Disinformation

Last night Obama looked Amnesiac Americans in the eye and re-won their hearts, apparently.

Yes, indeedy, he scored. He seems from the a.m. media buzz today to be out-teflon-ing Reagan. With a lot of help from his vast corporate media enablers, jumping the shark imho in their triangulation of Palin to eclipse the darker reality of the Obama regime. Read below the fold...

QUESTION: If a dramatic Veterans for Peace-led protest happens in the very front of the White House, Dec. 16, 2010, and 250 activists at least assemble in the cold and SNOW, and 135 of them stand tall in front of the White House fence, some even chaining themselves to it, and those 135 are arrested, but the mainstream media including progressive corporate media don't see it and report on it ... or saw but chose not to report on it, more accurately ...

... did it really happen?

Yes, yes, yes! but shame shame shame shame on our propaganda selling out fourth estate!! Read below the fold...

Eric Berne, M.D., decades ago wrote the very popular “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” self-help book based on his theory of “transactional analysis”. Berne maintained that people related to each other from three ego states, the child, adult and parent. He held that when these cross transactions at times reached dysfunctional levels, people would often resort to manipulative passive aggressive game-playing to achieve social power advantage. Read below the fold...

I am rushing to get to work but I have on Meet the Press in the background, which I rarely watch these days because it inspires nausea. Read below the fold...

As a thought experiment, let's say you were a very determined and very unscrupulous right-wing NeoCon mole in the State Department. Further, let's say you determined that not everything was currently going your way, so the best course of action would be to throw carefully selected spanners into the carefully selected works. Read below the fold...

This week soft-spoken, corporate media favored talking head historian Michael Beschloss appeared on Rachel Maddow to help her characterize the presidency of Barack Obama as a great one. I vented about that shark jump here.

Now, tonight on pbs' The Newshour Michael Beschloss inspires further jaw-dropping by declaring that the message from the people to Barack Obama in the 2010 midterms is that he should have governed from a MORE "centrist" position. WTF?

One more nail in the coffin of the still-born campaign liberalism that never survived to the Barack presidency. That never grew beyond the twinkle in millions of Americans hopeful eyes. Read below the fold...

So much of what I see in the MSM is the construction of narratives whose purpose is to direct our attention away from what is really going on, where the real problems are, and what real solutions might look like. A vital tool in this is the false metric. One of my favorites is the U-3 measure of unemployment which is currently 9.6%. Real un- and under employment is more than twice that. So just by making the U-3 the centerpiece of your narrative, you have already cut the problem in half. Then throw in a "natural" unemployment rate of 5% and you have cut the problem in half again. Read below the fold...

'Cause I got nuthin and Lambert is still away. So: what are you doing to prepare for winter? We got our first hard frost here last night, brrr. The berries in the forest preserve where I walk my puppy daily were frozen this morning, but still tart. I'm going to be trying to emulate Ohio this winter, and get these frakking basement rehab projects done once and for all. But it's cold down here (my new office suite I sort-of-built this year is in the basement), and I'll be burning a lot of wood, while keeping the thermostat set as low as I possibly can. Read below the fold...

I just had to point out this article. The title cracked me up. Some excerpts:

... In fact, Americans are no longer capable of arriving at opinions through actual thought:

[snip]

A new study by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows that most Americans who say they want more limited government also call Social Security and Medicare "very important." They want Washington to be involved in schools and to help reduce poverty. Nearly half want the government to maintain a role in regulating health care.

[snip] Read below the fold...

Despite being a blogger who blogs about politics, I actually know more about Sumerian grammar than I do about American political history, and I readily admit that. So this comment by reader Joe really intrigued me:

By the way, I think the filibuster issue is one of Corrente's major blind spots. I don't think the degree to which filibuster abuse has completely altered our system of governance can be overemphasized.

Read below the fold...

This annoyed the crap out of me. Have at it, Corrente.It's been making the rounds on the blogs and is the very embodiment of the 'fear strategy' that Dems are using to convince people to vote for them. What pisses me off most about it is the "you'll get what you deserve" part at the end. Fuck you, Dem strategist who came up with that. No, you will get what you deserve, when this is all over. I won't forget this threat. Read below the fold...

Y'all know I don't watch TV, but tell me what you think is going on here:

The cable news ratings for the third quarter of 2010 were released today, and Fox News is showing signs of decline as their viewership has decreased by 21%, and their top shows all posted double digit losses, while MSNBC’s shows grew and the network attracted more younger viewers.

Read below the fold...

I caught a few minutes of the beginning of Chris Matthews' Hardball tonight on MSNBC. In that oh-so-familiar "I'm okay and everyone else is an idiot" way of his, he was coughing out his contempt at Americans too dim-witted to grasp how the Obama administration has brought our country 70% back to recovery.

At least I think that was the respectably high percentage he quoted, uncited, and I found myself wondering bitterly what unmentionable orifice that statistic had originated from.

Or maybe it actually had been computed somewhere by one with an esteemed degree and a six plus figure salary. Or better yet, presented by a government agency. Which ever way, I'm not buying. Read below the fold...

Obama and company apparently feel they deserve some appreciation and recognition in their what I can only call "bizarro bubble" perspective. It seems Obamaco is getting ready to blame us on the left for any Dem losses in November.

I say, let us take advantage of this opportunity. If we are marginalized and demonized by them whenever politically convenient, "Let's give them something to talk about!" Let us make our displeasure felt at the voting booth! Though when was the last time any real messages from us on the left actually made the establishment or faux-progressive media radar. To blame us they will have to end their insulting denial of the scope of our existence. Read below the fold...

Bernie Sanders appeared on Dylan Ratigan's show yesterday talking about Elizabeth Warren's appointment. Towards the end of his interview, he said a few words about his opposition to extending the Bush Tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. His proposal was to end the tax breaks the high income people, take the $700 Billion freed up, spend $350 Billion on sorely needed infrastructure projects, creating millions of jobs over a 10 year period and taking the other $350 million in savings and applying it to deficit reduction. Read below the fold...