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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Yesterday I received an email on the topic of the 2008 election that was strangely familiar.  And there was a reason for the familiarity: I had seen it four years before, forwarded to my email box by the same person.  The reality is that this message is a complete hoax, and the fact that it is regurgitated after multiple elections (first being the 2000 election) and forwarded throughout the internet shows that gullible people are easily fooled because it comports with their established ideology.

First of all, here’s the email:

THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD & BREAK YOUR HEART

Interesting  Statistic
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of  Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out facts of 2008  Presidential election:

Number  of States won by:
Democrats:  19
Republicans:   29

Square  miles of land won by:
Democrats:  580,000
Republicans:   2,427,000

Population of counties  won by:
Democrats:  127 million
Republicans:  143 million

Murder rate  per 100,000 residents in counties won  by:
Democrats:  13.2
Republicans:   2.1

Professor Olson  adds:
“In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won by Republicans was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.

Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare.

Professor Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at  stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom

Anyone not blinded by ideology would quickly see these so-called “facts of [the] 2008 Presidential election” are suspicious, starting with the number of states and square miles of land won.  Has it really been that long since the election that people actually think McCain won 10 more states than Obama?  Talk about short-term memory.

It only took me 2 seconds — literally — to search Google to find out that this email is a long-discredited hoax.  FactCheck.org completely dismantles the widely forwarded message in its current 2008 manifestation.  Starting by pointing out that Professor Olson has denied being the source of these “facts” since 2000, FactCheck then addresses the stats:

• President-elect Barack Obama actually carried 28 states (and the District of Columbia), not 20 as claimed in the message. Sen. John McCain carried only 22 states, not 30.The murder rate for counties carried by Obama was 6.56 per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half the rate claimed in the message. The rate for counties carried by McCain was 3.60 per 100,000, much higher than claimed in the message.
• The total area of states won by Obama is actually 1,483,702 square miles, significantly more than the 580,000 stated by the e-mail. McCain’s states have an area of 2,310,315 square miles, not the 2,427,000 claimed.
• The population of counties carried by Obama is just under 183 million, not the 127 million claimed. McCain carried counties with a total population of just under 119 million, far fewer than claimed in this message.
• The murder rate for counties carried by Obama was 6.56 per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half the rate claimed in the message. The rate for counties carried by McCain was 3.60 per 100,000, much higher than [the 2.1] claimed in the message.

As you can see, the stats are not just slightly wrong, they’re way off.  But I doubt this will stop dishonest people from using it again, because in the world of right wing America ideology trumps reality every time.

Technorati Tags: Election 2008, politics, politics of fear, propaganda, Republicans

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Technorati Tags: Bill Moyers, Capitalism, Election 2008, Kevin Philips

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Election 2008, Greg Palast, voter suppression

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A year ago the NY Times reported that after five years of intensive investigations the US Justice Department, rather than finding the massive fraud consistently alleged, “has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections.”  During this time there were 86 convictions, most of which were because people “mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules.”

Mistakes and lapses in enforcing voting and registration rules routinely occur in elections, allowing thousands of ineligible voters to go to the polls. But the federal cases provide little evidence of widespread, organized fraud, prosecutors and election law experts said.

“There was nothing that we uncovered that suggested some sort of concerted effort to tilt the election,” Richard G. Frohling, an assistant United States attorney in Milwaukee, said.

Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the Loyola Law School, agreed, saying: “If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant. But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.”

So what is really behind this oft-repeated mantra of voter fraud?  Spence points to the fact that “those 1.3 million new voters [registered by ACORN in the last two years] are more than likely to vote for Barack Obama than John McCain.”  And this gets at the heart of the matter.  Political science professor Lori Minnite of Bernard College, who has investigated the issue over the lasts eight years, tells journalist Andrew Burmon it’s all nothing more than a “strategic ruse.”

Rather than protecting the election process from voter fraud — a problem that barely exists — Minnite says the true aim of Republican efforts appears to be voter suppression across the partisan divide. According to Minnite, investigating voter fraud has become a Republican cottage industry over the last 20 years because it justifies questioning the eligibility of thousands of would-be voters — often targeting poor and minority citizens in urban areas that lean Democratic. Playing the role of vigilant watchdog gives GOP bureaucrats a pretext for obstructing the path of marginalized and first-time voters headed for the polls.

