Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

It is almost too nice a spring day outside to be sitting in front of a computer writing a column, but there are a few things I have to say today besides talking about watching the revolutionary garden grow.

The tomatoes, collards, green beans and corn are coming up fine and will help offset the rising food prices this summer in Bush’s recessionary world.

But that’s not all that’s going on in the world, not that you would know it by reading the corporate news media and watching the public relations that passes for news on the local television airwaves.

The state of the economy seems to be affecting the news media as it often does in hard times. It is becoming harder and harder to find real news stories worth reading even in the national papers. Every news organization in the country is still talking about the Reverend Wright today, even as presidential candidate Barack Obama went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” for the full hour this morning and still sounded like the smartest, most reasonable candidate in the race.

While Senator John McCain continued to support Bush’s surge this week and made a strange appearance in Selma, Alabama last week, as if any African-Americans were ever going to vote for him, Hillary Clinton was showing her support for Israel with language much like Bush when she talked about “obliterating” Iran if they ever launch a nuclear attack on the Jewish state.

Of course what the American masses who barely keep up may not realize is that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and will most likely never obtain one. Dick Cheney and the Israeli military will see to that - if Bush doesn’t send in the U.S. Air Force soon and start World War III.

Obama pointed that out for Tim Russert, who just had to raise the issue - even though he should know better.

Even Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of NBC’s “Nightly News,” pointed out in a blog column the other day that the New York Times circulation is down and said this:

“I must admit that on Sundays it becomes a tough paper to figure out. While (last) week’s paper featured an op-ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards bemoaning the lack of serious, in-depth coverage of the political race, it’s tough to figure out exactly what readers the paper is speaking to, or seeking.”

What Times Is It?

I’ve been wondering that myself, since I check out the Times Website a couple of times a day looking to see if they might be breaking another story on the illegal surveillance program being run by the Bush administration - or something. The paper is credited with breaking a big story on that back in 2005, even though we had been talking about it on the blogs already, but where is the followup?

The Washington Post has done some fairly interesting stories of late, especially Dana Milbank in his “Washington Sketch” column, which by the way is online only and not in the print edition of the newspaper. Here are a couple of examples.

Anniversary of ‘Mission Accomplished’ Draws Laughs

The Incredible Shrinking Presidency of George W. Bush

The fare was so weak today I turned to The Nation magazine, where at least I found this:

Our Lapdog Media

But even that is not as strong as what you can sometimes find here at the little old Locust Fork Journal, when we have the resources and the motivation to go out and find the good stories.

I mean the Birmingham News is focusing all it’s guns on going after another African-American Democrat these days, the poor new mayor of Birmingham, instead of focusing its investigative attentions perhaps on a big story like why Birmingham has some of the most polluted air in the country. Was that story on the front page? Of course not. It’s “bad news,” not PR or manufactured news designed to bash Democrats.

Birmingham in Top Eight Polluted Cities

I mean we know what causes the bad air, mainly Alabama Power’s coal-fired power plants, along with the lack of an automobile inspection program that would help get the old polluting cars and pickup trucks off the roads. But I guess all that Alabama Power advertising money keeps them focused on things like doing the PR for the State Troopers in their “Take Back the Highways” campaign to keep drunks off the road (and everybody else who might like to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner out at a restaurant).

If the local press had put as much effort into investigating the causes of the bad air and potential solutions as they do drunk driving, we could have already solved the problem.

Here’s a simple suggestion no one in the press or the presidential race has thought about. What if every car on the road and every house in the suburbs had a white roof? That would reflect sun light back into the atmosphere like the glaciers that are now melting due to global warming.

And what if the federal and state governments switched the tax incentives to putting solar cells on houses instead of investing in oil exploration and bio-fuels, which is one of the major factors leading to high food prices.

If you are also disgruntled with the fare in the newspapers or TV news stations and want to help us chase those headlines and investigative reports, please consider making a donation today. You will be glad you did.

Connecting the Dots

by Glynn Wilson

Well I won’t back down
No I won’t back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won’t back down
- Tom Petty, Full Moon Fever, 1989

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., Feb. 3 - Tom Petty is playing the Super Bowl halftime show Sunday evening, so this is a good opportunity to explore his life and times, especially as it relates to king wannabe George W. Bush.

