"First, the fact that shows like Crossfire get good ratings doesn't enter into his argument. He is saying that as pundits on CNN, they have an ethical RESPONSIBILITY to be honest, not to twist facts according to the parties' wishes, and to actually discuss civilliy the issues of the day."
Maybe there is some such vague ethical responsibility but it is next to non existent today. There have already been one or two court cases from journalists suiting FOX. FOX producers tried to compel journalists to be untruthful. They either quit or were fired. it went to court. The judge established that FOX has no obligation to be truthful in what they reported.
Most of these journalists are all working in a capitalist system here. If you don't like what they are doing then you are basically indicting capitalism and maybe it deserves some indictment. They are not really not public servents as much as everyone seems to think they are. They work for corporations, and as a result their prime directive is to make money, ethical journalism is a footnote compared to that. As long as their prime directive is to make money, that means their number one objective is ratings and ad revenue. You don't get good rating by being boring. I'm not sure ethical journalism improves your ratings any more either, as proof I cite O'Reilly and Rush.
How exactly are you going to make all these people into public servents and not capitalists without completely rewiring the whole system.
"because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they are wrong"
Well I think he is wrong if he thinks most people are going to watch news that is boring, and stripping out the theater would make it more boring to most Americans and I don't think most Americans would watch it.
Well yes he did. He basically said because you are "journalists" you can no longer do theater, try to be entertaining or try to pump up your ratings. If they listened to him they would be consigned to massively boring, their ratings would crater, and the ratings of "The Daily Show" would go through the roof because everone would be compelled to turn to Stewart to get what they want which is news as theater.
All this was pretty well nailed in the movie "Network" years ago.
"The proof is in The Daily Show's high ratings and awards. It's a very sad commentary, and Jon Stewart knows it, that a *lot* of people get their news from his show because there aren't any better alternatives"
I think you are wrong and I think this is the crux of the issue here. People don't watch "The Daily Show" "because there aren't any better alternatives". They watch it precisely because its funny and its good theater. Straight news is mostly unhappy news or not interesting to most people news. I think everyone here who contends there just needs to be a good straight news show and everyone would watch is wrong. Again PBS has at least two pretty good straight news shows, that aren't badly slaved to corporate interests, Lehrer's news hour and Charlie Rose. Most people don't watch them.
The basic flaw in Stewarts whole tirade was that the news networks should somehow be forbidden to do theater, yet its OK that he does precisely that and that is why people watch him. I'm not sure that he wasn't actually trying to further expand his ratings. If all the new networks stopped doing theater they would be even more boring than they are and everyone would watch "The Daily Show" to get their news. He is a crafty wabbit.
So I guess we can all just watch PBS and listen to NPR and this problem goes away, right?
People do have other choices yet the still watch Fox and are being turned into Rupert Murdoch's own personal army of zombies. At some point you do have to concede that maybe most people may actually LIKE being slaved to corporations, after all most of them work form them, and they were giving American's a pretty sweet life compared to the rest of the world until recently.
Before you flame me I am mostly playing devil's advocate.
As long as those corporations were giving Americans big homes, multiple cars, and all the other assorted toys they wanted I'm pretty sure they've been pretty willing slaves. It will be interesting in the next few years, how Americans react now that they realize the elite that runs the big corporations is now selling them down the river with globalization.
The REAL reason Nader wasn't allowed in the debates are:
A. He has zero chance of winning like all the current crop of 3rd party candidates. To get in them you have to capture substantial numbers in polls like Perot and Anderson did and then its still a battle since the two parties control the debates now. Of course its really hard to acquire the critical mass to poll well as long as the media dismisses you. Pretty obviously a 3rd party needs to get a major celeb, with major name recognition, like Arnold, Jessie, Ross, Ronnie etc.
B. Nader has pissed off basically every entrenched interest and power in the U.S. and the world, far beyond just the corporate media, just like Michael Moore. That is their appeal to most of us. Why are you thinking the entrenched powers would or should encourage them, at all? They have zero reason to and our idealism isn't one.
Perhaps you should provide some support for this. Here is my evidence that many are:
- Jerry Falwell - Pat Roberts and the 700 Club - Jim and Tammy Fay Baker - Jimmy Swaggert - Oral Roberts - Billy Graham and son....this list goes on a while, should I continue?
I'm wagering all the sheeple that follow these conmen and give them huge sums of money are also Bush supporters.
"But clearly many non-foolish Americans disagree, and I for one would like to know what they're being told that we're not."
I think you are greatly overestimating most American's who are supporting Bush.
My estimation is there are a couple big groups who support Bush:
A) America's fundementalist Christains, the moral majority being one facet B) America's business community and especially the wealthy elite
Many in group A are in rural America, the Midwest and the South. Many of them are very fundamentalist. I'm not sure you've ever spent any time in America's bible belt and I'm not sure there is a counterpart in Europe. These are people who hand over billions of dollars to con men on TV like Jerry Fallwell and Jim Baker. They are gullible and easily manipulated. You need to remember most American's are completely ignorant of the most basic geography, foreign affairs and how the politcal world really works. They are easily manipulated and controlled.
In Group B there are certainly some very smart people. I'm pretty sure they are people who A) want to make a lot of money and B) want America to completely dominate the world. B tends to be a good way to accomplish A. These are hard core, make money at all costs Capitalists, a subset of them are America's wealthy elite who have all the money and power. Many would probably support Bush no matter what he does as long as he keeps slashing their taxes.
And of course you can't leave out the fact that since 9/11 the Republicans have been relentlessly promoting as much fear as possible in the American people, mostly in the easily manipulated group A. The Republican convention was a non stop exercise in telling people their children and grandchildren are in grave danger from "Terrorists" and if you elect Kerry your children will most certainly die. I live in a swing state, you should hear the fear mongering rhetoric they are putting on their automated dialers that are ringing my phone about a dozen times a day. The Dems have some too but it pales to the Republican messages.
I'm not sure all this makes it to the rest of the world, but there are really good an obvious reasons why America is split down the middle and half would follow Bush in to hell and probably will. Unfortunately the Dems are countering with Kerry and nobody likes him either. I'm pretty sure almost any good Democratic would beat Bush but Kerry isn't good. I'm pretty sure any good Republican candidate could demolish Kerry but Bush is not good. We are in a race to the bottom, who is the lesser evil.
Yes your wrong, other than its obvious I dislike the Republicans and FOX a lot more than I dislike the Democrats and CNN. I do watch CNN but as I said up there somewhere I hate most of it too with the possible exception of Aaron Brown and occasionally Lou Dobbs. Lou is stiff but to his credit he hammers the issues that count that everyone else ignores or pays lip service to immigration, unemployment, declining incomes, outsourcing, trade deficit and budget deficit.
I'd be overjoyed if a 3rd party displaced both parties, is it likely to happen, no. I imagine I'll bite a bullet and vote Kerry as much as I dislike the guy, just because its become pretty obvious Bush/Cheney and cronies are really, really bad and need to go, if for no other reason than the not stop lieing.
The one plus I could see with Bush/Cheney winning is their next four years are likely to be even worse than the last four and its likely to push many American's and most of the world in to open revolt against them. That is about the one and only way American's will wake up out of the sleep walk they've been in since the last revolt fizzled in the early 70's.
"I'm sure there are millions of smart people in the US who would watch a worthy news program if a news program were to provide "news for nerds"."
Well I'd be inclined to say that you might be talking about Lehrer's News Hour on PBS. Do you watch it? I'm guessing not because you don't seem to know one already exists. The problem with it is most people find it somewhat boring.
It being on PBS they also aren't particularly beholden to the corprate media everyone here is railing against. Everyone in this thread including Stewart seems to forget there are a few pretty good news shows around already and not many people watch them. They don't have comedy, theater or the aura of a sporting event.
That might be true if your a journalist on NPR or PBS. All the rest of them are vying for ratings, sales, advertising revenue, success. These people are all working entirely in a Capitalist system you know. Their JOB IS to cater to the whims of the American public to get the maximum number possible watching, reading, listening to them. If they don't pander no one watches them and they fail.
You are acting like these people are some kind of public servents, who will be assured success if they are just scrupulously honest, never say anything that they don't know to be entirely true, and who would probably be boring.
Lets not pretend like bad journalism is anything new. Remember the Hearst newspaper empire pretty much single handedly suckered the U.S. in to the Spanish American war entirely on false pretenses much the same as Iraq. The term yellow journalism actually dates back to Pulitzer but it was Hearst who made it a dominant force in the U.S.
What Stewart was doing there was classic "do as I say not as I do".
When I watched him on Crossfire I cheered him on. Smart, well informed people desperately want more of exactly what he was advocating. But then you think about it in a practical sense. The problem is most people aren't smart, well informed people so neither is most of the TV and TV news they watch. Its one of those cases where its impossible to tell which is the chicken and the egg, though I'm pretty sure if all TV news suddenly turned smart, nonpartisan and informed I doubt the American people would necessarily follow, they would probably just switch to a Sports channel. If you want most people to watch news it in fact needs to have a heavy dose of comedy, sporting event and or theater.
