McCamy Taylor
McCamy Taylor's JournalThe John and Elizabeth Edwards Appreciation Thread or Why John Solomon and the MSM Can Burn in Hell
Yes, I am going here. The same press that called Gore a Liar and called Kerry a Waffler attacked Edwards before he was even out of the gate. They had their man, John Solomon on the case, reporting on Edwards house, his hair, his hairdresser. Solomon all but called him gay. I think Ann Coulter really did call him gay. At the same time, the national press--the same people who declared Gore a Liar and Kerry a Waffler---declared that Obama and Hillary were locked in a Two Man Race as early as Jan 2007. And they shunned Edwards. After the initial flurry of slime pieces, no matter what he did, he could not get any coverage. It was a total media lock out. Had Edwards walked on water, we would have heard about the cut of Hillary's pantsuit or Obama's new tie.
The press told Democrats: "You have two candidates. You can choose from Obama or Hillary."
When Edwards came in second in Iowa, we were told that Obama came in first and Hillary came in second. Edwards second place finish meant that he was out of the race. We were told this on Countdown of all places. But by then it was old news. Because the corporate bosses had been following the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Citicorp/J.P.Morgan/BlueCross/Pfizer/BigOil script all along.
Which president would have held war crimes tribunals? Which president would have made banksters do the perp walk? Which president would have gotten on television and pleaded with the nation to deliver single payer health care----for the memory of his departed wife. Yes, the GOP knew that Elizabeth would die. They remembered what LBJ was able to accomplish by asking Americans to do it for JFK. Think about the sheer impossibility of passing Medicare and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s. But LBJ and Humphrey did it---with the help of a nation in mourning. The Bushies and the GOP were absolutely terrified of what the widower president Edwards would have been able to accomplish for the memory of his wife---
And so they character assassinated Edwards, deprived the couple of all hope, more than likely contributed to him seeking solace in the arms of another woman when it became clear that there was no way that they could win against the odds that were stacked against them and there would be no third chance for Elizabeth...
When Hillary Clinton is president, I want her to make single payer a priority. And I want them to name it the Elizabeth Edwards Act. To prove that the MSM does not always get its way.
One from the Vaults: "How Redstone Sold Dan Rather for 20 Pieces of Silver"
I am absolutely overjoyed that they are finally making a film about one of the most shameful moments of Mainstream Medium Whoredom---the Viacom conspiracy to get Bush re-selected so that Viacom could thwart media ownership rules. The price for Viacom? It's star reporter, Dan Rather. Here is what I wrote in 2007. Man, I was beginning to think that this day would never come! Go, Rather! Go, Mapes! Here's to Truth! 
Oh, and btw, after the Bush Was AWOL Story, 60 Minutes Planned to start investigating rumors of 2000 style voter suppression activity in swing states. That would have been very, very bad for W. and company. Good thing for them that someone pulled the plug on Mapes/Rather and Co.
To those who may be tempted to say "Get over it" not on your life. 
Ok, here is what I wrote in 2007.:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3539083
As everyone knows by now, Dan Rather, who has the highest recognizability and highest favorability rating of any anchor in the US and who was dropped like a hot potato by CBS after the authenticity of a single document in a single program was called into question, has filed a $70million law suit against his former employer.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/09/20...
As another DU member has posted, Viacom's chief, Sumner Redstone made no bones about which presidential candidate he favored in the 2004 election:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005669
"I don't want to denigrate Kerry," he went on, "but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people. . . . But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."
What an understatement. The truth was, Viacom/CBS desperately needed a second Bush term if it was to hold together its media empire and watch it grow, and it feared a John Kerry presidency. Here's a summary of what was going on behind the scenes at CBS from CommonDreams.org:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0403-25.htm
The attack on the existing media-ownership rules came from predictable corners: Both Viacom, which owns CBS, and Rupert Murdoch's conservative FOX News Channel were already in violation, and would be forced to sell off stations to come into compliance with the 35-percent limit. The rule change would enable Murdoch to control the airwaves of entire cities. That would be fine with Bush and the Powells, since Murdoch is one of their biggest boosters.
<snip>
It looked like Powell, backed by the Bush White House and with Republican control of Congress, would have no trouble ramming through these historic rule changes. The broadcast industry left nothing to chance: Between 1998 and 2004, broadcasters spent a boggling $249 million lobbying the federal government, including spending $27 million on federal candidates and lawmakers.
This would normally be called bribery. At the FCC, it's just business as usual.
You would think that FCC deregulation, affecting millions of Americans, would get major play in the media. But the national networks knew that if people found out about how one media mogul could own nearly everything you watch, hear and read in a city, there would be revolt. The solution for them was simple: They just didn't cover the issue for a year. The only thing the networks did was to join together — and you thought they were competitors? — in a brief filed with the FCC to call for media deregulation.
And then, something remarkable happened: Media activists — an unlikely coalition of liberals and conservatives — mounted a national campaign to defeat Powell and stop the corporate sell-off. The FCC received 2 million letters and e-mails, most of them opposing the sell-off. The Prometheus Radio Project, a grass-roots media activism group, sued to stop the sale of our airwaves, and won in federal court last June. These are hopeful signals that the days of backroom deals by media titans are numbered.
Now, that federal court ruling was a big problem for media giants like Viacom/CBS. After all its hard work and all its money (which had been essentially flushed down the toilet) it was back where it started in 2000---out of compliance with federal media ownership rules with no room to grow. (For those who like legal documents, here is one with lots of facts http://www.mediaaccess.org/filings/vcmcap.pdf ) Unless the case was overturned by the Supreme Court, it was stuck. And Viacom/CBS had another problem. W. was not doing as well as it had hoped, and John Kerry was not the friend of media giants that George W. Bush had been.
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert212...
"I wasn't there for the vote, but I was 100 percent in favor of overturning his rule," Kerry told CSPAN executive vice president Susan Swain during an interview taped earlier in the week. The "his" Kerry was referring to is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell. And the "rule" in question was the FCC's ill-fated effort to allow media companies to buy up more local media outlets by raising an ownership cap from a 35 to a 45 percent reach of the national audience.
This timeline from Bill Moyers shows what was happening in 2003 and early 2004 about the media merger issue:
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/mediatimeline.html
The Republican Congress was persuaded to raise the media ownership cap just enough to put NewsCorp and Viacom in compliance with the law, but they had no room to grow. (And since Viacom had been described as owning 41% of the nation's television channels in the court documents from 2001, I wonder if some one was fudging the math.) No problem, said the Bush administration. Just as soon as we win this re-election campaign, we are taking the appeal to the Supreme Court, which will raise the federal media ownership cap back up, so you guys in the entertainment business can start expanding again.
So, if you were Sumner Redstone and it was 2004 and you were faced with a choice of George W. Bush who was promising to write you a blank check for unlimited media acquisitions and mergers or John Kerry, who was really uncomfortable with the whole idea of too much media power concentrated into one set of hands, which candidate would you prefer? And if, as I suspect, you were actually out of compliance with the law (television holdings don't just shrink from greater than 41% down to 39% overnight), you might be a little nervous, too, that the current administration might decide to start enforcing the law.
The irony of it all is that the Bush administration never intended to keep its promise to launch a court appeal of the lower court ruling that threw out the FCC federal media owership rule changes. It was Michael Powell, who had done the administration's dirty work for years, who suddenly had a fit a conscience---or maybe he got pissed off at how they treated his dad, and he decided to get even in the best way he knew how, by turning the mainstream media against the Bush administration, by revealing them to be liars and cheats.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42134-20...
The decision disappointed big media companies that had lobbied heavily in support of the rules and thrilled those who had fought to keep tighter rein on how much control one company should have over television, newspapers and radio stations in individual markets.
<snip>
The rules would have allowed television networks such as CBS and Fox to buy a few more television stations nationally and let one company own the biggest newspaper and highest-rated television station in most cities.
Note the date on the Washington Post article. Jan. 28, 2005. When I read that, the curious behavior of the news networks over the exit polls made sense. I also knew that the Bush administration was in for a bumpy second term with the news media, because hell hath no fury.... The administration had waited until after W. was safely sworn in for his second term to admit to their flunkies in the corporate media that they had no intention of keeping their promises, probably because they knew that they would fail. When several of the networks got together to launch their own appeal, they failed. The result was coverage of DSMs, Cindy Sheehan and Katrina.
However, this revelation came too late for Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes, who had already been sold for 20 pieces of silver by their boss, Sumner Redstone, who preferred to dismantle the jewel in CBS's crown, 60 Minutes in order to curry favor with the White House in order to make money through mergers, rather than do it the old fashioned way, by producing quality programming.
A Hillary Rodham Clinton Appreciation Thread: Everyone's Mother
"I live in the United States," said I, "but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression. Sometimes I am in Washington, then in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado. My address is like my shoes: it travels with me."
Mother Jones (1837-1930)
From 1995:
Speaking more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on Chinese soil, Hillary Rodham Clinton catalogued a devastating litany of abuse that has afflicted women around the world today and criticized China for seeking to limit free and open discussion of women's issues here.
"It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights," Mrs. Clinton told the Fourth World Conference on Women assembled here.
"It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls," Mrs. Clinton said, or "when women and girls are sold into slavery or prostitution for human greed.
"It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small" she continued, or "when thousands of women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war."
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/06/world/hillary-clinton-in-china-details-abuse-of-women.html
If you live somewhere on this planet and want to preserve your right to have a child bride or commit infanticide against your newborn daughter because she was not born a boy or want to justify war "to protect the women" or want to "punish your enemy" by raping their wives and daughters or want to own African or Bangladeshi or "untouchable" slaves, then you should be very, very afraid of Hillary Clinton. The rest of us are looking forward to someone who thinks that other people's rights matter.
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