Original here
BillMoyers.com / By Lauren Feeney

America's ‘Inexcusable’ Indifference to Extreme Poverty -- Frances Fox Piven Speaks

An interview with Frances Fox Piven, a political scientist and activist whose writings on poverty, welfare rights, and protest movements have infuriated the Right.

Photo Credit: Luna Vandoorne/ Shutterstock

March 15, 2012 |  Frances Fox Piven is a political scientist and activist who has been writing about poverty, welfare rights and protest movements for nearly half a century. The Nation, where Piven has been a long-time contributor, calls her “legendary.” Recently, Piven has become well known to another audience. Since Glenn Beck placed her at the root of one of his famous chalkboard graphs, accusing her of plotting to “intentionally collapse our economic system,” Piven has been covered throughout the conservative blogosphere. We talked to Piven about rising inequality, poverty, and the condition of the safety net, as well as her sudden and un-intentioned notoriety.

Lauren Feeney: There’s been a lot of talk recently about growing inequality — how the richest of the rich just keep getting richer. But what’s going on with the poorest of the poor?

Frances Fox Piven: Poverty has been increasing pretty rapidly, at least since 2000, and then there was another big spike with the financial crisis. The official poverty rate is about 15 percent [but] I think the most reasonable estimate is that one out of three Americans are now poor. The official poverty line in the United States is set much lower than it is in other rich countries. That’s because it’s based on the cost of a market basket of basic foods multiplied by three to cover all other costs, and those other costs have inflated much more rapidly than food costs. I want to count people who in other prosperous countries would also be called poor.

We have another measure which we call extreme poverty — people who are living at half of the official poverty line — and the numbers in extreme poverty are increasing rapidly too. It’s a big problem, an inexcusable problem. Profits are increasing; the aggregate amount of wealth in this country does not in anyway justify having such a large pool of poor people and near poor people. We’re wiping out whatever progress has been made in the last half century in decreasing poverty.

Feeney: Mitt Romney recently said in an interview with Soledad O’Brien that he’s not worried about the very poor because they have a safety net. What’s the state of that safety net?

Piven: Dismal. It’s torn in many places.

There was something like a safety net put in place gradually between the 1930s and the 1960s — that included the program we call welfare, the food stamp program, Medicaid, WIC (a nutritional program for pregnant women and infants), unemployment benefits. By the end of the 1960s, these programs had expanded to the point that they provided at least minimal assistance to the majority of the poor. It was a ragged safety net, but there was a safety net. After the protests of the 1960s subsided, there were steady cutbacks in the main program that is welfare, Aid to Families with Dependent Children we called it then. The cutbacks took mainly the form of failing to raise the benefit levels to take account of inflation, so in real terms the benefits sank.

This was accompanied by an enormous outpouring of rhetoric blaming poor people — and black people and Hispanic people — for their own poverty. The culmination of all this occurred in 1996 when Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility Act, which essentially eliminated the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and replaced it with another program know as TANF. Under TANF, the states have been given much more license to refuse people, and the consequence has been that far, far fewer people get any assistance from TANF than they did from Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And this is of course called a success.

Feeney: My understanding is that, under TANF, there are work requirements, time limits, restrictions for immigrants, talk of drug testing ….

Piven: Finger printing, all sorts of things. They have criminalized the act of applying for or receiving government benefits. And people shrink from that, people shrink from the humiliation.

Feeney: If you pass the 60-month time limit on TANF benefits, is there any safety net for you?

Piven: Food stamps. You can still get food stamps. The truth is, we don’t even know how these people are surviving.

Feeney: By lumping everyone — or almost everyone — together, does the meme of “the 99 percent” overlook the problems of the extremely poor?

Piven: Well, not as much as the rest of us do. The encampments that the Occupy movement established did welcome the homeless, feed the homeless at their food kitchens; I think they behaved in a very ethical and inclusive way.

Something else is beginning to happen now. There are organizations of the poor, some of them who trace their origins back to the 1960s, and these organizations are very supportive of Occupy. This is not just a movement of college kids whose futures have been destroyed. This isn’t just a movement of workers who find their wages reduced. This should be a movement of all of the people who suffer the burdens of extreme inequality, especially the poor.

Poor and minority people in the United States have been singled out, basically since about 1980, as the targets for right wing and Republican rhetoric — tremendous amounts of castigation of the poor, as if it were poor people’s fault that things are going wrong in America. The argument has been that the big moral problem of the United States is that “those people” don’t get up and work hard, “those people” have babies out of wedlock, “those people” hang out on the stoop and drink beer…. It’s relentless. This kind of propaganda is mainly designed for the great mass of working people in the U.S. to quell whatever sympathies they might have for the poor, but also to instill fear in them of the risk of falling into poverty, the risk of having to depend on a government program or a handout. But the poor are also an audience for this kind of castigating propaganda. It has an effect — it makes people shrink into themselves, and that’s a very bad thing, because then they can’t be citizens, they can’t be political, they can’t protest the conditions under which they live.

If they — when they — link up with the larger protests, this will be an enormous boost to their sense of themselves, of their rights, and of their capacities to fight back against the policies that have brought them this low.

Feeney: Glenn Beck talks about you as though “Frances Fox Piven” were a household name. What’s he saying about you?

