TPP: Secretly Negotiated And Minimally Reported. Putting A Nice Wool Hood Over The Eyes Of Americans

By Noah

It’s safe to say that when Hillary Clinton finally announced, recently, that she was not supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP as it is more routinely called, that that was the first time many Americans had ever heard of TPP. Why? Well, for one thing, the negotiations of this particular international trade pact have been held in near total secrecy. The other reason is that our nation’s weeknight news outlets have abdicated their responsibility, moral and otherwise, to inform the public about this agreement which will greatly impact their lives.

TPP has been best described as NAFTA on steroids. Or, as International President of The United Steelworkers says, “Foie Gras for Corporations; Dead Rats for Workers." It is a sweeping trade agreement between the U.S., Canada, and ten countries around the Pacific Ocean. Included are Mexico, Chile, Peru, Vietnam, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore.

Just what we need; another, even bigger, more far-reaching trade deal that assaults the well being of the American middle and working classes. Weren’t enough American jobs shipped overseas with deals like NAFTA and CAFTA? To American and Multi-National corporate CEOs and Wall Street lowlifes, the answer is no. Public be damned. American workers will be competing for jobs with workers from countries that have a minimum wage that starts at 25 cents. If there was ever a deal that would turn Americans into serfs, this is it.

Supporters of the TPP, including our corporatist centrist President Obama, say that the deal will create markets for products made by U.S. workers. After all of the years of union busting that American workers have endured, no mention is made by TPP supporters about what wages those American workers will be making. TPP supporters also say the deal will create American jobs. Again, no mention of what those jobs pay or even how secure they might be. Job creation was a big selling point to the American public when NAFTA was rammed down our throats by New Gingrich and Bill Clinton. Something similar has happened with the TPP. A Democratic president has enjoyed total support for a trade deal from the Republican Party.

We’ve heard it all before. The laughter we now hear is coming from Wall Street, President Obama’s banker Jamie Dimon, and the K Street Bribery Squads who provide TPP supporters in the House and Senate with endless “campaign contributions”. The polite term for those who deliver the checks to Congress is Lobbyist. We really need to call them what they are- Bagmen. Period.

Until Clinton made her announcement, she did everything she could to avoid saying whether she was for or against the TPP, usually disingenuously claiming that she needed to see it first. It should also be mentioned that both she and President Obama stated during the 2008 campaign that they would renegotiate NAFTA. Both Secretary of State Clinton and the President have failed to do so when they’ve had the chance. Clinton, in fact was a strong supporter of NAFTA. So, given these facts, why should we believe her this time?

Clinton eventually had to stop being cagey. She was feeling the pressure from the Democratic Party base and her current most serious challenger for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. He had already won over a lot of potential primary voters by stating, in no uncertain terms, that he was strongly against the TPP. He has been consistent about his feelings on the subject since word about the TPP first surfaced, long, long before he announced his candidacy for President. In comparison, Clinton made her announcement only after the party base reacted so negatively to the June Senate vote on fast track authority for the deal.

Interestingly, the corporate media doesn’t call Sanders’ supporters “the base”. Instead, they call his followers “the left”, almost as an aspersion. Coverage of Sanders has been reluctant and minimal. Clinton, a corporatist centrist is their horse in the race. They still refer to her as the presumptive choice, so, when she announced her position on TPP, it was news that was worthy of their attention.

Here’s Sen. Sanders eloquently stating his position over one and a half years ago on virtually the only show that would have him on to talk about something so vital to the futures of so many. If you read or view nothing else about the TPP, take a look at this clip:



Sen. Sanders has been making the same statements about TPP for a very long time. Unfortunately, he hasn’t had much face time on the weeknight news programs. The Ed Schultz show appearance was a rare event. Schultz, who is very pro-labor and pro-working Americans oriented, was virtually alone in giving Sanders a podium for his positions. Now that Schulz is gone from MSNBC, it doesn’t seem that anyone, on any major network channel, is stepping up to fill the void on any sort of regular basis like Schultz did, not even the Emmy-winning Chris Hayes and certainly not any of the corporate shills on CNN or the extremist un-American wackjobs and nihilists on FOX.

So, without meaningful corporate news coverage of a Sanders campaign that draws thousands to his appearances, and virtually no detailed coverage of the TPP, it should be no surprise that the first time many Americans heard anything about TPP came with the Clinton announcement. Even then, although the phrase Trans-Pacific Partnership was uttered, there was next to nothing mentioned about what it actually was and what it would mean for the vast majority of Americans. It’s just a new take on the old 1950s “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” Well, at least back then, Americans could get a good-paying job at General Motors. Whole American cities revolved around those jobs. Sons and daughters went to college because of those jobs.

How bad has it been? Take a look at these two charts, provided by Media Matters that show Television news coverage of the TPP through January of this year. The first one represents the major network news program coverage. The second one represents the cable news outlets.

As you can see, only PBS and MSNBC (due to the now departed Ed Schultz) have ever been in this game. When charts are done for this year, I will expect to see only a marginal growth in coverage. The topic gets so little coverage that even the satirists have ignored it. A comedian’s audience has to know what something is before that comedian can squeeze laughter from it.

For CNN, the broadcast of last night’s Democratic debate probably radically expanded their audience’s exposure to TPP news. Thankfully, they hadn’t decided to run car commercials while Sen. Sanders spoke. Given the amount of coverage CNN has given to Sander’s campaign, it wouldn’t have shocked me if his microphone mysteriously conked out.

Why so little coverage of the TPP and the Sanders campaign? Do they consider the American people and the positions of Bernie Sanders a threat?

The CEOs that own the networks wouldn’t want to offend the CEOs that run the oil companies, car companies, and pharmaceutical companies that stand to gain hugely from the TPP and that buy so much advertising on their networks now, would they? Next time you watch MSNBC, CNN, or FOX, just count the number of BP commercials, the number of car commercials, and, last but certainly not the least, the ads for sleep aids, boner pills, and the like. Corporate America wants it viewers to get lots of sleep and plenty of sex. They certainly don’t want you thinking about how corporate America is screwing you.

Take a look at this chart, also provided by Media Matters, an organization that FOX’s Bill O’Reilly irrationally calls a "hate group." The TPP’s supporters tell us that TPP is a beautiful thing. The chart, on the other hand, shows that the U.S. ends up with a negative trade balance because of the TPP. Gee, that’s swell.

Looks like NJ's Imperial Thieving Fat Bastard isn't going to be toiling on a chain gang anytime soon

"Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go." You'd think by now NJ's Imperial Thieving Fat Bastard governor would be packing his toothbrush for a decade or two in the slammer, but it isn't looking that way. And "Scummy Joe" Scarborough will tell us why.

by Ken

For now, anyway, the last word apparently goes to "Scummy Joe" Scarborough, who now seems to have officially set himself up as apologist of and coddler of right-wing Imperial Thieving Fat Bastards.

MediaMatters took the trouble to document ("STUDY: New Investigation Into Gov. Christie Adminstration Virtually Ignored By Major Networks") that essentially no TV network news attention was paid, except by MSNBC, to the New York Times's carefully researched and documented story earlier in the week ("2nd Bridge Inquiry Said to Be Linked to Christie," by Matt Flegenheimer, William K. Rashbaum, and Kate Zernike) about multiple dimensions of illegality under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney and the Securities and Exchange Commission to the way New Jersey's Imperial Thieving Fat Bastard of a governor swindled a couple of billion dollars out of his favorite patsy, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. (Okay, that's my characterization of the ITFB's alleged crimes.)

As Erik Wemple subsequently noted on his washingtonpost.com blog, "No surprises in that data set. MSNBC, after all, has provided extensive coverage of all things related to Christie and Jersey infrastructure ever since the George Washington Bridge scandal exploded in January."

However, Erik also notes:

Some of that MSNBC coverage, however, wasn’t terribly complimentary of the New York Times scoop. On his June 24 program, “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough ripped the story and its placement on page A1: “This is garbage,” he said, adding that it’s a “joke of a story to put on the front page.”

Apparently Scummy Joe has higher standards when it comes to possible illegalities imputed to Republican thieving bastards. Stealing a couple of billion dollars? "A joke of a story to put on the front page."


