There are many cases I’ve heard of in which a young person, raised in a good family, suddenly commits suicide. Usually, the parents and friends of the victim do not forsee the event and cannot explain it afterwards. But I think I have an explanation.
The person may still be a teenager raised in an extremely religious family who decides not to follow his or her parents’ faith. Once he decides to leave it, he realizes that he may lose his parents’ love and that is a burden no child should have to endure. This is especially bad if the child is raised in a close knit community where the religious extremism is strongly enforced by nearly everyone in it. The attempts to keep the child’s deconversion a secret while going through the motions of religious life must be a constant source of stress on the child.
Issues like homosexuality, racism, and other forms of prejudice may also be factors, but I naturally think religious bigotry is the most serious one of all.
In our twisted culture, most men and even some women seem to be obsessed with big breasts and big butts. Yet there is one young woman who comes across as absolutely stunning in her beauty and talent, yet she has neither oversized breasts or a big butt. In fact, she is quite thin, lacking curves at all. But that matters not when you see her as a whole.
To all those plastic surgeons and others who give the impression that enlarging breasts can make a real difference in women’s lives, I’d like to give them a big F U! I’ve known some real unattractive women who were large chested. What matters is what is in the heart and the mind. But not the breasts or other body parts. Grow up, shallow minded pervs!
You have failed us, on both the overseas war situation and on domestic issues like health care reform and the failing economy. And no, you do NOT deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. You should have refused it and nominated someone else.
When I voted for you, I expected you to live up to your stated promise to make changes in Washington, changes I could beleive in. Instead, you have broken many of your own promises and flipped-flopped on several issues important to me. You have also made too many concessions to the Republican opposition, the very people who were put out of power last year. That makes you look weak and unprincipled. You have also lied to us several times.
So much for the hope you once offered us! Do not expect me to support you in 2012. We need a more progressive and honest person than you in the White House!
When you are up to your eyeballs in debt, you’d think that the banks that get you in debt in the first place would allow you to actually work off the debt you have accumulated over several months or years to keep you as a loyal customer AND allow you to acquire some skills that can help you get other jobs later. But NO, instead they harass you with lame phone calls and the callers have the stupidity to say things like, “You have a debt of $______ that can be paid over the phone today,” or some other such nonsense. Hey, banks! How is anyone supposed to pay off a debt if he is not allowed to WORK, and therefore cannot make money?!
PETA has been using female models appearing as angels as part of its latest campaign to promote animal adoption. One picture in patricular really misses the mark:
There is absolutely NOTHING I find commendable about this. PETA may love animals, but objectifying women and disrespecting religion has its own PR problems.
To see more of PETA’s pictorial stunts, look here:
At the risk of sounding like a crackpot conspiracy theorist , here is how I think the mainstream media manipulated the election process to make a candidate as much to their liking as possible:
OK, Democrats, the best possible candidates for you are Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. Ignore all the others, ESPECIALLY Dennis Kucinich. He is too extreme!
Republicans, we want John McCain to be the next President. The others are too weak and we especially don’t want RON PAUL in charge!
Great! The Democrats are fighting, fighting FIGHTING over Obama and Clinton! YAY! Let’s play that up for all it’s worth, to make the Republicans look stronger.
Finally, Obama has won the Democratic nomination. And McCain has won on the Republican side. Maybe we can get a WOMAN on the Republican ticket to attract some of the Hilary supporters and ensure McCain’s victory. Here’s Sarah Palin! Obama has picked a white guy to be HIS running mate. Ho hum….
Damn! Obama WON. No matter, once he takes office, we can whip up the opposition to him as much as possible to give him a hard time. Then he will NEVER threaten our interests.
Ever since it was founded in 1996, FOX News, contrary to its claim to be “fair and balanced” has instead consistently promoted a neo-Conservative agenda, ultimately leading to the election of George W. Bush as President in 2000, his re-election in 2004, and the waging by Bush of not one but two wars on the other side of the world. These wars have killed thousands of American troops, injured tens of thousands more, and driven America deeper in debt than it has ever been, finally ending up with us in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
As far as I’m concerned, this disgusting traitor should be thrown out of both the Democratic Party and the Senate for his screwing up the effort for health care reform this year!
The recent case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and held prisoner for 18 years and forced to bear two daughters by her kidnappers, bears a striking simularity to another case in Austria, but that one was far worse because it involved incest, lasted longer and involved the birth of seven children. Continue reading →
Fuck you. No, I’m not joking. I’m sick of this bullshit.
I’m sick of the way you’ve corrupted the public discourse. The way you’ve made it acceptable to hurl any insult you like at public officials. The way you blame us for the current atmosphere of hatred by accusing us of starting it with hating Bush. Like Bush didn’t come on the heels of eight years of your tireless efforts to destroy Clinton by any means necessary, like Bush didn’t give us good reason to complain. A couple of posters on a website compared Bush to Hitler and you’ve used it as free license to compare Obama to Hitler 24/7 and I’m sick of your hypocrisy, where it’s acceptable to say shit about Obama that you would have had an apopletic fit (and did) if anythign remotely similar had been said about your guys. Keith Olbermann calls Cheney a fascist when he was actually using fascist tactics and you think that gives you the freedom to call Obama a fascist, socialist, Marxist constantly for no reason at all. Fuck you and your bullshit false equivelancy.
I’m sick of the way you’ve made the populace stupid. Around a fifth of your populace thinks the sun orbits the earth, over half think evolution never happened. Your populace actually believe the media has a liberal bias. Not because it has, you have the most conservative media in the free world, but because you’ve shouted it so loud and so often that you’ve brainwashed the public into believing it, like the battered wife who parrots her husband’s insults. You’ve got a whole segment of the populace shouting about socialism and fascism and none of them know what the fucking words mean. You’ve convinced them that fascism is a left-wing thing. You’ve got them so turned around that some of them actually believe global warming isn’t happening. Fuck you.
I’m sick of the way you try to destroy the whole concept of government. You’ve tricked the people into believing that government can’t do anything right, always being careful to exclude the army because you love your bullets and bombs but you’ve so destroyed the public’s ability to reason that they don’t even think of interstate highways, the space program, the national parks program, etc. Government is always great when it’s doing what you tell it and inevitibly corrupt when it isn’t. Fuck you.
I’m sick of your rewriting of history. You’ve bleated so loud and long that Reagan was a great president, that the New Deal didn’t work, that cutting taxes increases revenues, that you actually have the people believing this bullshit. And these are the same people who will go on to become teachers and fill their student’s heads with this self-same bullshit. Reagan was a mediocre president at best who had teh good fortune to be in power when the USSR collapsed under it’s own weight and you bastards have turned him into teh Second Coming. You’ve rewritten history so that everything foul and hateful and wrong can be attributed to a Democrat while everything worthwhile is a Republican’s glory. Fuck you.
I’m sick of your dragging the centre ever further to the right. How many whackjob fringe ideas have you dragged into the mainstream? The aforementioned idea that tax cuts increase revenues, the Laffer Curve, the idea that Welfare harms the poor, the idea that there’s rampant fraud in Welfare, the idea that whatever is good for corporations is good for the country. And you push these ideas through your corporate media and you do it so long and loud that they become part of the accepted political landscape and because it is easier to tell a lie than to debunk one, we never get away from this rancid shit. Fuck you.
