How (I think) the corporate dominated media shaped last year’s Presidental election

At the risk of sounding like a crackpot conspiracy theorist , here is how I think the mainstream media manipulated the election process to make a candidate as much to their liking as possible:

OK, Democrats, the best possible candidates for you are Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. Ignore all the others, ESPECIALLY Dennis Kucinich. He is too extreme!

Republicans, we want John McCain to be the next President. The others are too weak and we especially don’t want RON PAUL in charge!

Great! The Democrats are fighting, fighting FIGHTING over Obama and Clinton! YAY! Let’s play that up for all it’s worth, to make the Republicans look stronger.

Finally, Obama has won the Democratic nomination. And McCain has won on the Republican side. Maybe we can get a WOMAN on the Republican ticket to attract some of the Hilary supporters and ensure McCain’s victory. Here’s Sarah Palin! Obama has picked a white guy to be HIS running mate. Ho hum….

Damn! Obama WON. No matter, once he takes office, we can whip up the opposition to him as much as possible to give him a hard time. Then he will NEVER threaten our interests.

Keith Olbermann does it again!

Last night, he made his longest and most personal special comment ever, taking up the entire hour of the Countdown episode, with references to his invalid father and others he knows who are victims of the lack of health care reform. Watch and weep…….

Sen. Max Baucus has got to go!

As far as I’m concerned, this disgusting traitor should be thrown out of both the Democratic Party and the Senate for his screwing up the effort for health care reform this year!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Baucus

Max Sieben Baucus (born December 11, 1941) is the senior U.S. Senator from Montana and a member of the Democratic Party. He is the current chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Finance and is influential in the debate over health care reform in the United States.^[1]

Baucus is pro-choice and pro gun rights and for maintaining the District of Columbia’s non-voting Congressional representation. He supports free trade.

Baucus served in the Montana state legislature in the early 1970s before being elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1974. He has represented Montanans in the U.S. Senate since 1978 and is the seventh longest-serving senator as of 2009.

Health care reform

 Senate finance committee

As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Baucus’s called the first Senate meeting of interested parties before the committee to discuss health care reform, including representatives from pharmaceutical groups, insurance companies, and HMOs and hospital management companies. The meeting was controversial because it did not include representatives from groups calling for single-payer health care.

 Opposition to single payer health care

Advocate groups attended a Senate Finance Committee meeting in May 2009 to protest their exclusion as well as statements by Baucus that “single payer was not an option on the table.” Baucus later had eight protesters (among them physicians and nurses), removed by police who arrested them for disrupting the hearing. Many of the single-payer advocates claimed it was a “pay to play” event.^[27][28][29] A representative of the Business Roundtable, which includes 35 memberships of HMOs health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, admitted that other countries, with lower health costs, and higher quality of care, such as those with single-payer systems, have a competitive advantage over the United States with its expensive private system.^[30]

At the next meeting on health care reform of the Senate Finance Committee, Baucus had five more doctors and nurses removed and arrested.^[31][32][33]

Senator Baucus admitted a few weeks later in June 2009 that it was a mistake to rule out a single payer plan.^[34] Senator Baucus said excluding consideration of a single payer plan was a mistake not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.^[35]

Baucus has used the term “uniquely American solution” to describe the end point of current health reform and has said that he believes America is not ready yet for any form of single payer health care. This is the same term the insurance trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), is using. AHIP has launched the Campaign for an American Solution, which argues for the use of private health insurance instead of a government backed program.^[1] It has been pointed out that America already has a “uniquely American solution” that is a single payer health care system, it is Medicare.^[36]

 Conflict of interest charges

Baucus has come under criticism for his ties to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries while significant numbers of his own constituents lack health insurance and access to health care. The University of Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research found that Montana has always ranked near the bottom in cross-state and national comparisons of health insurance coverage. ^[37] Despite this backdrop in his home state, Senator Baucus has been one of the biggest Senate beneficiaries of campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries. From 2003 to 2008, Baucus received $3,973,485 from the health sector, including $852,813 from pharmaceutical companies, $851,141 from health professionals, $784,185 from the insurance industry and $465,750 from HMOs/health services, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.^[38]

