This must be very embarrassing for H and G.
But it is an example of how propaganda enters our society.
That article was written in 1938.
Today, nothing has changed. Look at how Bush has been portrayed with 'Family Values' and a moral code following only the path of righteousness. An image projected (IMO) to rationalize the use of force to acquire, among other things, the oil rights in the Middle East.




http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,...Debate%2009-20
(FULL STORY ^^)


Old Hitler Article Stirs Debate

A fawning 1938 article by Homes & Gardens magazine about Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat remains widely available on the Web, even after the discoverer and original poster of the article took it off his site when the magazine demanded its removal.

The three-page article, "Hitler's Mountain Home, a Visit to 'Haus Wachenfeld,'" first appeared on Words of Waldman in early August. Mirrors of the page quickly sprang up across the Web, including one on the website of a well-known Holocaust revisionist.

The article depicts Hitler in glowing terms, such as the "Squire of Wachenfeld," and extols him as a talented architect, decorator and raconteur who "delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, singers, and musicians."

+++++++++++







This is a mirror of the Homes and Garden article:
http://gorky.batcave.net/

view it before it disapears.



Jack

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EI11Aa02.html

Misperceptions abound in US
By Matthew Riemer

A poll conducted in early August by the Washington Post revealed that 68 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein played a role in the September 11, 2001, attacks despite a continuing lack of evidence of such direct involvement or of even a vaguer relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda.

Such a discrepancy between available facts, evidence and public perception should elicit at least mild interest from those concerned with the continued functioning of a well-oiled, self-critical democracy based upon an informed citizenry in the United States.

This poll raises two pressing and critical questions: Why do seven out of 10 Americans believe what the Post itself called an "apparently groundless belief"?

The Post essentially answers this question in its own analysis, but is hesitant to draw what seems like a painstakingly obvious conclusion: that this widely-held misbelief is a direct result of the speeches and statements made by various members of the Bush administration, including the president himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

A plethora of such statements are readily available from a large pool of sources and their further documentation here serves no real purpose, but some of the more telling ones are worth mentioning.

The Post asserts that this notion is "without prompting from Washington" yet goes on to document a litany of statements from the Bush administration that directly contradict this. For example, in the months following September 11, Cheney said that it was "pretty well confirmed" that Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence operatives had meetings before the terrorist attacks took place.

In one of President George W Bush's most talked about statements, he said, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 - and still goes on." In the same speech he added, "We've removed an ally of al-Qaeda." In his most recent speech, the president called Iraq the new battlefield in the "war on terrorism".

These are two from among literally dozens of statements in which Bush explicitly links September 11 with Saddam and Iraq by referring to the efforts to bring to justice those complicit in the hijackings and the US's most recent war in Iraq as both being part of the "war on terrorism". When the first statement is stripped of its linguistic fat, Bush is saying that the war with Iraq began on September 11. Afghanistan is very rarely mentioned in these statements.

How does this affect how the rest of the world thinks of and judges Americans and their government?

As the results of this poll are considered throughout the world it can only produce feelings of smug satisfaction from all corners. Europeans especially will point to such information as being indicative of Americans' lack of knowledge and seriousness when it comes to history and current international affairs. Whether or not this is the case is basically moot, as that very perception is already in place and the trans-Atlantic divide seems as healthy as ever.

However, as much as polls and stories like this affect how Americans are perceived and how foreign governments deal with the US, the timing couldn't be worse. Washington is now asking for widespread assistance and money from countries who opposed the war in the face of the now self- admitted fact that the Bush administration misjudged how long an occupation of Iraq would last, how much it would cost to rebuild Iraq, and how much oil revenue would be generated to make that rebuilding process a self-funding effort, as Wolfowitz once hinted.

Finally, on the domestic front, the situation is bad for Bush and his prospects for re-election as Democrats will surely point to these numbers as evidence that the Bush administration misled the public into what many Americans now feel was an ill-conceived war. Indeed, Bush's approval ratings have been steadily falling, primarily due to the economy but partly due to the continued instability and loss of American lives in Iraq. In May, a Time Magazine/CNN poll of registered voters showed that Bush had a 63 percent approval rating. Now, in early September, that approval rating is down to 52 percent. If the Bush administration fails to show evidence tying together al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, in addition to failing to prevent the proportionally high number of American casualties in Iraq, the American people may begin to feel more and more alienated from this administration.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EJ04Ak01.html

Middle East

We report, you get it wrong
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday.

And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).