COME ON, WHAT'S THE BEEF? YOU PROBABLY
JUST DON'T LIKE HIS POLITICS, RIGHT?

Well, no, I don't like his politics, but I don't think the people who elected him governor twice don't know much about the politics being practiced in their name.

The money in question is money that -- and I don't think there's any question about this -- the Imperial Thieving Fat Bastard extorted out of the PANYNJ for use to do repairs to the Pulaski Skyway. It's money that magically became "available" after the ITFB unilaterally canceled the long-planned trans-Hudson tunnel, in a fog of obfuscations and outright lies (as the man ever told the truth about anything in public? ever?), despite its substantial and obvious value to large numbers of New Jerseyans, and then magically became available. Like for pilfering ITFBs.

Okay, let's have some facts. MediaMatters quotes two chunks from the NYT report:

The inquiries into securities law violations focus on a period of 2010 and 2011 when Gov. Chris Christie's administration pressed the Port Authority to pay for extensive repairs to the Skyway and related road projects, diverting money that was to be used on a new Hudson River rail tunnel that Mr. Christie canceled in October 2010.

Again and again, Port Authority lawyers warned against the move: The Pulaski Skyway, they noted, is owned and operated by the state, putting it outside the agency's purview, according to dozens of memos and emails reviewed by investigators and obtained by The New York Times.

But the Christie administration relentlessly lobbied to use the money for the Skyway, with Mr. Christie announcing publicly that the state planned to rely on Port Authority funds even before an agreement was reached. Eventually, the authority justified the Skyway repairs by casting the bridge as an access road to the Lincoln Tunnel, even though they are not directly connected.

Hmm, "Again and again, Port Authority lawyers warned against the move," eh? "Not directly connected," eh, the skyway and the tunnel? Well, and this is just an Imperial Thieving Fat Bastard brainstorming, what if we were to make up some cover name?

In bond documents describing the Skyway reconstruction and other repairs, the Port Authority has called the projects "Lincoln Tunnel Access Infrastructure Improvements."

The accuracy of this characterization is now a major focus of the investigations, according to several people briefed on the matter. Under a New York State law known as the Martin Act, prosecutors can bring felony charges for intentionally deceiving bond holders, without having to prove any intent to defraud or even establish that any fraud occurred.

BEFORE WE GO ON, SORRY, BUT THE "FAT" IN
"IMPERIAL THIEVING FAT BASTARD" MATTERS

I know I will be castigated for referring mockingly to the Imperial Thieving Fat Bastard's all-adulthood grotesque obesity. I'm sorry, though, it's who he is -- a loathsome, greedy, self-absorbed beast of limitless ravenous appetites who has flaunted his loathsomeness, greed, self-absorption, and limitless ravenous appetites. I think he want anyone who deals with him to know that he is an imperial thieving fat bastard. Play ball with him (and you remember how, when he was trying to separate himself from the crackpot-thug high school crony David Wildstein whom he planted at the PANYNJ, he depicted is old pal as a solitary high school wacko and himself as "an athlete"), and you'll be rewarded; fuck with him and, well, you risk suffering the wrath of an Imperial Thieving Fat Bastard.

You know, sort of the way Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer revealed the ITFB administration had threatened her city's Sandy recovery money if she didn't play ball with one of his high-stakes development scams. Does anyone really believe Mayor Zimmer made this up? It fits perfectly with the ITFB adminsitration's pattern of carrot-and-stick intimidation and thuggery. And again, I don't think the ITFB's "people" were all that shy about it. Intimidation doesn't work if the people you want to keep in line don't know they're under threat. It's just that nobody dares go public, for fear of, well, incurring the consequences. And the ITFB had a near-ironclad defense: You can't prove nuttin', coppers. And he should know, having been the kind of U.S. attorney Karl Rove loved, the kind who knew which criminals to sit on and which to send on their way with a friendly athlete's pat on the rump.


HEY, BUT AREN'T NEW JERSEYANS GETTING
A LOVELY REHABILITATED PULASKI SKYWAY?

Well, lucky for them. Their ITFB did a little something for them. At the same time, of course, he was bribing labor unions to whom chunks of that money would be flowing into playing ball with him. And who knows how many other ITFB cronies and seduction targets got their cuts? We do know about the merriment with which once-respected former NJ AG David Sansom, installed by the ITFB as his personal stooge-chariman of the PANYNJ, approved deals for which he got his cut as attorney for the lucky recipients.

But gosh, you say, the Pulaski Skyway needed rebuilding, and the state of New Jersey couldn't afford to do it.

Well, boo-hoo. Did you notice just recently that when the state of New Jersey couldn't afford to honor its legal obligations, and the ITFB decided that meant he could slash $904M from the state's contribution to its retirees' benefits (and another $1.57B next year!), and a bunch of unions sued, just this week --

A New Jersey judge on Wednesday refused to force Governor Chris Christie to restore almost a billion dollars in funds that he cut from the state's 2014 pension contribution.

The state's fiscal crisis trumped public workers' contractual rights, granted under the state's 2011 pension reform law, to the full contribution, according to Judge Mary Jacobson's ruling.
Public sector unions sued the Christie administration after he slashed $904 million from this year's pension contribution and directed the legislature to cut $1.57 billion from next year's budget, too.

Golly gee, wasn't it just this past fall that the state was a picture of financial health thanks to its ITFB governor's bold fiscal prudence? And now, gosh sucks, there's just no money for retired state workers. Apparently when it comes to state workers, as opposed to private-sector unions he's trying to bribe or connected cronies he's trying to enrich, boo-hoo, Your Honor, there's just no money to be found.

"Scummy Joe" Scarborough doesn't see anything wrong here. After all, he's just being a forceful leader for the people of his state. Well, no, he's being a forceful enforcer and enricher for the rich of his state, or else he wouldn't be doing it in secret through intimidation, extortion, and embezzlement. I guess "Scummy Joe" understands that the reason we have government is to help the rich become richer, and the reason we have elections is so the people can decide who they want deciding which rich people should get how much richer.

In the case of the canceled trans-Hudson tunnel, I think we can conclude that

These are, after all, economically troubled times -- after the ITFB's reelection win, that is. State government can't fill the pockets of every overprivileged supplicant.

#

Whatever the WSJ may have been in pre-Murdoch days, it's now apparently the Journal of Wall Street Bullshit

If there was ever really a truth-telling Dr. Jekyll component of the supposedly Jekyll-and-Hyde-like Wall Street Journal holed up in the newsroom, it seems to have passed safely into oblivion.

by Ken

Admirers of the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal always claimed that the paper had to be thought of as two fundamentally different entities. Yes, they acknowledged, the editorial pages were as shamelessly propagandistic as anyone with eyes could tell. However, they insisted, the news pages were strictly legit, and one of the journalistic world's great reportorial sources.

Since I avoided the paper like the plague, I was never in a position to judge. Certainly the filth spewed out daily on those editorial pages was so egregious, and lent such unwarranted respectability to heaps of the most vicious lies and obfuscations to be found in print, that I considered mere possession of the rag a mark of intellectual squalor.

Of course I was aware that the paper employed actual journalists who at least occasionally produced actual journalism, and even journalism of high quality. I know too that even the paper's staunchest defenders worried openly about the future of actual journalism following the News Corp takeover. I go into this background by way of explaining that I have no way of judging whether the monumental fraud the Journal has just perpetrated in its propaganda war against the reality of global warming is a product of the paper's News Corp-ification.

As it happens, the story, as reported by Media Matters (here courtesy of Nation of Change: "Wall Street Journal Downplays Study Confirming Global Warming"), concerns one that we took note of: "Climate-change deniers have never cared about 'truth'; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions." It concerns a study by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, spearheaded by physicist Richard Muller, who had long argued that the data on which other scientists based their theories of climate change couldn't be trusted without verification. The story was, essentially, that the Berkeley project's exhaustive study confirmed the data.

To say that this hasn't gone over well among right-wing counterscientific thugs is an understatement. Ironically, the project was funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation, which I think it's safe to say -- although Richard Muller denies it -- was clearly expecting a very different result.

