by Michael Jansen - Irish Times / Common Dreams
Health officials in Gaza said yesterday that the Palestinian death toll since Israel began its offensive against the Strip on December 27th had reached 917 and the number of wounded 4,100.
An explosion is seen after an Israeli air strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip January 13, 2009. (Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)Officials expect the number of casualties to rise steeply as Israeli armour and troops move into heavily populated urban areas in the north and Israeli planes intensify their bombardment of the south.
Bassem Naeem, health minister in the Hamas government, said that about 380 of the fatalities were women and children. Israeli sources said 300 militants had been killed, a figure which may include the 187 civilian policemen who died in the initial bombardment. This means, analysts argue, that two-thirds of the fatalities are civilians. Children, who officials say are heavily represented among the casualties, comprise half of Gaza's population.
In the north, Muhammad Shriteh, an ambulance driver for the Red Crescent Society, speaking on the phone from Gaza city, said rescue teams were unable to enter Zeitoun on the border with Israel because of heavy bombing and the Israeli advance. "It is very bad in Zeitoun area. All the families are leaving. It is a ghost town. We cannot collect bodies or the injured."
In the south, Jenny Linnel, a peace activist from Devon in England who is in Rafah, reported by phone that entire "neighbourhoods parallel to the border with Egypt" are being bombarded and tunnels used to smuggle essential goods and weapons into Gaza are being targeted.
"All residents have been ordered to leave. Homes are being destroyed or severely damaged. There has been a mass evacuation. Families go to stay with relatives who live elsewhere." Linnel has been serving as a volunteer with the Red Crescent.
UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Christopher Gunness said the agency estimates that the number of people who have fled Rafah is 20,000.
He said UNRWA had a convoy of more than 50 lorries carrying food, medical and non-food aid entering Gaza through Israel's Karem Shalom crossing.
UNRWA is dispersing aid to distribution centres and 31 shelters housing 25,000 people.
Human Rights Watch called on Israel to stop firing white phosphorus shells into heavily populated areas of Gaza. "White phosphorous can burn down houses and cause horrific burns when it touches the skin," said Marc Garlasco, the organisation's military analyst. Doctors in Gaza say one person has died and a number have suffered injuries consistent with white phosphorus burns.
Shriteh confirmed this report: "My partner and I collected from near al-Quds hospital one shahid [martyr or fatality] and seven injured people who had burns all over their bodies."
The UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution that "strongly condemned the ongoing Israeli military operations . . . which have resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people and systematic destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure".
The resolution was adopted by 33 votes with 13 abstentions, including European countries, and one against, Canada.
A boat owned by the Free Gaza Movement,carrying doctors, journalists and medicine, which set out for Gaza from Cyprus, has had to turn back for mechanical reasons. An Iranian cargo ship carrying medical supplies is set to enter Israel's maritime exclusion zone today.
by Paul Krugman - The New York Times / Common Dreams
Last week President-elect Barack Obama was asked to respond to critics who say that his stimulus plan won’t do enough to help the economy. Mr. Obama answered that he wants to hear ideas about “how to spend money efficiently and effectively to jump-start the economy.”
O.K., I’ll bite — although as I’ll explain shortly, the “jump-start” metaphor is part of the problem.
First, Mr. Obama should scrap his proposal for $150 billion in business tax cuts, which would do little to help the economy. Ideally he’d scrap the proposed $150 billion payroll tax cut as well, though I’m aware that it was a campaign promise.
Money not squandered on ineffective tax cuts could be used to provide further relief to Americans in distress — enhanced unemployment benefits, expanded Medicaid and more. And why not get an early start on the insurance subsidies — probably running at $100 billion or more per year — that will be essential if we’re going to achieve universal health care?
Mainly, though, Mr. Obama needs to make his plan bigger. To see why, consider a new report from his own economic team.
On Saturday, Christina Romer, the future head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, who will be the vice president’s chief economist, released estimates of what the Obama economic plan would accomplish. Their report is reasonable and intellectually honest, which is a welcome change from the fuzzy math of the last eight years.
But the report also makes it clear that the plan falls well short of what the economy needs.
