WikiLeaks Leaker a TRUE Patriot; Climate Change; Permanent War State; Obama the Republican; More Guns; MLK; American Exceptionalism Myth; more

- The Myth of 'American Exceptionalism' Implodes Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures...

The richest 10-15% - those cashing in on employers' good fortune from no longer-rising wages - helped bring on the crisis by speculating wildly and unsuccessfully in all sorts of new financial instruments (asset-backed securities, credit default swaps, etc). The richest also contributed to the crisis by using their money to shift US politics to the right, rendering government regulation and oversight inadequate to anticipate or moderate the crisis or even to react properly once it hit.

- In the Crosshairs: From Tucson to Kabul Here's a question: Why don't the dead of our foreign wars register on us, particularly the civilians killed in numbers that, if attributed to our enemies or past imperial armies, would be seen as the acts of barbarians?  After all, when a Taliban suicide bomber kills  17 Afghans and wounds 23 in a bathhouse, including a senior police border-control officer, we know just what to think.  It wouldn't matter if those who sent the bomber claimed that he had made a “mistake” in targeting, or if they declared the other deaths regrettable “collateral damage.”  When we attack with similar results, we hardly think about it at all.

- The Sickening "Vindication" (by Barack Obama) of Dick Cheney In the early months of Obama's presidency, the American Right did to him what they do to every Democratic politician:  they accused him of being soft of defense (specifically "soft on Terror") and leaving the nation weak and vulnerable to attack.  But that tactic quickly became untenable as everyone (other than his hardest-core followers) was forced to acknowledge that Obama was [unfortunately] embracing and even expanding -- rather than reversing -- the core Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism.

- The Tragic US Strategy in Afghanistan Meanwhile, with the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan serving as one of its most effective recruiting tools, the Taliban has grown exponentially--from an estimated 7,000 in 2006 to 35,000 or 40,000 today, according to NATO.

But after the release of the December review of the war, President Obama nonetheless declared that the United States is “on track to achieve our goals.” Either the administration has deluded itself or it can't muster the courage to tell the American public the truth.

- Can We Trust Climate Models? Increasingly, the Answer is ‘Yes’ "If you want to know ‘is climate change something that should be on my radar screen?'" he says, "then you end up with some very solid results. The climate is warming, and we can say why. Looking to the 21st century, all reasonable projections of what humans will be doing suggest that not only will the climate continue to warm, you have a good chance of it accelerating. Those are global-scale issues, and they're very solid."

- Revolution of Values: From MLK, Jr. to Bradley Manning Manning, 23, is alleged to have provided Wikileaks with documents that expose war crimes and other unethical behaviors being committed by the United States. He reportedly first went to his commanding officer when he saw that Iraqis were being imprisoned and tortured at the behest of the US military for simply publishing a document which questioned where the money went in Iraq. He was told to get back to work. Apparently when he saw more evidence of war crimes, he felt that the American public must know what is being done in its name. Manning is said to have joined the military because he believed in his country.

- After Tucson Shootings, Ariz. Republicans Push for Guns on School Campuses Gun rights advocates aren't letting a shooting that left six dead and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in the hospital slow them down. Republicans in the Arizona State Legislature are planning to move forward with several bills that would expand gun rights.

- 'Respect' for MLK: Surf Shop Celebrates With '20% Off All Black Products' Sale ... when the country is celebrating the birthday of, arguably, the most influential civil-rights activist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., boasting a sale with "20% Off All Black Products" is about as bad an idea as bad ideas go.

From Military-Industrial Complex to Permanent War State
by Gareth Porter
Published on Monday, January 17, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

  Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower's January 17, 1961 speech on the "military-industrial complex", that threat has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined.  It has become a "Permanent War State", with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future.

But despite their seeming invulnerability, the vested interests behind U.S. militarism have been seriously shaken twice in the past four decades by some combination of public revulsion against a major war, opposition to high military spending, serious concern about the budget deficit and a change in perception of the external threat.  Today, the Permanent War State faces the first three of those dangers to its power simultaneously -- and in a larger context of the worst economic crisis since the great depression.

When Eisenhower warned in this farewell address of the "potential" for the "disastrous rise of misplaced power", he was referring to the danger that militarist interests would gain control over the country's national security policy. The only reason it didn't happen on Ike's watch is that he stood up to the military and its allies.

The Air Force and the Army were so unhappy with his "New Look" military policy that they each waged political campaigns against it. The Army demanded that Ike reverse his budget cuts and beef up conventional forces. The Air Force twice fabricated intelligence to support its claim that the Soviet Union was rapidly overtaking the United States in strategic striking power -- first in bombers, later in ballistic missiles.

But Ike defied both services, reducing Army manpower by 44 percent from its 1953 level and refusing to order a crash program for bombers or for missiles.  He also rejected military recommendations for war in Indochina, bombing attacks on China and an ultimatum to the Soviet Union.

After Eisenhower, it became clear that the alliance of militarist interests included not only the military services and their industrial clients but civilian officials in the Pentagon, the CIA's Directorate of Operations, top officials at the State Department and the White House national security adviser.  During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, that militarist alliance succeeded in pushing the White House into a war in Vietnam, despite the reluctance of both presidents, as documented in my book Perils of Dominance.

But just when the power of the militarist alliance seemed unstoppable in the late 1960s, the public turned decisively against the Vietnam War, and a long period of public pressure to reduce military spending began. As a result, military manpower was reduced to below even the Eisenhower era levels.

For more than a decade the alliance of militarist interests was effectively constrained from advocating a more aggressive military posture.

Even during the Reagan era, after a temporary surge in military spending, popular fear of Soviet Union melted away in response to the rise of Gorbachev, just as the burgeoning federal budget deficit was becoming yet another threat to militarist bloc.  As it became clear that the Cold War was drawing to a close, the militarist interests faced the likely loss of much of their power and resources.

But in mid-1990 they got an unexpected break when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. George H. W. Bush - a key figure in the militarist complex as former CIA Director -- seized the opportunity to launch a war that would end the "Vietnam syndrome".  The Bush administration turned a popular clear-cut military victory in the 1991 Gulf War into a rationale for further use of military force in the Middle East.  Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's 1992 military strategy for the next decade said, "We must be prepared to act decisively in the Middle East/Persian Gulf region as we did in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm if our vital interests are threatened anew."

The Bush administration pressured the Saudis and other Arab regimes in the Gulf to allow longer-term bases for the U.S. Air Force, and over the next eight years, U.S. planes flew an annual average of 8,000 sorties in the "no fly zones" the United States had declared over most of Iraq, drawing frequent anti-aircraft fire.

The United States was already in a de facto state of war with Iraq well before George W. Bush's presidency.

The 9/11 attacks were the biggest single boon to the militarist alliance.  The Bush administration exploited the climate of fear to railroad the country into a war of aggression against Iraq.  The underlying strategy, approved by the military leadership after 9/11, was to use Iraq as a base from which to wage a campaign of regime change in a long list of countries.

That fateful decision only spurred recruitment and greater activism by al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, which expanded into Iraq and other countries.

Instead of reversing the ill-considered use of military force, however, the same coalition of officials pushed for an even more militarized approach to jihadism.  Over the next few years, it gained unprecedented power over resources and policy at home and further extended its reach abroad:   

• The Special Operations Forces, which operate in almost complete secrecy, obtained extraordinary authority to track down and kill or capture al Qaeda suspects not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in many more countries.

