This is a must read story!
The reason for the obscene cost of a political campaign is to pay for TV time. This cost has served to totally pervert the political realm, and destroy even the possibility of sane or good governance. All of American life is negatively impacted in the every growing need for the politicos to continually generate insane levels of finance in order to maintain or even run for office. Only very limited public funding of campaigns, limited to 6-8 weeks in length, can remove this corrosive and divisive scourge from American life.
Since the networks choose to not use the public airways, which they receive for free, in the public interest, to serve the public, it is vital that the system be changed so it is no longer possible for the political process to dump $3 Billion into the pockets of the broadcasters.
The Big Three networks have decided that our democracy is bad for their business, which is why this week viewers were treated to worm munching (NBC’s Fear Factor), puking (CBS’s Big Brother 5) and liposuction (ABC’s Extreme Makeover) instead of primetime convention coverage from Boston’s Fleet Center.
This follows network news executives’ decision to limit their coverage in Boston and New York to three hours per convention. Their justification: the public’s interest has waned as national conventions have lost their drama and evolved into “carefully scripted political infomercials.”
Instead, viewers are being fed “carefully scripted” reality television — an unsavory mix of gastronomic gross outs and cosmetic surgery — meant to serve us, the public, with what the networks think we really want.
What’s wrong with this view, according to Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten, is network executives “growing inability to distinguish between the public’s interest — fascination with entertainment and celebrity — and the public interest — a deference to the common good.”
It’s time Americans send the networks a clear message: By ignoring our democratic process — at at time of the most divisive presidential election of our generation, when Americans are dying in our name overseas and threat of terrorism at home looms large — ABC, NBC and CBS are doing a shameful disservice to the viewers they’re legally obligated to serve.
It is not too much to ask networks that are granted free licenses to broadcast over publicly owned airwaves to use those airwaves to help educate the American public about the choices we as a nation face this November.
Tell network executives, newsroom managers and anchors that our democracy matters.
By Sue Pleming
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. investigators found multiple examples of fraud and abuse in millions of dollars worth of contracts to rebuild Iraq that used U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi funds, according to an audit released on Friday.
The report to Congress by the inspector general’s office of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupying force dissolved in June, said it had been involved in 69 criminal investigations, of which 42 had been closed or referred elsewhere. A further 27 are still open.
In one case, an unnamed senior adviser for the CPA bypassed the bidding process for a $7.2 million security contract. The deal was revoked, a $2.3 million advance taken back from the contractor and the CPA adviser removed.
CPA Inspector General Stuart Bowen said his findings were not unexpected given that the CPA and contractors were working in a volatile, dangerous environment.
“These results are not surprising: the CPA faced a variety of daunting challenges, including extremely hazardous working conditions,” the former White House lawyer said in a letter accompanying the report.
In another case, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior appointed a Defense Department civilian as a coach for an Iraqi amateur sports team.
The civilian received a $40,000 cash advance but gave the funds to his military assistant who went gambling and lost some of it. The money frittered away was then written off as a legitimate loss. That case is still pending.
(Read the article)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Not only was the U.S. recession in 2001 the shallowest on record, it may not have been one at all — at least in the classic sense of two straight quarterly declines, new government data show.
In annual revisions to U.S. gross domestic product numbers released on Friday that could fuel a politically charged debate, the Commerce Department rewrote the history of the recent downturn by revising away a decline in the second quarter of 2001.
The new figures, which reflect more complete source data, show economic activity peaked in the second quarter of 2001, not the fourth quarter of 2000.
Measured from the new peak, the economy shrank just 0.4 percent, keeping the recession as measured by GDP the mildest on record. The 1969-1970 recessionary period, in which the economy contracted 0.6 percent, comes in a close second.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, the unofficial but accepted arbiter of U.S. recessions, has said the downturn began in March 2001 and ended in November of that year.
However, the White House has argued that the economy peaked earlier and has contended President Bush inherited the recession from his predecessor, President Bill Clinton.
Now, some might argue there was no recession at all.
“If I were describing this, I’d say it’s essentially a flat period,” said Brent Moulton, who is in charge of compiling the GDP data at the department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.
