Stephanopoulos & Gingrich on drapes, race & Congressional leadership

I have a few clips from last Sunday's morning talk shows that are still worthy of mention, and the first one is from This Week.

There's a remarkable amount of b.s. in this minute-and-a-half video clip.

First, George Stephanopoulos trots out a phrase that's been hackneyed for nearly 20 years now (or maybe even longer), that Obama is "Measuring the drapes in the Oval Office..." Gimme a break. Stephanopoulos should know this line well - it's one that President George H.W. Bush used against then-Governor Bill Clinton in 1992 when Stephanopoulos was working on the Clinton campaign.

More recently, it was endlessly pimped by President Bush in before the '04 election, and even more extensively before the '06 election (see below).

Hmm - well, Republicans are many things, but certainly original isn't one of them.

Back to the video at top - I'm always pleased when networks bring in Newt Gingrich, because I never want to go too long without being reminded how much I truly despise the man. Notice how much red meat Gingrich is throwing to the far right in a very short time; I especially got a kick out of Gingrich's assertion that a President Obama will "restrict the free speech rights of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh," but notice how he gives no specifics.

So, on its face, you would think that Gingrich has some concrete proof about how Obama will suppress the free rights of Sean Goebbels and Rush Göring, but he doesn't. Know why? Because that's not what Obama wants to do; he wants to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine in some form, and to also enforce a law that's still on the books, the Sherman Antitrust Act. Those two things will undoubtedly affect right-wing hate radios hegemony over the airwaves, but it certainly won't suppress Hannity or Limbaugh's free speech rights. But, it's not a stretch to say that the GOP will spin it otherwise, especially if Obama wins the election.

Obama, if he's elected in 11 days, will have plenty on his plate, but I hope that at some point he does get around to addressing both of the above topics, because the citizens of this country will never truly "take our country back" until the corporate media is busted up for good. I know, I know - I shouldn't hold my breath, but it's what I firmly believe needs to happen. That, and keeping the Internet free from tiered services, which is what the greedy media companies are pining for. (Thankfully, with a Democratically controlled Congress and hopefully Obama in the White House, the 'Net will be safe for the time being.)

I can't believe that I'm agreeing with Gingrich on anything, but I do agree with him on one point - Congress will likely be Democratically controlled, with large majorities in each house, and both houses are in desperate need for real leadership. And that means kicking Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid out of their leadership positions. Both have been miserable failures, and following the election, I will write Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and U.S. Rep. Bob Brady (D-PA), both of my Democratic legislators, to demand just that - leadership with a spine that is willing do many of the things that need to be done to get this country back in shape.

Of course, in the video above, Gingrich also railed about taxes, which comes as no surprise. But, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that taxes must be raised to combat the ballooning deficit, which is spiraling out of control. The question is by how much and who will pay more. Taxes are going to have to go up, and spending is going to have to come down in some areas - reducing the deficit must be a two-pronged approach.

Stephanopoulos also brought up "race" at the end of the clip. *Yawn* I think the predictable people will vote against Obama for this reason, but overall, I predict it won't have much of an impact. The only "race" that matters is the presidential one, and it's trending our way. But, I'm very, very wary for many reasons, so of which I will get to in successive posts this weekend.

Olbermann on McCain's double talk

Last night, Keith Olbermann did a pretty good round-up of all the McCain reversals. Watch the video above, and as Keith suggests, you'd better have a pen and paper, (or a good, stiff martini) handy to get it all down, or to simply start laughing after a few minutes.

From Crooks and Liars:

[Some of John McCain's more noted reversals]...
• Political Reform
• Immigration
• Gay Marriage
• Abortion
• Nuclear Waste at Yucca Mountain
• Military actions against rogue states
• Negotiating with Kim Jong Il
• Negotiating with Castro
• Negotiating with Terrorists (acceptable in 2002 when Powell went to Syria. In 2006, McCain said sooner or later we'll talk to Hamas, not appropriate now)
• Unilateral action against suspected terrorists in Pakistan (Confused leadership with Obama, not with Bush)
• Warrantless Wiretapping
• Torturing Detainees
• Indefinitely Holding Detainees
• Iraq War
• Tax Cuts for the Rich
• Estate Tax
• Privatizing Social Security
• Balanced Budget
• Windfall Profits Tax
• Offshore Drilling
• Bush Fundraisers
• Jerry Falwell
• Pastor John Hagee
• MLK Jr. Holiday
• South Africa Divestment
• the Confederate Flag
• Alternatives to evolution being taught in schools

