A bona-fide member of the Fifth Estate, practicing Mobile Journalism (MoJo) every chance we get...
The President calls out Republicans for blocking campaign finance reforms that would address last year’s Supreme Court decision opening the floodgates of corporate money into elections.
Target Ain’t People
MoveOn.Org’s ad featuring a demonstration against Target due to the retail company’s campaign contributions mostly to Republicans was refused by MSNBC, which declined to air the ad. In the video, you can see it discusses the boycott on Target by gay marriage supporters.
So much for the idea that corporations would not abuse their new rights guaranteed by the Bush-Roberts Supreme Court to give unlimited amounts to conservative Republican political campaigns.
A few Target and Best Buy shareholders weighed in Thursday on the flap over the companies’ political donations in Minnesota, urging the boards of both retailers to increase their oversight of campaign contributions. Target gave $150,000 and Best Buy $100,000 to a business-focused political fund helping a conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, triggering a national backlash from gay rights groups and liberals.
The companies made the donations after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling freed them to spend corporate funds on elections.
An excerpt from the video of George Carlin’s comedy routine called “Life Is Worth Losing.”
There’s a reason education sux and will never get better…
“Because the owners of this country don’t want that, the real owners, the big wealthy business owners who own everything and make all the important decisions.”
Key Line: “Forget the politicians. Politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners…”
“It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
The Locust Fork News-Journal Approaches Five Years in Business
I wish I could figure out a way to have a blues tune playing on the screen while you are reading this post, but then, that would just be a distraction anyway. One of these days I’m going to get around to finishing that blues song I started working on many years ago called The Alabama Power Blues.
I woke up Sunday morning,
and the power was off again…
Every time this happens, it plays havoc with the Charter cable Internet connection, even with a TrippLite installed to prevent the modem and router and computers from going off during a power outage.
It also places unnecessary wear and tear on the hard drives of all three of the computers we have online over here that it takes to produce and maintain this Website.
To make matters worse, on March 13, YouTube will no longer support the operating system or Web browser on this Apple laptop, which means in a couple of weeks, I will no longer be able to access or post YouTube videos on this site — unless we figure out a way to raise enough money to buy a new computer.
Once the power came back on this morning, I cranked up the coffee pot and placed an ad on the free online classified site Craigslist.org seeking to buy a used or refurbished MacBook Pro computer. This is going to be an essential tool to accomplish the planned upgrades to this site and to ramp up our news operation in the months ahead.
Before I ask for your contribution, let me give you, our faithful readers, an update of where we are.
And What You Can Do About It Now
Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson
During the 1995-96 academic year, I spent most of my time sitting in the Gorgas library at the University of Alabama scanning the New York Times on microfilm and reading stories about the environment along side public opinion polls. I spent a small fortune paying to print those stories for a Master’s thesis looking at how media coverage affects public opinion.
There was no search engine called Google in those early days, and most newspapers had not yet started backing up their stories in online databases such as Lexis-Nexis. So to conduct research, you had to go to the library and pull up old newspapers on microfilm and put change in the machine to print the stories.
The Internet company America Online was just coming on the scene, the Web browser Netscape had just been created, and a conservative convenience store clerk named Matt Drudge had 1,000 subscribers to one of the first e-mail lists. By the fall of 1996, about the time I moved to Milledgeville to teach at Georgia College the year the Olympics came to Atlanta and put up my first Web site, Drudge had started the first “news aggregation” Web site, The Drudge Report.
Bill Clinton was enjoying a great run as president and was reelected in a landslide that fall, in part because the U.S. economy was booming thanks to the dramatic increases in worker productivity due to the personal computer revolution.
Yes, old Bob Dole fell off that stage and didn’t run a great campaign. But a majority of the American people felt the government and the economy were working, so why change? In fact, by the year 1999, the Clinton-Gore administration had wiped out the Reagan budget deficit. Remember the “peace dividend?”
Technology U
by Glynn Wilson
I’m just going to come right out and say it. I know how to save the press and democracy — and the right to sue in this country.
The question is will the right people listen? Will they listen in time?
For an excellent discussion on where we are, check out this post from David Campbell, a professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom associated with the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies.
Revolutions in the media economy: The context of crisis
Many of the points he makes have already been discussed here, but perhaps people will listen to him.
“The way news and information is reported and delivered to citizens is undergoing profound transformations, especially in the United States and Europe,” he starts out. “In the last 12 months commentary has been rife with claims about ‘the death of newspapers,’ the end of journalism, and the impact this crisis will allegedly have on democratic politics.”
I won’t take the time or space here to summarize all his points. If you are interested in this information, go read his piece and then come back to see how I am going to fill in some gaps he’s missing in answer to the question: “How do we fund the good stuff?”
Sarah Palin for President and the early release of Eric Rudolph?
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
I’ve said it before and I will say it again here today. Sometimes I am profoundly embarrassed to be from Alabama. Today is one of those times.
Why? Because the staff of my hometown newspaper continues to stick its head in the sand and ignore the facts, the truth, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why it is in their fiduciary interests to do so.
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| Rowland Scherman |
| Izzy Stone |
I.F. Stone, the investigative journalist extraordinaire who died twenty years ago today on June 18th, 1989, spoke at the University of California, Berkeley at the Vietnam teach-in.
His words still echo with truth for today…
I.F. STONE: I cannot understand the fury in the press and among the respectables against the teach-ins. The State Department has it almost entirely its own way. The government line dominates the press and the radio and the TV. Why are they so frantic? When, for a little while, in a few moments and on a few campuses and a few places, a voice of dissent is heard, a little bit of debate has begun. Are they so unsure of themselves? Are they secretly so weak about their own point of view that they fear to have it exposed to public debate and public examination? You know, when the State Department holds its conferences, it never invites the opposition. It never invites a critic. It doesn’t even invite critical newspapermen to private briefings, for fear they might ask embarrassing questions. The atmosphere of the State Department is very much like that of the big government agencies in Moscow. You get the same apparatchik atmosphere, the same regurgitation by bureaucratic parrots of the official line. And this is what we have to deal with in our own country.
You know, there’s a great deal we don’t know about war and about why men fight. We know a lot about what people have said were the reasons they were fighting for. But modern psychology has taught us that the explanations people give for their activities are rarely the truth. And so it is in this case.
One of the reasons for all the trouble our country is in around the world, I think, is that we possess so huge a military establishment. If a country doesn’t have soldiers, it takes a slight and makes a protest, and that’s the end of it. But when it has an enormous military apparatus like ours, the tendency is to try to solve all kinds of political and economic questions by military means, a process that’s something like trying to repair a watch with a sledgehammer. And conversely, as long as we have a large military establishment, it’s going to be looking for work to do to maintain its appropriations, to get its promotions, to prove its usefulness, and to avoid technological unemployment. And all this miasma about wars of liberation that is so central to what is happening today in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic is really a reflection of the military’s desire to find work to do. The “war of liberation” neurosis is made to order for the military.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now did a show on him today.
Harper’s No Comment
