Author: digby

It’s Just Not Faaair!!!

Don’t you just love hearing poor little conservatives whine like itty bitty babies about their victimhood at the hands of the big, tewwible liberal media? It’s just heart rending, I tell you.

Check out Laura Ingraham on Reliable Sources when it repeats. She is just beside herself at the possibility that conservatives might be seen as anything but oppressed minorities who are shunned and cast aside by the monolithic liberal media that refuse to even acknowledge their right to exist! How could anyone even suggest that Republicans like Rush are doing anything but fighting back with their tiny fists against the liberal monsters who refuse to give them an even break? They are fighting for their lives! Sean and Bill and Neal may be vicious on the outside, but they’re quivering in fear on the inside, singing “we shall overcome” and “swing low sweet chariot” through a veil of tears.

And what really makes her just stomp her feet with exasperation is when people claim they aren’t liberal when they are! It’s dishonest and just plain evil. I mean, sure, George W. Bush has gotten some ok coverage but that’s just because he’s such a goood President compared to Clinton who was an evil President. That’s the difference. And even then, sometimes those icky liberals are just so mean to Bush when they say he might even be wrong sometimes and they try to get him to translate his sentences into English at press conferences. I mean, how much more biased can you get??? Why can’t everybody be fair and balanced and unapologetic, huh?

I just have to wonder something, though. They have complete control of the government, yet they are still unhappy and feel oppressed and powerless. What exactly do these people want? One party rule? World domination?

(oh yeah, that’s right…..)

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The Liquid List is gooood.

Check this out!

(And while I readily admit to knowling zilch about web design, I have to say that this one looks really good to me.)

Talk about Kewl!

Sisyphus Shrugged finds another example of the hateful liberal media in action.

And that special gal mentioned in the piece, Jennie Taliaferro of The Greatest Jeneration, should never be mentioned without quoting her at her very super-coolest:

We are at War–as much with Liberals as we are with Islamist terrorists. Your side is, unfortunately, the Enemy.

JennieTaliaferro

courtesy Martin Wisse at Progressive Gold

Again from His Purplosity, and on the subject of his earlier post on Rhandi Rhodes I’m pointed to a post by Skippy who lists a number of liberal radio voices who have been canned, eased out or otherwise metaphorically “disappeared” under suspicious circumstances.

But, he leaves out the best talk radio host ever in my book, the great Michael Jackson (not that one) who is considered by many in the radio business as having been the first talk show host.

His was on KABC until 1997, when the station unceremoniously demoted him to weekends. After being in drive time for more than 35 years, Jackson wasn’t too happy with his weekend gig at KABC, and eventually left the station in 1998.

He is famous for his “little black book,” which contains the name and phone number of anybody who is anybody-the rich, powerful, famous or infamous. Jackson has interviewed every U.S. President since Lyndon Johnson, and he was the first and only talk radio host to interview President Bill Clinton following the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

His show is erudite, intelligent, informative — but unfortunately he doesn’t get into any shouting matches with his guests, he doesn’t pontificate about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the evil Americans who don’t agree with him and his callers seem to be more interested in asking questions than sharing their learned opinions on every subject. In other words, his show doesn’t appeal to the angry morons who seem to be the most coveted audience in America.

Interestingly, he just spent the last couple of years at a Clear Channel station KLAC. Of course he was let go this last November when Clear suddenly decided to change from the talk show format to oldies. As it said in this article in the Long Beach Press Telegram:

The change comes at a time when, perhaps, Jackson has never been better. His in-studio guest list reflects that: Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Al and Tipper Gore all in the last week, all shunning phone interviews they might have given other radio hosts to meet in person with Jackson.

“Nobody turns us down,’ he says proudly.

But that only adds to the sting Jackson feels in losing his show. He explains the machinations that have put the political right in talk- show ascendancy, while making liberal hosts such as himself an endangered species.

“Talk shows are dominated by conservatives, probably because they reflect the political leanings of station managers, who, in the main, come up through the ranks of sales rather than through news, entertainment and programming. Also, they are in the main, although not entirely, hoping to emulate the success of (Rush) Limbaugh.’

KLAC, its sister station, KFI [on which appear Limbaugh, Elder, Hannity et al] and nearly 1,300 others are owned by Clear Channel Radio. But those vast holdings may prevent the company’s front office from correctly measuring the politics, public opinion, and personalities in its local markets.

