Considering what a repugnantly amoral opportunist Chris Matthews is, he got off easy with Jon Stewart, who remains a voice for serious morality camouflaged in comedy. Stewart is to be commended for not being afraid to tackle these systemic topics. But being, after all, a corporate media figure, his is indeed a highwire act and the men behind the curtain, the top corporadoes, could easily tire of his jabs at the system and suddenly pull the rug from under him.

BY GREG MITCHELL

If you have ever bemoaned the turn Matthews — a former newspaperman — has taken in recent years, you have to check out what happened on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday night. Matthews called it “the worst interview ever.”

(October 03, 2007) — You may find this hard to believe, but there was a time when TV gasbag Chris Matthews was a respectable hard news reporter. He worked in Washington, D.C. for the San Francisco Examiner from 1987 to around 2000, and also wrote columns for the San Francisco Chronicle and others. But if you have ever bemoaned the turn his career took as an interviewer/talk show host – or if you just hate the inside-the-beltway mentality of many of our leading press and TV pundits – then you would have loved Jon Stewart’s dismantling of Matthews on “The Daily Show” last night (Oct. 2, 2007). Read the rest of this entry »

Marva group of Jewish-American adolescents playing soldiers, and receiving a dangerous bath of Zionist chauvinism and the “correctness” of violence to solve political issues.

BY CHRIS HEDGES

CROSSPOST: http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20071001_israels_toy_soldiers/ ||| Posted on Oct 1, 2007

If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist “madrassa,” or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace. Read the rest of this entry »

Vacant-brained Fred Thompson and his GOPer trophy wife. One of the most baffling things about evil is that it often assumes attractive packages.

BY MATT TAIBBI | Dateline: Sep 24 2007

I can say exactly when I first knew that Fred Dalton Thompson is dangerous. It is 12:07 p.m. on Sunday, September 9th, in Manchester, New Hampshire, just outside a restaurant called Chez Vachon. Thompson has just served up another mumbling, noncommittal tour through a packed diner of breakfasting locals, sitting glumly through the requisite this-sure-is-great-coffee shot. Then, once the needed photos are banked, the lumbering B-list character actor — who plays a video called “The Hunt for Red November” at every campaign stop and sells buttons that, in an unsettlingly McLuhanian twist, pimp him as the “Law and Order candidate” — tries to make a quick beeline back to his bus. But a cheeky local TV reporter shouts at him before he can reach the door. Read the rest of this entry »

The Iranian President at the United Nations.

COMMENTARY By Jerry Mazza /•\ Online Journal Associate Editor | Dateline: Sep 26, 2007 // Fraternal crosspost

The Ahmadinejad visit to New York provided the media and its associated political class with yet another feeding frenzy to exercise their well developed talent for high-handed hypocrisy. Obviously it helps when the target is long preceded by and shrouded in obstinate ignorance and consequent confusion in a culture where history is only of peripheral interest, and where vociferous Zionism has a de facto chokehold on almost all critical institutions—from Congress to the media, and certainly academia. It also doesn’t help matters much that the Iranian leader—like most US imperial targets—is scarcely adept at juggling the symbols of American propaganda, and is often quite skilled at shooting himself in the foot. Like many smaller-power leaders who stand in defiance to probably the most hypocritical empire on record, they do not seem to fully understand the importance of communicating clearly and forthrightly with the US public above and through the curtain of thick distortions certain to be deployed by the corporate media and professional politicians (two sides of the same coin). And therein they miss fine opportunities to neutralize at least some of the poison being continuously spread around by these agents of imperial propaganda as they character assassinate the leaders and cultures marked for eventual physical attacks. It’s high time these leaders made an effort to understand and master this very special but essential language that could—up to a point—lessen the probabilities of such an attack.—Eds.

Read the rest of this entry »

A creature of the system, a “mechanic” who knows how to work the machine, Bill Clinton has made a career of phoney populism all his life. He has successfully fooled a great may people while remaining sturdily on the center-right, what Beltway insiders like to call “the Third Way.” Unfortunately, fronting for a decomposing but still murderous capitalism is not the way to cure what ails America.

By David Nasaw
Dateline: Sunday, September 23, 2007 [Reproduced under Sec 17, US Code]
This piece suggested by and in simulpost at makingthemaccountable.com

“Giving,” Bill Clinton’s folksy first-person tour of worthy causes and the good people who support them, is so relentlessly upbeat that only the most churlish professor would say a discouraging word about the book. But the former president is so intent on celebrating 21st-century philanthropy — and highlighting his and Hillary’s role in promoting “the explosion of private citizens doing public good” — that he blithely ignores a hard reality: Philanthropy and democracy don’t get along nearly as seamlessly as “Giving” would have us believe. Read the rest of this entry »

Sheehan friends and relatives in demonstration in Virginia. Cindy presents a HUGE problem to the system’s apologists: a person of unshakable conviction who is firmly “on the left.” So far efforts at character assessination have failed, but should she gain public office, the most likely tack will be to kill her credibility with faint praise, suggesting she’s too “naive” about the world, she’s a one-trick pony, and so on. Media whores have their work cut out for them with Cindy.

BY CINDY SHEEHAN Dateline: September 19th, 2007

I am consistently amazed at things that right-wing nut jobs throw at me to justify their support of an unjustifiable war. Seriously, when you watch Generals, Ambassadors, Senators and Congress Reps and pundits who still cheerlead for a miserable, failed and murderous policy you can almost see the skepticism in their eyes, too. They know they are lying for their masters now, if they, like George and Dick didn’t always know they were lying. Read the rest of this entry »

BUSH UNMASKED, By Molly Ivins. FROM THE CLASSIC FILES OF ALLEN L ROLAND Dateline: Tuesday, September 18, 2007


“Out Bush murderer!” screams this billboard in Uruguay during Bush’s recent trip to Latin America. Apparently many foreigners see what “W” is all about better than many Americans.

It’s not that he’s mean. It’s just that when it comes to seeing how his policies affect people, George W. Bush doesn’t have a clue : —Molly Ivins

TO FULLY UNDERSTAND George W Bush ~ you must listen to fellow Texan and columnist Molly Ivins who interprets why George Bush ” is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people .” Read the rest of this entry »

EDITORS’ PREAMBLE: Boyish and all-American-looking GOP language whore Frank Luntz has perverted further (a feat in itself!) the sordid and utterly immoral “art” of political p.r. The raves he receives by fellow establishment whores like Time Magazine are eloquent commentary on how “American civilization” operates in corporate terms. On his own website, he touts his horn thusly:

“Frank Luntz is one of the most honored communication professionals in America today. “Time Magazine” named him one of “50 of America’s most promising leaders aged 40 and under” and he is the “hottest pollster” in America according to the “Boston Globe.” Frank was named one of the four “Top Research Minds” by Business Week and was the winner of the coveted Washington Post “Crystal Ball” award for being the most accurate pundit in 1992. Public Television’s Bill Moyers had this to say about Frank: “He’s a magician with a gift for the politics of words and what words best connect with the hearts and minds of the public.” Said comedian Al Franken: ” Asking Frank Luntz if he understands public opinion is like asking Julia Childs if she knows how to make a soufflé.” Read the rest of this entry »

BY STEVEN BEST

A “downed” cow dragged to slaughter. Transportation to the slaughterhouse is just the culmination of her awful fate. “Downers” are animals who have been severely injured or become ill in the process of being raised “for food.”

Other “downers”—this time a couple of hogs, one of which cannot stand at all, also waiting to be taken to the abattoir. How much suffering must transpire before humans start paying real attention to our species’ atrocious tyranny over fellow creatures? Although many will surely deny it, including quite a few on the Left, it’s clear that human supremacist attitudes easily qualify as the earliest and least recognized form for fascism. Factory farms, by treating living, breathing animals as mere cogs in an ruthless industrial profit machine, are one of its most obscene manifestations. How long are we going to allow this to go on?

“Animal liberation may sound more like a parody of other liberation movements than a serious objective.” —Peter Singer

“Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the `final frontier.’” —Robin Webb, British ALF Press Officer

Introduction: Framing the Unframed Issue

It seems lost on most of the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Left that there is a new liberation movement on the planet – animal liberation – that is of immense ethical and political significance. But because animal liberation challenges the anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist dogmas that are so deeply entrenched in socialist and anarchist thinking and traditions, Leftists are more likely to mock than engage it. Read the rest of this entry »

BY PETER SINGER
DATELINE: October 2006

Most factory-farmed animals are confined for life in completely unnatural surroundings, reduced to mere abstract units denied the status of living creatures, and manipulated relentlessly to maximize profits. Alongside Big Pharma, agribusiness is one of the most corrupting influences in American politics.

For low meat prices, the animals, the environment and rural neighborhoods pay steeply.

There is a growing consensus that factory farming of animals - also known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations - is morally wrong. The American animal rights movement, which in its early years focused largely on the use of animals in research, now has come to see that factory farming represents by far the greater abuse of animals. The numbers speak for themselves. In the United States somewhere between 20 million and 40 million birds and mammals are killed for research every year. That might seem like a lot - and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for their fur, let alone the relatively tiny number used in circuses - but 40 million represents less than two days’ toll in America’s slaughterhouses, which kill about 10 billion animals each year. Read the rest of this entry »