Fake News

A Safe Substitute for Alcohol

davidswanson — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:44:08 -0400

By David Swanson

The U.S. Department of Justice says that alcohol plays a pivotal role in two-thirds of all cases of violence against an intimate (a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend), and blames alcohol for contributing to 100,000 sexual assaults against young people every year. That's right, alcohol hurts more people than al Qaeda.

Of course, alcohol does not always lead every consumer of it to violence. Most people who drink alcohol don't hurt anyone. But a large percentage of those who do get violent have been drinking alcohol. Should we ban it? We tried that once with miserable results, and we've banned other substances with equally bad outcomes.

We could stop promoting alcohol so heavily, but the impact of doing so would probably not be large. What to do? Well, what if there were a substitute for alcohol that didn't make anyone violent? What if this substitute were far less dangerous than alcohol to the health of the person using it, as well as to those around him or her? What if this alternative substance even had health benefits and medicinal properties and potentials? What if this substance satisfied the desire for intoxication without actually containing anything toxic, and you woke up the next morning without a hangover? What if this magical substitute for alcohol could boost the economy, free prisoners, reduce prison budgets, free up police to address serious crimes, and subtly improve our culture if only we could discover what it was?

The common name for this life-saving drug is marijuana, and in "Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?" the authors Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert argue for legalizing marijuana as a regulated substitute to reduce the societal damage done by alcohol. In the book's foreword, Norm Stamper, former Chief of the Seattle Police Department, writes:

"I've been asking police officers throughout the U.S. (and Canada) two questions. First: 'When's the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana?' (And by this I mean marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause; they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask, 'When's the last time you had to fight a drunk?' They look at their watches. It's telling that the booze question is answered in terms of hours, not days or weeks."

The case for making pot more available to those who might choose it over alcohol seems straightforward. Unless, of course, you've heard any of the pervasive myths that have been spread about it in this country for nearly a century. In 1927, lacking any Iraqi aluminum tubes to peddle yet, the New York Times published this fantasy:

"Mexican Family Go Insane
"Five Said to Have Been Stricken By Eating Marihuana
"A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to doctors, who say there is no hope of saving the children's lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life…."

This is not terribly different from the stories promoted by our government today, and much of the book is devoted to debunking myths. While television networks are not required to give back even a smidgen of our airwaves for political campaigns or information, they have been required to air anti-pot propaganda, or to incorporate it into the plots of shows (such as "ER" and "Beverly Hills 90210"). In 2005, the Government Accountability Office determined that the government's anti-pot campaign had violated the law against covert propaganda by producing video news releases that news programs aired as if they had been created completely independently of the government.

When Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps was shown in a photograph using marijuana, both USA Swimming and the US Olympic Committee came down hard on him, just as the NFL does to its players. These are all organizations that live off massive funding from the makers of alcohol. So, incidentally, do members of Congress. It's a good thing THEY are never influenced by money.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book

Keeping It Real: This Recession Ain't Over by a Long Shot

dlindorff — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:16:36 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The “happy talk” campaign in the US media and coming from the White House is just that: Happy Talk.

To get a real picture of what is happening with this economy, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Yes, the rate of decline in economic activity has slowed. But that
is to be expected. When an economy is going at full tilt, as the US
economy was doing in early 2007, a slowdown of any significance yields
huge numbers, in terms of falling production, falling factory
utilization, falling car sales, or, this time around, falling housing
prices.

But once you get to the same period in 2008, you’re already in a
deep recession, and there really isn’t that much farther to fall. If,
for example, the carmakers have basically shut down by fall of 2008,
and are just working off huge inventories, then you are not going to
see more factory closings and further reductions in production (how do
you reduce production below zero?).

The same can be said about unemployment, although here there is
another twist or two. Yes, the huge layoffs that saw the number of new
unemployed jumping by 6-700,000 per month in the early part of this
year seem to be over, and now new unemployment is rising by “just”
500,000 a month or so, but that’s because all the major employers have
already shut down or shut down entire shifts. There are not that many
people who can be laid off any more, at least in large groups. This
gets painted as “the pace of layoffs is slowing” as if that’s good
news, but it is the opposite.

But there is more trickery and misinformation regarding unemployment
statistics, too. One has to do with the oft-noted claim that the number
of people collecting unemployment benefits is declining—especially the
long-term unemployed. But the reason for this is not that people are
finally finding jobs. It’s that unemployment benefits are being
exhausted. The upper limit for collecting unemployment benefits in the
US is 79 weeks, and that’s only in some states where unemployment is
particularly high. In other states it is 72 weeks or even as low as 59
weeks.

