Monday Reads
Posted: March 25, 2013 Filed under: just because | Tags: assault weapons ban, Cyprus financial crisis, extinction of species, Faux News, gun control, marriage equality, Mike Bloomberg, Prop 8, SCOTUS, Tea Party Extremists 28 Comments
Good Morning!
There’s more than just a bit of March madness in the air and you don’t have to be watching basketball to catch it. It seems that the Republican Party’s Teabots have decided to boycott Fox News for being too liberal. Yes, you read that right. Fox is not fair and balanced towards their viewpoints so off with th eir heads!!!!
Among the demands the protesters have is that Fox News “be the right-wing CBS News: to break stories, to break information, and to do what news organizations have always done with such stories: break politicians,” that the network have at least one segment on Benghazi every night on two of its prime-time shows; that Fox similarly devote investigative resources to discovering the truth of Obama’s birth certificate; and that the network cease striving to be “fair and balanced.”
“We need Fox to turn right,” said Hjerlied. “We think this is a coverup and Fox is aiding and abetting it. This is the way Hitler started taking over Germany, by managing and manipulating the news media.”
The descriptions of the boycotters and their preferences for conspiracy sites is pretty obvious. Poor Fox and the Republican Party Establishment just cannot shove these loonies back into their boxes.
Cyprus will close down one of its two biggest banks and restructure the second one as part of an international bailout, Cyprus and
international lenders agreed on Tuesday.
Bank depositors of up to 100,000 euros will not suffer any losses but bigger depositors will contribute to recapitalizing the bank that is to be restructured – Bank of Cyprus.
Shareholders, bondholders and those who held deposits above 100,000 euros in Laiki bank, which will be closed down, will cover the cost of the resolution, euro zone ministers and the International Monetary Fund decided.
Depositors with more than 100,000 euros in the Bank of Cyprus will see their money above that threshold frozen until it is clear how much of it will be needed to recapitalize the bank so that it can reach a capital ratio of 9 percent.
Here’s some discussion of what the Cyprus fallout could be around the world by Marshall Auerback. Moody’s says Cyprus is still at risk of default, euro zone exit should these steps resolve the current crisis. So, what type of precedent does this set for such a risky move with no real guarantee of success?
Regardless of the ultimate form this bailout takes, it is increasingly hard to view Cyprus as a “one-off,” which has no implications for us here in the US. What Cyprus has demonstrated is that even with deposit insurance, your deposits are not in fact a risk-free guaranteed asset, but actually simply another branch in the creditor tree in relation to your bank if it fails. That was made abundantly clear by no less than the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bankers’ bank back in the heart of the financial crisis. The BIS noted that bank failures had become increasingly expensive for governments and taxpayers and therefore recommended an “Open Bank Resolution,” which would ensure that, as far as possible , “any future losses are ultimately borne by the bank’s shareholders and creditors.” (See primer on the Open Market Resolution concept by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.)
Why does this matter? Because, you, as a depositor are legally considered a “creditor” of your bank, not simply a customer who may have entrusted your entire life savings with the very same institution.
The science editor at BBC News wonders why there is such a fuss about extinction which leads to the question “would the world be a better place if we still had velociraptors? But, is natural extinction different than man-caused extinction?
We are certainly far better off without velociraptors slashing their way through our cities. Our streets are safer with no sabre-toothed tigers. And imagine trying to swat one of those monster prehistoric insects like a vulture-sized dragonfly.
The question of extinction most recently surfaced at the talks on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) – the treaty meant to save endangered species from the devastating effects of trade.
The slaughter of rhino, the decimation of elephant, the forlorn last stand of the tiger – all had their profiles raised as the delegates in Bangkok negotiated their fate.
And anyone hearing the protests and the campaigns, and the shocking statistics about the losses, might be forgiven for thinking that extinction was some new kind of evil that was not invented until rapacious and uncaring mankind came along.
