No, Mr. Beck, Congress Did Not Print a Bible for the Use of Schools from Chris Rodda on Vimeo.

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I know this is from last week (sorry, been watching the World Cup), but it’s yet another Daily Show clip exposing the sorry state of the American mainstream media. Michael Hastings, with his Rolling Stone piece that led to the downfall of General McChrystal, showed these morons how to do real journalism and the best they can do is whine about how Hastings got so much access.

For more on this I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s excellent post on the subject.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, corporate media, McChrystal, Obama

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Technorati Tags: Fox News Channel, media, The Daily Show

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5. ACORN and the hypocrisy of outrage

Let’s put the whole issue into perspective.  ACORN, a non-profit, grass-roots organization that represents poor Americans has received a  mere $53 million in federal funds since 1994, while these douchbag contractors from ArmorGroup are the recipients of a $189 million 5-year contract to defend the US embassy in Kabul.  That comes to $3.5 million a year for ACORN as opposed to nearly $38 million per year for ArmorGroup.  Where’s the outrage?  Barely a peep is heard.

One of the more obvious problems stemming from the government’s need for contractors like ArmorGroup — a relatively minor player in the realm of private military contractors — is that, given the US government’s commitment to the military occupation of Afghanistan and  Iraq, the Pentagon must rely on these sorts of  for-profit corporations to fulfil the work and procedures once handled by the US  military.

It’s so bad  that actions like those pictured above must go un-addressed.  There’s little the Pentagon can do, even though they have had multiple problems with ArmorGroup.  The New York Times recently discussed this issue:

The troubles with the ArmorGroup contract, and the State Department’s frustrated dealings with the company over two years and through two administrations, illustrate how the government has become dependent on the private security companies that work in war zones, and has struggled to manage companies that themselves are sometimes loosely run and do not always play by the government’s rules.

With a stretched military, the government relies on the security companies themselves to vet, train, and discipline the guards, all at the lowest cost.

“It’s expensive for the State Department to withdraw a contract from one company, rebid the project and award it to a new one,” said Janet Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who represents one of the ArmorGroup whistleblowers. “So businesses know that once they get a contract, State may ding them around a little bit, but it’s not going to fire them.”

The perils of this reliance were most graphically illustrated in Iraq in 2007, when security guards from another contractor, Blackwater, were involved in shootings that left 17 civilians dead on a Baghdad street. But interviews and documents show that the ArmorGroup affair, in its mundane, unsavory details, offers perhaps a more representative look inside the troubled relationship between contractors and the government in war zones.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, ArmorGroup, media, media reform, military contractors

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Writing at the Huffington Post, media reform campaigner Timothy Karr has a great article on what really scares rightwing TV and radio fearmongers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Lou Dobbs: greater localism and diversity in media.  Karr exposes their self-serving lies with a healthy dose of reality — which has a well-known liberal bias — pointing out, “The central mandate of the Federal Communications Commission — as enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934 — is to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media. This same principle of localism has been a rallying cry for several generations of true conservatives.”

He continues:

Broadcasters get hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies and the right to use our airwaves in exchange for a basic commitment to be responsive to the interests of local communities.

Moreover, the Supreme Court recognized that “safeguarding the public’s right to receive a diversity of views and information over the airwaves is … an integral component of the FCC’s mission.”

Sadly, the FCC has failed to live up to this standard. And what mainstream media’s fear-merchants are most afraid of is not censorship, but an FCC that actually does its job — creating more opportunities for people like you and me to participate in media.

We don’t have that now. Washington bureaucrats have allowed powerful media corporations to control the public airwaves and dominate local cable networks. We have reached a nadir where the free press that Thomas Jefferson hoped would open “all the avenues to truth” has devolved into a media system that’s a megaphone for the few.  Read on…

Truer, more obvious words couldn’t have been spoken.  The only way to break the current dominance of these paranoid, faux-populist douchebags is to demand the FCC regulate the public (i.e., our) airwaves by honoring its founding principles of diversity and localism.

Technorati Tags: censorship, CNN, Fox News Channel, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, media reform, Rush Limbaugh, Timothy Karr

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With the economy in the tanks and McCain’s poll numbers sagging because most Americans blame Republican policies for the current downturn, it appears the McCain campaign is planning to go even more negative than they already have.  While a desperate strategy of change-the-subject and attack with non-issues is no surprise, what is a little encouraging is that the Obama campaign is not simply sitting back and taking it but are already fighting back.  They’re bringing up the Keating Five scandal from the 1980s and 90s that cost American taxpayers nearly $3 billion (part of the $124 billion Savings and Loan debacle), and they’re making sure we know McCain was at the center of it all.

Obama for America has produced and released online a short documentary about the whole affair.  Check it out:

UPDATE: In yet another excellent post Glenn Greenwald recounts how Sean Hannity had Andy Martin, who in the 1980s and 90s filed unnumerable lawsuits that “were routinely filled with the most extreme anti-Semitic venom one could find anywhere this side of Mein Kampf,” on his Fox News Sunday show Hannity’s America.  But of course Hannity had nothing to say of the dark side of this so-called “internet journalist,” and instead gave him a national stage to attack Barack Obama’s past as a community organizer, claiming that during this time the presidential candidate was actually “training for a radical overthrow of the government,” and that if Obama becomes president, America is “basically going to be … in the throes of a socialist revolution, which attempts to essentially freeze out anybody who’s not part of this radical ideology.”

Setting aside the absurd notion that the increasingly centrist Obama is secretly planning to bring about a red dictatorship, Greenwald points out that the Obama campaign didn’t simply fall over and take it.  Instead, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs “mauled Sean Hannity” on Hannity & Colmes following the second presidential debate “by taking [Fox News'] deceitful standards and … applying it to Fox and their ‘journalists.’”  Watch the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Election 2008, John McCain, Keating five

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