Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly: Eat or drink a full dose of pepper spray on national television
SIGN THIS PETITION:
http://www.change.org/petitions/fox-news-anchor-eat-or-drink-a-full-dose-of-pepper-spray-on-national-television
Created By Nick Douglas
Why This Is Important
Ms. Kelly, on November 21, you told Bill O'Reilly that pepper spray (as used by Lt. John Pike to assault the UC Davis protestors) is "a food product, essentially." That was, of course, ridiculous.
While you allowed that the spray was "abrasive and intrusive", you wondered if it had been diluted (reportedly, it hadn't).
To back up your claim that pepper spray is a food product, please consume as much of it as was sprayed on each protestor's face, in one sitting, on camera at Fox News. You may mix the spray with one serving of food or drink, as I am not a sadist. Then, please relate the effects to your audience.
Showing posts with label Bill O'Reilly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill O'Reilly. Show all posts
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Stephen Singular on Right Wing Rage
From Salon.com:
It's been almost two years since George Tiller, who was one of the country's few providers of later-term abortions, was gunned down in his church in Wichita, Kan. His brutal murder was followed by a heated national debate over who and what was responsible for it. Tiller's killer, Scott Roeder, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who appears to have acted alone. But anti-abortion activists and several prominent commentators -- most notably Fox News host Bill O'Reilly -- had spent years issuing heated attacks on Tiller for his work. Did their emotionally charged rhetoric -- O'Reilly would ridicule the doctor as "Tiller the baby killer" -- create a climate conducive to Roeder's action?
In his new book, "The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion," crime journalist Stephen Singular explores these issues -- and concludes that Tiller's murder can only be understood within the context of right-wing extremism that has become increasingly mainstream. We caught up with him earlier this week:
You've been reporting on right-wing extremist activity since 1987, when you looked into the 1984 murder of talk radio host Alan Berg. How has it changed in the past 25 years?
You know, when I wrote about Alan Berg, I was writing about some very marginalized people. These were a bunch of white guys without jobs, and no money and no prospects and nothing going on; some had been to prison.
Now, [when we talk about the persecution of George Tiller,] we're talking about the attorney general of the state of Kansas. Now we're talking about some of the most successful figures in the American media -- we're talking about multimillionaires who get paid to demonize people on national television, who get paid millions and millions of dollars to tell people [that] Tiller['s] the Baby Killer, who get paid to deny all the complexities we're talking about, it's not just. It's an entire society that's said, "Hey, we're going to reward this kind of behavior."
And that filters down. It affects everything. It's an emotional atmosphere, and it not only affects the general culture -- think about the people who are at risk in that culture, emotionally, psychologically...
Revisiting the murder of Dr. George Tiller
Teresa Cotsirilos
Sunday, Apr 17, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/17/the_murder_of_dr_george_tiller/index.html
It's been almost two years since George Tiller, who was one of the country's few providers of later-term abortions, was gunned down in his church in Wichita, Kan. His brutal murder was followed by a heated national debate over who and what was responsible for it. Tiller's killer, Scott Roeder, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who appears to have acted alone. But anti-abortion activists and several prominent commentators -- most notably Fox News host Bill O'Reilly -- had spent years issuing heated attacks on Tiller for his work. Did their emotionally charged rhetoric -- O'Reilly would ridicule the doctor as "Tiller the baby killer" -- create a climate conducive to Roeder's action?
In his new book, "The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion," crime journalist Stephen Singular explores these issues -- and concludes that Tiller's murder can only be understood within the context of right-wing extremism that has become increasingly mainstream. We caught up with him earlier this week:
You've been reporting on right-wing extremist activity since 1987, when you looked into the 1984 murder of talk radio host Alan Berg. How has it changed in the past 25 years?
You know, when I wrote about Alan Berg, I was writing about some very marginalized people. These were a bunch of white guys without jobs, and no money and no prospects and nothing going on; some had been to prison.
Now, [when we talk about the persecution of George Tiller,] we're talking about the attorney general of the state of Kansas. Now we're talking about some of the most successful figures in the American media -- we're talking about multimillionaires who get paid to demonize people on national television, who get paid millions and millions of dollars to tell people [that] Tiller['s] the Baby Killer, who get paid to deny all the complexities we're talking about, it's not just. It's an entire society that's said, "Hey, we're going to reward this kind of behavior."
And that filters down. It affects everything. It's an emotional atmosphere, and it not only affects the general culture -- think about the people who are at risk in that culture, emotionally, psychologically...
Revisiting the murder of Dr. George Tiller
Teresa Cotsirilos
Sunday, Apr 17, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/17/the_murder_of_dr_george_tiller/index.html
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Videogame of the Week
Brave New PacMan
http://www.bravenewpacman.com/
Where PacMan battles Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin...
http://www.bravenewpacman.com/
Where PacMan battles Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin...
Friday, September 24, 2010
Never Forget: Bad Wars Aren't Possible Unless Good People Back Them
Today's OpenMike blog by Michael Moore September 15, 2010
I know we've been "free" of the Iraq War for two weeks now and our minds have turned to the new football season and Fashion Week in New York. And how exciting that the new fall TV season is just days away!
But before we get too far away from something we would all just like to forget, will you please allow me to just say something plain and blunt and necessary:
We invaded Iraq because most Americans -- including good liberals like Al Franken, Nicholas Kristof & Bill Keller of the New York Times, David Remnick of the New Yorker, the editors of the Atlantic and the New Republic, Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and John Kerry -- wanted to.
Of course the actual blame for the war goes to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz because they ordered the "precision" bombing, the invasion, the occupation, and the theft of our national treasury. I have no doubt that history will record that they committed the undisputed Crime of the (young) Century.
But how did they get away with it, considering they'd lost the presidential election by 543,895 votes? They also knew that the majority of the country probably wouldn't back them in such a war (a Newsweek poll in October 2002 showed 61% thought it was "very important" for Bush to get formal approval from the United Nations for war -- but that never happened). So how did they pull it off?
They did it by getting liberal voices to support their war. They did it by creating the look of bipartisanship. And they convinced other countries' leaders like Tony Blair to get on board and make it look like it wasn't just our intelligence agencies cooking the evidence.
But most importantly, they made this war (and its public support) happen because Bush & Co. had brilliantly conned the New York Times into running a bunch of phony front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had all these "weapons of mass destruction." The administration gleefully fed this false information not to Fox News or the Washington Times. They gave it to America's leading liberal newspaper. They must have had a laugh riot each morning when they'd pick up the New York Times and read the nearly word-for-word scenarios and talking points that they had concocted in the Vice President's office.
I blame the New York Times more for this war than Bush. I expected Bush and Cheney to try and get away with what they did. But the Times -- and the rest of the press -- was supposed to STOP them by doing their job: Be a relentless watchdog of government and business -- and then inform the public so we can take action.
Instead, the New York Times gave the Bush administration the cover they needed. They could -- and did -- say, 'Hey, look, even the Times says Saddam has WMD!'
With this groundwork laid, the Bush crowd ended up convincing a whopping 70% of the public to support the war -- a public that had given him less than 48% of its vote in 2000.
Early liberal support for this war was the key ingredient in selling it to a majority of the public. I realize this is something that no one in the media -- nor most of us -- really wants to discuss. Who among us wants to feel the pain of having to remember that liberals, by joining with Bush, made this war happen?
Please, before our collective memory fades, I just want us to be honest with ourselves and present an unsanitized version of how they pulled off this war. I can guarantee you the revisionists will make sure the real truth will not enter the history books.
Children born when the war began started second grade this month.
Kids who were eleven in 2003 are now old enough to join up and get killed in Iraq in a "non-combat capacity."
They'll never understand how we got here if we don't.
So let me state this clearly: This war was aided and abetted by a) liberals who were afraid to stick their necks out and thus remained silent; and b) liberals who actually said they believed Colin Powell's cartoon presentation at the U.N. and then went against their better judgment by publicly offering their support for the invasion of Iraq.
First, there were those 29 (turncoat) Democratic senators who voted for the war. Then there was the embarrassing display of reporters who couldn't wait to be "embedded" and go for a joy ride on a Bradley tank.
But my real despair lies with the people I counted on for strong opposition to this madness -- but who left the rest of us alone, out on a limb, as we tried to stop the war.
In March of 2003, to be a public figure speaking out against the war was considered instant career suicide. Take the Dixie Chicks as Exhibit A. Their lead singer, Natalie Maines, uttered just one sentence of criticism -- and their career was effectively dead and buried at that moment. Bruce Springsteen spoke out in their defense, and a Colorado DJ was fired for refusing to not play their songs. That was about it. Crickets everywhere else.
Then MSNBC fired the only nightly critic of the war -- the television legend, Phil Donahue. No one at the network -- or any network -- spoke up on his behalf. There would never again be a Phil Donahue show. (Little did GE know that, when they soon filled that 8pm hour with a sports guy by the name of Keith Olbermann, they would end up with the war's most brilliant and fiercest critic, night after night after night.) There were a few others -- Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo, Tim Robbins and Seymour Hersh -- who weren't afraid to speak the truth. But where was everyone else? Where were all those supposed liberal voices in the media?
Instead, this is what we were treated to back in 2003 and 2004:
** Al Franken, who said he "reluctantly" was "a supporter of the war against Saddam." And six months into the war Al was still saying, "There were reasons to go to war against Iraq ... I was very ambivalent about it but I still don't know if it was necessarily wrong (to go to war)."
** Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times, who attacked me and wrote a column comparing me to the nutty right-wingers who claimed Hillary had Vince Foster killed. He said people like me were "polarizing the political cesspool," and he chastised anyone who dared call Bush's reasons for going to war in Iraq "lies."
** Howell Raines, editor-in-chief of the "liberal" New York Times, who was, according to former Times editor Doug Frantz, "eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington ... He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of al-Qaeda." The book "Hard News" reported that "according to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs..."
** Bill Keller, at the time a New York Times columnist, who wrote: "We reluctant hawks may disagree among ourselves about the most compelling logic for war -- protecting America, relieving oppressed Iraqis or reforming the Middle East -- but we generally agree that the logic for standing pat does not hold. ... we are hard pressed to see an alternative that is not built on wishful thinking."
(The New York Times is so left-wing that when Raines retired, they replaced him with... Keller.)
** The New Yorker, the magazine for really smart liberals, found its editor-in-chief, David Remnick, supporting the war on its pages: "History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them. ... a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all." (To cover its ass, the New Yorker had another editor, Rick Hertzberg, write an anti-war editorial as a rebuttal.)
Some of the above have recanted their early support of the war. The Times fired its WMD correspondent and apologized to its readers. Al Franken has been a great Senator. Kristof now writes nice columns (check out last Sunday's).
But the support of the war by these leading liberals and the majority of the Democrats in the Senate made it safe for the Right to let loose a vicious and unchecked tirade of hate and threats on anyone (including myself) who dared to step out of line. It was not uncommon to hear the media describe me as "un-American," "anti-American," "aiding the terrorists," and being a "traitor."
Here are just a couple of examples of what was said about me over the airwaves by two of the nation's leading conservative commentators:
"Let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my 'What Would Jesus Do' band, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, 'Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore,' and then I'd see the little band: 'What Would Jesus Do?' And then I'd realize, 'Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.' And you know, well, I'm not sure." (Glenn Beck)
And:
"Well, I want to kill Michael Moore. Is that all right? All right. And I don't believe in capital punishment. That's just a joke on Moore." (Bill O'Reilly)
(Ironically, O'Reilly made his threat/joke the night after Janet Jackson's breast was bared at the Super Bowl -- which got CBS fined over half a million dollars because, you know, nipples are far more frightening than death threats.)
So that's how I'll personally remember the early war years: living with a real and present danger caused by the hate whipped up by right-wing radio and TV. (I've been advised not to recount certain specific incidents that happened to me, as it would only encourage other crazy people.)
So I dealt with it. And I'm still here. And I know many of you went through your own crap, standing up against the war at school, or work, or at Thanksgiving dinner, taking your own blows for simply saying what was the truth.
But how much easier it would have been for all of us if the liberal establishment had stood with us? We didn't own a daily newspaper, or a magazine with a circulation in the millions. We didn't have our own TV show or network. We weren't invited on shows like "Meet the Press," because they simply could not allow our voice to be heard.
The media watchdog group FAIR reported that in the three weeks after the war started, the CBS Evening News allowed only one anti-war voice on their show -- and that was on one night in one soundbite (and that was four seconds of me in a line from my Oscar speech) -- even though in March of 2003 our anti-war numbers were in the millions (remember the huge demonstrations in hundreds of cities?). We were around 30% of the country according to most polls (that's nearly 100 million Americans!) and yet we had no way to communicate with each other aside from through the Nation and a few websites like CommonDreams.org and Truth-Out.org.
But that was no way to build a huge mass movement of Middle Americans to oppose the war. Unless you had just lucked out and been handed an Oscar on live television in front of a gazillion people where you had 45 seconds to say something before they cut you off and booed you off the stage (hahahaha), you had no public platform. (Jeez, I sure did get booed a lot that year: simply walking through an airport, or eating dinner in a restaurant, or sitting at a Laker game where they suddenly put me up on the Jumbotron and the place went so angry-crazy that Larry David, who was sitting next to me, felt that maybe for his own safety he should perhaps slide a few seats down or go get us a couple of wieners. Instead, he stuck by my side -- and his skillful ninja moves got us out of there alive after the game.)
I know it's hard to remember, but when this war started, there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no way for you to bypass the media lords so you could have your own friggin' say.
Too bad for the bastards, those days are over.
The next time around, it won't be so easy to shut up a country girl band or try to silence someone while he accepts his little gold statue -- or completely ignore the millions of citizens in the streets.
So now we can hope that one of our wars is over. Too bad we lost. I hate to lose, don't you? But the fact is, we lost the very day we invaded a sovereign nation that posed absolutely no threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11. We lost lives (over 4,400 of ours, hundreds of thousands of theirs), we lost limbs (a total of 35,000 troops came back with various wounds and disabilities and God knows how many more with mental problems). We lost the money our grandchildren were supposed to live on.
And we lost our soul, who we were, what we stood for as a once-great country -- lost it all. Can we now ask for redemption -- for forgiveness? Can we be... "America" again?
I guess we'll see. The vast majority of the country eventually came around to the Dixie Chicks' position. And we elected an anti-Iraq-war guy by the name of Barack Hussein Obama.
But, please, promise yourselves never to forget how our country went crazy 7 1/2 years ago -- even though, to many people at the time, it seemed completely normal. And I'm here to tell you, no matter how much better it's gotten, no matter how normal you may think things are now, we're still halfway nuts. Just listen to the new batch of "sensible pundits" as they start to beat the drums about what we should do to Iran. One war down, one (or two or three) to go.
C'mon, Mr. President, not one more kid needs to die overseas wearing a uniform with our flag on it. We can't win like this. Let's dig a few thousand wells in Afghanistan, build a few free mosques, leave behind some food and clothing, fix their electrical grid, issue an apology and set up a Facebook page so they can stay in touch with us -- and then let's get the hell out. Your own National Security Advisor and your CIA Director have told you there are less than 100 al-Qaeda fighters in the entire country. 100???
100,000 U.S. troops going after 100 al-Qaeda? Is this a Looney Tunes presentation? "A-ba-dee-a-ba-dee-a-ba-dee -- That's All Folks!" Let's get real. I'm glad one war is "over." But I know how we got there -- and I'm willing now to fight just as hard to stop these other wars if you won't, Mr. Obama.
Your call.
Yours,
Michael Moore
Mike@MichaelMoore.com
MichaelMoore.com
P.S. Just a thought, Mr. President. Can I ask that you go back and watch this movie I made -- "Fahrenheit 9/11." There might be some answers there. I give you my permission to download it for free by going to this site: TorrentHound.com. Don't tell the studio I said it was ok! They've only made a half a billion $$ on it so far.
P.P.S. To everyone on my list: Thanks to your thousands of generous donations, we've raised over $60,000 for the Muslim community center near Ground Zero. This has made news around the world, that there are Americans who believe in our stated American principles.
I know we've been "free" of the Iraq War for two weeks now and our minds have turned to the new football season and Fashion Week in New York. And how exciting that the new fall TV season is just days away!
But before we get too far away from something we would all just like to forget, will you please allow me to just say something plain and blunt and necessary:
We invaded Iraq because most Americans -- including good liberals like Al Franken, Nicholas Kristof & Bill Keller of the New York Times, David Remnick of the New Yorker, the editors of the Atlantic and the New Republic, Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and John Kerry -- wanted to.
Of course the actual blame for the war goes to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz because they ordered the "precision" bombing, the invasion, the occupation, and the theft of our national treasury. I have no doubt that history will record that they committed the undisputed Crime of the (young) Century.
