As if the book weren’t sloggy enough to read, now you can catch the movie — Part I, anyway. The trailer was unveiled at CPAC last weekend, much to the delight of randy Randians, who cannot wait for it to hit the big screen. Yes, Ayn Rand’s dog of a book has now been made into a movie — at least, part one of a movie. Guess which day it will be released? That’s right, April 15th. I’m not sure who the backers of the film were, but it’s fair to assume at least some of them are the usual suspects, given the ridiculous assertions on the film’s website about the relevance of Atlas Shrugged to today’s society : Ask yourself: What would happen, if our producers disappear – Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and other industrialists fall off the radar, their companies shuttered and their creative genius no longer powering America? The answer lies in Atlas Shrugged Part I. For the millions around the world who have read Rand’s books, for those curious about her controversial philosophy, and for the uninitiated, and skeptical – the film, which only covers the first third of the book, is an opportunity to a faithful adaptation. Rand’s unique literary genius – which we hope to make accessible to a broader audience via film – is to show the price to be paid by the individual and society when the tragic words ” from each according to his ability, to each according to his need ” are carried out. Gotta say, I don’t think of Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs as industrialists, at least not in the Ayn Randian sense of things. This movie is just part of a larger strategy, one that Sarah Palin articulated when she told Sean Hannity that “pop culture is the influencer in this country “. As much as I hate to admit it, she’s on the mark with that, which is why her little reality show and Bristol Palin’s Dancing with the Stars appearances gave me heartburn. We’re a country that loves stupid more than serious. We have a coordinated attack on liberal values being mounted via popular culture, and this movie is just another weapon in the box. Early reviews on it are terrible, but I guarantee you it will spawn a cult of Rand-ites who memorize every word and cling to it like a religion. If it was good enough for L. Ron Hubbard, why not Ayn Rand? Maybe I’ll be less cranky about this when polls show people engaging in even a minimum of knowledge about the world they live in and the country they inhabit. I expect that to be about the time icicles drop on Satan’s head. Start the countdown clock.
Continue reading …The Powers That Be within the Republican Party are up in arms by the popularity of Rep. Ron Paul, who doesn’t exactly exemplify mainstream Republicanism. Republican Publicity Department Fox News Channel must have heard some loud outcries from their disinformed teabaggin’ audience about their choice to show the 2010 CPAC crowd booing Ron Paul in discussing his 2011 CPAC straw poll win , possibly because the booing was louder than the 2011 footage. They couldn’t be trying to discredit him, could they? So they trotted out B-grade talent Bill Hemmer to apologize : The situation stemmed from Fox News playing a clip of Paul’s 2010 victory in the CPAC straw poll and incorrectly identifying it as his 2011 victory. While Fox News told Mediaite that it was a mistake , the Paul supporters believed it was done because the 2010 video had more audible booing. Today,[..]Fox News’ Bill Hemmer , who interviewed Paul in the original segment in question, said delivered this statement on air: “It was clearly a mistake. We used the wrong videotape. There are similarities in the shot between last year’s event and this year. [..] Ron Paul won both years. However, there were audible boos in 2010 while you heard a lot more cheering this year. It’s an honest mistake. We apologize for the error and we look forward to having Representative Paul back on our show very soon.” But in fairness to Fox News, they’re not the only conservatives having a hard time swallowing the popularity of Ron Paul. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) is convinced that the CPAC straw poll was rigged : Count this as another sign that John Thune might be in favor of running, after all — a lengthy defense of his showing in last weekend’s straw poll. Thune told the Argus Leader on Tuesday that he’s not dismayed by the findings, which he thinks were “engineered” by supporters of certain candidates. Scores of Paul supporters, for example, could be seen packing the conference, and few political experts give the libertarian-leaning congressman much a chance of winning the GOP nomination. “I think that poll is receiving less and less credibility and legitimacy because it’s engineered by people who ship folks in for that,” Thune said. Also, Thune pointed out that ballots had to be submitted by Friday afternoon, about the time the senator was on the CPAC stage giving a speech, so many of them probably were cast before people had a chance to hear him. “The more important issue is the overall reception you get in response to your message,” Thune said of his CPAC appearance. Former Alaska Gov. “Sarah Palin got 3 (percent), so I don’t think that is a very good metric to go by. You read that right. If Half-Governor Word Salad can’t get more than than 3% from CPAC, then you know it’s not a real poll. Thune appears to be dipping his toe in the Republican Presidential waters as well, so his comments may simply be sour grapes over not enthralling the CPAC crowd as much as Paul.
