Category: News & Comment

GOP Revives Gingrich Era Efforts to ‘Kill Big Bird’

Jon Ponder

In a replay of a Gingrich era attempt to stifle open discourse and to end programs that educate poor children, the House subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education voted to de-fund public broadcasting. According to the San Franciso Chronicle:

A House subcommittee voted Thursday to sharply reduce the federal government’s financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children’s educational programs as “Sesame Street” and “Arthur.”

In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which passes federal funds to public broadcasters — starting with a 25 percent reduction for next year, from $400 million to $300 million.

The move may have been pre-saged by a “Special Report” in the rightwing Unification Church-owned Washington Times last month:

Newt Gingrich famously vowed to “zero out” federal funding for public broadcasting a few weeks before becoming House speaker in 1995, but the Republicans essentially backed down when they were accused of trying to kill Big Bird…

In January, PBS declined to add to its national distribution list an episode of the children’s series “Postcards From Buster” that featured two women in a same-sex union, although some stations chose to air it anyway…

Given the advantage PBS has as a free, over-the-air service, it should do far better, according to [Tim Graham, director of analysis for the Media Research Center, a conservative group that monitors the media for examples of bias].

He cited “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” as an example. It draws about 3 million viewers a night, but it would do much better if viewers were really interested in its sober approach to news coverage, Mr. Graham said. “They see themselves as ‘spinach TV.’ We will feed you what you don’t want to watch,” he said.

Such thinking is too subjective, said Les Crystal, executive producer of “NewsHour.”

“Do we do some subjects that are spinach? Maybe. One could argue that stories we’ve done on Darfur (in Sudan) are spinach to some people but meat and potatoes to others.”

Sad to say but killing PBS and NPR is better than the other alternative – allowing the Rightwing to turn them into propaganda outlets for the government like Fox News, Clear Channel and the Washington Times.

Jesse Helms Unrepentant on Race in Upcoming Memoir

Jon Ponder

In an upcoming memoir, former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms says it was the civil rights movement – not segregationists like himself and the Ku Klux Klan- who incited violence in the 1960’s. Helms who is 83, came to fame in the 1950’s and 1960’s as a racist editorialist on a television station in Raleigh.

CNN reports that in the book Helms says he believed:

…Voluntary racial integration would [have] come about without pressure from the federal government or from civil rights protests that he said sharpened racial antagonisms.

“We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance,” according to the uncorrected proof. “We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust.”

Translation: “If the Coloreds had just stayed in their place and not been so uppity, Whites would have eventually allowed them to have better segregated schools, bathrooms and drinking fountains.”

The Charlotte Observer reports that in his book Helms deals with his long history of racial smears and playing the race card to win elections as he always done, by denying involvement:

In 1950, U.S. Sen. Frank Porter Graham faced fellow Democrat Willis Smith in a hotly contested runoff. Helms supported Smith, whose supporters were accused of using racial smears. A handbill purported to show a photo of Graham’s wife dancing with a black man. Smith won, and Helms was often accused of having a role in the tactics…

Charges of racial politics arose again in 1990 when Helms faced former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt. One Helms ad showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter as a voice says, “You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority.”

“There were even some charges that the ad was intended as `racist,’ but that was untrue,” Helms writes. “Minority classifications were not limited to race, and we had no more interest in a race-based vote than we did in race-based jobs. The campaign was never about Mr. Gantt being black; it was always and only about him being liberal.”

Yeah, right.

Helms is an equal opportunity hater. When it became clear he and his segregationist cabal had lost the fight against equality for African Americans, he turned his sights on the gay community, frequently advocating prison sentences for gays and lesbians.

In the book, he admits that he was wrong about AIDS, however.

Helms also was an outspoken opponent of laws to protect homosexuals from discrimination and of funding for AIDS research, but he writes in the book that his views evolved during his final years in the Senate. He cited friendships he developed with North Carolina evangelist Franklin Graham and rock singer Bono, both of whom got him involved in the fight against the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

“Until then,” Helms writes, “it had been my feeling that AIDS was a disease largely spread by reckless and voluntary sexual and drug-abusing behavior, and that it would probably be confined to those in high risk populations. I was wrong.”

Thanks to PR contributor Judy for the tip.

Support Howard Dean – Give to the DNC

Jon Ponder

Duncan Black, aka Atrios, at Eschaton has a page up on the Democratic National Committee site where we are encouraged to show love for embattled DNC Chair Howard Dean by making a donation.