Also, unemployment benefits, which reportedly average $300/week, but
can be a lot less depending upon where a particular person worked and
what state he or she lives in, are lost if a person does some part-time
work, and since nobody can support a family on $300 a week, many people
on unemployment end up getting part-time jobs and lose their
unemployment benefits. That’s not a good sign either.

Finally, unemployment benefits only cover about half of American
workers. The rest, because they have already only been able to find
part-time jobs, or because they’ve been working “off the books,” or
because they are so-called “independent contractors”—people like
gardeners, freelance writers, lawyers, consultants, plumbers,
etc.—aren’t covered by unemployment insurance. When they get laid off,
they are on their own. And increasingly, the layoffs and job losses in
this declining economy are falling on people in that category. The
early lay-offs were done by managements of big companies which looked
ahead, saw the downturn, and implemented “cost-cutting” measures, which
meant slashing production and laying off workers. Independent workers
and small businesses, whose owners are personally hit when they have to
shut down production or operations, have struggled to stay in business
as long as possible, but are now entering the jobless rolls at an
accelerating rate.

But, and here’s a crucial point, many of them simply don’t get
recorded by the government statisticians as being unemployed. Anyone
who works even a few hours a week at some odd job, or for free in a
family business, is not counted. Anyone who sees no job prospects out
there and just gives up isn’t counted. Anyone who finds a half-time
job, but needs a full-time job is counted as employed. It didn’t use to
be this way. In a more honest time, more than three decades ago, such
people were counted as unemployed, but politicians pushed to have them
excluded to keep the official unemployment numbers looking lower. If
all such people were added to the unemployment numbers we would have
unemployment in the US at over 18 percent, and possibly closer to 20
percent. That’s one in five Americans out of work.

And remember, even though we are now in an economy that is
functioning at a depressed level, it is still in decline, and those
unemployment numbers are rising, not stabilizing.

Put that together with the fact that Americans collectively have
lost $14 trillion in wealth. They’ve lost invested savings, which are
still down almost 20 percent from where they were a year ago, and don’t
appear likely to recover any time soon. (Remember, even if the stock
market falls 40 percent and then rises 40%, it will still be down.
Consider: If you had $1000 in vested in a broad index like the S&P,
and it dropped 40% as happened last fall, you lost $400, and have just
$600. If the market then recovered 40%, though, which it hasn’t by a
long shot, you only gain 40% of $600, or $240, so your portfolio is
still only back to $840.) That $14 trillion also includes the lost
value of people’s homes, which until 2008 were being used to prop up
living standards as people borrowed on the rising equity in their
property. With housing values in much of the country now down anywhere
from 20% to 80%, many homes are now worth less than the amount of money
still owed on people’s mortgages. They can’t sell, and often, they
can’t pay the mortgage check.

Where is the consumer spending supposed to come from that used to
represent a whopping 70% of economic activity in a United States that
long ago stopped making things? The answer is: nowhere. The amount of
lost wealth makes a joke of the celebrated Obama stimulus plan, which
was less than $1 trillion, and which is spread out over two years.

There is simply no money to restart the orgy of consumer spending that kept the US economy afloat for so long.

People can’t even borrow if they want to. Banks are not lending,
because they know that the happy talk is nonsense, and they don’t want
to loan money to people and businesses that are liable to go belly up
as the recession continues. That’s why card companies like American
Express and many Visa issuers, instead of just charging a late charge
when card-holders miss a monthly payment deadline as in the past, are
now just jacking up the interest rate they charge, --in American
Express’s case to 28% or over 2% a month! That’s not the action of a
bank that is expecting to get repaid by a customer—it’s the
extortionate action of a usurer that wants to extract as much money as
possible from a borrower that it expects to have go bust. Banks are
canceling personal and business credit lines right and left too, making
a joke of the Obama administration’s claim that it bailed out the banks
so that they would “start lending again.”

Even the story about housing sales improving is misleading. The
reason it is happening is that so many homes have foreclosed that the
sale of foreclosed homes by banks is now a significant part of the
total housing market.

Again and again, much of the “happy talk” we hear, if examined
closely, turns out to be bad news being misinterpreted, often
deliberately.

