Category Archives: Media

Despicable GOP.

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No, I’m not just referring to the Republican Party’s current slate of presidential candidates – although they, alone, should be cause for derision. I’m referring to the Party’s ongoing disregard for ethics, human kindness and the Constitution.

Witness former Nixon administration staffer John Ehrlichman’s recent admission during an interview with Dan Baum for Harper’s about the war on drugs. As reported by Jezebel.com, Ehrlichman stated, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Disgusting as that is, the Nixon campaign’s actions regarding the Vietnam War were worse. It is now known that the campaign intentionally undermined the Paris peace talks to prevent the end of the war before the 1968 election. Of course, the Nixon campaign was also guilty of breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee to steal information that would help it win the campaign.

In other words, the GOP candidate was willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of US soldiers and subvert the electoral process in order to gain office.

The Nixon campaign’s actions lend credence to those who have charged that the Reagan campaign undermined President Carter’s negotiations with Iran for the release of our embassy hostages until after the 1980 election. They also add credibility to charges that, during the Reagan administration, the CIA ran an operation to sell drugs in black neighborhoods in order to finance the Contras in Central America. And those actions neatly align with what has been proven – that the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran in order to finance the Contras.

There’s more.

In response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was signed into law by a Democratic president, it is known that the Republican Party embraced southern racists to improve its ability to win elections. The Party created a war of “social values” (anti-abortion and anti-gay rights) in order to appeal to “Christian” evangelicals. It attacked labor unions to benefit its large corporate donors, and to deny campaign funds to Democratic candidates. It prioritized partisan ideology over respect for the law in its Supreme Court nominations ultimately resulting in a series of court decisions that led to a torrent of money to sway campaigns. And, as I’ve shown in my new book Antidote to Fact-Free Politics, the GOP used those ideological justices on the Supreme Court to quite literally steal the 2000 election from Al Gore.

Since that time, the GOP pursued an ill-advised and unnecessary war. It has resorted to unprecedented obstruction to thwart many of the objectives of the Obama administration. It has used its majorities in red states to gerrymander congressional districts in order to prevent them from ever electing Democrats. It has aligned with the Koch brothers, their billionaire allies, and large corporations to re-write state laws through the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in order to enact long-term change on behalf of corporate interests. And, despite no evidence of in-person voter fraud, it has imposed voter ID laws to disenfranchise poor and minority voters.

Yet, as the result of the propaganda originated by the RNC and broadcast by Fox News, rightwing radio and the ratings-driven mainstream media, many poor and middle class voters are convinced to vote Republican against their own self-interests.

Is it any wonder that our nation has officially become an oligarchy?

Exposing Republican Lies And The Failures Of A Compliant Media.

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I hope you will indulge me for promoting my new book, Antidote to Fact-Free Politics: Debunking the Falsehoods, Fabrications and Distortions Told by Conservatives and Perpetuated by the Media. It’s a culmination of months of research into the partisan lies that are unchallenged by the media, and repeated so often that they have become accepted as true.

The new book addresses 159 of these lies (I could easily have covered hundreds more) and refutes them with facts drawn almost entirely from government and nonpartisan sources. In fact, of the book’s 566 pages, 43 of them are devoted to references. Following is an excerpt taken from the Foreword that may better explain the book’s purpose:

“Why were Democrats unable to leverage the Bush failures and the resulting Great Recession into a majority that lasted at least through two terms of the Obama presidency?

Republicans would have you believe that it is because President Obama was a failure – the worst president in US history. They claimed that the President and a compliant Democratic-controlled Congress were leading the US down a path toward oblivion. Yet, by every objective measure, based on studies by world-renowned economists, the Obama administration was wildly successful in steering the economy back onto firm footing even as much of the world continued to struggle.

