I seldom cast stones at the main stream media, but they have earned this rock.
Most of the stones cast at them are not cast at news reporting, but at opinion columnists. Opinion columnists trade in, natch, opinions, and they have the right to be stupid mistaken (though, damn! I’d love to have a job where I could get paid large sums of money for being consistently, repeatedly, continuously wrong, wrong, wrong, but then I’m neither Tom Friedman nor the CEO of Citibank).
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times broke the story that many of the persons who posed as “military analysts” for various media outlets were in the pocket of the Pentagon and likely spouting the Bushie line in their “analyses.”
If you wanted more, you pretty much had to listen to NPR or read the left blogosphere.
The story has been pretty much ignored by those media organs implicated in that same story.
Who woulda thunk?
Glenn Greenwald has addressed it in great depth here and here.
But in the print and broadcast media? Nada. Zilch. Nil.
The bottom line is that the Bushies pressured persons to lie to the public about what was going on in Iraq and implied that their sources of income would be jeopardized if they did not toe the Republican Party line.
This week, On the Media interviewed one of these analysts who who found his role as Bushie toadie to be–er–uncomfortable. From the website:
Sounds good. But McCain failed to mention how existing employer-sponsored health benefits would be affected.
Employers could no longer deduct the cost of health plans for their workers, which several experts say is likely to cause companies to reduce or eliminate health benefits for their employees.
Workers would be taxed on the value of any employer-paid health benefits, partially offsetting the $5,000 credit for those now covered by such plans.
The aim of the McCain plan is to reduce health care costs through increased competition, by encouraging individuals to shop around for health insurance and medical care. There are many who favor such an approach, and we take no position on it one way or the other. But McCain’s simplistic ad misleads viewers by promising to give “every American family” a $5,000 benefit while failing to mention what he would also take away.
As I pointed out shortly after I started this blogging thingee, competition and health care are incompatible. Sick people are just not in the position to shop around for health care. They go where their doctors send them and do what their doctors tell them to do.
This could more properly be called the Rich Insurance Company Preservation Proposal.
God help that the rich should fail to get richer, while the middle class and the poor are still there to get poorer.
This is not the recipe to which I linked in this post. This is the recipe I used, Craig Claiborne’s recipe from the 1971 New York Times International Cookbook, the best cookbook ever written.
As with any of Craig Claiborne’s recipes, it is to die for. We verified that tonight.
Ingredients:
3lbs. Bottom round of beef (I used 2 lbs. chuck roast)
3 tablespoons black peppercorns
1 tablespoon mustard seeds (I substituted horseradish because I had no mustard seeds and didn’t want to go back to the store, and the Internet told me I could use horseradish)
25 whole cloves
25 bay leaves (only had six and some flakes)
3 large onions peeled and sliced (I used only two, because I was using less beef)
2 cups wine vinegar
1/4 cup butter
salt to taste (I used about 1/4 tsp. sea salt)
6 slices bacon (I used five, because that was all I needed to cover everything fully)
beef stock
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1/4 cup cold water
2 to 3 tablespoons heavy cream
1. The meat must be marinated three days in advance. Trim off most of the fat from the beef, then cut the beef into six large chunks. Select a glass, enamel, or stainless steel bowl large enough to the been comfortably. Combine the peppercorns, mustard seeds, cloves, bay leaves, onions, and vinegar and pour all of it over the beef. Refrigerate for 3 days.
2. When ready to cook, preheat oven to 400 degrees.
3. Melt the butter in a casserole.
4. Drain the meat and reserve both the meat and half the marinade with the seasonings.
5. Place the meat in the casserole and add the reserved liquid and seasonings. Add slat to taste. Place the casserole, uncovered, in the oven. Cook about one hour, then reduce the heat to 300 degrees.
6. Turn the meat in the liquid and cover each piece of meat with bacon. Continue cooking about one hour, or until the meat is tender. Remove the bacon and discard it. Cook the meat about ten minutes longer, then transfer to a warm platter and strain the cooking liquid. Discard the solids. To the cooking liquid add enough beef stock to make four cups. (I made three cups because of the smaller quantity of beef.)
7. Return the meat to a clean casserole and add the liquid. Bring to a boil. Blend the flour with the cold water and add it to the boiling liquid, stirring. Simmer about five minutes, adding more salt, if desired. Stir in the cream. Serve hot, with noodles, dumplings, or potatoes. (We served it with rice. I know, thanks to Bush and his ethanol scam, once we run out of rice, we won’t be able to afford any more.)
