When It Was News

Just half an hour per day with Cronkite, and we had more news - more essential information - than we get from 24-hour coverage today.
Wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that Cronkite never covered sports, weather, gossip, local crime, celebrities or Murrow forbid "entertainment."

48 times more coverage today, and we're one-forty-eighth as informed.

Cronkite stepped down from the news desk in 1980, and broadcast news has been going downhill ever since. Here's one reason why:

On Feb. 27, 1968, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite broadcast an editorial criticizing the escalation of U.S. forces in Vietnam. In the aftermath of the Tet offensive, Cronkite had traveled to Vietnam to interview soldiers and civilians. Returning to the United States, Cronkite shared his observations with the American public. In favor of diplomatic negotiations, Cronkite rejected President Lyndon B. Johnson's optimism for further military deployment to end the standoff between U.S. and Viet Cong forces. In a 1996 interview, Cronkite remembers the effect his editorial had on President Johnson, who was reported to have said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

Orwell Laughing His Dead Ass Off

The Universe - or more probably someone at Penguin Signet Classics - has a twisted sense of humor.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

For we bibliophiles who will stop paying the mortgage and buying food before we stop buying actual, real, bound-paper books, this is irony enough to last us for a few days. We told you that stupid electronic thing wasn't for reading real books.

But there's more - deliciously, perfectly more.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?
The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Here's a clue for giant corporations that think they can throw their weight around without consequences: when the reality of what you're planning to do would make a good headline in The Onion, it's time to step back and rethink it.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

"I Will Not Defend the Status Quo"

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) on the stakes in delaying a health care vote past August:

"If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

Here's the thing about laid-back people: Do not piss them off. You will regret it.

Senate repugs are crowing about destroying Obama's presidency by shutting down health care reform, and Senate DINOs are showing off their tiny dicks by demanding a fatal delay in the legislation.

Rejoice, liberals! For both obstructionist groups have crossed the line. This president is willing to sacrifice Main Street to the rapacious hordes of Wall Street. He is willing to shred the Constitution with preventive detention. He is willing to destroy the remnants of the Bush-battered military by breaking his promise to repeal DADT. He is willing to risk a quagmire in Afghanistan that will make the Iraq clusterfuck look like the "invasion" of Grenada.

But Barack Obama knows better than anyone that health care reform is the defining legislation of his presidency. I'm cynical enough to think it's possible that he will kill the public option to save a bill that will no longer be worthy of the name "reform" - possible, but not likely.

While his 4 p.m. health care statement at the White House was less than inspiring, I'll take heart from his take-no-prisoners rallying cry this morning.



Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

"We just want your truthful and spiritual support."

In Quill, Bruce Swaffield interviews Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, "a reporter based in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. He was trained by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and has dedicated his life to telling the truth. Currently, his brother is serving a 20-year prison sentence for blasphemy against Islam."

His experience is yet more proof that the one thing on which even the deadliest enemies agree is denying and punishing free speech.

Due to misunderstandings of the international community, namely the United States on the situation in Afghanistan, the values of democracy, especially freedom of speech, have been getting worse since 2005 in Afghanistan. The field of information is under control of many factions.

All the factions have made a very dangerous circle around freedom of speech. It is very dangerous for a journalist to get out the right and correct information from this hell and to process a balanced story for a newspaper.

Warlords are afraid of freedom of speech because if there is really freedom for the media, then [warlords] would be faced with war crimes tribunals when their crimes are revealed by the media.

The government controls the field of information. [The government] is corrupted and does not want a newspaper to write about the corruption in all stages of the regime.

Mullahs are ideologically against all the values of democracy; they also are the physical enemies of TV.

International troops don’t want the correct facts and figures of civilian casualties to be covered exactly by the media. The position of the Taliban against freedom of information is clear to everyone.

All the factions have come together and made a limitation for the media.

He goes on to describe injustices that won't surprise anyone familiar with how reporters are treated in war zones, but his request for help might:

The first thing is we realize any journalist has a strong influence inside their society. Now the U.S. is the biggest supporter of Afghanistan, and when we face a death sentence or are imprisoned, please don’t be silent. Put pressure on your government to talk about it (even single cases) with the Afghan government and resolve that [issue]. We don’t want money or anything else. Please, we just want your truthful and spiritual support.

You have a very long background of democracy. You have suffered what we are suffering now, and you know how to support us in each situation. We are fighting here for what you wanted in your society 300 years ago. So our goals are the same, but we need support.

Without freedom of speech and mind, nothing is possible for a society [to move] towards democracy.

Read the whole thing. Then help spread the word.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ...

The GOP's Internal Class War

Political historian Rick Perlstein, chronicler of the rise and fall of American conservatism, explains how Princess Tundra Trash has exposed the class war fracturing the GOP.