As you may recall, Bush’s 2000 campaign for president briefly used the song I Won’t Back Down from the 1989 album Full Moon Fever - until Petty found out about it and threatened to sue. Ironically, Bush did back down and stopped using the song immediately.

That may have been the last time he did the right thing. Since getting himself appointed to the presidency by the Supreme Court, it’s been all down hill for Bush when it comes to the law.

According to a clip from Rolling Stone magazine (not free online):

A cease-and-desist letter from Tom Petty proved to be a campaign heartbreaker for George W. Bush, as the Presidential hopeful was forced to back off his use of “I Won’t Back Down.”
***
After Petty’s single was used at Bush campaign events, publisher Randall Wixen (of Wixen Music Publishing and Gone Gator Music) wrote the letter at the behest of Petty. It stated, “It has recently come to our attention that your presidential campaign has been using the above-referenced song in connection with your presidential bid. Please be advised that this use has not been approved . . . Any use made by you or your campaign creates, either intentionally or unintentionally, the impression that you and your campaign have been endorsed by Tom Petty, which is not true.”

In response, the Bush campaign’s general counsel Michael Toner sent a letter that agreed that they would comply, but added, “We do not agree that the mere playing or use of a particular song at a campaign event connotes any impression, either intentional or unintentional, of endorsement.”

Was that an early indication of how corrupt the Bush administration was going to be?

If you think you are not above the law when it comes to appropriating copyrighted music without permission, from a musician who most definitely does not agree with you no less, what other arrogant violations of the law are possible in a bubble of a world where reality doesn’t matter to you?

At the top of the list - and the fight that will dominate the action in the United States Senate on the Monday after the Super Bowl - is the practice of spying on American citizens without warrants.

Maybe we should get Petty to write a song about that.

There are only a very small number of people who can save us from a continuation of Bush’s massive, domestic spying operation, which we know without a doubt has targeted non-profit groups of innocent citizens who advocate for peace and the environment. No matter how many times Bush and Cheney say it is only targeting suspected “terrorists” overseas, we know better.

It will be up to the Democrats in the U.S. Senate - and a few of their Republican colleagues who share a real concern for constitutional privacy and liberty - to stop the spying. It is clearly a blatant violation of the search and seizure clause in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As I was making the drive from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa on Saturday, a drive I have been taking all my life - especially during my two stays in T-Town working on a Bachelor’s degree in the early 1980s and a Master’s in the mid-1990s - I listened to an interview with Petty on National Public Radio. You can listen to it as well online.

In this 2006 interview, Petty talks about his successful 30-year career, during which time he and his band The Heartbreakers sold more than 50 million records. The Beatles and The Byrds greatly inspired the young Tom Petty, who remembers the first time he saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show.

Petty discusses an incident he went through with his family in the late ’80s - when an arsonist burned down his house - and how that affected his song writing. The anti-environmental klan burned down my house in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late 1990s, almost killing me when I fell off the roof of a two-story house going up in flames, so I can relate.

Petty recalls other hard times, including a period of depression in the ’90s when he lived in a cabin in the woods. Sounds a little like Henry David Thoreau, eh? Another one of our heroes.

And he discusses the making of his 1985 album Southern Accents, when he took a swing through his native region and came away with a series of stories inspired by his past growing up in Gainesville, Florida.

He wrote all those lyrics first and then composed the music to fit the words and stories tonally, he says.

Can’t you relate to these opening lines from the title song?

There’s a southern accent, where I come from
The young’uns call it country
The yankees call it dumb

When I was an undergrad at the University of Alabama from 1981-83, Petty released Hard Promises and Long After Dark.

I remember dancing to Petty’s songs in the old Solomon’s rock club on The Strip. It’s long gone now, just one of the many victims of the fight against sin by the University, and its growth toward downtown.

Petty broke free of the South and indicated how he felt about the region in his song One Story Town.

I’m for standin’ up, I’m for breakin’ free
I don’t want fate handed down to me
Yeah I’m for movin’ on, try another town
Time ain’t changin’ nothin’, take a look around

Oh, I’m lost in a one story town
Where everything’s close to the ground
Yeah the same shit goes down
Nothing turns around
It’s a one story town

On days when I find it hard to get anything done in Alabamaland, in part because of the nature of the region, that’s how I feel.