I love Jon Stewart, but for him to say "At least I can sleep at night" is kind of hypocritical. Either he should put on a show that what he was demanding so dtirdently, informed debate and smart journalism, or stick to satirizing journalism and leave it alone.
I didn't suggest he put together a "political wrestling federation show", I suggested he put on a show that does what he was telling the news networks to do, and probably watch it flop. Otherwise he should stick to comedy and satire. The comedy and satire angle is already doing a much better job of shredding the news networks, and especially shredding them in the ratings race, than preaching to them that they should aspire to an ideal that probably wouldn't work in our less than ideal world. Lehrer, Russert, Brown and Rose do a fair job of doing what Stewart proposed and they just don't compete well with partisan flame throwing.
Most people want to either:
A. Watch news heavily biased to their partisan view, and especially a media star that holds their partisan view shred the people they disagree with, which is why O'Reilly and Rush are #1.
B. Watch one side that matches their partisan view fight with the other side, the classic Crossfire. In fact neither side really ever wins but you always believe your side wins everytime.
America is pretty much polarized to 40-45% Republican/Right and 40-45% Democrat/Left and maybe 10-20% independent who are either kind of indifferent, dislike them both or actually try to make smart decisions based on issues in defiance of insurmountable odds. The right is going to watch Fox, the left is going to watch CNN, not sure who watches MSNBC. You can get both sides to watch Crossfire because both sides are equally and badly represented.
I leave CNN on in the background much of the day, though I usually turn off Crossfire and a few of their shows I can't stand(the monring show, Wolf, Paula, Cooper). OK I guess I actually shut off more than on lately. I dearly wish I could get CNN international because CNN U.S. seems to be intentionally very dumbed down for an American audience.
I shut off Crossfire because there is to much shouting and to much repetition of the same worn out talking points by the left and the right. I did watch the show yesterday thought and it was awe inspiring, especially because it was live and they kept coming back from the commercial breaks for another beating. I especially liked it when they were in Rapidfire and Stewart ignored the gong until they gave up on it.
Once again the right proved they have no sense of humour, Begala mostly kept his mouth shut and Carlson made a complete ass out of himself. Another example of the Republicans having no sense of humor the Michigan Republican party trying to charge Michael Moore with vote buying for offering clean underwear or Ramen noodles to slackers who vote. The first DA they took it to said no, she had real crime to deal with.
But there is a flaw in Stewart's arguement. The news shows are like they are because people watch them. If their ratings suck they will go off the air, but if people watch them they will keep doing what they do. Unfortunately most people want scandal, lurid crimes, partisan bickering, controversy and watching people fight. The problem here is mostly the American people and not so much the cable networks. Americans are so dumbed down most of them don't want to watch insightful debate or intelligent journalism.
Where cable news is today and is going to keep going is dictated almost entirely by FOX News. They now control a market share equal to all of the rest of the cable news networks combined, 9 of the top 10 shows through the summer. The one exception was Larry King and that is mostly because half his shows have been turned over to Court TV which obsess on the lurid trials of the day, and a quarter seem to be about Britain's royal family. Larry King has completely dumbed his show down to the level American's are comfortable with it.
The fact is a LOT of Americans are extremely partisan, and not well informed, and in particular a LOT of them are rabidly right wing partisans which is why talk radio is like it is and why FOX dominates an entire half of the cable news market.
What Stewart said was right in an ideal world but this isn't an ideal world. There are some fairly well done news shows Lehrer, Charlie Rose, Russert, Aaron Brown and they have an audience but they are never going to compete against vicious, partisan shouting matches like O'Reilly (though we can pray O'Reilly's career will crater now that the scandal mongering is aimed at him and not by him).
The hypocrisy in what Stewart said is I wager he would be a sensational flop if he were to try to do what he was telling the news networks to do. If he tried to run a news show with insightful debate and reasoned commentary (and no comedy) chances are high it would flop or end up with a subsistence market share. If anyone could do it he could and if he wants to put his money where his mouth is he should. Its pretty easy to scold the news networks to do something that would probably be ratings suicide, and then go back to doing fake news and comedy and a sure market share.
From Yahoo News
Fox News beats all rivals
Pamela McClintock, STAFF
Tue Sep 28, 6:23 PM ET
NEW YORK -- For the first time in its history, Fox News Channel beat the combined competition in primetime during the third quarter of 2004, with major headlines of the summer including the national political conventions and a brutal string of hurricanes.
According to Nielsen Media Research, Fox News averaged 1.8 million viewers, while CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and Headline News averaged a combined total of 1.7 million. The quarter ended Su
Its hard so say why it was done, but until the governments involved stop gagging everyone you have to assume it was the for the reason everyone knows about, photos of Swiss undercover agents photographing protesters.
Assuming that is the reason there are multiple cases of an out of control government here.
First off the Swiss undercover agents have apparently bestowed upon themselves the right to photograph protesters but the protesters can't take pictures of them back. These agents were in the public. There is absolutely no reason anyone doesn't have the right to take pictures of them and post them. If their identities are top secret then they should have sent some cops out to take the pictures whose ID's no one cares about.
Second, the photos were no doubt being used to identify and catalog protesters, most probably for law enforcement agencies inside and outside Switzerland. Anti globalization protestors are being tracked by all the countries who are pro globalization now. Since these protester were in public so they have to live with being photographed and should wear masks in the future. But those photos are no doubt going to be used to build files on them and label them in perpetuity as trouble makers so they are designed to strip them of their rights. They have basically been given criminal records without having been convicted of anything. There is potential they may be wiretapped, Internet use monitored, movements tracked especially as they move towards protest sites, and groups they belong to may be infiltrated by more undercover agents. If they were engaging in vandalism or assault then there is a basis for law enforcement action. If they are engaged in peaceful protest, even unlicensed peaceful protest, democratic governments should leave them alone unless they aspire to be the totalitarian governments they rail against so often.
Third, You have multiple nations and law enforcement agencies uniting to seize someone's property, and to suppress free speech, in this case internet sites who are very much about free speech. There was no basis to seize these photos to begin with since those agents were in public, but to deny people their free speech rights in the process is not something you expect from democratic governments. The fact that all these governments so easily united to do this across multiple international boundries and without laying any charges against IndyMedia suggests there is an international cabal that can shut down pretty much any Internet site on the flimsiest of evidence, and threaten free speech and dissent in the process. These are tactics very much designed to intimidate IndyMedia and to encourage them to be quiet.
" I'm working on getting my teaching certification in mathematics. Like any industry, it's good to have a backup plan"
Hmmm, teaching, now there is a high paying profession. Good backup plan. Is that one or two rungs above pizza delivery.
Maybe outsourcing programming will fizzle when managers realize how hard it is, but I doubt it. Most dumb managers think budget first, and quality and success second and the budget advantage is very compelling. Hopefully smart managers don't think that way but if they see tasks they can spin off to Timbuktu and save a bunch of money they will. The less managers spend on their staff the more there is for their options and bonuses. Gotta pay those country club dues.
My solution is self employment as long you have the skill and contacts to get work. Also move out of overpriced U.S. cities and eventually out of the U.S. all together so you can live cheap, underbid your U.S. counterparts and be on the winning end of outsourcing. An added fringe benefit of moving out of the U.S. is you get further away from the rising American police state(though probably not far enough), the moral majority and the nut cases running the Republican party lately.
Fahrenheit 911 has apparently been canceled from pay per view, presumably thanks to pressure from the Republicans.
Michael Powell declined to do anything about the Sinclair propaganda broadcast on public airwaves.
Maybe there is still liberal bias among some journalists and editors but it is obviously being rapidly trumped by the conservative bias in the FCC and the fat cats running many media outlets, and yes I know some of the fat cats are Democrats but they don't seem to be interfering in the editorial content of their outlets to the extent the conservative owners are, and when they do the Republican launch a scorched earth campaign against them (Regean bio and Faherenheit 911).
This is kind of cool. I've always wondered what it was really like in the early days of Nazi Germany.
You're on drugs if you think the media is going to cover any candidate who is in single digits in the polls. Well they do cover them but only as "spoilers" to one or the other major party candidate. Its important they paint them as crackpots and in fact "spoiling" Democracy by having the audacity to run against the two all powerful parties.
The media's job isn't to present American people with new ideas and fresh ways to look at things. They are there to run a horse race between the two major candidates, con the American people in to thinking there is a choice, and wherever possible randomly influence the outcome of the race, for example by observing a 2 point shift in the polls, declare a momentum swing, and generate a momentum swing in the process, or they take some silly little slip by a candidate and turn it in to a landslide that buries a candidate.
The two major candidates no matter who they are generate the same empty rhetoric every election, people think they have a choice when in reality the have the same choice in every election and its really no choice. The stock differences:
Democrats pro abortion, pro gays, tax the rich, pro affirmative action, create huge government run programs(especially health care), flag waving, bible thumping.