With Kerry at the helm, the left might focus on the real issues again
Naomi Klein
The Guardian
Last month, I reluctantly joined the Anybody But Bush camp. It was “Bush in a Box” that finally got me, a gag gift my brother gave my father on his 66th birthday. Bush in a Box is a cardboard cut-out of President 43 with a set of adhesive speech balloons featuring the usual tired Bushisms: “Is our children learning?” “They misunderestimated me” - standard-issue Bush-bashing schlock, on sale at Wal-Mart, made in Malaysia. Yet Bush in a Box filled me with despair. It’s not that the president is dumb, which I already knew, it’s that he makes us dumb. Don’t get me wrong: my brother is an exceptionally bright guy; he heads a think-tank that publishes weighty policy papers on the failings of export-oriented resource extraction and the false savings of cuts to welfare. Whenever I have a question involving interest rates or currency boards, he’s my first call. But Bush in a Box pretty much summarises the level of analysis coming from the left these days. You know the line: The White House has been hijacked by a shady gang of zealots who are either insane or stupid or both. Vote Kerry and return the country to sanity. But the zealots in Bush’s White House are neither insane nor stupid nor particularly shady. Rather, they openly serve the interests of the corporations that put them in office with bloody-minded efficiency. Their boldness stems not from the fact that they are a new breed of zealot but that the old breed finds itself in a newly unconstrained political climate. We know this, yet there is something about George Bush’s combination of ignorance, piety and swagger that triggers a condition in progressives I’ve come to think of as Bush Blindness. When it strikes, it causes us to lose sight of everything we know about politics, economics and history and to focus exclusively on the admittedly odd personalities of the people in the White House. Other side-effects include delighting in psychologists’ diagnoses of Bush’s warped relationship with his father and brisk sales of Bush “dum gum” - $1.25.
In his speech to the Democratic National Convention last night, Sen. John Kerry drew many distinctions between himself and President George W. Bush. One of the most striking policy divides was on the issue of energy. In a week that saw oil prices once again reach record highs, Kerry made sharp references to the Bush administration’s shady practice of developing an energy plan behind closed doors with oil/energy executives. He also questioned whether President Bush and Vice President Cheney’s dependence on the Saudi royal family has compromised America’s energy security. As Ohio focus groups showed last night, Kerry’s line, “I want an America that relies on its ingenuity and innovation, not the Saudi royal family” was one of the best received of the night. Unfortunately, Bush and Cheney, both former oilmen, have offered no serious solutions. By cutting funding for alternative energy development, while pressing for more tax breaks and for more drilling, the White House appears more interested in fueling oil industry profits than creating affordable, sustainable sources of energy for the future.
OIL PRICES HIT HIGH; BUSH DOES NOTHING: Reuters reports oil prices hit a record high on Friday, with “U.S. light crude hit $43.15 a barrel, the highest level in its 21-year history of trade on the New York exchange.” The White House has so far refused to follow through on President Bush’s campaign promise to “jawbone” OPEC to increase oil supplies or make serious investments in alternative energies.
BUSH CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTORS’ PROFITS SURGE: The record energy prices – and the White House’s refusal to do anything to curb them – has meant a huge increase in profits for large oil companies, many of which are big Bush campaign donors. Earlier this week, “ConocoPhillips said second-quarter profits surged nearly 75%, to $2.1 billion.” ConocoPhillips’s CEO is Archie Dunham, a Bush Pioneer (aka. someone who has raised the Bush-Cheney campaign more than $100,000). Since 2000, Conoco executives have given the Bush-Cheney campaign more than $200,000, and the company has given the RNC more than $350,000 in soft money. AP reports, “Shell saw its earnings rise 54%, thanks to higher prices for oil and natural gas.” The company pocketed an additional $3.7 billion in profits. Shell’s CEO is Jack Little, another Bush Pioneer and the company’s executives have given the Bush-Cheney campaign more than $22,000. British Petroleum posted record-setting second quarter profits of $3.9 billion – a 23 percent jump from just one year ago. Since 2000, BP’s executives have given the Bush-Cheney campaign more than $24,000 and the RNC more than $800,000 in soft money. And ExxonMobil “posted its highest quarterly profit ever yesterday as the company continues to benefit from the long run-up in energy prices.” The company posted second-quarter profit growth of 39 percent to $5.79 billion. Since 2000, ExxonMobil executives have given the Bush-Cheney campaign more than $75,000 and the RNC more than $700,000 in soft money.