Piven: Richard Cloward and I wrote an article published in The Nation in 1966 called “A Strategy to End Poverty” which proposed a big mobilization by community organizers, social workers and poor people to get full benefits under the welfare system, because we had done research showing that the welfare system operated by denying people their legal benefits.

They got hold of this article and labeled it a blueprint for bringing down American capitalism.

I didn’t know that Glenn Beck was featuring me on his television program until my students at the City University of New York put a Glenn Beck chalkboard up on the door of my office which showed that Richard and I were at the trunk of what Glenn Beck called the “tree of revolution,” and the branches went off to include SDS, the financial crisis, Barack Obama — I mean, it was amazing. Then I began to pay attention and Googled myself from time to time, and realized something about the nature of propaganda in contemporary America — things are so confusing, you can tell people anything. The Tea Party believes this. I have gotten many, many hundreds of death threats. They put my address on the Internet. Then I decided, they are drawing on a tradition that goes back to the Inquisition — they must think I’m a witch, because how else could I be responsible for so much?

Lauren Feeney is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and multimedia journalist.

CANADIANS REMAIN SAFE FROM GLENN BECK ATTACK

Blogger's Note: We Americans remain vulnerable. As you can see below, even I have been attacked by Glenn Beck. Click here to see whether you too might have been a target.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University

Posted: February 28, 2011 09:54 PM

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada's Radio Act requires that "a licenser may not broadcast....any false or misleading news." The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio. Harper's proposal was timed to facilitate the launch of a new right wing network, "Sun TV News" which Canadians call "Fox News North."

Harper, often referred to as "George W. Bush's Mini Me," is known for having mounted a Bush like war on government scientists, data collectors, transparency, and enlightenment in general. He is a wizard of all the familiar tools of demagoguery; false patriotism, bigotry, fear, selfishness and belligerent religiosity.

Harper's attempts to make lying legal on Canadian television is a stark admission that right wing political ideology can only dominate national debate through dishonest propaganda. Since corporate profit-taking is not an attractive vessel for populism, a political party or broadcast network that makes itself the tool of corporate and financial elites must lie to make its agenda popular with the public. In the Unites States, Fox News and talk radio, the sock puppets of billionaires and corporate robber barons have become the masters of propaganda and distortion on the public airwaves. Fox News's notoriously biased and dishonest coverage of the Wisconsin's protests is a prime example of the brand of news coverage Canada has smartly avoided.

Tucson Shooting: Don't assume you understand its genesis before watching all three of these stunning interviews!

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January 14, 2011

Tucson Shooting Survivor: "It Looks Like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the Rest Got Their First Target"

We speak with Tucson shooting survivor Eric Fuller. A 63-year-old disabled veteran, Fuller had campaigned for Arizona Democrat Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in her reelection campaign and was at the supermarket in Tucson on Saturday to meet with her. He was shot in the knee and also wounded in the back. "It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target," Fuller says. "Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled." [go here for transcript]

Why is Glenn Beck Obsessively Targeting Frances Fox Piven?

For more than a year, Fox News host Glenn Beck has been increasingly targeting Frances Fox Piven, a 78-year-old distinguished professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Beck has repeatedly accused her of advocating violence and of hatching a plan in 1966 to overthrow the system. Piven joins us in our studio. [go here for transcript]

Daniel Hernandez, Intern Who Helped Save Giffords: Political Discourse Has Become "Completely Destructive"

We speak with Daniel Hernandez, the 20-year-old intern for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords who has been credited with likely saving Giffords’ life immediately after the shooting. "I think a lot of people are realizing that the political discourse has, for years, become completely destructive and more about tearing the other people apart instead of trying to work together to build up the nation and the state," Hernandez says. [go here for transcript]

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You also might want to flash back to this one.

March 25, 2010

Gabrielle Giffords on MSNBC (March 25th)

While it is true that a deranged person in an information vacuum could go out and shoot anyone, any deranged person who watches very much American TV would surely have certain ideas pre-planted in his/her head...

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 Shakesville / By Melissa McEwan

  

Let's Get This Straight: There Is No Progressive Equivalent to the Right's Violent Rhetoric

The shooting in Tucson was not an anomaly. It was an inevitability, and as long as we play this foolish game of "both sides are just as bad," it will be inevitable again.

January 13, 2011 [Trigger warning for violent rhetoric of many different stripes.]


Both sides are, in fact, not "just as bad," when it comes to institutionally sanctioned violent and eliminationist rhetoric.

Photo Credit: JoelInSouthernCA on Flickr

An anonymous commenter at Daily Kos and the last Republican vice presidential nominee are not equivalent, no matter how many ridiculously irresponsible members of the media would have us believe otherwise.

There is, demonstrably, no leftist equivalent to Sarah Palin, former veep candidate and presumed future presidential candidate, who uses gun imagery (rifle sights) and language ("Don't Retreat, RELOAD") to exhort her followers to action.

There is no leftist equivalent to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a group which was created from the mailing list of the old white supremacist White Citizens Councils and has been noted as becoming increasingly "radical and racist" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which classifies the CCC as a hate group—and is nonetheless considered an acceptable association by prominent members of the Republican Party, including a a former senator and the last Republican presidential nominee.