Now that the nomination process for the Republicans is over, McCain is running and hiding from what he said on his quest for the nomination. He’s no Horton the Elephant–but, then, we have already established that “Horton the Elephant could not have been a Republican.
He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it’s okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there’s little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that.
(snip)
The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn’t change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.
So, Frawley did what any concerned citizen does — he posted a video on YouTube two weeks ago, containing still photos of moldy ceiling panels, broken toilet seats, backed up sewage water flooding a bathroom, exposed pipes — and demanded that viewers contact their congressmen.
I was at the dentist’s today have a temporary cap replaced with a (what I hope will be a) permanent one.
Unfortunately, in this case, my dentist is very good. The temporary cap fit so perfectly that it didn’t want to break free and come out.
The tech wiggled it and wiggled it. No go.
It wasn’t very pleasant, because, as she wiggled the cap, the tooth rocked back and forth. The tooth itself didn’t hurt, but the rocking did. I nearly crushed my cell phone, which I was holding in my hands.
Finally, she said, “I’m not trying to hurt you” and called in reinforcements.
I said, “That’s okay. I know you aren’t working for Dick Cheney.”
In an obvious effort to distinguish himself from Bush, McCain describes himself as “realistic idealist.” Yet his speeches and comments reveal a disturbing lack of realism about the world, especially the Middle East.
(snip)
Has the Arizona senator not noticed the world has changed since George W. made similar pronouncements at the turn of the century? The illusion that America alone can shape the globe should have passed.
(snip)
Yet, when McCain lays out how he’d exercise American power in Iraq and elsewhere, he seems unaware of the consequences of seven years of Bush policies.
I also prepared a ratatouille for tomorrow (again, not the linked recipe). It’s sort of a vegetable casserole with aubergine, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, onions, and assorted other stuff. Takes about half an hour to cut everything up and about an hour of messing about with the ingredients before it’s ready to go into the fridge for tomorrow.
I spent all afternoon slaving over a hot stove. So Linda cooked supper.
“For the record, we invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC to participate but they declined our offer or did not respond.”
John Stauber, coauthor of Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, contended that the Pentagon’s “surrogate” program violated federal law against domestic propaganda and called for a congressional investigation. “This war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign,” he said. Former ABC correspondent Bob Zelnick largely defended the program as standard operating procedure–an odd claim since the administration went to court to prevent its disclosure. Zelnick did concede, however, that news organizations should disclose more about military analysts’ conflicts of interest when they provide commentary.
What the hell kind of kids are we raising if we sedate them with movies on long drives, rather than letting the little bastards darlings fight it out like God intended? Siblings are supposed to hate each other. It makes the love they feel for each other when they grow up so much more precious.
How will they learn to deal with adversity when they don’t even learn to deal with their brothers and sisters?
Dammit. My parents knew enough to point to the center seam in the seat covers (okay, so seat covers don’t have seams any more–there’s always masking tape) and say, “Stay on your side.” And my brother and I still haven’t killed each other.
Yet.
Christalmighty, I drove 31 days and 7100 miles about the country in a van filled with three kids and with no DVD player and, you know what? we made it home.
(We didn’t like each other any more, but we made it home with no fatalities.)
Generation of wusses.
Not the kids.
The parents.
Who have to sedate their kids with Disney rather than deal with them.
If you can keep running when all about you
Are afraid of losing and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself alone when your party doubts you
And trusts another far more, too,
If you can wait for superdelegates to turn,
Lying will help, there’s no harm in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give a damn about haters,
But don’t hesitate to feign hurt, and sometimes cry:
If you can bowl–and not make the blue collar your master,
If you can do shots–and not lose your game;
If you can sit down with both Russert and Blitzer
And charm those two jagoffs to advance your aims;
If you can bear to hear your name cursed
By the best in the the party you claim to love,
And watch that party become rent and broken,
And laugh as you focus on rising above:
If you can talk with crowds, yet remember CEOs own you,
Or sit on Wal-Mart’s board, yet charm union bigs
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If you can screw them all just for the top gig,
If you can destroy the progressive movement
With a rank selfishness borne of certainty,
Yours is the donkey and what’s left of its carcass,
And–which is all that matters–you’ll be the nominee!
To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, “Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?”
She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn’t get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.
Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others “tolerated communists”. Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein’s sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)
All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn’t she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn’t the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn’t the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?
It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.
