Category: Action

Rachel Maddow says:

The real issue is story selection, is editorial control. I can only control what it is that I get asked to speak about in a very blunt way. That said, the way that I handle that is that I, I am gunning to get my own show. I would really like to be hosting a show on cable television, rather than guesting because I would like to exert more control over what gets discussed, over what counts as important.

The Press, the Fourth Estate, is the gatekeeper of Truth in our country. If the Press does not report it, it effectively never happened as far as the all important reaction of the citizenry is concerned. Where the Press shines it’s light, freedom follows.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

Thomas Jefferson

Information is the currency of democracy.

Thomas Jefferson

This has never been better demonstrated than during the reign of George Bush. The Press has not only blinded its own light in regards to scandalous crimes, it has on far too many occasions, such as the lead up to the Iraq Occupation and domestic spying, and in the latest iteration of the military analysts, actually aided and abetted in the criminal acts and despicable propaganda activities of the Worst President Ever. The Bush Administration has corrupted both the Press and the Justice Department to such an extent that is has literally, in the case of its Torture activities, gotten away with murder. It is up to us as citizens to do what we can to stop this. To take back our government and to restore a Free Press.

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

OK, I am struggling a bit and need y’alls help/feedback! As I have said, I think it is vitally important to start concentrating on the media, to bring whatever influence we in the blogosphere can to bear on this essential tool for public oversight.

The issue is highlighted right now by the fine, fine work Greenwald and others are doing on the military analyst scandal. (Which, like all things dirty about this administration, seems to have Karl’s fingerprints on it.)

The first struggle, a name for the overall campaign. Something not overly confrontational to their fragile egos…such as Eat The Media!!! but still exciting. I like Free The Press!

But am open to other suggestions. What say you all?

Next…resources. Do any of you fine people want to volunteer to put together a media contact list for the major cable news shows and news directors? If you can come up with a neato format, all the better, but if someone just puts a list together, some other kind soul could volunteer to put it in a handy dandy format. Ideally we would like to end up with a box we can put on the side panel like the contact Congress box. Alternatively, if you know of a good existing list, please link!

On to the Maddow Movement and some serendipitous surfing! >>>>

…just let me say this one more thing… start having political cocktail parties and start getting people thinking about our situation and perhaps this will also enlarge their world view

pfiore8

Have we started a list yet of all of the things that have to

be undone beginning next January????

masslass

To answer masslass, well yes, now we have.

Pull up a barstool, grab a cold one of your choice, and let’s have a Political Cocktail Party…

From an essay last week entitled “The Revolution Started Yesterday.  Well YOU Started It!  Political Cocktail Party,” I asked all of you enlightened Dharmites to discuss in the comments of that essay the things you feel could and should be addressed beginning Right Now in order to begin the undoing of all of the twisted and underhanded things that have been visited upon our country and the world by our “Current Criminal Administration“.  

The response was even better than I had hoped for, and I would like to thank you all so much for taking the time to get involved in more than just talking or typing about what we need to do, but to begin actually doing something about the issues we identify.  

Under the Topic of Action, we even created a new tag called Issues Project so everyone that wanted to get involved by writing essays that address this issue can be easily found by others here that are interested in these issues.

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?

Forgive them Father for they know not what they don’t.

They don’t report the news that matters, they report the news that sells.

Kagan Research, the media research firm, projected that the four cable news channels would earn $699 million in pre-tax profits in 2006. That would represent a jump of 32% from 2005, when they generated $529 million.

This is the first challenge of taking on the media, what they do is making money…so why should they change?

Before cable, TV news divisions were expected to lose money. It was considered part of their responsibility to the public, for using the public airwaves, to make a profit on their other programming.

The came Reagan and Gordon Gecco. Then came cable, the came the internet.

The NYTimes just got rid of a hundred people, journalism without sensationalism isn’t profitable.

GORE: Ultimately the guarantor of our freedoms are the people. And these kinds of outrages, a president saying that he has the right turn George Washington’s 200-plus year prohibition against torture and torture anyone he wants with his assistants gathering in the basement of the White House – according to recent revelations – personally reviewing the kinds of torture techniques being used prisoner by prisoner, its obscene.

As usual, Al Gore is right.

Unfortunately, The People have a few obstacles in their way.

Such as a Congress that is …(Editors note: long, expletive laden description of Congress deleted for space reasons)….ineffective. So ineffective as a matter of fact, that in his post on Dkos yesterday Senator Kerry in effect said that we have more power than he does….

And, when it comes to getting coverage on television, I really think you are selling your own power short. My going on the television and shoe-horning a 5 second mention of this into an interview – especially when the interviewer wants the interview to be on something else – doesn’t really change the nature of coverage. And I could hold press conferences until I’m blue in the face and it won’t get more coverage if the news networks don’t want to cover it. In the end, the main pressure the networks feel is from you. It was satisfying for me to go on MSNBC and tell them they had to get over asking about Wright all the time, but what can really bring real change is when you make folks like CNN realize that you didn’t want to hear any more about it. Activism works.

When you push on your end, and I push on mine, we can make sure everyone knows that we all demand answers to this. We need to keep up the clamor in every way we can.

