Obama v Fox

[Park Life 71]

His last-minute Olympic sprint to Chicago may have come to nothing, the Afghan quagmire may be bubbling away and Sarah Palin may be topping the bestseller list, but Barack Obama can at least take comfort from the fact that Britain's most upmarket supermarket chain is on his side.

 

Waitrose, which prides itself more on its "quality food, honestly priced" than staring down rightwing attack dogs, has become the latest firm to pull its ads from Fox News after presenter Glenn Beck's remarks about the US president.

 

In July, Beck called Obama "a racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" after the president said that police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had "acted stupidly" in arresting the distinguished professor Henry Louis Gates as he entered his own home.

 

Beck's outburst prompted dozens of companies – among them Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Travelocity – to withdraw their adverts from his show for fear that their businesses might become tainted by association.

 

Now Waitrose, which advertises on the channel carried by Sky in Britain, has followed suit after customers complained about the Glenn Beck Show.

 

An angry Waitrose shopper who emailed the chain to express his distaste over its decision "to be associated with this particular form of rightwing cant" received an apology last week.

 

 

Obama has been snubbing Fox recently at press briefings. Would be nice if he found a way to hurt Fox.

[The Fish 10430]

It flat out terrifies me that so many "people" in America takes this station as a reputable news source.

[Monkeys Fist 41318]

His last-minute Olympic sprint to Chicago may have come to nothing, the Afghan quagmire may be bubbling away and Sarah Palin may be topping the bestseller list, but Barack Obama can at least take comfort from the fact that Britain's most upmarket supermarket chain is on his side.

 

Waitrose, which prides itself more on its "quality food, honestly priced" than staring down rightwing attack dogs, has become the latest firm to pull its ads from Fox News after presenter Glenn Beck's remarks about the US president.

 

In July, Beck called Obama "a racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" after the president said that police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had "acted stupidly" in arresting the distinguished professor Henry Louis Gates as he entered his own home.

 

Beck's outburst prompted dozens of companies – among them Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Travelocity – to withdraw their adverts from his show for fear that their businesses might become tainted by association.

 

Now Waitrose, which advertises on the channel carried by Sky in Britain, has followed suit after customers complained about the Glenn Beck Show.

 

An angry Waitrose shopper who emailed the chain to express his distaste over its decision "to be associated with this particular form of rightwing cant" received an apology last week.

 

 

Obama has been snubbing Fox recently at press briefings. Would be nice if he found a way to hurt Fox.

Nick Griffin?

[Happy Face 29]

The Daily Show did a good bit on this the other night.

 

Every channel that got an interview went on about how Obama is over exposed, out there on every issue sticking his nose in and needs to be more Presidential (whatever that's supposed to mean).

 

Then Fox pop up and they harangued the shit out of him for being a cosetted, elitist snob out of touch with the people holed up in his bunker and letting others take the lead on every issue.

 

He shouldn't give any of the major channels interviews though. He should go on Dailykos, Salon, Democracy Now, NPR etc and promote a wider discourse amongst the American public. All the other corporate owned channels would be able to pick up whatever he says.

[NJS 4256]

Saw one the other day where he (Beck) was lamenting the latest polls which show an increase in "non-religous" people in the US. Basically all of the US's problems were down to these Godless bastards.

 

I honestly thought it would be impossible for anyone to watch it and not laugh at how stupid he sounds but then realised how many think the same.

[Happy Face 29]

 

[Park Life 71]

Americans must be one of the most misinformed people on the planet after North Korea.

[Cid_MCDP 0]

Hmmm? Somebody say something?

 

Leading story from FoxNews.com- the founder of Black Entertainment Television is making fun of the senatorial candidate from Virginia!

 

Honest to God. I just went over there and took a screenshot.

 

 

Seriously. Not shopped. This is what I should be concerned about? Somebody making fun of a senatorial candidate FFS? People used to punk Bush out to his face on TV like every fucking night. Why would you even consider this news?

