JHB
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Re:Chelsea Clinton: Did peoples' spin-detectors suddenly short out?
Who read the article about Chelsea Clinton? No, not the NY Daily News article that's spawned at least two threads in GD and probably more elsewhere?
I mean the other one, the Fast Company article that the Daily News piece cherry-picked from and spun.
Because in that article, the line about "not caring about money" was in the context of not being obsessed with nothing but money . Of not being another "grab everything and squeeze" type like Mitt Romney or the Kochs.
Even the bit about "I just work harder..." is in the context of overcoming the assumption that she's a well-connected do-nothing getting a ride on family connections, a la a certain scion of the Bush clan who loses fights with pretzels. It's not an example of Mitt-wit self- back-patting.
Really, don't people click through to sources when there's some obvious spin going on? Especially from an article from a tabloid newspaper?
I'm hardly a fan of the Clintons and the neoliberal economics their policies have been steeped in, but Jeez, people, use your heads. The Daily News piece may not be the Soviet-grade quote-extraction that the isolating of "You didn't build that" was, but it bears a strong family resemblance.
I, for one, remember who Romney chose for foreign policy advisors
McCain too, for that matter.
They were dominated by the same gaggle of chickenhawk neocons who:
1) were caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviets
2) dismissed bin Laden as a guy in a tent
3) had an ongoing pet project to clear out all the old Soviet allies in the MidEast (plus Iran) and replace them with... something else
4) seized (with gusto) the opportunity to use the aftermath of 911 to launch Pet Project Item Number 1: removing Saddam Hussein, and cooked up false pretenses for doing so
5) "Planned" the invasion and occupation of Iraq with an entire string of assumptions, any one of which would derail their vision of how smoothly it would go -- and didn't have a "plan B" when for the infinity-minus-oneth time in military history things didn't work out quite as planned.
6) suffered absolutely no consequences for botching the entire operation, costing thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands injured and maimed.
7) When making said "plans" they joked "Anyone can go to Baghdad, Real Men go to Tehran!", and they've been hankering to start Pet Project Item Number 3 or 4 (depending on how you count overthrowing Ghaddafi and Assad), attacking Iran.
They're big on tough talk, but as to their actual track record, they're long on blood but very, very short on results, and batting zero on seeing problems or major developments before they arrive.
So, when conservatives ask when will Obama be apologizing to Romney for dismissing Mitt's "Cold War" thinking, I have to ask: You wanted to put the "on to Tehran!" crowd back in the driver's seat. How "tough" do you think President Romney (or McCain) would be able to be about Ukraine since by now our forces would be tied up in Iran?
The reason Thomas was put on the SC was...
...NOT because he was the most qualified jurist. He wasn't.
...NOT because he was the most qualified black jurist. He wasn't.
...NOT because he was the most qualified black conservative jurist. He wasn't.
He was the most qualified black conservative with reliable but obfuscatable views on abortion & other subjects, and was young enough that he'd stay on the court for decades.
The Democratic senators were initially ready to give him a pass, since 1) they didn't look forward to another SC nomination battle, and 2) initially the black community was receptive to Thomas -- not enthusiastic, but not inclined to oppose -- and a fight against him wouldn't be well received.
At the time I thought Thomas should have been voted down just because of his lackluster record and ignoring conflict of interest (Thomas failed to recuse himself in a case involving the Ralston Purina company, where his political mentor Sen. John Danforth owned millions in stock and had brothers on the board of directors. Thomas' decision in favor of Purina directly benefited his pals).
Black opinion didn't shift until later in the process, after Thurgood Marshall made his "a black snake is still a snake" comment. The senators were finally forced to take a harder line when the harassment charges leaked out, and giving Thomas a pass would piss off another Democratic constituency: women fighting workplace harassment.
But all that happened too late: by that point conservatives were ginned up in support and the rest of the establishment didn't want another high-profile fight, so the Thomas hearings were kept to a he-said-she-said with Anita Hill (Angela Wright was shunted off to the side), giving the senators their excuse to just put it behind them.
So here we are, a quarter-century later, and he's still a lackluster jurist who ignores conflicts of interest, and is a reliable conservative operative in the courts.
Bill O'Reilly Complains About Americans Being 'Self-Absorbed and Ignorant'
via Crooks and Liars:
Fox's Bill O'Reilly is very upset that many Americans can't answer the same questions that are asked of immigrants who take our citizenship test, and used his Talking Points Memo segment this Monday to rail about it.
This from the man who works for a network that literally makes their viewers dumber, that constantly rails against funding of public education in favor of school vouchers and charter schools, and who has been carrying water for the party that's responsible for getting rid of civics classes in our public schools to begin with.
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O’Reilly said America is in decline because so many citizens are not paying attention and are not interested in the welfare of the country.
O'Reilly's right about the problem. You'll never get him to admit his and his network's part in contributing to it though.
Progressivity of the income tax was eliminated for high incomes under Reagan...
...and has not been restored since.
After adjusting for inflation, before the Kennedy-era tax cuts typically over half the brackets (sometimes well over half) affected incomes over $250,000, with about 40% affecting incomes above $500,000. Inflation eroded those levels (the brackets were not indexed for inflation) until the late 70s, when the top bracket dipped those into the single digits. Reagan's tax cuts cut even those further, eliminating brackets starting at over 500K entirely. And by the end of his term, the top bracket kicked in at roughly the median income, not anything that could be considered high (BushI went back on his "read my lips" line because these were unsustainably low).
