Thursday, January 31, 2008

presidential debate(s) sponsored by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a coal industry front group: NO QUESTIONS ON GLOBAL WARMING

Tonight’s CNN debate brought to you by the coal industry.

CNN is hosting a GOP presidential debate tonight in California and Democratic one in the state tomorrow. Both are sponsored by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a coal industry front group. In its past three ABEC-sponsored debates, there have been no questions asked on global warming. Watch an ad highlighting ABEC’s sponsorship:
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Comments By: Top Rated | Date

1. When, oh when can we get some debates that aren’t sponsored by media giants, big business, and other special interests? Where is the League of Women Voters when we need them?

Comment by missmolly — January 30, 2008 @ 10:55 am
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

One of Edwards’ biggest problems has been a relative blackout by our corporate news media ...

Under 7 years of George W. Bush’s presidency, our nation has regressed to the highest level of inequality seen since what Paul Krugman refers to as “The Long Gilded Age”. This chart explains the situation in graphic terms:


President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal contained numerous statutes that served to greatly reduce income inequality, which is denoted in the above chart as the percent of income made by the richest 10% of Americans. Beginning in the late 1930s, after several decades of the least amount of income inequality in American history, coinciding with the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history, the situation began to reverse itself with the onset of the “Reagan Revolution” in 1981. Under George Bush II, income inequality has now again attained Gilded Age proportions.

And not coincidentally, along with this rise in income inequality, we have seen a large increase in poverty under Bush the 2nd, with 5 million more Americans descending into poverty by 2004, to reach a total of 37 million, reflecting the increasing poverty rate in our country under Bush, as depicted in this graph:
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Fighting poverty is the cornerstone of John Edwards’ campaign for President in 2008. In a previous post I discussed the fact that his plans to address this issue are far superior to those of any other presidential candidate. A recent editorial in The Nation, titled “Time to Act on Inequality”, dealt with this issue, recognizing Edwards’ leadership: ...
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Accusations that Edwards is angry, aggressive, and confrontational

One of Edwards’ biggest problems has been a relative blackout by our corporate news media. When the media is forced to acknowledge him, as during the 3-way debate in South Carolina last week, his popularity surges. But when our corporate news media isn’t blacking him out they generally have nothing but criticism for him. These criticisms, when they don’t deal with trivia such as the price of his haircuts, generally deal with his confrontational stance towards corporate greed. One example is the Des Moines Register, which recently explained why they decided not to endorse his candidacy this year:

But Edwards is more combative this time around. He is no longer content to talk about economic inequity – he prescribes an aggressive effort to root out special interests in Washington, D.C.

"It is time to give these entrenched interests, that are standing against America, hell," Edwards told thousands of Iowa Democrats this month at the state party's fall fundraiser in Des Moines. "That's the only way we're going to win this fight."

Oh my! Not only does he talk about economic inequality, but he prescribes aggressive measures to combat it!

And here is some more aggressive criticism of Edwards’ campaign, by Stuart Rothenberg:

If Iowa Democrats choose Edwards, they are choosing anger, confrontation and class warfare…Edwards portrays himself as a fighter for the middle class, but his message is decidedly working class and left….

Given the North Carolina Democrat’s rhetoric and agenda, an Edwards Presidency would likely rip the nation apart – even further apart than Bush has torn it. For while Edwards bashes corporate America and “them,” this nation’s economy depends on the success of both small business and big business. Scare the stuffing out of Corporate America and watch the stock market tumble.

So, apparently it’s inconsistent to fight for both the working class and the middle class? And railing against George Bush’s corporate agenda is going to tear our nation apart? Give me a break! Rothenberg’s claim that criticizing corporate America will hurt our economy is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economic theories.

Edwards’ answer to those accusations – an inconvenient truth

Yes, corporate America fears an Edwards presidency. And yes, as Dan Balz explains:

The enemy he sees is corporate America and corporate greed. His message seeks not to unite America but to finish what he describes as "an epic struggle" against forces that are, literally, killing America – destroying jobs, holding down wages, putting ordinary Americans out of work or denying them medical care. "You need somebody in the arena who will never back down," he says. ...

Monday, January 21, 2008

American public is persuaded to believe this pleasant myth of the “free and open election process,” ...

