MSNBC, Please Fire Meghan McCain (Video)
She was hired because her father ran for president. What a mistake … NBC as a failed corporation, why not hire any commenter on this post?
Phil Donahue on America’s War Fever (Video)
On Piers Morgan Tonight of all places, Phil Donahue (who was kicked off MSNBC for being too anti-war in the wake of 9/11), speaks about the Bizarro world our political leaders live in when it comes to honest discussion about how America goes to war. (Side note: checking out the book Donahue references War Made Easy by Norman Solomon is enlightening.) Discussion starts around 35 seconds into this clip.
The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos: Bombshell Documents That Detail the Rule of the 1 Percent
Via Politicalgates:
“Are they real?” That’s the question people usually ask when they hear for the first time of the “Citigroup Plutonomy Memos.” The sad truth is: Yes, they are real, and instead of being discussed on mainstream media outlets all over America and beyond, Citigroup was surprisingly successful so far in suppressing these memos, using their lawyers to issue takedown-notices whenever these memos were being made available for download on the internet.
So what are we talking about? In 2005 and 2006, several analysts at Citigroup took a very, very close look at the economic inequalities within the USA and other countries and wrote two memos which were addressed to their very wealthy customers. If there is one group of people who need to know the truth about what is really going on within the society and the economy, minus the propaganda, then it’s businesspeople who have a lot of money to…
Two Icons, Two Deaths, Two Worlds: The Media Simplified Them Both
The world has said goodbye to two leaders who were worlds apart. One was a widely celebrated anti-communist, the other a widely despised communist. However, both the lives and thoughts of the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel, and North Korea’s Kim Jung-il were given short shrift.
The playwright turned President Havel who parlayed human rights activism into becoming Czechoslovakia‘s post-Communist President was a leader for the pro-democracy Charter 77 Movement, not just a Red-hating politician on a power trip.
Yet, the press praised him more for what he opposed than what he believed. The people who loved him adored him for both.
One report: “Thousands of silent mourners have accompanied the body of Vaclav Havel through central Prague as the Czech Republic began three days of national mourning for the icon of the Velvet Revolution.
About 10,000 mourners mostly in black, some carrying Czech or Slovak flags, joined a solemn procession taking the former president’s…
The Road to the Iraq War Will Happen Again
The power of the corporate media to deceive the people is simply astonishing, but, mind you, it depends on an already distracted, ignorant, semi-passive multitude whose marching values have been carefully cultivated.
In 2003 we went into Iraq under scandalously false pretexts, guns blazing—bragging about our ability to deliver “shock and awe” with impunity (the mark of the bully) and with one goal in mind: to rob and rape that country blind of its riches. The official excuse was that Iraq and Saddam were mortal threats that had to be neutralized.
Within a matter of weeks if not days, the official line—adopted without missing a beat by the entire punditocracy—was that we had gone in “to save Iraq”, “make it a democracy,” and all the rest of the self-serving claptrap we use over and over again to justify our uber-criminal behavior. With a straight face the official voices declared that those who…
Fox News On Police Pepper Spraying: ‘It’s A Food Product, Essentially’ (Video)
Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly break down the tumult between police and students at UC Davis: the police sprayed the sit-in protesters with a “food product.” O’Reilly adds, “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police, particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.” Hear that? Violent police crackdowns are basically a big, fun, good-natured food fight!
Media Roots: Greg Palast on OccupyWallStreet & U.S. Corporatocracy
On November 14, 2011, Abby Martin of Media Roots interviewed award-winning journalist and best-selling author Greg Palast after his talk at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley. Greg Palast, a freelance journalist for the BBC as well as British newspaper The Observer, discusses his newly published book Vultures’ Picnic, corporate collusion, the bought-and-paid-for-media establishment, the role of citizen journalism around the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and the value of organisations such as Project Censored.
Ron Paul’s 89 Seconds in CBS News GOP Presidential Debate
1.5 minutes out of 1 hour … it’s a quickie, but 89 seconds is all it takes to (come) on CBS. And 89 seconds is not bad if you’re facing the military industrial complex and mainstream media. Ron Paul’s the only one making any sense in the debates (though “sense” doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to electing a candidate). Let’s give him a chance to debate President Obama … you can make it happen, all you have to do is vote for Ron Paul in the first round (Obama’s gonna win anyway). OWS, climb aboard.
Before War of the Worlds, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835
Lunar man-bats, unicorns, bipedal beavers and a triad of mysterious solar temples featured in a sensational hoax perpetuated by the New York Sun in 1835. This from Victorian Gothic:
Imagine that you wake up one morning, sit at your computer, and you are bombarded with links to a developing story from a major news outlet: Stephen Hawking, by making novel use of Cambridge University’s new quantum supercomputer to analyze data from SETI’s telescope array, has discerned that the universe is awash with signals from intelligent life. It reads like a regular science story, at first, but soon it is revealed that Hawking and his colleagues have tapped into an extra-terrestrial television transmission, and are even now watching, breathless, as the first, dream-like images of alien civilizations display themselves on the Q-computer’s tiny monitor.
You and your friends refresh your browsers compulsively, talking over each new description that emerges of strange alien races and the exotic…
Why Are So Many in the Media Threatened By Occupy Wall Street?
The other night, I ran into a veteran journalist, a writer who I always considered was among the “plugged in.” Yet when I told him I was reporting on Occupy Wall Street, he plugged out, and stared at me cluelessly.
“What do they want,” he asked, echoing the questioned raised endlessly by TV pundits and editorial commentators. He didn’t seem to know or care who “they” are, or why they have taken to living in parks to make their point. He and his colleagues seem to be saying that to understand what’s going on, it all be first compressed into a press release with bullet points they can simplify further.
“I don’t get it,” he sighed. “Its about Occupying Wall Street,” I replied, “Occupying Wall Street, challenging the power of its economic power. Another blank look …
It’s as if we need our politics to follow a predictable format characterized by legislators playing…
Anonymous Busts Child Porn Ring
Funny, how the mainstream media isn’t all over this one, given Anonymous has been a great punching bag for them. Think they are still upset about the Stock Exchange? … Sara Yin reports in PC Magazine:
Hacker group Anonymous briefly crashed a large collection of child pornography Web sites, and published the names of its patrons.
Last week, the cyber vigilantes, better known for targeting large corporations and oppressive government regimes, used a brute force attack to infiltrate a server called Freedom Hosting, which housed about 40 child porn sites. The biggest site was Lolita City, which contained more than 100GB of content.
According to a timeline of events posted on Pastebin, Anonymous said before taking down the sites, it issued a warning to Freedom Hosting to remove the illegal content. When it failed to do so, Anonymous attacked. The sites were down for about five minutes before an admin restored them, upon which…
Glenn Beck: Occupy Protesters ‘Will Come For You and Drag You Into the Streets and Kill You’
Monday:
Let’s Occupy CNN Anchor Erin Burnett’s Brain With Some Real Information (Video)
At about 1:30 in into this clip …
Here’s How to Screw the Rich
Interesting points from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington:
Tax the rich. Those bastards.
I get why people who aren’t rich hate those that are. No one really cares what they have, they only care what they have relative to others. When there is inequality, and there always is, even the hyper intelligent call for a redistribution of wealth. It’s an enduring longing for us as a species, and no evidence to the contrary will convince people it just doesn’t work in any large group.
What I really didn’t understand until recently though is why so many rich Americans seem to loathe their richness as much as everyone else does. Many in Silicon Valley want to tax the rich into the middle class and let government spend and spend and spend. The super rich tech elite flock to Obama, joining in the call to screw the rich as loudly as all the rest.
Then I figured it out. As I wrote then, the super rich won’t mind at all if we “tax the rich” as it’s currently defined. That’s because people who are super rich don’t really pay taxes…
New York Times Scorns The Occupy Wall Street Protests
Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
Peeved by the mainstream media “blackout” of the Occupy Wall Street protest? Worse than those who have ignored it is the New York Times, which ran a steaming turd of an article (titled “Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim”). The takeaway is more or less that the protesters have no legitimate grievances, and the piece concludes with a wise middle-aged Wall Street trader lampooning the activists for owning Apple laptops. (The protesters favor higher taxation of the super-rich, yet they also own computers! What hypocrites!) Their coverage:
By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms.…
Prescription Drug Use Now Kills More People Than Traffic Accidents
Photo: 51fifty (CC)
Via the Inquisitr:
In 1979 the U.S. Government began tracking drug-related deaths and for the first time those deaths have surpassed the number of traffic fatalities on an annual basis. The most recent statistics which were taken in 2009 shows that 37,485 people died in traffic related accidents while 36,284 people died from drug related activities in a one year period.
Surprisingly the main culprit of those deaths were not street illegal drugs but rather prescription options including Xanax, OxyContin and the main culprit Vicodin which killed more people than cocaine and heroin combined.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times a Santa Barbara sheriff said: “The problem is right here under our noses in our medicine cabinets.”
The study also revealed that traffic related fatalities have actually fallen by a third since the 1970s even as the number of drivers using American roadways continues to increase, while drug related deaths have doubled in…
Best Tabloid Headline Ever?
I have to congratulate Gavon Laessig at Buzzfeed for bringing this to the world’s attention. Really quite extraordinary what the headline writers at the British tabloids are capable of!
Get ready to feel guilty after you stop laughing. Percy Foster was a 3-foot-6-inch dwarf who starred in the UK porno “Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, It’s Up Your Arse We Go.”
He bore an uncanny resemblance to celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Welsh agriculture officials discovered Foster’s body in an underground chamber, leading to this grisly headline from British tabloid The Sunday Sport.
Quite possibly a new low in print journalism…
Media Fail: Is Anonymous Helping Time Warner’s Bottom Line?
Photo: Vincent Diamante (CC)
Way more positive social action than feeding their machine, but an interesting shot at activism from Nick Bilton in the NY Times:
Anonymous, the hacker group, has jostled with the Iranian government and the Church of Scientology and has briefly shut down the Web sites of Visa, MasterCard and other global corporations.
When members appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.
What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the…