We cited a recent criticism of the Republicans by Jack Danforth, a Republican Episcopal minister and former Senator, below. Here’s Republican strategist Ed Rollins criticizing former RNC chairman Rich Bond in the National Review in 1993, for saying that only Republicans are “real” Americans and that only certain people – white Christians, presumably, are welcome in the GOP :

Rich Bond was wrong at the Republican Convention last August when he condemned the Democrats with his statement, ‘We are America; these other people are not America.” He’s wrong now when he says in effect, We are the Republican Party; these other Republicans are not.

If Republicans like Rich Bond can learn from past mistakes, it should now be apparent to them that we need to make room in our party for a broad and diverse range of ideas and lifestyles. We should not shut anyone out–including the more conservative elements of our party.

This is classic “liberal media” excess going after a Dem while giving Gops a pass on the very same “infractions” If Howard loses, we all do. To quote Atrios, quoting Bobbi Flekman in our favorite thrash-metal mockumentary, “Money talks and bullshit walks.”

Go – Give.

Admit It: You Think So Too

Trish

Borowitz does it again:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean apologized today for calling Republicans “pretty much a white, Christian party,” saying that he failed to mention that they were “fat and ugly” as well…

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn) lashed out at Dr. Dean from the floor of the Senate…

But hours later, Dr. Dean continued to stoke the controversy with his response to Sen. Frist’s remarks: “I knew I was forgetting something – Republicans are really stupid, too, and Bill Frist, in my opinion, is not even a real doctor.”

In the aftermath of Dr. Dean’s latest remarks, leading Democrats were mulling what to do about their volatile party chief, exploring a range of options including driving him out to the country and ditching him along a secluded road.

GOoPer Danforth Criticized His Party as ‘Political Arm of Conservative Christians’ – Just Like Howard Dean

Jon Ponder

AmericaBlog:

Gee, John Danforth is one angry Democrat. Oh, that’s right. He’s a former GOP Senator and not a Democrat at all. But, oh my, he criticizes the Republican party as being the party of conservative Christians. But, isn’t that what Howard Dean said? I’m so confused. Why isn’t the MSM all angry at John Danforth too?

From Danforth’s excellent NYT op ed earlier this year:

” By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians…. The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement…. But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives.”

White House Caught ‘Fixing’ Data on Climate Change

Jon Ponder

In the Soviet Union and Saddam’s Baathist regime, changing the facts to conform to the message was labeled “propaganda” by the American government and our media. In the Bush White House, it’s called Standard Operating Procedure:

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, changed descriptions of climate research approved by government scientists.

The Times said that Cooney, a lawyer and former lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, made notes on drafts of reports issued in 2002 and 2003, removing or adjusting language on climate research.

Some of the changes were as subtle as adding the words “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” the Times reported. In one section, he crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of glaciers and snowpack, the newspaper said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in a press briefing that Cooney’s editing was part of a broad review by 15 federal agencies, including policy people like Cooney as well as scientists. “Everybody who is involved in these issues should have input in these reports, and that’s all this is,” he says.

Climate change has been controversial for the Bush administration since 2001, when it withdrew support for the
Kyoto Protocol, a global pact to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. The administration questioned the cost and scientific merit of planned constraints.

“Scientists are best equipped to inform the public about climate science, not White House lawyers,” says Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. “People have a right to know the truth about climate science and the scientific consensus on the seriousness of this problem,” she says.

TVNewser Rounds Up Cable News Coverage of the Downing Street Memo

Jon Ponder

Maybe If We All Hold Our Breath, the Media Will Cover the Downing Street Memo:

Is the media finally waking up to the Downing Street Memo? A few odds and ends:

> Rep. John Conyers on HuffPost: “This is a stunning account of the way our media has slid backwards from the days of Woodward and Bernstein.”

> MSNBC’s Countdown hasn’t ignored it. “If you have missed it, and many have, it was a set of leaked notes from a British cabinet meeting in July 2002 indicating the U.S. was already trying to make the crime fit the punishment, already finding excuses, it said, to go to the war in Iraq,” Keith Olbermann said on Tuesday.

> “I’m still not quite sure why CNN has been so slow to cover it; the least we could do is cover the growing outrage on the Internet,” a CNN employee e-mails. “I’m sure this issue is NOT going to go away. And we shouldn’t allow Bush’s allegation that the memo was just a dirty trick leaked 4 days before the British election to go unchallenged…that doesn’t detract from the fact that the memo was authentic…”

> On Monday MSNBC’s Connected tackled the memo as an blogger story. CNN used a similar tactic on Wednesday’s Inside Politics.

> Democrats.com offers “a close reading of FoxSpeak.”

Still – I wouldn’t hold my breath for any in-depth coverage.

Little Known Clause in ‘No Child Left Behind’ Law Gives Military Access to High School Records

Jon Ponder

Voice of San Diego:

In case you thought the No Child Left Behind Act was all about education, beware of tiny clauses embedded in the layers of testing and accountability legalese.