Based on several nationwide surveys it conducted with California-based Knowledge Networks since June, as well as the results of other polls, PIPA found that 48 percent of the public believe US troops found evidence of close pre-war links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist group; 22 percent thought troops found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; and 25 percent believed that world public opinion favored Washington's going to war with Iraq. All three are misperceptions.

The report, Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War, also found that the more misperceptions held by the respondent, the more likely it was that s/he both supported the war and depended on commercial television for news about it.

The study is likely to stoke a growing public and professional debate over why mainstream news media - especially the broadcast media - were not more skeptical about the Bush administration's pre-war claims, particularly regarding Saddam Hussein's WMD stockpiles and ties with al-Qaeda.

"This is a dangerously revealing study," said Marvin Kalb, a former television correspondent and a senior fellow of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

While Kalb said he had some reservations about the specificity of the questions directed at the respondents, he noted that, "People who have had a strong belief that there is an unholy alliance between politics and the press now have more evidence." Fox, in particular, has been accused of pursuing a chauvinistic agenda in its news coverage despite its motto, "We report, you decide".

Overall, according to PIPA, 60 percent of the people surveyed held at least one of the three misperceptions through September. Thirty percent of respondents had none of those misperceptions.

Surprisingly, the percentage of people holding the misperceptions rose slightly over the last three months. In July, for example, polls found that 45 percent of the public believed US forces had found "clear evidence in Iraq that Hussein was working closely with al-Qaeda". In September, 49 percent believed that.

Likewise, those who believed troops had found WMD in Iraq jumped from 21 percent in July to 24 percent in September. One in five respondents said they believed that Iraq had actually used chemical or biological weapons during the war.

In determining what factors could create the misperceptions, PIPA considered a number of variables in the data.

It found a high correlation between respondents with the most misperceptions and their support for the decision to go to war. Only 23 percent of those who held none of the three misperceptions supported the war, while 53 percent who held one misperception did so. Of those who believe that both WMDs and evidence of al-Qaeda ties have been found in Iraq and that world opinion backed the United States, a whopping 86 percent said they supported war.

More specifically, among those who believed that Washington had found clear evidence of close ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda, two-thirds held the view that going to war was the best thing to do. Only 29 percent felt that way among those who did not believe that such evidence had been found.

Another factor that correlated closely with misperceptions about the war was party affiliation, with Republicans substantially "more likely" to hold misperceptions than Democrats. But support for Bush himself as expressed by whether or not the respondent said s/he intended to vote for him in 2004 appeared to be an even more critical factor.

The average frequency of misperceptions among respondents who planned to vote for Bush was 45 percent, while among those who plan to vote for a hypothetical Democrat candidate, the frequency averaged only 17 percent.

Asked "Has the US found clear evidence Saddam Hussein was working closely with al-Qaeda"? 68 percent of Bush supporters replied affirmatively. By contrast, two of every three Democrat-backers said no.

But news sources also accounted for major differences in misperceptions, according to PIPA, which asked more than 3,300 respondents since May where they "tended to get most of [their] news''. Eighty percent identified broadcast media, while 19 percent cited print media.

Among those who said broadcast media, 30 percent said two or more networks; 18 percent, Fox News; 16 percent, CNN; 24 percent, the three big networks - NBC (14 percent), ABC (11 percent), CBS (9 percent); and three percent, the two public networks, National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far.

Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between.

CBS ranked right behind Fox with a 71 percent score, while CNN and NBC tied as the best-performing commercial broadcast audience at 55 percent. Forty-seven percent of print media readers held at least one misperception.

As to the number of misconceptions held by their audiences, Fox far outscored all of its rivals. A whopping 45 percent of its viewers believed all three misperceptions, while the other commercial networks scored between 12 percent and 16 percent. Only nine percent of readers believed all three, while only four percent of the NPR/PBS audience did.

PIPA found that political affiliation and news source also compound one another. Thus, 78 percent of Bush supporters who watch Fox News said they thought the United States had found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda, while 50 percent of Bush supporters who rely on NPR/PBS thought so.

Conversely, 48 percent of Fox viewers who said they would support a Democrat believed that such evidence had been found. But none of the Democrat-backers who relied on NPR/PBS believed it.

The study also debunked the notion that misperceptions were due mainly to the lack of exposure to news.

Among Bush supporters, those who said they follow the news "very closely", were found more likely to hold misperceptions. Those Bush supporters, on the other hand, who say they follow the news "somewhat closely" or "not closely at all" held fewer misperceptions.

Conversely, those Democratic supporters who said they did not follow the news very closely were found to be twice as likely to hold misperceptions as those who said they did, according to PIPA.