Certainly, the Democratic National Committee has to assume some responsibility for the GOP’s resilience. It has failed to create a brand message that clearly and succinctly states the Democratic Party’s core beliefs. As a result, it has had difficulty communicating with voters, and it has been unable to unite the diverse groups and interests that comprise its membership. In fact, the Party seems to foolishly pride itself on living up to the long-ago quote by humorist Will Rogers, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

But the lack of branding, alone, does not explain what has happened in recent years. The truth of the matter is that Republicans have a number of structural advantages, including financial support from billionaires and many of the world’s largest corporations. They have an impressive number of litigation-minded “think tanks” determined to shape policy. Until recently, they enjoyed a majority in the US Supreme Court. They benefit from a network of media outlets that allow them to dominate media and control the message. In addition, over the past several decades, they have focused on building an advantage at the state and local level through gerrymandering and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that writes legislation on behalf of corporate sponsors, peddling it to its many conservative legislative members.

In January of 2009, on the very day that President Obama was being sworn into office, Republicans began exploiting all of these advantages in their attempts to undermine the new president and the newly-elected Democratic Congress. Republican congressional leaders agreed to block and filibuster every Democratic initiative in order to make Barack Obama a one-term president. In doing so, they rendered Congress gridlocked and led voters to believe that Democrats were ineffectual.

At the same time, Republican representatives and former Bush officials flooded Sunday morning news shows to peddle a combination of distortions, fabrications and lies – lies that were seldom challenged by the shows’ moderators. The pundits on Fox News Channel repeated the same lies and more. They questioned the President’s birthplace, his religion and his patriotism, not to mention his policies. Talk radio, which has long been dominated by rightwing radio hosts, did the same, often going much farther. They called him a fascist, a socialist, a communist, even a racist. The rightwing blogosphere was worse, offering “proof” that the President was a Muslim interloper determined to destroy the US.

The performance by this combination of ideological zealots, demagogues and cynical opportunists would have made Richard Nixon and his “plumbers” of Watergate fame proud. And it has worked.

In this book, I strive to expose the lies. In doing so, I have relied on a combination of government reports, fact-checking organizations, peer-reviewed academic studies, investigative news reports and government statistics. Bear in mind that Republicans have also used statistics to bolster their narrative. But how you parse the numbers matters. For example, if you judge the Obama administration’s economic policies based on spending and unemployment numbers from the day President Obama took office, you would conclude that he has overspent and underperformed. In fact, that’s what his opponents want you to do. But if you consider what he inherited and the difficulties he faced – a failed economy, high unemployment and a Middle East embroiled in war – and then adjust the numbers accordingly, you will see quite a different picture.”

The book covers a wide range of subject matter ranging from lies about African-Americans to lies about war, and virtually everything in between. If you care about the future of our nation, indeed the future of our planet, I hope you will check it out.

Trump Is Only A Symptom Of A More Serious Condition.

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The success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign should come as no surprise to anyone. It has been in the making since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed during the George H.W. Bush administration. That seemingly innocuous decision meant that US broadcast media no longer had to operate in the public interest. No longer held accountable to broadcast the truth, the radio airwaves were quickly dominated by rightwing conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Within a few years, more than 90 percent of talk radio was devoted to angry, hateful radio hosts telling the public that the government was too big, taxes were too high and liberals were wasting your money. These people treated politics as entertainment – the more hateful and bombastic they became, the higher their ratings.

Seizing on the opportunity that hate radio created, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes created a cable TV version called Fox News Channel. Scarcely trying to disguise its partisanship, Fox became a vocal and very angry arm of the Republican National Committee. Ailes handed out Republican talking points at the beginning of each day, and the on-air hosts repeated them verbatim. Most of the network guests were Republicans, and if Democrats dared to appear on the network in order to correct the record, they were angrily shouted down…a tactic epitomized by a program host who lost custody of his children after grabbing his wife by the throat and dragging her down the stairs.

