Cheney to Leahy: Fuck You!
posted by Rick at 10:41 PM

A little over a year ago, we heard about Paul Wolfowitz's eloquent response to an Al Franken taunt at the 2003 White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Now comes word that you don't have to be a smart-ass liberal writer to get that kind of response out of the darlings of the religious right in Washington. Indeed, the very same four-letter salute can be evoked from our great Vice President simply by reminding him of his own comments, as Sen. Patrick Leahy did at the annual Senate "class picture" photo op.

Senate aides with knowledge of the encounter Tuesday said the vice president confronted Leahy about some of the Democrat's criticism about alleged improprieties in Iraq military contracts awarded to Halliburton Co. Cheney, who as vice president is president of the Senate, is a former CEO of Halliburton.

Leahy responded by saying the vice president had once called him a "bad" Catholic.

Cheney then responded, "F--- off" or "F--- you," two aides said, both speaking on condition of anonymity.

What a Dick.

Police Violence at GOP Convention Will Only Hurt Bush if It's Reported
posted by Rick at 8:59 PM

Writing in the Berkshire Eagle, Joel Stonington suggests that a reprise at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York of the police riot that occurred at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago could have a similar effect on George W. Bush's re-election prospects as the original had on the campaign of Hubert Humphrey:

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police lines advanced through protesters, shot tear gas, and clubbed students. The violence was splashed across the front page of every major paper. Some say the Convention doomed the chances of Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. Will New York in 2004 define Generation X in a similar way?

History, from the last four years at least, suggests that New York may well resemble Chicago. The refusal of permits and massive build-up of security measures points toward a pattern of suppressing dissent, exemplified by the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia and the protests at the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) talks in Florida last November.

I have no doubt that there will be ample police violence in New York, and possibly at the Democratic Convention in Boston as well. The question is whether the media will have the intestinal fortitude to report it this time around--and I have serious misgivings about that. Judging by the recent record, the outlook is not good. A case in point is the coverage afforded the aforementioned FTAA protests. Stonington continues:

[P]rotests at the FTAA talks last November saw the use of unrestrained violence by police. For instance, members of the Miami-Dade County's Independent Review Panel of police actions said, in a draft report released a few weeks ago, "Civil rights were trampled and the socio-political values we hold dear we undermined."

In fact, Stonington's description of the police brutality in Chicago applies almost word-for-word to what happened in Miami--except that the protesters weren't necessarily students, and the police had added tasers and rubber bullets to their arsenal.

How much of the violence was reported in the mainstream media?

A search at the New York Times website for any articles about FTAA and Miami from November 1, 2003, to the present returns...nothing.

A similar search of the LA Times yields 8 stories. Of those, only this one is about the protests:

Miami Plans for Wave of Protests at Trade Meeting

[John F. Timoney] said his force of more than 1,000 officers has received training on how to ignore verbal insults impugning their sexuality, ethnicity and parentage. Special squads have been formed to swiftly dismantle "sleeping dragons," the human chains reinforced with PVC pipe, concrete barrels and other materials that antiglobalization protesters have used in the past to paralyze the flow of traffic and people.

There is no record, as far as I know, of any "sleeping dragons" in Miami; nor is there any reasonable doubt that the police illegally and violently stifled peaceful dissent there. But it was hardly "splashed across the front page of every major paper." Why? Because the corporations that own the major news media are in favor of "free trade," and they aren't eager to print stories that conflict with their self-interest. Those same corporations short-sightedly believe they stand to gain from the Bush League's pro-corporate agenda, and will again be loath to bite the hand that feeds them.

Police violence will occur at the GOP convention, and it will be recorded by thousands of amateurs with VCRs, cameras, audio cassettes, and old-fashioned paper and pencil. Their accounts will be published in blogs, online journals, and independent news media. The job of every partiotic American will be to make sure that the mainstream press is held accountable for covering the story too. Keep a watchful eye on indy media coverage of the convention, and make sure your local news outlets hear from you when they fail to tell the whole story.

Ray Charles versus Ronald Reagan...
posted by Rick at 7:29 PM

I almost fell out of my chair last night when I heard Tom Brokaw say that Ray Charles "was to music what Ronald Reagan was to politics."

Here is a list of the top ten ways that Ray Charles was not the Ronald Reagan of music:

10. Ray Charles did not come to music as a refugee from B movies where he had co-starred with a chimpanzee.

9. Ray Charles never joked on the air about launching an air strike on those who played other forms of music than his own.

8. Ray Charles did not arm Osama bin Laden, the Mujahideen, the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein--nor did he sell arms to Iran and ilegally funnel the proceeds to an insurgency that was in open rebellion against a legitimately elected government.