(Inter Press Service)

Good morning Jack....did I leave the cage open again??? Have a nice day Smilin' man! Take care! Sparky

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EH08Ak01.html


How neo-cons influence the Pentagon ...
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - An ad hoc office under US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official US intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.

But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other George W Bush political appointees scattered around the national security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and Abram Shulsky, respectively.

Other appointees who worked with them in both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-conservative icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of the pro-Likud Jerusalem Post; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under former president Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.

Along with Feith, all of the political appointees have in common a close identification with the views of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel. Feith, whose law partner is a spokesman for the settlement movement in Israel, has long been a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process, while WINEP has acted as the think tank for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which generally follows a Likud line.

Also like Feith, several of the appointees were proteges of Richard Perle, an AEI fellow who doubled as chairman until last April of Rumsfeld's unpaid Defense Policy Board (DPB), whose members were appointed by Feith, and also had an office in the Pentagon one floor below the NESA offices.

Similarly, Luti, a retired naval officer, was a protege of another DPB board member also based at AEI, former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. Luti in turn hired retired Colonel William Bruner, a former Gingrich staffer, and Chris Straub, a retired lieutenant-colonel, anti-abortion activist, and former staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Also working for Luti was another naval officer, Yousef Aboul-Enein, whose main job was to pore over Arabic-language newspapers and CIA transcripts of radio broadcasts to find evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and Saddam that may have been overlooked by the intelligence agencies, and a DIA officer named John Trigilio.

Through Feith, both offices worked closely with Perle, Gingrich and two other DPB members and major war boosters - former CIA director James Woolsey and Kenneth Adelman - in ensuring that the "intelligence" that they developed reached a wide public audience outside the bureaucracy.

They also debriefed "defectors" handled by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an opposition umbrella group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a long-time friend of Perle, whom the intelligence agencies generally wrote off as an unreliable self-promoter.

"They would draw up 'talking points' they would use and distribute to their friends," said Kwiatkowski. "But the talking points would be changed continually, not because of new intel [intelligence], but because the press was poking holes in what was in the memos."

The offices fed information directly and indirectly to sympathetic media outlets, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and FoxNews Network, as well as the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and syndicated columnists, such as Charles Krauthammer.

In inter-agency discussions, Feith and the two offices communicated almost exclusively with like-minded allies in other agencies, rather than with their official counterparts, including even the DIA in the Pentagon, according to Kwiatkowski.

Rather than working with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, its Near Eastern Affairs bureau, or even its Iraq desk, for example, they preferred to work through Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (and former AEI executive vice president) John Bolton; Michael Wurmser (another Perle protege at AEI who staffed the predecessor to OSP); and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the Vice President Dick Cheney.

At the National Security Council (NSC), they communicated mainly with Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, until Elliott Abrams, a dyed-in-the-wool neo-conservative with close ties to Feith and Perle, was appointed last December as the NSC's top Middle East aide.

"They worked really hard for Abrams; he was a necessary link," Kwiatkowski told Inter Press Service on Wednesday. "The day he got [the appointment], they were whooping and hollering, 'We got him in, we got him in'."

They rarely communicated directly with the CIA, leaving that to political heavyweights, including Gingrich, who is reported to have made several trips to the CIA headquarters, and, more importantly, I Lewis "Scooter" Lilly, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser.

According to recent published reports, CIA analysts felt these visits were designed to put pressure on them to tailor their analyses more to the liking of administration hawks.

In some cases, NESA and OSP even prepared memos specifically for Cheney and Libby, something unheard of in previous administrations because the lines of authority in the vice president's office and the Pentagon are entirely separate. "Luti sometimes would say, 'I've got to do this for Scooter'," said Kwiatkowski. "It looked like Cheney's office was pulling the strings."

Kwiatkowski said that she could not confirm published reports that OSP worked with a similar ad hoc group in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office. But she recounts one incident in which she helped escort a group of half a dozen Israelis, including several generals, from the first floor reception area to Feith's office. "We just followed them, because they knew exactly where they were going and moving fast."

When the group arrived, she noted the book which all visitors are required to sign under special regulations that took effect after the September 11, 2001. "I asked his secretary, 'Do you want these guys to sign in'? She said, 'No, these guys don't have to sign in'." It occurred to her, she said, that the office may have deliberately not wanted to maintain a record of the meeting.

She added that OSP and MESA personnel were already discussing the possibility of "going after Iran" after the war in Iraq last January and that articles by Michael Ledeen, another AEI fellow and Perle associate who has been calling for the US to work for "regime change" in Tehran since late 2001, were given much attention in the two offices.