Republican anti abortion, antigay, don't tax the rich, create huge programs that give money to big corporations(especially health care), flag waving, bible thumping.
But...
They now both want an ever expanding government slowly devouring our civil rights, Republican's having abandoned their most basic principal of limited government as they rush to fuse with the Democrats.
They both want Big Brother and they are in race to see who gets their first.
They are both completely enslaved to Israel and the Friends of Israel lobby. You will never hear a major party candidate do anything but fall all over themselves giving Israel a blank check.
They both are going to spend us in bankruptcy. The national debt is now sitting around $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, and the debt ceiling is about to be raised again.
They are both going to insure there is a never ending flood of illegals in to the country because it creates a giant pool of cheap, exploitable labor and drives down wages.
They are both going to continue the push to free trade and globalization, which will make America's multinationals and the wealthy even wealthier, while it pushes everyone else in to poverty competing against workers in China or wherever who make 30 cents an hour. You need to be a multinational because a half a trillion dollar annual trade deficit(and growing) and a half a trillion dollar annual budget deficit(and growing) is going to eventually bankrupt this country. The two combined are nearly a trillion dollars which is close to 10% of the U.S. GDP pouring in to debt.
You think the Democrats are the ones who want to cut the defense budget, and occasionally they have. But now, especially thanks to 9/11 both parties are going to try to out do each other in exploding the defense and intelligence budgets. Get used to the idea of a trillion dollar defense/intelligence budget because its coming soon. The Defense Industrial establishment had a real scare after the collapse of the cold war because they were in real danger of losing their stranglehold on America, their budget and their power. You can be sure they will never let that happen again.
Both parties are falling over each other to creat a new unified national intelligence agency that will have all the money and power of the FBI, CIA, NSA, NRO and Defense Intelligence fused in to one giant all seeing, all powerful spying agency, an agency which will make it easier, not harder to fabricate a case for war as was done in Iraq, because one partisan bureaucrat will run it all and can command it to generate the intelligence the President and his cronies want to see, with no dissenting opinion.
Colorado has a ballot initiative to do just this. If it passes Colorado would move from being a crucial, much courted, swing state to largely irrelevant. It would almost inevitably ending going 5 votes for one candidate and 4 for another. It would take a huge shift in votes to get to 6-3. No candidate is going to waste a second of their time or a dollar of advertising money to swing 1 electoral.
The people pushing it were trying to neutralize a Bush/Republican stronghold. Ironically since then Colorado has swung to being a toss up. If the Democrats were to actually win the Presidential vote they actually don't want this measure to pass so they get all 9 votes, if Bush wins they do want it to pass so they get 4 votes.
If you want to get rid of the electoral college you just need to switch to a popular vote nation wide. I doubt it will ever happen because the sparsely populated states in the West, Midwest and New England, wont give up the disproportional clout the electoral college gives them. I doubt the Republicans would tolerate it since they do well in many small, sparely populated states.
Its not like getting rid of the electoral college is going to result in any 3rd party gains that matter anyway. The only real way to do that would be to give seats in Congress based on the percentage of the vote each party garners so that they get a few seats and can be kingmakers in a coalition government, and of course you need to switch to a Prime Minister chosen by the ruling coalition. Ain't gonna happen in the U.S. of A.
If you want to see the last time there was a really successful 3rd party look up the Progressive movement in the early 1900's. Its a movement that is desperately needed today. It arose to fight out of control corporations, and massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a lucky few, the same things poisoning America today.
Unfortunately the two major parties are much more entrenched than they were then. On the plus side the Internet should make it easier to form a 3rd party. As Joe Trippi has proposed, in 2008 we need to rally the Deaniacs and push the Internet party even further than they did this year, broaden its appeal, and raise even more money in millions of hundred dollar internet contributions. Unfortunately you need a candidate and Dean has pretty much shredded his credibility and his future. The media finished him off obsessing over the scream speech. In reality he destroyed himself when he stopped being a rebel, and establishment outsider, and went courting Gore and Carter to get the establishment's endorsement. Not sure Gore and Carter didn't endorse him knowing it would destroy him.
The other problem is a candidate who is going to have broad enough appeal to get elected ends up thouroughly compromising himself and you end up with candidates just as pathetic as the current major party candidates. It would take a really exceptional candidate to fly in the face of convention wisdom, and current sickening predictable rhetoric, and capture the hearts of enough people to get elected.
Oh, And God Bless America...I want to throttle ever politician that ends every speech with that and wears an American flag lapel pin, like Bush and Kerry both do. They are both so predictable that they have become empty and meaningless in their obligatoriness.
You had a case before 9/11, before Fox News, before Rush and talk radio, before the media cheered on the war in Iraq and embedded journalists, reporters who only tell the military's side of every story.
You had a case, times changed, you won, its time to give it up since no one with a clue buys it anymore. If anything its time for the left to start harping about the conservative bias in the media, Fox being the #1 new network and they don't even pretend to be unbiased, excepting for constantly pounding everyone with the "Fair and Balanced" lie.
If you ask anybody who lives outside the U.S. and are used to really liberal media, I'm pretty sure they tell you American media has moved firmly to the center. Talk radio and Fox have moved so far to the right its deeply worrying if you want an enlightened pluralistic country. They are a media full of hatred, intolerance, arrogance and venom.
"...even O'Reilly..."
So I guess at this point your admitting the Swift Boat Vet ads were an over the top smear campaign, since McCain and O'Reilly both condemned them. Yet they were still plastered all over the media for weeks, played over and over, driven in to the ground by the networks, and hurt Kerry badly.
Why exactly is its OK for the right to make out like Reagan was a mix of saint, martyr and savior of the world but its proven impossible to tell the other side of the story. I grew up under Reagan, he was a dumb actor being run by the people behind him, a lot like the current President.
Lets not forget Reagan's real record:
- he stood and did nothing while the AIDS epidemic spread - He shredded the constitution with Iran/Contra - He has Ed Meese as Attorney General, the worst Attroney General in recent history, until John Ashcroft came along, though Janet Reno is right up there. - He ran up a staggering debt, especially squandering it on a military that was a complete waste, though I'll give its kind of small compared to the debt the current right winger is running up. Why do right wingers claim they are fiscally conservative and then run up debts that dwarf those of the so called liberals.
The right also consistently claims he single handedly toppled the U.S.S.R when Gorbachev, the Pope and Solidarity had way more to do with it than he did. Only thing Reagan did to topple the U.S.S.R was to fund, train and arm the Mujadeen in Afghanistan, though unfortunately he also created Al-qaida in the process.
Its a tribute to the right that they manage to completely and ruthlessly shred every Democratic President and candidate yet they completely lose it when anyone says a single cross word about any of their Presidents. Get off it, your double standard is sickening.
Only in your own mind, some bashed it, some expanded on it, for example by exploring in gory detail exactly whose medals he threw back, some tried to dig in to the facts, they carried people who supported him, some who opposed him, they reviewed the official Navy documents, and I know that really pissed the right off they actually looked at what the Navy's documents said.
This concept that anytime the media says something you don't like they have a flaming liberal bias and everytime they agree with the right you forget to notice is getting old, really, really old. You don't have to look further than Fox News and talk radio to see the right has acquired a massive media influence. Get over it. Most of us don't want you to coerce the media in to emulating Fox, or hey why stop there, lets just turn the media over to the Bush administration like a real police state. Most of us actually want "Fair and Balanced" instead of Fox just saying it when it flies in the the face of reality. A truly liberal media wouldn't have been riding along with the tanks in Iraq cheering on a war based on a web of lies, they would have questioned it before the war not a year later when its obvious to everyone it was a mistake.
Fahrenheit isn't going to appear on anything other pay per view before the election... when it matters. If Bush isn't reelected it will die a quick death. If he is reelected it wont do any good other than remind people they made a mistake, a big, big mistake. If Moore were to get it on broadcast TV the right would be howling to the moon, just like they did against the Reagan bio, and it would be run off the air, Moore knows it, I know it, you know it. It is unlikely to ever happen, and sure wont happen before the election.
You don't get it do you. I can admit something is propaganda even if I agree with the message, you apparently can't. That makes you a tool. It also makes you a waste of time and bandwidth. It makes you predictable and uninteresting because you don't say anything new, and you ain't gonna grow.
"I find it humorous that you are comparing Iraq to vietnam...mind but most of the time we are on the right side of these things."
I'm pretty sure you are the only one that said half of the bullshit in this paragraph. Not gonna waste the time going through it point by point explaining why most of what you said in here is BS. Again you are a waste of time.
"OK Doke Kerry testified he committed attrocities. What villages did he burn ? What children did he murder ? If he did how did his band of brothers participate ?"
He piloted a Swift boat in free fire zones. In case you are unaware of what free fire zones are, they are considered enemy held territory and anyone in them is the enemy, or an enemy sympathizer, so you shoot first and don't ask questions later. They were a license from your chain of command to kill civilians. They were an officially sanctioned atrocity, one of many in Vietnam.
Later dude, need to do something more constructive with my time. You can have the last word, make it good. Please wakeup someday and realize you and your country aren't God's gift to the world.
"He was transfered with the approval of the squadrons commanding officer."
His transfer was approved months after he'd already moved to Alabama. Why would the Guard approve the transfer of a pilot, who cost millions to train, to a unit that had no jets for him to fly, unless there was favoritism?
"He was competing for a spot only a handfull of people were competing for. People qualified for the fighter pilot spot were in short supply."
Apparently, and George wasn't one of them. He scored 25% on the aptitude test. That should have outright disqualified him were it not for his family's influence. Please stop pretending like the Guard wasn't the place all the children of the rich and powerful went to escape the draft. Thats what it was for then, unlike now where it is a one way ticket to combat in Iraq. Collin Powell is on record with his disgust that the Guard let the rich white boys escape the draft while the poor and black got to go to Vietnam to die. He doesn't mention this as much now that he works for one of those rich, white boys.
"The airforce didnt begin performing drug tests with physicals untill considerably after his tour was up."
I stand slightly corrected. They drug tests weren't a mandatory part of the physical then, but were instead random. They were instituted at this time and it closely corresponds to the time Bush was doing his best to disappear from the Guard. Its probable George was afraid he would get nailed with a random drug test as part of the physical which is why he ducked it though he probably wouldn't have been tested. It is a major coincidence that he aggressively started ducking the Guard at the same time the random testing started.
Actually found the details in Google tonight:
"Which is where Air Force Regulation 160-23, also known as the Medical Service Drug Abuse Testing Program, comes in. The new drug-testing effort was officially launched by the Air Force on April 21, 1972, following a Jan. 11, 1972, directive issued by the Department of Defense. That initiative, in response to increased drug use among soldiers in Vietnam, instructed the military branches to "establish the requirement for a systematic drug abuse testing program of all military personnel on active duty, effective 1 July 1972."
"It's true that in 1972 Bush was not on "active" duty: His Texas Guard unit was never mobilized. But according to Maj. Jeff Washburn, the chief of the National Guard's substance abuse program, a random drug-testing program was born out of that regulation and administered to guardsmen such as Bush. The random tests were unrelated to the scheduled annual physical exams, such as the one that Bush failed to take in 1972, a failure that resulted in his grounding."
"The 1972 drug-testing program took months, and in some cases years, to implement at Guard units across the country. And the percentage of guardsmen tested then was much lower than today's 40 percent rate. But as of April 1972, Air National guardsmen knew random drug testing was going to be implemented."
"I respect your right to dislike him but you would serve your own cause better by trying to find positive reasons to like Kerry or concrete issues where the president has harmed you."
I don't like Kerry either, I just dislike Bush a lot more. I'm currently torn between throwing my vote away on a 3rd party or throwing it away on Kerry just to get Bush and his cronies out of office. These isn't much about Kerry to like. His Vietnam record, especially his medal collecting is highly suspect. I just don't have any use for people like you and the POW's making him out to be a traitor because he told the truth about Vietnam in front of Congress, or trying to make out like Bush is a saint. He is a spoiled rotten rich kid. As Ann Richards says he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. He is an untreated alcoholic, drug abuser, mediocre student(to put it politely), incurious, ill informed, seems to think he is infallible and talking to God, and is completely unqualified to be president of anything let alone the most powerful country on the planet. Please wake up, smell the coffee, and see the obvious.
"I didn't bring up farenheit 911 because its obviously propaganda."
Actually you are just showing everything that agrees with your world view is noble and heroic truth telling and everything that disagrees with what you want to believe is propaganda. You see I can admit the obvious, Fahrenheit 911 is propaganda though it has grains of truth like most good propaganda. I prefer to try to sort out what the facts are based on the available evidence. You unfortunately are to closed minded to do that and it traps you in a hole where you are easily manipulated. Thats OK, its your pretogative but when you try to con everyone else with this propaganda don't expect people like me to sit idly buy and accept it unchallenged.
"our allies at considerable cost to ourselves"
Our allies in Vietnam were a string of corrupt, brutal, dictators. A key reason the U.S. lost Vietnam is those dictators were more despised by the Vietnamese people than the Communists so the U.S. was insured a never ending insurgency until they fell. The South Vietnamese military was built on cronyism reflecting the corruption of its leadership. Thats why it was a perpetual disaster everytime it had to fight on its own.
"While we didn't win the battle, much to the regret of the south Vietnamese ( remember all those lovely photographs of them scrambling to get to the US embassy) we did prove we would defend our allies at considerable cost to ourselves. It was a vital part of keeping Totalitarianism contained."
Your statements are self contradictory. We didn't defend our allies in the end. We abandoned them. It is simply impossible to say Vietnam was a victory in the Cold War and did anything to contain Totalitarianism. The U.S. lost and Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fell to communism. Vietnam was in fact a victory for Communism and a case study in how not to fight an insurgency. You can't just tell yourself and everyone else it was a victory in contradiction to obvious fact, and make it so. The U.S. lost in Vietnam, badly, deal with it. The only thing the U.S. did right was to get out before it completely destroyed the country as Afghanistan destroyed the U.S.S.R. The same thing could easily happen in Iraq unless there is a lot of dealing with reality in Washington.
"These are heroic stands, how do you compare fabricating lies about people you served with, with these stands ?"
Nice move, you skillfully ducked the Toledo Blade articles on the Tiger Force which pretty much supports all of Kennedy's atrocity allegations. You can't say Kerry lied when American forces did all the things he said they did. You have to engage in revisionism to turn Kerry in to a liar, he simply wasn't in fact. Cheney and Rumsfeld did try that revisionism by trying to cover up the fact about Tiger Force but truth has a way of coming out.
I'm sorry you and these POW's cant accept that American's did commit atrocities. Did all the vets in Vietnam commit them no, but some did and it appears the military may have encouraged or condoned, or at least sought to cover it up.
Atrocities happen in pretty much every war, especially insurgencies where everyone isn't wearing pretty uniforms. Faced with that kind of war soldiers almost inevitably start killing insurgents and innocent civilians without discrimination and it eats them up. It ate up a lot of Vietnam vets. Its eating up a lot of Iraq vets. You make people fight that brand of war for long you create a bunch of ticking time bombs.
"Killians commander disowned the memo's and stated categorically that there was no favoritism for Bush."
You pretty much shot yourself in the foot at this point so lets focus on this.
George W. was competing for a handful of guard spots amongst hundreds of candidates. He flunked the aptitude test yet he jumped to the top of the list over candidates who actually passed the test. Tell me again about how there was no favoritism. One of his Harvard professor says he bragged about the special treatment he had to get in to the Guard.
George W. unilaterally transfered himself to a unit in Alabama where he couldn't exercise his million dollar training as a jet pilot, and the Guard approved it after the fact, reluctantly. If you are in the guard you have to get approval for a transfer before you do it. Tell me again about how there was no favoritism.
George W. unilaterally refused to take his flight physical at a time when drug testing had been instituted as part of the physical, and he probably was using Cocaine and would have been busted. If you are in the Army its not your prerogative to decide if you do or don't take a physical, especially if you are a pilot. He should have instantly faced disciplinary action and probably landed in Vietnam packing an M-16 through the mud, but he got off scott free, and in fact got an early out. It should have set off alarm bells and he should have been forced to take a drug test since it was obvious thats why he was ducking it. Tell me again how he got no favoritism.
To be honest I'm impressed you Bush fans can keep a straight face when you claim he didn't get special treatment, it flys in the face of every fact. Like I said the only reason you and George get away with it is the most embarassing of the documentation was destroyed.
The major problem here is we don't have someone as apparently enlightened as Reed Hundt as FCC chairman now. Instead we have Michael Powell who has, for example, led the charge to dramatically expand the concentration of the media in the hands of few large conglomerates, showing judgement so bad, Congress was compelled to step in and overrule him.
He's also leading the charge to turn back the clock on what is and isn't allowed on television and radio to try and put us back in to a 1950's morality to placate the religious right who want to decide what the rest of us can and can't watch or listen to. Janet Jackson's tit was just bad judgement, bad taste and not even particularly good as tits go. It wasn't a valid foundation for rolling back the clock on our media, it was just a lame excuse for something the Republican's and the religious right wanted to do anyway. Janet's tit was to broadcasting standards as 9/11 was to the Patriot Act, the perfect enabler for an existing agenda.
I'm highly skeptical Powell will give the Democrats a fair hearing since his job and the job of his dad are riding on the outcome of the election Sinclair is trying to swing.
Slashdot Mirror
"First, the fact that shows like Crossfire get good ratings doesn't enter into his argument. He is saying that as pundits on CNN, they have an ethical RESPONSIBILITY to be honest, not to twist facts according to the parties' wishes, and to actually discuss civilliy the issues of the day."