The Great American Election Charade | by Ernest Partridge | January 16, 2008
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The more the American public is persuaded to believe this pleasant myth of the “free and open election process,” the longer that public will believe that each new Chief Executive is the legitimate "people's choice." And that persisting public belief suits the powers that be in the military-industrial-corporate-media complex (MICMC) just fine.
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(As numerous polls have disclosed, John Edwards is potentially the strongest Democratic candidate against the Republicans, and Hillary Clinton is the weakest. Yet Edwards, who finished second in the Iowa caucuses, has vanished from the pages of the mainstream media, from the columns of the punditocracy, and even from the press conferences of The Democratic Leadership Council – the Republican wing of the Democratic party).
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At long last, more and more ordinary Americans are getting the message that they have been lied to, that they can no longer trust the mainstream media, that their public treasury has been looted, that their children’s and grandchildren’s future has been mortgaged, and that they are living under the darkening shadow of despotism.

Still the establishment MICMC rolls on in its arguably pre-determined course, “populism” and the public be damned. Matt Taibbi on Bill Maher’s “Real Time” last Friday summed it up perfectly:

The [campaign] theme for awhile was that the voters were sick and tired of being told by the media who was going to be their nominee. But it seems to have come full circle now, and it looks like we may end up getting the same people we were going to get in the first place: [McCain and Clinton]....

Seventy percent of the country wants to withdraw from Iraq, and we get two pro-war candidates. If that doesn’t tell you how f****d-up the system is, I don’t know what does. ...

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Edwards: claim[s] inadequate and unfair press coverage ... [study] indicate that from January 6-11, Edwards received just a fraction of the coverage

January 17, 2008 | Edwards takes aim at media

WASHINGTON (CNN) — John Edwards' campaign is launching a full-on assault on the media for what they claim is inadequate and unfair press coverage of the former North Carolina senator's presidential bid.

"For the better part of a year the media has focused on two celebrity candidates,” Edwards Communications Director Chris Kofinis said Thursday. “And they continue to act as if there were only two candidates in the race, even after John Edwards beat Senator Clinton in Iowa and poll after poll show competitive races in Nevada, South Carolina and other key states."

On Thursday, the campaign went live with a Web site that sites several recent news headlines that only include Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It also includes recent statistics from the Project for Excellence in Journalism that indicate that from January 6-11, Edwards received just a fraction of the news coverage allotted to his two rivals.

The campaign has even produced a Web video, "What about John Edwards?", that scrolls through several clips of media pundits discussing only Clinton and Obama, and ends with the results of a focus group that suggested Edwards won the most recent debate in Las Vegas.

And on Wednesday, Edwards' spokesman Eric Schultz sent out an e-mail that suggested the senator's low poll numbers nationally are directly linked to his limited media coverage.

The candidate himself has brought up the issue repeatedly on the trail of late, and on Thursday one town-hall supporter urged the crowd to directly complain to media outlets about the lack of coverage. Edwards said he agreed, and that it was time to speak out.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Chamber of Commerce vows to punish anti-business candidates ... with more than $60M in presidential election

Chamber of Commerce vows to punish anti-business candidates | AP | By Tom Hamburger, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | January 8, 2008

“We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed,” chamber President Tom Donohue said.

The group indicates it will spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it put out in the last presidential cycle.

WASHINGTON -- Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said. ...
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Presidential candidates in particular have responded to the public concern. Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has been the bluntest populist voice, but other front-running Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, have also called for change on behalf of middle-class voters.

On the Republican side, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee -- emerging as an unexpected front-runner after winning the Iowa caucuses -- has used populist themes in his effort to woo independent voters, blasting bonus pay for corporate chief executives and the effect of unfettered globalization on workers. ...

Iran: US media has increasingly become a mouthpiece of the Bush administration, perpetuating and ventilating the fears ...

The Iran Fixation | How the American Media Enables Bush | By Ayesha Ijaz KhanY
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To the contrary, US media has increasingly become a mouthpiece of the Bush administration, perpetuating and ventilating the fears which prevent a population from thinking rationally about important issues. I happened to be in New York a few months ago when President Ahmedinijad arrived to address the United Nations General Assembly. The day he landed, local press ran shocking headlines in the newspapers. "Tehran Thug Comes To Town," read one; "Terror Has Landed," said another. It was the kind of diction one expects from a grade school bully, not intellectually honest analysis of issues with global ramifications.