 

EDIT: Oh, and yes, the "Breaking News" bit up there is referring to another student who wanted to blow up/ shoot up their school/ college. USF is University of South Florida.

Edited October 5, 2009 by Cid_MCDP

[Park Life 71]

You see this is why Murcock is now an American.

[Cid_MCDP 0]

You see this is why Murcock is now an American.

 

Damn- ain't that a bitch?

[Park Life 71]

You see this is why Murcock is now an American.

 

Damn- ain't that a bitch?

 

Once you become an american someone cuts half your brain away apparently.

[Billy Castell 0]

In no way is Fox News a news channel. It is a collection of ultra right wing retards being right bad losers because the black guy who won is ever so slighly left wing. Indeed, they ignore the fact that 40 million or so Americans cannot get healthcare, despite the nation still remaining a superpower, or the immense and shocking disparity in wealth that is almost as bad as Russia and bang on about Obama being a 'Communist' or whatever.

 

The fact a lot of yanks believe this tripe proves how stupid a lot of them are. The USA is not some state chosen by God as the ideal template, but the whole mythology behind that nation blinds them to the faults their society has. All you need to do if your narrow interests are threatened is to wrap yourself up in a flag and proclaim that your opponent is 'un-American' as if that crap hole has invented and thought of everything that is good or useful.

[Park Life 71]

In no way is Fox News a news channel. It is a collection of ultra right wing retards being right bad losers because the black guy who won is ever so slighly left wing. Indeed, they ignore the fact that 40 million or so Americans cannot get healthcare, despite the nation still remaining a superpower, or the immense and shocking disparity in wealth that is almost as bad as Russia and bang on about Obama being a 'Communist' or whatever.

 

The fact a lot of yanks believe this tripe proves how stupid a lot of them are. The USA is not some state chosen by God as the ideal template, but the whole mythology behind that nation blinds them to the faults their society has. All you need to do if your narrow interests are threatened is to wrap yourself up in a flag and proclaim that your opponent is 'un-American' as if that crap hole has invented and thought of everything that is good or useful.

 

If I was Obama I'd just shut Fox down with two airforce jets made to look like passenger planes.

[Happy Face 29]

Mind, picking on Fox lets the other woeful 'news organisations' in the states off the hook.

 

The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut today produces an extreme piece of government-serving, stenographic "journalism," publishing a dubious administration press release masquerading as a lengthy news article on Obama's approach to Terrorism and civil liberties. The Post depicts Obama as heavily and heroically engaged in disrupting the alleged Najibullah Zazi domestic terrorist plot and -- repeatedly highlighting that success -- claims "the White House has been charting a delicate course as it attempts to turn the page on Bush-era anti-terrorism policies," whereby "the Obama administration is increasingly confident that it has struck a balance between protecting civil liberties, honoring international law and safeguarding the country." Here are all of Kornblut's cited sources for the article -- every last one of them -- in the order she cites them:

 

Obama aides pointed . . . administration officials said . . . a senior administration official said . . . officials said . . . a senior administration official said . . . senior Obama officials stressed . . . a senior administration official said . . . aides said . . . officials said . . . one senior administration official said. . . . one senior official said. . . . The official said . . . a senior administration official said . . . a senior administration official said . . . administration officials said . . . . a senior official said.

 

Not a single named person is cited, and there's not a syllable of quoted dissent in any of it.

 

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

[Happy Face 29]

.....

 

Perhaps more than any other major corporate news outlet, The New York Times played a central role in promoting the Bush administration’s fraudulent case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The “reporting” of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon basically served as a front-page fiction laundering factory for Dick Cheney’s fantasy of a “mushroom cloud” threat from Saddam Hussein looming on the immediate horizon, topped off with a celebratory slice of yellowcake. More recently, the paper’s propagandists, William Broad and David Sanger, have aimed their sights on reporting dubious claims about Iran’s nuclear program.