I’m sick of your casual criminality. Teddy Kennedy, a man who’s boots you were not worthy to lick, was just buried and all I’ve heard from my rightist friends for days is Chappaquidick, Chappaquiddick, Chappaquidick. Your fucking golden boy raped the Constitution, mainly because he wanted to; tortured random people (and waterboarding is torture, fuck you too) essentially because he wanted to; spent like a drunken sailor, essentially because he wanted to; invaded a soverign nation, essentially for the loot and destroyed people’s lives, essentially for the evilulz and you bastards are obsessed with a fucking accident a Democrat had decades ago? You don’t go on about Laura Bush killing some guy decades ago. Fuck you.
I’m sick of you praising pure evil. You’re letting Dick Cheney be the standard-bearer for Republicanism. Dick Cheney, a man so nakedly evil that even his friends call him “Darth”; a man so callous that Lex Luthor would recoil in terror; a man who probably has dismembered hitchhikers in those man-sized safes and kills plants by his mere proximity. Fuck you.
I’m sick of your attempts to tilt the playing field permanently in your favour. Democrats filibustered a few of Bush’s most hateful judicial picks and you pricks started screaming about doing away with the filibuster but now you’re in the minority, you’re filibustering absolutely everything you can and whining when you don’t get the chance. You ignored everything the Democrats had to say when you had power and now that you don’t, you scream that everyone must be bipartisan. You don’t budge a fucking inch on anything but you insist that everyone must compromise to meet you. That’s your idea of politics: Don’t move an inch, force the other guy to come to the right to meet you and call the result a “compromise”. Fuck you.
I’m sick of your corporatism. You dress it up in false populism but anyone with half a brain can see that you’re the brought and paid for subsidiary of big business. You keep pushing tax cuts as the answer for absolutely everything, you keep sabotaging every attempt to control the excesses of big business. You geuinely think the world would be a better place if it was a combination of Bill Gibson’s dystopian vision of a corporate dominated world and Ayn Rand’s bullshit Objectivism, yet another entry in mankind’s endless attempts to find a moral justification for naked greed. You’ve taken the clinically insane spewings of a woman literally to the right of Hitler (pardon my Godwins) and the 1984-like vision of a dystopian author and convinced yourselves that would be a good place to live. Big business is the enemy of the people, always has been. The ideal for the corporate class is to have a small pool of people rich enough to buy their fucking crap and a much larger pool of people so poor and with so few options that they can be used and abused at the corporation’s whim. A corporation’s objective is not to look after you, it is to make ever-larger profits by any means necessary. You bastards want to reinstate fucking slavery to the corporate class and you’ve made the public so fucking stupid that they actually swallow the bullshit you’re serving up, they actually want to enslave themselves to the corporations that abuse them at every turn. They actually care more about the corporations right to make obscene profits than they care about their child’s right to live on a habitable planet. Fuck you.
Fuck you, you scumridden shitehawks, you make me sick. Just fuck off and die.
One of the founders of the Libertarian Party, David F. Nolan, is credited with creating the Nolan Chart, which has been used ever since as a guide to understanding various political positions. Here is a version of it:
The higher you are on the chart, the more freedom you beleive in. If you beleive in more economic freedom and less personal freedom, you will be on the right (Conservative) side of the chart. If you beleive in less economic freedom and more personal freedom, you will be on the left (Liberal) side of the chart. Libertarians beleive in more freedom for both and Statists beleive in less freedom for both, while centrists have a mix of all positions.
The real problem with the chart is that it is misleading. I beleive in maximum freedom for individuals, both in their personal dealings and as small business owners. Sole proprietorships and partnerships should be as free from government interference as possible, the only exception being that anyone wanting to start a small business should be able to apply for a loan from the government, which they can pay back five or ten years later with interest (thus enabling the government to make a profit from helping establish the businesses).
So I beleive that governments should be severely restricted in how they can treat individuals. But for some reason, Libertarians insist on corporations having the same rights of free speech and property rights as individuals. This is unacceptable to me, since I see corporations as being more like governments than individuals. Corporations can have an infinite lifespan and can acquire an infinite amount of property and money. In a “free market”, small businesses with individual owners cannot withstand competition with giant corporations; it’s like a mouse trying to compete with an elephant. And when corporations become powerful enough, they are able to bribe or threaten the officials in the government to do their bidding by bailing them out when they face bankruptcy.
Bailouts and corporate mergers should be forbidden. Corporations, I beleive, should be treated the OPPOSITE of small business owners. They should be regulated and taxed heavily and never bailed out, but BOUGHT OUT by the government, which then may break up the corporation’s properties and sell to individuals who want to establish their own small businesses. Indeed, I would make it so that new corporations couldn’t even be established at all!
An industry with thousands of small business and no corporations would result in a far healthier economy than one dominated by a half dozen giant corporations, due to their being far more competition and less risk of massive economic damage from businesses failing. The thousands of small business owners would value their freedom and would translate that value into a classically liberal democratic government. But an economy dominated by giant corporations would consist mostly of people used to taking orders from a few powerful executives, the very essence of an authoritarian society.
And that is why Libertarianism is doomed to fail. It is absurd to put giant corporations and small businesses on the same playing field, for the corporations will inevitably crush them, just as giant empires tend to crush smaller nations. Quite simply, there is really no such things as a “free market”, nor will there ever be. The only true path to freedom and social justice is a Liberal or Centrist path. Not Libertarian. The very existence of giant corporations and their corrupting power makes Libertarianism a dream that will never become reality.
I first became interested in the Libertarian Party because of its strong anti-war stance. In my opinion, it’s the one thing that definitely makes libertarians better than the Republicans or even many Democrats:
“It is time for Iraq to take responsibility for the costs and burdens of rebuilding their country,” says Libertarian Party National Chairman William Redpath, following a new report from the Government Accountability Office stating that Iraq may have a budget surplus of up to $79 billion dollars.
“Using US taxpayer money to pay for the rebuilding of the infrastructure of another nation is bad enough,” says Redpath, “but it is reprehensible and unforgivable when that nation is running a budget surplus while we have a substantial and growing federal budget deficit and a crumbling infrastructure.”
The Libertarian Party has been opposed to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq from the beginning. The Party, which stands adamantly opposed to the use of taxpayer money to support functions of the government not defined in the Constitution, has taken special exception to the use of tax revenues to pay for rebuilding foreign nations.
The Party calls for an end to the Iraq war and a withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq without undue delay.
“It’s a case of tragic irony,” says Libertarian Party spokesperson Andrew Davis. “The American public was told reconstruction efforts in Iraq would be paid for by oil revenues from that country. Now, more than five years later, Americans are shouldering the responsibility of rebuilding Iraq while facing decaying bridges and skyrocketing gas prices.”
“Something is very, very wrong with this picture,” says Davis.
The Libertarian Party is America’s third largest political party, founded in 1971 as an alternative to the two main political parties. You can find more information on the Libertarian Party by visiting www.LP.org. The Libertarian Party proudly stands for smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom.