Finally, it should be added that because of massive unemployment,
which is approaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, and
because of the massive loss of personal wealth, this recession is not
likely to act like any of the other recessions of the post-World War II
era. These have all been “U” or “V”-shaped affairs, where economic
activity would either drop and then after lingering at a low level for
a while, recover at an accelerating rate, slowly recover as in a “U”,
or plunge precipitously to a sharp bottom and then quickly recover, as
in a “V”. This time, we are more likely to see an “L”-shaped recession,
where the economy hits bottom at some point, and then operates for
years at a much lower level. That lower part of that “L” might rise
slowly, but it wouldn’t rise by much. In this case, we would see
continued high levels of unemployment, lower wages, and no bounce-back
in personal wealth.

So if we’re want to make the correct policy decisions, not to
mention the right political decisions and personal financial and basic
life decisions, let’s cut the happy talk, and start keeping it real.

__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Muntadar al-Zaidi Did What We Journalists Should Have Done Long Ago

dlindorff — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:14:46 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

When Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi heaved his two shoes at the
head of President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad,
he did something that the White House press corps should have done
years ago.

Al-Zaidi listened to Bush blather that the half-decade of war he
had initiated with the illegal invasion of Iraq had been “necessary for
US security, Iraqi stability (sic) and world peace” and something just
snapped. The television correspondent, who had been kidnapped and held
for a while last year by Shiite militants, pulled off a shoe and threw
it at Bush—a serious insult in Iraqi culture—and shouted “This is a
farewell kiss, you dog!” When the first shoe missed its target, he
grabbed a second shoe and heaved it too, causing the president to duck
a second time as al-Zaidi shouted, “This is from the widows, the
orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!”

I’ll admit, listening to Bush lie his way through eight years of
press conferences, while pre-selected reporters played along and
pretended to get his attention so they could ask questions which had
been submitted and vetted in advance, I have felt like throwing my
shoes at the television set.

Al-Zaidi, who paid for his courageous act of protest by being
brutally beaten by security guards, is a hero of the profession. He
stopped taking the president’s BS and called him what he is: a murderer
and a criminal, with the blood of perhaps upwards of a million Iraqis
on his hands. Al-Zaidi used what was supposed to be a staged photo-op
for the president as an opportunity to speak up for those whose lives
have been ruined by this president—the ones our suck-up journalists
routinely ignore.

I’m not suggesting that journalists should routinely leave
presidential press conferences in their stocking feet. We have
different ways of expressing our sentiments to people we feel have
insulted our intelligence than throwing shoes at them, but it would be
nice to see a journalist or two flip the president the bird when he
lies so blatantly to them. Or they could all get up and just walk out,
leaving him standing alone at the presidential lectern.

It’s time for the press corps to stop treating presidents like
royalty. If he accomplished anything at all in eight years in office,
President Bush has demonstrated that, to the contrary, the president is
a very ordinary—and in his case a rather less than ordinary—man. The
office of president deserves no more respect than that of the mayor of
Detroit, or of Wasilla.

My suggestion is that the press corps use the remaining five weeks
of the Bush administration to develop a new relationship with the
presidency—one in which they drop all the phony propriety and tradition
and start acting like boisterous newshounds of old, barking questions,
laughing cruelly at inane answers, demanding follow-ups when they are
given the run-around, and, where necessary, walking out, or perhaps
tossing the occasional shoe.

The journalism profession was a full-blown disaster and an utter
disgrace during the Bush administration, and with all the crises facing
the country and the world, in part because of that failure on their
part, we cannot afford to have them continue that failure into the
Obama administration.

With the Bush administration reduced to a running joke at this
point, it gives the journalism profession a chance to redeem itself by
using these few remaining weeks to establish a new tradition for
presidential press conferences and photo-ops—one that can continue on
into the new presidency.

Meanwhile, I’m suggesting that my alma mater, the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism, hire al=Zaidi to teach a
class in press conference journalism techniques. They should make it a
multi-year appointment, because if he left after just one year, his
would be difficult shoes to fill.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTE: Speaking of shoes and the White House, Skip Mendler of
Honesdale, PA has a great idea. He suggests that everyone who is
disgusted with the outgoing Bush/Cheney administration send a shoe to
the White House. Just imagine a pile up of a million smelly old running
shoes in the White House mailroom! I think he's got something. Spread
the word!
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Presidential Campaign Enters the Silly Season

dlindorff — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:12:11 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I’ve been getting some emails that refer to Barack Obama as a
“Manchurian Candidate,” a guy who is somehow hiding a secret radical
and/or Muslim jihadist agenda that will burst forth if he’s elected
president. There is a certain idiot factor at work here, since if Obama
were a closet Weatherman, who somehow learned of and adopted that 1960s
college dropout organzation’s creed at the tender age of 8, it would
have clashed badly with any Muslim teaching he might have picked up as
a student in an Indonesian public school at the same time (he attended
an Indonesian public schoolfrom the age of 6 to 8 before transferring
to a Catholic-run institution).