A devastating new report published in England yesterday by the foreign affairs committee of the House of Commons has added to a growing chorus of voices (including UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi) who insist the Iraq War, undertaken supposedly as part of the fight against global terrorism, has in fact provided a new home base for al Qaeda and swelled the ranks of America’s enemies. ”Iraq has become a ‘battle ground’ for al Qaeda, with appalling consequences for the Iraqi people,” reads one of the report’s conclusions. “The Coalition’s failure to bring law and order to parts of Iraq created a vacuum into which criminal elements and militias have stepped.” The report was released the same day Iraqi officials were forced to postpone “a major national conference billed as one of its first steps toward democracy and national reconciliation,” following a grisly spate of kidnappings and car bombings in recent days. The postponement of the conference and the content of the report both underscore the deterioration of security since the June handover of power.
OSAMA’S RED RIDER GUN: In an interview with the American Conservative, the anonymous CIA author of “Imperial Hubris” offered this helpful analogy to explain the folly of American action in Iraq: “Have you seen the movie ‘Christmas Story,’ where the boy wants a Red Rider air gun and his mom says no? Then at the end of Christmas day, when he has opened all his presents, he gets the gun and he thinks, ‘My God, I really got it. I never thought I’d get it.’ Iraq was Osama’s Red Rider BB gun. It was something he always wanted, but something he never expected.”
SUMMER IN THE CITY: The coalition’s failures “continue to haunt” the country today, as Iraqis struggle to endure widespread shortages of water and electricity. The Washington Post reports there are massive power outages in Baghdad this week, “with temperatures reaching 117 degrees and expected to climb.” Contrary to President Bush’s recent statement that electricity in Iraq is “now more widely available than before the war,” The New Standard reports, “Iraqi officials say the power supply in their country has not yet been repaired to pre-war levels.”
According to an article in The New Republic three weeks ago, a White House aide told a Pakistani official last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT (High Value Targets) were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July,” or the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Well, they were one day late, but the Bush administration will probably take it: Yesterday, July 29, “just hours before US presidential candidate John Kerry delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston,” Pakistani officials announced they had captured Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, one of the United States’ 21 most-wanted terrorists. The arrest is good news, but the timing of the announcement is raising questions, especially considering “Pakistani officials say Mr. Ghailani was captured last Sunday.”
The Albuquerque Journal reports that New Mexico locals hoping to attend a rally for Vice President Dick Cheney in Rio Rancho were “asked to sign an endorsement form if they couldn’t be verified as Bush-Cheney supporters.” The requirement to pledge allegiance to the Bush-Cheney ticket in order to attend the event was confirmed by a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. The endorsement read: ““I, (full name) … do herby (sic) endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States.” It later adds that, “In signing the above endorsement you are consenting to use and release of your name by Bush-Cheney as an endorser of President Bush.”
Under new rules issued by the Bush administration “the Environmental Protection Agency will be free to approve pesticides without consulting wildlife agencies to determine if the chemical might harm plants and animals” currently protected by the Endangered Species Act. “The new rule benefits the pesticide industry at the expense of endangered species,” said Aaron Colangelo, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The EPA claimed the old tests were complicated; instead, it’s easier to just get rid of them. Easier, maybe, but not better for the environment. The old law, for example, was “successfully used by environmental groups in a recent lawsuit seeking to mitigate the effects of pesticides on salmon in the Pacific Northwest. A federal judge found that the EPA had failed to abide by a requirement that it consult with federal wildlife agencies over the potential harm from pesticides.” Now, however, the EPA instead “will conduct its own scientific evaluation.”
“Why don’t they get new jobs if they’re unhappy — or go on Prozac?” Bush campaign worker Susan Sheybani’s musings on employee options in the weak U.S. job market.
By John Nichols, The Nation
The networks’ decision to give three hours of coverage to the conventions means that the public misses great speeches
Want big money to get elected to national office? If you’re a Democrat, you need to head for the hills—Beverly Hills. — A miner’s map for the liberal Gold Rush
by Eric Alterman
t’s like an Academy Awards ceremony for liberals outside the Wadsworth Theater, in Brentwood, California, on a sultry night in early May, as celebrity-show television interviewers and perhaps a hundred paparazzi jostle one another and scream out the names of stars to get a smile or a sound bite. The occasion is a benefit for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental-activist organization that has become the hottest cause in Hollywood other than sending George Bush back to Crawford. And here they come, one by one: Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Short, Rob Reiner, Larry David, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., all stopping to talk to the men and women with microphones about the need to protect and defend the planet from corporate polluters and their allies. Slipping through the crowd more quietly are Michelle Pfeiffer, Tobey Maguire, and Ray Romano. Also skipping the “green carpet” and sneaking in late, wearing faded blue jeans and a black Taj Mahal T-shirt, is the playboy-producer-philanthropist Steve Bing, the largest noncorporate giver of the night. Overseeing the event is Larry David’s wife, Laurie, a former TV producer and manager turned full-time environmental activist, who has been working for months to make this the biggest NRDC fundraiser ever.