There is no leftist equivalent to Glenn Beck, host of a long-running nationally syndicated radio show, former host of a show on CNN and current host of a show on Fox, best-selling author, DC rally organizer, and longtime user of eliminationist rhetoric, including equating universal healthcare to rape, joking about victims of forest fires being America-hating liberals, comparing Al Gore to Hitler, condoning the murder of Michael Moore, accusing Holocaust survivor George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator, joking about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, equating immigration reform with burning US citizens alive, publicly endorsing violent revolution, and winkingly telling his viewers not to get violent, all of which amounts to a speck on the tip of a very big iceberg.

There is no leftist equivalent to Ann Coulter, best-selling author and syndicated columnist, who has been a panelist on Fox's Hannity 28 times and was on Hannity & Colmes an additional 18 times, who has been a guest multiple times on The O'Reilly Factor, Geraldo at Large, Larry King Live, Huckabee, Your World with Neil Cavuto, Hardball, and other cable news shows, has made appearances on The Tonight Show, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, The Daily Show, and Real Time with Bill Maher, and has co-hosted The View, and has also said that a baseball bat is "the most effective way" to talk to liberals, as well as: "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too." And: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." And: "In [Clinton's] recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about whether he 'did it,' even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate."

There is no leftist equivalent to Bill O'Reilly, Fox News television show host, nationally syndicated radio show host, and best-selling author, who has appeared on The Tonight Show eleven times, The Late Show with David Letterman six times, The Daily Show six times, Live with Regis and Kelly five times, The View four times, Good Morning America three times, and Real Time with Bill Maher twice, among other national shows, and has lied about and stalked his critics, said that progressive bloggers should be dealt with "with a hand grenade," said Air America hosts were traitors and should be "put in chains," as well as: "And if Al Qaeda comes [to San Francisco] and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

There is no leftist equivalent to Rush "I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for" Limbaugh, nationally syndicated radio show host and invitee to the Bush White House.

There is no leftist equivalent to Pat "Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path" Buchanan, a regular MSNBC contributor and syndicated columnist.

There is no leftist equivalent to Michelle "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror" Malkin, a regular Fox panelist, best-selling author, and prominent conservative blogger.

There is no leftist equivalent to Pat "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians" Robertson, host of The 700 Club, who was a guest on Fox's Hannity & Colmes five times.

There is no leftist equivalent to Michael "Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war" Reagan, or Michael "Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing compared to what I'd like to see done to these people" Savage, both nationally syndicated radio show hosts.

There is no leftist equivalent to the Minutemen and other radical and eliminationist-spewing anti-immigration groups, some of whom have been subcontracted to work the border by the US government.

There is no leftist equivalent to radical and eliminationist-spewing anti-choice groups, who openly target doctors and call for their assassinations—and had a success just last year in the murder of Dr. George Tiller—and whose leaders get featured in whitewashing profiles in the Washington Post.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This is not an argument there is no hatred, no inappropriate and even violent rhetoric, among US leftists. There is.

This is evidence that, although violent rhetoric exists among US leftists, it is not remotely on the same scale, and, more importantly, not an institutionally endorsed tactic, as it is among US rightwingers.

This is a fact. It is not debatable.

And there is observably precious little integrity among conservatives in addressing this fact, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Palin takes the absolute cake for audaciously asserting that her rifle sight imagery was really "a surveyor's symbol," and not even having the decency to sheepishly acquiesce that, even if that were true (and not evident bullshit), it's understandable how a reasonable person could look at her "surveyor's symbol" alongside the word "target" and get the wrong, ahem, idea. No, it's all just a wall of total denial in the Palin camp, when she's not whining about being a victim herself of people who have the temerity to actually hold her accountable for her carelessly casual violent rhetoric. It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. And then it's deny and play the martyr.

But it's not like Palin's ideological allies are covering themselves in glory, either. There's no call for accountability, no call for reflection, not among conservatives. Just the usual game of deflection and projection, as they desperately try to find a way to make this liberals' fault.

Bill Kristol took to the airwaves this morning to call criticism of Palin "a disgrace" and accuse liberals of "McCarthyism." Commentators on Fox News, meanwhile, blame President Obama for not changing the tone in Washington, like he promised. Which would be hilarious, were that redirection of blame not a key part of conservatives' strategy to dodge responsibility for the eliminationist rhetoric that certainly contributed to the tragic events of this weekend.

When, a few months ago, there was a spate of widely-publicized suicides of bullied teens, we had, briefly, a national conversation about the dangers of bullying. But in the wake of an ideologically-motivated assassination attempt of a sitting member of Congress, we aren't having a national conversation about the dangers of violent rhetoric—because the conversation about bullying children was started by adults, and there are seemingly no responsible grown-ups to be found among conservatives anymore.

Faced with the overwhelming evidence of the violent rhetoric absolutely permeating the discourse emanating from their side of the aisle, conservatives adopt the approach of a petulant child—deny, obfuscate, and lash out defensively.

And engage in the most breathtaking disingenuous hypocrisy: Conservatives, who vociferously argue against the language and legislation of social justice, on the basis that it all "normalizes" marginalized people and their lives and cultures (it does!), are suddenly nothing but blinking, wide-eyed naïveté when it comes to their own violent rhetoric.