• The CIA sought and obtained virtually unlimited freedom to carry out drone strikes in secrecy and without any meaningful oversight by Congress.

• The Pentagon embraced the idea of the "long war" - a twenty-year strategy envisioning deployment of U.S. troops in dozens of countries, and the Army adopted the idea of "the era of persistent warfare" as its rationale for more budgetary resources.

• The military budget doubled from 1998 to 2008 in the biggest explosion of military spending since the early 1950s - and now accounts for 56 percent of discretionary federal spending.

• The military leadership used its political clout to ensure that U.S. forces would continue to fight in Afghanistan indefinitely, even after the premises of its strategy were shown to have been false.

Those moves have completed the process of creating a "Permanent War State" -- a set of institutions with the authority to wage largely secret wars across a vast expanse of the globe for the indefinite future.

But the power of this new state formation is still subject to the same political dynamics that have threatened militarist interests twice before: popular antipathy to a major war, broad demands for reduced military spending and the necessity to reduce the Federal budget deficit and debt.

The percentage of Americans who believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting has now reached 60 percent for the first time. And as the crisis over the federal debt reaches it climax, the swollen defense budget should bear the brunt of deep budget cuts. 

As early as 2005, a Pew Research Center survey found that, when respondents were given the opportunity to express a preference for budget cuts by major accounts, they opted to reduce military spending by 31 percent.  In another survey by the Pew Center a year ago, 76 percent of respondents, frustrated by the continued failure of the U.S. economy, wanted the United States to put top priority in its domestic problems.  

The only thing missing from this picture is a grassroots political movement organized specifically to demand an end to the Permanent War State. Such a movement could establish firm legal restraints on the institutions that threaten American Democratic institutions through a massive educational and lobbying effort. This is the right historical moment to harness the latent anti-militarist sentiment in the country to a conscious strategy for political change.  

Sean

MLK; Schools More Segregated today; Iranian 'Chernobyl' Thanks to US/Israel; Gun Control; WikiLeaks and US Hypocrisy; BP Oil; Republican Hypocrisy

- Stuxnet Virus Attack: Russia Warns of 'Iranian Chernobyl' Russian nuclear officials have warned of another Chernobyl-style nuclear disaster at Iran's controversial Bushehr reactor because of the damage caused by the Stuxnet virus- widely believed to have been the result of a sophisticated joint US-Israeli cyber attack.

- On MLK Day, Some Thoughts on Segregated Schools, Arne Duncan, and President Obama American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white.

- Talk About Civility is Fine, but Where are the New Calls for Gun Control? Behold the silence of the lambs. Naturally, I'm talking about the Democrats.

One of their own House members has been plugged in the head by a nut job armed with a Glock and a high-capacity magazine, yet even now they can't muster the courage to talk about sensible gun curbs. That issue is off the national agenda because Democrats have been rendered mute by their terror of [the Republican's best friends,] the gun lobby.

- Amid WikiLeaks Storm, US Gov't Promotes Ellsberg Film AMERICAN HYPOCRISY: Even as prosecutors build a case against the Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

- BP Targets One of the World's Last Unspoilt Wildernesses Speaking to The Independent on Sunday  yesterday, Mike Childs, FoE's head of climate change, said: "BP, a number of years ago, were positioning themselves to be the greenest of the oil companies, promising to go 'beyond petroleum'. This latest move positions them quite nicely as environmental villain number one, given the huge impact they had in the Gulf of Mexico as well."
The oil giant "cannot be trusted" to drill oil in difficult waters, and any oil spill would be "completely catastrophic". He added: "The Arctic should be a no-go for fossil fuel extraction as it's one of the few pristine environments we have left. It's very fragile and we should be looking at ways to protect it, not seemingly trying to find ways of wrecking it."

- Martin Luther King's Legacy n the mid-1960s, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. contributed an annual essay to The Nation on the state of civil rights and race relations in the United States.  His last piece, from March 14, 1966, could have been written today: "Jobs are harder to create than voting rolls. Harmonizing of peoples of vastly different cultural levels is complicated and frequently abrasive." Read and share four of King's timeless and timely essays to mark this year's holiday.

- Darrell Issa (Republican) asks business: Tell me what to change Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wants the oil industry, drug manufacturers and other trade groups and companies to tell him which Obama administration regulations to target this year.

- Don't Look Back Darrell Issa, the corrupt Republican congressman about to launch endless "investigations" into the Obama administration has had some troubles of his own.


Which Side Would Martin Luther King Be On?

President Lyndon B. Johnson and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meet at the White House, 1966

When it comes to newly maligned public workers, the answer is easy
by Roger Bybee
Published on Monday, January 17, 2011 by In These Times

If Martin Luther King, Jr. were to be resurrected today, just in time for the national holiday commemorating his memory, many of the anti-public sector politicians praising his legacy would be choking on their words.

After all, King was a persistent, unwavering champion of the most despised and disparaged members of society, like the public employees now being systematically demonized for state and local fiscal crises (Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich decimates the myths behind the campaign against government workers here).

Recent portraits of Martin Luther King, like Michael Eric Dyson's I May Not Get There With You and the brand-new All Work Has Dignity by Michael Honey, stress his unwavering commitment to labor unions and economic rights as well as full racial justice.
King's exhausting pace of organizing and mobilizing helped to force the passage of landmark civil rights legislation in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But he never considered resting on his laurels. He remained utterly unconcerned with retaining elite approval, as he had a larger vision of economic and social justice he sought to pursue.
Dr. King maintained a disciplined method of non-violence, but increasingly went "too far" in challenging America's economic inequality and the inequality its corporations established across the globe, backed up by U.S. military might. In a little-known speech at the Highlander Institute for activists in 1957, King proudly proclaimed:

I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence.

King fought not just against "Jim Crow" laws, but against the underlying structure of America's economy which condemned all working people--black, white, and Latino--to a fundamental lack of power, dignity, and economic security. The condition of black people in America was a distinct product of American racism, but it was also intertwined with the economic powerlessness facing all poor and working people, King argued.

The Northern media—which largely applauded his efforts to bring down the irrational system of Southern segregation which kept the entire region backward for a century and impeded economic development—were far less sympathetic to his forceful denunciation of economic injustice and the Vietnam War.
As Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen noted,

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" — including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power."

Thus, at the time of his death on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was deeply immersed in the struggle of 1,300 black sanitation workers in Memphis who had organized themselves into an AFSCME local.. At the same time, he was also building a coalition for a "Poor People's Campaign" that would assemble in Washington, D.C., to demand "economic rights" for people of all colors. It was aimed at building a mighty coalition that would span autoworkers in Detroit, discarded coalminers in Appalachia, Latino farmworkers, and oppressed blacks in both the South and North.

In his new book All Work Has Dignity, Honey pulls together 11 of King's speeches on labor and explains the lasting significance of King's emphasis on the need for "economic rights" for all.

People forget that Dr. King was every bit as committed to economic justice as he was to ending racial segregation. As we struggle with massive unemployment, a staggering racial wealth gap and near collapse of our financial system, King’s prophetic writings and speeches underscore his relevance for today.

King saw domestic inequality as inextricably linked with the foreign policy of U.S. corporations and the government. He spoke out against the Vietnam War not as a "tragic well-intentioned mistake," as so many liberals described it, but the inevitable result of the U.S. empire of corporate power expanding under a growing military umbrella.
In an audacious statement that would get him branded a dangerous "extremist" today, King declared on April 4, 1967, that the United States was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." King was an early critic of corporate globalization, which exploited the misery of the world's poorest nations:

capitalists of the West [are] investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.