Along with the stars in the 1,400-seat hall are many of the same fundraising giants who have helped establish Hollywood as the first stop for any liberal politician or do-gooder organization. The audience boasts three studio heads, including Alan Horn, of Warner Brothers. In the late 1990s, together with the director Rob Reiner, Horn helped the NRDC get off the ground in Hollywood by spending three full days taking its founder and president, John Adams, to see the heads of all the studios and persuade them to support it. They agreed, eventually, and tonight the NRDC will get $100,000 each from HBO and Village Roadshow Productions, $50,000 from MTV Networks, and $25,000 each from Fox Group and the William Morris Agency. The environmental group has come a long way since 2000, when Cameron Diaz could joke, “When asked if I was into the NRDC, I said, ‘I don’t know—how does one of their songs go?’”
The program is a mixture of high-minded politics and lowbrow comedy, with earnest but entertaining music in between. Afterward Laurie David, dancing on the sidelines in a slinky green Versace dress, throws up her hands as if her team had just scored the winning touchdown. The NRDC will be $3 million richer.
Kerry and Co. are so damn civil and happy, it’s almost scary. But will the disciplined new party be able to summon the passion?
By Arianna Huffington
Forget Disneyland — for the next few days, Beantown is the happiest place on earth. Or at least the most civil.
The Kerry campaign has put the kibosh on Bush bashing, preferring to make their candidate’s positive vision for the country the overriding theme of the convention.
It’s the Anger Management platform — and a very sensible strategy.
Unfettered rage at Bush, his corporate cronyism and his lies about Iraq (oops, I think that’s one of the proscribed phrases; my bad) has fueled the Democrats since a movement of outraged activists gave the party a much needed spine transplant during the primary season. Kerry picked up the baton in Iowa and has run with it to great effect. At the moment, 54 percent of Americans feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction — and nearly three-fifths say we need to change course.
Now it’s time for Kerry to convince voters that he’s the one to chart the new direction, and to define just what that direction will be.
So everywhere you go here — or, at least, everywhere the police allow you to go — everyone is reading from the same positive playbook.
At a star-studded and jampacked pre-convention event honoring Bill and Hillary Clinton — the A-list affair was so overbooked that many VIPs had to hover outside the door, waiting for someone to leave before the fire marshals would let them in — the former first couple was humble and on message, with Bill describing himself and Hillary as “foot soldiers for Kerry-Edwards.” They had clearly gotten the Anger Management memo, and the former president, in particular, avoided the more critical stance he has recently adopted toward Bush. The only whiff of a dig at W. was Clinton’s assurance that the one thing Democrats could count on was that, this time, “every vote will be counted” (this must be on the list of preapproved phrases; I’ve heard it a number of times since arriving in Boston — and it never fails to draw a cheer).
The curious saga of the Boston FBI’s ‘unconfirmed reports’ of a right-wing threat to the media
by James Ridgeway
BOSTON
TV coverage of Boston, day one, slanted skeptically against the Democrats — except for Fox, which couldn’t bear to show most of the event.
By Eric Boehlert
From the moment on “Today” Monday morning when NBC’s Katie Couric asked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., whether she had initially been left off the prime time speaking schedule for the Democratic convention because the Kerry/Edwards campaign feared she would “overshadow” the current ticket, TV news outlets had an agreed-upon narrative for the first day of the Democratic convention.
This “will Clinton overshadow?” angle (a repeat of a popular trope from the 2000 convention), along with the news clip showing Sen. John Kerry’s wife Teresa Heinz Kerry telling a reporter to “shove it,” set the groundwork for a day of coverage that often bristled with low-grade press animosity towards Kerry.
Naturally, convention coverage is going to be stacked with partisan rhetoric, as the pundits fill air time with talk and more talk. And it’s only natural for Kerry’s critics to be given a chance to air their side during the Democrats’ party in Boston. But it was strange, during Monday’s first, news-free day of convention coverage, how often television anchors and reporters effortlessly adapted the Republican talking points about the Kerry campaign and supposed divisions within the Democratic Party. While not openly contemptuous of Kerry, the way so much of the press was of vice president Al Gore in 2000, TV’s talking heads had a habit on Monday of spinning things in a slightly negative light.
