We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

[Woodsman]

Excellent piece by Thomas Frank.

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We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Is the left enjoying a moment of triumph -- or has a president with no bearings left the Tea Party in charge?

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/09/we_a...ed_everything/

[lektrode]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Excellent piece by Thomas Frank.

---

We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Is the left enjoying a moment of triumph -- or has a president with no bearings left the Tea Party in charge?

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/09/we_a...ed_everything/

heh - sure - the lib-dem run op/ed depts of the lamestream media have all been 'captured' and its all fox's fault?

meanwhile they(all) continue to run cover for the top of the dems money machine by ignoring the biggest criminal conspiracy EVER

and its the teaparty's fault?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

i dunno woody - just as i start to think you arent all that hard-over on the left, you go and prove me right again...

[touhy]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Whatever you say Perfessor.

(I am handling Woodman's replies while he is on break)

[Slimprofits]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

This thread already has and will continue to generate many entertaining narraratives. A gift that keeps on giving.

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Fox and the rest of the media make no difference; they are all a part of FIRE

Let's find a way to get TECI supporting independents in power and start solving this countries problems.

[Woodsman]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

This thread already has and will continue to generate many entertaining narraratives. A gift that keeps on giving.

Whatever floats your boat, slim.

Lek, now don't imagine for a minute that I don't enjoy your home spun commentary and creative spelling, but you're so much more interesting (albeit no less entertaining) when you actually read the post before sharing your thoughts with us. There's maybe three sentences about the tbaggers in the whole piece, boss.

As for being a lefty, you got me dead to rights, Lek. I can't live the lie anymore. I GOTTA BE ME! I'm actually a six-foot two, vegan, African-American lesbian and vice-president of the local Code Pink chapter run by my life partner and pre-op transgendered longshoreman Franchesca (call her Frank).

I'm so relieved now that I've gotten that off my heaving D cups, girlfriend.

[lektrode]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

EYE KNEW IT!!!!

OK woody - you got me to laff - OUTLOUD N PROUD even ;)

and i'm NOT having a good day - after bailing out last week at 6.63...

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/...ws-184836.html

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Sharyl Attkisson | CBS Photo
http://www.politico.com/design/sprites/p-sprite.png); position: absolute; top: 10px; right: 10px; text-indent: -9999em; width: 16px; height: 16px; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">Close

By DYLAN BYERS | 3/10/14 2:36 PM EDT


CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has reached an agreement to resign from CBS News ahead of contract, bringing an end to months of hard-fought negotiations, sources familiar with her departure told POLITICO on Monday.
Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network's liberal bias, an outsized influence by the network's corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt like her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air.
At the same time, Attkisson's own reporting on the Obama administration, which some staffers characterized as agenda-driven, had led network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting. She is currently at work on a book -- tentatively titled "Stonewalled: One Reporter's Fight for Truth in Obama's Washington" -- which addresses the challenges of reporting critically on the Obama administration.
(WATCH: POLITICO interviews Sharyl Attkisson)
Feeling increasingly stymied and marginalized at the network, Attkisson began talking to CBS News President David Rhodes as early as last April about getting out of her contract. Those negotiations intensified in recent weeks, and her request was finally honored on Monday.
Reached by phone, Attkisson described her resignation as "amicable." She said she will now turn her attention to the book, which is being published by HarperCollins, a division of NewsCorp (and not by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS Corporation.)
Sonya McNair, the senior vice president for communications for CBS News, said in a statement: “CBS News veteran Sharyl Attkisson is leaving the news division to pursue other endeavors. We appreciate her many contributions and we wish her well.”
(Earlier on POLITICO: The Attkisson approach)
But Attkisson had become a polarizing figure at the network, sources there said. While some championed her relentless dedication to investigations -- ranging from defective Firestone Tires to the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal -- others saw evidence of a political agenda, particularly against President Obama. (The bulk of Attkisson’s work since 2009 has focused on the failures or perceived failures of the Obama administration, including the administration’s failed green energy investments and the attack in Benghazi, though she has reported on several Republican failures as well.)
Others have suggested that CBS News itself was politically biased: "It's no secret that Sharyl has been unhappy about CBS's lack of interest in investigative reporting, especially when it comes to stories about the Obama administration," a source close to Attkisson said.
(50 POLITICOs to watch: Sharyl Attkisson)
Attkisson's frustrations aside, the network maintains a dedicated investigative unit, which produces packages that appear across CBS News programming.
Attkisson joined CBS News from CNN in 1993. She served as an overnight anchor for two years before becoming a Washington-based correspondent, a position she held until this week. She has won five Emmy awards for her reporting on Fast and Furious, the Red Cross, Republican fundraising, TARP and border patrol.
An earlier version of this post said Attkisson has won two Emmy awards. She has won five.

