Like a bad check, these clowns keep bouncing back, with the persistence of a nasty cold that just won’t ever seem to quite go away.

Guess we can’t be too surprised, though. Hopefully people won’t be nearly as prone to swallow the BS from them the way they have done in the past. I really like how the guy phrases it at the end that they just want to raise the focus on violent crime.

On a website he calls ExposeObama.com, Floyd G. Brown, the producer of the “Willie Horton” ad that helped defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, is preparing an encore.

Brown is raising money for a series of ads that he says will show Barack Obama to be out of touch on an issue of fundamental concern to voters: violent crime.

By “violent crime” does he mean the war in Iraq? Come to think of it, Floyd, I’m glad you’ve brought that up, since it does seem to be disappearing as an issue from the media landscape.

Brown and GOP strategists say such ads stimulate a debate on crime and punishment and may provide a window into the morality of a candidate.

As well as providing a window into the morality of those who willfully distort these subjects for partisan political gain. Hopefully this will indeed stimulate a debate on crime and punishment. How about a debate on the massive crimes of fraud and theft being waged against the American taxpayer by privileged ruling elites governing from Wall Street who use their position to bilk taxpayers of billions in their money raking pursuit of endless cash through the policy of perpetual war? That’s one debate I think we may be overdue in having, particularly via the platform of the corporate media.

Read The Full Report

Don Hazen authors one of the better pieces I’ve come across as of late on just how the propaganda machine functions. There is a good reason they call it an ‘echo chamber.’

“Sliming” is the rabid, rapid, media barrage of persistently repeated lies and innuendo mastered by the right-wing media machine, which aims to tar candidates with negative associations before their campaigns get rolling. Or alternatively, to bruise them enough so that they will suffer under the burden of damaged goods as they try to gain footing.

The conservative roots usually puts out a speculative story through Fox News or Matt Drudge (of the Drudge Report), a powerful mouthpiece for the Bush White House. Then the right-wing echo reverberates as the lies make their way to talk radio and the right-wing blogosphere. Eventually, it gets picked up and carried by the mainstream media, with few understanding where the story originated.

In fact, disinformation conjured by the conservatives often has its most profound impact with the steady cooperation of the corporate press in repeating their lies. How many people still think that Al Gore said he invented the Internet?…

Fox’s ability to be blatantly partisan, yet be treated like serious news journalists, is an unprecedented and thus far successful, juggling act. Furthermore, Fox critics are perpetually frustrated with the counter-productive collusion of Democrats and some activists to cooperate with Fox by appearing on its shows, aiding Fox’s claims of the legitimacy of its new organization.

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Lots of people tend to dismiss Fox’s influence, saying that they have been discredited among those who matter, and its audience is mainly conservatives who are beyond reason. But that notion misses the point, as Fox’s audience is larger than CNN and MSNBC combined, and many watch it for its perceived entertainment value.

More importantly, Fox, as one part of the right-wing echo chamber, is a key component in the feeder system into the mainstream media. Many journalists and editors revel in the right-wing disinformation machine as something akin to watching a car wreck and seem obliged to report accusations by right-wing media, even if made up.

And in the big picture, mainstream media does not seem to comprehend that in being unable or unwilling to find the truth before they report misinformation, they are contributing to their own demise. As the media system is increasingly transformed into polarized voices, mainstream media has already lost a good deal of its credibility and its audience.

As Paul Waldman of Media Matters and the Gadfly notes here…

In their repugnant book “The Way to Win,” ABC News political director Mark Halperin and John Harris of The Politico (and formerly of the Washington Post) explain that, as journalists, “Matt Drudge rules our world.” In other words, when Drudge — a right-wing operative who closely coordinates his activities with the Republican National Committee — puts up a sensational story on his website, Halperin, Harris and the rest of their cohorts simply have no choice but to run off and cover it, whether it is true or not.

Read The Complete Article from AlterNet

This is pretty sick.

After months of studied ambiguity, President Bush finally admitted that Iraq had ” nothing ” to do with the attack on the World Trade Center. The Defense Department, however, appears determined to perpetuate the myth.

Today, the administration released veterans day messages from troops in Iraq. These “taped messages from the U.S. Defense Department” featured a replica of the twin towers in the background.

Whether it is listing US serviceperson’s gravestones with the political propaganda name applied to the conflict they died in (such as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” rather than, say “Korean War” or “Vietnam War”), to putting shards of Saddam’s statue in the WTC memorial, to this (and many, many more), this administration rivals anything the Soviets, Maoist China or most any other authoritarian state has attempted to pull off in the propaganda department.

Watch the videos as cablecast from CNN Here take from The Carpetbagger Report

These guys are doing some great work.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin each thanked the man — identified as a federal housing representative — who followed them to the lectern Monday to announce a major reversal in policy.

But the well-dressed, well-spoken man calling himself Rene Oswin, assistant deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, turned out to be an impostor who was part of a weeks-long hoax.

“Everything is going to change about the way we work, and the change is going to start here today in New Orleans,” the man said during his speech.

Jackson, he said, had had to cancel his appearance at the meeting of 1,000 builders and contractors at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner because he had to stay in Washington to meet with President Bush.

William Loiry, president of meeting sponsor Equity International, said he was duped.

“We were contacted about a week ago or so by someone who we believed to be [public relations firm] Hill & Knowlton [saying] that they were representing the HUD secretary and that he wanted to make a major announcement at this summit.

“Of course, we know Hill and Knowlton and know they’re a reputable firm. We agreed to that.”

The reference to Hill and Knowlton being a ‘reputable firm’ is particularly rich. Uh, yeah, if reputable means shilling lies for war crimes for cash. Hill & Knowlton are to information what Heidi Fleiss is to romance.

Read the Full CNN Report

Who are The Yes Men? Read more Here.

This article from Le Nouvel Observateur goes to the heart of a theme we often discuss on USTV, that of the role of television as a main tool for ‘manufacturing consent’ in self-proclaimed democracies. In this case, its essential use in the rise of power of Italy’s neo-fascist coroporatist Silvio Berlusconi.

We know that television does not function like other media that have to differentiate themselves, to exalt their differences to sell. Commercial television must level, must promote equality - not of rights, but of behavior and consumption. After the introduction of commercial channels, television transformed itself into a mechanism for the production of desires. And those are desires for material consumption, since advertising is geared to that. But the mechanism instigated by the reading of the audience has quickly taken on wider and more worrying aspects, to the point of subjecting politics itself to its logic.

News broadcasts, by introducing the use of polls to comment on and evaluate problems of social importance, have rooted an equation in the public mind between majority and truth. The most worrying aspect is the tendency to give the poll the value of truth. For the first time, truth and power are expressed in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. Terms like “teledemocracy” and “videocracy,” apparently opposed to one another, express a single concept. The dictatorship of the majority is realized in the video era.

Read The Full Article Here

This is an interesting side by side comparison of events from the DOD’s information stylists, The Lincoln Group, and a different version of the same events/timeline.

As if we didn’t already know the general gist, but here’s some detail.

A week after the US Defence Secretary criticised the media for “exaggerating” reports of violence in Iraq, The Independent has obtained examples of newspaper reports the Bush administration want Iraqis to read.

They were prepared by specially trained American “psy-ops” troops who paid thousands of dollars to Iraqi newspaper editors to run these unattributed reports in their publications. In order to hide its involvement, the Pentagon hired the Lincoln Group to act as a liaison between troops and journalists. The Lincoln Group was at the centre of controversy last year when it was revealed the company was being paid more than $100m (£58m) for various contracts, including the planting of such stories.

Read The Full Article Here

Shocking! Shocking, I say!

Old news to some of the more observant citizens, but glad to see outfits like The New York Times start to pay attention to this stuff.

Many television news stations, including some from the nation’s largest markets, are continuing to broadcast reports as news without disclosing that the segments were produced by corporations pitching new products, according to a report to be released today by a group that monitors the news media.

Television news directors have said that the segments, known as video news releases, are almost never broadcast, but the group assembled television videotape from 69 stations that it said had broadcast fake news segments in the past 10 months.

Democracy Now! did a good feature on this report prepared by the Center for Media and Democracy, as well, including a good interview with one of America’s finest public servants today, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. The fact he is not a majority member on the commission is yet another one of those sad indictments of the ‘victory’ of George W. Bush in the 2004 auction, uh, er, I mean election.

Read the full report Here

This may be one of the more pathetically disturbing aspects of the Bush administration.

Media reform groups are calling for a deeper investigation of Bush administration advertising and propaganda efforts following the release of a report that concludes the White House has spun a web of public relations (PR) contracts larger than previously thought.

At issue are agreements to produce everything from advertisements to video news releases - government-vetted spots designed to air alongside and to be indistinguishable from regular televised news reports.

Critics of the state-sponsored content said it constitutes part of a broader government attack on press freedom and that it amounts to a subversion of democracy.

“When elected public servants use taxpayer dollars to manipulate or deceive the very people whose consent they require for their legitimacy, our public servants then become our masters,” said Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Here’s a money shot line…

Conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media faulted the report as based on an incomplete accounting of Clinton PR spending. The GAO would never undertake a more thorough study because the three-year statute of limitations governing such reviews has passed, the group said, adding that the democratic legislators had this fact in mind when they commissioned their study.

AIM, trotting out Clinton again. Never mind the incontrovertible facts about the Bush administration spending billions of tax dollars on funding covert propaganda, both overseas as well as domestically, they are upset cause this study didn’t want to compare the amount of bullshit being spun by the Busheviks with PR pushed by the Clinton administration. One would think that if they were really concerned about ‘accuracy in media’, and dedicated to pursuit of those principles, they would be livid that the Bush administration has spent so much money on poisoning our information system with deceptive and often misleading information in order to generate support for their policies. But once again, its party and ideology over principles.

It seems that according to this report from The Independent U.K. that Tony Blair and his clique have learned a thing or two from their masters Cheney and Rove.

Sad to see the U.K. succumbing to this same disease. But as Nazi leader Herman Goering said….

“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war, but after all it is the leaders who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice,, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

Read The Report Here

If there are doubts that the Reich Wing of our nation is truly hell bent on establishing dictatorial corporate fascism in this nation, perhaps this might further dispel them.

Pure devotee like cult status being bestowed on our King George. Wake up fellow Americans. The whole purpose of being an American is that we don’t have leaders, we have representatives.

One Orlando resident penned a concerned letter to the (registration-restricted) Orlando Sentinel on Saturday about the billboard. As the site is restricted to members, the letter appears below.

“The first thing I thought was, when was the last time I have seen a president on a billboard?” wrote Orlando resident Dianna Lawson. “Didn’t Saddam Hussein have his picture up everywhere? What next, a statue?”

As the sign says, a ‘political public service message brought to you by Clear Channel” (and corporate oligopolies everywhere).

Clear Channel - clearing the channels of any opposition and dissent.