I ran across this at TPM this morning and was glad to see it. My 84 year old Mom lives with me. She’s been a registered Republican forever. This past year she switched parties. She received one of these DVDs. I explained to her what it was. It’s in the garbage.

From TPM:

We’ve finally gotten to speak with the people behind the mass distribution of Obsession, a DVD warning viewers of the threats of radical Islam. And they’re actually claiming that their mailing of the DVD to millions of households in swing states, and paying to have it inserted in local papers in places like Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, is not an attempt to sway voters in swing states.

And get this: They’re saying the swing-state focus is simply an effort to get the attention of reporters in swing states, because the media is heavily focused on swing states and if they distributed the DVD in non-swing states it wouldn’t get any attention.

The movie is being distributed by Clarion Fund, a right-wing group founded by filmmaker Raphael Shore, in partnership with the Endowment for Middle East Truth. Since these organizations are 501(c)(3) non-profits, it would be illegal for them to use the DVD as an express effort to win people’s votes — but they can embark on educational campaigns.

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The Scotsman has a good article with questions and answers in regard to the conflict and international law.

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The following is from a site called BraveNewFilms, and is roughly two months old. I thought it worthy of a re-hash.

John Gibson is the worst of all rightwing pundits, if you ask me. Not only does he lie with the best of them, he’s plain, flat out mean too! If Walter Cronkite were to walk into FOX studios with an AK-47 and wipe these assholes out, would anyone hold it against him?

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We here at Blue Herald rarely, if ever, post anything related to reichwing nutjob Michelle Malkin. Partly because she’s reichwing. Partly because she’s a nutjob. But mostly because she’s becoming more and more irrelevant by the hour.

Sadly, No! has a post up exposing Michelle’s brand of lunacy. Click the link, if you have the intestinal fortitude.

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Cheney was the keynote speaker at the meeting where the idea for the group formed. Several members of the AEI (experts on radical Islam uh huh) will speak at a forum they’re holding next month. They placed a newspaper ad calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a terrorist. They’re hellbent on war with Iran. Oh, and they have loads of money. Watch out for this group of whackos.

Freedom’s Watch, a deep-pocketed conservative group led by two former senior White House officials, made an audacious debut in late August when it began a $15 million advertising campaign designed to maintain Congressional support for President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq.

Founded this summer by a dozen wealthy conservatives, the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy.

Next month, Freedom’s Watch will sponsor a private forum of 20 experts on radical Islam that is expected to make the case that Iran poses a direct threat to the security of the United States, according to several benefactors of the group.

More at the New York Times

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By Philip Weiss
New York Magazine

He hides, but craves attention. He is prurient and prudish, powerful and paranoid, an icon of the right who seems obsessed with making Hillary Clinton our next president. And he has America caught in the grip of his contradictions.

My mission is to find Matt Drudge, and I-m failing. I-ve e-mailed the author of the Drudge Report countless times and written letters to him at the two places he owns in Miami to say I-m coming to town and want to talk, but when I check into my hotel there’s no note from him at the desk. It’s late Sunday night, and I turn on his weekly radio show in the room. Drudge is on his favorite theme, surveillance cameras everywhere, his belief that Google wants to spy on us and pass it all on to the government. At such times, Drudge comes off as a hunted man. “I just don-t want to be watched when I-m visiting the Lincoln Memorial, going through Penn Station, or walking down Hollywood Boulevard. So many cameras everywhere. And now you start feeding that into some kind of database and start linking it up with a Fascist company like Google? This is a serious issue. And it’s not given serious consideration-when it is a total transformation of our society and our liberties. What gives you a right? Why are you watching me? People say, well, what do you have to hide, Drudge? What do you have to hide? You know what? The burden should be on them. I think I have a right not to be watched.”

I call in to the show a few times: 1-866-4-drudge. Busy. You can often hear Drudge at his keyboard even as he’s on air, so I drop him another e-mail with a clever headline like something on the Drudge Report. Then the next morning I go round to his two addresses. It’s breaking my word. I-d e-mailed Drudge, “Not Stalking You; Coming to Miami,” because I know how feverish he is about the prying press. When Lindsay Lohan had her accident in Beverly Hills in May, Drudge said it was caused by violent “stalkerazzi.” He said, “That’s probably why she was drunk and higher than a kite … because she has no life and no privacy … they create their villains and then they report on them.” Not that this philosophy keeps Drudge from posting paparazzi pictures on the Drudge Report, or milking the Paris Hilton drama.

read more HERE

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from Think Progress.org
cross posted at Think Progress

This weekend on Washington D.C. ABC affiliate’s Capital Sunday, Center for American Progress Iraq analyst Brian Katulis debated American Enterprise Institute’s military analyst - and Iraq escalation architect - Fred Kagan.

“Right now, Iraq is in civil war. It’s in fact in multiple civil wars,” Katulis said. “And I don-t think that these military tactics that these armchair generals and the academics offer up fundamentally address the core issue - that Iraqis are in a vicious struggle for power.”

Taking issue with Katulis- description of him as an “armchair general,” Kagan complained that “you only get called an armchair general when you actually advocate doing anything.” Speaking as an armchair general, Kagan went on to claim “sectarian killings are way down,” despite an AP report that Iraqi deaths have doubled so far this year.

Be sure to watch the video.

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By Joe Conason
Salon.com

Freedom’s Watch, the former press secretary’s new pro-Iraq war group, has little to do with veterans and everything to do with politics.

If you happen to reside in the district of a Republican member of Congress whose support of the Iraq war is wavering, or in a state where a Republican senator is facing reelection next year, you may soon see a moving commercial. Featuring the voice and image of a veteran who lost both legs in Iraq, it delivers a familiar message: “They attacked us before” — on 9/11 — “and they will attack us again” if we don’t fight on until “victory.”

Nobody would want to argue with John Kriesel, the veteran who appears in this ad and whose sacrifices are all too obvious. When he gazes out from the screen to admonish us that “it’s no time for politics,” he is surely sincere. So are the other veterans and family members of deceased vets who are appearing in similar ads urging Congress to stay the course (although that phrase is no longer operative). They too tell us, no doubt believing every word, that we are winning the war, that we invaded Iraq to fight the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and that to withdraw now would dishonor those who have been killed and wounded there — and they insist that anyone who disagrees is motivated by “politics.” But the same degree of misguided sincerity should not necessarily be attributed Freedom’s Watch, the new right-wing organization financing those ads.

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from Think Progress

With the departure of Karl Rove, the media is speculating as to how that will affect Bush’s domestic agenda. White House deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan argued that Bush will pursue an “ambitious agenda” despite Rove’s departure:

The tank is full. The president’s priorities haven-t changed, nor has his ambitious agenda. When we come back in the Fall, the Congress is going to have a full plate in front of it. [Fox News, 8/14/07]

Similarly, spokeswoman Dana Perino claimed, “We have a lot of things that we can get done.” In reality, Bush’s domestic agenda “has largely shrunk to veto threats of bills passed by the Democratic-led Congress.”

Even the White House’s faithful conservative allies aren-t buying the spin. Last night on Fox, right-wing pundits Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes disputed the White House’s contention that it has an agenda:

read more and see video HERE

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from The Center for American Progress

Right-wing preacher Fred Phelps’s “anti-gay hate group Westboro Baptist Church” is planning “protests at funerals of victims of the 35W bridge collapse to state that God made the bridge fall because he hates America, and especially Minnesota, because of its tolerance of homosexuality.” Shortly after the bridge’s collapse, the Westboro group put out a release headlined, “Thank God for Minneapolis Bridge Collapse.” This instance is far not the first time Phelps has exploited calamity and catastrophe to promote his right-wing cause. In response to the July 2005 London attacks, Phelps posted a release stating, “Thank God for the bombing of London’s subway today — July 7, 2005 — wherein dozens were killed and hundreds seriously injured. Wish it was many more.” Phelps’s cult has also traveled the country disrupting military funerals, picketing dozens of burial services with messages such as “Thank God For AIDS” and “God Hates Fags.” These “protests” forced Congress to pass the Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act in 2006, which “bars protests within 500 feet of a military cemetery from 60 minutes before to 60 minutes after a funeral if those protests involve disruptive noises or other disturbances.” Banned from military funerals, Phelps is excited to be taking his hate agenda to the victims in Minneapolis.

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I (by accident!) caught the tail end of Rush’s radio program yesterday. Rush spoke of the Minneapolis bridge collapse tragedy. In it he said, basically, that America’s infrastructure woes are all made up. I couldn’t find that quote anywhere on the ‘net, but did find this:

Tim Pawlenty has a different take:

Either Pawlenty isn’t a true-blooded republican… or Limbaugh is being his typically normal asshole-ish self. You decide!

These people really should get their talking points straight.

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cross-posted at Think Progress

Washington DC FM talk radio station 106.7 WJFK yesterday announced it was dropping Bill O-Reilly’s nationally syndicated show, and replacing it with a sports-talk program. The Washington Post reports today that O-Reilly’s cancellation is a “case in point” of how poorly conservative radio programs have fared in DC:

With the exception of Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk-radio hosts have struggled for years to find a wide audience on the local dial. While Limbaugh’s afternoon program remains popular on WMAL (630 AM), not many other conservatives- programs have.

Yet despite their underwhelming performance, numerous right-wing radio hosts have been given repeated opportunities to succeed in DC. “Such radio stars of the right as Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage at times have literally had no ratings in Washington, as measured by Arbitron.”

In its diagnosis of conservative talk’s failures in the DC region, the Post points to a host of factors including the weak signals of some stations, weak programming, and the unique culture of the area that is resistant to political talk radio. One factor that went unmentioned, however, is the impact media consolidation has had on the local market.

read more at THINK PROGRESS

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Fox News Channel’s pillar of truth, Bill O’Reilly has added some spiffy new charts to this story. He’s accusing George Soros of vast left-wing media buying to spread his message about far left politics and smearing the lives and careers of the Righties. (What’s so familiar about this?) Hmm. Could it be the G.O.P.’s smear campaigns during election times? Surely they’re as honest as Saint Teresa.

Check out this video goodness at Crooks and Liars.

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In the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich laid the blame for the tragedy at the feet of liberals. Here’s what he said:

“I want to say to the elite of this country - the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton…of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don-t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”

On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Gingrich if he would apply those same words to the Virginia Tech tragedy. “Yes,” Gingrich said, offering a rambling, nonsensical response that segued into Don Imus and McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform.

Read more and watch interview at Think Progress

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(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Several recent posts have touched on false equivalency, perhaps the most persistent, pernicious mistake perpetrated by the press. Although the post Color Commentary was undertook partially in jest, on political issues, the typical media formula is to present a Republican and a Democrat, let them both have their say, and leave it at that. The problem is this is socially or politically equitable, but has absolutely nothing to do with veracity and accuracy. As The Bullshit Matrix explored, anyone who lies with some cleverness has an advantage in most political arenas, because the press typically won’t call them on it. It would be impolite, the correction can be attacked as partisan, and it might cost the reporter a source or two. In such an environment, the truth can easily be muddied or obscured. The public may also labor under the assumption that “surely the Vice President wouldn’t lie about such an important matter!” Alternatively, a cynical viewer might say, “all politicians are liars!” which is another pernicious form of false equivalency. Not all participants are equally honorable, honest or accurate. If the press does not fact-check, it does a grave service to their viewers/readers, and abets liars and bullshitters.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” As I’ve seen others note, if speaker one comes on and says 2+2=4, and speaker two, a hack, says 2+2=8, the press’ default approach is to suggest 2+2=6. Issues exist where there are simply legitimate differences of opinion or where judgment is ultimately subjective. However, on factual matters, that’s not the case. On matters of science in particular, there’s no reason not to say 2+2=4, or at the very least explain that the overwhelming number of scientist hold that 2+2=4 (and if necessary, why that’s the case).

The national discourse on global warming and man-made climate change may have improved in the past couple years, but it remains badly skewed. The debate has not centered on Democrats and Republicans arguing about what to do about global warming, a legitimate policy issue. Instead, the conflict has been between reality and fantasy, with many Republicans simply denying empirical facts, much as tobacco executives used to say that no scientific proof existed to show that cigarettes were harmful to one’s health.
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