According to Ms. Romer and Mr. Bernstein, the Obama plan would have its maximum impact in the fourth quarter of 2010. Without the plan, they project, the unemployment rate in that quarter would be a disastrous 8.8 percent. Yet even with the plan, unemployment would be 7 percent — roughly as high as it is now.
After 2010, the report says, the effects of the economic plan would rapidly fade away. The job of promoting full recovery would, however, remain undone: the unemployment rate would still be a painful 6.3 percent in the last quarter of 2011.
Now, economic forecasting is an inexact science, to say the least, and things could turn out better than the report predicts. But they could also turn out worse. The report itself acknowledges that “some private forecasters anticipate unemployment rates as high as 11 percent in the absence of action.” And I’m with Lawrence Summers, another member of the Obama economic team, who recently declared, “In this crisis, doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.” Unfortunately, that principle isn’t reflected in the current plan.
So how can Mr. Obama do more? By including a lot more public investment in his plan — which will be possible if he takes a longer view.
The Romer-Bernstein report acknowledges that “a dollar of infrastructure spending is more effective in creating jobs than a dollar of tax cuts.” It argues, however, that “there is a limit on how much government investment can be carried out efficiently in a short time frame.” But why does the time frame have to be short?
As far as I can tell, Mr. Obama’s planners have focused on investment projects that will deliver their main jobs boost over the next two years. But since unemployment is likely to remain high well beyond that two-year window, the plan should also include longer-term investment projects.
And bear in mind that even a project that delivers its main punch in, say, 2011 can provide significant economic support in earlier years. If Mr. Obama drops the “jump-start” metaphor, if he accepts the reality that we need a multi-year program rather than a short burst of activity, he can create a lot more jobs through government investment, even in the near term.
Still, shouldn’t Mr. Obama wait for proof that a bigger, longer-term plan is needed? No. Right now the investment portion of the Obama plan is limited by a shortage of “shovel ready” projects, projects ready to go on short notice. A lot more investment can be under way by late 2010 or 2011 if Mr. Obama gives the go-ahead now — but if he waits too long before deciding, that window of opportunity will be gone.
One more thing: even with the Obama plan, the Romer-Bernstein report predicts an average unemployment rate of 7.3 percent over the next three years. That’s a scary number, big enough to pose a real risk that the U.S. economy will get stuck in a Japan-type deflationary trap.
So my advice to the Obama team is to scrap the business tax cuts, and, more important, to deal with the threat of doing too little by doing more. And the way to do more is to stop talking about jump-starts and look more broadly at the possibilities for government investment.
By Barbara Ehrenreich - Alternet
As the poor and the formerly middle-class become the new American majority, will they finally have enough status to get their needs met?
Ever on the lookout for the bright side of hard times, I am tempted to delete “class inequality” from my worry list. Less than a year ago, it was the one of the biggest economic threats on the horizon, with even hard line conservative pundits grousing that wealth was flowing uphill at an alarming rate, leaving the middle class stuck with stagnating incomes while the new super-rich ascended to the heavens in their personal jets. Then the whole top-heavy structure of American capitalism began to totter, and –poof!—inequality all but vanished from the public discourse. A financial columnist in the Chicago Sun Times has just announced that the recession is a “great leveler,” serving to “democratize[d] the agony,” as we all tumble into “the Nouveau Poor…”
The media have been pelting us with heart-wrenching stories about the neo-suffering of the Nouveau Poor, or at least the Formerly Super-rich among them: Foreclosures in Greenwich CT! A collapsing market for cosmetic surgery! Sales of Gulfstream jets declining! Niemen Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue on the ropes! We read of desperate measures, like having to cut back the personal trainer to two hours a week. Parties have been canceled; dinner guests have been offered, gasp, baked potatoes and chili. The New York Times relates the story of a New Jersey teenager whose parents were forced to cut her $100 a week allowance and private Pilates classes. In one of the most pathetic tales of all, New Yorker Alexandra Penney relates how she lost her life savings to Bernie Madoff and is now faced with having to lay off her three-day- a-week maid, Yolanda. “I wear a classic clean white shirt every day of the week. I have about 40 white shirts. They make me feel fresh and ready to face whatever battles I may be fighting …” she wrote, but without Yolanda, “How am I going to iron those shirts so I can still feel like a poor civilized person?”
