other 50% owner, National Geographic Society, is considered a sacred brand by many in the environmental community. In fact, the organization, founded in 1888, states that one of its missions is “Inspiring people to care about the planet”.

The National Geographic Society opted not to give any statement regarding the association between its brand and Beck. But Russell Howard, senior vice president of communications for the National Geographic Channel, sent a statement — similar to one sent to Color of Change — about the channel's advertising choices. Howard would not disclose whether the channel felt any pressure from Color of Change or others to remove its advertising from Beck’s show, though it has twice told Color of Change that it will not do so:

"National Geographic Channel’s advertising messages appear on a cross section of cable and broadcast networks, as determined by various marketing analytics and budgetary considerations. Some ad placements are on networks specifically selected by NGC and others are part of a larger placement that is not network specific or controlled by NGC. Regardless of the mechanics of the ad placement, inclusion or absence of an advertising message should never be construed as a reflection, validation or criticism by NGC of the network’s or specific program’s content."

Morgan Goodwin, of itsgettinghotinhere.org and cofounder of GlennMcCarthyBeck.com doesn’t agree. He believes that the National Geographic brand and others are being compromised by the association with Beck.

“I think Fox's name brand is being tarnished by Beck's slander,” says Goodwin. “He can say whatever he wants, because this is America, but it looks really bad when Fox and the companies that advertise on his show are making money off of [him]. National Geographic Channel is hiding behind its close connection to Rupert Murdoch as an excuse for having their ads air on Beck's show, but there's no excuse for that from a decent organization.”

Frisch agrees, saying that National Geographic’s association with News Corp, and the advertising on Beck’s show that it gets as a result, are all the more reason to pull the ads.

“Everything has a price,” says Frisch. “For National Geographic Channel, it’s their credibility."

http://solveclimate.com/blog/20090915/why-national-geographic-still-advertising-glenn-beck

Los Angeles: Group challenging KPFK 'racist purge, gag rule' demands voice for voiceless

2009-09-15T22:29:00.000-07:00

Deborah Dupre'
Examiner
September 16, 2009

Addressing KPFK community radio station alleged institutional racism, Saturday night the Ad Hoc Committee for KPFK Community Radio gathered over 100 supporters in Los Angeles to learn and plan to transform the station to its original democratic purpose, giving voice to the voiceless.

Civil Liberty defines the term 'institutional racism' as “societal patterns that have the net effect of imposing oppressive or otherwise negative conditions against identifiable groups on the basis of race or ethnicity.”

Leslie Radford, Dedon Kamathi and Michael Novick were among noted Los Angeles human rights advocates who coordinated the gathering that some in attendance characterised as historic. The electrifying speaker, Tim Wise plus noted humanitarians Jerry Quigley and Don DeBar flew from NY to attend.

Take Back KPFK led the program’s first session, dedicating it to its endorsed candidates for the upcoming station board election. Dedon Kamathi topped the list.

KPFK Board reportedly eliminated persons of color candidates, upon claim of insufficient nominating signatures. Kamathi reported having twenty nomination votes. The board requires ten.

Kamathi is a former member of SDS and the Black Panthers, two Cointelpro target groups, according to the Church committee counterintelligence investigation congressional records.

The endorsed candidates’ two-minute speech platforms centered on returning the station to local democratisation through practises such as: local programming and self-determination; stronger youth participation; real fiscal accountability, including accountability from management to listeners; live on-the-street broadcasting; and focus on the increasing criminalization of communities of color in Los Angeles.*

“Tim Wise of Los Angeles,” Mike Novak spoke about the “revolutionary struggle against the empire,” reminding that Cointelpro targeted minorities and anti-white imperialists. Novak likened the empire’s neutralization of minorities to a “vampire with bulimia.”

Jerry Quigley, former employee of Pacifica, presented his experiences as a targeted individual of workplace bullying - or mobbing, a crime in some countries. Quigley won some of the highest KPFK ratings, yet was dismissed from the job, he said, due to a one time “clean air policy violation” while another – white - broadcaster repeatedly violated, and continues to violate, this policy with immunity.

Bernard White, the recently banned and fired program director of Pacifica’s New York station WBAI, highlighted a claim by station board member Steve Brown that Boulder, Colorado-based radio station KGNU enjoyed an advantage over WBAI in terms of fund-raising based on KGNU not having to manage the “distraction” of racial diversity.

A person of color in position of human resources director dismissed White from his position, later admitting that he was just following orders from Pacifica’s new management.

Keynote speaker, Tim Wise gave a presentation entitled, Progressive Left Media and Institutional Racism II. Aside from exposing trends of progressive media exhibiting racist decision making, he addressed racism as a national issue needing attention.

Wise encouraged peace and environmental movement members to stop blaming oil as sole cause of the wars. The nation needs to acknowledge the underlying cause for war: a white privilege racist mentality that justifies stealing from other countries populated by people of color, and using mainly Americans of color to sacrifice their lives for the immorality, asserted Wise.

Leslie Radford listed documented racist code words, heavy-handed bullying incidents, and racist dual standards employed by KPFK since the 1970’s with immunity. Radford highlighted that today’s racist code words are that more whites are needed on the board “because the station needs more money.”

Event attendees voiced agreement with Mark Karlin’s Buzzflash editorial today in that, “Appeasement will not work with the corporatists and their racist pawns.”

“The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in becoming Civil Rights Laws because blacks and whites of good will and dreamers of equality put themselves physically on the line to move the nation into action. It wasn't a victory of Democrats… or Republicans... It was a victory of mass mobilization, protest and outrage,” states Karlin

Likewise, the Ad Hoc KPFK group calls on black and whites of good will to stand with them in defending rights and community radio station values and principles.

According to the world's largest resource to end bullying, Bully Online: Racism is a form of bullying; no bully stops on his or her own; all bullies depend on people doing nothing to stop them; and to do nothing is to support the bully.

http://www.examiner.com/x-10438-Peace-Studies-Examiner~y2009m9d16-Group-challenging-KPFK-over-racist-purge-gag-rule-demands-voice-for-voiceless

Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Media Beats The War Drums For Afghanistan

2009-09-08T16:15:00.000-07:00

By Melvin A. Goodman
The Public Record
Sep 8th, 2009

President Barack Obama is currently facing the most two important decisions of his young presidency. On Wednesday, we will learn whether he has the intestinal fortitude to fight for real change in reforming the nation’s health care system.

And later this month, we will learn whether he will commit more young men and women to a losing battle in Afghanistan, which is rapidly becoming President Obama’s briar patch. Meanwhile, nothing has changed at home, where the armchair warriors of the mainstream media are campaigning for more troops and a greater commitment to “winning.”

Sadly, nothing has changed in Afghanistan, where Afghan civilians are being killed in NATO bombing raids that continue to demonstrate a cavalier attitude toward protecting the innocent from U.S. fighter planes. And yesterday we learned that U.S. soldiers stormed through an Afghan hospital, searching for wounded Taliban fighters and tying up hospital staff and visitors.

We were led to believe several months ago that the change in U.S. commanders in Afghanistan was due primarily to making sure our military power more responsibly and to avoid “collateral damage” in order to “win hearts and minds.”

The late Supreme Court justice Hugo Black believed that “paramount among the responsibilities of a free press was the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shots and shells.” Seven years ago, however, many elements of the mainstream media helped build a consensus for war against Iraq based on falsified intelligence and devious claims about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to terrorism.

The day after Secretary of State Colin Powell’s calumnious speech to the United Nations making the case for war, the editorial and oped writers of the Washington Post seconded the motion and called for immediate military action. Even the most liberal Post writer, the late Mary McGrory, wrote an oped titled “I’m Persuaded,” which failed to analyze the dubious claims put forth by Powell’s speechwriters at the Central Intelligence Agency, led by CIA Director George Tenet and deputy director John McLaughlin.

Once again, the editorial and oped writers of the Post are making the case for an expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Armchair warriors such as Richard Cohen and Anne Applebaum in Tuesday’s Post as well as David Ignatius and Michael Gerson in recent weeks have made their pitches for war. Cohen, who is neither a student of national security nor foreign policy and regularly beat the war drums for Iraq, makes the simplest and most simple-minded argument in an oped titled “Eight Years Later and Still No Revenge.” ...

CONTINUED: http://pubrecord.org/commentary/4847/deja-again-media-beats-drums/

Trader Joe's Wants LaRouche PAC Barred

2009-09-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

By ELIZABETH BANICKI
Courthouse News Service
September 04, 2009

LOS ANGELES (CN) - Trader Joe's wants Lyndon LaRouche's Political Action Committee enjoined from protesting outside its stores. The company claims LaRouche acolytes have harassed customers outside 60 of its California stores while protesting health-care reform, calling Trader Joe's patrons "Bitches" and "Hitler Lovers."

The LaRouche committee has staged dozens of protests nears Trader Joe's entrance and exit doors, of which there are usually only two, the grocer claims in Superior Count. It says LaRouche's members display pictures of Obama with a Hitler-style moustache and of Obama Photoshopped next to Hitler.

"At the Trader Joe's in Irvine, the LaRouche Activists wore swastikas, which brought some customers to tears," according to the complaint.

Tension between activists and customers nearly led to a fistfight outside one store, and in screaming matches have forced police to be called to remove the activists, driving customers away, the complaint states.