GLOBALIZATION: SOUTHERN MODEL EXPANDED ACROSS GLOBE
The current version of globalization would seem familiar to Dr. King, as the the Southern economic model of all-powerful management, docile low-wage labor, and publicly subsidized operations, is now hugely expanded and ported around the globe.
Were he with us today, Dr. King would stand against the opportunistic politicians overlooking the untaxed wealth of billionaires to target public workers. In choosing which side to take in this growing battle, King would have little trouble making a decision, states Honey:

Efforts to shred public employee unions would have deadly effects on the wages, jobs and living standards of the rest of us—especially African Americans, who constitute the most highly unionized group of workers in the country. King fought for the right of all workers to belong to unions, and died supporting that right in Memphis.

Sean

Right Wing Racism and Violence; AZ Shooting; Guns; Healthcare Repeal Will Harm Economy; Republicans Try to Destroy Unions; WikiLeaks; Climate Change; more

- Palin Put a Gun Target on Giffords' District; Now a Colleague Says: 'Palin Needs to Look at Her Own Behavior' After Sarah Palin targeted her district with a gunsight on a map identifying Democrats Palin was urging her followers to "reload" and defeat, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords said: "We are on Sarah Palin's targeted list. The way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of the gunsight over our district. When people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action." On Saturday, Giffords, a moderate Democrat who stirred the wrath of right-wingers with her vote for health care reform, was shot by a gunman who had posted "I can't trust the government" videos on the Internet. The shooting spree killed six people, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl, and left 13 others injured.

- Now Arizona Wants to Allow Concealed Guns on Campuses Arizona's weak gun laws could reach a new low this spring.  When the Arizona state legislature reconvenes today for the first day of the new session, two gun bills will be on the table for debate.

- Shameless: Right-wing pundit Jim Hoft Falls For Fake Facebook Profile In Attempt To Link Loughner To Obama In the wake of Saturday's tragic shooting in Arizona, Gateway Pundit and Breitbart blogger Jim Hoft has been on a one man mission to prove that the deranged shooter was a "typical leftist nut." This morning, Hoft posted what he seems to think is bulletproof evidence supporting this thesis, but, as is usually the case with him, it is merely evidence that someone as hackishly irresponsible as Hoft should have no role in our national political discourse.

- The Tucson Massacre: After the Cameras Are Gone? The hate here is deafening. We have been sending signals for years now and the hate continues. It is relentless, whether from minutemen, hate-radio loudmouths or from state legislators.

To the parachute journalists and all those that have discovered Arizona overnight, don't forget that. Long after you leave, long after this massacre has ceased to be headline news, we will continue to have to contend with the normalized bigotry and hate against brown peoples that continually comes out of the state capitol and that is nowadays prevalent throughout the state. Please remember this and look at your own communities to see if all this hate is already festering there. I can almost guarantee you that it is. Bring it to light before the next massacre. Perhaps you will prevent the next massacre.

- U.S. Healthcare Law Repeal Hurts Deficits An effort by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to repeal the healthcare law enacted last year would add to already huge federal budget deficits, the Congressional Budget Office warned on Thursday.

- Will the New Assaults on Public Employee Unions Undermine All Workers? Years of demonizing public employee unions as part of a right-wing assault against the labor movement now seems about to pay off...

- Crabs, Birds, Fish: No End to Mysterious Animal Deaths First, it was birds falling from the sky, then thousands of dead fish washing up on shore.

- Great Barrier Reef Under Threat From Floods Australia's spectacular Great Barrier Reef is under threat from massive floods swamping the country's northeast which are pouring harmful debris and sediment into the sea, an expert said Wednesday.

- WikiLeaks Reveals Israel Aimed to Keep Gaza Economy on Brink of Collapse Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza's economy "on the brink of collapse" while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by a Norwegian daily on Wednesday.

- Newly Elected Republicans Violate Constitution and US LAW- Miss Swearing-In Oath, Vote on Floor Anyway Two Republicans, including a member of the GOP leadership, voted on the House floor several times despite not having been sworn in, throwing the House into parliamentary turmoil Thursday - the same day the Constitution was read aloud on the floor.

- Canadian Study Sees Global Warming for Centuries Carbon dioxide already emitted into the atmosphere will keep contributing to global warming for centuries, eventually causing a huge Antarctic ice sheet to collapse and lift sea levels, Canadian scientists said on Sunday.

Posted before, but in the wake of the recent shootings it needs to be repeated:
- Fox News Makes You Stupid
- The Truth About "The Truth About Fox News Viewers"


Serious Guns and White Terrorism: Two Unasked Question in Tucson Mass Murder
by Bill Quigley
Published on Monday, January 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Question: How does a mentally unstable man who was kicked out of school and had run-ins with the law buy such a serious weapon?

The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was a serious weapon - a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol, with an extended magazine. Some weapons like that were illegal to sell in the US from 1994 to 2004 under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. It is now legal to sell and own them. The National Rifle Association reports there are tens of millions of assault weapons in private hands in the US.

The federal background check for people purchasing such weapons only prohibits selling such weapons to people who have been legally determined to be mentally defective or found insane or convicted of crimes. This man had not been found legally mentally defective or convicted so he was legally entitled to purchase an assault weapon. In Arizona he was legally entitled to carry the weapon in a concealed manner.

The US has well over 250 million guns in private hands according to the National Rifle Association. That is more, according to the BBC, than any country in the world. In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States according to the Brady Campaign.

Does the US really need tens of millions of assault weapons and hundreds of millions of other guns? We already put more of our people in prison than any country in the world and we spend more on our military than all the rest of the world together. How fearful must we be?

Question: Why is there so little talk of terrorism?

Apparently when a mentally unstable white male is accused, terrorism is not the first thing that comes to mind. White terrorism is not a concept the US takes seriously.

When Clay Duke, a white male, threatened Florida school board members with a gun and shot at them before shooting himself, in December 2010, he was mentally imbalanced.

When Michael Enright, a white male, was arrested for slashing the throat of a Muslim NYC cab driver in August of 2010, his friends said he had a drinking problem.

When Byron Williams, a white male, was arrested after opening fire on police officers and admitted he was on his way to kill people at offices of a liberal foundation and a civil liberties organization, in July 2010, he was an unemployed right wing felon with a drinking problem.

When Joe Stack, a white male, flew his private plane into a federal building in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, he was angry with the IRS.

When a white male is accused of mass murder, white terrorism is not much talked of. Rather the mass murder becomes a terrible tragedy but not one where race or ethnicity or religion need be examined.

Now, if the accused had been Muslim, does anyone doubt whether this mass murder would have been considered an act of terrorism? US Muslims could have expected increased surveillance and harassment at home and the places where they work and worship. They could have expected a Congressional inquiry into the radicalization of their people. Oh, Representative Peter King (R-NY) has already started that one!

Bill is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans.  He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. 

Sean

More Proof of Conservative Media; Climate Change Deaths Rise; Republicans Embrace Terrorists; Arizona to Ban Ethnic Studies; Republicans Want War; More Republican Racism; more

- Ethnic Studies ban affects Reason and Justice in Arizona While much condemnation has rightly been expressed toward Arizona's anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, a less-reported and potentially more sinister measure is set to take effect on January 1, 2011. This new law, which was passed by the conservative state legislature at the behest of then-School Superintendent (and now Attorney General-elect) Tom Horne, is designated HB 2281 and is colloquially referred to as a measure to ban ethnic studies programs in the state. As with SB 1070, the implications of this law are problematic, wide-ranging and decidedly hate filled.

