Lawrence O’Donnell’s send up of Newt Gingrich’s attempt to excuse his adulteries by saying that his patriotism combined with his workaholic tendencies drove him into the arms of congressional staffers is must-see video.
But I have to point out that not only was Gingrich having an affair with a staffer when he led the Republicans’ campaign to impeach Pres. Clinton because he lied in a deposition in civil lawsuit over his affair with a staffer, as O’Donnell points out, but both Gingrich and Clinton were engaged in extramarital affairs when they made the Defense of Marriage Act the law of the land.
Around the time that “Good News for Modern Man,” the modern-English version of the New Testament, was published in the mid-1970s, I was spending a summer out of college in the Southern, suburban small town where I’d gone to high school.
No one I knew personally objected to (or cared about) the new translation, but among a vocal minority out in the hustings who believed that the Bible was the dictated word of God, there was outrage. One of their leaders, a country preacher called Rev. Johnny, found the “Good News” to be so blasphemous that he scheduled an old-fashioned book burning in front of the courthouse.
Being young, irreligious and bored, my friends and I tuned in to the reverend’s pre-conflagration sermon on a fuzzy AM radio station, during which he made this unforgettable statement:
REV. JOHNNY: The King James version of the Bible is the only true version of the Bible because it’s the version of the Bible that Jesus carried with him on the Crusades. (Emphasis his.)
For the history challenged, what Rev. Johnny asserted here was that Jesus, who is said to have died about 33 A.D., led the Crusades against the Muslim infidels in the Holy Land, circa 1000 to 1300 A.D., and that he had in hand an edition of the King James Version of the Bible — an English translation from the original Greek commissioned in 1604 by England’s James I.
I was reminded of Rev. Johnny’s rewrite of the first 1,600 years of the Christian era when I heard GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann, who is running for president, rewrite the history of slavery in speech to potential Iowa caucus-goers over the weekend:
It’s apparent now that the corporate media has chosen to ignore the fact that that the Family Research Center, a group that is openly affiliated with the mainstream Republican Party, has been named to the official list of U.S. hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for some ace reporter to ask Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), winner of the FRC’s Value Voters Summit presidential straw poll, if he stands by his endorsement by a high-profile hate group.
Unlike representatives from, say, the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation and other race-based hate groups on the list, FRC openly consults with and lobbies Republican members of Congress. It also sponsors the GOP-oriented “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, which features a must-do presidential candidate cattle call that is open only to Republicans.
Christine O’Donnell made her first public appearance at the Summit after winning the Delaware primary this year, and Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., won the presidential straw poll. But don’t hold your breath waiting for some ace reporter to ask him if he stands by his endorsement by a high-profile hate group.
In a just world, corporate media would shun the FRC, just as it shuns race-based hate groups. After all, it’s been decades since the media felt an obligation to give the Klan or Aryan Nation a national platform for their views. That’s because the media — and our society as a whole — reached a consensus long ago that there really are not two legitimate sides in the debate over civil rights for racial minorities.
Unfortunately, we’re apparently a decade or two away from reaching the same consensus about the gay rights debate.
Case in point: Last night, MSNBC gave a national platform to FRC Pres. Tony Perkins on “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” ostensibly so Perkins could defend his organization and explain why its designation as a hate-group is wrong.
Instead, Perkins chose to double-down on some of the same lies and smears that led to the FRC being named to the hate group list:
As you doubtless know by now, Keith Olbermann is returning to work tonight on MSNBC’s “Countdown” after being suspended for making three political donations to Democratic candidates in the last week or so of the midterm election campaign.
