Year: 2007

Stephanie Miller Gets a Rave Review for Her Stint on MSNBC

Jon Ponder

Brent Budowsky at The Hill:

Progressive radio talk show host Stephanie Miller is doing a great job in the old Imus spot on MSNBC, and I hope everyone has a chance to catch her show.

Stephanie is a comedienne, radio host and progressive impressario, and it’s great to see her doing cable television.

She’s funny, pointed, provocative, progressive and her time on MSNBC is a mini-breakthrough and I suspect we’ll be seeing more of her.

There are some exciting developments in progressive radio and entertainment.

MSNBC is famously located across the river from Manhattan in Seacaucus, NJ. Stephanie talked a lot about being homesick for Los Angeles, so I’m not sure she’ll be back on the air anytime soon, which is a shame.

Lawyer Won’t Even Tell ABC His Client’s Name So They Can NOT Link It to D.C. Madam

Trish

Now that’s keeping a secret!

A lawyer with “good reason” to suspect his client will appear on the D.C. Madam’s list has contacted ABC News to keep them from revealing the client’s identity.

But his client’s name is so secret, he didn’t even tell ABC. Wha?

In a letter to ABC News, Steven Salky of Zuckerman Spaeder in Washington, D.C., said he has “reason to believe” that his client might be named in this Friday’s “20/20” report about the alleged prostitution ring.

But Salky did not identify who his client is.

Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “D.C. Madam,” is pulling a Jack Abramoff and spilling her guts so she won’t be the only one in jail for breaking the law. She is also suing former employees who engaged in real sex, as opposed to the “fantasy sex” she says her business offered and that all her clients claim to have purchased.

Whoever the mystery man is, he must be really, really impotent. Sorry, I meant he must be “important,” if his lawyer is trying that hard to keep him out of the public mud.

Maybe ABC can hire Miss Cleo to figure out who the client is so they can comply with the lawyer’s request. Or to be safe, just not mention the name of any Republicans known to be flaming hypocrites. On second thought, calling Miss Cleo would probably be more realistic.

Study: Bill O’Reilly is a Propaganda Pro

Buck Banks

While I knew Bill O’Reilly was a bloviating blowhard before I read the Indiana University study, I did not realize that 40 percvent of Americans consider him a journalist while only 30 percent of Americans think Bob Woodward is a legit journalist. Now granted, Woodward’s creds have been somewhat reduced by his recent tactics, but still, he was half of the team that exposed the Watergate scandal, so he at one time was the kind of journalist that journalists want to be.

But O’Reilly has never been a journalist and should not be confused with one. Instead, according to the study, which used methods employed in the 1930s to measure propaganda, O’Reilly should be considered a master at propagandizing.

Politicians and media, particularly of the left-leaning persuasion, are in the company of illegal aliens, criminals, terrorists — never vulnerable to villainous forces and undeserving of empathy.

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, [researchers] found that O’Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

  • Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
  • Glittering generalities — the oppositie of name calling;
  • Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
  • Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
  • Plain folks — an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”;
  • Transfer — carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
  • Testimonials — involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O’Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.
[…]

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Western thinking has become conservative; the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has come to the end of its development.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Conservative Icon Willam F. Buckley Worries Bush Is Killing GOP

Jon Ponder

William F. Buckley, ancient founder of the National Review and leading light of the once powerful country-club wing of the GOP, is worried that Pres. Bush is destroying the Republican Party:

“The parallel [to Iraq insurgency] even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn’t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.”
— Bill Buckley

The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue.

Buckley sees the fatal issue as Bush’s war in Iraq and fears that while the president’s aggressive campaign to win short-term political victories at home — like vetoing his own “emergency supplemental” war funding bill — may bolster his hardcore, mostly Christian nationalist base, it is all just a misdirection meant to hide the fact that Bush and his team know that the war is lost:

[Beyond] affirming executive supremacy in matters of war, what is George Bush going to do? It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month.

Buckley compares the Iraqi insurgency to the spread of early Christianity, casting America in the role of the faltering Roman Empire:

When the Romans were challenged by Christianity, Rome fell. The generation of Christians moved by their faith overwhelmed the regimented reserves of the Roman state. It was four years ago that [Vice Pres.] Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a “surge,” of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease?

He even suggests the insurgents’ cause is as unstoppable as your typical country clubbing freeman’s need for drink:

The parallel even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn’t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.

Finally:

There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

Buckley ignores the source of his party’s affliction. Bush would have never reelected without the votes of the Christian nationalists, especially the ones in Ohio who turned out in droves to vote for Karl Rove’s anti-gay marriage amendment. These same easily fooled voters are largely still behind Bush and his lost cause.

Satanic Influence of Illegal Immigrants and Liberals Debated by Utah GOP

Jon Ponder

So not kidding: Christian nationalist whackos commandeered the Utah County Republican Convention last weekend and came very close to making Utah Republicans into a national joke:

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to “destroy Christian America” and replace it with “a godless new world order — and that is not extremism, that is fact,” Larsen said.

Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan’s influence on illegal immigrants…

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan’s minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants “hate American people” and “are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won’t do.”