For more information on this issue, or to arrange a media interview, please call Andrew Davis at (202) 731-0002.
But most of their positions against governmental intervention seem too extreme and unrealistic. If they would moderate their platform to support smaller government in general instead of taking any absolute positions, then they could gain a larger and more diverse membership and start winning elections at the federal level, which they never have before. Their reluctance to be more moderate is their first mistake. As the Nolan Chart shows, the Libertarian Party needs to be open to all those that would score as “Libertarians”, not just those purists who would be at the uppermost tip of the chart, and perhaps even Liberals, Centrists, and Conservatives well away from the lower (Statist) part of the chart.
Their second mistake is to ally themselves with the Republicans against the Democrats. If the Republicans ever regain power, what’s to stop them from throwing the Libertarians under the bus later to persue power for themselves once more?
A group that is ideologically pure can never take power in a pluralistic democracy. It can only do so by force, which libertarianism does not allow. Therefore, the Libertarians may never take power, though they should. Fortunately, there are some who see this and are working to make the Libertarian Party a more diverse one:
Assuming that they ultimately fail, however, there is another possibility. It would involve libertarians taking over the Republican Party and getting rid of the most hard-core Conservative elements in it. The best example of a libertarian who is also a Republican is Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who ran for President last year.
Either possibility will be fine with me. The status quo of a weak Libertarian Party, a stronger Republican Party still dominated by neo-Conservatism, and a Democratic Party with total power and no accountablity is not!
In my last blog entry, I noted that the New York Times published an article by reporter Brian Stelter claiming that executives at News Corporation and General Electric, the parent companies of FOX News and MSNBC respectively, had arranged a cease-fire between Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann. Subsequent actions by Olbermann proved that article to be false. So what did Stelter do?
Executives at two of the country’s largest media companies are still trying to salvage what was essentially a cease-fire between MSNBC and the Fox News Channel.
The two cable news channels temporarily resumed their long-running feud this week after The New York Times reported that their parent companies, General Electric and the News Corporation, had struck a deal to stop each other’s televised personal attacks.
Fox News executives felt that MSNBC had broken the deal when Keith Olbermann, in an apparent show of independence, insulted his 8 p.m. rival, Bill O’Reilly, and the News Corporation’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, on Monday. On his show, “Countdown,” Mr. Olbermann called Mr. O’Reilly a “racist clown.”
Mr. O’Reilly responded with his own attack two days later on his program, “The O’Reilly Factor,” where he claimed that G.E., through MSNBC, was “promoting the election of Barack Obama and then seeking to profit from his policies.”
The chief executives at General Electric, whose NBC News division operates MSNBC, and News Corporation, which owns Fox News, reached an unusual agreement last spring to halt the regular personal assaults on each other’s channels.
Eric Burns, the former host of Fox’s media criticism show “Fox News Watch” and the author of “All the News Unfit to Print,” said, “Even in an age where there seemed to be no boundaries, people at the very top of two networks thought, ‘Well, I guess there are boundaries, because they’ve been crossed.’ ”
But the agreement was strained almost from the start, according to employees at the channels, even though it mostly succeeded in stopping the vicious personal attacks lobbed by the two hosts until this week.
Despite the renewed tensions, Mr. Murdoch and his counterpart at G.E., Jeffrey R. Immelt, are still seeking a truce in a feud that has embarrassed both companies, said three employees at the companies with direct knowledge of the situation. Mr. Murdoch was said to be particularly incensed by Mr. Olbermann’s and Mr. O’Reilly’s sniping.
The deal extends beyond the prime-time hour that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly occupy. Employees of daytime programs on MSNBC were specifically told by executives not to mention Fox hosts in segments critical of conservative media figures, according to two staff members. The employees requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.
In a statement, G.E. said, “While both companies agreed that the tone should be more civil, no one at G.E. told anyone at NBC News or MSNBC how to report the news.”
Some Fox employees said they were told in June and July not to flagrantly criticize General Electric. Fox said in a statement Friday, “This has nothing to do with preventing anyone from practicing journalism or interfering with freedom of speech — this is about corporate responsibility. We’ve never suppressed any stories about NBC or G.E. — both organizations are covered as news warrants.”
Still, some watchdog groups said the months-long cease-fire challenged the claims that the two media companies did not interfere in their on-air content.
The advocacy group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting asked its supporters on Friday to contact G.E., urging it to renounce the agreement with Fox.
Jeff Cohen, the founder of the group, said the deal between the two networks’ parent companies was a reason to be wary of corporate-owned TV news.
“It should remind news consumers of who calls the tune and pays the bills — and that TV reporters and even loud-mouthed commentators have corporate bosses whose interests are often not about unbridled journalism,” Mr. Cohen said.
Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon.com, said Thursday that it appeared that “the owners of two large news organizations colluded to make sure their audience got less, not more, information, and to promote their business interests, not the public interest.”
She asked, “How is it any different from a media organization making a deal with a politician not to expose a scandal in exchange for a political favor? We’d call that corruption, and I think this is the same thing.”
The executives had sought for years to tamp down the attacks by Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, to little success. Frustrated by the refusal by NBC’s chief executive, Jeffrey Zucker, to halt the attacks on Mr. O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, personally instructed Mr. O’Reilly’s program to aim at Mr. Immelt, people familiar with the situation said.
Peace talks, such as they were, resumed in the spring between G.E. and News Corporation executives. At a lunch in April, Mr. Ailes and Mr. Immelt agreed to tone down the attacks. It was not visible to viewers until after Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch shook hands at an off-the-record conference sponsored by Microsoft in May and word of a cease-fire trickled down to both news divisions.
Mr. Olbermann told viewers on June 1 that he would halt his jokes about Fox News because he believed that Fox had played a part in inciting the death of the abortion doctor George Tiller. Inside Fox, executives chuckled. They knew that a pact had already been struck by Mr. Olbermann’s bosses to end the feud.
In the months after, when MSNBC would say something that strained the agreement, Fox News would respond accordingly, and vice versa.
In July, after Mr. Olbermann condemned Fox’s Glenn Beck for letting a guest assert that a terrorist attack in the United States might be a good thing, Mr. Beck booked a segment about G.E. and declared that a “merger between G.E. and the Obama administration” was “nearly complete.”
After the detente was reported by The Times on Monday, the fighting resumed and Mr. Olbermann claimed there was no deal among the parent companies. That was met by heated skepticism among bloggers.
Two days later, Mr. O’Reilly had his turn. His news hook: The Securities and Exchange Commission had fined G.E. $50 million on charges of misleading investors. And on Thursday, Mr. O’Reilly showed Mr. Immelt’s and Mr. Zucker’s faces and wondered how long they could allow “this barbaric display” — that is an Olbermann reference — “under the NBC News banner.”
Mr. Olbermann and MSNBC declined to comment Friday.
It remains to be seen whether the personal attacks will be halted again. Fox’s stance on Friday suggested that the corporate criticism would not.
“At this point,” a Fox spokeswoman said Friday, “the entire situation is more about major issues at NBC and G.E. than it is about Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann.”