Maybe there is some such vague ethical responsibility but it is next to non existent today. There have already been one or two court cases from journalists suiting FOX. FOX producers tried to compel journalists to be untruthful. They either quit or were fired. it went to court. The judge established that FOX has no obligation to be truthful in what they reported.
Most of these journalists are all working in a capitalist system here. If you don't like what they are doing then you are basically indicting capitalism and maybe it deserves some indictment. They are not really not public servents as much as everyone seems to think they are. They work for corporations, and as a result their prime directive is to make money, ethical journalism is a footnote compared to that. As long as their prime directive is to make money, that means their number one objective is ratings and ad revenue. You don't get good rating by being boring. I'm not sure ethical journalism improves your ratings any more either, as proof I cite O'Reilly and Rush.
How exactly are you going to make all these people into public servents and not capitalists without completely rewiring the whole system.
"because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they are wrong"
Well I think he is wrong if he thinks most people are going to watch news that is boring, and stripping out the theater would make it more boring to most Americans and I don't think most Americans would watch it.
"Stewart never said not to "do as I do""
Well yes he did. He basically said because you are "journalists" you can no longer do theater, try to be entertaining or try to pump up your ratings. If they listened to him they would be consigned to massively boring, their ratings would crater, and the ratings of "The Daily Show" would go through the roof because everone would be compelled to turn to Stewart to get what they want which is news as theater.
All this was pretty well nailed in the movie "Network" years ago.
"The proof is in The Daily Show's high ratings and awards. It's a very sad commentary, and Jon Stewart knows it, that a *lot* of people get their news from his show because there aren't any better alternatives"
I think you are wrong and I think this is the crux of the issue here. People don't watch
"The Daily Show" "because there aren't any better alternatives". They watch it precisely because its funny and its good theater. Straight news is mostly unhappy news or not interesting to most people news. I think everyone here who contends there just needs to be a good straight news show and everyone would watch is wrong. Again PBS has at least two pretty good straight news shows, that aren't badly slaved to corporate interests, Lehrer's news hour and Charlie Rose. Most people don't watch them.
The basic flaw in Stewarts whole tirade was that the news networks should somehow be forbidden to do theater, yet its OK that he does precisely that and that is why people watch him. I'm not sure that he wasn't actually trying to further expand his ratings. If all the new networks stopped doing theater they would be even more boring than they are and everyone would watch "The Daily Show" to get their news. He is a crafty wabbit.
So I guess we can all just watch PBS and listen to NPR and this problem goes away, right?
People do have other choices yet the still watch Fox and are being turned into Rupert Murdoch's own personal army of zombies. At some point you do have to concede that maybe most people may actually LIKE being slaved to corporations, after all most of them work form them, and they were giving American's a pretty sweet life compared to the rest of the world until recently.
Before you flame me I am mostly playing devil's advocate.
As long as those corporations were giving Americans big homes, multiple cars, and all the other assorted toys they wanted I'm pretty sure they've been pretty willing slaves. It will be interesting in the next few years, how Americans react now that they realize the elite that runs the big corporations is now selling them down the river with globalization.
The REAL reason Nader wasn't allowed in the debates are:
A. He has zero chance of winning like all the current crop of 3rd party candidates. To get in them you have to capture substantial numbers in polls like Perot and Anderson did and then its still a battle since the two parties control the debates now. Of course its really hard to acquire the critical mass to poll well as long as the media dismisses you. Pretty obviously a 3rd party needs to get a major celeb, with major name recognition, like Arnold, Jessie, Ross, Ronnie etc.
B. Nader has pissed off basically every entrenched interest and power in the U.S. and the world, far beyond just the corporate media, just like Michael Moore. That is their appeal to most of us. Why are you thinking the entrenched powers would or should encourage them, at all? They have zero reason to and our idealism isn't one.
"Americans aren't naturally ignorant sheeple."
....this list goes on a while, should I continue?
Perhaps you should provide some support for this. Here is my evidence that many are:
- Jerry Falwell
- Pat Roberts and the 700 Club
- Jim and Tammy Fay Baker
- Jimmy Swaggert
- Oral Roberts
- Billy Graham and son
I'm wagering all the sheeple that follow these conmen and give them huge sums of money are also Bush supporters.
"But clearly many non-foolish Americans disagree, and I for one would like to know what they're being told that we're not."
I think you are greatly overestimating most American's who are supporting Bush.
My estimation is there are a couple big groups who support Bush:
A) America's fundementalist Christains, the moral majority being one facet
B) America's business community and especially the wealthy elite
Many in group A are in rural America, the Midwest and the South. Many of them are very fundamentalist. I'm not sure you've ever spent any time in America's bible belt and I'm not sure there is a counterpart in Europe. These are people who hand over billions of dollars to con men on TV like Jerry Fallwell and Jim Baker. They are gullible and easily manipulated. You need to remember most American's are completely ignorant of the most basic geography, foreign affairs and how the politcal world really works. They are easily manipulated and controlled.
In Group B there are certainly some very smart people. I'm pretty sure they are people who A) want to make a lot of money and B) want America to completely dominate the world. B tends to be a good way to accomplish A. These are hard core, make money at all costs Capitalists, a subset of them are America's wealthy elite who have all the money and power. Many would probably support Bush no matter what he does as long as he keeps slashing their taxes.
And of course you can't leave out the fact that since 9/11 the Republicans have been relentlessly promoting as much fear as possible in the American people, mostly in the easily manipulated group A. The Republican convention was a non stop exercise in telling people their children and grandchildren are in grave danger from "Terrorists" and if you elect Kerry your children will most certainly die. I live in a swing state, you should hear the fear mongering rhetoric they are putting on their automated dialers that are ringing my phone about a dozen times a day. The Dems have some too but it pales to the Republican messages.
I'm not sure all this makes it to the rest of the world, but there are really good an obvious reasons why America is split down the middle and half would follow Bush in to hell and probably will. Unfortunately the Dems are countering with Kerry and nobody likes him either. I'm pretty sure almost any good Democratic would beat Bush but Kerry isn't good. I'm pretty sure any good Republican candidate could demolish Kerry but Bush is not good. We are in a race to the bottom, who is the lesser evil.
Yes your wrong, other than its obvious I dislike the Republicans and FOX a lot more than I dislike the Democrats and CNN. I do watch CNN but as I said up there somewhere I hate most of it too with the possible exception of Aaron Brown and occasionally Lou Dobbs. Lou is stiff but to his credit he hammers the issues that count that everyone else ignores or pays lip service to immigration, unemployment, declining incomes, outsourcing, trade deficit and budget deficit.
I'd be overjoyed if a 3rd party displaced both parties, is it likely to happen, no. I imagine I'll bite a bullet and vote Kerry as much as I dislike the guy, just because its become pretty obvious Bush/Cheney and cronies are really, really bad and need to go, if for no other reason than the not stop lieing.
The one plus I could see with Bush/Cheney winning is their next four years are likely to be even worse than the last four and its likely to push many American's and most of the world in to open revolt against them. That is about the one and only way American's will wake up out of the sleep walk they've been in since the last revolt fizzled in the early 70's.
"I'm sure there are millions of smart people in the US who would watch a worthy news program if a news program were to provide "news for nerds"."
Well I'd be inclined to say that you might be talking about Lehrer's News Hour on PBS. Do you watch it? I'm guessing not because you don't seem to know one already exists. The problem with it is most people find it somewhat boring.
It being on PBS they also aren't particularly beholden to the corprate media everyone here is railing against. Everyone in this thread including Stewart seems to forget there are a few pretty good news shows around already and not many people watch them. They don't have comedy, theater or the aura of a sporting event.
That might be true if your a journalist on NPR or PBS. All the rest of them are vying for ratings, sales, advertising revenue, success. These people are all working entirely in a Capitalist system you know. Their JOB IS to cater to the whims of the American public to get the maximum number possible watching, reading, listening to them. If they don't pander no one watches them and they fail.
You are acting like these people are some kind of public servents, who will be assured success if they are just scrupulously honest, never say anything that they don't know to be entirely true, and who would probably be boring.
Lets not pretend like bad journalism is anything new. Remember the Hearst newspaper empire pretty much single handedly suckered the U.S. in to the Spanish American war entirely on false pretenses much the same as Iraq. The term yellow journalism actually dates back to Pulitzer but it was Hearst who made it a dominant force in the U.S.
Don't see your point.
What Stewart was doing there was classic "do as I say not as I do".
When I watched him on Crossfire I cheered him on. Smart, well informed people desperately want more of exactly what he was advocating. But then you think about it in a practical sense. The problem is most people aren't smart, well informed people so neither is most of the TV and TV news they watch. Its one of those cases where its impossible to tell which is the chicken and the egg, though I'm pretty sure if all TV news suddenly turned smart, nonpartisan and informed I doubt the American people would necessarily follow, they would probably just switch to a Sports channel. If you want most people to watch news it in fact needs to have a heavy dose of comedy, sporting event and or theater.
