Tag: Propaganda

The empire is really sucking bilge water when they start firing key propagandists!

Job cuts at ABC leave workers stunned and downcast

Photo: Good Morning America hosts demonstrating happy-happy-joy-joy to Disney-berg villagers.

If “Good Morning America” or “World News” look any different in the coming weeks, it might be because ABC News is employing nearly 400 fewer people.

Earlier this week, ABC News, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, largely completed one of the most drastic rounds of budget cutbacks at a television news operation in decades, affecting roughly a quarter of the staff. The cutbacks promise to change ABC both on- and off-camera.

The business of news is a particularly ugly one these days, and news outlets across the country have trimmed their staffs. But it is exceedingly rare for a newspaper or a network to shed a quarter of its employees all at once, as ABC has done.

For viewers, the effects will be felt on the individual broadcasts, like “World News with Diane Sawyer,” which lost two of its six senior staff members to buyouts. They will not be replaced.

In the future, more segments will be reported, filmed and edited by jacks-of-all-trades, called digital journalists, internally. They may lack the polish that a traditional four-person crew can provide, but they are much less expensive. Sometimes two of the digital journalists will team up for reports.

Hell, just sign up for an account at Docudharma!

And drop a nickel in the kitty.

ABC News is doing a follow up on their initial report on the ‘Jesus Rifles’ with the christian religious inscriptions on military rifle scopes, still being used and which goes beyond the ones used in the military.

This cut is in the report and video of:

“Shame on them forever for their impossibly slow, plodding and utterly backwards plan for correction of this national and international disgrace,” said Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

Couldn’t have stated it better, in a civil manner, except I’d use much more stronger words and with more rage especially as to the thought process by the manufacturing executives allowing this but also any who think this shines a positive light in fighting an insurgency in another’s country, of their own freedom of religious beliefs, and especially that it gives a positive, macho, message as to any christian religious ideology. It smacks of extreme christian fundamentalism as the fundamentalist of the Muslim religion or any other’s with extremist views of intolerance towards others!

The New Yorker and The Atlantic are running twin puff pieces on how – they hate to admit it but – Timmy G saved the economy.

The New Yawker sezzie poohs:

Economists are still debating what it was that ended the financial crisis and turned the economy around. It is inarguable, though, that Geithner’s stabilization plan has proved more effective than many observers expected, this one included.

Whereas the Atlantians suggest that our fabled civilization was not destroyed by the gods for excess greed and corruption, ’cause Timmeh held back the thunderbolts with hizown chest:

Yet when the history books are written, Geithner will be recognized as Barack Obama’s key lieutenant in the struggle to right the economy and fix the finance system. Economically, Geithner’s plan has worked better and more cheaply than anyone could have imagined a year ago.

The twin, virtually interchangeable pieces appearing at the same time and having extremely similar, if not identical overall angles is prolly just a coincidence, as opposed to a controlled marketing campaign, don’tcha think?

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know they can relax.  Everything’s hunky dory now and Tim G is an elfin sizzle chest whose athleticism “inspires an adolescent awe in male colleagues.”

A new tasteless Trash-Piece about President John Kennedy, composed almost entirely of ficticious dialog, malicious rumors, and outright lies, is now being made by Joel Surnow (the creator of the series “24”) — a well-known Hollywood ultra-conservative Neocon, in the form of a 8-part Mini-Series, titled: “The Kennedys“, to be aired on “The History Channel” network.

The piece is so completely full of made-up-out-of-whole-cloth garbage and malicious propaganda, that even the mild mannered Ted Sorenson (former Kennedy aide, and speechwriter) has come out publically denouncing it, in advance of its airing (which is one whole year away).

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald obtained an early version of the screenplay containing a draft of the dialog and its content. Greenwald said, “this one-sided right wing script suffers from a totally vindictive, malicious approach”. Greenwald and Sorenson both contend that it is not only littered with easily documented falsehoods, they also insist that the production team drafted a ridiculous “cartoon” and “caricature” of the former president — downplaying all the weighty historical episodes in favor of tawdry, salacious and entirely ficitious material and dialog.  

