Month: February 2015

Lying Pantsuit Lady

by Gaius Publius

I’ve written quite a bit (for example, here) about the spokesperson in the ubiquitous American Petroleum Institute (API) ads. She’s almost an institution, the way “Flo,” the spokesperson for Progressive Insurance, is an institution. I’ve called the API actress “Lying Pantsuit Lady” for a reason. She’s omnipresent, like carbon and the lies she tells defending it.

Here she is now, saying America is number one (in planet destruction). The lie? She talks like that’s a good thing.

I’ve so far resisted putting her face in my posts, not from a tender interest in the fact that she’s providing for her family (yes, she has one) by helping bake the planet to a golden brown, but because I can’t find an online version of her most striking ad, the one I call Carbon Blackmail. Its message goes like this:

Brooke Alexander (paraphrased): “Like that TV–iPad lifestyle you’re living? Want to keep it? Oil is part of the mix that brings it to you, along with wind and solar, of course.” 

See? Blackmail. The underlying message is this:

“If we don’t stop the carbon, we’ll start exiting modern life in 30 years. But that’s 30 years away, and if we do stop, you won’t like the result.

“So how about this — we keep burning carbon, you keep your Breaking Bad and your ESPN, and we’ll add some soothing solar to the mix. It’s a tough choice, right? No carbon and less TV for a while, or carbon till you die, and then who cares? We choose number two. Deal?”

Unfortunately, that one’s not a lie. The geniuses at API understand the situation perfectly, better than most Americans, in fact. If you find a YouTube version of this ad, please send me a link.

But this will suffice to present her to you, since she and API have a new ad that’s almost as bad. I’m calling this “America, King of Carbon.” Watch, then I’ll show you the lies:

About the lies, here are the two big ones:

Hydraulic fracturing technology is safely recovering lots more oil and natural gas.

That one’s obvious. Fracking is safe? And:

Hydraulic fracturing technology is … supporting a new century of American energy security.

That one’s less obvious, but if we don’t get a grip on the climate problem, neither America nor China will have a “new century” in which they’re energy-secure. Nor will either be a single country, but at some point will have broken apart into civilized zones and wandering hunter-gatherer zones. In America’s case, you can’t rule the West Coast from the East Coast across a chaotic middle. In China’s case, much of their “breadbasket” will be under water, and there are many regions to the south and west that are streaked with valleys, gorges and ravines. That break-apart situation has already happened once to them.

(By the way, did you notice that the American flag in the ad’s second shot is a child’s chalk drawing? That’s a third lie if you think about it, the suggestion that promoting carbon is good for your five-year-old.)

Lying Pantsuit Lady, “LPL,” a modern American icon. She stands for all that destroys us, and she stands for it proudly and well. She’s been with us a long time (as has “Flo”) and for a reason. She’s that good.

Remember our LPL. I’m sure she’ll come up again in these pages. I hope her son, and his daughter after him, enjoy their adult lives as much as she apparently enjoys hers. Carbon dollars are still dollars, you know. I’m glad for her success; it really is hard to make it as a non-star actor in Hollywood, and her career is long and filled with soaps. In Hollywood terms, LPL is the role of a lifetime, a Big Break.

But I’m also sorry for her effect, and I do think she bears a responsibility, similar to Henry “Reverse Mortgage” Winkler. Some things should not be promoted.

GP

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Make history in Chicago

by digby

This letter went out to our Blue America members this morning:

Be A Part of The History Being Made in Chicago

By Rick Perlstein

Eighteen months ago, I wrote about how a hydra-headed protest movement against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s agenda of privatization, austerity, and authoritarian governance was changing the face of politics in the Windy City. Now, it’s close to achieving a miracle: ending Rahm Emanuel’s political career once and for all.

In the first round of Chicago’s mayoral election on February 24th, Rahm Emanuel came a shocking five points shy of the 50 percent he needed to win reelection outright– performing three points shy of the final pre-election polls. Chicagoans, it seems have had it up to here with Rahm’s crusade to build a new, more durable Chicago machine– this one, though, headquartered in places like Wall Street (where Emanuel worked as an investment banker), Abu Dhabi (the oil kingdom whose “sovereign wealth fund” owns a third of Chicago’s parking meter concession), and Philadelphia (home of the services corporation Aramark, which after being awarded the janitorial franchise left Chicago’s public schools crawling with vermin, and responded by firing a quarter of their workforce.)

It happened despite a Karl Rove-style campaign funded by $30 million in donations from corporate interests in return for favors from the city. It was a people-powered miracle. But we’re only halfway there.

