"An Intelligence BOMBSHELL about IRAN and NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" is how CNN _WHORES_ the December NIE intel , "NO Iran bomb program" report...

Stealing a page from George Orwell's totalitarian novels, and from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' reality-distorting hate propaganda leading up to the Germany's WWII invasions of first Western Europe and then Eastern Europe, CNN is trumpeting their headline:

"AN INTELLIGENCE BOMBSHELL ABOUT IRAN and NUCLEAR WEAPONS... but this time is the intel correct?"

....which of course to millions of sofa-bound TV viewers out there in America-land, is interpreted as

"SEE THERE! CNN says there is a BOMBSHELL INTELLIGENCE REPORT THAT IRAN HAS NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"

CNN's headline further implies that while the US intel pushed by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secreatary of State Colin Powell, and the entire Bush-Cheney neo-con "intel" choir "IRAG HAS WMD PROGRAM!" was WRONG in the Bush administration's Naziesque rush to bomb and invade Iraq, this time, with the NIE reporting that Iran DOES NOT have a nuclear bomb program, CNN's screaming headline implies "the INTEL (NIE report that Iran STOPPED its nuclear program in 2004) MAY NOT BE correct."

In fact, the latest NIE report is a BOMBSHELL, prcisely because it demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that America's election-stealing president and vice president are WAR MONGERING LIARS INSANE with WAR LUST to BOMB YET ANOTHER COUNTRY.

CNN, in uber media-whore, WAR-PROPAGANDA MODE, manages to convey a message DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSIE to the real facts of this news story... and furthermore, in doing so, CNN WHITEWASHES the IN-YOUR-FACE WAR LIES of Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their entire AIPAC neo-con-infested government and media.

As if that isn't enough, in trumpeting their "BOMBSHELL INTELLIGENCE REPORT about IRAN's NUCLEAR PROGRAM!" CNN also DISTORTS and MISINFORMS on the true nature of America's neo-con War Mongers, who have been on a 2 decade quest to UNDO the NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES... of PRESIDENT (and Republican saint) RONALD REAGAN, by GUTTIN international NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES, in favor of "UNILATERAL" American NUCLEAR MILTIARY BACKED THREATS and COERCIONS!

America's media, case study CNN "news" - has gone COMPLETELY NAZI in its lust for WIDER WARS. And when CNN isn't 'TEASING" with its "IRAN NUCLEAR BOMBSHELL!" hysterical headline (which, as with most TV, the TEASERS gets more air-time over the days ahead of a report than the actual air time spent on that report), CNN is PIMPING its FAVORITE 'news" coverage - THE 2008 presidential CANDIDATE.
Specifically, this hour CNN is pimping CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS of the candidates!
Well, THANKS, CNN, for the TEXTBOOK example of an American media network WHORING a PROPAGANDA NARRATIVE: HYSTERICAL Nazi-esque headlines "WE MUST INVADE AND CONQUER THE ENEMY NOW, before they DESTROY OUR REICH and the Good Ameican volk!" interspersed with American CELEBRITY WORSHIP bullshit.

---------------------------------

CNN headline: "U.S. wants more pressure on Iran
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/12/08/us.iran/index.html
U.S. Defense Secretary Gates calls on international community to pressurize Iran
Makes comments at Gulf states' security conference in Manama, Bahrain

Gates: "Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos"
[NOTE: AMERICA ILLEGALLY BOMBED and OCCUPIED IRAQ, has ALLOWED the TALIBAN to overtake over half of Afghanistan, and now the neo-con US War Secreatary IS BLAMING IRAN for "INSTABILITY and CHAOS" in the area!]
MANAMA, Bahrain (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called on the international community to step up pressure on Iran to vow not to develop nuclear weapons, suspend uranium enrichment and open up its nuclear facilities for inspection.
Gates' address to a Gulf states' security conference Saturday came a day after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters at a NATO meeting in Belgium that the United States will continue to push for a new U.N. resolution to pressure Iran to halt its nuclear program.

Gates sarcastically noted that Iran celebrated the U.S. intelligence community's recent report -- the National Intelligence Estimate -- that said Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. He said it marks a "watershed" that "Iran has, for the first time, embraced as valid an assessment of the United States intelligence community -- on Iran's nuclear weapons program."

He said "since that government now acknowledges the quality of American intelligence assessments, I assume that it also will embrace as valid American intelligence assessments" that Iran is funding and training of militia groups in Iraq; deploying lethal weapons and technology to both Iraq and Afghanistan; supporting terrorist organizations -- like Hezbollah and Hamas -- that have murdered thousands of innocent civilians; and continued research and development of medium-range ballistic missiles that can carry weapons of mass destruction.

"In reality, you cannot pick and choose only the conclusions you like of this National Intelligence Estimate," Gates said.

"The report expresses with greater confidence than ever that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program -- developed secretly, kept hidden for years, and in violation of its international obligations," he said.

"It reports that they do continue their nuclear enrichment program, an essential long lead time component of any nuclear weapons program. It states that they do have the mechanisms still in place to restart their program."

Don't Miss
Rice: U.S. still wants Iran sanctions
Iranian officers' info led to new U.S. assessment
Democrats slam Bush account on Iran
Gates said pressure from the international community is the only thing that can stop Iran from restarting its nuclear weapons program at any time "if it has not done so already."

"While we must keep our options open, the United States and the international community must continue -- and intensify -- our economic, financial, and diplomatic pressures on Iran to suspend enrichment and agree to verifiable arrangements that can prevent that country from resuming its nuclear weapons program at a moment's notice -- at the whim of its most militant leaders," Gates said.

"Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents -- Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike," he said.


"There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing."

Gates, in an interview Friday with the Al-Arabiya television network, said: "The U.S. is 100 percent committed to a diplomatic option on Iran," according to a retranslation of his remarks from English to Arabic to English. E-mail to a friend

uber-Media WHORES CNN sought to crank out "IRAN NUCLEAR BOMB!" bogus "news" special....

POOR WOLF BLITZER!
With Mr. Bush exposed as a war-lusting liar (President Bush has actually been hyping "WORLD WAR THREE" for the past few weeks from behind his "restore honor and dignity to the White House" podium) CNN has had to cancel its Fox 'news'-esque "IRAN SECRET NUCLEAR BOMB!" special TV production.
And Mr. Blitzer, of CNN 'news,' will just have to surreptitiously watch those videos of Air Force bombs levelling Iraqi homes (the ones that CNN and other media whores no longer run on American airwaves... wouldn't be "Christian" to gloat over bombing homes, would it?), instead of watching the Air Force crank out its newest arousal-inciting "BUNKER BUSTERS," "shake and bake" (phosphorous bombs), MOAB "Mother of All Bombs" cargo-plane launched super-bombs (and maybe, even, tactical nukes?) over virgin cities and targets in IRAN war coverage that Mr. Bush, Mr. Blitzer, Mr. Lieberman, Mr. Gergen (uber Washington Post "conventional wisdom" media whore) and so many other ghouls in the American press, media and government have been so lusting for....

But CHEER UP, BOYS! With the AIPAC neo-con war-lobby owning Nancy Pelosi and her craven Democrats, (including Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid too timid to step on a bug), the jig is not yet up on your bombing/death-squads/torture/looting/nuclear fallout/hired mercenaries/police-state America and permanent war fantasies just yet!

=========================================

Intel report sinks CNN Iran special
Two-hour 'Nuclear' was slated for Dec. 12
By BRIAN LOWRYHOLLYWOOD
7 December 2007
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117977083.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1

-- The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed one casualty: CNN has postponed speculative documentary "We Were Warned -- Iran Goes Nuclear."
The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the "CNN Presents" banner, was "set partially in the future," featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials -- playing fictional cabinet members -- debate how to deal with the Iranian threat.

That special was "based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions," said CNN veep-senior exec producer Mark Nelson, noting that the surprising NIE report "changed everything."

In its place, CNN will this weekend air two Campbell Brown-hosted specials on the Iran situation and its history. Portions of "We Were Warned" correspondent Frank Sesno's original reporting will be incorporated into those hours, which air Saturday and Sunday.

Among those participating in the war-game panel featured as part of "Iran Goes Nuclear" were former CIA director Jim Woolsey, former EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman and former presidential adviser David Gergen.

Eric Alterman's "Top 6 What's Wrong with Major Media" doesn't begin to catch the SHEER CORRUPTION of the Media whores...

Eric Alterman's "the Top 6 Things Wrong with Main-Stream-Media" (below, DOESN'T BEGIN TO SCRATCH THE SURFACE of the SHEER, disgusting, craven, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the Main Stream Media whores.
Need an example? In South Florida, they are pumping RAW SEWAGE into the ocean.. via a huge pipe less than a mile off shore of Broward-Palm Beach County beaches. If the winds and tide are heading back towards shore, the sewage comes RIGHT BACK TO THE BEACH - where it wipes out the fragile reefs, and of course forces swimmers to swim in it. Well, maybe it isn't RAW sewage... maybe it is "once treated" sewage, or even "twice treated" sewage.
WELL, WE DON'T KNOW.. because ALL THREE of South Florida's WHORE "major media" newspapers WON'T COVER that disgraceful scandal! THEY ARE TOO BUSY SELLING LIES, GARBAGE INFORMATION.. and now SHIT,
LITERALLY!
"WELCOME TO FLORIDA! COME SWIM IN OUR SHIT!" should be the new tourism motto of Broward, Palm Beach, and Dade counties. Never in human history, have so many benefited so much from the cheap, renewable, all-but-free natural resource that is the thin line between land and surf of Florida's beaches. (Any "cost" to "maintaining the beaches" involves, not the beaches themselves, but INFRASTRUCTURE adjacent to or on the beaches, or roads and buildings leading to the beaches. Even "beach renourishment" projects, no matter how costly, are about rescuing the DEVELOPMENT threatened by retreating shorelines,.) Florida's once pristine beaches have created MILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars in tourist revenue for South Florida's businesses... but they, the ENTIRE region and state of Florida, will do NOTHING to PROTECT those beaches - from the sewage that beach tourism development has created over the years! Not only that, they- South Florida businesses and especially MEDIA WHORES - CONTINUE TO LURE TOURISTS to VISIT Florida, presumably to SWIM IN THOSE now polluted with fecal bacteria waters!

Florida papers and press have also renounced ANY RESPONSIBILITY to oversee the $7.8 BILLION Everglades Restoration program. This allows the Republican state house to treat the federal TAXPAYER MONEY like a PRIVATE SLUSH FUND - to dole out huge funds to friends and crony contractors, especially connected landowners paid INFLATED PRICES for land that the state would CONDEMN in a New York minute if it was in the way of a highway interchange, but receives prime suburban valuations from the Restoration plan, despite being out in the middle of nowhere. Further, the properties in question would be worthless to agriculture or owners without extensive drainage and water subsidies, yet property owners demand, and get, massively inflated prices because business and the state house look at the "Restoration" project as their cash cow.

ALL THREE SOUTH FLORDIA PAPERS - the PALM BEACH POST, Ft. Lauderdale SUN-SENTINEL, and MIAMI HERALD - are party to these SCANDALS - ENTICING TOURISTS to SWIM IN SEWAGE, and allowing Florida officials to SQUANDER BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of taxpayer restoration funds. And that is just TWO little issues, at three little papers.

The GROSS, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the "Major Media" extends from STOLEN ELECTIONS, to WHITEWASHING 9-11 culpability, to pretending that ffemale privates, ordered to "abuse" prisoners at US run Abu Ghraib prison, were acting as "rogue operators" - at a time when the Secretary of Defense, Vice President, and President were OPENLY ASSERTING the " RIGHT" to TORTURE prisoners... TO DEATH! And what is with the Orwellian "DETAINEE" designation for prisoners that the Media Whores and War government love to use? You are "DETAINED" if you are stopped for a few moments, or even hours, or days. When someone is "detained" as a teenager, and remains in American prisons 5 years later, that isn't "detention" - that is prison.


The SHEER, VILE, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the "American Major Media" is BOTTOMLESS, and the NEW YORK TIMES, FOX 'news" and other corporate media whores ARE STILL LUSTING to BOMB MORE COUNTRIES, and KILL MORE MILLIONS of Mid-easterners.


=============================================


What's Really Wrong With the MSM?
Eric Alterman "the liberal media" at theNation.com
posted December 6, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/alterman

Of course, far more is wrong with the mainstream media than can be described, or even enumerated, in one column. But let's give it a shot, using only items that have come up since my last column, all of which speak to the issue of why its members have forfeited our collective trust.

1. Its members consistently defer to conservative Republican Presidents with a history of deliberate deception, allowing them to define their terms. "One of the reasons for not [calling chaos in Iraq a civil war] was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House has contended that this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of unnecessary political statement."--Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times.

2. Its members invite Republican Congressmen, known to be not merely unreliable but delusional, to lie about Democratic Congressmen. When challenged, they reply that they cannot be bothered to discern the truth: Time's Joe Klein, a pundit who terms the Democratic Party "a party with absolutely no redeeming social value," one whose members "make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth," recently informed the magazine's readers that "tone-deaf" Democrats in the House had passed legislation that "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only," and thereby "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The liberal blogosphere, led by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, demonstrated that this statement was categorically false, as the bill reads: "A court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Time eventually printed a correction but refused to adjudicate between truth and falsehood, claiming merely that Democrats and Republicans interpret the bill differently. Klein shrugged off criticism by saying, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Later Republican Peter Hoekstra, who is also on record insisting that the United States had discovered a WMD program in Iraq but that the CIA had conspired to cover it up, revealed that he had been a key source for Klein's reporting.

3. Its members invite conservative Republican individuals known to be insane, unbalanced and unconcerned with the truth to lie about Democratic presidential candidates on the front page of their newspapers and when confronted respond that it is not their job to determine the truth. The Washington Post's Perry Bacon published a recent front-page article giving voice to right-wing paranoids, racists and assorted hatemongers who insist that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. Sources included the Moonie-financed Insight online magazine, Human Events (home to Ann Coulter), demagogues Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, and some guy who posted on the Internet somewhere. Beyond the Obama campaign's denials, nowhere in the piece did Bacon inform readers that these allegations are demonstrably false. In an online chat, the paper's Lois Romano explicitly defended the practice, claiming that "airing some of this and giving [Obama] a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight."

4. Its corporations fire, and then buy the silence of, their own reporters in order to hide the truth, when it involves the draft records of certain conservative Republican Presidents. After being fired by CBS News as the chosen fall-person for Dan Rather's story on George W. Bush's draft avoidance, producer Mary Mapes published Truth and Duty, a book that insisted the story was true, the documents were real and she had been the victim of a deal between CBS's parent, Viacom, and the Bush White House to quash the story. After the book's publication, CBS paid Mapes an undisclosed sum to settle her lawsuit against the company and required her to sign a confidentiality agreement covering the deal. The three other CBS staffers working with Rather on the story were also fired and given settlements, one reportedly worth $3 million. Recall that the documents in question, while never authenticated, have never been proven to be forgeries, and CBS's own committee of inquiry took no position on their veracity.

5. Its members are so in thrall to the powerful conservative Republican figures they cover that they make up excuses for their self-serving behavior. Appearing on Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio show, Mark Halperin, former political director of ABC News, now a top analyst for ABC and Time, offered his views on the reason Senate minority leader Trent Lott was resigning: "I think that this is a true 'wants to spend more time with his family' case." Halperin was apparently unaware that Lott--whose politically connected brother-in-law was recently indicted on bribery charges--himself failed to offer this lamest of excuses and also that his resignation came just in time to avoid the enactment of a tough new ethics law relating to retiring legislators and their future lobbying practices.

6. Its members ignore the substance of politics and instead focus obsessively on atmospherics, leaving voters clueless about the politicians for whom they are expected to vote. "I've always felt that we did a disservice to voters and the public by filling the news hole with too much horse race and not enough information to let them make a decision on who the best President would be," Halperin explains in a new book. "We should examine a candidate's public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance," he then added in a widely quoted mea culpa on the New York Times op-ed page. Alas, within a week of writing those words, Halperin published two pieces on the Time website that focused exclusively on the various campaigns, with nary a substance-related syllable in either one.

Media Whores who trumpetted the "BOMB IRAN NOW!" narrative...

Debunking Iran's Nuclear Program: Another 'Intelligence Failure' -- On the Part of the Press?
by Greg Mitchell
(December 04, 2007)
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003680766

Iraqi WMD redux: The release of the NIE throwing cold water on oft-repeated claims of a rampant Iranian nuclear weapons program has chastened public officials and policymakers who have promoted this line for years. But many in the media have made these same claims, often extravagantly.

NEW YORK Press reports so far have suggested that the belated release of the National Intelligence Estimate yesterday throwing cold water on oft-repeated claims of a rampant Iranian nuclear weapons program has deeply embarrassed, or at least chastened, public officials and policymakers who have promoted this line for years. Gaining little attention so far: Many in the media have made these same claims, often extravagantly, which promoted (deliberately or not) the tubthumping for striking Iran.

Surely you remember Sen. John McCain's inspired Beach Boys' parody, a YouTube favorite, "Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran"? That was the least of it. You could dance to it and it had a good beat. Not so for so much of the press and punditry surrounding the bomb. Who can forget Norman Podhoretz's call for an immediate attack on Iran, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last May, as he argued that "the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force -- any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938."

As I've warned in this space for years, too many in the media seemed to fail to learn the lessons of the Iraqi WMD intelligence failure -- and White House propaganda effort -- and instead, were repeating it, re: Iran. This time, perhaps, we may have averted war, with little help from most of the media. In this case, it appears, the NIE people managed to resist several months of efforts by the administration to change their assessment. If only they had stiffened their backbones concerning Iraq in 2002.


For the rest of today and this week, media critics will be offering up all sorts of reminders of the near-fatal claims by many in the press relating to Iranian nukes. Sure to get attention are the scare stories in the summer of 2005 after "proof" of an Iranian nuke program somehow surfaced on a certain laptop, proudly unveiled by offiicials and bought by many in the media then as firm evidence (and now debunked, like much of the "proof" of Iraqi WMD provided by defectors a few years back).

Wth much effort, I've already found this beauty from David Brooks of The New York Times from Jan. 22, 2006, when he declared that "despite administration hopes, there is scant reason to believe that imagined Iranian cosmopolitans would shut down the nuclear program, or could if they wanted to, or could do it in time - before Israel forced the issue to a crisis point. This is going to be a lengthy and tortured debate, dividing both parties. We'll probably be engaged in it up to the moment the Iranian bombs are built and fully functioning."

As recently as this past June, Thomas Friedman of The Times wrote: "Iran is about to go nuclear."

Even more recently, on October 23, 2007, Richard Cohen (like Brooks and Friedman, a big backer of the attack on Iraq) of The Washington Post, wrote: "Sadly, it is simply not possible to dismiss the Iranian threat. Not only is Iran proceeding with a nuclear program, but it projects a pugnacious, somewhat nutty, profile to the world."

More in this vein is sure to come: I found those three quotes without even breaking a sweat. At least Friedman, Brooks and Cohen back some kind of diplomacy in regard to Iran, unlike many of their brethren.

Another Post columnist, Jim Hoagland, exactly one month ago summarized his year-long travels and study surrounding this issue, declaring "unmistakable effort by Iran to develop nuclear weapons....That Iran has gone to great, secretive lengths to create and push forward a bomb-building capability is not a Bush delusion." He added the warning that "time is running out on the diplomatic track."

One week before that, reporting on his trip to Moscow, Hoagland noted Putin's doubts that Tehran will be able to turn enriched uranium into a usable weapon -- but called that failure "implausible."

We'd be remiss if we left out William Kristol, the hawk's hawk on Iran, who for the July 14, 2006 issue of The Weekly Standard called for a "military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions--and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."

As often the case, Salon.com's popular blogger, Glenn Greenwald, may have gotten there first. A longtime critic of The Washington Post editorial page and its editor, Fred Hiatt, he has already happily reprinted a few choice passages from the past.

Here is the latest, from a Sept. 26, 2007 editorial in the Post, which flatly denounced Iran's "race for a bomb":

"As France's new foreign minister has recognized, the danger is growing that the United States and its allies could face a choice between allowing Iran to acquire the capacity to build a nuclear weapon and going to war to prevent it.

"The only way to avoid facing that terrible decision is effective diplomacy -- that is, a mix of sanctions and incentives that will induce Mr. Ahmadinejad's superiors to suspend their race for a bomb. ...
Even if Tehran provides satisfactory answers, its uranium enrichment -- and thus its progress toward a bomb -- will continue. That doesn't trouble Mr. ElBaradei, who hasn't hidden his view that the world should stop trying to prevent Iran from enriching uranium and should concentrate instead on blocking U.S. military action ...

"European diplomats say they are worried that escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, if fueled by more sanctions, could lead to war. What they don't make clear is how the government Mr. Ahmadinejad represents will be induced to change its policy if it has nothing to fear from the West."

Greenwald also resurrects Post editorial quotes in this vein going back to 2005, along with this choice snippet from a September online interview with Kenneth Pollack, whose complete wrongheadedness on Iraqi WMD somehow has not kept him from remaining a darling of the press as an expert on Iran's nukes and other Middle East issues:

"Q. How compelling is the evidence that Iranians are developing a nuclear weapons program?

"POLLACK: Obviously, the evidence is circumstantial, but it is quite strong."

I'll provide other examples of pundit malfeasance as they surface.
*
Care to comment or read more press criticism? Go to E&P Editor Greg Mitchell's new blog at
Comment.

More on GHOULISH TIME magazine's propensity to LIE like Joseph Goebbels...

Time magazine refused to publish responses to Klein's false smears
by Glenn Greenwald
December 4, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/04/time/index.html

The disgraceful behavior of Time Magazine in the Joe Klein scandal has been well-documented. But new facts have emerged that reveal that Time's behavior was far worse than previously thought.

First, Sen. Russ Feingold submitted a letter to Time protesting the false statements in Klein's article. But Time refused to publish it. Sen. Feingold's spokesman said that the letter "was submitted to TIME very shortly after Klein's column ran but the letters department was about as responsive as the column was accurate."
(continued..)

More on Lying Neo-con uber media whore JOE KLEIN's democracy-gutting lies....

CATCHING A MEDIA WHORE in the ACT OF LYING is easy... IT IS JUST THE SHEER VOLUME of their LIES, screeching out at America from the pages of TIME and NEWSWEEK and the WASHINGTON WHORE POST and the suzlberger-owned NEW YORK SLIMES and "I deal with Communist Chinese, while bitching about Communists" Rupert Murdoch's Fox 'news' - that is destroying America, ruining international cooperation (eg, NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES _GUTTED_ by the neo-con/neo-Confederate Bush-Cheney administration), and of course making GREED and THE WORSHIP OF MONEY the driving forces in American media and politics. Here, JOE KLEIN is EXPOSED AS A LYING MEDIA WHORE yet again...
=======================================

TIME Magazine isn't Exactly Shackled to the Truth
A. Alexander, December 1st, 2007
http://www.progressivedailybeacon.com/more.php?page=opinion&id=1753

Only recently, TIME magazine performed an outrageous hit-piece on Congressional Democrats and their plan to restore Constitutional protections to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA). According to TIME's Joe Klein, a longtime and big-time Neoconservative supporter, Democrats were essentially intending to provide terrorists with the same protections afforded innocent and law abiding U.S. citizens. When Salon's Glenn Greenwald called TIME on their ridiculous, false, misleading, and scandalous claim the editor was reluctant to admit fault and to print a retraction

CJR deconstructs a Washington Whore Post/Perry Bacon Jr. HIT PIECE smear-job on Barak Obama....

Is Perry Bacon Serious?
Obama story has no place in the Washington Post
By Paul McLeary
Thu 29 Nov 2007
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/post_75.php

<< In The Washington Post this morning, reporter Perry Bacon Jr. wrote what may be the single WORST campaign ‘08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle. >> [Which, needless to say, is plain old world-class whoredom & a 'major media' propaganda smear job.]

Media Whores CNN, President Jon Klein WHORING "BROWN is EVIL!" (illegal immigrants) as new Wedge-issue for 2008....

We are delighted to hear that UBER WHORES CNN are being targeted for attention by watchdogs such as HuffPost's Marty Kaplan, and we welcome the "competition" of Tim Rutten's new "Corrupt News Network" column in Saturday morning's LATimes. Maybe we (the humble writers/editors here at MediaWhoresUSA.blogspot.com) can go back to living normal lives, instead of dwelling, over-time, unpaid, in the s***-filled cesspit that is "Major Media" (corporate media) USA.

<< The reason Rutten calls CNN corrupt is the collateral damage to American democracy of the network's campaign to convince advertisers that the eyeballs watching the most trusted name in news think Mexicans Gone Wild is a sexier topic for our country to fight about in 2007 and 2008 than health care, education, the environment, energy, and all the other issues that got shockingly short shrift at the YouTubaganza. >>

===============================

Time Warner: Brown Is The New Gay
by Marty Kaplan
1 December 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/time-warner-brown-is-th_b_74928.html


When I read the funny Saturday morning take-down of me in HuffPo by Bill Robinson, the brother of CNN PR boss Christa Robinson, my immediate reaction was, Jeebus, do I now have to apologize to Dana Perino's brother for being mean to her, too?

Here's Bill Robinson's point: "You want to protest CNN's debate? Conspiracy theories about YouTube videos ain't gonna do it, they just got the highest ratings ever for a political program. Besting the record set by their last debate. No, if you want to get to CNN, then unplug your Time Warner Cable."

He's right. Follow the money - or in this case, the Nielsens. The contradictory doublespeak by the doublestandard-bearers of the best political team on television is merely a wonky journalism sideshow; it's the ka-ching that really counts. After all, when CNN domestic president Jon Klein, and CNN political director Sam Feist, were asked to defend CNN's choice of YouTube questions by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, they both ended up giving the same answer: Wheee! Lookit the ratings! Move over, General Motors; in the age of Big Media, what's good for Time Warner is good for the country. Say goodnight, ladies of the League of Women's Voters; Joe Klein's stock options are back on top, baby!


But now that I've read Tim Rutten's "Corrupt News Network" column in Saturday morning's LATimes, what had been hidden in plain sight has hit me like a ton of bits. Before the debate, I'd been skeptical about CNN's making the Republican presidential candidates face the many YouTubed-in questions about homophobia, the wedge issue driven deep into the country by the reckless Bush-Rove GOP. But Rutten made me realize how 2006 (and 2004 and 2002 and 2000) I was being. In 2007 and 2008, illegal immigrants are the new Other.

That's why, as Rutten points out, the first 35 minutes of the debate were devoted to immigration, despite the fact that (as Pew polls show) 96 percent of Americans don't think immigration is the most important issue confronting the country. But Broken Borders is the ratings-pumping battle cry for CNN's house demagogue, Lou Dobbs, and its ticket to besting the bullies over at Fox. (Glenn Beck, CNN's pet psycho, also does a damn fine job of demonizing darkies.)

The reason Rutten calls CNN corrupt is the collateral damage to American democracy of the network's campaign to convince advertisers that the eyeballs watching the most trusted name in news think Mexicans Gone Wild is a sexier topic for our country to fight about in 2007 and 2008 than health care, education, the environment, energy, and all the other issues that got shockingly short shrift at the YouTubaganza.

Washington Whore Post BURIES ENRON FRAUD, SEC RULING stories on pages D-1 and D-3....

Today's Washington Post front page leads with more of their favorite fare: Dem. and Republican primary and debate conversational (no hard news) stories... but the post BURIES today's REAL NEWS _DEEP_ in the paper, on pages D-1 and D-3.
On page D-1 is the story "SEC Votes to LIMIT Shareholder Rights." On the heels of the massive ENRON and Arthur Andersen, World Com (etc.) financial scandals, ONE MIGHT THINK that this story deserves FRONT PAGE, A-1 coverage... Republicans are set to LOOSEN the ACCOUNTABILITY of corporations to their stockholders yet again!

Sure enough, BURIED on page D-3 is a Whore Post story "Three Linked to Enron Fraud Plead Guilty."

The Whore Post and "major media" - HELPING the Bush-Cheney Republican Party BURY news of the massive financial scandals and fraud of Enron corp.

This treatment of "hard news" (i.e. burying it) by the Post, also illustrates the COMPLICITY of the Democratic Party 'leadership' of Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Harry Reid: They FOLLOW the "conventional wisdom" notion that the SEC story is "no big deal", and ALLOW the Republicans and post to BURY IT deep in the paper's business section.


SEC Votes to Limit Shareholder Rights
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/28/AR2007112802196.html?hpid=sec-business

Three Linked to Enron Fraud Plead Guilty
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/28/AR2007112802358.html?hpid%3Dsec-business&sub=AR

Washington Post's PRINCIPLES of Journalism.. at least back in 1933....