I love Jon Stewart, but for him to say "At least I can sleep at night" is kind of hypocritical. Either he should put on a show that what he was demanding so dtirdently, informed debate and smart journalism, or stick to satirizing journalism and leave it alone.
I didn't suggest he put together a "political wrestling federation show", I suggested he put on a show that does what he was telling the news networks to do, and probably watch it flop. Otherwise he should stick to comedy and satire. The comedy and satire angle is already doing a much better job of shredding the news networks, and especially shredding them in the ratings race, than preaching to them that they should aspire to an ideal that probably wouldn't work in our less than ideal world. Lehrer, Russert, Brown and Rose do a fair job of doing what Stewart proposed and they just don't compete well with partisan flame throwing.
Most people want to either:
A. Watch news heavily biased to their partisan view, and especially a media star that holds their partisan view shred the people they disagree with, which is why O'Reilly and Rush are #1.
B. Watch one side that matches their partisan view fight with the other side, the classic Crossfire. In fact neither side really ever wins but you always believe your side wins everytime.
America is pretty much polarized to 40-45% Republican/Right and 40-45% Democrat/Left and maybe 10-20% independent who are either kind of indifferent, dislike them both or actually try to make smart decisions based on issues in defiance of insurmountable odds. The right is going to watch Fox, the left is going to watch CNN, not sure who watches MSNBC. You can get both sides to watch Crossfire because both sides are equally and badly represented.
I leave CNN on in the background much of the day, though I usually turn off Crossfire and a few of their shows I can't stand(the monring show, Wolf, Paula, Cooper). OK I guess I actually shut off more than on lately. I dearly wish I could get CNN international because CNN U.S. seems to be intentionally very dumbed down for an American audience.
I shut off Crossfire because there is to much shouting and to much repetition of the same worn out talking points by the left and the right. I did watch the show yesterday thought and it was awe inspiring, especially because it was live and they kept coming back from the commercial breaks for another beating. I especially liked it when they were in Rapidfire and Stewart ignored the gong until they gave up on it.
Once again the right proved they have no sense of humour, Begala mostly kept his mouth shut and Carlson made a complete ass out of himself. Another example of the Republicans having no sense of humor the Michigan Republican party trying to charge Michael Moore with vote buying for offering clean underwear or Ramen noodles to slackers who vote. The first DA they took it to said no, she had real crime to deal with.
But there is a flaw in Stewart's arguement. The news shows are like they are because people watch them. If their ratings suck they will go off the air, but if people watch them they will keep doing what they do. Unfortunately most people want scandal, lurid crimes, partisan bickering, controversy and watching people fight. The problem here is mostly the American people and not so much the cable networks. Americans are so dumbed down most of them don't want to watch insightful debate or intelligent journalism.
Where cable news is today and is going to keep going is dictated almost entirely by FOX News. They now control a market share equal to all of the rest of the cable news networks combined, 9 of the top 10 shows through the summer. The one exception was Larry King and that is mostly because half his shows have been turned over to Court TV which obsess on the lurid trials of the day, and a quarter seem to be about Britain's royal family. Larry King has completely dumbed his show down to the level American's are comfortable with it.
The fact is a LOT of Americans are extremely partisan, and not well informed, and in particular a LOT of them are rabidly right wing partisans which is why talk radio is like it is and why FOX dominates an entire half of the cable news market.
What Stewart said was right in an ideal world but this isn't an ideal world. There are some fairly well done news shows Lehrer, Charlie Rose, Russert, Aaron Brown and they have an audience but they are never going to compete against vicious, partisan shouting matches like O'Reilly (though we can pray O'Reilly's career will crater now that the scandal mongering is aimed at him and not by him).
The hypocrisy in what Stewart said is I wager he would be a sensational flop if he were to try to do what he was telling the news networks to do. If he tried to run a news show with insightful debate and reasoned commentary (and no comedy) chances are high it would flop or end up with a subsistence market share. If anyone could do it he could and if he wants to put his money where his mouth is he should. Its pretty easy to scold the news networks to do something that would probably be ratings suicide, and then go back to doing fake news and comedy and a sure market share.
From Yahoo News
Fox News beats all rivals
Pamela McClintock, STAFF
Tue Sep 28, 6:23 PM ET
NEW YORK -- For the first time in its history, Fox News Channel beat the combined competition in primetime during the third quarter of 2004, with major headlines of the summer including the national political conventions and a brutal string of hurricanes.
According to Nielsen Media Research, Fox News averaged 1.8 million viewers, while CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and Headline News averaged a combined total of 1.7 million. The quarter ended Su
Its hard so say why it was done, but until the governments involved stop gagging everyone you have to assume it was the for the reason everyone knows about, photos of Swiss undercover agents photographing protesters.
Assuming that is the reason there are multiple cases of an out of control government here.
First off the Swiss undercover agents have apparently bestowed upon themselves the right to photograph protesters but the protesters can't take pictures of them back. These agents were in the public. There is absolutely no reason anyone doesn't have the right to take pictures of them and post them. If their identities are top secret then they should have sent some cops out to take the pictures whose ID's no one cares about.
Second, the photos were no doubt being used to identify and catalog protesters, most probably for law enforcement agencies inside and outside Switzerland. Anti globalization protestors are being tracked by all the countries who are pro globalization now. Since these protester were in public so they have to live with being photographed and should wear masks in the future. But those photos are no doubt going to be used to build files on them and label them in perpetuity as trouble makers so they are designed to strip them of their rights. They have basically been given criminal records without having been convicted of anything. There is potential they may be wiretapped, Internet use monitored, movements tracked especially as they move towards protest sites, and groups they belong to may be infiltrated by more undercover agents. If they were engaging in vandalism or assault then there is a basis for law enforcement action. If they are engaged in peaceful protest, even unlicensed peaceful protest, democratic governments should leave them alone unless they aspire to be the totalitarian governments they rail against so often.
Third, You have multiple nations and law enforcement agencies uniting to seize someone's property, and to suppress free speech, in this case internet sites who are very much about free speech. There was no basis to seize these photos to begin with since those agents were in public, but to deny people their free speech rights in the process is not something you expect from democratic governments. The fact that all these governments so easily united to do this across multiple international boundries and without laying any charges against IndyMedia suggests there is an international cabal that can shut down pretty much any Internet site on the flimsiest of evidence, and threaten free speech and dissent in the process. These are tactics very much designed to intimidate IndyMedia and to encourage them to be quiet.
" I'm working on getting my teaching certification in mathematics. Like any industry, it's good to have a backup plan"
Hmmm, teaching, now there is a high paying profession. Good backup plan. Is that one or two rungs above pizza delivery.
Maybe outsourcing programming will fizzle when managers realize how hard it is, but I doubt it. Most dumb managers think budget first, and quality and success second and the budget advantage is very compelling. Hopefully smart managers don't think that way but if they see tasks they can spin off to Timbuktu and save a bunch of money they will. The less managers spend on their staff the more there is for their options and bonuses. Gotta pay those country club dues.
My solution is self employment as long you have the skill and contacts to get work. Also move out of overpriced U.S. cities and eventually out of the U.S. all together so you can live cheap, underbid your U.S. counterparts and be on the winning end of outsourcing. An added fringe benefit of moving out of the U.S. is you get further away from the rising American police state(though probably not far enough), the moral majority and the nut cases running the Republican party lately.
So much for media bias.
Fahrenheit 911 has apparently been canceled from pay per view, presumably thanks to pressure from the Republicans.
Michael Powell declined to do anything about the Sinclair propaganda broadcast on public airwaves.
Maybe there is still liberal bias among some journalists and editors but it is obviously being rapidly trumped by the conservative bias in the FCC and the fat cats running many media outlets, and yes I know some of the fat cats are Democrats but they don't seem to be interfering in the editorial content of their outlets to the extent the conservative owners are, and when they do the Republican launch a scorched earth campaign against them (Regean bio and Faherenheit 911).
This is kind of cool. I've always wondered what it was really like in the early days of Nazi Germany.
You're on drugs if you think the media is going to cover any candidate who is in single digits in the polls. Well they do cover them but only as "spoilers" to one or the other major party candidate. Its important they paint them as crackpots and in fact "spoiling" Democracy by having the audacity to run against the two all powerful parties.
The media's job isn't to present American people with new ideas and fresh ways to look at things. They are there to run a horse race between the two major candidates, con the American people in to thinking there is a choice, and wherever possible randomly influence the outcome of the race, for example by observing a 2 point shift in the polls, declare a momentum swing, and generate a momentum swing in the process, or they take some silly little slip by a candidate and turn it in to a landslide that buries a candidate.
The two major candidates no matter who they are generate the same empty rhetoric every election, people think they have a choice when in reality the have the same choice in every election and its really no choice. The stock differences:
Democrats pro abortion, pro gays, tax the rich, pro affirmative action, create huge government run programs(especially health care), flag waving, bible thumping.