- CNN Poll: U.S. opposition to Afghanistan war remains high The survey indicates a partisan divide, with three-quarters of Democrats and more then six in ten independent voters opposed to the war, and Republicans supporting it by a 52 to 44 percent margin. A minority of Democrats and independents say the war is going well, with a majority of Republicans saying things are going well for the U.S. This year the U.S. and its coalition partners ramped up the fight against Taliban militants in Afghanistan. [resulting in the slaughter of more civilians, resulting in more anti-US sentiment, thus breeding more insurgent fighters. So it's become a self sustaining war]

- 2010: Deadliest for natural disasters in a generation The high death toll has less to do with Mother Nature and more to do with mankind. The excessive amount of extreme weather that dominated 2010 is a classic sign of man-made global warming that climate scientists have long warned about. They calculate that the killer Russian heat wave – setting a national record of 44C – would happen once every 100,000 years without global warming. Plus, poor construction and development practices conspire to make nature disasters more deadly than they need be. More people live in poverty in vulnerable buildings in crowded cities. That means that when the ground shakes, the river breaches or the tropical cyclone hits, more people die. "It's a form of suicide, isn't it? We build houses that kill ourselves [in earthquakes]. We build houses in flood zones that drown ourselves," said Roger Bilham, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado. "It's our fault for not anticipating these things. You know, this is the Earth doing its thing."

- 15 Huge Lies Glenn Beck Did Not Get Fired For In 2010 In 2010, Glenn Beck repeatedly made up facts on Fox News show -- a barrage of lies that would force any credible news outlet to fire him. Media Matters counts down 15 of the most notable fibs that Beck told this year on Fox News, culminating with the biggest lie of all.

- Conservative Media Bias Exposed Indeed, a Pew Research Center survey found that of the top 10 most-covered candidates in the midterm elections, conservatives held the top three spots. Here's more evidence. I asked AOL's Relegence team, which tracks more than 30,000 news sites on the Web, to compare coverage of comparable liberals and conservatives over the past 12 months. The results are stark. Conservatives were featured in vastly more stories.

- The Media's Failure to Challenge Corporate Spin and Lies MSNBC’s Chris Matthews had a good laugh during a recent segment about the five biggest political lies of 2010. PolitiFact gave the top prize to Republicans and pundits who repeatedly lied—and got away with it—by calling the healthcare bill a “government takeover.”

- White Power USA: The Rise of Right-Wing Militia in America, a news report by Democracy Now Read the racist comments from republicans in the comments section, while they proclaim they aren't racists.

- Dead birds fall from sky in Arkansas Wildlife experts are trying to determine what caused more than 1,000 blackbirds to die and fall from the sky over the town of Beebe in Arkansas.

Leading Conservatives Openly Support a Terrorist Group
By Glenn Greenwald
Published Jan 3 2011 on Salon.com

Imagine if a group of leading American liberals met on foreign soil with -- and expressed vocal support for -- supporters of a terrorist group that had (a) a long history of hateful anti-American rhetoric, (b) an active role in both the takeover of a U.S. embassy and Saddam Hussein's brutal 1991 repression of Iraqi Shiites, (c) extensive financial and military support from Saddam, (d) multiple acts of violence aimed at civilians, and (e) years of being designated a "Terrorist organization" by the U.S. under Presidents of both parties, a designation which is ongoing? The ensuing uproar and orgies of denunciation would be deafening.

But on December 23, a group of leading conservatives -- including Rudy Giuliani and former Bush officials Michael Mukasey, Tom Ridge, and Fran Townsend -- did exactly that. In Paris, of all places, they appeared at a forum organized by supporters of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK) -- a group declared by the U.S. since 1997 to be "terrorist organization" -- and expressed wholesale support for that group. Worse -- on foreign soil -- they vehemently criticized their own country's opposition to these Terrorists and specifically "demanded that Obama instead take the [] group off the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations and incorporate it into efforts to overturn the mullah-led government in Tehran." In other words, they are calling on the U.S. to embrace this Saddam-supported, U.S.-hating Terrorist group and recruit them to help overthrow the government of Iran. To a foreign audience, Mukasey denounced his own country's opposition to these Terrorists as "nothing less than an embarrassment."

Using common definitions, there is good reason for the MEK to be deemed by the U.S. Government to be a Terrorist group. In 2007, the Bush administration declared that "MEK leadership and members across the world maintain the capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond," and added that the group exhibits "cult-like characteristics." The Council on Foreign Relations has detailed that the MEK has been involved in numerous violent actions over the years, including many directed at Americans, such as "the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries" and "the killings of U.S.military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran in the 1970s." This is whom Guiliani, Ridge, Townsend and other conservatives are cheering.

Applying the orthodoxies of American political discourse, how can these Terrorist-supporting actions by prominent American conservatives not generate intense controversy? For one thing, their appearance in France to slam their own country's foreign policy blatantly violates the long-standing and rigorously enforced taboo against criticizing the U.S. Government while on dreaded foreign soil (the NYT previously noted that "nothing sets conservative opinion-mongers on edge like a speech made by a Democrat on foreign soil"). Worse, their conduct undoubtedly constitutes the crime of "aiding and abetting Terrorism" as interpreted by the Justice Department -- an interpretation recently upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision last year in Holder v. Humanitarian Law. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole represented the Humanitarian Law plaintiffs in their unsuccessful challenge to the DOJ's interpretation of the "material support" statute, and he argues today in The New York Times that as a result of that ruling, it is a felony in the U.S. "to engage in public advocacy to challenge a group's 'terrorist' designation or even to encourage peaceful avenues for redress of grievances."

Like Cole, I believe the advocacy and actions of these Bush officials in support of this Terrorist group should be deemed constitutionally protected free expression. But under American law and the view of the DOJ, it isn't. There are people sitting in prison right now with extremely long prison sentences for so-called "material support for terrorism" who did little different than what these right-wing advocates just did. What justifies allowing these Bush officials to materially support a Terrorist group with impunity?

Then there's CNN. How can they possibly continue to employ someone -- Fran Townsend -- who so openly supports a Terrorist group? Less than six months ago, that network abruptly fired its long-time producer, Octavia Nasr, for doing nothing more than expressing well wishes upon the death of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, one of the Shiite world's most beloved religious figures. Her sentiments were echoed by the British Ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, who wrote a piece entitled "The Passing of a Decent Man," and by the journal Foreign Policy, which hailed him as "a voice of moderation and an advocate of unity." But because Fadlallh had connections to Hezbollah -- a group designated as a Terrorist organization by the U.S. -- and was an opponent of Israel, neocon and other right-wing organs demonized Nasr and CNN quickly accommodated them by ending her career.

Granted, Nasr was a news producer and Townsend is at CNN to provide commentary, but is it even remotely conceivable to imagine CNN employing someone who openly advocated for Hamas or Hezbollah, who met with their supporters on foreign soil and bashed the U.S. for classifying them as a Terrorist organization and otherwise acting against them or, more radically still, demanding that the U.S. embrace these groups as allies? To ask the question is to answer it. So why is Fran Townsend permitted to keep her CNN job even as she openly meets with supporters of a Terrorist group with a long history of violence and anti-American hatred?