PRINCIPLES of Journalism for the Washington Post, set by purchaser of the ailing newspaper, West Coast financier Eugene Meyer, 1933:


http://www.washpostco.com/history-history-1925.htm
1933
On June 1, a public bankruptcy auction was held on the steps of The Post's E Street Building and the newspaper was sold for $825,000 to Eugene Meyer, a California-born financier. Meyer was not an experienced newspaperman, but he had strong convictions about publishing a newspaper which he expressed in this set of principles:

* The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.
*The Newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.
*As a disseminator of the news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.
*What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as for the old.
*The newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.
*In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good.
*The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.

Update on the TIME magazine WILLFUL DECEIT, PATENTLY FALSE STATEMENTS in their rah-rah SURVEILLANCE story....

Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald are working on the story of TIME magazine publishing a JOE KLEIN article that was FULL OF PATENTLY FALSE statements, if not DELIBERATE LIES. Here an up-date on our previous post, in the form of an open letter by Greenwald to the editors of TIME:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/27/time/index.html

Mr. Stengel - I'm working on a comprehensive piece for Salon about the process that allowed Joe Klein to publish BLATANTLY FALSE STATEMENTS in his FISA article. I'd like to interview you regarding this matter, including these topics:
*Who edited Joe Klein's piece?
*How could such unambiguously, factually false claims make it into the article, and who is responsible for correcting it?
*Does Time have the responsibility not only to correct mistakes like this but also, where it seems rather clearly to be the by-product of WILLFUL DECEIT on the part of a source, describe how it was tricked?
Could you email me and let me know if you can talk and I can call you, or you can give me a call [phone number]. Thanks -
Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/27/time/index.html

Media Whores IGNORE the Washington, DC created IRAQ HOLOCAUST.....

In an excellent commentary, Mark Weisbrot details how the "Major Media," week in and week out, copy or replicate the number one propaganda technique of Nazi Propaganda Minister JOSEPH GOEBBELS:
#1. SMEAR your opponents as subhuman, as enemies of all that is good, and as a threat to your nation
#2. FOCUS on the heroic qualities of those in your party, or on your side, in the war against the evil-doers...
#3. IGNORE the TRUE COSTS of one's policies, either by minimizing the human qualities of the victims, OR NOT MENTIONING THEM (victims) AT ALL.

<< Is Washington responsible for a holocaust in Iraq? That is the question that almost everyone here wants to avoid. So the holocaust is denied. >>

======================================

Holocaust Denial, American Style
By Mark Weisbrot, AlterNet.
Posted November 21, 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/68568/

Institutionally unwilling to consider America's responsibility for the bloodbath, the traditional media have refused to acknowledge the massive number of Iraqis killed since the invasion.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.

This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.

The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain's leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000 people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died because of public health problems created by the war, including breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of medicines, etc.

Amazingly, some journalists and editors - and of course some politicians - dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don't believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.

The methods used in the estimates of Iraqi deaths are the same as those used to estimate the deaths in Darfur, which are widely accepted in the media. They are also consistent with the large numbers of refugees from the violence (estimated at more than four million). There is no reason to disbelieve them, or to accept tallies such as that the Iraq Body Count (73,305 - 84,222), which include only a small proportion of those killed, as an estimate of the overall death toll.

Of course, acknowledging the holocaust in Iraq might change the debate over the war. While Iraqi lives do not count for much in US politics, recognizing that a mass slaughter of this magnitude is taking place could lead to more questions about how this horrible situation came to be. Right now a convenient myth dominates the discussion: the fall of Saddam Hussein simply unleashed a civil war that was waiting to happen, and the violence is all due to Iraqis' inherent hatred of each other.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that the occupation itself - including the strategy of the occupying forces - has played a large role in escalating the violence to holocaust proportions. It is in the nature of such an occupation, where the vast majority of the people are opposed to the occupation and according to polls believe it is right to try and kill the occupiers, to pit one ethnic group against another. This was clear when Shiite troops were sent into Sunni Fallujah in 2004; it is obvious in the nature of the death-squad government, where officials from the highest levels of the Interior Ministry to the lowest ranking police officers - all trained and supported by the US military - have carried out a violent, sectarian mission of "ethnic cleansing." (The largest proportion of the killings in Iraq are from gunfire and executions, not from car bombs). It has become even more obvious in recent months as the United States is now arming both sides of the civil war, including Sunni militias in Anbar province as well as the Shiite government militias.

Is Washington responsible for a holocaust in Iraq? That is the question that almost everyone here wants to avoid. So the holocaust is denied

How they do it: How TIME magazine and other Media Whores LIE to America, week after week.....

Time magazine's FISA fiasco shows how Beltway reporters mislead the country
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday November 25, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/25/klein_fisa/index.html

On Wednesday, I documented that Joe Klein's column in this week's Time Magazine contained multiple false statements about the new FISA bill -- The RESTORE Act -- passed by House Democrats last week. The most obvious and harmful inaccuracy was his claim that that bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court" and that it therefore "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." Based on those outright falsehoods, Klein called the House Democrats' bill "well beyond stupid."

That day, Klein responded on his blog to what I wrote without acknowledging that he was doing so and without even telling his readers what the criticisms were. He insisted that everything he wrote was accurate ("as I reported, [the bill] obliquely gives foreign terrorists the same procedures as American citizens, if not the same rights"). He also said that the RESTORE Act was just "a partisan waste of time, fodder for lawyers and civil liberties extremists."

Yesterday -- Saturday night on Thanksgiving weekend -- Klein returned to the Time blog to write an extremely conditional, weaselly, self-justifying and partial "correction" to what he wrote in the print magazine. There's no indication whether any correction will appear in the print magazine, but the online version of Klein's article contains no such correction and still contains all of his grave misstatements.

I don't want the focus here to be on Klein himself. It's beyond well-established what he is and what a slothful, easily manipulated and dishonest "reporter" he is. As deceitful as the correction itself is (for the reasons set forth below), at least he returned to the issue and finally admitted wrongdoing (Klein: "Clearly, I didn't do sufficient vetting of the facts"), which is more than most of this type of pundit typically does.

* * * * *

What I want to do is examine Klein's conduct here to illustrate how so many Beltway reporters (though not all) function. This is not a matter of some obscure error involving details. Because of what Klein did, Time Magazine told its 4 million readers that the bill passed by the House Democrats "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans" and thus shows how Democrats still can't be trusted on national security. The whole column was built on complete, transparent falsehoods about the key provisions of that bill.

Yet look at Klein's first statement in his "correction":

I may have made a mistake in my column this week about the FISA legislation passed by the House, although it's difficult to tell for sure given the technical nature of the bill's language and fierce disagreements between even moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Committee about what the bill actually does contain.
One can debate whether Klein's original, inaccurate claims about the House FISA bill in his Time article can fairly be called "lies" (as opposed to inexcusably reckless inaccuracies). But this statement by Klein in his "correction" unquestionably is a lie.

There is no confusion possible about whether the House bill -- as Klein originally wrote -- "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court." Anyone who told that to Klein was lying. All you have to do is read the House bill in order to know that. Here is Section 2 of the RESTORE Act -- the very first section after the "Definitions" section:


'CLARIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE OF NON-UNITED STATES PERSONS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES'

Sec. 105A. (a) Foreign to Foreign Communications-

(1) IN GENERAL - Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.

Nobody who can read basic English can fail to understand what this says. As clearly as it can, the bill says that no warrant is required for communications involving non-U.S. persons outside of the U.S. In fact, individual warrants are not even required when a foreign target communicates with someone inside the U.S.; only general approval by the FISA court of the procedures used to eavesdrop is required (see Sec. 105). Thus, Klein's statements about the bill were indisputably, unquestionably false, and all one had to do is read the painfully clear language of the bill to know that.

But Klein, of course, never bothered to read the bill and still hasn't (even though he is published by Time to "report on" and opine about this bill). Instead, even now, he says that he has spoken with both Republicans and Democrats, and while Democrats insist that what he wrote was false, "the Republican Committee staff disagrees and says [his] reporting is correct."

In other words, Klein's GOP source(s) blatantly lied to him about what the bill does and doesn't do in order to manipulate him into uncritically feeding Time's readers the Rush Limbaugh Line -- namely, that Democrats are giving equal rights to Terrorists and preventing the Leader from eavesdropping on foreign Terrorists. And Klein dutifully wrote down what he was told in Time without bothering to find out if it was true and without ever bothering to talk to any of the bill's Democratic proponents. And no Time Editor knew enough or cared enough to bother correcting any of it. And thus, the unfortunate 4 million Americans who read and trust Time now think that the Democrats' FISA bill does the exact opposite of what it actually does.

That is the real story here. That's how our political system works. Scheming GOP operatives feed whispered lies to their favorite, most gullible, most slothful and/or dishonest Beltway journalists. Gleeful and grateful that they have been chosen for this dirty task, these journalists then scamper and write down what they were told and think that, by doing so, they are engaged in what they call "original reporting" -- which means uncritically passing on what they're told by government sources. As a result, they continue to obfuscate every key political issue and mislead Americans by doing the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.

Even now that Klein knows that he was lied to by his GOP source(s), he still won't say that. Indeed, he does the opposite. He claims that there's some super-complex, clouded ambiguity here that people of good faith (such as his lying GOP operative-source) can see differently (Klein: "I reported as fact a provision of the bill that seems to be disputable, to say the least" and "I was clearly wrong to state as fact something that might not actually be in the bill"). Again and again, Klein defends his lying GOP source by pretending that there is some genuine grounds for disagreement here among good faith ladies and gentlemen that accounts for what he was told.

Worse, Klein now says that none of this really matters anyway, because "we are talking about relatively obscure and unimportant technical details" and his "larger point" about Democrats' excess partisanship is "still true." So Klein's column smeared House Democrats as wanting to protect Terrorists, based on a lie fed to him by GOP sources, and now that it's exposed for what it is, he says that none of that really matters anyway. What matters is that Democrats are still being foolish by not agreeing to the demands of the House Republicans and giving amnesty to telecoms and passing a bill that Republicans like, too.