To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, it seems progressivity is for little people.
In case you're wondering why I picked 1942 as a start date, it's purely for readability, thanks to my graphics skills or lack thereof. I need to figure out how to pull off skipping some intervals, because some of those inflation-adjusted brackets reach higher. Much higher:
The Hunting of the President (2004)
Stop me if you've heard this: A Democrat running for and then elected president who doesn't fit the Conservative Movement's favored "weak on crime and defense, tax and spend liberal" narrative, so they ignore reality and invent their own narrative -- that he's a radical leftist who wants to usher in a police state (and his wife! What a harpy!)
They push that out through billionaire-funded conservative media and foundations, and press investigation after investigation -- both inside and outside of the government.
The 2004 fiim, based on the 2001 book.
Bill Clinton in 2004, speaking following a screening of the film. Worth listening to:
You're joking, right? Vince Foster, "wag the dog", travelgate,...
...the "Clinton $400 haircut delays air travelers" "scandal", even Whitewater itself. And that's not getting into the fringier ones like the "Clinton body count", the allegations that he was in on drug smuggling through the Mena airfield, "The Clinton Chronicles", etc. etc. etc.
They counted as a "Clinton scandal" China's upgrades to its nuclear arsenal using secrets they had obtained during Reagan & Bush's terms.
No axe-grinding rumor promulgated by old White Citizens Council guys (his enemies in Arkansas politics) went unexamined for use nationally.
From "renounced his citizenship" to "trashed the White House" they threw ball after ball of elephant dung at him hoping some would stick, and what didn't stick would pile up around him so they could point to the cloud of steam rising from it and say "y'know, where there's smoke..."
Clinton's personal peccadilloes finally gave them something they could latch onto legally, but it didn't happen out of the blue. It was the constant stream of "scandals" that were either pure bullshit or blown-up petty stuff (and of which Republicans partake just as freely) fanned by conservative news media that painted Bill (and Hillary) as radical-leftist Al Capones that just had to be taken down, even if all you could get on him was tax evasion.
To claim that "No trumped up scandals made out of nothing" about Clinton is just mind-bogglingly ignorant.
Search on "video news release", "VNR", and/or "prepackaged news"
It's a PR tool that's become a staple, especially in local news. There's a suggested script for the lead-in (kind of obvious what it was with this example), followed by a video segment produced by some other party. And the big question is who the other parties are. It would have been interesting to see the video segment that followed, to figure out what they were trying to sell -- probably a retail association trying to promote a "come on, everybody's doing it" attitude to encourage more spending during the holidays.
They're very attractive for local stations because it gives them material to air at little or no cost, and the lead-in by the local station anchors gives the impression that it's something the station did on it's own, not something that they got from elsewhere and just used verbatim.
Critics of VNRs have called the practice deceptive or a propaganda technique, particularly when the segment is not identified to the viewers as a VNR. Firms producing VNRs disagree and equate their use to a press release in video form and point to the fact that editorial judgement in the worthiness, part or whole, of a VNR's content is still left in the hands of Journalists, Program Producers or the like. The United States Federal Communications Commission is currently investigating the practice of VNRs.
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VNRs have been used extensively in business since at least the early 1980s. Corporations such as Microsoft and Philip Morris, and the pharmaceutical industry generally, have all made use of the technique.
According to the trade-group Public Relations Society of America, a VNR is the video equivalent of a press release.[2] and presents a client's case in an attractive, informative format. The VNR placement agency seeks to garner media attention for the client's products, services, brands or other marketing goals. The VNR affords local TV stations free broadcast quality materials for use in reports offered by such stations.
The Center for Media and Democracy's Executive Director John Stauber disagreed. "The use of VNRs amounts to systematic deception of viewers, both by the hidden interested parties behind them, and by news organizations with impure motives themselves," he said.
Reporting on a September 2005 seminar on new media, Media Daily News noted that VNRs "which can look like regular news stories to the unaided eye--can be placed in local or national newscasts." On that panel was Larry Moskowitz, the president and CEO of Medialink Worldwide. "If there is news in your brands we'll find a way to put your brands in your news. In a sense, it's product placement, but it's earned a place on the shelf," Media Daily News reported. [14]
Medialink Worldwide, one of the largest producers and distributors of VNRs, states in its 2003 annual report that a "VNR is a television news story that communicates an entity's public relations or corporate message. It is paid for by the corporation or organization seeking to announce news and is delivered without charge to the media." [15]
While the company likens VNRs as akin to the traditional hard copy news release, it acknowledges they are widely used in newsrooms. "Produced in broadcast news style, VNRs relay the news of a product launch, medical discovery, corporate merger event, timely feature or breaking news directly to television news decision-makers who may use the video and audio material in full or edited form. Most major television stations in the world now use VNRs, some on a regular basis," Medialink states.
As O'Brien comments, "I don't find that funny–I find it scary."
This would appear to be one more example of what Free Press and others were warning us about a few years back–fake news segments that are really just corporate PR planted in the middle of a "newscast."
The FCC should, in theory, do something about this manipulation of the news on the public airwaves. But the commission has been extremely slow to act. As James Rainey reported in the L.A. Times (3/30/11), two stations faced slap-on-the-wrist fines for airing commercials dressed up as news–four years after the offending broadcasts aired.
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