Equal Time For The American Dream

Posted by on September 6, 2011 at 10:32 pm. 3 Comments :

CNN Tea PartyLast December CNN announced that they would be co-hosting a Republican debate with the Tea Party Express. That ridiculous idea was something put together under the new leadership of Ken Jautz who was promoted to head CNN after distinguishing himself at sister station Headline News. At HLN Jautz was responsible for such journalistic masterstrokes as The Nancy Grace Program. And of course he will always be remembered as the man who brought Glenn Beck to television.

When the Tea Party Express partnership was unveiled I responded by noting that the group was a corrupt branch of a fake movement that was nothing more than a bunch of ultra-conservative GOP malcontents:

“They were created by Sal Russo and his Republican PR firm, Russo Marsh, and their brief history is fraught with scandal. Rival Tea Party groups were harshly critical of them for directing nearly half of the money they raised from citizen supporters to Russo’s firm. Their former spokesman, Mark Williams, was forced to resign after publishing a racially offensive article on his web site.”

Nevertheless, CNN proceeded with this embarrassing endeavor which will air Monday, September 12. America will have to sit though a farce that elevates the Tea Party to a status they have not earned on their own, seeing as how they have an approval rating in the twenties. Even amongst Republicans they are not particularly well liked. But that didn’t stop CNN from broadcasting Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union message.

The blatant unfairness of this led me to ask “Would CNN ever consider partnering with MoveOn.org for a Democratic debate?” That seemed unthinkable at the time, which is precisely the point I was making. But now The American Dream Movement has stepped up to assert the same principle of fairness. They are petitioning CNN to give them equal time to respond after the President’s speech on Thursday before congress. And they make a compelling case:

“Now it’s only fair for CNN to air the American Dream Movement’s progressive response to the president’s major jobs speech on Thursday.

The American Dream Movement includes scores of groups representing millions of members who’ve been out in force for months campaigning for jobs, not cuts. In July, we had twice as many gatherings as the tea party had when they launched.”

If CNN would recognize a phony organization that was invented by Fox News and the Koch brothers, and is a adjunct division of the Republican Party, they ought to give some consideration to a legitimate grassroots group of citizens who represent real people and working families.

Please support this effort by signing the petition:

Tell CNN to Give the American Dream Movement Equal Time.

If they would do it for Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party, they should do it for the American Dream Movement. And what’s more, they should partner with the American Dreamers to co-host a debate in the upcoming election. It’s only fair.

Find us on Google+
Advertisement:

Sarah Palin’s Estranged Union Brothers and Sisters

Posted by on September 6, 2011 at 4:51 pm. 5 Comments :

Sarah PalinIn a new Facebook treatise, Sarah Palin has proven again how oblivious she is to reality.

The essay begins by criticizing President Obama for remarks he didn’t make. Palin, and much of the conservative noise machine, is aghast that Teamsters President James Hoffa, Jr. gave a speech with colorful rhetoric about “going to war” against anti-labor right-wingers and “taking out” the Tea Party “sons-of-bitches” in congress in the next election. In the post-Giffords era it is unwise to use such provocative language. But for Palin, who still defends her brazenly hostile admonition, “Don’t Retreat – Reload,” to complain about it is an Olympian feat of hypocrisy.

Then Palin begins the third paragraph with something that actually sounds reasonable:

“To the same degree Americans are concerned about irresponsible, greedy corporate execs who got cushy bonuses from taxpayer-funded bailouts…”

That’s a pretty enlightened comment from a Republican. The problem is that she and her GOP pals have never before accepted the notion that corporate execs are greedy and irresponsible, even though the American people have known it for some time. But Palin spoils the moment with the remainder of her sentence:

“…we should also be concerned about greedy union bosses who are willing to tank our economy just to protect their own power.”

Here we have a small lapse in logic in that Palin provides no evidence that union bosses are doing any such thing. And since union bosses become bosses through union elections, union members are confident that their chosen leaders are working on their behalf. And if you listen to folks like Hoffa you can always hear their passion for policies that benefit labor, as opposed to Palin’s agenda of further enriching the wealthy and powerful. Palin goes on to make the ludicrous comment that union leaders are…

“…chasing American industry offshore by making outrageous, economically illogical demands that they know will never work.”