They have a great grasp of cultural anthropology when they want to complain about progressive ideas, inclusion, diversity, and equality. But when it comes to being accountable for their own ideas, their anthropological prowess magically disappears.

Only progressives "infect" the culture, but conservative hate speech exists in a void.

That's what we're meant to believe, anyway. But we know it is not true. This culture, this habit, of eliminationist rhetoric is not happening in a vacuum. It's happening in a culture of widely-available guns (thanks to conservative policies), of underfunded and unavailable medical care, especially mental health care (thanks to conservative policies), of a widespread belief that government is the enemy of the people (thanks to conservative rhetoric), and of millions of increasingly desperate people (thanks to an economy totally fucked by conservative governance).

The shooting in Tucson was not an anomaly. It was an inevitability.

And as long as we continue to play this foolish game of "both sides are just as bad," and rely on trusty old ablism to dismiss Jared Lee Loughner as a crackpot—dutifully ignoring that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators; carefully pretending that the existence of people with mental illness who are potentially dangerous somehow absolves us of responsibility for violent rhetoric, as opposed to serving to underline precisely why it's irresponsible—it will be inevitable again.

Let's get this straight: This shit doesn't happen in a void. It happens in a culture rife with violent political rhetoric, and it's time for conservatives to pull up their goddamn bootstraps and get to work doing the hard business of self-reflection.

This is one problem the invisible hand of the market can't fix for them—unless, perhaps, it's holding a mirror.

Melissa McEwan writes and edits the blog Shakespeare's Sister.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Examination of Conscience

Examination of Conscience

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Reader Supported News

12 January 11

Petition: Congressional Action on Political Violence Advocacy

On November 22, 1963, Mummy picked me up early from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. Driving home to Hickory Hill in northern Virginia, I noticed that all the District flags were at half staff. Mummy told us that a bad man had shot Uncle Jack and that he was in heaven. Daddy's friend and former football teammate, Dean Markham, a Justice Department Rackets Division Attorney picked up my little brother David at Our Lady of Victory. "Why did they kill Uncle Jack?" David asked him. Dean, an ex-marine, combat veteran, known as the toughest linesmen on the "GI-Bill Squad," - the toughest football team in Harvard University's history - wasn't tough enough to field that question. He wept silently all the way to our driveway.

When I got home, Daddy was walking in the yard with Brumus, our giant black Newfoundland and Rusty, the Irish Setter. We ran and hugged him. We were all crying. He told us, "He had the most wonderful life, and he never had a sad day."

Neither Beck, Hannity nor Savage nor the hate merchants at Fox News and talk radio can claim to have invented their genre. Toxic right-wing vitriol so dominated the public airwaves from the McCarthy era until 1963 that President Kennedy, that year, launched a citizen's campaign to enforce the Fairness Doctrine, which required accuracy and balance in the broadcast media. Students, civic and religious groups filed more than 500 complaints against right-wing extremists and hate-mongering commentators before the FCC.

The Dallas, Texas, airwaves were particularly radioactive; preachers and political leaders and local businessmen spewed extremist vitriol on the city's radio and TV stations, inflaming the passions of the city's legions of unhinged fanatics. There was something about the city - a rage or craziness, that, whether sensible or not, seemed to have set the stage for Jack's murder. The Voice of America, half an hour after the assassination, described Dallas as "the center of extreme right wing." The Texas town was such a seething cauldron of right-wing depravity that historian William Manchester portrayed it as recalling the final days of the Weimar Republic. "Mad things happened," reported Manchester. "Huge billboards screamed 'Impeach Earl Warren.'" Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant "Stevenson's going to die - his heart will stop stop stop and he will burn burn burn!" The mercantile elite that ruled the city carefully cultivated the seeds of hate. Radical-right broadsides were distributed in public schools; the Kennedy name was booed in classrooms; junior executives who refused to attend radical seminars were blackballed and fired. Manchester continued:

Dallas had become the mecca for medicine show evangelists of the National Independence Convention, the Christian Crusades, the Minutemen, the John Birch Society and Patrick Henry Societies and the headquarters of right wing oil man H.L. Hunt and his dubious activities ... The city's mayor, Earl Carroll, a right wing co-founder of the John Birch Society, was known as 'the socialist mayor of Dallas' because he maintained his affiliation with the Democratic Party.

Dallas's oil and gas barons who routinely denounced JFK as a "comsymp" had unbottled the genie of populist rage and harnessed it to the cause of radical ideology, anti-government fervor and corporate dominion.

Uncle Jack's speech in Dallas was to have been an explosive broadside against the right wing. He found Dallas' streets packed five deep with Kennedy Democrats, but among them were the familiar ornaments of presidential hatred; high-flying confederate flags and hundreds of posters adorning the walls and streets of Dallas showing Jack's picture inscribed with "Wanted for Treason." One man held a posterboard saying, "you a traitor [sic]." Other placards accused him of being a communist. When public school P.A. systems announced Jack's assassination, Dallas school children as young as the fourth grade applauded. A Birmingham radio caller declared that "any white man who did what he did for niggers should be shot." As my siblings and I visited the White House to console my cousins John and Caroline, a picket paraded out front with a sign, "God punished JFK."

Jack had received myriad warnings against visiting the right-wing Texas city. Indeed, there had been a sense of foreboding even within our family as he and Aunt Jackie prepared for the trip. Jack made an unscheduled trip to Cape Cod to say goodbye to my ailing grandfather. The night before the trip, Mummy found Jack distant and brooding at a dinner for the Supreme Court Justices. He was very fond of Mummy, but for the first time ever, he looked right through her.

Jack's death forced a national bout of self-examination. In 1964, Americans repudiated the forces of right-wing hatred and violence with an historic landslide in the presidential election between LBJ and Goldwater. For a while, the advocates of right-wing extremism receded from the public forum. Now they have returned with a vengeance - to the broadcast media and to prominent positions in the political landscape.

Gabrielle Giffords lies in a hospital room fighting for her life, and a precious nine-year-old girl is dead along with five others. Let's pray for them and for our country and hope this tragedy prompts another round of examination of conscience.

In the wake of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' attempted assassination, conservatives are claiming the attacker was a lone nut case uninfluenced by media suggestions. But why then is it that the only people in the media's "joking" crosshairs have been liberals ...and only liberals have been attacked?

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January 10th, 2011 12:48 AM

Fox News: The No. 1 Name in Murder Fantasies

By Steve Rendall / Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

Bill O'Reilly's recent "joke" about decapitating Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was only the latest example of a demented Fox News culture that permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against those deemed enemies of the station, its personalities or their worldview.

During the cable channel's 2008 election coverage, in what she later called an attempt at humor, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta linked Osama bin Laden to Barack Obama as people who both should be assassinated:

And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could.

A week before Trotta's "joke," Republican primary candidate Mike Huckabee was apologizing for his own Obama assassination quip. Addressing a gathering of the National Rifle Association, Huckabee joked that a loud thud heard backstage during his address was Barack Obama diving to the floor to avoid gun shots. Months later, Huckabee was given his own Fox News show.

With its biggest new star, Glenn Beck, Fox News hired a host well-known for on-air death fantasies--for instance, chattering about killing filmmaker Michael Moore with his bare hands and hoping out loud that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio) would burn to death. In a Fox News skit in September 2009, Beck portrayed himself poisoning Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It's a culture that apparently filters down to Fox News viewers and supporters. Over the years Fox Nation, the Fox News "owned and operated" fan website, has regularly featured comments expressing the desire to see Barack Obama's assassinated.

Yesterday News Hounds (11/8/10) published a collection of such quotes, some of which can still be read at on the Fox site. Fox Nation purports to be self-policing, to depend on readers to report inappropriate and irresponsible remarks for removal. Apparently presidential assassination fantasies fall short of Fox Nation's standards for inappropriate or irresponsible commentary.

Recent examples of these assassination fantasies on Fox Nation include comments calling for President Obama to "get what Kennedy got," for the CIA to "take this pres down" and a warning to the president that the Koran "ain't thick enough to stop a .308 round."

There is some evidence that Fox's murder fantasy culture has already helped to spark violent action. Reporting for Media Matters, journalist John Hamilton tells the story of Byron Williams, a Beck devotee who engaged in a shootout that injured two California Highway Patrol officers in July. After his apprehension, Williams told police he'd intended to travel Oakland California to kill people at the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.

In a jailhouse interview in which he described the right-wing media sources that informed his views, Williams returned again and again to Glenn Beck:

I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.

Among the things Beck did, according to Hamilton, was attack the Tides Foundation in 29 separate Fox News shows in the 18 months leading up to Williams' foiled mission to Oakland.

Moreover, as the ADL reports, Pittsburgh's Richard Poplawski was so inspired by Beck's anti-government conspiracy theories, he reposted to a neo-Nazi website tape of Beck suggesting the government was building concentration camps for dissidents--before he was arrested after a shootout with police that left three officers dead.

If this all wasn't so deadly serious it would be seriously funny, because O'Reilly has spent years accusing liberal and progressive websites of fomenting hate speech. O'Reilly's crusade largely targets the comment and open forum sections of such websites, highlighting comments that generally pale in comparison to those broadcast on Fox and posted on Fox Nation. To add to the irony, when O'Reilly is called out for failing to make distinctions between the editorial content and comment sections of these websites, he argues that the groups are responsible for everything on their websites:

Open forum is bull.... You can regulate what’s on your website.

When it comes to hypocrisy and Fox News, you really can't make this stuff up.

The hostility behind O'Reilly's creepy Milbank beheading joke was on display when the host appeared to make a veiled threat toward Milbank's boss in an appearance on another Fox show. Apparently angered that Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt permitted Milbank to publish columns critical of Fox News, O'Reilly had Fox host Megyn Kelly put a picture of Hiatt up on the screen, and told her audience:

This is the editor, Milbank's editor, Fred Hiatt. And Fred won't do anything about Milbank lying in his column. I just want everybody in America to know what the Washington Post has come to. All right, you can take Fred's picture off. Fred, have a nice weekend, buddy.

(Later in the same appearance, O'Reilly suggested that the host join him in physically assaulting Milbank: "I think you and I should go and beat him up.")

O'Reilly's veiled threat toward Hiatt recalls one made in a recent interview with an Australian paper by Fox boss Rupert Murdoch (Australian Financial Review, 11/5/10):

People love Fox News.... We said to the cable operators when we put the price up, we said, do you want a monument to yourself....? Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down.

Perhaps the fish does rot from the head.

Fair and Balanced Questions: What is truly going on in America, "voter fraud" by individual Democratic voters ...or systematic rigging of elections by hacking election computers? And supposing that the election computers ARE being hacked. Who is doing that, George Soros or Karl Rove?

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As a start toward getting the truth, let's watch Jon Stewart's recent summation of Glenn Beck's amusingly illustrated case against Soros:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
George Soros Plans to Overthrow America
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

In the clip you just watched you repeatedly hear "voter fraud" mentioned on Fox News -- enough times to make anyone suspect that myriad Democratic voters commiting "voter fraud" are the reason why the Republicans didn't sweep both houses of congress last November 2nd.  Karl Rove's role in hacking election computers goes totally unmentioned.

Is this because Rove innocent? Well, watch this Keith Olbermann clip from a couple years ago:



O.K., so that was a couple years ago. Maybe the case against Rove has long since dried up?

Um, well, this account is pretty damned current:

John Michael Spinelli
Columbus Government Examiner

CBS, CNN capture video of Ohio attorney subpoena served on Karl Rove
October 27th, 2010 3:43 pm ET

COLUMBUS, Ohio (CGE) - A federal subpoena, issued by Ohio attorney Cliff Arnebeck and sanctioned by the Office of Ohio Secretary of State, was served last Sunday in Washington to Karl Rove on his way to an appearance on the CBS news program Face the Nation.

CNN, CBS capture video of subpoena servicing to Karl Rove

The process service for the subpoena reported that CBS and CNN camera men "captured video" of the event.

In an article written by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman and published at OpEdNews.com, the federal subpoena orders Rove to testify in deposition about his role in the alleged theft of the 2004 election, and to discuss his orchestration of tens of millions of corporate/billionaire dollars in this year's General Elections on November 2.

...

For the rest of the article above, go here: http://www.examiner.com/government-in-columbus/cbs-cnn-capture-video-of-ohio-attorney-subpoena-served-on-karl-rove

It's not surprising that Glenn Beck missed this detail, because it certainly doesn't fit very well into his story.

But why didn't Olbermann pick up on it?

Oops, how obvious! Olbermann has recently been shown that he can be fired for the most trivial of "missteps" ...and any mention on the air of electronic election rigging in the USA by REPUBLICANS would surely be a "capital offense."

The "mainstream media" that most Americans watch is mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch, not George Soros.

Perhaps many of my readers have difficulty in believing that wholesale election rigging can be taking place in "the land of the free and the home of the brave." That would be thoroughly un-American. Surely something that would have been detected and decried by the House Un-American Activities Committee...

Seriously though, U.S. voting machines and central tabulators are decidedly vulnerable to hacking by insiders.

But how do we know that and why should we believe such an un-American activity is being carried out in America? Well, even Jon Stewart has figured this out:



But neither Jon Stewart nor Glenn Beck are computer experts. So let's hear from some true experts:



Perhaps you Fox News watchers are a bit suspicious that all those experts may have been "poor loser" Democrats. If so, then hear it from REPUBLICAN information-technology expert Stephen Spoonamore:



So, now maybe you are convinced that the means for wholesale election theft are soundly established, but is there any strong evidence of wholesale rigging of U.S. elections has actually taken place?

Yes, indeed there is!   For example, I highly recommend that you read "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?" by Steven F. Freeman & Joel Bleifuss. But if that is too much bother and/or you want to know about more recent elections than 2004, go here: http://electiondefensealliance.org/

That leaves only the question of what George Soros has been up to recently.

Just what is Soros' role in U.S. politics? Is he really plotting the overthrow of the entire country like Glenn Beck says? Well, an article in today's Los Angeles Times spells out Soros' stated opinion on Obama's first two years in office.

The last three paragraphs of this LA Times article read like this:

Soros, who did not participate in the 2010 election ... [says] Obama needs to push back more against the right, particularly around the issue of tax cuts.

"I admire the president for his attempt to rise above partisan party politics," he said in a statement he sent to the Tribune Washington Bureau. "His policies have made the recession he inherited shorter and shallower than it would otherwise have been. But after two years of complete noncooperation and vicious distortion, the time for compromise has ended."

"Extending the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% will not create jobs, but it will preclude further job-creating fiscal measures, including support to states," he said. (blogger emphasis added)

Um, that doesn't sound much like a plot to take over the country to me.

Rather, it sounds a lot more like a plot for We The People to rein in the looting of our country by the richest 2% -- and implies that Soros is actually "calling in artillery on his own position" to SAVE the country!

Yes, Virginia, there IS a component of the U.S. mainstream media that still tells the truth!

Blogger's Note: Whether or not you read this article in its entirety, do not fail to play this fabulous two and a half minute video!  Sorry, but because no embedding code was provided, you will need to go directly to the McClatchy Newspapers site.

Posted on Thu, Apr. 01, 2010
Not satisfied with U.S. history, some conservatives are rewriting it

Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: April 03, 2010 10:05:15 AM

WASHINGTON — The right is rewriting history.

The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.

The effort reaches far beyond one state, however.

In articles and speeches, on radio and TV, conservatives are working to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today's politics.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

Some conservatives say it's a long-overdue swing of the pendulum after years of liberal efforts to define history on their terms in classrooms and in popular culture.

"We are adding balance," Texas school board member Don McLeroy said. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."

The effort in Texas and nationwide is controversial, however, even among many conservatives. McLeroy was defeated in a recent primary after he led the campaign for a more conservative version of history, a defeat that the National Review, a leading conservative organ, called "sensible."

While even some conservative intellectuals say that some of the revisionist history is simply wrong, at the core, the effort reflects the ever-changing view of history, which is always subject to revision thanks to new information or new ways of looking at things, and often is viewed through a political lens.

"History in the popular world is always a political football," said Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia University. "The right is unusually mobilized at the moment."

"Part of the tide of history is that it's contested terrain," said Fritz Fischer, a historian at the University of Northern Colorado and the chairman of the National Council for History Education. "We should always be arguing and questioning what happened in the past."

It's not just historians who contest history, however. It's also politicians and pundits.

The left has done it.

Fischer cited the case of controversial former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, whose essay claiming that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were the fruit of illegal U.S. policies became a cause celebre. Fischer said Churchill "ignored a lot of evidence and made some up to promulgate a particular political belief."

Now, it's the right.

"There's clearly a political impetus behind this that connects to the issues of today," Fischer said, such as labeling President Barack Obama a socialist. "But when history is ignored to do it, that can be dangerous."

Here are five recent examples of new conservative versions of history:

JAMESTOWN

Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.

"Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow," he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club.

It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama's agenda.

It was not, however, true.

The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

At the same event, Armey urged people to read the Federalist Papers as a guide to the sentiments of the tea party movement.

"The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers," Armey said.

Others such as Democrats and the news media, "people here who do not cherish America the way we do," don't understand because "they did not read the Federalist Papers," he said.

A member of the audience asked Armey how the Federalist Papers could be such a tea party manifesto when they were written largely by Alexander Hamilton, who the questioner said "was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government."

Armey ridiculed the very suggestion.

"Widely regarded by whom?" he asked. "Today's modern, ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case, in fact, about Hamilton."

Hamilton, however, was an unapologetic advocate of a strong central government, one that plays an active role in the economy and is led by a president named for life and thus beyond the emotions of the people. Hamilton also pushed for excise taxes and customs duties to pay down federal debt.

In fact, Ian Finseth said in a history written for the University of Virginia, others at the constitutional convention "thought his proposals went too far in strengthening the central government."

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Theodore Roosevelt was long an icon of the Republican Party, a dynamic leader who ushered in the Progressive era, busting trusts, regulating robber barons, building the Panama Canal and sending the U.S. fleet around the world announcing ascendant American power.

Fox TV commentator Glenn Beck, however, says that Roosevelt was a socialist whose legacy is destroying America. It started, Beck said, with Roosevelt's admonition to the wealthy of his day to spend their riches for the good of society.

"We judge no man a fortune in civil life if it's honorably obtained and well spent," Roosevelt said, according to Beck. "It's not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it only to be gained so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community."

Actually, Roosevelt said, "We GRUDGE no man a fortune ... if it's honorably obtained and well USED." But either way, Beck saw the threat.

"Oh? Well, thank you," Beck said with scorn during his keynote speech to the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. The presidential suggestion that the wealthy of the Gilded Age should contribute to the good of society was a clear danger that must be condemned, Beck said.

"Is this what the Republican Party stands for? Well, you should ask members of the Republican Party, because this is not our founders' idea of America. And this is the cancer that's eating at America. It is big government; it's a socialist utopia," Beck said.

"And we need to address it as if it is a cancer. It must be cut out of the system because they cannot coexist. ... You must eradicate it. It cannot coexist."

There's no doubt that Roosevelt was a domestic policy liberal by today's standards. In a 1910 speech in Kansas, he acknowledged that his "New Nationalism" meant "far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had."

The 26th president insisted, however, that he wanted the government to guarantee opportunity, not a handout.

"The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare," he said.

"Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. ... Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him."

In his autobiography three years later, Roosevelt went on to dismiss the tenets of socialism as taught by Karl Marx as "an exploded theory."

"Too many thoroughly well-meaning men and women in the America of today glibly repeat and accept," he wrote, "various assumptions and speculations by Marx and others which by the lapse of time and by actual experiment have been shown to possess not one shred of value."

In addition, Roosevelt didn't advocate government ownership of the means of production, the definition of socialism.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

It's long been debated how well Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal government programs countered the Great Depression, but now a prominent conservative has introduced the idea that Roosevelt CAUSED the Depression.

"FDR took office in the midst of a recession," Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. "He decided to choose massive government spending and the creation of monstrous bureaucracies. Do we detect a Democrat pattern here in all of this? He took what was a manageable recession and turned it into a 10-year depression."

A year before, Bachmann went to the House floor to blame FDR and what she called the "Hoot-Smalley" tariffs for creating the Depression.

"The recession that FDR had to deal with wasn't as bad as the recession (President Calvin) Coolidge had to deal with in the early '20s," she said.

Coolidge cut taxes and created the roaring '20s, Bachmann said.

"FDR applied just the opposite formula: the Hoot-Smalley act, which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions. And of course trade barriers and the regulatory burden and of course tax barriers.

"That's what we saw happen under FDR. That took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost 10 years under that kind of thinking."

The truth? Historians agree that tariffs hurt trade and worsened the depression.

However, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act — not Hoot-Smalley — was proposed by two Republicans, Sen. Reed Smoot of Utah and Rep. Willis Hawley of Oregon. A Republican House and a Republican Senate approved it. President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, signed it into law.

The facts also show that the country was in something far worse than a "manageable recession" in March 1933 when Roosevelt took office.

Stocks had lost 90 percent of their value since the crash of 1929. Thousands of banks had failed. Unemployment reached an all-time high of 24.9 percent just before Roosevelt was inaugurated.

JOE MCCARTHY

Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., burst onto the national stage in the early 1950s with accusations that he had a list of names of known Communists in the federal government. He didn't name them, was censured by the Senate eventually and his name became synonymous with witch hunts — McCarthyism.

Now, the end of the Cold War has opened up spy files and identified many Communist spies who operated inside the government during the era. Some conservatives argue that this proves not only that McCarthy was right, but also that he was a hero and that he was smeared by liberals, the news media and historians.

"Almost everything about McCarthy in current history books is a lie and will have to be revised," conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly said.

"Liberals had to destroy McCarthy because he exposed the entire liberal establishment as having sheltered Soviet spies," conservative commentator Ann Coulter said in one interview.

"The myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times," she said in another. "Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. ... If the Internet, talk radio and Fox News had been around in McCarthy's day, my book wouldn't be the first time most people would be hearing the truth about 'McCarthyism.' "

Yet even some prominent conservatives say that McCarthy's defenders go too far, and that even from a conservative perspective, McCarthy was no hero and damaged the country.

"A dangerous movement has been growing among conservative writers to vindicate the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and his campaign to expose Soviet spies in the U.S. government," Ronald Kessler wrote for the conservative Web site Newsmax.com.

"The FBI agents who were actually chasing those spies have told me that McCarthy hurt their efforts because he trumped up charges, unfairly besmirched honorable Americans and gave hunting spies a bad name."

Kessler said the release of secret Cold War files under the Venona Project confirmed that there were Soviet spies in the U.S. government.

"The problem was that the people McCarthy tarnished as Communists or Communist sympathizers were not the real spies," Kessler wrote.

"The cause of anti-communism, which united millions of Americans and which gained the support of Democrats, Republicans and independents, was undermined by Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin," wrote William Bennett, who was the conservative secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan.

"McCarthy addressed a real problem: disloyal elements within the U.S. government. But his approach to this real problem was to cause untold grief to the country he claimed to love," Bennett wrote in his book "America: The Last Best Hope."

"Worst of all, McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions."

ON THE WEB
More on Jamestown
Armey's speech at the National Press Club
Treasury Department history of Hamilton
University of Virginia on Hamilton
More on the Venona Project

MORE FROM MCCLATCHY
Who should be at Obama's health care signing? Truman
Here's the truth: 'Birther' claims are just plain nuts
Secret camps and guillotines? Groups make birthers look sane

For more McClatchy politics coverage, visit Planet Washington

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/01/91478/some-conservatives-rewrite-history.html#ixzz0k9OGnAWj

McClatchy Newspapers 2010

The Health Care Bill Will Be Voted on Today, Sunday: Whose Prayers Will Be Answered?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's Sunday - Where Is Your Health Care?

By John Cory, Reader Supported News
   21 March 2010
Reader Supported News | Perspective

t is Sunday morning. There is supposed to be a vote on health care reform today. I assume that Glenn Beck is ensconced in church and praying madly for failure.

        I was not aware that it was Lent until Glenn Beck said that scheduling a vote during Lent and on the Sabbath was an "affront to God." Unlike Republicans in 2005 when they voted on Palm Sunday in the Terri Schiavo matter?

        I am not big on churches.

        But as it is Lent - maybe the Catholic Bishops could give up two things:

        1) Molesting children and covering for those who do.

        2) Telling women what to do with their bodies.

        Just a thought. Like I said, I'm not big on churches.

        I see the Malimpabeck trio figured they could take down an 11-year-old kid - but failed. Here's the story from Les Blumenthal at McClatchy. Marcelas Owens knows how to deal with bullies: "My mother always taught me they can have their own opinion but that doesn't mean they are right."

        That kid should run for office.

        I don't know what is going to happen today. Everyone tells me HCR will pass by a narrow margin. Maybe.

        How the Hell did we get to the point of comforting ourselves with the mantra "It's better than nothing."

        I'm going to grab a cup of coffee and watch and wait.

        Maybe the Rapture will begin and free up some parking spaces.

        Speaking of the Rapture: Sean Hannity is being accused of scamming real Americans. He's being accused by a conservative right-wing blogger, Debbie Schlussel.

        Maybe there is a God.