The only senators who received more campaign contributions from the health sector during the period from 2003 to 2008 than Senator Baucus were three major Presidential contenders, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain.^[39] Baucus tops the list of recipients from business PACs. A 2006 study by Public Citizen found that between 1999 and 2005 Baucus, along with former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, took in the most special-interest money of any senator.^[40]

Only three senators have more former staffers working as lobbyists on K Street, at least two dozen in Baucus’s case.^[40] Several of Baucus’ ex-staffers with whom he is still close, among them, former chief of staff David Castagnetti, are now working for the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries.^[39] Castagnetti co-founded the lobbying firm of Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, which represents “America’s Health Insurance Plans Inc.,” the national trade group of health insurance companies, the Medicare Cost Contractors Alliance, as well as Amgen, AstraZeneca PLC and Merck & Co. Another former chief of staff, Jeff Forbes, went on to open his own lobbying shop and to represent the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the Advanced Medical Technology Association, among other groups.

Commentator Ed Schultz stated on his MSNBC TV show that Baucus has received “more money from pharmaceutical companies and insurance industry folks than any other Democrat in the Congress. Baucus got $183,000 from health insurance companies and $229,900 from drug companies”, and contrasting the presence of representatives from these groups with the absence of representatives from Single payer advocates he added wryly “May I remind you, they were at the table.”^[27]

A statistical analysis of the impact of political contributions on individual Senator’s support for the public insurance option conducted by Nate Silver has suggested that Baucus was an unlikely supporter of the public option in the first place. Based on Baucus’s political ideology and the per capita health care spending in Montana, Silver’s model projects that there would be a 30.6% probability of Baucus supporting a public insurance option even if he had received no relevant campaign contributions. Silver calculates that the impact on Senator Baucus of the significant campaign contributions that he has received from the health care industry further reduces the probability of Baucus supporting a public insurance option from 30.6% to just 0.6%.^[41]

The disproportionately large amount of political contributions Senator Baucus has taken from the health care industry over the years calls into question the impartiality of the Senator’s decisions in his capacity as Chair of the Senate Committee that controls healthcare legislation; this includes the Senator’s decision to exclude from the legislative process advocates of a single payer option which is vehemently opposed by the health care industry but has significant support from the public at large.^[42] As noted above, Senator Baucus admitted in June 2009 that it was a mistake to rule out a single payer plan on the grounds that, among others, it alienated a large, vocal constituency.^[43]

In response to the questions raised by the large amount of funding Senator Baucus took from the health care industry even as he exerted control over health care legislation in the Senate, Senator Baucus declared a moratorium as of July 1, 2009 on taking more special interest money from health care political action committees.^[44]

Senator Baucus, however, declined to return as part of his moratorium any of the millions of dollars he has received from health care industry interests up until July 1, 2009 or to rule out a resumption of taking the same or greater health care industry contributions in the future.^[44] Senator Baucus’ new policy on not taking health care industry money reportedly still permits him to take money from lobbyists or corporate executes, who the Washington Post found continued to make donations after July 1, 2009. ^[44]

A watchdog group found that in July 2009 Senator Baucus took more money from the health care industry in violation of the self-defined terms of his moratorium, leading the Senator to return the money.^[45]

Senator Baucus timed the start of his self-imposed moratorium on July 1 to begin right after a Senate break in late June when Baucus held his 10th annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in Big Sky, Montana, for a minimum donation of $2,500.^[44]

And that is bad enough. Now I have found THIS:

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5132.shtml

The slick swindler: Senator Max Baucus, the man behind the health care bill
By Joshua Frank
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Sep 17, 2009, 00:21

While still in high school, I had the pleasure of flying across the country to Washington, D.C., for a weeklong youth workshop on leadership and democracy. I remember the excitement I had knowing I was about to meet both of my Montana senators. Back then I was a proud registered Democrat. Having joined the party only two months earlier, the prospect of rubbing shoulders with a veteran of my party, I thought, was sure to be the highlight of the trip.

The swank décor of the hallways on the Hill mesmerized me as I winded through the legislative chambers. The bright carpet and gorgeous, slightly older interns meandering around the foyers made me think that perhaps politics had its subtle rewards. My intrepid journey from wing to wing led me to the bustling office of Montana Senator Max Baucus.