But hard times are no more likely to abolish class inequality than Obama’s inauguration is likely to eradicate racism. No one actually knows yet whether inequality has increased or decreased during the last year of recession, but the historical precedents are not promising. The economists I’ve talked to -- like Biden’s top economic advisor, Jared Bernstein -- insist that recessions are particularly unkind to the poor and the middle class. Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan says, “Income polarization always gets worse during recessions.” It makes sense. If the stock market has shrunk your assets of $500 million to a mere $250 million, you may have to pass on a third or fourth vacation home. But if you’ve just lost an $8 an hour job, you’re looking at no home at all.
Alright, I’m a journalist and I understand how the media work. When a millionaire cuts back on his crème fraiche and caviar consumption, you have a touching human interest story. But pitch a story about a laid-off roofer who loses his trailer home and you’re likely to get a big editorial yawn. “Poor Get Poorer” is just not an eye-grabbing headline, even when the evidence is overwhelming. Food stamp applications, for example, are rising toward a historic record; calls to one DC-area hunger hotline have jumped 248 percent in the last six months, most of them from people who have never needed food aid before. And for the first time since 1996, there’s been a marked upswing in the number of people seeking cash assistance from TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families), the exsanguinated version of welfare left by welfare “reform.” Too bad for them that TANF is essentially a wage-supplement program based on the assumption that the poor would always be able to find jobs, and that it pays, at most, less than half the federal poverty level.
Why do the sufferings of the poor and the downwardly- mobile class matter more than the tiny deprivations of the rich? Leaving aside all the soft-hearted socialist, Christian-type, arguments, it’s because poverty and the squeeze on the middle class are a big part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Only one thing kept the sub-rich spending in the 00’s, and hence kept the economy going, and that was debt: credit card debt, home equity loans, car loans, college loans and of course the now famously “toxic” subprime mortgages, which were bundled and sliced into “securities” and marketed to the rich as high-interest investments throughout the world. The gross inequality of American society wasn’t just unfair or aesthetically displeasing; it created a perilously unstable situation.
Which is why any serious government attempt to get the economy going again -- and I leave aside the unserious attempts like bank bailouts and other corporate welfare projects -- has to start at the bottom. Obama is promising to generate three million new jobs in “shovel ready” projects, and let’s hope they’re not all jobs for young men with strong backs. Until those jobs kick in, and in case they leave out the elderly, the single moms and the downsized desk-workers, we’re going to need an economic policy centered on the poor: more money for food stamps, for Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and, yes, cash assistance along the lines of what welfare once was, so that when people come tumbling down they don’t end up six feet under. For those who think “welfare” sounds too radical, we could just call it a “right to life” program, only one in which the objects of concern have already been born.
If that sounds politically unfeasible, consider this: When Clinton was cutting welfare and food stamps in the 90s, the poor were still an easily marginalized group, subjected to the nastiest sorts of racial and gender stereotyping. They were lazy, promiscuous, addicted, deadbeats, as whole choruses of conservative experts announced. Thanks to the recession, however -- and I knew there had to be a bright side -- the ranks of the poor are swelling every day with failed business owners, office workers, salespeople, and long-time homeowners. Stereotype that! As the poor and the formerly middle class Nouveau Poor become the American majority, they will finally have the clout to get their needs met.
REUTERS/Vincent Kessler
Ann Jones - TruthDig
The first of 20,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops are scheduled to arrive in Afghanistan next month to re-win the war George W. Bush neglected to finish in his eagerness to start another one. However, “winning” the military campaign against the Taliban is the lesser half of the story.
Going into Afghanistan, the Bush administration called for a political campaign to reconstruct the country and thereby establish the authority of a stable, democratic Afghan central government. It was understood that the two campaigns—military and political/economic—had to go forward together; the success of each depended on the other. But the vision of a reconstructed, peaceful, stable, democratically governed Afghanistan faded fast. Most Afghans now believe that it was nothing but a cover story for the Bush administration’s real goal—to set up permanent bases in Afghanistan and occupy the country forever.
Whatever the truth of the matter, in the long run, it’s not soldiers but services that count—electricity, water, food, health care, justice, and jobs. Had the U.S. delivered the promised services on time, while employing Afghans to rebuild their own country according to their own priorities and under the supervision of their own government—a mini-Marshall Plan—they would now be in charge of their own defense. The forces on the other side, which we loosely call the Taliban, would also have lost much of their grounds for complaint.
Instead, the Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it “liberated,” Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers. Think of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater in Iraq; Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point, and DynCorp International in Afghanistan. They’re all in it together. So far, the Bush administration has bamboozled Americans about its shady aid program. Nobody talks about it. Yet the aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren’t so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about why, today, we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go belly up.
What’s worse, there’s no reason to expect that things will change significantly on Barack Obama’s watch. During the election campaign, he called repeatedly for more troops for “the right war” in Afghanistan (while pledging to draw-down U.S. forces in Iraq), but he has yet to say a significant word about the reconstruction mission. While many aid workers in that country remain full of good intentions, the delivery systems for and uses of U.S. aid have been so thoroughly corrupted that we can only expect more of the same—unless Obama cleans house fast. But given the monumental problems on his plate, how likely is that?
The Jolly Privateers
It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction in Afghanistan. While the U.S. has occupied the country—for seven years and counting—and efficiently set up a network of bases and prisons, it has yet to restore to Kabul, the capital, a mud brick city slightly more populous than Houston, a single one of the public services its citizens used to enjoy. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, they modernized the education system and built power plants, dams, factories, and apartment blocs, still the most coveted in the country. If, in the last seven years, George W. Bush did not get the lights back on in the capital, or the water flowing, or dispose of the sewage or trash, how can we assume Barack Obama will do any better with the corrupt system he’s about to inherit?
Between 2002 and 2008, the U.S. pledged $10.4 billion dollars in “development” (reconstruction) aid to Afghanistan, but actually delivered only $5 billion of that amount. Considering that the U.S. is spending $36 billion a year on the war in Afghanistan and about $8 billion a month on the war in Iraq, that $5 billion in development aid looks paltry indeed. But keep in mind that, in a country as poor as Afghanistan, a little well spent money can make a big difference.
The problem is not simply that the Bush administration skimped on aid, but that it handed it over to for-profit contractors. Privatization, as is now abundantly clear, enriches only the privateers and serves only their private interests.
Take one pertinent example. When the inspectors general of the Pentagon and State Department investigated the U.S. program to train the Afghan police in 2006, they found the number of men trained (about 30,000) to be less than half the number reported by the administration (70,000). The training had lasted eight weeks at most, with no in-the-field experience whatsoever. Only about half the equipment assigned to the police—including thousands of trucks—could be accounted for, and the men trained were then deemed “incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work.”
The American privateer training the police—DynCorp—went on to win no-bid contracts to train police in Iraq with similar results. The total bill for American taxpayers from 2004 to 2006: $1.6 billion. It’s unclear whether that money came from the military or the development budget, but in either case it was wasted. The inspectors general reported that police incompetence contributed directly to increased opium production, the reinvigoration of the Taliban, and government corruption in general, thoroughly subverting much ballyhooed U.S. goals, both military and political.
In the does-no-one-ever-learn category: the latest American victory plan, announced in December, calls for recruiting and rearming local militias to combat the Taliban. Keep in mind that hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly donated by Japan, have already been spent to disarm local militias. A proposal to rearm them was soundly defeated last fall in the Afghan Parliament. Now, it’s again the plan du jour, rubber-stamped by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Afghans protest that such a plan amounts to sponsoring civil war, which, if true, would mean that American involvement in Afghanistan might be coming full circle—civil war being the state in which the U.S. left Afghanistan at the end of our proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. American commanders, however, insist that they must use militias because Afghan Army and police forces are “simply not available.” Maj. Gen. Michael S. Tucker, deputy commander of American forces, told the New York Times, “We don’t have enough police, [and] we don’t have time to get the police ready.” This, despite the State Department’s award to DynCorp last August of another $317.4 million contract “to continue training civilian police forces in Afghanistan,” a contract DynCorp CEO William Ballhaus greeted as “an opportunity to contribute to peace, stability and democracy in the world [and] support our government’s efforts to improve people’s lives.”
America First
In other areas less obviously connected to security, American aid policy is no less self-serving or self-defeating. Although the Bush administration handpicked the Afghan president and claims to want to extend his authority throughout the country, it refuses to channel aid money through his government’s ministries. (It argues that the Afghan government is corrupt, which it is, in a pathetic, minor league sort of way.)
Instead of giving aid money for Afghan schools to the Ministry of Education, for example, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funds private American contractors to start literacy programs for adults. As a result, Afghan teachers abandon the public schools and education administrators leave the Ministry for higher paying jobs with those contractors, further undermining public education and governance. The Bush administration may have no particular reason to sabotage its handpicked government, but it has had every reason to befriend private contractors who have, in turn, kicked back generously to election campaigns and Republican coffers.
There are other peculiar features of American development aid. Nearly half of it (47%) goes to support “technical assistance.” Translated, that means overpaid American “experts,” often totally unqualified—somebody’s good old college buddies—are paid handsomely to advise the locals on matters ranging from office procedures to pesticide use, even when the Afghans neither request nor welcome such advice. By contrast, the universally admired aid programs of Sweden and Ireland allocate only 4% and 2% respectively to such technical assistance, and when asked, they send real experts. American technical advisors, like American privateers, are paid by checks—big ones—that pass directly from the federal treasury to private accounts in American banks, thus helping to insure that about 86 cents of every dollar designated for U.S. “foreign” aid anywhere in the world never leaves the U.S.A.
American aid that actually makes it abroad arrives with strings attached. At least 70% of it is “tied” to the purchase of American products. A food aid program, for example, might require Afghanistan to purchase American agricultural products in preference to their own, thus putting Afghan farmers out of business or driving even more of them into the poppy trade. (The percentage of aid from Sweden, Ireland, and the United Kingdom that is similarly tied: zero.)
Testifying before a congressional subcommittee on May 8, 2001, Andrew Natsios, then head of USAID, described American aid as “a key foreign policy instrument [that] helps nations prepare for participation in the global trading system and become better markets for U.S. exports.” Such so-called aid cuts American business in right from the start. USAID has even developed a system for “preselecting” certain private contractors, then inviting only those preselected companies to apply for contracts the agency wants to issue.
Often, in fact, only one of the preselected contractors puts in for the job and then—if you need a hint as to what’s really going on—just happens to award subcontracts to some of the others. It’s remarkable, too, how many former USAID officials have passed through the famed revolving door in Washington to become highly paid consultants to private contractors—and vice versa. By January 2006, the Bush administration had co-opted USAID altogether. The once independent aid agency launched by President Kennedy in 1961 became a subsidiary of the State Department and a partner of the Pentagon.
Oh, and keep in mind one more thing: While the private contractors may be in it for the duration, most employees and technical experts in Afghanistan stay on the job only six months to a year because it’s considered such a “hardship post.” As a result, projects tend not to last long and to be remarkably unrelated to those that came before or will come after. Contractors collect the big bucks whether or not the aid they contracted to deliver benefits Afghans, or even reaches them.
These arrangements help explain why Afghanistan remains such a shambles.
The Afghan Scam
It’s not that American aid has done nothing. Check out the USAID website and you’ll find a summary of what is claimed for it (under the glorious heading of “Afghanistan Reborn”). It will inform you that USAID has completed literally thousands of projects in that country. The USAID loves numbers, but don’t be deceived by them. A thousand short-term USAID projects can’t hold a candle to one long, careful, patient program run, year after year, by a bunch of Afghans led by a single Swede.
If there has been any progress in Afghanistan, especially in and around Kabul, it’s largely been because two-thirds of the reconstruction aid to Afghanistan comes from other (mostly European) countries that do a better job, and partly because the country’s druglords spend big on palatial homes and services in the capital. But the one-third of international aid that is supposed to come from the U.S., and that might make a critical difference when added to the work of others, eternally falls into the wrong pockets.
What would Afghans have done differently, if they’d been in charge? They’d have built much smaller schools, and a lot more of them, in places more convenient to children than to foreign construction crews. Afghans would have hired Afghans to do the building. Louis Berger Group had the contract to build more than 1,000 schools at a cost of $274,000 per school. Already way behind schedule in 2005, they had finished only a small fraction of them when roofs began to collapse under the snows of winter.
Believe me, given that same $274,000, Afghans would have built 15 or 20 schools with good roofs. The same math can be applied to medical clinics. Afghans would also have chosen to repair irrigation systems and wells, to restore ruined orchards, vineyards, and fields. Amazingly enough, USAID initially had no agricultural programs in a country where rural subsistence farmers are 85% of the population. Now, after seven years, the agency finally claims to have “improved” irrigation on “nearly 15%” of arable land. And you can be sure that Afghans wouldn’t have chosen—again—the Louis Berger Group to rebuild the 389-mile-long Kabul/Kandahar highway with foreign labor at a cost of $1 million per mile. (continue reading)
REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol
Source: Wired
If you think you're being watched, you're probably right.
The American Civil Liberties Union posted a website Monday showing that government-financed surveillance cameras are running rampant across the United States.
All the while, studies suggest they do nothing to cut down on violent crime. San Francisco, for example, has spent $700,000 for dozens of public cameras, but a University of California study (.pdf, 187 pages) just concluded there was "no evidence" they curtailed violent crime.
"Violent incidents do not decline in areas near the cameras relative to areas further away," added the study, which noted the cameras helped police bring charges against six people accused of felony property crimes. "We observe no decline in violent crimes occurring in public places."
But the report did show that, over the past two years, property crimes such as burglary and muggings dropped an estimated 24 percent in areas within 100 feet of San Francisco camera locations.
The ACLU's website, "You Are Being Watched," shows a map of the 50 U.S. states with links to news accounts about where surveillance cameras are in each state. The federal government has given state and local governments $300 million in grants to fund an ever-growing array of cameras.
Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, said in a telephone interview that, while the cameras have helped nab suspects, he believes they provide a false sense of security.
"It's the illusion of security ... public authorities like to give the impression they are doing something about crime and terrorism," Steinhardt said.
He said it is impossible to quantify exactly how many government-backed surveillance cameras are in the public right of way, but they are in virtually every U.S. state.
Two questions posed on the ACLU site ask: "Do we want a society where an innocent individual can't walk down the street without being considered a potential criminal?" and "Do we want a society where people are comfortable with constant surveillance?"
by Cenk Uygur - The Smirking Chimp
Fox News is always ragging on Air America. They say that a liberal radio network can't work, the hosts don't have any talent and that the network is always losing money. So, let's see how Air America did against Fox News last year.
In 2008, former Air America host, Al Franken was elected the next Senator from Minnesota. Current Air America host Rachel Maddow was given her own television show on MSNBC, where she instantly doubled the ratings and even beat legendary Larry King on CNN (and also tripled the ratings of current Fox host Glenn Beck when he was on CNN Headline News in the same time slot).
In 2008, no Fox News host or anchor became a United States Senator. Nor did anyone double their ratings. To be fair, they still did relatively well in the ratings although both CNN and MSNBC closed ground on them during the year.
Oh yeah, one other thing - their parent corporation lost a tremendous amount of money. The Rupert Murdoch run News Corporation lost $30 billion in market cap. Yes, Fox's parent corporation lost a stunning $30 billion in value in 2008. Boy, those conservatives sure know how to run a business!
What happened, I thought Air America couldn't make money? Did you know that Fox News lost $90 million a year for its first five years of operation? Air America has never come close to losing that kind of money. But you see, when it comes to them, they call that an investment. When it comes to liberal networks, they just call it losing money.
Does that distinction make any sense? Of course, not. But their advantage is that they don't live in the reality-based world. So, they can use any rhetorical trick they like and not be held accountable. But here is the problem, the reality-based world has a way of catching up with you. Just ask George Bush. And in this case, it caught up to News Corp. to the tune of $30 billion. Ouch.
I assume we won't be hearing much from Fox anymore about how to run a business. Or how to run a Senate campaign. Or how to double your ratings. They might be best served by drinking a tall glass of shut up juice for awhile. Somehow, I doubt they will though.
Young Turks on You Tube
Disclaimer: The Young Turks were also an Air America show at one time and our videos are still carried on their website. Plus, I loathe Fox News. So, those are my biases, but the facts remain the same nonetheless.
By the way, we also did our part in 2008. The Young Turks is one of the top rated shows on XM satellite radio and one of the most popular shows on You Tube (Top 100 Most Viewed -- All Time) with close to 60 million views. And unlike News Corp., we turned a profit this year.
from BartCop
Steve Young
“I don’t know if we’ve ever had an opponent who is so disliked by Republicans as Al Franken,” said Minnesota Republican Party Chair Ron Carey. “It’s one thing to lose to an honorable opponent, but Al Franken is not considered an honorable opponent by Minnesota Republicans.”
If Mr. Carey and the rest of the Republicans would like to see how they’ve come to realize their - as well as Bill O’Reilly’s worst nightmare - they need only look in the mirror.
When I sat down in 2002 to speak with Franken about how seemingly adversarial conditions played a positive part in his life for my book, “Great Failures of the Extremely Successful… Mistakes, Adversity, Failure and Other Steppingstones to Success,” he had no idea that some of his greatest adversaries would help him to become a member of one of America’s most exclusive clubs…the U.S. Senate.
Back then I brought up the possibility of Franken going in to talk radio, but he intimated it was probably the last thing he would do. Funny, it ended up becoming just that, right before he ran for the Minnesota senate seat held by Republican Norm Coleman.
Air America was not yet a twinkle in the liberal’s eye, and despite his book, “Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot and other Observations” Franken was still more known for his comedy than he was for his political stance. His “Strange Bedfellows” bits on Comedy Central during the 96 election with then Republican Arianna Huffington were just a small hint of the direction Franken was heading.
The straw that broke the far right wing’s back came in the form of a 2003 law suit where the right-wing elevated the comic/author Franken from comic and author to Michael Moore danger level.
Penguin Books published Franken’s book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” which included a cover photo of O’Reilly and a chapter accusing O’Reilly of lying. The book had sold fairly well, but would have run its course until Fox News, pushed by O’Reilly taking the bait, sued claiming infringement of its registered trademark phrase “Fair and Balanced.” A federal judge found the lawsuit to be “wholly without merit” and Fox then filed to dismiss it. With the media attention drawn by the legal folly, Franken’s sales and his public image went bonkers. He not only beat O’Reilly and made him appear thin-skinned and toothless, but his books and satirical approach taught the Democrats to fight back creatively. More importantly, he gave open-minded Republicans a bit of the truth behind far-right talk show zealots claims. Claims that had pretty much gone without scrutiny even by the so-called liberal mainstream media who were happy to book people like Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Ann Coulter to get their take on politics.
Franken began his Minnesota campaign far behind Coleman, with all talk show hosts writing him off as a ridiculous no-chance candidate. After winning the Democratic primary, the Minnesota Republican Party released a letter about an article, Franken, a long time satirist, had written for Playboy magazine in 2000 entitled “Porn-O-Rama!” The letter, signed by six prominent GOP women, including a state senator and state representative, called on Franken to apologize for what they referred to as a “demeaning and degrading” article. Radio Right grabbed the story and pushed it for weeks.
Rather than paint Franken as a deviant, it drew even more support and closed the divide between him and Coleman. The more venom the right threw at Franken, the more money came in to his campaign and the less he had to spend to get a camera or microphone in front of him. Franken had already had notoriety but the Republicans attempt to turn Franken into Fagin gave his race a national je ne sais quoi.
Meanwhile, O’Reilly, continued to attack Franken as well as whomever didn’t lay down for Bill’s side of an argument. O’Reilly’s public skewering of then presidential candidate, Chris Dodd, who fought back toe to toe, sent Dodd’s campaign coffers to over-flowing. Bill’s frequent jabs and well-publicized distaste for Keith Olbermann that fueled the MSNBC franchise’s rating confirms he has yet to learn that there’s always a hook hidden within the bait.
It’s not a stretch to believe that without O’Reilly, Franken wouldn’t not have entered the Senate race, let alone won.
Carey and pretty much any other Republican pundit you put a microphone in front of today will tell you Franken stole the election. It won’t keep him from taking his seat and just makes them just look all the more the loser.
This isn’t to say the Left is unfamiliar with aiding and abetting their own demons. For years the left has built up Limbaugh’s profile by making him their number one enemy. Moveon.org’s General Petraeus/Betrayus ad backfired big time. Barack Obama has made Sean Hannity so much of a talking point that radio talk’s number two now uses Obama’s Hannity soundbites as his radio show’s intro.
They say the negative campaigning works . My guess is that neither side will ever learn that throwing dirt not only gets your own hands dirty but it can boomerang into making the person you aimed at extremely sympathetic.
It’s not that Franken won’t have a rocky road in the Senate. Normally, no matter how dirty the campaign, the victor has a honeymoon period. Franken won’t even have time to lock the hotel room door before the honeymoon receives its cease and desist order. He can only hope that O’Reilly won’t stop trying to ruin the marriage.
from BartCop
** Save Gas **
** READ A BOOK **
Search by Book Title/Author /Keyword
USA Today NEWS
USA Today SPORTS
USA Today WEATHER
The Other Big Mac, Ipods & More!
USA Today MONEY
USA Today LIFE
USA Today TRAVEL
"FORE...five...six...seven...."
The Eyes Have It
You can improve your putting by proper use of your eyes during each stage of the putt; here’s how...
Eyes during setup: • When you set up to stroke a putt, one of the first things you must do is position your eyes over the golf ball and over your target line. Doing this will give you the best chance to start the ball headed on the target line.
• To help position your eyes over the ball, most putter heads have a top surface split into two separate elevations, with an indicator placed on each elevation. When used correctly, this mechanism ensures your eyes are directly over the ball.
• If your head/eyes drift outside or inside of the ball, the putter’s bi-level alignment indicators will no longer match up to each other, immediately indicating your eyes are not directly over the ball and target line. For example, if your putter has two indicator lines on the upper level and an indicator on the bottom level, you know your eyes are positioned correctly over the ball and target line when the indicator on the lower level appears between the two lines on the upper level.
Eyes during the stroke:
• Keep your eyes on the ball and over the target line during the stroke.
Eyes after contact:
• Keep your eyes over the target line during the stroke. If you have to peek toward the hole, try your best to only swivel your head down the target line rather then lifting your head, as this will change your spine angle and move your head off the target line.
• Try your best to keep your eyes over the target line by holding your focus on the grass that was under the ball, even long after contact. You’re not going to improve the putt by watching it roll, so don’t be in a rush to look up.
The Key to Eliminating Your Slice
Making a proper “full shoulder turn” is one of the most important fundamentals of the golf swing, yet it's one of the most common mistakes made by golfers; and why so many have slice problems. A proper shoulder turn is when you rotate the shoulders so the leading shoulder comes under your chin, without letting your hips turn much at all. Below we explain the ways this eliminates the slice:
• If your shoulder rotation is stopped too early, your arms will tend to continue by fling across the target line and causing an outside-to-inside swing path, resulting in the dreaded banana-ball. A full shoulder turn will help the club fall “on plane”, which greatly reduces the chance of cutting across the target line and slicing the golf ball.
• A full shoulder turn will promote proper weight shift. Remember too keep your lower body from moving laterally. Do not confuse the full shoulder turn as meaning you must get the club back to parallel at the top of the swing. Many great golfers have a compact swing that comes up far short of parallel at the top, but all great golfers take a full shoulder turn when executing a full shot.
• A full shoulder turn will bring you to the top of the swing and assist in getting the hands and arms into proper position.
• Keep your chin up and off your chest so the leading shoulder can rotate and pass under the chin. If the shoulder hits your chin, it will cut the shoulder rotation short and encourage a slice.
• When a golfer does not utilize a full shoulder turn, they tend to rely more on the small muscles (hands and arms) to swing the golf club. This leads to inconsistent ball striking and shots prone to slicing. With a full shoulder turn, you will use more of your big muscles, which are much more consistent, and help you square the club face and avoid a slice. Don’t be in a rush; taking the club back slow will help you to finish the back swing with a full shoulder turn. More body, less arms.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment