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June 19, 2009

Murdoch’s Propaganda World

cartoon-propaganda-world

For a complete list of Murdoch’s extensive News Corporation holdings, read the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘Who Owns What? here.

Also read:
News Corp. Suffers Staggering $6.4 Billion Loss
Ryan Nakashima, Huffington Post, Feb. 5, 2009.

April 25, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Even Under Obama, Our Two-Tiered Justice System Rolls On Edition

Why Are Glenn Beck and His Media Colleagues Walking Free While Minnesota’s ‘RNC 8′ Are Prosecuted for Terrorism?

Real Texans, natives from those parts of the state not dominated by the alligator-cowboy-boot luxury of the oil-pump Petrograds of Dallas or Houston, claim that, even in its death throes, a poisonous snake is still dangerous. Poke it with a stick and, with it’s a final ounce of waning spite, it will snap and try to kill as it writhes its last.

Such is the case with the fading right-wing media and their cohort in the Republican Party, their only hope for continued relevance encapsulated by the fervent wish that the increasingly popular President Obama fail miserably, and take the country down with him. These neocon elite know, even from their musings of history by the dim firelight in Plato’s cave, that a successful Obama spells the end, at least in their lifetimes, of the modern ‘free market’ corporatist-conservative movement blueprinted by Milton Freidman and his acolytes, and set into motion by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two Bush presidencies, culminating in the Dubya-initiated disaster of our current economic crisis, the inevitable historically-repeated result of stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

But the Limbaughs and Becks, Hannitys and O’Reillys are also battling with each other for ratings from a dwindling, aging audience, causing them to engage in a war of words wherein they must out-do one another in issuing paranoia-laden proclamations in a voice of sullen outrage, bray archaic Cold War bombast or, in the case of Glenn Beck, display the tearful, fearful ramblings of a man losing his mind.

Not that any of them actually believe any of the guff they spread daily – they are mental itinerant workers who are well-paid for peddling a continually shifting ideology – when Bush said we are not at war with Islam, he was statesmanlike and diplomatic; when Obama does it, he’s surrendering to our Muslim enemies. When Bush ordered Shock and Awe bombings of Baghdad that killed innocent Iraqi teenagers, that’s understandable – the unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ of war; when Obama orders the three teenage pirates threatening the life of an American citizen shot, he’s killing kids. When Clinton was in office, seemingly his every movement, even firing staff in the White House Travel Office, was worthy of a special prosecutor; when Obama talks about holding those accountable who illegally ordered torture, he’s turning the country into a banana republic. And on it goes, an endless stream of swill offered up by the millionaire shills for the entertainment division of the Fox funhouse mirror of political propaganda, toiling in the fields planted by Edward Bernays, Joseph Goebbels, H.R. Haldeman and unsung laborers in behavioral psychology and mass marketing who devoted their professional lives to convincing the public to buy products they don’t need and adopt political ideas that empty their bank accounts and lower their wages, while tempering their minds to accept ever larger loads of pernicious claptrap that serves the profitable interests of the wealthy moguls who bankroll the whole anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional neoconservative operation.

Every day, in the safe confines of the radio or cable TV studio, these media evangelists of the New World Order wrestle with indomitably evil straw men, unleash torpedos of invective at liberal ghost blips on the radar, launch fusillades of bile at comic book enemies from the Eisenhower era, crucify those they detect as suspicious of Jesus’ divinity or conservative Republican provenance, and, most hilariously, mount fearsome attacks on the mythical Left-Wing Media, the corporate conglomerate parents of which are owned by wealthy capitalists who invest on Wall Street, seek further tax cuts for their upper-income bracket, deregulation for their companies, pay good money to lobby politicians, and, in many cases, own a piece of the outlet that broadcasts the daily doses of outrage and hate to the lower caste of ignorant, addled Proles seeking an easy leftist scapegoat for what has happened to their country in the wake of the misrule of the elite Republican right.

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March 14, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Tales of Incredible GOP Slop Edition

“But after September 11th, having been being hit once, how could we take a chance that Saddam Hussein might not strike again?”
Ari Fleischer to Chris Matthews, March 11, 2009.

You Know When They’re Lying…

Not that I want them to ever figure this out, but if the GOP wishes to know why wide swatches of the American public no longer trusts them, aside from the Little King’s eight long years of rule by error, and an economy that had to be peeled from the bottom of the barrel, they might look at some of the incredible statements that emanate from the acrid mouths of the supply-siders.

For instance, Martian Talking Point Ari Fleischer appeared on the Matthews boy’s MSNBC variety hour the other day and spread it on thick for Bush’s Legacy. Out of the steaming heap of preposterous twaddle and dead-eyed slag with which he repeatedly insulted the audience, one statement, along with the outrageously delirious quote that heads this piece, was the ‘tell’ that removed all credibility from any other word he spoke – that’s when he implied that Republicans would never blame Obama should there be another 9/11. The remnants of Karl Rove’s viperous, vile, vicious, kick-below-the-belt Republican Party and their cohorts in Murdoch’s Media would give Obama a pass on a major terrorist attack? As Mark Twain once wrote, it’s enough to make a cow laugh.

“I thought they [CEOs] were honest.”
Jim Cramer to Jon Stewart, March 12, 2009.