 

Readers of the Times, therefore, should take with a huge grain of weaponized salt the paper’s “review” of Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, Rethink Afghanistan. With no sense of the painful irony of writing such jibberish in the Times, reviewer Andy Webster declares that the film could “use balance, something in short supply here:”

 

At an almost breathless pace that leaves little room for reflection, Mr. Greenwald presents a flurry of sights, voices and figures, many of them compelling but all reflecting his point of view. A historical summary is fleeting. What appears, again and again, are terrifying images of children: dead, hideously maimed or, in one instance, almost put up for sale by a frantic civilian in a refugee camp. Military engagements, it seems, are messy and claim innocent lives.

 

If it takes Greenwald’s “point of view” to see the human costs of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in the form of deformed, maimed and dead civilians, then his film should be required viewing for anyone purporting to support the war.

 

Anyone who has actually seen the film knows that a string of former top intelligence officials, perhaps most significant among them the former head of the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center, Robert Grenier, are heard meticulously deconstructing the dominant justifications for the continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. What does Grenier know? Oh, he was just the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he was one of the Agency’s top officials planning the U.S. invasion. Grenier, along with former CIA operative Robert Baer and other former intelligence officials, rebut in detail the claim that the war in Afghanistan is about fighting al Qaeda or making America safer, which Baer says bluntly in the film is “just complete bullshit.” The film also features Graham Fuller, the former CIA station chief in Kabul. (Click here to watch this part of the film)

 

I guess the Times would have been satisfied if the film did not also include extensive analysis from Anand Gopal, the Afghanistan correspondent of that famed leftist, anti-war rag, The Wall Street Journal. “Al Qaeda and the Taliban are groups with completely distinct ideologies and goals,” Gopal says in the film. The Taliban, he says, has as its central goal “to kick out the Americans.” Greenwald’s film would presumably have been more “objective” in the Times’s eyes if it had included the analysis of, say, Steve Coll, whose definitive book on al Qaeda, Ghost Wars, won the Pulitzer. Oh, right, Coll is a major voice in Greenwald’s film.

 

Webster complains that the film “has no time to approach an opposing view with sympathy or understanding for its concerns.” First of all, that is just plain false. What Greenwald does is divide the one-hour film into cogent sections that address the most common arguments made in support of the war in Afghanistan, namely national security, counter-terrorism and women’s rights. These are all familiar to anyone paying even a tiny amount of attention. But more to the point, why should a documentary calling on people to “rethink Afghanistan” be required to rehash or offer “sympathy” to ideas or policies that are promoted endlessly on major news programs, in corporate newspapers and by an endless string of U.S. government and military officials?

 

Rethink Afghanistan does not present the perfect argument against the war in Afghanistan (I certainly have had my own disagreements with Greenwald and with some of the film’s politics), but that is not what Greenwald and his team intended to do. The title says it all: they want Americans to stop and rethink support for a war that worsens by the day, costs billions of dollars, causes the deaths of U.S. soldiers and countless Afghan civilians and which, ultimately, will make the U.S. less safe.

 

The Times snarkily declares that Rethink Afghanistan is “unlikely to win over new supporters” to the anti-war or anti-escalation crowd. Quite the contrary: there are 600 screenings of the film scheduled and MoveOn.org, which has been very sluggish in coming around to criticizing the Afghan war, has just teamed up with Greenwald to promote the film. That in and of itself was no small accomplishment. The timing of Rethink Afghanistan is very important and will serve a utilitarian purpose for those people serious about the facts and not manipulating them, as has been the case on the pages of a certain newspaper we all know.

 

To watch the film, go to Brave New Film’s Rethink Afghanistan website.

 

http://rebelreports.com/post/205318314/ny-...tan-film-is-not

[Cid_MCDP 0]

You see this is why Murcock is now an American.

 

Damn- ain't that a bitch?