But how did they get away with it, considering they'd lost the presidential election by 543,895 votes? They also knew that the majority of the country probably wouldn't back them in such a war (a Newsweek poll in October 2002 showed 61% thought it was "very important" for Bush to get formal approval from the United Nations for war -- but that never happened). So how did they pull it off?
They did it by getting liberal voices to support their war. They did it by creating the look of bipartisanship. And they convinced other countries' leaders like Tony Blair to get on board and make it look like it wasn't just our intelligence agencies cooking the evidence.
But most importantly, they made this war (and its public support) happen because Bush & Co. had brilliantly conned the New York Times into running a bunch of phony front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had all these "weapons of mass destruction." The administration gleefully fed this false information not to Fox News or the Washington Times. They gave it to America's leading liberal newspaper. They must have had a laugh riot each morning when they'd pick up the New York Times and read the nearly word-for-word scenarios and talking points that they had concocted in the Vice President's office.
I blame the New York Times more for this war than Bush. I expected Bush and Cheney to try and get away with what they did. But the Times -- and the rest of the press -- was supposed to STOP them by doing their job: Be a relentless watchdog of government and business -- and then inform the public so we can take action.
Instead, the New York Times gave the Bush administration the cover they needed. They could -- and did -- say, 'Hey, look, even the Times says Saddam has WMD!'
With this groundwork laid, the Bush crowd ended up convincing a whopping 70% of the public to support the war -- a public that had given him less than 48% of its vote in 2000.
Early liberal support for this war was the key ingredient in selling it to a majority of the public. I realize this is something that no one in the media -- nor most of us -- really wants to discuss. Who among us wants to feel the pain of having to remember that liberals, by joining with Bush, made this war happen?
Please, before our collective memory fades, I just want us to be honest with ourselves and present an unsanitized version of how they pulled off this war. I can guarantee you the revisionists will make sure the real truth will not enter the history books.
Children born when the war began started second grade this month.
Kids who were eleven in 2003 are now old enough to join up and get killed in Iraq in a "non-combat capacity."
They'll never understand how we got here if we don't.
So let me state this clearly: This war was aided and abetted by a) liberals who were afraid to stick their necks out and thus remained silent; and b) liberals who actually said they believed Colin Powell's cartoon presentation at the U.N. and then went against their better judgment by publicly offering their support for the invasion of Iraq.
First, there were those 29 (turncoat) Democratic senators who voted for the war. Then there was the embarrassing display of reporters who couldn't wait to be "embedded" and go for a joy ride on a Bradley tank.
But my real despair lies with the people I counted on for strong opposition to this madness -- but who left the rest of us alone, out on a limb, as we tried to stop the war.
In March of 2003, to be a public figure speaking out against the war was considered instant career suicide. Take the Dixie Chicks as Exhibit A. Their lead singer, Natalie Maines, uttered just one sentence of criticism -- and their career was effectively dead and buried at that moment. Bruce Springsteen spoke out in their defense, and a Colorado DJ was fired for refusing to not play their songs. That was about it. Crickets everywhere else.
Then MSNBC fired the only nightly critic of the war -- the television legend, Phil Donahue. No one at the network -- or any network -- spoke up on his behalf. There would never again be a Phil Donahue show. (Little did GE know that, when they soon filled that 8pm hour with a sports guy by the name of Keith Olbermann, they would end up with the war's most brilliant and fiercest critic, night after night after night.) There were a few others -- Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo, Tim Robbins and Seymour Hersh -- who weren't afraid to speak the truth. But where was everyone else? Where were all those supposed liberal voices in the media?
Instead, this is what we were treated to back in 2003 and 2004:
** Al Franken, who said he "reluctantly" was "a supporter of the war against Saddam." And six months into the war Al was still saying, "There were reasons to go to war against Iraq ... I was very ambivalent about it but I still don't know if it was necessarily wrong (to go to war)."
** Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times, who attacked me and wrote a column comparing me to the nutty right-wingers who claimed Hillary had Vince Foster killed. He said people like me were "polarizing the political cesspool," and he chastised anyone who dared call Bush's reasons for going to war in Iraq "lies."
** Howell Raines, editor-in-chief of the "liberal" New York Times, who was, according to former Times editor Doug Frantz, "eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington ... He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of al-Qaeda." The book "Hard News" reported that "according to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs..."
** Bill Keller, at the time a New York Times columnist, who wrote: "We reluctant hawks may disagree among ourselves about the most compelling logic for war -- protecting America, relieving oppressed Iraqis or reforming the Middle East -- but we generally agree that the logic for standing pat does not hold. ... we are hard pressed to see an alternative that is not built on wishful thinking."
(The New York Times is so left-wing that when Raines retired, they replaced him with... Keller.)
** The New Yorker, the magazine for really smart liberals, found its editor-in-chief, David Remnick, supporting the war on its pages: "History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them. ... a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all." (To cover its ass, the New Yorker had another editor, Rick Hertzberg, write an anti-war editorial as a rebuttal.)
Some of the above have recanted their early support of the war. The Times fired its WMD correspondent and apologized to its readers. Al Franken has been a great Senator. Kristof now writes nice columns (check out last Sunday's).
But the support of the war by these leading liberals and the majority of the Democrats in the Senate made it safe for the Right to let loose a vicious and unchecked tirade of hate and threats on anyone (including myself) who dared to step out of line. It was not uncommon to hear the media describe me as "un-American," "anti-American," "aiding the terrorists," and being a "traitor."
Here are just a couple of examples of what was said about me over the airwaves by two of the nation's leading conservative commentators:
"Let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my 'What Would Jesus Do' band, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, 'Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore,' and then I'd see the little band: 'What Would Jesus Do?' And then I'd realize, 'Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.' And you know, well, I'm not sure." (Glenn Beck)
And:
"Well, I want to kill Michael Moore. Is that all right? All right. And I don't believe in capital punishment. That's just a joke on Moore." (Bill O'Reilly)
(Ironically, O'Reilly made his threat/joke the night after Janet Jackson's breast was bared at the Super Bowl -- which got CBS fined over half a million dollars because, you know, nipples are far more frightening than death threats.)
So that's how I'll personally remember the early war years: living with a real and present danger caused by the hate whipped up by right-wing radio and TV. (I've been advised not to recount certain specific incidents that happened to me, as it would only encourage other crazy people.)
So I dealt with it. And I'm still here. And I know many of you went through your own crap, standing up against the war at school, or work, or at Thanksgiving dinner, taking your own blows for simply saying what was the truth.
But how much easier it would have been for all of us if the liberal establishment had stood with us? We didn't own a daily newspaper, or a magazine with a circulation in the millions. We didn't have our own TV show or network. We weren't invited on shows like "Meet the Press," because they simply could not allow our voice to be heard.
The media watchdog group FAIR reported that in the three weeks after the war started, the CBS Evening News allowed only one anti-war voice on their show -- and that was on one night in one soundbite (and that was four seconds of me in a line from my Oscar speech) -- even though in March of 2003 our anti-war numbers were in the millions (remember the huge demonstrations in hundreds of cities?). We were around 30% of the country according to most polls (that's nearly 100 million Americans!) and yet we had no way to communicate with each other aside from through the Nation and a few websites like CommonDreams.org and Truth-Out.org.
But that was no way to build a huge mass movement of Middle Americans to oppose the war. Unless you had just lucked out and been handed an Oscar on live television in front of a gazillion people where you had 45 seconds to say something before they cut you off and booed you off the stage (hahahaha), you had no public platform. (Jeez, I sure did get booed a lot that year: simply walking through an airport, or eating dinner in a restaurant, or sitting at a Laker game where they suddenly put me up on the Jumbotron and the place went so angry-crazy that Larry David, who was sitting next to me, felt that maybe for his own safety he should perhaps slide a few seats down or go get us a couple of wieners. Instead, he stuck by my side -- and his skillful ninja moves got us out of there alive after the game.)
I know it's hard to remember, but when this war started, there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no way for you to bypass the media lords so you could have your own friggin' say.
Too bad for the bastards, those days are over.
The next time around, it won't be so easy to shut up a country girl band or try to silence someone while he accepts his little gold statue -- or completely ignore the millions of citizens in the streets.
So now we can hope that one of our wars is over. Too bad we lost. I hate to lose, don't you? But the fact is, we lost the very day we invaded a sovereign nation that posed absolutely no threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11. We lost lives (over 4,400 of ours, hundreds of thousands of theirs), we lost limbs (a total of 35,000 troops came back with various wounds and disabilities and God knows how many more with mental problems). We lost the money our grandchildren were supposed to live on.
And we lost our soul, who we were, what we stood for as a once-great country -- lost it all. Can we now ask for redemption -- for forgiveness? Can we be... "America" again?
I guess we'll see. The vast majority of the country eventually came around to the Dixie Chicks' position. And we elected an anti-Iraq-war guy by the name of Barack Hussein Obama.
But, please, promise yourselves never to forget how our country went crazy 7 1/2 years ago -- even though, to many people at the time, it seemed completely normal. And I'm here to tell you, no matter how much better it's gotten, no matter how normal you may think things are now, we're still halfway nuts. Just listen to the new batch of "sensible pundits" as they start to beat the drums about what we should do to Iran. One war down, one (or two or three) to go.
C'mon, Mr. President, not one more kid needs to die overseas wearing a uniform with our flag on it. We can't win like this. Let's dig a few thousand wells in Afghanistan, build a few free mosques, leave behind some food and clothing, fix their electrical grid, issue an apology and set up a Facebook page so they can stay in touch with us -- and then let's get the hell out. Your own National Security Advisor and your CIA Director have told you there are less than 100 al-Qaeda fighters in the entire country. 100???
100,000 U.S. troops going after 100 al-Qaeda? Is this a Looney Tunes presentation? "A-ba-dee-a-ba-dee-a-ba-dee -- That's All Folks!" Let's get real. I'm glad one war is "over." But I know how we got there -- and I'm willing now to fight just as hard to stop these other wars if you won't, Mr. Obama.
Your call.
Yours,
Michael Moore
Mike@MichaelMoore.com
MichaelMoore.com
P.S. Just a thought, Mr. President. Can I ask that you go back and watch this movie I made -- "Fahrenheit 9/11." There might be some answers there. I give you my permission to download it for free by going to this site: TorrentHound.com. Don't tell the studio I said it was ok! They've only made a half a billion $$ on it so far.
P.P.S. To everyone on my list: Thanks to your thousands of generous donations, we've raised over $60,000 for the Muslim community center near Ground Zero. This has made news around the world, that there are Americans who believe in our stated American principles.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Michael Moore: 'Capitalism is anti-Jesus'
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/22/news/economy/michael_moore_capitalism_love.fortune/
Michael Moore: 'Capitalism is anti-Jesus'In a Fortune interview, the flame-throwing director explains why his new film brings his religion into the picture for the first time.
By Scott Cendrowski, reporter
September 23, 2009
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- The title of Michael Moore's latest film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," may be ironic, but there's nothing subtle about the message, right from the opening scenes.
The two-hour documentary begins with footage of a family being evicted from their foreclosed home by a half dozen police officers. Then he presents more incriminating evidence: a bankrupt Chicago factory where workers are denied pay, a privately run juvenile prison that paid off judges to give convicts longer sentences, and last year's $700 billion bailout of the banking system.
Moore, 55, ends with this conclusion: "Capitalism is an evil and you can't regulate evil. You have to replace it with something that is good for everyone."
The writer-director-partisan, who rose to prominence after his 1989 takedown of GM in the documentary "Roger & Me" and his mainstream hit "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004, spoke with Fortune on the eve of his film's Wednesday opening in New York City and Los Angeles (it opens nationwide on Oct. 2).
Moore talked about how his Catholic upbringing influenced the film, why Corporate America still irks him, and how to fix his economically troubled home state of Michigan. Excerpts:
You've said you started filming "Capitalism: A Love story" a year and a half ago. Did the film change after Lehman went bankrupt and the stock market crashed?
I've thought about this for 20 years. Ever since "Roger and Me," I've felt the problem here is an economic system that is unjust and unfair. It's not democratic. And I keep making these films but I dance around the subject: it's General Motors here, the health-care industry there, and I started thinking, "Why don't I just name it?"
I started out wanting to explore the premise of capitalism being anti-American, and anti-Jesus, meaning it's not a Democratic economy. And it's not run with a moral or ethical code. But when the crash happened, it added a third plot line: not only is capitalism anti-American and anti-Jesus, it doesn't work.
[The wealthiest Americans] proved that the free market is something they really don't believe in, they don't believe in competition, they actually do believe in socialism, that we the people should use our tax dollars to keep them in their mansions and their yachts.
I think they exposed themselves to a lot of middle class people who did believe in their system and they showed everybody the Ponzi scheme that it is. It's set up like a pyramid, so that the richest 1% at the top have more financial wealth than the 95% beneath them.
But the trick here is to get the 95% believing that if they work hard and slave away, they would get to the top of the pyramid. Of course, as we know, only a few people can stand on top of a pyramid. The fact that this crash exposed our economic system as a corrupt scam was something I didn't intend on happening while I was making the movie.
How is this film different from your previous ones?
I talk about my religion, which I have never talked about. I think religion should be a private matter. But I thought it was important to this discussion. I'm not a proselytizer, but I do have very strong beliefs and these beliefs were formed not in the school of Karl Marx, but in the Catholic Church. Priests and nuns taught me these lessons of how we're to treat each other, how we're to treat the poor, and how we're to divide up the pie.
I'm one of the few people on the left who's been fortunate to have access to a mainstream audience. I'm always thinking about ways to communicate with them and stay true to myself, because I am them, and I come from Middle America. I have very conservative values that go contrary to the fictional character that's been created of me by Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and the Fox News Channel. I've been with the same woman for 30 years, I don't invest my money in anything but a savings account.
Has your view of corporate America changed since your first film, "Roger & Me," opened in 1989?
I've become all the more agitated, especially with what I've seen and with having a peak behind the curtain. Having the life I do, working in an industry that's owned by major corporations. [Moore's film is distributed by a unit of Liberty Media, whose CEO John Malone is a formidable capitalist.]
Just a couple weeks ago, the film was going to debut in the Toronto Film Festival in the Elgin Theatre. Visa sponsors the theater, so during the festival it's called the Visa Screening Room. So they had [the film studio] call me to ask, Is there any reference against Visa in the movie? And this is while they're still deciding whether to put the movie in the festival.
Are there any good things happening in American business?
I see very little support for the things we really need to be investing in. Where's the cure for cancer? Where's the bullet train to take us from New York to L.A. in 10 hours? Where are the alternative energy systems to save us when we run out of oil?
I wish these were the priorities. But when Wall Street sucks up our best mathematicians, physicists, engineers, when they should be working on these other things and instead they're working to create derivatives ... c'mon. We're in deep, deep trouble. We need the best minds working on these things.
You live in Michigan, where you were born and raised. How can Detroit be saved?
It revolves around good-paying jobs. We've allowed the middle class to be decimated over the last 30 years. We've allowed our industrial infrastructure to collapse. So instead of initially giving bailout money to a General Motors that was never going to change or to banks so they can cover losses from crazy betting schemes, this money should be going to helping to create jobs in places like Detroit. People need to work. There are so many things we need to build and create for the 21st century.
I would do what my friend Dan Kildee is doing in Flint, Michigan. He's the county treasurer and he's taken over 9,000 homes that have been abandoned. He's tearing them down and his idea essentially shrank the city in physical size. They restored neighborhoods by building parks, fields and woods.
For crime in Detroit: what is the chance, if the person down the street is making $50,000 to $60,000 a year, [that he would] break into your home to steal your TV?
You tried to get Hank Paulson on the phone in the film, but weren't successful. If you got him on the phone today, what would you ask?
If I had a chance to talk to him, I'd want him to come clean and tell me the truth about how he rigged this whole thing. Tell us what happened because we don't know the details. How did so many Goldman people end up in the administration? How is it that Goldman's chief competitors are left to die -- not bailing out Lehman Bros., Bear Stearns falls apart, Merrill Lynch is absorbed into Bank of America -- and look who's left standing: the company that's got all their boys inside the administration.
If capitalism is evil, what's the solution?
Some people say to me, democracy is not an economic system, it's a political system. My answer to that is, you think capitalism has nothing to do with politics?
Let's quit talking like we're back in Economics 101. Capitalism is not only an economic system that legalizes greed, it also has at its foundation a political system of capitalism that is, "We have to buy the political system because we don't have enough votes. We're only 1% of the votes. We have to buy the people, and we have to buy the people by convincing them if they work hard, they too can be rich one day." [Americans] have gone along with it for the last 30 years.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Beast of the Month - April 2009
Beast of the Month - April 2009
Rick Santelli
Pseudo-populist Cable Shill
"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
Populism in America is a funny thing. When it comes from the mouths of guys like Michael Moore, Jim Hightower or Greg Palast who focus their energy defending the little guy against corporate abuse and the collusion of big business and big government, the work gets either ignored or relentlessly attacked. When so-called populism focuses its ire on lesser (and often uglier) targets, on the other hand, it gets highlighted as something to take notice of.