Ledeen and Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, recently created the Coalition for Democracy in Iran to lobby for a more aggressive policy there. Their move coincided with suggestions by Sharon that Washington adopt a more confrontational policy vis-a-vis Tehran.

Iran recently said it was prepared to turn over five senior al-Qaeda figures, including the son of Osama bin Laden, who are currently in its custody if Washington permanently shuts down an Iraqi-based Iranian rebel group that is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department.

Pentagon officials, particularly Feith's office, have reportedly opposed the deal, which had been favored by the State Department, because of the possibility that the group, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, might be useful in putting pressure on Tehran.

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ts/6932504.htm

Reality television: Rush Limbaugh revealed
BY MARK WHICKER
The Orange County Register

(KRT) - Rush Limbaugh's observations of Donovan McNabb don't even make his Top 1,000 list.

Limbaugh said Philadelphia's defense, not McNabb, won the `02 NFC East title. For Limbaugh, that is accuracy. McNabb missed the final six games, and the Eagles went 5-1.

He also said the NFL is "desirous" of having black coaches succeed, and it is hard to argue with that one, too. Not when the Lions get fined and punished because they hired Steve Mariucci without going through the charade of interviewing a black candidate.

Had Limbaugh stopped there, he still would be working for ESPN's Sunday-morning gabfest.

But Limbaugh never can stop there. He did not become the rich and powerful king of "news talk" by stopping there.

Because Limbaugh loves to reassure his audience that affirmative action is the ruin of American society, he had to play that card.

So he said the league and media also were "desirous" of seeing black quarterbacks succeed - as if McNabb was there on a quota system.

That prompted Limbaugh to "resign" and, as is customary with media bullies, he turned tail on his critics and offered no resistance.

The comment was not just politically incorrect. It was incorrect. The league and media have done nothing to promote black quarterbacks, or there might be 15 of them.

It has been a long process. Rush must have been on the golf course when:

Doug Williams won a Super Bowl.

Randall Cunningham electrified the Eagles.

Steve McNair got to a Super Bowl and began establishing himself as the NFL's toughest player.

Kordell Stewart got to an AFC Championship Game.

McNabb got to two NFC Championship Games.

Warren Moon set yardage records.

Daunte Culpepper mocked teams that picked Akili Smith and Tim Couch ahead of him.

Those battles were won long ago.

When you see a black quarterback today, it's as routine as a black 6 o'clock news anchor. Many fans had even forgotten McNabb was black.

But here's Rush, trying to take the whole process to appeal.

And this time he paid for it - because he said it on TV and not radio.

There are two losers in this story, neither of them Limbaugh, since he will spin Victimhood into even greater glory.

No, the losers are ESPN and talk radio.

Despite its fantastic investigative and documentary work, ESPN still has a terminal case of the cutes.

It also cannot leave the games alone, cannot get past its own boredom.

Limbaugh fulfilled ESPN's only demand: He was loud.

Putting him on TV and expecting him to do no damage was like letting a grizzly bear into your pantry and expecting the doughnuts to survive.

A conservative author on MSNBC said Limbaugh's remark wasn't a "hanging offense." He's right. Rush isn't being hanged. He merely lost his gig.

And it happened because ESPN, ABC and Disney wonder how you can conclude McNabb has gone backward when he had his best passer rating in `02 - unless you're working your agenda.

The other point is that Limbaugh could have said all kinds of things about McNabb on the radio and nothing would have happened.

After all, he has called Hillary Clinton a murderer, Tom Daschle the devil, and idly wondered why all post-office mug shots look like Jesse Jackson, with no regulation or retribution.

The reason that mudslinging works on the radio is simple: On the radio, Limbaugh is speaking to the dittoheads, the disciples who swallow everything. On TV, Limbaugh has to address the population as a whole.

McNabb knows about talk-show slime. In 1999, a radio joker organized busloads of listeners to attend the NFL draft and boo McNabb when the Eagles picked him, because he wasn't Ricky Williams. Hello, Philly.

Don Imus decided to honor the retiring Bob Murphy, a Hall of Famer who has broadcast Mets games since the franchise began in 1962. Except Imus spent his segment ridiculing Murphy, who has been ill and obviously makes mistakes borne of age.

A year ago, during the Arizona-St. Louis Division Series, a particular sicko in Phoenix finally showed how a talk-show host could get fired. Beau Duran called Flynn Kile, whose husband, Darryl, had died while pitching for the Cardinals in June of `02.

"You're hot," Duran said. "Do you have a date for the game?"

That did it, although it would have been more fun if Duran had been forced to stay on the air until several Cardinals pitchers could have gotten a personal audience.

