An article on Yahoo that describes exactly what is happening with the demise of the public option and a few huge private insurers lining up for the windfall profits of mandated insurance with no competition, namely Wellpoint, United Healthcare and Blue Cross.
I assure you its not just the Republicans. Max Baucus is leading the effort in the Senate, he is a Democrat, he is completely in the pocket of big health care corporations. He hosts many of them, his big campaign contributors, in Montana every year for fly fishinga and horse back riding so they can tell him how they want health care bills written.
Tom Daschle is also pulling strings, also a Democrat, has Obama's ear while he is getting rich lobbying for his big health care corporate clients.
Obama and Emanuel are the ones that have apparently been meeting with big Pharma behind closed doors and agreeing to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices for Medicare D in exchange for $80 billion in ill defined cost saving over ten years. If Medicare continues to not negotiate drug prices big Pharma is going to continue to make out like bandits, they know it, which is why they are running pro health care reform ads now.
You simply can't pretend anything is the fault of one party in this country. Both parties are equally compromised by lobbyists, big campaign contributions and big corporations. That's why middle class working people are being constantly screwed in this country, because they never get a seat at the table and they have no representation in the political process any more. Only say the middle class has in the process is when they vote, and since they are choosing between two parties that both suck that is no say at all.
"Not if there's a public option."
In case you haven't heard Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have caved multiple times on the public option in the last couple weeks. Its looking like they only way there will be a public option is if the Democrats can get a bill through the Senate on a party line vote which is unlikely.
I have high confidence if a bill is shoved through, it will be so compromised by compromise its going to just make everything worse, and its going to screw middle class working people to the benefit of just about everyone else, like always....
"my Chinese friends have never thought it's as bad as you seem to believe"
Most people living in Fascist states don't mind them until they fall on them like a ton of bricks, and at that point you aren't likely to be chit chatting with them. Fascist states are usually very good at producing jobs and economic progress so as long as you aren't on the wrong side of the party most people are fine with them. Most people don't care if they are free as long as they are making a good living, I do... Most Germans loved the Nazi's in the 30's using the same rationale.
You couldn't pay me enough to live in China. As flawed as the U.S. is, at least its not a Fascist police state yet.
"if our workforce is capable then they'll be hired for those sorts of jobs instead."
Not by CEO's looking for the cheapest labor they can get that can more or less do the work. They are looking to maximize their bottom lines to make good numbers for quarters, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to slash labor expenses. The quality of the work may suffer some, but you can throw more bodies at things so the cheap labor market always wins with bean counters. With the cost of living in Western Europe and the U.S. workers there simply can't compete until places like China stop manipulating their currency and their cost of living achieves parity with the West.
Tariffs and trade barriers have been used by countries for centuries to compensate for the fact that other countries have lower cost of living and cheaper labor. It took some rocket scientist free traders in the U.S. to completely dismantle them, while all the countries they are competing against still have them in spades. Markets in Japan, China, Korea and India are still not free, they erect all kinds of barriers to prevent Western corporations from competing on a level field there. The U.S. is practicing unilateral economic disarmament and our economy is going down in flames as a result. I might be OK with free trade if every country we compete with was as free as we are, they aren't.
"The fact is that Obama is a redistributionist who claims that jobs are owed and not earned."
The fact is some of America's greatest prosperity was during the 50's and 60's. Tax rates for the rich ran in the 70-90% range. That was when America was as redistributionist as it could get and America did great. So your Fox News/CNBC/Wall Street Journal propaganda rings hollow. I love it how they screen "class warfare" now that the Democrats are back in charge. They conveniently gloss over there has been class warfare for the last 30 years, but it was the rich waging it and they won, big time. They only use the term "class warfare" when the middle class is trying to claw some of it back.
The progressive tax system started getting dismantled under Reagan and George W. finished the job. The more it was dismantled the sicker America got. For example billionaire hedge fund managers now get taxed at 15%, working people its closer to 40%. By the time W. was finished America was actually redistributionist again, except it was redistributing all the wealth to the top 1%. Income inequality now is the worst its been since the roaring 20's which is is coincidentally the last time we had a crash like the current one.
So your claim America is "redistributionist" and that this is the problem is completely and utterly false.
It simply isn't healthy to have all the wealth concentrated in the hands of a small number of people. You need affluent, happy workers who buy things to have a balanced economy. Rich people don't buy stuff(other than yachts and mansions). Americans have continued on the buying binge been for the 30 years even though their wages are stagnant, but its mostly been through massive debt accumulation and now the party is over. You will see how much it really sucks to have 1% rich and 99% broke now that the housing bubble has burst.
The only people who are being "given" health care are the poor and people with major health problems. There are a lot of young and healthy people who may well see $10K or more a year in new "taxes" paying for "mandated" insurance coverage. Obama explicitly said during the campaign "no mandate. It appears he lied, big and boldly..... Only reason I voted for him was he explicitly said "No mandate" for health insurance. He can offer all the health care reform he wants but as soon as he mandates I pay jackal insurance companies $10K a year for health insurance he's made a political enemy for life. I would have voted for McCain if he hadn't picked that wacko Palin as is VP, especially at his age.
The people who are going to get screwed here are healthy young people who work for small businesses(under 50 employees) and don't get insurance from their employer. If your employer gives you insurance at least you dodge some payroll and income tax(government subsidizes employer provided insurance to the tune of $200 billion a year already this way). This bill seems designed to force everyone to work for big corporations. You are gonna take a $10K salary hit working for a small business under this new regime because none of them will provide insurance.
It seems very likely everyone without employer insurance will be forced to buy insurance on the open market, as an individual with no bargaining power, and be completely screwed by the insurance companies. If you are mandated to buy insurance but have no public option you are feeding all the people without employer insurance to the wolves(private insurers). Insurance companies will be forced to take people with major health problems and they will jack up their premiums to compensate and tack on some more profit to boot. They will have a captive market, little competition, and people will be forced to buy insurance no matter the price, so the sky is the limit. In many states there is only one dominant insurer, Blue Cross for example, and little competition.
I have high confidence any health care reform that passes Congress will be a windfall to health care, insurance and big pharma corporations. Why do you think big pharma is running pro health care reform ads non stop. Its gonna be Medicare-D all over again, the only people who win are the corporations.
The people who are going to get completely screwed.... again... are middle income working stiffs. I am pretty sure the only "reform" here is to force large numbers of young, healthy people to pay through the nose for insurance under a mandate, so there is a bigger money pool for the corporations and the chonically sick, for example the obese who made bad life style choices, get expensive chronic illness and need someone to pay for their "free" health care, and the lucky ones who get to pay are the young, healthy people who made good life style choices. These people already pay 12.5% in payrool taxes, 20-25% in income taxes, an auto insurance tax in most states and now get a $10K health insurance tax. Working people will have nothing left to live on.
- Reducing the wages of most workers to the vicinity of a dollar an hour, maybe $10 an hour if you are highly educated and skilled, and maybe get work weeks up to around 70 hours with no vacations and no overtime pay. - Eliminate all taxes on corporations and reduce taxes on the wealthy below 15% which is where it already is on capital gains and billionaire hedge fund managers. They also don't want to pay any payroll taxes or health insurance. Taxing workers making a subsistence wage in to the ground is still OK as long as they don't pay any of it. - They want their taxes eliminated but they still want the government and tax payers to give them billions of dollars in government contracts, bail outs, low interest loans, free money from the Fed, subsidies, etc. - They want schools that drill their workers intensively for about 16 years in math, science, computers and obedience. Don't bother with arts, independent thinking or creativity... kind of like "No Child Left Behind" on steroids. - They would probably favor a totalitarian regime as long as its pro multinational, basically Fascist leaning as long as the party is their friend and makes them lots of money. Two ideal examples of perfect governments for multinationals are the new China and 1930's Germany. And yes IBM did love the Nazi's in the 1930's too. They want their workers thoroughly cowed, subservient, afraid and most definitely not organized.
