Rolling Stone Castrates Fox News

[Stephen Fox]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... y-20110525

[Neil Heath]

I read the whole thing, and it's very damning in its take on Fox News and its ruler. Unfortunately, I have little trouble believing that much of the story is true.

[Jim]

[KeithE]

[Jim]

From the News Leader, a Gannett outfit: “Singer and activist Harry Belafonte says President Barack Obama and his ‘mission’ have failed because of a lack of moral courage and vision.”

When Belafonte, a virtual democrat oracle and treasured friend of Venezuela President/Butcher Hugo Chavez, pronounces the benediction on Barack Hussein’s presidency – and right as Ramadan gets going good, adding insult to injury – the end of the progressive era may be in sight. The dear leader (shazzam…surprise…surprise) is scheduled to make a speech just past noon today, presumably right after the Senate vote on the debt-ceiling matter. No matter which way it votes (and he must already know), the intrepid jogger on the Potomac will take the credit, since there can be no failure, even if the senators choose up sides, break out the AK-47s and have an invigorating shootout at the Senate Corral, which may not be a bad idea…sort of term limits with a rather obvious finality about it.

[Jim]

Though I’m not a tea-partier, I believe this outfit has had a far greater influence on current politics than some here like to admit. So…what are the prospects for a third party if the tea-partiers feel they have nowhere to go? Only the Shadow knows, of course, but I wrote a short story a while back that had to do with the forming of an independent party for an election. It’s excerpted from the book The Stem-cell Quarterback & Other Stories and found here: . Anyone with much time to waste is welcome to read it.

[Sandy]

It's hard to tell whether the reticent effects of this most recent battle over the debt ceiling will hang over to the election, since in political time, the election is a long way off and people tend to forget things quickly. However, Quinnipiac polls have tracked a lot of this through the past few weeks, and if what they polled works its way through the election, there will only be a half dozen or so tea partiers still holding congressional seats after that first week in November 2012.

If it is any consolation to the Obama haters, this didn't help his job approval ratings either. However, the same poll shows that his approval ratings shot forward to record heights among voters over 55 and government employees. They apparently see his willingness to concede most of what he wanted out of this bill as a strong defense of the programs on which their livlihood depends. The GOP will have to run an unusually bi-partisan, uncharacteristically strong centrist if they have any hope of unseating him. The chances of a GOP candidate from further to the right to win either the nomination or the presidency were pretty much eliminated by this highly public congressional battle.

[Jim]

The irony connected to the recent debt-ceiling debacle lies in the fact that Obama and the democrat Congress could have raised the debt-ceiling last December with no strings attached. They didn’t do that, apparently deciding to make it an issue this year that could cause the republicans to appear evil and insensitive. Their plan backfired, not least because the citizenry is catching on the to the fact that borrowing money to provide liquidity can’t go on forever if there’s no hope of repaying the lenders, as is the case now, with the possible exception of raising the tax rates high enough on EVERYONE to repay, in which case the top tier of payers, which make up the job-makers, will simply get out of the game or undergo bankruptcy. This would amount to government takeover of everything, cradle to grave, the obvious intent of the dear leader, who continued his campaign with his speech yesterday, again calling for raising the rates on the wealthiest, which at this time and in the foreseeable future would hardly affect the financial mire. The democrat lawmakers, who rake in something like $178,000 per year, would not be affected by soaking the rich yet again, those making $250,000 or more.

The stock market may recover but it’s been spiraling downward for a long time, dropping drastically yesterday, when it was supposed to rebound at all the good news of a “deal.” The plain truth is that people have no faith in a government that attempts to do what citizens know they can’t do vis-à-vis their credit cards and bank loans. There’s a total leadership vacuum in this country, whether through sheer incompetence or willful actions to destroy the country. Obama’s speech yesterday, complete with his teleprompters far out front on the grass (that one camera-person made a boo-boo and showed one of them) was sheer boilerplate, anchored by his intention to get even with the people who make the country work – the job-producers, who likely will sit on their hands until he is gone.

[Sandy]

Politics and impressions aside, this recession is the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, and will help him go down in history for what he was--the worst president in the history of the country. His economic policies, or lack thereof, helped export more than nine million American jobs to third world countries. Then, because the profit margins were mounting because of the exploitation of cheap labor, he cut tax breaks for the companies that were employing thousands of Indians, Indonesians and Vietnamese, and in some cases, subsidized them.

Corporate profit margins and profits themselves swelled to record levels during the last two years of the Bush administration, and yet unemployment soared as well, at least, in this country it did. That because those companies took their record profits, protected by tax cuts and government subsidies, and hired workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, the middle east, and even in the Gulf of Mexico, at low wages, which emptied the US of jobs. Bush's economic policy was to sit by and let them do it, and then shifted the burden of paying for the government services they needed to operate their businesses to the middle class. The energy price hikes and the tax burden was the greatest redistribution of this country's wealth in history. That busted the economy, killed jobs and put people out of work. Most of the jobs are permanently lost, unless some kind of policy can be initiated which forces corporations to produce their products in America, or forbids them from selling their stuff here.

The same corporations are spending billions of the dollars they make off of us by overcharging and underpaying their fair share of taxes on convincing us that we need to vote for the politicians who will just hand all of this over to them. I heard today that no fewer than 23 of the Republican members of the PA house of representatives have introduced legislation which they cut and pasted from websites operated by corporate interests. Hopefully, word about that will leak out and people won't be stupid enough to vote for those idiots.

[Jim]

[Sandy]

"Fair Share": The actual cost to the government of providing services and protection which enables and permits corporations and business to operate. This would include maintenance of the infrastructure, such as the FAA which enables corporations to move their people from place to place to conduct business, other transportation resources, such as subsidies to states for highways and railroads to transport goods, communication services, protection provided by the military in foreign countries where multi-billion dollar corporations have production facilities. The "fair share" would represent the difference in the cost between maintaining these kinds of facilities for private citizens and for corporations and business.

It seems interesting that the writer of Rolling Stone attributes so much influence to Ailes and Fox. Given their ratings, they have a fraction of the viewers that the evening network news has, and nothing even close to the higher rated entertainment programs. Fox averages slightly over a million viewers a day, the CBS evening news has more than 30 million, and the big three networks news programs approach 90 million viewers a day. That's not even close.

[Neil Heath]

[Jim]

[Sandy]

[Jim]

[KeithE]

[Jim]