Take Glenn Beck, for example. (And we really mean it, PLEASE take him.) He has become a leading doomsayer in the Obama hackathon that takes place daily on Fox News, and a ratings champ on the "We report, you decide" network. This despite (or perhaps because of) the fact any examination of Beck's rants would reveal a man who isn't a populist like often hyped, but rather someone who is utterly psychotic. Stephen Colbert recently had fun with this on his show, urging Beck to "crank up the crazy and rip off the knob!" He did so after Beck presented an apocalyptic scenario Colbert described as "the most terrifying fictional future I have ever heard yanked right out of someone's ass." He summed up Beck's future vision of America as a land of "ignorant, illiterate, whacked-out hillbillies with nothing to lose. Terrifying! But, more viewers for Fox News!" It's hard to believe that Fox, already the home of borderline personalities such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, could actually lower the bar for unhinged behavior, but, by golly, we gotta hand it to them, they have.
Then there's good old Rush Limbaugh, who is being touted as the new leader of the GOP. Limbaugh, much like O'Reilly, has long portrayed himself as a champion against the establishment, though already unconvincing after any comparison of his deranged oxy-fueled radio rants with Republican talking points memos. Besides this, it's hard to take seriously a multi-millionaire who has never worn blue jeans his entire life when he feigns to be a common man, especially when he froths about right-wing economics that screws the working class in favor of the rich.
Speaking of the working class, how about Joe Wurzelbacher, AKA Joe the Plumber, who was made into a working class hero near the end of the desperate McCain campaign? This after Joe whined to Obama about plans to raise taxes on people making over $250K a year (not a major working class concern.) To be fair, Joe W. deserves some sympathy after the Obama machine began illegally digging into his private files in order to uncover dirt after McCain used him as a political prop. However, Plumber Joe has since exploited his faux-celebrity status as a tool for reactionary political forces. Recently, he was hired by the Orwellian-named Americans for Prosperity to speak at rallies against the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize. Actual blue collar workers managed to sneak in to the events and heckle Joe while wealthy right-wingers cheered on his anti-worker pandering. Plumber Joe, hope you're enjoying your Warholian fifteen minutes while they last.
Still, the most offensive faux-populist moment of recent has not come from Rush, Beck or even Joe W. Instead, the award must go to CNBC's Rick Santelli, The Konformist Beast of the Month.
Santelli was, until February 19th, a fairly unknown third-rate correspondent for the minimally watched CNBC business news network. That all changed when discussing Barack Obama's Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan to help nine million families avoid foreclosure with a $75 billion fund. On the network, he blasted the plan: "The government is promoting bad behavior... Why don’t you put up a Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water... It's time for another tea party!"
(As he said this, Santelli was on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, and the traders who cheered him on appeared to be the wimpiest, most pasty-skinned mob since the Brooks Brother riot in Florida during the 2000 election.)
The so-called "Rant of the Year" was curious in many respects. Imagine, for example, if a cable news correspondent had pulled something similar about the Iraq War being a scam right before it was launched. Just what would've been the reaction to that? No doubt he/she would've been blasted for lacking journalistic objectivity and likely would've lost their job. Or perhaps for an even more recent comparison, when the Wall Street $700 billion dollar bailout was being debated in September and October, where were the Rick Santellis blasting the promotion of bad behavior and declaring the recipients of the boondoggle to be losers? Instead, all objectivity was thrown out the window and the swindle was pushed through with establishment media hysteria behind it, promoting bad behavior be damned. Yet suddenly, when the issue becomes providing $75 billion in aid to help victims of subprime loan scams keep their homes, outrage becomes acceptable. This, of course, is the bigger point: attacking trillion-dollar war rackets and Wall Street handouts isn't kosher, but calling poor and middle-class home owners "losers" while they struggle to remain afloat is okely-dokely.
The hypocrisy in this case is even worse: on the Website The eXiled, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine reported that General Electric, the parent company to CNBC, received $139 billion in government-backed loan guarantees to keep GE Capital from going bankrupt and sinking the GE empire, CNBC included, with it. That amount, incidentally, is $64 billion more than what nine million subprime victims Santelli mocked as losers are to receive in the Obama plan. Noting these facts, Ames & Levine sarcastically dismissed Santelli as a bailout welfare queen.
The response to Santelli's rant proves just how okay the media establishment was with his hypocritical stand. As Santelli frothed, the folks in the CNBC anchor booth chuckled as though it was entertaining truths. Quickly, the rant went "viral" on YouTube, which is quite unusual since media/entertainment oligopolies such as NBC normally ruthlessly suppress any free distribution of their copyrighted work over the Internet. The "viral" nature of the video was pushed on cyberspace by Matt Drudge, who seemed flushed with an excitement he normally gets only from gay porn. On CNBC's big sister MSNBC, it was promoted by smiling mouthpieces who gushed about the - here comes the "P" word - populist nature of his rant.
Of course, perhaps the fault here lies in the continuing promotion of the George Magazine philosophy which has turned politics into entertainment, reducing actual debate about substance and ideas into shallow celebrity cults of personality. In that context, Santelli is indeed a "populist" hero, as his manufactured celebrity status qualifies him for the name brand certification.
But laying the blame at the feet of poor John-John (who even in death has been the most influential man in journalism over the last decade, though that is definitely influence to the worst) wouldn't be honest. For it wasn't mere celebrity narcissism behind the promotion of the Santelli rant, but rather a heavily financed right-wing machine. A Playboy article by Ames and Levine links Santelli's demand for a "tea party" with a project backed by the deep pockets of the ultra-right Koch family. Santelli’s call for a "Chicago Tea Party" was a mainstream push for an Astroturf "grass-roots" campaign for “tea parties” nationally protesting Obama's economic policies from the right. The case made by Ames and Levine is pretty simple: if Santelli wasn't pimping out his minimal journalistic cred for major Koch bucks, he was definitely selling himself short.
Here's another case study to show how out of whack the framing of "populism" is in the USA: the telling reaction to the AIG bonus scandal. When it was revealed that AIG had paid $165 million out of $170 billion in bonuses to employees, there was legitimate widespread outrage in the public, outrage that was neither orchestrated nor anticipated. (And yes, let's ignore for a second that, at this point, $165 million is chump change for Wall Street.) Establishment politicians chimed in, feigning outrage as well, including Barack Obama, who unconvincingly pretended to be upset, even though his administration directed legislation allowing the bonus loophole. Faced with mass anger, Congress originally pushed for 90 percent surtaxes on Wall Street bailout company bonuses for anyone making over $250K, but after Obama declared opposition to the plan, it appears to be dead on arrival. (Obama's excuse, that to stop the bonuses from going through would interfere with legal contracts, oddly wasn't used when he forced UAW members take massive pay cuts in Detroit.) Quickly, the korporate media, rather than helping the AIG outrage go viral, tried to squash it, with Michael Gerson of the Washington Post decrying the controversy as "demagoguery" rather than genuine.
To be fair, there was some backlash against Santelli as well. Still, it seems the main source of any mainstream outrage against him was not for his crude dismissal of struggling homeowners, but rather for how his rant was an attack on Barack Obama, the patron saint of yuppie liberalism. (Tellingly, it was Jon Stewart, the leading media mouthpiece of yuppie liberalism, who smacked up CNBC the most, using Jim Cramer of the news network's Mad Money as a stand-in after Santelli wimped out on a Daily Show appearance.)
Meanwhile, after Team Obama later announced their trillion dollar "toxic asset" bailout for Wall Street, there was again no populist rant on cable news against subsidizing losers and promoting bad behavior. Putting it all together, let's note the pattern:
* $700 billion TARP bailout deal for Wall Street: Mass cheerleading for the plan
* $787 billion Obama Stimulus Plan that was somewhat aimed at the middle and lower class: Controversy and vigorous debate
* $75 billion Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan fund to help homeowners avoid foreclosure: Smug “journalist” denounces it as a plan to help "losers"
* Attempt to tax $165 million in bonuses at bailout recipient AIG: Controversy is denounced as "demagoguery"
* $1 trillion plan to bailout Wall Street's "toxic assets": No controversy whatsoever
It seems the only time any controversy is hyped in the mainstream press is when the recipient of the money is even partially the poor, the working class and the middle class. Meanwhile, though the public is indeed outraged by the massive swindle over the last year by Wall Street (with up to $9 trillion in government resources pumped in to these korporate parasites) blowhards like Santelli are trying to intentionally confuse the public, equating the Wall Street bailout with the stimulus package and focus the ire of rage against the poor and disenfranchised rather than the bankers.
Perhaps most important, there appears to be a concerted attempt by the right wing to frame Barack Obama's positions as far left, even though he has pushed more to give handouts to Wall Street than even the Bush Administration. With unemployment at 8.5 percent and rising, hopefully the image of Obama as the great progressive champion will soon be gone (and good riddance.) Until then, it appears that even Santelli isn't the worst example of phony populism coming from Chicago.
In any case, we salute Rick Santelli as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Ricky!!!
Sources:
Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?" Playboy 27 February 2009 <http://www.playboy.com/blog/2009/02/backstabber.html>.
Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "'Slick Rick' Santelli Is A Bailout Queen." The eXiled 3 March 2009 <http://exiledonline.com/%E2%80%9Cslick-rick%E2%80%9D-santelli-is-a-bailout-queen-tea-party-mascot%E2%80%99s-company-took-139-billion-in-bailout-funds-ge-uses-taxpayer-money-to-censor-its-critics-destroy-bailout-program-f/>.
Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "Victory Gloat: Ames & Levin Serve Up Santelli's Head on The Daily Show." Huffington Post 5 March 2009 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/05/jon-stewart-eviscerates-c_n_172057.html>.
Calmes, Jackie and Story, Louise. "Outcry Builds in Washington for Recovery of A.I.G. Bonuses" New York Times 19 March 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/business/19bailout.html>.
"CNBC's Santelli Rants About Housing Bailout." ABC News 19 February 2009 <http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/02/cnbcs-santelli.html>.
Donmoyer, Ryan J. "Dodd Blames Obama Administration for Bonus Amendment." Bloomberg 19 March 2009 <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aT_tMXRy2vDs>.
"Doom Bunker - Glenn Beck's 'War Room'." ColbertNation.com 4 March 2009 <http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/220649/march-04-2009/doom-bunker---glenn-beck-s--war-room->.
Edwards, David and Webster, Stephen C. "Colbert Mocks 'Crazy Eyes' Beck with 'Doom Bunker' Segment." Raw Story 5 March 2009 <http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Colbert_mocks_Glenn_Beck_with_doom_0305.html>.
Ford, Glen. "So President Obama Is Finally Pissed Off? So What?" Black Agenda Report 18 March 2009 <http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/so-president-obama-finally-pissed-so-what>.
Grey, Barry. "Wall Street Celebrates Government Windfall for Banks and Big Investors." World Socialist Web Site 24 March 2009 <http://wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/toxi-m24.shtml>.
Oswald, Rachel. "Union Plumbers Heckle and Jeer 'Joe the Plumber' at Rally." Raw Story 31 March 2009 <http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Union_plumbers_heckle_Joe_Plumber_at_0331.html>.
Ritholtz, Barry. "Rick Santelli’s Planted Rant?" The Big Picture 28 February 2009 <http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/02/rick-santellis-faux-rant>.
Sirota, David. "Welcome to Double-standard America." Salon 21 March 2009 <http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/03/21/sirota>.
Spitzer, Eliot. "The Real AIG Scandal." Slate 17 March 2009 <http://www.slate.com/id/2213942/>.
Rick Santelli
Pseudo-populist Cable Shill
"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
Populism in America is a funny thing. When it comes from the mouths of guys like Michael Moore, Jim Hightower or Greg Palast who focus their energy defending the little guy against corporate abuse and the collusion of big business and big government, the work gets either ignored or relentlessly attacked. When so-called populism focuses its ire on lesser (and often uglier) targets, on the other hand, it gets highlighted as something to take notice of.
Take Glenn Beck, for example. (And we really mean it, PLEASE take him.) He has become a leading doomsayer in the Obama hackathon that takes place daily on Fox News, and a ratings champ on the "We report, you decide" network. This despite (or perhaps because of) the fact any examination of Beck's rants would reveal a man who isn't a populist like often hyped, but rather someone who is utterly psychotic. Stephen Colbert recently had fun with this on his show, urging Beck to "crank up the crazy and rip off the knob!" He did so after Beck presented an apocalyptic scenario Colbert described as "the most terrifying fictional future I have ever heard yanked right out of someone's ass." He summed up Beck's future vision of America as a land of "ignorant, illiterate, whacked-out hillbillies with nothing to lose. Terrifying! But, more viewers for Fox News!" It's hard to believe that Fox, already the home of borderline personalities such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, could actually lower the bar for unhinged behavior, but, by golly, we gotta hand it to them, they have.
Then there's good old Rush Limbaugh, who is being touted as the new leader of the GOP. Limbaugh, much like O'Reilly, has long portrayed himself as a champion against the establishment, though already unconvincing after any comparison of his deranged oxy-fueled radio rants with Republican talking points memos. Besides this, it's hard to take seriously a multi-millionaire who has never worn blue jeans his entire life when he feigns to be a common man, especially when he froths about right-wing economics that screws the working class in favor of the rich.
Speaking of the working class, how about Joe Wurzelbacher, AKA Joe the Plumber, who was made into a working class hero near the end of the desperate McCain campaign? This after Joe whined to Obama about plans to raise taxes on people making over $250K a year (not a major working class concern.) To be fair, Joe W. deserves some sympathy after the Obama machine began illegally digging into his private files in order to uncover dirt after McCain used him as a political prop. However, Plumber Joe has since exploited his faux-celebrity status as a tool for reactionary political forces. Recently, he was hired by the Orwellian-named Americans for Prosperity to speak at rallies against the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize. Actual blue collar workers managed to sneak in to the events and heckle Joe while wealthy right-wingers cheered on his anti-worker pandering. Plumber Joe, hope you're enjoying your Warholian fifteen minutes while they last.
Still, the most offensive faux-populist moment of recent has not come from Rush, Beck or even Joe W. Instead, the award must go to CNBC's Rick Santelli, The Konformist Beast of the Month.
Santelli was, until February 19th, a fairly unknown third-rate correspondent for the minimally watched CNBC business news network. That all changed when discussing Barack Obama's Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan to help nine million families avoid foreclosure with a $75 billion fund. On the network, he blasted the plan: "The government is promoting bad behavior... Why don’t you put up a Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water... It's time for another tea party!"
(As he said this, Santelli was on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, and the traders who cheered him on appeared to be the wimpiest, most pasty-skinned mob since the Brooks Brother riot in Florida during the 2000 election.)
The so-called "Rant of the Year" was curious in many respects. Imagine, for example, if a cable news correspondent had pulled something similar about the Iraq War being a scam right before it was launched. Just what would've been the reaction to that? No doubt he/she would've been blasted for lacking journalistic objectivity and likely would've lost their job. Or perhaps for an even more recent comparison, when the Wall Street $700 billion dollar bailout was being debated in September and October, where were the Rick Santellis blasting the promotion of bad behavior and declaring the recipients of the boondoggle to be losers? Instead, all objectivity was thrown out the window and the swindle was pushed through with establishment media hysteria behind it, promoting bad behavior be damned. Yet suddenly, when the issue becomes providing $75 billion in aid to help victims of subprime loan scams keep their homes, outrage becomes acceptable. This, of course, is the bigger point: attacking trillion-dollar war rackets and Wall Street handouts isn't kosher, but calling poor and middle-class home owners "losers" while they struggle to remain afloat is okely-dokely.
The hypocrisy in this case is even worse: on the Website The eXiled, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine reported that General Electric, the parent company to CNBC, received $139 billion in government-backed loan guarantees to keep GE Capital from going bankrupt and sinking the GE empire, CNBC included, with it. That amount, incidentally, is $64 billion more than what nine million subprime victims Santelli mocked as losers are to receive in the Obama plan. Noting these facts, Ames & Levine sarcastically dismissed Santelli as a bailout welfare queen.
The response to Santelli's rant proves just how okay the media establishment was with his hypocritical stand. As Santelli frothed, the folks in the CNBC anchor booth chuckled as though it was entertaining truths. Quickly, the rant went "viral" on YouTube, which is quite unusual since media/entertainment oligopolies such as NBC normally ruthlessly suppress any free distribution of their copyrighted work over the Internet. The "viral" nature of the video was pushed on cyberspace by Matt Drudge, who seemed flushed with an excitement he normally gets only from gay porn. On CNBC's big sister MSNBC, it was promoted by smiling mouthpieces who gushed about the - here comes the "P" word - populist nature of his rant.