Muller was careful to note in the op-ed piece he wrote when the project's basic findings were released that the study did not take any position on whether the clearly measurable global warming was man-made. But he made it clear that where climate-change skeptics had previously had grounds for skepticism, they no longer did. In a phrase that has been widely picked up -- though not at the Wall Street Journal -- he argued, "You should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer."

As Media Matters notes, though, there was one curious thing about the Muller op-ed. It was published -- on October 21, "the same day the preliminary reports from the BEST study were released" -- in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal and on the paper's website, but not in the U.S. print edition.

A Factiva search of the Wall Street Journal shows that the Journal's U.S. paper did not mention the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study for over two weeks after the results were published. The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media noted that the Journal published an editorial in the following days titled "The Post-Global Warming World" that was "dismissive of climate change" and had not "a word about the BEST study." [Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, 11/1/11]

And when the Journal broke its mysterious silence on the subject? As Media Matters' headline puts it: "WSJ Eventually Prints Article About Study -- Only To Downplay It." In a November 5 article, "Global Temperatures: All Over The Map," Carl Bialik (billed by the paper as "The Numbers Guy") reports it as a story about the "uncertain nature of tracking global temperature." What he's actually assembled, the MediaMatters report suggests, is an orgy of obfuscations if not outright lies.

I get the feeling reading Bialik that he knows less about climate science than I do, which isn't much, but he's clearly good at searching out people with the slant he wants on the story and then performing tricks with numbers. Given enough prompting from the scientific peanut gallery, he had what he needed to be able to throw bunches of numbers up in the air and have them land as superbly adulterated right-wing bullshit.

Naturally this all gets kind of technical, though again my impression is that Bialik hasn't a clue what the discussion is actually about. He makes a federal case, for example, of supposedly expert allegations that the BEST study ignores satellite temperature readings in favor of allegedly much inferior ground readings, but NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt (in an e-mail to Media Matters via the Climate Science Rapid Response Team) notes that "the satellites and the ground stations are measuring different things, and it isn't obvious that they should be the same," and insists that the "factor of two difference" claimed by Bialik "is not supportable from the data." (Richard Muller points out in an e-mail to Media Matters that the article's claim "is misleading because he doesn't point out that satellite measurements do not give ground measurements, but only temperatures up higher in the atmosphere. Also the satellite measurements he is referring to are, I believe, global and not land only.") Media Matters cites other scientists saying that the satellite data in fact accord quite well with the ground data.

But perhaps the best indicator of the quality of Bialik's "reporting" is this claim:

This sort of messy hashing-out of the global climate record is happening in the open because the Berkeley Earth team chose to release its data, and its papers, before undergoing peer review by scientific journals. Already some feedback has led to updates and corrections to the research. Berkeley Earth plans other work, including adding ocean temperature trends to the land records and fixing errors in its database.

He does actually quote Richard Muller on the subject of peer review. He ends his piece:

"Some people mistakenly think peer review means secret review by anonymous referees at journals," Mr. Muller says. "We're getting wonderful peer review, from McIntyre, from Briggs, from other people. That's the process of science."

However, it seems most unlikely that Bialik, when he got this quote from Muller, mentioned the use he planned to make of the peer-review issue, which is to blatantly imply, without a ghost of a whisper of a hint of substantiation, that those "updates and corrections to the research" in any way alter the study's findings or the report's conclusions. And we can be pretty sure that Bialik never said anything to Muller about Berkeley Earth planning on "fixing errors in its database." How can we be sure? Because Media Matters quotes Muller again via e-mail:

In response to that passage, Richard Muller wrote: "I can't imagine what he is referring to." Muller noted that his team had updated data from NASA in a chart, not their own results.

I would suggest that it's hopelessly naive Bialik has any interest at all in the truth. It's all about furthering the mission of the Wall Street Journal as the prime propaganda outlet for the 1%. As some guy once said, "Climate-change deniers have never cared about 'truth'; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions." Media Matters reminds us about the September 2009 WSJ editorial, "Rigging a Climate 'Consensus,'" which extrapolated from the famous stolen e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia that climate-change data could no longer be trusted, now that it was revealed as possibly rigged, which the BEST report clearly indicates was not the case.

Of course that was the WSJ's editorial side, the universally acknowledged Mr. Hyde of the supposedly Jekyll-and-Hyde operation. If there ever was a truth-telling Dr. Jekyll component holed up in the newsroom, it seems to have passed safely into oblivion.

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Say, Mo Dowd, can you think of anyone in gov't or media who's fibbed publicly more recently than Donald Rumsfeld?

"Rummy's memoir, 'Known and Unknown,' is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed 'anticipatory self-defense.' . . . You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want."

-- Maureen Dowd, making fun of Donald Rumsfeld

"[T]he story here isn't that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who's been paying attention has known that since the channel's inception more than a decade ago. The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods."

-- Media Matters' Eric Boehlert

by Ken

Now I don't necessarily mind that Maureen Dowd is calling Donald Rumsfeld to account for his serial lies. "At Rumsfeld.com," she writes in her column today, "Simply the Worst" (see link above), "the author has put up an archive of records and memos," and she proceeds to tick off a bunch of Rummy-whoppers. I certainly don't want Rummy getting a free pass just 'cause folks have forgotten how he lied us into a war for which he had made sure we were unprepared in every way except the initial fighting, all via lies -- or maybe lies-plus-delusions. (Remember how the war was going to pay for itself with all those oil revenues, which we were presumably going to steal?)

The problem is the usual one with our Mo: She waits to pile on until it's totally safe. The time to be waxing indignant about the Rummy-whoppers was the time when he was dropping them on a little-suspecting American public. Although of course the gullible and craven have hidden behind the eternal "Who could have guessed?," the fact is that lots of people who'd done their homework were anywhere from deeply suspicious to thoroughly persuaded that Rummy and Chimpy and Big Dick and the whole gang were just making it up as they went. By and large, as we've noted frequently, those people were punished for being right, while the media automatons who nodded like bobblehead dolls paid no price or were actually rewarded for being wrong.

That would have been a good time to ridicule Rummy for going to war with the facts he wanted. And now would be a good time to be blowing the whistle on the gaggle of compulsive liars who have more or less taken over our political and media discourse.

I don't kid myself that a piece like Eric Boehlert's latest effort ("'We Were a Stalin-esque Mouthpiece for Bush' -- Fox News Insider"; again, see link above) is going to reach the mass of Americans who swallow down all the sludge dumped on them by the Fox Noisemakers. As I keep pointing out, they believe only partly because they're gullible; more importantly, I think, the Foxies give them the lies they want. Ever since Ronald Reagan made Americans understand that they have no obligation to reality, that what really matters whatever ignorant, delusional nonsense fills their heads, the faithful have known their rights: above all, the right to the lies that make them feel better, more manly, more indignant (when indignation is what they want to feel), more trigger-happy, whatever will provide them with some release for all that stored-up unhappiness. Short of addressing the sources of that unhappiness, of course, which would be unthinkable.

[A] former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch's cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as apurely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

"It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats," says the source. "They're a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news."

So how, according to Eric's source, does the process work?

"They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they're balanced or that they're not right-wing extreme propagandist," says the source. But it's all a well-orchestrated lie, according this former insider. It's a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

"You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks," says the source. "And God help you if you don't because sooner or later you're going to get burned."

The source explains:

"Like any news channel there's lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn't 'news,' they didn't care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything -- anything -- that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn't explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There's a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is."

What if Fox News staffers aren't instinctively conservative or don't have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? "My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead," the source explains. "You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough."

Eric's source talks about the changes he witnessed in his time on the inside.

"When I first got there back in the day, and I don't know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were 'training' you, as it were, they would say, 'Here's how we're different.' They'd say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live truck outside the prison and all the lives shots. CNN would go, 'Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls.' MSNBC would say the same thing.

"We would come out and say, 'Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two year old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the schoolyard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get.' And they say that's the way we do it here. And you're going, all right, it's a bit of an extreme example, but it's something to think about. It's not unreasonable."

The Ailesmen know how to play on their people's native sympathies, or rather antipathies.

"When you first get in they tell you we're a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don't even start arguing that or you won't even last your first day.