Republican anti abortion, antigay, don't tax the rich, create huge programs that give money to big corporations(especially health care), flag waving, bible thumping.
But...
They now both want an ever expanding government slowly devouring our civil rights, Republican's having abandoned their most basic principal of limited government as they rush to fuse with the Democrats.
They both want Big Brother and they are in race to see who gets their first.
They are both completely enslaved to Israel and the Friends of Israel lobby. You will never hear a major party candidate do anything but fall all over themselves giving Israel a blank check.
They both are going to spend us in bankruptcy. The national debt is now sitting around $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, and the debt ceiling is about to be raised again.
They are both going to insure there is a never ending flood of illegals in to the country because it creates a giant pool of cheap, exploitable labor and drives down wages.
They are both going to continue the push to free trade and globalization, which will make America's multinationals and the wealthy even wealthier, while it pushes everyone else in to poverty competing against workers in China or wherever who make 30 cents an hour. You need to be a multinational because a half a trillion dollar annual trade deficit(and growing) and a half a trillion dollar annual budget deficit(and growing) is going to eventually bankrupt this country. The two combined are nearly a trillion dollars which is close to 10% of the U.S. GDP pouring in to debt.
You think the Democrats are the ones who want to cut the defense budget, and occasionally they have. But now, especially thanks to 9/11 both parties are going to try to out do each other in exploding the defense and intelligence budgets. Get used to the idea of a trillion dollar defense/intelligence budget because its coming soon. The Defense Industrial establishment had a real scare after the collapse of the cold war because they were in real danger of losing their stranglehold on America, their budget and their power. You can be sure they will never let that happen again.
Both parties are falling over each other to creat a new unified national intelligence agency that will have all the money and power of the FBI, CIA, NSA, NRO and Defense Intelligence fused in to one giant all seeing, all powerful spying agency, an agency which will make it easier, not harder to fabricate a case for war as was done in Iraq, because one partisan bureaucrat will run it all and can command it to generate the intelligence the President and his cronies want to see, with no dissenting opinion.
Colorado has a ballot initiative to do just this. If it passes Colorado would move from being a crucial, much courted, swing state to largely irrelevant. It would almost inevitably ending going 5 votes for one candidate and 4 for another. It would take a huge shift in votes to get to 6-3. No candidate is going to waste a second of their time or a dollar of advertising money to swing 1 electoral.
The people pushing it were trying to neutralize a Bush/Republican stronghold. Ironically since then Colorado has swung to being a toss up. If the Democrats were to actually win the Presidential vote they actually don't want this measure to pass so they get all 9 votes, if Bush wins they do want it to pass so they get 4 votes.
If you want to get rid of the electoral college you just need to switch to a popular vote nation wide. I doubt it will ever happen because the sparsely populated states in the West, Midwest and New England, wont give up the disproportional clout the electoral college gives them. I doubt the Republicans would tolerate it since they do well in many small, sparely populated states.
Its not like getting rid of the electoral college is going to result in any 3rd party gains that matter anyway. The only real way to do that would be to give seats in Congress based on the percentage of the vote each party garners so that they get a few seats and can be kingmakers in a coalition government, and of course you need to switch to a Prime Minister chosen by the ruling coalition. Ain't gonna happen in the U.S. of A.
If you want to see the last time there was a really successful 3rd party look up the Progressive movement in the early 1900's. Its a movement that is desperately needed today. It arose to fight out of control corporations, and massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a lucky few, the same things poisoning America today.
Unfortunately the two major parties are much more entrenched than they were then. On the plus side the Internet should make it easier to form a 3rd party. As Joe Trippi has proposed, in 2008 we need to rally the Deaniacs and push the Internet party even further than they did this year, broaden its appeal, and raise even more money in millions of hundred dollar internet contributions. Unfortunately you need a candidate and Dean has pretty much shredded his credibility and his future. The media finished him off obsessing over the scream speech. In reality he destroyed himself when he stopped being a rebel, and establishment outsider, and went courting Gore and Carter to get the establishment's endorsement. Not sure Gore and Carter didn't endorse him knowing it would destroy him.
The other problem is a candidate who is going to have broad enough appeal to get elected ends up thouroughly compromising himself and you end up with candidates just as pathetic as the current major party candidates. It would take a really exceptional candidate to fly in the face of convention wisdom, and current sickening predictable rhetoric, and capture the hearts of enough people to get elected.
Oh, And God Bless America...I want to throttle ever politician that ends every speech with that and wears an American flag lapel pin, like Bush and Kerry both do. They are both so predictable that they have become empty and meaningless in their obligatoriness.
"but they're still liberal"
.. case closed.
You had a case before 9/11, before Fox News, before Rush and talk radio, before the media cheered on the war in Iraq and embedded journalists, reporters who only tell the military's side of every story.
You had a case, times changed, you won, its time to give it up since no one with a clue buys it anymore. If anything its time for the left to start harping about the conservative bias in the media, Fox being the #1 new network and they don't even pretend to be unbiased, excepting for constantly pounding everyone with the "Fair and Balanced" lie.
If you ask anybody who lives outside the U.S. and are used to really liberal media, I'm pretty sure they tell you American media has moved firmly to the center. Talk radio and Fox have moved so far to the right its deeply worrying if you want an enlightened pluralistic country. They are a media full of hatred, intolerance, arrogance and venom.
"...even O'Reilly..."
So I guess at this point your admitting the Swift Boat Vet ads were an over the top smear campaign, since McCain and O'Reilly both condemned them. Yet they were still plastered all over the media for weeks, played over and over, driven in to the ground by the networks, and hurt Kerry badly.
Liberal bias in the meda.. bah
Why exactly is its OK for the right to make out like Reagan was a mix of saint, martyr and savior of the world but its proven impossible to tell the other side of the story. I grew up under Reagan, he was a dumb actor being run by the people behind him, a lot like the current President.
Lets not forget Reagan's real record:
- he stood and did nothing while the AIDS epidemic spread
- He shredded the constitution with Iran/Contra
- He has Ed Meese as Attorney General, the worst Attroney General in recent history, until John Ashcroft came along, though Janet Reno is right up there.
- He ran up a staggering debt, especially squandering it on a military that was a complete waste, though I'll give its kind of small compared to the debt the current right winger is running up. Why do right wingers claim they are fiscally conservative and then run up debts that dwarf those of the so called liberals.
The right also consistently claims he single handedly toppled the U.S.S.R when Gorbachev, the Pope and Solidarity had way more to do with it than he did. Only thing Reagan did to topple the U.S.S.R was to fund, train and arm the Mujadeen in Afghanistan, though unfortunately he also created Al-qaida in the process.
Its a tribute to the right that they manage to completely and ruthlessly shred every Democratic President and candidate yet they completely lose it when anyone says a single cross word about any of their Presidents. Get off it, your double standard is sickening.
"was bashing the ad every chance it got"
Only in your own mind, some bashed it, some expanded on it, for example by exploring in gory detail exactly whose medals he threw back, some tried to dig in to the facts, they carried people who supported him, some who opposed him, they reviewed the official Navy documents, and I know that really pissed the right off they actually looked at what the Navy's documents said.
This concept that anytime the media says something you don't like they have a flaming liberal bias and everytime they agree with the right you forget to notice is getting old, really, really old. You don't have to look further than Fox News and talk radio to see the right has acquired a massive media influence. Get over it. Most of us don't want you to coerce the media in to emulating Fox, or hey why stop there, lets just turn the media over to the Bush administration like a real police state. Most of us actually want "Fair and Balanced" instead of Fox just saying it when it flies in the the face of reality. A truly liberal media wouldn't have been riding along with the tanks in Iraq cheering on a war based on a web of lies, they would have questioned it before the war not a year later when its obvious to everyone it was a mistake.
Fahrenheit isn't going to appear on anything other pay per view before the election... when it matters. If Bush isn't reelected it will die a quick death. If he is reelected it wont do any good other than remind people they made a mistake, a big, big mistake. If Moore were to get it on broadcast TV the right would be howling to the moon, just like they did against the Reagan bio, and it would be run off the air, Moore knows it, I know it, you know it. It is unlikely to ever happen, and sure wont happen before the election.
"By youre own call its propaganda"
You don't get it do you. I can admit something is propaganda even if I agree with the message, you apparently can't. That makes you a tool. It also makes you a waste of time and bandwidth. It makes you predictable and uninteresting because you don't say anything new, and you ain't gonna grow.
"I find it humorous that you are comparing Iraq to vietnam...mind but most of the time we are on the right side of these things."
I'm pretty sure you are the only one that said half of the bullshit in this paragraph. Not gonna waste the time going through it point by point explaining why most of what you said in here is BS. Again you are a waste of time.
"OK Doke Kerry testified he committed attrocities. What villages did he burn ? What children did he murder ? If he did how did his band of brothers participate ?"