I should state right now that some of the most ghastly examples are indeed entirely the result of man’s activities, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes carelessly.
We’re seeing slow, drawn out, death-by-lobbying of the hopes for better gun safety laws. The NRA is pushing the meme that gun-free zones–like the Sandy Hook School–attract mass murderers. Mark Follman takes on this myth.
Ever since the massacres in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., this idea has been repeated like some surreal requiem: The reason that mass gun violence keeps happening is because the United States is full of places that ban guns.
Second Amendment activists have long floated this theme, and now lawmaker sacross the nation are using it, too. During a recent floor debate in the Colorado legislature, Republican state Rep. Carole Murray put it this way: “Most of the mass killings that we talk about have been affected in gun-free zones. So when you have a gun-free zone, it’s like saying, ‘Come and get me.'”
The argument claims to explain both the motive behind mass shootings and how they play out. The killers deliberately choose sites where firearms are forbidden, gun-rights advocates say, and because there are no weapons, no “good guy with a gun” will be on hand to stop the crime.
Sound bite sophistry
With its overtones of fear and heroism, the argument makes for slick sound bites. But here’s the problem: Both its underlying assumptions are contradicted by data. Not only is there zero evidence to support them, our examination at Mother Jones of America’s mass shootings indicates they are just plain wrong.
Among the 62 mass shootings over the past 30 years that we studied, not a single case includes evidence that the killer chose to target a place because it banned guns. To the contrary, in many of the cases there was clearly another motive for the choice of location. For example, 20 were workplace shootings, most of which involved perpetrators who felt wronged by employers and colleagues. Last September, when a troubled man working at a sign manufacturer in Minneapolis was told he would be let go, he pulled out a 9mm Glock and killed six people and injured another before putting a bullet in his own head. Similar tragedies unfolded at a beer distributor in Connecticut in 2010 and at a plastics factory in Kentucky in 2008.
Or consider the 12 school shootings we documented, in which all but one of the killers had personal ties to the school they struck.
Or take the man who opened fire in suburban Milwaukee last August: Are we to believe that a white supremacist targeted the Sikh temple there not because it was filled with members of a religious minority he despised, but because it was a place that didn’t allow firearms?
Despite the momentum in Congress of the NRA, Mayor Mike Bloomberg is going to spend beaucoups bux trying to get a better outcome.
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants new gun control legislation so bad that he’s set to spend a staggering $12 million of his own money on ads targeting US senators in a dozen states.
As the New York Times reports, Bloomberg’s new wave of ads, which begin on Monday, support universal background checks for nearly all gun purchases, but do not mention a ban on assault weapons. The ads, run under the auspices of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group funded and co-chaired by Bloomberg, will target Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Patrick Toomey (R-Penn.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Dan Coats (R-Ind.), and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).
Bloomberg’s $12 million ad buy further cements his position as the main political force challenging the clout of the National Rifle Association. For decades, the NRA has used its money and manpower to oust politicians who support any new regulation of guns in America. The threat of NRA attacks helped stifle any effort at new gun laws, including requiring background checks for most gun purchases and reinstating the ban on assault rifles, which expired in 2004. Now, by pumping money into Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Independence USA, his super-PAC, Bloomberg hopes to counter the might of the NRA, while giving cover to pro-gun-control legislators.
Today, SCOTUS hears arguments on California’s Prop 8 and will begin to hear arguments on the constitutionality of DOMA.
California Attorney General Kemala Harris gave an impassioned, pithy defense of marriage equality during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s hearing on whether California’s Proposition 8, which overturned the state’s marriage equality law, is itself constitutional.
Asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley to explain why she was refusing to defend the state’s proposition, Harris insisted that the measure undermined the fundamental rights of gay Americans, taking away their equal protections under the law:
I am absolutely against a ban on same-sex marriages because [bans] are simply unconstitutional. And it is one thing to read the polls, which we have discussed which show again that a majority of Americans are in favor of same sex marriage, but it is more important to read the Constitution. And the Constitution of the United States dictates, I believe, under every court precedent that we have discussed in terms of describing marriage as a fundamental right that the same-sex couples that are before the United states supreme court — Mrs. Windsor, Miss Perry — be allowed to have equal protection under the laws as any Americans when it comes to their ability to join themselves with their loving partners in marriage and raise their children. And 61% of Californians are in favor of same-sex marriage.