The best fix for these American idiot CEO's, out to make a quick bug with no regard to long term consequences, is to strip them of their citizenship, and deport to them to their new corporate headquarters in China and India. I think once they get to live in China full time, with no ticket home to the U.S., and get to endure the repression, censorship, corruption like a real Chinese citizen, they will change their tune. They will especially realize their mistake when they get on the wrong side of a party boss or a company owned by powerful party members. Right now China is nice to them and is kissing their asses while they turn over all their capital, jobs, IP and market access. Chances are once they have all those and have their own version of IBM, owned by powerful party bosses, like Lenovo, they will completely destroy IBM and every other western corporation who sold their long term survival down the river for a few years of cheap labor, illusory access to China's markets and short term profit.
I was reading Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" last week. There is a passage I loved on the predictions of America's imminent demise. He is commenting on European intellectuals who declare America is finished, that Americans suck because they can't do math and that Americans are dumb because they haven't read Goethe. Taleb then points out this intellectual is using MS Word on a Windows PC's running an Intel CPU, or a better example I like, using Google on an Apple iPhone while listening to music bought from iTunes.
We American's may be lazy and stupid and maybe we are finished but this country still churns out some amazing ideas and ideas are the important thing. Taleb also points out there is a LOT more money in designing Nike shoes than there is running a sweat shop to manufacture them. As long as America allows people, especially young entrepreneurs to chase dreams and gamble on their ideas I don't think America or America's technology sector is doomed. I'd take America any day as an idea factory over a China where anything resembling a free spirit is crushed. China has a lot of well educated people, and a lot of repressed people who work CHEAP which is what Siebel and his exec friends find so appealing, but as long as they are surfing on a censored Internet, governed by a repressive one party state, living in cities where you can cut the air with a knife, I think their future creating things is limited. America is a startup machine, while China's companies seem to have a disturbing tendency to be state owned or owned by friends and family of powerful party members. If you need to manufacture cheap knockoffs or run an IT sweat shop China is NUMBA ONE. You need startups and idea factories, America is still a leader.
To serve as my own counter point here is Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, on the self inflicted damage done to America in the last eight years. We need to overcome a lot more than we would have had to but for a turning point in 2000:
"Ironically, just at the time we needed to accelerate to remain competitive in 2000, we elected the worst president in history. He not only focused on all the wrong things -- starting wars, religious bigotry and zealotry, letting the financial system go unregulated, etc. -- he cut R&D funding for science and technology. Thanks largely to our insipid political leaders, we stalled for eight of the most important years in the past 100. The U.S. is resilient, but this is a lot to overcome. The world is pretty uniformly covered with smart people -- we have no patent on that. And with the Web/Internet now enabling them to learn and grow just as rapidly as us, we are far worse off now than we were in 2000."
You seem to be forgetting most of the most recent and mind boggling rush to state capitalism began under Bush and Paulson. Obama and Geitner have just been extending what Bush and the Republican's wrought. The bailout of AIG dwarfs GM, and it was entirely done by Paulson so he could use the state's coffers to bail out Goldman Sachs. That was state capitalism at its worst.
What the Democrats lean towards is old school Socialism, not Fascism. I should point out Fascists HATE unions with a passion so your attempt to hang the label on Democrats doesn't really work. Union hating is a stereotypical Republican trait so it fits with their Fascist tendencies. Obama nationalized GM to save unions which is something a true Fascist would never do. Nationalized health care is also very much more Socialism than Fascism.
State capitalism is more about giant private corporations in private hands of rich and connected party members working hand in hand with a ruling party and state, and they are further enriched by the largess of the state as long as they stay on the right side of the people in power. The Republicans for the eight years of Bush were blatant about the enrichment of their rich well connected party members. Dems do it too but not as blatantly as the last eight years under Bush. Socialism tends to place the power in government run bureaucracies and not so much wealthy corporations and their owners.
So if you need a score card, Democrats more Socialist, Republicans more Fascist. Though the extent to which Democrats are bought out by lobbyists and corporations, just like Republicans, both parties have some disturbing Fascist tendencies.
I know EXACTLY what it means and I'm not the first one to apply it to the Republican's in the Bush era. It seems to be trendy among Republican's lately to accuse Obama of it since he sucked GM in to state capitalism and they are accusing of same on health care. It is unfortunate we haven't been able to use this word since World War II without people going ape shit and Godwin on it. Fascism is alive and well its just somewhat more subdued than Mussolini's original. If you ask me China is probably the biggest, most successful Fascist state of all time, and America's wealthy seem to LOVE it.
The recent Republican antics disrupting town halls on health care reminds me SO much of the brown shirts. The Republican rabble rousers so need to all start wearing brown shirts.
So you are saying women who have pierced tongues, and other assorted parts of their anatomy can work at Siebel. If so it must not be quite as bad as you make it sound....
It does kind of sound like what I suspected. Siebel would prefer the U.S. were more like China or Singapore, repressive police states, with all the impoverished workers sitting in their cubes and on their assembly lines in quiet repression making profits for the man. I'm feeling a sudden urge to dust off my DVD of THX-1138.
It would be great if Siebel could get on a boat, get off in Shanghai and try living there permanently if he thinks its so great. That would be called practicing what he is preaching. Until he does that he is full of shit.
I doubt he would really like it there very much when many of the freedoms he seems to be taking for granted in the West were gone for good. Brief business trips there don't count. I wager if he were to try to found a new Siebel Inc. in China today from scratch he wouldn't like the experience. First he is not Chinese, strike one. Strike two and three unless he was related to or otherwise connected to powerful people in the Communist Party, chances are his company would be crushed the first time it had a run in with a corporation owned by someone who IS connected with party officials.
China has a lot going for it, mostly it has abundant cheap, extremely oppressed labor which every company on the planet wants to exploit.
China, like India, has a LOT of well educated people who also work relatively cheaply compared to the industrial world, and that certainly gives them a competitive edge so I will conceede that point.
But.....
It is also a very repressive, very corrupt, Fascist state and people blinded by dollar signs seem to keep forgetting that. The Chinese State, party officials and their families own huge chunks of most of the important Chinese corporations and they don't believe in level playing fields for anyone competing against them.
Everything and everyone is heavily censored and it is extremely common for censorship to be used to conceal the widespread corruption at all levels of society. I seriously doubt any state will be successful long term if its foundation is based on concealment, deceit and suppression of truth.
Maybe China will eventually dominate the world like Seibel suggests. I sure hope for the world's sake they don't or if they do its only accompanied by the collapse of their repressive state and one party dictatorial rule. If it does dominate the world under its current system it could well become the role model for the rest of the world and we could all end up under repressive Fascist dictatorships. We've sure been trying to go there recently in the U.S. and U.K. since the turn of the century.
For Western executive to continue to predict the inevitable victory of China reminds me so very much of how America's rich and American companies like Ford and IBM heaped praise and business on Nazi Germany in the 30's. They loved that repressive Fascist state too when it was also producing economic miracles. Fascist states can be brutally successful because the state can intervene to correct markets, to pump vast amounts of capital in to strategic directions that private investors wouldn't. They can also quickly and easily remove sources of friction. For example someone tries to unionize a factory or mine, the state police crushes the organizers. A recent case where a chemical factory apparently leaked deadly chemicals and sickened a thousand people in an adjacent toy factory, the state declared it a case of mass hysteria, and the chemical factory continued operation unhindered. A whistle blower tries to expose corruption, he is disappeared. Any dissent about the direction chosen by the ruling party, crushed. It is very efficient and I know why Western executives like it so much. They wish America were run the same way as long as the rich and well connected aren't the ones getting crushed under a jack boot.
Another thing going for China is its a huge beneficiary of every Western company and exec rushing to transfer every bit of capital, IP, jobs, and markets to Chinese control. They are searching for near term quarterly profits, for that cheap labor, and for a foothold in China's markets which could be hugely profitable in the future. Chances are they will get some short term profits and the Chinese will eventually crush them before they see any serious penetration in to Chinese markets. In fact I just realized Sie
"You could run. If you don't like the choices, then give the people a better choice."
I wouldn't be electable in this country for anything above dog catcher. For starters, I'm anti religion. I simply wouldn't debase myself by pretending I'm religious just to get elected. As a result, I could never get elected for anything that matters in the U.S.
I also say what I think with a disturbing regularity and to get elected you have to tell the majority of the people what they want to hear, not what you actually think or even what the facts are. To get elected you pretty much have to lie constantly, and by the time you succeed in getting elected you have so compromised yourself you don't remember what the truth is or what you stood for before you started the campaign.