Essentially the issue is: the more voters, the worse for Republicans, especially this year where a large majority of the newly registered are young people and poor African Americans, demographics heavily in favor of Barack Obama.  Investigative journalist Greg Palast has been covering the issue of vote rigging and voter suppresion at least since 2001.  He recounts what happened in 2004:

In Ohio, during the 2004 Presidential election, 153,237 ballots were simply thrown away — more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. The official number is bad enough — 1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, according to the federal government’s Elections Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count.

Correcting for that under-reporting, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. Why doesn’t your government tell you this?

Unsurprisingly those most likely to have their ballots rejected are minority groups, blacks and Native Americans, both heavily Democratic.  In looking at purged voter rolls in 2008, the NY Times notes that Colorado has rejected more than 37,000 voters since August 1.  And party affiliation matters.  Thirty-three percent of all registered voters in the state are Democrats, 35% Republican, and 31% are unaffiliated, yet 37% of purged voters were Democrats while only 28% were Repulican.

More than half the voters purged voted in the last two election cycles (54% in 2006 and 51% in 2004).  The Times article doubts whether there has been a concerted effort to purge voters and points to increased screening regulations as a result of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.  Yet, it fails to look into the political and ideological motivations behind HAVA in the first place.  It is precisely this piece of disasterous legislation that has been essential to the concerted effort to purge unwanted voters from the rolls.

Technorati Tags: Election 2008, politics, voter suppression

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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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Rick Davis, a long-time Washington lobbyist and currently John McCain’s campaign manager, recently told The Washington Post, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” It was a somewhat rare and candid admission by a high level party operative to how the political process actually operates in the United States. While Davis’ comments might seem specific to this election, both major parties have for years preferred to avoid real issues – universal health care, the militaristic state, corporate crime and domination, a growing prison-industrial complex, to name a few – instead choosing to emphasize the personal qualities and style of candidates, especially when it comes to presidential elections. As in advertising, which permeates American’s consumerist culture, the PR surrounding political campaigns is more about feelings and emotions, faith and brand identity than it is about the issues most important to the public.

Mainstream media coverage plays right along with the charade. In fact, it is the perfect vehicle for the branding of hollow political figures. Talk mostly revolves around questions like “Did he or she win over the public with this or that speech?” “How was the presentation?” “Does he come across as an elitist?” And on and on. It’s simple pundit-driven “journalism,” easy to produce, providing the illusion of substance while serving corporate masters.

When public opinion conflicts with elite interests, the public is silenced. Those seeking office know who their paymasters are, and if any issue supported by large portions of the population but opposed by corporate power gets through media filters, it is framed in such a way to be stripped of any substance. For example, take universal health care. For years large majorities of the American public have been in favor of it. So large in fact it can’t be ignored or easily swept under the rug. Ever since Bill Clinton – who was elected in large part for proposing universal coverage – eventually bowed to the insurance industry and HMOs and failed to make the necessary changes, any and all subsequent reform proposals, if even made, only give lip service to the idea of health care for all while doing everything to avoid making the real changes necessary.

Such is politics and democracy in America, a corporate friendly environment indeed.

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has a slightly different take on this subject than I do.  Where I see the depoliticization of politics as a much more bipartisan issue, he points to the Republicans as the main culprits:

Ever since Ronald Reagan’s election, this is what the Republicans do every four years. They render issues irrelevant and convert campaigns into cultural wars and personality referenda. They converted our elections into tawdry reality shows long before networks realized their entertainment value. And every four years, Democrats seems shocked and paralyzed by all of this and desperately delude themselves into believing that mean-spirited “negativity” and nastiness will alienate voters, while the media swoons at the potency of these attacks.

While he certainly is correct in his assessment of the GOP’s approach, it seems to me one of the reasons the Democrats cave in is because they are unwilling to push a truly democratic, issues-based politics to the fore.  Basically limited to rhetorical promises at best, Democrats are easily exposed as the hollow populists most of the country sees them to be.  You see, they play the corporate game as well, which limits the depth and reach their campaigns can actually go.

Greenwald takes the stance of a “realist,” which is understandable.  He knows that “cultural tribalism, resentment and alienation are very powerful influences in how people think.”  This is certainly true, but is the most effective response more tribalism, more attacks, an increased focus on qualities and style?  I doubt Greenwald thinks so.  But it’s not so clear what he proposes the Democrats should do.  He rightly deplores the empty, personal attack strategy of the GOP, and calls for a more combative (defensive?) approach:

Democrats have clearly decided (yet again) to cede that lowly playing field to the GOP and are hoping (yet again) that those personality and cultural issues are not enough to outweigh the country’s dislike of Republican policies…. If John McCain remains — even from the mouths of Democrats — the Honored, Honorable, Principled, Heroic Maverick, the GOP chances will be as high as they can be.