Fox News helped to create and promote the Tea Party, inflating the numbers of demonstrators while, at the same time, dismissing the racist rhetoric. The network took the side of those who brought guns to the demonstrations and threatened to “exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.” The network ramped up racist remarks surrounding the police killings of unarmed blacks – even that of a 12-year-old boy whose “crime” was playing with a toy gun. It supported virulent anti-government groups, such as those surrounding Cliven Bundy. And for more than 7 years, its program hosts have verbally attacked our president and celebrated the obstruction of his policies and court nominees.

Is it any wonder, then, that the same sort of hateful discourse has now permeated the Republican debates?

Donald Trump and his supporters have simply repeated what the rightwing media have been saying all along. They are immune to facts and the truth. They don’t care about policy discussions. Trump’s political movement is all about emotion – the emotions of anger and hate.

For its part, the Republican Party has reveled in the obstruction and destruction aimed at Democrats. Only now that it has become a very real possibility that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination and potentially destroy the “Grand Old Party;” only now that the polls have shown that either Democratic candidate could defeat Trump, has the Party establishment become concerned.

But Trump is not the only potential problem. The rhetoric and actions of the other Republican candidates are just as ugly and just as hateful. They all portray an America few people recognize. They all feed off of the anger created and promoted by the media. They all act as if the political campaign is little more than a made-for-TV reality show with all of the substance and thoughtfulness of Honey Boo-Boo. And though such candidates are good for network ratings, any of them would be disastrous for the future of our nation and the world, if for no other reason than the fact that none of them recognize the impending disaster otherwise known as climate change.

We can only hope that voters repudiate the hate. We should hope that the Republican nominee is defeated in a landslide. Elections should be about policies and leadership. Not about ratings.

Okay, GOP. Now What?

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The past weekend’s results in South Carolina and the suspension of Jeb! Bush’s campaign leaves only one GOP candidate with the credentials to be president…John Kasich. And though he is extreme enough to collect the votes of some conservatives, he has little chance of winning.

The only candidates who have a real chance of winning the GOP nomination are a bombastic bully (Donald Trump) who could be the first candidate to actually make money in pursuit of the nomination; a theocratic snake (Ted Cruz) whose unusual version of Christianity led him to call for the indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities; and a remote-controlled robot (Marco Rubio) who takes direction from Glenn Beck and the same group of neo-con warmongers who manipulated the government under George W. Bush.

None of the three has the qualifications to hold the world’s most powerful office. Moreover, they all promise what they can and will do while offering few details of how they will do it. Little wonder. The few detailed plans they have offered are completely unworkable. For example, the tax plans put forward by the top 3 candidates would dramatically escalate both the deficit and national debt. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, Trump’s plan would add $11.2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Cruz’s plan would add $10.2 trillion to the national debt. And Rubio’s plan would add a mere $8.2 trillion.

And these are the so-called conservatives?!! By comparison the current president they all hate so much is a piker…a true skinflint.

In addition, the GOP candidates would repeal Obamacare, once again making healthcare unaffordable for tens of millions of Americans. All of them would ignore climate change. Two of the Republican leaders claim they would deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. One (Trump) would ban Muslims from the US – a promise that appealed to 75 percent of the registered Republicans in South Carolina. Is it any wonder then that he won the primary?

For today’s GOP, it’s obvious that facts, truth, constitutionality and morality no longer matter. Instead of appealing to voters’ intellect, these candidates have chosen to appeal to emotions…specifically the emotions of hate and fear. Of course, if you have been paying attention to rightwing radio, Fox News Channel and Republican campaigns for the past several decades, that will come as no surprise.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress and rightwing media have done their best to destroy one of the most qualified presidential candidates. They continue to attack Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server while serving as Secretary of State. Never mind that her immediate predecessors also used private servers and received classified emails. Never mind that she has been cleared of any wrongdoing by the State Department and the FBI. She must have done something wrong if she is a Democrat who worked for President Obama. And Bernie Sanders? Even though he has been largely ignored by the media, he’s a Socialist Democrat! What more do you need to know? And though Republicans have not bothered to attack him, Hillary’s campaign and her surrogates have. Four of Bill Clinton’s economic advisers have pronounced Sanders’ plans as unaffordable. But wait! Other economists, including Robert Reich, Labor Secretary under President Clinton have endorsed Sanders’ plans, saying they could not only work, his universal health plan alone could save trillions of dollars.

But what are you going to trust? The facts and reason? Or your emotions and the lying Republicans?

The Hoax That Won’t Go Away.

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Following the release of videos showing Planned Parenthood employees discussing fetal tissue donations, rightwing politicians continue to call for defunding Planned Parenthood. Even though the videos have been discredited as fraudulently-edited and obtained under false pretenses, and even though defunding the organization would deny healthcare to thousands of women, the ginned-up controversy won’t go away.

Why? The controversy is being fueled by rightwing media, including Fox News Channel. They apparently see abortion as a wedge issue for the 2016 elections – particularly since they are likely to face the nation’s first serious female presidential candidate.

We’ve seen this drama play out before. A surreptitious and unscrupulous right wing group lies to gain access to an organization. Then it edits the videos to portray that organization in a false manner. The Republicans in Congress become outraged – outraged I say – and demand that the organization be stripped of all federal funds. Then, sometime later, it is proven that the videos were fraudulent, but it doesn’t matter, because the damage has been done.

It happened to ACORN. It happened to Shirley Sherrod of the Department of Agriculture. And it happened to the NAACP.

Now it’s Planned Parenthood that’s in the Republican crosshairs despite the fact that, according to a 2013 Gallup Poll, 53 percent of Americans support legal abortions, while only 29 percent oppose the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. But the will of the people seldom matters to the Republican ideologues. Neither do the rights of women and minorities.

In reality, Planned Parenthood operates more than 700 healthcare clinics nationwide. Abortion represents only 3 percent of the organization’s activities. It does not sell fetal tissue. But, in some states, it does permit women to donate fetal tissue in order to help them make the best of a bad situation. The majority of Planned Parenthood’s work consists of family planning, STD prevention and treatment, and primary medical care. Its clinics are an important part of the nation’s healthcare system. Without them, many families would have to travel long distances for care or be denied care altogether.

Nevertheless, in their continuing attempts to divide the nation in order to gain votes while depressing votes for their opponents, Republicans are willing to put all of that at risk. That’s why they continue to incite the uninformed and the misinformed with continuing attacks. It’s a hateful and cynical strategy.

Let’s make sure it’s also a failed strategy.

“Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

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As a result of our on-going fight with ISIS, the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, and hateful, uniformed statements by Donald Trump, the amount of anger toward Muslims has increased. Mostly, it’s based on religious differences combined with gross misunderstanding. For example, a post has begun circulating on Facebook asking “Can a good Muslim be a good American?”

You may as well ask, “Can a good Christian be a good American?”

In fact, the same question could be asked of a follower of any faith. After all, virtually every system of faith has its share of fundamentalists who are prone to terroristic acts. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan has long operated under the veil (or, more properly, the hood) of Christianity.

Disregarding recent research that shows atheists act more ethically and “morally” than those who profess to be religious, let’s examine the claims made by the Facebook author in the text of the post:

The post claims that a Muslim cannot be a good American because no other religion is accepted by His Allah except Islam (Quran, 2:256). If that’s the case, what about Exodus 34:14 of the Christian Bible? It reads: “Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.”

The Facebook post claims that allegiance to Islam forbids Muslims from making friends with Christians or Jews. Since all three religions stem from Abraham, this is patently absurd. Moreover, some of history’s most tolerant rulers were Muslim.

The post claims that Muslims must “must submit to the mullahs (spiritual leaders), who teach annihilation of Israel and destruction of America, the great Satan.” Such beliefs are only taught in the most radical madrasas – most of them based on Wahabism, an extreme and virulent form of Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia. It is this form of Islam that is the basis of ISIS. It should be noted that there are equally intolerant forms of Christianity and Judaism. But Americans don’t treat all Christians and Jews in the same way we currently treat Muslims.

The post claims that Muslim men are “instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him (Quran 4:34).” There are also passages in the Bible and the Torah, which if taken literally, permit or encourage equally troubling and socially-unacceptable behavior, such as slavery. For example, Exodus 21:7 states, “If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do.” And Exodus 31:15 orders those who work on the Sabbath to be stoned. Leviticus 19:28 bans tattoos. And Leviticus 19:19 bans the wearing of garments made of fabric blends.

The Facebook post claims that a Muslim “cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.” First, the Constitution was not based on Biblical principles any more than it was based on Quranic principles. It was based on reason. Second, the Quran declares the Bible to be a true revelation of God and demands faith in the Bible (Sura 2:40-42,126,136,285; 3:3,71,93; 4:47,136; 5:47-51, 69,71-72; 6:91; 10:37,94; 21:7; 29:45,46; 35:31; 46:11). Third, Muslims accept Jesus as a prophet. However, Christians do not acknowledge the Prophet Muhammad.

Finally, the post claims that democracy and Islam cannot co-exist, since every Muslim government is either dictatorial or autocratic. It is true that some Muslim governments are theocracies. But many have at least some form of democracy, including Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Pakistan, Palestine, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, and Turkey. Further, recent history has seen many authoritarian Christian nations such as Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. And one could reasonably argue that Israel is not a true democracy, as it denies rights to Palestinians and claims to be a Jewish state.

The point is, no one benefits by making false claims about race and religion; making generalizations about large groups of people; or denying respect to others. As Rodney King said during the 1992 riots over his treatment by police, “Can’t we all just get along?”

The Attempted Destruction Of A Candidate.

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Since she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has been the presumptive Democratic nominee for the office of president. And, of course, that has made her the prime target for Teapublican attacks. There is simply no other explanation for the continued investigation into the attack on our Benghazi consulate. In fact, few other incidents in US history have received such scrutiny. Not the attack on a Marine base in Lebanon during the Reagan administration. Not the sale of weapons to Iran during the Iran-Contra scandal under Reagan. Not the attacks on 9/11 during the Bush administration. Not even the run-up to our invasion of Iraq on false pretenses.

For nearly 3 years, there has been a near constant drumbeat of rumors and accusations by Teapublicans over the Benghazi attack. Only Obamacare has been the subject of more Teapublican rants than Benghazi. We even have a select congressional committee on Benghazi. Yet, despite no evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary or anyone in the Obama administration, the “scandal” persists. Indeed, it has grown into “e-mailgate” over Clinton’s decision to use her own e-mail and her husband’s computer server, instead of the one provided for her by the State Department.

Was she trying to hide something? Did she illegally use her husband’s server to receive and send classified information? Could the server have been hacked? More to the point, was she trying to hide what really happened at Benghazi from Teapublican congressmen?

Multiple investigations have proven that the answer to all of those questions is an emphatic no!

Clinton provided all of her e-mails from the server regarding State Department business – more than 30,000 – which have been poured over by the FBI and still there is no evidence of wrongdoing. But the purported scandal will not go away. It continues to expand. Each and every day, the so-called “liberal” media publish yet another story of a new Teapublican allegation. Now the FBI has been given access to all of Clinton’s personal e-mails. Of course, this is exactly what Teapublicans have been fishing for.

Be prepared for her private e-mails to be leaked to Teapublicans and then to the Press. Anything that can possibly be portrayed as negative, deceitful or unethical will show up in the media. And, if there happens to be one e-mail that can be construed as a “bombshell,” it will be released next summer during the peak of the presidential campaign.

