The “shout downs” organized by the Republican right meet one of the classic definition of “fascist” tactics–defined as using shouting and disruption to deprive the civil and respectful debate of ideas. There is literally no defense to these tactics. I don’t criticize those who feel genuine anger or fear and show up to meetings to express those emotions. But I do call out the tactic of screaming and disrupting a meeting and the fact that this is a systematic tactic by thugs who want to prevent civil discourse, not promote it.
Let’s have the media name names, publish photographs, and do interviews of those responsible for approving, even organizing these techniues. And let’s find an investigative journalist – are there many left – to prove these so-called grassroots shouters are, or are not, being paid.
Ironic, eh? Today the left bussed-in a couple hundred members of several unions, including pipefitters and SEIU union members from points as far away as New York State for the Obamassiah’s event in Wakarusa, Indiana. Conservatives came on their own, around 700 of them. Obama’s Secret Service detail also told Wakarusa town manager Tom Roeder, (a republican), his tickets to the event were being revoked.
Even more ironic is President Bush appointed Davis to serve on the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board back in 2005. I suppose if you’re a conservative in Davis’ book, you have no civil liberties. And we thought all along that civil liberties are supposed to be freedoms that protect you from the government.
I’ll bet Davis can’t wait until all driver’s licenses contain an RFID chip so he can place operatives with RFID readers at tea party protest to gather names of conservative terrorists.
Fox News is reporting that ABC News is refusing to air opposing ads during ABC’s Obama-fest prime time special next Wednesday.
The prime time special — called “Questions for the President: Prescription for America” — will be a nationally televised event during which Obama will answer questions presented by audience members selected by ABC News. The network has refused to accept advocacy ads during the hourlong show.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele accused ABC News and anchor Charles Gibson of making Obama’s case for “nationalized” health care “without any opportunity for opposing views to be aired.
Obama has in effect, hijacked the network. Take that, Fox!
In a fundraising e-mail aimed at raising nearly $100,000 to buy air time for a counterprogram, Steele said the RNC’s request to add its views to the debate during the special was “flatly rejected” by ABC News.
“What are the Democrats and their media allies afraid of? The truth?” he asked in a fundraising letter to supporters. “That is outrageous! And we will not take it!”
[...]
Since the president’s inauguration in January, ABC’s “World News” and “Good Morning America” have aired stories that feature Obama or supporters of his health care plan 55 times compared to 18 appearances by critics of his plan, according to a Business & Media Institute (BMI) analysis released Wednesday.
ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE
Tue Jun 16 2009 08:45:10 ET
On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!
Highlights on the agenda:
ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.
The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.
MORE
Late Monday night, Republican National Committee Chief of Staff Ken McKay fired off a complaint to the head of ABCNEWS:
Dear Mr. Westin:
As the national debate on health care reform intensifies, I am deeply concerned and disappointed with ABC’s astonishing decision to exclude opposing voices on this critical issue on June 24, 2009. Next Wednesday, ABC News will air a primetime health care reform “town hall” at the White House with President Barack Obama. In addition, according to an ABC News report, GOOD MORNING AMERICA, WORLD NEWS, NIGHTLINE and ABC’s web news “will all feature special programming on the president’s health care agenda.” This does not include the promotion, over the next 9 days, the president’s health care agenda will receive on ABC News programming.
This is amazing, but not surprising. Back in November we reported about voter intimidation at a local polling place by Black Panthers in Philadelphia.
While Bush was still in office the Civil Rights Division of DOJ filed a complaint against the Malik Shabazz and two of the local NBPP radicals for violating Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any “attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce” any voter and those aiding voters.
Of the three, the DOJ chose to only admonish one member who carried and waived a club by giving him a slap on the wrist and enjoining him from “displaying a weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location” in Philadelphia. They did nothing regarding their racial threats, racial insults and menacing and intimidating gestures towards voters and poll workers.
Hang on to your hammer and sickle, we’re about to get a dose, as the Obama administration starts it’s own news network.
Reads the print pool report from that day: “After shaking hands with the team’s parents and members of Congress who showed up, the president walked the team over to his basketball court and shot hoops. The pool was held back from the stroll down the drive and around the corner, and couldn’t see the court. Poolers could hear periodic cheering coming from the other side of the bushes.”