Harris is considered an up and comer to the national political scene. You can follow the link above to see the interview. We will be following the arguments closely today and will keep you updated as things happen.
So. that’s it for me this morning. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Quiet Sunday Night Open Thread
Posted: March 24, 2013 Filed under: just because, open thread, The Media SUCKS | Tags: Anthony Lewis, Cary Grant, Clarence Earl Gideon, Gideon v. Wainwright, Gideon's Trumpet, Grace Kelly, Greg Mitchell, Iraq War, King of the Cat Burglars, Peter Scott, Rothschild giraffe calf, SCOTUS, The Human Fly, The Washington Post, To Catch a Thief, Warren Court 7 Comments
Here’s a feel-good story for a quiet Sunday night:
Rare Rothschild giraffe born at Greenwich conservation center
When a rare, nearly 6-foot-tall giraffe was born Friday morning at the LEO Zoological Conservation Center, she had a crowd waiting for her.
Petal, a 6-year-old Rothschild giraffe — which are classified as endangered — gave birth to a healthy female calf with a group of other giraffes and conservation center staff watching.
“She’s a great mom,” said Marcella Leone, founder and director of the center. “She was very proud, trying to show off her newborn.”
Petal, now a second-time mother, has already bonded with her newborn, who looks like her, with a mix of dark patches broken up by bright cream channels.
There’s a contest to name the newborn, which you can enter here.
LEOZCC is a nonprofit, accredited conservation center and off-site breeding facility specializing in species at risk and conservation-based education programs. The mission of the Lionshare Educational Organization, which manages LEO Zoological Conservation Center, is to inspire conservation leadership by engaging people with wildlife and the natural world.
Here’s a video of the baby giraffe standing up for the very first time.
Isn’t that adorable?
I don’t know if you saw this story at The Daily Beast yesterday: Why Tea Partiers Are Boycotting Fox News
Apparently some Tea Partiers are upset with Fox News for not hammering the Benghazi story anymore.
“Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.”
The three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and is the second time this group of activists have gone Fox-free in an effort to steer the coverage. Organizers say a two-day boycott earlier this month knocked 20 percent off of the network’s regular viewership. (A Daily Beast analysis of the same data showed that the boycott had little effect.) […]
A leader of the boycott, Kathy Amidon, of Nashville, declined an interview, instead directing The Daily Beast to a website, Benghazi-Truth. The website, a single-page, 23,000-word manifesto complete with multicolored fonts, supposedly incriminating videos of Fox News’s complicity in a coverup, and communist propaganda photographs, is kept by someone who identifies himself online as “Proe Graphique,” and who other members of boycott described as someone who works “in New York media.”
By way of explanation, the website reports: “People ask why not all mainstream media? Why just Boycott FOX? The answer, again, is that FOX needs the Tea Party/conservatives more than the conservatives need FOX after FOX turned left, basically selling out the people who made FOX successful in an attempt to earn an extra buck. FOX is extremely vulnerable to these boycotts while the rest of the MSM doesn’t need us at all, to speak of.”
Talk about biting off your own nose to spite your face! How far right are these people if they think Fox News is too far left?
This story isn’t really lightweight, but it’s so ridiculous that it’s almost funny. Greg Mitchell posted a piece that he wrote on assignment for the Washington Post on media failures on Iraq. Amazingly, ten years after the fact, the Post wimped out and killed the story. Here’s Mitchell’s introduction–you can read the whole think at his blog.