Why would they do that? How would it help them to retain their power, which is what Palin asserts is their motive? If What Palin says is true, then union leaders could just as easily support her agenda and produce more jobs, which would produce more union dues and the loyalty of members. So once again, Palin’s critique is utterly devoid of logic.

Then Palin really goes off the rails. She makes some sort of connection between union leaders and their “politically aligned corporate friends.” Since when were union leaders and corporate honchos friends? And Palin continues into fairytale land where Obama is both a socialist and a corporatist:

“This collusion is at the heart of Obama’s economic vision for America. In practice it is socialism for the very rich and the very poor, but a brutal form of capitalism for the rest of us.”

The gist of Palin’s argument is that Obama of advocating spreading the wealth to poor people via services to prevent them from starving, becoming homeless, or dying from lack of medical care. And she also accuses him of socialist advocacy for the rich via bailouts and cutting back on regulations. Unfortunately for Palin, Obama never signed a bailout bill. That was George Bush’s baby. And as for regulations, she is trying to have it both ways by accusing Obama of giving in to the corporations on regulatory policy at the same time as she is criticizing the administration for executing too may regulations. This peculiar schizophrenia is summed up in her next paragraph:

“Ask yourself if the folks you heard demonize concerned, independent Americans [her name for Tea Baggers] yesterday really speak for the working class when they’re all too happy to burden your families with the bill to bail out the President’s friends on Wall Street.”

Really? The union bosses are happy to bail out Wall Street bankers? Since when? Where does she get this stuff? I’m beginning to get worried about her. From this bit of dementia she segues to an insinuation that Obama is guilty of graft and cronyism simply because he lived in Chicago for awhile. She provides no proof, of course. It is just the most vile brand of guilt by association, which she says “isn’t just the result of a few bad apples. It’s the nature of a skewed system.” So, according to her, everybody’s guilty.

This long-winded assault on working people, and the leaders of the union movement that supports them, is Palin’s way of endearing herself to the group. I’m afraid she is not going to have much success with that plan. American labor isn’t stupid and they know when someone is trying to use and manipulate them. They know who their champions are, as well as their enemies. And without any doubt, they know who the sons-of-bitches are who would lie to them on behalf of the corporate masters that seek only to exploit them for greater wealth. Give it up, Sarah. It isn’t gonna work.


A Hire Power: The Local Approach To Resolving The Job Crisis Nationally

Posted by on September 5, 2011 at 3:59 pm. 3 Comments :

Hire PowerAmerica is at a crossroads on this Labor Day. We can sit back and wait for greedy, impersonal corporations, or politicians with conflicts of interest and hyper-partisanship, to come to the rescue of middle and low-income citizens, or we can submit to a Hire Power!

About two and half years ago the United States hit a boulder in the economic road. Venerable money center banks were crushed under the weight of spurious investments and barely legal schemes. There was a broad consensus that absent some dramatic response there would be a catastrophic failure of the nation’s financial foundations which, of course, would spread throughout the world.

The markets panicked, plummeting 5,000 points (45%) from September 2008 to March 2009. Home foreclosures skyrocketed and the unemployment rate rose from 6.2% to 8.6%. In the meantime, Washington scrambled to legislate bailouts and stimuli for banks, insurance companies, and auto manufacturers, somehow neglecting to provide aid to millions of middle and low-income victims of this banking-driven disaster.

Today the Dow Jones average is back above 11,000, about where it was in September 2008, and nearly double its low. Investment firms like Goldman Sachs have fared well also. Goldman’s stock today is 150% above where it had bottomed out. Automakers like GM and Chrysler are once again profitable and paying back their government loans. And the unemployment rate has … well … it’s gotten even worse, rising to 9.1%.

So by almost every measure the economic recovery has been swift and robust with one exception: Jobs. The nation is experiencing what analysts call a “jobless” recovery. The companies that have been enjoying renewed success thanks to consumer support are still hesitant about hiring. They are hoarding their resources to either avoid new risk or to reward themselves with higher salaries and bonuses.