* * * * *

What a repugnant though vivid microcosm this is for how so many of our Beltway journalists function. They think that their only job is to write down faithfully what they are told by both sides (if we're lucky) and call it a day. If one side is blatantly lying and the other side is telling the truth, that isn't for them to say.

Exactly like a stenographer in a court proceeding, their only job is to record the words that they hear accurately, not to identify what actually is true. And here is Klein admitting -- finally -- that this is exactly what he did (although in this case, he wasn't even a good stenographer since he only wrote down what one side said, not both).

The very idea of a reporter and a major news magazine publishing a piece about a crucial bill that neither the reporter nor any editor has ever even bothered to read is amazing. No blogger that I read regularly would ever think about doing that. But that's how the Bush administration has been able to depict all of its false statements about Iraq, and its illegal spying on Americans, as some sort of complex, impossible-to-resolve "controversy." GOP operatives say "X" and reporters write it down, and it would be terribly "partisan" for them to point out that "X" is actually an outright lie.

Had Klein even bothered to read the Democrats' bill before calling it "well beyond stupid" and passing on lies about it, he would have had a real story. This:

Last week, House Democrats passed a bill that allows the government to eavesdrop on foreigners outside of the U.S., but requires court approval to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens inside the U.S. But GOP operatives/politicians have spent the week telling reporters that the bill does the opposite, falsely claiming that it gives the same rights to Terrorists that it gives to U.S. citizens.
Those are the objective facts. That is actually what happened. Yet Klein's function -- like those of most of his colleagues -- isn't to report what actually happened, so he'll never say that. And thus, Time has yet again completely misled its readers on a critical political issue by passing on GOP falsehoods as fact, and they are highly unlikely to do anything in the way of alerting their readers to what they did, let alone reporting the real story here: how and why that happened.

UPDATE: Jane Hamsher breaks this whole matter down to its essence. Atrios adds some observations about what would occur if the Joe Klein situation were reversed.

Wall St. Journal whores the "WACKY LEFT drives Clinton out of mainstream" meme...

In this article the Wall Street Journal whores its favorite meme: that the "loony left" is responsible for all the defeats of losing Democrat candidates and leaders, from John Kerry to Tom Daschle and all the losing Democrats before or after.

But the facts are that Al Gore won the popular vote DESPITE DOING NOTHING to HIGHLIGHT THE PLIGHT OF TEXAS SCHOOLCHILDREN tossed off of pre-school, after-school, and health-care programs by then Texas Gov. George W. Bush's signature TAX CUTS FOR MILLIONAIRES and BILLIONAIRES.

Al Gore ran a miserable campaign that REFUSED to use an issue DEFINING THE CRUELTY and crass greed of the Right-Wing agenda... the agenda that the Whore Street Journal pimps every day, day in and day out, DESPITE that agenda's DEVASTATING IMPACT ON NATIONAL SECURITY.

The Wall Street Journal worships only one god - the god of MONEY, MAMOM, cold profit, AND GREED.

AMERICA DID NOT WIN WWII and become a world superpower by putting GREED and PROFIT above the spirit of MUTUAL COOPERATION and SHARED SACRIFICE.

But the GHOULISH LIARS of the WHORE STREET JOURNAL will FOREVER attempt to justify their "GREED IS GOOD" agenda, through snarky editorials such as this one.

WHORES STREET JOURNAL pimps their "LOONY LEFT DRAGS HILLARY DOWN" insanity:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119577999706601663.html?mod=blogs

Media Whores work relentlessly TO IGNORE the McClellan "Bush, Cheney Rove, and Card INSTRUCTED ME TO LIE about Plame scandal" story

All The President's Liars: Where the Hell are The Washington Post and New York Times on McClellangate?!
November 21, 2007
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steve_yo_071121_all_the_president_s_.htm

McClellan book publisher furiously backpedals on significance of the books revelation, that Bush, Cheney, Rove, and WH Chief of Staff Andrew Card had WH spokesman Scott McClellan LIE to the American public during the CIA outing scandal....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21917188/

========================

Thomas FRIEDMAN of the New York Time, displays his AIPAC, neo-con, Warmongering INSANITY; calls for DICK CHENEY to be the DEMOCRAT's VP nominee!!

Hat-tip to ThinkProgress.com,
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/19/friedman-keep-cheney-on-for-another-term/
and Mathew Yglasias,
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/worst_oped_day_ever.php
for capturing and pointing out the sheer INSANE WAR LUST of Thomas Freidman and his employer, the "we LOVE TRASHING NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES, while THREATENING NUCLEAR ANHILATION to those we declare to be enemies" NEW YORK TIMES.
NO article or editorial ever published by the NEW YORK whore TIMES has ever quite captured the sheer insanity of the TIMES' devotion to the neo-con, Neo-Confederate, AIPAC war-lust, and designs for imperial hegemony and nuclear-backed intimidations -- and there have been many hundreds if not thousands of such NYT articles over the past decade urging, demanding, and white-washing wars, invasions, occuptaions, torture, spyng, and retributon (including WILLIAM SAFIRE's NYT "RETRIBUTION AGAINST FALLUJAH!" op-ed that advocated a massive reprisal against Fallujah that was indistinguisable from German treatment of GUERNICA, the embattled city in Spain bombed to rubble by Luftwaffe bombers during the Spanish Civil War) - as much as this insane THOMAS FRIEDMAN article, calling for DICK CHENEY - of HALLIBURTON STOCK OPTIONS/DEALING WITH IRAQ behind back of US/UN EMBARGO on Iraq infamy! - to be the choice of DEMOCRATS for their VP nominee in the 2008 elections!

Mr. Friedman, Mr. Safire, Mr. Sulzberger, and the entire top echelons of the New York Times have simply GONE BATTY with POWER, GREED, uncheked influence over the US news industry, and neo-con war-lust: it is THEY (and other AIPAC NEO-CON Straussian imperialists) over the past decade who have sought to LEGITIMIZE the Republican Right-Wing agenda to TRASH INTERNATIONAL TREATIES - including prohibition of TORTURE and restraints on NUCLEAR PROLIFERATIO - and who now seek to grind every nation on the earth under the bombs-and-bullets BOOT HEEL of US military "enforcement", aka threats or outright "war on terra" aggression.

THE NEO-CON WAR LUST AGENDA to CONQUER IRAN, IRAQ, SYRIA, and CASPIAN OIL NATIONS is INDISTINGUISHABLE from the German desire to CONQUER POLAND, Western Europe, and Russia, except that the Nazis did not have the massive NUCLEAR ARSENAL that Israel and America have today.

=========================================

Channeling Dick Cheney
[i.e., "Dick Cheney for DEMOCRATIC Vice President nominee" !!]
By Thomas Friedman
New York Times columnist
Published: November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18friedman.html

I have no idea who is going to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but lately I’ve been wondering whether, if it is Barack Obama, he might want to consider keeping Dick Cheney on as his vice president.

Skip to next paragraph

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman

Go to Columnist Page » No, I personally am not a Dick Cheney fan, and I know it is absurd to even suggest, but now that I have your attention, here’s what’s on my mind: After Iraq and Pakistan, the most vexing foreign policy issue that will face the next president will be how to handle Iran. There is a cold war in the Middle East today between America and Iran, and until and unless it gets resolved, I see Iran using its proxies, its chess pieces — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and the Shiite militias in Iraq — to stymie America and its allies across the region.

And that brings me back to the Obama-Cheney ticket: When it comes to how best to deal with Iran, each has half a policy — but if you actually put them together, they’d add up to an ideal U.S. strategy for Iran. Dare I say, they complete each other.

Vice President Cheney is the hawk-eating hawk, who regularly swoops down and declares that the U.S. will not permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Trust me, the Iranians take his threats seriously. But Mr. Cheney’s Dr. Strangelove imitation is totally wasted with President Bush and Secretary of State Condi Rice. Because the president and secretary of state have never been able to make up their minds as to what U.S. policy toward Iran should be — to bring about regime change or a change of behavior — it’s impossible to have any effective diplomacy.

If she were taking advantage of Mr. Cheney’s madness, Secretary Rice would be going to Tehran and saying to the Iranians: “Look, I’m ready to cut a deal with you guys, but I have to tell you, back home, I’ve got Cheney on my back and he is truly craaaaazzzzy. You guys don’t know the half of it. He thinks waterboarding is what you do with your grandchildren at the pool on Sunday. I’m not sure how much longer I can restrain him. So maybe we should have a serious nuke talk, and, if it goes well, we’ll back off regime change.”

Instead, we just have Mr. Cheney being Mr. Cheney, but the Bush team neither carrying out his threats nor leveraging them to drive meaningful diplomacy with Tehran. There’s no good cop, it’s just a bad cop/bad cop routine — a big reason our Iran policy has been a failure. It has not stopped the Iranian nuclear program or changed the regime.

“For coercive diplomacy to work you need to be able to threaten what the regime values most — its own survival,” said the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Robert Litwak, author of the book “Regime Change.” “But for coercive diplomacy to work, you also need to be ready to take yes for an answer.”

Mr. Obama, by contrast, has “yes” down pat. As he said on “Meet the Press” last week: “I would meet directly with the leadership in Iran. I believe that we have not exhausted the diplomatic efforts that could be required to resolve some of these problems — them developing nuclear weapons, them supporting terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.”

I think a President Obama offering to go to Tehran would have a huge impact on that country and create lots of internal debate, especially if we made clear that America would be satisfied with a verifiable change of Iranian behavior.

But Mr. Obama’s stress on engaging Iran, while a useful antidote to the Bush boycott policy, is not sufficient. Mr. Obama evinces little feel for generating the leverage you’d need to make such diplomacy work. When negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran’s or Syria’s, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.