Trader Joe's says it has been bombarded with complaints from people saying they will not shop at the stores until the LaRouche people are gone.

Trader Joe's has a "No Solicitation" policy.

However, a spokesman for the LaRouche PAC said, "It is a fairly significant First Amendment issue" that boils down to "what is a free-standing store under California Constitution?"

Trader Joe's has stores in free-standing buildings in Santa Barbara, Eagle Rock and Pasadena. The rest are in small neighborhood or community shopping centers.

Trader Joe's seeks damages for trespass, declaratory relief, and a restraining order and injunction. It is represented by Jennifer Laser with O'Melveny & Myers.

http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/09/04/Trader_Joe_s_Wants_LaRouche_PAC_Barred.htm

CIA Torture: Who are Broderian Anti-Investigation Journalists really Protecting?

2009-09-07T21:47:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald
Salon
Sept. 3, 2009

David Broder

In one of the most drearily predictable media developments ever, David Broder today -- yet again -- joins in with an endless string of establishment pundits to demand that there be no investigations by the DOJ of war crimes and other felonies committed by the Bush administration. The one silver lining from all of this is that it has clarified a crucial political fact: most establishment "journalists" don't believe in the rule of law for political elites -- period. They believe high political officials should be able to break the law -- commit felonies -- and be immunized from legal consequences. To any reasonable observer, that is simply no longer in doubt. Opposition to investigations -- especially for the real culprits as opposed to low-level interrogators -- is as close to a unanimous media view as something can be (though the NYT Editorial Board today, standing virtually alone, calls for full criminal investigations, including of high-level Bush officials).

Broder claims he "agree[s] on the importance of accountability for illegal acts and for serious breaches of trust by government officials -- even at the highest levels." As examples of this "agreement," he cites this: "I had no problem with the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and I called for Bill Clinton to resign when he lied to his Cabinet colleagues and to the country during the Monica Lewinsky scandal." But he then goes on to boast that he supported Ford's pardon of Nixon. He thought the prosecution of Lewis Libby was "silliness." He simply believes that "the rule of law" is only for ordinary Americans, not for powerful political officials who commit felonies -- and in that, he's completely typical of the Beltway mindset. It's not an accident that he's the Dean of Washington Journalism; he is a perfect embodiment of that culture.

That media elites -- ostensibly devoted to accountability for the powerful -- fulfill the exact opposite role by demanding immunity for their lawbreaking is why elite lawlessness is so rampant. But that's well-established by now, so I want to focus on another point raised by this Broderian opposition: a completely self-serving falsehood that lies at the core of the debate over investigations. The standard claim made by investigation opponents in the media is that we all know that torture is abhorrent and that what was done is terribly wrong, but that prosecutions would just be too disruptive. Broder asks: "Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock? . . . The cost to the country would simply be too great."

But it's simply not true that these journalists vehemently objected to torture as abhorrent but now merely believe prosecutions are an over-reaction. The reality is that they did not object to the torture regime as it was implemented. They did the opposite: they mocked those who objected to it and who tried to stop it as overheated, hysterical, fringe leftists -- as Broder did in a November, 2004 Op-Ed, deriding as "unhinged" those who were arguing "that 'the forces of darkness' are taking over the country." ...

CONTINUED: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/03/accountability/

Melissa Scott, Porn Star Turned Televangelist

2009-09-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

Video: Glenn Beck Finds "Communist" Art At NBC Headquarters At Rockefeller Center

2009-09-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

Video: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/02/glenn-beck-finds-communis_n_275915.html

Posted: 09- 2-09

If you thought Glenn Beck's conspiracy theories couldn't get any more bizarre, you obviously don't watch that much Glenn Beck. This time Beck is taking shots at the titan of American capitalism, John Rockefeller, accusing him of having been a secret communist. Beck knows this to be true because he has discovered all sorts of "communist" and "fascist" art on NBC headquarters at Rockefeller Center, as well as on land behind the United Nations that was donated by Rockefeller.

Trying to discern Beck's ultimate point from this is difficult but I believe it's something like: Rockefeller was an early American progressive, which actually means he was a communist, and they have connections to the fascists. And we know this because Rockefeller left clues to his true legacy with these communist art pieces which are hidden in plain sight, and since we have people in our own time who call themselves progressives they must actually be communists (possibly fascists?). ...

Fox's Doocy Parrots Heritage Talking Points, Claims They Came "From a Friend"

2009-09-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

August 12, 2009

On August 12, Steve Doocy cited five "really hard" health care questions to ask elected officials at town hall meetings, which he said he received "from one of [his] friends." All of Doocy's questions, however, are virtually identical to the "five questions Americans should be pressing their elected leaders on" posted on the conservative Heritage Foundation's blog. ...

CONTINUED: http://mediamatters.org/research/200908120016

MSNBC Pulls Buchanan Column Sympathetic to Hitler

2009-09-04T17:47:00.000-07:00

By Alex Koppelman
Salon
Sept. 3, 2009

Pat Buchanan has often posed something of a problem for MSNBC. He's a frequent contributor on the network, and he does, after all, have a long history of extremely controversial positions, like writing of AIDS in the early 1980's, "The poor homosexuals -- They have declared war against nature, and nature is exacting an awful retribution."

For the most part, though, MSNBC has looked the other way when it comes to Buchanan. A column he wrote in which he appears pretty sympathetic to Adolf Hitler, though, might have been the last straw -- at least for MSNBC.com.

In the piece, which was reprinted on MSNBC.com and caused a fair amount of controversy, Buchanan wrote:

[I]f Hitler was out to conquer the world ... Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?

Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell? ....

Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps ....

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Winston Churchill was right when he called it “The Unnecessary War” — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.

The column has now been removed from MSNBC's Web site. A spokesperson gave Politico an explanatory statement that says, "An editorial decision was made to remove the column from msnbc.com. Pat is a contributor to MSNBC, his syndicated column does not speak for the network or represent the views of MSNBC."

Eleven More Companies Ditch Glenn Beck

2009-09-04T06:57:00.000-07:00

Eleven new companies whose ads were recently seen during Beck's program--Binder & Binder, Capital One, The Dannon Company, Discover, HSBC, ICAN Benefit Group Insurance, Infiniti, Jelmar (manufacturer of CLR All-Purpose Cleaner), Jordan McKenna Debt Counseling Network, Mercedes-Benz and Simplex Healthcare (creator of the Diabetes Care Club) --have pledged to ColorOfChange.org to take steps to ensure that their ads don't run on Beck's show. Fifty-seven companies have now committed not to support Beck's show since ColorOfChange.org launched its campaign four weeks ago after the Fox News Channel host called President Obama a "racist" who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" during an appearance on Fox & Friends.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-rucker/eleven-more-companies-dit_b_275756.html

Press release - http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhcd7gb3_6f98bsvc4

Diane Sawyer's Apostolic Passion for Richard Nixon

2009-09-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

Edited by Alex Constantine

Sawyer and the Nixon Administration

"Prior to joining CBS News, Sawyer held several positions in the Nixon administration. She was part of the Nixon-Ford transition team from 1974 to 1975. She also assisted former President Nixon in the writing of his memoirs in 1974 and 1975. ... "

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/story?id=128165

Sawyer Still Admires Nixon

" ... After several years, Sawyer left her television employment for government service. She joined the Nixon White House on the staff of press secretary Ron Ziegler, working as a press aide from 1970 until Nixon was forced to step down in 1974. Even after the resignation, Sawyer stayed on and helped the unindicted co-conspirator assemble his memoirs on his compound in San Clemente, California. Rumors abound of physical intimacy with Nixon (who she still admires to this day) ... "

http://www.nndb.com/people/698/000024626/

Passion

For four years she had worked with Richard M. Nixon in post-Watergate exile, a faithful spin doctor collaborating on RN, a fairy tale of a memoir at San Clemente, Nixon's Elba on the beaches of La-La Land.

"I fell into the most seductive trap that awaits every one of us," explained Sawyer, "which is the fiction of one's indispensability.... I was being loyal and noble. They're among my worst faults."

A painful silence settled over the room. We could hear phones ringing in the background.

"Oh, Fred, you'd have done the same thing. How could you not."

"I'd have told Tricky Dick to go piss up a rope."

Even in the fifteen years since he was run out of town, Nixon had dogged my paranoid dream life, the president of my nightmares.

"What exactly did I do?" She never sounded more wounded, more vulnerable, more breathtakingly naive.

"You were seduced by hanging out and rubbing shoulders with those people. I don't think if I were head of a news division that I would have hired you after all that."

"I don't know that I would have, either. I was conflicted. It was a very tricky straddle."

More than anything, it is absolutely essential to the health of Diane Sawyer's psyche that she never be reduced to anything as unseemly as saying, "Okay hotshot, I blew it." It is essential because Diane Sawyer, along with the rest of her TV colleagues, those glowing stars in our pedestrian firmaments, is creating her own biography, her own version of herself. Equable is the watchword here. Her life must at all costs be as poised and calm as her beauty is blond and cool, and she cannot afford to have a picky, picky, picky ding-a-ling like me disrupt the serenity, the gentleness of the pond by throwing meanspirited little pebbles into it. Sawyer's nonautobiography will, of course, one day head the best seller list for ten years, the only anomaly being that in lieu of heading up the nonfiction it would find a more appropriate home topping off the other column. If one wanted to be unkind, one might say it'll be not unlike the nonbook Sawyer wasted four years of life helping to create for Nixon. As, indeed, her inability to say I blew it might also have been learned at the feet of the master. And what fascinating feet they evidently were.

"...You are constantly chasing Nixon around corners trying to find out who he is," she said. "I wanted to know more about him.... His public life is too long and too blistering for you ever to go back and retrieve the private man. There's too much. When it works, it's a natural dual personality [the public and the private man] with politicians. Some of them, you can figure out who they really are. The ones like him — highly intelligent, almost congenitally embattled, and wary to the point of extreme elusiveness — are a lifetime's work of trying to diagnose.... Part of what keeps him such a living presence, think how long, when you are switching the television screen, you see him there, you stop, and you continue to stop, and I don't believe that even you continue to switch when you see him come on.... Think how long, in an age when people get used up really fast, and use themselves up really fast, when it takes very little to parch a person's life, and their life history, to dry them out, he stays riveting. And that in itself is an accomplishment of some phenomenal and mysterious kind.... Any of the people who find it inexplicable [Sawyer's loyalty to Nixon] I bet would have done the same thing, standing there seeing a man on that day [Nixon's impeachment day], with the destruction all around him, however self-created, would have done the same thing...

"Everybody talks about his awkwardness with social talk. Not only is he not awkward when he gets into substance, he weaves magic in a room.... It used to be one of the rare amusements in San Clemente to see people come in who held no brief for him, who were firmly defended by their political and personal preconceptions, and watch how long it took for their mouths to drop open. It usually took somewhere between three and four minutes, and then they were captive. And it happened over and over again...."

All this has been delivered with an apostolic fervor, so that when Sawyer finishes I simply sit there stunned and limp, in many ways more limp than an orgasm has ever left me. Because I admire

http://www.esquire.com/features/diane-sawyer-affair-090209

Wiki Biography

Sawyer was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, the daughter of Jean W. (née Dunagan), an elementary school teacher, and Erbon Powers "Tom" Sawyer, a judge.[2] Soon after her birth, her family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where her father rose to local prominence as a Republican politician and community leader; he was the Jefferson County Judge/Executive when he was killed in a car accident on Louisville's Interstate 64 in 1969. E. P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park, located in the Frey's Hill area of Louisville, is named in his honor.

Sawyer attended Seneca High School in the Buechel area of Louisville. In 1963, she won the "America's Junior Miss" scholarship pageant as a representative from the State of Kentucky, and in 1967, she received a degree in English from Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

She attended one semester of law school at the University of Louisville before turning to journalism.

On April 29, 1988, she and Mike Nichols, a film director, were married; they have no children. Nichols has Daisy (born 1974), Max (born 1964), and Jenny (born 1977) from his three previous marriages. Sawyer had previously had relationships with Frank Gannon, aide to President Richard Nixon, and U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke.

Sawyer served as a local TV news reporter and weather girl for WLKY-TV in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1970, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler hired her to serve in the administration of President Nixon. Sawyer stayed on through his resignation in 1974 and worked on the Nixon-Ford transition team in 1974-75, after which she decamped with Nixon to California and helped him write his memoirs, published in 1978. She also helped prepare Nixon for his famous set of television interviews with journalist David Frost in 1977.[4] Years later, Sawyer would be suspected to be Deep Throat, the source of leaks of classified information to Bob Woodward during the Watergate scandal. In 2005 Deep Throat was identified as W. Mark Felt but prior to that, Rabbi Baruch Korff, a longtime Nixon confidant and defender known as "Nixon's rabbi," said on his deathbed that he believed Sawyer was Deep Throat. Sawyer laughed it off, and she was one of six people to request and receive a public denial from Woodward.

In 1978, Sawyer joined CBS as a political correspondent and became a co-anchor, with Bill Kurtis, of the CBS Morning News in 1981. In 1984, she became a correspondent for 60 Minutes, where she remained for five years.

In 1989, she moved to ABC to co-anchor Primetime Live with Sam Donaldson. From 1998-2000, she would become a co-anchor for ABC's 20/20, co-anchoring on Wednesdays with Donaldson and on Sundays with Barbara Walters.

In 1999, Sawyer returned to morning news, under a lucrative contract, as the co-anchor of Good Morning America, with Charles Gibson. The assignment was putatively temporary, but her success in the position, measured by a close in the gap with front-runner The Today Show on NBC, has kept her in the position far longer than anticipated.

On September 2, 2009, she was announced as the replacement for Charles Gibson, who is retiring as ABC's World News anchor. She will become the anchor in January 2010 and will be leaving Good Morning America. Along with Katie Couric, this means two of the three leading anchors will be women.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Sawyer
****
Contemporary Spin Doctor: Diane Sawyer Interview Allows Ann Coulter To Assert New Credibility For ‘McCarthyism’

There is No Such Thing as "Liberal Fascism"

2009-09-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

By Gary G. Kohls, MD
Online Journal
Sep 2, 2009, 00:24

Recent letters to the Duluth News-Tribune editor have accused earlier letter writers of not knowing their history. The letter writer of August 19 also alluded to a book entitled Liberal Fascism, which is one of the recent American right-wing Rovian/Limbaughesque efforts to distract attention from the legitimate, obvious and overwhelming similarities between the far right-wing politics of the current Republican Party and the far right-wing politics of World II-era Italy and Germany (and Japan, for that matter). That letter-writer needs to go back to the history books himself and learn about the history of European fascism -- which is very good advice for the rest of us as well.

Fascism, in the various definitions outlined in reputable textbooks, encyclopedias and dictionaries is a right-wing (not left-wing!) ideology of negativism which attempts to destroy liberalism, socialism, communism, true democracy, egalitarianism and labor unionism. It also tends to be ultra-nationalist, racist, sexist, corporatist and militarist.

As a political and economic system in Mussolini’s Italy, fascism combined elements of corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism and anti-communism.

In Hitler’s Germany, political and economic fascism was welcomed by the big money corporate interests that were afraid of the power of the trade union movement. German fascism (Nazism) spawned thuggery, street fighting (the infamous Brownshirts and SA) and routinely disrupted, by intimidating and shouting down their anti-fascist opponents, any attempt at open-minded public discourse. Election fraud was rampant and there was an obsession with national security issues.

Two good places to start learning the forgotten history of fascism are with Dr. Laurence Britt’s 14 points of fascism found at here and with more at Wikipedia.

German Nazis literally smashed leftist printing presses (and got away with it, with the right-wing Gestapo looking the other way) and had anti-fascist activists (such as poets, artists, authors, union activists and assorted nonviolent resisters -- many of whom were Jewish) arrested, imprisoned, tortured and often executed. The Nazi Brownshirts shouted down liberal legislators in the Reichstag (before beating them, imprisoning them and burning down the building).

They used total press censorship as part of a powerful and extensive network of right-wing propaganda machinery, with ultimately total control of Germany’s mainstream media and the outlawing of any alternative press.

Nazism was totalitarian, ultra-nationalistic, militaristic, anti-Semitic, racist and it unashamedly tortured members of its opposition. Alarmingly, it also co-opted German Christianity and turned it into a punitive, pro-violent, virulently anti-Semitic religion (with swastikas hanging from many pulpits) which then obediently went along with Hitler’s military recruitment efforts, concentration camps and the brutal invasion and occupation of sovereign nations.

Fascists like Hitler and his Big Business backers hated liberals, socialists and the left-wing workers’ rights movement, and they successfully broke the unions just in time for Hitler’s war industry boom that ultimately resulted in full (though not well-paid) employment and Germany’s overwhelmingly powerful military machine.

The use of the words “socialist” and “workers” in the name of Hitler’s political party (National Socialist German Worker’s Party [NSDAP] from which the term Nazi was derived) was a token concession to the leftist inclinations of voters such as poor farmers, the under-employed and poorly paid workers and the many impoverished people who had suffered so much under the hyperinflation, joblessness and hunger resulting from the German militarists’ gamble that started, and then lost, World War I. The use of those two words turned out to be a cruel joke that has confused many who haven’t taken the time to learn the sobering facts of world history, especially the history of European fascism.

Though Hitler is dead, his spirit seems to be alive and well. Fascism is, by definition, an extension of far right-wing politics and economics.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

Fascism is a right-wing, anti-liberal ideology and should be recognized as such.

There is no such thing as liberal fascism.

Dr. Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, a member of Veterans for Peace, a peace and justice activist, and opposes fascism in all its variations.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5081.shtml

America's Neo-Fascism

2009-09-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

" ... Fascism was triumphantly anti-liberal. ... "

By Jon Taplin - tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com - August 19, 2009

I had an epiphany this afternoon. I was watching Chris Matthews and this spokesperson for the Gun Owners of America was on. He defended all the people bringing Semi Automatic rifles to Obama events. So Matthews asked him, "Do you think people should be able to bring a loaded gun and sit in the first row of a President Obama event. And the gun owners flack says --"Yes."

My epiphany was :"Wow! There is a real American Neo-Fascist Movement abroad."

My disbelief came on top of the epiphany about the woman yesterday who was comparing Obama to Hitler. She has not a semester of history in her brain. That's why Barney said she was like arguing with a coffee table. Thats what I feel sometimes about some of our correspondents. Here's some real history, by the twentieth century's last great living historian Eric Hobsbwam.

"Fascism was triumphantly anti-liberal. It also provided the proof that man can, without difficulty, combine crack-brained beliefs about the world with a confident mastery of contemporary high technology.... Nevertheless, the combination of conservative values, the techniques of mass democracy, and an innovative ideology of irrationalist savagery, essentially centered in nationalism, must be explained.... The strong commitment of the Left, from the liberal onwards, to anti-war movements, the huge popular revulsion against the mass killings of the First World War, led many to underestimate the emergence of a relatively small, but absolutely numerous, minority for whom uniform and discipline, sacrifice-of self and others- and blood arms and power were what made masculine life worth living. These Rambos of their time were natural recruits for the Radical Right." ...

Continued: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/08/19/americas_neo_fascism/?ref=c2

TV Show Hires Ex-President Bush's Daughter

2009-08-31T12:45:00.000-07:00

By REUTERS
Published: August 31, 2009

Jenna Bush Hager

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former President George W. Bush's daughter, Jenna Bush Hager, is set to become a correspondent for the U.S. television news and talk show "Today."

NBC, which airs "Today" weekday mornings, said on Monday it had hired Hager, 27, to be a contributing correspondent starting September 14.

"In previous appearances, she displayed a natural ability to communicate and connect," Jim Bell, the show's executive producer, said in a statement. "She has great passion about important subjects, especially education and literacy."

Hager started teaching schoolchildren in Washington in 2005 and has served as an intern for UNICEF, touring Latin America and the Caribbean to document the plight of impoverished children.

She currently is the Young Leadership Ambassador & Chair for UNICEF's Next Generation committee.

Hager has written two books that made The New York Times bestsellers list, "Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope," the true story of a 17-year-old mother in Latin America who has HIV, and "Read All About It!," a picture book co-written with her mother, former first lady Laura Bush.

Hager also has written stories for The New York Times and CosmoGIRL! magazine. She graduated from the University of Texas in 2004.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/08/31/arts/entertainment-us-bush.html

Is Rupert Murdoch Stupid?

2009-08-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

Fox News hosts have been calling out the dogs of war. Does Rupert Murdoch think the network won't be held accountable in the event of political violence?

Excerpt: By Francis Wilkinson
The Week
August 15, 2009

I am looking at an ABC News headline: Fear for Obama's Safety Grows as Hate Groups Thrive on Racial Backlash. It cites a guy in Maryland carrying a "Death to Obama, Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids" sign. It cites the standoff in Los Angeles between police, Secret Service agents, and a suspect who had allegedly made threats against the White House. It cites Rush Limbaugh.

The story does not cite Glenn Beck. But you can bet that if shots ever ring out, Beck will not escape scrutiny. ...

Instead of simply feeding the furnace to keep things hot, Murdoch seems to have given matches to the kids and sent them upstairs to play. With each passing day, more smoke rises from the rafters as the boys set fire to ever larger sections of the attic.

Casual incitements to violence were once the portfolio of the radical Left on American campuses and the streets. They now appear to be the job description of select Fox News personalities. (Read David Frum here for a partial inventory.)

Alienated men enamored of firearms and drunk on cheap rhetoric sometimes do unsurprising things with terrible consequences. If the worst—or merely the awful—were to happen, where does Murdoch think the bulk of the blame would fall? On George Will?

A liberal cottage industry now exists to keep track of every utterance of Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck. O'Reilly's relentless attacks on abortion doctor George Tiller, subsequently murdered by a zealot, have already generated condemnation. But Tiller's murder barely rose to the level of a national event—and O'Reilly is the responsible one of the trio.

If 100,000 petitioners can respond to Beck's racial theories with an effective advertiser boycott, how would 69 million Obama voters respond in the event of actual political violence? Does Murdoch really think his network wouldn't be blamed? Does he think his advertisers wouldn't notice that a sizable portion of the nation held Fox News accountable?

instead of simply feeding the furnace to keep things hot, Murdoch seems to have given matches to the kids and sent them upstairs to play. With each passing day, more smoke rises from the rafters as the boys set fire to ever larger sections of the attic.

Casual incitements to violence were once the portfolio of the radical Left on American campuses and the streets. They now appear to be the job description of select Fox News personalities. (Read David Frum here for a partial inventory.)

Alienated men enamored of firearms and drunk on cheap rhetoric sometimes do unsurprising things with terrible consequences. If the worst—or merely the awful—were to happen, where does Murdoch think the bulk of the blame would fall? On George Will?

A liberal cottage industry now exists to keep track of every utterance of Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck. O'Reilly's relentless attacks on abortion doctor George Tiller, subsequently murdered by a zealot, have already generated condemnation. But Tiller's murder barely rose to the level of a national event—and O'Reilly is the responsible one of the trio.

If 100,000 petitioners can respond to Beck's racial theories with an effective advertiser boycott, how would 69 million Obama voters respond in the event of actual political violence? Does Murdoch really think his network wouldn't be blamed? Does he think his advertisers wouldn't notice that a sizable portion of the nation held Fox News accountable?

http://www.theweek.com/bullpen/column/99619/Is_Rupert_Murdoch_stupid

Son of Doocy

2009-08-30T12:54:00.000-07:00

FOXNews Steve Doocy's Mini-Me Shows Up On Hardball To Blast Hillary; Party With McCain
By Nicole Belle
crooksandliars.com
Apr 15, 2008

A saboteur! Peter Doocy, who is apparently the son of FOXNews' Steve Doocy of FOX & Friends, was one of a handful of students invited to ask a question of John McCain on MSNBC's Hardball, which broadcasted from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Why a producer didn't say, "Hmmm...Doocy? Any relationship to the Steve Doocy on a rival network?", I just can't say. But the Mini-Doocy doesn't fall far from the tree, and Peter asked a question that would no doubt get him a gig working with Dad (or Drudge. C'mon Pete, aim high!) when he graduates.

"Hi, Senator McCain. My name is Peter Doocy, I’m a junior here. And I’m sure that you saw your…one of your Democratic opponents, Hillary Clinton, recently drinking whiskey shots with some potential voters. Now I was wondering if you think she’s finally resorted to hittin’ the sauce, just because of some unfavorable polling? And I was also wondering if you’d care to join me for a shot after this?"

Ah....little Petey has heard about the famous McCain media courting parties that has enabled to McCain to get away with so much and is ready to get in on the action. Someone must have told him the BBQ ribs were really good.

What's even sadder than this abomination of airtime is McCain's strange and rambling response. Please, someone explain to me why someone more than 50 years past his high school days is still harkening back to his high school athletic career?

http://crooksandliars.com/2008/04/16/foxnews-steve-doocys-mini-me-shows-up-on-hardball-to-blast-hillary-party-with-mccain#comment-535548

The New Republic: Party On The GOP Crazy Train

2009-08-29T21:35:00.000-07:00

by Jonathan Chait
August 24, 2009

I had an unusual thought not long ago while I watched a video clip of a screaming man at a town hall accusing John Dingell of effectively planning the murder of his disabled son. As I watched, the idea struck me that it was legitimately impossible to determine if the man was crazy merely in the political sense—as in, hoo boy, Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy ideas sure are crazy—or crazy in the more literal sense of a person whose mental health issues render him frequently unable to function. It was a total jump ball which kind of crazy he was. The two senses of the word had finally merged.

Genuinely curious, I watched the man—Mike Sola of Milan, Michigan—give a television interview. Sola accused Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer of having sent thugs to his home in the middle of the night and threatened to personally use "lethal force" on the next wee-hour thug home invasion. How awful, I thought. Fox News is exploiting a mentally ill man.

But then I learned that Sola came to his deranged fear by traditional, ideological venues. He had read an op-ed in the New York Post by Betsy McCaughey, the right-wing fabulist, who falsely claimed that the House health care bill would require patients to attend end-of-life counseling. Reports of this had spread throughout the conservative media, mutated into even wilder fears of government euthanizing the old and sick, and presumably lodged themselves into Sola's apparently sane (by traditional medical standards) head.

What we are witnessing is the convergence of the mainstream Republican culture with the right-wing political subculture. Last year, the two remained clearly distinct. During the presidential election last fall, angry people began showing up at John McCain's rallies, screaming out various lunatic conspiracy theories. McCain reacted to these supporters with discomfort or puzzlement. Here he was accusing Obama of massive tax hikes or palling around with Bill Ayers, and attendees at his rallies were shouting about Obama being an Arab or plotting to destroy the country. McCain would squint his face as if to wonder, "What are these people talking about?"

Now, mainstream Republican leaders are reading from the same hymnal. You don't need to rely on poorly written, all-capital-letter e-mails for your lunatic conspiracy theories. You can get them straight from the GOP and its message organs. ...

CONTINUED: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112167444

The Washington Post's Support For Torture

2009-08-29T13:21:00.000-07:00

by Andrew
Atlantic Blog
29 Aug 2009

In the latest release from those in the Bush administration and CIA who authorized and supported America's torture of prisoners of war, we get the following story today in the Washington Post. It details that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed gave up a wealth of information in the period after he was tortured by Cheney and Bush via the CIA. It does not and cannot prove that his information could not have been procured by legal or ethical interrogation methods. But what is interesting to me is the Washington Post's editorial and institutional position in favor of not calling waterboarding and sleep deprivation what they have always been called in every court of law and every society including the US in recent times: torture. They refuse to use the word "torture" for an act that is memorialized in Cambodia's museum of torture. That's how deeply the Washington Post is enmeshed in the pro-torture forces in Washington. The refusal to use this word is a clear, political act by the Post in defense of the Bush administration's torture and abuse policies. It places the Washington Post as an adjunct to the Bush-Cheney policy of torturing thousands of prisoners across every theater of war and across the globe.

For example, here's a classic couple of sentences where you have to strain to avoid the t-word:

"Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again."

"Coercive methods". "Torment". Notice something missing? Now read the piece stripped of its Orwellian newspeak:

"Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of brutal torture sessions - he was shackled naked to maintain a stress position for a month, the shackles cutting into his wrists and forcing his feet to swell painfully, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, subjected to days and nights of loud noise and bright lights, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torture, he was not waterboarded again."

CONTINUED: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/the-washington-posts-support-for-torture.html

CNN Calls on Cable Operators to Block Ad Critical of Lou Dobbs

2009-08-29T00:09:00.000-07:00

By Brian Stelter
NY TIMES
August 4, 2009

A commercial critiquing CNN’s Lou Dobbs is being shown on Fox News and MSNBC this week — but not CNN.

CNN has worked with the cable operators that carry its channel to block the commercial, which was produced by the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters. According to a CNN employee who requested anonymity, CNN managers said in a morning staff meeting that the channel had invoked unspecified agreements with operators to stop the ad from running.

The ad accuses Mr. Dobbs of “promoting the false, right-wing conspiracy that President Obama hasn’t produced a valid U.S. birth certificate.”

It calls on viewers to “let CNN know there’s nothing ‘legitimate’ about racially charged paranoia.”

Media Matters sought to buy air time on the cable news channels in Washington, New York and Atlanta this week.

In a statement, CNN said that it “retains the right to object to any ad run by the cable operator on our network whose purpose is to attack CNN or our employees.” A CNN spokeswoman said she didn’t know if the word “agreement” was used in the staff meeting.

WhoRunsGov first reported that CNN had “privately pressed cable operators not to run” the ad.

Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters, said that CNN’s blocking of the ad “seems like the actions of a network desperate to provide cover for its primetime host rather than living up to its standard of being the most trusted name in news.”

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/cnn-calls-on-cable-operators-to-block-anti-cnn-advertisement/?hp

Rendon Group/Controversial PR Firm Screens Journalists Embedding with Troops in Afghanistan

2009-08-27T13:13:00.000-07:00

Related: "How the CIA Paid for Judy Miller's Stories - All the News That's Fit to Buy"

" ... The Rendon Group became infamous after the invasion of Iraq once it was discovered that its PR people helped manufacture the Iraqi National Congress, which was funded by the CIA and provided much of the erroneous information about Saddam Hussein’s government possessing weapons of mass destruction. ... "

Allgov.com
August 27, 2009

Embedded NBC Journalists in Iraq (photo: 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum) Reporters seeking to cover the war in Afghanistan may not get the chance to embed with U.S. military units if their previous coverage of the conflict is deemed too negative. The Pentagon is relying on the controversial public relations firm, The Rendon Group, to critique the media work of journalists who have requested assignments with U.S. Army, Air Force or Marine Corps units.

The Rendon Group became infamous after the invasion of Iraq once it was discovered that its PR people helped manufacture the Iraqi National Congress, which was funded by the CIA and provided much of the erroneous information about Saddam Hussein’s government possessing weapons of mass destruction.

The news of screening reporters follows an earlier revelation that Army officials denied a Stars and Stripes journalist from embedding with the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq because he “refused to highlight” good news coming out of that war. Stars and Stripes is funded by the Department of Defense.

An Air Force spokeswoman denied the military is playing favorites with members of the media. “We have not denied access to anyone because of what may or may not come out of their biography,” said Air Force Captain Elizabeth Mathias, a public affairs officer based in Kabul, Afghanistan. “It’s so we know with whom we’re working.”

-Noel Brinkerhoff

http://www.allgov.com/ViewNews/Controversial_PR_Firm_Screens_Journalists_Embedding_with_Troops_in_Afghanistan_90827

The Granddaddy of Toxic Talk Radio is Back

2009-08-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

Bob Grant

by Tommi Avicolli-Mecca
www.beyondchron.org
Aug. 27‚ 2009

As if American talk radio wasn’t toxic enough, what with all of the right-wing nut cases who daily barrage us with their hatred of blacks, queers, environmentalists and left-wingers.

Now, the defenders of keeping women barefoot and pregnant and gays in the closet have a new kid on the block, the grandfather of hate and intolerance, Bob Grant, who was ousted from New York City’s WABC radio in 1996 for his daily racist comments. Grant is returning to his old stomping grounds on September 13 to fill the airwaves with more of that good old-time American bigotry for which the medium has become famous.

Anyone who thinks this is good news must love Grant’s greatest hits, which include regular immigrant bashing and referring to African Americans as “savages” and “sub-human.” Grant once described former black New York Mayor David Dinkins as looking like “the men’s room attendant at the 21 Club.”

When a person with AIDS called Grant’s show and asked for a little sympathy, the vitriolic host told him that people with AIDS couldn’t die soon enough. One might say the same thing about old right-wing talk show hosts.

Grant didn’t just hate people of color, queers and leftists, he also freely expressed violent intentions towards them, once saying that New York police should open fire on the city’s annual Gay Pride Parade: “Ideally, it would have been nice to have a few phalanxes of policemen with machine guns and mow them down.”

As for the so-called tree-huggers: “I’d like to get every environmentalist, put 'em up against a wall, and shoot 'em.”

While denying that he was a racist (it’s difficult for me to even type that line without breaking into laughter), Grant decried the fact that whites could not openly express racist thoughts. “If they did,” he said, “the thugs, the savages, the refugees from Kalahari would tear the place apart. But I guess our group has evolved too far. I guess that’s the price we pay for being a little higher up on the evolutionary scale.”

Asked why WABC would bring back Grant’s KKK mentality to its airwaves, station program director Laurie Cantillo said, “Many listeners missed his colorful commentary.”

Obviously, the only color the station sees is green.

Which is good news for those of us who oppose the venom that Grant and his ilk spew out every day. While free speech is sacred and I’d never deny anyone, even someone as morally challenged as Grant, the right to say what he wanted, advertising dollars are not protected under our Constitution.

Perhaps some of the station’s advertisers need to know that there are many people who don’t appreciate Grant’s verbal diarrhea. Wouldn’t it be funny if those who spend their dollars to support his program suddenly decided to spend them elsewhere?

Might be the best way to get rid of the old garbage.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is co-editor of Avanti Popolo: Italians Sailing Beyond Columbus, and editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, which has just been nominated for an American Library Association award. His website is www.avicollimecca.com

http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=7290

Lou Dobbs and the White Supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens

2009-08-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

Also see: "The Council of Conservative Citizens," AC's Anti-Fascist Research Bin, July 27, 2009

Excerpt: "Lou Dobbs home to 'birthers' and white supremacists," by Zennie Abraham, SFGate.com, August 03 2009

... Google "Lou Dobbs white supremacist" and one sees over 23,000 results, the vast majority related to his series of stories on illegal aliens. In fact, it was an every day constant drum beat from Lou well through 2008. But Bill Scher of the Huff Post reports that as far back as 2006, Dobbs story source was the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that was pointed to as having a "white supremacy" ideology according to the Anti-Defamation League. What was Dobbs talking about? The supposed "Mexican campaign to recapture the Southwest", an idea that was slammed by many as completely, well, idiotic.

And the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), another anti-racism watchdog group, has pointed specifically to Dobbs for hosting white supremacists as far back as 2004. One of them, Glen Spencer, has spoken at least twice to the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, which has described blacks (like me I guess) as "a retrograde species of humanity." And the SPLC explains that Dobbs never mentioned the affiliation of Spencer or for that matter Joe McCutchen who was famous for writing anti-Semitic "letters to the editor" to various publications.

Virginia Abernathy was another Dobbs guest with ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, in her case as an editorial adviser according to Commondreams.org and other sources.

CNN offered an explanation for the Dobbs connection to the Council of Conservative Citizens in an email to onepeoplesproject.com as presented by LaLuchaSigue:

A freelance field producer in Los Angeles searched the web for Aztlan maps and grabbed the Council of Conservative Citizens map without knowing the nature of the organization. The graphic was a late inclusion in the script and, regrettably, was missed in the vetting process.

Oh c'mon! Blaming this on one field producer doesn't even touch the question of who booked this cast of characters to be on Dobbs show ...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?blogid=95&entry_id=44806#ixzz0PLu4wEMU

Major Media Outlets Ignore News That CIA Documents Fail To Back-Up Cheney’s Torture Claims

2009-08-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

thinkprogress.org
Aug 25th, 2009

In April, Vice President Cheney received extensive media coverage when he called on the Obama administration to release two CIA memos allegedly showing evidence that the Bush-era interrogation policies saved lives. His request came in response to critics who lambasted the Bush administration’s program and said it actually hurt U.S. efforts. From Cheney’s interview with Sean Hannity on April 20:

HANNITY: And secondly, why is it important that those interrogations took place? I mean, the ones they were talking about were sleep deprivation, waterboarding, putting insects into small, confined areas and telling them they were deadly insects. [...]

CHENEY: It worked. It’s been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives, preventing another mass casualty attack against the United States. … And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.

Yesterday, the CIA released two of those memos from 2004 and 2005, which had been secret until now. As Spencer Ackerman notes, these memos do nothing to back up Cheney’s claims:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations. ...

CONTINUED: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/25/cheney-media-torture/

Dick Morris, Fox News Political Hooker, and the DC Madam

2009-08-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

Morris - a Fox News political painted lady who lambastes health care and other Democratic initiatives with a sniffy air of comprehensive wisdom - knows hooking well, according to the New York Times in 2007:

Dick Morris, Fox News "commentator" and foot fetishist

DC Madam Names Dick Morris As Client
Reported by Ellen
NewsHounds
April 30, 2007

FOX News pundit Dick "Toe Sucker" Morris may still be up to his old tricks. According to the New York Times, Morris has been named by DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey as one of her clients. The Times reports:

Dick Morris, the television commentator and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, who resigned in 1996 after reports that he was seeing a prostitute, was also a customer, Ms. Palfrey’s lawyer has said in court.

http://www.newshounds.us/2007/04/30/dc_madam_names_dick_morris_as_client.php

The World Can't Be Changed Without Fighting Western Propaganda

2009-08-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

BY Andrei Vltchek
ZNet
Aug 18th, 2009

Sometimes I am chased by nightmares: I am in the middle of some bombed out refugee camp, maybe in Congo (DRC) or in some other desperate country at the periphery of media interests. Children are running around with swollen bellies, clearly suffering from malnutrition. Many women in the camp have swollen bellies too, but not because of an act of love, but as a result of the rape they suffered in recent months. There is gunfire coming from the hills and UN troops are helpless to stop it.

Sometimes I wake up and the dream is gone. Or I manage to suppress it; purge it from my subconscious. But sometimes it stays with me for the rest of the day. And often it is not a dream at all, but reality. I actually find myself in places like Kibati, facing the desperate eyes of children, the resigned, red and swollen eyes of women, the barrel of a gun. There are fires on the horizon and the sounds of gunfire coming from the bush. And instead of a pillow, I am squeezing the shutter of my professional Nikon, or the metal tube of my pen.

What I write and what I photograph appear periodically on the pages of newspapers and magazines. Sometimes one or two images make it to the walls of museums or galleries. But it is always a fight, a struggle to convince editors, publishers, distributors, or curators to accept at least some watered-down glimpse of reality - to be shown to the general public.

The era of brave reporters and determined editors seems to be over. Correspondents who covered the Vietnam War, who actually helped to stop the Vietnam War, are getting older. They write memoirs and publish books, but they hardly witness today's conflicts. There are still some fearless and dedicated journalists - Keith Harmon Snow or John Pilger to mention just two - but they are more exceptions that prove the rule than a common occurrence.

And yet brave alternative voices are needed more now than in any other time in recent history. As corporate control over the media becomes nearly complete, almost all large outlets now serve establishment economic and political interests. The more they do, the more they talk about the need for freedom of the press, objectivity, and unbiased reporting; somewhere else, not at home.

While most of the English language media is exercising an unprecedented suppression of information about, for instance, the brutality of Western foreign policy in sub-Saharan Africa or about the ongoing Indonesian genocide in West Papua (two parts of the world with tremendous raw material wealth exploited by multi-national mining companies), establishment media outlets in the United States, UK, and Australia intensify their attacks against alternative points of views coming from Beijing (PRC), Caracas, or Havana. The more complete the grip on power by market fundamentalists, the more anti-Chinese or anti-Chavez rhetoric appears on the channels of Western mass media - channels whose propaganda now reaches basically every corner of the globe.

I grew up in Czechoslovakia and although I don't remember Soviet tanks rolling down the streets of Prague in 1968 as a small child, I clearly remember the aftermath - the collaboration, lies, and cynicism of the so called "normalization process". What is shocking to me now - being a naturalized citizen of the United States - is not so much that all that I am describing here is actually happening, but the indifference that accompanies all these terrible events. And above all, that the great majority of the people in the English speaking so-called "First World" actually believe what they read in the newspapers and what they see on the television screens. The lies and one-sidedness seem to be too obvious to be ignored! But they mostly are. Describing the lexicon of Western power, Arundhati Roy once wrote: "So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace." And we accept that they are.

In a way, control of information is now much more complete in the United States or UK or Australia than it was in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland. There is no "hunger for truth" - hunger for alternative views - for every pamphlet that dares to challenge the regime and the political doublespeak in books and films. There is no such intellectual hunger in Sydney, New York, or London as there used to be in Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw. The writers and journalists in the West hardly "write between the lines" and readers do not expect and are not searching for hidden messages.

It all goes mostly unchallenged: propaganda and the lack of alternative views. It seems that we forgot how to question things. It seems that we accepted manipulation of our present and our history; that we are even turning against those few who are still left standing tall and defending common sense and truth and what can be seen with the naked eyes but is denied in the name of freedom, democracy and objectivity (great words that are now abused to the point that they are losing meaning). Are we, in the West, once again entering an era when we will point fingers at dissidents, turn ourselves into snitches, and collaborators? We had many periods like that in our history. Not long ago - not so long ago at all!

In the meantime, while our intellectuals are collaborating with power and getting rewarded for their efforts, great parts of the world are bathed in blood, starving, or both. Collaboration and the silence of those who know or should now is partially to blame for the present state of the world.

Perfected politically correct speech became embedded in the writing, speech, even psyche of many of our thinkers so, god forbid, they would not offend people in poor countries (they can be butchered and encouraged to butcher each other, but they should not "be offended", especially their corrupt political and religious leaders who are serving Western and multi-national interests). Practically speaking - the limits of discussion permitted to appear on television screens or on the pages of our newspapers were defined. Or one could say that the right wing and establishment derided as "politically correct" to challenge the limits of discussion, also the smears. If it suits the establishment, it defines feudal dictatorship in far away places (as long as they serve its interests) as part of the culture of this or that country it controls or wants to control. If religion serves Western geopolitical interests (read: if religion helps us to kill progressive/Left-wing leaders and their followers), the West will declare its profound respect for such religion, even our support, as England supported Wahhabism in the Middle East, as long as it believed that Wahhabism would suppress the strife for egalitarian society and fair distribution of natural resources.

While we are busy trashing Cuba for human rights abuses (a few dozens of people in jail, many of whom would probably be charged with terrorism in the West, since they openly aim at overthrowing the constitution and the government) and China for Tibet (glorifying by all means the former religious feudal lord just because antagonizing and ostracizing China is the main goal of our foreign policy - an openly racist approach) there are millions of victims of our geopolitical interests rotting or already buried in Congo (DRC) and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, in West Papua, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

Our human rights record (if we consider all human beings "human" and accept that violating the rights of a man, woman or child in Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Oceania or Asia is as deplorable as violating human rights in London, New York, or Melbourne) is so horrid - presently as in the past - that it is unimaginable that our citizens still could believe that our countries have some moral leverage and should be allowed to arbitrate and exercise moral judgment.

While post-Cold War propaganda (busy destroying everything that is left from progressive movements) dares to compare the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany (the same Soviet Union that was sacrificed by the West to Nazi Germany; the same Soviet Union that at the cost of more than 20 million lives saved the world from Fascism), it omits the fact that the first concentration camps were not built by the Russians but by the British Empire in Africa; and that no gulag can match the horrors of colonial terror exercised by European powers in between two world wars.

The propaganda is so embedded in the national psyche in the United States and Europe that any discussions of this sort are not emerging, are not demanded, or are simply not allowed or tolerated. While the Soviet revolution and later gulags are used as some dubious proof that a Socialist system can't possibly work (while Stalin was clearly paranoid, there is no denying that there was a plot to direct the Nazis to the East - sacrificing Czechoslovakia by France and Britain at the Munich Conference in 1938 was clear proof of it), the Western holocaust in Africa (for instance the Belgian extermination of tens of millions of Congolese during the reign of King Leopold I) is not presented as proof that Western-style monarchies and market fundamentalism are essentially dangerous and unacceptable for humanity, having already assassinated hundreds of millions all over the world.

Of course it was all about money and European greed - about raw materials - why tens of millions in Congo had to die a hundred years ago (then it was rubber). The reasons are not all that different now, although the killings are mainly performed by local forces and by the army from the neighboring and now staunchly pro-American Rwanda, as well as mercenaries. And the reasons are not too different in West Papua, except that there the killing is performed by Indonesian troops defending the economic interests of Jakarta's corrupt elites as well as Western multinational companies; or in Iraq.

And we are not outraged, anymore. Law-obeying citizens of our countries are buckling-up, not littering on the streets, waiting in the middle of the night obediently for a green light to cross the streets. But they don't oppose massacres performed in the name of their economic interests. As long as the massacres are well packaged by the media and propaganda apparatus, as long as it is not being spelled out that the killing is to support big business but also the relatively high standard of the majority of those living in so called "developed countries," as long as it is all officially for human rights and democracy and freedom. One of the reasons why official propaganda is so readily accepted is because it helps to massage and calm our bad conscience.

Intellectual elites and academia are not immune to accepting, recycling, and even inventing lies. In the last few years I have been invited to speak at several elite universities in English speaking world - from Melbourne to Hong Kong University, Columbia and Cornell, Cambridge and Auckland. I realized that challenging existing theses does not mean that one defends intellectual integrity: quite the opposite. Even more than in the mass media, academia is deeply hostile to the challenges of established clichés. Try to openly disagree with the thesis that Indonesia is a tolerant state, a striving democracy, and who knows what else that gained so many professors their tenure, and you will be labeled as an extremist, or as a provocateur at best. And it will be very difficult to avoid open insults. Try to challenge the monolithic anti-Chinese views!

In Anglo-Saxon academia, to voice one's own opinion is undesirable, almost unacceptable. To make a point, an author or the speaker is expected to quote someone else: "It is said by Mr. Green that the earth is round." "Professor Brown confirmed that it was raining yesterday." If no one else said it before, it is doubtful that it ever happened. And the writer or speaker is strongly discouraged from voicing his or her opinion on the matter at hand. In summary: almost any point of view or bit of information is expected to be confirmed by the establishment, or at least by some part of it. It has to go through the informal censorship.

Long lists of footnotes now decorate almost any non-fiction book, as groups of academics and many non-fiction writers, instead of doing much of their own research and fieldwork, tirelessly quote and re-quote each other. Orwell, Burchett, or Hemingway would find it extremely difficult to operate in such an environment.

The results are often grotesque. Two cases in Asia are great examples of this intellectual cowardice and servility not only of the diplomatic but also academic and journalistic community: Thailand and Indonesia.

Clichés created by Anglo-Saxon media and academia are repeated tirelessly by the main networks, including the BBC and CNN, and by almost all influential dailies. When our media talk about Cambodia, for instance, they rarely forget to mention the genocide of the "Communist" Khmer Rouge. But one would have to search samizdat to find out that the Khmer Rouge came to power only after savage U.S. carpet-bombing of the countryside. And that when Vietnam forced the Khmer Rouge out, the U.S. demanded at the U.N. the "immediate return of the legitimate government"!

There is hardly anything in the online editions of the Western newspapers of record depicting the horrors unleashed by the West against Indochina, Indonesia (2 to 3 million people killed after the U.S. supported a coup that brought General Suharto to power) and East Timor, to mention just a few.

I have never heard of any public figure in the West using the mass media to call for the boycott of anything Indonesian because of the continuous killing of Papuans (just as few seemed to be outraged in the 1970s and '80s over genocide in East Timor). Tibet is quite a different matter. Criticism of China over its policy toward Tibet is epic. Criticism of China in general is monumental and disproportionate.

Whenever China fails, it is because "it is still Communist;" when it succeeds, "It is not Communist anymore." As a reader, I want to hear from Chinese people whether their country is Communist or not. From what I hear, it still is and, moreover, the great majority still wants it to be.

But that's not good enough: the planet's oldest major culture cannot be trusted to describe itself: the job has to be done by English native speakers, by the only people selected or chosen to influence and shape world public opinion.

I want to hear from my colleagues in Beijing. I want them to be able to argue openly with those who hold their country responsible (absurdly) for everything from Sudan to Burma to the ruined environment. How many reports have we seen on BBC World depicting Chinese factories belching black smoke, and how many have we seen on the pollution created by the U.S. - still the greatest polluter on earth?

Or what are the thoughts of Japanese scholars, writers and journalists on the Second World War? We all know what English-speaking journalists based in Tokyo believe their Japanese colleagues are thinking, but why are we habitually prevented from reading direct translations of works written by those who are filling the pages of some of the largest newspapers on earth, published in Japan and China? Why do we have to be guided by a wise invisible hand that forms the global consensus.

Being fluent in Spanish, I realize how little of the current trends in Latin America are fairly represented in U.S., British and Asian publications. My Latin American colleagues often complain that it is almost impossible to discuss Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez or Bolivian President Evo Morales in London or New York with those who do not read Spanish - their opinions appear to be uniform and frustratingly biased.

These days the left is of course the main topic - the real issue - in Latin America. While British and North American journalists and writers are analyzing recent Latin American revolutions in accordance with the political guidelines of their own publications, readers all over the world (unless they understand Spanish) know close to nothing about the opinions of those who are at this very moment making history in Venezuela or Bolivia.

How often does it appear on the pages of our publications that Chavez introduced direct democracy, allowing people to influence the future of their country through countless referendums while the citizens of our "real democracies" have to shut up and do what they're told? Germans were not allowed to vote on whether they wanted unification; Czechs and Slovaks were not asked whether they wanted their "Velvet Divorce;" British, Italian, and U.S. citizens had to put on boots and march to Iraq.

English-language newspapers are full of stories about China without Chinese people being allowed to speak for themselves. They are also full of stories about Japan, where Japanese people are being quoted but not trusted to share their full articles about their own country - pieces that would be written by them from beginning to end.

For now, the English language is the main tool of communication in the world, but not forever. Its writers, journalists, newspapers and publishing houses are not facilitating better understanding between nations. They are completely failing to promote a diversity of ideas.

Media outlets use English as a tool that serves political, economic, even intellectual interests. A growing number of non-native speakers are forced to use English in order to be part of the only group that has influence; the group that matters - the group that reads, understands, and thinks the "right" way. On top of spelling and grammar, newcomers to this group learn how to feel and react to the world around them, as well as what they should consider objective. The result is uniformity and intellectual discipline.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, chased by nightmares and images that I, a long time ago, downloaded from my cameras to extended memory, I begin dreaming about some better and more just arrangement of the world. But there is always the same creeping question that I ask myself: how can it be achieved?

I think about all successful revolutions of the past - they all have one common pre-condition: education and information. In order to change things, people have to know the truth. They have to know their past.

This is what was repeated over and over again to the citizens of Chile, Argentina, and South Africa. No better future, no honest and just reconciliation can be achieved unless both the past and the present are analyzed and understood. That's why Chile succeeded and Indonesia failed. That's why South Africa, despite all its complexities and problems is on course to exorcise its demons and move toward a much better future.

But the West - Europe, United States, and to a great extent Australia - are all living in denial. They never fully accepted the truth about the terror they unleashed and are still unleashing against the great majority of the world. They are still rich: the richest, as they live from the sweat and blood of others. They are still an empire - one Empire - united by colonialist culture: a trunk and branches: all one.

There will never be peace on earth, a real reconciliation, unless this culture of control disappears. And the only way to make it disappear is to face reality, address and revisit the past.

It is the responsibility of those who know the world and understand the suffering of its people to speak the truth. No matter what the cost, no matter how many privileges will disappear with each honest sentence (we all know that the Empire is vindictive). Not to speak truth to power (it does not deserve it) but against power. To disregard existing institutions from media to academia, as they are no solution but part of the problem, co-responsible for the state of the world in which we are living! Only a multitude of voices repeating what everybody, except those in the ruling countries, seems to know; voices amalgamated in "J'accuse", will defeat the present wrongs that rule the world. But only voices truly united and only in a multitude. With determination and great courage!

SOURCE: ZNET http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21731 (thanks Thierry for suggestion)

Wallace crops VHA doc to falsely suggest Obama administration pressuring vets to end their lives

2009-08-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

http://mediamatters.org/research/200908230014

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace repeatedly cropped quotes from a Veterans Health Administration (VHA) document to falsely suggest that the Obama administration is pressuring veterans to end their lives prematurely and to accuse Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs Tammy Duckworth of lying about it. In fact, contrary to Wallace's false assertions, the document he referred to does not require doctors to direct veterans to what conservatives have labeled the "Death Book for Veterans." ...

Is Sean Hannity Considering Presidential Run In 2012?

2009-08-23T05:41:00.001-07:00

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/08/22/sean-hannity-considering-presidential-run-2012

False 'Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots

2009-08-22T17:54:00.000-07:00

Steve Pope/Associated Press
NYT
August 13, 2009

WASHINGTON — The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.

Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.

Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor).

There is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a cost-cutting measure. But over the course of the past few months, early, stated fears from anti-abortion conservatives that Mr. Obama would pursue a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda, combined with twisted accounts of actual legislative proposals that would provide financing for optional consultations with doctors about hospice care and other “end of life” services, fed the rumor to the point where it overcame the debate.

On Thursday, Mr. Grassley said in a statement that he and others in the small group of senators that was trying to negotiate a health care plan had dropped any “end of life” proposals from consideration.

A pending House bill has language authorizing Medicare to finance beneficiaries’ consultations with professionals on whether to authorize aggressive and potentially life-saving interventions later in life. Though the consultations would be voluntary, and a similar provision passed in Congress last year without such a furor, Mr. Grassley said it was being dropped in the Senate “because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”

The extent to which it and other provisions have been misinterpreted in recent days, notably by angry speakers at recent town hall meetings but also by Ms. Palin — who popularized the “death panel” phrase — has surprised longtime advocates of changes to the health care system.

“I guess what surprised me is the ferocity, it’s much stronger than I expected,” said John Rother, the executive vice president of AARP, which is supportive of the health care proposals and has repeatedly declared the “death panel” rumors false. “It’s people who are ideologically opposed to Mr. Obama, and this is the opportunity to weaken the president.”

The specter of government-sponsored, forced euthanasia was raised as early as Nov. 23, just weeks after the election and long before any legislation had been drafted, in an outlet with opinion pages decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama, The Washington Times.