In the interview, Petty goes into his belief that some of his songs have been important to other people and he says he doesn’t want to sell them out if he doesn’t have to. He resists selling his songs to advertisers, which shows a certain integrity that is lacking in many artists today - in these most commercialized, materialistic, capitalistic times.

Even though I am mostly turned off to professional football these days, along with the massive money hype that goes along with the Super Bowl, I think I’ll catch the half time show anyway. And while I’m at it, I’ll tip a Yuengling to Tom Petty and take a moment to remember his stand against Bush.

Here’s to you, Tom Petty. More power to ya, man…

Lessons For The U.S. News Media

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Remember this line from that old candy commercial, “Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t?”

That’s ringing in my head this morning as I write this:

Sometimes you feel like fighting; sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes, it’s more fun to sit back and watch others fight about it.

Sometimes it’s enough to sit around in the Strat-o-lounger and watch people make idiots of themselves on C-SPAN.

I tend to do that a lot lately, although I could get out of my easy chair more - if the public interest seemed heightened enough to know there were those who would support such an effort.

Meanwhile, this blogging business sometimes provides the perfect forum to be an armchair quarterback, a back seat driver if you will.

Here’s an example.

I was watching C-SPAN the other day and saw an interesting forum at the National Press Club in Washingtion moderated by Marvin Kalb. His guests included Dan Rather and his heir apparent tough questioner at the White House, NBC’s David Gregory. Helen Thomas was also on the panel, along with the New York Times Washington correspondent David Sanger.

Reporters working for Alabama newspapers could learn a thing or two by watching these kinds of programs, or reading about them on blogs, but I suppose they don’t care enough or have time for such trivial things like self-criticism and trying to figure out what they are doing wrong.

The blurb from the panel discussion that got the most attention in blogland was a comment from Gregory. He argued that, because there’s so much polarization in politics today, people try to divine or assign motives for reporters asking certain questions at the White House press briefings. When Helen Thomas asked Gregory what was responsible for the polarization, he said:

“I think its because of the internet largely. The polarized atmosphere in the internet and blogs and whatnot have been a major contributor to that.”

That’s a meme, of course, designed to say “look at us. We are the Washington news media. Look no further to find out what’s going on in the world. We will tell you what you need to know. Those newfangled blogs are not worth spitting on.”

But let the analysis continue…

In February - at a similar event at the Press Club - Gregory pointed the finger at blogs for the reason that politics and political coverage has become so polarized.

But Glenn Greenwald pointed out at the time:

“The reality, of course, is that most media-criticizing bloggers do not want journalists to be ‘political advocates.’ They want them to do what journalists are supposed to do - which is not sit around with their good, trustworthy, nice-guy friends in the White House and simply ask questions and get information, but instead to scrutinize that information, treat it with doubt, investigate it before passing it along to determine whether it’s true (or not).

“And the reason bloggers want them to do that, the reason that bloggers demand more of journalists is not because bloggers are enraged, confused, unreasonable partisans. It’s because bloggers are American citizens who are deeply concerned about what has happened to their country over the last six years.”

Gregory Says Blogs To Blame for Polarization?

They, we, are also concerned that the traditional, legacy press and broadcast news outlets are seriously letting us down.

So even those of us who have spent a considerable amount of time working for news organizations now realize that it is going to take a Web Press revolution to turn things around.

Here’s one column about the Gregory incident that got a lot of attention in blogland. It makes some good points.

David Gregory Meet I.F. Stone and Tom Paine

What no one has seemed to focus on from that panel discussion was Dan Rather’s comments about a big part of the problem being the corporate takeover of the news media in recent decades, which has almost completely torn down the wall separating news rooms and boardrooms.

Of course Gregory defended his corporate bosses at GE-NBC and gave the obligatory Washington reporters answer when that subject comes up. He said he has never been interferred with by the suits at NBC.

But I suspect if you could get Gregory over to the Irish Times bar near the Capitol in D.C. and get him talking off the record after a few beers, he might just talk about the self censorship that goes on all the time. It’s not that the president of GE, which bought out NBC in 1986, has ever called him up and threatened his job if he didn’t report things a certain way.

White House

President George W. Bush spins…

In other words (to use a Bushism), reporters know which side their bread is buttered on. To use another food cliche to explain this, reporters know you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

One of the most useful things to come out of the panel session was a discussion of how the White House press corps should gang up and agree to followup on each others’ questions, since Bush is adept at changing the subject by controlling who he calls on.