Mr. Obama would also be more effective if he not only stressed how much further he was ready to go than the Bush team to engage Iran, but also how much further he would be ready to go in bringing meaningful leverage on Iran — by, say, opting for a gasoline tax that would help bring down the price of oil, or by abandoning the anti-Russia policies of the Bush team and trying to enlist Vladimir Putin, or China and India, on our side to bring real pressure on Tehran.

In sum, Mr. Obama’s instinct is right — but he needs to dial down his inner Jimmy Carter a bit when it comes to talking to Iran, and dial up a bit more inner Dick Cheney. If Democrats want to win this election, they have to get these two in balance — they have to learn how to criticize the Bush record from the right and the left, to show they can be better at engagement and coercion. Successful diplomacy requires both. Americans will want to know that Democrats can do both. My guess is that many still aren’t sure.

New York Times - LYING neo-con WHORES - deconstructed in one paragraph...

In our previous post, we attempted to deconstruct the DECADE, dozen-years-plus neo-con agenda of the New York Times. At every turn, they have boosted and trumpeted invasions, stolen elections, stonewalled investigations, promoted looting-of-the treasury tax cuts for billionaires as economic policy; they have ignored perjury and obstruction of justice re the "outing" of a CIA undercover agent by the White House to smear and intimidate whistleblowers; and they consistently WHITEWASH or ignore or bury deep in their pages dozens of other administration and Republican scandals, including the connections between then president Bush and ENRON Chairman Ken Lay that were far more SCANDALOUS than any Clinton connection to the "Whitewater" routine real estate flop that was only a tiny part of the Republican dominated "DEREGULATIONS" that stiffed American taxpayers with the TRILLION DOLLAR S&L debacle.
Below, a reader comments to Stephen Schlesinger's delusional op-ed, saluting the neo-con New York Times as some sort of paragon of progressive, 'small-d' democratic America.

==========================================


RASPBERRIES TO THE NEW YORK TIMES http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-schlesinger/kudos-to-the-new-york_b_73122.html?load=1&page=2#comments

The idea that the Times can rescue itself from journalistic ignominy with a couple of politically correct and ineffective editorials is absurd. You say The Times has "at moments given pause?"

Moments? In total, more like decades, such as the years-long persecution of the innocent Wen Ho Lee, the years-long flagellation of the Clintons over non-existent Whitewater "scandals", the repeated false "reporting" in the years before and after the Iraq invasion (not to mention the internal whitewashing of editorial responsibility for the lies put into print) , the character assassination of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, and even now the Times's Pentagon reporter unquestioningly repeats the flagrant lies about Iran supplying Iraqi insurgents with IEDs and other weaponry.

"Imagine this country without this paper." ? One can only wish! For 7 years The Times's news pages have been to Bush what Pravda was to Brezhnev. Occasional remonstrances from their op-ed pages from the likes of Krugman and Dowd and a few editorials mean nothing compared to the pro-Republican, anti-Democratic propaganda that has permeated their news pages for over a decade.

You've GOT to be kidding! Stephen Schlesinger - Harvard, Time - opines that NY whore Times is a "FLAG of PROGRESSIVE THINKING"!

WOW! Mr. Schlesinger's defense, nay COMMENDATION of the New York Times is so over-the-top, so wacky, that we simply must ask "Is Mr. Schlesinger actually that IGNORANT, or is he so blinded by his Northeastern/Harvard/Time/AIPAC bias, that he actually believes his own propaganda?"

Mr. Schlesinger actually COMMENDS the NY Times for "reprimand[ing]...the Bush administration... for Blackwater lawlessness" but a quick glance at the NY Times front page today reveals NO COVERAGE (much less consternation, much less front-page screaming headlines) of the State Department's Inspector General Howard J. "Buzzy" Krongard COMMITTING PERJURY before Congressional Committee, in his on-going efforts at the State Department (in his role as Inspector General charged with INVESTIGATING Blackwater!) to MINIMIZE, WHITEWASH, and COVER UP Blackwater's.... "LAWLESSNESS", to steal Mr. Schlesinger's word.

(here is a TVnewsLies.org clip from our previous post on the perjury and Inspector General whitewash/cover-up)

Howard J. Krongard, US State Department Inspector General lied under oath to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform It seems that federal prosecutors have been looking into allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq by Blackwater, USA. And, surprise, surprise, Krongard was on the carpet for interfering with the investigation.

Mr. SCHLESINGER, YOU, SIR, ARE A FOOL if not an outright IDIOT! You actually belive that one, two, or even three editorials buried deep in the editorial section of the Times comprises a COMMITTMENT to "progressive thinking in America"?
QUITE THE OPPOSITE! DESPITE their AKNOWLEDGING that Blackwater is LAWLESS, that the administration's stem-cell policy "IS A FIASCO" perpetrated to appease the administration's reactionary, fundamentalist supporters; and that the Bush-Cheney administration is SUBORNING OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE in the Miers/Bolton CONTEMPT and SCORN of Congressional Subpoenaes, the WHORE Times will do EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER to KEEP THOSE STORIES _OFF_ of the front page... where they would make a difference!!

In an insightful column a week or two ago, Frank Rich wrote of the "GOOD GERMANS AMONG US", decrying America's complacency with the roggue, lawless Bush administration. Mr. Rich didn't specifically single out his employer in his commentary, even though, of course, the TIMES has been at the epicenter of EVERY Republican outrage and atrocity of the past dozen years, from helping Republicans turn "WHITEWATER" into a "Monica- Did she, or didn't she" IMPEACHMENT, to sneering at Al Gore all through the summer of 2000 while GIVING Texas Governor George W. Bush a FREE PASS for his long record of scandals, including AWOL/Desertion from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war, to the stolen election of 2000, to of course Judith Miller and the Times ENCOURAGAING and ENABLING the LIES TO WAR against Iraq in early 2003. Indeed, Mr. William Safire, long the signature columnist of the Times (and former NIXON SPEECHWRITER and Nixon apologist) was THE FIRST AND MOST VOCAL to call for MASSIVE RETRIBUTION ON FALLUJAH for the ambush and gunning of BLACKWATER MERCENARIES there. Mr. SCHLESINGER, the LEVELLING of Fallujah is in NO SMALL PART the work of William Safire and the New York Times!

Like a "GOOD GERMAN" in World War II, you will take the reports of "Jewish TERRORISTS ("IRAQI INSURGENTS") SHOT WHILE TRYING TO ESCAPE" as a perfectly valid excuse to wipe an entire town, village or community RIGHT OFF THE MAP.

====================================

Kudos to the New York Times
by (IDIOT!) Stephen Schlesinger
Kudos to the New York Times
Posted November 17, 2007


The Friday, November 16th editorial page of the New York Times demonstrates why this newspaper these days remains the most important organ of opinion in the country. In three hard-hitting editorials, the paper gave expression, in unvarnished, well-argued, and concisely-honed paragraphs, to outrage over the shameful behavior of the Bush Administration in three instances -- White House defiance of Congressional investigations; the Blackwater mess; and the stem cell fiasco.

The first editorial, "In Contempt" slammed the refusal of two of Bush aides, Chief of Staff Josh Bolton and former White House counsel Harriet Miers to respond to congressional subpoenas to testify in the United States attorneys scandal. Their disregard for congress's right to call witnesses was, as the paper said, not only an illegal obstruction in a lawful probe of an abuse of authority by the government, but also a dangerous effort to upset our careful system of checks and balances.

The second editorial, "Prosecuting Blackwater," reprimands the Bush Administration for its continuing failure to impose penalties on the lawless behavior of the Blackwater guards who killed at least 14 Iraqis in an indiscriminate and unjustified shooting spree last September.

Finally "A Stem Cell Achievement" chastizes President Bush for hobbling stem cell research because of the religious right. While the Times has at moments given pause in the past over events like its flawed coverage of the US decision to invade Iraq, its editorial pages continue on most occasions to hold high the flag of progressive thinking in America. Imagine this country without this paper.

Media whores Trumpet Bonds Indictment; they almost ignore PERJURY re State Dept. Oversight of BLACKWATER hired gunmen in Iraq....

Once again, America's criminally negligent, fraudulent, and corrupt "Major Media" use their influence and corporate bias to make a MAJOR SCANDAL of the Barry Bonds indictment - the FBI announcing the prosecution immediately after Attorney General nominee Mukasay's nomination sailed past the somnolent senate - while almost IGNORING THE CLEAR PERJURY on the part of the STATE DEPARTMENT's INSPECTOR GENERAL, Howard J. Krongard, known as "Buzzy" Krongard, who was charged with doing a thorough if not criminal audit into Blackwater's conduct of multi-million dollar State Department "security" contracts in Baghdad, Iraq.

THE AMERICAN CORPORATE MEDIA will try to move HEAVEN AND EARTH to WHITEWASH the CORRUPTION of the Bush administration, and they have learned that the easiest way to do so is to entertain the masses with an overblown CELEBRITY SCANDAL.

Martha Stewart: SENT TO PRISON for "dumping" $55,000 worth of ImClone stock, a company she had NO contact with.

George W. Bush: "DUMPED" one-third-of-a million dollars worth of HARKEN ENERGY stock, WHILE ON THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS _AND_ on the AUDIT COMMITTEE of Harken. Bush DUMPED his shares after the SEC ordered Harken to issue a revised P/L (profit/loss), a new statement when the SEC realized that Harken's original P/L statement was fraudulent.

The revised Harken P/L statement corrected previously stated PROFITS to be actual LOSSES.

Mr. Bush DUMPED his shares in ADVANCE of the new P/LOSS statement - CLAIMING IGNORANCE of the new loss figures! Even though he had a HARVARD MBA, and sat on the AUDIT COMMITTEE!