There is simply no limit on the manipulation and exploitation of the term "terrorism" by America's political class. Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell support endless policies that slaughter civilians for political ends, yet with a straight face accuse Julian Assange -- who has done nothing like that -- of being a "terrorist." GOP Rep. Peter King is launching a McCarthyite Congressional hearing to investigate radicalism and Terrorism sympathies among American Muslim while ignoring his own long history of enthusiastic support for Catholic Terrorists in Northern Ireland; as Marcy Wheeler says: "Peter King would still be in prison if the US had treated his material support for terrorism as it now does."

And WikiLeaks this morning published a diplomatic cable from the U.S. summarizing the long-discussed meeting on July 25, 1990, at which the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, talked to Saddam -- a month before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait -- about the history of extensive American support for his regime, the desire of the U.S. for friendly relations with Saddam, and her statement that the U.S. does not care about Saddam's border disputes with Kuwait (Glaspie recorded that she told Saddam: "then, as now, we took no positions on these Arab affairs"). Months later, the U.S. attacked Iraq and cited a slew of human rights abuses and support for Terrorism that took place when the U.S. was arming and supporting Saddam and during the time they had removed Iraq from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in order to provide that support.

The reason there isn't more uproar over these Bush officials' overt foreign-soil advocacy on behalf of a Terrorist group is because they want to use that group's Terrorism to advance U.S. aims. Using Terrorism on behalf of American interests is always permissible, because the actual definition of a Terrorist -- the one that our political and media class universally embraces -- is nothing more than this: "someone who impedes or defies U.S. will with any degree of efficacy."

Even though the actions of these Bush officials violate every alleged piety about bashing one's own country on foreign soil and may very well constitute a felony under U.S. law, they will be shielded from criticisms because they want to use the Terrorist group to overthrow a government that refuses to bow to American dictates. Embracing Terrorist groups is perfectly acceptable when used for that end. That's why Fran Townsend will never suffer the fate of Octavia Nasr, and why her fellow Bush officials will never be deemed Terrorist supporters by the DOJ or establishment media outlets, even though what they've done makes them, by definition, exactly that.

UPDATE: Amazingly, Fran Townsend, on CNN, hailed the Supreme Court's decision in Humanitarian Law -- the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the DOJ's view that one can be guilty of "material support for terrorism" simply by talking to or advocating for a Terrorist group -- and enthusiastically agreed when Wolf Blitzer said, while interviewing her: "If you're thinking about even voicing support for a terrorist group, don't do it because the government can come down hard on you and the Supreme Court said the government has every right to do so." Yet "voicing support for a terrorist group" is exactly what Townsend is now doing -- and it makes her a criminal under the very Supreme Court ruling that she so gleefully praised.

Sean

Oil is Motivation for War; The War You Don't See; Fox 'News' Lies About Climate Change; WikiLeaks is GOOD; Tax Cuts for the Rich Kill Jobs; Ralph Nader; Cheney the Criminal; more

- Oil or Terrorism: Which Motivates U.S. Policy More? The protection of some of the world’s most virulent authoritarian regimes thus became integral to maintaining Anglo-U.S. geopolitical control of the world’s strategic hydrocarbon energy reserves. Our governments have willingly paid a high price for this access – the price of national security.

- FOXLEAKS: Fox Boss Ordered Staff to Cast Doubt On Climate Science In the midst of global climate change talks last December, a top Fox News official sent an email questioning the "veracity of climate change data" and ordering the network's journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."

The directive, sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, was issued less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was "on track to be the warmest [decade] on record."

- Majority of One by Ralph Nader On Friday, December 10, 2010, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent Socialist, of Vermont,  tore the covers off an oligarchic driven Congress and a concessionary President with eight-and-a-half hours of non-stop presentations of facts and figures and a plea for fairness and justice.

Obama has frittered away his comfortable majority in Congress on many accounts for two years. And millions of people and their children will be paying the bill for his failure to fight for them.

- Journalists Begin, Finally, to Stand Up in Defense of WikiLeaks and Freedom of Information While most US journalists have been slow to defend WikiLeaks-and some have been openly critical of the website's distribution of leaked US diplomatic cables-their Australian peers are pushing back against attempts to constrain freedom of information and the press.

- Nigeria Mulls $250 Million Deal to Drop Cheney Charges Nigeria has negotiated a 250 million dollar settlement deal that would see it drop charges against US ex-vice president Dick Cheney and others over a bribery scandal, an official said Tuesday.

- ...And Justice For Few Poor defendants on death row, immigrants in unfair deportation proceedings, torture victims, domestic violence survivors and victims of racial discrimination - all these groups are consistently being denied access to justice while those responsible for the abuses are protected, according to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

- Tax Cuts Create Jobs? Prove It ...the period between 2001 and 2004, when George W. Bush pushed through a series of tax cuts for investors and corporations in the name of creating jobs, actually saw some of the weakest job creation rates on record following a recession.

- Who is Better on Taxes, Republicans or Democrats? Democrats, Clearly A simple chart explains why.

- The Republicans' Fatal Misreading of FDR -- and How It Would Worsen The Depression It's almost forgotten now, but FDR ran for election promising a balanced budget and big spending cuts. By the time he assumed the Presidency, however, public protests against the economic collapse were so huge that he was forced to change course and launch his public spending push. The result? Unemployment began to slide down from its 25 per cent peak.
But then, in 1936, FDR wobbled. He listened to [Republicans] and slashed spending. Unemployment rose again - producing the spike in unemployment that [Republicans] now perversely cite as evidence that the New Deal didn't work. But the reality stands. When FDR spent, unemployment fell. When FDR cut back, unemployment rose.

Pilger: Wikileaks is Necessary 'Revolution in Journalism'
WikiLeaks, Web to Revolutionize Reporting, says Journalist and Filmmaker John Pilger
Published on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 by Reuters
by Mike Collett-White

LONDON - Revelations on the WikiLeaks website which have enraged governments around the world should force the traditional media to rely less on official sources, award-winning journalist John Pilger said.

In an interview to discuss his film "The War You Don't See," the veteran Australian reporter, John Pilger, told Reuters the internet, and more specifically WikiLeaks, would bring about a "revolution" in journalism which too often failed to do its job properly.

In an interview to discuss his film "The War You Don't See," the veteran Australian reporter told Reuters the internet, and more specifically WikiLeaks, would bring about a "revolution" in journalism which too often failed to do its job properly.

One reason the media did not challenge the U.S. and British governments' justification for going to war in Iraq in 2003, later shown to be misplaced, was their eagerness to believe the official version of events, Pilger argued.

He said the same was true of television coverage of the Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, when British broadcasters appeared willing only to use Israeli video rather than trawling the internet for alternative footage.

"That mindset that only authority can really determine the 'truth' on the news, that's a form of embedding that really now has to change," said Pilger, who has covered conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia, written books and made several acclaimed documentaries.
"There's no question about the pressure on it to change coming from the internet and coming from WikiLeaks -- it will change," he added in the interview ahead of Tuesday evening's broadcast of his new film.

"That is the canker in all of this, it's the compulsion to quote, not necessarily believing the authority source. But then once you quote it and you put it out on the wires or you broadcast it, it takes on a sort of mantle of fact and that's where the whole teaching of journalism is wrong.