Talk shows are a crack in the mirror of America. Ask Kobe Bryant's accuser. Or listen to the Phil Hendrie Show, based at KFI.

Hendrie interviews outlandish "guests" - the doctor who says parents should watch pornography with their kids, the Afghani USC student who demands that American planes fly closer to the ground. The phones light up immediately, from the outraged.

The joke is that the "guests" are Hendrie himself, a fact he announces periodically. The animals bellow anyway.

Sports talk isn't as important, of course, but it comes from the same poisonous root. Fire this guy. Trade this other guy. Call up Bud Selig and pretend you're a sports writer.

Rush Limbaugh crawled out of that bunker and put himself before TV lights, and everybody got a good look. For a month anyway.

---

© 2003, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).




Dittoheads, indeed

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/04/op...partner=GOOGLE


Washington's Sour Sales Pitch
By MICHAEL HOLTZMAN

Published: October 4, 2003


It is no surprise that a federal panel investigating American "public diplomacy" in the Arab world reported this week that despite our efforts to win hearts and minds, "hostility toward America has reached shocking levels." However, I doubt that recommendations like spending millions more on public relations and naming "a special White House coordinator for public relations efforts abroad" will be of much help.

Rather, the entire operation needs rethinking. United States public diplomacy is neither public nor diplomatic. First, the government ? not the broader American public ? has been the main messenger to a world that is mightily suspicious of it. Further, the State Department, which oversees most efforts, seems to view public diplomacy not as a dialogue but as a one-sided exercise. The result is America speaking at the world, usually with simplistic and often offensive propaganda:

>The State Department spent $15 million for a warm and fuzzy TV advertising campaign called "Shared Values" intended for broadcast in Muslim countries. The advertisements tried to depict religious tolerance here by giving brief profiles of thriving Muslims in the United States. Several Arab countries refused to run the ads, which were ultimately dropped after test audiences said they didn't touch on any of the main issues that divide America and the Muslim world.

>An Army unit in Iraq has been putting up posters with Saddam Hussein's face superimposed over the bodies of Elvis Presley, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Rita Hayworth and the rock star Billy Idol (who is adorned with a crucifix). Other than offending Muslims by depicting scantily clad women and Christian symbols, what does this campaign hope to achieve?

>The White House created an Office of Global Communications to counter hostile depictions of America in the foreign news media. The approach was to get military and civilian officials on the TV to rebut what they saw as inaccuracies on Al Jazeera and other satellite networks. But why complain about the unrestricted free press that is budding in the Middle East when you can embrace it, using it to tell America's story?

>The State Department has held a series of touchy-feely events in which "average" Americans ? including one daughter of a United States senator ? engage in video conferences with their Arab counterparts.

> The government is developing Web sites to influence people who happen to live in some of the least Internet-linked regions of the world.

> The State Department is spending $6 million to start a glossy, youth-oriented magazine called Hi; typical content is a celebrity profile of the Arab-American actor Tony Shalhoub. The magazine sells for as much as $2 in places with per capita incomes as low as $930 a year. While American officials are calling it a hit, newsstand owners in those countries say otherwise. "You can take the whole pile if you want," one vendor near American University in Cairo told a reporter for the weekly Al Ahram. "Nobody wants to buy it, anyway."

> In Afghanistan, the military dropped leaflets featuring the image of a clean-shaven Osama bin Laden in Western garb that read: "The murderer and coward has abandoned you." That the photo was so clearly doctored only enhanced the idea of America as a manipulative superpower, draining the goodwill and credibility needed for future diplomacy.

It is simply shocking that America, the country that invented modern advertising and marketing communications, has put together such a bewilderingly uncreative and counterproductive sales pitch. Is it any wonder that the Pew Foundation's latest polls of international attitudes find anti-Americanism a potent and growing force in the Muslim world?

Margaret Tutwiler, a highly capable former State Department spokeswoman, is expected to become the next public diplomacy czar. One hopes she will recognize that public diplomacy needs to acknowledge a world that is far more skeptical of government messages than we have assumed. To be credible to the so-called Arab street, public diplomacy should be directed mainly at spheres of everyday life. Washington should put its money into helping American doctors, teachers, businesses, religious leaders, athletic teams and entertainers go abroad and provide the sorts of services the people of the Middle East are eager for.

America is not a commodity to be sold to the Muslim world. The ultimate goal, as one State Department official has put it, should be to build "a level of understanding so that despite policy differences people won't want to come here and kill us." To get to that point, the government should get out of the advertising business and instead help Americans with something to offer play a bigger role.

http://www.sierratimes.com/03/10/03/tedlang.htm


Newton was Right: Bias Goes Both Ways!
By Ted Lang © 2003
The outrages of the Clinton administration clearly brought into focus the complicity of the liberally biased press and media. Hollywood loved and adored Clinton, even at a time when rabid adulation wasn’t an urgency considering the virtual nonexistence of a meaningful Republican opposition. Remember how House Speaker Newt Gingrich was crucified for a book deal, and then Hillary Clinton, who has yet to write a book on her own, was given an $8 million advance? Where’s Bill’s book? He got $12 million from the liberal publishing industry, also for never having written a book.

Sorry for the redundancy – Americans have a short memory. I cited this easily recalled example of the double standard, a double standard constantly demonstrated by the media’s bias resulting in their continually confirming the accuracy of such charges against them. Just watch them salivate over the created news event regarding the White House CIA leak, or an innocent Rush Limbaugh sports gaffe, and compare it to their fervor concerning all the strange Clinton era deaths, homicides and “suicides,” never investigated and followed-up on. Does CBS now finally fess up that Chandra is indeed no longer with us?


The alliance of the Times-led TV network news and most of the media with the liberalism that controls the Democrat Party has polarized the electorate between all Democrats and those that oppose this biased unfairness. The Republican Party has mistaken those who comprise the grass roots opposition to Democrats and their media as now being totally within their “big tent.” But as Bush’s slide in popularity is beginning to show, Republicans are counting their dumbos before their eggs have hatched.


It takes a real slick politician, like a Bill Clinton or an Adolf Hitler, to first create an object of hatred for the masses to rally against, and then to take this raw, negative emotion and create something positive that is consistently reliable in the long term. Bush’s squeaky election, then his smashing mid term electoral success, translates to a short-term positive characteristic of his presidency. Only the aforementioned outstanding politicians and accomplished snake oil carny hawkers can convert negative mass emotionalism to a positive constructive momentum that surrounds its leader with success.


An example of the latter concept is the failure of Bill Clinton to rally California Democrats to the positive in terms of standing by the fallen leadership of Gray Davis. Who can be attacked for his failures as he can amongst his challengers? Therefore, the Clintons and their DNC sent in the cavalry to rescue him in the form of liberalism’s newly crowned messiah, General Wesley Clark.


The point is, any revolution can agonize at great length on the negative, but is extremely vulnerable to the short run when required to perform positively. Witness the good, the bad, and the failure of the French Revolution. And unless the positive is balanced against the negative, an unnatural scientific phenomenon will occur. This phenomenon is natural in physics in that it matches equal amounts of force; but in politics, timing controls force. Revulsion of establishment media bias has put the Democrat Party at great risk of failure due to their obvious dependence on Hollywood and big media support. The Internet, Limbaugh, talk radio and Jayson Blair have discredited the latter.


The media advantage no longer exists for Democrats, or at least hadn’t until recently. It is becoming increasingly obvious that a new bias is being established by the equal and opposite reaction that can now be found on the Internet and talk radio. Limbaugh consistently calls himself a conservative, and not a Republican. That’s nonsense! Limbaugh, talk radio, certain Internet sites, are now firmly in Bush’s corner, and Bush is not even remotely classifiable as a conservative. The progressive socialist term that has morphed from the term “liberal” to “neoconservative” best describes Bush’s political proclivities. And they are anything but conservative.


What we have now, are talk radio shows and Internet sites that parrot party government propaganda lines, and see themselves as journalistic outlets. But the true objective of journalism, as protected by the First Amendment, is to expose government fraud, waste, and abuse. How can this happen if the new “conservative” media will do what they can to cover for the administration? How can these outlets meet this objective if all they care about is aligning themselves with the preconceived notions held by the uninformed masses?


What we are now seeing is both a new media and a new bias, and Newton’s principles apply. There is indeed an equal and opposite reaction. How does this reaction serve the interests of the people, the readers and viewers? Are pop-up business and financial bottom lines still what it’s all about? Is it only about profits in the final analysis? Then when and how will true journalism evolve to teach, to inform, and to warn?

