No Scarborough, MSNBC is Not Like Fox.

To view the video go here

This morning  Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough were arguing about RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’s   decision to bar CNN and NBC from airing the GOP presidential debates if they show the documentary on Hillary Clinton.

Mika Brzezinski said that Priebus should come on their show and explain his position because he still had Fox for the friendly venue that he wants.  Joe stepped in and said “Every time you bring up Fox, you’ve got to bring up MSNBC."

If Joe’s comments comparing the networks and the rhetoric stopped there, I might tend to agree with him more often. MSNBC, low ratings and all, do not recruit people who are running in the democratic primary.  There's no doubt that the network liens liberal and they will discuss the issues from that point of view.  I don't think any one is blaming the RNC for trying to use their leverage but they can't be crying media bias.

Joe Scarborough always plays the moral equivalence card when confronted with some crazy things republicans say.  These days, moderates  like to stay above the fray by saying that both sides do it, but that's not true. The left has their fringe elements but they've been kept  out the limelight for several years now.  The right on the other hand has been out of power for several years, so they're more willing to show their frustration.  For example, Republicans are attacking Republicans right now and Democrats are sitting back and enjoying the show.

For whatever the reasons, liberals don't tune in to talk radio or view MSNBC unless it's during a presidential election year, and the network’s rating prove it.  I normally record the evening programming for some tidbits I might of missed during the day.  Oftentimes, a guest like Erza Klien will break down an economic theory enough to where I can understand it.  Lawrence O'Donnell will break down policy procedures as he did when he was a senior staff member in the U.S. Senate.

Fox on the other hand appeals to the older 65 year plus white viewer, who will turn on Fox at 6:00 AM and a leave it there until they go to bed.  It's a constituency that votes.  Christianity, conservatism, the Second Amendment and traditional values is what drives these people and Fox tailors their programing to suit their needs.

I don't see what Republicans are complaining about because they have more than their share of the media. Conservatives certainly dominate talk radio and Fox dominates political cable television.  I guess they want network television, Hollywood, the New York Times  and the White House as some sort of entitlement. They think that the country is center right even though the data doesn't support that.

A good illustration  of the media and political differences is someone's take on the George Zimmerman trial. I bet an avid viewer of Fox thinks that Trayvon Martin was a thug, and George Zimmerman had every right to kill him in self-defense.  An MSNBC viewer like myself watched most of the trial and was disappointed but not surprised at the verdict. It wasn't so much the network's influence because most of us already had preconceived notions about the outcome.I believe networks like MSNBC, and Fox serves as cheerleaders for a certain point of view and CNN does a disservice because they go out of their way to try to stay in the middle.  Look at the several George Zimmerman trial letters that have been written in our newspaper which are mostly about promoting an agenda.

Wrong Questions….Wrong Answers

The Sunday talks wanted to know what this would do to Obama’s poll numbers and to the confidence in government. The partisans of the right brought in the IRS scandals just to keep the fire of distrust and hatred going. I will discuss the vanishing IRS scandal later in the blog.

I really want to know how a person who was released by the Army while still in basic training because of the injuries he sustained, got into the CIA. How was Edward Snowden, a three-month  contract employee with a GED able to analyze secret documents for NSA?  Three-month  employment is about the right amount of time  it takes to make a good cup of coffee and make copies of unclassified material. I don’t know why Edward Snowden wanted to work for NSA when he hated the  intrusions by our government on peoples lives since at least 2008 .He was so upset at our government that he voted for Ron Paul. How ironic,Mr. Snowden is upset at our government so he moves to Hong Kong.

The person at Booz Allan (contract firm for NSA) who does the hiring should be fired. In fact, Booz Allan should be thoroughly investigated. You would have thought after Bradley Manning, the government wouldn’t let low-level employees have access to classified material. Silly me,why should I be surprised? The more we investigate the armed services for sexual misconduct;the more they appear to be surprised it’s happening.

The more I learn about PRISM and the NSA phone number gathering, the more I’m convinced that both sides are lying. If NSA is storing 3 billion phone numbers a day for future use(maybe); then what they are doing is no different than what the private sector telecoms are doing.I don’t think the government is getting their money’s worth because they can only cite two terrorist’s plots that were averted, using this program. The terrorist who plan to do us harm, know they are being monitored, so it’s highly unlikely that they will be caught using this needle-in-the-haystack method.  What we don't know how well the software is in tracking behavior patterns of the owners of the phone numbers  that we choose to legally track.  I think it’s more of a futuristic program with enormous possibilities.