Greenwald told the Huffington Post he counted more than a dozen sex scenes written into the biopic with only scant acknowledgment of the Cuban Missile crisis. Sorenson, in the film, says that each and every one of the conversations he is depicted to have had with the President never even happened.

“I was amazed to find reading those pages that every single conversation with the President in the Oval office or elsewhere in which I according to the script participated, never happened. There were no such conversations… A minimum amount of research could’ve avoided the remarkable number of obvious errors of that kind in this script.”

       —Ted Sorensen

Robert Greenwald has now started a Web Site: StopKennedySmears.com where you can sign a Petition to demand that The History Channel stop this character assassination piece that has no business, and no merit being aired on “The History Channel” network.

Everyone please go and sign the Petition StopKennedySmears.com.  With enough public pressure from the public, this piece of sleaze journalism, and fraudulent history can be stopped.

by Tom Engelhardt:

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI.  In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire.  More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported.  In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died.  In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226.  Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006.  And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued.  In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport.  (No one was killed.)    

The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived.

Read all of it here… it’s worth it.

I guess now that it’s the dead of winter, the time when people can really get sick, the “Swine Flu” panic is a thing of the past.

We have many more things to panic about now, right?   I mean, we’ve got the official CNN 24/7 “terrorgasm”, we’ve got coffers to bill at Big Corporations who can Supply Things To Us That Will Keep Us Safe.

And considering that there was a case of a suicide bomber somewhere (Afghanistan?) hiding the bomb up his rectum, Colbert’s suggestion that all Muslim men have a colonoscopy before boarding an aircraft doesn’t seem like something that would be far-fetched in today’s world.

But that’s not what this is about.  This is about — gosh, I almost forgot it myself, how distracting today’s panics are! — “Swine Flu”, you know that thing that was supposed to kill all of us, that thing we were all geared up to be SCARED SCARED SCARED about — and more importantly that thing that was designed to open all our wallets.

You’ll never see this on our 24-hour news terror programs, but for some reason the European Parliament has decided to investigate this scam:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/i…

The Council of Europe member states will launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on extent of the pharma’s industry’s influence on WHO. The Health Committee of the EU Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for the inquiry. The step is a long-overdue move to public transparency of a “Golden Triangle” of drug corruption between WHO, the pharma industry and academic scientists that has permanently damaged the lives of millions and even caused death.

The parliament motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Bundestag and now chairman of the Health Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council  of Europe). Wodarg is a medical doctor and epidemiologist, a specialist in lung disease and environmental medicine, who considers the current “pandemic” Swine Flu campaign of the WHO to be “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the Century.”[1]

The text of the resolution just passed by a sufficient number in the Council of Europe Parliament says among other things, “In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines. The “bird-flu”-campaign (2005/06) combined with the “swine-flu”-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.”[2]

The Parliamentary inquiry will look into the issue of „falsified pandemic” that was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of its group of academic experts, SAGE, many of whose members have been documented to have intense financial ties to the same pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, who benefit from the production of drugs and untested H1N1 vaccines. They will investigate the influence of the pharma industry in creation of a worldwide campaign against the so-called H5N1 “Avian Flu”  and H1N1 Swine Flu. The inquiry will be given “urgent” priority in the general assembly of the parliament.

In his official statement to the Committee, Wodarg criticized the influence of the pharma industry on scientists and officials of WHO, stating that it has led to the situation where “unnecessarily millions of healthy people are exposed to the risk of poorly tested vaccines,” and that, for a flu strain that is “vastly less harmful” than all previous flu epidemics.

There you have it, in plain English.    

What everybody knew, who was paying attention.  Of course NOW they decide to do this, NOW, after the pharmaceutical companies have sold all the vaccines they could, I mean, if you haven’t gotten a vaccine by now, you’re probably not gonna get one, right?

This reeks of the “I am shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here” line from Casablanca (and forgive me if i’m not quoting it correctly).