Unfortunately we get the bad politicians we get because the whole system is rigged to elect people who are good campaigners and horrible legislators. Not sure I could even stand being a Congressmen or President. You can't do anything right or well by the time you've made the thousand compromises necessary to pass a bill. Me I'd favor repealing a few thousand existing bad laws, rather than passing a bunch of new ones. Unfortunately passing an ever bigger teetering pile of crap laws is considered success for a politician which is why this country is slowly drowning under a pile of bad legislation.
If you made me dictator for a year I'd take that job. Doubt the country could take the shock though. I'd disband at least half of the Federal bureaucracy, cut the military in at least half and make it a purely defensive force, eliminate taxes on everyone but the wealthy, and I'd let people opt out of Social Security and Medicare. Not sure the economy could take it because the Federal government printing and borrowing money, and pumping it out in Federal pork is one of the few things keeping the U.S. economy afloat.
"It's impressive when a contradiction of that caliber makes into the same sentence."
Not really, its more just a brutal realization that the U.S. is locked in to the death grip of a two party system where both parties completely suck. They have so completely stacked the system against third party and independent candidates, and the media is so stacked again third parties and independent candidates, about the only useful role left in our elections is for independents to hold their noses and pick the lesser of the two evils. It is a useful role except when independents failed and picked Bush.
Last cable news show I watched regularly was Aaron Brown on CNN. That guy was AWESOME for just doing old school news reporting. Of course he was doomed trying to do that in this day and age, now that the news networks are desperately trying to out shock and pander each other. So they replace him with Anderson Cooper, Mr. inflated ego. Actual news reporting is pretty much dead on the news networks. Fox panders to the right, MSNBC panders to the left, and CNN tries to pander to everyone and succeeds with no one.
So I watch CNN, MSNBC and Fox occassionly, but I favor PBS and BBC. Really I watch news on TV a lot less than I use to, I mostly just skim Google news now.
The quality of all three U.S. cable news networks has deteriorated so much its sad. CNN in its early days under Turner and Bernard Shaw was head and shoulders better than any of the 24/7 news networks now. Its pretty criminal what Time Warner and Joe Klein have done to CNN. They've turned it in to complete garbage now. I wish they would sell it back to Ted Turner.
I watch Glenn Beck now and again just because he is hilarious. That guy is completely NUTS, and he seals the deal that Fox has no standards or any pretense of "fair and balanced" that they A hired him and B keep, especially after his remarks wishing for another Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. O'Reilly isn't quite as nuts as Beck, he is mostly just mean and cranky. Sure Fox isn't really biased when they are regurgitated the same news as everyone else but even then they constantly slip in completing whoppers for untruth and bias, worse than any other network, and their stars are completely off the deep end for bias.
I kind of like Rachael Maddow because she is at least smart and well spoken, but her left bias is pretty annoying too.
I think I've read DailyKos for the space of about 2 days several years ago back when it was big news to see what the fuss was about. Those people are nuts too. I haven't really have any use for the Democrats either. Only thing they have in their favor is they aren't the complete horror the Republicans have become. The Republican party has cratered so badly, and is teetering so close to Fascism, everyone looks good by comparison, even the Democrats. The worst problem the Democrats have is Reid, Pelosi, Murtha, etc. are a complete embarrassment. The Democrats seriously need to get some Congressional leaders that don't suck. They just can't seem to elect competent men and women to Congress.
I'd take Reagan or Nixon back any day over the pathetic carcass that is today's Republican party and that was Bush. If John McCain had been the John McCain of 2000 and he hadn't picked that nutcase Palin as his VP I would have voted for him over Obama. You see I'm about as hard core Independent as they come and I'm just screwed because I have to pick between the garbage the Dems and Republicans put on the ballot.
Actually the third one is totally "non geek". Its everyone one on Wall Street or who plays the stock market and watched Time Warner nose dive when they merged with AOL. With the people who play the stock market for fun and profit AOL is very toxic at this point, and this probably includes everyone whom AOL might want to buy their stock to prop it up which is, for better or worse, the main gauge of success in this Capitalist world.
In fact I'm not sure any of those bullets are geek only. Bullet one is delineated by the people who use AOL as their ISP/Portal and everyone else. Needless to say the people who actually use AOL as their ISP/portal is a pretty small number and getting smaller all the time.
Perhaps you could argue Time Warner destroyed AOL instead of vice versa. Certainly Time Warner's destroyed CNN which was sad to watch so they have a track record destroying victims of their mergers, but in this case I think AOL was the principal destroyer since they were primarily a dial up portal as their was a mass migration to DSL and Cable modems.
Since when has any member of the Murdoch media empire ever engaged in "Quality journalism". This is the owner of Fox News who went to a court of appeals to affirm their right to force their journalists to lie in their broadcasts. This is the owner of the network which, in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, ran stories that Saddam had drones he was planning to use to spray chemical and biological weapons on American cities.
Granted the WSJ is probably still doing useful reporting, I don't think Rupert has managed to infect it with his spin machine.... yet.
For AOL to really turn around they need to rebrand their company. That AOL brand is completely toxic to most people due to:
- overdone saturation CD marketing campaigns that made that brand perennial joke fodder - a reputation as the walled Internet of the clueless - AOL nearly single handedly destroying Time Warner (though maybe that wouldn't have been a bad thing) which associates their brand with catastrophic failure - there is something about Steve Case that just gives me the willies. He strikes me as the ultimate PHB.
I suspect a lot of people wouldn't go to an AOL portal just because its got AOL on it no matter how good the content.
I will give AOL kudos for trying to save journalism when it seems no one else will. Someone needs to save journalism while separating it from dead tree newspaper because that business model needs to die. There simply isn't a rationale for a distribution model that kills millions of trees every year nor for burning the fuel hauling them all over the place.
I still read the New York Times online though I doubt that will continue when the return to the subscription model. I also have a nagging remembrance of how badly they failed when they let Judith Miller run her pro Iraq war propaganda campaign under their letterhead. In general old media completely failed us from about 9/11/01 up until they finally stopped being complete propaganda tools for the Bush administration around the time of Katrina. I'd seriously like to see some good journalists work over the Obama administration and Congress too for their continued pandering to big business. I'm hoping Danial Froomkin will pick up the cause when he starts work at Huffinton Post.
"As for deserting the national guard, he never did. He completed his requirements early and left when they were done. That's a far cry from desertion. What "everyone knows" is based on the false document."
OMG. You CAN'T just complete Guard "requirements early". Its a fixed term commitment like any military enlistment, in his case a six year commitment. He apparently did his first four years, but he totally punted on his last two years, apparently on his own authority, and NO ONE knows how he pulled that off.
This Wikipedia article goes in to great detail on this issue. It is completely inexplicable how he refused his mandatory flight physical, and was taken off flight statue, and there were no consequences. This is the point his guard records pretty much stopped......
"The Air Force regulation cited here, AFM 35-13 Para 2-29m[12] required the commander of Bush's Texas National Guard unit to "direct an investigation as to why the individual failed to accomplish the medical examination"[13] and no further documentation is known about this investigation."
All indications are the Guard had included drug testing as part of the physical and since he was suspected of being a heavy Cocaine user at the time he knew he wouldn't pass so he just refused to take it.
"Ironically, just at the time we needed to accelerate to remain competitive in 2000, we elected the worst president in history. He not only focused on all the wrong things -- starting wars, religious bigotry and zealotry, letting the financial system go unregulated, etc. -- he cut R&D funding for science and technology. Thanks largely to our insipid political leaders, we stalled for eight of the most important years in the past 100. The U.S. is resilient, but this is a lot to overcome. The world is pretty uniformly covered with smart people -- we have no patent on that. And with the Web/Internet now enabling them to learn and grow just as rapidly as us, we are far worse off now than we were in 2000."
You seriously underestimate the power the executive has in the U.S. The Executive controls ALL of the federal regulatory agencies. When Bush came to office he put right wing idealogues who hated government, IN CHARGE OF THE GOVERMENT. Their qualifications were usually based on campaign and religous credentials, not on qualification for the position. You don't put people who hate government in CHARGE of government unless you want a catastrophe which is what he got.
