Category: Media

Inherent in universal health care plans are price controls.  By bundling patients together under major health care insurance providers or the Federal government, patients gain the ability to collectively bargain with doctors, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and nurses, lowering the cost that these people and companies can charge for their services.  By this method, more people are able to get more health care at a lower cost, with the sacrifice being that we can no longer use market mechanisms to influence our health care system.

Conventional market economics will suggest that this is an outright bad idea, since market mechanisms are more responsive and elastic than asymmetrical bargaining.  However, this can be dismissed as a serious rebuttal since health care markets are already deeply distorted by complicated insurance systems and the AMA cartel controlling doctor credentials.

But, there is an important practical and philosophical problem which this poses.  

Dis grace ful

Washington Post’s Balz: Media will scrutinize McCain ‘once the general election really begins.’

Wash. Post’s Murray: ‘Just wait’ until after the primaries for media to scrutinize McCain.

Russert: ‘In Time,’ McCain Will ‘Receive The Same Scrutiny’ From The Media As Obama And Clinton

RUSSERT: We get flooded with e-mails, Senator McCain making a mistake on Shia versus Sunni, making mistake about the first Persian Gulf War and the second vis-a-vis oil. His own relationship with Pastor Hagee and why isn’t that talked about and reported on the way Reverend Wright’s relationship with Senator Obama is talked about. But all that in time. I mean, it is only May. This has been going on for some time but it will be a long, long campaign. And when Senator McCain is back in the media’s light, he’ll receive the same scrutiny.

uh-huh

Now that even the corporatist beltway elite lackey media has slowly come to recognize the inevitability of the political version of the unbeatable New England Patriots losing the big one it’s time to put the intramural pissing matches aside and to start reorganizing for a shot at the true target. The Hillary Rodham-Clinton campaign now faces fourth and thirty-two, has the ball at it’s own twenty yard line, is down by eight and there are sixteen seconds left in the Super Bowl. It’s not exactly officially in the books yet but the fat lady is humming and the opposing team has just administered the traditional Gatorade baptism to their head coach on the sidelines.

Subtitle: Thoughts on effectively changing the media.

Thought One: Calling a campaign to change/reform the media a ‘media war’ is not the way to effectively change the media! Frontal attacks on massive egos are rarely effective…..by themselves. Of course we desperately need voices such as the inestimable Monsieur hornbeck telling it like it is…

What these Beltway Butt Kissing Access Whore Media MORANS don’t get is that people don’t buy their bullshit anymore.

……to keep up the bad cop pressure. But the blogosphere has bee railing against the antics of Pumpkinhead and Tweety for years now.

Without much effect. The punditroids expect and are used to the blogosphere attacking them, they have vaccinated themselves with rationalization and denial and are very good at ignoring all but the most strident attacks. But! When the blogosphere united on the specific issue of Matthews’ sexism it did have an effect, and elicited a near apology! But it didn’t really change the Uber-narrative.

So…maybe more good cop? Maybe it is time to try massage them….massaging their narrative?

“Death solves all problems – no man, no problem.”

-Joseph Stalin

You can add D.C. Madame Deborah Jeane Palfrey to that long list of marvelously convenient mysterious deaths, ‘accidents’ and ‘suicides’ that have for so long been a fixture of the hijacked by fascist American political system. The dead giveaway on the importance of Palfrey and the threat that she represents is that ordinarily such an incident would be flogged to death 24/7 on the corporate media machine given the sexual sleaze factor and the celebrity allure. Well that insipid blathering sow Nancy Grace spent about ten or fifteen minutes on it on Thursday and was then on to something ridiculous involving actor Rob Lowe, as much as I hate cable ‘news’ programs I tuned again the night after and she was talking about some kidnapped or murdered pregnant teenager, you know, the same local news that is trumped up and manufactured into a national crisis.

You know who is bitter in America? I am. Because shit-kickers voted twice for a retarded guy they wanted to have a beer with, and everybody else had to suffer the consequences!

-Bill Maher

The bubba vote? What a fucking hoot! Newsweek magazine just continues to amaze in their increasingly successful quest to become America’s predominant tabloid shitrag. This week’s cover story is laughingly entitled Obama’s Bubba Gap and flogs the latest Clinton slime machine storyline that the magical mulatto empty suit is failing to attract the same dumb motherfucker demographic who were largely responsible for giving us the eight year running pox on western civilization that is the George W. Bush soft dictatorship.