I mean, the EU sure wouldn’t want to actually infringe on a corporation’s god-given natural rights to scam the public into making money?    But to keep a little legitimacy in the public eye, they’ll sure pretend to investigate it afterwards, probably to slap a few fines on the perps so they can share the wealth, you know?

I was saying it back when they fear was being ramped up to fever pitch (excuse the pun) over this bogus flu.   That the WHO must have been corrupted.   Because it was, well, just obvious as fuck (pardon the language)..  

The world is completely corrupt.  You can’t believe anything any more.

But the public keeps getting punked.    It seems every year the public is ever-more-easy to punk.

Why is that?

Back on October 2nd, I wrote a piece here titled “Lockerbie Bomber” case getting fishier and fishier”.

And not long prior to that I wrote a piece titled “Angry about the “Lockerbie bomber” getting released?”.

In both these essays were quite a few links to other information regarding the wholly bogus nature of the “official” Lockerbie story.

Well, 20 years after the fact, and many years after all of this information was publicly known, the BBC decides to finally report the following:

BBC probe casts doubt on Lockerbie evidence

LONDON – A BBC investigation has cast doubt on key evidence in the case against the Libyan convicted of blowing up a US jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, the broadcaster said Wednesday.

A tiny fragment of the timer allegedly used to blow up Pan Am flight 103 — crucial in linking Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi to the bomb — was not properly tested and was also unlikely to have survived the explosion, it said.

Megrahi was jailed in 2001 for the attack which left 270 people dead, but was controversially released from his Scottish prison in August 2009 because he was suffering from terminal cancer and only had months to live.

Investigators believe the plane bomb was contained in a Toshiba radio cassette player inside a brown suitcase with various items of clothing, and was triggered by a digital timer that was later linked to Libya.

But according to the BBC’s Newsnight programme, the fragment of the timer — found embedded in a charred piece of clothing three weeks after the bombing — was never tested to confirm if it had actually been in a blast.

Even now, they pull back, far back, from the truth of this story.  It’s not just that this was “never tested”.  

This key piece of evidence was reportedly planted by the CIA.  

A fragment of circuit board alleged to have been part of the bomb’s timing mechanism is the sole item of physical evidence linking the two Libyans to the December 1988 bombing. But Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, declared: “I have come to suspect that the timing device in question was not that of Pan Am 103 but a different timing device that the CIA had picked up from the Libyans … I have been driven to the conclusion that the device was a CIA plant.”

Mr Dalyell, a long-standing critic of US and British government insistence that Libya was behind the attack, said an analysis of the fragment had shown it had been exposed to a temperature of 4,000deg C. But a Swiss police specialist had cast doubt on this, saying the explosion would have lasted only a fraction of a second in outside air temperatures of about minus 40C.

Accusing the Crown Office, the Scottish prosecuting authority, of failing to follow up the right leads, Mr Dalyell said – to strident denials from Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Scottish Office minister – that it had allowed itself for six years “to be suborned by political pressure into failing to carry out its duty”.

He said this was a “wicked” dereliction of duty that brought shame on Britain.

That’s from 1995.   Thanks, BBC, for being on the ball here!

There’s also this:

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the tragedy, describes the ruling of Megrahi as the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history, blaming both the Scottish legal system and US intelligence.

“The Americans played their role in the investigation and influenced the prosecution,” Swire told the Scotsman Newspaper.

Top level UK diplomats tend to agree with him, such Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya.

“No court is likely get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence,” Miles told the BBC.

The spectacular decision of the SCCRC is certain to give a second life to the dozen of alternative theories of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Nearly two decades later, the case is back to square one.

Back to square one

Let us give Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord Maclean some credit. After hearing 230 witnesses and studying 621 exhibits during 84 days of evidence, spread over eight months, the three judges of the Lockerbie trial almost got correctly the date of the worst act of terror in the UK.

In the first line of the first paragraph of the most expensive verdict in history they wrote: “At 1903 hours on 22 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 fell out of the sky.” As a matter of fact, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on December 21st 1988.