Of course, perhaps the fault here lies in the continuing promotion of the George Magazine philosophy which has turned politics into entertainment, reducing actual debate about substance and ideas into shallow celebrity cults of personality. In that context, Santelli is indeed a "populist" hero, as his manufactured celebrity status qualifies him for the name brand certification.
But laying the blame at the feet of poor John-John (who even in death has been the most influential man in journalism over the last decade, though that is definitely influence to the worst) wouldn't be honest. For it wasn't mere celebrity narcissism behind the promotion of the Santelli rant, but rather a heavily financed right-wing machine. A Playboy article by Ames and Levine links Santelli's demand for a "tea party" with a project backed by the deep pockets of the ultra-right Koch family. Santelli’s call for a "Chicago Tea Party" was a mainstream push for an Astroturf "grass-roots" campaign for “tea parties” nationally protesting Obama's economic policies from the right. The case made by Ames and Levine is pretty simple: if Santelli wasn't pimping out his minimal journalistic cred for major Koch bucks, he was definitely selling himself short.
Here's another case study to show how out of whack the framing of "populism" is in the USA: the telling reaction to the AIG bonus scandal. When it was revealed that AIG had paid $165 million out of $170 billion in bonuses to employees, there was legitimate widespread outrage in the public, outrage that was neither orchestrated nor anticipated. (And yes, let's ignore for a second that, at this point, $165 million is chump change for Wall Street.) Establishment politicians chimed in, feigning outrage as well, including Barack Obama, who unconvincingly pretended to be upset, even though his administration directed legislation allowing the bonus loophole. Faced with mass anger, Congress originally pushed for 90 percent surtaxes on Wall Street bailout company bonuses for anyone making over $250K, but after Obama declared opposition to the plan, it appears to be dead on arrival. (Obama's excuse, that to stop the bonuses from going through would interfere with legal contracts, oddly wasn't used when he forced UAW members take massive pay cuts in Detroit.) Quickly, the korporate media, rather than helping the AIG outrage go viral, tried to squash it, with Michael Gerson of the Washington Post decrying the controversy as "demagoguery" rather than genuine.
To be fair, there was some backlash against Santelli as well. Still, it seems the main source of any mainstream outrage against him was not for his crude dismissal of struggling homeowners, but rather for how his rant was an attack on Barack Obama, the patron saint of yuppie liberalism. (Tellingly, it was Jon Stewart, the leading media mouthpiece of yuppie liberalism, who smacked up CNBC the most, using Jim Cramer of the news network's Mad Money as a stand-in after Santelli wimped out on a Daily Show appearance.)
Meanwhile, after Team Obama later announced their trillion dollar "toxic asset" bailout for Wall Street, there was again no populist rant on cable news against subsidizing losers and promoting bad behavior. Putting it all together, let's note the pattern:
* $700 billion TARP bailout deal for Wall Street: Mass cheerleading for the plan
* $787 billion Obama Stimulus Plan that was somewhat aimed at the middle and lower class: Controversy and vigorous debate
* $75 billion Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan fund to help homeowners avoid foreclosure: Smug “journalist” denounces it as a plan to help "losers"
* Attempt to tax $165 million in bonuses at bailout recipient AIG: Controversy is denounced as "demagoguery"
* $1 trillion plan to bailout Wall Street's "toxic assets": No controversy whatsoever
It seems the only time any controversy is hyped in the mainstream press is when the recipient of the money is even partially the poor, the working class and the middle class. Meanwhile, though the public is indeed outraged by the massive swindle over the last year by Wall Street (with up to $9 trillion in government resources pumped in to these korporate parasites) blowhards like Santelli are trying to intentionally confuse the public, equating the Wall Street bailout with the stimulus package and focus the ire of rage against the poor and disenfranchised rather than the bankers.
Perhaps most important, there appears to be a concerted attempt by the right wing to frame Barack Obama's positions as far left, even though he has pushed more to give handouts to Wall Street than even the Bush Administration. With unemployment at 8.5 percent and rising, hopefully the image of Obama as the great progressive champion will soon be gone (and good riddance.) Until then, it appears that even Santelli isn't the worst example of phony populism coming from Chicago.
In any case, we salute Rick Santelli as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Ricky!!!
Sources:
Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?" Playboy 27 February 2009 <http://www.playboy.com/blog/2009/02/backstabber.html>.
Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "'Slick Rick' Santelli Is A Bailout Queen." The eXiled 3 March 2009 <http://exiledonline.com/%E2%80%9Cslick-rick%E2%80%9D-santelli-is-a-bailout-queen-tea-party-mascot%E2%80%99s-company-took-139-billion-in-bailout-funds-ge-uses-taxpayer-money-to-censor-its-critics-destroy-bailout-program-f/>.
Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "Victory Gloat: Ames & Levin Serve Up Santelli's Head on The Daily Show." Huffington Post 5 March 2009 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/05/jon-stewart-eviscerates-c_n_172057.html>.
Calmes, Jackie and Story, Louise. "Outcry Builds in Washington for Recovery of A.I.G. Bonuses" New York Times 19 March 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/business/19bailout.html>.
"CNBC's Santelli Rants About Housing Bailout." ABC News 19 February 2009 <http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/02/cnbcs-santelli.html>.
Donmoyer, Ryan J. "Dodd Blames Obama Administration for Bonus Amendment." Bloomberg 19 March 2009 <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aT_tMXRy2vDs>.
"Doom Bunker - Glenn Beck's 'War Room'." ColbertNation.com 4 March 2009 <http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/220649/march-04-2009/doom-bunker---glenn-beck-s--war-room->.
Edwards, David and Webster, Stephen C. "Colbert Mocks 'Crazy Eyes' Beck with 'Doom Bunker' Segment." Raw Story 5 March 2009 <http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Colbert_mocks_Glenn_Beck_with_doom_0305.html>.
Ford, Glen. "So President Obama Is Finally Pissed Off? So What?" Black Agenda Report 18 March 2009 <http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/so-president-obama-finally-pissed-so-what>.
Grey, Barry. "Wall Street Celebrates Government Windfall for Banks and Big Investors." World Socialist Web Site 24 March 2009 <http://wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/toxi-m24.shtml>.
Oswald, Rachel. "Union Plumbers Heckle and Jeer 'Joe the Plumber' at Rally." Raw Story 31 March 2009 <http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Union_plumbers_heckle_Joe_Plumber_at_0331.html>.
Ritholtz, Barry. "Rick Santelli’s Planted Rant?" The Big Picture 28 February 2009 <http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/02/rick-santellis-faux-rant>.
Sirota, David. "Welcome to Double-standard America." Salon 21 March 2009 <http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/03/21/sirota>.
Spitzer, Eliot. "The Real AIG Scandal." Slate 17 March 2009 <http://www.slate.com/id/2213942/>.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Obama On Health Care: A Comprehensive Betrayal
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-health-care-comprehensive-betrayal-%E2%80%93-where-do-we-go-here
Obama On Health Care: A Comprehensive Betrayal – Where Do We Go From Here?
The shrunken and eviscerated public option in the Obama health care plan may now be discarded in favor of something called a health co-op. The mounting toll of concessions to drug companies and bailouts of private insurers contained in the Obama plan have transformed it, according to Rep. John Conyers, into “crap,” and threaten to make Obama a one-term president. Republicans, all the while, are fighting Obamacare every bit as resolutely as if it were Medicare For All, drumming up disinformed protesters for health care town meetings. And the embargo of single payer media coverage continues, despite its being the majority sentiment of Americans. This is the year of health care reform. Or not.
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Wed, 08/12/2009
At some point in last year's presidential election campaign, Barack Obama went on Bill O'Reilly's show to concede that maybe the war in Iraq, and Bush's murderous escalation of that war, the so-called surge, were not such bad ideas after all. Obama met with the admirals and generals and came away declaring that withdrawal from Iraq really meant withdrawal to secure bases inside Iraq. A US troop pullout would not happen until well into his second term, if then, with the accent on the “if.”
Casting the wishes of most Americans and the overwhelming majority of his own party under the bus, Democratic leaders and the corporate media told us all, was the wise, the realistic, the pragmatic thing to do. The election, they said, would be waged on domestic policy, on health care. Barack Obama has again and again doubled down on that set of promises, declaring that his first term should be judged on whether he manages to deliver comprehensive, affordable health care to everybody, including the nation's fifty million uninsured.
Seven months into his administration, Barack Obama has never been the antiwar president. He was the first president in American history to keep a Secretary of Defense appointed by the other party. Obama is not the anti-warrantless wiretapping president, or the anti-torture president or the anti-NAFTA president, or the pro-public education president, either. He bought GM but refused to use it as a lever to create a new passenger rail industry or green jobs, instead crushing the auto workers and forsaking his promises to make it easier to organize unions. Obama has transferred, as Glen Ford points out, $12 trillion dollars to fraudulent Wall Street banksters, more than all previous presidents combined. Beyond the lovely wife and family, and the novelty of a black president who speaks full sentences in correct English, not much is left of the man or the cause tens of millions thought they voted for.
It looks like Barack Obama won't be the health care president either. Obama's health care plan is so full of concessions to drug companies, so crammed with a constantly growing list of bailouts and exceptions for insurance companies that the White House is deliberately withholding information on it from Obama' own supporters. Organizing For America, the remnant of the Obama campaign and inheritor of its 13 million strong email and phone list, is calling supporters to canvass and turn out for health care “town meetings,” but dares not tell people exactly what they are supporting. For a while it was something called “the public option,” which would compete with and keep the insurance companies honest. Now it's something even cloudier, called a health co-op.
No less a progressive stalwart than Detroit's Rep. John Conyers announced his deep disappointment with Barack Obama before a crowd of progressives last month in Washington's Busboys and Poets restaurant. Obama, he opined, could be a one-term president if he doesn't manage to deliver on health care.
Conyers is the sponsor of HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All Act, which proposes the expansion of the highly successful Medicare program, along with enhancements such as dental coverage to all Americans. President Obama has admitted many times in recent months that Medicare For All, also called single payer, is the only way, and the least expensive way to cover the uninsured while at the same time bringing costs down. But with few exceptions, leading Democrats, themselves in the pay of health insurance companies and Big Pharma, have declared that Medicare For All is “politically infeasible.”
With corporate media shutting off all points of view to the left of the president, and Republicans fighting even the hopelessly compromised Democratic plans as if they were single payer, the public is presented with an utterly distorted picture of the health care debate --- pro-Obama legislators being shouted down by right wing white seniors on Medicare worried about government coming between them and their doctors, and liberal Democrats pleading for civility. It's worth remembering that the same people calling for amiable and civil discourse on health care have ruthlessly censored any mention of single payer from the broadcast airwaves. Even the White House has disinvited the president's own family doctor for his single payer sentiments, and removed the testimony of single payer advocates from White House transcripts and video.
For the moment, argues Dave Lindorff, single payer advocates have more in common with some of the deluded Republican protesters at public health town meetings than they have with Democratic legislators at the front of the room. They know they're being lied to and they know that the proceedings are sham and theatre and they are acting accordingly. Maybe we ought to be doing the same. We ought to insist on a floor vote on HR 676, and demand that our representatives support it. We also have to demand that states be free to pursue their own single payer experiments.
It's time to stop listening to Democrats who say Medicare For All is “politically infeasible” despite its being the democratic will of most of the American people. On their lips, political feasibility is just another name for whether it can pass the legislature this session. Political feasibility is not even in the language of movements for social change. The activists of the 1950s and 60s Freedom Movement knew very well that their demands were not politically feasible. Should they have shut up until Congress and the Supreme Court caught up with them?
Barack Obama may well make himself a one-term president by adding health care to the growing list of his betrayals, and he might come close to handing the Congress back to Republicans as soon as next year. Those are the wages of comprehensive betrayal. If that's what they want to do, we can't stop them. We've got our own work to do, going forward, and regardless of what they Democratic leaders and corporate media imagine is politically feasible.
Obama On Health Care: A Comprehensive Betrayal – Where Do We Go From Here?
The shrunken and eviscerated public option in the Obama health care plan may now be discarded in favor of something called a health co-op. The mounting toll of concessions to drug companies and bailouts of private insurers contained in the Obama plan have transformed it, according to Rep. John Conyers, into “crap,” and threaten to make Obama a one-term president. Republicans, all the while, are fighting Obamacare every bit as resolutely as if it were Medicare For All, drumming up disinformed protesters for health care town meetings. And the embargo of single payer media coverage continues, despite its being the majority sentiment of Americans. This is the year of health care reform. Or not.
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Wed, 08/12/2009
At some point in last year's presidential election campaign, Barack Obama went on Bill O'Reilly's show to concede that maybe the war in Iraq, and Bush's murderous escalation of that war, the so-called surge, were not such bad ideas after all. Obama met with the admirals and generals and came away declaring that withdrawal from Iraq really meant withdrawal to secure bases inside Iraq. A US troop pullout would not happen until well into his second term, if then, with the accent on the “if.”
Casting the wishes of most Americans and the overwhelming majority of his own party under the bus, Democratic leaders and the corporate media told us all, was the wise, the realistic, the pragmatic thing to do. The election, they said, would be waged on domestic policy, on health care. Barack Obama has again and again doubled down on that set of promises, declaring that his first term should be judged on whether he manages to deliver comprehensive, affordable health care to everybody, including the nation's fifty million uninsured.
Seven months into his administration, Barack Obama has never been the antiwar president. He was the first president in American history to keep a Secretary of Defense appointed by the other party. Obama is not the anti-warrantless wiretapping president, or the anti-torture president or the anti-NAFTA president, or the pro-public education president, either. He bought GM but refused to use it as a lever to create a new passenger rail industry or green jobs, instead crushing the auto workers and forsaking his promises to make it easier to organize unions. Obama has transferred, as Glen Ford points out, $12 trillion dollars to fraudulent Wall Street banksters, more than all previous presidents combined. Beyond the lovely wife and family, and the novelty of a black president who speaks full sentences in correct English, not much is left of the man or the cause tens of millions thought they voted for.
It looks like Barack Obama won't be the health care president either. Obama's health care plan is so full of concessions to drug companies, so crammed with a constantly growing list of bailouts and exceptions for insurance companies that the White House is deliberately withholding information on it from Obama' own supporters. Organizing For America, the remnant of the Obama campaign and inheritor of its 13 million strong email and phone list, is calling supporters to canvass and turn out for health care “town meetings,” but dares not tell people exactly what they are supporting. For a while it was something called “the public option,” which would compete with and keep the insurance companies honest. Now it's something even cloudier, called a health co-op.
No less a progressive stalwart than Detroit's Rep. John Conyers announced his deep disappointment with Barack Obama before a crowd of progressives last month in Washington's Busboys and Poets restaurant. Obama, he opined, could be a one-term president if he doesn't manage to deliver on health care.
Conyers is the sponsor of HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All Act, which proposes the expansion of the highly successful Medicare program, along with enhancements such as dental coverage to all Americans. President Obama has admitted many times in recent months that Medicare For All, also called single payer, is the only way, and the least expensive way to cover the uninsured while at the same time bringing costs down. But with few exceptions, leading Democrats, themselves in the pay of health insurance companies and Big Pharma, have declared that Medicare For All is “politically infeasible.”
With corporate media shutting off all points of view to the left of the president, and Republicans fighting even the hopelessly compromised Democratic plans as if they were single payer, the public is presented with an utterly distorted picture of the health care debate --- pro-Obama legislators being shouted down by right wing white seniors on Medicare worried about government coming between them and their doctors, and liberal Democrats pleading for civility. It's worth remembering that the same people calling for amiable and civil discourse on health care have ruthlessly censored any mention of single payer from the broadcast airwaves. Even the White House has disinvited the president's own family doctor for his single payer sentiments, and removed the testimony of single payer advocates from White House transcripts and video.
For the moment, argues Dave Lindorff, single payer advocates have more in common with some of the deluded Republican protesters at public health town meetings than they have with Democratic legislators at the front of the room. They know they're being lied to and they know that the proceedings are sham and theatre and they are acting accordingly. Maybe we ought to be doing the same. We ought to insist on a floor vote on HR 676, and demand that our representatives support it. We also have to demand that states be free to pursue their own single payer experiments.
It's time to stop listening to Democrats who say Medicare For All is “politically infeasible” despite its being the democratic will of most of the American people. On their lips, political feasibility is just another name for whether it can pass the legislature this session. Political feasibility is not even in the language of movements for social change. The activists of the 1950s and 60s Freedom Movement knew very well that their demands were not politically feasible. Should they have shut up until Congress and the Supreme Court caught up with them?