"For the first few years it was let's take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it's not just the conservative take on things, we're going to take the Republican take on things, which is not necessarily in lockstep with the conservative point of view.

"And then two, three, five years into that it was, we're taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president."

>Eric points out how rare it is for Fox Noisers past or present to talk about what they do there, and gives generous credit to the extreme "us vs. them" mentality Fox Noisemaster Roger Ailes has carefully cultivated in the organization. " His source explains, "Ailes is obsessed with presenting a unified Fox News front to the outside world; an obsession that may explain Ailes; refusal to publicly criticize or even critique his own team regardless of how outlandish their on-air behavior." Again, the source stresses that the issue isn't partisanship per se but that, in Eric's words, "Fox News is designed to mislead its viewers and designed to engage in a purely political enterprise."

So, Fox News as a legitimate news outlet? The source laughs at the suggestion, and thinks much of the public, along with the Beltway press corps, has been duped by Murdoch's marketing campaign over the years. "People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don't. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things," says the source.

The source continues: "I don't think people understand that it's an organization that's built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that's on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You'd think that people would wise up, but they don't."

As for the press, the former Fox News employee gives reporters and pundits low grades for refusing, over the years, to call out Fox News for being the propaganda outlet that it so clearly is. The source suggests there are a variety of reasons for the newsroom timidity.

"They don't have enough staff or enough balls or don't have enough money or don't have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it's not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they'll kick you in the ass," says the source. "I'm sure most [journalists] know that. It's not worth being Swift Boated for your effort," a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative things about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch's operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

"That blew me away," says the source, who stresses the White House's critique of Fox News "happens to be true."

As I said, I understand that no amount of reporting by Eric Boehlert and other media-watchers on the reality-based side is likely to penetrate the swamp of delusion the Right has worked so hard to perpetuate and exploit. Still, people with media pulpits need to be on the case, constantly. Waiting for the "All clear!" signal to show that it's safe for the pilers-on to pile on merely guarantees that it will be too little, too late.

The lies that need to be called out are the ones being told now -- by all the "lying liars," to coin a phrase.

#

Death is too important a subject to be left to the mercy of rampaging, reality-defying numskulls

UPDATE: New gloss on the eternal question:
Are they liars or just morons?

What was old is new again: Since the "death panels" lies are back, it seems only appropriate to bring back this offering by the great R. J. Matson from last year's holiday season.

by Ken

I know we're supposed to make nice to those poor misunderstood Teabaggers, and bow before the legitimacy of their grievances. It's just kind of hard when, besotted by their newfound power, they're off on a screaming rampage, wildly wielding their weapons of psychotic destruction against every vestige of reality and human decency caught in their path.

Since, on a scale of zero to a gazillion, they know less than nothing about life (I'm deducting points for the preposterous wrongness of nearly everything they think they know), and have chosen to devote their lives to a relentless war on reality, it's hardly surprising that they're both totally ignorant of and in denial about death. The only clue these wacko scumbags may ever get about the subject is likely to come at the very "moment of." If then.

To the extent that the human race has a lick of sense, death is something we attempt to incorporate into our lives, to understand the reality of it and, as best we can, plan for the eventuality that none of us can avoid. But again, just as the Teabagger spit on life, they defecate on reality, and will do everything in their power to eradicate it.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that back to the "death panels" lies. Now personally, I don't give a damn how clueless these people wish to remain about their own deaths, and I can only wish them the speediest possible encounter in the hope that something may perhaps penetrate those seemingly impenetrable skulls. But when they screech and foment and wield their bloody axes to prevent other people from attempting to cope with reality, they go too far.

Of course it served the demagogues of the Right only too well to pretend to go along with what even they surely knew was a conspiracy of cretinousness, that there was something insidious about the sane, sensible provision included in the health care package to enable people who so wish to avail themselves of professional counsel in anticipating and preparing for death. But apparently for people who believe that they have the right and power to turn back reality, this incredibly modest proposal is intolerable.

More power to Media Matters' Jamison Foser for trying to blow the whistle on the media enablers of the big lie:

If Media Won't Correct The "Lie Of The Year," What Will They Correct?

December 26, 2010 8:01 pm ET by Jamison Foser

If you thought the New York Times' write-up of a Medicare regulation about advising patients of end-of-life care options was bad, wait until you see the Associated Press. The Times article invoked Sarah Palin's 2009 claim that a similar provision constituted "death panels," while explaining only that Palin's (deeply false) claim was "unsubstantiated." The AP didn't even offer that caveat. Here's how the wire service's report handles Palin's lie:

[T]he practice was heavily criticized by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and some other Republicans who have likened the counseling to "death panels." . . .…

Prominent Republicans singled it out as a glaring example of government overreach. Palin's use of the phrase "death panels" solidified GOP opposition to the health care bill.

That isn't even "he said, she said" reporting (which is bad enough.) That's just "she said." But what she said was false. That's worth mentioning, don't you think?

Nobody should be surprised when Palin lies -- after all, she knows news organizations like the AP will just type up what she said and pass it along to their readers, without lifting a finger to correct the record.

It's an interesting question, of a thumb-suckingly intellectual sort, as to whether someone like Princess Sarah knows better and is simply being conveniently cynical or is sincerely befuddled when she spews nonsense like this. Right now it doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference. Those of us left behind in what the Bush regimistas referred to sneeringly as the reality-based community have to stick together to insist on, at the very least, equal time for reality.


UPDATE: SO TELL US, CONGRESSMAN-ELECT
JOHNSON, ARE YOU KIDDING OR WHAT?

From Morocco Howie passes on a post from Modernesquire on Plunderbund, citing the case of incoming Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio, who early this month made a great show of announcing his refusal to accept Congressional health care benefits as an expression of his outrage at the newly enacted national health care package. As the Ohio Free Press reported:

“Lincoln famously put forth the notion that government should be of the people, by the people and for the people,” Johnson said. “This is one substantial way I can show that my commitment to the people of Eastern and Southern Ohio is to help them, not to gain exclusive benefits for myself.”

Johnson said Congress must focus on repealing Obama Health Care and instead adopt patient-based, market-driven health care solutions.

“I oppose ObamaCare because government-controlled health care will create more debt and huge bureaucracy,” Johnson said. “We need to reverse the government takeover of our health care, and we should adopt common sense, patient-centered, private sector solutions like making health care portable from job to job and state to state, tort reform, and promoting health savings accounts.”

Does this man know how to do "self-righteous," or what?

The only wee problem, as Modernesquire notes via the Youngstown News's Windy.com blog, is that the congressman-elect left out a tiny bit of the picture. In foregoing congressional health care coverage, which actually is provided through private insurers, he isn't exactly falling back on a "common sense, patient-centered, private sector solution." As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, Johnson "has and will continue to receive federal health-care benefits from that branch of the military."

The point is not -- as lame-brained, similarly fake-self-righteous apologists for the congressman-elect have blustered -- that he didn't earn that coverage. The point is that he has declared himself unalterably opposed to "exclusive benefits" for himself and to "the government takeover of our health care." The reality is that his much-derided "ObamaCare" is provided entirely by market-driven private insurers, whereas his military health care is in fact government-run health insurance.

So there's no question that Congressman-elect Johnson is a 100 percent raving hypocrite. The only remaining question is: Is he really that stupid, or is he just another right-wing pathological liar?

#

A hearty welcome to Equality Matters

Clinton White House aide Richard Socarides, a frequent critic of the Obama administration on LGBT issues including its actions in support of DADT repeal, heads Media Matters' "new media and communications initiative" in support of LGBT equality.

"Equality Matters, [David] Brock said, should 'expose right-wing bigotry and homophobia wherever we find it' and 'stiffen the spines of progressives.' That, he said, did not change with the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' . . . 'We know that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" will be a news hook,' Mr. Brock said. 'But we believe the big battle is full equality.'"

-- from Sheryl Gay Stolberg's NYT blog report on the
creation of the Media Matters spinoff Equality Matters

by Ken

In the two years she's been Washington correspondent for The Advocate, Kerry Eleveld has established herself as one of the sharper and more persistent members of the DC press corps. Okay, considering the pronounced docility of that press corps, this sounds like a back-handed compliment. She's done a bang-up job, making herself a living nuisance for White House press goader Robert Gibbs, regularly holding him answerable for the President Obama's lip-service-oriented position on LGBT issues.

Kerry will be missed in that capacity as she moves on to what we can all hope will be an important new mission, as editor of the website of Equality Matters, a new "project" of Media Matters, to be headed by Richard Socarides. The website goes live today, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports in an extensive account on the NYT blog "The Caucus," which begins (for links see the onsite version):

December 19, 2010

One Battle Won, Activists Shift Sights

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON -- As gay people around the country reveled on Sunday in the historic Senate vote to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," a liberal media watchdog group said it planned to announce on Monday that it was setting up a "communications war room for gay equality" in an effort to win the movement's next and biggest battle: for a right to same-sex marriage.

The new group, Equality Matters, grew out of Media Matters, an organization backed by wealthy liberal donors -- including prominent gay philanthropists -- that has staked its claim in Washington punditry with aggressive attacks on Fox News and conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

It will be run by Richard Socarides, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton who has been deeply critical of President Obama's record on gay rights. A well-known gay journalist, Kerry Eleveld, the Washington correspondent for The Advocate, will leave that newspaper in January to edit the new group's Web site, equalitymatters.org, which is to go online Monday morning.

"Yesterday was a very important breakthrough," Mr. Socarides said in an interview on Sunday, "and President Obama's comments, especially following the vote, were very significant, where he for the first time connected race and gender to sexual orientation under the banner of civil rights.

"But we will celebrate this important victory for five minutes, and then we have to move on, because we are the last group of Americans who are discriminated against in federal law and there is a lot of work to do."

Mr. Obama ran for office promising to be a "fierce advocate" for the rights of gay people, and he pledged his support for goals deeply important to them. These included passing a hate crimes bill making it a federal crime to assault someone because of sexual orientation; repealing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military; passing the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which would forbid employers to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation; and overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman for purpose of all federal laws.

Just what the administration contributed to the DADT victory will remain a subject of debate, but the lack of progress with the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) despite those Democratic congressional majorities that are already ghostly memories is painful, and leaves the jobs of people all over the country subject to the whims of prejudice against their sexual orientation, and the still-untouched (except lately in the courts) DOMA remains an insurmountable obstacle to full citizenship for the LGBT community.

The Equality Matters website was already accepting signups for its mailing list yesterday. The site's "About Us" says:

EqualityMatters.org is a new media and communications initiative in support of gay equality. Through strategic communications, research, training and media monitoring we strengthen efforts for full LGBT rights and correct anti-gay misinformation. Our goal is to enhance advocacy and activism across all platforms and to leverage our expertise in support of others who are working to make full equality a national imperative.

Stolberg's NYT blog report continues:

While a range of groups are working to advance gay rights, the movement has lacked a national rapid-response war room of the sort that can push back against homophobic messages in the media and the political arena and keep the pressure on elected officials, said David Mixner, a gay author and activist.

"I think the lesson we have learned over the last two years is that you've got to be tough," Mr. Mixner said, "and you've got to keep people's feet to the fire."

The organizers of Equality Matters say that is their intent. Mr. Socarides and the founder of Media Matters, David Brock, said they began planning Equality Matters several months ago. They quickly persuaded Ms. Eleveld, who covered the Obama campaign and has covered Washington for the last two years, to join them.

"I've spent the past two years with a front-row seat to history, and the longer I sat there the more I felt drawn to participating," Ms. Eleveld said in an interview.

Mr. Brock, a former conservative journalist who is gay -- and who broke with the right in the 1990s -- has lately been expanding the Media Matters organization. He said in an interview that he had raised $23 million in the last year for the group, which has an operating budget of $13 million. His backers include George Soros, the liberal donor; the Hollywood producer Steve Bing; and gay philanthropists like James Hormel, an ambassador to Luxembourg under Mr. Clinton.

Equality Matters, Mr. Brock said, should "expose right-wing bigotry and homophobia wherever we find it" and "stiffen the spines of progressives." That, he said, did not change with the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He said Equality Matters was planned long before anyone in Washington had an inkling that repeal was possible.

"We know that ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell' will be a news hook," Mr. Brock said. "But we believe the big battle is full equality, which is gay marriage."

#

Say, Mo Dowd, can you think of anyone in gov't or media who's fibbed publicly more recently than Donald Rumsfeld?

"Rummy's memoir, 'Known and Unknown,' is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed 'anticipatory self-defense.' . . . You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want."

-- Maureen Dowd, making fun of Donald Rumsfeld

"[T]he story here isn't that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who's been paying attention has known that since the channel's inception more than a decade ago. The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods."

-- Media Matters' Eric Boehlert

by Ken

Now I don't necessarily mind that Maureen Dowd is calling Donald Rumsfeld to account for his serial lies. "At Rumsfeld.com," she writes in her column today, "Simply the Worst" (see link above), "the author has put up an archive of records and memos," and she proceeds to tick off a bunch of Rummywhoppers. I certainly don't want Rummy getting a free pass just 'cause folks have forgotten how he lied us into a war for which he had made sure we were unprepared in every way except the initial fighting, all via lies -- or maybe lies-plus-delusions. (Remember how the war was going to pay for itself with all those oil revenues, which we were presumably going to steal?)

The problem is the usual one with our Mo: She waits to pile on until it's totally safe. The time to be waxing indignant about the Rummywhoppers was the time when he was dropping them on a little-suspecting American public. Although of course the gullible and craven have hidden behind the eternal "Who could have guessed?," the fact is that lots of people who'd done their homework were anywhere from deeply suspicious to thoroughly persuaded that Rummy and Chimpy and Big Dick and the whole gang were just making it up as they went. By and large, as we've noted frequently, those people were punished for being right, while the media automatons who nodded like bobblehead dolls paid no price or were actually rewarded for being wrong.

That would have been a good time to ridicule Rummy for going to war with the facts he wanted. And now would be a good time to be blowing the whistle on the gaggle of compulsive liars who have more or less taken over our political and media discourse.

I don't kid myself that a piece like Eric Boehlert's latest effort ("'We Were a Stalin-esque Mouthpiece for Bush' -- Fox News Insider"; again, see link above) is going to reach the mass of Americans who swallow down all the sludge dumped on them by the Fox Noisemakers. As I keep pointing out, they believe only partly because they're gullible; more importantly, I think, the Foxies give them the lies they want. Ever since Ronald Reagan made Americans understand that they have no obligation to reality, that what really matters whatever ignorant, delusional nonsense fills their heads, the faithful have known their rights: above all, the right to the lies that make them feel better, more manly, more indignant (when indignation is what they want to feel), more trigger-happy, whatever will provide them with some release for all that stored-up unhappiness. Short of addressing the sources of that unhappiness, of course, which would be unthinkable.

[A] former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch's cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as apurely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

"It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats," says the source. "They're a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news."

So how, according to Eric's source, does the process work?

"They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they're balanced or that they're not right-wing extreme propagandist," says the source. But it's all a well-orchestrated lie, according this former insider. It's a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

"You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks," says the source. "And God help you if you don't because sooner or later you're going to get burned."

The source explains:

"Like any news channel there's lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn't 'news,' they didn't care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything -- anything -- that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn't explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There's a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is."

What if Fox News staffers aren't instinctively conservative or don't have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? "My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead," the source explains. "You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough."

Eric's source talks about the changes he witnessed in his time on the inside.

"When I first got there back in the day, and I don't know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were 'training' you, as it were, they would say, 'Here's how we're different.' They'd say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live truck outside the prison and all the lives shots. CNN would go, 'Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls.' MSNBC would say the same thing.

"We would come out and say, 'Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two year old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the schoolyard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get.' And they say that's the way we do it here. And you're going, all right, it's a bit of an extreme example, but it's something to think about. It's not unreasonable."

The Ailesmen know how to play on their people's native sympathies, or rather antipathies.

"When you first get in they tell you we're a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don't even start arguing that or you won't even last your first day.

"For the first few years it was let's take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it's not just the conservative take on things, we're going to take the Republican take on things, which is not necessarily in lockstep with the conservative point of view.

"And then two, three, five years into that it was, we're taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president."

