Media Watch: Welcome to 2010 ... NOT the beginning of a new decade

JournalisN'T ... Photo taken at a Tea Party Patriots gathering - Organized by the Pasadena Patriots, Tea Party Patriots from all over Southern California on Tuesday afternoon December 29th, celebrated an incredibly successful 2009 and gathered to get ready for the exciting 2010 year ahead. We gathered at Riley's Farm in Oak Glen at 3p for fireside fellowship, hot cider, and Holiday cheer. The fireside gathering featured chili and fixins and we were all treated to a performance of "Take Our Country Back" - written and performed by Chris Cassone. Chris also took this occasion to announce a 125 city tour that will begin in March 2010 ... and end on election day, November 2010 in Las Vegas ... Senate leader Harry Reid's district. From the apple orchards to the fishin' hole, there was a lot to do at Riley's Farm in a gathering of like minded folks! Caption & Image Credit: Edmund Jenks (2010)

Media Watch: Welcome to 2010 ... NOT the beginning of a new decade

Welcome to January 1, 2010 and the 10th anniversary of the bogus Y2K scare and the end of the ninth year of this millennium.

To watch the formal and recognized media outlets note this day is an act of definitive frustration ... it is like hearing someone call Valentines Day, "Valen-TIMES" day.

If one were to believe what the reporters are actually saying one would write the beginning of this posting ... Good Friday morning, 1/1/10. Happy New Year, and new decade, by popular acclaim ... just as they had ten years ago on January 1, 2000.

James (Jim) Riley, owner of Riley's Farm, a working apple orchard and living history farm featuring pick-your-own fruit, living American history education, dinner theater, group banquet facilities and extended, historically-themed overnight stays. He is pictured here next to the farm's flintlock rifle display and "Live Free Or Die" flag while reviewing video taken of the Tea Party Patriot gathering at the farm on the afternoon of Dec. 29, 2009. Image Credit: Edmund Jenks (2010)

This edited and excerpted from Politico -

The N.Y. Times went with a large, classy, centered italic banner, '1/1/00,' and noted, 'Computers Prevail in First Hours of '00.' (earlier edition) The L.A. Times was slightly less poetic: 'Yeltsin Steps Down.' Others: 'Y2K A-OK,' 'Hooray 2K,' 'Green Bay cheers 2000,' 'Fears to cheers,' and the witty, 'Looks like we made it!'

[Today] In Honolulu, the WashPost's Anne E. Kornblut filed 'pool report #8' at 11:50 p.m. ET: 'It is my pleasure to push the button on this, the final White House pool report of the decade. Ten years ago tonight, we were all awaiting the Y2K meltdown, the 2000 presidential recount was still a year away – and Barack Obama was a 38-year-old state senator running a losing campaign for Congress. Ten years from now, on New Year's Eve in 2019, Obama will be an ex-president. And hopefully someone else will be sitting pool van outside the vacation home of the president. For now, however, what we know is this: Obama, after leaving the golf course at 6:33 p.m. local time, is back at his family vacation home in Kailua (they got back at about 6:40 p.m.). The president played more than five hours of golf with friends Greg Orme, Bobby Titcomb and Mike Ramos – and although he missed the final putt on the 18th hole, got a big cheer from the bystanders on the road next to the Mid-Pacific Country Club. The Obamas are now in for the night, and we have a full lid.'

On Chicago Tribune p. 1, a New Year's kiss: 'On to the next decade: Zachary Dixon, 17, and Melinda Craddock, 18, of Galesburg welcome 2010 ... during the 8:15 p.m. New Year's Eve fireworks over Navy Pier in Chicago. ... Chicago area temperatures expected to reach a low of 2 and high of 17 on Friday.'

*First rant of the year – Dr. Larry J. Sabato e-mails: 'I realize the world is nuts in major ways, and this is just a minor slice of fruitcake. But truly, is there any chance the media will stop declaring Thursday the end of the decade? The first decade of the 21st century ends a year from Thursday. Did the first decade A.D. end with the year 9? Of course not! There was no year zero, so Decade One ended on the last day of the year in 10 A.D. Ergo, we've got another whole year in which to name the decade. Maybe something will happen that will help us make sense out of the past ten years.' Good luck with that!
Reference Here>>

We just have to ignore logic and fact in this era of proclaimed "Transparency", "Hope", "Change", "Reform", and "Recovery" in the face of double-digit unemployment and looming inflation ... while we see votes being taken in Congress on 2,000 plus pages of proposed laws that takeover 1/6th of our economy, exert unconstitutional control over all and kill incentive to serve citizens in the name of healthcare reform ... as this Government chooses to impose new Multi-Trillion Dollar debts that will bankrupt economic opportunity and freedom of this and future generations - "The end of a decade".

Good-bye to 2009 and Happy New Year to 2010 ... a year that we still have the freedom to make choices and can resolve to take this country back.

MEDIA WATCH - Alinsky’s children: CBS, TNR and Andrew Sullivan

Headline banner showing how CBS News uses the Alinsky method of Radical/Progressive thought and tactics. Image Credit: CBS News via Fausta's Blog

MEDIA WATCH - Alinsky’s children: CBS, TNR and Andrew Sullivan

A Blog entry prompted by a headline that appeared on an Opinion piece posted at CBS News. It appears that CBS had reworked a piece that had run in The New Republic and changed the opinions around to meet their agenda using Alinsky's rules - targeting, personalization, polarization, and personification ... The plight of the Iranians is just another opportunity.

Saul Alinsky is the father of Radical/Progressive thought and tactics and the references in this posting highlight the use of these tactics.

This excerpted and edited from Fausta's Blog -

Alinsky’s children: CBS, TNR and Andrew Sullivan Fausta's Blog - June 15th, 2009 at 8:49 am

The CBS’s article Meet Iran’s George W. Bush
New Republic: Can Anyone Beat Ahmadinejad In This Week’s Election?, was a retread from an article in TNR:

Lest we forget, Jim reminds us of two facts:
One:

CBS forgot the part about Bush liberating over 50,000,000 Muslims from two of the most violent regimes in history and bringing democracy to the Middle East.

And two:

For the record- The New York Times detailed the recount investigation paid for by a consortium of newspapers and admitted that BUSH WON in 2004.

Look it up yourself: the NYT actually said,

Acomprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.

But it’s time to slander, so Andrew Sullivan was over at The Atlantic saying that Ahmadinejad is Karl Rove. The link takes you to Stacy’s post; if you want to check out Sillivan’s post you go there. Sullivan never misses a chance to indulge his Sarah Palin fixation, while at it,

Ahmadinejad’s bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove - the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin.

What is even more bizarre is Sullivan’s recurrent and perverse focus on Palin’s children, which he constantly indulges in his posts, about which Althouse comments,

And why should the governor of a state be called an “attention-starved celebreality star”? Is it because you don’t respect her as a politician? You might call everyone with the nerve to run for President/Vice President an attention-starved celebreality star, but the fact is you don’t. Apparently, it’s because she’s got kids who do things that you think we can sit back and view as objects of idle amusement. If anyone is to be a politician — in your nasty little world — their kids better toe the line and stay perfectly prim and healthy and smart (or hide).

But back to Sullivan’s first post: Iran is a Red State:

Think of this regime as Cheney and Rove in a police state setting, and you see what’s been going on. (Of course, Rove and Cheney live within a democratic system utterly unlike Iran, and there’s no evidence they would violate democratic norms as Khamenei just did. But their demagoguery, abuse of the state, dedication to conflict abroad, co-optation of the armed forces, and manipulation of rural and religious voters all have parallels in Red State Iran.)

So what Sullivan’s saying, in his heightened consciousness and loftier intellect which given the chance he probably will humbly acknowledge, is that he would have you believe that voters in red state America don’t vote out of their own free will since Karl and Dick manipulate them any which way, through the deployment of Czarist shams like Sarah Palin and her children. From there to taking the leap and equating George Bush = Ahmadinejad is simply putting the icing on the metaphorical cake, or am I missing something here?

What these statements in CBS, TNR, Sullivan and others have in common is Alinsky’s rules:

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

“One of the criteria for picking the target is the target’s vulnerability … the other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract.”

Targeting, personalization, polarization, and personification: The plight of the Iranians is just another opportunity.
Reference Here>>

... And the hits just keep on comin'!

Hamas Leadership Dispenses Terror That Cuts Two Ways

In a public relations campaign launched in the Palestinian Authority, the Hamas terror organization is claiming victory over Israel's withdrawal and promises to terrorize Haifa and Tel Aviv until Israel is defeated and Palestine restored to the Arabs. They are taking credit for the Israeli withdrawal, saying that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip defeated by the "resistance," not as the result of "useless negotiations." Caption and Image Credit: Hyscience

Hamas Leadership Dispenses Terror That Cuts Two Ways

The biggest tell on a government and its attitude toward its people in a crisis situation is how it responds to the protection and care of the citizenry.

Hamas has finally poked the beehive of Israel to where the government of Israel had to respond with a damaging force where the Hamas leadership knew that Israel would not tolerate having rocket bombs being shot into their national boundaries any longer.

After Israel dropped bombs on the launching points from where the Hamas initiated rocket bomb activity had been traced, collateral damage in sued and injuries to the citizens who lived under Hamas rule needed a response. The appropriate response would be to allow a quick first medical response in order to allow the injured but living to remain living.

This excerpted and edited from Pajamas Media –

Revealing Silence at the Gaza-Egypt Border
Why does Hamas victimize its own people? And why doesn't the media call them on it?
January 2, 2009 - by Richard Landes

At about 1:10 on Sunday, December 28, 2008, the BBC anchor Peter Dobbie found out, along with his audience, that there were 40 Egyptian ambulances ready to evacuate wounded, and lorries full of medical goods sent by Qatar to restock Gazan hospitals, waiting at the border crossing in Egypt. (According to another source there were also 50 Egyptian doctors ready to go into the Strip to help.) Since Dobbie and his audience had heard the repeated complaint from the people in Gaza that the hospitals were overwhelmed by the injured and desperately lacking in supplies, one would have expected the border to be full of purposeful activity. Instead, nothing was happening. The Gazan side lay silent.

A real journalist, someone with a smell for revealing anomalies, would have immediately recognized this as an important story to follow up on. After all, Dobbie had not hesitated to interrupt and challenge Israeli spokesmen on precisely the issues at stake: the disproportion between Israeli-caused fatalities and Israeli-suffered fatalities, the inevitable suffering of innocent civilians when such a bombing campaign takes place in so densely populated an area. “The math doesn’t work,” said Dobbie, implying what commentators emphasized elsewhere — the “disproportionate use of force” the Israelis were employing.

So here was a perfect issue with which to challenge Hamas spokesmen: If they were so distraught at the loss of life of their own people, why didn’t they take care of them? What on earth would possess Hamas not to avail themselves of what they pleadingly told the world they so desperately needed? As the honest and courageous Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey put it, “My head hurts.”

Alas, the BBC did nothing of the sort. The next six hours saw nothing but canned footage repeating Palestinian complaints, voiced not only by Hamas spokesmen and BBC reporters, but UN officials like Chris Gunning and human rights advocates, and, of course, others in the Western MSM.
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Too bad. Had the BBC behaved like real journalists instead of parroting Palestinian narratives, they might have taken the “golden” (read excremental) thread that leads out of the labyrinth and straight to the “real story.”

That story, of course, is the dreadful Palestinian strategy, taken to new heights by Hamas in the early 21st century — play the victim card at any cost. In this case, create a genuine humanitarian crisis.
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Hamas initially offered two reasons for not allowing the wounded out: 1) the roads were too dangerous to venture out on, and 2) they were composing a list of the wounded.
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Then Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, speaking to Khaled Abu Toameh, denied the Egyptian allegation that Hamas was to blame, “claiming that many of the wounded rejected an Egyptian offer to receive medical treatment in Cairo in protest against Cairo’s ‘support’ for the IDF operation.
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On the contrary, as Ma’an News Agency reported, Hamas would allow no passage of wounded until the border was completely open.
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And of the 600 wounded (according to Palestinian sources) all of them, suffering in a ludicrously crowded and understaffed hospital, refused to go to Egypt?

