This has got to be one of the funniest posts in a political blog in years. Hat tip to Lean Left. Poor Scott from Powerline:

The star hosts of CNN and MSNBC news shows have notoriously derided the tea party demonstrations around the country with reference to the practice of teabagging (which I had never heard of before they brought it up). As John noted, both networks' "journalists" used the rallies as an occasion for childish sexual innuendoes -- in the case of MSNBC, the same obscene teabag "joke" was repeated 51 times in a 13-minute segment.

The Media Research Center detailed the teabagging references in an informative press release. The Huffington Post noted the references as well as more "jokes" in the same vein (including a video of Cooper's jape, over which David Gergen cluelessly chortles).

While sitting in for Keith Olbermann on April 15, MSNBC's David Shuster packed the teabagging puns into his report on the protests. Shuster is like a juvenile student who has commandeered the loudspeaker system at his high school to commit the prank of a lifetime. Maybe it was just a case of Olbermann's writers feeding Shuster the same good stuff they usually put in Olbermann's mouth.

I encourage you to read the entire rant. It's a hoot. If you need any further incentive, the post's title is "An Obscene Insult."

TV and radio critic Bill Mann has an excellent Huntington Post article which exposes a largely unknown practice that explains part of why Rush Limbaugh is syndicated in so many markets.

It's because -- ready for this? -- Rush's show was, and presumably still is, given away for free to many local radio stations.

This shocker is because of a little-known practice in broadcast syndication called a "barter deal." (Barter deals were briefly mentioned in Michael Wolff's first-rate recent piece on Rush in Vanity Fair).

Here's how a barter deal works: To launch the show, Limbaugh's syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks -- the same folks who syndicate wingnut du jour Glen Beck -- gave Limbaugh's three hours away -- that's right, no cash -- to local radio stations, mostly in medium and smaller markets, back in the early 1990's.

So, a local talk station got Rush's show for zilch. In exchange, Premiere took for itself much of the local station's available advertising time (roughly 15 minutes an hour) and packed the show with national ads it had already pre-sold.

Think Gold Bond Medicated Powder.

It's a very sweet deal for local radio station owners, explained Bill Exline a respected radio broker (he helped people buy and sell local stations). "Not only does the local station get three hours of free programming," Exline explained, "but that's one less local talk-show host on staff they need. It makes small- and medium-market radio properties more profitable and attractive by cutting down staff expenses."

When you have an massive corporation behind you, it's easy to do well. And, if you think that massive corporate support like this would go to a liberal talk show host, you haven't paid much attention to how corporate power has pushed a far right agenda. Even at MSNBC, things only seem so "liberal" because there is one token liberal, Rachel Maddow, and one token moderate, Keith Olbermann. The rest of that network is dominated by conservative and rightist anchors with low profiles in addition to Tweety, a conservative Phonycrat, and the fringe right Joe Scarborough. (BTW: what really did happen to Lori Klausutus?)

Syndicator chicanery of the variety exposed by Mann is only part of the problem. The other issue is the role of advertising. Advertisers, for the most part, are huge corporations with rightist Republicans as CEOs and major shareholders. Even worse, most privately held corporations are owned entirely by Gopper nutjobs.

A lot of liberals were disappointed by Al Franken's show on Air America. His centrist politics, including conservative pro war views were certainly out of step with most of the network's listeners. (I think that is why he avoided taking callers, which usually is a staple for talk radio.) Yet, even he had trouble getting advertising, even in markets where he was beating Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Really.

The sad reality is that centrist and liberal talkers don't just need to beat rightist nutjobs like Limbaugh in order to be more profitable. They have to obliterate the Goppers in the ratings just to keep up.

That's why we should laugh when Limbaugh claims that his success shows that his views enjoy gigantic popularity. Yes, Rush and his clones at Faux News may be benefiting from anti-Obama feelings on the right, but that cannot obscure us from seeing how the whole corporate media system is as fixed as pro wrestling.

 

Mike Prysner, Iraq vet, shows how much a point of view can change when confronted with ugly reality.

OK, here's what actually is happening with the teabagger protests.