"Authority has its place, but the skepticism about authority must be ingrained in people."
In The War You Don't See, Pilger interviews leading broadcast journalists including Dan Rather and Rageh Omaar, who agree that journalists failed in their basic duties during the build-up to the Iraq conflict.

It seeks to highlight how British television reporters based in London were quick to accept what they were being told by officials in Westminster, which did not necessarily reflect what was happening on the ground in Iraq.

OTHER SIDE OF STORY

The film shows how independent journalists occasionally provided evidence that countered the official version, while WikiLeaks was a relatively new source of sometimes disturbing information with the potential to embarrass the authorities.

The documentary opens with extended clips from classified U.S. military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff. WikiLeaks released the footage in April.

Pilger also interviews WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, remanded in custody in Britain last week after Sweden issued a European arrest warrant.

Assange jokes that since it is officially wrong to retain information and to destroy it, his only choice was to publish.

Pilger, one of several prominent figures who offered a surety to secure bail for Assange, praised the recent publication of secret U.S. embassy documents which have attracted global media coverage.

"I think the WikiLeaks disclosures have been like watching a great parade of wonderful scoops," Pilger said in the interview.

"(It is) basic rich journalism that is telling people how the world works. It's not just telling them what a prime minister said. It's not framing it in how governments or other vested interests want us to think about something.

"It's giving us the story in their words. I think it's a revolution in journalism."
The War You Don't see is aired on ITV on Tuesday evening and is being screened at select theatres across Britain.

Sean

Leaked Fox News Emails Prove Fox Lies; Ralph Nader Accurately Describes Obama; Tax Cuts for the Super-Rich; WikiLeaks

- Nader: I am Looking for Someone to Challenge Obama in 2012 Perennial third-party candidate Ralph Nader predicted on Wednesday that President Obama's tax deal with Republicans will earn him a primary challenge in 2012. .... He said Obama's decision to allow tax-cut extensions for the wealthy in the lame-duck deal betrays the progressives who supported his campaign in 2008 and called the president a "con man."

- Obama's Huge Would-Be Gift To The Scions Of The Super-Rich The Obama concession [to the republicans] that's getting most of the attention in the media is the one that would extend the Bush income tax cuts even for households making over $250,000 a year. That's a gift to your average millionaire of $139,000 a year for the next two years.

- House Dems Reject Obama's Tax Deal; Pelosi Promises a Fight for a Fairer Plan After he brokered a deal with congressional Republicans to extend Bush-era tax cuts and establish a sweeping estate-tax exemption in return for maintaining unemployment benefits, President Obama essentially told congressional Democrats: Take it or leave it. House Democrats have decided to leave it.

- 'Hacktivists' Warn Over More Action The loose-knit group, known as Anonymous, has disrupted sites belonging to finance giants including MasterCard and Visa by bombarding their websites with millions of bogus visits during a campaign called "Operation Payback".
Their blog post vowing to fight any organisation which supports censorship came as WikiLeaks' payment processor, DataCell, said it was preparing to take legal action against the credit card companies over their refusal to process donations.

- WikiLeaks Cables: Shell's Grip on Nigerian State Revealed The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

- On Behalf of Afghan Familes, Journalist Testifies before Congress Jeremy Scahill Testifies Before Congress on America's Secret Wars

- FLASHBACK: Fox News emails not the first leak indicating effort to slant news rightward Today, Media Matters released emails obtained from a Fox News source, showing Washington managing editor Bill Sammon directing staff not to use the phrase "public option" when discussing health care reform legislation. ... It is not the first time that Media Matters obtained leaked Fox News documents that paint a picture of network management attempting to slant the news toward the right (and often succeeding.)

LEAKED EMAIL: Fox Boss Caught Slanting News Reporting
by Ben Dimiero
Published December 09, 2010 at MediaMatters.org

At the height of the health care reform debate last fall, Bill Sammon, Fox News' controversial Washington managing editor, sent a memo directing his network's journalists not to use the phrase "public option."

Instead, Sammon wrote, Fox's reporters should use "government option" and similar phrases -- wording that a top Republican pollster had recommended in order to turn public opinion against the Democrats' reform efforts.

Journalists on the network's flagship news program, Special Report with Bret Baier, appear to have followed Sammon's directive in reporting on health care reform that evening.
Sources familiar with the situation in Fox's Washington bureau have told Media Matters that Sammon uses his position as managing editor to "slant" Fox's supposedly neutral news coverage to the right. Sammon's "government option" email is the clearest evidence yet that Sammon is aggressively pushing Fox's reporting to the right -- in this case by issuing written orders to his staff.

As far back as March 2009, Fox personalities had sporadically referred to the "government option."

Two months prior to Sammon's 2009 memo, Republican pollster Frank Luntz appeared on Sean Hannity's August 18 Fox News program. Luntz scolded Hannity for referring to the "public option" and encouraged Hannity to use "government option" instead.

Luntz argued that "if you call it a 'public option,' the American people are split," but that "if you call it the 'government option,' the public is overwhelmingly against it." Luntz explained that the program would be "sponsored by the government" and falsely claimed that it would also be "paid for by the government."

"You know what," Hannity replied, "it's a great point, and from now on, I'm going to call it the government option."

On October 26, 2009, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced the inclusion of a public insurance option that states could opt out of in the Senate's health care bill.
That night, Special Report used "public" and "government" interchangeably when describing the public option provision.

Anchor Bret Baier referred to "a so-called public option"; the "public option"; "government-provided insurance coverage"; "this government-run insurance option"; the "healthcare public option"; and "the government-run option, the public option." Correspondent Shannon Bream referred to "a government-run public option"; "a public option"; "a government-run option"; and "the public option."

The next morning, October 27, Sammon sent an email to the staffs of Special Report, Fox News Sunday, and FoxNews.com, as well as to other reporters and producers at the network. The subject line read: "friendly reminder: let's not slip back into calling it the 'public option.' "

Sammon instructed staff to refer on air to "government-run health insurance," the "government option," "the public option, which is the government-run plan," or -- when "necessary" -- "the so-called public option":

From: Sammon, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:23 AM
To: 054 -FNSunday; 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 069 -Politics; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 036 -FOX.WHU; 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers
Subject: friendly reminder: let's not slip back into calling it the "public option"
1) Please use the term "government-run health insurance" or, when brevity is a concern, "government option," whenever possible.
2) When it is necessary to use the term "public option" (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation's lexicon), use the qualifier "so-called," as in "the so-called public option."
3) Here's another way to phrase it: "The public option, which is the government-run plan."
4) When newsmakers and sources use the term "public option" in our stories, there's not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.

Fox's senior vice president for news, Michael Clemente, soon replied. He thanked Sammon for his email and said that he preferred Fox staffers use Sammon's third phrasing: "The public option, which is the government-run plan."

From: Clemente, Michael
To: Sammon, Bill; 054 -FNSunday; 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 069 -Politics; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 036 -FOX.WHU; 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers
Sent: Tue Oct 27 08:45:29 2009
Subject: RE: friendly reminder: let's not slip back into calling it the "public option"

Thank you Bill
#3 on your list is the preferred way to say it, write it, use it.
Michael Clemente
SVP-News
212.XXX.XXXX

Sammon's email appears to have had an impact. On the October 27 Special Report -- unlike on the previous night's broadcast -- Fox journalists made no references to the "public option" without using versions of the pre-approved qualifiers outlined in Sammon's and Clemente's emails.