Continue reading …
Demonstrations and protests spread around the Middle East after the toppling of Egypt’s Mubarak. Steve Bell
Continue reading …
The US and president Barack Obama continue to waver in their position regarding the unrest sweeping through the Middle East. The country says it will not dictate events in the region. But Obama has criticised the Iranian government’s violent response to protests there, while at the same time maintaining a more neutral tone with Bahrain. Many find the US’s response disappointing, and some feel the White House will only react strongly to those governments it does not have a stake in. Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane reports.
Continue reading …Not that these studies actually matter , because the people who don’t believe in global climate change have motivators that don’t include actual “facts.” But who knows? Maybe somewhere in the bowels of some government building is someone paying attention who will one day do something to keep this from getting worse. Maybe it won’t be too late. Extreme rainstorms and snowfalls have grown substantially stronger, two studies suggest, with scientists for the first time finding the telltale fingerprints of man-made global warming on downpours that often cause deadly flooding. Two studies in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature link heavy rains to increases in greenhouse gases more than ever before. One group of researchers looked at the strongest rain and snow events of each year from 1951 to 1999 in the Northern Hemisphere and found that the more recent storms were 7 per cent wetter. That may not sound like much, but it adds up to be a substantial increase, said the report from a team of researchers from Canada and Scotland. The study did not single out specific storms but examined worst-of-each-year events all over the Northern Hemisphere. While the study ended in 1999, the close of the decade when scientists say climate change kicked into a higher gear, the events examined were similar to more recent disasters: deluges that triggered last year’s deadly floods in Pakistan and in Nashville, Tenn., and this winter’s paralyzing blizzards in parts of the United States. The change in severity was most apparent in North America, but that could be because that is where the most rain gauges are, scientists said. Both studies should weaken the argument that climate change is a “victimless crime,” said Myles Allen of the University of Oxford. He co-authored the second study, which connected flooding and climate change in Britain. “Extreme weather is what actually hurts people.” Jonathan Overpeck, a University of Arizona climate scientist, who did not take part in either study, praised them as sensible and “particularly relevant given the array of extreme weather that we’ve seen this winter and stretching back over the last few years.”
Continue reading …Fox News Highlights Nazi, Hitler Signs in Wisconsin Pension Debate, Networks Skip Controversy
February 17, 2011 No Comment
The network morning shows on Thursday failed to find any controversy in union protests from Wisconsin, ignoring the signs comparing Scott Walker, the state's Republican governor, to the Taliban, the Nazis and Hitler. Fox News, on the other hand, highlighted the attacks on “Mullah Walker.” Wisconsin radio talk show host Vicki McKenna appeared on Your World With Neil Cavuto to discuss the battle over whether state employees will have to pay more for their pension and health care. Citing the attacks by liberals, she informed, ” I have been called the Taliban, Hitler…I mean, anything that involves dictator, tyrants or genocide, historical references to slavery. ” In comparison, Good Morning News anchor Juju Chang spun the story: “Well, a bill seen as the most aggressive anti-union proposal in the country goes up for a vote in Wisconsin today.” She simply claimed that state workers are “swarming the capitol in protest.” Early Show news anchor Jeff Glor defined the protest as “a dramatic showdown between state workers and the Governor.” Yet, CBS didn't inform viewers that many of the marchers were holding signs with targets over the Governor or comparing him to Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak. On the Today show, Ann Curry blandly explained, “Wisconsin lawmakers could vote today on a bill that drew thousands of protesters at their state house last night. The measure would strip government workers, except police and firefighters, of nearly all union bargaining rights and make them pay more for pensions and health coverage.”