As I see it, what is needed to win is not more attention to personality and qualities, but rather a greater focus on the fundamental changes we know are needed.  But the liberal wing of the corporate power structure will never be able to go that far.

Technorati Tags: debate, Democrats, Election 2008, elections, media, politics

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Yet according to Microsoft’s own argument this so called “interaction” amounts to little more than soccer moms being able to voice their opinions, parents organizing PTA meetings, and politicians providing the same PR-crafted information to those constituents who are online as to those offline. Nothing very transformative in that. But that was 2000 you say, today things are actually different.

Well now we have Barack Obama, running perhaps the most internet savvy campaign in America’s relatively short digital history, with his participatory My.BarackObama.com site fashioned after hugely popular social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, where members can start their own blogs and connect with fellow Obamans (as they like to term themselves). Yet at a time when this medium had the potential to sway the erstwhile progressive Democratic presidential nominee, the tremendously transformative powers of the internet proved little more than a fizzle. Despite the fact that thousands of his supporters (24000 at last count) started a group on My.BarackObama pleading with the Senator to vote against and filibuster (as he had promised to do on the campaign trail) the new FISA regulations legalizing warrentless wiretaps and granting immunity to those that had participated in the illegal program, Obama voted for the bill allowing its most controversial aspects to pass.

The online campaigners were swept aside, their voices ignored. Social networking may help friends stay in contact and have a laugh about this or that photo or video, but it has proven a sorry substitute for real political activism and engagement – other than reinforcing well-crafted political slogans or raising some money for one particular candidate or another.

Despite my strong criticisms of the mainstream news media – print in particular – and the corporate-friendly, free market-praising direction they has taken over the years, Hedges makes some important points about their role in a democratic society that I have to agree with:

Newspapers, when well run, are a public trust. They provide, at their best, the means for citizens to examine themselves, to ferret out lies and the abuse of power by elected officials and corrupt businesses, to give a voice to those who would, without the press, have no voice, and to follow, in ways a private citizen cannot, the daily workings of local, state and federal government. Newspapers hire people to write about city hall, the state capital, political campaigns, sports, music, art and theater. They keep citizens engaged with their cultural, civic and political life. When I began as a foreign correspondent 25 years ago, most major city papers had bureaus in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Moscow. Reporters and photographers showed Americans how the world beyond our borders looked, thought and believed. Most of this is vanishing or has vanished.

Many people believe that new technologies will simply replace the old in better, new and improved ways. As if some law of nature. Perhaps this comes from decades of sophisticated product advertising making pretty much the same arguments. But regardless of its roots this ideology is borne from a belief that technologies are neutral (or positive) tools that will merely allow ostensibly democratic societies, which have the necessary checks and balances, to flourish in ever greater degrees of citizen participation.

But what is always absent such theses is the reality of power. Maybe one person, maybe thousands, even millions can blog, rant and rave about this issue or that. Finding a shared concern, they might even organize a protest here or there or actually get a candidate for political office elected. But the question remains, how will that kind of soft power, however important or welcome, compete with the very hard power of military and monopoly interests? Rupert Murdoch’s resources for propagandizing are infinitely more powerful than those wielded by the disembodied relationships of blog networks. The Pentagon has far more resources to spread its message than you or me, more than we could dream of. No, apathy is their friend, and it’s an easy sale in such a short attentions span medium as this. The message is clear and they are winning: we should keep buying things and shut up.

With all that being said, I have no doubt the internet will likely play an important role in organizing resistance and other activities in the future. But the point I’m making is that it will never be the source of that activity. No, other non-digital aspects of reality will take care of that: old fashioned things like hunger, inflation, inequality, class conflict and the like.

The more things change, the more they always stay the same.

Technorati Tags: democratization, digitization, netroots, new media, politics

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Technorati Tags: Iraq, media

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So what exactly is a “time horizon” you might ask? It can’t be a deadline or timetable because Bush has repeatedly opposed such things when it comes to Iraq. Apparently, according to White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe, “The agreement will look at goal dates for transition of responsibilities and missions. The focus is on the Iraqi assumption of missions, not on what troop levels will be.” Therefore when we reach the time horizon we will simply reevaluate the situation of whether the uncivilized Iraqis can run things to our liking, no guarantees of reductions necessary.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, media

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