Dismissing some of the local papers as tabloids, I picked up a copy of The New Yorker magazine, only to find on its cover a demeaning representation of President Ahmedinijad sitting on the toilet, pants down, playing footsie with the man in the next stall. Surely, for the American audience, it was a take on the Republican Senator from Idaho who had recently been caught doing just that with an undercover cop at an airport bathroom and a jibe simultaneously at Ahmedinijad, who had denied in his speech at Columbia University that homosexuality existed in Iran.

But to many American Muslims it was flagrant cultural insensitivity to caricaturize a head of state in such a way, and also a reminder that Iran was being demeaned through its President only so the attack could soon be justified. It reminded Muslims of the early nineties when Saddam toilet paper had taken America by storm, only to be followed by operation Desert Storm. That is how the propaganda machine works. First you degrade and then you attack. ...
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But what would have happened if the Iranians sat tight and did not offer their version? What will happen in months to come? Will the Bush administration continue to find excuses to throw America into another unjustifiable war? Will the American media just sit on the sidelines and watch while that happens? Is their obligation to the people of the United States or to the Bush administration?

Ayesha Ijaz Khan is a London-based lawyer and writer and can be contacted via her website www.ayeshaijazkhan.com

The Polls You Won’t Hear Much About ... John Edwards is by far the Democrats' strongest candidate in the general election

The Polls You Won’t Hear Much About | By: Phoenix Woman Monday January 14, 2008 6:00 pm
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Here are the current Rasmussen head-to-head match-ups for the various Republican candidates against the Democrats:

A few things should be immediately apparent:

1) McCain is by far the GOP's strongest candidate in the general election. ...
2) John Edwards is by far the Democrats' strongest candidate in the general election. ...
3) Hillary Clinton is the weakest Democratic candidate in the general election. ...
4) Barack Obama is in between Edwards and Hillary Clinton in strength in the general election. ...
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The upshot of all this: If Hillary's the Democratic nominee, we could very easily lose to any likely GOP nominee. If Obama's the nominee, he does OK so long as he doesn't face McCain. But if Edwards is the nominee, we're sitting pretty. Which, I suspect, is one reason why Big Media hates John Edwards so much and does everything it can to destroy him. (Speaking of which: KingOneEye at DailyKos pointed out this morning how the NYT is ignoring a key result of its own poll on the race -- namely, that as more people get to know him, Edwards' favorability rating keeps going up.)

........................................................... [Supporting background] ........................

John Edwards is pi$$ing off all the right people.

But he hates John Edwards even more because John Edwards has spoken out publicly against the monopolization of America's media outlets into the hands of a small number of plutocrats like Murdoch. Murdoch's media empire fired back, calling Edwards a hypocrite, leaking confidential information, all in an attempt to smear John Edwards to avoid talking about the real issues.

Just look at the bile and vitriol spilling from these New York Post headlines. Two of the most savage attacks were directed as much as Nataline Sarkisyan and Elizabeth Edwards' as they were at Edwards.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch isn't the only right-wing corporatist to go after John Edwards with personal attacks.

Take the far-right Washington Times, for example. In the view of the editorial pages, Edwards is a "widely scorned" "sanctimonius hypocrite." All in all, the Times says, "Mr. Edwards's rank hypocrisy is boundless." On the bright side, he's "well-coifed" but "not ready for prime time." ...

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U.S. corporate elite fear candidate Edwards
| Reuters | Friday January 11 2008 | By Kevin Drawbaugh

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Ask corporate lobbyists which presidential contender is most feared by their clients and the answer is almost always the same -- Democrat John Edwards.

The former North Carolina senator's chosen profession alone raises the hackles of business people. Before entering politics, he made a fortune as a trial lawyer.
In litigious America, trial lawyers bring lawsuits against companies on behalf of aggrieved individuals and sometimes win multimillion-dollar settlements. Edwards won several.