Says Jackson, “The change at KLAC had nothing whatsoever to do with me.’ And, he adds, it had nothing to do with the rise of conservative talk-show hosts. “I don’t want to sound like sour grapes. I don’t want to sound as if hosts on the political right have driven me out. The decision was a business one where the owners feel that they can make more money by cutting the staff, in front of the microphone and backstage, and by running canned music.

“My show was way ahead of expectations in the ratings at this stage of development. I had been on the air for just one and a half years, and the company had decided that they were not going to spend any money promoting the project. By contrast, look around. Our successful sister station, KFI, is publicized and advertised everywhere.’

The guy is the absolute best and he is having trouble staying on the air in Los Angeles, for Gawd’s sake! This makes no sense whatsoever.

It is possible, he says, that Clear Channel has misread the L.A.-area market, and has failed to grasp the presence of an extensive audience for a liberal talk show. (He defines a liberal talk-show host as one “open to all points of view.’)

“California is different from the rest of the nation,’ he says. “Every single major elective office in the state is held by a Democrat: the governor, lieutenant governor, the assembly and senate, the mayor of L.A., the attorney general, all of them. And so, KLAC turns off the microphones to talk.’

No kidding. Los Angeles is one of the most liberal cities in the country and we have no liberal talk shows. We have one of the best talk show hosts in the country right here, the man who is credited as inventing the genre and he can’t keep a job.

Sorry. This simply does not compute.

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There’s just something about it they don’t like

Atrios has a post up about John Edwards coming out against legacy admissions, a position which is immediately derided by some as being silly because the federal government can’t do anything about such things.

This is true, of course, but then the Government can’t make people go out “and love a neighbor like you’d like to love yerself,” as our President preaches, but he says it anyway.

The point is that Edwards is using the legacy issue as a way of drawing attention to the fact that there are many dispensations given for a variety of reasons in college admissions, so why is the race issue being used as the only example of discrimination in this area? It’s a smart way of putting the anti-affirmative action forces on the defensive by making them explain why one is so much worse than the other. After all, if a student is denied access to the college of their choice because someone with lower scores was admitted due to their race, how is it that no one complains if the same person is denied admittance because someone with a lower test score was admitted because their father graduated there? If one is discrimination, isn’t the other?

Clearly, the GOP is trying to mislead the public into believing that affirmative action is the only impediment to colleges being a pure scholastic meritocracy, which is nonsense. Admissions take many factors into account, race being only one of them. One could easily ask whether it is fair that a musically gifted student should be given admission even though her test scores and grades are lower than some others. Certainly many athletes are given preference over others with far more impressive academic credentials. Any one of these jocks could have “taken the slot” that would have gone to the student who would have made the cut if only scores and grades had been taken into account.

When you frame the issue this way, it makes you wonder why affirmative-action has become the only focus of these supposed legions of white students who have been denied admission to college because someone less qualified took their place. You have to wonder why they are so sure that their place was taken by undeserving African-Americans or women or Hispanics. Is it not just as reasonable that their place was taken by an undeserving football player, legacy C student or ballet dancer?

Why is it that only “less qualified” minorities make everyone so upset?

You only hurt the one you love

Via Cursor:

Following up on the item I posted yesterday on anti-trust investigation of the alternative media the SFGate reports on the issue and I obviously misunderstood the depth of the problem and was much too flippant in characterizing it as political. Apparently, it is also about whether there is too much style coverage in alternative papers and whether anybody in LA should ever have to answer to somebody in New York. It’s a super-duper crisis in the alternative press that some evidently believe can only be resolved with a tough US Attorney and a visit by some G-men.

The inquiry is the result of a horse-trading deal last October in which each of the two firms agreed to shut down one of its papers in a city where they competed. The arrangement between the nation’s two largest alternative newsweekly chains left Los Angeles and Cleveland with only one citywide weekly each.

[…]

If so, the trend would be one more sign that weekly newspaper chains are moving farther away from their progressive, grassroots origins and acting more like the gargantuan daily newspaper conglomerates they were meant to provide an alternative to in the first place.

Do read the entire article. You will see that the real problem is the corporate dominance of the alternative press by such behemoths as The Village Voice and New Times and how this is hampering the spread of progressive ideas.