But since some low-wattage and conspiracy-minded people seem ready
to believe this kind of stuff, let’s consider John McCain’s early
background, and the possibility of his being a Manchurian Candidate
too. Fair’s fair, right?

Okay. McCain, it turns out, was actually born outside the US, in
the Panama Canal Zone, which in 1936 was territory leased from Panama.
His father, a Navy officer, was stationed there with his wife at the
time of McCain’s birth. Now it’s a safe bet that McCain was largely
raised—fed, diapered, and spoken to—at that age by a local Panamian
woman. That’s what, after all, you do when you are an elite officer and
the wife of an elite officer in a foreign country where low-wage help
is abundant. Who knows what subversive ideologies were poured into the
young McCain’s tender ears at that vulnerable period of his life by his
Panamanian nurse? Maybe that would explain McCain’s support for an
amnesty program for immigrants from Latin America a few years back.
Does he have a secret agenda to throw open the doors of America to
Latin American immigrants once in the White House?

And worse yet, maybe his Panamian amah was a Marxist! Lord knows
that Central America in the mid-1930s was a hotbed of revolution. The
dreaded Augusto Sandino had only just been executed in Nicaragua, just
north of the Zone, two years before McCain’s birth, following a bloody
guerrilla war against US Marines, and the region was full of bitter and
vengeful nationalist and Marxist revolutionaries bent on throwing the
US out of Latin America. Could his nurse have been one of these people,
whispering and implanting the language of liberation into the young
boy’s still unformed mind, ready to spring to life once he assumed high
office in Washington?

Then we turn to McCain’s prisoner of war days in the hands of the
North Vietnamese. Certainly his mind was weak and vulnerable to
control. While many of McCain’s fellow POWs endured five, six or more
years of torture without cracking, he is said to have begun spilling
secrets and agreeing to broadcast anti-American propaganda statements
after only four days of torture shortly after his capture. We also know
that the Communists had a sophisticated system of mind control
developed, which was shared among the Communist nations of the USSR,
China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Were these techniques applied to
the captive McCain, and did they leave him after five long years of
captivity robotically programmed to seek and win the presidency, only
then to launch a campaign of sabotage to soften America up for
Communist takeover?

This prospect seems much more likely than that some Muslim teacher got to Obama in his grammar school in Indonesia.

Actually, I find the Obama Manchurian Candidate theory much weaker
than the McCain Manchurian Candidate theory, just based upon my own
experience. I was, after all, put through some serious indoctrination
by my own family. My parents sent me to Sunday School at the local
Congregational Church, from the age of six to the age of about 11. I
can still remember the earnest parent volunteers teaching us all the
nonsense about the earth being formed in six days, about Adam and Eve,
the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the Virgin birth (What
was a virgin, I wondered? They wouldn’t say…), and the crucifixion and
resurrection. None of it stuck. Despite the indoctrinators’ best
efforts, I left Sunday School an atheist and remain one today. The only
thing I really learned in Sunday School was how to smoke—something a
number of us learned together while skipping class and hiding out in
the church attic. Is Christian dogma that much weaker that it can fail
to impress a young mind while Muslim dogma can take a firm hold in an
even shorter time? What an insult to Christianity!

My daughter too, is testimony to the limits of early childhood
propaganda efforts. At the age of 7, we brought her to Shanghai, China,
where for a year, she attended first grade in a local Chinese public
school. She learned excellent Chinese there, but though there was
considerable indoctrination in Maoist theory, with special focus on the
life of the young Mao and also of the selfless workers’ hero Lei Feng
(they actually had one daily class called “Loving the Country class”
and most other subjects had a propaganda aspect), and though she also
attended a fifth grade Chinese public school when we returned to China
a few years later, for a stay in Xi’an, at 24 she is hardly a Commie or
a Maoist, I’m sure though, that should she someday decide to run for
president, some of the same people who suspect Obama of being a closet
Muslim terrorist will say she harbors secret Communist sentiments from
her early school years.

Such is the state of some American minds.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. HIs
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36666';
digg_title = "Presidential Campaign Enters the Silly Season";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n I’ve been getting some emails that refer to Barack Obama as a “Manchurian Candidate,” a guy who is somehow hiding a secret radical and/or Muslim jihadist agenda that will burst forth if he’s elected president. There is a certain idiot factor at work here, since if Obama were a closet Weatherman, who somehow learned of and adopted that 1960s college dropout organzation’s creed at the tender age of 8, it would have clashed badly with any Muslim teaching he might have picked up as a student in an Indonesian public school at the same time (he attended an Indonesian public schoolfrom the age of 6 to 8 before transferring to a Catholic-run institution).\r\n\r\n But since some low-wattage and conspiracy-minded people seem ready to believe this kind of stuff, let’s consider John McCain’s early background, and the possibility of his being a Manchurian Candidate too. Fair’s fair, right? \r\n\r";
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McClellan: We Fed Fox News Lies & Talking Points

US_Veteran — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:59:24 -0400

We already knew that Fox was nothing but a theater of WH puppets

Fair and Balanced.. I'm trying not to laugh

Media

batchphile — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:29:57 -0400

In light of the media’s inability to report responsibly on the most pressing issues of our day – the Iraq war, the economy, illegal activities of the Bush Administration, climate change, etc. – I propose a one-day mass media boycott on April 1st. This includes all television, radio and print media. Economically, this may not impact them much, but it may serve to suggest our unity in dissatisfaction with their efforts and behaviors and – who knows? – if this proves fairly easy, we might consider a longer boycott!

SWIFT BOATING BARACK

mikekohr — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:24:57 -0500

It's began.

I received my first e-mail blast claiming Barack Obama is both a radical Muslim and a radical Christain.

This widely distributed E-mail blast has been debunked and discredited by, Newsweek http://www.newsweek.com/id/91424 , NBC MSN, the Urban Legends website, and many other reputable organizations. It is a smear that attempts to claim that Obama is a radical Muslim and a radical Christen at the same time. Both claims can not be right, although both could be and are untrue.

It is unclear as to who or where this has originated. Some have pointed the finger at the Clinton campaign, others at right-wing attempts to :"Swift-Boat," Obama by telling outrageous lies.

"Thou shall not bear false witness against they neighbor." -GOD-

If you receive this message it is imcombant on you, in order to avoid the eternal hellfire of damnation, to immediately "reply to all," that sent you this crap.

Moderator's Note: Donation request removed as it violates the Rules of Democrats.com.

mike kohr
Chairman of the Bureau County ObamaManiacs

Welcome to the Jungle: US Military Psychological Operations and You

Heather Wokusch — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:28:41 -0400

"...the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other." - Benjamin Franklin, 1787

They say that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it will immediately jump out, but that if you raise the pot's heat gradually, the frog won't react.

The US public has been on a slow boil since 2001. This administration's rollbacks have been so consistent and so egregious that it's no surprise many Americans feel apathetic.

And that begs the question: What exactly would it take to get the US public spurred into action?

Sentient World Simulation (SWS) may have an answer. It's a computer-based project designed to "generate alternative futures" and no surprise, the US Defense Department is actively involved.

According to one of the project's developers, Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, "SWS will consist of a synthetic environment that mirrors the real world in all it key aspects - Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, and Infrastructure." The goal is to copy each person on earth into the SWS parallel universe, and then see how they respond to external events such as natural disasters or political upheavals.

The concept paper Chaturvedi co-authored additionally notes, "SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," to help the military "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners."

To anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners.

Blurring the lines between military and civilian Psychological Operations is nothing new. In 1989, US forces in Panama blasted Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" into the Vatican Embassy during negotiations for the handover of General Manuel Noriega, and from 1998-1999, US military PSYOP personnel interned at both CNN and NPR.

More recently, a 2003 Pentagon document called Information Operations Roadmap detailed the US military's approach to exploiting information in order to "keep pace with warfighter needs and support defense transformation." Personally approved by former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the document was declassified in 2006 and covers everything from the Pentagon's plans for Computer Network Attack ("We Must Fight the Net") to beefing up the use of Psychological Operations ("We Must Improve PSYOP") to manipulating information through means including: "Radio/ TV/Print/ Web media designed to directly modify behavior and distributed in theater supporting military endeavors in semi or non-permissive environment."

