WELCOME,to the Sedgwick County Kansas blog for the 18th Judicial District. If you voice an opinion here that Judge Pilshaw,Fleetwood,Brooks,Henderson or Powell or DA Foulston (or her ADA’s) do not like it will quickly be removed.
The Wichita Eagle is scared of freedom of the press. The last thing any city the size of Wichita needs is people telling about their experiences with the Kansas SRS or the Constitutionally challenged judges from this corrupt county.
The Wichita Eagle is afraid that if another uniformed county employee starts a mass murder spree they will not get to massage Foulston’s neck and bring her drinks as she recounts her bio…just another day in crooked SG county!
Surprise! Daylight Saving Pushed Back One Week by 2005 Energy Conservation Act
“If you turned your clocks back one hour early Monday morning thinking it was the annual move back to Standard Time, all you succeeded in doing was moving into a new time zone.
The move from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time doesn’t happen this year until the first Sunday in November, instead of the usual last Sunday in October.
That means computer software, cellphones and other electronic equipment that is programmed to automatically change will have to be manually reset Monday morning back to Daylight Saving Time, then changed back one hour next Sunday.
President Bush in 2005 signed the Energy Conservation Act, which pushed back the time change in an effort to squeeze just a little more daylight — and a bit of energy savings — into the daily lives of Americans.
The legislation also changed the “spring forward” to Daylight Saving Time by one week.
Government estimates place the overall energy savings at just over 1 percent.” foxnews
Very scary stuff. What are these draft-dodging warmongers *thinking*? Memos to the Dickster and Shrub: Send your daughters to Iraq for a 15 month deployment patrolling Baghdad streets–and make sure they’re riding in Humvees, not MRAPS–then after you’ve done this, call us back on what you want to do to Iran.
Last week Lola Wheeler out in western Kansas informed WEBlog readers of her friends and her really cool blog, everydaycitizen.com.
This is great. It represents a thoughtful interchange of intelligent ideas. Contributors can post photos and videos, which represents state of the art use of the Internet. Earth calling WE editors…
Check it out and book mark it.
Well, I see the Obama campaign took a page out of the bushco playbook and LIED about his gay bashing preacher friend. Repeatedly, he said donnie mccloset, er mcclerkin, was JUST ANOTHER SINGER.
Now we find out the bigoted homophobe HEADLINED and MC’d the gay bash concert?
Stick a fork in Obama ’cause he’s done. Not only is he a bigot, but he is a LYING bigot.
I wonder if the obama supporters will get in bed, so to speak, with the Edwards campaign after obama’s particularly hypocritical bigotry flames out his campaign?
Or will he support the ted haggartys of the world?
Maybe his folks could throw in with Romney? ‘Cause rudy is waaaaaay too gay friendly for the obama group….
Farmgrl when you get all of your news from one source you start to list to the left. You are definitely listing. What are you so afraid of from Fox News - the truth. Don’t think your mind can assimilate all of the facts and come to a rational conclusion. Demounderground is not a news source. It is a smear arm of the demo party. Broaden your mind - reach out embrace something different.
In addition to his Emmy for his tv channel Current, an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth, an a Nobel Peace prize, Al Gore recently received Spain’s Prince of Asturia’s award, a WEBBY for opening the internet to political debate, and a QUILL award for his book, “The Assault on Reason.”
Capn, while you are editing the blog, have these removed too:
“helpless little bitch”heheheheh.
I guess I struck a nerve?Maybe JR can post the troll’s greatest hits.And JM? I have never been banned.And you?Posted by: ksfarmgrrl | October 29, 2007 at 10:08 AM
Heheheeh. I asked the question last week.How does it feel to be a helpless little bitch at the mercy of the libs who DICTATE what goes on in the threads, the posts….I mean, that’s what you are saying, no?Do you just enjoy being powerless and at the mercy of the eds?hehehehehehe…..Looks to me like the EDS are more at the mercy of troll boy…Posted by: ksfarmgrrl | October 29, 2007 at 09:47 AM
“helpless little bitch”heheheheh.
I guess I struck a nerve?Maybe JR can post the troll’s greatest hits.And JM? I have never been banned.And you?Posted by: ksfarmgrrl | October 29, 2007 at 10:08 AM
Heheheeh. I asked the question last week.How does it feel to be a helpless little bitch at the mercy of the libs who DICTATE what goes on in the threads, the posts….I mean, that’s what you are saying, no?Do you just enjoy being powerless and at the mercy of the eds?hehehehehehe…..Looks to me like the EDS are more at the mercy of troll boy…Posted by: ksfarmgrrl | October 29, 2007 at 09:47 AM
That is all that you do since your meltdown back in February.
One can little blame you. You then and have since revealed yourself as one very sick and disturbed individual. For your own sake and ours. Do seek help.
TIM RUSSERT: Mr. Vice President, welcome to “Meet the Press.”
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Good morning, Tim.
RUSSERT: How close are we to war with Iran?
CHENEY: Well, I think we are in the final stages of diplomacy, obviously. We have done virtually everything we can with respect to carrots, if you will. It’s time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them.
RUSSERT: But you squashed Iraq and that didn’t work out so well.
CHENEY: Iraq will be fine, Tim. It just needs a firmer hand. We learned that lesson. We’re not going to get hung up on democracy this time. (Expletive) purple thumbs.
RUSSERT: Isn’t Secretary Rice still pushing carrots for Iran?
CHENEY: The more carrots Condi feeds ‘em, the better they’ll be able to see the bombs coming.
RUSSERT: First you threatened to take action if Iran built a nuclear weapon. Now you’re threatening to take action if Iran knows how to build a nuclear weapon. What’s next? You threaten to take action if Ahmadinejad dresses up as a nuclear weapon for Halloween?
CHENEY: Well, the difficulty here is, each time he has rejected what he was called upon to do by the international community. I’m not sure now, no matter what he says, that anyone would believe him. He’s pretending he doesn’t have W.M.D., just like Saddam.
RUSSERT: But Saddam didn’t have W.M.D.
CHENEY: He did, Tim.
RUSSERT: He did?
CHENEY: Ever wonder what happened to them?
RUSSERT: What happened to them?
CHENEY: Think about it, Tim.
RUSSERT: The New York Times reported yesterday that the suspected nuclear reactor in Syria bombed by Israeli jets was well under construction in 2003, the same year we went to war with Syria’s neighbor Iraq. Did we go after the wrong country?
CHENEY: Syria is not a country, Tim. It’s a way station run by an eye doctor.
RUSSERT: Conservatives are tossing around some lock-and-load language. The president is talking about Iran sparking a “nuclear holocaust” and World War III. Giuliani adviser Norman Podhoretz thinks we’re in World War IV. Shouldn’t you at least give the new sanctions against Iran a chance to work?
CHENEY: Oh, we have, Tim. The sanctions were announced Thursday. It’s now Sunday. I think things have gotten so bad inside Iran, from the standpoint of the Iranian people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
RUSSERT: But what if your analysis is not correct — again? Let’s put up on the screen part of an interview The New York Times’s Thom Shanker did with the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen: “With America at war in two Muslim countries, he said, attacking a third Islamic nation in the region ‘has extraordinary challenges and risks associated with it.’ The military option, he said, should be a last resort.” Your own chairman of the Joint Chiefs does not think the military can handle a third war.
CHENEY: If Admiral Mullen wants to be Admiral Sullen, that’s his business. I’m not going to be a defeatist or question the courage of our fighting men.
RUSSERT: Critics say that if you attack Iran, there will be riots in every Muslim capital, the Iranians will flood Iraq with more explosives and money for the Shiite militias. They say you’ll only end up making more enemies for America, and our troops.
CHENEY: Why don’t we just give the Islamofascists Sudetenland, Tim? Peace in our time.
RUSSERT: The Europeans are upset that you might start another war in their backyard.
CHENEY: (Rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath) Eurappeasers.
RUSSERT: An Iranian spokesman dismissed the new U.S. sanctions as “worthless and ineffective” and said they were “doomed to fail as before.” And Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards — a group you have accused of proliferating weapons of mass destruction — also warned that his forces would respond with an “even more decisive” strike if attacked.
CHENEY: Don’t worry about General Ali Baba, Tim. We gave the Israelis his home address.
RUSSERT: How will you even know where to bomb, given that all the experts say the Iranians have hidden their real nuclear facilities underground?
CHENEY: Can you say magic carpet bombing, Tim? We didn’t build those bunker busters just to stack ‘em up in a warehouse in North Dakota.
RUSSERT: It’s so close to the next election, Mr. Vice President, shouldn’t you just keep on the diplomatic track and let the next president make this decision?
CHENEY: You really want Rudy Giuliani playing with the nuclear button, Tim? Now, that’s insane.
Who besides Hank and Nathan have been missing for the last two weeks? Is them being gone what made the blog “civil”? I remember Hank is who called for the boycott, don’t remember who said they would honor it but seems the dad and son combo are the only two gone. Are there others?
Linda, we havent seen much of XXX or Steven Davis lately either. I think they joined. And germie, but then, her writing seems to be appearing under other nics. Something she will deny of course.
Anyone else?
Of course, what am I thinking. If they are boycotting and not lurking, they cant answer…
And Tracy?
Max? BG? American Way? Germie?
It isnt all that difficult to spot. Blame the libs, SOCIALISTS, hillary, and anyone who doesnt kiss the ass of the rich.
But then, that description could fit LOTS of wingnuts….
I’m not around here much — don’t have the stomach for it, so wouldn’t be the one who would notice who is or isn’t gone. What I haven’t seen is any change in civility. Don’t know the poster who contends the blog has been more “civil,” but in the short visits I’ve made I haven’t seen a difference.
I’m going to ignore the endless, and endlessly stupid, flame wars over who’s posting what bad words under what nics. Who cares. Why you folks get caught up in that endless and pointless game, I have no idea . . .
—–I don’t “cut and paste” much, but this is so clear. On to a topic raised from time to time by the “liberals” here; the real game exposed:
From the WSJ:
“Until the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it required broadcasters to provide equal time to all sides of “controversial” issues. In practice, this led to what Bill Monroe, a former host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” called “timid, don’t-rock-the-boat coverage.” On radio, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman notes, it “effectively kept partisan shows off the airwaves,” so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations. Today there are 1,800.
“But the Fairness Doctrine has always had fans in the corridors of power because it gave incumbents a way of muzzling their opponents. The Kennedy administration used it as a political weapon. Bill Ruder, Kennedy’s assistant secretary of commerce, explained: “Our strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.” The Nixon administration similarly used the doctrine to torment left-wing broadcasters.
. . .
“The stakes are high. “Lovers of liberty must expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are,” writes Brian Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
“That’s because the attempts to control the airwaves won’t stop with so-called equal time rules. Al Franken, the liberal former Air America host who is now running for the Senate in Minnesota, is already slipping into the role of potential legislative censor of his old industry. “You shouldn’t be able to lie on the air,” he told Newsweek’s Mr. Fineman earlier this year. “You can’t utter obscenities in a broadcast, so why should you be able to lie? You should be fined for lying.”
“In fact, you can be “fined” for lying, if the person you lie about successfully sues for defamation. But the First Amendment makes it exceedingly difficult for defamation plaintiffs to prevail, especially if they are public figures–and for good reason. Under a more pro-plaintiff legal regime, “the pall of fear and timidity imposed upon those who would give voice to public criticism is an atmosphere in which the First Amendment freedoms cannot survive,” Justice William Brennan wrote in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).
“Justice Brennan used to be a liberal hero. If he were alive today, he would surely be dismayed to learn that liberals seem to have concluded they have no use for the First Amendment.”
It’s plain to see, for those who look; Democrats seeking the return of the “Fairness Doctrine” isn’t about “fairness” at all (it never was, of course); it’s a tactic to shut up political opponents for political advantage. In other words, the usual tactic from the left: free speech for me, but not for thee.
Well CF, we only have millionaires elected to high offices in this country, how would you equal the playing field across the board for everybody to have a voice?
I’m with GMC on this, 100%.
The Fairness Doctrine is clearly a 1st Amendment violation.
Wonder what the AG nominee would think about this, would he consider it torture. I’m guessing yes, since bush hasn’t been incriminated yet.Afghans captured by Canadians allege torture: report 1 hour, 17 minutes ago
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Suspected Taliban members captured by Canadian troops and handed over to Afghan authorities say they have been tortured despite promises they would be treated well, a newspaper said on Monday.
ADVERTISEMENTCanada’s minority Conservative government, which ran into serious trouble when faced with similar allegations earlier in the year, signed a deal with Kabul in May allowing Canadian officials access to prisoners.
The French-language daily La Presse said it had found three prisoners who alleged inmates had been beaten with bricks and cables, given electric shocks, deprived of sleep and had their nails torn out.
The three said they had been captured by Canadian troops, given a document that said torture was no longer used in Afghanistan and then transferred to the Afghan secret police.
“The people from the secret service tore it (the document) up and threw it in my face. They tortured me for 20 hours. I protested and said the Canadians had promised that nothing would happen to me,” La Presse quoted one of the three men as saying.
“They replied: ‘We’re not in Canada, we’re at home. The Canadians are dogs!”‘ he said.
La Presse said it had conducted the interviews in Sarpoza prison in the southern city of Kandahar, where Canada’s 2,500-strong military mission is based.
Officials from Canada’s defense and foreign ministries said they would look into the report.
Human rights experts, speaking earlier this year, said Canadian soldiers could be guilty of war crimes because they transferred the detainees at a time when Ottawa was aware that Afghan authorities regularly tortured prisoners.
International conventions prohibit a country from handing over prisoners if there is reason to suspect abuse.
oil rushing toward 100 p.b., up 33% since mid-august, bush will indeed be able to proclaim “mission accomplished” soon. I bet he ends up on the board of one or two oil companies after he finds nobody wants him as a guest lecturer.
Phantom, a part (not to say all) the increase in the world price of oil involves the devaluation of the dollar as against other currencies. Oil is traded, using the dollar as the “benchmark”, IIRC, thus devaluation thereof will cause the nominal price of oil to rise, ceteris paribus.
Since inflation other than food and energy is low, the fed will continue to allow the dollar to devalue, which will contribute to energy cost increasing.Food and energy increases impact the mid and lower classes the most, and so it goes.
As oil zooms past record high after record high and the value of the U.S. dollar continues to fall to a new low, talk of the dollar’s influence on the price of a barrel of oil has returned to the conversation on Wall Street.
Most economists and analysts who watch the commodity said oil’s link to the U.S. dollar is important– but just part of the bigger picture.
“I believe there is a link between currency and commodities – but the linkage between the two is loose,” said David Hensley, chief U.S. economist for JP Morgan Chase & Co. “A currency link doesn’t even begin to fully explain oil’s massive rise in recent months.”
Oil analysts said the primary driver of oil is not the dollar’s value but global demand and geopolitical events. The growing thirst for the black stuff in countries like China and India is an important force in driving the price of oil over the long term. (cont’d at the above link)
ks. watch tomorrow after the rate cut, if everything affecting oil is constant tomorrow, we may see cause and effect in action with the dollar dropping and oil price incr.
“Well CF, we only have millionaires elected to high offices in this country, how would you equal the playing field across the board for everybody to have a voice?”
So, because millionaires are the ones who are IN FACT elected to public office, they are the only ones entitled to free speech IN PRINCIPLE?
Even for you, Max, that’s pretty silly.
Heckler,
Hell yes, apply the Fairness Doctrine to NPR! I’d LOVE to hear some actual liberals on NPR (that’s “Nice Polite Republicans”)instead of eliminationist Wingnut hacks like Dinesh D’Souza. NPR hasn’t been ‘balanced’ since Kenneth Tomlinson slanted its coverage to the Right.
You Wingnuts ought to try LISTENING to NPR before you snivel about how ‘biased’ it is. Once they titled right and started reporting the Wingnut worldview, I stopped pledging and stopped listening.
Wingnuts ratf*cked NPR, but they still like having it around to beat as a Straw Man. Kind of like what they did to American democracy.
This is supposedly a true story, but I havent run it through Snopes.com yet >>>
The Budweiser Story (not a joke)
This is TRUE!
How Budweiser handled those who laughed at those who died on the 11th of September, 2001…
Thought you might like to know what happened in a little town north of Bakersfield , California .
On September 11th,
A Budweiser employee was making a delivery to a convenience store in a California town named McFarland.
He knew of the tragedy that had occurred in New York when he entered the business to find the two Arabs, who owned the business, whooping and hollering to show their approval and support of this treacherous attack.
The Budweiser employee went to his truck, called his boss and told him of the very upsetting event! He didn’t feel he could be in that store with those horrible people. His boss asked him,
‘Do you think you could go in there long enough to pull every Budweiser product and item our beverage company sells there? We’ll never deliver to them again.’
The employee walked in, proceeded to pull every single product his beverage company provided and left with an incredible grin on his face.
He told them never to bother to call for a delivery again.
Budweiser happens to be the beer of choice for that community.
Just letting you know how Kern County handled this situation.
And Now the Rest Of The Story:
It seems that the Bud driver and the Pepsi man are neighbors. Bud called Pepsi and told him.
Pepsi called his boss who told him to pull all Pepsi products as well!!! That would include Frito Lay, etc.Furthermore, word spread and all vendors followed suit! At last report, the store was closed indefinitely.
I knew something strange was going on at NPR when I heard Neil Conan say on the death of Reagan, “how can we communicate to our younger colleagues who never knew Reagan how great this man was?”
Gee . . . so much for left-wing bias . . . or even, heaven forbid, objectivity.
Last I knew, Ben, Judge Brooks was, after being “unelected”, again elected (I think, it may have been an appointment to a vacancy) and was assigned to the Juvenile Court.
Chuckle… I’m sure there would be no more chemical fires if only liberal economic policies were in place. Or for that matter, auto accidents, old people falling down, or kids having too much homework. We would all live in socialist utopia. Birds would be singing, flowers in constant bloom, and everyone would have a diet Coke in their hands and singing; I’d like to teach the world to sing…
So - liberal means “agrees with me.” Ergo, NPR doesn’t always agree with me, thus it’s not “liberal” - or at least liberal enough. Apparantly, to Capn, “objectivity” also means “agrees with me.”
Gotcha.
Thus, the correct policy ought to be that there should be talk radio that you agree with. At taxpayers expense.
Gotcha.
Just so we know where you stand . . .
Once again: if this administration (of which I’m not particularly a supporter) is everything you say it is, why are you not in the streets NOW???!!!
The fact of the matter is that the Dems want the “Fairness Doctrine” (which never had anything to do with fairness, of course) back for the purpose of partisan advantage, not any sort of “fairness” (whatever that is).
Just FYI - I very much doubt that the “fairness doctrine” would withstand constitutional scrutiny today, given the vastly changed media environment. But then, the Constitution is something just to be “finessed” away, huh?
On this day in 1966, blacker than Black Tuesday for the children of the world, the leftist, baby-hating National Organization for Women was formally organized during a conference in Washington, DC.
I heard Lynn Cheney sniveling on the Diane Rehm Show about how terrible it was the PBS was swift boating Dick on their Frontline program. This was being done with Federal funds mind you. You couldn’t have provided better advertisement for the program. I watched it online and would recommend it.
Too funny, the guy pulls a bush p.r. stunt and loses his job.U.S. official in fake reporters flap out of job By Randall Mikkelsen
1 hour, 4 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Bush administration official whose department had government workers pose as journalists in a news conference has been dropped from a planned new job as media chief for the top U.S. spy agency.
ADVERTISEMENTThe Office of the Director of National Intelligence said on Monday that John Philbin, who until last week was external affairs director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would not be taking up a similar job with the intelligence office.
“Mr. Philbin is not, nor is he scheduled to be, the director of public affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” the office said in a written statement.
Philbin had accepted the intelligence job several weeks ago and had been due to start on Monday, office spokesman Ross Feinstein said. He declined to give additional details.
FEMA employees last Tuesday posed as reporters at a news conference in Washington about the Southern California wildfires. The briefing was called on short notice and no journalists were on hand when it started.
Instead, FEMA deputy director Harvey Johnson stood before a FEMA camera feeding live images to television networks and took questions from agency employees posing as reporters.
The Bush administration, which has been accused on several occasions of masking public relations efforts as journalism, sharply denounced the misrepresentation after it became public last Friday.
National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has also faced congressional challenges to his own credibility over misstatements as he pushes for permanent authority to eavesdrop in international terrorism investigations.
Philbin, in a Washington Post article published on Saturday, expressed regret over the incident. “It was absolutely a bad decision … I should have stopped it,” he said.
Asked about Philbin, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, “We don’t comment on personnel decisions.”
Or any other wingnut.Please provide one, just one example of any media that approaches right wing talk radio for bias.
You can’t. There isn’t any.
And THAT is what you are defending; the rights monopoly in media. Why is that. Is it because you KNOW there are an awful lot of people who would vote differently if they weren’t lied to by the right?
Buffett Slams Tax System DisparitiesSpeech Raises at Least $1 Million for Clinton CampaignBy Tomoeh Murakami TseWashington Post Staff Writer
NEW YORK, — Warren E. Buffett was his usual folksy self Tuesday night at a fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as he slammed a system that allows the very rich to pay taxes at a lower rate than the middle class.Buffett cited himself, the third-richest person in the world, as an example. Last year, Buffett said, he was taxed at 17.7 percent on his taxable income of more than $46 million. His receptionist was taxed at about 30 percent.
Buffett said that was despite the fact that he was not trying to avoid paying higher taxes. “I don’t have a tax shelter,” he said. And he challenged Congress and his audience to see what the people who “clean our offices” are taxed, to loud applause.A populist tone permeated the 70-minute talk with the billionaire investor and philanthropist in Manhattan on Tuesday night. The talk, given to about 600 Wall Street bankers and money managers, raised at least $1 million for Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Associated Press reported.The event comes as public frustration has grown over executive compensation and disparity in pay. It also comes as Congress debates changes to the tax code that would decrease take-home pay for managers of private-equity firms and hedge funds, pools of money for wealthy families and institutional investors. The rich can take advantage of tax loopholes, including one that allows those managers to pay the capital gains tax rate of 15 percent instead of the ordinary top income tax rate of 35 percent.Buffett said that he and other privileged Americans must do more to help the less fortunate.”We have the chance in 2008 to repair a lot of damage,” Buffett said.”We have a wonderful economy. . . . Our problem is how we conduct ourselves in the world.” Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha, has not endorsed Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.But he has already donated the maximum $4,600 allowed by an individual to Clinton’s presidential campaign. Buffett called Clinton “the person to run the country.” He has not donated to any other candidate, according to public records, although he has said he would also support Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in a similar event.Buffett is on the board of directors of The Washington Post Co.Clinton acted as moderator. Topics included Buffett’s views on the impact of the real estate slump on the economy (he doesn’t see it spilling over to the broader market) and how to get started in investing (you are more likely to find diamonds in the rough among small companies).Clinton finished by asking Buffett, “Why are you a Democrat?”Buffett said he thought Democrats would do a better job in evening out the field for those who had drawn the unlucky tickets in life.
J R listen closlely. Buy some air time. Get sponsors to help bankroll it. Hire left wing talk show hosts like Jeanene Garafola, Al Franken, James Carville, Paul Begala - are you getting the picture. Broadcast the show opposite Rush if you are feeling brave. You now have equal time - as long as it lasts. The right won’t even ask for equal time.
When the stations are owned by Clear Channel, and other such ownership, you cant buy time on their systems…
There is NO Liberal talk radio available in Wichita, on broadcast air waves. Thus there is NO Fairness of the programming…
Radio 1240 AM starts at 5:30 a.m. with Right Wing Talk Radio… That runs until 8:30 followed by sports, and then Jim Rome talk sports (usually from a right wing perspective).
1330 is ALL right wing, ALL the time… They have maybe 3hours of local programming between 6:00 a.m., and 9 a.m.
At 9 a.m. its Neal BoortzAt 11 a.m., RushAt 2 p.m., its HannityAt 5 p.m., its O’Reilly
After O’Reilly, is Michael Savage, at 7 p.m.; followed by Mark Levin at 9 p.m. –
Levin is followed by Laura Ingraham, who is followed by Jerry Doyle until 3:30 a.m.
Alan Colmes - Hannity’s TV Buddy - gets a shot from 3:30 a.m. till 6:00 a.m.
Now, how is that anywhere close to Balanced??? And you cant BUY air time on that station!! The owners wont let you, unless you are Right Wing, or Far Right Wing… And nobody can make them!
KFH isnt a whole lot better, except for it has sports programming, and more locally originated programming.
They run Right Wing Talk Radio from 5:30 - 8:30 a.m. with Walton and Johnson… They have Don and Mike on in the afternoons.Then when they arent carrying ball games, they have Dr. Drew on at night, until Midnight…
Then is Coast to Coast(UFO/Weirdo Show); followed by a Glenn Beck Re-run, until time for Walton/Johnson…
Again, a little better, but not even close to being a balanced channel — Shoot, KFH barely has any NEWS… They just run comedy short segments during the time most stations run news.
There are NO LIBERAL Talk radio shows available in Wichita, unless you count Alan Colmes at 3:30 A.M.!!
Maybe the way to get to the Right Wing Talk Radio owners is to sue them for holding monopolies on broadcasting… That might be the next step before the Fairness Doctrine (which would not get rid of Right Wing Talk Radio, like the Radio talking heads keep telling their little parrot listeners)
Just like a Talk Radio Parrot, there shows up Kansas, with yet another of his millions of Ad Hominem posts that contribue nothing to the Blog, except for Space!! ROFL
Sugar Chas I see you are still out there spreading disinformation. Bid higher dollars for the time slot. It is called competition. If people really want to listen to left wing tripe they will pay big bucks to make it available won’t they?
I won’t even try to explain to you that Clear Channel is a private company and in no way will ever be made to spread left wing garbage’ free gratis. It is called commercial radio for just that reason.
Maybe the way to get to the Right Wing Talk Radio owners is to sue them for holding monopolies on broadcasting… That might be the next step before the Fairness Doctrine (which would not get rid of Right Wing Talk Radio, like the Radio talking heads keep telling their little parrot listeners)
Posted by: sugar | October 29, 2007 at 06:30 PM
Sug you got any lawyer types knocking down your door to represent you in that suit?
“Glenn Beck in trying to deny global warming, told his sheep that the hottest year in global history was 1934 - actually 1934 was the hottest year in American history, whereas the globe, where all of us live, the hottest year was 2005, followed by 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006. I mean I know facts aren’t mandatory in what you do, but isn’t it embarrassing when you get them wrong every night.” “
It took years for conservative talk to become successful. Even now rating are slipping for some of the talk show hosts. I guess people can only listen to so much hate day after day.
I listen on the internet to some of the progressive talk shows and I hear a lot of independents calling the shows. Liberal and progressive talk radio has come a long way in five year and I have no doubt that someday you will hear them in Wichita. As the saying goes, nothing lasts forever.
“Today the House of Representatives affirmed that freedom will continue to reign on the airwaves of America. Thanks to the support of 308 of my colleagues, Congress has ensured that the Fairness Doctrine will remain in the grave for now. This was a resounding victory for free speech. ” Mike Pence
Pence’s amendment to the Financial Services Appropriations bill prohibiting funds to be used to impose the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters passed in an extraordinary show of bipartisanship 309 to 115.
In fact, 113 Democrats joined 196 Republicans in favor of this funding ban.
This is called democracy - not feudalism.
And when you get thoroughly trained on spell check, you can then preach to me what our founding fathers said about radio.
‘Gotcha?’ Well, that would require you to have understood my point–which you plainly did not.
“So - liberal means “agrees with me.” Ergo, NPR doesn’t always agree with me, thus it’s not “liberal” - or at least liberal enough. Apparantly, to Capn, “objectivity” also means “agrees with me.”"
Nice word salad there, GMC70–shame that it’s utterly devoid of meaning.
Your attempt to impute certain views to me fails and fails miserably. You missed my basic point: apply the Fairness Doctrine to NPR, so that ALL VIEWS CAN BE REPRESENTED, since, at present, all views AREN’T represented–particularly mine, though not exclusively.
I opted out of paying for/listening to NPR because its coverage was obviously slanted and not representative of the full spectrum of views, much less of what’s ACTUALLY the case, which in fact may correspond to NONE of these views.
This leaves aside the dishonesty of the ‘balanced’ Fox News “report ‘both sides’” approach to distortion information. But for better or worse, to the extent that this has become the default model of reporting, NPR ought to observe it. Instead, we get commentaries from Dinesh D’Souza calling liberals fascists, and no commentary by the Left denouncing the Right for its fascism. That’s what I objected to–not to the fact that NPR wasn’t reporting the news in a way that I saw fit.
So, GMC70, pretty lame attempt to trap me using my own words. But it’s still a Monday, so you have four days left in this week.
As to your other point, GMC70, isn’t it obvious that this country has ceased to be a functioning democracy?
The Supreme Court installed its President of Choice in 2000, the 2004 election was ratf*cked on the ground in Ohio (why were all the election records destroyed, GMC70, in violation of a Federal court order and the law of the State of Ohio?), and the vast majority of citizens know damn good and well that nothing they say or do will make a whit of difference to the running of this country.
Call me sentimental, GMC70, but I’m not willing to opt out just yet. The signs, however, are ominous. I’m going to post the full text of a piece that makes this point much more eloquently than I have here.
The piece is from Naomi Wolf, and it’s called “Ten steps to close down an open society.” It seems self-evident to me that this is where we are.
Democracy is fragile. For it to survive, it needs to be valued by those entrusted with protecting it. As should be obvious of this Administration, such tender mercies are patently not their concern.
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
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They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security - remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” - didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda has noted, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2 Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3 Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5 Harass citizens’ groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government - after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.
“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.
“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”
“That’ll do it,” the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.
7 Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8 Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9 Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10 Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
129 Comments
WELCOME,to the Sedgwick County Kansas blog for the 18th Judicial District. If you voice an opinion here that Judge Pilshaw,Fleetwood,Brooks,Henderson or Powell or DA Foulston (or her ADA’s) do not like it will quickly be removed.
The Wichita Eagle is scared of freedom of the press. The last thing any city the size of Wichita needs is people telling about their experiences with the Kansas SRS or the Constitutionally challenged judges from this corrupt county.
The Wichita Eagle is afraid that if another uniformed county employee starts a mass murder spree they will not get to massage Foulston’s neck and bring her drinks as she recounts her bio…just another day in crooked SG county!
And I thought it was bad just going to our overcrowded, understaffed, unbelievably mismanaged traffic court!
Blog Patrol ————>Fleetwood
Cheney’s Plan for Iran Attack Starts With Israeli Missile Strike
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/66157
Secret move to upgrade air base for Iran attack plans
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/foreign/display.var.1792035.0.0.php
Surprise! Daylight Saving Pushed Back One Week by 2005 Energy Conservation Act
“If you turned your clocks back one hour early Monday morning thinking it was the annual move back to Standard Time, all you succeeded in doing was moving into a new time zone.
The move from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time doesn’t happen this year until the first Sunday in November, instead of the usual last Sunday in October.
That means computer software, cellphones and other electronic equipment that is programmed to automatically change will have to be manually reset Monday morning back to Daylight Saving Time, then changed back one hour next Sunday.
President Bush in 2005 signed the Energy Conservation Act, which pushed back the time change in an effort to squeeze just a little more daylight — and a bit of energy savings — into the daily lives of Americans.
The legislation also changed the “spring forward” to Daylight Saving Time by one week.
Government estimates place the overall energy savings at just over 1 percent.” foxnews
RH,
Very scary stuff. What are these draft-dodging warmongers *thinking*? Memos to the Dickster and Shrub: Send your daughters to Iraq for a 15 month deployment patrolling Baghdad streets–and make sure they’re riding in Humvees, not MRAPS–then after you’ve done this, call us back on what you want to do to Iran.
Last week Lola Wheeler out in western Kansas informed WEBlog readers of her friends and her really cool blog, everydaycitizen.com.
This is great. It represents a thoughtful interchange of intelligent ideas. Contributors can post photos and videos, which represents state of the art use of the Internet. Earth calling WE editors…
Check it out and book mark it.
Well, I see the Obama campaign took a page out of the bushco playbook and LIED about his gay bashing preacher friend. Repeatedly, he said donnie mccloset, er mcclerkin, was JUST ANOTHER SINGER.
Now we find out the bigoted homophobe HEADLINED and MC’d the gay bash concert?
Stick a fork in Obama ’cause he’s done. Not only is he a bigot, but he is a LYING bigot.
Once again, the comments are priceless. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132×3656702
AND just who was Obama pandering to with his whole hearted embrace of bigotry? And h ow did it work for him?
Heheheheh. Bigotry is as bigotry does. Obama failed miserably with the very homophobes who’s vote he courted.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132×3657177
He’s toast. Here’s a hint Obama.
The wingnuts will NOT vote for you, no matter HOW many gay bashing concerts you have with mccloset.
Fux news. Heheheheeh!
’nuff said.
I wonder if the obama supporters will get in bed, so to speak, with the Edwards campaign after obama’s particularly hypocritical bigotry flames out his campaign?
Or will he support the ted haggartys of the world?
Maybe his folks could throw in with Romney? ‘Cause rudy is waaaaaay too gay friendly for the obama group….
When you can’t discredit the facts, just attack the source.
Slimeball approach.
Good morning.. did anyone notice that Phillip is on a roll today with posting… the office work must be slow. Haha
Farmgrl when you get all of your news from one source you start to list to the left. You are definitely listing. What are you so afraid of from Fox News - the truth. Don’t think your mind can assimilate all of the facts and come to a rational conclusion. Demounderground is not a news source. It is a smear arm of the demo party. Broaden your mind - reach out embrace something different.
farmtwat is something different all right.
Al Gore wins more awards–
In addition to his Emmy for his tv channel Current, an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth, an a Nobel Peace prize, Al Gore recently received Spain’s Prince of Asturia’s award, a WEBBY for opening the internet to political debate, and a QUILL award for his book, “The Assault on Reason.”
I couldn’t care less what they do to themselves.
Wow, the Quill award!
Whoooooooopppppeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!
Ksgrrl–
I’m going to e-mail Brownlee about who was posting over my nic.
At the same time, I’ll see if I can get the profane references to bodyparts expunged at the same time.
Yes, please do Capn.
See if the WE Blog will remove all the BITCH posts too.
Heheheeh Capn. I dont care. There is only ONE poster who calls me that.
SO.. KANSAS… I’m ready for that $5000 bet. In fact, since your investments do so well and you own so much unencumbered property…
WHY NOT MAKE IT $10,000?
(crickets chirping)
hee hee hee hee
JM, the meltdown king, thinks bitch is so much worse than farmtwat.
hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee.
Hypocrisy, thy name is….
hee hee hee hee
Oh yes, please. Hide the children.
Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee
I just love getting him all worked up and then leaving him unanswered and unsatisfied.
I think that’s called a PRICK tease?
Capn, while you are editing the blog, have these removed too:
“helpless little bitch”heheheheh.
I guess I struck a nerve?Maybe JR can post the troll’s greatest hits.And JM? I have never been banned.And you?Posted by: ksfarmgrrl | October 29, 2007 at 10:08 AM
Heheheeh. I asked the question last week.How does it feel to be a helpless little bitch at the mercy of the libs who DICTATE what goes on in the threads, the posts….I mean, that’s what you are saying, no?Do you just enjoy being powerless and at the mercy of the eds?hehehehehehe…..Looks to me like the EDS are more at the mercy of troll boy…Posted by: ksfarmgrrl | October 29, 2007 at 09:47 AM
I don’t take money from welfare cases like you kfg. You can barely afford seed money, less $5000.00 in cash.
Let’s get rid of these too Capn:
“helpless little bitch”heheheheh.
I guess I struck a nerve?Maybe JR can post the troll’s greatest hits.And JM? I have never been banned.And you?Posted by: ksfarmgrrl | October 29, 2007 at 10:08 AM
Heheheeh. I asked the question last week.How does it feel to be a helpless little bitch at the mercy of the libs who DICTATE what goes on in the threads, the posts….I mean, that’s what you are saying, no?Do you just enjoy being powerless and at the mercy of the eds?hehehehehehe…..Looks to me like the EDS are more at the mercy of troll boy…Posted by: ksfarmgrrl | October 29, 2007 at 09:47 AM
And she crys and complains until other posts are removed.
But hers are A-OK!
Well we will see what happens when the boycotters get back.
I’d like to get Hank and Nathan at least on board with denouncing JM and all his nics and askink him to either suspend or leave.
Maybe if some of his like minded told him how truly bad he is for their causes here, JM would go back to his dirty picture blog.
Who is worse then ksfarmgirl?
JR police your own. Isn’t that what you always preach?
Or is that Chas/Sugar?
“I don’t take money from welfare cases like you kfg. You can barely afford seed money, less $5000.00 in cash.”
OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And you would know this… how?
Heheheheheheh.
Ok, well, thanks for confirming that you ARE a welcher and a multi nic poster.
You can pick up your loser prize on the way out….
One thing about Hank and Nathan,
YOU can’t tell them what to do JR.
They have brains of their own, unlike your pals.
kfg doesn’t troll or switch nics James.
That is all that you do since your meltdown back in February.
One can little blame you. You then and have since revealed yourself as one very sick and disturbed individual. For your own sake and ours. Do seek help.
WHAT NAME YOU USING THIS WEEK TIPPY?
TIM RUSSERT: Mr. Vice President, welcome to “Meet the Press.”
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Good morning, Tim.
RUSSERT: How close are we to war with Iran?
CHENEY: Well, I think we are in the final stages of diplomacy, obviously. We have done virtually everything we can with respect to carrots, if you will. It’s time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them.
RUSSERT: But you squashed Iraq and that didn’t work out so well.
CHENEY: Iraq will be fine, Tim. It just needs a firmer hand. We learned that lesson. We’re not going to get hung up on democracy this time. (Expletive) purple thumbs.
RUSSERT: Isn’t Secretary Rice still pushing carrots for Iran?
CHENEY: The more carrots Condi feeds ‘em, the better they’ll be able to see the bombs coming.
RUSSERT: First you threatened to take action if Iran built a nuclear weapon. Now you’re threatening to take action if Iran knows how to build a nuclear weapon. What’s next? You threaten to take action if Ahmadinejad dresses up as a nuclear weapon for Halloween?
CHENEY: Well, the difficulty here is, each time he has rejected what he was called upon to do by the international community. I’m not sure now, no matter what he says, that anyone would believe him. He’s pretending he doesn’t have W.M.D., just like Saddam.
RUSSERT: But Saddam didn’t have W.M.D.
CHENEY: He did, Tim.
RUSSERT: He did?
CHENEY: Ever wonder what happened to them?
RUSSERT: What happened to them?
CHENEY: Think about it, Tim.
RUSSERT: The New York Times reported yesterday that the suspected nuclear reactor in Syria bombed by Israeli jets was well under construction in 2003, the same year we went to war with Syria’s neighbor Iraq. Did we go after the wrong country?
CHENEY: Syria is not a country, Tim. It’s a way station run by an eye doctor.
RUSSERT: Conservatives are tossing around some lock-and-load language. The president is talking about Iran sparking a “nuclear holocaust” and World War III. Giuliani adviser Norman Podhoretz thinks we’re in World War IV. Shouldn’t you at least give the new sanctions against Iran a chance to work?
CHENEY: Oh, we have, Tim. The sanctions were announced Thursday. It’s now Sunday. I think things have gotten so bad inside Iran, from the standpoint of the Iranian people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
RUSSERT: But what if your analysis is not correct — again? Let’s put up on the screen part of an interview The New York Times’s Thom Shanker did with the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen: “With America at war in two Muslim countries, he said, attacking a third Islamic nation in the region ‘has extraordinary challenges and risks associated with it.’ The military option, he said, should be a last resort.” Your own chairman of the Joint Chiefs does not think the military can handle a third war.
CHENEY: If Admiral Mullen wants to be Admiral Sullen, that’s his business. I’m not going to be a defeatist or question the courage of our fighting men.
RUSSERT: Critics say that if you attack Iran, there will be riots in every Muslim capital, the Iranians will flood Iraq with more explosives and money for the Shiite militias. They say you’ll only end up making more enemies for America, and our troops.
CHENEY: Why don’t we just give the Islamofascists Sudetenland, Tim? Peace in our time.
RUSSERT: The Europeans are upset that you might start another war in their backyard.
CHENEY: (Rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath) Eurappeasers.
RUSSERT: An Iranian spokesman dismissed the new U.S. sanctions as “worthless and ineffective” and said they were “doomed to fail as before.” And Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards — a group you have accused of proliferating weapons of mass destruction — also warned that his forces would respond with an “even more decisive” strike if attacked.
CHENEY: Don’t worry about General Ali Baba, Tim. We gave the Israelis his home address.
RUSSERT: How will you even know where to bomb, given that all the experts say the Iranians have hidden their real nuclear facilities underground?
CHENEY: Can you say magic carpet bombing, Tim? We didn’t build those bunker busters just to stack ‘em up in a warehouse in North Dakota.
RUSSERT: It’s so close to the next election, Mr. Vice President, shouldn’t you just keep on the diplomatic track and let the next president make this decision?
CHENEY: You really want Rudy Giuliani playing with the nuclear button, Tim? Now, that’s insane.
Kansas must be getting a great laugh out of the posts today. More so then usual.
This state was built by farmtwat.So what?
Hey you have whined and complained for months that no one would take your bet.
And when I take it, offer you two to one and even three to one?
You weasel out.
That orange cheeto color looks good on you. Is your mommy calling you to come up from the basement and eat your cereal?
We’re still waiting on your explanation of how you scamed the welfare system….
Who besides Hank and Nathan have been missing for the last two weeks? Is them being gone what made the blog “civil”? I remember Hank is who called for the boycott, don’t remember who said they would honor it but seems the dad and son combo are the only two gone. Are there others?
So.. how many posts HAVE you had removed?
And me?
hehehehhehehe.
And how many times have you been banned?
And me?
heheheheh. Like I asked before, how does it feel to be a helpless little female dog (better?) at the mercy of me?
hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee….
Not that I know of Linda.
Linda, we havent seen much of XXX or Steven Davis lately either. I think they joined. And germie, but then, her writing seems to be appearing under other nics. Something she will deny of course.
Anyone else?
Of course, what am I thinking. If they are boycotting and not lurking, they cant answer…
And Tracy?
Max? BG? American Way? Germie?
It isnt all that difficult to spot. Blame the libs, SOCIALISTS, hillary, and anyone who doesnt kiss the ass of the rich.
But then, that description could fit LOTS of wingnuts….
Waiting for the proof.
And besides, kansas DIDNT take my bet.
yet.
Maybe it’s our own welfare queen KANSAS that doesnt have the $5000?
hehehehehehehehehehehe…..
naaaawwwwww. All those investments and property SURELY make him able to put his money where his big fat mouth is?
XXX is busy and Steven is sick to death of the troll.
I could go get where Steven and I volunteered to leave the blog if Kansas would go too and take his many nics with him.
That wasn’t good enough for James. He demanded that CapnAmerica go to.
Not that he would have respected any such arrangement anyway.
KFG, I joined hanky panky’s boycott covertly.How am I doing?
I’m not around here much — don’t have the stomach for it, so wouldn’t be the one who would notice who is or isn’t gone. What I haven’t seen is any change in civility. Don’t know the poster who contends the blog has been more “civil,” but in the short visits I’ve made I haven’t seen a difference.
I’m going to ignore the endless, and endlessly stupid, flame wars over who’s posting what bad words under what nics. Who cares. Why you folks get caught up in that endless and pointless game, I have no idea . . .
—–I don’t “cut and paste” much, but this is so clear. On to a topic raised from time to time by the “liberals” here; the real game exposed:
From the WSJ:
“Until the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it required broadcasters to provide equal time to all sides of “controversial” issues. In practice, this led to what Bill Monroe, a former host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” called “timid, don’t-rock-the-boat coverage.” On radio, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman notes, it “effectively kept partisan shows off the airwaves,” so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations. Today there are 1,800.
“But the Fairness Doctrine has always had fans in the corridors of power because it gave incumbents a way of muzzling their opponents. The Kennedy administration used it as a political weapon. Bill Ruder, Kennedy’s assistant secretary of commerce, explained: “Our strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.” The Nixon administration similarly used the doctrine to torment left-wing broadcasters.
. . .
“The stakes are high. “Lovers of liberty must expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are,” writes Brian Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
“That’s because the attempts to control the airwaves won’t stop with so-called equal time rules. Al Franken, the liberal former Air America host who is now running for the Senate in Minnesota, is already slipping into the role of potential legislative censor of his old industry. “You shouldn’t be able to lie on the air,” he told Newsweek’s Mr. Fineman earlier this year. “You can’t utter obscenities in a broadcast, so why should you be able to lie? You should be fined for lying.”
“In fact, you can be “fined” for lying, if the person you lie about successfully sues for defamation. But the First Amendment makes it exceedingly difficult for defamation plaintiffs to prevail, especially if they are public figures–and for good reason. Under a more pro-plaintiff legal regime, “the pall of fear and timidity imposed upon those who would give voice to public criticism is an atmosphere in which the First Amendment freedoms cannot survive,” Justice William Brennan wrote in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).
“Justice Brennan used to be a liberal hero. If he were alive today, he would surely be dismayed to learn that liberals seem to have concluded they have no use for the First Amendment.”
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110010795
It’s plain to see, for those who look; Democrats seeking the return of the “Fairness Doctrine” isn’t about “fairness” at all (it never was, of course); it’s a tactic to shut up political opponents for political advantage. In other words, the usual tactic from the left: free speech for me, but not for thee.
Why does the left hate the 1st amendment?
hee hee hee hee.
Liars. And I’m still waiting on ks to take me up on HIS $5000 bet…
GMC70,
Why does the right hate free speech by restricting it to the highest bidder?
Restore the Fairness Doctrine, and return the public airwaves to the voices OF the public.
Well, I have more pleasant things to do than spar with kansas and outie.
Like scooping chicken poop outa the coop….
CF
You going to apply the fairness doctrine to NPR as well? If anyone needs it they do. They live partially off of my dime.
Well CF, we only have millionaires elected to high offices in this country, how would you equal the playing field across the board for everybody to have a voice?
I’m with GMC on this, 100%.
The Fairness Doctrine is clearly a 1st Amendment violation.
This is pathetic…
Waiting for Obama to denounce the hate fest last night. hehehe. Like he would EVER deny a calculated strategy…
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132×3658052
Wonder what the AG nominee would think about this, would he consider it torture. I’m guessing yes, since bush hasn’t been incriminated yet.Afghans captured by Canadians allege torture: report 1 hour, 17 minutes ago
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Suspected Taliban members captured by Canadian troops and handed over to Afghan authorities say they have been tortured despite promises they would be treated well, a newspaper said on Monday.
ADVERTISEMENTCanada’s minority Conservative government, which ran into serious trouble when faced with similar allegations earlier in the year, signed a deal with Kabul in May allowing Canadian officials access to prisoners.
The French-language daily La Presse said it had found three prisoners who alleged inmates had been beaten with bricks and cables, given electric shocks, deprived of sleep and had their nails torn out.
The three said they had been captured by Canadian troops, given a document that said torture was no longer used in Afghanistan and then transferred to the Afghan secret police.
“The people from the secret service tore it (the document) up and threw it in my face. They tortured me for 20 hours. I protested and said the Canadians had promised that nothing would happen to me,” La Presse quoted one of the three men as saying.
“They replied: ‘We’re not in Canada, we’re at home. The Canadians are dogs!”‘ he said.
La Presse said it had conducted the interviews in Sarpoza prison in the southern city of Kandahar, where Canada’s 2,500-strong military mission is based.
Officials from Canada’s defense and foreign ministries said they would look into the report.
Human rights experts, speaking earlier this year, said Canadian soldiers could be guilty of war crimes because they transferred the detainees at a time when Ottawa was aware that Afghan authorities regularly tortured prisoners.
International conventions prohibit a country from handing over prisoners if there is reason to suspect abuse.
oil rushing toward 100 p.b., up 33% since mid-august, bush will indeed be able to proclaim “mission accomplished” soon. I bet he ends up on the board of one or two oil companies after he finds nobody wants him as a guest lecturer.
Phantom, a part (not to say all) the increase in the world price of oil involves the devaluation of the dollar as against other currencies. Oil is traded, using the dollar as the “benchmark”, IIRC, thus devaluation thereof will cause the nominal price of oil to rise, ceteris paribus.
Since inflation other than food and energy is low, the fed will continue to allow the dollar to devalue, which will contribute to energy cost increasing.Food and energy increases impact the mid and lower classes the most, and so it goes.
“Waiting for Obama to denounce the hate fest”
And why should he? There are many problems our nation faces - including war.
He must appeal to a large group of voters to get elected. He doesn’t have to tailor his beliefs and speeches for a small tiny minority of citizens.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/article/strong-oildollar-link_326736_1.html
Dollar and Oil’s Link Not as Strong As Speculated
As oil zooms past record high after record high and the value of the U.S. dollar continues to fall to a new low, talk of the dollar’s influence on the price of a barrel of oil has returned to the conversation on Wall Street.
Most economists and analysts who watch the commodity said oil’s link to the U.S. dollar is important– but just part of the bigger picture.
“I believe there is a link between currency and commodities – but the linkage between the two is loose,” said David Hensley, chief U.S. economist for JP Morgan Chase & Co. “A currency link doesn’t even begin to fully explain oil’s massive rise in recent months.”
Oil analysts said the primary driver of oil is not the dollar’s value but global demand and geopolitical events. The growing thirst for the black stuff in countries like China and India is an important force in driving the price of oil over the long term. (cont’d at the above link)
Looks like somebody is getting paranoid again >>>=========================
Or is that Chas/Sugar?
Posted by: Owners Want to Know | October 29, 2007 at 10:40 AM
=================================
sugar is not Chas got it??
sugar knows Chas, and would not want to be Chas. LOL
And besides, Owners(etc) is just another graffitti troll…
DNFTT folks — the keepers feed them just fine under the bridges!!
DID NOT…
DID TOO…
MY LAWYER’S BIGGER THAN YOUR LAWYER
HA!
SUGAR YOU SWEET
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
“Are there others?”
Yes.
ks. watch tomorrow after the rate cut, if everything affecting oil is constant tomorrow, we may see cause and effect in action with the dollar dropping and oil price incr.
Max,
“Well CF, we only have millionaires elected to high offices in this country, how would you equal the playing field across the board for everybody to have a voice?”
So, because millionaires are the ones who are IN FACT elected to public office, they are the only ones entitled to free speech IN PRINCIPLE?
Even for you, Max, that’s pretty silly.
Heckler,
Hell yes, apply the Fairness Doctrine to NPR! I’d LOVE to hear some actual liberals on NPR (that’s “Nice Polite Republicans”)instead of eliminationist Wingnut hacks like Dinesh D’Souza. NPR hasn’t been ‘balanced’ since Kenneth Tomlinson slanted its coverage to the Right.
You Wingnuts ought to try LISTENING to NPR before you snivel about how ‘biased’ it is. Once they titled right and started reporting the Wingnut worldview, I stopped pledging and stopped listening.
Wingnuts ratf*cked NPR, but they still like having it around to beat as a Straw Man. Kind of like what they did to American democracy.
This is supposedly a true story, but I havent run it through Snopes.com yet >>>
The Budweiser Story (not a joke)
This is TRUE!
How Budweiser handled those who laughed at those who died on the 11th of September, 2001…
Thought you might like to know what happened in a little town north of Bakersfield , California .
On September 11th,
A Budweiser employee was making a delivery to a convenience store in a California town named McFarland.
He knew of the tragedy that had occurred in New York when he entered the business to find the two Arabs, who owned the business, whooping and hollering to show their approval and support of this treacherous attack.
The Budweiser employee went to his truck, called his boss and told him of the very upsetting event! He didn’t feel he could be in that store with those horrible people. His boss asked him,
‘Do you think you could go in there long enough to pull every Budweiser product and item our beverage company sells there? We’ll never deliver to them again.’
The employee walked in, proceeded to pull every single product his beverage company provided and left with an incredible grin on his face.
He told them never to bother to call for a delivery again.
Budweiser happens to be the beer of choice for that community.
Just letting you know how Kern County handled this situation.
And Now the Rest Of The Story:
It seems that the Bud driver and the Pepsi man are neighbors. Bud called Pepsi and told him.
Pepsi called his boss who told him to pull all Pepsi products as well!!! That would include Frito Lay, etc.Furthermore, word spread and all vendors followed suit! At last report, the store was closed indefinitely.
Good old American Passive-Aggressive A$$ Whoopin!
Barton Solvents plant in Des Moines is on fire; they’re really in a string of not so good luck.
http://www.bizjournals.com/wichita/stories/2007/10/29/daily6.html
Dittos, CF2K.
I knew something strange was going on at NPR when I heard Neil Conan say on the death of Reagan, “how can we communicate to our younger colleagues who never knew Reagan how great this man was?”
Gee . . . so much for left-wing bias . . . or even, heaven forbid, objectivity.
HEY MAX!
That black stench of pollution from the chemical fire in your home town is the smell of LASSIE-FAIRE capitalism.
How’s it smell?
Am - DAD - I notice your diatribe has not been deleted.
Is Brooks still a judge? I thought he had been ‘unelected’
Last I knew, Ben, Judge Brooks was, after being “unelected”, again elected (I think, it may have been an appointment to a vacancy) and was assigned to the Juvenile Court.
Chuckle… I’m sure there would be no more chemical fires if only liberal economic policies were in place. Or for that matter, auto accidents, old people falling down, or kids having too much homework. We would all live in socialist utopia. Birds would be singing, flowers in constant bloom, and everyone would have a diet Coke in their hands and singing; I’d like to teach the world to sing…
CF -
So - liberal means “agrees with me.” Ergo, NPR doesn’t always agree with me, thus it’s not “liberal” - or at least liberal enough. Apparantly, to Capn, “objectivity” also means “agrees with me.”
Gotcha.
Thus, the correct policy ought to be that there should be talk radio that you agree with. At taxpayers expense.
Gotcha.
Just so we know where you stand . . .
Once again: if this administration (of which I’m not particularly a supporter) is everything you say it is, why are you not in the streets NOW???!!!
The fact of the matter is that the Dems want the “Fairness Doctrine” (which never had anything to do with fairness, of course) back for the purpose of partisan advantage, not any sort of “fairness” (whatever that is).
Just FYI - I very much doubt that the “fairness doctrine” would withstand constitutional scrutiny today, given the vastly changed media environment. But then, the Constitution is something just to be “finessed” away, huh?
On this day in 1966, blacker than Black Tuesday for the children of the world, the leftist, baby-hating National Organization for Women was formally organized during a conference in Washington, DC.
“On this day in 1966…..Posted by: parkay | October 29, 2007 at 04:21 PM ”
I never heard of the “Leftist Baby-Hating National Organization for Women”.
Did you just make that up?
I heard Lynn Cheney sniveling on the Diane Rehm Show about how terrible it was the PBS was swift boating Dick on their Frontline program. This was being done with Federal funds mind you. You couldn’t have provided better advertisement for the program. I watched it online and would recommend it.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cheney/
Too funny, the guy pulls a bush p.r. stunt and loses his job.U.S. official in fake reporters flap out of job By Randall Mikkelsen
1 hour, 4 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Bush administration official whose department had government workers pose as journalists in a news conference has been dropped from a planned new job as media chief for the top U.S. spy agency.
ADVERTISEMENTThe Office of the Director of National Intelligence said on Monday that John Philbin, who until last week was external affairs director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would not be taking up a similar job with the intelligence office.
“Mr. Philbin is not, nor is he scheduled to be, the director of public affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” the office said in a written statement.
Philbin had accepted the intelligence job several weeks ago and had been due to start on Monday, office spokesman Ross Feinstein said. He declined to give additional details.
FEMA employees last Tuesday posed as reporters at a news conference in Washington about the Southern California wildfires. The briefing was called on short notice and no journalists were on hand when it started.
Instead, FEMA deputy director Harvey Johnson stood before a FEMA camera feeding live images to television networks and took questions from agency employees posing as reporters.
The Bush administration, which has been accused on several occasions of masking public relations efforts as journalism, sharply denounced the misrepresentation after it became public last Friday.
National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has also faced congressional challenges to his own credibility over misstatements as he pushes for permanent authority to eavesdrop in international terrorism investigations.
Philbin, in a Washington Post article published on Saturday, expressed regret over the incident. “It was absolutely a bad decision … I should have stopped it,” he said.
Asked about Philbin, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, “We don’t comment on personnel decisions.”
The Budweiser story is fiction.
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/budweiser.asp
Thanks MonkeyHawk I didnt know for sure… I have had it in email countless times… I figured somebody here would know!!
GMC
Or any other wingnut.Please provide one, just one example of any media that approaches right wing talk radio for bias.
You can’t. There isn’t any.
And THAT is what you are defending; the rights monopoly in media. Why is that. Is it because you KNOW there are an awful lot of people who would vote differently if they weren’t lied to by the right?
Yeah that’s probably it.
Oh WTH JR, I’ll take a shot. How about um… left wing talk radio?
It’s not our fault y’all don’t listen to it. I can understand though, how it would be tough to listen to that negativity and whining all day long.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/27/AR2007062700097.html
Buffett Slams Tax System DisparitiesSpeech Raises at Least $1 Million for Clinton CampaignBy Tomoeh Murakami TseWashington Post Staff Writer
NEW YORK, — Warren E. Buffett was his usual folksy self Tuesday night at a fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as he slammed a system that allows the very rich to pay taxes at a lower rate than the middle class.Buffett cited himself, the third-richest person in the world, as an example. Last year, Buffett said, he was taxed at 17.7 percent on his taxable income of more than $46 million. His receptionist was taxed at about 30 percent.
Buffett said that was despite the fact that he was not trying to avoid paying higher taxes. “I don’t have a tax shelter,” he said. And he challenged Congress and his audience to see what the people who “clean our offices” are taxed, to loud applause.A populist tone permeated the 70-minute talk with the billionaire investor and philanthropist in Manhattan on Tuesday night. The talk, given to about 600 Wall Street bankers and money managers, raised at least $1 million for Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Associated Press reported.The event comes as public frustration has grown over executive compensation and disparity in pay. It also comes as Congress debates changes to the tax code that would decrease take-home pay for managers of private-equity firms and hedge funds, pools of money for wealthy families and institutional investors. The rich can take advantage of tax loopholes, including one that allows those managers to pay the capital gains tax rate of 15 percent instead of the ordinary top income tax rate of 35 percent.Buffett said that he and other privileged Americans must do more to help the less fortunate.”We have the chance in 2008 to repair a lot of damage,” Buffett said.”We have a wonderful economy. . . . Our problem is how we conduct ourselves in the world.” Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha, has not endorsed Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.But he has already donated the maximum $4,600 allowed by an individual to Clinton’s presidential campaign. Buffett called Clinton “the person to run the country.” He has not donated to any other candidate, according to public records, although he has said he would also support Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in a similar event.Buffett is on the board of directors of The Washington Post Co.Clinton acted as moderator. Topics included Buffett’s views on the impact of the real estate slump on the economy (he doesn’t see it spilling over to the broader market) and how to get started in investing (you are more likely to find diamonds in the rough among small companies).Clinton finished by asking Buffett, “Why are you a Democrat?”Buffett said he thought Democrats would do a better job in evening out the field for those who had drawn the unlucky tickets in life.
(Note: a few of the Pritzkers feel the same way)
J R listen closlely. Buy some air time. Get sponsors to help bankroll it. Hire left wing talk show hosts like Jeanene Garafola, Al Franken, James Carville, Paul Begala - are you getting the picture. Broadcast the show opposite Rush if you are feeling brave. You now have equal time - as long as it lasts. The right won’t even ask for equal time.
“Once again: if this administration (of which I’m not particularly a supporter) is everything you say it is, why are you not in the streets NOW???!!!”
Uh… because YOU would be prosecuting us?