1) Most radio stations, especially rightist talk stations, are owned by a small number of corporations.

2) Those corporations and the syndicators are owned by really, really rich people who do not pay anywhere near their fair share in taxes.

3) Those owners are mad that Bush's tax cuts for the rich are going to expire.

4) The owner class orders the rightist talkers to whip their imbeciles into a frenzy.

5) Some of those imbeciles go to the teabagging protests and fight against their own economic interests.

Now, a few of the teabaggers are rich people who would benefit economically from not paying closer to their fair share in taxes, but most rich people wouldn't hang out with the poorly educated people who make up most of the teabaggers.

This has got to be some of the most pathetic Astroturf I've seen in a long time.

 

This posting has been submitted to the Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm.

Regardless of the corporate media's lost interest in the involvement of Rick Warren in the inauguration of President Obama, the issue is still quite important. No matter how hard he tries to put a mainstream facade on his religious extremism as is the habit of Orange County, CA fundamentalists, Warren's real agenda hasn't changed.

In a previous posting, I ran this YouTube video of Warren preaching to his flock in a stadium. There, he asked them to emulate the behavior of followers of Hitler and Lenin. He then had his worshipers hold up sign saying the chant, "Whatever It Takes."



He claimed to have built a network of 400,000 churches for his "revolution." The video includes a transcript.

When you listen to Warren's speech, it is obvious that he wants to be in charge of a theocratic revolution. Do you want to live under such a regime?

Warren had way too much clout even before Obama and McCain shamelessly pandered to him during the 2008 presidential election. The Nation ran an expose of the favoritism Warren has been getting from Congress.

The California megachurch minister and opponent of gay marriage who will deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration had his income tax returns audited in 1996. When the IRS tried to collect the taxes it claimed he owed, Warren went to court. Congress then passed a law granting Warren's tax deduction, pre-empting the US Court of Appeals from even taking up the case against him. The votes in the House and Senate were unanimous.

The IRS permits members of the clergy to claim exemptions for their housing. At the time of Warren's audit the amount claimed had to be "reasonable"--it shouldn't exceed the fair market value for the rental of the home. That 1996 audit concluded that Warren was deducting more than that--the IRS said he owed it $55,300. Warren challenged the IRS in tax court, arguing that his housing exemption should be unlimited.

The facts were simple: in 1993 Warren deducted $77,663, his entire Saddleback Church salary that year, as a housing expense--and paid no taxes at all on that salary. In addition, he claimed a deduction for his mortgage expenses--even though they had been covered by the salary. He made similar claims in subsequent tax returns.

Warren is an incredibly powerful man with a dangerous agenda. His speech at the inauguration have made him even more prominent and politically powerful. Warren's efforts to create a relatively harmless public image cannot be taken seriously by anyone who cares about state/church separations or the consequences of theocracy for queers, women, and non-Christians.

 

All anyone should need to do to see that the institution of marriage is dubious is to look at the high divorce and domestic violence rates that the institution causes. Another obvious approach is to just look around you and see how miserable most heteros are in their marriages.

Our society has so thoroughly romanticized marriage that we have completely forgotten marriage's original purpose. Marriage was originally intended to codify and enforce the status of women and children as property of men. That notion has gotten significantly less popular outside of the Christian Right and other religious extremists in our society, but the original structures of the institution are in place.

Can an institution that is designed as a property relationship really be turned into a loving, egalitarian one? Doesn't it make sense to start over?

The hateful and bigoted rhetoric of the Mormons and others who think that marriage should be limited to a man and a woman tend to make decent people want to be on the opposite side of them. Also, having two different legal standards based on sexual orientation is understandably objectionable.

When you add the highly offensive efforts of people to use the power of the state to impose their religious beliefs on people who don't share them, it is easy to see why people just want to shut them up by making legal marriage an institution independent of gender.

However, the long term solution to the marriage issue is abolition of all marriage, regardless of gender. It's not an easy struggle, and it probably won't be won in my lifetime. But, challenging deeply rooted and oppressive institutions is never easy.

