Corporate Media, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama, Cable News Sucks, Helen Thomas is Da Man and Falling Dollar.

A lazy Sunday and not really wanting to do anything, nothing good on television, so I watched a little of what is now euphemistically referred to as the news.

I got to see a lot Hillary and Bill, but I don't remember seeing McCain. That's not surprising, since McCain is corporate media's choice for president and you don't want to mess with a winning formula. McCain is spending most of his time opposing his own positions and generally just not looking real bright.

McCain employs the media to cement his “maverick/independent” image. The Tim
Russert/Chris Matthews “We are his base,” as Matthews said, school of corporate
punditry will extol his manifest virtues until November. He received a standing
ovation for a speech he recently gave at the Newspaper Publishers Convention.
The Democratic nominee will face a mainstream media that consistently interprets
or ignores events to favor McCain. His gaffes or temper tantrums will be glossed
over. The media doesn’t actively “dislike” Obama as much as it did Al Gore. It
dislikes Hillary but hopes to keep the Democratic race going as long as
possible. But there is little doubt the Democratic nominee will have to defeat
both McCain and the media in the fall.

I didn't really see much of Obama, but I saw a hell of a lot of his preacher.

The corporate media loved Barack, way back when it looked like Hillary was a sure thing. They needed a nomination race to talk about. And what would get more ratings than a historic contest between a black man and a white woman?

But things didn't quite go the way that was expected. Barack Obama started beating Hillary, big time. In fact, it would just about take a miracle for Hillary to beat Barack. But you wouldn't know that by listening to the corporate media. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is the exception. But the rest of the corporate media is doing their best to provide Hillary with that miracle. Simply because, running against Hillary, McCain has his best shot at winning.

In a blink of an eye, the media has jumped ship from the Obama
campaign and become a crucial Clinton ally, pressing just the message -- that
Obama is a likely loser in the general election -- that Hillary and her allies
have been promoting for the past six weeks.

The new tenor of media coverage is visible almost everywhere, from
Politico, Time and The New Republic to The Washington Post and The New York
Times.

For Hillary, the shift is a potential lifesaver as she struggles to
keep her head above water; without it, she would, metaphorically, drown.

Just an example of how stupid it is to get your political information from the corporate media, the plan is working.

After losing Pennsylvania and a difficult month of scandals, Barack Obama's
double-digit lead over Hillary Clinton has dropped to 7 points in the latest
NEWSWEEK Poll.

I'm not the only one who has noticed the abysmal performance of the corporate media vs the Internet. There's an excellent article in the NYT by Elizabeth Edwards, yeah that would be John's wife, about this very subject. She is one smart woman.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is
cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes
of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are
accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.

The problem today unfortunately is that voters who take their
responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about
the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they
do not have access to the Internet.

News is different from other programming on television or other content in
print. It is essential to an informed electorate. And an informed electorate is
essential to freedom itself. But as long as corporations to which news gathering
is not the primary source of income or expertise get to decide what information
about the candidates “sells,” we are not functioning as well as we could if we
had the engaged, skeptical press we deserve.

Hell's bells, Hillary's even teaming up with the Right to either try to further her nomination chances, which are practically nil, or else to damage Obama to the point that he can't win in November. I got burnt out on Hillary when she voted to let the idiot Bush invade Iraq and she's done nothing since to change my mind.

Last week was officially the moment that the race for the Democratic
nomination slipped through the looking glass into surrealism. Here is a brief
list of those people who are now actively supporting Hillary Clinton’s
candidacy: Pat Buchanan, a charming man slightly to the right of Genghis Khan;
Rush Limbaugh, the most voluble and incendiary of right-wing talk-show hosts;
Richard Mellon Scaife, the media mogul who financed the virulently antiClinton
crusades of the 1990s; and, if you read between the lines, even Karl Rove, the
“architect” of the past decade or so of Republican dominance in electoral
politics.

Am I hallucinating? I promise you I’m not. The merging of the forces
that once persecuted the Clintons with the Clinton campaign itself has been a
wonder to behold. Some on the once solidly anti-Clinton right have even been
directly urging people to register as Democrats to vote for her.

A person who so firmly believes that she would be the president that this country needs to lead it through it current crises, should be able to manage something much simpler, like her own campaign. Right?

WASHINGTON — Despite Hillary Clinton's big win in Pennsylvania last week,
the story of her campaign is often one of mismanagement and missed
opportunities, and it raises questions about how she'd organize and run the
White House.

"There's a certain style to the campaign, and it shows what we might
expect in a Clinton presidency: a lot of viewpoints and a messiness," said James
McCann, a political science professor at Purdue University in Indiana.

Whether that's a good or bad trait is in the eye of the analyst. McCann
called it "policymaking through trial and error," similar to how Bill Clinton
ran his administration, which to many was a big success.

But her campaign tumbled from riches to rags to rebounds — and now to
hanging on for dear life. It wasn't supposed to be that way.

And McCain, he went through Hell serving his country in Nam, now he's playing Hell with his country trying to become president.

The North Carolina Republican Party is running an ad showing Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America" sermon. McCain says he's doing everything in his power to put a stop to it. If you're silly enough to believe that, you just might be a Republican.

On the campaign trail yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said he’ll “do
everything” in his power and bring “every
pressure to bear” in order to stop the North Carolina Republican party from
running an
attack ad featuring Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But
the chairwoman of the North Carolina GOP, Linda Daves, told NPR
yesterday that McCain has not done all he could. According to Daves, she
hasn’t even spoken to McCain:

While McCain want us to believe that he's a real tiger when it comes to terrorism, if it's right wing terrorism, he's more of a fluffy little kitten.

As John McCain continues using guilt-by-association tactics to falsely
portray his political opponent as a radical terrorist sympathizer, it's worth
remembering that McCain himself has a little terrorism problem of his own.

McCain's terrorism problem dates back to the early 1990s, when he sided
with right-wing domestic terrorists and voted against tough new legislation
cracking down on a wave of anti-choice domestic terrorism targeting women who
visited abortion clinics, their doctors, and clinic staff.

In both 1993 and 1994,

McCain voted against the anti-terrorism measure. On each occasion, McCain was
one of thirty radical anti-choice Senators to oppose the bill Fortunately,
despite McCain's opposition, it passed the Senate by a 69-30 margin.

John McCain took a "poverty tour" in Alabama, telling the folks a lot of stuff that sounded real good to them. But the stuff he didn't tell them about is what John McCain is really about. From Down with Tyranny.

There's not only McCain's support for making Bush's tax cuts permanent. Most
outrageous is McCain's plan to cut the corporate income tax rate, from 35
percent to 25 percent. What you won't read in today's coverage of McCain's
proposal is that, according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office study,
61% of American corporations, including 39% of large companies, paid no
corporate income taxes between 1996 and 2000. Last year, corporations shouldered
just 14.4% of the total US tax burden, compared with about 50% in 1940. And
McCain wants to give these corporations a break?

Really it was just pretty sickening watching the news today. These guys either think we're stupid or else they're clueless. The daytime cable news is even worse. It looks like they hire a bunch of ex-cheerleaders that have very little idea of what they're reading. Not all of them, but most of them.

I'll take Helen Thomas anytime. I'd love to sit around and drink a couple of beers with Helen and just shoot the breeze. I'd even buy.

...Q You're denying, in this room, that we torture and we have
tortured?

MS. PERINO: Yes, I am denying that.

Helen then turned in her seat, looked at her colleagues, shook her head
in disgust, and asked sadly: "Where is everybody? For God's sakes!"

Well, if I can still afford to buy a couple of beers.







Have a good Monday,

Later