After his Friday interview with PBS journalist Bill Moyers and after the specially edited for the dual purposes of fearmongering and race baiting for political gain sound bytes were heard in their proper context the fake devil that is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright not only right but he is deserving of an apology by every lazy corporate media hack who have once again chosen that a regular paycheck earned by picking the low hanging fruit and not upsetting the plantation masters is far more desirable than such quaint antiquities as journalistic integrity. When looking at the ‘questionable’ sermons in their true context I must agree and also must say that I have heard similar sentiments espoused by some of those on the right although in slightly less bombastic terms (they dearly cling to their blood soaked rag and whimper stars and stripes forever), it’s called BLOWBACK (see Chalmers Johnson’s book of same title) and this country has a closet full of murderous skeletons when it comes to those of darker colored skins.

I can’t prove the assertion in the title. I’m not connected to any “inside” track. And anything a lowly wage-earner like me could possibly know about conspiracies is almost certainly disinformation.

But the assertion is true, and I bet you know that. And so we must ask some questions.

It might possibly be illegal, and it’s certainly anti-consumerist, to entertain the mental state they used to call “remembering.” It’s a superstition of mine that remembering is indispensable to being prepared for the future. It seems if you notice something happens again and again and again, over a period of years, that you might expect it to happen again in the future. Now, if you find that notion a little whacky, it’s best we part company here. Otherwise, here’s what I remember about our Media, our Democratic politicians, and our elections:

Well it’s certainly been interesting to watch the fervent Obama supporters justify and spin his appearance on Fox News Sunday.

Having seen it twice now (9 am and 10 am, there are repeats at 2 pm and 6 pm on Fox News Channel) I myself have come to 2 conclusions-

First of all, Barack Obama is not particularly liberal or progressive.  While his performance was masterful and left Chris Wallace flopping around like a fish out of water, Obama achieved his success by basically throwing the Democratic part of the Democratic Party under the bus.

John Roberts?  Puleeeeze.

Nor was that the only example.

Armando warned us months ago that politicians always disappoint and if you are of the belief that Barack is just fooling the Villagers and that he really doesn’t mean the things he says about “bi-partisanship” then he was lying like a rug today.

Which brings me to my second point.  Some people think this struggle is about this or that person.  They are sadly mistaken.  It is about an elitist anti-democratic (note the small d) culture in government and the corporate media that has thrown away the Constitution and the Rule of Law and seeks only raw power for the benefit of a small cadre of the ultra rich (yes Tweety, $5 million a year makes you ultra rich).

It’s not that Hillary or St. McSame are any better, in many respects they are demonstrably worse.

Once again I find myself forced to choose a lesser evil and yet I choose it with the understanding that as evil as it is even incremental steps forward are progress.  You work your ass off to achieve small changes in the environment that will make the job easier in the future.

Anything else is just giving up and that is the coward’s way out.

• Paul Rosenberg- Obama On Fox Tomorrow–Who’s Outfoxing Who???
• Greg Sargent- Obama Doesn’t "Take Fox On," After All
• bonddad- Obama Lost My Vote By Going on Fox
• eugene- This is Who Obama Is.
• Fox News Transcript h/t Jerome Armstrong

In today’s OpEd section of The New York Times, Elizabeth Edwards delivers a very well expressed and unfortunately, very necessary, critique of today’s press regarding the picking of a president.

Opening with a mention of the media’s (lack of serious) coverage of the Pennsylvania primary, Elizabeth hits the nail on the head and calls the press out for what it has become: shallow. She also notes that she is not alone in this observation.

I’m not the only one who noticed this shallow news coverage. A report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy found that during the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign, 63 percent of the campaign stories focused on political strategy while only 15 percent discussed the candidates’ ideas and proposals.

The picking of our president is too important a task to approach without good, solid analysis of a candidate’s policies and positions.

Take a look at this paragraph from page 4 of today’s blockbuster NYT article:

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein.

Hmm.  Why don’t we have some fun with google?  This goes some interesting places.