Ivins: Was he or wasn't he? Saddam's links to al-Qaida tenuous

Molly Ivins
FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM

NEW YORK CITY -- Are you confused yet? Two weeks ago, President Bush said, "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties." In September 2002, he said, "You can't distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam." But Bush also said two weeks ago, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11."
That helpful clarification came after Vice President Dick Cheney was asked on "Meet the Press" why he thought 70 percent of Americans believe Saddam was behind Sept. 11. "It's not surprising that people make that connection," said the veep. Back in 2001, Cheney had said it was "pretty well confirmed" that Iraq and the Sept. 11 hijackers had coordinated. But most recently he said, "I don't know" if Saddam was connected to Sept. 11.
On the thoroughly discredited report that the lead hijacker Mohammad Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001, Cheney said, "We've never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or denying it." In fact, the report has been disavowed by Czech intelligence, and American intelligence found that Atta was on the East Coast of the United States at the time of the alleged meeting.
Now, still trying to follow the bouncing ball on Saddam and al-Qaida, we find the Los Angeles Times reporting in November 2002, "Allies Find No Links Between Iraq, Al Qaeda." Spain, which supported the United States in the war and has been active in prosecuting al-Qaida, reported "no link to al-Qaida." A high-ranking German intelligence official said talk of an Iraq-al-Qaida connection is "nonsense" and "not even the American intelligence community believes that anymore."
In August, the National Journal reported on three former Bush national security officials who had said "the prewar evidence tying al-Qaida to Iraq was tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies." Greg Thielmann, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said intelligence confirmed that Saddam and al-Qaida were "mortal enemies." Osama bin Laden often denounced Saddam Hussein as "an infidel."
Guess someone forgot to tell the president and the vice president. The one known connection between Iraq and al-Qaida is that for a time an al-Qaida operative was in Baghdad, presumably up to no good, although we have no evidence. Uh, there were 18 al-Qaida operatives lurking in this country -- does that make us guilty of harboring terrorists?
According to the Los Angeles Times, the classified section of a congressional report about 9-11 details "a Saudi government that not only provided significant money and aid to the suicide hijackers but also allowed potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to flow to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups through support charities and other fronts." That was the part of the congressional report we were not allowed to read, despite the vigorous protests of members of the committee.
Now, after his statement on Sept. 19 that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11," Bush said on Sept. 25: "9-11 changed my calculation. It's really important for this nation to continue to chase down and deal with threats before they materialize, and we learned that on 9-11."
So, you see, we have no evidence that Saddam was involved in 9-11, but it's all about 9-11.
Moving right along to the crystal-clear matter of the weapons of mass destruction, we find Colin Powell saying of Saddam back in 2001: "I think we ought to declare our containment policy a success. We have kept him contained; kept him in his box. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. He threatens not the United States."
Veep Cheney then believed the same. Five days after 9-11, he said, "Saddam Hussein is bottled up." But the storyline changed, and by October 2002, Bush told the nation: "The threat comes from Iraq. America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a nuclear cloud."
Just before the war, Bush said, "The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
We could go on and on with all the detailed information the administration gave us about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -- over 500 tons of Sarin gas, etc. But now comes the Kay report confirming what we have been learning all along -- there ain't none. For months, whenever anyone asked, "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" the administration and its flaks in the press corps said, "You better not raise that question because you'll sure be embarrassed when we find them." Well, we haven't. Not a trace of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. But, hey, it's only an interim report.
I have been trying to concentrate on the pragmatic lately. Even if we were wrong to go into Iraq, let's focus on what can be done now to save the situation. But sometimes -- such as when the president admits Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11 or our official WMD searchers admit they have nothing -- it seems to me useful to go back and review the bidding.
The fact that 70 percent of the American people are under the misimpression that Saddam was connected to 9-11 seems to me a shocking indictment of the news media. I think we need to go back and explain how we got where we are.
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Lessons from the past



"The Reichstag is burning" and the flag wavers rule.........

So many similarities.............


http://worldatwar.net/event/reichstagsbrand/


For some strange reason, 'flag wavers' of today have no concern for the loss of liberty thru the Patriot Act, go figure

Pretty sad isn't it?

MEDIA
Fox Distorts, Fox Connives

Just days after its release, "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," a film co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress, is selling like hotcakes, bouncing between the #1 and #2 most popular DVDs on Amazon.com. (Watch a preview of the film, and read major news coverage of it.) Not surprisingly, that has brought on a blaze of attacks from Fox News, whose credibility as a news organization has been severely damaged. In a diatribe that only reinforces Fox's unethical mix of conservative commentary and "news," Fox anchor/commentator John Gibson called one of the movie's sponsors, MoveOn.org, a "liberal hatchet organization" and claimed "America's major media are dominated by the left - 80-some percent of reporters are self-described liberals." That, of course, is untrue: As Media Matters notes, a report released on May 23 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that only 34% of national journalists identified themselves as liberal, and 61% identified themselves as moderate or conservative. Despite this onslaught, however, more evidence emerged yesterday of Fox's true bias. Georgetown law professor David Cole recounts first-hand in The Nation how Fox's Bill O'Reilly deliberately misled his viewers about Iraq. And now, thirty-three separate memos from Fox News director John Moody have been published for the first time, showing just how far the network's executives have gone to skew news coverage.

MEMOS URGE DOWNPLAYING OF U.S. CASUALTIES & VIOLENCE: Amid White House calls for more positive news coverage of Iraq, Moody's memos were instructing Fox correspondents to downplay U.S. casualties and violence plaguing Iraq. In a 3/24/04 memo, Moody complained, "the real news in Iraq is being obscured by temporary tragedy." A few weeks later, he instructs reporters to "not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S. lives."

MEMOS TRANSLATE INTO RIGHT-WING SPIN: Moody's memo on 6/2/03 highlighted FCC Chairman Michael Powell's interview on Fox after the FCC's decision to follow Rupert Murdoch's demand to loosen ownership rules. Moody said, "let's do a few hits on the commission's vote." That translated into Murdoch-style propaganda, with a Fox News anchor that day disparaging the previous rules preventing media consolidation as "written back when we had black and white TV, rabbit-ear antennas and three channels to choose from - obviously, the media world is very different today." While Powell's decision was the most radical rollback of media law in a generation, the Fox News anchor claimed, "In fact, this wasn't really a major overhaul. You simply loosened the rules a bit."

MEMOS DEFEND JOURNALISTICALLY UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR: As "Outfoxed" shows, Fox News viciously attacked former Bush counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke after he delivered a devastating account of how the White House botched the response to 9/11. And Moody's 3/24/04 memo shows just how dismissive of journalistic ethics the network became in its quest to destroy Clarke. In that memo, Moody justifies Fox's airing of an anonymous briefing Clarke gave on background during his tenure at the White House. When Clarke gave the briefing, journalists agreed not to use his name, as he was speaking generally for the White House, not giving his own opinion. But instead of respecting that agreement, Fox decided to follow the White House's smear campaign and became the first network to air the briefing, breaking a long-standing journalistic tradition of not exposing sources correspondents agreed to leave unattributed. The network then claimed Clarke's two-year-old statements called into question his new criticisms, even though he was no longer working for the White House and now free to air his opinions. As Moody bragged, "Neither [Fox correspondent Jim Angle] nor Fox did anything wrong, except accomplish some good reporting."

FOX INSIDER ADMITS CHALLENGING GOP 'NOT THE FOX WAY': Cablenewser, a respected cable industry trade publication, published an anonymous e-mail from a senior Fox News official in which the official admits that challenging Republicans and conservatives "is not the Fox way." Instead, the official says, the mantra is "Let the GOP off easy, and pound the Democrat du jour." The official, who according to the trade publication "has been with the network since it premiered," says that "to suggest that the on-air talent and producers are free to report the news as they see fit is disingenuous at best" – a point corroborated by former Fox employees interviewed in "Outfoxed." Of course, that did not stop Fox from disparaging those former employees in a statement this week. But as the Fox official says, the decision to attack Fox critics "can be laid right at [Fox News executive/former GOP operative] Roger Ailes' doorstep... nothing short of scorched-earth will do as far as slamming these [ex-employees]."

FOX'S FRIENDS ADMIT PREMISE OF 'OUTFOXED': While Fox News desperately tries to defend its credibility, some of its own right-wing allies are corroborating the premise of "Outfoxed." Insight Magazine, the far-right publication of the Washington Times, admitted Fox's news bias, noting themselves that the network is a "conservative news network that claims to be fair and balanced." Review a long history of Fox's biased reporting.

Propaganda Machines.....

Falwell is probably one of the more dangerous machines in current times. Easy to point to him and call him a looney, but like teflon, the crazy imagery slides away as some Christians blindly follow his biblical rants.
example:
'God is pro War'
LINK
Based on the reinterpretion of a Hebrew word, murder becomes an acceptable action.

Now enter the IRS.
( I got to this link thru an rss feedreader, you might need to subscribe to the NYT)
LINK

Now the 'fun' starts
Will the IRS make a decision against a 'friend' of their 'Boss', wait it out to see who their new 'Boss' will be this fall, or go for the 'gold'.

Stay tuned

I give NO credence whatsoever to a "news" program that, with all going on in the world, has as its lead story "American Idol" results. That says it all.

False prophets. Jesus is clear on violence. His followers are not. Falwell and his ilk have clout with the press because they are pro Israel; without Israel who would pay attention to him? Who would listen to him? The Carlyle Group? Boeing? Grumman? Haliburton?