Fear Greed and Infotainment vs. The Press

See this piece in the Arizona Daily Star, by a David Cuillier, a former newspaper reporter and editor, and current vice chairman of the national Society of Professional Journalists' Freedom of Information Committee.

Some details and comments about BushCo paying journalists to spread propaganda are mentioned. Also, some details about the Press' duty to speak out, and newspaper companies gradually sliding away from the press' function as a check on government and industry misdeeds.

I think what caught my eye about this op-ed piece is the tendency of some people to believe assertions that basically anyone who questions the current administration is somehow helping "the terrorists" or actually on the side of religious fundamentalists who wish to harm our country. Of course what shows such assertions to be utter bullshit is that there is no motivation for anyone questioning BushCo to side with destructive religious psychos from foreign nations. We have enough destructive religious psychos here, not quite as militant as the overseas version, calling themselves Christians, and doing a big insult to Christianity in the process, anyway. Anybody who's not a few bricks short of a load, for example those that are fed up with the lying and cheating of the Bush Administration, would never be on the same side as the morons of the ultraconservative religious right of any nationality.

But my point is that people can act like they believe whatever Cheney says, and whatever the so-called Conservatives have been saying since the Reagan days, when the Conservatives started wishing to get in control, and devote the government to serving large corporations and a handful of rich business leaders, rather than our own country, its own people, its environment and its infrastructure.

The writer of the article points to fear as motivation for folks to rally around something, anything, blindly. So no wonder the Vice President and other hired mouthpieces like O'Reilly, and, I guess, the President, keep having to dredge up new demons for people to fear. Outlining threat after threat, they keep picking more and more on people right here at home, usually their political opponents, often those of diverse social backgrounds who don't attend the correct church.

You can read the comments section of about any story in the Star, and see the few people whose duty is to hammer away at the actually very conservative paper, calling it again and again "The Red Star." Usually comments are tinted with xenophobia, racism, hatred, and form an amalgam of whatever kind of drivel you can hear well-paid conservative mouthpieces spout on just about any "news" show. You can't really call anything about that section of current events info "press." You can't really call it info because most of it is lies, the rest of it is twisted truth, and the overall function is to divide and conquer by covering up the truth, and to intimidate with the threat of playground-style name-calling into unquestioning silence.

Right wing slimeballs trying to influence election

So what else is new? Business as usual with the right wing religious nuts and power-mad robber barons trying to fuck over our country and every man woman and child in it.

Read about it here in the Huffiningtonpost blog.

Or watch it yourself. I wouldn't. I just think it's another example of why TV is bad. And I think this type of thing happens daily on the TV news.

A snip from the story:

"The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.

tacos tacos tacos

My friend Missy Bit has been talking about tacos up Oakland way. Just wanted to post a picture of Chuck7's Tucson/California style tacos of late.

The "Cheneysphere," "crying wolf," and deterioration of our infrastructure

Two articles I read recently on Raw Story.com jibed nicely with and articulated a couple topics that have been on my mind lately.

One is Cheney. More and more, he seems like the real criminal behind what is apparently, and sadly, a fascist takeover of our government. He's been around since the Reagan days, when all this crap started happening, and increasingly seems like the man pulling the strings of the respective puppets. Now that the right wing radicals are on shaky footing and their massive unpopularity is public knowledge and receiving media coverage, Cheney's bile-spewing is starting to seem desperate and is becoming more and more negative and insane-sounding. They call Gore crazy every time he gives a speech but that's just a cheap effort to smear him. Cheney and the rest of the right wing radicals don't need a smear campaign to lose support- people can just listen to the things they are saying.

The Raw Story article I'm talking about is where the boy who cried wolf comes up. The writer, a Hannah Selinger, points out that anytime anyone, in this case Connecticut senatorial candidate Ned Lamont, starts talking about failed Bush policies or the fact that the so-called war in Iraq was a grave mistake and was justified with lies, Cheney starts saying that that person is actually helping Middle Eastern morons who would bomb and kill us, that that person is in line with religious fundamentalists who want to fuck over anyone that doesn't believe their fundamentalist bullshit. So Cheney here is crying wolf again and again these days.

Out of his mouth comes some of most negative, bile-infused, twisted lies and smears you'll hear these days. He never has anything good to say about anything. This is our Vice President, the most powerful vice president ever. But to what effect?

The other article, this one in the Seattle Post by a Chuck McCutcheon, deals with something that's on my mind a lot lately. We all pay a lot of tax dollars, but the Bush Administration is squandering all of it on some truly moronic things, while the country suffers. We are left in the lurch while the Bush Administration slowly destroys the economy and puts the nation in debt. I'm talking about infrastructure, one of those things a government is responsible for, one of the reasons we pay taxes. Roads, power grids, protection and assistance in emergencies and natural disasters, prevention of natural disasters, protection from outside aggression and home grown crazies (yes BushCo does a horrible job protecting us from threats- they've weakened a strong military, exported our National Guard, and used a false war on terrorism to override laws, democracy and the constitution) are some of the things we pay for. But when a government stops respresenting us, stops protecting us, avoids its role as a helper and supporter of the people, then what kind of government is that?

New Orleans was the first thing that got me thinking about it- the wasteland it became and the apparent utter failure of government assistance after the hurricane of nearly a year ago. Why did that all happen? Would it have happened under Kerry? Global warming has made weather much more dangerous. BushCo has famously done nothing to reverse it, and is instead denying that global warming exists. BushCo is also famously involved in denying a lot of scientific evidence, even covering it up, scientific evidence of anything that blows the whistle on BushCo's tendency to destroy the environment.

Power failures are getting worse. Mental health services are a disaster, and ever since the Reagan days people who should be in a home somewhere are walking the streets and often end up in jail. The Seattle Post article points out a few other key points and makes the obvious point that we are less, secure, less safe under Bush and Company than we would be under an administration that wasn't burning our tax dollars in a war that is destructive, unnecessary, and toxic.

So my point is, when Cheney tells us Democrats are going to make us less safe, he's lying.

"...the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution."

Thank you, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit for ruling on the OBVIOUS unconstituional power grab and wild stab at indimidation by the Bush Administration's warrentless spying program.

In the dark of night they operate, with the ability to do whatever they want without regard for your freedom, the very freedom they claim to be fighting for. That whole spying program had NOTHING to do with preventing attacks against the United States, it has EVERYTHING to do with supressing oppostion to Bush and attempts to get BushCo to abide by the law, and our right to speak out against such obvious abuses of power, and countless others. They call it a chilling effect. They call it being made an example of.

Preventing the pychos and their bombs and their violence resulting from crazy fundamentalist beliefs has EVERYTHING to do with good intellegence and not frittering away our military resources on a meaningless and tragic war. It has everything to dow with retaining the best and the brightest for careers in keeping the U.S. safe, and not sending them off to get poisoned by spent uranium, and cutting their benefits when they come home. It has everything to with listening to the professionals who keep their eyes on the tragic, crazy psychos of this world, not with surveiling the millions and millions of people who are fed up with BuchCo and its malign ways and have the courage to speak out. It has everything to do with not alienating various branches of the government with crazy budget cuts and insane rules about speaking the truth about threats, both paramilitary and environmental.

In other words, get a warrant.

Judge Diggs will no doubt be labeled an "activist judge" by the right wing radical BushCo mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh and Vice President Dick Cheney. They will say national security is at stake, but that's a lie. How can anyone believe anything they say anyway? Public opposition to them is massive but they will launch a massive PR campaign. They will fight the ruling and no doubt try take away even more of our rights, and that'll be because that's what BushCo and the NeoCons are all about: taking away your rights, the rights that allow you to send mail, check out library books, talk on the phone, walk down the street WITHOUT BEING SEARCHED BY THE POLICE, SECRET POLICE OR OTHER SHADOWY GOVERNMENT OR PRIVATE POLICE FORCES FOR NO REASON AT ALL OR FOR SIMPLY HAVEN SPOKEN OUT AGAINST THE FOOLISH MORON AND HIS POWER-MAD HYENAS WHO ARE CURRENTLY MAKING A SHAMBLES OF GOVERNMENT AND OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CONSTITUION. All in the name of freedom. The supreme lie, there, we are crushing the constituion this country was founded on, as well as checks and balances, in the name of freedom. I say they are doing all that in a mindless power grab which will benefit the few, and not the many.

Don't let's forget they are there to represent us, not a handful of the very rich.

Read about it here.

And you better believe they are pissed, and they are going to be more pissed the more people speak about against abuses of power like warrentless spying, investigations and searches.

BushCo and the 5th ammendment

Editorial writer Sarah Garrecht Gassen has a piece in today's (8/13/05) Arizona Daily Star detailing provisions and relevance of the constitution's 5th ammendment. Her premise is basically the 5th ammendment is about not getting scooped up and trampled by the government on a whim, i.e. "protecting the ordinary from the powerful."

In a day when the constitution is being dismantled, trampled by people like Dick Cheney and his pals at BushCo, and the word "freedom" is reduced to cheap stickers on the back of pickup trucks, keeping informed about our rights is more important than ever.

It's worth a look at the comments link at the bottom of the editorial to see the moron viewpoints and the more realistic arguments of those who read the Star.

"The kind of taco you don't look up from"

I've always liked the idea of a journey where you make your way from point to point doing something you love. The journey is defined and mapped out by activity at its stops, like Burt Lancaster swimming his way pool by pool across the county in The Swimmer, or the journey through Dublin in James Joyce's Uylsses, or a downtown Tucson pub-crawl, on foot, pub to pub, (with a cab ride home after). One day I am going to spend a day in L.A. shooting photos, making a vector across the city, and organizing the work to reflect that journey.

In this article by Cindy Price of the New York times, the journey is a strech of the California coast and the purpose is tacos. I happen to make great (usually vegetarian) tacos almost every day, and I love California, so I can relate. Price and her boyfriend start in an obscure L.A. neighborhood, and munch their way north along the coastal highway all the way to San Franciso's Mission district. Nice article, nice journey.

For more on the taco experience, see Bandini's excellent Tacohunt blog.