The other clear TV oddity on day one was how the Fox News Channel, from 8 to 10:30 p.m. refused to air anything live from the Democratic convention podium, including speeches, tributes and patriotic songs. Only when the Clintons spoke did Fox turn its camera to the event.
By BOB HERBERT
mid all the muscle-flexing in Boston this week (”my homeland security platform is bigger than yours”), it was impossible to hear more than the merest hint or offhand whisper about the demoralizing decline in the fortunes of America’s cities over the past few years.
Paralyzed by a war in Iraq that we don’t know how to end or win, we’re in danger of forgetting completely about the struggling cities here at home.
Bill Clinton mentioned the 300,000 poor children being cut out of after-school programs and the increases in gang violence across the country. And he gave cheering delegates a devastating riff on the impending lapse of the ban on assault weapons and White House plans to scrap federal funds for tens of thousands of police officers:
“Our policy,” he said, “was to put more police on the street and to take assault weapons off the street - and it gave you eight years of declining crime and eight years of declining violence. Their policy is the reverse. They’re taking police off the streets while they put assault weapons back on the street.”
But those brief comments were the exception. A clearer sense of the rot that’s starting to reestablish itself in America’s cities was offered in an article out of Cleveland by The Times’s Fox Butterfield on Tuesday. “Many cities with budget shortfalls,” he wrote, “are cutting their police forces and closing innovative law enforcement units that helped reduce crime in the 1990’s, police chiefs and city officials say.”
Cleveland has laid off 15 percent of its cops - 250 officers. Pittsburgh has lost a quarter of its officers, and Saginaw, Mich., a third. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has waved goodbye to 1,200 deputies, closed several jails and released some inmates early. In Houston, police officers are taking up the duties of 190 jail guards who were let go.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
nder the headline “Voters Want Specifics From Kerry,” The Washington Post recently quoted a voter demanding that
Mr. Kerry proposes spending $650 billion extending health insurance to lower- and middle-income families. Whether you approve or not, you can’t say he hasn’t addressed the issue. Why hasn’t this voter heard about it?
Well, I’ve been reading 60 days’ worth of transcripts from the places four out of five Americans cite as where they usually get their news: the major cable and broadcast TV networks. Never mind the details - I couldn’t even find a clear statement that Mr. Kerry wants to roll back recent high-income tax cuts and use the money to cover most of the uninsured. When reports mentioned the Kerry plan at all, it was usually horse race analysis - how it’s playing, not what’s in it.
On the other hand, everyone knows that Teresa Heinz Kerry told someone to “shove it,” though even there, the context was missing. Except for a brief reference on MSNBC, none of the transcripts I’ve read mention that the target of her ire works for Richard Mellon Scaife, a billionaire who financed smear campaigns against the Clintons - including accusations of murder. (CNN did mention Mr. Scaife on its Web site, but described him only as a donor to “conservative causes.”) And viewers learned nothing about Mr. Scaife’s long vendetta against Mrs. Heinz Kerry herself.
by Greg Palast
[Boston] The millionaires are dancing now. The balloons are falling on John Kerry, John Edwards and their nuclear families.
They’re playing “Johnnie B. Goode” over the loudspeakers. Democrats are hopping up and down like JFK never went to Dallas; like Bill Clinton didn’t blow it for us; like there’s a chance to bring the boys home alive; like America can crawl out of Dick Cheney’s bunker and look at the sun again.
But has Johnnie Kerry been good so far?
He told us tonight about some poor bastard in Ohio whose job evaporated when his company unbolted the equipment and sent it south. Hey, Johnnie, didn’t you vote for NAFTA?
I applauded when he said the White House should stop treating teachers and school kids like fugitives from justice and help them out. But, Johnnie, didn’t you vote for George Bush’s “No Child’s Behind Left” assault on public education?
Then there was that little story meant to show us all he is a Man for All Seasons, above party politics. “I broke with many in my own party,” he said, “to vote for a balanced budget, because I thought it was the right thing to do.” No, John, it wasn’t. It was craven political cowardice, going with the anti-government hysteria that put a knife into the heart of the programs you cried over tonight.
He told us the sad story of the poor homeless guy huddled in front of the White House. Is this the same John Kerry that voted for Clinton’s welfare “reform”? That put a five-year limit on food stamps, making child starvation the law of the USA. At least Ronald Reagan offered ketchup as a vegetable.
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