….he is saying, by my interpretation, that it is the press that holds the ultimate power at this stage of our democracy. That it is the biggest obstacle facing We The People in taking back our country.

Remember back when you were just a child and you somehow got into an argument with a sibling or a playmate?   Whenever an adult would come to investigate the commotion that was coming from your general vicinity, the topic would change from one of true discord and quickly transform into a repeating of this simple mantra:

Well, you started it!  

No, you started it!

No, You Did!

NO, YOU DID……and on and on it went.

It’ll all make sense in a bit.  Hang in there with me, OK?    

Oh, BTW.  You are about to be the change you always wanted to see happen.  No, really.

Come with me on our first (hat tip to pfiore8) Political Cocktail Party!

just let me say this one more thing… start having political cocktail parties and start getting people thinking about our situation and perhaps this will also enlarge their world view

We all grew up in a world where we were taught that might equals right, you should speak softly but carry a big stick, and if you didn’t start it, by Goddess, you better end it.

OK.  Maybe we didn’t start the absolute shit-storm that has slowly degraded our Constitution, caused the rule of law in this country to become more of a suggestion for anyone in the Ruling Party and more of a disadvantage to those of us who are not in the top 1% of the income earners here in what used to be Our Country.

You know what?  WE did NOT start it.  But, being who WE are, WE are going to put an end to it.  I’ll explain why WE will do just that.  

OK, enough with the capital letters.  You get the point.

Speaking of points, at this point in time it is no longer important as to who started it.  It is important that the degradation of our lives and our way of life is stopped.  Let’s take it from there.

The Revolution?  It’s on, my friends!  

You started it!

This will be a quick one. We’re putting together a public action kit for Thursday. It will be something that anyone can use anywhere to start up a dialog with strangers, find out what their concerns are, share yours and hopefully send out some positive, activist ripples.

All the fixings can be had at Staples and no doubt Office Depot or any office supply store. The final bit of work is to fine tune the content of the presentation. We have some eye-catching art work on the way (fingers crossed on the file size).

First sheet is issues/survey. What are the bullet point issues that get you most worked up? Personally, I’d need an UZI to list all mine. The survey is the premise for the discussion. People in general love to have their opinions asked. Ever stay on the line for a robo-poll?

Second list is a contact sheet – legislators, etc (we’ll be covering MA)

Second/third sheet is LTE contact info and talking/venting/screaming points.

Third/fourth sheet is a list of links to progressive sites. It’ll probably be a three sheet effort. And that’s not to the wind.

If you can make it to Faneuil Hall in Boston around 11:30 this Thursday that’d be great. If you can do something locally wherever you are that’d be great. If you can take some time and write to your congress critters that’d be great. If you can take some time and write some LTEs that’d be great. If you can take some time and call your congress critters or local rag that’d be great.

If you can join one of the many protests that seem to be naturally occurring simultaneously that’d be really great. The longshoremen’s union, the truckers and the immigrants will all be making a statement on the born-in-the-USA (Haymarket, Chicago, 1886, 8 hr workday movement) International Workers Day.

Don’t know about all of you out there but I just can’t sit around flinging IP packets into the bit-stream and waiting for something to happen. We can type away until our fingers fall off. It’ll change nothing. We gather here in web space and piss and moan to the chorus. We’re intelligent, we’re creative, we’re outraged by what is happening around us. We pour our hearts out. Nothing happens. We’d still be in Viet Nam if people hadn’t gone out of their way to show up by the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, to collectively vent their unwillingness to allow the desecration of all they held to be right to continue.

It has to start somewhere at some point in time with someone showing up in public to make the case for stopping the collective insanity. It looks like a lot of people have picked May One as the day. If you can’t bring yourself to participate, find something going on and go watch. Body counts matter. There’s enough of us who were around for the 60s and 70s protests to remember what it felt like to be part of a movement for peace. Movement is the key. Turn off the computer, go outside, find one other person to join you and go to the most heavily trafficked public place near you. See if anyone else shows up who may have the same feelings you do.

This May One thing is in our primitive neo-pagan history. It’s that cross-quarter day halfway between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice. There’s a primal nature behind the day. Get outside with other like-minded people and see what happens. Take pictures. YELL LOUDER!

May One. Take America Back.

More…

A sad truth and a harsh reality in the richest nation in the world. And the global situation regarding food, hunger, and nutrition is much worse, as even the Bush administration has reluctantly admitted:

President George W. Bush on Monday ordered the release of $200 million in U.S. emergency food aid to help alleviate food shortages in developing countries in Africa and elsewhere, the White House said.

Bush took action a day after top finance and development officials from around the world called for urgent steps to stem rising food prices, warning that social unrest would spread unless the cost of basic staples was contained.

A drop in a very big bucket, but every drop helps and is needed.

Since bowing out of the presidential race, John Edwards has continued to speak out on a number of important issues affecting the US and the world. And one issue Edwards has always been impassioned about – is poverty and the importance of a progressive sustained comprehensive set of solutions to alleviate poverty at home and abroad.

Yesterday, Edwards continued this focus and spoke at the opening ceremony for the Millennium Campus Conference, a three-day event sponsored by MIT’s Global Poverty Initiative. Read on for more.

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