July 27, 2012
April 14, 2012
February 17, 2012
Dynasty Resurrection?
Occupy Cal graphics for Valentine’s Day
Occupy Cal Mushroom
“I left my ♥ in San Francisco . . . ♫ . . .”
Is America being set up for the return of the Bush Dynasty? Has the legacy of Murrow’s Boys morphed into a shameless spectacle of his network’s modern on air talent kowtowing to the Republican Party in the form of stories about a political triumph that is being spun as a “compromise”?
In the early morning hours on Thursday, KCBS news radio in San Francisco reported that the payroll tax cut had been extended because the Republicans folded on their insistence that it be balanced by corresponding budget cuts.
Isn’t the “payroll tax cut” code talk for cutting back on workers’ contributions to the Social Security Trust fund? Hasn’t destroying the Social Security program been the top Republican political goal since the day FDR signed it into law?
They get to take another major step towards dismantling the Social Security Program and make their dreams come true and a step to destroy (eliminate funding from) other social programs is postponed and that qualifies as a compromise? GMAFB!
Hasn’t cutting social programs become the Sadistic highlight of the post St. Reagan era for the Republicans? Wouldn’t getting America’s free press to applaud the trend just be icing on the cake? Could the trend to cut social programs funding be compared to being the budgetary equivalent of Sherman’s march to the sea?
Isn’t portraying the lack of cuts as a humiliating compromise the final nail in the coffin for America’s Freedom of the Press?
Do employees at Fox News really start the day by facing a photo of Murdoch, taking an loyalty oath, and then putting their hats over their hearts while singing along to “Memo from Turner”? Or is that just an urban legend?
The World’s Laziest Journalist thinks that he remembers a posting on the Columbia Journalism Review’s website castigating American Journalists for using the dishonest “payroll tax cut” euphemism in place of the more politically charged term “raid on the Social Security Trust Fund.”
In the conservative dominated realm of spin, ascertaining the truth in American Politics has come to resemble the classic chase scene in Orson Wells film “The Lady from Shanghai.” Which image is political reality, which is diabolical spin? Remember if you make a guess and it is incorrect, you will lose more of you rapidly diminishing supply of Constitutional rights. (Good luck!)
Hasn’t the pervasive Conservative noise machine pummeled Americans into surrendering their insistence that the function of the press is to provide citizens with accurate information that will permit them to make well informed decisions when they vote? Isn’t amusing and entertaining what just what Edward R. Murrow and his posse, called Murrow’s Boys, really wanted?
Have you heard the radio ads that tout a method for getting a choice of approximately 500 American radio stations? (Define “a hall of mirrors.”) Should the ever narrowing window of opportunity for access to foreign news sources be compared to Hitler’s edict that proclaimed that listening to foreign radio stations had become a capital offense?
What would be so bad about listening to Sky Rock from Paris, Triple J from Australia, or (if it still exists) Radio Caroline?
Wasn’t there a book a while back in the USA, with the cryptic title: “Ladies and Gentlemen; this way to the showers!”? What was that supposed to mean?
At the World’s Laziest Journalist’s Headquarters we thought we saw a mention on the Internets (and a story in last Sunday’s edition of the New York Times) about some newsmen getting arrested in Great Britain because of a hacking scandal investigation. Did we just imagine that?
Before Dubya sent American troops off to Afghanistan and Iraq, the American Free Press ran “we don’t want another Vietnam” essays on their Op Ed pages. Now as America prepares to use the principles established at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials outlining the necessary condition for permitting a preemptive strike, the lefties in the press realize that such divisive diversions are counter-productive and seem to have given up that lame attempt at circulation building stunt journalism.
If Rupert Murdoch tells the journalists to jump, they must jump and ask “How high?” on the way up.
America established the principle of war for humanitarian reasons before authorizing drone attacks on Libya. This week the need to send drones attacks against Syria as a means of protecting that country’s citizens from a bloodthirsty national leader is becoming abundantly clear thanks to the fair and balance new coverage being provided by America’s Free Press.
Weren’t the trend spotting reporters in American Journalism right on top of the “Linsanity” phenomenon this week? We may have to personally direct the Pulitzer Prize selection committee’s attention to some of the best of the lot.
Not all the work done at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory is devoted to deep dark secret government plots against its own citizens. One of the Factory’s midlevel management team, earlier this week, dug out an old item from long ago when he was only a summer intern there.