Max wasn’t in, however, so a cheery office assistant led me to a committee meeting that the senator was attending. “It will be just a few minutes,” she said, continuing to chat with me about the beauty and serenity of Montana. She had grown up in Great Falls or somewhere nearby, and missed the quiet open range and starry nights. I must have reminded her of what she was like before deciding to test the dirty waters of Washington politics.

A few minutes later, Max scurried out and shook my hand as if I were the elected official he had traveled a thousand miles to meet. “So glad to finally meet you,” he said. “How in the hell does he know who I am?” I thought. He didn’t, of course. He was just politicking.

Max wasn’t a good ol’ boy like Conrad Burns, his rival Republican from Montana at the time, who said during his first campaign in 1988 that he would help single mothers by “[telling] them to find a husband.” But Max was sleazy in his own right. His gaudy single-knot tie and wing-tip shoes caught my eye immediately. I remember wondering how long Mr. Baucus had been away from the Big Sky Country. I didn’t really care, though. He was the Democrat I had come to see.

I asked Max about Washington life, and we poked fun at Conrad Burns, whom I had met earlier in the day. Whereas Baucus’ busy overpacked office was full of citizens who seemed to give a shit, Conrad’s quarters were filled with wide leather couches and trophy animals that hung on his plush papered walls. We joked about Burns’ assistants who were advising him on how he should vote on specific legislation even though they had never even traveled to Montana. I thought to myself, “Man, Democrats really are a lot cooler than Republicans.”

It didn’t hurt that Max knew my uncle who ran a little grocery store in Lockwood, a small town outside of the city where I grew up. It made me think Max was one of us, a regular guy who represented regular folks. I let the used car salesman attire slide; the guy was all right.

My trip ended soon thereafter. I had met some interesting people, seen a lot of monuments and museums, and was enthralled with how the system actually worked. Or at least I thought I understood how it all functioned. The runners, the lobbyists, the rookies, the senior congressional leaders, the reporters, and oh those interns. I thought I had it down. I couldn’t wait to get home to tell my family what I’d learned, whom I’d met, and how Senator Baucus knew my dad’s brother. I was even contemplating the best way for me to help his upcoming election campaign.

It wasn’t more than six months later that I was knocked to my senses. The fairytale had ended. I read in the newspaper that my buddy Max had supported the North America Free Trade Agreement a few years prior. By then, I was diving into local environmental issues and came across the effects of NAFTA and the senators who supported it. Baucus was at the top of the hit list. I couldn’t believe it.

Upon further exploration, I learned that Baucus sat on the influential congressional committees, including the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, Environment and Public Works, and Finance and Joint Taxation. I learned how this man whom I had come to admire — for no real reason other than his bashing of a Republican — had succumbed to the interests of campaign contributors time and again. I found out how his seat on the Finance Committee scored him bundles of cash from the health care industry and some big corporations I had never even heard of, including JP Morgan, Brown & Foreman, and Citigroup. I knew these guys weren’t from Montana.

I also learned how my hero supported welfare reform, Fast Track, and President Clinton’s Salvage Rider Act, all of which blatantly raped the Montana forests I loved so dearly. A year later in college, I read an old article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in the Washington Post, which disclosed how actor Robert Redford had campaigned for Baucus by dropping letters in the mailboxes of elite Hollywood liberals, hoping to entice them to donate money to the Montanan for his astute convictions for environmental justice.

But as St. Clair and Cockburn put it so poignantly, “Across the length and breadth of Congress, it is impossible to uncover a more tenacious front-man for the mining, timber, and grazing industries . . . it was Baucus who crushed the Clinton administration’s timid effort to reform federal mining and grazing policies and terminate below-cost timber sales to big timber companies subsidized by the taxpayers.”

I was indignant. “How could he . . . ?!” I pondered. “If the Democrats aren’t saving our natural resources, who the hell is?”

That anger has festered in me to this day. Max Baucus may still be the most corporate –entrenched, conniving Democrat in Washington, and now Americans are getting a health care bill written by the health care lobby for the health care industry.

The dangling tassels on Max’s fancy wing-tip shoes will forever irk me. Those tassels and his decorative silk tie should have been the first sign that this politician didn’t represent regular folks. He was, after all, literally clad in the interests of the out-of-state corporations that lined his thick campaign coffers. I have hated the pretentious Wall Street pinstripes ever since Baucus’ sobering eye-opener.

I doubt that Max has ever hiked or driven through Montana’s Yaak River basin, where a massive forest service sale has destroyed critical grizzly bear habitat. I’d bet he’s never seen what the massive clear cuts have done to the region’s ecosystem, as tributaries have turned a pale yellow from mud and debris. And I cannot imagine Baucus ever apologizing for the legislation he supported during the Clinton years that’s to blame for it all. Many groups have challenged the illegalities of the outright pillage but all of these suits have been defeated or dismissed because the Salvage law gives the forest service “discretion to disregard entirely the effect on the grizzly bear.” All this from the party I once belonged to.

I can’t fathom that Baucus has sat down and spoken with the hundreds of poor single mothers in rural Montana who cannot afford to put their kids in daycare because they are forced to work at places like Wal-Mart where they earn little more than minimum wage. I am sure they’d love to tell him how grateful they are for their newfound careers and Clinton’s welfare reform that put them to work. Unlike many progressives who are preoccupied with the wars in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, these Montanans have more pressing concerns. They are turned off by politics because they have trouble keeping food in the fridge and buying holiday gifts for their kids. For most of us, it’s a luxury to be politically active.

People continue to believe it’s only the Republicans who have undermined everything progressives have fought for. I once believed this to be the case. I hated conservatives for their outright disregard for the little guy. But my short voyage out east as a teenager turned into a life lesson, teaching me that political affiliation means little when talking about real life consequences of compromising ideals. I think this is a lesson we must all keep in mind as many look to the Democrats, naively hoping that they can save us from the strangle of Glenn Beck’s choke hold. Let’s not allow fancy rhetoric or party loyalty derail our need for real change or our push for single-payer health care.

Occasionally I wonder how my grandfather, who I am told was a staunch Democrat, would feel about all this. He wasn’t a flashy man, like the Democrats in Washington today, but a hard working North Dakotan farmer who, as the story is told, even detested his neighbor for being what he called “one of those damned Republicans.” Back then it was thought Democrats, although never progressive, stood for something genuine and were even elected to office because rural folk could discern the subtle difference between a donkey and an elephant.

I am convinced no such differences exist today, and I’m certain that my granddad would agree.

Joshua Frank is the author of “Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush” (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of “Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland,” published by AK Press in July 2008.

We need a real progressive Democrat to overthrow this sell-out! Heck, even a moderate Republican would be better than this guy! At least, we’d know what to expect from Republicans. When someone calling himself a Democrat stabs progressives in the back, he should be EXPELLED from the Democratic party!

The damning truth about Republicans

This was written by a user known as Prophet 451. And everything seems to be totally truthful and makes sense, so I will adopt it for myself:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Prophet%20451/147

Dear Republicans,

Fuck you. No, I’m not joking. I’m sick of this bullshit.

I’m sick of the way you’ve corrupted the public discourse. The way you’ve made it acceptable to hurl any insult you like at public officials. The way you blame us for the current atmosphere of hatred by accusing us of starting it with hating Bush. Like Bush didn’t come on the heels of eight years of your tireless efforts to destroy Clinton by any means necessary, like Bush didn’t give us good reason to complain. A couple of posters on a website compared Bush to Hitler and you’ve used it as free license to compare Obama to Hitler 24/7 and I’m sick of your hypocrisy, where it’s acceptable to say shit about Obama that you would have had an apopletic fit (and did) if anythign remotely similar had been said about your guys. Keith Olbermann calls Cheney a fascist when he was actually using fascist tactics and you think that gives you the freedom to call Obama a fascist, socialist, Marxist constantly for no reason at all. Fuck you and your bullshit false equivelancy.

I’m sick of the way you’ve made the populace stupid. Around a fifth of your populace thinks the sun orbits the earth, over half think evolution never happened. Your populace actually believe the media has a liberal bias. Not because it has, you have the most conservative media in the free world, but because you’ve shouted it so loud and so often that you’ve brainwashed the public into believing it, like the battered wife who parrots her husband’s insults. You’ve got a whole segment of the populace shouting about socialism and fascism and none of them know what the fucking words mean. You’ve convinced them that fascism is a left-wing thing. You’ve got them so turned around that some of them actually believe global warming isn’t happening. Fuck you.

I’m sick of the way you try to destroy the whole concept of government. You’ve tricked the people into believing that government can’t do anything right, always being careful to exclude the army because you love your bullets and bombs but you’ve so destroyed the public’s ability to reason that they don’t even think of interstate highways, the space program, the national parks program, etc. Government is always great when it’s doing what you tell it and inevitibly corrupt when it isn’t. Fuck you.

I’m sick of your rewriting of history. You’ve bleated so loud and long that Reagan was a great president, that the New Deal didn’t work, that cutting taxes increases revenues, that you actually have the people believing this bullshit. And these are the same people who will go on to become teachers and fill their student’s heads with this self-same bullshit. Reagan was a mediocre president at best who had teh good fortune to be in power when the USSR collapsed under it’s own weight and you bastards have turned him into teh Second Coming. You’ve rewritten history so that everything foul and hateful and wrong can be attributed to a Democrat while everything worthwhile is a Republican’s glory. Fuck you.

I’m sick of your dragging the centre ever further to the right. How many whackjob fringe ideas have you dragged into the mainstream? The aforementioned idea that tax cuts increase revenues, the Laffer Curve, the idea that Welfare harms the poor, the idea that there’s rampant fraud in Welfare, the idea that whatever is good for corporations is good for the country. And you push these ideas through your corporate media and you do it so long and loud that they become part of the accepted political landscape and because it is easier to tell a lie than to debunk one, we never get away from this rancid shit. Fuck you.

I’m sick of your casual criminality. Teddy Kennedy, a man who’s boots you were not worthy to lick, was just buried and all I’ve heard from my rightist friends for days is Chappaquidick, Chappaquiddick, Chappaquidick. Your fucking golden boy raped the Constitution, mainly because he wanted to; tortured random people (and waterboarding is torture, fuck you too) essentially because he wanted to; spent like a drunken sailor, essentially because he wanted to; invaded a soverign nation, essentially for the loot and destroyed people’s lives, essentially for the evilulz and you bastards are obsessed with a fucking accident a Democrat had decades ago? You don’t go on about Laura Bush killing some guy decades ago. Fuck you.

I’m sick of you praising pure evil. You’re letting Dick Cheney be the standard-bearer for Republicanism. Dick Cheney, a man so nakedly evil that even his friends call him “Darth”; a man so callous that Lex Luthor would recoil in terror; a man who probably has dismembered hitchhikers in those man-sized safes and kills plants by his mere proximity. Fuck you.

I’m sick of your attempts to tilt the playing field permanently in your favour. Democrats filibustered a few of Bush’s most hateful judicial picks and you pricks started screaming about doing away with the filibuster but now you’re in the minority, you’re filibustering absolutely everything you can and whining when you don’t get the chance. You ignored everything the Democrats had to say when you had power and now that you don’t, you scream that everyone must be bipartisan. You don’t budge a fucking inch on anything but you insist that everyone must compromise to meet you. That’s your idea of politics: Don’t move an inch, force the other guy to come to the right to meet you and call the result a “compromise”. Fuck you.

I’m sick of your corporatism. You dress it up in false populism but anyone with half a brain can see that you’re the brought and paid for subsidiary of big business. You keep pushing tax cuts as the answer for absolutely everything, you keep sabotaging every attempt to control the excesses of big business. You geuinely think the world would be a better place if it was a combination of Bill Gibson’s dystopian vision of a corporate dominated world and Ayn Rand’s bullshit Objectivism, yet another entry in mankind’s endless attempts to find a moral justification for naked greed. You’ve taken the clinically insane spewings of a woman literally to the right of Hitler (pardon my Godwins) and the 1984-like vision of a dystopian author and convinced yourselves that would be a good place to live. Big business is the enemy of the people, always has been. The ideal for the corporate class is to have a small pool of people rich enough to buy their fucking crap and a much larger pool of people so poor and with so few options that they can be used and abused at the corporation’s whim. A corporation’s objective is not to look after you, it is to make ever-larger profits by any means necessary. You bastards want to reinstate fucking slavery to the corporate class and you’ve made the public so fucking stupid that they actually swallow the bullshit you’re serving up, they actually want to enslave themselves to the corporations that abuse them at every turn. They actually care more about the corporations right to make obscene profits than they care about their child’s right to live on a habitable planet. Fuck you.

Fuck you, you scumridden shitehawks, you make me sick. Just fuck off and die.

Can libertarians overthrow the Neo-Conservatives?

I first became interested in the Libertarian Party because of its strong anti-war stance. In my opinion, it’s the one thing that definitely makes libertarians better than the Republicans or even many Democrats:

http://www.lp.org/news/press-releases/time-to-cut-off-iraq

For Immediate Release
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Time to Cut Off Iraq

Iraq should be footing their own bill 

“It is time for Iraq to take responsibility for the costs and burdens of rebuilding their country,” says Libertarian Party National Chairman William Redpath, following a new report from the Government Accountability Office stating that Iraq may have a budget surplus of up to $79 billion dollars. 

“Using US taxpayer money to pay for the rebuilding of the infrastructure of another nation is bad enough,” says Redpath, “but it is reprehensible and unforgivable when that nation is running a budget surplus while we have a substantial and growing federal budget deficit and a crumbling infrastructure.”

The Libertarian Party has been opposed to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq from the beginning.  The Party, which stands adamantly opposed to the use of taxpayer money to support functions of the government not defined in the Constitution, has taken special exception to the use of tax revenues to pay for rebuilding foreign nations.

The Party calls for an end to the Iraq war and a withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq without undue delay. 

“It’s a case of tragic irony,” says Libertarian Party spokesperson Andrew Davis. “The American public was told reconstruction efforts in Iraq would be paid for by oil revenues from that country.  Now, more than five years later, Americans are shouldering the responsibility of rebuilding Iraq while facing decaying bridges and skyrocketing gas prices.”

“Something is very, very wrong with this picture,” says Davis. 

The Libertarian Party is America’s third largest political party, founded in 1971 as an alternative to the two main political parties.  You can find more information on the Libertarian Party by visiting www.LP.org. The Libertarian Party proudly stands for smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom.
 
For more information on this issue, or to arrange a media interview, please call Andrew Davis at (202) 731-0002.

But most of their positions against governmental intervention seem too extreme and unrealistic. If they would moderate their platform to support smaller government in general instead of taking any absolute positions, then they could gain a larger and more diverse membership and start winning elections at the federal level, which they never have before. Their reluctance to be more moderate is their first mistake. As the Nolan Chart shows, the Libertarian Party needs to be open to all those that would score as “Libertarians”, not just those purists who would be at the uppermost tip of the chart, and perhaps even Liberals, Centrists, and Conservatives well away from the lower (Statist) part of the chart.

Their second mistake is to ally themselves with the Republicans against the Democrats. If the Republicans ever regain power, what’s to stop them from throwing the Libertarians under the bus later to persue power for themselves once more?

A group that is ideologically pure can never take power in a pluralistic democracy. It can only do so by force, which libertarianism does not allow. Therefore, the Libertarians may never take power, though they should. Fortunately, there are some who see this and are working to make the Libertarian Party a more diverse one:

http://www.reformthelp.org/

Assuming that they ultimately fail, however, there is another possibility. It would involve libertarians taking over the Republican Party and getting rid of the most hard-core Conservative elements in it. The best example of a libertarian who is also a Republican is Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who ran for President last year.

http://www.rlc.org/

Either possibility will be fine with me. The status quo of a weak Libertarian Party, a stronger Republican Party still dominated by neo-Conservatism, and a Democratic Party with total power and no accountablity is not!

The feud between Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly

I first took notice of Keith Olbermann when I happened to see a video on YouTube of him condemning President Bush for his conduct during the Iraq War.

I thought that was quite amazing, but then I saw these special reports on Bill O’Reilly, which totally blew me away!

You can’t get more damning than that! There are only two possibilities: Either Olbermann slandered Bill O’Reilly (in which case Bill O and FOX News should have sued Keith O and MSNBC as a matter of honor), or he told the truth (in which case FOX News should have fired Bill O). There is no third option. The fact that no slander lawsuit was ever filed and that O’Reilly works at FOX News to this day shows beyond all reasonable doubt that FOX News is a channel with no integrity whatsoever.

Here’s another example of Olbermann busting  O’Reilly for falsehoods relating to World War II:

And unlike Bill O, who never makes an apology for his mistaken statements, Keith O does! One evening, he slammed New York Times managing editor Bill Keller for not firing a reporter who had not only printed a false story, but had committed plagerism to boot!