Michael Scharf is an international law expert at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Scharf joined the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence in April 1989. He was also responsible for drawing up the UN Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992.

“It was a trial where everybody agreed ahead of time that they were just going to focus on these two guys, and they were the fall guys,” Sharf wrote.

“The CIA and the FBI kept the State Department in the dark. It worked for them for us to be fully committed to the theory that Libya was responsible. I helped the counter-terrorism bureau draft documents that described why we thought Libya was responsible, but these were not based on seeing a lot of evidence, but rather on representations from the CIA and FBI and the Department of Justice about what the case would prove and did prove.”

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Remember when FOX employee Glenn Beck said that “President Obama is a racist who hates white people and white culture.”?

    Well, the Republican party officially agrees with that now.

    Listen as Republican party leader Micheal Steele states how much he Loves, LOVES Glenn Beck.

More below the fold, and two questions for every Republican candidate in 2010 as well . . . .  

I don’t even watch CNN, not on purpose, but I often flip by them when I’m channel surfing.  Sometimes I’ll even click on them deliberately just to see what kind of b.s. they’re peddling.   And I admit I have hated them with a passion for years now, ever since I used to trade e-mails with their news head, and he would actually write me back, and he’d try to convince me that they weren’t really that biased, and then he got sacked for not being biased ENOUGH.   I think his name was Jordan Eason or Eason Jordan, I can’t remember.   He actually had the temerity to claim that Wolf Blitzer wasn’t biased.  Ha!  

They jumped the shark a long time ago.

But if there’s a term for jumping the shark AGAIN, I think it would apply to CNN these days.   The Second Jumping of the Shark, or perhaps the Jumping of the Whale.

Every time I flip by there, it’s pure “TERROR!” and nothing else, 24/7, over and over.  

I’m confused.   Some patsy tried to set his balls on fire on an airplane and it’s an international crisis?    Wow.   Are people really buying this crap these days?   Haven’t they wised up?

I mean, just today they had an Elephant in the Room situation where it was revealed that the father of the “terrorist” talked with the CIA about his son not too long ago.   I mean, he MET with the CIA.    

Then, right on schedule, the guy is helped onto an airplane by a well-dressed man in Amsterdam, because he doesn’t have a passport and somehow he convinces an international air carrier to let a guy onto an international flight without a passport?   And the guy by some just WHACKY coincidence isn’t on the “no fly” list even though we have nuns and thousands of people who have no business being on it — hell, Ted Kennedy was on it — and now they’re trying to come up with all KINDS of excuses as to why this guy wasn’t on the no-fly list …..

But what I always try to look at during times like this is this:

What news stories are NOT being reported right now?  

Because this is how they “cover stuff up”.   They find another story that’s just SOOO fascinating and they have to spend SOOOO much time on that they (gosh!) just don’t have time to report other stories.  

Anyway, I have a couple of candidates.   Please feel free to add your own.

1.   Official: U.S. intelligence found Iran nuke document was forged

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) – U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Oops.  Yeah, we sure wouldn’t want the U.S. population to know about this, because next month we might want to ramp up the hatred against Iran again, it might be a timely thing to do, and we sure wouldn’t want them remembering this, now, would we?

2.  Treasury Okays Unlimited Slush Fund For Fannie, Freddie

Forget raising the cap to $800 billion for Fannie/Freddie.  They announce (on Christmas eve no less) that the slush fund for picking up toxic mortgage is unlimited:

Treasury uncaps credit line for Fannie, Freddie

The Obama administration pledged on Thursday to back beleaguered mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, no matter how big their losses may be in the next three years.

It also jettisoned a demand that the two companies cut the size of their mortgage-related investment portfolios next year, allowing them to provide even more support in the near term for a housing market recovering from its worst slump in decades.

Wow!   Now if the majority of the American people actually knew about both of these, they might be a little angry, and justifiably so.

But you gotta wonder what other pockets are being picked while the “news” channels are on this 24/7 “TERRORGASM”.