So that’s what happened yesterday morning in Bush’s press conference in which the Iran nuke question came up due to the new Intel report saying Iran is not such an eminent threat after all.

Bush nearly lost it completely. His body language revealed what a lot of us have been saying for a long time: Bush is a liar of the first order.

Video Part 1

Video Part 2

Transcript

And here’s another lesson.

When the Los Angeles Times decided to purge liberal columnist Robert Scheer from its editorial pages a couple of years ago, he didn’t die or go away. He started an online news site at TruthDig.Com.

His column now appears regularly in The Nation magazine, and he does something this week that a lot of people have been calling on the U.S. news media to do for several years: Tell the truth. Call it like it is. Go ahead and say it.

“Bush is such a liar,” Scheer says in the lede to this week’s column.

Bush on Iran: Fool Me Twice

Our new favorite blog columnist in Alabama, Scott Horton at Harpers.Org, also called Bush a liar in his post on the subject. He evens explains Bush’s three kinds of lies.

Department of Poorly Coordinated and Unbelievable Cover Stories

Compare that to the so-called fair and balanced Reuters wire story out today. It’s critical, but gives Bush his out.

True to Form, Bush Refuses to Budge on Iran

Now I’ve called Bush a liar so many times on this Web Press that I can’t count the times in the archives over the past two and a half years. Maybe as time goes by and it becomes even more apparent, more bloggers will do it.

Then, perhaps one day before this disastrous period in our history comes to an ignominious end, someone in a big newspaper like the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times or the Washington Post might finally get around to telling its readers the truth about the current occupant of the White House, like Walter Cronkite did on CBS in the late 1960s after his now famous trip to Vietnam.

We don’t expect the Birmingham News to get it, but perhaps if someone over at the Associated Press would do it, the local TV news talking heads might also tell their viewers the truth for a change.

And maybe one of these days, someone in big medialand will get around to catching up with another position blogs like this have been taking for some time.

Maybe David Gregory will go on NBC nightly news one day soon and say what we have known for several years. The only hope we have of restoring America’s reputation in the world is either for Bush and Cheney to resign - or for Congress to impeach them and remove them from office.

We are not kidding. We are not making this stuff up. It’s not an angry rant. It’s not a conspiracy theory.

Maybe if you don’t believe me, you should watch this video. I posted it the other day, but perhaps you missed it. If so, click on it today.

Then, if you are still not convinced, go buy this book or check it out from the library and read it.

The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

If enough people pay attention to this, maybe we can save the world from Giuliani … and Huckabee.

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

The Thanksgiving editorial column is an American newspaper tradition.

Surfing around the Web looking for a good one leads me to believe it is a tradition that perhaps should be abolished.

But since I am thankful for getting to sleep really, really late today and avoid a large Baptist family gathering, I will offer up a few Thanksgiving columns for your perusal and a few pithy comments.

One of my favorite ideas for a Thanksgiving column comes from Gail Collins at the New York Times. In the end the column leaves much to be desired, but I like the idea anyway.

The subheader is: “Qualities We Don’t Want in the Next President.” Now you have to admit, that’s a column any lover of democracy and Bush basher would read, although it really doesn’t deliver much in the way of a satisfying feast.

“The first undesirable attribute was loyalty, in the sense of valuing personal relationships over competence,” she writes. “Really, we need to elect someone who would push his/her grandmother under a bus if she screwed up the mission.”

That’s not the way I would have put it, but you decide.

Presidential Shopping List

Another New York Times columnist, Richard Cohen, has an interesting idea.

In his column, Turkey Tune-Out Time, he advocates a break from e-mail:

“…e-mail is a bummer and addiction to it perverse,” he says.

Why?

“First, e-mail is reactive, a wait-and-respond thing, the surest guarantee of inside-the-box thinking. Second, it’s a lousy tool for conflict resolution, a multiplier of misunderstandings. Third, it leads people to say things they would never say face to face. Fourth, once they’re said, they’re recorded in their colossal inanity for all eternity.

“What you accumulate,” said an expert he found, is “interpersonal sludge.”

So he recommends that we all, “Turn off, tune out, drop in. And a decent-sized turkey takes five hours to cook.”