The people opposing the methods being used by NSA have an uphill battle because they cannot prove that the government is doing anything illegal because, as the chart indicates, the FISA court has approved of their actions except for one in 1999. That's not to say that the government is innocent because I still remember  when the FBI director, the Atty. Gen and others threaten to quit over what they said was the overreaching of the then NSA surveillance program. The Bush administration made changes to the program to something those officials could sign off on. Rand Paul said he is starting a class action suit against the government but I suspect that is just one more of his boisterous threats that never see the light of day. Rand Paul is a legend in his own mind.

I no longer feel sorry for those politicians who say they had no idea of what was going on. If a three year contract employee for Booz Allan knew, then it wasn’t that difficult. That brings me back to the time when only six senators went to view Iraq’s WMD contradicting  evidence.

Fox News,as they normally do,turned the NSA story into the Benghazi/FBI scandal. Chris Wallace tried to get Michael Hayden to say something negative about President Obama but he was blind sided a couple of times by Hayden.

Transcript of yesterday’s Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: Let me ask you about Obama and I promise, Senator Johnson, I'm going to bring you back in after this final question. Back in 2006, Senator Obama voted against your nomination to be CIA director because of your involvement in government programs,
From what you know and I understand you've been on the outside, how much has he changed? He expanded, restricted these government surveillance programs that he inherited.
HAYDEN: In terms of surveillance?
WALLACE: Yes.
HAYDEN: Expanded in volume, changed the legal grounding for them a little bit, put it more under congressional authorization rather than the president's Article II powers and added a bit more oversight.
But in terms of what NSA is doing, there is incredible continuity between the two presidents.
On Benghazi talking points:
WALLACE: General Hayden, I want on to ask you about another aspect of the Benghazi attack because you would have a first hand from your experience and that's the talking point and the whole process involving the talking points.
HAYDEN: Oh, the most unusual, Chris, is that CIA was writing the talking points.
Look, on a good Sunday morning on the talk shows, you get policy talk. On most Sunday mornings you get political talk. Neither of those are intelligence talk. So, why is the intelligence organization writing when the page is blank?

The way this should happen, Chris, is it's a policy guise. Right now, what it is they want to reveal to the American people and they send it up river for the CIA -- not to be flip here -- to check the spelling and the facts.

Look, al Qaeda, terrorist, extremist -- those are all words that we use to accurately describe what happened there. But each one of them is freighted with political cargo. Why do you put the intelligence organization in the role of deciding which of those words to use?
The other bombshell was delivered about the IRS so-called scandal.

“The top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is calling attention to evidence that seemingly contradicts the claims from congressional Republicans that the IRS targeting of conservative groups originated in Washington, D.C.
In a letter to committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., highlights the testimony of an IRS manager in Cincinnati who oversaw the screening process for tax-exempt groups. In his testimony, the IRS manager, who identifies himself as a "conservative Republican," told committee staff members that he had no reason to believe the White House was involved in the targeting scandal, and that he did not believe the targeting was motivated by a political bias against conservatives.”

I don’t expect the scandals to go away because the GOP will try to feed the propaganda to their constituents because the economy is improving leaving them with no other alternative.

Another (*yawn) Sunday Talk Show Roundup

Ed Schultz, said that the four talk show discussions took 193 minutes and of that, only 7 minutes were used to talk about jobs. That’s unless you count repealing Obamacare as a job-creation  plan like the Republicans.

I can’t tell  you what Meet the Press was about because David Gregory was all over the map. I was surprised that women do not want the government giving them equal pay- for- equal work; according to Representative Marshall Blackburn of Tennessee.

Fox News Sunday was about Chris Wallace encouraging the GOP to charge Eric holder with perjury.  Later in another segment, Chris was surprised when Laura Ingraham and Evan Bly didn’t  want  to go into Syria and dispose President Bashar Al-Assad. Laura said we should have learned from our mistake of invading Iraq. The joke is on us because we have just learned that China will make a fortune on Iraq’s oil. The invasion of Iraq benefited Iran and China, but Fox is consumed with the three so-called scandals and getting involved in another war.