On April 6– in less than six weeks!– Rahm faces off against the second place finisher, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia , who is another people-powered miracle: a true reformer, compassionate, smart, and qualified. As an alderman he fought so hard against the machine that Mayor Richard M. Daley made kicking him off the city council a top political priority. The same thing happened when he served in Springfield as a state senator.

Now, as a county commissioner, he helped balance Cook County’s mess of a budget while lowering taxes. Me, I love the guy. I’m backing his campaign to the hilt. I hope you will too. We really, really need you on this one. In the first round, Mayor 1% outspent Garcia by an almost twelve to one margin. And still he couldn’t get enough votes to win. Imagine how well he could do if the financial gap was closed a bit?

Here’s the deal. All Blue America donors to Chuy’s campaign will be entered in a random drawing. One lucky winner with get a very collectible, RIAA-certified quadruple platinum for the Barenaked Ladies album, Stunt.

Twenty other randomly chosen winners will get a personally signed copy of one of my books, either Nixonland, or my latest, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

And, of course, the satisfaction of helping deal a historic setback to everything that is awful in Democratic Party politics right now, in the person of the man who (1) was Bill Clinton’s point man in passing the North American Free Trade Act (2) made $18 million in two and a half years as an influence peddler on Wall Street (3) Presided over a crusade to kneecap the campaigns of progressive populists as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. (4) as White House chief of staff, tried to convince President Obama not to pursue the Affordable Care Act; and as mayor– well, hell, I could run these numbers clean up to thirty or forty.

He needs to go. We have a genuine chance to make it happen. Act now or forever hold your peace!!

In solidarity,

Rick Perlstein,
Digby
John Amato
Howie Klein

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Yet another lie

by digby

At this point I think people ought to be questioning whether any story Bill O’Reilly ever told about his intrepid reporting days is true:

O’Reilly has on several occasions referred to a perilous situation he said that he endured while covering the riots in Los Angeles for Inside Edition, the syndicated news magazine show that he fronted between 1989 and 1995.

“They were throwing bricks and stones at us,” O’Reilly told an online interviewer in 2006. “Concrete was raining down on us. The cops saved our butts that time.” Earlier this week, he told the broadcaster Hugh Hewitt: “We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us.”[…]

Inside Edition colleagues from the time who were in Los Angeles with O’Reilly – reporters Bonnie Strauss, Tony Cox and Rick Kirkham, and crew members Theresa McKeown, Bob McCall and Neil Antin – told the Guardian that they did not recall such an incident.

Kirkham, the show’s lead reporter on the riots, was adamant that it did not take place. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?”

Tonya Freeman, the head of the show’s library at the time, said: “I honestly don’t recall watching or hearing about that. I believe I probably would have remembered something like that.” Another librarian from the time also said she did not recall the incident. A spokeswoman for Inside Edition declined to comment. Several other senior Inside Edition staffers from the time declined to comment when asked if they recalled O’Reilly’s version of events.

Several members of the team, however, recalled that one afternoon in the days following the peak of the riots, which began on 29 April, the angry resident attacked a camera while O’Reilly was being filmed near the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Pico Boulevard. “It was one person with one rock,” said McCall, the sound man. “Nobody was hit.”

“A man came out of his home,” said Antin, who was operating the camera that was struck. “He picked up a chunk of concrete, and threw it at the camera.” Told of O’Reilly’s description of a bombardment, Antin said: “I don’t think that’s really … No, I mean no, not where we were.”[…]

McKeown, the director of west coast operations, and Kirkham, said O’Reilly had in the moments beforehand irritated residents who were trying to put out fires and clear wreckage. A seventh member of the team, who declined to be quoted for this article, agreed with this characterisation of the incident.

“There were people putting out fires nearby,” said McKeown. “And Bill showed up in his fancy car.” McKeown said at one point, the driver of O’Reilly’s personal car risked causing further offence by exiting the vehicle with a bottle of Windex and polishing the roof.

“The guy was watching us and getting more and more angry,” said McKeown. “Bill was being Bill – complaining ‘people are in my eye line’ – and kind of being very insensitive to the situation.” Kirkham said: “It was just so out of line. He starts barking commands about ‘this isn’t good enough for me’, ‘this isn’t gonna work’, ‘who’s in charge here?’”

The man shouted abuse at O’Reilly and the team, crew members said, and O’Reilly ordered him to shut up. He asked “don’t you know who I am?’,” according to two members of the team.

“The guy lost it,” said McKeown.

Bill? He wouldn’t do that…

Think about this: he even lied about his experiences at Inside Edition.

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“Evil bastards” should go to prison
by Tom Sullivan

“I want to stop paying tax, until everyone pays tax,” Wise told the Evening Standard. “I have actively loved paying tax, because I am a profound fucking socialist and I believe we are all in it together. But I am disgusted with HMRC. I am disgusted with HSBC. And I’m not paying a penny more until those evil bastards go to prison.”

Actor Greg Wise is married to Oscar winner Emma Thompson, reported the Guardian.

HMRC has come under fire in the HSBC scandal because of a failure to carry out a criminal investigation against the bank, which has its headquarters in the UK. While the agency found more than 1,000 tax evaders among the almost 7,000 UK clients of HSBC Suisse, only one individual has been prosecuted. About £135m has been recovered in tax, a lower figure than in other European countries.

Stuart Gulliver, the head of HSBC, has apologised in writing and again on Monday, when he said the bank’s bosses were shamed and humbled by the scandal.

How refreshing. On both sides of the Atlantic, we’re all breathless with anticipation to see pubic servants who’ve taken oaths to uphold the law do actually something about it, you know, and-justice-for-all-wise. Sent the evil bastards to prison already.

Forcing Change in Big Media’s Pro-war Bias


by Spocko

Yesterday I posted some positive steps to get anti-war and anti-torture voices into the media.

Today I want to suggest some other steps and some leverage methods to force the issue.

I’m going to be discussing them and the research that led to them tonight on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. at 6 pm PDT

Today Digby wrote about Chris Hayes and Laura Ingram pointing out how the networks push war. Now, what to do to change it?

Following Lee Fang’s Nation article on retired generals pushing bombing without being identified. I dug into the process for getting those guests to get on the air.   I spoke to news producers, show bookers, guests, corporate media execs, FCC and FTC lawyers. I spoke to corporate CFOs, institutional investors, hedge fund managers and media trackers.

After I understood the process, I asked, “Who or what has the power to change things?”

Some of the most insightful comments came from a pundit guest and a major network lawyer.

“The news and Sunday morning show producers are both lazy and afraid.” -Pundit guest

I asked for clarification. “They are afraid of getting fired for booking a ‘bad’ guest.” How ‘bad’ is defined can vary from “Makes the host look bad, makes regular guests look bad, to is inarticulate on the camera.”

I understand the fear, so then I asked, “Say we had new, proven ‘good’ guests, but with a different perspective, what would it take to get them on? A memo from the head of the news division? A call from a big advertiser? A letter from corporate lawyers that guests now have to meet certain FCC and FTC regulations? The top media CEO mandating it? A cash transaction? A conversation with a major shareholder over golf? A twitter storm from the public?”

The pundit had fascinating answers, but these questions were asked before the Brian Williams firing. The firing gave me some data that I didn’t have before.

To me that story was about NBCUniversal trying to protect a certain brand image that they want the NBC News division to have. They then took actions showing the price they were willing to pay to maintain it.

Following the firing Williams dropped from 23rd to 825th on the trustworthy scale.  How much could that drop cost a network? One New York Times story had a chart showing that a 30 second spot on Williams show generating $47,000 in revenue.

NBC made the decision to distance the man from the brand. The brand promise now explicitly includes the anchors having a “responsibility to the truth.”

This brand value of NBC News is clearly measured in dollars.

If NBCUniversal did not believe that this aspect of their news brand and their hosts’ trustworthiness was important, they would have kept Williams on.

Of course the Williams firing leads some groups to go after O’Reilly and FOX for lying, That’s great, but O’Reilly and Fox News weren’t built on integrity.They are playing a different game. Fox’s “Fair And Balanced” is a catch phrase not an actual practice.  The people to focus on are ABC, CBS and CNN.

Now is the time to remind them that they don’t want their anchors and news brand to become a punch line like Williams.

Want a specific step? If you have prepared ‘good’ guests with an anti-war perspective, tweet to the networks. “Booking only pro-war voices  means your news isn’t being truthful.  #don’tbelikeBrianWilliams book[anti-war person]”

Networks respond to social media pressure.  I know that recently Code Pink tried to get on to peace activists on ABC.  It hasn’t worked yet, but it’s a start as a model.

Hearing just from that group isn’t enough nor is it the networks only pressure. It might not even be in their top 10.

What other pressures matter?  