That is simply a load of bogus crap! Here is a clip from Countdown on June 17, 2009, in which Olbermann made yet another long and scathing attack on FOX News:
Which would lead me to ask, “What cease fire?” It looks like it was business as usual, with the exception of any direct references to Bill O’Reilly. Again, it was because of the George Tiller issue that Olbermann felt he should refrain from making fun of his rival. But any attack on FOX News in general would certainly be an attack on O’Reilly by implication. You don’t make several attacks on a rival during a “cease-fire”.
Finally, on July 17, Olbermann attacked the notion of news organizations agreeing to cover up any actual news, calling it “slimy”. So if Stelter was correct, that means Olbermann is one of the world’s biggest hypocrites. By this time, if there HAD been a deal of some kind between News Corp. and G.E., Olbermann should have been fired.
The fighting wasn’t “resumed” because it never ended! BRIAN STELTER LIED!
So now, I will repeat my demand to the publishers of the New York Times: Brian Stelter committed libel and not only refused to apologize for it, but has repeated his offense. Any reporter that wrote as falsely as he did, I’d have fired within a week, and Stelter should be NOW!
The feud between these TV news titans came to a head on June 1, 2009. The previous day, Dr. George Tiller, who O’Reilly had stigmatized for years as “Tiller the baby killer” because he was one of the few doctors who provided late-term abortions, was shot to death at his Lutheran church by an anti-abortion fanatic.
That prompted Bill O’Reilly to attempt some damage control:
At the same time, Keith Olbermann was dealing with the situation in his own way. He made his most bitter attack against O’Reilly and FOX News yet, accusing them of responsibility for Tiller’s death, and declared that FOX News needed to be subjected to a “quarantine”.
Thus, he made the decision to retire his mocking of O’Reilly, merely being content to quote his words. Frankly, I would have done the same. The whole situation was just too disgusting to make fun of.
And that’s where it stood until July 31, when this article was published in the New York Times:
It was a media cage fight, televised every weeknight at 8 p.m. But the match was halted when the blood started to spray executives in the high-priced seats.
For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.
It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.
Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.
In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).
“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.
The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.
“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”
The parent companies declined to comment directly on the details of the cease-fire, which was orchestrated in part by Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, and Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice president who oversees corporate affairs at the News Corporation.
Mr. Olbermann, who is on vacation, said by e-mail message, “I am party to no deal,” adding that he would not have been included in any conversations between G.E. and the News Corporation. Fox News said it would not comment.
Civility was not always the aim of Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, men who, in an industry of thin skins, are both famous for reacting to verbal pinpricks. Both host 8 p.m. programs on cable news in studios a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan.
The conservative-leaning Mr. O’Reilly has turned “The O’Reilly Factor” into a profit center for the News Corporation by blitzing his opponents and espousing his opinions unapologetically. He found his bête noire in the liberal-leaning Mr. Olbermann, the host of MSNBC’s “Countdown,” who saw in Mr. O’Reilly a regenerating target he nicknamed the “Bill-o the Clown.”
The 6-foot-4 Mr. Olbermann started sniping regularly at the also 6-foot-4 Mr. O’Reilly in late 2005, sometimes making him the subject of the “Countdown” segment, the “Worst Person in the World.” Mr. O’Reilly was also a stand-in for the perceived offenses of the top-rated Fox News.
By punching up at his higher-rated prey, Mr. Olbermann helped his own third-place cable news show. “Honestly, I should send him a check each week,” he remarked to a reporter three years ago. Fox noticed. Mr. Murdoch remarked to Esquire last year that “Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O’Reilly.” Mr. O’Reilly refused to mention his critic by name on the “Factor,” deeming him a “vicious smear merchant,” but he regularly blamed Mr. Zucker for “ruining a once-great brand,” NBC.
In late 2007, Mr. O’Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush Mr. Immelt and ask about G.E.’s business in Iran, which is legal, and which includes sales of energy and medical technology. G.E. says it no longer does business in Iran.
Mr. O’Reilly continued to pour pressure on its corporate leaders, even saying on one program last year that “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt.” The resulting e-mail to G.E. from Mr. O’Reilly’s viewers was scathing.
The messages hit nerves on both sides. Mr. Immelt remarked to MSNBC staff members last summer that he would “never forgive Rupert Murdoch” for Fox’s behavior, according to two people who were present. In private phone calls, the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, told NBC officials to end the attacks.
In February, Mr. Zucker told Newsweek what he had told Mr. Olbermann privately: “I wish it weren’t so personal.” The previous year, Mr. Murdoch said that Mr. O’Reilly “shouldn’t be so sensitive” to the attacks lobbed by MSNBC.
Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting “wasn’t good for either parent,” said an NBC employee with direct knowledge of the situation. But the session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch.
But like any title fight, the final round could not end without an attempted knockout. On June 1, the day after the abortion provider George Tiller was killed in Kansas, Mr. Olbermann took to the air to cite Mr. O’Reilly’s numerous references to “Tiller, the baby killer” and to announce that he would retire his caricature of Mr. O’Reilly.
“The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air,” he said.
The next day, Mr. O’Reilly made the extraordinary claim that “federal authorities have developed information about General Electric doing business with Iran, deadly business” and published Mr. Immelt’s e-mail address and mailing address, repeating it slowly for emphasis.
Then the attacks mostly stopped.
Shortly after, Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, told producers that he wanted the channel’s other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann’s lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to “be fair” to G.E.
The executives at both companies, it appears, were relieved. “For this war to stop, it meant fewer headaches on the corporate side,” one employee said.
Tensions still simmer between the two networks, however, and staff members have been unwilling or unable to stop the strife altogether. This week, for instance, the Fox host Glenn Beck called Mr. Obama a racist, prompting rebukes on a number of MSNBC shows. But for now, the daily back and forth has quieted.
“They’ve won their respective constituencies,” said a former member of MSNBC’s senior staff. “They don’t need to do this anymore, really.”
Olbermann was returning from a two week vacation. When he resumed hosting his show on August 3, he addressed that article directly:
He must have been furious! Had he kept his word and never made fun of Bill O’Reilly again, it would have made him look like a corporate shill, not a legitimate newsman. So in this case, he had to break his word in order to preserve his credibility!
And his action proved to be justified on August 11, when O’Reilly attacked General Electric the parent company of MSNBC:
Thus it appears there was no deal on the side of O’Reilly and FOX News as well. Olbermann shot back the next evening:
So now, I have just one question: Has Brian Stelter been fired from the New York Times yet?
Oh and by the way, Keith Olbermann would not need to do damage control if someone was insane enough to kill Bill O’Reilly. He already denounced one such threat made against his rival on August 19, 2008. That’s right, ONE YEAR AGO!
Conspiracy nut. Obsessive extremist. Racist who accuses others of racism to cover his @$$. That’s Glenn Beck, who calls himself a libertarian but acts more like a member of the John Birch Society of several decades ago. And he doesn’t belong on television, unless you also think Ku Klux Klansmen also belong on TV.
I wonder if he would think I am racist and hate white culture too. Since I am white myself, of course that is nonsense. Likewise, Barack Obama is himself half-white and was raised by this white mother and white grandparents.
And if you see something “wrong” with trying to level the playing field for people of all colors, then you are a race-baiter yourself.