It’s clear that the American people cannot rely on big business to address the jobs deficit that is still burdening so many families. It’s time to take matters into our own hands. Small businesses have the power to effect a massive change in the current economic environment. Some estimates show that more than 70% of new jobs are created by small businesses. It is within that market that ordinary citizens can bypass the greedy and insensitive corporations who are only interested in enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us. They have already demonstrated that they couldn’t care less about American workers by their refusal to create new jobs, or when they do create jobs, it’s for workers in other countries.

So what can we do about It? We can promote the creation of new jobs by small business in our own communities. If small businesses with fewer than 100 employees were to commit to hiring one person – just one person – the effect on the community could be significant. Take Rhode Island, for example. The state has about 6,200 businesses with between 10 and 100 employees. If each one of them hired a single new employee, that would be 6,200 Rhode Islanders with a job that previously did not have one. It would reduce unemployment in the state by one percent. It would mean that 6,200 fewer people would be receiving unemployment benefits and other government aid. 6,200 more people would be contributing to, rather than draining, public resources.

More importantly, it would mean an additional 6,200 people would have income with which to patronize other businesses in the community. Restaurants, dry cleaners, book stores, etc., would prosper. Suppliers and manufacturers who service those businesses would see increased demand. And all of those businesses would then be able to explore hiring more people as well, continuing the cycle of prosperity.

Make no mistake about it. The right-wing myth of trickle-down economics is a proven failure. For ten years corporations have enjoyed the supposedly temporary tax cuts implemented under the Bush administration, but they have not been creating jobs. The reason is simple. Companies do not create jobs for the heck of it. Lowering their taxes or repealing regulations will not produce a single new job. After all, why would a company hire people to make more of something that they aren’t selling just because their taxes went down? Companies hire people when they have increased demand for their products or services. Increased demand occurs when consumers are buying things. So when people have good paying jobs and money in their pockets they will make purchases which will spur companies to meet the new demand by hiring more workers.

But maybe there is a way to prime the jobs pump. The goal should be to put more people to work so that they can distribute their income back into the economy. This effort may take some measure of faith on the part of the businesses who take the initial step to hire a new employee. Some businesses may not be able to fully justify a new hire. Do it anyway! The potential upside for the business and the broader economy makes it a reasonable risk. There is a sort of patriotic duty to assume such a risk on behalf of the welfare of our country. If enough of your neighbors join in, the rewards will be substantial. In the worst case scenario, you may have to let the new employee go in a few weeks or months. But at least he or she would have been employed briefly, and the cost to the business would have been negligible. It’s the sort of speculative investment that is worthwhile even if it does not guarantee a return.

On the other hand, if it does succeed, the nation’s economic health can be restored community-by-community. We can build out this program and spread it across the country. Neighbors helping neighbors. No dependence on government programs that do too little and are too difficult to implement. Medium-sized businesses can participate by hiring two or three new people. Big businesses would eventually recognize the momentum and loosen up their own purse strings to hire in even greater numbers. And the spending by all of these newly employed citizens would finance the economic rebound that everyone has been hoping for.

Does this seem too idealistic? Too fanciful and unrealistic given the harsh dimensions of our economic hardships? Let’s ask the city of Atlanta whose “Hire One Atlanta” program is already in progress and showing promising results. So far, nearly 1,500 businesses have added more than 13,000 workers. They are aiming for 150,000 jobs over the course of a year. They make a compelling argument on their web site:

“Hire one new employee and you’ll start a chain of events that can positively impact individuals and our entire economy.  According to one analyst, a single new hire can (on average) increase U.S. GDP by about $100,000. Imagine if 150,000 businesses each hired just one person.”

That’s a $15 billion boost to the economy, and that’s just in one city. Last week the city of Greensboro, North Carolina announced that they will implement a program similar to the one in Atlanta. Why not spread this across the nation and put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work? The spike in spending, investing, and consumer confidence could be just what is needed to finally bring the economic recovery to the job market. And rather than just the top 1% of the nation’s wealthy elite enjoying the benefits of a rebound, all Americans can share in a growing and healthy economy.

The best part is that all of this can be accomplished by ordinary citizens inspired by the power unleashed in the simple act of of hiring their neighbors. So let’s get started. This is what we call Hire Power!


