Link Roundup
2.25.05 - From Zack
I just haven't
had any time lately to write these due to some work i'm doing on an electoral
reform conference being held this weekend in Los Angeles. National experts
will conduct teach in's as well as show the various documentary films and
footage that are either finished or in the works that detail election day
abuses and the inherent problems that a corporate controlled, made for stealing,
electronic democracy poses.
Let's
begin on a lighter note...or a more serious one depending on how you
look at it...here's our twice un-elected-elected President:
"This notion
that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous.
Having said that, all options are on the table," Bush said.
No Child
Left Behind...the facts are in...just what we, and teachers been saying
all along! I just love how the media has been so quiet on this story
for so long...this report forced them to do something at least:
"Concluding a yearlong study on the effectiveness of President Bush's
sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel of
lawmakers drawn from many states yesterday pronounced it a flawed, convoluted
and unconstitutional education reform initiative that had usurped
state and local control of public schools."
And,
yes, the right wing found someone to offer the counter position...none
other than a rountable of corporate executives!! Thanks media for giving
them a prominent say on a study by experts in education!! Why do they deserve
to be quoted, why does the media need the fallacy of "balance"?:
"My big concern
is they did a better job of pinpointing problems than identifying solutions,"
said
Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, a group that represents
top corporate executives. "Most of what they call for would be a reversal that
would turn back the clock on what N.C.L.B. is trying to accomplish, all in the
name of federalism."
Maureen
Dowd on the return of the Swift Boaters!! This time their target
is seniors, not a war hero, and this time its to privatize social security.
And they even found a way to bring in gay marriage and being against
troops to demogoge AARP:
"...USA Next,
which has spent millions on Republican policy fights, has pledged
to spend as much as $10 million on ads and other tactics to "dynamite"
AARP and get Americans to rip up Social Security. It's hiring some
of the same consultants who helped the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who dynamited
John Kerry, a war hero, by sliming him as a war criminal. The USA Next group
intends to combine the two ruthless success stories of the Bush re-election:
the Swiftian tactic of amplifying its vicious and dishonest attacks
through the media, and the Rovian tactic of hanging gay marriage like
an anvil around the neck of a foe.
It began with an almost comically hyperbolic Internet ad that briefly
ran on The American Spectator's Web site, painting AARP as
pro-gay sex - even though it's tough to think of AARP and steamy lust
in the same hot breath - and anti-soldier. Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey
sent a letter to President Bush yesterday calling the USA Next ad "incendiary"
and asking him to denounce such tactics.
And, our
imbecile of a Governor who prides himself on "kicking ass" on nurses and teachers
and kissing up to big corporations (who, under his rules, are not special
interests, but nurses and teachers are...huh????) is finally being exposed more
regularly, and better, his poll numbers have gone down 10 points in
the past 2 months...its a start:
"Schwarzenegger
made headlines in recent months by deriding political opponents as "girlie
men" and ridiculing a group of nurses at a women's conference. Now,
an effort to paint the state's teachers as little more than a balky special
interest group has angered many critics, who have begun to question
why constituencies dominated by women have been subjected to such tough
talk.
"He behaves like
an arrogant patriarch with respect to women's occupations," said Rose Ann De
Moro, executive director of the California Nurses Association.
"Nurses, teachers, home health workers — it's vulgar how he's run roughshod
over them. He's arrogant, and he's a bully."
As a candidate,
Schwarzenegger was dogged by allegations that he had groped and humiliated
women on movie sets. In December, a small group of nurses gathered
at a state women's conference to protest Schwarzenegger's decision to
side with hospitals and delay changes to the state's nurse-to-patient ratio.
With Shriver in the audience, Schwarzenegger responded to the protesters
by saying, "The special interests don't like me in Sacramento because
I am always kicking their butts."
"The arrogance
of taking on teachers, nurses and other professions where women are
underpaid, overworked and vital to society is beyond the pale," said
Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and
a frequent Schwarzenegger critic. "But Arnold is someone who treats
women as objects, so it's natural for him to have a tendency to disregard
and devalue professions that are made up of women."
The teachers
union is running radio commercials statewide criticizing the governor's
proposals. Top officials of the organization, as well as some school administrators,
also have accused Schwarzenegger of reneging on a promise to deliver
$2 billion in revenue to schools (they didn't just accuse, HE DID RENEGE, god
the media sucks). The nurses uinon has taken out full-page newspaper
ads suggesting Schwarzenegger's corporate campaign donors are the real
special interests.
Last week, some
300 nurses and their supporters disrupted a movie premiere in Sacramento,
booing Schwarzenegger as he posed with actors Vince Vaughn and The Rock.
"A mass movement
is developing, and it's fascinating to see women coming together," DeMoro of
the nurses union said.
Guckerts
work to slander and defeat Dashcle also coming out:
Guckert, who
quit his job at Talon News two weeks ago, after it was learned he had used the
alias Jeff Gannon and had ties to several sex sites, took on the Argus
Leader last year in at least a dozen articles in which he sought
to link the paper to Daschle or claim a bias by the paper against Daschle's
opponent, John Thune. "He mainly wanted to know about areas that made the paper
look bad," Executive Editor Randell Beck told E&P Tuesday. "Our alleged
bias -- he would keep coming back to that even though there was no proof."
Among the attempts
by Guckert to portray the paper as biased in favor of Daschle
was a story that Daschle and Argus Leader political reporter Dave Kranz attended
South Dakota State University at the same time. "They did know each
other there," Beck acknowledged. "But that was all. He took things like that
and tried to put it together and make two plus two equal five."
Don't Give
Gannon A Pass...C'mon media...just pretendt Clinton is President
By now, almost
everyone's heard of Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. He's the fake reporter with
a false name given all-too-real press credentials by the White House. He's
known for asking biased, leading questions during press briefings before finally
being exposed a month ago as a right-wing operative with no journalism experience,
a fake name, and a shady past. There are some serious ethical, professional
and national security issues at stake. Now, "Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.)
is circulating a letter among his colleagues that asks
President Bush to launch an investigation" into how Gannon gained
access to White House press briefings without any journalistic qualifications.
Durbin and other concerned lawmakers are adding their voices to a previous
investigation request by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), as well as a subpoena
request by two leaders of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Reps. John Conyers
(D-MI) and Louise Slaughter (D-NY), who want federal prosecutors to gain access
to a record Gannon kept of his time over the past two years. Here are some
basic questions that must be answered by the White House:
HOW LONG CAN
JOURNALISTS GAIN ACCESS TO THE WHITE HOUSE WITHOUT AN FBI BACKGROUND CHECK?
Most White House journalists have what is called a "hard pass," a permanent
pass obtained after undergoing a
rigorous FBI background check. Gannon skipped over that step. Instead,
as Salon's Eric Boehlert explains, "the White House waved him into press briefings
for nearly two years using what's called a day pass." Now, day passes are
special exceptions that are "designed for temporary use by out-of-town reporters
who need access to the White House, not
for indefinite use by reporters." If the background check is necessary
for reporters with extended access to the White House, why were the rules
circumvented for Gannon? Is there a limit to how long a reporter can slide
on "day" passes, as Gannon did for years?
HOW DID GANNON
GET A WHITE HOUSE PRESS PASS TWO MONTHS BEFORE HIS SUPPOSED PUBLICATION EVEN
EXISTED? Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan admitted the White House
gave Gannon his first day press pass in February
2003. The problem: His "publication," Talon News, didn't exist until
April 2003.
BY WHAT CRITERIA
DID THE WHITE HOUSE EVALUATE TALON NEWS? Talon
News is the brainchild of a Republican activist from Texas, Bobby
Eberle. Eberle, who runs the aptly named "GOPUSA," told the New York Times
he created Talon News because he wanted to quietly construct a news service
with a conservative slant: "if someone were to see 'GOPUSA,' there's an instant
built-in bias there." In denying Gannon a pass, the congressional
press office pointed out Gannon was unable to show that "Talon News has
any paid subscribers." They also found that while actual working reporters
can show their principal income comes from reporting stories for publication
in actual news services, Talon's "paying a single reporter a 'stipend' does
not meet the intent of the rule." As the Washington Post's Dana Milbank put
it, Gannon was "representing a
phony media company that doesn't really have any such thing as circulation
or readership."
HOW DID GANNON
GET A WHITE HOUSE PRESS PASS UNDER A FAKE NAME? Jeff Gannon's real name
is James Guckert. (He told Wolf Blitzer that he changed his name because "Jeff
Gannon" was easier to pronounce.) Although all applications for White House
press passes are supposed to be thoroughly vetted, White House Press Secretary
Scott McClellan said
he was unaware that Gannon was using an alias. His predecessor, Ari
Fleischer, also pleads
ignorance. Gannon signed
in to the White House each day as "Jeff Guckert," a name which did
not match his pass yet no one seemed to thing that was strange. In fact,
no one at the White House seems overly concerned with what amounts to a stunning
national security breach.
WHAT IS GANNON'S
CONNECTION TO THE VALERIE PLAME CASE? Jeff Gannon has been interviewed
by FBI agents who are investigating another security breach in the White House,
namely, the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the press. So far,
Gannon has been coy, giving "conflicting
signals, over many months, concerning whether he saw a secret document
or merely knew about it from other sources." Today he says he never really
saw the memo, he'd only read about it in the Wall Street Journal. Reps. Conyers
and Slaughter are asking Patrick Fitzgerald, the lead prosecutor in the Plame
investigation, to subpoena the journal Gannon kept over the past two years
to find out what Gannon actually knew, and when.
SOCIAL SECURITY HOUSE PRIVATIZATION LEADER A WALL ST. LUSH: The Republican
chairman of the House Social Security Subcommittee, Louisiana Rep. Jim McCrery,
has accepted nearly $200,000 in contributions over four years from the very
same Wall Street firms that would likely reap billions if President Bush's
privatization scheme is made law. Campaign
for America's Future, a progressive advocacy group, yesterday accused
McCrery of a severe
conflict of interest, and announced plans to run "newspaper advertisements
against Mr. McCrery under the headline 'Who
Does This Man Work For?' in his hometown, Shreveport," the New York
Times reports. McCrery responded by attacking the group's "extreme liberal
bias," while ignoring the substantive charges.