Liberal critics seem to agree that we must help John Ashcroft stop these corporate media tyrants. Like progressive political writer “Marc Haefele, a former political columnist for the LA Weekly who resigned from the paper within a month after the New Times-VVM deal, and was first approached by justice investigators in mid November.” He told them, “The LA Weekly to a large extent is being edited under New York oversight at this point in time. This was basically going on before they made the [deal]. I was asked about whether I felt that had an effect on the content of the paper … and I said that, yeah, I thought the paper was basically run from New York by New Yorkers, and it was a paper about Los Angeles, and that did not necessarily work out all the time.”

If that doesn’t require federal intervention, I don’t know what does.

However, some people like Los Angeles Magazine editor in chief Kit Rachlis inexplicably find the much welcomed Justice Department investigation to be a bit more complicated:

“There’s a terrible irony in the John Ashcroft Justice Department investigating the alternative press when, in fact, they have allowed far larger corporate entities to get away with transactions that have certainly raised a lot more antitrust issues than the LA Weekly-New Times deal has, and which had far greater effect on society,” he says. “I don’t think it’s too paranoid to say that they’re looking into the alternative press for political reasons.”

As the article then points out:

Indeed, the U.S. Justice Department has done nothing to derail the endless media mergers that have taken place between corporate giants in recent years, and has yet to block a single joint-operating agreement between competing newspapers since the Newspaper Preservation Act was passed in 1970.

Oh please. Is he trying to say that there is something unusual about Ashcroft investigating a media company for anti-trust violations? Well, so what if there is, anyway? It is far more important that reporters from the LA Weekly don’t have to take orders from some stupid New Yorker. And if it takes crawling into bed with the Bush administration to make that point, well then I don’t see that you have any choice. As long as those rotten editors get theirs (and they stop publishing all that icky arts and culture junk that actually make people pick up the rags in the first place.)

Seriously, this is nuts. It sounds like NewTimes and VVM made a deal that was a technical violation of the Anti-Trust act. But, to believe that this “violation” of anti-trust in any way impedes competition in a marketplace that is totally dominated by mega-media corporations who own everything from the cable coming into your house, your computer dial-up, your only local mainstream newspaper, several radio stations and at least one of your local TV stations plus many more cable networks is ridiculous. The Justice Department is NOT investigating because of its grave concern about competition in the marketplace of ideas and those who are helping them out of myopic concern that these corporate chains are infecting the alternative press with commercial values are hopelessly naive.

Gleefully helping the Feds lean on the Village Voice just doesn’t seem to me to be the smartest thing for liberals to do in this day and age. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s going to guarantee a more “responsive” alternative media going forward.

It’s pretty clear that the Washington Kewl Kidz have decided that John Edwards is completely unqualified to be President. He just doesn’t have the requisite foreign policy experience or the “gravitas” required in this time of crisis.

The kind of gravitas that was presumably evident in the last presidential campaign when George W. Bush handled foreign policy questions with such aplomb:

“Can you name the general who is in charge of Pakistan?” asked Andy Hiller, political reporter for WHDH-TV in Boston. He was inquiring about Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf, who seized control of the country Oct. 12 in a military coup. “Wait, wait, is this 50 questions?” asked Bush.

Hiller replied: “No, it’s four questions of four leaders in four hot spots.” Bush said: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected—not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country and I think that’s good news for the subcontinent.”

And he has grown even beyond that fine performance to attain a Churchillian stature today that is likely unbeatable. For instance, two days ago our leader showed the kind of calm, measured response that makes people feel confident that a mature person is in charge and can be trusted to make the right decision for America:

You said we’re headed to war in Iraq. I don’t know why you say that. I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq.

I’m the person who gets to decide, not you. And I hope this can be done peacefully.

We have got a military presence there to remind Saddam Hussein, however, that when I say we will lead a coalition of the willing to disarm him if he chooses not to disarm, I mean it.

Just yesterday, President Lincoln…er…Bush demonstrated once again his thorough grasp of the complexities of the North Korean crisis:

“We’ve got a great heart,” Mr. Bush said of the United States, noting the nation’s food donations to North Korea, “but I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks.”

This is the kind of compelling, seasoned rhetoric we have come to expect from our President and I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to have to look long and hard to find someone who not only thoroughly understands the nuanced and subtle language required for delicate diplomatic situations, but can communicate the complexity of international affairs so clearly and understandably to the American people.

The Kewl Kidz know better than anyone that George W. Bush has set a new standard for foreign policy knowledge, leadership and rhetoric and it’s going to be extremely difficult for any Democrat to meet it. Those with furrowed brows or lawyerly backgrounds need not apply.

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Now, where did I read that liberals are boring ascetics and conservatives are the real partiers…

A letter to the editor in today’s LA Times:

My “Right-On Girlstyle Award” goes to the women of Nigeria — not for the stoning problem. I’m talking about the women who took over and closed down a Chevron-Texaco oil refinery.

More than 100 Nigerian women closed it down for several weeks. Their big demand — jobs for their husbands and sons. Yes, all they wanted was a means to alleviate their severe poverty while living a stone’s throw from the symbol of U.S. wealth, cheap oil. They finally won by threatening to bare their breasts. It’s a tribal custom called shaming; if a woman bares her breasts in front of strangers it is a shame on the men who witness it.

I propose that the women of America go to Washington and shame those men. Yes, let’s go there and bare our breasts at President Bush’s State of the Union address. Shame on him for diverting attention away from the health-care crisis, the pension crisis, the education crisis; shame on him for stomping on environmental protection regulations; shame on him for bombing innocent people any minute now in Baghdad; shame on him for promoting the use of oil and thus a war, rather than promoting alternative methods of energy production; shame on him for all the young Americans who are totally unmotivated to vote, yet have already died in Afghanistan or will soon die in Iraq. Women of America, let’s bare our breasts for peace and democracy!

Carolyn Rios

I hadn’t actually thought of it before, but this could be the radical new form of political discourse we Democrats have been looking for.

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Johnnie puts his foot down

General Johnnie is on the case when it comes to cracking down on those anti-trust behemoths who would crowd out competition and leave the poor unsuspecting public with no choices and no hope. He is the consumers best friend and don’t you forget it. Just read this by John Powers in The LA Weekly if you don’t believe me.

Who Do You Antitrust?

Ashcroft’s Department of Justice is investigating possible antitrust violations on the part of two alternative news companies, New Times Media and Village Voice Media (of which the L.A. Weekly is part). While I’ll leave it to the lawyers to limn the merits of the case, I must say it’s striking that two comparatively small chains should face the scrutiny of the same DOJ that notoriously gave Microsoft a cushy deal in its antitrust settlement, takes no steps against America’s broadband monopolies, and does nothing to limit huge “synergistic” empires like Fox, AOL Time Warner and Disney. If I were of a politically suspicious nature, I would wonder whether the DOJ is targeting alternative papers like this one because we are an alternative to the corporate media — opposing the Iraq war, chronicling Ashcroft’s efforts to dismantle the Constitution and challenging our government’s near-religious faith in the market. In fact, there’s something worthy of Joseph Heller, if not Kafka, in the idea that, at this point in history, the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration is going after free weekly papers — in the name of defending free expression.

So, the all powerful alternative media are flexing their muscles in the marketplace of ideas. Have they no shame?

You go General Johnnie. Shut these corporate tyrants down!

Can you say “deluded?”

I have one more little balloon I’d like to prick before we move on to “bare breasts for peace.” (Just hold on.) I have to take issue with a meme that seems to have infected the brains of many Republicans. I’m not the first to note this, but I don’t think it can be repeated too often. It is best exemplified in a letter I read in the NYTimes on Tuesday:

“George W. Bush’s campaign tactics in 2000, the “Southern Strategy” and the Trent Lott episode are yesterdays’ news. The Republican Party, and all it stands for, won an overwhelming victory in the 2002 Congressional elections. Americans are pleased with the presiden’ts agenda just as it is.”

Ok. I won’t go into the obvious absurdity of Trent Lott being “yesterdays news” compared to the election returns because he is literally last week’s news at the very least. Of course, the election was last November’s news, before the Trent Lott scandal, but why pick nits?

The real delusion is this triumphant interpretation of the 2002 election. The Republicans gained two Senate seats and 6 House seats. This is constantly claimed to be an “overwhelming” victory.

Ah, but it is an historic victory because the party in the White House always loses in the first midterm, right? And, they usually lose by more than 25 seats in the House, too, so it was extra, super-duper overwhelming. It’s been more than 60 years since any President was so beloved by the American people that they voted for his party in the first election after his inauguration. Therefore, George W. Bush achieved something that makes him eligible for Mt. Rushmore if not canonization.

But…but…he didn’t defy history at all. And why is that?

Because he didn’t win the election in 2000, that’s why. If Al Gore had been in office as the voters wanted, there would have nothing remarkable about the 2002 GOP gains at all, except for the fact that they were so small.

Uncle Tony may have defied history, but Dubya didn’t.