The GOP War On Voting Is In Full Swing

Posted by on September 2, 2011 at 3:19 pm. 25 Comments :

Rolling Stone just published an enlightening, albeit disturbing, article detailing the coordinated effort on the part of the Republican Party to roll back voting rights for millions of Americans. With the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC], the billionaire Koch brothers, and other rightist allies, the GOP has already succeeded in passing legislation that inhibits and/or prohibits voting by students, seniors, minorities, and the poor.

GOP War On Voting

The article goes into great depth describing the GOP assault on democracy and the potential for disenfranchisement and electoral chaos. Some groups, including the ACLU, are challenging the new laws in court. But if these laws can’t be overturned in time for 2012, citizens will need to more aggressively pursue registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns than ever before.

The movement to Block the Vote has become such a critical part of the Republican agenda that they are casting aside the pretense of voter fraud as a justification for their efforts. They were never able to provide evidence of that anyway. Now, Matthew Vadum, a conservative columnist associated with WorldNetDaily, American Spectator, and BigGovernment, wrote an article for the ultra-conservative American Thinker provocatively titled, “Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Registering [the poor] to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. […] Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor. It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money.”

When the right is this comfortable openly expressing their hostility toward both democracy and working-class Americans, either the wheels are about to come off that wagon, or we have an epic battle on our hands. It’s all out in the open now. The conservative view is one that would permit only landowners (and preferably just the male, white ones) to vote. Any American that does not represent the elite class is somehow invested in the nation’s ruin and is only concerned with narrow, self-interests. And of course, the rich are never so selfish. They never vote for their own interests. All they want is what’s best for everyone, even the little people who shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Whatever would we do without these benevolent guardians of virtue watching over us and voting on our behalf? And if you think it’s just wackos like Vadum saying these things…..

John Stossel (Fox News): “Let’s stop saying everyone should vote.”
Rush Limbaugh: “If people cannot even feed and clothe themselves, should they be allowed to vote?”
Judson Phillips (Tea Party Nation): “If you’re not a property owner, I’m sorry, but property owners have a little bit more of a vested stake in the community than not property owners do.”
Steve Doocy (Fox News): “With 47% of Americans not paying taxes – 47% – should those who don’t pay be allowed to vote?”

It’s hard to imagine a more repulsive philosophy. These are the same people that align themselves with the Founding Fathers and a return to Constitutional rule. These are the same people that have deceived a small, gullible segment of the electorate, that calls itself the Tea Party, and has manipulated them into advocating policies that are harmful to themselves. And these are the same people who now want to take away the most fundamental right of every American – the right to vote.

Whatever we do, we cannot permit this cynical agenda to succeed. This is a fight that will determine the outcome of every other fight we undertake. It is imperative that real patriots commit themselves to ensuring that everyone who wants to vote has an opportunity to do so. The more people who participate in the electoral process, the more representative our political institutions will be. And it’s about time that they represent the people and not corporations and wealthy special interests.

[This Just In] Sen. Dick Durbin will hold a hearing September 8, on the “New State Voting Laws – Barriers to the Ballot?”

Some additional resources:
ThinkProgress
People for the American Way

And then there’s this:


Fed Up? Rick Perry Sucks Up To AT&T And Vice Versa

Posted by on September 1, 2011 at 4:09 pm. 19 Comments :

A couple of weeks ago Rick Perry was caught on tape with a representative of Bank of America who offered a comforting message to the Texas governor saying that “We’ll help you out.” He wasn’t kidding.

Rick Perry

ThinkProgress documented the extent to which BofA had already provided abundant comfort to Perry. He has received over $125,000 from BofA’s PAC. He has received $4 million from the Republican Governor’s Association, to which BofA was a major contributor while Perry was its chairman. In exchange, Perry has been a stalwart advocate of deregulation for banking and financial services. He regards the Consumer Financial Protection Agency as unconstitutional.

But Bank of America is not Perry’s only CFF (Corporate Friend Forever) He is also intimate with AT&T. He recently endorsed the mega-merger between AT&T and T-Mobile (which the Justice Department recently announced it would challenge). I’m sure that had nothing to do with the $500,000 Perry has received from AT&T over the past decade.