7. Ray Charles did not drive his record label trillions of dollars into debt.

6. Ray Charles did not advocate putting a network of loudspeakers in space to prevent attacks on America by foreign musicians.

5. Ray Charles did not claim credit for the death of disco just because he happened to be there when it died.

4. Ray Charles did not hand over control of music to rich people, or circulate wealthy, powerful businessmen through his band like a revolving door.

3. Ray Charles did not remember a time when America didn't know it had a blues problem.

2. Ray Charles never advocated denying the services of musicians to "welfare queens."

And the number one reason Ray Charles was not Ronald Reagan: Ray Charles knew he was blind.

Last week, Reuters published a pair of photos which they said reflected the declining popular opinion of the war in Iraq. The first photo showed a smiling Jessica Lynch, in dress uniform, shaking the hand of an admiring child while beaming adults looked on in the background; the second showed Lynndie England holding the end of a leash with an apparently naked Iraqi man at the other end.

In the accompanying story, journalism experts said the pictures are a measure of the change in public opinion.

"Between the time Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi hospital in April 2003 and England was revealed posing in pictures of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib this spring," says the story, "public opinion has traveled a parallel path from hopeful to skeptical over the American role in Iraq."

You might expect that opinion polls would rise and fall with good and bad news from the front. Less intuitive--and more disturbing--is that according to the experts, the relationship goes both ways.

What images the media choose to portray the story relies heavily on those polls, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Washington's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"Which image they select is usually influenced by their sense of public attitudes, so polls tend to have a very substantial impact on framing the way journalists think," Rosenstiel said.

An unflattering picture of a candidate may get no coverage if he is ahead but be widespread if he is losing, he said. Thus, he said, declining support for the war is reflected in what we see.

The same dynamic seems to be at work in the Paper of Record. For several years, the New York Times has parroted the Bush administration's pronouncements on everything from Homeland Security to yellowcake uranium. Now, as public dissatisfaction grows, the paper has suddenly rediscovered its proper role. The editors apologize for having been taken in, and promise to be more discriminating in running Bush League blather as straight news in the future. But as Megan Boler writes in the Toronto Star, "The N.Y. Times admission cannot help but smell like last-minute political jockeying to distance itself from an increasingly unpopular Bush administration." Again, we see supposedly hard news being shaped by public opinion.

Broadcast news, for its part, has long been more entertainment than information. The networks sensationalize in search of ratings, they reduce issues to sound bites, they cover every election as if it were a sporting event--and if anything, more blatantly and overtly than print media, they cater to the perceived tastes of their target audience.

In general (there are exceptions, but they're even worse), the media aim to tell us what they think we already believe. Forget about telling us the truth, or telling us what we need to know--they tell us what they think the masses want to hear. Or as the strip-joint proprietor says in John Prine's "Living In the Future," "Hell, we give 'em what they wanna see."

Excellence in journalism? This is hardly journalism at all. It's just plain pandering. The job of the news media is to inform us, not to amplify and reinforce whatever we already think.

If there's a silver lining, it's in the form of a lesson in how to work the media: to impact what they present as news, you simply have to impact what they perceive public opinion to be. This is a technique the right wing learned years ago, and they have been using it to their advantage ever since. By convincing the media that the population thinks they are biased toward the left, they've pulled the editorial slant far to the right.

It's time to fight back. Write your local paper. Write your local radio and TV stations. Write the networks. Let them know that you expect them to dig beneath the party lines and sound bites and easy answers, do some real research, and report the facts. When they fail to do so, call them on it. Let them know you won't stand for lazy journalism, recycled propaganda, and focus-group pandering. It's the only way to take back the media.

Oops!
posted by Rick at 7:29 PM

I just discovered today that at least some versions of MS Internet Explorer don't like self-terminating script tags...or don't like the way I was trying to use them, anyway. So ever since the last time I updated the template, the blog has looked rather empty to most visitors. (Hey, the page rendered fine in Safari.)

Moral for bloggers, webmasters and other writers of HTML: test your code by viewing it in every browser you can get your hands on!

I think everything's fixed now. You might see a few changes, now that you can see anything at all. For example:

Headlines from the Irregular Times--offbeat, often entertaining, consisently worthwhile progressive commentary--are now found at the bottom of the left-hand column;

A running tabulation of the cost of the Iraq war, courtesy of costofwar.com, is shown at the top of the right-hand column. Click "More details" to see how the dollars translate to schools we could have built, children we could have insured, and other ways we could have used the money that has gone down the drain in Bush's Folly; and

We have comments! You can now register your opinions and reactions to Bush League posts by clicking on the "Comments" link below each post. Please do!

And now, back to our blog....