Then there was CNBC’s Mad Money maniac Jim Cramer getting some needed schooling in journalism from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last Thursday. As much as Cramer bobbed and weaved, Stewart kept landing solid punches, but the one line that took any faint breeze of credibility out of Cap’n Jimbo’s sails was the ludicrous, fall-on-the-floor funny take that he didn’t realize corporate CEOs were lying to him. This hyperactive lump of dross has been selling his 20 years of financial experience on Wall Street and he didn’t know CEOs LIE? Okay, either this guy is the dumbest wide-eyed hayseed to ever hit the big time, in which case CNBC should rip up his contract and send him back to Mayberry, or he has such contempt for average Americans that he thinks he can get away with this monumental sleazebag-of-the-month con job, and I’d pick Door Number Two here.

Since Obama’s election, we’ve heard a landfill of these absurd head-slapping ‘tells’ from the Party of Limbo – “We believe in small government”; “We honor the Constitution”; “We’re the party of fiscal responsibility”; “Bush beat al-Qaeda and won the war on terror”; “We’re against earmarks”; “It’s Obama’s recession” – and I hope the Republicants keep it up. No advertising from the opposition could more effectively doom the GOP than endlessly repeating something as patently ridiculous as, “We’re the party that cares about the people!”

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July 3, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Newsweek’s Cindy McCain Puff Pastry Falls Flat Edition

Surprise! The Recipe is Not Original

This isn’t really intended to criticize Cindy McCain – God knows the woman has suffered enough from 30 years of marriage to John McCain – but rather to dissect the puff profile Holly Bailey concocted for Newsweek June 21, “In Search of Cindy McCain.”

In her often risible attempts to slab on sugar frosting over the rocky-road history of John McCain and his second wife Cindy, Ms. Bailey, a young Corporate Media go-getter plainly anxious to avoid ruffling any powerful feathers, instead leaves gaping cracks through which the careful reader can detect glimmers of harsh reality, rendered as it is by the leaden hand of an ardent, if inexpert, propagandist.

For those of us who relish chuckling at such obvious kiss-up buncombe, here are just a few of the more entertaining highlights, but read the article for the full head-slapping impact:

Without an ounce of shame or regret, Ms. Bailey persists in inserting flag-waving quotes from Mrs. McCain which sound as if they were invented by McCain’s campaign staff. To explain her “long-distance marriage” and “together but apart” relationship to political animal Johnny, Holly has Cindy comparing Mr. McCain going to Washington with a Navy officer’s deployment overseas: “It was almost like a deployment …What I told the kids from the time they were little is that their dad was deployed and serving our country in Washington.” She followed that selfless patriotic tearjerker with Mrs. Sen. McCain admitting that when she married her husband, she knew that he would “put country first” before his bride and kids. Rather than the portrait of a dedicated pol with his nose to the grindstone in Congress that Ms. Bailey tried to etch, one could also take from this that John McCain didn’t much care for his wife or children, and preferred staying alone in Washington to hanging out at home with the whole damn family.

Ms. Bailey also notes that exemplary Good Citizen John somehow didn’t notice his wife was addicted to both booze and painkillers for years “brought on in part by the stress of politics,” as Holly writes, but doesn’t think this angle is worthy of further pursuit. Cindy herself is quoted, somewhat pathetically, as saying she’s her husband’s “best friend, best adviser and closest confidant” yet she neglected to tell him she was strung out on drugs and liquor, so apparently that relationship didn’t cut both ways. Just to review: Here is a man who seeks to be the president of one of the most powerful nations on earth, yet he is completely ignorant of what is happening to his wife right under his nose? Voters might care to know how that’s even possible unless it was willful, and if it was willful, how McCain could be that unfeeling and blind toward someone he supposedly loves? After all, his calling card is his love for his country – as president, would he refuse to face reality as it declines as well? Ah, but don’t rely on Ms. Bailey bring up any of those uncomfortable questions – she’s on a mission to fluff up the hair and apply cosmetics to her subject’s past, not commit any actual acts of journalism.

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June 11, 2008

Rumors

Filed under: Toon — Tags: , , , , , — Volt @ 6:19 pm

May 23, 2008

The Revolving Door Song

March 1, 2008

Anti-Obama T-Shirt Sales Surge Online

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , , , — Volt @ 8:13 am

Alex Markels, US News and World Report, February 29, 2008

If you think the recent photo of Barack Obama wearing a turban – now appearing on the Internet near you – is a cheap shot, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Or, at least, you haven’t seen the arsenal of cheap shots now on display at CafePress.com, an online store that at last count featured more than 900 anti-Obama designs for sale on some 33,000 T-shirts and other tchotchkes.

Indeed, just as Matt Drudge posted the photo of Obama dressed in local garb during a visit to Somalia, which some have alleged was forwarded by the Clinton campaign, the same image – on more than a dozen T-shirts and sweatshirts – was selling on CafePress.com, along with a cornucopia of “Barack Obummer” campaign buttons and “Osama Obama” onesies.

Ranging from silly to downright offensive, the designs are created and uploaded by millions of would-be entrepreneurs, who then pick which products to emblazon them on and even set the price. “We have a review process that keeps out too much love or too much hate,” CafePress CEO Fred Durham says of the more than 250,000 designs displayed on the website at any given time.

Much like what sometimes happens on eBay, offensive stuff occasionally slips through the cracks, such as a recent T-shirt depicting Obama in a Nazi uniform alongside Adolf Hitler under a caption reading, “Don’t Be Fooled by Propaganda.”

Read More Here

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