Harken's method of trying to write off losses as PROFITS - using deceptive accounting - would be systematized on a grander scale 20 years later, when ENRON executives "sold" Enron's I.O.U.'s to wholly owned subsidiary companies (created specifically for that purpose), who then wrote Enron's FUTURE PAYMENTS on those debts as IMMEDIATE PROFITS, and then marked that subsidiaries so-called "PROFITS" back to Enron's tally sheet. PRESTO! LOSSES (debts) have been magically transformed to PROFITS on Enron's books. This deception, this fraudulent accounting, ALLOWED ENRON EXECUTIVES to DUMP THEIR SHARES on an unsuspecting workforce and public; looting investors OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS - with the complicit approval of the Bush-Cheney administration.

The media has taken these simple stories: HARKEN ACCOUNTING FRAUD and Enron accounting fraud - and made them into "ancient history" complexity - and they have NEVER SOUGHT TO LINK Mr. Bush to those frauds (or held him to account for his "DUMPING" of his Harken energy stock in violation of SEC regulations, which required PRIOR APPROVAL for a company board member to sell shares of a company that he sits on the board of.)

But CNN, Fox 'news', ESPN, and other network executives LUST at the images of Bary Bonds being led into court in handcuffs, or tried for perjury - while they happily PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE YET ANOTHER example of Bush-Cheney CORRUPTION, the vast overpayments and hired-gun license-to-kill the administration has granted BLACKWATER mercenary 'security' company.

=============================================


Barry Bonds vs. Howard Krongard: And the Winner Is…
Reg, Contributing Editor, TvNewsLIES.org.
http://tvnewslies.org/blog/?p=670

…and the winner is Howard, J, Krongard, - a name barely known to most Americans, and someone who remains barely known, thanks to the corporate US media. Here’s the competition:

A top story this week in the news: Barry Bonds was indicted on charges of four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. Bonds stands accused of lying under oath to a grand jury about his use of steroids. If he is found guilty on all counts, Bonds faces up to fifteen years in prison.

Barry Bonds is obviously a menace to us all. He apparently poses a great threat to all our lives and to the safety of the nation. Let us all hope that justice is done and the full force of the law is brought down on this dangerous criminal.

Non story this week in the news: Howard J. Krongard, US State Department Inspector General lied under oath to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform It seems that federal prosecutors have been looking into allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq by Blackwater, USA. And, surprise, surprise, Krongard was on the carpet for interfering with the investigation.

And guess what else? Someone found out that Howard’s brother, Alvin (Buzzy) Krongard, sits on the Advisory Board of Blackwater. When asked about this, Howard told the House Committee that Buzzy had NO connection to Blackwater. He knew NOTHING, not a thing about this, even after a call to his brother. But, but, but after a recess, Krongard knew the jig was up. He admitted that it was true, Buzzy was a member of the Board, but had never, ever told him about it.

Small problem: Brother Buzzy called the Committee and told them that he had, indeed, told brother Howard of his connection to Blackwater. Uh oh. That’s perjury. Howard Krongard LIED UNDER OATH about a matter relevant to an ongoing investigation. Perjury is a crime. Wanna bet nothing happens to the man?

Howard Krongard is obviously not a menace to anyone. He apparently poses no threat to our lives or to the safety of the nation. Let’s all hope that Chairman Henry Waxman doesn’t look too closely into “allegations of perjury” after Thanksgiving, as he has promised to do. And let us all hope that Krongard, like Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and other Bushco criminals continue to escape prosecution and punishment of any sort.

Barry Bonds is allegedly a criminal; Howard Krongard is a servant of the people.

After all, there is something to be said about consistency and cronyism in a ‘time of war.’ And, oh yes, never forget that everything changed after 9/11.

MEDIA WHORES CNN FORCED student to ask "Pearls or Diamonds" STUPID QUESTION at Democratic Debate...

CNN is up to its usual WHORING of American news; selling DISINFORMATION and DISTRACTION stories at every opportunity to ENABLE the radical right-wing agenda (of XPORTING WARS; using military spending as a means to transfer national wealth from working families to the entrenched elite; and aiding the ruling junta in making vital information secret or off-limits.

For example, here is a story CNN and all the other Media WHORES IGNORE:
"HOW MANY FEDERAL DOLLARS have been spent on the "reconstruction" of New Orleans, and HOW, after all those billions of dollars spent, are there STILL MOUNDS OF DEBRIS covering ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOODS, and why has the federal government REFUSED TO DRAW UP A MASTER ENVIRONMENTAL PLAN to guide the long-term reconstruction of New Orleans?"

In yet another example of that "secret" but plainly visible CNN agenda, not only did Wolf Blitzer repeatedly CUT OFF Dennis Kucinich, but the post-debate CNN team included some Clinton campaign hired advisors (James Carville), and pretended the "2nd tier candidates" (Dodd, Richardson, Kucinich, and Biden) didn't exist.

Questions About Carville and CNN
By Julie Bosman
November 16, 2007
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/questions-about-carville-begala-and-cnn/index.html?hp

There are very few political analysts more closely associated with the Clintons than James Carville, who was a key adviser to Mr. Clinton in the 1992 campaign.
So it’s no surprise that Mr. Carville’s appearance on a round table after last night’s CNN-sponsored Democratic debate is arousing some morning-after controversy.
“Would it kill CNN to disclose that James Carville is a partisan Clinton supporter when talking about the presidential race?” wrote Daily Kos. “Would it kill James Carville to disclose that he is a partisan Clinton supporter when on the air talking about the presidential race? Apparently so.”

===================

"Diamonds v. Pearls" Student Blasts CNN (Updated With CNN Response)
16 Nov 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/11/16/diamonds-and-pearls-are-a_n_73024.html


Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred "diamonds or pearls" at last night's debate wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

"Every single question asked during the debate by the audience had to be approved by CNN," Luisa writes. "I was asked to submit questions including "lighthearted/fun" questions. I submitted more than five questions on issues important to me. I did a policy memo on Yucca Mountain a year ago and was the finalist for the Truman Scholarship. For sure, I thought I would get to ask the Yucca question that was APPROVED by CNN days in advance."

Now, Luisa is getting "swamped" with critical e-mails.

So what happened?

Writes Luisa:

"CNN ran out of time and used me to "close" the debate with the pearls/diamonds question. Seconds later this girl comes up to me and says, "you gave our school a bad reputation.' Well, I had to explain to her that every question from the audience was pre-planned and censored. That's what the media does. See, the media chose what they wanted, not what the people or audience really wanted. That's politics; that's reality. So, if you want to read about real issues important to America--and the whole world, I suggest you pick up a copy of the Economist or the New York Times or some other independent source. If you want me to explain to you how the media works, I am more than happy to do so. But do not judge me or my integrity based on that question."

New York Times WHORE, DAVID BROOKS, tries to WHITEWASH Reagan's RACIST legacy. LIAR!

THANK YOU, PAUL KRUGMAN, and Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell, for BRINGING THIS ISSUE to the forefront of America's press/media consciousness: That President Reagan may have had some terrific good points, but his legacy of RACE-BAITING was ALWAYS at the core of his national electioneering (i.e. the "Southern strategy" - portraying Blacks and other minorities as criminals and welfare cheats, in an attempt to woo White Southern voters.)

===================================

Columnists War Breaks Out at 'NYT'

By Greg Mitchell
November 14, 2007
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003671765


NEW YORK The New York Times Op-Ed page hasn’t been this hot in a long time. Now we are experiencing Columnist Wars, with Bob Herbert this week joining in a rapidly escalating battle between Paul Krugman and David Brooks -- largely over an incident involving Ronald Reagan at a local fair over 27 years ago.

None has mentioned a colleague by name, while tossing around charges such as "woefully wrongheaded" and "agitprop." Outside commentators have now weighed in, but the ball at the Times now rests on Brooks' side of the court.

Krugman kicked it off with a Sept. 27 column on the Republicans’ continuing problems in attracting minority voters. “Republican politicians ... understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites,” he declared. “Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.”

Then came this kicker, as Krugman charged that GOP godfather, Ronald Reagan, who “began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered.”

Brooks took awhile, but fired back on Nov. 9, opening his column: “Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

“The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

“The truth,” Brook explained, “is more complicated.” He claimed that Reagan had actually attempted to court black votes right after the 1980 convention. Brooks then offered as an excuse for the Mississippi trip: the Reagan campaign “was famously disorganized,” and he was forced to go when locals promised he would be there. When he got there he gave a “short and cheerful” speech: “The use of the phrase ‘states’ rights’ didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.”

Brooks concluded: “You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase ‘states’ rights’ in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. ...

“Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion.” Then he smashed Krugman: “But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.”

Krugman, no fool, knew Brooks was referring to him and hit back with a post on his www.nytimes.com Web page: “So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that 'I believe in states’ rights,' he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

“Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.” He then recalled other Reagan “race-baiting” whoppers and added: “Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been ‘humiliating to the South,’ he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.

“In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.

“And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.

“Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.” Oh, then there was the fact that “Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday.”

No word of reply from Brooks, so far, but now Bob Herbert has pushed the envelope with an angry column today which starts, “Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.”

He charged: “Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, ‘I believe in states’ rights.’

“Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

“That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

“Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew. ...

“Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record. ...

“Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.

“The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.”

Your move, Mr. Brooks.

----------------------------
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P and author of nine books. A collection of his columns on Iraq and the media will be published in March. His new blog is at: http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/

CBS swims against the media "See No Evil" tide: Reports on "HIDDEN EPIDEMIC" of US VETERAN SUICIDES...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main3496471.shtml

"Stunning": CBS News Discovers "Hidden Epidemic" of Military Suicides
Rachel Sklar
November 13, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/11/13/stunning-cbs-news-disc_n_72417.html

Tonight CBS will air the first of a two-part series on the "hidden epidemic" of military suicides, revealing numbers that CBS calls "stunning." The report examines data on the suicide rate amongst veterans once they return home, which indicates a serious mental health issue — and a hidden mortality rate.

"We first started researching military suicides because it had never been done before," said Armen Keteyian, CBS News' chief investigative correspondent in a statement forwarded by CBS News. "But when all the data was collected, we were astonished. I had no idea how much of an epidemic CBS uncovered. We expect this to be a wake up call."

Keteyian previewed the segment on the "CBS Early Show" today, saying that the CBS five-month study found that vets were "more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets." Chillingly, though the Veterans Affairs Department estimates that "some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year,' that's a lowball estimate. Said Keteyian: "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."

[Update, 5:30pm: CBS has just released some of those numbers: "At least 120 Americans who served in the U.S. military killed themselves per week in 2005, CBS News learned in a five-month investigation into veteran suicides. That's 6,256 veteran suicides in one year, in 45 states."]

According to a CBS spokesperson, the report represents the first time an actual count of veteran suicides at home has been tallied, as opposed to estimates. "We also have number from the DOD of active duty suicides that we believed have never been reported before dating back to 1995," said the spokesperson. "Many believe, including the family members, that they VA hasn't done a true nationwide count of the numbers (which are stunning) because they just don't want to know." This echoes findings in a CBS report on the matter back in January 2004, which focused on soldier suicides during deployment but which also noted that the Pentagon did not count post-release suicides, and that a pre-Iraq war army study had predicted "an impending soldier-suicide crisis" (which, according to critics, was "largely ignored").

The two-part series will focus tonight on the numbers, and tomorrow on how the Dept. of Veterans Affairs is handling this problem (our guess, based on the above: Not well). According to CBS, tonight's segment runs 5 minutes — long for a newscast (though tonight is a single-sponsor broadcast (Pfizer) which will definitely save a few minutes).

Military suicides have been in the news recently owing to the passage last month of the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act (HR. 327), named for 22-year-old Army Reservist Joshua Omvig who commited suicide a few months after his return from Iraq. The bill "directs the Department of Veterans Affairs to develop and implement a comprehensive program to reduce the incidence of suicide among veterans," by virtue of better screening of veteran patients for mental health, tracking of veterans, better suicide prevention training for VA staff (including designating one suicide-specific counselor at each facility), and a 24-hour mental-health care, including a hotline. The legislation also requires the VA to report back on "status, timeline and costs for complete implementation within 2 years" within 90 days (i.e. by late January). Hopefully they can reverse the trend. If not, hopefully CBS will still be there.

The Veteran Suicide Epidemic [CBS News] (video here)
Vets' Suicide Rate "Stunning" [CBS News]

Related:
Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars [Alternet]
Paul Rieckhoff: Suicide: Vets Fight The War Within [HuffPo]
H.R. 5771 [109th]: Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act [GovTrack.us]

Uber media whore Fred Hiatt's Washington Post CAUGHT LYING AGAIN.....INVERTS polling data on the risk of Global Warming as campaign issue for Dems...

FRED HIATT and the whore WASHINGTON POST: PAID, PROFESSIONAL LIARS....

They MANUFACTURE OPINION talking points as "facts" to weave an article where opinion masks as reporting, in this case, INVERTING the risk of global warming as a campaign issue to Democrats, because FRED HAITT and the Washington Post are flat-earth society reactionaries who want to take America back to the good ol' days of Sharecropping & Segregation, if not outright chattel slavery (as the nation's capitol city once enjoyed).
By writing this piece as "GLOBAL WARMING IS A DANGEROUS ISSUE FOR DEMOCRATS!", Mr. Hiatt and his WaPost continue their relentless attempt to minimize and marginalize Global Warming (and other environmental issues) as important national issues, because they agree with the George Bush/Dick Cheney/GOP vision of America as a banana republic, wealthy plantation lords with absolute powe on vast plantations, surrounded by a sea of ignorant, disposable, disenfranchised peons.

TPM catches the essence of the Post's LYING:
<< There was ZERO POLLING DATA in the piece to support this claim. As Matthew Yglesias noted, the basis for it appeared to be little more than the [Washington Post's] "time honored principled Everything is Bad News for Democrats." >>

Of course, David Broder and George Will are the signature staid, fuddy-duddy "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" commenators for the Whore WaPost, and despite OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE - EVERY GLACIER ON EARTH in RETREAT in both satellite photos and in visits to those glaciers - George Will writes op-ed after op-ed saying that GLOBAL WARMING is nothing but a Democrat hoax and a Commie plot!

As we just mentioned, FRED HIATT, GEORGE WILL, and most of the writers and editors of the Washington Post ARE PAID PROFESSIONAL LIARS - royal courtiers and court sycophants to power, wealth, and money.

TPM's insightful conclusion:
Yet despite the fact that lots of Republicans have reached this conclusion, somehow The Washington Post was only able to discover that this is a risky issue for Democrats. This illustrates once again that the default setting for many in the political media is still that Dems are always vulnerable; Dems are always at risk of getting too far ahead of public opinion; and Dems are always at risk of provoking a backlash from the same public that strongly agrees with them.

==================================

Sorry, Washington Post -- Pollling Data Shows That Global Warming Issue Is Risky For Republicans [and NOT for Democrats, as the Whore Post stated in their article.]
by Greg Sargent at TalkingPointsMemo.com
November 8, 2007
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/horsesmouth/2007/11/sorry_washingto.php

A few days ago, The Washington Post ran a long front-page story that carried this frightful headline:

Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats

There was ZERO POLLING DATA in the piece to support this claim. As Matthew Yglesias noted, the basis for it appeared to be little more than the "time honored principled Everything is Bad News for Democrats."

Well, as luck would have it, we now have some actual empirical evidence on this question: A new poll that, unsurprisingly, finds that the public wants action on the biggest global problem before us right now and that it's a risky issue for Republicans.

The Politico got an advance look at a poll conducted for an environmental group by Whit Ayres, a REPUBLICAN pollster, that surveyed voter opinion on the green question in the 49 closest House districts:

In a presentation similar to ones provided to congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle in recent days, Ayres illustrates how independents — who were responsible for ousting the GOP majority in 2006 — are unmistakably supportive of swift action to cut carbon emissions and require cuts in carbon dioxide emissions by cars, factories and power plants.

Ayres seemed most surprised that independents and, to a lesser extent, Republicans wanted the U.S. to act even if China and India, two big polluters with rapidly growing economies, did not.

The swing district independent voters said they were much more likely to support a candidate who votes to cut carbon emissions.
Republican voters were SURPRISINGLY SUPPORTIVE OF EFFERTS to COMBAT GLOBAL WARMING also made it clear they were much less likely to hold members of Congress accountable if they failed to act anytime soon...

Republicans are split in three camps: a small but vocal group who think global warming is basically a hoax (26 percent of GOP voters in the Ayres poll said it does not exist); a big group that includes GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani who agree the Earth is warming but are reluctant to embrace plans opposed by business or viewed as burdensome government regulation; and a growing number who are pushing for specific, market-based solutions now.


The latter group is on the rise.

In sum, this pollster found that (a) independents, whom Republicans need to win back, are "unmistakably supportive" of action on global warming; (b) that Republican voters are "surprisingly supportive" of action; and (c) that the number of Republicans who want specific, market-based solutions now is "on the rise." While The Politico doesn't provide the polling numbers, the conclusion is clear, and Politico even spoke to "a lot" of Republicans, including a former top Bush strategist, who are saying that inaction on this issue holds real peril for them.

Yet despite the fact that lots of Republicans have reached this conclusion, somehow The Washington Post was only able to discover that this is a risky issue for Democrats. This illustrates once again that the default setting for many in the political media is still that Dems are always vulnerable; Dems are always at risk of getting too far ahead of public opinion; and Dems are always at risk of provoking a backlash from the same public that strongly agrees with them.


It'll be interesting to see if WaPo revisits this issue, now that we have some actual empirical evidence to shed light on the topic the paper reported so extensively on. Somehow one doubts that WaPo will call up Ayres and ask him what gives.

Wash Post editor FRED HIATT LOVES George Bush's SPYING ON AMERICANS agenda...

Hat-tip to Correntewire.com for posting this story - and for noticing the import of FRED HIATT's COMPLICIT-with-SPYING direction at the whore post.

AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein to Senate: "they’re doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States"
Submitted by lambert on Wed, 2007-11-07 13:54.
warrantless surveillance
[UPDATE: Comedy gold! Pravda on the Potomac’s eak-chinned Fred Hiatt buries the story on D01.]
http://www.correntewire.com/at_t_whistleblower_mark_klein_to_senate_they_re_doing_a_huge_massive_domestic_dragnet_on_everybody_in_the_united_states
-----------------------------------------------------------------
[our comments]
In typical Washington WHORE Post fashion, editor Fred Hiatt has his junior writer write up an IMPORTANT STORY as a conversational INFOTAINMENT "he said, she said" piece, in this case an AT&T communications engineer explaining that the government (NSA) co-opted AT&T to install MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE EQUIPMENT - equipment that could read and save EVERYTHING TRANSMITTED THROUGH _ANY_ AT&T SERVERS, including data and voice from other telecom companies routed however briefly through AT&T's equipment.

Mr. Fred Hiatt, YOU, SIR, are one of America's TOP FIVE MEDIA WHORES: you put the ILLEGAL SPYING ON AMERICANS on page D-1 as a CONVERSATION piece, but you put the Monica impeachment of President Clinton (and worse than that, entirely FABRICATED fake "scandals" like "Lincoln Bedroom" and "White House trashing") ON THE FRONT PAGE, for days and weeks at a time, in order to help the Radical Right Republicans subvert American democracy.

=========================================

A Story of Surveillance
Former Technician 'Turning In' AT&T Over NSA Program
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2007; Page D01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html