Wow, that's a pretty stunning achievement, even for a politician. I didn't know that someone could possibly stand for so little and while running for president. Talk about not taking a stand! We've been hearing Republicans piss and moan about Democratic candidates' reversals on issues for years (some of it fair, some of it taken out of context), but I'd like to know how they plan on explaining McCain's dozens and dozens of reversals away. The answer is that they can't - all Repubes can do is continue to bring up wedge-issue distractions like flag lapel pins, gay marriage, religion, evolution, abortion, ministers of ill repute and anything else that will (lamely) try to take Americans' minds off of just how poorly things are in the country right now, be it the economy, what passes for our foreign policy, our skyrocketing debt, our disaster in Iraq, runaway inflation, monstrous fuel prices, our crumbling infrastructure, etc. What's worse, the likes of Bush and McCain have few answers in how to get us out of this mess, a mess that their party bears a pretty nasty share of the responsibility for.

I'm willing to cut McCain some slack on a few of the above - after all, issues do evolve, and if you spend enough time in a deliberative body like the U.S. Senate, positions, like public opinion, can and will change over time. But, not in the span of 4-5 years, which is right around the time McCain no doubt decided that he's take another run at the presidency, so he'd better get his ideological (party line) votes in order. Enter John McBush, candidate for president who had to court the evangelical and far right wings of the party, so he could raise enough money and support to get the nomination.

Will the press cover these McCain flip flops? Fat chance, especially when Democrats are making noise about once again enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act and re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine. I sure hope an Obama administration does both.

In the meantime, I certainly hope a vast majority of American voters aren't relying on our corporate media to form opinions and make informed decisions about the '08 election.

Major hat tip (h/t) to Crooks & Liars for compiling the exhaustive list of McCain flip flops - it couldn't have been easy.

Matt Drudge: still a GOP stooge

[Click for a larger view]

Every once in a while, I enjoy pointing out just how absurdly moronic Matt Drudge is. I know, it's not particularly newsworthy, and really, it's a demonstration that I have a firm grasp of the obvious. But, every once in a while it bears repeating. Why? Because his Website is one of the most visited on the Web.

For some reason, the GOP and its shills like Drudge still seem to have a fetish for Al Gore. Perhaps its because of Gore's success and the inroads he's making in raising the warning flag about global warming. Who knows? But, the misinformation and attacks are like the Energizer bunny - They keep coming... well, you know the rest.

The above image is a screen capture from the Drudge Report a few days ago, featuring a prominent story about Gore's energy consumption. What a joke. The link goes to a story Here, by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a blatantly right-wing funded organization. (I wrote about it Here when these morons tried to embarrass Gore just hours after his ground-breaking movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won several Oscars.)

Gore's energy consumption habits aren't really of interest to me or anyone else other than the most rabid GOPers. And, of course, his energy consumption only tells part of the story. Here's a guy criss-crossing the globe trying to make a difference with global warming, in addition to the fact that he buys green energy, and he has solar panels installed on his very large home, yet he's getting his balls busted by partisan hacks who don't have anything better to do.

Meh - enough of it - I guess I'm no better than they are, but it's worth pointing out that Drudge will do whatever he can to smear prominent Democrats, and this is just another example.

I'll never tire of pointing out that the idea of a "librul media" is unadulterated bullshit. Drudge is one of the most visited sites on the Web (and many news networks report what his Website says, like it's news! And not just Fox News, either), Fox News is the most watched cable news channel during most time slots, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the largest media conglomerate in the U.S., and the top three radio personalities are all GOP shills. Oh yea, we have a "librul media" alright.

No wonder the right is panicked about the possibility of a Democratic Congress re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine.

I'm pleased that Obama has talked publicly about enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act if he becomes president. It's about time - no president has enforced it since Reagan effectively gutted it when he became president. It's still a law that's on the books, it's in the public interest, and it's about time that some of these huge corporations be broken up, specifically our mass media conglomerates.

Murdoch praises Obama? Don't trust it...

Hey, I took Psych 101, and when we hear a hard-line right-winger like Rupert Murdoch predicting a Barack Obama win in the fall, we all should call it out for what it really is - a big, steaming pile of GOP #2. C'mon, you don't have to be a political scientist to figure out what he's trying to do here - a lil' reverse psychology. It's not in Murdoch's best interests for Obama to win the election this fall, so don't think for a second that Murdoch and his "network," Fox Noise Channel, won't do everything in its power to propel John McCain to the White House.