... populism has never been an entirely comfortable fit for elite conservatives. Majorities of middle-class Americans can be persuaded to support tax cuts for the rich—even repeal of the estate tax—out of an optimism that they may eventually become rich themselves. But they are also susceptible to appeals like the one George Wallace made in the recession year of 1976. He built his campaign on both hellfire-and-brimstone moralism and a pledge of soak-the-rich tax policies. The elite conservative fears that the temptation to woo working-class voters will, you know, shade into policies that actually advantage the working class. That fear surfaced recently when Rush Limbaugh—whom Frum himself has singled out as one of the dangerous populists dragging the Republicans down—dismissed those who criticized the AIG bonuses as "peasants with their pitchforks" who must be silenced for the sake of conservative orthodoxy. But it's harder to persuade the economically less fortunate to respect conservative orthodoxy during a recession. That's starting to make some conservatives nervous.

Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots. In postwar America, a panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency. In the Kennedy years, the right-wing militia known as the Minutemen armed for what they believed would be an imminent Russian takeover. In the Carter years it was the Posse Comitatus; Bill Clinton's rise saw six anti-abortion murders and the Oklahoma City bombings. Each time, the conservative mainstream was able to adroitly hive off the embarrassing fringe while laying claim to some of the grassroots anger that inspired it. Now the violence is back. But this time, the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find. This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O'Reilly was forced to devote airtime to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O'Reilly's claim that "Tiller the baby killer" was getting away with "Nazi stuff" helped contribute to an atmosphere in which Tiller's alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.

At least in the past, those who wished to represent their movement as cosmopolitan and urbane could simply point to William F. Buckley as the right's most prominent spokesman. Now Buckley is gone, and the most prominent spokesmen—the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Becks—can be heard mouthing attitudes once confined to the violent fringe. For the second time in three months, Fox heavily promoted anti-administration "tea party" events this past Fourth of July—rallies in praise of secession and the Articles of Confederation, at which speakers "joked" about a coup against the communist Muslim Barack Obama like the one against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. "What's going on at Fox News?" Frum recently asked, excoriating Beck for passing out to followers books by the nutty far-right conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen. If you were an elite conservative, you might be embarrassed too.

The conservative intellectuals once were able to work together more effectively with the conservative unwashed. Now, more and more, their recent irritation renders them akin to the Stalinist commissars mocked by poet Bertolt -Brecht, who asked if they might "dissolve the people/And elect another." The bargain the right has offered the downwardly mobile, culturally insecure traditionalist—give us your votes, and we will give you existential certitudes in a world that seems somehow to have gone crazy—is looking less like good politics all the time.

Read the whole thing.

h/t Crooks and Liars.

Assassinations R Us

Along with Glenn Greenwald and PZ Myers, Talking Points Memo is one of the blogs in which the comments are not to be missed.

Zach Roth's piece today on the CIA's secret assassination program got speculation running rife about likely victims over the last eight years.

The Washington Post reports today on how the program had been revived and then put on hold several times since 2001. But it also says, referring to the "presidential finding" with which President Bush authorized the program in 2001:

The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency's actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.

"No geographical limitations" presumably means that operations could potentially be carried out in countries, friendly or unfriendly, that are far from any war zone -- including even the US itself. And it seems likely that they would be carried out without notifying the foreign country in question.

Of course, we've frequently, and quite openly, used the military to carry out attacks on specific Qaeda leaders -- even before 9/11. But using the CIA to do so, and with such broad authority to operate anywhere in the world, as this program seems to have given the agency, would appear to take things into a different realm.

Zach didn't know the half of it.

Commenter FPN:

How about some of the people targeted may not have "just" been "high value" Al Qaeda, but high ranking members of a royal family/intelligence:

"On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 43, and on July 23, 2002, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud was killed in a car accident at the age of 41. A week later, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir was found dead, having "died of thirst" at the age of 25. Prince Turki was fired from his position as head of Saudi Intelligence on September 1, 2001, and became the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain in 2002.

On February 20, 2003, Pakistani air force chief Mir, his wife, and fifteen others were killed in a plane crash.

None of this appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report, though it might have been planned for that document. This is because the Bush administration censored 28 pages of material about Saudi connections to 9/11 from the report on the grounds of national security."

Commenter martin dreadnought:

Again, the crux of this entire story is not that Cheney himself was involved, it's a question of who was targeted and why.

We already know of many deaths which came at convenient times for the Bush administration. I'm not sure I need to go through all of these again, but just a few of them would be Paul Wellstone, Pat Tillman, Dr. David Kelly, Bruce Ivins, and the DC Madam Debra Palfrey.

All of these people had the ability to cause significant damage to the Bush administration and every one of them died a suspicious death. I think the chances of all of these deaths happening in a vaccuum are close to nil.

Commenter danger:

Could also include Nicola Calipari, Benazir Bhutto, the guy at Minot AFB in the nuke transport snafu, and to a lesser extent Rafik Hariri and even Alexander Litvinenko.

Should also point out that in the case of Calipari, the real target would have been Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who as a feminist, pacifist communist who openly sided with the Iraqi people before she was kidnapped would have definitely been a thorn in the side to the administration.

Commenter MyMY:

This clearly demands thorough investigation!