He piloted a Swift boat in free fire zones. In case you are unaware of what free fire zones are, they are considered enemy held territory and anyone in them is the enemy, or an enemy sympathizer, so you shoot first and don't ask questions later. They were a license from your chain of command to kill civilians. They were an officially sanctioned atrocity, one of many in Vietnam.
Later dude, need to do something more constructive with my time. You can have the last word, make it good. Please wakeup someday and realize you and your country aren't God's gift to the world.
"He was transfered with the approval of the squadrons commanding officer."
His transfer was approved months after he'd already moved to Alabama. Why would the Guard approve the transfer of a pilot, who cost millions to train, to a unit that had no jets for him to fly, unless there was favoritism?
"He was competing for a spot only a handfull of people were competing for. People qualified for the fighter pilot spot were in short supply."
Apparently, and George wasn't one of them. He scored 25% on the aptitude test. That should have outright disqualified him were it not for his family's influence. Please stop pretending like the Guard wasn't the place all the children of the rich and powerful went to escape the draft. Thats what it was for then, unlike now where it is a one way ticket to combat in Iraq. Collin Powell is on record with his disgust that the Guard let the rich white boys escape the draft while the poor and black got to go to Vietnam to die. He doesn't mention this as much now that he works for one of those rich, white boys.
"The airforce didnt begin performing drug tests with physicals untill considerably after his tour was up."
I stand slightly corrected. They drug tests weren't a mandatory part of the physical then, but were instead random. They were instituted at this time and it closely corresponds to the time Bush was doing his best to disappear from the Guard. Its probable George was afraid he would get nailed with a random drug test as part of the physical which is why he ducked it though he probably wouldn't have been tested. It is a major coincidence that he aggressively started ducking the Guard at the same time the random testing started.
Actually found the details in Google tonight:
"Which is where Air Force Regulation 160-23, also known as the Medical Service Drug Abuse Testing Program, comes in. The new drug-testing effort was officially launched by the Air Force on April 21, 1972, following a Jan. 11, 1972, directive issued by the Department of Defense. That initiative, in response to increased drug use among soldiers in Vietnam, instructed the military branches to "establish the requirement for a systematic drug abuse testing program of all military personnel on active duty, effective 1 July 1972."
"It's true that in 1972 Bush was not on "active" duty: His Texas Guard unit was never mobilized. But according to Maj. Jeff Washburn, the chief of the National Guard's substance abuse program, a random drug-testing program was born out of that regulation and administered to guardsmen such as Bush. The random tests were unrelated to the scheduled annual physical exams, such as the one that Bush failed to take in 1972, a failure that resulted in his grounding."
"The 1972 drug-testing program took months, and in some cases years, to implement at Guard units across the country. And the percentage of guardsmen tested then was much lower than today's 40 percent rate. But as of April 1972, Air National guardsmen knew random drug testing was going to be implemented."
"I respect your right to dislike him but you would serve your own cause better by trying to find positive reasons to like Kerry or concrete issues where the president has harmed you."
I don't like Kerry either, I just dislike Bush a lot more. I'm currently torn between throwing my vote away on a 3rd party or throwing it away on Kerry just to get Bush and his cronies out of office. These isn't much about Kerry to like. His Vietnam record, especially his medal collecting is highly suspect. I just don't have any use for people like you and the POW's making him out to be a traitor because he told the truth about Vietnam in front of Congress, or trying to make out like Bush is a saint. He is a spoiled rotten rich kid. As Ann Richards says he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. He is an untreated alcoholic, drug abuser, mediocre student(to put it politely), incurious, ill informed, seems to think he is infallible and talking to God, and is completely unqualified to be president of anything let alone the most powerful country on the planet. Please wake up, smell the coffee, and see the obvious.
"I didn't bring up farenheit 911 because its obviously propaganda."
Actually you are just showing everything that agrees with your world view is noble and heroic truth telling and everything that disagrees with what you want to believe is propaganda. You see I can admit the obvious, Fahrenheit 911 is propaganda though it has grains of truth like most good propaganda. I prefer to try to sort out what the facts are based on the available evidence. You unfortunately are to closed minded to do that and it traps you in a hole where you are easily manipulated. Thats OK, its your pretogative but when you try to con everyone else with this propaganda don't expect people like me to sit idly buy and accept it unchallenged.
"our allies at considerable cost to ourselves"
Our allies in Vietnam were a string of corrupt, brutal, dictators. A key reason the U.S. lost Vietnam is those dictators were more despised by the Vietnamese people than the Communists so the U.S. was insured a never ending insurgency until they fell. The South Vietnamese military was built on cronyism reflecting the corruption of its leadership. Thats why it was a perpetual disaster everytime it had to fight on its own.
"While we didn't win the battle, much to the regret of the south Vietnamese ( remember all those lovely photographs of them scrambling to get to the US embassy) we did prove we would defend our allies at considerable cost to ourselves. It was a vital part of keeping Totalitarianism contained."
Your statements are self contradictory. We didn't defend our allies in the end. We abandoned them. It is simply impossible to say Vietnam was a victory in the Cold War and did anything to contain Totalitarianism. The U.S. lost and Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fell to communism. Vietnam was in fact a victory for Communism and a case study in how not to fight an insurgency. You can't just tell yourself and everyone else it was a victory in contradiction to obvious fact, and make it so. The U.S. lost in Vietnam, badly, deal with it. The only thing the U.S. did right was to get out before it completely destroyed the country as Afghanistan destroyed the U.S.S.R. The same thing could easily happen in Iraq unless there is a lot of dealing with reality in Washington.
"These are heroic stands, how do you compare fabricating lies about people you served with, with these stands ?"
Nice move, you skillfully ducked the Toledo Blade articles on the Tiger Force which pretty much supports all of Kennedy's atrocity allegations. You can't say Kerry lied when American forces did all the things he said they did. You have to engage in revisionism to turn Kerry in to a liar, he simply wasn't in fact. Cheney and Rumsfeld did try that revisionism by trying to cover up the fact about Tiger Force but truth has a way of coming out.
I'm sorry you and these POW's cant accept that American's did commit atrocities. Did all the vets in Vietnam commit them no, but some did and it appears the military may have encouraged or condoned, or at least sought to cover it up.
Atrocities happen in pretty much every war, especially insurgencies where everyone isn't wearing pretty uniforms. Faced with that kind of war soldiers almost inevitably start killing insurgents and innocent civilians without discrimination and it eats them up. It ate up a lot of Vietnam vets. Its eating up a lot of Iraq vets. You make people fight that brand of war for long you create a bunch of ticking time bombs.
"Killians commander disowned the memo's and stated categorically that there was no favoritism for Bush."
You pretty much shot yourself in the foot at this point so lets focus on this.
George W. was competing for a handful of guard spots amongst hundreds of candidates. He flunked the aptitude test yet he jumped to the top of the list over candidates who actually passed the test. Tell me again about how there was no favoritism. One of his Harvard professor says he bragged about the special treatment he had to get in to the Guard.
George W. unilaterally transfered himself to a unit in Alabama where he couldn't exercise his million dollar training as a jet pilot, and the Guard approved it after the fact, reluctantly. If you are in the guard you have to get approval for a transfer before you do it. Tell me again about how there was no favoritism.
George W. unilaterally refused to take his flight physical at a time when drug testing had been instituted as part of the physical, and he probably was using Cocaine and would have been busted. If you are in the Army its not your prerogative to decide if you do or don't take a physical, especially if you are a pilot. He should have instantly faced disciplinary action and probably landed in Vietnam packing an M-16 through the mud, but he got off scott free, and in fact got an early out. It should have set off alarm bells and he should have been forced to take a drug test since it was obvious thats why he was ducking it. Tell me again how he got no favoritism.
To be honest I'm impressed you Bush fans can keep a straight face when you claim he didn't get special treatment, it flys in the face of every fact. Like I said the only reason you and George get away with it is the most embarassing of the documentation was destroyed.
The major problem here is we don't have someone as apparently enlightened as Reed Hundt as FCC chairman now. Instead we have Michael Powell who has, for example, led the charge to dramatically expand the concentration of the media in the hands of few large conglomerates, showing judgement so bad, Congress was compelled to step in and overrule him.
He's also leading the charge to turn back the clock on what is and isn't allowed on television and radio to try and put us back in to a 1950's morality to placate the religious right who want to decide what the rest of us can and can't watch or listen to. Janet Jackson's tit was just bad judgement, bad taste and not even particularly good as tits go. It wasn't a valid foundation for rolling back the clock on our media, it was just a lame excuse for something the Republican's and the religious right wanted to do anyway. Janet's tit was to broadcasting standards as 9/11 was to the Patriot Act, the perfect enabler for an existing agenda.
I'm highly skeptical Powell will give the Democrats a fair hearing since his job and the job of his dad are riding on the outcome of the election Sinclair is trying to swing.
It was a joke dumbass, you didn't get it.