This week with George Stephanopoulos, was by far the best talk show this past Sunday.  You know, if I were Karl Rowe and the GOP, I would encourage investigating the facts, but I would refrain from preaching. Karl Rowe is comfortable spreading his lies on Fox News because he has no one to challenge him.  Yesterday, he met his match with Arianna Huffington and David Plouffe.  Karl Rowe is a pathological liar, and he’s perfected it with a lot of practice. He was prepared when Arianna accused the group he was associated with, Crossroads GPS of manipulating their tax -exempt status.  Karl made the mistake of trying to take the high- road because it doesn't take a genius to bring out the abuses of the Bush administration. David Plouffe reminded Karl that the Bush administration IRS audited the NAACP because of what the then leader said about the war in Iraq. David also reminded Karl about the firing of all of the U.S. attorneys for political reasons and the actions of Alberto Gonzalez and Andy Card when they went to the sickbed of the Atty. General to try to get him to sign- off on an illegal spying program. The look on Karl Rowe’s face(after being fact checked by Plouffe and Huffington)  was priceless;he looked like the cat who just got caught eating the canary. 

I did hear of a novel idea to fund an infrastructure project.  A  legislator is trying to create a bill for American corporations who are participating in tax shelter schemes overseas. The bill will give them a chance to do something patriotic.  The legislation would try to  persuade them to invest in low interest tax -exempt bonds to fund our needed infrastructure.  We already have a plan to put up the first one trillion dollars, but it needs to be passed by Congress.

Getting Everything off My Chest

Like the old western cowboy, I was just going to ride into the sunset and forget that I ever took part in the on line political discussions. When I read Mark T. Wayne's letter to the editor and heard what Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh others from the right said, I then thought that I should get everything off my chest before departing. It's good for my blood pressure and excellent for the soul.

It looks like Fox News is going to blame Hurricane Sandy, the mainstream media and people that wanted free stuff from the government who came out in droves to vote. It doesn't matter if Fox News came in15th place out of 26 of polls who tracked the 2012 election. The poll's Fox News usually quote, Rasmussen & Gallup came in tied for dead last. How can that network call Karl Rowe and Dick Morris political experts if they are consistently wrong? I liked it when Megan Kelly asked Karl Rowe if his math was something he "does as a Republican to make himself feel better, or is this real?"..Classic, I guess Fox News wants to maintain a small part of credibility.

Let's discuss the elephant in the room; racial animosity and stereotyping. If you were to play a word association game with a republican, and throw out a word like minority, they would say “handouts." Then you could mention women, and they would say, “free birth control pills." Idiots like Bill O'Reilly and some higher-ups in the Republican Party think all they have to do is put Marco Rubio on the ticket, and the Hispanic vote is in the bag. It's thinking like that will lose them the 29 electoral votes in Florida when the counting is done. They'll ever admit it's the harsh rhetoric, or the fact they can't tell the difference between a Puerto Rican, Mexican-American and Cuban American. It's that kind of thinking that will forever make Florida a purple state. It’s about policies. They failed to see that it doesn't matter if Florida has a Republican governor and a Republican controlled government, the voters will stand in line for 8 hours to overcome their voter suppression laws and they have good memories.

Nationally, there were constant stories of GOP controlled states trying to pass “personhood laws” and other government intrusion laws in an effort to weaken Roe v, Wade. Women got to see where the GOP stood on “equal pay for equal pay” and they made their feelings known Tuesday night.

The 2008 election was supposedly a wake-up call for the GOP, but they thought if they could obstruct, it would slow down the democratic avalanche. The Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote, leaving the gate open for the GOP landslide in 2010. The Tea Party gave the GOP the infusion they needed making the party think that they had a mandate to cut spending and taxes during a recession. They made a mistake of not compromising to raise the debt ceiling, so in turn our credit rating dropped and Congress was left in a stalemate. Meanwhile, the Tea Party kept replacing moderate Republicans with unelectable candidates which prevented them from taking over the Senate. I believe that I wrote a blog about the Democrats losing the Senate 'cause it was almost impossible to retain 23 seats while the opposition only had to defend 10. The impossible happened plus two because the Democrats didn't lose a single incumbent seat. The Democrats did pretty well in picking up the house seats they did because they were in gerrymandered districts. Those gerrymandered districts will be redone in the year 2020.