The last word to commenter Mr. E:

Or at the very least, I wide re-airing of Wag the Dog.

Those #^&!*$% Socialist Veterans

Actual Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, knows that compared to single-payer systems Medicare and VA, the public option being proposed for health care reform is capitalism on steroids.

So yesterday, Sanders had a little fun with Senator John McCain, R-LOSER.

Heather at Crooks and Liars:

Bernie Sanders gives John McCain an uncomfortable moment asking him if the VA is socialized health care, and if he or anyone else in the Senate is advocating doing away with it. Sanders is exactly right. It is not the job of the Senate to protect the private health insurance industry. It's a shame the best we may get out of the Senate is a public option and that we don't have a few more Bernie Sanders out there fighting for real health care reform.

See the video here.

Broke, Humiliated Mongiardo Keeps Lying About Cap and Trade

From the Paducah Sun, via Penn Energy.

Mongiardo, seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate next year, said at a Paducah news conference (July 15) that the so-called "Cap and Trade Bill" would increase electric rates in Kentucky by at least 70 percent, harm the state's coal industry, and force steel and aluminum plants to close.

As the story was written by Bill Bartleman of the wingnut Paducah Sun, do I need to tell you that Bartleman made no attempt to counter Mongiardo's lies with the facts?

On Sunday, Joe Gerth at the Courier-Journal discussed Mongiardo's and Jack Conway's views on cap-and-trade, and although he let Dan get away with lying for several opening grafs, eventually he pointed out the facts.

There is agreement that the legislation would cost consumers more, but estimates of those costs vary. And the legislation that passed the House attempted to offset some of the costs.

E.On U.S., the parent company of LG&E and Kentucky Utilities, has said that residential customers in Kentucky would see their rates rise about $10.50 a month in three years and about $19 by 2020. Commercial customers could see their rates rise as much as 39 percent by 2020.

Let's review: on the same day that Mongiardo's campaign admitted that in the second quarter it raised less than one-fourth of what Conway raised, Mongiardo goes to DINO-friendly territory to claim cap-and-trade would almost double electric rates, apparently immediately.

This after the biggest electricity supplier in Kentucky explains that cap-and-trade will cause no increase for three years, and then raise rates slowly over the next eight years to a maximum of $19 per month per household. For me, that's a 20 percent increase eleven years from now.

Dan Mongiardo: liar, corporate shill, homophobe, pathetic fundraiser, incompetent campaigner, loser.

New Questions About the 2010 Senate Race

Now that we finally know just how few pennies Dan Mongiardo managed to beg from even his BFFs in the Magic Buggy Whip industry, here are some new questions that need to be answered ASAP:

How long will it take for the MSM to stop referring to the Homophobe-in-Chief as the "favorite" to challenge Jim Bunning?

Will Dan Mongiardo drop out of the race before Governor Beshear names somebody else to be his running mate in 2011?

If he does, will Beshear take him back?

If Beshear pretends he didn't hear about Dr. Dan dropping out and goes ahead and names another running mate, will Mongiardo resign or go for the Lame Duck Embarassment Guinness World Record?

If Mongiardo doesn't drop out before Beshear names another running mate, how long will he stay in the race?

If he stays in the race, how much money is he likely to raise in the third quarter, and will anyone take my bet that it will be less than 50K?

If he stays in the race, will he dare to show his face at Fancy Farm? If he does, can we get Jon Stewart to MC?

If he actually stays in the race all the way through the primary election in May, how few votes will he get, and will anyone actually admit casting one of them?

If Mongiardo drops out, will anyone else jump into the race to challenge Conway? And if nobody does, will we all die of boredom before May?

It's now about four hours since the news broke about Mongiardo's pathetic fundraising - has Jack Conway's campaign staff stopped laughing yet?

It's the Money, Stupid

UPDATE 7:05 p.m. Three hundred grand? Are you fucking kidding me? I think my local girl scout troop did more than $300K in cookies this March. Read Media Czech's full takedown.

It's now been a week since Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo's Senate campaign said it would release its second-quarter fundraising totals.

But first thing that morning, Attorney General Jack Conway's Senate campaign announced that Conway had set new Kentucky fundraising records by collecting $1.325 million.

We've been waiting for Mongiardo's numbers ever since. We're still waiting.

Now Page One Kentucky reports a rumor that Mongiardo's fundraising fell short of Conway's by a million dollars.

Taylor Shelton wondered in comments how soon Mongiardo would drop out of the race.

Last Thursday, I speculated in comments at Barefoot and Progressive that Mongiardo would raise less than $500K, and would raise less in his own home region of Eastern Kentucky than the $125,000 Louisvillian Conway raised in the same region.

I don't think Mongiardo's going to drop out, no matter how little money he raised in the second quarter. I think he's going to keep lying, and shilling for the Magic Buggy Whip industry, and fucking over Eastern Kentucky, and bashing gays, and whining about those mean ol' liberal bloggers and how much they love that elitist Jack Conway right up until the day after the 2010 May primary when he sets a new Kentucky record for fewest votes cast.