But the very next night, Keith O apologized for his condemnation of Keller. Appearantly, Olbermann had never worked at that newspaper before and knew nothing beforehand about how it was run. So he practiced what he preached!

There is no question that MSNBC is slanted towards the Liberal perspective. I suspect that was done because of FOX News appealing so much to right-wingers, so MSNBC had to balance it out. FOX News certainly has no business calling itself “fair and balanced”, nor does Bill O’Reilly have any business calling his show a “no spin zone”. Look at how arrogantly he dealt with Richard Dawkins:

….and then with Kirk Cameron, treating him with kid gloves while continuing to bash Dawkins:

And he even got into a shouting match with Geraldo Rivera over illegal immigration and drunk driving! How unprofessional!

Meanwhile, Olbermann took on Wal-Mart for several days to expose its terrible wrongdoing towards a disabled former employee:

Until Wal-Mart was forced to back down:

Now, those blind and moronic FOX News fans who call Olbermann a liar, without specifying what he lied about, are YOU going to file a slander lawsuit against him? Is anyone? If not, SHUT UP! In matters of credibility and honor, Keith Olbermann beats anyone at FOX News hands down! The only reason you distrust Olbermann is political prejudice, the irrational assumption that somehow Conservatives have a monopoly on truth and virtues and therefore anyone non-Conservative must be misguided, dishonest, even evil. WRONG! Grow up and deal with real life and not the nationalistic crap you’ve been spoon fed since you were babies!

When I was a child, I had absolute faith in God, in my parents and my country, like most children tend to have. In 1979, I would watch the news and see reports about American hostages being taken in Iran, about the Shah being deposed, and about Iranians chanting “Death to America!”, and I couldn’t understand why. What had we Americans ever done to Iran? I got the impression that the Iranians were evil people who hated us just because we were different.

But years later, I attended college and it wasn’t until then that I finally learned the truth: that in 1953, we Americans, through the CIA, had helped overthrow a democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran and allowed the Shah to take absolute power there. Why? Because that Prime Minister had attempted to nationalize the oil fields owned and operated by British and American oil companies, in HIS OWN COUNTRY! WHAT ARROGANCE AND HYPOCRISY WE DISPLAYED BACK THEN! NO WONDER THE IRANIANS WERE SO ANGRY! But in 1979, these disgraceful facts were never revealed by the mainstream media. The implication was that the Islamic Revolution of Iran had occured for no logical reason. But that was a lie of omission.

If someone like Keith Olbermann had been around in 1979 reporting the political news and slamming reporters of other networks for screwing with the truth, perhaps we would have learned the truth about the Iranian situation much sooner and we the people would not have been stupid enough to elect Ronald Reagan as the next President of the United States.

In any case, it was me learning the truth about Iran and what we did to it that made me reject forever the Conservative Republican politics of my parents and most of my other relatives. I wised up, and it’s about time millions of Americans did also and stopped acting like SHEEP being led to their slaughter by the pied pipers of FOX News and the Republican leaders.

Keep up the good work, Keith Olbermann. This Honorable Skeptic salutes you and hopes to see you on the air for many years to come!

Why I hate political parties

It seems that no matter which party is in absolute control of the American federal government, corruption and prejudice results.

Here are several ways the parties screw up the government, and with it, the American people:

1. RULE BY SHUTTING OUT THE OTHER PARTY – Never mind that the party out of power represents a considerable portion of the people who pay taxes just like the supporters of the party in power. And even that the party out of power has many legitimate concerns that most moderates and independent voters may share.
2. LET THE PRESIDENT OF THEIR OWN PARTY DO WHATEVER HE WANTS, BUT GIVE THE SHAFT TO HIM IF HE IS OF THE OPPOSING PARTY - Relates to the first point, but even more serious since the President in theory is representative of the American people as a whole. He is also Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Thus, partisan matters shouldn’t even be played so much here.
3. SPEND, SPEND, SPEND ON WHATEVER YOUR PARTY FAVORS – Never mind that we really need to curb spending completely to get our government out of debt!

We never needed political parties, because they are not even mentioned in the U. S. Constitution. If our Founding Fathers had thought more carefully, they might have prohibited them altogether. Maybe we still should!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-party_democracy