And he loses it at a rude caller and makes himself look totally stupid:
He also gets caught lying about stupid stuff on the View:
And has even made an idiotic threat against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which was simply not funny:
And perhaps worst of all, he made a joke about Michael Jackson on the day he died:
Corporate advertisers are already abandoning Beck.
It took him a long time, but CNN President Jon Klein finally got around to doing what he should have done a long time ago. In order to maintain the professed trademarkof his network for objectivity in broadcasting, he realized he had no choice but to fire Lou Dobbs.Of course, cautious as he is, Klein did not fire the anti-immigration crusader directly, or even alone. He threw Dobbs overboard as part of a vendetta against radio talk-show hosts in general.
As first reported on the Website TVNewser.com, in a conference call on Aug. 11, Klein told his producers they should no longer book radio talk-show hosts on CNN shows: not on “The Situation Room,” nor Larry King, Anderson Cooper or Campbell Brown. From now on, said his edict, no radio talkers will appear on CNN. Period.
Why? Because, argued Klein, radio talk-show hosts are incapable of understanding or commenting on the important issues of the day. “Complex issues require world-class reporting,” sniffed Klein. Not only that, TVNewser.com quotes Klein as complaining that radio hosts too often do nothing more than “contribute to the noise,” and their comments are “all too predictable.”
Klein’s dead wrong, of course. Yes, we Americans do confront complex issues today, but radio talk-show hosts like me, whether liberal or conservative, are more than capable of dealing with them. After all, that’s what we do for a living. We research the issues. We explain them to listeners. We take listener calls about them. We talk about them, on average, three hours a day – without a teleprompter. We understand the issues far better, in fact, than any blow-dried anchor that does little more than read a script, written by somebody else, for one hour at the most.
Now, I must admit, I was both puzzled and disappointed to learn of Klein’s manifesto. Puzzled because radio talk-show hosts have long played an important role at the network. “Crossfire” actually began with two talk radio hosts, Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden. Other CNN personalities of yesterday or today – Larry King, Mary Matalin, Bill Bennett, Roland Martin, Glenn Beck and yours truly – hosted, or continue to host, their own radio shows.
I’m disappointed by Klein’s decision because I enjoyed six good years at CNN – as co-host of “Crossfire” and “The Spin Room.” Since leaving the network (not voluntarily), I have jumped at the chance to appear occasionally as an unpaid guest on “The Situation Room,” “Reliable Sources” or other CNN programs. I’m a big CNN fan, and I’ll miss being part of it.
But my grief is more than outweighed by one giant consolation: At least, this means the end of that pompous, arrogant and obnoxious Lou Dobbs. After all, Lou Dobbs is also a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. So Klein’s edict – “No Radio Talk Show Hosts on CNN” – must mean the end of Lou Dobbs.
And it’s about time. Dobbs contradicts everything CNN supposedly stands for. He doesn’t just report, he pontificates. He doesn’t just deliver the news, he pollutes it with his own opinions. He doesn’t even pretend to be in the middle of the road, he exults in being on the extreme right.
Actually, Klein missed two excellent opportunities to fire Dobbs. First, when Dobbs assumed the role of chief executioner for undocumented workers. No fine points about breaking up families or crippling certain American industries for Dobbs. If they’re here illegally, they should be sent back across the border, all 12 million of them. It’s the kind of daily rant you expect from right-wing Fox News, but not from “news leader” CNN.
Klein should also have dumped Dobbs for fanning the flames of the “birther” issue. Long after every serious news operation had dismissed questions about the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate as totally whacko, Dobbs kept beating the birther drum on CNN. But, instead of admonishing him to stick to “world-class reporting,” Klein himself said Dobbs was raising a legitimate issue.
Still, better late than never. We now know Lou Dobbs will be fired because we know Jon Klein is a man of his word. After all, he’s the president of CNN, “the most trusted name in news.” Surely, Klein would never ban all radio talk-show hosts from CNN and leave talk show host Lou Dobbs on the air. Would he?
The title of that article is totally misleading, since there is no confirmation that Lou Dobbs has been fired from CNN yet. So why did Bill Press write such nonsense?
Indeed, there is no link on the article to the original report on TVNewser.com, nor is there any confirmation on the website for CNN. See for yourself that the site for Lou Dobbs’ show on CNN is still up as of this writing:
So here we have an unconfirmed report about something that the CNN President supposedly said and it is posted not on the CNN website itself, but as commentary on another website without a shred of proof!
BILL PRESS, YOU ARE EVEN WORSE THAN LOU DOBBS HIMSELF! In the name of journalistic integrity, I demand that you retract your bogus statement and issue a formal apology to CNN and to Lou Dobbs!
Update: I finally found the report on TVNewser.com referred to by Bill Press, thanks to MediaMatters for America:
Yesterday, TVNewser reported that CNN president Jon Klein “asked his show producers to avoid booking talk radio hosts.” According to TVNewser, this was Klein’s reasoning:
“Complex issues require world class reporting,” Klein is quoted as saying, adding that talk radio hosts too often add to the noise, and that what they say is “all too predictable.”
TVNewser writes that Lou Dobbs — who hosts both a radio show and a CNN show — is “presumably not affected by this.”
Tuesday, Aug 11
No More Talk Radio Hosts on CNN?
Exclusive: TVNewser has learned, and a CNN spokesperson confirms, that in his morning editorial meeting today, CNN/U.S. president Jon Klein asked his show producers to avoid booking talk radio hosts. “Complex issues require world class reporting,” Klein is quoted as saying, adding that talk radio hosts too often add to the noise, and that what they say is “all too predictable.”
One of CNN’s longtime show hosts, Lou Dobbs, hosts a daily radio show. A few political contributors also host radio shows including Bill Bennett and Roland Martin. They are presumably not affected by this.
But this means other talk radio hosts who appear regularly on CNN, probably won’t in the near future including names like Stephanie Miller, Michael Medved, and Ben Ferguson.
> Update: Roland Martin stopped hosting his show on WVON last October when he became senior analyst for the “Tom Joyner Morning Show.”
Posted by Chris Ariens
So here is a report that couldn’t possibly be true. Are they implying that the CNN President is so ignorant that he didn’t know that Lou Dobbs hosts a radio program? And why wouldn’t any of the producers ask him directly if Lou Dobbs was to be fired as a result of this order?
I hereby write off TVNewser.com as a reliable news source!
I first took notice of Keith Olbermann when I happened to see a video on YouTube of him condemning President Bush for his conduct during the Iraq War.
I thought that was quite amazing, but then I saw these special reports on Bill O’Reilly, which totally blew me away!
You can’t get more damning than that! There are only two possibilities: Either Olbermann slandered Bill O’Reilly (in which case Bill O and FOX News should have sued Keith O and MSNBC as a matter of honor), or he told the truth (in which case FOX News should have fired Bill O). There is no third option. The fact that no slander lawsuit was ever filed and that O’Reilly works at FOX News to this day shows beyond all reasonable doubt that FOX News is a channel with no integrity whatsoever.
Here’s another example of Olbermann busting O’Reilly for falsehoods relating to World War II:
And unlike Bill O, who never makes an apology for his mistaken statements, Keith O does! One evening, he slammed New York Times managing editor Bill Keller for not firing a reporter who had not only printed a false story, but had committed plagerism to boot!
But the very next night, Keith O apologized for his condemnation of Keller. Appearantly, Olbermann had never worked at that newspaper before and knew nothing beforehand about how it was run. So he practiced what he preached!
There is no question that MSNBC is slanted towards the Liberal perspective. I suspect that was done because of FOX News appealing so much to right-wingers, so MSNBC had to balance it out. FOX News certainly has no business calling itself “fair and balanced”, nor does Bill O’Reilly have any business calling his show a “no spin zone”. Look at how arrogantly he dealt with Richard Dawkins:
….and then with Kirk Cameron, treating him with kid gloves while continuing to bash Dawkins:
And he even got into a shouting match with Geraldo Rivera over illegal immigration and drunk driving! How unprofessional!
Meanwhile, Olbermann took on Wal-Mart for several days to expose its terrible wrongdoing towards a disabled former employee:
Until Wal-Mart was forced to back down:
Now, those blind and moronic FOX News fans who call Olbermann a liar, without specifying what he lied about, are YOU going to file a slander lawsuit against him? Is anyone? If not, SHUT UP! In matters of credibility and honor, Keith Olbermann beats anyone at FOX News hands down! The only reason you distrust Olbermann is political prejudice, the irrational assumption that somehow Conservatives have a monopoly on truth and virtues and therefore anyone non-Conservative must be misguided, dishonest, even evil. WRONG! Grow up and deal with real life and not the nationalistic crap you’ve been spoon fed since you were babies!
When I was a child, I had absolute faith in God, in my parents and my country, like most children tend to have. In 1979, I would watch the news and see reports about American hostages being taken in Iran, about the Shah being deposed, and about Iranians chanting “Death to America!”, and I couldn’t understand why. What had we Americans ever done to Iran? I got the impression that the Iranians were evil people who hated us just because we were different.
But years later, I attended college and it wasn’t until then that I finally learned the truth: that in 1953, we Americans, through the CIA, had helped overthrow a democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran and allowed the Shah to take absolute power there. Why? Because that Prime Minister had attempted to nationalize the oil fields owned and operated by British and American oil companies, in HIS OWN COUNTRY! WHAT ARROGANCE AND HYPOCRISY WE DISPLAYED BACK THEN! NO WONDER THE IRANIANS WERE SO ANGRY! But in 1979, these disgraceful facts were never revealed by the mainstream media. The implication was that the Islamic Revolution of Iran had occured for no logical reason. But that was a lie of omission.
If someone like Keith Olbermann had been around in 1979 reporting the political news and slamming reporters of other networks for screwing with the truth, perhaps we would have learned the truth about the Iranian situation much sooner and we the people would not have been stupid enough to elect Ronald Reagan as the next President of the United States.
In any case, it was me learning the truth about Iran and what we did to it that made me reject forever the Conservative Republican politics of my parents and most of my other relatives. I wised up, and it’s about time millions of Americans did also and stopped acting like SHEEP being led to their slaughter by the pied pipers of FOX News and the Republican leaders.
Keep up the good work, Keith Olbermann. This Honorable Skeptic salutes you and hopes to see you on the air for many years to come!
Jindal is the governor of Louisiana, and is a supporter of Intelligent Design. He also completely sold out his Indian heritage. But that’s not the worst thing about him. What really bothers me is that he SUX at dealing with issues and speaking to the people. UGH!
On February 24, 2009 Jindal delivered the official Republican response to President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress. Jindal called the president’s economic stimulus plan “irresponsible” and argued against government intervention.[42] He used Hurricane Katrina to warn against government solutions to the economic crisis. “Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us,” Jindal said. “Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts.” He praised the late sheriff Harry Lee for standing up to the government during Katrina.[43][44] David Johnson, a Republican political strategist criticized Jindal’s mention of Hurrican Katrina stating ““The one thing Republicans want to forget is Katrina.”[45] Jindal’s speech was poorly received even among some Republicans,[46][47] conservative commentators were among his harshest critics, calling his speech “a disaster for the Republican Party”.[45][48]
Jindal’s story of meeting Lee in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was questioned following the speech, as Jindal was not in New Orleans at the time.[49] On February 27, 2009, a spokesman for Jindal clarified the timing of the meeting, stating that the story took place days after the storm.[50]
So lame it gave me a headache! Is Louisiana really a state of morons?
Republicans, you are in serious trouble! Ditch Jindal and find someone like Dwight Eisenhower to revive your party, or it will die out like the dinosaurs did!
Unless, of course, you beleive the spin of FOX News:
I have decided to join in the efforts to have Lou Dobbs, the anti-immigrant and anti-Obama fanatic, fired from CNN for his irrational obsessions, which have brought disgrace to the CNN channel. To learn more, go here:
This is the fourth of my series of blog entries on economics.
There are two reasons why the wealthy in America have managed to increase their appearant wealth. First, having massive capital already, they can take advantage of the capitalist system to maintain their high social position. Second, inflation devalues the dollar over time, so that being merely a millonaire is no longer such a big deal. It seems obvious that people obsessed with their personal wealth are not that concerned with merely being well to do, but being richer than someone else. Thus, people like Donald Trump and Bill Gates make themselves ultra-rich by their own egomania rather than out of any need.
Not only does the massive accumulation of wealth in so few hands deprive millions of others of the chance to be as wealthy, but it hinders economic growth by the limiting of cash flow.
Imagine an economy of ten people, all millionaires buying and selling to each other. We may also have an economy of ten people who have $100 each, also buying and selling to each other. Thus, the economic potential of the first economy is about $10 million, while the economic potential of the second one is only about $1000. But if the millionaires hold on to most of their money and refuse to spend it, then the economic activity is much lower than it can be, while the people with only $100 each who spend their money freely produce a great deal of economic activity relative to their limited financial resources. Money that is held in accounts and not used for anything is useless to an economy. It is only used when it is spent or invested.
With so much money being held by the wealthy, the Federal Reserve tries to produce more to keep the economy moving. But this causes inflation, which over time hurts the poor and the middle class. So what is the best solution?
I believe that is exactly why tax rates should be far higher for the wealthy than for the middle class and poor, to liberate that excess money and return it to the economy once the government has spent it. At the same time, the Federal Reserve must stop printing and coining any new money for a long period of time and gradually take out most of the money that is there, releasing some of it only occationally later to replace worn out bill and coins. The less money in an economy, the greater its value becomes and thus the buying power of the lower classes will rise enormously. Prices will fall until pennies will be of value once more and being a millionaire will also have meaning again. And there will be NO billionaires at all!
The minimum wage in the United States is $6.55 per hour. What if a corporate executive is paid about $200 an hour? Doesn’t that sound like a lot? No, not really.
A typical work day is about eight hours long. Thus he’d be paid about $1600 a day.
A typical work week is about five days long. Thus he’d be paid about $8000 a week.
A typical work year might be 50 weeks long. Thus he’d be paid $400,000 a year.
Assuming he works that job for a lifetime, about 50 work years, he earn a total of about $20,000,000.
That’s only $20 MILLION over his lifetime. Not billion. Just 20 million.
So how did we end up with so many billionaires? Because they used the economy unfairly to enrich themselves at eveyone else’s expense. And that limits economic growth. These exectives became parasites on their own companies!
If you cut the pay of these executives to a reasonable limit, then the company will be able to hire and pay more workers, increasing productivity. Profits for the company will actually rise as a result.
And what benefits those companies benefits the rest of us.
This is my third blog entry in a row about economics.
If you have never lived through the Great Depression, it’s possible that you either don’t know what you are talking about, or are lying outright to promote some form of ideological extremism.
First look at this:
This is a video by Shane Killian, a Libertarian activist. While I admire the man for his work on defending evolution and attacking pseudoscience, he seems to be out of his league when it comes to economics, as the next video clearly shows:
Killian then proceeds to rewrite history regarding the Great Depression:
What bull$#it! Quite simply, if the New Deal was such a failure, then why did FDR not become a one term President?. Why, indeed, was he elected no less than FOUR TIMES!?
Because the Great Depression was the worst economic crisis ever in American history, it may be considered uncharted territory. Our government had to experiment to find a solution. Some things attempted during the Great Depression worked better than others, but it was hardly true that the New Deal was a total failure and that World War II finally got us out of the Depression! Indeed, if our economy had not recovered to a reasonable degree by 1941, we would never have been able to wage World War II so well! The right-wing extremists got the issue EXACTLY backwards! War is more likely to destroy a struggling economy than to strengthen it!
So why did Killain make the claims he did? Two reasons.
He is a Libertarian. While the ideals of free market economics promoted by that party are indeed admirable, they are also purely a theroetical concept. In the real world, a completely free market CANNOT EXIST FOREVER! If you allow a capitalist economy to run on its own without any government intervention, we will only fall into a depression eventually and stay there PERMENANTLY! Killian’s faith in the “free market” is no better than religious fanaticism.
He is brilliant on some subjects, therefore he assumes that he must be right on ALL subjects. But that is simply not true of anyone. No one knows or understands everything equally well. Myself included.
I don’t claim to be an expert on economics, but I think I know enough to explain why I consider supply-side economics to have been such a disasterous failure since the Reagan years. It was nothing more than a scam to trick people into voting Republican.
When you cut taxes for the wealthy during a recession, they do indeed invest more in the economy, but mainly to benefit themselves rather than to benefit society as a whole. As a result, the gap between rich and poor increases, even as economic activity skyrockets. People become rich by hoarding money rather than spending it, and so the money supply circulating decreases. The Federal Reserve may attempt to solve the problem by printing more money, but this causes inflation, itself a sign of economic distress. Inflation hurts the poor and middle classes, while the wealthy accumulate still more money. Eventually, we end up with ANOTHER recession only a few years after the earlier one ended! So the economic growth caused by the tax cuts may make revenues appear to increase for a short time, but the crash that comes later makes that issue moot. And the default response of the “conservatives” to the new recession is…….more stupid tax cuts!
One thing that can definintely be said about the lies and hypocrisy of many Republicans was that while they did cut taxes, they did NOT reduce the size of government. In fact, they INCREASED it! The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security were both started under Republican administrations (and even this Liberal wants them shut down as unnecessary). And even Reagan blew up military spending while denouncing the excess size of government. Hey, the military IS part of the government! HELLO!!!!
The mistake the “conservatives” kept making was to judge the success of their economic policies by their short term effects, and ignore the downturns that their own policies caused later. What we really need is a set of policies that can generate long-term, slow, and steady economic growth and development that is not likely to result in a crash later. As the old saying goes, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” So maybe we could try this:
I strongly recommend several things to get us out of the economic recession we are in now. For our economy to be as productive as possible, as many people within it need to be working and spending their own money, thus increasing production.
Abolish the minimum wage. It was intended to prevent the exploitation of workers, but it actually hurts the working class by limiting the ability of businesses to hire and keep employees. It is far better to have over 99% of workers employed at $3.00 an hour than it is to have only 80% of those workers employed at $7.00 an hour. With the minimum wage, there is a gap between the employed and the unemployed that wouldn’t exist otherwise. We never needed a minimum wage because in a truly free market, companies can compete for workers. If workers feel they are being paid less than they are worth, they can search for and find another company that may pay them more per hour.
Establish a MAXIMUM wage. Many corporate CEOs and other executives so vastly overpay themselves that they actually are parasites on their own companies rather than leading them to prosperity. If their pay is limited, then the company can hire more workers, increasing production. More production results in a stronger economy.
Outlaw outsourcing. It is the height of absurdity for a company based in the United States to have its manufacturing done in other countries to reduce labor costs and with it the final price of the goods produced. This causes workers in the United States to switch to service positions so they are no longer producers, but middlemen only. This threatens American independence. Thus, a company that outsources its manufacturing is betraying the American people! It is far better to pay higher prices for fewer goods of a higher quality than to pay lower prices for more goods that are of lower quality. It’s really that simple! When we make our own goods, we tend to care more about how they are made.
Remove the property rights from corporations and ban corporate mergers and corporate bailouts. The biggest mistake we as a society ever made was to grant corporations the same property rights as individuals. This is because corporations are unlimited in size, and when such giant corporations fail, millions of people may lose their jobs, causing a drop in cash flow that threatens other businesses. So I would recommend that when any corporation fails, the government should NEVER bail it out, but instead should be required by law to BUY OUT the company, fire all its executives, and sell all its properties at auction to individual investors who wish to start and run their own small businesses. I feel that lassez-faire capitalism can really only work when there are NO giant corporations to screw up the works. This is because corporations are more like governments than like individuals, and the same problems of abuse and inefficiency that plague governments ultimately affect corporations as well.
Deregulate small businesses. It should be as easy as possible for anyone to start and operate a business. The more people we have owning their own businesses, the more people in general will value their freedom and insist on the government being accountable to them rather than vice versa.
Stop the printing and coining of new money for at least a decade. When the Federal Reserve prints more money, inflation results. Stop the printing of paper money and the making of coins, and we will have deflation as less and less money remains. Deflation will increase the buying power of the dollar, making up for the less remaining currency.
Tax the wealthy heavily and do not tax the poor and middle classes at all, while reducing taxes overall. This policy will prevent the hoarding of money that impedes cash flow. It does not matter at all how much money is in the economy. If there is less cash flow, the economy is weaker. If there is greater cash flow, the economy will be strengthened. The poorest economies are those with extremes of wealth and poverty, with almost no middle class. We need to increase the middle class and lessen the economic power of the wealthy. Then we will have a stable economy instead of the boom and bust periods we have had repeatedly since the late 1970s. The horror of “Reaganomics” should be thrown into the trash can of history and buried forever!
Reduce the size of government. Also, put government officials under the same economic rules as those outside the government, so that no one can use government to enrich themselves. There should be NO soverign immunity for any government agencies and the people that operate them. Focus primarily on paying down the public debt and make it illegal for the government to ever borrow money. If the government cannot afford something, it should not be done.
Decriminalize all drugs. We waste too much public money on law enforcement by imprisoning people who take illegal drugs instead of treating them like victims of a health problem. Why do we keep tobacco and alcohol legal and regulate them, but not treat all drugs the same way and boost the economy by allowing American citizens to produce and sell them without fear of arrest? Because we have hypocrites running the federal agencies!
