By protecting President Pinocchio, has the media become a threat to democracy? (See 1 below.)
If you want to check media and press accuracy go to: Honest Reporting.com and Camera.com!
I am part of a local group who are putting together a series of truthful responses to Obama's distortions and lies in the belief he has begun campaigning with a view towards taking complete charge of government as a result of capturing The House in the 2014 mid term elections, Thus, he will be in a position to spend without restraint.
Stay tuned !
---
Assad, Russia and Iran's Ayatollah win? Obama, Israel, the Saudis, Gulf emirates, Turkey and NATO lose? So much for Hillary and her reset button diplomacy. (See 2 below.)
---
Sowell goes pastoral and challenges Professor Cass Sunstein's view that there are others more capable of decision making than oneself. Naturally liberals fill that role. (See 3 below.)
---
Was Michelle's bit part in the Oscar's a ploy regarding her future political ambition?
Is the Obama dynasty forming? (See 4 and 4a below.)
---
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) The Media Threat to Democracy
By J.T. HatterAnn Coulter, in a recent Kudlow Report, enraged the punditry by suggesting that the mainstream media was a threat to democracy.
"I mean, you really wonder if Democrats would win any elections if we had an honest media in this country," Coulter said. "As Pat Caddell says, the media is becoming a threat to democracy."
In the runup to the last presidential election, Pat Caddell, a Democratic pollster and staunch liberal, said,
"I think we're at the most dangerous time in our political history in terms of the balance of power in the role that the media plays in whether or not we maintain a free democracy or not."
Coulter and Caddell, both experienced media professionals, have given voice to what many Americans believe is the principal threat to American democracy: the progressive liberal mainstream media.
I have absolutely no doubt that Barrack Hussein Obama won election and re-election on the strength of mainstream media support for him and his leftist ideology. It certainly wasn't that Obama had distinguished himself in his career. He had accomplished nothing other than getting himself elected to office, and he did that by dazzling the mainstream media. He had few, if any, qualifications for the presidency. And he has yet to satisfactorily prove to many that he is even eligible for the position. How then does someone like Obama get elected and then re-elected after a disastrous first term?
A Thoroughly Dishonest Media
Obama took the presidential election with 51% of the popular vote, and a 3.85% edge over Mitt Romney. The mainstream media provided Obama his thin margin of victory. Fox news reported "Five ways the mainstream media tipped the scales in favor of Obama." I believe the mainstream media regularly delivers about 10-20% of the popular vote to the Democrats, and have been doing so for the past thirty years or so. I agree with Ann that you really do have to wonder if the Democrats would win any elections without the mainstream media.
Today, the mainstream media -- ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, Newsweek, Time, and all the other mainstream media outlets -- are unabashedly liberal. They have also been integrated into the inner workings of the Democratic Party and the United States government. The Obama administration tells the mainstream media what to report and how to report it. We now have a government-controlled press, not a free press.
Our Founding Fathers knew that if the government controlled the news media, that the people would only hear the political news the government wanted them to hear. The government could control what the people believed and valued. Such is the reality of the media in today's America. The government-controlled media shapes the message, frames it and delivers it to the people.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
Early in my career I needed to obtain certification to teach technical information to mostly non-professional people. The certifying organization immersed my class in instruction on how to reach into people's minds and make them learn what you have to teach them. Education is not as easy as it might look to some. There is an art to the craft. We were taught that the most effective medium for learning was via visual process: television or a live presentation are the best media for education.
We process over 99% of the information we receive through our eyes. The visual cortex is linked directly to the brain. The information people receive through the visual cortex is true virtually all of the time. Almost everything that we see is true, so the brain immediately accepts what the eyes see. So human beings naturally believe what they see -- seeing is believing. Most people believe virtually everything they see on television. They really believe it. They cannot refuse to believe it because once information gets past the visual cortex and directly into the brain it becomes fact -- unless the intellection process tells the brain otherwise.
People emulate what they see on television. Copycat killings are a good example. I believe the television media is responsible for more children being killed in schools than any other single factor. The widespread sexual deviancy in our society is another example of media influence. Once people see what is possible on television they believe it is possible, even acceptable, for them to do. When televisionbegan to show males wearing earrings and bandanas on their heads, and females sporting tattoos, we saw an immediate flood across the nation of males wearing earrings and bandannas and females getting inked. Monkey see, monkey do. Look around.
Television tells society what is cool and acceptable. People emulate what they see on TV. They believe what the media pundits tell them. The media has been telling the American people for the past fifty years that liberalism is good and conservatism is bad. Many people now believe this.