A group called Military Free Zone wants to alert the public to a little-known provision in George W. Bush’s NCLB Act that allows military recruiters to gather private contact information on all public high school students. Organizers offer tips on how to resist recruiters and how to take action against what they call an invasion of privacy.

Although slightly over the top with sinister, conspiratorial messages, the group’s Web site includes an “opt-out” form that students can fill out and turn in to their high schools. This form lets students retain their privacy rights when the military comes to call at the school.

Non-Denial Denials: Transcript of Bush & Blair on the Downing Street Memo

Jon Ponder

I happened to see an old clip the other day of President Clinton facing reporters at a White House press conference during the height of the Lewinsky scandal. It was interesting to see – and to remember – the undisguised disdain that radiated from the press corps toward the president throughout the course of that scandal.

By contrast, President Bush and British Prime Minister faced a much different press corps at the news conference they held yesterday. What emanated from the men and women of the press is hard to describe. Is it fear, or a sort of Stockholm Syndrome?

But credit must be given to the reporter from Reuters who dared asked Bush a question about the Downing Street Memo. Not that he got an answer – or that there was any follow-up from him or his colleagues challenging the non-responses, which are, after all, another form of lies.

Here is what Bush and Blair said, in toto, taken from the White House transcript:

Q Thank you, sir. On Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo from July 2002 says intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam through military action. Is this an accurate reflection of what happened? Could both of you respond?

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Well, I can respond to that very easily. No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all. And let me remind you that that memorandum was written before we then went to the United Nations. Now, no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me. And the fact is we decided to go to the United Nations and went through that process, which resulted in the November 2002 United Nations resolution, to give a final chance to Saddam Hussein to comply with international law. He didn’t do so. And that was the reason why we had to take military action.

But all the way through that period of time, we were trying to look for a way of managing to resolve this without conflict. As it happened, we weren’t able to do that because — as I think was very clear — there was no way that Saddam Hussein was ever going to change the way that he worked, or the way that he acted.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I — you know, I read kind of the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in the middle of his race. I’m not sure who “they dropped it out” is, but — I’m not suggesting that you all dropped it out there. (Laughter.) And somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use military force to deal with Saddam. There’s nothing farther from the truth.

My conversation with the Prime Minister was, how could we do this peacefully, what could we do. And this meeting, evidently, that took place in London happened before we even went to the United Nations — or I went to the United Nations. And so it’s — look, both us of didn’t want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It’s the last option. The consequences of committing the military are — are very difficult. The hardest things I do as the President is to try to comfort families who’ve lost a loved one in combat. It’s the last option that the President must have — and it’s the last option I know my friend had, as well.

And so we worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully, take a — put a united front up to Saddam Hussein, and say, the world speaks, and he ignored the world. Remember, 1441 passed the Security Council unanimously. He made the decision. And the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

These have to the limpest nonresponses on record. Yet Dana Bash on CNN today seemed bemused that the liberal blogs weren’t satisfied. Nobody should be satisfied with these answers, particularly those who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to report the truth about important issues like war and terrorism.

Have you signed the Conyers letter? This is not a letter that advocates impeaching the president – that’s a bromide from the Right. It’s simply a letter that demands that President Bush explain the discrepancies between what was said in the minutes of the Blair meeting and what Bush, Cheney and the others were telling Americans about their plans to go to war.

Sign the letter: www.johnconyers.com

Energy Bill Handouts to Benefit Former Enron Execs

Buck Banks

Public Citizen has broken a story based on a close reading of the 700-plus-page energy bill currently being debated by the Senate and other public documents. Apparently, under the bill, a consortium formed by four former Enron executives qualifies for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees for a $2.8 billion coal gassification facility in Wyoming.

Public Citizen’s investigation to find out who this loan would benefit narrowed the answer to just one company: Houston-based DKRW Energy. This company, named after the four Enron executives that founded it – Jon C. Doyle, Robert C. Kelly, H. David Ramm and White – formed a subsidiary, Medicine Bow Fuel & Power, to develop a $2.8 billion coal gasification project in Medicine Bow, Wyo. The DKRW facility meets all the criteria required in the legislation: The coal will be supplied from Arch Coal mines neighboring the power facility; it will stuff carbon dioxide emissions into oil wells; and the facility will be located in a western state (Wyoming) at an altitude above 4,000 feet.

Following the release of the story, Senate Energy Committee representatives contacted Public Citizen with an explanation that several other companies also qualify for funds under the bill’s provision. But since neither the names of the companies nor their projects are publicly available, Public Citizen has not been able to confirm the assertion.

The organization did note that the former Enron execs likely finagled the loan provisions because, given their track records, they were finding it difficult to secure private funding for their pork-barrel project.