Outlaw credit cards. They cause too many people to run up large personal debt that limits their ability to spend money on goods and services later.
This morning, Farrah Fawcett died after a long battle with cancer. She was 62. Tongues wagged about it for a short time.
Only a few hours later, Michael Jackson died suddenly of a heart attack. He was only 50. Suddenly, the media jumps all over it and Farrah is not even mentioned anymore. It’s like Michael’s death so overshadowed Farrah’s that she might as well have never existed.
Yes, Michael sold more albums than most other artists, while Farrah was an actress of average standing. But that does not justify the media’s treatment of the situation. It seems sad to me that one should be seen as far more precious than the other. What if Farrah had been your mother, sister, wife, or daughter? Wouldn’t you feel cheated and insulted?
Besides, Farrah was never accused of child molestation. Give her some credit! She led a normal life, a striking contrast to Michael. Who would you rather have visting your home? For me, the answer would be obvious. Michael gave me the creeps for all sorts of reasons. Farrah never did.
I guess that reflects the depraved nature of our society.
It seems that no matter which party is in absolute control of the American federal government, corruption and prejudice results.
Here are several ways the parties screw up the government, and with it, the American people:
RULE BY SHUTTING OUT THE OTHER PARTY – Never mind that the party out of power represents a considerable portion of the people who pay taxes just like the supporters of the party in power. And even that the party out of power has many legitimate concerns that most moderates and independent voters may share.
LET THE PRESIDENT OF THEIR OWN PARTY DO WHATEVER HE WANTS, BUT GIVE THE SHAFT TO HIM IF HE IS OF THE OPPOSING PARTY – Relates to the first point, but even more serious since the President in theory is representative of the American people as a whole. He is also Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Thus, partisan matters shouldn’t even be played so much here.
SPEND, SPEND, SPEND ON WHATEVER YOUR PARTY FAVORS – Never mind that we really need to curb spending completely to get our government out of debt!
We never needed political parties, because they are not even mentioned in the U. S. Constitution. If our Founding Fathers had thought more carefully, they might have prohibited them altogether. Maybe we still should!
After all, if you think sending me stupid e-mails like this is in any way, shape, or form appropriate for a House Speaker to do, you don’t belong at that position at all. We have two wars going on, our economy is a mess and you are doing THIS?!
Dear Dale,
You are among a special group of committed Democrats whose sacrifice and dedication made our victories last November possible. For all you’ve done to support the Democratic Party and to move America in a New Direction you have my deepest gratitude.
Now, I want to offer you and a guest a special invitation for a chance to join me at my table at our dinner with President Obama in Washington, DC on June 18th for the President’s Dinner.
Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the HouseP.S. The deadline to enter to win to meet the President and have a photograph with him is in less than 48 hours!Act now.
If you live in Pennsylvania, please consider supporting Jake Towne, a libertarian, in his quest to get elected to Congress and defeat Republican Congressman Charlie Dent!
I want to see the libertarians become more influential, to the point that they completely overthrow the Republican Party, thus becoming the Democratic Party’s main opposition. Even if Jake does not win, Dent is likely to be defeated by a Democrat. Either way, I am determined to keep the Republicans from ever regaining the power they had under Bush Jr!
One of the most laughable misconceptions people have about economics is that laissez-faire capitalism is somehow an example of economic freedom, while socialism is a form of economic tyranny. Certainly the type of socialism that Communism was came across as tyrannical and deserved to be abolished. But not socialism itself. Socialism coupled with a democratic government that has a written constitution that guarantees civil rights for all citizens actually promotes the most economic freedom, while laissez-faire capitalism is economic ANARCHY that eventually results in both chaos and tyranny, like political anarchy does. With no restraints by government, corporations will only get larger and more powerful by merging with smaller and weaker corporations and will so dominate the market that small businesses started by individual owners seldom have a chance to even get off the ground. That is NOT a free market! Such a concept doesn’t really exist, except in the deluded minds of many Conservatives and Libertarians. You either have a market in which government occationally intervenes to break up giant corporations (trust-busting) to allow small businesses to thrive and maintain their independence, or you have a market in which individual efforts at owning one’s own means of production and income are destroyed by the giant corporations themselves. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood that unrestrained government destroys individual liberty, so they made a system of checks and balances in the Constitution to restrain government. They should have done the same with the American economic system. If a democratic government can have its own method of checks and balances against corporations, and thus prevent corporations from ever merging and even buy out and sell off the properties of failing corporations to individuals who wish to start their own small businesses, then we will have more economic freedom. Corporations themselves are more like governments in their makeup and operations than like individuals. They should never be “free” to exploit resources and people as they please. Only INDIVIDUALS should be free for freedom to have any real meaning! We see imperialism, which was the norm 150 years ago, as evil today, because it involved governments conquering and ruling other peoples for the gain of the conquerers. Why should laissez-faire captalism be seen any differently? Can we not abolish that as well and promote real economic freedom instead?
After all the killings and destruction since 1948 in the “Holy Land”, we must do all we can to undo the systematic brainwashing of the American people that has been done for many decades by Christian fundamenalist leaders and propagandists. As far as I’m concerned, they are mass murderers by proxy!
First, they claim that Israel’s founding was a fulfilment of Bible prophecy and thus will lead to the return of Christ and the establishment of God’s kingdom. They must claim this because so many prophecies in the Old Testament referring to Israel were NOT fulfilled in ancient times, therefore, they assume that these prophecies will be fulfilled in modern times with the new state of Israel. But that is nothing but a rationalization.
Second, if you read what Jesus actually said in the Gospels about his return, then certain events were supposed to take place, then he would return while the generation that saw him alive still lived. Indeed, the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70 and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 could be seen as fulfillments of what Jesus said…….but he did NOT return. So why would some Christians still be waiting for his return nearly 2000 years later? And linking his return to the JEWISH state of Israel is absurd, period!
Third, and worst of all, many Christians see what has happened in the Middle East since 1948 as a reenactment of the ancient wars described in the Bible, where many atrocities were also committed. Indeed, the Book of Joshua describes a long campaigne of conquest and genocide that would be compared with what the German Nazis did if it happened today. And that is the main reason most fundamentalist Christians are not bothered by the wrongdoings of Israel because they think, “Such things were done in Biblical times and were said to be God’s will, so why not let them happen again?” That’s a bit like expecting a teenager to wear diapers long after he has outgrown them and been potty trained. This is one reason why I am sometimes so contemptuous of religion: It actually prevents people from growing up spiritually and morally.
And Palestinians, you are not blameless either! You, just as Israel, have murdered far too many innocents in the name of your religion and your nationality. If I had my way, I’d sweep both you AND the Jews off the “Holy Land” and allow that land 100 years of healing before I ever allow any people to live there again. And then only atheists and agnostics, who would treat the land and its history more objectively than any Jew, Christian, and Muslim would.
If you want to see just how stupid the mentality I described just above can get, just go to a library and check out The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, and its several sequels that this despicable fraud wrote in the late 1970s and 1980s. He was using religion to promote hard-line Conservative politics, and for that alone I will spit on him forever!
Dale Husband's Intellectual Rants 