But beyond his profession, Edwards' tone and language on the campaign trail have increased business antipathy toward him. His stump speeches are peppered with attacks on "corporate greed" and warnings of "the destruction of the middle class."
He accuses lobbyists of "corrupting the government" and says Americans lack universal health care because of "drug companies, insurance companies and their lobbyists." ...

Iran boats: Iran says "Coalition warship No. 73 this is an Iranian navy patrol boat."

U.S.: Voices on Recording May Not Have Been From Iranian Speedboats | Chilling Threat Could Have Come From the Shore or Another Ship, Navy Says | By MARTHA RADDATZ and JONATHAN KARL | Jan. 10, 2008
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The Iranians have denied using the threatening language and are saying U.S.-released video is fabricated. Today, the Iranian government aired its own video of the event on state-run TV there. On the audio, the voice that the Iranians say is the communication from their vessel can be heard identifying itself to the American ship, "Coalition warship No. 73 this is an Iranian navy patrol boat." ...

Iran boats: result was a decision to play it up as a major incident. ... decision on its content was made by top officials of DoD

January 16, 2008 | How the Pentagon Planted a False Story | by Gareth Porter

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.
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Then the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that U.S. warships would "explode" in "a few seconds." Although it was ostensibly a Navy production, IPS has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense Department.
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With the reports from 5th Fleet commander Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff in hand early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, Jan. 6, to discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result was a decision to play it up as a major incident.
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At 9 a.m., Barbara Starr of CNN reported that "military officials" had told her that the Iranian boats had not only carried out "threatening maneuvers," but had transmitted a message by radio that "I am coming at you" and "you will explode." She reported the dramatic news that the commander of one boat was "in the process of giving the order to shoot when they moved away."
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A separate audio recording of that voice, which came across the VHF channel open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video on which the voice apparently could not be heard. That was a political decision, and Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office told IPS the decision on what to include in the video was "a collaborative effort of leadership here, the Central Command, and Navy leadership in the field." ...
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. As an official at 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain told IPS, it is common knowledge among officers there that hecklers – often referred to as "Filipino Monkey" – frequently intervene on the VHF ship-to-ship channel to make threats or rude comments.

One of the popular threats made by such hecklers, according to British journalist Lewis Page, who had transited the Strait with the Royal Navy is, "Look out, I am going to hit [collide with] you."

By Jan. 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier. "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats," said Morrell. ...

Monday, January 07, 2008

According to Hockenberry, Zucker said "that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine."

Jewish NBC News programming head censors root cause of 9/11 | Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 7:43 pm
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Former "Dateline" reporter blasts NBC (Reuters)

By Paul J. GoughWed Jan 2, 9:06 AM ET

A former "Dateline NBC" correspondent claims that in the aftermath of September 11, the network diverted him from reporting on al Qaeda and instead wanted him to ride along with the country's "forgotten heroes," firefighters.

John Hockenberry, who was laid off from "Dateline" in early 2005, wrote in this month's Technology Review that on the Sunday after the September 2001 attacks he was pitching stories on the origins of al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism. He claimed that then-NBC programming chief Jeff Zucker, who came into a meeting Hockenberry was having with "Dateline" executive producer David Corvo, said "Dateline" should instead focus on the firefighters and perhaps ride along with them a la "Cops," the Fox reality series.

According to Hockenberry, Zucker said "that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine."
NBC News wasn't impressed by this or any of Hockenberry's other claims.

"It's unfortunate that John Hockenberry seems to be so far out of touch with reality," an NBC spokesperson said. "The comments are so utterly absurd, we will have no further comment." ...

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Another bombshell is Hockenberry's claims that General Electric, NBC's parent company, discouraged him from talking to the Bin Laden family about their estranged family member. Hockenberry asked GE, which does business with the Bin Laden family company, to help him get in contact with them. Instead, a PR executive called Hockenberry's hotel room in Saudi Arabia and read a statement about how GE didn't see its "valuable business relationship" with the Bin Laden Group as having anything to do with "Dateline."

In another instance, Hockenberry claimed a story he did about a Weather Underground member wouldn't appear on the Sunday edition of "Dateline" unless its lead-out, the 1960s family drama "American Dreams," did a show about "protesters or something." And for another story on the abuse of mentally ill inmates, Hockenberry was told by a producer that video of a fatal attack on a prisoner by guards wasn't enough.