We’ve seen this act before.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president, there were numerous allegations and investigations into Whitewater, an ill-fated investment in which Republicans claimed that the Clintons had defrauded other investors, but, in fact, the Clintons lost money themselves. That “scandal” was followed by Troopergate, Fostergate, Billarygate and numerous other “gates.” All of them were simply fishing expeditions to find dirt on the Clintons. Only after expending 6-7 years and more than $70 million, did Republicans finally strike paydirt when Monica Lewinsky’s friend outed her relationship with Clinton leading to a congressionally-appointed Special Prosecutor who was freed to dig into every corner and crevice of the Clintons’ lives.

In fact, the Republican obsession had little to do with the Clintons themselves. Like the elephant that serves as the Republican logo, Republicans have long memories. They are still looking for payback over the threatened impeachment and resignation of Richard Nixon. They first tried to pin a scandal on Jimmy Carter and settled for the Iran hostage crisis which was extended by Reagan’s treasonous agreement with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the presidential elections. They tried to pin anything and everything on Bill Clinton. And they failed at painting Barack Obama as a radical Muslim Kenyan unqualified to hold the office.

Now they’ve turned their attention to Hillary.

Of course, the Teapublicans could not have any success with such manufactured scandals if not for a compliant, corrupt and lazy Press; a Press that is all too happy to fawn over every bombastic word that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth; a Press that happily publishes accusations leveled at Hillary without any attempt to research the accusations and to put them into context.

For example, did you know that Hillary was not legally bound to use a government e-mail server? Did you know that the State Department’s server was hacked while Clinton’s remained secure? (It is, after all, a server shared with a former president of the United States.) Did you know that the previous two Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, also used private e-mail accounts while in office? And did you know that Karl Rove and the Bush administration funneled millions of e-mails regarding government business through a server owned by the Republican National Committee and, when asked to produce those e-mails, erased them?

Where was the outrage then? Where were the congressional investigations? Where was the Press?

When Journalism Becomes Propaganda.

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Where do you go for news? Do you rely on a single source? Do you read beyond the headlines? Do you take the time to explore beyond the sound bites? Do you take the time to fact check statements by politicians? Do you check the veracity of chain emails and posts on social media?

Most people realize that news media can be biased. But do you know the extent of media bias? Of the 152 Fox News Channel statements checked by Politifact.com, 118 (77%) were found to be half true, mostly false, false or pants on fire lies. And, of the 21 statements made by Rush Limbaugh, none were true. Most other conservative radio hosts fare no better. Yet these people represent more than 90 percent of talk radio.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to any but the most partisan among us.

And if you think the mainstream media are liberal, you’ve been listening to far too many conservatives. Studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of the guests invited to appear on the Sunday morning network news shows are conservative. Most newscasts and newspapers are no better. Even when the media try to be objective they fail. What passes for journalistic objectivity these days consists of presenting both the Teapublican and Democratic sides of an issue. There are seldom any follow-up questions. No attempt to provide context. No attempt to get at the truth.

In states like Arizona, the only way a Democrat can make headlines is if he or she gets caught doing something wrong. Yet the same media constantly cover and promote conservative initiatives and points of view. The same is true for stories about government entities, such as the VA or the EPA. The media love to portray the government as the enemy. As mentioned in a previous post, most media reported on the toxic spill in the Animas River. But few took the time or effort to find out the causes for the spill and to put it into context with regard to other environmental accidents. For most media, the fact that the spill was caused by a contractor working for the EPA – the agency that is supposed to protect the environment – was the story. The entire story.

You can see the same mentality at work with regard to the Hillary Clinton email “scandal.” Almost all of the media have led with the story. But how many have mentioned that Clinton did nothing illegal? How many have mentioned that when Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were Secretaries of State, they also used private email servers? How many have mentioned that the Bush White House funneled emails through the Republican National Committee’s email server, then deleted more than 20 million emails after they were requested by Congress to learn more about the outing of Valerie Plame and the run-up to the Iraq War?

You can also see conservative bias in the time and space devoted to coverage of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They have similar poll numbers. Yet, even though Bernie Sanders has drawn larger crowds, Sanders is largely ignored while Trump is constantly in the headlines. The problem is made worse by the news editors’ desire to promote ratings or readership. Donald Trump is a celebrity. Bernie Sanders is not.

And, as long as we’re on the subject of polls, never underestimate how the media can influence issues by the way they ask questions. For example, CNN recently asked half of its poll respondents if Congress should approve or reject the Iran deal. At the same time, CNN asked the other half how they felt about a deal that would place major restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and greater international inspection of Iran’s nuclear facilities. CNN chose only to report the results to the first question which showed that a majority think Congress should reject the deal. It chose not to report the results to the second question which showed that the majority was in favor of the deal.

Only 6 companies now own the vast majority of television networks and cable or satellite carriers. 5 corporations control the majority of radio. 5 corporations control most large newspapers. And 5 corporations control a huge portion of online media. These corporations have one agenda – to make money. They demand higher ratings and greater numbers of subscribers. If it serves their interests to distort the news in order to increase those ratings, they’ll do it. And, these days, people want to hear from angry conservatives. They want to blame their problems on undocumented immigrants. They want to read stories about an out-of-control government. Who cares if the stories are unfair and untrue?

Yet, if our news media are not accurate and fair; if they do not provide context; if they prioritize facts over truth; if they are swayed by ratings, they do not practice journalism. They are merely engaging in propaganda. And if you rely on them to make decisions, you are a victim of that propaganda. So is our nation.

You simply can’t sit back and expect the media to inform you. You have to work at it. It may be frustrating and sometimes boring work. But, with the availability of online news sources and fact-checkers, it’s not that difficult. After all, our nation was founded on the expectation of an informed voting public. Indeed, it is the most important principle on which the nation was built.

Gold King Mine Spill: What The Headlines Don’t Tell You.

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If you’ve seen the headlines, you no doubt “know” that the EPA unintentionally caused the spill of more than 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into the scenic Animas River. With great glee, the so-called liberal media announced that the Environmental Protection Agency was responsible for polluting our environment.

But wait! There’s more to the story that the majority of the media haven’t covered.

There are tens of thousands of mines in Colorado and other states that are disasters waiting to happen. Most of these mines were abandoned by their owners after the ore ran out leaving them as ticking time bombs for the public to clean up. And it’s not just old mines which were dug in the 1800s. The Gold King Mine, while no longer operational, was depleted in the 1990s. And the Sunnyside Mine, which was leaking about 200 gallons of toxic water into the Gold King before the spill, is currently owned and operated by a Canadian company.

The two mines had become such a threat to the Animas River, the EPA had wanted to declare the area a superfund site, designated for extensive cleanup. But, worried about the impact on tourism, Silverton and San Juan County apparently asked the EPA for permission to quietly conduct the cleanup themselves. When they failed, the EPA stepped in last Fall. But since it was too late in the season, the EPA hired a contractor to seal the Gold King Mine. When they came back to unseal the mine and to contain the polluted water with a plastic liner, the dam holding back the water failed.

So the EPA, which is underfunded and under constant attack from conservatives who despise any form of regulation, is being blamed for the damage. How convenient for the right wing oligarchs!

After a constant drumbeat of hate directed toward the EPA and constant threats to further cut its funding, the GOP with help from the media finally found the story it was looking for…a story that would embarrass the EPA and turn the public against it. After all, who reads beyond the headlines? Who cares about another government agency? Who remembers what the country was like before the EPA; when the corporations were free to pollute without control; when the air in our cities became almost too toxic to breathe; when the chemicals in the Cuyahoga River caught on fire thirteen times?

Never mind that the EPA has become one of the nation’s most effective watchdogs to protect us from the greedy corporations defiling our air, water and food. Never mind that it does so against overwhelming odds – unable to hire enough regulators to oversee thousands of polluting corporations and individuals. Never mind that, prior to the Gold King spill, the EPA had cleaned up roughly 9,000 polluted mines in Colorado alone.

The EPA and one of its private contractors had an accident. Let’s crucify them. Not those responsible for creating the problem in the first place.

The US Is No Longer A Democracy. Here’s How It Happened.

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Last year, a study from Princeton and Northwestern universities, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens,” concluded that the US government no longer represents the interests of the majority of the nation’s citizens. Instead, it panders to the rich and powerful.

In other words, the US has become an oligarchy defined as a government by the few, a small group that exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.

More recently, President Jimmy Carter, commenting on how big money has subverted our elections, said, “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations.”

The US didn’t become an oligarchy by accident. We got here as the result of a long list of political decisions designed to pander to the wealthy and the powerful. Here’s how:

During the 1800s, the US went from a largely agrarian society to a society based on the industrial revolution. This created some extremely wealthy individuals often referred to as the “Robber Barons,” who took advantage of cheap labor created by the influx of immigrants. They paid little and subjected their employees to horrific working conditions. During this so-called Gilded Age, the wealthy chose the candidates and ran the nation until the masses began to rebel.

In the early 1900s, the Gilded Age ended when workers began to unionize. The wealthy responded by hiring the police and ex-military (the American Legion) to break the labor strikes by bashing some heads. In reality, it was America’s second civil war.

When the Great Depression struck, the nation moved even further toward socialism which caused the wealthy to try to arrange the assassination of President Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, many of the industrialists wanted the nation’s government to reflect the fascist governments of Italy and Germany. Their agenda was interrupted with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, World War II and the revelations of the Nazi death camps. And they were forced to accept the will of the masses until the 1970s when President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew attacked the new media in order to deflect criticism of their policies.

By raising questions about the objectivity of the media which were embraced by conservatives, it set the stage (intentionally or not) for the Reagan administration and its economic policy of “Trickle Down” theory. This was nothing more than a return to the “Horse and Sparrow” economics of the gilded age, during which government policies were carefully crafted to benefit the wealthy under the theory that if you feed enough oats (money) to the horses (the wealthy) enough will fall on the road to feed the sparrows (the masses).

Reagan portrayed the government and its regulation of industry as the enemy. He attacked labor unions. He lowered taxes for the wealthy. He increased the amount of money exempted from estate taxes. He deregulated the media by eliminating the Fairness Doctrine which held media accountable to serve in the public interest. And he lowered capital gains taxes, which allowed the wealthy to keep more of their primary sources of income – interest and dividends from investments.

With the wealthy allowed to accumulate more money, labor unions on the defensive and an emasculated press, the table was set for the oligarchs. All of this was made worse by Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed who showed the Republican National Committee that it could thrive by eliminating compromises from our political discussions and treating politics as war – a blood sport. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich took congressional dysfunction a step further by transforming the GOP into a parliamentary-style party in which the entire Party is unified on every vote. If you dare to break ranks with Party, you are punished in the next primary and election.

Add to all of this the more than $28 billion lobbying industry, which is financed almost exclusively by the rich and the powerful, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which writes laws on behalf of its corporate sponsors then hands them to its conservative members to sponsor in their state legislatures where the bills are often passed with little discussion or examination, and the George W. Bush administration which cut income taxes for the rich by 4.6 percent and all but eliminated the estate tax.

The last major player is the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, which by 3 decisions (Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United v FEC and McCutcheon v FEC) unleashed a torrent of money in campaign donations from the oligarchs. So much so, that candidates should have to wear NASCAR-style uniforms with labels of their sponsors. Indeed, of the nearly $400 million donated to presidential candidates so far this year, nearly half has come from fewer than 400 families!

Given all of this, no election in our history has been as critical as next year’s. We can either continue further down the road of oligarchy by electing candidates who try to divide us over social issues while pandering to the wealthy. Or we can elect candidates of change – real change. Candidates who will put the power of the government back in the hands of the people.

That’s why I support Bernie Sanders.