Not bad advice. Too bad I can’t take it. You?
Read the rest of this entry »

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

A dozen times in the past few weeks I have sat down in front of this computer and started to write a column about the damn heat wave and drought enveloping Alabamaland and much of the country.

But each time, I have slunk back to the Stratolounger in front of the TV and said to heck with it. This is the time of year when the best thing to do is catch up on old movies on cable under a strong air conditioner. Simply moving one’s body about the house is hard.

Besides, everybody knows it’s hot, literally, as hell. So where’s the news value in writing about it?

It’s so damn hot and dry that we are beginning to wonder if there is enough rain out there in clouds of the future to ever bring the dead grass back to life again. To keep the tomatoes growing, they have to be watered twice a day.

With water restrictions in place, there is no way to keep the hydrangeas and the dogwoods alive. If we have an ice storm this winter, there will be lots of dead trees falling on houses, because the ground and their root systems are so dry they will snap like dry beans.

It’s been more than 90 degrees in the shade on the screened in porch for so many days in a row that I can’t remember what the count is anymore.

Yet there’s not one peep out of weatherman James Spann on ABC’s 33/40 this entire summer about global warming being a myth. But there’s also not been one single story on any local television news station about global warming, and nothing in the local papers either.

Let’s face facts. We live in a land of denial. That’s why I call it Alabamaland.

Maybe all the criticism of the media from the left is starting to work just a little bit, however.

The Birmingham bureau of the Associated Press managed to produce a story the other day that I missed on the wires at the time, perhaps because the heat has turned me so lazy that I feel some days like I am back in the Big Easy.

Thanks to a couple of Republican Senators, Trent Lott of Mississippi and Dick Shelby of Alabama, developers are using federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Katrina to build condos - complete with Bear Bryant art - near the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny stadium in Tuscaloosa.

Katrina Aid Goes Toward Football Condos

When an alert reader pointed that out to me today in an e-mail message, I could hardly believe my eyes for a split second. Then I said to myself, “Self, that makes perfect sense in Bush’s America, where everybody loves a tax break for the rich, especially when it REALLY screws the poor.”

This is not the land of the free or the brave anymore, folks. We should change our national anthem and motto. How about this: “The good old US of A, the land where everybody looks out for themselves, and the rich get richer and the poor can go to hell after their teeth rot out.”

That government is best which governs least indeed.

It’s gotten so bad that one of the most powerful lawyers and Democrats in Alabama is so afraid of his own shadow that he insists anyone who supports the impeachment of the worst president in American history, that’s right, George W. Bush, is too far to the left to be included in any Democratic Party discussion in Alabama.

I won’t name this attorney just yet, because I have a surprise story in store for the Alabama Democratic Party I am working on to be published in the next few weeks.

But I will say this about that. Anybody who does not support the impeachment of Gonzales, Cheney and Bush should not be calling themselves a Democrat, and will certainly never be elected to any office in this state or any other in the future. So-called mainstream, centrist Democrats are so much road kill in the current political climate. And if you don’t believe me, wait until you see the public opinion data that backs it up.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

Alabama author Rick Bragg

Perhaps one of the reasons I got motivated enough to write tonight is because last night, I made my way downtown to the McWayne Science Center to see my old friend Rick Bragg read from his new book The Prince of Frogtown.

Now I know it’s way too hot to be talking about football, but he also has a piece in a new special issue of Sports Illustrated about the upcoming Alabama football season.

The Rising Tide

The last column I wrote in this space was about the end of the era of the written word. I still stand by my conclusions. But that is not to say that some people won’t still write. And some people will still read good writing – when they can find it.

Now if we could just get more people to write about this damn global warming – so we can begin to do some things to reverse it. Time’s a wastin’.

Do you feel it yet? What have you done about it lately?

Me? I just a few days ago bought an insulation blanket for the hot water heater and installed it. We are capturing water in the sink as it heats up for washing dishes to use on the plants. And, we are gradually making the transition all over the house to energy efficient light bulbs. This winter, I plan on installing more insulation in the attic.

Now if we could just stop the tax breaks for condos and oil and coal companies and change the national policy to provide some tax breaks for solar power panels for homeowners, we might make some real progress.

Will it ever happen in Bush’s America or Alabama Powerland?

Not if we keep electing centrist Democrats with no cajónes.