The Medium is the Message
Marshal McLuhan was a communication theorist who made an impact in media theory in the 1960s, a time when the media was beginning to realize its power. He coined the phrases "global village" and "the medium is the message". McLuhan introduced us to the notion that the medium itself was just as important, if not more important, than the transient content it conveyed to us. The phrase, "the medium is the message", was introduced in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He gives us chilling examples of what the media actually represents to us:
"...the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself -- the content -- and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner.
The media subjects us to a constant barrage of information and themes. It enters into our living rooms and we watch a continuous parade of scandal, gore and mayhem as we casually eat our dinners. Bloodshed, terrorism and crime become easy as pie.
Think about how the media frames its message and whom they use to present it to us. When you think of Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, Rachel Maddow, Bill Moyers, Ed Shultz, or Piers Morgan, do you think of trustworthy, objective individuals who are earnestly doing their best to bring you information you need to make decisions?
Or do you think of them as progressive propagandists actively working their leftist agenda? Which are they? They are the ones preparing the meal and serving us dinner.
The media personalities are as important to conveying information and impressions to us as is the news content they are delivering. The medium is the message. Their liberal predilections are inserted into every sentence, every phrase, every sound bite and video clip they present to us.
"McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As society's values, norms and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of."
This observation is critical to understanding what the media is doing to us. The mainstream media are changing us gradually. They are corrupting us in a most insidious fashion. While pretending to present to us a factual analysis of world events, they are actually insinuating their progressive values, opinions, judgments and propaganda, with the deliberate objective of controlling our thinking and beliefs. This is done intentionally and without apology.
To the media propagandists, the ends justify the means. We are becoming a nation of immoral, dependent, tattooed media consumers who will follow wherever the media leads us, like the children led by the Pied Piper of Hamlin to their destruction.
To the media propagandists, the ends justify the means. We are becoming a nation of immoral, dependent, tattooed media consumers who will follow wherever the media leads us, like the children led by the Pied Piper of Hamlin to their destruction.
The Government/Media Complex
We are witnessing a marriage of the progressive media with a progressive government regime, an unholy alliance in terms of the American ideal. The end result is the certain destruction of freedom and liberty in America. History is a good guide in this matter.
Obama meets with Rachael Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Ed Schultz and other "influential progressives" to give them his thoughts on how he wants the news reported to the public. In exchange for access to White House officials, media stars have agreed to the censoring and editing of their stories. Obama and his ilk have criticized Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, implying that they are on dangerous ground when they report stories unfavorable to the regime.
The Democratic Party has infiltrated the mainstream media, sending its best and brightest to work as news reporters and television journalists. George Stephanopoulos was the White House Communications Director and political consultant for impeached President Bill Clinton. He is currently is chief political correspondent for ABC News, hosts the ABC show This Week and is co-anchor of Good Morning America.
Robert Gibbs, former Obama Press Secretary, and David Axelrod, Obama's principal media and campaign advisor, are both going to work for NBC and MSNBC as media "contributors." Gibbs has assured us he won't be "a cheerleader for the president" and Axelrod promises he "will be honest with my opinions." Who can believe anything they say? Obama is famous for his Orwellian doublespeak and misdirection. At no time has the Obama administration been truthful with the American people about its actions and objectives. The fact is that the administration and the media routinely work together to deprive the American people of the truth. This is necessary to the progressive agenda.
At a recent press conference on gun control in Philadelphia, Vice President Joe Biden said, "To be very blunt with you, we're counting on all of you, the legitimate news media to cover these discussions because the truth is that times have changed."
Biden is telling his media -- his progressive Democratic Party media, the legitimate media -- that he is depending on them to facilitate the administration's attack on the Second Amendment. The administration has an ardent following on gun control in the progressive media. They are glad to be the juicy meat used by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The mainstream media is no longer our watchdog: they belong to the progressive left.
When government officials and the mainstream media conspire to deprive us of the truth they deprive us of our liberty. And that is what is at stake. The mainstream media is truly a threat to our democracy.
J.T. Hatter is the author of Lost in Zombieland: The Rise of President Zero, a political satire on the Obama administration.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Assad Pulls Ahead in Syrian War. Putin, Khamenei Are Co-Victors
March 5 has been set as the date for peace talks to open in Moscow between the Syrian opposition and the Assad regime.
Opposition leader Moaz al-Khatib is waiting to meet the Assad regime’s representative, possibly Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, in the Russian capital by the end of February to set up the talks. Bashar Assad has taken his resignation off the agenda and insists on reserving the option to run again for president in 2014.