Due to “popular demand,” based on my post last night, I’m publishing below the assigned Outlook piece that I submitted to the Washington Post on Thursday. I see that the Post is now defending killing the piece because it didn’t offer sufficient “broader analytical points or insights.” I’ll let you decide if that’s true and why they might have rejected it.
The original appeared almost word-for-word at The Nation this weekend (there I added a reference to Bob Woodward and to Bob Simon). I had absolutely no plans to even mention that the piece was killed until late last night when I saw that Paul Farhi of the Post had written for Outlook a piece claiming that the media “didn’t fail” in the run-up to the Iraq war. That inspired me to write the post last night which has proved quite popular.
The cowardice of the corporate media is just amazing.
When I was a senior in high school, I had to write a lengthy term paper for my English class. I had recently read a book about a momentous Supreme Court decision, Gideon v. Wainwright. The book was Gideon’s Trumpet, by Anthony Lewis. I was so inspired by the book and the SCOTUS decision that I wrote my term paper about the case. I called it “Justice for the Poor.” I was a liberal from childhood and I’ve only moved further left in my old age!
From the summary of the case at the United States Courts website:
Clarence Earl Gideon was an unlikely hero. He was a man with an eighth-grade education who ran away from home when he was in middle school. He spent much of his early adult life as a drifter, spending time in and out of prisons for nonviolent crimes.
Gideon was charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit a misdemeanor, which is a felony under Florida law. At trial, Gideon appeared in court without an attorney. In open court, he asked the judge to appoint counsel for him because he could not afford an attorney. The trial judge denied Gideon’s request because Florida law only permitted appointment of counsel for poor defendants charged with capital offenses.
At trial, Gideon represented himself – he made an opening statement to the jury, cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses, presented witnesses in his own defense, declined to testify himself, and made arguments emphasizing his innocence. Despite his efforts, the jury found Gideon guilty and he was sentenced to five years imprisonment.
Gideon sought relief from his conviction by filing a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the Florida Supreme Court. In his petition, Gideon challenged his conviction and sentence on the ground that the trial judge’s refusal to appoint counsel violated Gideon’s constitutional rights. The Florida Supreme Court denied Gideon’s petition.
Gideon next filed a handwritten petition in the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court agreed to hear the case to resolve the question of whether the right to counsel guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution applies to defendants in state court.
The Supremes decided that criminal defendants who could not afford an attorney should be provided with one.
The Court held that the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of counsel is a fundamental right essential to a fair trial and, as such, applies the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In overturning Betts, Justice Black stated that “reason and reflection require us to recognize that in our adversary system of criminal justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” He further wrote that the “noble ideal” of “fair trials before impartial tribunals in which ever defendant stands equal before the law . . . cannot be realized if the poor man charged with crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him.”
I don’t think my English teacher was particularly liberal, but he said I convinced him with my paper and I got an “A.”
You can read more about this case at The Nation.
I really miss the Warren Court!
I came across a fascinating obituary yesterday in The Guardian. It’s about Peter Scott, who for years was a cat burgler who targeted movie stars and other very wealthy people. He was known as “The King of the Cat Burglers” and “The Human Fly.”
Peter Scott, the “King of the Cat Burglars”, who has died of cancer aged 82, was once Britain’s most prolific raider of the wealthy, specialising in the theft of jewellery and artworks from Mayfair mansions and stately homes. He was the subject of a film, starring a young Judi Dench, and the author of a memoir in which he claimed he was “sent by God to take back some of the wealth that the outrageously rich had taken from the rest of us”.
Born Peter Craig Gulston into a middle-class Belfast family, he was educated at the Belfast Royal Academy, where a contemporary was John Cole, the former BBC political editor and Guardian journalist. By the age of 12 Peter had decided on a life of crime rather than any of the legal options that would have been available to him. His teenage apprenticeship involved burgling houses in the wealthy Belfast suburbs, with his college scarf, rugby bag and debonair manner as disguise. He reckoned to have carried out more the 150 such thefts by the time he was finally arrested in 1952 and sent to Crumlin Road jail for six months.
Realising that he was now a marked man in Belfast, he changed his name to Scott, moved to London and found work as a club bouncer in the West End. But off duty, he won a reputation as an accomplished and athletic cat burglar, able to climb and penetrate the best-guarded home counties mansions. He specialised in stealing from the very rich or, as he put it, “the real meaty jugular vein of society”. Jail time – by the end of his career he had served about 14 years – was the price he was prepared to pay for being a real-life Raffles.
While inside for an early stretch, he met the then best-known thief in London, George “Taters” Chatham. Together the two of them stole millions of pounds’ worth of art and jewellery. Over the years, Scott claimed to have robbed Vivien Leigh and Zsa Zsa Gabor and to have taken Sophia Loren’s £200,000 necklace when she was in Britain filming The Millionairess in 1960. He robbed the late Shah of Iran’s English mansion, making sure not to disturb the peacocks, which acted as guard dogs. The French Riviera was another happy hunting ground.
Scott wrote a memoir called The Gentleman Thief, published in 1995. Even after the book was published and Scott was supposedly retired,
…in 1997, he was involved in the theft of Picasso’s Tête de Femme from a Mayfair gallery. Scott quoted WE Henley to the officers who arrested him: “Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed.”They were unimpressed. He was jailed for three and a half years for handling stolen goods, having pleaded guilty halfway through the trial. “I was poaching excitement,” was how he explained his relapse.
Scott spent his later years as a tennis coach and tending the gardens of a church in Camden, north London – he had always sought horticultural work in jail – and offering advice to local youngsters about the pitfalls of crime.
There an even longer tribute to Scott at The Telegraph.
This guy reminded me so much of the Cary Grant character in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. In the movie, Grant plays a reformed cat burglar named John Robie. Like Scott, Robie loved to spend time in his garden caring for his roses. In the movie, someone is pulling off daring jewel thefts using Robie’s modus operandi, and Robie is naturally a suspect. In order to prove his innocence he has to catch the imitator. I’m sure you’ve seen the movie, but here’s the trailer. I couldn’t get it to embed. And here’s a clip in which Grace Kelly tries to trap Robie into stealing her (fake) diamonds, but instead . . . fireworks!
I hope you’re having an enjoyable evening. Please share any upbeat or funny links you’ve come across today–actually whatever you want to post is fine. This is a wide open thread!
Bill O’Reilly jumps the Shark … errrr … Easter Bunny
Posted: March 23, 2013 Filed under: VAGINA Bill O'Reilly | Tags: easter bunny, german pagan rituals, origins of easter, Ostera, spring and fertility goddess, Vagina Bill O'Reilly 46 Comments
This is so ridiculous that it almost isn’t worth posting. However, it’s a Saturday and we could use a good laugh. Billy O’Reilly thinks secularizing the Easter Bunny will lead to abortion and drug use. I never knew O’Reilly was such a big fan of German Fertility Goddesses.
O’REILLY: Secular progressives are running wild with President Obama in the White House. They feel unchained, liberated, and they’re trying to diminish any form of religion. The goal is to marginalize religious opposition to secular programs. For example, in Canada and China a woman can have an abortion for any reason at any time. Secular progressives want that here. But traditional forces in America are in opposition. Therefore in this country, you can’t terminate a baby about to be born without a damn good reason. And if you do abort a late term baby, you could be charged with murder. SPs hate that. In Scandanavia, there are laws that say you cannot criticize minorities and if you do, you could be arrested. Secular progressives want laws like that here. Also the legalization of drugs, well under way in many places, and that is a secular cause. So, if the far left can marginalize Santa and the Easter bunny, of they can tell the children those symbols are obsolete and unnecessary, they then set the stage for a totally secular society in the future.