The instances of catastrophic failure that resulted are too numerous to list:
- FEMA director incompetent and New Orleans goes a week with little relief after Katrina - EPA/NASA among others forced to altar positions on global warming - DOJ was nearly destroyed by putting unqualified people in professional civil service jobs because they were loyal Republicans and born again, and Gonzales being appointed Attorney General finished the devastation - SEC was completely disfunctional as a major financial crisis developed especially under Chrisopher Cox who was a rabid "free marketeer" - R&D funding gutted - FDA started working for the companies instead of regulating them and we now have a raft of unsafe foods and drugs - NSA turned to spy on American citizens - CIA turned in to an agency of torturers and law breakers. Also and agency humiliated by blessing an Iraq when there were no WMD's and no links to Al Qaeda
Not sure I follow your exact point. The Seventeenth Amendment is a somewhat obscure change in how Senators are elected. Not sure how you can attribute it to the decline of America a hundred years later.
Sixteenth amendment and income tax, I can give you that one, I wish we didn't have that one either, and its a subject for debate if its been good or bad. Its certainly allowed the Federal government to bleed its population white and become bloated. Not sure America would have risen to be a super power without it though, so your point is a stretch.
I assume you didn't like FDR for his socialism, though Social Security and Medicare are wildly popular with most. FDR was the president during World War II when the U.S. began its ascendancy to super power status so not sure you can blame him for America's decline 60 years later.
Not sure what your beef is with LBJ, I assume it either Vietnam or you are opposed to the Civil Rights Act, which is a tough thing to oppose unless you are a segregationist. Are you a segregationist? Again not sure how you can blame a President from 40 years ago for something happening now.
Do you just not get the difference. CBS did the ethical thing and fired the people responsible for bias. Fox on the other hand waged a lengthy court battle to defend its right to knowingly lie in their news casts.
I feel for the CBS team though. I dearly wish they HAD swayed the election because as bad as Kerry sucked, the last four years of Bush were almost certainly worse. Exactly how many cases of election manipulation did the Bush machine perpetrate that were MUCH worse than the CBS case. They ruthlessly destroyed John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 using a false story that he fathered a colored child. They did some pretty tacky things to block a recount in Florida in 2000, and they "Swift boated" Kerry. At this point "Swift Boating" is synonymous with voter manipulation. They managed to make someone who actually served in combat in Vietnam look bad versus Bush and Cheney who both dodged the draft and sat out Vietnam partying in the U.S.
"Taking shortcuts leads to dead people, disinformation, becoming what you hate, so-on, and so forth."
Kind of like the Fox campaign to whip up a frenzy for the U.S. invasiona of Iraq. Can't say Bush/Rove/Cheney directed that Murdoch/Ailes Fox propaganda campaign, but it sure was exactly what Bush/Cheney needed because they wanted to attack Iraq, and they knew they really didn't have any justification to do it so they neded the help of Fox and Judith Miller at the NY Times to fabricate a case.
I can still remember the Fox news reports right before the war started claiming Saddam had drones he was going to use to spray U.S. cities with chemical and biological weapons. It was pure fantasy, class big lie propaganda, tell a lie so big people will believe it just because it is so big.
So in the Rather case you have something that cost NO lives, but did cost Rather his job. In the Fox propaganda campaign it helped whip up a frenzy for a war that KILLED hundreds of thousands of people.
Once again it is clear Rather case, little bias punished harshly, Fox case HUGE bias and they've gotten away with it unscathed for a decade. If anything there bias just boosts their ratings with the rocket scientists who still think Fox is telling the truth.
Any biography of W you will find clearly tracks that he got in to the Texas Air National Guard using family connections to dodge the draft in Vietnam. He was, trained at great expense to fly obsolete jets that would never get sent to Vietnam. The Texas Air National Guard was designed for rich kids to dodge the draft, because they could become fighter jocks without any risk of seeing combat.
In the middle of his guard duty he moved to Alabama to work on a political campaign, and anecdotally party hard, though the evidence of his partying and drug use is he said, she said so you can't prove it either. It appears he did no guard duty while he was there. After that he headed to Harvard to get his MBA still before his Texas guard duty was over. You can't nail him for it because there is no documentation left in his Texas Guard files any more in how he managed to use Guard duty to get duck the draft, but fulfilled none of the obligations once he bolted Texas, and suffered no consequence.
As I said it is a weird case you will only find with the rich and powerful. It is clear from well established biography he didn't finish his guard service, he suffered no repercussions for deserting his guard service and there is no documentation on what happened or how he got away with it. It is pretty clear once he ducked his guard service he should have been prosecuted or drafted but wasn't.
So its not really bias to try to expose this sordid history of Bush, especially after he sent hundreds of thousands of Americans off to an optional war in Iraq, when he himself was for all practical purposes a draft dodger and deserter. Rather's team was just in a Catch-22, they knew the story to be true, but they also knew there was no way to prove it.
Can't say I disagree that the stimulus bill Obama let Pelosi ram through wasn't a retarded waste of money BUT... the only reason it even happened was because the Bush administration left the U.S. and global economy in a smoldering ruin because they somehow thought it was a good idea to not regulate anything. Most economists agreed a huge stimulus was probably necessary, I just wish they had spent the money on something worthwhile that would have made a lasting difference like Hoover dam did during the Depression.
Certainly some of that blame can be shared with Clinton, Rubin, Greenspan, Frank and Dodd, but it is pretty clear that the absolute worst of the the subprime debacle happened on Bush's watch. it was clear about 2004-2005 that there was massive mortgage fraud underway but the Bush administration absolutely didn't care as long as everyone was getting rich off it and they could brag about all the people who were able to buy homes for the first time. They chose to ignore they were homes the people couldn't afford and the the teaser rate mortgages were pretty much criminal.
There hasn't really been much spending under Obama so far that wasn't direct fall out of an economy pushed to the brink of depression by the incompetence of the Bush administration.
Health care might be the first clear case of liberal spending but just about everyone agrees our health care system is broken and has to be fixed. Unfortunately by the time our broken Congress gets done with it I have high confidence the bill the produce will be as broken as Medicare-D and make the problem worse not better. Unfortunately the entire U.S. government has been purchased by lobbyists for big corporations who've figured out by putting a few million in the pockets of the right politicians they can get one multi-billion dollar windfall after another at the taxpayer's expense.
Not sure we should really even peg out of control spending on President's any more, its Congress and lobbyists that are causing most of the problem, the Presidents just aren't stopping it by use of the veto pen.
No argument there are all kinds of biases around but you are making a pretty weak argument defending Fox on that basisc because their bias is OFF THE SCALE.
In the left bias case you cite Rather was FIRED for that one story. Kind of says CBS applied some standards and ethics that were a LOT tougher than Fox which intentionally broadcasts false information, is proud of it, and would never fire one of their talking heads for lying as long as the lies are the Murdouch/Ailes/Rove/Cheney approved lies.
The Rather case was also not something you can claim as serious bias. The fact is everyone knows Bush deserted his guard service, possible to avoid drug testing in his flight physical because he was a heavy cocaine user at the time. The guard commander's secretary said what was in the letter was pretty plausible.
The problem with the Bush case is due to the power of his family in Texas and especially when he was governor of Texas(and commander in chief of the Texas Guard) all the incriminating stuff in his guard file was almost certainly destroyed by his operatives. You have this ugly case where Bush did something bad bordering on criminal and got away with it because his family is rich and powerful. You can't exactly blame Rather's team for wanting to nail Bush for deserting his guard duty which he certainly did. They, like everyone else in the world with a brain, didn't want to see that loser get another four years. It was a desire proved justified because by the end of his second term Bush and Co. had nearly destroyed the U.S. and everyone, including many Republicans, realized too late what a complete disaster Bush's reign was for the country.
W's eight years in power may well have ended America's ascendancy and may have started a decline which may prove irreversible.
Slashdot Mirror
An article on Yahoo that describes exactly what is happening with the demise of the public option and a few huge private insurers lining up for the windfall profits of mandated insurance with no competition, namely Wellpoint, United Healthcare and Blue Cross.
I assure you its not just the Republicans. Max Baucus is leading the effort in the Senate, he is a Democrat, he is completely in the pocket of big health care corporations. He hosts many of them, his big campaign contributors, in Montana every year for fly fishinga and horse back riding so they can tell him how they want health care bills written.
Tom Daschle is also pulling strings, also a Democrat, has Obama's ear while he is getting rich lobbying for his big health care corporate clients.
Obama and Emanuel are the ones that have apparently been meeting with big Pharma behind closed doors and agreeing to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices for Medicare D in exchange for $80 billion in ill defined cost saving over ten years. If Medicare continues to not negotiate drug prices big Pharma is going to continue to make out like bandits, they know it, which is why they are running pro health care reform ads now.
You simply can't pretend anything is the fault of one party in this country. Both parties are equally compromised by lobbyists, big campaign contributions and big corporations. That's why middle class working people are being constantly screwed in this country, because they never get a seat at the table and they have no representation in the political process any more. Only say the middle class has in the process is when they vote, and since they are choosing between two parties that both suck that is no say at all.
"Not if there's a public option."
In case you haven't heard Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have caved multiple times on the public option in the last couple weeks. Its looking like they only way there will be a public option is if the Democrats can get a bill through the Senate on a party line vote which is unlikely.
I have high confidence if a bill is shoved through, it will be so compromised by compromise its going to just make everything worse, and its going to screw middle class working people to the benefit of just about everyone else, like always....
"my Chinese friends have never thought it's as bad as you seem to believe"
Most people living in Fascist states don't mind them until they fall on them like a ton of bricks, and at that point you aren't likely to be chit chatting with them. Fascist states are usually very good at producing jobs and economic progress so as long as you aren't on the wrong side of the party most people are fine with them. Most people don't care if they are free as long as they are making a good living, I do... Most Germans loved the Nazi's in the 30's using the same rationale.
You couldn't pay me enough to live in China. As flawed as the U.S. is, at least its not a Fascist police state yet.
"if our workforce is capable then they'll be hired for those sorts of jobs instead."
Not by CEO's looking for the cheapest labor they can get that can more or less do the work. They are looking to maximize their bottom lines to make good numbers for quarters, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to slash labor expenses. The quality of the work may suffer some, but you can throw more bodies at things so the cheap labor market always wins with bean counters. With the cost of living in Western Europe and the U.S. workers there simply can't compete until places like China stop manipulating their currency and their cost of living achieves parity with the West.
Tariffs and trade barriers have been used by countries for centuries to compensate for the fact that other countries have lower cost of living and cheaper labor. It took some rocket scientist free traders in the U.S. to completely dismantle them, while all the countries they are competing against still have them in spades. Markets in Japan, China, Korea and India are still not free, they erect all kinds of barriers to prevent Western corporations from competing on a level field there. The U.S. is practicing unilateral economic disarmament and our economy is going down in flames as a result. I might be OK with free trade if every country we compete with was as free as we are, they aren't.
"The fact is that Obama is a redistributionist who claims that jobs are owed and not earned."
The fact is some of America's greatest prosperity was during the 50's and 60's. Tax rates for the rich ran in the 70-90% range. That was when America was as redistributionist as it could get and America did great. So your Fox News/CNBC/Wall Street Journal propaganda rings hollow. I love it how they screen "class warfare" now that the Democrats are back in charge. They conveniently gloss over there has been class warfare for the last 30 years, but it was the rich waging it and they won, big time. They only use the term "class warfare" when the middle class is trying to claw some of it back.
The progressive tax system started getting dismantled under Reagan and George W. finished the job. The more it was dismantled the sicker America got. For example billionaire hedge fund managers now get taxed at 15%, working people its closer to 40%. By the time W. was finished America was actually redistributionist again, except it was redistributing all the wealth to the top 1%. Income inequality now is the worst its been since the roaring 20's which is is coincidentally the last time we had a crash like the current one.
So your claim America is "redistributionist" and that this is the problem is completely and utterly false.
It simply isn't healthy to have all the wealth concentrated in the hands of a small number of people. You need affluent, happy workers who buy things to have a balanced economy. Rich people don't buy stuff(other than yachts and mansions). Americans have continued on the buying binge been for the 30 years even though their wages are stagnant, but its mostly been through massive debt accumulation and now the party is over. You will see how much it really sucks to have 1% rich and 99% broke now that the housing bubble has burst.
"arms in protest of giving them healthcare"
The only people who are being "given" health care are the poor and people with major health problems. There are a lot of young and healthy people who may well see $10K or more a year in new "taxes" paying for "mandated" insurance coverage. Obama explicitly said during the campaign "no mandate. It appears he lied, big and boldly..... Only reason I voted for him was he explicitly said "No mandate" for health insurance. He can offer all the health care reform he wants but as soon as he mandates I pay jackal insurance companies $10K a year for health insurance he's made a political enemy for life. I would have voted for McCain if he hadn't picked that wacko Palin as is VP, especially at his age.
The people who are going to get screwed here are healthy young people who work for small businesses(under 50 employees) and don't get insurance from their employer. If your employer gives you insurance at least you dodge some payroll and income tax(government subsidizes employer provided insurance to the tune of $200 billion a year already this way). This bill seems designed to force everyone to work for big corporations. You are gonna take a $10K salary hit working for a small business under this new regime because none of them will provide insurance.
It seems very likely everyone without employer insurance will be forced to buy insurance on the open market, as an individual with no bargaining power, and be completely screwed by the insurance companies. If you are mandated to buy insurance but have no public option you are feeding all the people without employer insurance to the wolves(private insurers). Insurance companies will be forced to take people with major health problems and they will jack up their premiums to compensate and tack on some more profit to boot. They will have a captive market, little competition, and people will be forced to buy insurance no matter the price, so the sky is the limit. In many states there is only one dominant insurer, Blue Cross for example, and little competition.
I have high confidence any health care reform that passes Congress will be a windfall to health care, insurance and big pharma corporations. Why do you think big pharma is running pro health care reform ads non stop. Its gonna be Medicare-D all over again, the only people who win are the corporations.
The people who are going to get completely screwed.... again... are middle income working stiffs. I am pretty sure the only "reform" here is to force large numbers of young, healthy people to pay through the nose for insurance under a mandate, so there is a bigger money pool for the corporations and the chonically sick, for example the obese who made bad life style choices, get expensive chronic illness and need someone to pay for their "free" health care, and the lucky ones who get to pay are the young, healthy people who made good life style choices. These people already pay 12.5% in payrool taxes, 20-25% in income taxes, an auto insurance tax in most states and now get a $10K health insurance tax. Working people will have nothing left to live on.
"The US should fix the causes, not the symptoms."
I'm pretty sure that entails:
- Reducing the wages of most workers to the vicinity of a dollar an hour, maybe $10 an hour if you are highly educated and skilled, and maybe get work weeks up to around 70 hours with no vacations and no overtime pay.
- Eliminate all taxes on corporations and reduce taxes on the wealthy below 15% which is where it already is on capital gains and billionaire hedge fund managers. They also don't want to pay any payroll taxes or health insurance. Taxing workers making a subsistence wage in to the ground is still OK as long as they don't pay any of it.
- They want their taxes eliminated but they still want the government and tax payers to give them billions of dollars in government contracts, bail outs, low interest loans, free money from the Fed, subsidies, etc.
- They want schools that drill their workers intensively for about 16 years in math, science, computers and obedience. Don't bother with arts, independent thinking or creativity... kind of like "No Child Left Behind" on steroids.
- They would probably favor a totalitarian regime as long as its pro multinational, basically Fascist leaning as long as the party is their friend and makes them lots of money. Two ideal examples of perfect governments for multinationals are the new China and 1930's Germany. And yes IBM did love the Nazi's in the 1930's too. They want their workers thoroughly cowed, subservient, afraid and most definitely not organized.
The best fix for these American idiot CEO's, out to make a quick bug with no regard to long term consequences, is to strip them of their citizenship, and deport to them to their new corporate headquarters in China and India. I think once they get to live in China full time, with no ticket home to the U.S., and get to endure the repression, censorship, corruption like a real Chinese citizen, they will change their tune. They will especially realize their mistake when they get on the wrong side of a party boss or a company owned by powerful party members. Right now China is nice to them and is kissing their asses while they turn over all their capital, jobs, IP and market access. Chances are once they have all those and have their own version of IBM, owned by powerful party bosses, like Lenovo, they will completely destroy IBM and every other western corporation who sold their long term survival down the river for a few years of cheap labor, illusory access to China's markets and short term profit.
I was reading Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" last week. There is a passage I loved on the predictions of America's imminent demise. He is commenting on European intellectuals who declare America is finished, that Americans suck because they can't do math and that Americans are dumb because they haven't read Goethe. Taleb then points out this intellectual is using MS Word on a Windows PC's running an Intel CPU, or a better example I like, using Google on an Apple iPhone while listening to music bought from iTunes.
We American's may be lazy and stupid and maybe we are finished but this country still churns out some amazing ideas and ideas are the important thing. Taleb also points out there is a LOT more money in designing Nike shoes than there is running a sweat shop to manufacture them. As long as America allows people, especially young entrepreneurs to chase dreams and gamble on their ideas I don't think America or America's technology sector is doomed. I'd take America any day as an idea factory over a China where anything resembling a free spirit is crushed. China has a lot of well educated people, and a lot of repressed people who work CHEAP which is what Siebel and his exec friends find so appealing, but as long as they are surfing on a censored Internet, governed by a repressive one party state, living in cities where you can cut the air with a knife, I think their future creating things is limited. America is a startup machine, while China's companies seem to have a disturbing tendency to be state owned or owned by friends and family of powerful party members. If you need to manufacture cheap knockoffs or run an IT sweat shop China is NUMBA ONE. You need startups and idea factories, America is still a leader.
To serve as my own counter point here is Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, on the self inflicted damage done to America in the last eight years. We need to overcome a lot more than we would have had to but for a turning point in 2000:
"Ironically, just at the time we needed to accelerate to remain competitive in 2000, we elected the worst president in history. He not only focused on all the wrong things -- starting wars, religious bigotry and zealotry, letting the financial system go unregulated, etc. -- he cut R&D funding for science and technology. Thanks largely to our insipid political leaders, we stalled for eight of the most important years in the past 100. The U.S. is resilient, but this is a lot to overcome. The world is pretty uniformly covered with smart people -- we have no patent on that. And with the Web/Internet now enabling them to learn and grow just as rapidly as us, we are far worse off now than we were in 2000."
You seem to be forgetting most of the most recent and mind boggling rush to state capitalism began under Bush and Paulson. Obama and Geitner have just been extending what Bush and the Republican's wrought. The bailout of AIG dwarfs GM, and it was entirely done by Paulson so he could use the state's coffers to bail out Goldman Sachs. That was state capitalism at its worst.
What the Democrats lean towards is old school Socialism, not Fascism. I should point out Fascists HATE unions with a passion so your attempt to hang the label on Democrats doesn't really work. Union hating is a stereotypical Republican trait so it fits with their Fascist tendencies. Obama nationalized GM to save unions which is something a true Fascist would never do. Nationalized health care is also very much more Socialism than Fascism.
State capitalism is more about giant private corporations in private hands of rich and connected party members working hand in hand with a ruling party and state, and they are further enriched by the largess of the state as long as they stay on the right side of the people in power. The Republicans for the eight years of Bush were blatant about the enrichment of their rich well connected party members. Dems do it too but not as blatantly as the last eight years under Bush. Socialism tends to place the power in government run bureaucracies and not so much wealthy corporations and their owners.
So if you need a score card, Democrats more Socialist, Republicans more Fascist. Though the extent to which Democrats are bought out by lobbyists and corporations, just like Republicans, both parties have some disturbing Fascist tendencies.
I know EXACTLY what it means and I'm not the first one to apply it to the Republican's in the Bush era. It seems to be trendy among Republican's lately to accuse Obama of it since he sucked GM in to state capitalism and they are accusing of same on health care. It is unfortunate we haven't been able to use this word since World War II without people going ape shit and Godwin on it. Fascism is alive and well its just somewhat more subdued than Mussolini's original. If you ask me China is probably the biggest, most successful Fascist state of all time, and America's wealthy seem to LOVE it.
The recent Republican antics disrupting town halls on health care reminds me SO much of the brown shirts. The Republican rabble rousers so need to all start wearing brown shirts.
"no piercings unless you're a woman"
So you are saying women who have pierced tongues, and other assorted parts of their anatomy can work at Siebel. If so it must not be quite as bad as you make it sound....
It does kind of sound like what I suspected. Siebel would prefer the U.S. were more like China or Singapore, repressive police states, with all the impoverished workers sitting in their cubes and on their assembly lines in quiet repression making profits for the man. I'm feeling a sudden urge to dust off my DVD of THX-1138.
It would be great if Siebel could get on a boat, get off in Shanghai and try living there permanently if he thinks its so great. That would be called practicing what he is preaching. Until he does that he is full of shit.
I doubt he would really like it there very much when many of the freedoms he seems to be taking for granted in the West were gone for good. Brief business trips there don't count. I wager if he were to try to found a new Siebel Inc. in China today from scratch he wouldn't like the experience. First he is not Chinese, strike one. Strike two and three unless he was related to or otherwise connected to powerful people in the Communist Party, chances are his company would be crushed the first time it had a run in with a corporation owned by someone who IS connected with party officials.
China has a lot going for it, mostly it has abundant cheap, extremely oppressed labor which every company on the planet wants to exploit.
China, like India, has a LOT of well educated people who also work relatively cheaply compared to the industrial world, and that certainly gives them a competitive edge so I will conceede that point.
But.....
It is also a very repressive, very corrupt, Fascist state and people blinded by dollar signs seem to keep forgetting that. The Chinese State, party officials and their families own huge chunks of most of the important Chinese corporations and they don't believe in level playing fields for anyone competing against them.
Everything and everyone is heavily censored and it is extremely common for censorship to be used to conceal the widespread corruption at all levels of society. I seriously doubt any state will be successful long term if its foundation is based on concealment, deceit and suppression of truth.
Maybe China will eventually dominate the world like Seibel suggests. I sure hope for the world's sake they don't or if they do its only accompanied by the collapse of their repressive state and one party dictatorial rule. If it does dominate the world under its current system it could well become the role model for the rest of the world and we could all end up under repressive Fascist dictatorships. We've sure been trying to go there recently in the U.S. and U.K. since the turn of the century.
For Western executive to continue to predict the inevitable victory of China reminds me so very much of how America's rich and American companies like Ford and IBM heaped praise and business on Nazi Germany in the 30's. They loved that repressive Fascist state too when it was also producing economic miracles. Fascist states can be brutally successful because the state can intervene to correct markets, to pump vast amounts of capital in to strategic directions that private investors wouldn't. They can also quickly and easily remove sources of friction. For example someone tries to unionize a factory or mine, the state police crushes the organizers. A recent case where a chemical factory apparently leaked deadly chemicals and sickened a thousand people in an adjacent toy factory, the state declared it a case of mass hysteria, and the chemical factory continued operation unhindered. A whistle blower tries to expose corruption, he is disappeared. Any dissent about the direction chosen by the ruling party, crushed. It is very efficient and I know why Western executives like it so much. They wish America were run the same way as long as the rich and well connected aren't the ones getting crushed under a jack boot.
Another thing going for China is its a huge beneficiary of every Western company and exec rushing to transfer every bit of capital, IP, jobs, and markets to Chinese control. They are searching for near term quarterly profits, for that cheap labor, and for a foothold in China's markets which could be hugely profitable in the future. Chances are they will get some short term profits and the Chinese will eventually crush them before they see any serious penetration in to Chinese markets. In fact I just realized Sie
"You could run. If you don't like the choices, then give the people a better choice."
I wouldn't be electable in this country for anything above dog catcher. For starters, I'm anti religion. I simply wouldn't debase myself by pretending I'm religious just to get elected. As a result, I could never get elected for anything that matters in the U.S.
I also say what I think with a disturbing regularity and to get elected you have to tell the majority of the people what they want to hear, not what you actually think or even what the facts are. To get elected you pretty much have to lie constantly, and by the time you succeed in getting elected you have so compromised yourself you don't remember what the truth is or what you stood for before you started the campaign.
Unfortunately we get the bad politicians we get because the whole system is rigged to elect people who are good campaigners and horrible legislators. Not sure I could even stand being a Congressmen or President. You can't do anything right or well by the time you've made the thousand compromises necessary to pass a bill. Me I'd favor repealing a few thousand existing bad laws, rather than passing a bunch of new ones. Unfortunately passing an ever bigger teetering pile of crap laws is considered success for a politician which is why this country is slowly drowning under a pile of bad legislation.
If you made me dictator for a year I'd take that job. Doubt the country could take the shock though. I'd disband at least half of the Federal bureaucracy, cut the military in at least half and make it a purely defensive force, eliminate taxes on everyone but the wealthy, and I'd let people opt out of Social Security and Medicare. Not sure the economy could take it because the Federal government printing and borrowing money, and pumping it out in Federal pork is one of the few things keeping the U.S. economy afloat.
"It's impressive when a contradiction of that caliber makes into the same sentence."
Not really, its more just a brutal realization that the U.S. is locked in to the death grip of a two party system where both parties completely suck. They have so completely stacked the system against third party and independent candidates, and the media is so stacked again third parties and independent candidates, about the only useful role left in our elections is for independents to hold their noses and pick the lesser of the two evils. It is a useful role except when independents failed and picked Bush.
Last cable news show I watched regularly was Aaron Brown on CNN. That guy was AWESOME for just doing old school news reporting. Of course he was doomed trying to do that in this day and age, now that the news networks are desperately trying to out shock and pander each other. So they replace him with Anderson Cooper, Mr. inflated ego. Actual news reporting is pretty much dead on the news networks. Fox panders to the right, MSNBC panders to the left, and CNN tries to pander to everyone and succeeds with no one.
So I watch CNN, MSNBC and Fox occassionly, but I favor PBS and BBC. Really I watch news on TV a lot less than I use to, I mostly just skim Google news now.
The quality of all three U.S. cable news networks has deteriorated so much its sad. CNN in its early days under Turner and Bernard Shaw was head and shoulders better than any of the 24/7 news networks now. Its pretty criminal what Time Warner and Joe Klein have done to CNN. They've turned it in to complete garbage now. I wish they would sell it back to Ted Turner.
I watch Glenn Beck now and again just because he is hilarious. That guy is completely NUTS, and he seals the deal that Fox has no standards or any pretense of "fair and balanced" that they A hired him and B keep, especially after his remarks wishing for another Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. O'Reilly isn't quite as nuts as Beck, he is mostly just mean and cranky. Sure Fox isn't really biased when they are regurgitated the same news as everyone else but even then they constantly slip in completing whoppers for untruth and bias, worse than any other network, and their stars are completely off the deep end for bias.
I kind of like Rachael Maddow because she is at least smart and well spoken, but her left bias is pretty annoying too.
I think I've read DailyKos for the space of about 2 days several years ago back when it was big news to see what the fuss was about. Those people are nuts too. I haven't really have any use for the Democrats either. Only thing they have in their favor is they aren't the complete horror the Republicans have become. The Republican party has cratered so badly, and is teetering so close to Fascism, everyone looks good by comparison, even the Democrats. The worst problem the Democrats have is Reid, Pelosi, Murtha, etc. are a complete embarrassment. The Democrats seriously need to get some Congressional leaders that don't suck. They just can't seem to elect competent men and women to Congress.
I'd take Reagan or Nixon back any day over the pathetic carcass that is today's Republican party and that was Bush. If John McCain had been the John McCain of 2000 and he hadn't picked that nutcase Palin as his VP I would have voted for him over Obama. You see I'm about as hard core Independent as they come and I'm just screwed because I have to pick between the garbage the Dems and Republicans put on the ballot.
Actually the third one is totally "non geek". Its everyone one on Wall Street or who plays the stock market and watched Time Warner nose dive when they merged with AOL. With the people who play the stock market for fun and profit AOL is very toxic at this point, and this probably includes everyone whom AOL might want to buy their stock to prop it up which is, for better or worse, the main gauge of success in this Capitalist world.
In fact I'm not sure any of those bullets are geek only. Bullet one is delineated by the people who use AOL as their ISP/Portal and everyone else. Needless to say the people who actually use AOL as their ISP/portal is a pretty small number and getting smaller all the time.
Perhaps you could argue Time Warner destroyed AOL instead of vice versa. Certainly Time Warner's destroyed CNN which was sad to watch so they have a track record destroying victims of their mergers, but in this case I think AOL was the principal destroyer since they were primarily a dial up portal as their was a mass migration to DSL and Cable modems.
Since when has any member of the Murdoch media empire ever engaged in "Quality journalism". This is the owner of Fox News who went to a court of appeals to affirm their right to force their journalists to lie in their broadcasts. This is the owner of the network which, in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, ran stories that Saddam had drones he was planning to use to spray chemical and biological weapons on American cities.
Granted the WSJ is probably still doing useful reporting, I don't think Rupert has managed to infect it with his spin machine.... yet.
For AOL to really turn around they need to rebrand their company. That AOL brand is completely toxic to most people due to:
- overdone saturation CD marketing campaigns that made that brand perennial joke fodder
- a reputation as the walled Internet of the clueless
- AOL nearly single handedly destroying Time Warner (though maybe that wouldn't have been a bad thing) which associates their brand with catastrophic failure
- there is something about Steve Case that just gives me the willies. He strikes me as the ultimate PHB.
I suspect a lot of people wouldn't go to an AOL portal just because its got AOL on it no matter how good the content.
I will give AOL kudos for trying to save journalism when it seems no one else will. Someone needs to save journalism while separating it from dead tree newspaper because that business model needs to die. There simply isn't a rationale for a distribution model that kills millions of trees every year nor for burning the fuel hauling them all over the place.
I still read the New York Times online though I doubt that will continue when the return to the subscription model. I also have a nagging remembrance of how badly they failed when they let Judith Miller run her pro Iraq war propaganda campaign under their letterhead. In general old media completely failed us from about 9/11/01 up until they finally stopped being complete propaganda tools for the Bush administration around the time of Katrina. I'd seriously like to see some good journalists work over the Obama administration and Congress too for their continued pandering to big business. I'm hoping Danial Froomkin will pick up the cause when he starts work at Huffinton Post.
"As for deserting the national guard, he never did. He completed his requirements early and left when they were done. That's a far cry from desertion. What "everyone knows" is based on the false document."
OMG. You CAN'T just complete Guard "requirements early". Its a fixed term commitment like any military enlistment, in his case a six year commitment. He apparently did his first four years, but he totally punted on his last two years, apparently on his own authority, and NO ONE knows how he pulled that off.
This Wikipedia article goes in to great detail on this issue. It is completely inexplicable how he refused his mandatory flight physical, and was taken off flight statue, and there were no consequences. This is the point his guard records pretty much stopped......
"The Air Force regulation cited here, AFM 35-13 Para 2-29m[12] required the commander of Bush's Texas National Guard unit to "direct an investigation as to why the individual failed to accomplish the medical examination"[13] and no further documentation is known about this investigation."
All indications are the Guard had included drug testing as part of the physical and since he was suspected of being a heavy Cocaine user at the time he knew he wouldn't pass so he just refused to take it.
Here is Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, on W:
"Ironically, just at the time we needed to accelerate to remain competitive in 2000, we elected the worst president in history. He not only focused on all the wrong things -- starting wars, religious bigotry and zealotry, letting the financial system go unregulated, etc. -- he cut R&D funding for science and technology. Thanks largely to our insipid political leaders, we stalled for eight of the most important years in the past 100. The U.S. is resilient, but this is a lot to overcome. The world is pretty uniformly covered with smart people -- we have no patent on that. And with the Web/Internet now enabling them to learn and grow just as rapidly as us, we are far worse off now than we were in 2000."
You seriously underestimate the power the executive has in the U.S. The Executive controls ALL of the federal regulatory agencies. When Bush came to office he put right wing idealogues who hated government, IN CHARGE OF THE GOVERMENT. Their qualifications were usually based on campaign and religous credentials, not on qualification for the position. You don't put people who hate government in CHARGE of government unless you want a catastrophe which is what he got.
The instances of catastrophic failure that resulted are too numerous to list:
- FEMA director incompetent and New Orleans goes a week with little relief after Katrina
- EPA/NASA among others forced to altar positions on global warming
- DOJ was nearly destroyed by putting unqualified people in professional civil service jobs because they were loyal Republicans and born again, and Gonzales being appointed Attorney General finished the devastation
- SEC was completely disfunctional as a major financial crisis developed especially under Chrisopher Cox who was a rabid "free marketeer"
- R&D funding gutted
- FDA started working for the companies instead of regulating them and we now have a raft of unsafe foods and drugs
- NSA turned to spy on American citizens
- CIA turned in to an agency of torturers and law breakers. Also and agency humiliated by blessing an Iraq when there were no WMD's and no links to Al Qaeda
Not sure I follow your exact point. The Seventeenth Amendment is a somewhat obscure change in how Senators are elected. Not sure how you can attribute it to the decline of America a hundred years later.
Sixteenth amendment and income tax, I can give you that one, I wish we didn't have that one either, and its a subject for debate if its been good or bad. Its certainly allowed the Federal government to bleed its population white and become bloated. Not sure America would have risen to be a super power without it though, so your point is a stretch.
I assume you didn't like FDR for his socialism, though Social Security and Medicare are wildly popular with most. FDR was the president during World War II when the U.S. began its ascendancy to super power status so not sure you can blame him for America's decline 60 years later.
Not sure what your beef is with LBJ, I assume it either Vietnam or you are opposed to the Civil Rights Act, which is a tough thing to oppose unless you are a segregationist. Are you a segregationist? Again not sure how you can blame a President from 40 years ago for something happening now.
Dude CBS fired him for it...... get it..... bias punished.
Can you cite any case where Fox punished one of its reporters for lying. The most famous case of Fox and lying was Jane Akre. Fox tried to force her to lie on air about a Monsanto drug for dairy cows and when she refused Fox fired her. Fox won the appeal when the court determined it was OK for Fox to intentionally falsify the news. There is an FCC policy against lying in the news but.... but its only a policy, so Fox can do it all they want according to the appeals court, so apparently they do.
Do you just not get the difference. CBS did the ethical thing and fired the people responsible for bias. Fox on the other hand waged a lengthy court battle to defend its right to knowingly lie in their news casts.
I feel for the CBS team though. I dearly wish they HAD swayed the election because as bad as Kerry sucked, the last four years of Bush were almost certainly worse. Exactly how many cases of election manipulation did the Bush machine perpetrate that were MUCH worse than the CBS case. They ruthlessly destroyed John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 using a false story that he fathered a colored child. They did some pretty tacky things to block a recount in Florida in 2000, and they "Swift boated" Kerry. At this point "Swift Boating" is synonymous with voter manipulation. They managed to make someone who actually served in combat in Vietnam look bad versus Bush and Cheney who both dodged the draft and sat out Vietnam partying in the U.S.
"Taking shortcuts leads to dead people, disinformation, becoming what you hate, so-on, and so forth."
Kind of like the Fox campaign to whip up a frenzy for the U.S. invasiona of Iraq. Can't say Bush/Rove/Cheney directed that Murdoch/Ailes Fox propaganda campaign, but it sure was exactly what Bush/Cheney needed because they wanted to attack Iraq, and they knew they really didn't have any justification to do it so they neded the help of Fox and Judith Miller at the NY Times to fabricate a case.
I can still remember the Fox news reports right before the war started claiming Saddam had drones he was going to use to spray U.S. cities with chemical and biological weapons. It was pure fantasy, class big lie propaganda, tell a lie so big people will believe it just because it is so big.
So in the Rather case you have something that cost NO lives, but did cost Rather his job. In the Fox propaganda campaign it helped whip up a frenzy for a war that KILLED hundreds of thousands of people.
Once again it is clear Rather case, little bias punished harshly, Fox case HUGE bias and they've gotten away with it unscathed for a decade. If anything there bias just boosts their ratings with the rocket scientists who still think Fox is telling the truth.
Any biography of W you will find clearly tracks that he got in to the Texas Air National Guard using family connections to dodge the draft in Vietnam. He was, trained at great expense to fly obsolete jets that would never get sent to Vietnam. The Texas Air National Guard was designed for rich kids to dodge the draft, because they could become fighter jocks without any risk of seeing combat.
In the middle of his guard duty he moved to Alabama to work on a political campaign, and anecdotally party hard, though the evidence of his partying and drug use is he said, she said so you can't prove it either. It appears he did no guard duty while he was there. After that he headed to Harvard to get his MBA still before his Texas guard duty was over. You can't nail him for it because there is no documentation left in his Texas Guard files any more in how he managed to use Guard duty to get duck the draft, but fulfilled none of the obligations once he bolted Texas, and suffered no consequence.
As I said it is a weird case you will only find with the rich and powerful. It is clear from well established biography he didn't finish his guard service, he suffered no repercussions for deserting his guard service and there is no documentation on what happened or how he got away with it. It is pretty clear once he ducked his guard service he should have been prosecuted or drafted but wasn't.
So its not really bias to try to expose this sordid history of Bush, especially after he sent hundreds of thousands of Americans off to an optional war in Iraq, when he himself was for all practical purposes a draft dodger and deserter. Rather's team was just in a Catch-22, they knew the story to be true, but they also knew there was no way to prove it.
Can't say I disagree that the stimulus bill Obama let Pelosi ram through wasn't a retarded waste of money BUT... the only reason it even happened was because the Bush administration left the U.S. and global economy in a smoldering ruin because they somehow thought it was a good idea to not regulate anything. Most economists agreed a huge stimulus was probably necessary, I just wish they had spent the money on something worthwhile that would have made a lasting difference like Hoover dam did during the Depression.
Certainly some of that blame can be shared with Clinton, Rubin, Greenspan, Frank and Dodd, but it is pretty clear that the absolute worst of the the subprime debacle happened on Bush's watch. it was clear about 2004-2005 that there was massive mortgage fraud underway but the Bush administration absolutely didn't care as long as everyone was getting rich off it and they could brag about all the people who were able to buy homes for the first time. They chose to ignore they were homes the people couldn't afford and the the teaser rate mortgages were pretty much criminal.
There hasn't really been much spending under Obama so far that wasn't direct fall out of an economy pushed to the brink of depression by the incompetence of the Bush administration.
Health care might be the first clear case of liberal spending but just about everyone agrees our health care system is broken and has to be fixed. Unfortunately by the time our broken Congress gets done with it I have high confidence the bill the produce will be as broken as Medicare-D and make the problem worse not better. Unfortunately the entire U.S. government has been purchased by lobbyists for big corporations who've figured out by putting a few million in the pockets of the right politicians they can get one multi-billion dollar windfall after another at the taxpayer's expense.
Not sure we should really even peg out of control spending on President's any more, its Congress and lobbyists that are causing most of the problem, the Presidents just aren't stopping it by use of the veto pen.
No argument there are all kinds of biases around but you are making a pretty weak argument defending Fox on that basisc because their bias is OFF THE SCALE.
In the left bias case you cite Rather was FIRED for that one story. Kind of says CBS applied some standards and ethics that were a LOT tougher than Fox which intentionally broadcasts false information, is proud of it, and would never fire one of their talking heads for lying as long as the lies are the Murdouch/Ailes/Rove/Cheney approved lies.
The Rather case was also not something you can claim as serious bias. The fact is everyone knows Bush deserted his guard service, possible to avoid drug testing in his flight physical because he was a heavy cocaine user at the time. The guard commander's secretary said what was in the letter was pretty plausible.
The problem with the Bush case is due to the power of his family in Texas and especially when he was governor of Texas(and commander in chief of the Texas Guard) all the incriminating stuff in his guard file was almost certainly destroyed by his operatives. You have this ugly case where Bush did something bad bordering on criminal and got away with it because his family is rich and powerful. You can't exactly blame Rather's team for wanting to nail Bush for deserting his guard duty which he certainly did. They, like everyone else in the world with a brain, didn't want to see that loser get another four years. It was a desire proved justified because by the end of his second term Bush and Co. had nearly destroyed the U.S. and everyone, including many Republicans, realized too late what a complete disaster Bush's reign was for the country.
W's eight years in power may well have ended America's ascendancy and may have started a decline which may prove irreversible.