Eric points out how rare it is for Fox Noisers past or present to talk about what they do there, and gives generous credit to the extreme "us vs. them" mentality Fox Noisemaster Roger Ailes has carefully cultivated in the organization. " His source explains, "Ailes is obsessed with presenting a unified Fox News front to the outside world; an obsession that may explain Ailes; refusal to publicly criticize or even critique his own team regardless of how outlandish their on-air behavior." Again, the source stresses that the issue isn't partisanship per se but that, in Eric's words, "Fox News is designed to mislead its viewers and designed to engage in a purely political enterprise."

So, Fox News as a legitimate news outlet? The source laughs at the suggestion, and thinks much of the public, along with the Beltway press corps, has been duped by Murdoch's marketing campaign over the years. "People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don't. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things," says the source.

The source continues: "I don't think people understand that it's an organization that's built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that's on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You'd think that people would wise up, but they don't."

As for the press, the former Fox News employee gives reporters and pundits low grades for refusing, over the years, to call out Fox News for being the propaganda outlet that it so clearly is. The source suggests there are a variety of reasons for the newsroom timidity.

"They don't have enough staff or enough balls or don't have enough money or don't have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it's not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they'll kick you in the ass," says the source. "I'm sure most [journalists] know that. It's not worth being Swift Boated for your effort," a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative things about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch's operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

"That blew me away," says the source, who stresses the White House's critique of Fox News "happens to be true."

As I said, I understand that no amount of reporting by Eric Boehlert and other media-watchers on the reality-based side is likely to penetrate the swamp of delusion the Right has worked so hard to perpetuate and exploit. Still, people with media pulpits need to be on the case, constantly. Waiting for the "All clear!" signal to show that it's safe for the pilers-on to pile on merely guarantees that it will be too little, too late.

The lies that need to be called out are the ones being told now -- by all the "lying liars," to coin a phrase.

#

Republican Teabaggery And Calls For Violence

I have to say that even I was a little shocked a couple weeks ago when Minnesota kook Michele Bachmann seemed to be calling for the violent overthrow of the government and for violence in a general way to achieve... whatever's bothering her and whichever deluded loons happen to hear her on Fox. I mean we hear it often enough from the marginalized sociopaths in the right-wing media-- irresponsible drug addicts, alcoholics and clowns like Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck and Hannity-- but Bachmann, alas, is a member of Congress, just re-elected in November with 187,817 votes (46%).

Apparently, in Ms. Bachmann's dangerous and distorted world view only she and those who think like her are real Americans.  She said as much in the last election cycle. 

Her latest tirades, however; should not be tolerated because of the potential for equally disturbed people to respond to her call to be armed and dangerous by acting out violently.  Further, she stated, "Thomas Jefferson told us having a revolution every now and then is a good thing and we the people are going to have to fight back if we aren't going to lose our country."

Some people will attempt to hide behind the idea that this is free speech or is just her opinions as a defense.  It may be free speech but in many states being a danger to yourself or others with two medical doctors signatures can result in an involuntary placement in a psychiatric unit for evaluation.

If you choose to ignore the obvious psychiatric symptoms then you can't ignore her statements regarding the necessity to become armed and dangerous and the necessity for revolution as examples of seditious and therefore illegal behavior.

Sedition is defined in the dictionary as speech that is deemed by legal authority as tending towards calling for insurrection against established order.  Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent or resistance to lawful authority.

In point of fact America is a nation of laws.  We just had an election last November 2008 and her party lost the election.  Since this was a lawful election the majority of Americans voted for the current administration.  That clearly means Ms. Bachmann does not know the Constitution she purports to defend or what democracy she claims to love is.

In preparation for Wednesday's GOP/Fox tea bag parties the right-wing media is agitating for violence. Perhaps Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch and neo-fascist Texas conglomerate Clear Channel should be reminded that they could lose his licenses to broadcast in this country if the extremists they use to rabble rouse for the sake of ratings revenue step over the line.

Since President Obama's inauguration, numerous conservative media figures have called for a "revolution" or have invoked violent rhetoric while discussing the Obama administration or government in general. In addition to encouraging violence, such violent rhetoric has also included suggesting Obama's policies were doing violence to the American people and depicting Obama as a rapist, spousal abuser, or mobster.

Media Matters for America has previously noted that since Obama's inauguration, conservative media figures have made ominous, even apocalyptic claims about the impact policies pursued by Obama and other progressives might have on the United States; warned of impending socialism, fascism, communism, Nazism, McCarthyism, or Marxism under the Obama administration; asserted or suggested that under Obama, U.S. sovereignty may give way to a one-world government; and warned their audiences that Obama's administration will seize their guns.

To hear this kind of incendiary rhetoric from shrill clowns pimping for a the cash is one thing-- and it should be dealt with through the courts when it goes from freedom of speech issues to incitement to violence and sedition, the difference between a blowhard like Lou Dobbs on the one hand and a dangerous criminal like Glenn Beck on the other-- but to hear it coming down as the policy of the Republican Party is even more worrisome for America. Remember, almost 20% of the country-- nearly one in five people-- view the Republican congressional rump favorably.

Firedoglake is on fire with one teabagger expose after another today. Jane brings up all the corporate moolah and lobbyist efforts financing this fake grassroots extravagenza, and Blue Texan wants to figure out what the organizers are trying to accomplish.

Teabaggers are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that "grassroots" demonstrations aren't  orchestrated by corporate lobbyists. Understandable-- if you didn't have any experience organizing a demonstration that didn't have millions in free PR from Fox News and well-funded GOP fat cats providing a national infrastructure, you wouldn't know the difference.

This morning Paul Krugman addressed the Republican Party's strategy of undermining the legitimacy of the government by reminding us that everything that critics mock about the teabag parties "has long been standard practice within the Republican Party." Referring to irresponsible claims by Spencer Bachus that he has a list of 17 socialists in the House and by self-serving Florida freshman Bill Posey that Obama is an alien, Krugman warns us that "the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House."

Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because “liberal” doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists?

Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff-- but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh.

...[I]t turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.

But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000-- actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists-- that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

So what’s the implication of the fact that Republicans are refusing to grow up, the fact that they are still behaving the same way they did when history seemed to be on their side? I’d say that it’s good for Democrats, at least in the short run-- but it’s bad for the country.

Only 26% of Americans agree with Cheney that Obama is making the country less safe. I assume those are the tea baggers, dittoheads and the people who voted for Michele Bachmann.

The view from that Gawd-fearing little Village on the Potomac sure isn't the America we see

It's election time in the Village, in the legendary 1967-68 British TV series The Prisoner. While it didn't surprise me to learn that it was the one and only Digby who coined the usage of "the Village" and "Villagers" to refer to the self-appointed "insider" elite of our nation's capital, what did surprise me is that she wasn't thinking of this Village, the one in which the late Patrick McGoohan awoke to find himself trapped as "No. 6."

"It's that same phony, operatic fervor that leaves the rest of the country wondering what in the hell these people are smoking."

-- Digby, in the June 2007 post where she first used "the villagers" to refer to the huddled mass of overprivileged D.C. insiders, then wailing hysterically at the prospect of prison time for convicted felon Irving "Lewis" Libby

"The elite media have long behaved as though the only part of tax policy that matters is the part that affects the wealthy."

-- Media Matters' Jamison Foser

"Keep taxes as low as reasonably possible but also as high as necessary in order to ensure income inequality does not get out of hand and in order to ensure that money flows throughout the entire economy. Trickle down is nonsense. Trickle up is the way to go. Raise the level of the many at the bottom. As they spend day to day, jobs are created, goods are produced, small businesses and large are strengthened. Profits increase. And as profits increase incomes of the folks at the top increase as well."

-- Andrew C. White, in a blog post yesterday

by Ken

It's worth remembering the context in which Digby first applied the term "the Village" to the elite of D.C. insiders -- politicos, hangers-on, and especially media enablers. It was in a June 2007 post called "The Deciders," written when the reality of a prison sentence was closing in on convicted felon Irving "Lewis" Libby, and his high-powered "insider" friends were wailing in horror at the injustice of it (before, of course, the Real Decider decided to spare the Scooter Man any time in the pokey).