Look for the upcoming children’s book by Snowbilly Snookie right after her astounding literary contribution for children about the war on Santa and Christmas. It’s just amazing to me how early Romano-Christian culture co-opted pagan rituals and symbols and these whackadoodles seem to be upset when every one wants them back. Rabbits and eggs are very ancient fertility symbols. The egg-laying bunny actually wasn’t invented until the 18th century. The actual origin of the bunny comes from Germany and it had nothing to do with a christian “Easter” It had to do with a Germanic Fertility Goddess.
The idea of an egg-laying bunny came to the U.S. in the 18th century. German immigrants in the Pennsylvania Dutch area told their children about the “Osterhase” (sometimes spelled “Oschter Haws“[11]).[12] “Hase” means “hare”, not rabbit, and in Northwest European folklore the “Easter Bunny” indeed is a hare, not a rabbit. According to the legend, only good children received gifts of colored eggs in the nests that they made in their caps and bonnets before Easter.[13] In 1835, Jakob Grimm wrote of long-standing similar myths in Germany itself. Grimm suggested that these derived from legends of the reconstructed continental Germanic goddess *Ostara,
Ostara is the German spring and fertility goddess. Be prepared, the history of this actually links to my interest in extremely old burials and grave goods.
Easter is deeply rooted in German culture: as a time of celebrations,
customs and traditions across the country. The word Ostern is believed to have come from the German Spring and Fertility Goddess Ostara, whose sacred animal was the ‘fertile’ hare, and in pre-Christian days a light cult held a festival in her honor as soon as the days became longer, which, with the introduction of Christianity, was changed in the 2nd century to a celebration for the resurrection of Jesus. As a source of new life the egg had been a symbol of creation, spring and fertility since ancient times, long before Christianity, with its origins traced back to 5000 BC, when the Egyptians and Persians painted eggs to eat and give as presents for spring equinox. The first Christians then placed eggs both in and on graves, believing that just as a grave hid a life the egg also seemed to be dormant but contained life sealed within it, and German archeologists have found centuries old examples of these offerings.
Again, it’s just another example of how Roman culture and religion co-opted pagan culture. The word “easter” is basically an anglicized version of the goddess’ name. The eggs existed as pagan symbols way before the invention of Christianity itself. The entire man-in-bunny-suit is a modern invention.
Bill O’Reilly is continues to prove he’s an ignorant ass.
Saturday Reads: Daily Caller Caught Red-Handed (?), GOP “Estranged from America,” and Other News
Posted: March 23, 2013 Filed under: Barack Obama, morning reads, Republican politics, Social Security, U.S. Politics | Tags: abortion, Chained CPI, David Martosko, Dominican investigation, East Coast meteor, Foster Friess, Income Inequality, North Dakota Stand Up for Women Rally, Politico, Robert Menendez, The Daily Caller, the top 1%, Tucker Carlson, Washington Post 28 Comments
Good Morning!!
There’s a lot of news out there this morning, so I’ll get right to it.
Well, well, well, isn’t this an interesting headline at the WaPo: Dominican official links Daily Caller to alleged lies about Menendez.
A top Dominican law enforcement official said Friday that a local lawyer has reported being paid by someone claiming to work for the conservative Web site the Daily Caller to find prostitutes who would lie and say they had sex for money with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
The lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as “Carlos,” had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.
The Daily Caller, owned by smirky right winger Tucker Carlson, claims it’s not true. Sure, Tucker.
The videotaped claims of two women, made with their faces obscured, were posted in the fall on the Daily Caller. The site reported that “the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. . . . They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”
In its statement Friday, the Daily Caller said: “At no point did any money change hands between The Daily Caller and any sources or individuals connected with this investigation, nor did anyone named Carlos travel to the Dominican Republic on behalf of The Daily Caller. As recently as two weeks ago, Figueroa was on record with another news outlet as saying the women he represented were telling the truth about their initial allegations against Senator Menendez.”
There’s quite a bit of wiggle room in that denial. So no one from the Daily Caller actually handed money to anyone, and “Carlos” didn’t travel from the U.S. to the Dominican. Big deal. The arrangements were probably made by phone and the money was giving out through the lawyer.
I don’t know what happened for sure, but I know Tucker Carlson is a sleazy S.O.B. What I didn’t know until today (via Crooks and Liars) is that the Daily Caller got its start-up funds from Foster Friess, the Republican billionaire donor who recommended that women put an aspirin between their knees as contraception. C&L’s Karoli also linked to this Mother Jones article by Kate Sheppard: Controversial Daily Caller Editor Admitted to Posing As Radical Animal Rights Activist.
David Martosko—the outgoing executive editor of the conservative Daily Caller and a prominent defender of the news site’sdisputed claim that Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) paid two women for sex in the Dominican Republic—admitted in a court document obtained by Mother Jones that he used a fake Facebook profile to pose as a “dope-smoking commie” in order to gather information on animal rights activists. The admission came in a May 2011 depositionMartosko gave under oath as part of a defamation case against him and his former employer, Berman and Company, a PR shop that specializes in combating progressive activists who target corporations.
Before Daily Caller Editor in Chief Tucker Carlson hired him in 2011—a controversial choice given Martosko’s previous arrests and lack of experience in journalism—Martosko spent a decade working for Richard Berman, a longtime PR operative behind a number of industry-backed campaigns. At Berman and Company, Martosko served as the director of research for the Center for Consumer Freedom, a Berman-run nonprofit that opposes new laws on food and beverages. CCF, which is funded by the food and beverage industry, runsHumane Watch, a website that posts derogatory information about the Humane Society of the United States. Martosko was the site’s “founding editor.” CCF also operates Activist Cash, a website that compiles biographical information on groups and individuals that engage in “anti-consumer activism.”
Despite all this circumstantial evidence that the Daily Caller is a fraudulent operation, Politico posted a piece by MacKenzie Weinger supporting Carlson’s operation and implying that the WaPo is trying to defend Democrats rather than simply reporting the results of investigative reporting.
Also from the WaPo, and op-ed by Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center — The numbers prove it: The GOP is estranged from America. I actually have a lot of problems with this article–Kohut writes from the point of view of an old-style Republican, which he is. He claims that the Democratic Party has gotten more liberal, when the current Democratic President, Barack Obama has publicly state that his ideology is that of a Rockefeller-type Republican. Here’s an excerpt:
A Blast from the Past
Posted: March 22, 2013 Filed under: The Media SUCKS, the villagers | Tags: ant-Iraq War journalist, Democracy Now, firing, MSNBC, Phil Donahue 14 Comments
I’d forgotten that Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC in 2003 for his anti-Iraq views. If you haven’t watched Juan Gonzlez interview Donahue on Democracy Now, you really should. It’s a good reminder of the complicity of the media in the march to war and that there were a brave few that wouldn’t shut up.
In 2003, the legendary television host Phil Donahue was fired from his prime-time MSNBC talk show during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The problem was not Donahue’s ratings, but rather his views: An internal MSNBC memo warned Donahue was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” providing “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” Donahue joins us to look back on his firing 10 years later. “They were terrified of the antiwar voice,” Donahue says.
You definitely need to read the transcript at least to catch the exchange between Amy Goodman and Chris Matthews who always acts like his bathroom never smells when he’s in it. He reminds me a lot of Schultzie in the old TV sitcom Hogan’s Heros. “I know nothing, nothing!”
AMY GOODMAN: I want to congratulate you, Chris, on 10 years of MSNBC, but I wish standing with you was Phil Donahue. He shouldn’t have been fired for expressing an antiwar point of view on the eve of the election. His point of view and the people brought on were also important.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I don’t know what the reasons were, but I doubt it was that.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we have the MS—the NBC memo, that was a secret memo—
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Oh, OK, good.
Just a great reminder of the fake meme of liberal bias in our media. Also, more hubris by the press who refuses to admit they really could’ve done something other than be mouthpieces of propaganda.
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