He is backed in this by President Vladimir Putin. And even the Syrian opposition appears to have tacitly bowed to this precondition – an admission that the rebel movement has reached its limit and Assad’s genocidal, no-holds-barred tactics have paid off.
With all their acclaimed victories, rebel forces know that their desperate bid to conquer Damascus was repulsed by the Syrian army’s superior fire power and heavy armor. They were thrown back from the heart of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. And they failed to gain control of Assad’s chemical arsenal. Ferocious fighting failed to bring the big Syrian Air Force bases into rebel hands.
Now, most of the fighting opposition to the Assad regime is ready to negotiate terms for a ceasefire as the opening gambit for a political settlement. They face their enemy standing firm as the unvanquished ruler of Syria and commander-in-chief of its armed forces at the cost of Syria 80-100,000 Syrian lives and a ravaged country. In so doing, Assad has cemented the Tehran-Damascus-Hizballah alliance.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s’s sphere of influence now stretches from the Persian Gulf up to the Mediterranean – his reward for the billion dollars worth of aid per month he poured into buttressing Assad. His other ally, Hassan Nasrallah, whose Hizballah operatives fought shoulder to shoulder with Syrian troops, emerges as the strongman of Lebanon. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s staunch backer in diplomacy, arms and moral support, congratulates himself for picking the winning side in Syria’s civil war and, moreover, frustrating US and NATO designs to remove the Syrian ruler from power.
Those are the winners.
And the losers are the United States, the Gulf emirates and Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey. Barack Obama’s vision of a democratic, liberal “Arab Spring” has collapsed. Al Qaeda is a ubiquitous presence as transitional governments struggle to their feet – or not - in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Israel finds a tighter than ever Syrian-Hizballah-Iranian noose closing around its borders as Tehran’s nuclear weapons program marches on. Turkey gambled heavily on bringing about Assad’s overthrow as the key to its bid for regional power– and missed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Shepherds and Sheep
John Stuart Mill's classic essay "On Liberty" gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people's decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing "that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging."
Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that "people make a lot of mistakes." Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging.
What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.
Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.
Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?
Think about the First World War, from which nations on both sides ended up worse off than before, after an unprecedented carnage that killed substantial fractions of whole younger generations and left millions starving amid the rubble of war.
Think about the Holocaust, and about other government slaughters of even more millions of innocent men, women and children under Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.
Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, in which millions of people were plunged into poverty in even the most prosperous nations, was needlessly prolonged by government policies now recognized in retrospect as foolish and irresponsible.
One of the key differences between mistakes that we make in our own lives and mistakes made by governments is that bad consequences force us to correct our own mistakes. But government officials cannot admit to making a mistake without jeopardizing their whole careers.
Can you imagine a President of the United States saying to the mothers of America, "I am sorry your sons were killed in a war I never should have gotten us into"?
What is even more relevant to Professor Sunstein's desire to have our betters tell us how to live our lives, is that so many oppressive and even catastrophic government policies were cheered on by the intelligentsia.
Back in the 1930s, for example, totalitarianism was considered to be "the wave of the future" by much of the intelligentsia, not only in the totalitarian countries themselves but in democratic nations as well.
The Soviet Union was being praised to the skies by such literary luminaries as George Bernard Shaw in Britain and Edmund Wilson in America, while literally millions of people were being systematically starved to death by Stalin and masses of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.
Even Hitler and Mussolini had their supporters or apologists among intellectuals in the Western democracies, including at one time Lincoln Steffens and W.E.B. Du Bois.
An even larger array of the intellectual elite in the 1930s opposed the efforts of Western democracies to respond to Hitler's massive military buildup with offsetting military defense buildups to deter Hitler or to defend themselves if deterrence failed.
"Disarmament" was the mantra of the day among the intelligentsia, often garnished with the suggestion that the Western democracies should "set an example" for other nations -- as if Nazi Germany or imperial Japan was likely to follow their example.
Too many among today's intellectual elite see themselves as our shepherds and us as their sheep. Tragically, too many of us are apparently willing to be sheep, in exchange for being taken care of, being relieved of the burdens of adult responsibility and being supplied with "free" stuff paid for by others.
Copyright 2013, Creators Syndicate Inc.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)Obamawood 90210
By Jim Burkee
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin asks perhaps the most important question of today’s post-Oscars analysis: “Why was Michelle Obama at the Oscars?” With military personnel as “props” standing behind her, in dress uniform, to boot. While the appearance was unsurprising – the Obamas seem to pop up on talk shows, ball fields, and at every turn of the channel – it was nonetheless another disturbing integration of Hollywood and Washington.
