Chop-chop Video

You may remember a previous blog post a few years back where I interviewed my friend Trung who was, at the time, enrolled in the master's program at University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). Trung is also a blogger who shares my contempt for the tea party. Well, apparently the ignorant teabaggers have contempt -- actually, violent hatred -- towards Trung's alma mater.

Trung explains the ongoing situation in his blog. It involves Andrew Breitbart (need I say more?) and secretly (actually, not so secretly) video taped lectures of UMKC econ professors. Of course, Breitbart and his minions are up to old tricks. They gave the splice job to these videos in the same way they distorted and minced Shirley Sherrod's words last July.

Breitbart and his BigGovernment web site are using the obviously edited videos to accuse two labor-studies professors of indoctrinating innocent, malleable minds to the violent ways of union thugs. The complete unadulterated videos, however, reveal the exact opposite. One professor tells students to resist violence because it "gives credence" to the argument that "these people need to be controlled."

But facts be damned. In a twist that's not really a twist because it's totally predictable, the teabaggers are actually the violent thugs. Incited by the erroneous videos, they started with phoning in threats to the university but quickly escalated the situation by trespassing on the UMSL (University of Missouri-St. Louis) campus and threatening students with violence:

In order to distract people from the fact that they were busted lying, St. Louis tea party provocateur Adam Sharp, who's blogged on Breitbart's sites before, apparently trespassed on the UMSL campus on Saturday to harass students and instructor Don Giljum. Sharp attempted to film students in their classroom, pestered them as they walked out of class with questions like "do you condone violence," and was arrested and charged with trespassing. Don Giljum was also taken to the police station because there was an altercation, and as students waited outside of the police station, another tea partier approached them and began taunting them and daring them to "take a swing" at him. This is after a week where the tea party violated students' privacy by putting videos on YouTube showing comments made for the purpose of classroom discussion.

Breitbart, in an April 18 interview with Sean Hannity, said he planned to "go after" educators. And there you have it. We've seen ethnic intolerance, religious intolerance, and every other shade of bigotry from these nuts, but now... academic intolerance.

Freedom of inquiry by students and faculty is the foundation of education and our university system. It's all too fitting that the teabaggers go after this.

Rewriting History

"Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it." — Robert F. Kennedy, 1925 - 1968

From the mouth of Dana Perino, with no objection from Sean Hannity and his pals: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term."


(YouTube video)

That extraordinary lie is insulting to our entire country. We won't forget that the attacks on September 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3000 people, and the subsequent anthrax attacks, and the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks all happened under the careless watch of President George W. Bush.

I only mention the Beltway sniper attacks because if anybody wants to call the Fort Hood shootings an act of terrorism, then we also must call the Beltway attacks an act of terrorism.

And I'll tell Perino what she owes the American people: the truth or shut up.

Fraud News

Does Fox News just not care anymore? Are they not even trying to be real journalists? Why does it take a comedy show to reveal that Fox's Sean Hannity used film footage from a completely different protest to make the GOP's health care rally appear more heavily attended?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Sean Hannity Uses Glenn Beck's Protest Footage
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

The news media is in a downward spiral. Nine months ago I wrote about Sean Delonas' vile racists cartoons printed in the NY Post. At the time there was a disingenuous controversy over whether the illustrations were intentionally racist. Well, stop the presses. Sandra Guzman, a former NY Post editor fired after speaking out against the cartoon, is now speaking out against the racist and misogynistic atmosphere at the Post. In addition to her shocking allegations of sexual harassment, she had this to say about the atmosphere in the newsroom:

In the complaint, Guzman said that multiple editors knew that the cartoon was offensive, but didn't do anything about it. It was, she alleges, par for the course when it came to the paper's coverage. Guzman alleged that she had once learned that the Post had planned to run a cartoon in the newspaper depicting Jews as sewer rats. She also alleged that "Charles Hurt, the Post's Washington D.C. Bureau Chief and a high ranking journalist at the newspaper, had confirmed to Ms. Guzman that the Post had such a policy in place, telling her that the Post's 'goal is to destroy Barack Obama. We don't want him to succeed.'"

This is the fraud and paranoia that Rupert Murdoch builds his empire upon.

Battle of Bumper Stickers

For the last several months I've been watching Bill Moyers Journal every Friday on PBS. In the world of journalism, he is a veteran. I watch his show and feel like I've turned the dial back 40 or 50 years to a calmer, more reasonable and more respectable news media. He's definitely not a hot-head like Bill O'Reilly. He's not obnoxiously argumentative like Sean Hannity. He's not even a funny man like Jon Stewart. Bill Moyers is simply a real journalist.

Last night Keith Olbermann interviewed Bill Moyers and the main topic was the mainstream media. Moyers talked about the dangers of the corporate media simplifying the deep and profound problems we face in the US. He called it a "battle of bumper stickers." However, he felt encouraged when the voters saw through the whole gas tax holiday issue, and he feels that the internet might be the antidote to the herd of the mainstream media:



His most recent book, Moyers on Democracy, is a collection of his speeches on what is happening with our country -- the assault on our Constitution, the undermining of our electoral process, the class war inherent in the growth of economic inequality, the dangers of an imperial executive branch, and the attack on the independence of the press. "The gravediggers of democracy will not have the last word.”