Reporting on health care reform that night, Baier referenced the public option three times. In each instance, he referred to it as "government-run health insurance" or a "government-run health insurance option" -- precisely echoing the first wording choice laid out by Sammon.

On the same show, correspondent Jim Angle referred to "a government insurance plan, the so-called public option"; "a government insurance option"; and "a government insurance plan."

The wording of Sammon's email -- a "friendly reminder" not to "slip back into calling it the 'public option' " -- suggests that someone in the Fox News chain of command had previously issued similar instructions.

And indeed, the issue had surfaced before in Fox's newscasts.

On the September 3, 2009, Special Report -- three weeks after Luntz told Hannity to call it the "government option" -- Baier discussed the potential inclusion of a public option during the show's nightly commentary segment.

During the segment -- after Baier himself had referred to a "public option" -- NPR's Mara Liasson also referred several times to the "public option," prompting Baier to interrupt her to clarify that it is the "government-run option of health insurance."

As the conversation continued, The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer and The Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes both used "public option." When Liasson mentioned a "triggered public option," Baier again interrupted, asking, "Should we say 'government option,' by the way?"
"Government option, OK," replied Liasson.
"Everybody gets it," Baier explained.
On-screen text during the segment also used "Government Option."

Watch:


Fox executives regularly defend the network by claiming that the right-wing propaganda on Hannity and its other opinion shows is entirely separate from its news programming, which they insist is objective. But Sammon's email gives credence to allegations that news from Fox's Washington bureau is being deliberately distorted to benefit conservatives and the Republican Party.

In October, Media Matters reported that sources with knowledge of the situation had raised concerns about the direction of Fox's Washington bureau under Sammon, who took over as managing editor in February 2009:

"[There is] more pressure from Sammon to slant news to the right or to tell people how to report news, doing it in a more brutish way," one source with knowledge of the situation said. "A lot of the reporters are conservative and are glad to pick up news. But there is a point at which it is no longer reporting, but distorting things."

"[Former Fox News Washington managing editor] Brit Hume was also encouraging people to look at things with other points of view. Brit was smart to see that a lot of mainstream media ignore certain points of view," the source added. "That was a smart and effective way to build the Fox brand.
"But if you come in to say, 'ignore points of view and ignore facts,' then you are straying away from being a legitimate news reporter."

Asked about the first source's allegation, a second source with knowledge of the situation said, "I wouldn't disagree with it from this standpoint: Brit was the 800-pound gorilla who could pick up the phone and say he will not do that. Bill Sammon is no 800-pound gorilla within the organization. He doesn't have that much sway."

The second source also said of Sammon, "He is not going to buck the bosses in New York. The D.C. bureau chief [Brian Boughton] and managing editor in D.C. [Sammon] are not as powerful as they once were. They are not going to raise objections and fight hard. They will just pass on the message."

Since then, a Fox source has told Media Matters:

"People are allowed to have opinions when they espouse opinions. But when news is being tampered with, you have to worry. I keep hearing things from staffers about Sammon."
"I think Sammon comes up with this himself. It takes a conservative slant; it is his news judgment. If things are being classed as news that aren't, that is a problem."

Media Matters contacted Sammon, Clemente, and two Fox spokespeople for comment and we have not received a response.

Update:
Sammon spoke to The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz about the leaked email and reportedly told him:

Sammon said in an interview that the term "public option" "is a vague, bland, undescriptive phrase," and that after all, "who would be against a public park?" The phrase "government-run plan," he said, is "a more neutral term," and was used just last week by a New York Times columnist.
"I have no idea what the Republicans were pushing or not. It's simply an accurate, fair, objective term."

Sean

WikiLeaks and Why It's a Good Thing; Obama Halted Bush Torture Probe; Tea Party Hypocrisy; Climate Change Cost Billions Their Homes; Palin Homophobia; more!

- Obama and Republicans Worked Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe Read!

- Amnesia as a Way of Life: WikiLeaks Amid the "Careless People" If one could cut through the thicket of false premises, logical fallacies, false dichotomies, arrays of strawmen, general flutter-headed palaver, and out and out paranoid fantasy marshaled by the caretakers and apologists of the present system, I would ask this question -- why is it you are driven with such vehemence to defend and attempt to preserve the current order? As it is, it seems the nation is being held together with hydrogenated fat, wheat gluten, payday loans, Tyvek®, particleboard, and the provisional binding of homespun bigotry and official duplicity.

- Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government” Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary.

- Anti-Spending Tea Party Caucus Members Took Over $1 Billion In Earmarks Congressional earmarks have been one of the primary targets  of the tea party, ... But it appears that tea party’s self-proclaimed representatives in Washington haven’t been putting their money where their mouths are. Hotline On Call reports today that members of House Tea Party Caucus, founded by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to “represent the views of our constituents,” requested over $1 billion in earmarks during the last fiscal year...

- The defense budget has grown so obscenely bloated...



- Climate Change Will Cost a Billion People Their Homes Devastating changes to sea levels, rainfall, water supplies, weather systems and crop yields are increasingly likely before the end of the century, scientists will warn tomorrow.

- Afghan War Hero is Put Down by Mistake Target, a tawny-coloured mongrel bitch, defied an Afghan suicide bomber, gunshot wounds and an attempted hit-and-run, but fate finally caught up with her in middle America, where an animal control agent put her to sleep in a heartbreaking case of mistaken identity.

- Willow Palin (Sarah's Daughter) Facebook Posts: Homophobic Slurs & More (PHOTOS) Willow Palin, the 16-year-old daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, wrote multiple Facebook posts containing homophobic slurs such as "faggot" on Sunday night [after classmates posted bad reviews of her mother's new TV show].

- While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.




The Moral Standards of WikiLeaks Critics
By Glenn Greenwald
Published Dec 1 2010 on Salon.com

Time's Joe Klein writes this about the WikiLeaks disclosures:

I am tremendously concernced [sic] about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange. . . . If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.

Do you have that principle down?  If "a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail" because of the WikiLeaks disclosure -- even a "single one" -- then the entire WikiLeaks enterprise is proven to be a "disaster" and "Assange is a criminal" who "should be in jail."  That's quite a rigorous moral standard.  So let's apply it elsewhere:
What about the most destructive "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" the planet has known for at least a generation:  the "human disaster" known as the attack on Iraq, which Klein supported?  That didn't result in the imprisonment of "a single foreign national," but rather the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the destruction of a country of 26 million people.  Are those who supported that "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" -- or at least those responsible for its execution -- also "criminals who should be in jail"?

How about the multiple journalists and other human beings whom the U.S. Government imprisoned (and continues to imprison) for years without charges  -- and tortured -- including many whom the Government knew were completely innocent, while Klein assured the world that wasn't happening?  How about those responsible for the war in Afghanistan (which Klein supports) with its checkpoint shootings of an "amazing number" of innocent Afghans and civilian slaughtering air strikes, or the use of cluster bombs in Yemen, or the civilian killing drones in Pakistan?  Are those responsible for the sky-high corpses of innocent people from these actions also "criminals who should be in jail"?

I'm not singling out Klein here; his commentary is merely illustrative of what I'm finding truly stunning about the increasingly bloodthirsty two-minute hate session aimed at Julian Assange, also known as the new Osama bin Laden.  The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of -- and in some cases directly responsible for -- the world's deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade.  And they're demanding Assange's imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them.  To accomplish that, they're actually advocating -- somehow with a straight face -- the theory that if a single innocent person is harmed by these disclosures, then it proves that Assange and WikiLeaks are evil monsters who deserve the worst fates one can conjure, all while they devote themselves to protecting and defending a secrecy regime that spawns at least as much human suffering and disaster as any single other force in the world.  That is what the secrecy regime of the permanent National Security State has spawned.