The early gay liberationists were strongly critical of the institution of marriage as have been many feminists over the years. However, as lgbt people have focused more on acceptance than liberation in the last decade or so, pretending that we all want to mimic heterosexual marriage has become the biggest focus of our movement, to the detriment of issues that effect far more queers. The vast majority of us will never get married, regardless of the law.

At some point, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities need to face and tell the truth about marriage.

Marriage is a violent and oppressive institution that needs to go.

 

Photo: NOAA Photo Library

If you think our financial markets are getting farther and farther away from sound investment and much closer to reckless speculation, this might interest you. I recently learned about an incredibly flaky financial instrument: the weather derivative. Wikipedia has a description of weather derivatives(taken today):

Weather derivatives are financial instruments that can be used by organizations or individuals as part of a risk management strategy to reduce risk associated with adverse or unexpected weather conditions. The difference from other derivatives is that the underlying asset (rain/temperature/snow) has no direct value to price the weather derivative. Farmers can use weather derivatives to hedge against poor harvests caused by drought or frost; theme parks may want to insure against rainy weekends during peak summer seasons; and gas and power companies may use heating degree days (HDD) or cooling degree days (CDD) contracts to smooth earnings. A sports event managing company may wish to hedge the loss by entering into a weather derivative contract because if it rains the day of the sporting event, fewer tickets will be sold.

Heating degree days are one of the most common types of weather derivative. Typical terms for an HDD contract could be: for the November to March period, for each day where the temperature falls below 18 degrees Celsius keep a cumulative count of the difference between 18 degrees and the average daily temperature. Depending upon whether the option is a put option or a call option, pay out a set amount per heating degree day that the actual count differs from the strike.

The first weather derivative deal was in July 1996 when Aquila Energy structured a dual-commodity hedge for Consolidated Edison Co. The transaction involved ConEd's purchase of electric power from Aquila for the month of August. The price of the power was agreed to, but a weather clause was embedded into the contract. This clause stipulated that Aquila would pay ConEd a rebate if August turned out to be cooler than expected. The measurement of this was referenced to Cooling Degree Days measured at New York City's Central Park weather station. If total CDDs were from 0 to 10% below the expected 320, the company received no discount to the power price, but if total CDDs were 11 to 20% below normal, Con Ed would receive a $16,000 discount. Other discounted levels were worked in for even greater departures from normal.

After that humble beginning, weather derivatives slowly began trading over-the-counter in 1997. As the market for these products grew, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange introduced the first exchange-traded weather futures contracts (and corresponding options), in 1999. The CME currently trades weather derivative contracts for 18 cities in the United States, nine in Europe, six in Canada and two in Japan. Most of these contracts track cooling degree days or heating degree days, but recent additions track frost days in the Netherlands and monthly/seasonal snowfall in Boston and New York. A major early pioneer in weather derivatives was Enron Corporation, through its EnronOnline unit.

A logical thinker should note that these weather derivatives got their initial push from Enron, yes Enron.

I'm sure a blindly conservative or libertarian person would defend this as spreading risk. However, when people speculate on derivatives this flaky, its overall effect on the economy is destabilizing. When futures markets try to take on the function of the insurance industry in a crass and greedy way, it's both bizarre and dangerous. We need to strictly regulate derivatives and other dodgy financial instruments and limit the varieties that are legal.

If turning Wall St. into the Las Vegas strip only hurt wealthy investors, then no one would have a reason to care about this. But, speculation is a root cause of the huge bailouts and the economic crises we face today.

 

There has been a proverbial elephant in the living room of the corporate media's coverage of the Binghamton shootings: the role of the NRA and other gun control opponents in making the whole thing happen.

If our country was responsible enough to ban private gun ownership, very few of these shootings would happen. The guns simply would not be available. Yet, the corporate media censor this fact and censor that responsibility of the NRA and other gun control opponents for these shootings.

In the real world, there simply is no possible way to support private gun ownership without enabling every crime committed with guns. That includes all of the gay bashings, robberies, rapes, and murders that are committed with guns. You are putting the guns in the hands of the criminals if you support gun ownership.