Continue reading …
Click here to view this media At the very end of Fox and Friends yesterday, Brian Kilmeade and Fox “legal analyst” Peter Johnson Jr. go ballistic over funding public television and radio, saying it should be “privatized”, calling it “welfare for broadcasting” and suggesting in their not-so-subtle way that public broadcasting is a government propaganda channel. Why does this not surprise me in the least? After all, why would we possibly need public broadcasting when we have such stellar, unbiased sources as Fox News? Who would be there to tell us how the Muslims are going to impose Sharia Law on us (without explaining exactly what that is), or inflict Glenn Beck on the planet daily? James Fallows wrote a terrific column on why NPR matters and should matter to everyone. After extolling Fox News’ excellence (hey, he said it, not me) at what they do, he says this: “News” in the normal sense is a means for Fox’s personalities, not an end in itself. It provides occasions for the ongoing development of its political narrative — the war on American values, the out-of-touchness of Democrats — much as current events give preachers material for sermons. This is why Fox’s emphasis goes to its star interpreters — Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, the “Fox and Friends” crew — more than to expanding bureaus around the country or the world, investing in scientific, economic, or international expertise, or generally trying harder to place primary observers wherever it can.** Isn’t NPR just the same thing, from an different political perspective? No, and the difference matters. NPR, whatever its failings, is one of the few current inheritors of the tradition of the ambitious, first-rate news organization . When people talk about the “decline of the press,” in practice they mean that fewer and fewer newspapers, news magazine, and broadcast networks can afford to try to gather information. The LA Times, the Washington Post, CBS News — they once had people stationed all around the world. Now they work mainly from headquarters — last year the Post closed all its domestic bureaus outside Washington — and let’s not even think about poor Newsweek and US News. Ahem. NPR is reporting on the protests in Wisconsin . Fox News isn’t. NPR reported on Egypt long before any “mainstream” news source did. But they think it should be privatized? Bill Moyers recently spoke on the importance of facts , and how they still matter even in this age of infopinion. Indeed, they do. Much of his speech was directed at Fox News, and how they distort those same facts. … So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths. Any journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists (say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the yahoos of talk radio.) …No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. Partisans in particular – and the audiences for Murdoch’s Fox News and talk radio – are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinformation. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he “may be the antichrist.” In the Fox News segment above, funding for public broadcasting is laughed at as “welfare for broadcasters”, which makes no sense at all. Johnson just about burst a blood vessel over “Antiques Roadshow” and “Masterpiece Theater” , claiming they are useless shows that could just as easily be funded by private enterprise as the government. In the process, he suggested that those two shows are representative of all the broadcasting PBS does. Then they go one step further, suggesting that because government funds go to public broadcasting, the government controls the content. Leaving no child behind or stone unturned, they also attack the contention that de-funding PBS would harm children. Speaking as a parent whose kids grew up with Sesame Street and other PBS children’s programming, I couldn’t agree more. It will leave kids with the sugary crap that has no substance on networks. The same networks that make Justin Bieber a star and obsess on every move Brittany Spears makes. So yeah, it’ll hurt children. But listen to what they’re really saying when they shout “privatize public broadcasting!” They’re saying we should not have access to information unless it’s served through the filters of ideologues and corporations, a claim worthy of Orwell. Moyers: George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that “like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket,” this kind of propaganda engenders a “protective stupidity” almost impossible for facts to penetrate.
Continue reading …
Click here to view this media In one of the better segments I’ve seen Rachel do in a long time, she explains the Republican Party’s all-out war on government and public-sector union members, and why they’re just fine with federal job losses. Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz really have both done a great job of covering the protest in Wisconsin. And unlike their cohorts over at Fox News, they’re covering it from the workers’ and labor’s perspective instead of attacking the unions. Rachel also talked to former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold about his new organization, Progressives United. Amanda Terkel at the HuffPo has more on that. Russ Feingold Launches ‘Progressives United’ To Combat Corporate Influences In Politics : When some senators retire, they decide to take lucrative lobbying jobs . Others go straight to Wall Street . But Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, who lost his re-election bid in November, is continuing on his principled — and often lonely — path by starting an organization to combat corporate influence in politics, an effort he hopes will spark “a new progressive movement” that will truly hold elected officials accountable. Launching on Wednesday, Progressives United is an attempt to to build a grassroots effort aimed at mitigating the effects of, and eventually overturning, the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to corporate spending in the U.S. electoral system. In addition to online mobilization, the political action committee (PAC) will support progressive candidates at the local, state and national levels, as well as holding the media and elected officials accountable on the group’s key priorities. “In my view — and the view of many people — it’s one of the most lawless decisions in the history of our country,” said Feingold of Citizens United in an interview with The Huffington Post. “The idea of allowing corporations to have unlimited influence on our democracy is very dangerous, obviously. That’s exactly what it does … Things were like this 100 years ago in the United States, with the huge corporate and business power of the oil companies and others. But this time it’s like the Gilded Age on steroids.” Go read the rest and here’s Feingold talking to Rachel Maddow about empowering U.S. workers and his new organization. Click here to view this media
Continue reading …I also finally caught up with this Niall Ferguson column from Newsweek I’ve been seeing referenced hither and thither, harshly attacking Obama’s handling of the Egypt situation: The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak’s cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn’t end there. America’s two closest friends in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington’s failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration’s apparent cluelessness. Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy. This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues. This is kind of over the top, no? First of all, the Herzliya conference isn’t a Peace Corps meeting; it’s a pretty strongly neoconnish and right-leaning gathering, to varying degrees of seriousness; the closing night speaker this year, reports Matt Duss in The Nation, who attended, was none other than Haley Barbour. So of course the prevailing opinion there was bound to be that Obama had handled it disastrously. Then he launches into this whole comparison of Obama to Bismarck, noting that Bismarck immediately declared himself on the right side of history, no waffling about. All right. I haven’t read my German unification history for a good 25 years, I admit, so I’m sure there’s a lot I’m forgetting, but there is the fundamental fact that Bismarck was supporting the forces for German nationalism that were right there in central Europe and united by a culture and a language, whereas…what? Obama is supposed to be able to do the same with a country a third of the way around the world? It just seems silly. I’ve written thousands of columns over the years. I know how it goes. Sometimes you get a bee in your bonnet and you let it rip. Every once in a great while you hit what we Americans call a tape-measure shot (please explain, someone). But time generally instructs that you should let those columns sit for a day and read them over once you’ve calmed down. Oh yes, and then there’s the part where Obama and Hillary ought to be acting more like Kissinger. Would that be the Cambodia Kissinger? Chile? East Timor? Or the one who lengthened the Vietnam war in Paris? Ferguson wants “grand strategy,” you see. Hey, he’s Niall Ferguson. I’m just me. But what if we live in a post-grand strategy age? Grand strategies (by which he means realpolitik, mainly) ensured stability, chiefly. Stability is good. But so are other things, and we are now in an age, quite unlike the 1970s, when the peoples of the developing world want more: freedom, opportunity, economic self-determination. The world can’t be contained in the old Kennan sense these days, and should not be. I stand by what I said last week, and what both the Economist and Clive Crook say. Obama handled Egypt fine. The outcome, so far, is a positive one. The US didn’t mess that up. Ferguson voices the frustrations of the Cairo protesters, the Israelis and the Saudis. But it’s impossible that any US position could have satisfied all those players. You do the best you can. In the end, the protesters won, and the US didn’t hinder it. Obama administration US foreign policy Egypt Michael Tomasky guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …It really pains me to see this kind of idiotic policy-making in the Obama administration. If I heard about a GWB administration official saying, “hey, we ought to actively intercede in other countries anytime we see a potential shit-storm about to erupt,” I’d understand that, coming from a neocon who loves to see US military action provide some short-term entertainment for Faux News. But really, this is from staff supporting
Continue reading …