For instance, Obama recently publicly said that the Sherman Antitrust Act ought to be reinforced, and if an Obama administration decided to do just that, it could possibly spell an end to News Corp's hegemony (and maybe even right-wing talk radio, too). I also think it's time to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, something President Reagan allowed to lapse in 1987.

Anyway, here is some of what Murdoch had to say about Obama:

He is a rock star. It's fantastic. I love what he is saying about education. I don't think he will win Florida.....but he will win in Ohio and the election. I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk.

Again, I'm wary about what he's saying. Maybe, just maybe, even Murdoch realizes what most other political realists do - that McCain has an increasingly steep hill to climb to win the White House.

However, this is exactly the type of development and pronouncement that Democrats have to guard against. It isn't going to be an easy election for (presumptively) Obama to win, and Republicans and the right-wing neocons aren't going to simply roll over and die. But, they may play possum, and that's what I think Murdoch is doing here.

Photo from AP

As predicted: anti-Gore coalition gears up

Well, it didn't take long. I despise Matt Drudge, but I drop by his Website daily to see how the right-wing shill is spinning the news according to RNC standards. This morning, as I was making my morning rounds on the Internet, this was the headline on Drudge's site. Of course, it's an oversimplification of what Gore really means. The headline on Drudge linked to a Time excerpt of Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, which comes out next Tuesday.

Here's a portion of the excerpt:

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.

[Snip]

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to "psychographic" categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.

And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush's economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president's controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.

(Note that the highlighted, bold entries in the above passages are mine, and not in the original.) The rest of the Time excerpt is Here.

Now, you be the judge - is Al Gore really saying, as Drudge implies with his headline on his Website, that "American Democracy is now in danger"? What he is saying, as explained in the excerpt above, is that our idea or brand of democracy is in danger. AND IT IS.

The MoveOn example above I find particularly disturbing and outrageous. It's one of an infinite number of examples that one can find where the White House manipulates the mass media in this country. In part, we have Ronald Reagan to thank for that. His suspension of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 has allowed corporate-owned networks to air their political views, to the detriment of the marketplace of ideas, which traditionally allowed people to hear opposing views and weigh political decisions.

Now, media conglomerates are free to express political views (and advertisements) that align with their corporate interests. I'm going to be blogging much more about the Fairness Doctrine in the near future - I don't have enough time to adequately cover it now.

Gore's example of how a significant portion of the population still believes that Iraq is connected to 9-11 is pretty telling as well. (Somewhere, Karl Rove is clapping his hands with glee.) This administration willfully lies, then denies that it's done so. Iraq is the best example of it. Lie, lie, lie, until you start to believe it is the mantra of Bush's cabal. They'll even answer the question about Iraq having anything to with 9-11 with a "no," but in the same sentence they'll bring up 9-11 anyway. And many people are falling for it.

The War in Iraq is in many ways a PR and marketing effort. It's about manipulating public opinion to maintain support of the war. Since that support is evaporating, Bush is merely turning the war into a Democrat vs. Republican ideological war. Republicans are treating withdraw from Iraq as a defeat for the party. Maybe it would be, and maybe it wouldn't, but the overwhelming concern should be the lives of American troops and American interests. But those things don't matter to this administration.

I think that's part of what Al Gore means. I'm really looking forward to his book, but I'm anticipating the right's reaction to his book even more. I'm sure Sean Hannity already has a special planned. I sure hope so.

There's lots of Gore on Time's Website. Another piece, The Last Temptation of Al Gore, talks about Gore's potential presidential candidacy next year, which unfortunately is looking less and less likely. A brief excerpt of the excerpt:

"It happens all the time," says Tipper Gore. "Everybody wants to take him for a walk in the woods. He won't go. He's not doing it!" But even Tipper—so happy and relieved to see her husband freed up after 30 years in politics—knows better than to say never: "If the feeling came over him and he had to do it, of course I'd be with him." Perhaps that feeling never comes over him. Maybe Obama or Clinton or John Edwards achieves bulletproof inevitability and Gore never sees his opening. But if it does come, if at some point in the next five months or so the leader stumbles and the party has one of its periodic crises of faith, then he will have to decide once and for all whether to take a final shot at reaching his life's dream. It's the Last Temptation of Gore, and it's one reason he has been so careful not to rule out a presidential bid. Is it far-fetched to think that his grass-roots climate campaign could yet turn into a presidential one? As the recovering politician himself says, "You always have to worry about a relapse."

I have a great amount of respect and admiration for Gore's work and activism, but I still say that he could make the greatest amount of difference by running for president (and winning). Polls still show him with significant public support, as an undeclared candidate.

Run, Al. Please.