Barack Obama may well make himself a one-term president by adding health care to the growing list of his betrayals, and he might come close to handing the Congress back to Republicans as soon as next year. Those are the wages of comprehensive betrayal. If that's what they want to do, we can't stop them. We've got our own work to do, going forward, and regardless of what they Democratic leaders and corporate media imagine is politically feasible.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Glenn Beck ‘has a deep-seated hatred for logic’
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/30/colbert-beck-has-a-deep-seated-hatred-for-logic/
Colbert: Glenn Beck ‘has a deep-seated hatred for logic’
By David Edwards and Ron Brynaert
July 30, 2009
President Barack Obama is set to meet with Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley early Thursday evening to discuss how the black scholar’s arrest can be a “teaching moment.” Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert used his “The Word” segment to explain how racism is like farts and neither should be discussed.
“Nation, as you know, I don’t see race,” Colbert said. “People tell me I’m white and I believe them because my fridge is full of drinkable yogurt.”
Colbert blasted President Obama, because “six months after racism officially ended, he fanned the flames of prejudice by taking sides in the Gates arrest controversy.”
Obama’s use of the word “stupidly” divided “Americans into two groups: those outraged over Gates’ arrest and those outraged at the other group’s outrage.”
As for the mama crack that the police report described but that Gates denied making. Colbert said he believed Gates really said, “Yo mama so fat when she wears red the police say ‘hey Kool Aid Man’…and then falsely arrest her.”
Colbert then noted that his “crazy eyes” nemesis Glenn Beck called Obama a racist (Video at this link) a few days ago.
Beck told the hosts of Fox & Friends that “this president has exposed himself, I think, as a guy — over and over and over again — who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Moments later, Beck added, “I’m not saying he [Obama] doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
“Right,” Colbert agreed, “that’s not saying [Obama] dislikes white people. He’s saying that he has a deep-seated hatred for them.”
Colbert continued, “Like how Beck likes arguing but has a deep-seated hatred for logic.”
Later, Colbert played clips of former Bush brain Karl Rove saying how “Americans don’t like to talk about race” and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly saying, “I’m just not gonna talk about race with black people unless I know them very, very well.”
Regarding O’Reilly’s comment, Colbert quipped, “In other words, he’s not gonna talk about race.”
Colbert: Glenn Beck ‘has a deep-seated hatred for logic’
By David Edwards and Ron Brynaert
July 30, 2009
President Barack Obama is set to meet with Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley early Thursday evening to discuss how the black scholar’s arrest can be a “teaching moment.” Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert used his “The Word” segment to explain how racism is like farts and neither should be discussed.
“Nation, as you know, I don’t see race,” Colbert said. “People tell me I’m white and I believe them because my fridge is full of drinkable yogurt.”
Colbert blasted President Obama, because “six months after racism officially ended, he fanned the flames of prejudice by taking sides in the Gates arrest controversy.”
Obama’s use of the word “stupidly” divided “Americans into two groups: those outraged over Gates’ arrest and those outraged at the other group’s outrage.”
As for the mama crack that the police report described but that Gates denied making. Colbert said he believed Gates really said, “Yo mama so fat when she wears red the police say ‘hey Kool Aid Man’…and then falsely arrest her.”
Colbert then noted that his “crazy eyes” nemesis Glenn Beck called Obama a racist (Video at this link) a few days ago.
Beck told the hosts of Fox & Friends that “this president has exposed himself, I think, as a guy — over and over and over again — who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Moments later, Beck added, “I’m not saying he [Obama] doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
“Right,” Colbert agreed, “that’s not saying [Obama] dislikes white people. He’s saying that he has a deep-seated hatred for them.”
Colbert continued, “Like how Beck likes arguing but has a deep-seated hatred for logic.”
Later, Colbert played clips of former Bush brain Karl Rove saying how “Americans don’t like to talk about race” and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly saying, “I’m just not gonna talk about race with black people unless I know them very, very well.”
Regarding O’Reilly’s comment, Colbert quipped, “In other words, he’s not gonna talk about race.”
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Ventura: I’ll waterboard Hannity
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/05/22/ventura-ill-waterboard-hannity/
Ventura: I’ll waterboard Hannity into saying Obama best president ever
By Mike Sheehan
May 22, 2009
After ripping George W. Bush and expressing his desire to waterboard Dick Cheney, former governor Jesse Ventura continues his media storm, this time in a sitdown with Huffington Post.
The ex-pro wrestler minced no words, as usual.
Americans have changed “in that we have a paranoia that there’s a crazy Arab around every tree,” Ventura told Marcus Baram. “We’re walking on eggshells now, when in reality you have as much chance of running into a terrorist as winning the Powerball.”
Related: Texas gov. will use stimulus funds to pay to repair mansion
He ripped into conservative talkers, such as Bill O’Reilly: “I always want to go on [his show], I’ve got something, I’m going to blast him for something. I don’t want to reveal what it is so he can’t prepare. But he doesn’t have the courage to have me on.”
On Sean Hannity, whose show Ventura guested on this week: “He’s scared to death of me. It was over in a few minutes and that was it.”
The former Navy SEAL said he’d relish an opportunity to waterboard Hannity, a procedure he endured himself during military training: “I’ll bet him a thousand bucks that I can get him to say ‘Barack Obama is the greatest president’ — if I get him to say it, he’ll give the thousand to charity and if I can’t, I’ll give the money to charity.”
Ventura didn’t spare Democrats either, on torture: “They condoned it. Nobody stepped forward and said this is torture. Democrats are so spineless, so afraid to go against the tide.”
The always quotable Ventura has made memorable appearances on Fox News and The View in recent days, blasting the use of torture and questioning the official story of 9/11, which caused co-host Brian Kilmeade to walk off the set of Fox & Friends.
Ventura: I’ll waterboard Hannity into saying Obama best president ever
By Mike Sheehan
May 22, 2009
After ripping George W. Bush and expressing his desire to waterboard Dick Cheney, former governor Jesse Ventura continues his media storm, this time in a sitdown with Huffington Post.
The ex-pro wrestler minced no words, as usual.
Americans have changed “in that we have a paranoia that there’s a crazy Arab around every tree,” Ventura told Marcus Baram. “We’re walking on eggshells now, when in reality you have as much chance of running into a terrorist as winning the Powerball.”
Related: Texas gov. will use stimulus funds to pay to repair mansion
He ripped into conservative talkers, such as Bill O’Reilly: “I always want to go on [his show], I’ve got something, I’m going to blast him for something. I don’t want to reveal what it is so he can’t prepare. But he doesn’t have the courage to have me on.”
On Sean Hannity, whose show Ventura guested on this week: “He’s scared to death of me. It was over in a few minutes and that was it.”
The former Navy SEAL said he’d relish an opportunity to waterboard Hannity, a procedure he endured himself during military training: “I’ll bet him a thousand bucks that I can get him to say ‘Barack Obama is the greatest president’ — if I get him to say it, he’ll give the thousand to charity and if I can’t, I’ll give the money to charity.”
Ventura didn’t spare Democrats either, on torture: “They condoned it. Nobody stepped forward and said this is torture. Democrats are so spineless, so afraid to go against the tide.”
The always quotable Ventura has made memorable appearances on Fox News and The View in recent days, blasting the use of torture and questioning the official story of 9/11, which caused co-host Brian Kilmeade to walk off the set of Fox & Friends.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Savage: Obama appointees the Nazi Party
http://www.prisonplanet.com/savage-%e2%80%9cobama-appointees-actually-have-almost-the-same-exact-policies-as-the-nazi-party-did%e2%80%9d.html
Savage: “Obama appointees actually have almost the same exact policies as the Nazi Party did”
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 13, 2009
Michael “Savage” Weiner, corporate media talk show host and former beatnik, has told his audience that Obama’s appointees are following the policies of the Nazis. Savage, a former Bush supporter and notorious carnival barker for the false right-left paradigm (and neocon Muslim-hater), does not bother to call out a single Obama appointee by name. Instead, in the audio clip here, Weiner concentrates on Obama’s “green shirts,” an allusion to Hitler’s SA brown shirts.
Savage is correct about the fascistic character of Obama’s mass movement, but he has conveniently omitted an important part of the larger picture.
Hitler was a creation of Wall Street financiers and the international bankers, a historical fact documented by British economist, historian, and writer Antony C. Sutton. Sutton documents the roles played by J.P. Morgan, T. W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, and other elitists in the rise of Hitler and Nazism.
“Wall Street financed the German cartels in the mid-1920s which in turn proceeded to bring Hitler to power,” writes Sutton in the final chapter of his book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. “Hitler and his S.S. street thugs came in part from affiliates or subsidiaries of U.S. firms, including Henry Ford in 1922, payments by I.G. Farben and General Electric in 1933, followed by the Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiary payments to Heinrich Himmler up to 1944.” Hitler’s mass movement was a creation of bankers and industrialists.
In Adam Lebor’s Hitler’s Secret Bankers (see also Charles Higham’s Trading With the Enemy), we learn how the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and its American president, Thomas McKittrick, continued trading and money laundering on behalf of the Nazis throughout the Second World War.
BIS is an international organization of central banks established under the globalist Bretton-Woods International Financial scheme. BIS is closely associated with the Bilderberg Group, the elitist organization established by the Nazi collaborator Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (see Alden Hatch’s H. R. H. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands for more on Bernhard’s SS connections).
It should be noted that Timothy F. Geithner, Obama’s point man on the economy and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, sits on the board of directors of BIS (Fed mob boss Ben Bernanke also sits on the board of this one-time Nazi front group that now controls the IMF and World Bank).
It is no mistake Bilderberg and Rockefeller stooge Henry Kissinger came out early in favor of Obama, as did Rockefeller minion and co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Obama’s appointees are overwhelmingly of the globalist and bankster persuasion — a preponderant number are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission.
Financial support for the Obama campaign flowed in from Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and others.
Michael “Savage” Weiner would have us believe Obama is a “neo-marxist fascist dictator” and his hand-picked appointees “actually have almost the same exact policies as the Nazi Party did,” when in fact Obama’s policies are those of the bankers, not Hitler or Ernst Röhm, co-founder of the Sturmabteilung or SA. In fact, Obama is a puppet for the global elite and it is completely irrelevant if he subscribes to Marxism, Nazism, or anything else.
Savage and the neocons are fond of conflating Nazism with “progressive” Democrat liberalism — which is yet another artificially generated flavor of bankster dominated statism — a tactic they employed in the days following the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, when neocons absurdly attempted to demonize Muslims as “Islamofascists.”
In a call to Savage’s radio show, activist Mark Dice was able to get the former beatnik turned talk show host to admit he believes any mention of the Bilderbergers is too “esoteric” for his largely neocon wannabe audience. It is not the Bilderbergers (and by way of extension the CFR and the Trilateralists) we need to worry about, but rather the “Democrat socialist group run by Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Ann Feinstein, and the others.”
Weiner further admits he has known about the Bilderberg Group since 1990, and yet he refuses to discuss the organization’s objectives and the indisputable fact members are at the highest levels of government, including the Obama administration. It is the Democrats we need to worry about, declares Savage, not the international banking elite.
“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers,” wrote the historian of the elite, Carroll Quigley, in his book Tragedy and Hope. “Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”
Michael “Savage” Weiner understands this all too well. His role — along with Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and other corporate media “conservatives” — is to foment a carefully orchestrated and controlled opposition to the current regime so that in four or eight years, after Obama has accomplished the tasks assigned to him by the global elite, the American people “can throw the rascals out… without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”
Savage: “Obama appointees actually have almost the same exact policies as the Nazi Party did”
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 13, 2009
Michael “Savage” Weiner, corporate media talk show host and former beatnik, has told his audience that Obama’s appointees are following the policies of the Nazis. Savage, a former Bush supporter and notorious carnival barker for the false right-left paradigm (and neocon Muslim-hater), does not bother to call out a single Obama appointee by name. Instead, in the audio clip here, Weiner concentrates on Obama’s “green shirts,” an allusion to Hitler’s SA brown shirts.
Savage is correct about the fascistic character of Obama’s mass movement, but he has conveniently omitted an important part of the larger picture.
Hitler was a creation of Wall Street financiers and the international bankers, a historical fact documented by British economist, historian, and writer Antony C. Sutton. Sutton documents the roles played by J.P. Morgan, T. W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, and other elitists in the rise of Hitler and Nazism.
“Wall Street financed the German cartels in the mid-1920s which in turn proceeded to bring Hitler to power,” writes Sutton in the final chapter of his book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. “Hitler and his S.S. street thugs came in part from affiliates or subsidiaries of U.S. firms, including Henry Ford in 1922, payments by I.G. Farben and General Electric in 1933, followed by the Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiary payments to Heinrich Himmler up to 1944.” Hitler’s mass movement was a creation of bankers and industrialists.
In Adam Lebor’s Hitler’s Secret Bankers (see also Charles Higham’s Trading With the Enemy), we learn how the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and its American president, Thomas McKittrick, continued trading and money laundering on behalf of the Nazis throughout the Second World War.
BIS is an international organization of central banks established under the globalist Bretton-Woods International Financial scheme. BIS is closely associated with the Bilderberg Group, the elitist organization established by the Nazi collaborator Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (see Alden Hatch’s H. R. H. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands for more on Bernhard’s SS connections).
It should be noted that Timothy F. Geithner, Obama’s point man on the economy and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, sits on the board of directors of BIS (Fed mob boss Ben Bernanke also sits on the board of this one-time Nazi front group that now controls the IMF and World Bank).
It is no mistake Bilderberg and Rockefeller stooge Henry Kissinger came out early in favor of Obama, as did Rockefeller minion and co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Obama’s appointees are overwhelmingly of the globalist and bankster persuasion — a preponderant number are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission.
Financial support for the Obama campaign flowed in from Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and others.
Michael “Savage” Weiner would have us believe Obama is a “neo-marxist fascist dictator” and his hand-picked appointees “actually have almost the same exact policies as the Nazi Party did,” when in fact Obama’s policies are those of the bankers, not Hitler or Ernst Röhm, co-founder of the Sturmabteilung or SA. In fact, Obama is a puppet for the global elite and it is completely irrelevant if he subscribes to Marxism, Nazism, or anything else.
Savage and the neocons are fond of conflating Nazism with “progressive” Democrat liberalism — which is yet another artificially generated flavor of bankster dominated statism — a tactic they employed in the days following the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, when neocons absurdly attempted to demonize Muslims as “Islamofascists.”
In a call to Savage’s radio show, activist Mark Dice was able to get the former beatnik turned talk show host to admit he believes any mention of the Bilderbergers is too “esoteric” for his largely neocon wannabe audience. It is not the Bilderbergers (and by way of extension the CFR and the Trilateralists) we need to worry about, but rather the “Democrat socialist group run by Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Ann Feinstein, and the others.”
Weiner further admits he has known about the Bilderberg Group since 1990, and yet he refuses to discuss the organization’s objectives and the indisputable fact members are at the highest levels of government, including the Obama administration. It is the Democrats we need to worry about, declares Savage, not the international banking elite.
“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers,” wrote the historian of the elite, Carroll Quigley, in his book Tragedy and Hope. “Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”
Michael “Savage” Weiner understands this all too well. His role — along with Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and other corporate media “conservatives” — is to foment a carefully orchestrated and controlled opposition to the current regime so that in four or eight years, after Obama has accomplished the tasks assigned to him by the global elite, the American people “can throw the rascals out… without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
NSA spied on everyone, targeted journalists
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Whistleblower_Bushs_NSA_targeted_reporters_0121.html
Whistleblower: NSA spied on everyone, targeted journalists
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Wednesday January 21, 2009
Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.
"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."
Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. ... What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata ... and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."
According to Tice, in addition to this "low-tech, dragnet" approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.
"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."
When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists."
"To what purpose?" Olbermann asked. "I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?"
Tice did not answer directly, but simply stated, "If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything." He added, however, that he had no idea what was ultimately done with the information, except that he was sure it "was digitized and put on databases somewhere."
Tice first began alleging that there were illegal activities going on at both the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in December 2005, several months after being fired by the NSA. He also served at that time as a source for the New York Times story which revealed the existence of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.
Over the next several months, however, Tice was frustrated in his attempts to testify before Congress, had his credibility attacked by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, and was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in an apparent attempt at intimidation.
Tice is now coming forward again now because George Bush is finally out of office. He told Olbermann that the Obama administration has not been in touch with him about his latest revelations, but, "I did send a letter to, I think it's [Obama intelligence adviser John] Brennan -- a handwritten letter, because I knew all my communications were tapped, my phones, my computer, and I've had the FBI on me like flies on you-know-what ... and I'm assuming that he gave the note to our current president -- that I intended to say a little bit more than I had in the past."