 

Once you become an american someone cuts half your brain away apparently.

 

 

I didn't think you guys knew about our new immigration program- half your brain for a whole free gun.

 

It's been more successful than I'd imagined...

[luckyluke 2]

During my three week tour of Italy last year I met dozens of Americans, and only handful of them weren't stupid. The pick of the bunch, even better than the man who had a ten minute conversation with me before asking where in the States I was from, were the five law students in Florence.

 

This was late June, Obama vs Hilary was reaching its climax. Things had been going quite well until they asked us if who we would like to succeed Bush. The look on this guy's face when my brother said Obama was priceless. Our attention had been drawn to them by the smokin' hot blonde but she was the worst of the lot; she said she only watched Fox News because all other stations and all the newspapers were just "too goddamned liberal for her", she had a look of revulsion on her face when the most sensible of their group admitted to reading the New York Times. He also wanted to work in Public Health Law, much to the scorn of his travelling buddies, which prompted me to ask him how the hell had he managed to end up on holiday with these nutjobs. He didn't have an answer, but I saw his pain.

 

When we retired to our beds we found that we were sharing our dorm with a teacher from San Fransisco, he could not stop apologising on behalf of his country when we told him about his compatriots. He was delighted to hear that the blonde chick had described California as "the worst". lol:

[Guest alex]

You meet some scarily ignorant Americans doing the whistlestop tour thing in Europe. Some of them aren't even sure what country they're in.

[AgentAxeman 164]

Left wing love in!!

 

 

seriously tho, you can't call people stupid cos they disagree with your political views, and if you do then you're as bad as those you're attacking! Dont forget that these people also think you're 'Stupid'. i guess if thats the case we're all as stupid as each other!!

 

which p.o.v. is the correct one?

 

that is the question!!

 

[NJS 4256]

I think people who call Obama a Communist or Nazi (or both at the same time) can be designated as stupid pretty fairly imo.

[Happy Face 29]

Left wing love in!!

 

 

seriously tho, you can't call people stupid cos they disagree with your political views, and if you do then you're as bad as those you're attacking! Dont forget that these people also think you're 'Stupid'. i guess if thats the case we're all as stupid as each other!!

 

which p.o.v. is the correct one?

 

that is the question!!

 

 

Fair and balanced Fox News are organising, hosting, promoting and supporting tea party's to protest the government...then reporting on them as a glorious example of grass roots protest and democracy in action.

 

It's not left wing to oppose that.

[Guest alex]

I think people who call Obama a Communist or Nazi (or both at the same time) can be designated as stupid pretty fairly imo.

Same goes for people who refuse to look at anywhere other than Fox for news. That's actually choosing to be narrow-minded.

[luckyluke 2]

You meet some scarily ignorant Americans doing the whistlestop tour thing in Europe. Some of them aren't even sure what country they're in.

 

Another favourite was the girl who'd claimed to have 'done' (an obscenely arrogant use of the verb that irked my brother and I no end) England, when on further questioning it revealed that she had seen Buckingham Palace and been to a few Walkabouts in London.

[NJS 4256]

I met an American once who was telling me how much he'd impressed on his kids the need for travel to broaden the mind (fair enough) which he said he'd decided after one two week trip to Europe when he was a student.

 

I guess that means my two one week trips to the US mean I can tick that box as done.

[Guest alex]

You meet some scarily ignorant Americans doing the whistlestop tour thing in Europe. Some of them aren't even sure what country they're in.

 

Another favourite was the girl who'd claimed to have 'done' (an obscenely arrogant use of the verb that irked my brother and I no end) England, when on further questioning it revealed that she had seen Buckingham Palace and been to a few Walkabouts in London.

I once had a conversation with one who commented on the quaintness of the Turkish national costumes in the window of a shop. I told him we were in Greece. He asked "What's the difference?" Cracked me up. I mean, Brits abroad can be canny bad, but they usually know what country they're in.