When the stations are owned by Clear Channel, and other such ownership, you cant buy time on their systems…
There is NO Liberal talk radio available in Wichita, on broadcast air waves. Thus there is NO Fairness of the programming…
Radio 1240 AM starts at 5:30 a.m. with Right Wing Talk Radio… That runs until 8:30 followed by sports, and then Jim Rome talk sports (usually from a right wing perspective).
1330 is ALL right wing, ALL the time… They have maybe 3hours of local programming between 6:00 a.m., and 9 a.m.
At 9 a.m. its Neal BoortzAt 11 a.m., RushAt 2 p.m., its HannityAt 5 p.m., its O’Reilly
After O’Reilly, is Michael Savage, at 7 p.m.; followed by Mark Levin at 9 p.m. –
Levin is followed by Laura Ingraham, who is followed by Jerry Doyle until 3:30 a.m.
Alan Colmes - Hannity’s TV Buddy - gets a shot from 3:30 a.m. till 6:00 a.m.
Now, how is that anywhere close to Balanced??? And you cant BUY air time on that station!! The owners wont let you, unless you are Right Wing, or Far Right Wing… And nobody can make them!
KFH isnt a whole lot better, except for it has sports programming, and more locally originated programming.
They run Right Wing Talk Radio from 5:30 - 8:30 a.m. with Walton and Johnson… They have Don and Mike on in the afternoons.Then when they arent carrying ball games, they have Dr. Drew on at night, until Midnight…
Then is Coast to Coast(UFO/Weirdo Show); followed by a Glenn Beck Re-run, until time for Walton/Johnson…
Again, a little better, but not even close to being a balanced channel — Shoot, KFH barely has any NEWS… They just run comedy short segments during the time most stations run news.
There are NO LIBERAL Talk radio shows available in Wichita, unless you count Alan Colmes at 3:30 A.M.!!
I would say the Fairness Doctrine might speak to our local situation pretty good…
There ARE some liberal radio shows on XM Radio, which, of course, is not the typical broadcast radio programming.
W.H.I.N.E.
The local Liberal Talk Show, heard all the time everywhere, 24/7.
On International wavelength bands, Leftists can listen to:
W.A.A.H.
Maybe the way to get to the Right Wing Talk Radio owners is to sue them for holding monopolies on broadcasting… That might be the next step before the Fairness Doctrine (which would not get rid of Right Wing Talk Radio, like the Radio talking heads keep telling their little parrot listeners)
Just like a Talk Radio Parrot, there shows up Kansas, with yet another of his millions of Ad Hominem posts that contribue nothing to the Blog, except for Space!! ROFL
Sugar Chas I see you are still out there spreading disinformation. Bid higher dollars for the time slot. It is called competition. If people really want to listen to left wing tripe they will pay big bucks to make it available won’t they?
I won’t even try to explain to you that Clear Channel is a private company and in no way will ever be made to spread left wing garbage’ free gratis. It is called commercial radio for just that reason.
Maybe the way to get to the Right Wing Talk Radio owners is to sue them for holding monopolies on broadcasting… That might be the next step before the Fairness Doctrine (which would not get rid of Right Wing Talk Radio, like the Radio talking heads keep telling their little parrot listeners)
Posted by: sugar | October 29, 2007 at 06:30 PM
Sug you got any lawyer types knocking down your door to represent you in that suit?
Actually sugar, I listen to PBS more than any other radio, except maybe for “golden oldies.”
One of my favorite broadcast entertainers is Garrison Keillor. I don’t particularly like his politics, but he puts on an amusing show.
Right-wingers need media shows like Beck’s to keep them misinformed.
‘CNN’s Glenn Beck confused over “global” warming concept’http://www.desmogblog.com/cnns-glenn-beck-confused-over-global-warming-concept
“Olbermann:
“Glenn Beck in trying to deny global warming, told his sheep that the hottest year in global history was 1934 - actually 1934 was the hottest year in American history, whereas the globe, where all of us live, the hottest year was 2005, followed by 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006. I mean I know facts aren’t mandatory in what you do, but isn’t it embarrassing when you get them wrong every night.” “
There is NO Liberal talk radio available in Wichita, on broadcast air waves. Thus there is NO Fairness of the programming…
Maybe that’s because there are only ten liberals in Wichita!!!
Geez, is it economical for a business to operate for TEN people????
No.
“But, but (waaaaaaaaaa!) it’s not fair.”
Life is not fair. Government does not exist to make your lives fair!What a bunch of crybabies.
Thanks MPS for telling us about everydaycitizen.com
Easy to see.
The right is AFRAID of fairness in broadcasting.
What? What are they afraid of?
What? What are they afraid of?
Posted by: J R
Just a little thing called the first amendment to the US Constitution.
Interesting how the first article in the Bill of Rights starts out:
“Congress………….”
It took years for conservative talk to become successful. Even now rating are slipping for some of the talk show hosts. I guess people can only listen to so much hate day after day.
I listen on the internet to some of the progressive talk shows and I hear a lot of independents calling the shows. Liberal and progressive talk radio has come a long way in five year and I have no doubt that someday you will hear them in Wichita. As the saying goes, nothing lasts forever.
Well pattypesterme?
Where is MY free speech?
Or?
Do Rush and company get special dispensation because they’ve got deep pockets and sponsors with even deeper pockets?
Them that have the gold make the rules?
That’s called feudalism. It was not the founders intent.
They are called the “public airwaves” for a reason.
“Today the House of Representatives affirmed that freedom will continue to reign on the airwaves of America. Thanks to the support of 308 of my colleagues, Congress has ensured that the Fairness Doctrine will remain in the grave for now. This was a resounding victory for free speech. ” Mike Pence
Pence’s amendment to the Financial Services Appropriations bill prohibiting funds to be used to impose the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters passed in an extraordinary show of bipartisanship 309 to 115.
In fact, 113 Democrats joined 196 Republicans in favor of this funding ban.
This is called democracy - not feudalism.
And when you get thoroughly trained on spell check, you can then preach to me what our founding fathers said about radio.
I guess they are called “ClearChannel Airwaves”
With liberty and justice…
For those who can afford it.
Having Liberal Talk Radio is like having an “elevator in an outhouse.”
The two just don’t go together.
“…so, stop lying and saying the fairness doctrine would take away first amendment rights. it would do no such thing!”
Posted by: sugar | October 29, 2007 at 08:06 PM
Nice speech sugar/Chas.
You still don’t get it, but Libs seldom do.
Oh we get it Kansas, we all know what an idiot you are.
GMC70,
‘Gotcha?’ Well, that would require you to have understood my point–which you plainly did not.
“So - liberal means “agrees with me.” Ergo, NPR doesn’t always agree with me, thus it’s not “liberal” - or at least liberal enough. Apparantly, to Capn, “objectivity” also means “agrees with me.”"
Nice word salad there, GMC70–shame that it’s utterly devoid of meaning.
Your attempt to impute certain views to me fails and fails miserably. You missed my basic point: apply the Fairness Doctrine to NPR, so that ALL VIEWS CAN BE REPRESENTED, since, at present, all views AREN’T represented–particularly mine, though not exclusively.
I opted out of paying for/listening to NPR because its coverage was obviously slanted and not representative of the full spectrum of views, much less of what’s ACTUALLY the case, which in fact may correspond to NONE of these views.
This leaves aside the dishonesty of the ‘balanced’ Fox News “report ‘both sides’” approach to distortion information. But for better or worse, to the extent that this has become the default model of reporting, NPR ought to observe it. Instead, we get commentaries from Dinesh D’Souza calling liberals fascists, and no commentary by the Left denouncing the Right for its fascism. That’s what I objected to–not to the fact that NPR wasn’t reporting the news in a way that I saw fit.
So, GMC70, pretty lame attempt to trap me using my own words. But it’s still a Monday, so you have four days left in this week.
As to your other point, GMC70, isn’t it obvious that this country has ceased to be a functioning democracy?
The Supreme Court installed its President of Choice in 2000, the 2004 election was ratf*cked on the ground in Ohio (why were all the election records destroyed, GMC70, in violation of a Federal court order and the law of the State of Ohio?), and the vast majority of citizens know damn good and well that nothing they say or do will make a whit of difference to the running of this country.
Call me sentimental, GMC70, but I’m not willing to opt out just yet. The signs, however, are ominous. I’m going to post the full text of a piece that makes this point much more eloquently than I have here.
The piece is from Naomi Wolf, and it’s called “Ten steps to close down an open society.” It seems self-evident to me that this is where we are.
Democracy is fragile. For it to survive, it needs to be valued by those entrusted with protecting it. As should be obvious of this Administration, such tender mercies are patently not their concern.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/ten-steps-to-close-down-a_b_46695.html
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Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
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They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security - remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” - didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda has noted, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2 Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3 Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5 Harass citizens’ groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government - after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.
“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.
“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”
“That’ll do it,” the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.
7 Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8 Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9 Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10 Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
“The accumulation of all powers