Read the TV pool report: “Your Pool was not allowed to go over and shoot POTUS with the team shooting hoops. We protested loudly.”
Now we know why: Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who’s speaking.
Also, just like a network, they have their own little logo!
It’s perfectly fine, of course, for the White House to put out its own version of events — but is it right to do so by preventing actual reporters from covering something? (Even something like a pickup basketball game).
Do Obama White House officials think their media coverage isn’t flattering enough?
Is the goal to ultimately replace the pesky photographers who film what they want to and not what they’re told to (not to mention the annoying reporters who ask uncomfortable questions about, say, detainee policy and bank bailouts)?
It could just be that the White House doesn’t want press coverage of Obama sans teleprompter. But hey, they have a car company, an insurance company, and some banks. Why not a news network? Maybe Keith Olbermann can be their chief White House correspondent.
Sounds like it may be right out of Joseph Goebbels playbook.
Hitler was deeply impressed by Goebbels’s success in turning the small Berlin section of the Party into a powerful organization in North Germany and in 1929 appointed him Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSDAP. Looking back many years later (24 June 1942), Hitler observed: “Dr. Goebbels was gifted with the two things without which the situation in Berlin could not have been mastered: verbal facility and intellect.. . . For Dr. Goebbels, who had not found much in the way of a political organization when he started, had won Berlin in the truest sense of the word.”
Hitler had indeed cause to be grateful to his Propaganda Leader, who was the true creator and organizer of the Fuhrer myth, of the image of the Messiah-redeemer, feeding the theatrical element in the Nazi leader while at the same time inducing the self-surrender of the German masses through skilful stage management and manipulation. A cynic, devoid of genuine inner convictions, Goebbels found his mission in selling Hitler to the German public, in projecting himself as his most faithful shield-bearer and orchestrating a pseudo-religious cult of the Fuhrer as the saviour of Germany from Jews, profiteers and Marxists.
The Fairness Doctrine can’t be far behind. Move over, MSNBC.
An Oklahoma City police officer wrongly pulled over a man last week and confiscated an anti-President Barack Obama sign the man had on his vehicle.
The officer misinterpreted the sign as threatening, said Capt. Steve McCool, of the Oklahoma City Police Department, and took the sign, which read “Abort Obama, not the unborn.”
Chip Harrison said he was driving to work when a police car followed him for several miles and then signaled for him to pull over.
”I pulled over, knowing I hadn’t done anything wrong,” Harrison said in a recent phone interview.
When the officer asked Harrison if he knew why he had been pulled over, Harrison said he did not.
”They said, ‘It’s because of the sign in your window,’” Harrison said. ”It’s not meant to be a threat, it’s a statement about abortion,” Harrison said. He said he disagrees with the president’s position on abortion.
”I asked the officer, ‘Do you know what abort means?’” Harrison said. “He said, ‘Yeah, it means to kill.’ I said, ‘No, it means to remove or terminate.’”
Harrison said his sign was to be interpreted as saying something like: Remove Obama from office, not unborn babies from the womb.
[...]
But his run-in with the law wasn’t over yet.
”The Secret Service called and said they were at my house,” Harrison said. After talking to his attorney, Harrison went home where he met the Secret Service.
”When I was on my way there, the Secret Service called me and said they weren’t going to ransack my house or anything … they just wanted to (walk through the house) and make sure I wasn’t a part of any hate groups.” Full story is [here]
Senior FCC staff working for acting Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps held meetings last week with policy and legislative advisers to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman to discuss ways the committee can create openings for the FCC to put in place a form of the “Fairness Doctrine” without actually calling it such.
How atypical of the left. Let’s create something just like the Fairness Doctrine and give it a new name. Maybe that’s because according to a Rasmussen Poll, only “38% of U.S. voters think that the government [fascists] should require all radio stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary.”