In addition, the Dallas Morning News reported last December that AT&T bought 700 copies of Perry’s book, “Fed Up!” to distribute to attendees of an ALEC-sponsored luncheon. (Read more about ALEC)

“…the book purchase was arranged between [AT&T] and the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC], the conservative outfit that invited Perry to speak at its annual policy summit.

“A spokeswoman for the Exchange Council said the book order cost more than $13,000. AT&T said the sponsorship was meant to share Perry’s agenda with people who attended the summit, many of whom are state legislators from across the country.”

The relationship between Perry and AT&T, a Dallas-based corporation, raises many ethical and legal questions. Throw in a connection to ALEC and you have the makings of a world-class larcenous affair that suggests a slight modification to the AT&T slogan, “Rethink Ethical.”

This sort of pay-to-play politics is typical of the Perry regime in Texas. He has long run an operation out of the governor’s mansion that produced lucrative state contracts in exchange for political donations.

Rick Perry Pay-to-Play

Texas business as usual. And as I’ve said before “Perry is an evangelical huckster with no substantive record of achievement? He’s Elmer Gantry with a government job and gets his snake oil straight from the well.”


Fox Nation vs. Reality: On Tea Party Negatives

Posted by on September 1, 2011 at 12:30 pm. NO Comments :

Fox Nation continues to inhabit a universe that does not remotely resemble the real one that the rest of us inhabit. Take, for instance, this item posted today:

Fox Nation - Tea Party Negatives

So according to Fox Nation, the poll (from Quinnipiac) shows higher negatives for the Democratic Party (51-35) than the Tea Party (42-29), which, of course, doesn’t exist. That’s actually true, even if it isn’t a complete reading of the poll’s results (more on that later). What the Fox Nationalists omit from their sensationalist headline is that the Republican Party has even higher negatives (53-32) than the Democrats. The gap between the favorable and unfavorable numbers for the Democrats is 16%, while the gap for the GOP is much worse at 21%.

As for the Tea Party’s numbers, it is important to take into account a couple of significant factors. First of all, the survey reported that the number of people that have not heard enough about the Tea Party to have an opinion (29%) is about two and a half times more than for the Democrats and Republicans. Were that number lower, the negatives for the Tea Party would exceed those for the other parties based on the distribution of the Tea Party’s known numbers. Secondly, the Tea Party’s favorable numbers are lower than those for both the Democrats and Republicans.

The bottom line for this survey is that the numbers for the Democrats, while nothing to boast about, are better than either the Republicans or the Tea Party when fully analyzed. And that’s not quite the way the Fox Nationalists reported it – as usual.

Find us on Google+
Advertisement:

Culture Warrior Bill O’Reilly Takes One In The Gut

Posted by on August 30, 2011 at 10:11 pm. 2 Comments :

Fox Nation GawkerLast week I posted a screen grab from Fox Nation that revealed that the Fox News crew had trouble counting in single digits. The image that appeared on Fox Nation and FoxNews.com with the headline, “Gawker and 7 Other Formerly Popular Sites That Are Dead or Dying,” actually had eight sites in addition to Gawker. What I didn’t know at the time was Fox’s reason for taking up space to slam Gawker. Now I know:

How Bill O’Reilly Tried to Get His Wife’s Boyfriend Investigated By the Cops

Last summer, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly came to believe that his wife was romantically involved with another man. Not just any man, but a police detective in the Long Island community they call home. So O’Reilly did what any concerned husband would do: He pulled strings to get the police department’s internal affairs unit to investigate one of their own for messing with the wrong man’s lady.

Fox News was aware that Gawker was preparing to publish this story about their top ratings draw and had decided to make a preemptive strike. The story reveals compelling evidence that O’Reilly’s marriage is on the skids. His wife had purchased a home in her own name and transferred her voter registration. And her name has been removed from the IRS filings of the charitable foundation that she and Bill had previously managed together.

In addition to the love triangle, the story also features civil corruption via the alleged connection between O’Reilly and his pals at the Nassau County Police Department. It doesn’t help matters that O’Reilly was perhaps dangling a major donation to the department at the time he sought to use the them to extract his romantic revenge. In their defense, Fox was uncharacteristically succinct issuing a terse non-denial:

“Gawker has been lying about Fox News for several years. We are not going to dignify this with any further comment.”

So it appears that the Culture Warrior, the protector of America’s virtue, the bane of Secular-Progressives, is something less than virtuous himself. Gee, who would have known?

Bill O'Reilly


Where In The World Is Glenn Beck?

Posted by on August 29, 2011 at 2:27 pm. 8 Comments :

The past couple of weeks saw Glenn Beck take his Acute Paranoia Revue on the road. He appeared in Israel where he complained that he was losing a million dollars staging a silly affair that purported to “Restore Courage” to ….. something or other. And from there he embarked on a worldwide adventure wherein he was all but invisible. Can you find him?

Where Is Glenn Beck

After making grandiose, narcissistic declarations that the event would change the course of the world, the planet still appears to be on the same orbit. There was no pillar of fire. No gates of Heaven and/or Hell opening. However, there was a miracle, as imagined in the mind of Beck. Just like last year’s “Restoring Honor” event in Washington, D.C. when Beck asserted that a flock of geese constituted a miracle from God, the Israel rally’s miracle was that an unscheduled singer was able to be squeezed into a tightly scripted program at the last minute. That’s not a joke. Beck insisted that that was an actual miracle from God. By that measure I, myself, was the beneficiary of divine intervention a couple of days ago when God caused a new lane to open at a busy grocery store just as I was approaching the check-out area. Praise the Lord!

In his speech from Israel, Beck announced the remainder of his travel itinerary. The first place he would venture post-Israel would be Cape Town, South Africa. His reason for choosing that destination was “to remind the world what the evil of apartheid actually looked like.”

There is precious little evidence that Beck was in Cape Town. He held no rallies and made no public appearances. There were no interviews with the local press. All there was was a broadcast to his U.S. radio affiliates wherein he said he was in Cape Town and that…

“Apartheid is going to play a role in the conversation of the world again, but they’re going to blame Israel for Apartheid and we’re here to set the record straight on what Apartheid was and what it is and is it happening in Israel or not. […] By the way, Apartheid solved in South Africa peacefully. We should figure out how South Africa did that. Huh?”

Apartheid solved Peacefully? Beck knows less about South African history than he does about U.S. history. South Africa was a hotbed of violence perpetrated by a racist regime. The resistance to the government oppression was led by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which the regime regarded as a terrorist organization. Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years. Heroic comrades like Stephen Biko were assassinated. In 1976 a peaceful student protest in Soweto was met by police aggression and resulted in the deaths of 600 protesters. The government’s reign of terror included the arrest and torture of tens of thousands of black Africans.

In his Cape Town broadcast, Beck slammed Mandela as a communist with whom he disagreed on everything. The parallels between his views on Mandela and his views on the revolutions in Egypt, Libya, etc., are striking. He regards all of these uprisings as ominous acts of evil inspired by radical leftists. There is an irony in Beck traveling to South Africa from Israel in that Israel was, to its shame, a supporter of the Apartheid regime. Then Again, so was the American president, and right-wing idol, Ronald Reagan. Based on the available evidence, Beck, too, would have stood with South Africa’s white leadership against the commie hoards from the black homelands.

From Cape Town Beck reportedly went to Venezuela. As Beck tells it, he was denied permission to land by Hugo Chavez, but he found an alternate means of entry into the country. Once again, there is no evidence that he ever set foot in Venezuela or anywhere else in South America. He had previously announced that he would be speaking “to a group of nearly 5,000 local leaders from all over the continent.” If there were a public event of that size it would surely have been reported somewhere. And why have there been no accounts of the event by any of the alleged attendees? Including Beck! His own web site says nothing about his supposed stay in Venezuela.

Finally, Beck headed home to Texas where he delivered a sermon at the High Point Church in Arlington. This is a date that he managed keep. There is an article about it on his web site along with an audio recording of his address. The sermon was typical Beck fare pontificating on his moral superiority and the need to stand (Beck is the nation’s foremost adversary of sitting). He announced that the Human Rights Movement was over and that his Human Responsibility Movement would replace it. With respect to that he introduced his “Declaration of Responsibilities,” all of which he has already personally broken.