While The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 forbids US propaganda intended for foreign audiences from being used domestically, Information Operations Roadmap acknowledges that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa."

The 2003 Pentagon document adds, "the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG [U.S. government] intent rather than information dissemination practices."

Perhaps that's why a top US general ordered public affairs to be joined with combat PSYOP into one "strategic communications office" in Iraq in the summer of 2004.

Domestically, it doesn't help that SWS and other developments in military Psychological Operations are accompanied by rollbacks in the right to dissent and bipartisan support of government surveillance of American citizens.

Makes you wish our cyberspace clones could tell us how best to fight the Matrix.

At the very least, we must become more vigilant about the ongoing use of military PSYOP and misinformation – the Pat Tillman case is a perfect example. Holding the Defense Department and media accountable for every mislead regarding the Bush administration's military adventurism is more important than ever.

Action Ideas:

1. For a great database on the Bush Administration's misleads about Iraq, see Rep. Henry A. Waxman's Iraq on the Record. (http://oversight.house.gov/IraqOnTheRecord).

2. One Defense Department group particularly especially interested in these topics is The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its Information Exploitation Office, (http://dtsn.darpa.mil/ixo/) for example, is focused on "shaping the battlespace before conflict" and its site is filled with snappy computer graphics reminiscent of militaristic video games. Taxpayer dollars hard at work.

3. For media watchdog groups, check out Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (http://www.fair.org) and Media Matters for America (http://mediamatters.org)

4. Had enough? E-mail, call or write the White House, Congress or state and local government at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/.

Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives' Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now series. For a linked version of the article or to contact Heather, visit www.heatherwokusch.com.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Chris Elliott — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:00:51 -0400

"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."

Joseph Stalin's infamous words.

This certainly seems to reflect corporate media's attitude to the ongoing slaughter in Iraq.

It is the 4th anniversary of Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L) - the invasion was later renamed for PR reasons - and despite the US military's reluctance to 'do body counts' a number of other organizations are aware of the level of carnage. Rather than being described as an 'insurgency' it should more accurately be described as a 'holocaust'.

New estimates at the number of Iraqis killed in the conflict over the last 4 years place the death toll at a little over 1 million lives. With 3.7 million refugees and incalculable numbers of wounded, traumatized, tortured, imprisoned, raped, or contaminated with depleted Uranium. This must be some strange new version of the word 'liberation' that I was not previously aware of.

Add to this another half million infant deaths during the 10 years of ~~medieval siege~~ sanctions that Madeleine Albright assured us 'were worth it'.

If a hundred Americans or Britons were killed in a explosion it would be a media sensation for weeks. Russia announced a day of mourning after over a hundred people were killed in a mine explosion last week. In Iraq they dont have this luxury since every single day is a national day of mourning.

Yet to the corporate media these daily massacres are just statistics that may occasionally get a mention but are otherwise less newsworthy than the daily crossword puzzle. Instead they bombard us with celebrity drug scandals, runaway teenagers, confessions of stick-thin supermodels, or more sickening by far, they lambast other nations for their 'poor human rights records' and 'press censorship'. They condemn democratic countries like Iran for being undemocratic while ignoring the fact the US is spending billions on ~~bribes~~ Aid to some of the nastiest undemocratic regimes in the world (Pakistan, Egypt, Colombia to name but 3 of a long list) not to mention close military ties with Israel and Saudi Arabia whose human rights records must surely rank close to the worst of all.

The English language fails us sometimes, there should be a far bigger word than 'hypocricy'.

A Gay Porn Star is Honored at CPAC

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:00:18 -0500

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070307/cm_thenation/45172362

A Gay Porn Star is Honored at CPAC

Wed Mar 7, 5:28 AM ET

The Nation -- A former gay porn star and male escort was awarded the Jeanne
Kirkpatrick Freedom award at last weekend's CPAC. He is Cpl. Matt Sanchez, a
Marine, campus culture warrior and Fox News favorite who David Horowitz
introduced me to at CPAC.

Tom Bacchus has a full run-down of the Sanchez saga, along with photos which
you should absolutely NOT view if you are in the presence of minors or in a
crowded workplace. On my blog, I describe my meeting with Sanchez, discuss
his psychological similarities to Ann Coulter, and explain how personally
conflicted figures like him are drawn to the right.

What to make of Matt Sanchez, the 36 year old Marine who's begun to make the
rightwing gab show circuit by complaining that (what a shocker) fellow
students at Columbia University don't like having a military presence at
their school, a Manhattan university.