Although the reasons are hollow, they do tell us about Hamas priorities, and the overwhelming message of this refusal is that helping their own civilians survive ranks very low on their scale, well below revenge and public relations concerns. Indeed, as with Israel, so with Egypt: they hold their people hostage to maximalist demands.

Some say Hamas doesn’t care about their people. The evidence suggests far worse. They actively seek the victimization of their own people. Indeed, the enormous resources they have expended on the constant, if largely ineffective, barrage of rockets on Israeli civilians is actually quite staggering. Not only have they lavished much of their meager resources to this vicious and gratuitous activity, but, as a result of those attacks, guaranteed that their borders would be closed and their people would continue to suffer — hostages to their hatred. Thus, the phony excuses offered for the border snafu disguise something far more sinister: Hamas wants the crisis; they want civilians dying dramatically in wretched hospitals.

On the face of it, it seems absurd that a government would actively victimize its own people. What advantage in making an already miserable people suffer even more?

There are two major explanations here. First, Hamas, like many other Palestinian groups, is addicted to violence against Israel. Anything they can do, no matter how small, to make Israelis suffer, they will do, whatever the cost.
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But the second explanation is far more disturbing, because it involves the media. Hamas only gains a real advantage to having Palestinians suffer if they, who do so much to inflict that suffering, can blame it on Israel.

It would be absurd for Hamas to stand in front of the world and say, “Look at how much we make our own people suffer; join us in hating Israel.” So the game is intensely hypocritical. It depends on getting public opinion, both in the Arab-Muslim world and in the West, to accept a scapegoating narrative — the Palestinian Guernica — that deflects responsibility.

And the pathetic thing is that it works.
Reference Here>>

The truly odd thing to all of this is that this scapegoating narrative of suffering has a parallel application.

This strategy of deflecting responsibility is also being used by our current Executive and Congressional leadership to diffuse the problems in our economy in the causes and attempts to right the wrongs caused by our leadership.

Further, they have a willing partner in the forces of the MSM to NOT report the story outside of the narrative template that Hamas is using in its campaign of terror in the Middle-East.

To reconstruct the questions asked at the beginning of this article:

Why does our Executive and Cogressional Leadership victimize its own people through social engineering agendas (using taxpayer money in programs that continue to fail)? And why doesn't the media call them on it?

Democrats – Can’t See The Forest For The Trees

The day after it was revealed that former ABC News Capitol Hill correspondent Linda Douglass was going to be joining Barack Obama's presidential campaign, "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace said this was a perfect example of how liberal and biased the mainstream media are. Image Credit: NewsBusters

Democrats – Can’t See The Forest For The Trees

It is funny to pick up the paper, or turn on the computer and read what political reporters, writers, and political operatives have to say about each other and further, what they have to say about the landscape they operate in.

On one hand, they all speak in the highest deference about how they respect people who are able to draw the line between personal opinion and respecting the point of view of others, while on the other, they view the world as a mine field … even when they know the communications world is so totally committed to left focused politics.

We, at MAXINE, don’t get it. Many, in the media communications field, think that tough questions are the bulwark of fairness, yet when these very same people make the decision to play a role where they may actually have to field a question, they invariably respond as though they are having to enter a war zone as opposed to actually respond with reasoned counterpoint … and fairness to the question and issue at hand.

CNN's Howard Kurtz, on Sunday morning's Reliable Sources, raised the accuracy of the story with Linda Douglass who covered Capitol Hill for ABC News until the end of 2005. Image Credit: NewsBusters

This example excerpted and edited from the Washington Post -

As Obama Aide, Reporter Dons Flack Jacket
By Howard Kurtz - Washington Post Staff Writer - Monday, June 16, 2008; Page C01

ST. LOUIS -- As Barack Obama started fielding questions at a hospital here last week, Linda Douglass stood off to the left, scribbling in a reporter's notebook, as she has in every presidential campaign since 1980.

It wasn't until 20 minutes later, when she shouted, "Last question!" that her former colleagues were reminded of her new role as a traveling spokeswoman who will be the public face -- a female face in this post-Hillary period -- of the campaign.

After three decades as a television correspondent, Douglass is now on the inside -- but still not getting all the answers. She recalls Obama telling her that he would not talk to her, let alone the outside world, about the vice-presidential selection process, saying: "We're locking it down, we're buttoning it up."

Which is fine with Douglass: "That was so the people who are trying to claw me every day won't get anything. I expect to be kept in the dark."
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Given her background, is Douglass, who covered John McCain's 2000 campaign, prepared to slam the presumed Republican nominee?

"I do like McCain and the people around him, and I consider him still to be a friend," she says. "But I have fundamental differences with John McCain on the issues and always have. I don't have any problem criticizing John McCain."

Describing her disagreements with the Arizona senator -- on the Iraq war, health care and the Bush tax cuts -- Douglass says: "It was no secret to the reporters around me that I have Democratic-leaning views. But they said I was always fair."
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It wasn't until a 45-minute job interview with Obama last month that she decided to leave journalism for good.
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At first, "I was afraid I'd slip into on-one-hand/on-the-other-hand mode. I think reporters are constantly struggling with themselves to suppress their own opinions." Because she believes in Obama's message, Douglass says, "for me this is really liberating."
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McCurry likens the switch to a film critic who is handed a camera and told to make a movie. "She wants to do it in a different way from the spinners of the past," he says. "She wants to get away from the rat-a-tat-tat back-and-forth and keep focused on what journalists need to get the job done."

GOP strategist Dan Schnur, a spokesman for McCain's 2000 campaign, says that Douglass was known for being fair but that the transition may be difficult. "The more us communication types are trained in spin, the more different we become from the reporters who are covering our candidates," he says.
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The Illinois senator may have unrealistic expectations about news management. In telling reporters on his plane that he would no longer discuss his search for a running mate, he said that if they heard "secondhand accounts, rumors, gossip about this election process, you can take it from me that it is wrong." Of course, details usually leak out, and they are sometimes accurate.
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Douglass's first television appearance as a newly minted flack took place on her old network, ABC, the morning after Obama clinched the nomination.
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After saying, "All right, Linda, the niceties are over," anchor Chris Cuomo asked whether Obama might pick Clinton or another woman as his running mate. Douglass deflected the question -- "There is no short list, there is no long list" -- and pivoted to her talking points, ticking off "the very sharp contrasts" with McCain in "health care and whether the tax cuts go to the rich, as John McCain wants, or to the middle class, as Barack Obama wants, and getting out of Iraq."
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Behind the scenes, Douglass tries to dig out answers to reporters' questions. "I bug everyone all day.
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But there are limits to Douglass's clout, as she learned when she twice tried to end the news conference and Obama didn't stop taking questions.

"If he wants to keep talking, he'll keep talking," she says.

A Clintonite's Choice

Fox News's newest contributor, to be announced today, may surprise the liberal crowd: former Clinton White House lawyer Lanny Davis.

"Fox has always treated me with respect and given me a chance to express my point of view," Davis says of the network that the Democratic candidates refused to grant a debate out of concern that it favors Republicans. He will be a frequent guest, along with such Fox stalwarts as Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich.

A relentless surrogate for Hillary Clinton, Davis says, he felt "ganged up on" during appearances on the other cable channels. He says that Clinton was "demonized" by MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, and that CNN's primary-night panels were tilted toward the Obama side.

"Does Fox have a conservative slant on some of their programs? Yes," Davis says. "They're giving me a chance to provide a counterpoint, and that's all I can ask."
Reference Here>>

As a citizen out here in the cable bill paying, and program viewing public, isn’t having viewpoints being given a chance to be expressed clearly all we can ask?

Given Lanny Davis’s view of most of the media landscape … the answer is sadly, NO.

The only communicative structure we are all aching for is an attempt at balance in the communication of viewpoints.

The Howard Kurtz piece on Linda Douglass (and Lanny Davis) puts a spotlight the on the reason why the media landscape will not change for the better anytime soon - Democrats can not see the forest for the trees.