Waxman is also interested, say sources, in looking at how the Internet is being used for content and free speech purposes. “It’s all about diversity in media,” says a House Energy staffer, familiar with the meetings. “Does one radio station or one station group control four of the five most powerful outlets in one community? Do four stations in one region carry Rush Limbaugh, and nothing else during the same time slot? Does one heavily trafficked Internet site present one side of an issue and not link to sites that present alternative views? These are some of the questions the chairman is thinking about right now, and we are going to have an FCC that will finally have the people in place to answer them.”…
I’d like to see them try. Do these political hacks think they can control everything? How is it that only the liberal politicians are asking these questions? It’s simple, they merely want to quash Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, et al.
“This isn’t just about Limbaugh or a local radio host most of us haven’t heard about,” says Democrat committee member. “The FCC and state and local governments also have oversight over the Internet lines and the cable and telecom companies that operate them. We want to get alternative views on radio and TV, but we also want to makes sure those alternative views are read, heard and seen online, which is becoming increasingly video and audio driven. Thanks to the stimulus package, we’ve established that broadband networks — the Internet — are critical, national infrastructure. We think that gives us an opening to look at what runs over that critical infrastructure. More [here]
I cannot believe that these people are so fucking stupid.
One-party rule, baby. Suppress the opposition. That’s what it’s all about.
Angry black man and pro slavery reparationist Leonard Pitts is pissed-off because of a statement Rush Limbaugh made while being interviewed by Sean Hannity last week. The only part of the interview Pittstain quotes is this, “I hope he fails.”
To put it all in context, here are the excerpts from the Hannity-Limbaugh interview:
HANNITY: So we have a new president now. Abraham Lincoln or FDR or Barack Obama, obviously. First of all, what are your general thoughts about him as a person?
RUSH: I’ll tell you, you know, a lot of people right now just — they’re absorbed in the historical nature of this, first black president and so forth. Well, that is wonderful. That’s great. But I got over that months ago after he won the election.
I mean, Sean, he is our president now. And he’s not black, he’s not from Mars, he’s not — he’s our president, he’s a human being. We’re a country comprised of human beings that the Democrat Party and the left have attempted to arrange into groups of victims, and that’s who he appeals to, and the victims are the people waiting around for some grievance to be resolved.
They’re waiting around for something to happen for them, and he is parlaying that. I think the fact that he’s African-American, his father was black, to me it’s irrelevant. This is the greatest country on earth. We want to keep it that way. It is that way for specific reasons.
[...]
If he does not eliminate the Bush tax cuts, I would call that success. So yes, I would hope he would succeed if he acts like Reagan, but if he’s going to do FDR, if he’s going to do the new, new deal all over which we will call here the raw deal, why would I want him to succeed?
Look, he’s my president. The fact that he is historic is irrelevant to me now. It matters not at all. I — if he is going to implement a far left — look it. I think it’s already decided. $2 trillion in stimulus? The growth of government. I think the intent here is to create as many dependant Americans as possible looking to government for their hope and salvation.
If he gets nationalized health care, I mean, it’s over, Sean. We’re never going to roll that back. That’s the end of America as we have known it because that’s then going to set the stage for everything being government owned, operated, or provided.
Why would I want that to succeed? I don’t believe in that. I know that’s not how this country is going to be great in the future, it’s not what made this country great.
So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail, if his agenda is a far- left collectivism, some people say socialism, as a conservative heartfelt, deeply, why would I want socialism to succeed?
Pitts closed with this:
If he is successful, Limbaugh and the other clowns will face tough sledding in a radically different world. Small wonder he is so eager to strangle this presidency in its infancy. And need it even be said?
I hope he fails.
I find it amazing the liberals fear Limbaugh so much.
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This is amazing, but not surprising. Back in November we reported about voter intimidation at a local polling place by Black Panthers in Philadelphia.
Hitler was deeply impressed by Goebbels’s success in turning the small Berlin section of the Party into a powerful organization in North Germany and in 1929 appointed him Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSDAP. Looking back many years later (24 June 1942), Hitler observed: “Dr. Goebbels was gifted with the two things without which the situation in Berlin could not have been mastered: verbal facility and intellect.. . . For Dr. Goebbels, who had not found much in the way of a political organization when he started, had won Berlin in the truest sense of the word.”
”They said, ‘It’s because of the sign in your window,’” Harrison said. ”It’s not meant to be a threat, it’s a statement about abortion,” Harrison said. He said he disagrees with the president’s position on abortion.
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