Beck is going to have to work harder if he is going to satisfy his insatiable lust for adulation. None of the events on his travels produced much in the way of publicity. Even Fox News ignored him. He is already grumbling about the lack of attention paid by the media. Which is funny because he used to do nothing but bash the press, but now he is desperate for it to notice him again. If this keeps up, expect Beck to escalate his rhetoric and declare war on San Francisco or pronounce himself the Messiah. Short of that he will next be seen crawling under a stone that no one will bother to roll away.

[Update] On his radio program today, Beck said that he had addressed 1,400 rabbis in Cape Town and 5,000 pastors in Venezuela. And still there are no accounts by media or participants of these events. Still, Beck’s web sites have no stories about them. I’m beginning to think the Israel rally was done on a green-screen.


Fox Nation Only Likes Their Own 9/11 Truthers

Posted by on August 28, 2011 at 1:31 pm. NO Comments :

Yet another example of the unique tunnel-blindness of Fox News and their rightist colleagues.

Fox Nation Touré

The Fox Nationalists are clearly disturbed by the conspiracy theorists who believe that the truth about the 9/11 attacks has not yet been told. Consequently they use that as an excuse to dismiss remarks by MSNBC’s Touré regarding global warming. The Fox Nation item links to an article by their pals at NewsBusters:

“On Friday’s Dylan Ratigan Show, MSNBC contributor Touré, who is also a 9/11 truther, wondered if Hurricane Irene is an example of global warming. He speculated, ‘When you talk about an unusual weather event happening in New York and this sort of thing, is this really evidence of global warming to see this sort of a massive storm happening here?’

“Touré is routinely featured on MSNBC, despite his tendency to tweet in support of 9/11 conspiracy theories.”

What a travesty! Hosting a 9/11 Truther to give commentary about unrelated news events? The only thing that could be worse would be to give a 9/11 Truther his own daily show. Like…um…Fox did with 9/11 Truther, Judge Andrew Napolitano

The Fox Nation/NewsBusters gang whines that “It’s a bit much to blame this hurricane on global warming. It’s even weirder when a conspiracy-minded 9/11 truther does it.” I wonder why I haven’t yet seen Fox post an article dismissing everything Napolitano says because of his conspiracy theorism.

And, by the way, Touré is factually correct in his questioning about hurricanes and global warming. The science is pretty well established that the impact of climate change will include more frequent and more severe weather events. But Fox won’t let facts interfere with their bashing of anyone with whom they disagree. They don’t even care if their bashing happens to snag one of their own.


New Tea Party Express Bus Trip Already Out Of Gas

Posted by on August 28, 2011 at 12:57 pm. 8 Comments :

The big kick off celebration for the Tea Party Express’s latest bus trip began with something of a whimper. The event was held in Napa, California amidst the wineries and grape fields.

Last year the Tea Party Express bus tour was launched by Sarah Palin. This year the best they could come up with was losing Nevada senatorial candidate, Sharron Angle. Palin has a good excuse though. She is busy not riding on her own “One America” bus tour, which she quit six days in.

Tea Party Express had heavily promoted this trip, even promising Baggers that “This is your opportunity to hear special guests speakers, including presidential candidates.” Unfortunately, not a single candidate bothered to show up.

The bus trip will continue across the country with plans to end September 12, in Tampa Bay, Florida, in conjunction with a GOP presidential debate sponsored by CNN and Tea Party Express.

When CNN originally announced that they were partnering with Tea party Express, it was an embarrassing association that never should have been entered into. Tea Party Express is a corrupt enterprise that was created by Republican publicist and fundraiser, Sal Russo. Most of the money raised by the group was funneled right back into Russo’s company for publicity and management fees.

What’s more, since the association was announced, the Tea Party has bled support. It now sports favorable ratings of only 20%. It is viewed less favorably than atheists and Muslims.

CNN sullied its already teetering reputation by embracing Tea Party Express. That decision was the work of Ken Jautz, who was promoted to run CNN after his tenure at Headline News. Jautz will forever be remembered as the man who brought Glenn Beck to Television.

And now that the boneheaded decision to clasp hands with TPE has proven to be a fiasco, it is not too late to break ranks. There is simply no excuse for a news enterprise to partner with a phony scam outfit that purports to represent a movement that is widely reviled.