According to his theory; if you take the segment of Madonna’s “Truth or Dare” documentary film where she ridiculed actor Kevin Costner and speculate that that incident must have occurred just about the time he (as Executive Producer for the film project called “The Bodyguard”) was making assessment about who should be given the role of the female singing sensation (what is type casting?); you just might come up with some speculation about how Whitney Houston’s big career boost was directly attributable to some rudeness delivered by Madonna. (Didn’t Madonna used to have some aspirations for an acting career to augment her musical achievements?)
This week Tony Bennett was given the key to the city in a ceremony at San Francisco City Hall. Some pre-event publicity indicated that part of the program would include the honoree singing “I Left My ♥ in San Francisco.” He didn’t. (OMFG! Somebody has left the ♥ symbol loose on the Internets! Now it will spread like the bubonic plague!)
The Occupy Cal rebel encampment on Sproul Plaza was moved to another area of the campus late this week. (Note: On Friday morning, it was being reported by an Occupy Potester that the encampment on the steps of Doe Library had been removed. A Google News search was inconclusive.)
On Thursday, we saw news reports that stated that a brokered Republican Convention might be offered the choice of JEB Bush or Sarah Palin to function as a “tie-breaker.”
(How many Democrats will be dumb enough to believe that the Republican Party is ready to name a beauty contest winner as commander-in-chief of the American military? {This is what mystery fans call “a red herring.”})
There is a bit of folk wisdom in Hollywood that advises script writers to leave some “wiggle room” at the conclusion of a horror film, so that the monster can return in a sequel.
Wasn’t there a bunch of news reports about the Bush Dynasty being as extinct as the dinosaurs when George W. Bush’s term in office was concluded? Is Karl Rove going to pull an astonishing sequel scenario out of a hat this summer just as if American politics were as predictable as a Wes Craven movie sequel?
Are the liberal pundits in America’s Free Press just going to sit there and not bring up the possibility of the political effort to reincarnate something that was deemed extinct?
If this column isn’t reprinted on the Op Ed page of the New York Times next week, maybe the World’s Laziest Journalist should try to contact the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney (New South Wales) and see if there’s any possibility of being a guest lecturer there before the November election. Don’t people into scholarship value alternative viewpoints . . . especially if in retrospect they were spot-on?
To be continued . . .
Former San Francisco columnist Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary included this entry: “Cynic, n. a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
Now, the disk jockey will play The Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” Janis Joplin’s “Down on me,” and Quicksilver Messenger Service’s “Holy Moly.” We have to go to the poster shop and get the one of the flying Mustang from “Bullitt.” Have a “Make Love, not war” type week.
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January 30, 2012
December 6, 2011
November 11, 2011
August 12, 2011
June 23, 2011
June 3, 2011
May 15, 2011
April 15, 2011
February 8, 2011
100th Birthday Quote-to-Quote: The Real Ronald Reagan
Ever wonder where current Republican twits like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann get some of their goofiest, dumbest twists on history, society and government? Seems they are simply borrowing from the ‘Master,’ the same mental colossus many members of the GOP want engraved on the dime and enshrined on Mount Rushmore:
“Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?”
– Ronald Reagan, campaign speech, 1980.“Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal.”
– Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time, May 17, 1976“I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at the point of a bayonet, if necessary.”
– Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1965“I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
– Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1966“Today a newcomer to the state is automatically eligible for our many aid programs the moment he crosses the border.”
– Ronald Reagan, in a speech announcing his candidacy for Governor, January 3, 1966. (In fact, immigrants to California had to wait five years before becoming eligible for benefits. Reagan acknowledged his error, but nine months later said exactly the same thing.)“…a faceless mass, waiting for handouts.”
– Ronald Reagan, 1965. (Description of Medicaid recipients.)“Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders.”
– California Governor Ronald Reagan, in the Sacramento Bee, April 28, 1966“We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”
– Ronald Reagan, TV speech, October 27, 1964“History shows that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20 percent of the people’s income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government…. When it reaches 25 percent, there comes an increase in lawlessness.”
– Ronald Reagan, in Time, April 14, 1980. (History shows no such thing. Income tax rates in Europe have traditionally been far higher than U.S. rates, while European crime rates have been much lower.)“Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G. I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything.”
– Ronald Reagan, in Newsweek, April 21, 1980. (Wrong again.)“What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
– Ronald Reagan, defending himself against charges of callousness on Good Morning America, January 31, 1984“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.”
– Ronald Reagan (Republican candidate for president), quoted in the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, February 15, 1980. (In reality, the average nuclear reactor generates 30 tons of radioactive waste per year.)“Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon.”
– Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1980. (The U.S. Department of Transportation calculates that a 14-car train traveling at 80 miles per hour gets 400 passenger miles to the gallon. A 1980 auto carrying an average of 2.2 people gets 42.6 passenger miles to the gallon.)“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The U.S. Geological Survey has told me that the proven potential for oil in Alaska alone is greater than the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia.”
– Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1980. (According to the USGS, the Saudi reserves of 165.5 billion barrels are 17 times the proven reserves–9.2 billion barrels–in Alaska.)“I have flown twice over Mount St. Helens. I’m not a scientist and I don’t know the figures, but I have a suspicion that one little mountain out there, in these last several months, has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind.”
– Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time magazine, October 20, 1980. (According to scientists, Mount St. Helens emitted about 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day at its peak activity, compared with 81,000 tons per day produced by cars.)“…until now has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this.”
– President Reagan revealing a disturbing view about the “coming of Armageddon,” December 6, 1983“Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy.”
– James David Barber, presidential scholar in “On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency,” by Mark Hertsgaard“He demonstrated for all to see how far you can go in this life with a smile, a shoeshine and the nerve to put your own spin on the facts.”
– David Nyhan, Boston Globe columnist“He has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless”
– Patti Davis (formerly Patricia Ann Reagan) talking about her father in “The Way I See It.”“Poor dear, there’s nothing between his ears.”
– British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
Quotes selected from a post at DemocraticUnderground.com.
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January 20, 2011
January 11, 2011
January 5, 2011
December 30, 2010
Emperor Christie Fiddles at Disney World While New Jerseyans Burn
Clueless Christie’s Katrina Moment and Palin Takes a Dive
“Hanging out with Mickey Mouse while backs all over New Jersey ache under the strain of shoveling two feet of snow will probably not help his [Christie's] poll numbers at home either. The Hill also reports that Christie’s popularity in New Jersey slipped five points in a Quinnipiac poll released this month.”
– Joshua Norman, “Chris Christie Under Fire for Disney World Vacation During Blizzard,” CBS News, Dec. 28, 2010.
Is Snowstorm Aftermath NJ Gov. Chris Christie’s Katrina?
– Sara Kugler Frazier, AP, Dec. 30, 2010.
“Alaska doesn’t care for Sarah Palin. In fact, other than (predictably) Massachusetts, the ex-governor’s home state has the ‘dimmest’ view of the reality TV star in the entire nation. That’s one of the takeaways in Public Policy Polling’s new report, which paints a discouraging portrait of the Sarah Palin’s drooping favorability ratings across America and on her home turf. Only 33 percent of Alaskans have a favorable opinion of Palin, and only 60 percent of Alaskan Republicans have embraced her (as opposed to 80 percent of the GOP faithful in ‘most places’ across the country).”
– Erik Hayden, “Palin Loves Alaska, But the Feeling Isn’t Mutual,” The Atlantic Wire, Dec. 29, 2010.
Poll: No Longer ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’– Jordan Fabian, The Hill, Dec. 28, 2010.
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“Corporations Are People” Gaffe Dooms Romney’s Presidential Bid
These days, Mitt Romney has the haunted look of a mountain climber who just heard half the strands of his lifeline snap while hanging only a few yards from the peak of Mt. Everest. He can’t turn back from his life-long quest to reach the peak, yet he knows there’s a good possibility the rope will break before he reaches his goal and he’ll go plummeting down the side. Along with the overstuffed carload of gobsmacking flip-flops on everything from women’s rights to income taxes to health care that Mitt carries with him like a mummy’s curse, his sure-thing Golden-Haired Boy 2012 GOP presidential nomination is now showing its dark roots, and it’s all the fault of Romney himself.
At the Iowa State Fair the other day, Romney attempted another of those tedious ‘Ask Mitt’ torture sessions where he is forced to extemporize to answer questions from the overly-corndogged locals. This is a dangerous zone for the Mittster, who has a hard enough time getting through his soporific stump speeches without sweating through his magic underwear. Romney no doubt figured he was on safe ground — it’s Iowa and Republican runs here like boiling grease through a deep fryer. But the rubes were having none of it — missiles of verbal pyrotechnics, along with derisive laughter, always deadly for a serious candidate, pierced the hot air as oldsters in the crowd fusilladed Romney about Social Security, Medicare, and raising taxes on corporations and his own top one-percent tax bracket to help pay for them. After taking the standard Norquist stupidity pledge never to raise taxes, which is akin to vowing never to move out of your house, even if it’s burning down around you, Mitt then exhibited the complacently haughty behavior that has appealed to his party’s Christopublican-Teabagger base by serenely patronizing his irate interrogators with “Corporations are people, my friend,” a phrase that will follow Romney like a dead skunk chained to his leg for the rest of his doomed quest for the Republican presidential nomination.
Consider that prior to this gaffe, Romney’s thin hold on the nomination was threefold: First, Wall Street reptiles with ice in their aortas and gin-embalmed country club Republicans embraced Mitt as a fellow-traveler — a man willing to make the hard decisions before lunch of how many American jobs to cut or send to foreign shores and live without guilt on the proceeds. Secondly, others in the party elite thought Romney was an agreeably vacillating vessel who could easily be packaged as a caring ‘moderate conservative’ with a chance of beating Obama in 2012. Third, he has a pile of his own money to sink in his campaign, always a relief and comfort to the political investment class.
But with his ad-lib proclamation on the personhood of corporations, which comes as close as Romney gets to a core principle, he tossed it all away. Mitt might as well have announced he’s a Communist who worships Joe Stalin. To most Americans, unschooled in the prevailing hallucinations of five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, the ruminants of global high finance, the silly supply-side economists of which there seems to be an endless supply, and the curdled cognoscenti of the Federalist Society, corporations are clearly nothing like flesh-and-blood human beings and should not enjoy the same rights. Aside from the obvious that corporations cannot vote, or be hauled into court, or put in jail, and can only be fined for their wrongdoing. (They could also be put out of business, but in corporate-beguiled Washington that happens about as often as Sarah Palin submitting to an interview outside of Fox News.) Unlike Shakespeare’s Shylock, the modern corporation never suffers from cold nor heat nor injury from wounds physical or emotional and represents a unique eternal legal construct — the front-office executives may change from death and retirement, but the corporation can go on forever. Ambrose Bierce aptly defined this swindle a century ago in “The Devil’s Dictionary”: “Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” Adding to the legalized larceny, the multi-national corporations take advantage of tax loopholes that are not available to the average American citizen, nor even small businesses, which gives these artificial abstractions unequal and superior rights to real people.
Most Americans are only vaguely aware of any of this, but they do have the fed-up feeling, rightfully, that those at the top of the corporate pie are making out like bandits, and forcing them to work longer hours at less pay to keep their jobs, and they don’t appreciate that ugly pie smashed into their faces by a spoiled multi-millionaire who thinks he should be president. Uttering “Corporations are people” with the passive-aggressive condescension of “my friend” appended removed any chance of Romney reaching the summit as he publicly tried to flim-flam the Iowans into believing that having a mountain of reeking manure in your backyard is the same as owning a prize racehorse.
In another era, a bland and malleable aspirant such as Tim Pawlenty would have taken the top spot after Romney implodes, but this is not that era in GOP politics as the pathetic two-percenter Pawlenty bends over so far backwards trying to appeal to the Teabaggers he appears to be engaged in a bizarre perpetual circus trick and the Republican base rates his conservative sincerity barely above that of Mitt’s.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin’s presidential ambitions will be confined to wistful private moments inside her ridiculous tour bus; Ron Paul will, as usual, fade as quasi-libertarianism and oligarchic corporatism actually don’t mix well; and Gingrich, Cain, Santorum, Huntsman and the other GOP stragglers will depart with vanity-wall photos of their brief moment on the national stage.
Predictions at this early stage are foolish, but here’s one anyway: I don’t think Romney will last beyond the South Carolina primary, if that far. If Obama was counting on running against Mr. Corporate Personhood, he might want to recalculate — the vacuous but wingnut-popular Rick Perry is about to announce, and the Ed Rollins version of Michele Bachmann is taking it seriously now, and both are ready to genuflect to the Republican party establishment to get a crack at the White House.
Any progressive or liberal Democrat who takes either the Texas Governor or the Minnesota Congresswoman lightly does so at their peril. Remember the lesson of the 1970s when Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a buffoon too far right to be electable — we are still paying for that mistake.
Copyright 2011 RS Janes.
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