As it often happens, the election of President Obama might save the GOP from going the way of the Whig Party. It might be a good possibility that President Obama might change the makeup of the Supreme Court, which will make the social issues less important at the federal level. The president and the party will make sure that we don't have an unfettered form of capitalism where Wall Street and big oil can run amok. It will be a time to concentrate on upward mobility instead of the other way around. The Republican Party can join the Democrats and bring our troops home from Afghanistan. It is now time to incorporate some good Republican ideas into improving Obamacare. The parties will still have their spirited debates, as well they should but at the end of day, compromise should win out.

If the GOP wants to think it's about the “makers and takers," then they will continue to lose that argument.It’s about all of us being in this together. It will be more of the same if they continue to spout “holier than thou" or  try to defund Planned Parenthood for pure political reasons.

Conservatism is certainly not dead but talk radio, Fox News and the fringe element in the party are misinterpreting the meaning of that ideology. There was a time where “climate change" and "compromise" was part of the conservative movement. It was the Republican Party which gave us the EPA and the Earned Income Tax Credit to get people off welfare and into the working middle class. Yes, you read that right in 1975 the Tax Reduction Act was a Republican program that was devised by conservative stalwart Milton Friedman to eliminate welfare and pay the poor.

No, Mark T. Wayne it's not President Obama, who is causing the division amongst us. It’s people like you who won't accept his legitimacy. You can't accept that there just might be a different and better way to do things in some cases. People like you keep score, but it all goes in the negative column and never offsets with something positive. You don't have to like the president or his policies but don't think for one minute that the division is because of one man who was elected by the majority of voters in the Electoral College and the popular vote. I have never accepted that logic and I never will.

Jon Stewart slams Chris Wallace

A shellacking

I have been trying to debunk the media bias falsehood that has been taken to be true by right wing conservatives for several years. Jon Stewart explains my position in less than 15 minutes. Politicians on the right will make the mainstream media the enemy and those on the left will use Fox News as their enemy. That's where the line stops, because you don't see as many democrats hosting TV shows.

It's healthy for conservatives to have a network that's in line with their views, but they continuously misinform their viewers by omitting pertinent facts and it's no secret that Fox News will tout the republican line. I always hear mainstream republicans say" and that's not coming from Fox news." It is true that MSNBC has tried to be the alternate of Fox, with little success but it's competing with CNN, ABC, CBS, PBS, and NBC as far as actual news goes. MSNBC does tout the liberal/ progressive view but it doesn't have the viewers necessary to make democrats cater to them. The hosts of MSNBC tried their very best to get the public option, Dream Act, and other liberal agendas passed but the White House pushed back by calling them the “professional left."

Chris Wallace should've prepared more because you don't go after Jon Stewart with sound bites or try to catch him off guard with "gotcha" clips. Jon took Rachel Maddow to school when she tried those tactics, and yesterday he did the same thing with Chris Wallace. You can’t stump people with heartfelt opinions. I think conservatives need to get a sense of humor. Chris Wallace looked stupid trying to say a commercial that had several people picking up the lines on others, was comparing Sarah Palin to herpes. I still can't figure out why Wallace put out that Diane Sawyer clip where she made a mistake in covering the immigration law in Arizona. Liberals are not saying that everything on the network news comes out correct each and every time, but I don't think Diane Sawyer was trying to manipulate her audience. Therein lies a difference; watch the clip and tell me what you think.

Jon Stewart didn’t explain credibility  in this clip, but he has on the past. I've been criticized for quoting Jon Stewart and Bill Maher in the past, but they are knowledgeable individuals that know a lot about politics, national and world events. The fact that they are professional comedians doesn't make any difference. It doesn't matter if you are a history teacher, politician, blogger, telephone man or the person in the street; intelligence always comes to the forefront.

Case in point,VISDMOM and Edith Ann are correct it's all about control and a single point of view..Why fight it?You cannot win against a locked- in  fundamentalist with an agenda.What difference does it make,the GOP pushed this bill through? It should make the Dems and others mad enough to elect those who will repeal this intrusive bill or at least take it to court. How can a MAN (with certainty)know what is intrusive to a woman? The thread on PRO & CON of the Sonogram is  just another attention getter that ends as a platform for the Pro-Life agenda. The traffic has been slow;time to perk it up.I won't be a party to the nonsense of republicans ,not only pushing their agenda, but  not be satisfied until they make you like it.