In 2004, over 29,000 people in this country were killed by guns (lower statistics are generally limited to homicides or exclude suicides). To put this in perspective, this is comparable to the deaths in over nine September 11 attacks. Over 64,000 people were injured with guns.

The issue of guns being used for suicides is especially troubling. Unlike most methods of committing suicide, the rapid finality of gunshots makes it impossible for people to change their minds.

The Mumbai attacks show us that guns can be quite effective terrorist weapons. However, the level of gun terrorism on the streets of the US is far greater than that in those horrific attacks.

If you think that you are a responsible gun owner, think again. One of the main sources for guns on our streets is stolen guns. By owning guns, you are increasing the supply of illegally available guns without even realizing it.

If you wonder "what kind of people" are responsible for the Binghamton attacks and you support private ownership, you can discover what one of them is like by looking in the mirror. No matter how much you try to deny or rationalize what you are doing, you have your share of the responsibility. That doesn't just apply to the extremists at the NRA, who are playing a leading role in the slaughter. It applies to anyone who opposes banning guns.

By the way, "gun safety" is an oxymoron. All guns are dangerous. The only way to have safety from firearms is to get rid of the things.

 

Phony "elections" in Iraq are nothing new. Scott Ritter reported on the massive Bush regime election fraud in 2005. Now the puppet regime Iraq is continuing the tradition by engaging in massive election fraud in the regional elections that occurred earlier this year.

Do we know this because of the New York Times, the CBS Evening News, or CNN? That was a joke. They are still doing their utmost to shill for the Iraq War. That's why Alternet and other independent media are so important. From Abeer Mohammed and Neil Arun of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, we find out the following in a 3/3/09 Alternet article.

Iraq's election commission is fighting back against claims that it failed to take account of grave violations in tightly contested provincial polls.

Last week it released final results from the January 31 election, confirming Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's allies came top in ten of 14 provinces where polls were held.

It also released details of electoral violations, confirming that none of the 20 cases of serious fraud it had investigated were severe enough to affect the overall outcome.

Sound good? It shouldn't. Stalin and Hitler said that their elections were fair and free too. Later in the article, we find out what really happened.

Over the last few weeks, IWPR-trained journalists have gathered several reports of alleged violations, ranging from ballot boxes going temporarily missing to family members voting for absent relatives.

The strongest allegations of fraud so far have come from the Iraqiya list of former prime minister Ayad Allawi.

"The majority of violations occurred in Baghdad, Salahaddin and Anbar," said Ali Nesaif, a member of parliament with Allawi's list. "Some boxes were stolen from polling centers in Salahaddin as well as Diyala."

...

The Sadrist bloc has also voiced anger at the election commission's findings.

"We have been mistreated in this election. IHEC was not fair -- it was biased in favor of other lists," Amir Tahar al-Kinani, the leader of a list backing Sadr told IWPR.

He pointed out that initial results showed the party was in second place in Maysan province, followed by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, SIIC.

"In the final results, we dropped to third position, while SIIC took second place. How can that happen?" asked Kinani.

...

A list led by Ali Hatim Sulaiman, a tribal leader, was challenging initial results in Anbar, said the source.

SIIC, which currently runs Baghdad's provincial council, had reportedly contested votes in the capital.

It happened the same way that Bush "won" the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections here in the US: via fraud.

There was even open vote buying by an election observer. This sounds like a GOP wet dream.

Abu Qasim, a 44-year-old government employee in Baghdad, said he saw an election observer issuing ten U.S. dollar mobile phone cards in front of a polling station.

"When I saw this, I returned home without voting because I realised that the country is ruined and the elections don't mean anything anymore," he said.

If newspapers reported important news stories like these rather than censoring them, they wouldn't be in as big of a financial mess. Why should people pay money to be misled and defrauded?

When any politicians talk about Iraq being a "democracy," you know they are lying through their teeth. There is no democracy in Iraq. The overall level of violence is higher now than it was before the escalation due to the fact that the main source of the violence, the US military, has severely escalated its killings.

It's all a crock of shit.

 

A politician lying??? Oh my!!! What a shock!!!!!