Whistleblower: NSA spied on everyone, targeted journalists
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Wednesday January 21, 2009
Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.
"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."
Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. ... What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata ... and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."
According to Tice, in addition to this "low-tech, dragnet" approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.
"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."
When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists."
"To what purpose?" Olbermann asked. "I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?"
Tice did not answer directly, but simply stated, "If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything." He added, however, that he had no idea what was ultimately done with the information, except that he was sure it "was digitized and put on databases somewhere."
Tice first began alleging that there were illegal activities going on at both the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in December 2005, several months after being fired by the NSA. He also served at that time as a source for the New York Times story which revealed the existence of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.
Over the next several months, however, Tice was frustrated in his attempts to testify before Congress, had his credibility attacked by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, and was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in an apparent attempt at intimidation.
Tice is now coming forward again now because George Bush is finally out of office. He told Olbermann that the Obama administration has not been in touch with him about his latest revelations, but, "I did send a letter to, I think it's [Obama intelligence adviser John] Brennan -- a handwritten letter, because I knew all my communications were tapped, my phones, my computer, and I've had the FBI on me like flies on you-know-what ... and I'm assuming that he gave the note to our current president -- that I intended to say a little bit more than I had in the past."
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
McCain, Obama tied in TV audiences
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D930S7U81
McCain, Obama tied in TV audiences
By DAVID BAUDER
9-5-8
NEW YORK (AP) - As a television draw, John McCain was every bit the equal of Barack Obama.
The GOP presidential candidate attracted roughly the same number of viewers to his convention acceptance speech Thursday as Obama did before the Democrats last week, according to Nielsen Media Research.
It marked the end of an astonishing run where more than 40 million people watched political speeches on three nights by Obama, McCain and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Republican convention was the most-watched convention on television ever, beating a standard set by the Democrats a week earlier.
Three times in two weeks, political speeches were watched by more people than the "American Idol" finale, the Academy Awards and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics this year.
"It clearly suggests that a great number of Americans think that who will be the next president is important and worthy of their time," said Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter and director of the Project for Excellence in journalism.
Television ratings throughout the primary season had already indicated an intense interest in the election, but viewers clearly were more fascinated in the Democratic contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton than the Republican nomination fight.
This week's ratings, with an average of 34.5 million viewers watching the GOP convention over three days, proved people are becoming more interested in what the Republicans have to say. The Democrats had an average audience of 30.2 million over four days, Nielsen said.
"No one really thought they had it in them in terms of pulling off this amazing convention," said Jay Wallace, vice president for news and editorial at Fox News Channel. But Hurricane Gustav pulled people into the news networks over the weekend, he said. People were also intensely curious about McCain's pick of Palin as a running mate, he said.
Nielsen said that 38.9 million people watched McCain accept the GOP nomination Thursday on either ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC. PBS, which has a more imprecise estimate based on samples in a few big cities, said 3.5 million watched on its network.
Last week, Obama's speech in Denver was seen by 38.4 million on 10 different commercial networks, and an additional 4 million on PBS.
Add it up, and that's McCain, 42.4 million, to Obama, 42.4 million.
No one can really tell who truly had the biggest audience, since C-SPAN also showed the speeches, and Nielsen doesn't measure the cable channel's viewers. But if the presidential vote is this close on Nov. 4, it will be a long night.
McCain may have caught a break Thursday when the opening NFL game between the New York Giants and Washington Redskins finished a couple of minutes before the Republican took the stage, Wallace said.
More men (17.9 million) watched McCain speak than watched Obama (16.2 million), Nielsen said.
"The storylines this year have been so amazing," Wallace said. "It really got started with Hillary and Obama—that got everyone in middle America watching. They got caught up in the drama of it."
The numbers put to rest the thought that politics has been a turnoff and death for ratings, which has long been gospel at the TV networks, Rosenstiel said.
That has particularly applied to convention coverage, which broadcast networks have backed away from over the years because executives saw them as stage-managed events. ABC, CBS and NBC each added an hour this year to convention coverage, but it didn't halt one trend: Viewers are just as likely to watch the conventions on cable news networks.
Fox was the most-watched network all three nights of the GOP convention, duplicating its feat from the 2004 GOP convention. CNN was the most popular destination for Obama's speech.
Fox had 9.2 million viewers for McCain's speech, followed by NBC—which aired the football game—at 8.7 million. ABC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC followed in order, Nielsen said.
Thursday's edition of Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," featuring the first part of Bill O'Reilly's interview with Barack Obama, was also the second-highest rated edition of his show ever, topped only by a night in March 2003 when the Iraq war was breaking out.
McCain, Obama tied in TV audiences
By DAVID BAUDER
9-5-8
NEW YORK (AP) - As a television draw, John McCain was every bit the equal of Barack Obama.
The GOP presidential candidate attracted roughly the same number of viewers to his convention acceptance speech Thursday as Obama did before the Democrats last week, according to Nielsen Media Research.
It marked the end of an astonishing run where more than 40 million people watched political speeches on three nights by Obama, McCain and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Republican convention was the most-watched convention on television ever, beating a standard set by the Democrats a week earlier.
Three times in two weeks, political speeches were watched by more people than the "American Idol" finale, the Academy Awards and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics this year.
"It clearly suggests that a great number of Americans think that who will be the next president is important and worthy of their time," said Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter and director of the Project for Excellence in journalism.
Television ratings throughout the primary season had already indicated an intense interest in the election, but viewers clearly were more fascinated in the Democratic contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton than the Republican nomination fight.
This week's ratings, with an average of 34.5 million viewers watching the GOP convention over three days, proved people are becoming more interested in what the Republicans have to say. The Democrats had an average audience of 30.2 million over four days, Nielsen said.
"No one really thought they had it in them in terms of pulling off this amazing convention," said Jay Wallace, vice president for news and editorial at Fox News Channel. But Hurricane Gustav pulled people into the news networks over the weekend, he said. People were also intensely curious about McCain's pick of Palin as a running mate, he said.
Nielsen said that 38.9 million people watched McCain accept the GOP nomination Thursday on either ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC. PBS, which has a more imprecise estimate based on samples in a few big cities, said 3.5 million watched on its network.
Last week, Obama's speech in Denver was seen by 38.4 million on 10 different commercial networks, and an additional 4 million on PBS.
Add it up, and that's McCain, 42.4 million, to Obama, 42.4 million.
No one can really tell who truly had the biggest audience, since C-SPAN also showed the speeches, and Nielsen doesn't measure the cable channel's viewers. But if the presidential vote is this close on Nov. 4, it will be a long night.
McCain may have caught a break Thursday when the opening NFL game between the New York Giants and Washington Redskins finished a couple of minutes before the Republican took the stage, Wallace said.
More men (17.9 million) watched McCain speak than watched Obama (16.2 million), Nielsen said.
"The storylines this year have been so amazing," Wallace said. "It really got started with Hillary and Obama—that got everyone in middle America watching. They got caught up in the drama of it."
The numbers put to rest the thought that politics has been a turnoff and death for ratings, which has long been gospel at the TV networks, Rosenstiel said.
That has particularly applied to convention coverage, which broadcast networks have backed away from over the years because executives saw them as stage-managed events. ABC, CBS and NBC each added an hour this year to convention coverage, but it didn't halt one trend: Viewers are just as likely to watch the conventions on cable news networks.
Fox was the most-watched network all three nights of the GOP convention, duplicating its feat from the 2004 GOP convention. CNN was the most popular destination for Obama's speech.
Fox had 9.2 million viewers for McCain's speech, followed by NBC—which aired the football game—at 8.7 million. ABC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC followed in order, Nielsen said.
Thursday's edition of Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," featuring the first part of Bill O'Reilly's interview with Barack Obama, was also the second-highest rated edition of his show ever, topped only by a night in March 2003 when the Iraq war was breaking out.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
It's a wrap - 'Milk' filming ends in S.F.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/18/DDNDVJJHL.DTL
It's a wrap - 'Milk' filming ends in S.F.
Ruthe Stein, Chronicle Senior Movie Writer
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
"Harvey will be coming out soon," an extra assured the crowd in front of City Hall on a recent Sunday. They had gathered to be in a scene in "Milk"- the movie about the life and death of Harvey Milk - in which the San Francisco supervisor delivers an impassioned speech. It was really Sean Penn, of course, who plays the martyred supervisor, who would be appearing. But, this extra explained, because he's a "method actor," he wants to be called Harvey.
From the bright sun, it could have been June, when the Gay Freedom Day parade was led 30 years ago by Milk, seated on top of a convertible with flowers in one hand and the other hand a clenched fist. He was as pumped up as his bulging muscles.
A couple thousand people waited for a re-enactment of Milk's fiery speech, which capped the parade. This was the last day calling for such a large cast.
"Milk" had been filming all over San Francisco for eight weeks and wrapped Monday with a scene shot on a set on Treasure Island of Milk watching "Tosca." The movie is due in the fall, positioning it for Oscar consideration.
Appearing on the City Hall steps to deafening applause, Penn looked shockingly like Milk. He had his almost Grecian nose and dark wavy hair parted to one side and wore a tight T-shirt that showed off his muscles.
"Brothers and sisters, you must come out to your parents," Penn/Harvey shouted, pronouncing his vowels distinctly to sound like a New Yorker. "It may hurt them. But think how they could hurt you in the voting booth."
Penn would do eight takes of this speech all to loud applause from an indefatigable crowd, including people who had stood in the same spot 30 years ago listening to Milk urge gays to protect their rights from those trying to get gay-friendly legislation repealed.
A dozen rows back from Penn, John Hershey, 63, started crying. Milk had influenced him to come out to his family, Hershey recalled.
"This is an important thing for me because I want all the kids to know what Harvey did," he said.
All age groups were represented. Peter Weitl came with his wife, Jenni. They're both 28. "We came to be part of history, even if it's re-created history. We couldn't have been there the first time," he said.
The production company had posted instructions on the Internet of what to wear to look of the period. Shorts and blue jeans were fine; bell bottoms and garish colors were not. A lot of people blithely ignored this, dressing in copies of Pucci's brightly colored wrap dress and in drag. Men showed off large tattoos by wearing leather vests with nothing under them. The few cars on Polk Street were all period, including a Thunderbird and Ford Pinto station wagon.
Bottled water was available for free, but extras were warned to pitch the bottles when the cameras were on. People drank H2O out of the tap in the '70s.
A production assistant followed Penn around the front of City Hall with a large navy blue umbrella. She held it over his head to shield him from the sun. Seeing he had a captive audience, Penn broke loose of the umbrella to deliver an impromptu speech that Milk would have loved.
"I almost wish Jerry Falwell were alive to see this. Almost," Penn shouted to the crowd. After dropping some names of conservatives who are still with us - "Bill O'Reilly, who is too stupid to talk about," and "Sean Hannity, the butt boy of Rupert Murdoch," Penn said, "We know something more. We know their end is near."
What was fun about having "Milk" shot here is how "in" it made locals feel. They could go home that Sunday and tell friends that Penn gave a speech just for them. Keen observers might have caught a glimpse of Robin Williams, who at one point was to play Milk, and Oliver Stone, who was to direct one version of the biopic. Both stopped by to watch Penn and director Gus Van Sant, whom Williams worked with on "Good Will Hunting."
Thousands of San Franciscans marched in a simulation of the Gay Freedom Parade that was held on June 25, 1978, and of the vigil in November that year to commemorate the deaths of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, both murdered by Supervisor Dan White.
The cast and crew have been all over town spending money in restaurants and hotels and generally adding to the San Francisco economy. There were other ways in which the local population benefited from the "Milk" people being here.
Those who weren't around to see the Castro district in the 1970s got a sense of it after scenic designers went to work changing storefronts. Overnight a store called Aquarius Records popped up with a purple, yellow, orange and periwinkle front. The shop used to be in the Castro but moved to Noe Valley. Designers also brought back China Court, a popular restaurant in the '70s. Milk's election headquarters was decorated with posters of him under a colorful canopy.
The interior of Milk's camera shop also was re-created and became a place where his pals from the old days like author Armistead Maupin, one-time Milk aide Anne Kronenberg and Cleve Jones, founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt who is an adviser on the film, would stop in. "They were moved to tears to see everything exactly the way it had been," said Dan Jinks, co-producer with Bruce Cohen. The two previously produced "American Beauty" and "Big Fish."
"I have never gotten to work on a project before that not only is based on a true event but where we are shooting it in the places where it actually happened," Cohen said.
Jones came on the set to watch himself be played by Emile Hirsch, telling the actor, "This is where I was standing."
"I feel like 'Milk' is really a once-in-a-lifetime chance," Cohen said. "It is so much about the city. But it isn't just a storybook place. We are re-creating a part of the history of San Francisco."
This is the first time since the cast and crew of "Zodiac" disembarked here in 2005 that a major motion picture has been shot in San Francisco. Like "Milk," "Zodiac" takes place in San Francisco. But not all of it was filmed here because of how expensive this city is. In part because Penn lives in the Bay Area but mainly because, as Jinks put it, "Harvey Milk is such a San Francisco story," he and Cohen resisted pressure from the money people to shoot most of it in Vancouver. It was always their idea that the city be a character in the movie.
"The picture is scripted for the city, and you know it would be a creative embarrassment if they had to shoot it somewhere else," said Stefanie Coyote, executive director of the San Francisco Film Commission, who helped negotiate good access to City Hall.
The area surrounding City Hall, as well as the building, plays a big role in "Milk." In one scene inside City Hall, Supervisor White, played by Josh Brolin fresh off his career-making role in "No Country for Old Men," was being grilled by the press on his decision to remain supervisor. He had resigned his seat, then changed his mind but could not get Moscone to give the position back to him. Milk wanted White gone, which was why he also was shot dead.
Mayor Newsom offered to lend the "Milk" crew his office to film Moscone's shooting. "We did not take him up on his offer. We thought it was more important that he be using his office," Jinks said. Instead, the anteroom to his office, where the killing took place, was re-created on a set. The room has been redecorated numerous times, so the film's version probably is more accurate. Cubicles in the Federal Office Building at 50 United Nations Plaza substituted for the supervisors' work space because they have far more luxurious offices now than in 1978.
A brisk woman with bouffant hair and wearing a blouse with a large bow was seen coming out of the building. She's Ashlee Temple, and she plays then Board of Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein. She auditioned by re-enacting Feinstein's stunning announcement to the press that Moscone and Milk were dead. "She didn't cry but you can see she is very shocked and very fragile," said Temple, who studied a news clip. "It takes every bit of energy in her to get those words out 'and the suspect is Dan White.' "
While the last scene shot here was of Penn listening to "Tosca," the part from the opera he is watching was filmed weeks ago. The modest budget was strained bringing in costumes from "Tosca" and renting an existing set from the opera. The crew put up some lights, and for a couple of hours a soundstage on Treasure Island became an opera house.
"Harvey was a huge opera fan," Jinks said. "Nothing made him happier." Except maybe a whole movie all about him.
E-mail Ruthe Stein at rstein@sfchronicle.com
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
It's a wrap - 'Milk' filming ends in S.F.
Ruthe Stein, Chronicle Senior Movie Writer
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
"Harvey will be coming out soon," an extra assured the crowd in front of City Hall on a recent Sunday. They had gathered to be in a scene in "Milk"- the movie about the life and death of Harvey Milk - in which the San Francisco supervisor delivers an impassioned speech. It was really Sean Penn, of course, who plays the martyred supervisor, who would be appearing. But, this extra explained, because he's a "method actor," he wants to be called Harvey.
From the bright sun, it could have been June, when the Gay Freedom Day parade was led 30 years ago by Milk, seated on top of a convertible with flowers in one hand and the other hand a clenched fist. He was as pumped up as his bulging muscles.
A couple thousand people waited for a re-enactment of Milk's fiery speech, which capped the parade. This was the last day calling for such a large cast.
"Milk" had been filming all over San Francisco for eight weeks and wrapped Monday with a scene shot on a set on Treasure Island of Milk watching "Tosca." The movie is due in the fall, positioning it for Oscar consideration.
Appearing on the City Hall steps to deafening applause, Penn looked shockingly like Milk. He had his almost Grecian nose and dark wavy hair parted to one side and wore a tight T-shirt that showed off his muscles.
"Brothers and sisters, you must come out to your parents," Penn/Harvey shouted, pronouncing his vowels distinctly to sound like a New Yorker. "It may hurt them. But think how they could hurt you in the voting booth."
Penn would do eight takes of this speech all to loud applause from an indefatigable crowd, including people who had stood in the same spot 30 years ago listening to Milk urge gays to protect their rights from those trying to get gay-friendly legislation repealed.
A dozen rows back from Penn, John Hershey, 63, started crying. Milk had influenced him to come out to his family, Hershey recalled.
"This is an important thing for me because I want all the kids to know what Harvey did," he said.
All age groups were represented. Peter Weitl came with his wife, Jenni. They're both 28. "We came to be part of history, even if it's re-created history. We couldn't have been there the first time," he said.
The production company had posted instructions on the Internet of what to wear to look of the period. Shorts and blue jeans were fine; bell bottoms and garish colors were not. A lot of people blithely ignored this, dressing in copies of Pucci's brightly colored wrap dress and in drag. Men showed off large tattoos by wearing leather vests with nothing under them. The few cars on Polk Street were all period, including a Thunderbird and Ford Pinto station wagon.
Bottled water was available for free, but extras were warned to pitch the bottles when the cameras were on. People drank H2O out of the tap in the '70s.
A production assistant followed Penn around the front of City Hall with a large navy blue umbrella. She held it over his head to shield him from the sun. Seeing he had a captive audience, Penn broke loose of the umbrella to deliver an impromptu speech that Milk would have loved.
"I almost wish Jerry Falwell were alive to see this. Almost," Penn shouted to the crowd. After dropping some names of conservatives who are still with us - "Bill O'Reilly, who is too stupid to talk about," and "Sean Hannity, the butt boy of Rupert Murdoch," Penn said, "We know something more. We know their end is near."
What was fun about having "Milk" shot here is how "in" it made locals feel. They could go home that Sunday and tell friends that Penn gave a speech just for them. Keen observers might have caught a glimpse of Robin Williams, who at one point was to play Milk, and Oliver Stone, who was to direct one version of the biopic. Both stopped by to watch Penn and director Gus Van Sant, whom Williams worked with on "Good Will Hunting."
Thousands of San Franciscans marched in a simulation of the Gay Freedom Parade that was held on June 25, 1978, and of the vigil in November that year to commemorate the deaths of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, both murdered by Supervisor Dan White.
The cast and crew have been all over town spending money in restaurants and hotels and generally adding to the San Francisco economy. There were other ways in which the local population benefited from the "Milk" people being here.
Those who weren't around to see the Castro district in the 1970s got a sense of it after scenic designers went to work changing storefronts. Overnight a store called Aquarius Records popped up with a purple, yellow, orange and periwinkle front. The shop used to be in the Castro but moved to Noe Valley. Designers also brought back China Court, a popular restaurant in the '70s. Milk's election headquarters was decorated with posters of him under a colorful canopy.
The interior of Milk's camera shop also was re-created and became a place where his pals from the old days like author Armistead Maupin, one-time Milk aide Anne Kronenberg and Cleve Jones, founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt who is an adviser on the film, would stop in. "They were moved to tears to see everything exactly the way it had been," said Dan Jinks, co-producer with Bruce Cohen. The two previously produced "American Beauty" and "Big Fish."
"I have never gotten to work on a project before that not only is based on a true event but where we are shooting it in the places where it actually happened," Cohen said.
Jones came on the set to watch himself be played by Emile Hirsch, telling the actor, "This is where I was standing."
"I feel like 'Milk' is really a once-in-a-lifetime chance," Cohen said. "It is so much about the city. But it isn't just a storybook place. We are re-creating a part of the history of San Francisco."
This is the first time since the cast and crew of "Zodiac" disembarked here in 2005 that a major motion picture has been shot in San Francisco. Like "Milk," "Zodiac" takes place in San Francisco. But not all of it was filmed here because of how expensive this city is. In part because Penn lives in the Bay Area but mainly because, as Jinks put it, "Harvey Milk is such a San Francisco story," he and Cohen resisted pressure from the money people to shoot most of it in Vancouver. It was always their idea that the city be a character in the movie.
"The picture is scripted for the city, and you know it would be a creative embarrassment if they had to shoot it somewhere else," said Stefanie Coyote, executive director of the San Francisco Film Commission, who helped negotiate good access to City Hall.
The area surrounding City Hall, as well as the building, plays a big role in "Milk." In one scene inside City Hall, Supervisor White, played by Josh Brolin fresh off his career-making role in "No Country for Old Men," was being grilled by the press on his decision to remain supervisor. He had resigned his seat, then changed his mind but could not get Moscone to give the position back to him. Milk wanted White gone, which was why he also was shot dead.
Mayor Newsom offered to lend the "Milk" crew his office to film Moscone's shooting. "We did not take him up on his offer. We thought it was more important that he be using his office," Jinks said. Instead, the anteroom to his office, where the killing took place, was re-created on a set. The room has been redecorated numerous times, so the film's version probably is more accurate. Cubicles in the Federal Office Building at 50 United Nations Plaza substituted for the supervisors' work space because they have far more luxurious offices now than in 1978.
A brisk woman with bouffant hair and wearing a blouse with a large bow was seen coming out of the building. She's Ashlee Temple, and she plays then Board of Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein. She auditioned by re-enacting Feinstein's stunning announcement to the press that Moscone and Milk were dead. "She didn't cry but you can see she is very shocked and very fragile," said Temple, who studied a news clip. "It takes every bit of energy in her to get those words out 'and the suspect is Dan White.' "
While the last scene shot here was of Penn listening to "Tosca," the part from the opera he is watching was filmed weeks ago. The modest budget was strained bringing in costumes from "Tosca" and renting an existing set from the opera. The crew put up some lights, and for a couple of hours a soundstage on Treasure Island became an opera house.
"Harvey was a huge opera fan," Jinks said. "Nothing made him happier." Except maybe a whole movie all about him.
E-mail Ruthe Stein at rstein@sfchronicle.com
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
O'Reilly: "I don't want to go on a lynching party..."
http://mediamatters.org/items/200802200001
O'Reilly: "I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels"
Summary: In a discussion of recent comments made by Michelle Obama, Bill O'Reilly took a call from a listener who stated that, according to "a friend who had knowledge of her," Obama " 'is a very angry,' her word was 'militant woman.' " O'Reilly later stated: "I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down."
During the February 19 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Bill O'Reilly took a call from a listener who said of Michelle Obama, "I just wanted to say that I think Michelle Obama is an angry woman -- is speaking, I think, with her real voice for the first time." O'Reilly and his callers were discussing Obama's recent comments, which included her assertion that "[f]or the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." When O'Reilly asked the caller, whom he identified as "Maryanne," "You're basing that on what?" she replied: "Well your representative asked me not to talk about this, but I have a friend who had knowledge of her and said to me months ago, 'This is a very angry,' her word was 'militant woman.' " O'Reilly then responded, "What I want you to do then, Maryanne ... I want you to stay on the line. ... Because it's not fair to Michelle Obama for you ... because we don't know who you are, and we don't know who your friend is, but we want to know. We want to know, OK. But it's not fair at this point for you to say, 'My friend said X and Y,' because we just don't know. But if you would give us your information, we would like to talk to your friend. And then whatever your friend tells us, we'll track it down. We'll do it in a fair and balanced and methodical way." He later added, "If indeed Michelle Obama is angry about something, if she has a history, we would like to know that, and then we can put it into some kind of context so that we can be fair to everybody."
O'Reilly then stated:
O'REILLY: You know, I have a lot of sympathy for Michelle Obama, for Bill Clinton, for all of these people. Bill Clinton, I have sympathy for him, because they're thrown into a hopper where everybody is waiting for them to make a mistake, so that they can just go and bludgeon them. And, you know, Bill Clinton and I don't agree on a lot of things, and I think I've made that clear over the years, but he's trying to stick up for his wife, and every time the guy turns around, there's another demagogue or another ideologue in his face trying to humiliate him because they're rooting for Obama.
That's wrong. And I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.
From the February 19 edition of Westwood One's The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly:
O'REILLY: Maryanne, Woodbury, Connecticut: What say you, Maryanne? Maryanne --
CALLER: I'm here.
O'REILLY: -- you're on the air.
CALLER: Here I am.
O'REILLY: OK.
CALLER: I just wanted to say that I think Michelle Obama is an angry woman -- is speaking, I think, with her real voice for the first time. And --
O'REILLY: But how do you -- what do you base that on? You're basing that on what?
CALLER: Well, your representative asked me not to talk about this, but I have a friend who had knowledge of her and said to me months ago, "This is a very angry," her word was "militant woman."
O'REILLY: All right. What I want you do then, Maryanne, if -- I want you to stay on the line.
CALLER: OK.
O'REILLY: Because it's not fair to Michelle Obama for you --
CALLER: Oh no, all I'm saying is --
O'REILLY: -- because we don't know who you are, and we don't know who your friend is, but we want to know. We want to know, OK. But it's not fair at this point for you to say, "My friend said X and Y," because we just don't know. But if you would give us your information, we would like to talk to your friend. And then whatever your friend tells us, we'll track it down. We'll do it in a fair and balanced and methodical way. That's how we're going to cover this campaign -- all of them, all of them. So stay on the line, give us your information. If indeed Michelle Obama is angry about something, if she has a history, we would like to know that, and then we can put it into some kind of context so that we can be fair to everybody.
You know, I have a lot of sympathy for Michelle Obama, for Bill Clinton, for all of these people. Bill Clinton, I have sympathy for him, because they're thrown into a hopper where everybody is waiting for them to make a mistake, so that they can just go and bludgeon them. And, you know, Bill Clinton and I don't agree on a lot of things, and I think I've made that clear over the years, but he's trying to stick up for his wife, and every time the guy turns around, there's another demagogue or another ideologue in his face trying to humiliate him because they're rooting for Obama.
That's wrong. And I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.
1-877-9-NO-SPIN. Right back.
— A.I.
Tips from readers R.R. and J.A. contributed to this item. Thanks and keep them coming!
Posted to the web on Wednesday, February 20, 2008
O'Reilly: "I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels"
Summary: In a discussion of recent comments made by Michelle Obama, Bill O'Reilly took a call from a listener who stated that, according to "a friend who had knowledge of her," Obama " 'is a very angry,' her word was 'militant woman.' " O'Reilly later stated: "I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down."
During the February 19 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Bill O'Reilly took a call from a listener who said of Michelle Obama, "I just wanted to say that I think Michelle Obama is an angry woman -- is speaking, I think, with her real voice for the first time." O'Reilly and his callers were discussing Obama's recent comments, which included her assertion that "[f]or the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." When O'Reilly asked the caller, whom he identified as "Maryanne," "You're basing that on what?" she replied: "Well your representative asked me not to talk about this, but I have a friend who had knowledge of her and said to me months ago, 'This is a very angry,' her word was 'militant woman.' " O'Reilly then responded, "What I want you to do then, Maryanne ... I want you to stay on the line. ... Because it's not fair to Michelle Obama for you ... because we don't know who you are, and we don't know who your friend is, but we want to know. We want to know, OK. But it's not fair at this point for you to say, 'My friend said X and Y,' because we just don't know. But if you would give us your information, we would like to talk to your friend. And then whatever your friend tells us, we'll track it down. We'll do it in a fair and balanced and methodical way." He later added, "If indeed Michelle Obama is angry about something, if she has a history, we would like to know that, and then we can put it into some kind of context so that we can be fair to everybody."
O'Reilly then stated:
O'REILLY: You know, I have a lot of sympathy for Michelle Obama, for Bill Clinton, for all of these people. Bill Clinton, I have sympathy for him, because they're thrown into a hopper where everybody is waiting for them to make a mistake, so that they can just go and bludgeon them. And, you know, Bill Clinton and I don't agree on a lot of things, and I think I've made that clear over the years, but he's trying to stick up for his wife, and every time the guy turns around, there's another demagogue or another ideologue in his face trying to humiliate him because they're rooting for Obama.
That's wrong. And I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.
From the February 19 edition of Westwood One's The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly:
O'REILLY: Maryanne, Woodbury, Connecticut: What say you, Maryanne? Maryanne --
CALLER: I'm here.
O'REILLY: -- you're on the air.
CALLER: Here I am.
O'REILLY: OK.
CALLER: I just wanted to say that I think Michelle Obama is an angry woman -- is speaking, I think, with her real voice for the first time. And --
O'REILLY: But how do you -- what do you base that on? You're basing that on what?
CALLER: Well, your representative asked me not to talk about this, but I have a friend who had knowledge of her and said to me months ago, "This is a very angry," her word was "militant woman."
O'REILLY: All right. What I want you do then, Maryanne, if -- I want you to stay on the line.
CALLER: OK.
O'REILLY: Because it's not fair to Michelle Obama for you --
CALLER: Oh no, all I'm saying is --
O'REILLY: -- because we don't know who you are, and we don't know who your friend is, but we want to know. We want to know, OK. But it's not fair at this point for you to say, "My friend said X and Y," because we just don't know. But if you would give us your information, we would like to talk to your friend. And then whatever your friend tells us, we'll track it down. We'll do it in a fair and balanced and methodical way. That's how we're going to cover this campaign -- all of them, all of them. So stay on the line, give us your information. If indeed Michelle Obama is angry about something, if she has a history, we would like to know that, and then we can put it into some kind of context so that we can be fair to everybody.
You know, I have a lot of sympathy for Michelle Obama, for Bill Clinton, for all of these people. Bill Clinton, I have sympathy for him, because they're thrown into a hopper where everybody is waiting for them to make a mistake, so that they can just go and bludgeon them. And, you know, Bill Clinton and I don't agree on a lot of things, and I think I've made that clear over the years, but he's trying to stick up for his wife, and every time the guy turns around, there's another demagogue or another ideologue in his face trying to humiliate him because they're rooting for Obama.
That's wrong. And I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.
1-877-9-NO-SPIN. Right back.
— A.I.
Tips from readers R.R. and J.A. contributed to this item. Thanks and keep them coming!
Posted to the web on Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Friday, February 8, 2008
Fox News is in for a very rough 2008
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200801290001
Fox News is in for a very rough 2008
by Eric Boehlert
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
My guess is that Fox News guru Roger Ailes has been reaching for the Tums more often than usual early in the New Year, and there are lots of reasons for the hovering angst.
Let's take an extended multiple choice quiz. Right now, which of the following topics is likely causing the discomfort inside Ailes' Fox News empire?
A) CNN's resurgence as the go-to cable destination for election coverage.
B) The incredible shrinking candidacy of Fox News' favored son, Rudy Giuliani.
C) The still-standing candidacy of Fox News nemesis and well-funded, anti-war GOP candidate Rep. Ron Paul.
D) The Democratic candidates' blanket refusal to debate on Fox News during the primary season.
E) Host Bill O'Reilly being so desperate for an interview from a Democratic contender that he had to schlep all the way to New Hampshire, where he shoved an aide to Sen. Barack Obama and then had to be calmed down by Secret Service agents.
F) Former Fox News architect and Ailes confidante Dan Cooper posting chapters from his a wildly unflattering tell-all book about his old boss. ("The best thing that ever happened to Roger Ailes was 9/11.")
G) The fledgling Fox Business Network, whose anemic ratings are in danger of being surpassed by some large city public access channels.
H) Host John Gibson's recent heartless attacks on actor Heath Ledger, just hours after the young actor was found dead.
I) Fox News reporter Major Garrett botching his "exclusive" that Paul Begala and James Carville were going to join Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, and then refusing to correct the record.
I'd say it's A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. (I doubt Gibson's grave-dancing or Garrett's whopper caused Ailes a moment's concern.)
Bottom line is that Fox News is in for a very rough 2008. And the umbrella reason for that is quite simple: Eight years ago the all-news cable channel went all-in on the presidency of George Bush and became a broadcast partner with the White House. Proof of that was on display Sunday night, January 27, during Fox News' prime-time, "Fighting to the Finish," an "historic documentary" on the final year of Bush's presidency. Filmed in HD and featuring "unprecedented access," according to the Fox News press release, the show was pure propaganda. (I must have missed Fox News' "Fighting to the Finish" special back in 2000, chronicling the conclusion of President Bill Clinton's second term and his "extraordinarily consequential tenure.")
The point is that Fox News years ago made an obvious decision to appeal almost exclusively to Republican viewers. The good news then for Fox News was that it succeeded. The bad news now for Fox News is that it succeeded.
Meaning, when the GOP catches a cold, everybody at Fox News gets sick. As blogger Logan Murphy put it at Crooks and Liars, "Watching FOXNews getting their comeuppance has been fun to watch. They made their bed, now they're having to lie in it and it's not too comfortable."
The most obvious signs of Fox News' downturn have been the cable ratings for the big primary and caucus votes this year, as well as the high-profile debates. With this election season generating unprecedented voter and viewer interest, Fox News' rating bumps to date have remained underwhelming, to say the least.
For instance, on the night of the big New Hampshire primary, CNN, which habitually trails behind Fox News in the prime-time race, attracted nearly 250,000 more viewers than its top competitor, marking a changing-of-the-guard of sorts.
The turnaround was striking when you consider that in 2004, even with no Republicans running against Bush, Fox News was still able to draw 200,000 more viewers than CNN on the night of the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Yet in 2008, with a very competitive GOP field, CNN was the ratings winner from New Hampshire.
And just look at the ratings for January 19, which featured returns from the Nevada caucus coming in during the late afternoon, and then fresh returns from the South Carolina Republican primary being posted during prime time that night. In the past, Fox News would have absolutely owned that night of coverage, as conservative news junkies flocked to their home team -- Fox News -- to see the results. But no more. CNN grabbed nearly just as many prime-time viewers for the Republican South Carolina returns as did Fox News.
The problem for Fox News is that it's the Democratic race that's creating most of the excitement, yet Fox News has been forced to mostly watch the race from the sidelines. That's because last winter, after Fox News tried to smear Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) for purportedly attending a radical Muslim school as a child, liberal bloggers launched an initiative to get Democratic candidates to boycott a debate co-sponsored by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic Party. (The boycott, powered by Foxattacks.com, was later extended to any and all Fox News debates.)
The point of the online crusade was not to simply embarrass Fox News or rattle Nevada Democrats for being out of touch with the grassroots masses that distrusted and despised Fox News. The point, instead, was to begin chipping away, in a serious, consistent method, at Fox News' reputation. To spell out that Fox News was nothing more than a Republican mouthpiece and that Democrats need not engage with the News Corp. giant.
The lack of Democratic debates for Fox News has meant a huge setback for the news organization from a ratings perspective. Just look at the grand slam CNN hit last week when, on January 21, it broadcast the much-talked-about Democratic debate from South Carolina. The CNN event not only creamed Fox News in the ratings, nearly tripling its audience that night, but the debate set a new cable news mark for the most viewers ever to watch a primary debate.
In fact, of the 10 most-watched debates this election season, Fox has aired just two, compared to CNN's five. Of the 10 most-watched debates, six have featured Democrats; four Republicans.
CNN is virtually guaranteed another monster ratings win this week with a pair of high-profile debates staged in California -- the Republicans on Wednesday night and Democrats on Thursday.
No wonder CNN's so giddy these days. Here's the spin CNN president Jonathan Klein put out following its New Hampshire ratings win: "There's a freshness and exuberance to our coverage that the others just aren't matching. ... Fox almost seems downright despondent in their coverage."
So I'm not the only one who feels like Fox News coverage, especially of the Republican field, often feels like a televised wake. Or maybe that's just been Fox News' collective, subconscious mourning of the Giuliani campaign.
After all, Sean Hannity serves as Fox News' official ambassador to the Giuliani campaign; a campaign that Ailes and Fox News were hoping to ride back into the White House. Yet despite showering Giuliani with all kinds of laudatory coverage, both Hannity and Ailes have been powerless, as they've watched Giuliani's rudderless campaign go nowhere for months.
Even an all-out Fox News marketing blitz to label Giuliani "America's Mayor" never got traction. In fact, it ranked right up there with the launch of New Coke, in terms of branding success. (Watch this clip to see the Fox News absurdity up-close.)
In the meantime, the rise of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and especially Mike Huckabee, with his populist streak, has caused all sorts of consternation at Fox News. Even the conservative Weekly Standard took notice. The magazine recently wrote that "A lot of conservatives have problems with both Huckabee and McCain. Last night on Fox, for example, Sean Hannity could barely conceal his distaste for both pols."
And don't even mention Ron Paul's name to the folks at Fox News, who have stepped outside their role as journalists to try to kneecap the anti-war GOP candidate. The most blatant slap came right before the New Hampshire primary, when Fox News refused to include Paul in a televised GOP debate, despite the fact that just days earlier Paul grabbed 10 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucus, nearly doubling the tally Giuliani posted.
Paul's Republican supporters became so incensed by the snub that they literally chased Sean Hannity through the New Hampshire night chanting "Fox News sucks!" and captured the scene in a homemade clip that really has to be seen to be believed. (To recap New Hampshire for Fox News: Hannity was pursued by a Republican mob, O'Reilly got into a shoving match with an Obama aide, and CNN grabbed more viewers. Now that's a week to remember!)
Oh, and we can't forget the wildly hyped launch of the Fox Business Network, which, News Corp. execs bragged, would dethrone longtime cable business news champ CNBC. Of course, that might happen one day. But the early ratings for Fox Business Network have been unbelievably weak.
After two months on the air, Fox Business Network, available in 30 million homes, was attracting, on average, just 6,300 viewers on any given weekday, according to Nielsen Media Research. That was good for a nearly invisible .05 rating. (By comparison, CNBC during that period was attracting 265,000 viewers.)
Making matters worse for Ailes was the fact that on January 22, as fears mounted about a possible global financial crisis, CNBC posted its best ratings in seven years, attracting 401,000 viewers that day.
The hurdle for Fox Business Network has always been simple: Why would investors and day traders in search of reliable business information turn from CNBC over to the Fox brand, which is so well-known for passing along one-sided information? News Corp. always assumed Fox News would help launch the business channel. But Fox News is taken seriously by so few people, it may be hurting the business launch.
After all, Fox News continues to embarrass itself with a type of journalism that nobody else in the industry would dare call professional. And for proof of that look no further than Major Garrett, who is supposed to be one of the channel's nonpartisan, serious journalists. He landed a recent scoop about how former advisers to Bill Clinton, Paul Begala and James Carville, were getting set to join Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Carville immediately shot the story down, telling Talking Points Memo's Greg Sargent that very same day, "Fox was, is and will continue to be an asinine and ignorant network. I have not spoken to anyone in the Clinton campaign about this. I'm not getting back into domestic political consulting."
Begala did Carville one better and directly emailed Garrett to deny the story -- a story Garrett never bothered trying to check with Begala or Carville before it was broadcast. Garrett's response to Begala's blanket denial? Garrett told the Democratic operative that he would take his denial "under advisement." [Emphasis added.]
Garrett then went back on the air and repeated the same story, and added the fact that Begala had been on a conference call the day before with Clinton advisers, which was also false. And no, despite his earlier email exchange with Begala, Garrett never bothered to try to confirm the conference call story with him before reporting it on Fox News.
On his Fox News blog, Garrett did acknowledge the Begala email and claimed he'd be updating the fast-moving story soon -- which, he told readers, would likely be confirmed the next day when the Clinton campaign made the Begala/Carville announcement. But the next day when the story imploded, Garrett simply ignored the embarrassing gaffe.
Recounting the whole Kafka-esque charade at the Huffington Post, Begala wrote, "I've never had a more surrealistic day. If this is what one of Fox's best and most respected reporters is doing, what are the hacks up to?"
They're watching CNN capture the campaign ratings crown.
UPDATE: Fresh Nielsen numbers show Fox News' ratings woes continued over the weekend. During Saturday night's 8-10 p.m. ET coverage of the Democrats' South Carolina primary results, Fox News not only got trounced by CNN among viewers 25-54, but lost to MSNBC as well.
Fox News is in for a very rough 2008
by Eric Boehlert
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
My guess is that Fox News guru Roger Ailes has been reaching for the Tums more often than usual early in the New Year, and there are lots of reasons for the hovering angst.
Let's take an extended multiple choice quiz. Right now, which of the following topics is likely causing the discomfort inside Ailes' Fox News empire?
A) CNN's resurgence as the go-to cable destination for election coverage.
B) The incredible shrinking candidacy of Fox News' favored son, Rudy Giuliani.
C) The still-standing candidacy of Fox News nemesis and well-funded, anti-war GOP candidate Rep. Ron Paul.
D) The Democratic candidates' blanket refusal to debate on Fox News during the primary season.
E) Host Bill O'Reilly being so desperate for an interview from a Democratic contender that he had to schlep all the way to New Hampshire, where he shoved an aide to Sen. Barack Obama and then had to be calmed down by Secret Service agents.
F) Former Fox News architect and Ailes confidante Dan Cooper posting chapters from his a wildly unflattering tell-all book about his old boss. ("The best thing that ever happened to Roger Ailes was 9/11.")
G) The fledgling Fox Business Network, whose anemic ratings are in danger of being surpassed by some large city public access channels.
H) Host John Gibson's recent heartless attacks on actor Heath Ledger, just hours after the young actor was found dead.
I) Fox News reporter Major Garrett botching his "exclusive" that Paul Begala and James Carville were going to join Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, and then refusing to correct the record.
I'd say it's A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. (I doubt Gibson's grave-dancing or Garrett's whopper caused Ailes a moment's concern.)
Bottom line is that Fox News is in for a very rough 2008. And the umbrella reason for that is quite simple: Eight years ago the all-news cable channel went all-in on the presidency of George Bush and became a broadcast partner with the White House. Proof of that was on display Sunday night, January 27, during Fox News' prime-time, "Fighting to the Finish," an "historic documentary" on the final year of Bush's presidency. Filmed in HD and featuring "unprecedented access," according to the Fox News press release, the show was pure propaganda. (I must have missed Fox News' "Fighting to the Finish" special back in 2000, chronicling the conclusion of President Bill Clinton's second term and his "extraordinarily consequential tenure.")
The point is that Fox News years ago made an obvious decision to appeal almost exclusively to Republican viewers. The good news then for Fox News was that it succeeded. The bad news now for Fox News is that it succeeded.
Meaning, when the GOP catches a cold, everybody at Fox News gets sick. As blogger Logan Murphy put it at Crooks and Liars, "Watching FOXNews getting their comeuppance has been fun to watch. They made their bed, now they're having to lie in it and it's not too comfortable."
The most obvious signs of Fox News' downturn have been the cable ratings for the big primary and caucus votes this year, as well as the high-profile debates. With this election season generating unprecedented voter and viewer interest, Fox News' rating bumps to date have remained underwhelming, to say the least.
For instance, on the night of the big New Hampshire primary, CNN, which habitually trails behind Fox News in the prime-time race, attracted nearly 250,000 more viewers than its top competitor, marking a changing-of-the-guard of sorts.
The turnaround was striking when you consider that in 2004, even with no Republicans running against Bush, Fox News was still able to draw 200,000 more viewers than CNN on the night of the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Yet in 2008, with a very competitive GOP field, CNN was the ratings winner from New Hampshire.
And just look at the ratings for January 19, which featured returns from the Nevada caucus coming in during the late afternoon, and then fresh returns from the South Carolina Republican primary being posted during prime time that night. In the past, Fox News would have absolutely owned that night of coverage, as conservative news junkies flocked to their home team -- Fox News -- to see the results. But no more. CNN grabbed nearly just as many prime-time viewers for the Republican South Carolina returns as did Fox News.
The problem for Fox News is that it's the Democratic race that's creating most of the excitement, yet Fox News has been forced to mostly watch the race from the sidelines. That's because last winter, after Fox News tried to smear Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) for purportedly attending a radical Muslim school as a child, liberal bloggers launched an initiative to get Democratic candidates to boycott a debate co-sponsored by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic Party. (The boycott, powered by Foxattacks.com, was later extended to any and all Fox News debates.)
The point of the online crusade was not to simply embarrass Fox News or rattle Nevada Democrats for being out of touch with the grassroots masses that distrusted and despised Fox News. The point, instead, was to begin chipping away, in a serious, consistent method, at Fox News' reputation. To spell out that Fox News was nothing more than a Republican mouthpiece and that Democrats need not engage with the News Corp. giant.
The lack of Democratic debates for Fox News has meant a huge setback for the news organization from a ratings perspective. Just look at the grand slam CNN hit last week when, on January 21, it broadcast the much-talked-about Democratic debate from South Carolina. The CNN event not only creamed Fox News in the ratings, nearly tripling its audience that night, but the debate set a new cable news mark for the most viewers ever to watch a primary debate.
In fact, of the 10 most-watched debates this election season, Fox has aired just two, compared to CNN's five. Of the 10 most-watched debates, six have featured Democrats; four Republicans.
CNN is virtually guaranteed another monster ratings win this week with a pair of high-profile debates staged in California -- the Republicans on Wednesday night and Democrats on Thursday.
No wonder CNN's so giddy these days. Here's the spin CNN president Jonathan Klein put out following its New Hampshire ratings win: "There's a freshness and exuberance to our coverage that the others just aren't matching. ... Fox almost seems downright despondent in their coverage."
So I'm not the only one who feels like Fox News coverage, especially of the Republican field, often feels like a televised wake. Or maybe that's just been Fox News' collective, subconscious mourning of the Giuliani campaign.
After all, Sean Hannity serves as Fox News' official ambassador to the Giuliani campaign; a campaign that Ailes and Fox News were hoping to ride back into the White House. Yet despite showering Giuliani with all kinds of laudatory coverage, both Hannity and Ailes have been powerless, as they've watched Giuliani's rudderless campaign go nowhere for months.
Even an all-out Fox News marketing blitz to label Giuliani "America's Mayor" never got traction. In fact, it ranked right up there with the launch of New Coke, in terms of branding success. (Watch this clip to see the Fox News absurdity up-close.)
In the meantime, the rise of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and especially Mike Huckabee, with his populist streak, has caused all sorts of consternation at Fox News. Even the conservative Weekly Standard took notice. The magazine recently wrote that "A lot of conservatives have problems with both Huckabee and McCain. Last night on Fox, for example, Sean Hannity could barely conceal his distaste for both pols."
And don't even mention Ron Paul's name to the folks at Fox News, who have stepped outside their role as journalists to try to kneecap the anti-war GOP candidate. The most blatant slap came right before the New Hampshire primary, when Fox News refused to include Paul in a televised GOP debate, despite the fact that just days earlier Paul grabbed 10 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucus, nearly doubling the tally Giuliani posted.
Paul's Republican supporters became so incensed by the snub that they literally chased Sean Hannity through the New Hampshire night chanting "Fox News sucks!" and captured the scene in a homemade clip that really has to be seen to be believed. (To recap New Hampshire for Fox News: Hannity was pursued by a Republican mob, O'Reilly got into a shoving match with an Obama aide, and CNN grabbed more viewers. Now that's a week to remember!)
Oh, and we can't forget the wildly hyped launch of the Fox Business Network, which, News Corp. execs bragged, would dethrone longtime cable business news champ CNBC. Of course, that might happen one day. But the early ratings for Fox Business Network have been unbelievably weak.
After two months on the air, Fox Business Network, available in 30 million homes, was attracting, on average, just 6,300 viewers on any given weekday, according to Nielsen Media Research. That was good for a nearly invisible .05 rating. (By comparison, CNBC during that period was attracting 265,000 viewers.)
Making matters worse for Ailes was the fact that on January 22, as fears mounted about a possible global financial crisis, CNBC posted its best ratings in seven years, attracting 401,000 viewers that day.
The hurdle for Fox Business Network has always been simple: Why would investors and day traders in search of reliable business information turn from CNBC over to the Fox brand, which is so well-known for passing along one-sided information? News Corp. always assumed Fox News would help launch the business channel. But Fox News is taken seriously by so few people, it may be hurting the business launch.
After all, Fox News continues to embarrass itself with a type of journalism that nobody else in the industry would dare call professional. And for proof of that look no further than Major Garrett, who is supposed to be one of the channel's nonpartisan, serious journalists. He landed a recent scoop about how former advisers to Bill Clinton, Paul Begala and James Carville, were getting set to join Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Carville immediately shot the story down, telling Talking Points Memo's Greg Sargent that very same day, "Fox was, is and will continue to be an asinine and ignorant network. I have not spoken to anyone in the Clinton campaign about this. I'm not getting back into domestic political consulting."
Begala did Carville one better and directly emailed Garrett to deny the story -- a story Garrett never bothered trying to check with Begala or Carville before it was broadcast. Garrett's response to Begala's blanket denial? Garrett told the Democratic operative that he would take his denial "under advisement." [Emphasis added.]
Garrett then went back on the air and repeated the same story, and added the fact that Begala had been on a conference call the day before with Clinton advisers, which was also false. And no, despite his earlier email exchange with Begala, Garrett never bothered to try to confirm the conference call story with him before reporting it on Fox News.
On his Fox News blog, Garrett did acknowledge the Begala email and claimed he'd be updating the fast-moving story soon -- which, he told readers, would likely be confirmed the next day when the Clinton campaign made the Begala/Carville announcement. But the next day when the story imploded, Garrett simply ignored the embarrassing gaffe.
Recounting the whole Kafka-esque charade at the Huffington Post, Begala wrote, "I've never had a more surrealistic day. If this is what one of Fox's best and most respected reporters is doing, what are the hacks up to?"
They're watching CNN capture the campaign ratings crown.
UPDATE: Fresh Nielsen numbers show Fox News' ratings woes continued over the weekend. During Saturday night's 8-10 p.m. ET coverage of the Democrats' South Carolina primary results, Fox News not only got trounced by CNN among viewers 25-54, but lost to MSNBC as well.
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