Admittedly, it is not the first time we have seen politicians cozy up to celebrities. John F. Kennedy pioneered the relationship by turning the White House into a packaged “Camelot,” with a birthday serenade by Marilyn Monroe, and friendships with Rat Pack friends Sinatra and Davis. Ronald Reagan, himself a product of Hollywood, kept close ties to an old generation of stars, while bringing Hollywood glitz and glamour to the White House. And who can forget Bill Clinton’s sale of the Lincoln Bedroom to a train of Hollywood stars and other FOB’s (Friends of Bill), a fundraising scheme topped only by Obama’s machine in 2012?
More troublesome still is the Hollywoodification of the declining fourth estate, the news media. Sunday morning former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos hosted ABS’s This Week a storied and once-serious news program. And this morning America awoke to see Stephanopoulos’s hard-hitting interview of Jennifer Lawrenceinterrupted by a flirtatious Jack Nicholson. David Gregory, host of Meet the Press, is a regular on the Today Show, dancing Gangnam Style and changing diapers. David Brinkley and Tim Russert must be spinning in their graves.
Little wonder Washington politicians have turned budget negotiations into a series of Jerry Bruckheimer thrillers, where the country comes perilously close every few months to falling off a “Fiscal Cliff” (see Jon Stewart’s satire, Cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust).
How are we to take seriously politicians and journalists who pretend to be celebrities? America’s trust in our political class is at an all-time low, so naturally, Washington tries to reinforce its image by cozying up to the entertainment industry – the only segment of society considered less trustworthy than Washington.
I do not share the public’s distaste for Hollywood. I love movies. The best of them provide us with a needed escape from reality, ephemeral freedom from life’s anxieties. It is Hollywood’s job to transport us away to another world, another time – as the best of them do. The best actors, like Lincoln’s Daniel Day Lewis, pretend and deceive as a profession, and I laud those remarkable God-given gifts.
But effective deception, pretending, and Hollywood make-believe should not be what politicians in Washington aspire to. A world where our top journalists are also actors, and where our politicians aspire to celebrity, is a dangerous one. Before long, our news and our movies become interchangeable, both products of gifted storytellers, all fiction and no fact. How tempting it must be for our political leaders to curry favor, starry-eyed, with celebrities and to share the red carpet. But their job is to remain grounded in fact – to educate, to dialogue, and to lead. And that cannot happen if our political leaders spend their days dancing with the stars.
Thanks to Amity Shlaes’ new biography, Calvin Coolidge – “Silent Cal” – is making a bit of a comeback. Coolidge’s gift is one remarkably absent in Washington today: Restraint. While you may not agree that the government which governs least, governs best, we should all agree that we are better off seeking leaders who would rather spend their time on the Senate floor or Situation Room, than the dance floor and the green room.
She dazzled on Fallon and the Oscars, and a poll has her leading for Senate. Another first lady with major options
In the months after Bill Clinton’s second election, few would have guessed that first lady Hillary Clinton would be just a few years away from a successful run for Senate, a stint as secretary of state, and the subject of front-running buzz to be the next president of the United States.
Of course, it turns out she was. And the current first lady, Michelle Obama, is more popular than Clinton was then. So, what does the future hold for her?
After a winning weekend on Jimmy Fallon’s show and the Academy Awards, it’s clear she will be in demand.
There’s a tradition at the Oscars of an elder statesman of Hollywood (and they are mostly statesmen) presenting the award for best picture at the end of the perennially overtime award show. Last year it was Tom Cruise, the year before that it was Steven Spielberg (his third appearance in 10 years), and before that people like Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood.
So it was a surprise last night when Jack Nicholson strutted onstage and turned skyward to take in the countenance of the special guest being beamed in live from the White House on a giant screen overhead. On the screen, the first lady, standing and chatting with service members in formal wear, doing a classic, “Oh hi, I didn’t see you there” fourth wall greeting. But it wasn’t really that big of a surprise.
Why Michelle Obama? Though the winner she announced, “Argo,” had some Washington drama in it, she made no mention of politics or patriotism or the troops, and only passing reference to children, which has been the focus of much of her work in the White House.
Why doesn’t matter. Obama was simply there to be Obama because she, Michelle Obama,would present the Oscar for best picture and because America can’t seem to get enough of her. She’s competed in a pushup contest with Ellen DeGeneres, guest-hosted “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and other reality TV shows at the White House, sketched with Jimmy Fallon, and honed her award chops at the BET and Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards. She has almost 100 IMDB credits to her name.
Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment