you: "In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously
agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule
against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States." Lawyers
paid by Bill O'Reilly's bosses argued in court that Fox can lie with impunity.
It's their right under the 1st Ammendment Neocon media marches on
Very sad. Apparently the Bancrofts have decided to sell
the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch. Eric Alterman comments (in
a column written several days ago):
BillO is quite the classyIt is rather shocking that so many people who care about the future of
journalism remain silent or sanguine about his impact on one of democracy's most
important professions. The news pages in the Wall Street Journal are
about the smartest and bravest of any newspaper in America. Some people, like
Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino, enjoy stock holdings that offer roughly 20
million good reasons to believe that such journalism can continue unimpeded
within the Murdoch empire. But the rest of us might as well believe in Peter
Pan.....The silver lining of this takeover is that when Murdoch destroys the
credibility of the Journal — as he must if it is to fit in with his
business plan — he will be removing the primary pillar of the editorial page's
influence as well. In this regard his ownership is a kind of poisoned
chalice.
guy A treat for
O'Reilly's fans heading on over here to check out the "hate": "During the course
of Defendant BILL O'REILLY's sexual rant, it became clear that he was using a
vibrator upon himself, and that he ejaculated." Incidentally, there are two
sides in this battle: 1) the Coulter/O'Reilly/Limbaugh side, and then there's 2)
the Netroots/Colbert/Olbermann side. Funny how things have shaken out. Dave
Neiwart takes us on a guided tour of Bill
O'Reilly hate. He really is quite the pleasant fellow. And here's an
interview Andrea and her lawyer did on the TODAY Show back in Oct. 04….She says
she went forward with the suit because Bill was going to pay her
a little visit….
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Andrea Mackris: Mainly the last time I had spoken to Bill and when this
inappropriate conversation had happened—the last time. He said it was going to
be in person. And, ummm…I felt extremely threatened for many reasons…She either had a very good memory or she recorded it…
Well, it’s one or the other, OK?
I was told that there was more than one taped call..
Can you imagine BillO making a personal appearance after he
allegedly “sexually harassed” her? Many of you may have forgotten, but
Andrea never made public her lawsuit. It was Bill O’Reilly himself who did and
also sued her lawyer. I guess he thought he could intimidate them….You might say
he thought FOX was invincible…
BillO! AmericaBlog:
Home Depot seems to have had a change of heart. They’re now unequivocally
telling their customers that they will not advertise on Bill O’Reilly’s show.
Oddly, however, they’re now also claiming that they never advertised on
O’Reilly’s show.... Perhaps Home Depot is doing “run of network” ads that appear
across the FOX networks, with FOX choosing which shows the ads run on. A lot of
companies like to use this kind of advertising to claim that they don’t
advertise on particular shows - it’s a smoke screen and a lie. If this is the
case here, then Home Depot needs to specifically inform us that they have asked
FOX not to run any Home Depot ads on The O’Reilly Factor.Having said that, Home Depot has some explaining to do if it thinks Hannity
is any better than O’Reilly. FOX, across the board, smears gays, blacks, attacks
the environment, and more. Home Depot needs to dump the hate network now, across
the board.Ron Jarvis, Vice President of Environmental Innovation
[email protected]Frank Blake, Chief Executive Officer
[email protected]Carol Tome, Chief Financial Officer
[email protected]
The AFA
(American Family Association) vows to fight back.
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(1087) Keith talks to our buddy Cenk
Uygur about the dishonesty of FOXNews billing themselves as “fair and
balanced news”… GOP prez candidate short on
facts
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(366) Republican presidential contender Duncan Hunter was asked by on
yesterday’s Hardball if he had any opinion on Alberto Gonzales’s alleged perjury
before Congress. Hunter demurred from answering for Gonzo, but used the airtime
to slam the Democrats for ignoring what he thinks should be the priority for
Congress: the “loopholes” in the FISA law. The only problem? Those loopholes
aren’t really loopholes. They’re
protections to American citizens, not like silly things like civil
liberties matter to Republicans like Duncan Hunter. The ACLU has compiled a
list of myths and
facts on the FISA laws. GOP moves to steal more electoral
votes I’m not a big fan of the electoral college system, but
this article doesn’t make me feel better about amending it. The
New Yorker:
At first glance, next year’s Presidential election looks like a blowout. But
it might not be. Luckily for the incumbent party, neither George W. Bush nor
Dick Cheney will be running; indeed, the election of 2008 will be the first
since 1952 without a sitting President or Vice-President on the ballot. At the
moment, survey research reflects a generic public preference for a Democratic
victory next year. Still, despite everything, there are nearly as many polls
showing particular Republicans beating particular Democrats as vice versa. So
this election could be another close one. If it is, the winner may turn out to
have been chosen not on November 4, 2008, but five months earlier, on June
3rd.Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento
quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all
fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it
would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the
winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are
represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The
bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican
ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes-votes that it
wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the
Union.
If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at the video “Hacking
Democracy”.
Eugenics: Can we get serious
here? When Ross Douthat argues that "eugenics" is the right word
to describe modern liberal attitudes toward abortion and gene therapy, he's not
being "unfair" or
"weird."
He is, to
use his own phrase, smearing people over a difference of opinion about
bioethics. Look: Ross is a smart guy. He knows perfectly well that modern
liberals have no serious connection to eugenics advocates of the past. He knows
perfectly well that abortion supporters aren't motivated by eugenicist theories.
He's not using the word out of a dedication to scientific precision. Rather, he
and his fellow conservatives are using the word "eugenics" because they also
know perfectly well that it's (quite rightly) associated with racism,
pseudo-science, and Adolf Hitler. As far as they're concerned, that's a feature,
not a bug. This is highbrow Rush Limbaugh-ism, not serious argument. Back to
the sandbox with it.
Moronic Bush quote of the
day President Bush on Monday, talking about new
British prime minister Gordon Brown:
He's a problem solver. He's a glass-half-full man, not a glass-half-empty
guy, you know. Some of these world leaders say, 'Oh, the problems are so
significant, let us retreat, let us not take them on, they're too
tough'.
Where does he come up with this stuff? Who are these foreign leaders who are
so overwhelmed with their jobs that they want to go hide in a closet? I want
names.
to blow up Muslim holy sites in Mecca and Medina is best deterrent against
terrorism. VoteVets launches Tillman
petition. The White House refuses to release documents
about Army Ranger Pat Tillman’s death, citing executive privilege. VoteVets asks
that you sign
a letter informing the President that this is not acceptable. If There Were Liberals on the
Teevee This is the kind of thing which might actually
get some attention, but most likely the general public will be blissfully
unaware of Bush's veto when it happens. Michael Moore is fat. "No support" for an
investigation? Mere 70% of Americans thinks Congress should
investigate Alberto Gonzales. Take action on neocon
media Contact CNN. Ask them
if someone who told her listeners to jam
a voter hotline is really someone appropriate for "The most trusted name in
news." Senator Arlen demands Gonzo send him a
letter of explanation Given our history with the senior
senator from Pennsylvania, I'm sure he could get a letter like this from Abu
G:
Dear Senator Arlen,
I made poopy in my pants.
Love,
Alberto G.
And Arlen will deem is satisfactory. GOP insanity watch
The Nation provides a pithy explanation of why Ron Paul is a lunatic
who shouldn't
be allowed within a thousand yards of the White House: "Look at those policy
positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to
the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO;....fence the borders; deport
illegals; stop lecturing foreign governments about human rights; let the Middle
East go hang. What's not to like?" Wait. Did I say The Nation? Sorry.
Actually, that was John Derbyshire writing in National Review about why
Ron Paul would be absolutely brilliant as president of the United States. Have I
mentioned lately that these guys are barking mad? Consider it done. Neocon media at
play Surge Proponent Supports Surge And CBS misleads
you. The dead-Ender right wing and the bridge
they're building to the 1920s. It's important to keep up on the
war-supporting rump of the Republican party. Here's a post
by Dean Barnett, which explains how "the left" is deeply invested in
"defeat" in Iraq and for this, among other reasons, is ignoring, denying and
generally trying to cover up the good news now coming out of Iraq day by day.
As Barnett writes, critics of the war "have a lot invested in this war failing
and failing miserably."
At other moments, the pro-war rump seems to oscillate between heralding the
untold successes in Iraq and blaming the critics of the war, who've never had
any hand in its prosecution, for what they appear to believe is the inevitable
failure of their enterprise.
What I'd like to focus on though is the increasingly clear and no less
disturbing trend for the president's defenders to ape the tactics, rhetoric and
strategy of the post-WWI German revanchist right, which laid the groundwork for
and in many respects evolved into the Nazi party.
An inflammatory comparison? Yes. But the inflammatory nature of the
comparison shouldn't scare us into ignoring how strong the similarities are. You
see it in the explicit 'stab in the back'
rhetoric and the effort to cover up their own authorship and prosecution of the
role by blaming their own failures on the critics of the war.
And then perhaps the most telling sign, from an American perspective: As the
dead-ender right's plans and dreams about Iraq come under greater and greater
strain from the alternative universe of reality, and as the president's
popularity wanes further and further, there's a growing tendency for them to
think about and write about domestic American politics in terms of violence and
extra-constitutional action.
A minor example of this I noticed just yesterday on the Powerline Blog, where
Sen. Schumer's (D-NY) call to remove the "presumption of confirmation" from
President Bush's court appointments a "coup". "Is This a coup? If not, what is
it?" ran the headline to the post.
As the war for faux-democracy looks more and more like a debacle, the lure of
authoritarianism at home becomes greater and greater for the war's dead-end
defenders. And as redeployment looks more and more likely, they have to keep
raising the stakes on the consequences of doing so. Apparently our whole future,
our honor, destiny, certainly our safety from the Iraqi insurgents who will
restart the insurgency in the US -- all of this is in the balance. The stakes
must keep rising because that is, paradoxically, the only way for them to avoid
taking responsibility for their failures. And cowardice that militant, in a
faction within the body politic, is dangerous for the rest of us.
But can he read it? If so,
will he read it? Edwards campaign to send giant copy of
the Constitution to Alberto Gonzales. That and other political news of the day
in today's Election
Central Happy Hour Roundup.