[lektrode]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

....Lek, now don't imagine for a minute that I don't enjoy your home spun commentary and creative spelling, but you're so much more interesting (albeit no less entertaining) when you actually read the post before sharing your thoughts with us. There's maybe three sentences about the tbaggers in the whole piece, boss....

ok - i just read it - stuff like this that spews forth from the 'all lib-dems, all the time' op/ed depts mostly gives me a headache
and all i can say is that people who have time/inclination if not ENTHUSIASM to choke down all this kind of stuff are either ...

A: .gov/dem-party apologists assuaging their guilt trips for having put such a side-winder in the whitehouse, only to have to explain to the disappointed masses (that fell for all their BS propaganda that 'succeeded' in putting The Most Un-qualified/In-Experienced clown of a POTUS in US history) - WHY they should still vote for dems, not matter whats wrong with them,

or B: are political 'science' teachers/junkies with too much 'free time' on their hands (typically while on someone elses dime/timeclock at work)

here's a few lil beauties for example:

That’s key: political economy. And you use the word “egalitarian.” That’s sort of what’s completely missing today. All of these victories on these other fronts, largely matters of identity politics, and where is the egalitarian left?

Right, and my friend Walter Michaels has made this point very eloquently over and over again . . . that the problem with a notion of equality or social justice that’s rooted in the perspectives of multiculturalism and diversity is that from those perspectives you can have a society that’s perfectly just if less than 1 percent of the population controls 95 percent of the stuff, so long as that one percent is half women and 12 percent black, and 12 percent Latino and whatever the appropriate numbers are gay. Now that’s a problem.

cant fergit them now, no siree (or my other suspicion that most of the op/ed depts are apparently run by em these daze)
since one cant watch TV for even 15mins, go more than 2 pages into a newspaper or magazine, without being 'exposed' to the daily 'pro-lifestyle-choice' propaganda - altho personally i couldnt care less about this issue, just am tired of hearing about it, in every.media.outlet.on.every.show.in.every.paper/mag.on.every.day.of.the.week. continously, it seems, since 2008.)

and this one...

You’ve got to explain that a little more.

Well, in not much more than a decade, gayness has gone from being if not completely stigmatized, certainly not normalized. . . .

Yeah, you’re right. Ten years ago, remember, those ballot initiatives all over the country in the election of ’04 to outlaw gay marriage and it was instrumental to winning Bush’s reelection.

That’s right. And here we are like a decade later and that’s. . . .

Going the other direction now. But the symbolism of this is all very interesting. In your Harper’s article you talk about Obama as a symbol, that he’s a cipher. I think you’re quoting someone…

I think I’m quoting Matt Taibbi I believe, but I’ll take it. I’ll take credit for it also. Because he is. He’s always been a cipher. You know that.

and i'll just excuse him for 'using in his name in vain' and/or name dropping matt in here...

Obama’s a highly intelligent man. You’ve met him.
Yes.
Maybe he’s a cipher in the sense that he’s a symbol. But he’s not a cipher of a human.
I don’t know. Look, I’ve taught a bunch of versions of him.
You mean you’ve had people like him as students?
Yeah. So his cohort in the Ivy League. His style. There’s superficial polish or there’s a polish that may go down to the core. I don’t know. A performance of a judicious intellectuality. A capacity to show an ability to understand and empathize with multiple sides of an argument. Obama has described himself in that way himself in one or maybe both of his books and elsewhere. He’s said that he has this knack for encouraging people to see a better world for themselves through him.
Yeah, he’s like a blank slate.
Right. Which in a less charitable moment you might say is like a sociopath.
Come on now!
I’m not saying that. But I’m just saying. I’m not saying he’s a sociopath but…

uh huh = just more of the same 'critical examination' of the sort that usually comes out as 'extollation by faint criticism' (to paraphrase)

and how could he/they NOT get round to this comparison?:

That (blank slate personality) seems like the classic … the kind of people who lead the Democratic Party. Only he’s got considerably more charisma than most of them.
He’s better at it than most. And this is another point that I make. That any public figure, especially a politician or a figure in a movement, is going to be like a hologram that’s created by the array of forces that he or she feels the need to respond to. That’s how it was that we got more out of Richard Nixon from the left than we’ve gotten from either Clinton or Obama.
That’s a provocative point right there.
Not that he liked us any more, to put it bluntly.
Yeah, he said terrible things. Right? Kent State, all that…
Right, but the labor movement and what are now called the social movements of the 60s had enough traction within the society that, as part of his understanding of who he was as someone that had to govern the country, was that he had to take them into account in some way. Clinton, as he pointed out, felt our pain, except for maybe Ricky Ray Rector. And when he dreamt of a world he would like to see in his earnest moments I’m sure it was closer to the world that you and I and others like us would yearn to see, than anything that Nixon ever wanted. But he screwed us a lot more. And the same with Obama.
That’s interesting. If Nixon had to take the left into account and Clinton didn’t, that’s very interesting.

and what better way to 'extoll by faint criticism' than comparing the O'man to nixon and... ???
CLINTON?

Well, in fact, I go a step further about Clinton. He not only didn’t have to take the left into account, his presidency was in good measure about making that clear to the left.
Making it clear to the left that they were of no importance or significance?
That’s right. That they were cue-takers, and cue-takers only. NAFTA. Welfare reform. The effective elimination of the federal government’s commitment to provide affordable housing for the poor.
Yeah. There’s a long list: deregulated the airwaves, deregulated banking…
I’ve got the photo of him signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall.
With Larry Summers at his elbow I believe.

and who did the O'man tap for HIS 'inner circle' ? (after the lamestream media tilted the elections in 2008, giving the dems control of all three branches in 2009, and bailing-out their biggest campaign contributors...

never mind the fact that after he left the beltway, wild bill WENT WHERE? - nope, not back to ole arkansas - after handing the banksters the keys to the city/DC, he and his carpetbagger wife end up in NY, of all places ??? - where he/they have gone from the great plains to GREAT WEALTH - and nobody, esp guys like these 2 - ever seems to question THE CONNECTION -
as if its merely just another co-incidence ?

and the teapartiers, fox, the rightwing are all The Problem ??? according to this line of thinking - read: propaganda output from the lib-leftish-dem media-intelligensia-industrial complex thats rakin' it in with their manufactured controversies (see 'marriage' rights, gun 'control', 'free' birth control, free college 'education' or indoctrination, depending upon which side of the .gov largesse hog-troff one happens to be gorging/gouging on...

so.. i dunno woody, after reading all that - whats yer point ?

[Slimprofits]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Like I said....

[lektrode]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Like I said....

come on - cant ya come up with better one-liners than them 2, slim?

this story (and the reactions to it) seems to me, is The Political Divide.

i might not be (any where near) educated enough to credibly debate on stuff like this - but i do know BS when eye see it

adding: IMHO, the money being spent/blown on political 'science' in The US today, along with the credence heaped upon it/them, is THE ROOT of most of the political evil in The US today

its as IF, some magical triangulation/calculation is all thats required to effectively manage the country and its governance today

its the biggest/purest BS story ever told

and the 'liberals' - by that i mean: those that seem to believe all this/that crap and that with just another 20or30 THOUSAND pages of "legislative cure-all" and 'funded' with another few trillion from taxing 'the rich' - they can fix everything thats 'disadvantaging' their fave voter blocks - and we're all just supposed to lap it up as The Truth ?

meanwhile all we ever seem to get out of them is more of the same: such as the bailout of the banksters, bailout of the auto/municipal unions(for a year or so, after the mostly dem-controlled states/cities spent like drunken sailors.. w apologies to sailors) all thru the oughts, culminating with the 'affordable' care act, and 'marriage' rights (seeing as they apparently think that NOTHING is more important these daze)

and the now mythical 'pivot to jobs' is all about raising the min wage?

what about doing something that might actually CREATE jobs ?
nah - they dont have a clue what to do on that one - cept for maybe sending john F(raud) over there to see if he can rile up putin and maybe get the ole war machine bubbling again, while he makes himself look all wanna-bee prezidente matl - or dump another trillion into 'education' - so that after macdonalds and walmart get forced to jack up wages, they'll just stop hiring anybody that dont have a BS in BS degree.

[vinoveri]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

yeah, a few decades of "enlightened" yuppies (now aging boomers) promulgating the "I'm a social liberal and fiscal conservative" mantra may explain a lot of what we see today:

Leftist social/cultural values (e.g., gender/sexuality/abortion militarized political correctness, destruction of the family - closing of the intellect - egalitarianisms "of outcome" - think education, nanny state

Right winger fiscal policies - bankers, crony capitalism, corporate welfare, big brother, etc.

The "me generation" has sure given us a lot.

Ironically, the answer may lie in the inverse: Social Conservatism (family, community, honesty, loyalty, industriousness, generosity) and Fiscal Liberalism (robust safety net, efficient health care, and higher education - subsidies, etc)

Live and let live attitudes, enlightened dialog directed toward a better society of freedom/equal opportunity, true freedom on speech and assembly, use of the common "wealth" of the country for the good of all including robust social safety net, subsidiarity and solidarity generally are a better approach

[Slimprofits]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

come on - cant ya come up with better one-liners than them 2, slim?

Neither of those were jokey or sarcastic. I find Left / Right debates about the media extremely entertaining. Please carry on.

[Penguin]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Gotta say that I, for one, found the article to be a breath of fresh air.

He gets at siome points I have made repeatedly here and elsewhere:

When the Democratic Party turned its back on the labor movement it changed everything. This was done to make a deliberate turn to identity politics which allowed the party to grasp some of the loot offered by business while only throwing away one constituency. Namely, labor.

I'm sorry to offend anyone, but if you think this has nothing to do with their subsequent embrace of FIRE you are missing everything. Not just some things. Everything. While still interested in labor they, by necessity HAD to protect the interests of the productive side of the economy. You see this is where labor existed, or exists today in remnants. Clinton's famed "third way" was nothing more than a formal announcement of what the previous decades had already made very clear: The Democratic Party had shunned labor and embraced FIRE.

That said, labor allowed personal prejudices to keep them from innoculating themselves against this assault. Had they not been primarily a white, male, middle class enterprise there may have been enough pushback from those tempted by identity politics to prevent the change. But at this late time it is too late. The die has been cast and we'll never know what might have been.

I don't agree with everything this guy had to say. But I will say that a whole lot of it cuts to the very heart of the matter. I've not seen many people at all say these things out loud. It is good to see someone else doing so for a change.

Will

[lektrode]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Gotta say that I, for one, found the article to be a breath of fresh air.....

I'm sorry to offend anyone, .... Clinton's famed "third way" was nothing more than a formal announcement of what the previous decades had already made very clear: The Democratic Party had shunned labor and embraced FIRE...

none taken, will - i appreciate hearing WHY you "found the article to be a breath of fresh air"

and my issue with dem party-politix in general is the tendency to pander to ever smaller slivers of the electorate to cobble together a 'majority' of a 2% margin of victory

as i've mentioned prev - if they got all the disparate slivers together under the big blue tent - and gave em all free booze?

they all be fighting with each other in a couple of hours.

and the lamestream media just laps it up, stoking it at every opportunity, profiting handsomely and steering the debate in their op/ed depts preferred direction - no matter what the consequences (see elections of 2008/12)

and they like to say the 'conservatives' are prisoners of ideology ?