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to “destroy Christian America” and replace it with “a godless new world order — and that is not extremism, that is fact,” Larsen said.

At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. “by self invasion.”

After Larsen spoke, other delegates rose to agree with him:

One speaker, who was identified as “Joe,” said illegal immigrants were Marxist and under the influence of the devil. Another, who declined to give her name … said illegal immigrants should not be allowed because “they are not going to become Republicans and stop flying the flag upside down. … If they want to be Americans, they should learn to speak English and fly their flag like we do.”

Finally, a grownup took the floor:

[State] Senator Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, spoke against the resolution, saying Larsen, whom he called a “true patriot and a close friend,” was embarrassing the Republican Party.

“I agree with 95 percent of this resolution but it has some language that is divisive and not inspiring other people to its vision,” he said. “This only gives fodder to the liberal media to give negative attention to the Republican Party.”

When Joe Wright, a local elected official, voiced support for Pres. Bush, he was booed — twice:

“This might be the most divisive issue in the Republican Party,” he said. “I support President Bush but he needs to support this issue harder.”

When Wright said “the economic benefit (of illegal immigration) outweighs the downside” he was jeered. He warned that the Republican Party of California had “killed themselves” by taking a hostile stance against illegal aliens … He ended by saying “President Bush needs to fix this now” and was booed again.

Larsen was given the floor again to finish the sale:

“If the Democrats take over the country, we will be dead, and we will have abortion and partial-birth abortion and the Republican Party will go into extinction,” he said. “Nancy Pelosi and the ACLU would oppose this (resolution).”

But when it came time to vote on Larsen’s resolution to officially name illegal aliens and liberals as being in league with Satan, it turned out that most of the attendees had voted with their fee:

Eventually party officials counted all delegates in attendance, only to discover that, with 299, they were about 30 short of a quorum and could take no action.

It is true that Gov. Pete Wilson drove the California GOP off a cliff with his nakedly political attack on illegal aliens in the 1990s. The ugly, bullying language had the unintended consequence of energizing Latino communities, transforming millions of legal residents from either apolitical nonvoters or registered Republicans into Democrats. With the exception of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s two elections, these new voters have provided a durable majority in state and federal elections in the state’s largest counties.

It would be poetic justice if the conservatives’ compulsive mean streak toward the disenfranchised turned out to be its Achilles heel.

Is Toe-Sucking Fox Newser Dick Morris In D.C. Madam’s Phone List?

Jon Ponder


At it again? D.C. madam Deborah Jean Palfrey has given 46 pounds of her clients’ phone records to Brian Ross at ABC News. Ross, who was instrumental in outing former Rep. Mark Foley’s perving on congressional pages, plans to reveal the names of the owners of the phone numbers — many of whom, potentially, are powerful Washington figures — on the network Friday night — just in time for May sweeps.

Dick Morris’ paid mistress said he had a fetish for toe sucking (info that goes into the TMI hall of fame) — and that he believed paying for her loving negated the fact he was cheating on his wife.

But in the Washington Post coverage yesterday, one name stuck out:

[Palfrey’s attorney Montgomery] Sibley also filed notice that he intends to depose political consultant Dick Morris in a separate civil proceeding. Morris would not comment.

On the eve of the Democratic Convention in September 1996, Morris was forced to resign as head of Pres. Clinton’s reelection campaign after Sherry Rowlands, a call girl with whom he had a long-term for-pay relationship, sold her story to the supermarket tabloid “The Star” for around $50,000. In the article, Rowlands revealed that Morris had a fetish for toe sucking, a fact that will always have a place in the TMI hall of fame.

She also offered a glimpse into Morris’ marriage that may have some saliency today, if his phone number does appear on Palfrey’s list:

Asked about Morris’s wife, Rowlands said: “I’m sure this is hurting her, and was not meant to hurt her. He’s the one who hurt her, not me. . . . He loves his wife — that’s why he would pay me . . . to come see him. That makes him feel he is not cheating on his wife. This is business as long as he’s paying for it.”

Shorter: It isn’t adultery if you pay for it.

Since the Clintons kicked him out, Morris has earned millions as a professional Clinton hater inside the GOP noise machine. He bloviates regularly on the Fox News Channel, writes a syndicated column for the Fox aligned New York Post and has authored several books trashing the senator and ex-president.

He also converted to Catholicism.

Feinstein Introduced Bill to Close Guantanamo

Jon Ponder

Los Angeles Times:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a measure Monday to force the Pentagon to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and move the trials of Al Qaeda suspects to the United States.

But the Defense Department got another green light for those Guantanamo tribunals to continue, when the Supreme Court declined Monday to hear the appeal of two detainees who challenged the legality of the military commissions.

In a statement, Feinstein said the detention facility had hurt America’s credibility around the world because of allegations of abuse there and doubts about the legal rights afforded detainees.

“We must recognize the sustained damage this facility is doing to our international standing,” she said in the statement. “We are better served by closing this facility and transferring the detainees elsewhere.”

Feinstein’s measure would transfer Guantanamo detainees to military or civilian detention facilities in the United States or to their home countries. The legislation allows detainees who “pose no continuing security threat” to be released. Feinstein said she opposed “releasing any terrorists.”