Meanwhile, in the real world (as opposed to the world of speculation, fantasy, and fear-mongering) there is no evidence -- zero -- that the WikiLeaks disclosures have harmed a single person.  As McClatchy reported, they have exercised increasing levels of caution to protect innocent people.  Even Robert Gates disdained hysterical warnings about the damage caused as "significantly overwrought."  But look at what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world:

We viscerally saw the grotesque realities of our war in Iraq with the Apache attack video on innocent civilians and journalists in Baghdad -- and their small children -- as they desperately scurried for cover.  We recently learned that the U.S. government adopted a formal policy of refusing to investigate the systematic human rights abuses of our new Iraqi client state, all of which took place under our deliberately blind eye.  We learned of 15,000 additional civilian deaths caused by the war in Iraq that we didn't know of before.  We learned -- as documented by The Washington Post's former Baghdad Bureau Chief -- how clear, deliberate and extensive were the lies of top Bush officials about that war as it was unfolding:  "Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public," she wrote.

In this latest WikiLeaks release -- probably the least informative of them all, at least so far -- we learned a great deal as well.  Juan Cole today details the 10 most important revelations about the Middle East.  Scott Horton examines the revelation that the State Department pressured and bullied Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA's kidnapping of one of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent.  The head of the Bank of England got caught interfering in British politics to induce harsher austerity measures in violation of his duty to remain apolitical and removed from the political process, a scandal resulting in calls for his resignation.  British officials, while pretending to conduct a sweeping investigation into the Iraq War, were privately pledging to protect Bush officials from embarrassing disclosures.  Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered U.N. diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, likely in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961 (see Articles 27 and 30; and, believe me, I know:  it's just "law," nothing any Serious person believes should constrain our great leaders).

Do WikiLeaks critics believe it'd be best if all that were kept secret, if we remained ignorant of it, if the world's most powerful factions could continue to hide things like that?  Apparently.  When Joe Klein and his media comrades calling for Assange's head start uncovering even a fraction of secret government conduct this important, then they'll have credibility to complain about WikiLeaks' "excessive commitment to disclosure."  But that will never happen.

One could respond that it's good that we know these specific things, but not other things WikiLeaks has released.  That's all well and good; as I've said several times, there are reasonable concerns about some specific disclosures here.  But in the real world, this ideal, perfectly calibrated subversion of the secrecy regime doesn't exist.  WikiLeaks is it.  We have occasional investigative probes of isolated government secrets coming from establishment media outlets (the illegal NSA program, the CIA black sites, the Pentagon propaganda program), along with transparency groups such as the ACLU, CCR, EPIC and EFF valiantly battling through protracted litigation to uncover secrets.  But nothing comes close to the blows WikiLeaks has struck in undermining that regime.

The real-world alternative to the current iteration of WikiLeaks is not The Perfect Wikileaks that makes perfect judgments about what should and should not be disclosed, but rather, the ongoing, essentially unchallenged hegemony of the permanent National Security State, for which secrecy is the first article of faith and prime weapon.  I want again to really encourage everyone to read this great analysis by The Economist's Democracy in America, which includes this:

I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy. Some folks ask, "Who elected Julian Assange?" The answer is nobody did, which is, ironically, why WikiLeaks is able to improve the quality of our democracy. Of course, those jealously protective of the privileges of unaccountable state power will tell us that people will die if we can read their email, but so what? Different people, maybe more people, will die if we can't.

The last decade, by itself, leaves no doubt about the truth of that last sentence.  And Matt Yglesias is right that while diplomacy can be hindered without secrecy, one must also consider "how the ability to keep secrets can hinder diplomacy" (incidentally:  one of the more Orwellian aspects of this week's discussion has been the constant use of the word "diplomacy" to impugn what WikiLeaks did, creating some Wizard of Oz fantasy whereby the Pentagon is the Bad Witch of the U.S. Government [thus justifying leaks about war] while the State Department is the Good Witch [thus rendering these leaks awful]:  that's absurd, as they are merely arms of the same entity, both devoted to the same ends, ones which are often nefarious, and State Department officials are just as susceptible as Pentagon officials to abusive conduct when operating in the dark).

But Matt's other point merits even more attention.  He's certainly right when he says that "for a third time in a row, a WikiLeaks document dump has conclusively demonstrated that an awful lot of US government confidentiality is basically about nothing," but I'd quibble with his next observation:

There’s no scandal here and there’s no legitimate state secret. It’s just routine for the work done by public servants and public expense in the name of the public to be kept semi-hidden from the public for decades.

It is a "scandal" when the Government conceals things it is doing without any legitimate basis for that secrecy.  Each and every document that is revealed by WikiLeaks which has been improperly classified -- whether because it's innocuous or because it is designed to hide wrongdoing -- is itself an improper act, a serious abuse of government secrecy powers.  Because we're supposed to have an open government -- a democracy --  everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications.   That's not just some lofty, abstract theory; it's central to having anything resembling "consent of the governed."

But we have completely abandoned that principle; we've reversed it.  Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public.  That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive.  That's the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics -- whether intended or not -- are helping to preserve.  There are people who eagerly want that secrecy regime to continue:  namely, (a) Washington politicians, Permanent State functionaries, and media figures whose status, power and sense of self-importance are established by their access and devotion to that world of secrecy, and (b) those who actually believe that -- despite (or because of) all the above acts -- the U.S. Government somehow uses this extreme secrecy for the Good.  Having surveyed the vast suffering and violence they have wreaked behind that wall, those are exactly the people whom WikiLeaks is devoted to undermining.

* * * * *

On the issue of the Interpol arrest warrant issued yesterday for Assange's arrest:  I think it's deeply irresponsible either to assume his guilt or to assume his innocence until the case plays out.   I genuinely have no opinion of the validity of those allegations, but what I do know -- as John Cole notes -- is this:  as soon as Scott Ritter began telling the truth about Iraqi WMDs, he was publicly smeared with allegations of sexual improprieties.  As soon as Eliot Spitzer began posing a real threat to Wall Street criminals, a massive and strange federal investigation was launched over nothing more than routine acts of consensual adult prostitution, ending his career (and the threat he posed to oligarchs).  And now, the day after Julian Assange is responsible for one of the largest leaks in history, an arrest warrant issues that sharply curtails his movement and makes his detention highly likely.  It's unreasonable to view that pattern as evidence that the allegations are part of some conspiracy -- I genuinely do not believe or disbelieve that -- but, particularly in light of that pattern, it's most definitely unreasonable to assume that he's guilty of anything without having those allegations tested and then proven in court.

Finally, as I noted last night:  I was on Canada's CBC last tonight talking about these issues; it can be seen here.  I'll also be on MSNBC this morning, at roughly 10:00 a.m., on the same topic.

UPDATE:  The notion that one crime doesn't excuse another has absolutely nothing to do with anything I wrote; it's a complete nonsequitur, merely the standard claim of those who want to propound moral standards for others that they not only refuse to apply to themselves, but violate with far greater frequency and severity than those they're condemning.

UPDATE II:  This cartoonist (and Professor of History) summarized several of the key points perfectly:

Sean