For this question I spoke to a former network lawyer. She describing the process for making a decision on a conflict between two big companies and their ads. She said the boss gathered everyone together and asked two questions.

“What are the other networks doing? How big is the ad buy?”         —Former network lawyer

This struck me for two reasons. First is understanding any action happens in context with the peers. Peer pressure happens in the big leagues too. Secondly the financial question. People often trot out the line, “It’s all about the money” which signals the ends the discussion.

I’d like people to look at “the ad buy” in another way.

The networks are selling a war. They are giving tremendous value to the companies that benefit from war.  Networks should be better compensated for that value.  By not charging for that value they are leaving money on the table and aren’t serving shareholders.

The first ISIS/Sryian bombing was estimated to cost taxpayers around 870 million. The first week around one billion. Weapons manufactures had a good quarter following that week and reported it in their earnings.

Who does an anti-war message or anti-torture message give value to?

If only a war message is seen as valuable, of course networks won’t go any other route.

So instead of asking for an anti-war message or trying to force them to run one, let’s hold them to their shareholder’s mandate.


The news networks have a responsibility to make money for shareholders, the truth is subservient to that.

If your constituency are the companies making money selling this war, you don’t have a duty to tell both sides.

The networks already have on weapons salesmen without identifying their employers.  Why should the General Dynamics spokesperson get the Sunday guest spot to push drones? How much is it worth to the Blackwater spokesperson to get the spot instead to push “boots on the ground?” Auction them off to the highest bidder.

Does this seem absurd? It is only if people continue to look at the network news division as a public trust. Maybe they still are.  Will they fight the idea that they are only pro-war for the money? Now is the time to push ’em and find out.

Rahmbo on the run

by digby

Must read ‘o the day by Rick Perlstein:

On Tuesday, Chicagoans voted themselves a reprieve. With 45.4 percent of the vote, Mayor Rahm Emanuel ended the first round of his first reelection bid almost five points below what he needed to avoid a runoff election in April—and three points below his performance in the last major pre-election poll. “Mayor 1%” will face second-place finisher Jesus “Chuy” García, the soft-spoken, compassionate Cook County board member who proclaimed himself with a Chicagoan lilt the “neighborhood guy”—who over-performed the poll.

Perhaps what turned some voters against Rahm at the last minute—or motivated them to go to the polls in the first place on a cold Chicago day that started out in the single digits—was an Election Day exposé that appeared in the British paper the Guardian by investigate reporter Spencer Ackerman. “The Disappeared” revealed the existence of Homan Square, a forlorn “black site” that the Chicago Police operate on the West Side.

There, Chicagoans learned—many for the first time—arrestees are locked up for days at a time without access to lawyers. One victim was 15 years old; he was released without being charged with anything. Another, a 44-year-old named John Hubbard, never left—he died in custody. One of the “NATO 3” defendants, later acquitted on most charges of alleged terror plans during a 2012 Chicago protest, was shackled to a bench there for 17 hours.

It “struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it,” the Guardian reported. And for a candidate, Rahm Emanuel, who ran on a message he was turning the page on the old, malodorous “Chicago way,” the piece contributed to a narrative that proved devastating.

Read on. You won’t believe how much money he spent. And how he’s corrupted the political processes of Chicago.

Think about that: he’s corrupted the political processes of Chicago. Unbelievable.

Natch

by digby

For real …

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Shades of gray over 50


by digby

Dara Lind at Vox published this helpful chart to see the progress of President Obama’s graying hair:

As you can see, it’s not a serious story.  In fact, it’s quite funny.

But it does raise a point that I’ve been wanting to make for years. At about the time any president becomes a lame duck everyone starts to remark how much the office has aged them.  Their hair has gone gray and they look much more haggard than they did when they came into office. Now I’m sure the office does take its toll. A normal person can’t even imagine the stress, even for the ones who didn’t seem to be all that engaged in the details like Reagan or W.

But the sad truth is that aging for everyone starts off slowly and then it seems to happen all at once.  And that coincides with the age that most presidents are in office.  President Obama came into office at the age of 47. And he’s now 54.  Most of us take on a lot of gray during those years. So yeah, presidents look a lot older when they leave office than when they came in. But everyone their age looks a lot older. It’s just a sad reality of the middle aged person. (You too will find this out grasshopper …)

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Chris Hayes FTW

by digby

I wrote a piece for Salon today about the war porn the cable TV news networks are broadcasting into America’s living rooms. I recount the days after 9/11 when the media went wild and ushered in the Iraq war without any skepticism or dissent. I recount the particular case of MSNBC which famously fired anti-war Phil Donohue with Chris Matthews quoted in the press saying that Donohue would “bring down the network.” And I may have mentioned the political response, like Huckleberry’s calm and thoughtful analysis :

“This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home!!!”