"Is it just me," Digby began, "or is the DC establishment's circling of the wagons around Scooter just a little bit over the top, even for them?"

After quoting a hysterical (hysterical-gaga, that is, not hysterical-funny) rant from Secretary of State Condi Rice ("who is known for her calm -- some might say somnambulent -- rhetoric," but who "waxes Hallmark when it comes to Scoot"), she wrote (boldface emphasis added):

The entire "village" is beside themselves over this, in much the same way they worked themselves into a frenzy over Clinton's hallway trysts. It's that same phony, operatic fervor that leaves the rest of the country wondering what in the hell these people are smoking. Libby may be a friend, but these bilious paeans to his "goodness" and excusing his behavior from everyone from Joe Klein to Condi Rice is verging on bizarre.

This case is not hard for normal people to understand. Libby was convicted in a court of law for perjury and obstruction of justice. It happens every day. It was not a partisan witch hunt --- the prosecutor and the judge were both appointed by George W. Bush and confirmed by a Republican Senate. And while there was plenty of kibitzing in the blogosphere, there were no leaks or manipulation of the press by the prosecutor and he's continued to be tight lipped since the trial.

Scooter screwed up, pure and simple and whether it was on his own or to cover for his boss, it doesn't matter. To those of us who live out here in the real world, his conviction is not a surprising outcome. If you screw up when you are dealing with the FBI, the DOJ and the CIA and you get caught --- you pay. End of story. Yet, the DC establishment is weeping and wailing and clutching their pearls over this as if Scooter were Emmett Till while the rest of us watch with our jaws agape at their disorienting, inconsistent worldview that seems to operate on some other plane than the rest of us. When we joke about Versailles on the Potomac, this is what we're talking about.

Digby has explained that the concept of the "Village" as a beleaguered garrison of supposed sanity and decency where the hardy "Villagers" -- politicos, permanent government drones, hangers-on, and especially their media cohabitants and enablers -- huddle to defend their own traces back to a still-astonishing November 1998 Washington Post column, the magna carta of Villageocracy, in which Sally Quinn (seen here with her husband, former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee) defended her "town" against that barefoot hillbilly marauder, "Blowjob Bill" Clinton. (No, of course she didn't call him that. Our Miss Sally would never talk about blowjobs in print. She just gives them in print.)

In the matter of Villager Libby, Digby opined:

It seems to me that like provincial elders from the beginning of time, these insiders believe that only they get to decide which witches should be burned and which ones shouldn't. Outsiders like Patrick Fitzgerald, the career federal prosecutor, have no business interfering. Unlike that nice Republican judge, Ken Starr, who they all agreed understood what needed to be done, he's not one of them. Scooter is, and when Fitzgerald held him to the same standard as the little people, he broke their rules.

The problem, of course, is that their "town" isn't really their town and these town elders haven't been elected by anybody. It's the seat of government of the most powerful nation on earth and their little social construct has ramifications for everyone on the planet. When they become screaming gorgons to irrationally protect one of their own (or destroy an outsider) they are telling people that they "are different from you and me," which may have been fine in feudal Europe, but it's a little out of place in 21st century America.

There's no easy way to explain what makes these people imagine that they are so specially principled, so uniquely entitled -- and their imagined entitlement seems to me to go to the heart of the matter. But it was that special of specialdom that I found myself thinking of in the face of two fresh outrages that both Howie and I found ourselves spluttering about yesterday.

There was, first, a demonstration that struck me as striking, even by Village standards, of the seemingly instinctive collusion between the Village's permanently right-of-center political establishment and its faithful media collaborators. It serves, among other things, as yet another reminder -- as if one were needed -- that there really is no rational way of dealing with these people.

When the Party of No pays lip service to dealing with the present economic meltdown, about the only policy initiative the naysayers can come up with is "tax cuts" and "more tax cuts," the present-day "conservative" solution to any problem you can think of. But apparently when you offer a program that includes reasonable tax cuts, the torch-bearing Villagers don't even notice. As our Media Matters pal Jamison Foser noted in a great post called "The media's tax fraud," there was none other than the Washington Post, and most of the rest of the "mainstream" media, "carrying the water" (as Rush would say) for the insider elites:

When is a tax cut for 98 percent of taxpayers portrayed as a tax increase? When some of the small handful of people whose taxes will go up happen to control the nation's news media.

Last week, President Obama unveiled a budget outline that extends the Bush tax cuts for all but the top two percent of taxpayers and makes permanent a tax credit of up to $800 for low- and middle-income workers that was included in the recent stimulus package, among other tax cuts.

On the other hand, individual taxpayers with taxable income above $200,000 ($250,000 for families) per year would pay more in taxes under Obama's plan, under which the tax rates paid on income in the top brackets would revert to their levels under President Clinton in the 1990s -- from 33 and 35 percent to 36 and 39.6 percent. Slate.com's Daniel Gross estimates that for someone with $350,000 in income, this will amount to about $1,500 a year in increased taxes.

So: Obama's plan cuts taxes for the vast majority of Americans, while raising them for the small number of people who make more than $200,000.

But the media, eager to hype their bogus "war on the wealthy" storyline, have portrayed it as a tax increase.

Here's how The Washington Post led its front-page article last Friday, the day after the plan was announced:

President Obama delivered to Congress yesterday a $3.6 trillion spending plan that would finance vast new investments in health care, energy independence and education by raising taxes on the oil and gas industry, hedge fund managers, multinational corporations and nearly 3 million of the nation's top earners.

The article was chock-full of details about the tax hikes, referring to "nearly $1 trillion in new taxes over the next decade on the nation's highest earners ... $318 billion in new taxes on families in the highest income brackets, who would see new limits on the value of the tax breaks from itemized deductions. ... That proposal is a fraction of the new taxes Obama proposes to heap on the nation's highest earners. ... Hedge fund managers would take an even bigger hit. ... Oil and gas companies would be asked to pay an extra $31 billion over the next 10 years ... Corporations that operate overseas could expect to pay $210 billion more over the next 10 years."

By my count, at least 484 of the article's 1,284 words were about the tax increases in Obama's proposal. Among those 484 words was this quote from House GOP leader John Boehner: "The era of big government is back, and Democrats are asking you to pay for it." That simply isn't true, unless you make more than $200,000 a year -- though the Post simply presented Boehner's claim without rebuttal.

And how did the Post address the tax cuts in Obama's plan? The article devoted just 39 words to them. Among other omissions, the Post completely ignored the fact that the plan makes permanent the Bush tax cuts for the vast majority of Americans.

And by the following Monday, tax cuts had disappeared entirely from the Post's reporting. Under the headline "Aides Defend President's Budget; White House and Fiscal Conservatives Set for Showdown," the Post reported Obama's budget would be "raising taxes on top income earners and oil and gas companies" and again quoted a Republican criticizing the tax increases. But there wasn't so much as a hint that most Americans would see their tax bills go down.

The New York Times' coverage of Obama's proposal was little better -- and cable news was often even worse.

Here's one indication of how hysterical the media went over potential tax increases for very few Americans: both The New York Times and ABC News rushed to produce reports about wealthy taxpayers purportedly seeking to reduce their incomes to avoid paying the higher tax rates.

I'm leaving out lots of good stuff, so don't deprive yourself of the experience of reading the post for yourself. But we have to jump to this bit:

That is certainly not a new phenomenon. The elite media have long behaved as though the only part of tax policy that matters is the part that affects the wealthy.

During last year's Democratic primary debates, ABC's Charlie Gibson asked the candidates about their plans to let some of the Bush tax cuts lapse as scheduled. When Hillary Clinton pointed out that the candidates were planning to let expire only the cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers, Gibson famously claimed that would include public schoolteachers. Gibson's lack of understanding of the typical family's income (and tax) situation was so clear, the debate audience actually laughed at him.

It seems to me an incredibly important observation that our Extended Village coverage of economic and budgetary matters comes essentially from the perch of the above-the-$200K elites. Yesterday a National Review Online blogpost that actually purported to offer a real-world justification for this burned up the Intertubes. In an outburst of raging imbecility bordering on out-and-out psychosis, Corner blogger (and Village idiot) Lisa Schiffren paid tribute to what she calls the "working affluent":

The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant "up or out" policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today -- in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and, as [her friend] Tigerhawk points out, in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife's former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.

Now, to begin with, this business of "demonizing" exists only in the fevered imagination of blogger Schiffren. Notice how conveniently she manages to forget the wholesale rewriting of the tax code in all of the Republican administrations of the last 28 years to lower the tax burden of the rich and super-rich. In what delusional universe is it "demonizing" someone to ask that person to pay his/her fair share? Of course convenient right-wing amnesia-slash-obliviousness kicks in here too, in that these delusionally overprivileged folk always manage not to see the extent to which their economic status yields them wildly disproportionate benefits from their government. After all, they hate government, even as they take every imaginable advantage of it.

It is of course Ms. Schiffren who is demeaning hard work, if only by her rank inability to recognize what it is. None of us who are alarmed, even appalled, by the shocking and near-unprecedented income disparities that have opened up between America's haves and havenots demean the labor of anyone who works hard. It's certainly an encouraging thought that some of the $200K-plus earners in fact earn their dough. But Ms. Schiffren seems to have an exceedingly dim perception of what many people who are paid not much more than minimum wage have to do for their pittance. It might help her to spend some time cleaning toilets or picking up garbage or picking crops or working in mines, for wages that fall, shall we say, well short of the $200K level.

As I indicated, the ignorance of this diatribe has left me spluttering. So I heartily recommend a blistering post by my colleague Andrew C. White, "Sometimes they say stuff that pisses me off." Here's a bit of what Andrew had to say:

It has long been a trite position of the right wing that those at the top of society are morally superior to the rest of us. It is their breeding, higher incomes, etc that prove their superiority. This is of course pure bunk. No matter how many times over the centuries or how many ways it has been thoroughly debunked it remains as a pet delusion of grandeur for them.

Sometimes though they say stuff that just pisses me off...

"And why is a president who needs them [the affluent] to keep on producing at the prodigious rates both society and the economy require, treating them as if they -- not the slackers, the entitled, and the net tax consumers -- were the problem?"

The prodigious rates evidenced by the plummeting economy, half-sized DOW, and millions of jobs lost? Including many of their own? The net tax consumers are a good target. Perhaps all the corporations and businesses that receive subsidies, government contracts, and tax breaks ought to be charged a fair share of that. Perhaps the upper tax brackets that received the bulk of the disastrous conservative republican tax give aways that were a large part of the cause of our current problems ought to pay all that money back. And perhaps the author ought to provide some proof for the un-sourced slam about unnamed and unknown slackers, entitled, and net tax consumers?

Oh yes, and speaking of tax consumers... perhaps the oil companies should pay for their own foreign wars and return the six trillion the government has spent on their behalf in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Or there's this, in response to Ms. Schiffren's assertion, "No group of people contribute more to their community."

Provide proof for this statement please because there are plenty of working poor and middle class that find time to coach kids sports teams, volunteer for fire departments, train as EMT's, volunteer at hospitals, take meals to shut-in’s, etc. Probably far more working poor and middle class that are the backbones of their communities by doing these things than “working affluent” sitting on charity boards sipping lattes.

"More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity."

No. He is trying to dig the country out of the economic disaster that conservative policy has created. Where else to look then for help then to those that benefited from these disastrous policies? Truly patriotic people would be looking for ways to help out the President in this effort. Similarly, truly productive people don’t need incentives to produce. They do so for the love of it.

"So, what happens when the heart surgeons, dentists, litigators, and people who employ 10 or 20 other people in their mid-size businesses decide that they don't want to pay for the excessive, pointless spending that the president finds so compelling?"

Pointless? Pointless? Learn some economics. He's not just spending money because he likes to spend money. He's spending money to save your jobs, your homes, your economic prospects, your small businesses, your large corporations, your 401k’s and the lives of the rest of us.

Again, there's lots of wonderful stuff I'm leaving out, but here is Andrew's conclusion (I tried like heck to excerpt this but just couldn't find anything I was prepared to lose):

The bottom line is that thanks to conservative republican economic beliefs being dominant since 1980 exemplified by the "drown the country in the bathtub" views of Grover Norquist [right] and the belief in the moral superiority of industry titans, Wall Street financiers... you know... the Ken Lay's and Jack Abramoff's and Bernie Madoff's of the world... those guys and their unrelentingly, hard-working moral superiority... this country is facing the worst economic situation since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

The money flow has stopped. The banking industry is on life support. Loans can't be had and that means homes aren't being bought or sold, businesses aren't growing or starting, workers of all stripes, affluent and non-affluent, are being laid off, unemployment is at a 25 year high with a record 12.5 million unemployed workers. GM & GE are in the tank. Read that again... GM and GE, the centerpieces of the once dominant American economy are both in severe danger. GE's stock price? $6.74. GM's? $1.47. Banking giant Citigroup? $1.01.

Right now is a time for all Americans to ask not what their country can do for them but rather what they can do for their country. Right now is a time when being patriotic is doing whatever is necessary to get this country back on its feet again.

My parents grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during WWII. They have told me stories of rationing, of walking the neighborhood gathering tin cans and other scrap metal for the war effort. Of living in one town after another criss-crossing the Midwest wherever grandfather could find work. They tell stories of sacrifice for the common good. The common good.

The conservative republican mantra is "tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts." I am all in favor of keeping taxes as low as feasibly possible. The fact of the matter is that this country was at its financial, industrial, economic, and productively strongest during the decades following WWII when taxes were sky high, unionization was at its highest, and income inequality was its lowest.

After near 30 years of conservative economic policy income inequality is as high as it was during the gilded age, unionization is at its lowest, the average Americans income growth has stagnated for years, and our financial, industrial and economic strength is down and… taxes are at their lowest in years. America no longer leads due to conservative policy geared towards corporate greed.

Greed is a sin. Economic policy has been run by greed for far too long and we are now reaping the price of allowing it too run unchecked. Making money is a fine thing but it is not the only thing for which humans, society, and governments are made.

The conservative economic agenda has been one of class warfare. During the last couple decades of large increases in American productivity the produce of that increase has gone completely to the very upper class. It has not “trickled down” to the average American. Income growth at the top has been astronomical. The rest of us have experienced no real growth and in many cases loss of real, effective income.

The result? Recession edging towards depression.

High incomes, personal, corporate, wind fall, capital gains, or estate need to be taxed at a high rate in order to sustain a healthy economy. In a healthy economy money flows. Money that flows in only direction stops flowing when it reaches its destination. That is what we are seeing today. Money has flowed only to the top for the last 29 years and now it has stopped flowing.

This does not mean "soaking the rich" or stopping the haves from having enough to invest. It does mean that an extremist view of “tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts” and drowning the government in a bathtub are exactly that. Extremist. Extremist in the same way that terrorists and religious fanatics are extremists. And every bit as destructive.

Keep taxes as low as reasonably possible but also as high as necessary in order to ensure income inequality does not get out of hand and in order to ensure that money flows throughout the entire economy. Trickle down is nonsense. Trickle up is the way to go. Raise the level of the many at the bottom. As they spend day to day, jobs are created, goods are produced, small businesses and large are strengthened. Profits increase. And as profits increase incomes of the folks at the top increase as well. This is not socialism as the screamers like to scream. This is simply sound economics. It is also morally sound.

A free market is one with oversight and accountability. A free market is one with known and fair rules. A free market is one that takes into account all costs of production… including environmental costs to water, air and soil. A free market is one in which favored industries do not receive tax breaks and/or subsidies that allow them to profit from unprofitable ventures or to have an advantage over competing industries and products.

The government should stay out of business as much as possible. Fair and free competition can be very productive. However, there are some places where the government is the best or only vehicle in which to solve or nurture societal needs.

The last couple decades have been decades ruled by the sins of greed and gluttony. Sins come about from excess. Excess leads to disaster. We have witnessed the culmination of excessive disaster these past 8 years. It is now time to reign in the excess. Clean up the mess. Sweep away the wreckage. Restructure the economy on sound, moral and productive grounds that benefit all of society and not just the sinful, greedy few.

Now that's a mouthful, Andrew!

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