“There are multiple people being paid by Fox News to essentially run for office as Republican candidates. If you count not just their hosts but their contributors, you’re looking at a significant portion of the entire Republican lineup of potential contenders for 2012.” – Rachel Maddow
As his colleague Rachel Maddow said Friday night, Olbermann’s suspension — like CNN’s firing Rick Sanchez and NPR’s firing Juan Williams — draws a sharp distinction between the ethical boundaries of real journalistic organizations like MSBNC, CNN and NPR and the lack of any similar journalistic ethics at the GOP-Fox propaganda channel:
MADDOW: Here’s the larger point, though, that’s going mysteriously missing from the right-wing cackling and old media cluck-cluck-clucking: I know everyone likes to say, “Oh, cable news, it’s all the same. Fox and MSNBC — mirror images of each other. But if you look at the long history of Fox hosts not just giving money to candidates, but actively endorsing campaigns and raising millions of dollars for politicians and political parties — whether it’s Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck or Mike Huckabee — and you’ll see that we can lay that old false equivalency to rest forever. There are multiple people being paid by Fox News to essentially run for office as Republican candidates. If you count not just their hosts but their contributors, you’re looking at a significant portion of the entire Republican lineup of potential contenders for 2012.
They can do that because there’s no rule against that at Fox. Their network is run as a political operation. Ours isn’t. Yeah, Keith’s a liberal, and so am I. But we’re not a political operation — Fox is. We’re a news operation. The rules around here are part of how you know that.
Indisputable evidence of this is the fact that at least 30 people who work for Fox donated money and/or time and/or endorsed Republican candidates in the midterms. According to Media Matters, if Fox was a legitimate news organization, it would have to suspend most of its marquee names, including Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, William Kristol and even the propaganda channel’s owner, Rupert Murdoch.
In the segment before this commentary on MSNBC’s “Countdown” last night, Keith Olbermann made a point of saying that he personally likes Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman and that he believe Gibbs does a good job, so his commentary here is not meant as a personal retaliation against Gibbs’ senseless and badly timed attack on the “professional left” yesterday.
Instead, what Olbermann delivers here is a thoughtful, measured rebuttal to the idea that left-wing media — like the opinion shows on MSNBC and liberal radio talk shows and websites — is just an analog to Fox News and right-wing radio and blogs.
First, speaking on behalf of Chris Matthews — which I do not — thanks to the tea baggers calling for a sponsor boycott for all the free publicity for his documentary. I’m pretty sure the film, “Rise of the New Right,” would have been relegated to the remainder bin had they not raised its profile this way.
If they actually watched the piece then, good golly, are these authoritarian wing nuts ever thin-skinned. There is nothing inflammatory in it. In fact, there’s hardly anything new there that regular watchers of legitimate cable news haven’t seen.
My guess is that the people who are so incensed about it relegate their information consumption to Republican propaganda on Fox News, where tea baggery is treated with respect the anti-establishment mob phenomenon has not earned and does not deserve.
I’m no fan of Matthews, who, like Dick Morris and Ann Coulter, owes his broadcast career to his spittle-spewing Clinton hatred in the 1990s. My only quibble with his documentary is with the title. There’s nothing “new” about these tired old Bush lovers. They’ve been around years.
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Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
“The man is afraid of the voice of the people and that the people understand and know what he’s doing. He’s trying to stifle the ability of journalists to let the people of America know what’s really going on with their government.”
— “Kamala Harris called President Donald Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House ‘absolutely abhorrent,’” The Wrap reports.
“Not one of them is trained in technical skills. Not one research PhD, as opposed to China, where half the cabinet is science and technology PhDs. We’re led by grifters and fools.”
— Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, on X, on President Trump’s 35-person cabinet.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far… The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
— Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), breaking with President Trump in a direct-to-camera video.
“Donald Trump made over a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July,” The Guardian reports. “His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.”
“The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study,” the Associated Press reports.
A new Fox News Poll finds 71% of voters think the Trump administration lacks a clear strategy for ending the Iran War, including 95% of Democrats, 83% of independents, and 43% of Republicans. Sixty percent say U.S. military action against Iran was the wrong decision, while just 37% say it was right.
“The Trump administration last year spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave for federal workers as part of its plan to shrink the government and save taxpayers money, according to a new estimate by a congressional watchdog,” CNN reports.
Reuters has documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