But there have been a couple of exceptions this time, with Chris hayes leading the pack:

For months he’s been making the case that this lurid coverage is not only creating the conditions for war without any proper debate, it’s playing into the terrorists’ hands. When Fox’s Bill O’Reilly recently declared that we are in a “Holy War” with Islam, Hayes said on his program:

“That sort of rhetoric is, of course, exactly what ISIS wants. For if this is a Holy War, they aren’t some murderous cult or some fringe Sunni militia. No, if it’s a Holy War, then they are the representatives of Islam, which is why the president at today’s summit on countering violent extremism was so careful not to cast the fight on those terms.”

These terrorists produce this propaganda for recruitment purposes but produce them with slick production values for U.S. and other western media in order to try to make the US the common enemy of all Islam. Hayes is one of the only cable news hosts to explicitly challenge not only the Holy War meme, but the reaction of the media to every alleged threat.

But he is on the same page with one very unlikely Fox News personality. Here’s Laura Ingraham, of all people, talking about the shopping mall threat assessment:

“I don’t think we should jump every time the freaks with the ACE bandages around their faces put out videos… I think we should have a mature debate about how to secure the Homeland without changing our way of life.”

When she’s right, she’s right. Hayes responded with this:

Amen sister. I was incredibly gratified to see Laura Ingraham making essentially the same point about terrorist propaganda that we have been making consistently on this show which is that everyone needs to stay calm and rational in the face of what is obviously emotional manipulation, by people whom we all agree are invested in our emotional manipulation and who achieve emotional manipulation in large part with propaganda videos demonstrating their brutal tactics. But the ability of Al-Shabaab or Boko Haram or ISIS to murder people they’ve captured or make videos of those murders does not correlate in any meaningful way to an actual threat they pose to Americans here in the U.S. Nor does it correlate to its military potency.

He went on to discuss a a recent analysis by Zack Beauchamp showing that ISIS is, in fact, losing ground militarily and dolefully added, “if you’ve been watching the national news coverage of ISIS, Beauchamp’s report feels like it might as well be coming from Mars.”

I also make note of the fact that Matthews has again joined the war party with his usual fervor. And I wonder if, as he did in 2003, he might once more be the one whispering to the press that MSNBC isn’t going to be a “left-wing network.”

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Process dodge ball

by digby

Matt Duss at Tablet points out (rightly in my view)  that all this caterwauling about Netanyahu’s breach of protocol is beside the point.  Yes, it’s improper. But the issue isn’t really about who invited whom and whether or not they should have done so:

The idea that there was nothing untoward about the Republican speaker of the House and the Israeli ambassador arranging such an invitation in secret and then springing it on the White House doesn’t really pass the laugh test. Imagine, for comparison’s sake, that congressional Democrats had, in a similar manner, arranged in 2003 for French President Jacques Chirac to deliver a speech against the Iraq invasion. Somehow I doubt we’d even be debating its propriety.

Where Leibovitz and I do agree, however, is that the current U.S.-Israel tension is more about policy than personalities. While the two men have never gotten along, it’s a mistake to treat this as a personal dispute. Treating it as such misses the important fact that the two men represent genuine constituencies who have very different views of how to advance their respective country’s security interests and the role that the other should play in helping them do that.

First off, to paraphrase John McCain, the fundamentals of the U.S.-Israel relationship remain strong. The military-to-military relationship is among the closest that the United States has with any country. The intelligence- and information-sharing between the two countries, particularly on the issue of Iran, is, as multiple Israeli security officials have told me over the past several years, “Better than ever”—or at least it was until Netanyahu decided to start selectively leaking information about Iranian nuclear talks in order to scuttle a deal.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a big deal that this is happening. Manners and protocol are beside the point and they are obscuring the real issue at stake.

Now, maybe that’s not a totally terrible thing in this case. These are very delicate negotiations which shouldn’t be happening in public in the first place at least until an actual deal is struck.  Arguing over the diplomatic protocol of a congressional speech may actually be a good thing in this case. Still, it’s a common problem with these issues of war and peace. We end up hotly debating the process and fail to argue about the underlying issue. And then it happens and everyone stands around going “w3hat the hell just happened?”

Read Duss’s piece if you’d like to know what the real argument is all about and why we should be concerned about it.