In an editorial, the newspaper reminded its readers of the Aktion T4 program of Nazi Germany in which “children and adults with disabilities, and anyone anywhere in the Third Reich was subject to execution who was blind, deaf, senile, retarded, or had any significant neurological condition.”

Noting the “administrative predilections” of the new team at the White House, it urged “anyone who sees the current climate as a budding T4 program to win the hearts and minds of deniers.”

The editorial captured broader concerns about Mr. Obama’s abortion rights philosophy held among socially conservative Americans who did not vote for him. But it did not directly tie forced euthanasia to health care plans of Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.

When the Democrats included money for family planning in a proposed version of the stimulus bill in January, the socially conservative George Neumayr wrote for the American Spectator: “Euthanasia is another shovel ready job for Pelosi to assign to the states. Reducing health care costs under Obama’s plan, after all, counts as economic stimulus, too — controlling life, controlling death, controlling costs.”

Ms. McCaughey, whose 1994 critique of Mr. Clinton’s plan was hotly disputed after its publication in The New Republic, weighed in around the same time.

She warned that a provision in the stimulus bill would create a bureaucracy to “monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost-effective,” was carried in a commentary she wrote for Bloomberg News that gained resonance throughout the conservative media, most notably with Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck.

The legislation did not direct the coordinator to dictate doctors’ treatments. A separate part of the law — regarding a council set up to coordinate research comparing the effectiveness of treatments — states that the council’s recommendations cannot “be construed as mandates or clinical guidelines for payment, coverage or treatment.”

But Ms. McCaughey’s article provided another opportunity for others to raise the specter of forced euthanasia. “Sometimes for the common good, you just have to say, ‘Hey, Grandpa, you’ve had a good life,’ ” Mr. Beck said.

The syndicated conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote, “No one should be surprised at the coming embrace of euthanasia.” The Washington Times editorial page reprised its reference to the Nazis, quoting the Aktion T4 program: “It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified.”

The notion was picked up by various conservative groups, but still, as Mr. Obama and Congress remained focused on other matters, it did not gain wide attention. Former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, an advocate for the health care proposals, said he was occasionally confronted with the “forced euthanasia” accusation at forums on the plans, but came to see it as an advantage. “Almost automatically you have most of the audience on your side,” Mr. Daschle said. “Any rational normal person isn’t going to believe that assertion.” ...

Continued: tp://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/policy/14panel.html?_r=1

Creepy News Corps.' Thuggish Business Tactics

2009-08-22T10:51:00.001-07:00

News America Marketing (NAM) is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corps. - the mother ship of Fox News. NAM was recently sued by Valassis, a competitor in the newspaper ad-stuffers biz. Rupert Murdoch's NAM lost the case and will pay $300-million to the plaintiff for engaging in underhanded, monopolistic business practices. Along the way, at trial, we are offered a rare glimpse inside Murdoch's furtive corporate empire, and like my nephew, it isn't pretty ...

News America's Carlucci Again Accused of Threatening to "Destroy" Floorgraphics
By Jim Edwards
industry.bnet.com
July 15th, 2009

George Rebh, founder of Floorgraphics, said News America Marketing CEO Paul Carlucci threatened to “destroy” his agency if he competed for clients, a Michigan state court heard. The testimony came in a case where newspaper coupon giant Valassis is trying to prove that News America used illegal monopoly practices against its competitors.

It is the second time that Rebh has told the story of his infamous meeting with Carlucci, who is also the publisher of the New York Post. Earlier this year, Rebh testified in a New Jersey federal court that he had a lunch meeting with Carlucci at which the latter had said “I will destroy you!” if Rebh’s Floorgraphics made inroads into News America’s in-store supermarket ad empire. Carlucci denies he said that.

In Rebh’s most recent recollection of the meeting, he described how he showed up at the now defunct Dish of Salt restaurant in New York, just blocks from News Corp’s HQ. In attendance at the round table were Carlucci, News America president Dominic Porco, Floorgraphics’ Rebh, his brother Richard, the CEO, and Gary Henderson. The execs talked business in which, Rebh said, he hoped to explore the possibility of working on joint promotions with News America. But Carlucci didn’t like that idea. He wanted to buy Floorgraphics, Rebh said:

Question: What happened? What did he say?

Answer: At a certain point, Mr. Carlucci turned to us, but primarily Richard, and said so you are here to sell your company. And that — because that was not the purpose we were there, that kind of took us a little by surprise and Richard said, no, that’s not why we came.

… Question: What did Mr. Carlucci say in response to that?

Answer: He kind of smiled and he said, you know, when we acquired ActMedia, which was in 1997, I asked them about what they thought of floor advertising and they all thought it was a fad, that it would go away. He said, words to the effect, but, I have always liked floor advertising, so, from this point on consider us your competitor. And he said, again, words to the effect, and you should know that I work for a man who wants it all and doesn’t understand anyone telling him he can’t have it all. And know this, if you ever get into any of our businesses, I/we will destroy you.

That “man” is News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch; News Corp. owns News America. News America ultimately acquired Floorgraphics in settlement of the latter’s anti-competition case against it.

http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/10002966/news-americas-carlucci-once-again-accused-of-threatening-to-destroy-floorgraphics/

Nauseating, isn't it? If this is the way the vile Mr. Murdoch conducts business, we'll just take ours elsewhere and let his Nazis twist in the wind. Boycott the Fox News nest of vipers. Next month, Rupert makes a Bloody Mary - without alcohol or tomato juice ...

- Uncle Creepy

GE Blasts Bill O’Reilly: Roadside Bombs Claim ‘False’

2009-08-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

chattahbox.com
August 13, 2009

(ChattahBox)—The war between MSNBC and the Fox News Channel is heating up, with General Electric hitting back at reports that it made materials that ended up in terrorists’ roadside bombs, which killed American soldiers.

Bill O’Reilly made the spurious claims against GE, the parent company of MSNBC, on his show on Tuesday, which GE called “irresponsible and maliciously false” in a statement released on Wednesday, according to an AP report.

O’Reilly reported that his “sources” told him of an ongoing federal investigation into American companies supplying radio frequency modules for roadside bombs. He claimed that an unnamed American company sold the parts to Corezing International, a company based in Singapore that has business dealings with the Islamic regime of Iran.

O’Reilly then pointed the finger at GE saying, he “has been told but cannot confirm that the General Electric corporation is under suspicion in the case.”

GE spokesman Gary Sheffer, said GE does not do business with Corezing International nor does it manufacturer the described radio modules. Sheffer described O’Reilly’s “smear” as a “new low.” Fox News did not comment in response to GE’s statements. ...

http://chattahbox.com/entertainment/2009/08/13/ge-blasts-bill-oreilly-roadside-bombs-claim-false/

Republican Testicles Shrink as Limbaugh’s Head Grows

2009-08-18T09:44:00.001-07:00

From the Ministry of Mind Control and Propanganda:

http://numbcranium.com/2009/03/04/republican-testicles-shrink-as-limbaughs-head-grows/

Family Security Matters Praises Nazi Spy Reinhard Gehlen

2009-08-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

CIA Nazi Recruit and Knight of Malta, Reinhard Gehlen

I've noticed that CIA hangouts are less limited these days ... as we approach open fascist rule. Family Security Matters, the ultra-con opinion-formation teet, is even praising notorious CIA Nazi recruit Reinhard Gehlen (who has everything in common with the far-right propagandists at Family Security Matters) - and looking down its nose at demonic liberals who quibble over death squads, torture, a long history of political assassinations, violent coups waged against democratically-elected leaders and the installation of fascist military dictatorships in their place ... So what if Gehlen was responsible for an untold multitude of American deaths during WW II? Liberals are a threat to programmed Christian (Nazified) families everywhere and must be crushed beneath our respectable heels ...
***
July 22, 2009

When Political Games Trump Security Concerns
By Lance Thompson
Family Security Matters

“It is the nature of an intelligence service that it must receive encouragement and support from the government of the day; if the government lacks interest in or expert understanding for its intelligence service, not even the best service will succeed in overcoming external prejudices against it.” These are the words of [Nazi] Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the German federal intelligence service, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), in 1971, in his excellent memoir, The Service. (English edition: World Publishing, New York, 1972). Gehlen brought invaluable intelligence assets [Nazis] to the United States regarding Russia after World War II, and founded the BND which continues its important work to this day.

Gehlen’s wisdom is alarmingly relevant today, as the American foreign intelligence service, the CIA, is battered by politically motivated attacks by Democrats and the Obama administration. The CIA, whose mission is to inform our leaders about the capabilities and intentions of our adversaries and allies, has always been a favorite target of liberals. ...

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.3797/pub_detail.asp
***
PS: Back in 1967, American oil companies wanted land that belonged to Indians in Guatemala. The Indians refused to negotiate for the land, so the CIA sent planes in to napalm the tribal land-holders. No more Indians. The Guatemalan government, already beholden to the US government, sold the land to the oil companies cheap. (Source: Cry of the People, by Penny Lernoux.)

This is the sort of thing that riles nitpicking liberals. "Conservatives," of course, could give a fig about a tribe of brown-skinned Indians burned alive to fuel American cars.
The verbally flatulent "conservatives" at Family Security Matters have their priorities straight - evil liberals should be rounded up, put in camps ...

Now, remind me: Why is our precious Warfare State - with its massive military propaganda machine - foundering? ...

- AC