President Obama told a whopper of a lie on his speech announcing his plans to drag out the war on Iraq even longer. (Democracy Now! 3/26/09)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As a candidate for president, I made clear my support for a timeline of sixteen months to carry out this drawdown, while pledging to consult closely with our military commanders upon taking office to ensure that we preserve the gains we’ve made and to protect our troops. These consultations are now complete, and I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next eighteen months. So let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31st, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.

The lie at the end of this about the "combat mission" ending by 8/31/10 should be easy to spot and debunk. There is simply no possible way that you can have tens of thousands of US troops occupying Iraq without them getting into combat, even if that were not the intent.

As you might expect, the military knows this and they have come up with a fig leaf. Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service told DN's audience what the actual situation is intended to be.

GARETH PORTER: Well, the evidence of this plan to continue to keep combat brigades in Iraq past the August 31st deadline is very clear from looking into the military planning that has been done with regard to the brigade combat teams, the basic combat organization of the US Army in Iraq for the past six years. So I basically began to talk to some of the people who’ve been close to the military planning, specifically in the US Army, over the past few months. And there’s no secret about this, in fact.

What’s happening is that the basic combat organization in Iraq, the brigade combat team, is going to be slightly revamped by adding a few dozen, perhaps more than that, officers who will be doing the advising and assistance directly with the Iraqi military and police, perhaps some other institutions, as well—it’s not clear—but they will be added on top of the existing brigade combat team, rather than having any fundamental change in the structure of those organizations in Iraq. So, what we have is the same combat potential, same combat organization, which will remain on the ground in Iraq.

Now, there will be some drawdown. There’s no doubt about that. But the promise that President Obama made on February 27th that all combat brigades would be withdrawn from Iraq, that simply is not true. It’s not going to happen.

I remember how the Bush regime fired or pushed into forced retirement generals who opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq (i.e. the honest generals). If Obama is getting resistance to a genuine desire to stop the war on the Iraqi people, he could easily fire General Betrayus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

People need to reinvigorate the movement to stop the Iraq War. We cannot trust or rely on Barack Obama, just as we cannot trust or rely on any politician.

Photo: jurvetson

 

If you want meaningful change, you will have to push the institutions that control this country and the people who run it to break the bad, conservative habits that are creating discrimination, stagnation, and misery.

1) Tell the Obama Administration to Make Lifting the Military Ban a Priority
Much of the debate on lifting the military ban is distorted by Bill Clinton's decision to call his version of the ban "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Under the policy, the military routinely does ask and runs witchhunts against lgbt servicemembers. Now the Republican Defense Secretary Robert Gates has announced that the Obama administration will postpone ending "DADT" indefinitely, it's time to let them know that we want them to start working on this critical issue immediately.

Contact the White House:

Web

Phone: 202-456-1111

Postal Mail:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

2. Tell Your Representatives to Support HR 676, Medicare for All
Democrats.com has a petition asking members of Congress to co-sponsor HR 676, the single payer healthcare legislation. Single payer is the only proposal in Congress that has cost savings. It also is the only one that provides real, universal healthcare to everyone because it gets HMOs and insurance companies out of insurance, and they routinely deny life saving medical care to people who have "coverage" now.

Please find out if your House Member is co-sponsoring HR 676.

If s/he hasn't, please sign the petition!

3. Tell Secretary of Agriculture to Fight Global Warming
From Care2's Petition:

But early in its tenure, the Bush administration excluded Alaska's Tongass rainforest from roadless protections. The Tongass is our nation's largest national forest and the largest remaining old-growth temperate rainforest in the world.

This spring, the selling of old growth timber in roadless areas in the Tongass is scheduled to begin. Clearcutting old growth permanently damages its habitat value for old growth dependent species and building new roads will further fragment this important ecosystem.

Tell USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack to end the Bush administration's exemption of the Tongass from the roadless rule.

There is a lot of CO2 trapped in old growth forests. Logging them reduces that, and clear cutting reduces it dramatically. Fighting Global Warming involves actions on many fronts, and this is an important one.

Please sign the petition!