THE MEDIA EDITION: ISSUE 65, VOLUME 95
CORPORATE MEDIA: THE REAL TOXIC ASSETS
by Malik Isasis


















The deregulation of the media has resulted in the same results as energy deregulation, and banking deregulation, which is to say, corporate media has become an industry that is totally out of control. There are a total of about six corporations (Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS), and General Electric) that filters EVERYTHING we read, hear, and see—that’s six CEOs.

The corporate media has laid down every yellow brick along this path of delusion and perpetual war that begun with Bush and the neocons. The collapse of the fourth estate is a symptom of a much greater sickness in American democracy, Corporatism of government.

False Choices

In Americans’ lifetime they will have watched 3 years worth of commercials. While Americans have a plethora of choices, those choices are consumer choices rather than political choices. We have for example, 26 choices of cereal brand but only two political choices, Democrat and Republican—one party if you’re cynical, but consumer choice and political choice are not the same.

While we are distracted with all of the consumer choices, corporate raiders are treating the federal government like a buffet. No-bid contracts and cronyism has fueled the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, and the healthcare industrial complex. These industries have created and worsen the very problems they claim to correct. The United States has the highest incarceration rate out of the Western world; the United States has been in a perpetual war for 57 years beginning with the Korean War; and the United States’ healthcare system exacerbates sickness and indebtedness. Who besides corporations, benefits when the federal government is privatized?

The corporate media reports facts as being fluid. If Republicans say that the world is flat and the Democrats say it is round, the media will report both sides and say, “You decide.” Media consolidation has all but done away with advocacy media and because there is the corporatization of the media, the media no longer acts in the interests of the people, but in the interest of corporations.

North Korea, China and other communists, despotic, and theocratic governments keep their populace in the dark by controlling the media. In America, there is a blackout of information through distraction of weather, traffic, sports, and entertainment. The things the Israeli government does to the Palestinian people are blacked out in America media.

Corporate Media At Work

Corporate media is a blunt tool to destroy democracy with misinformation.






Building Consent

Corporations manufacture need and exploit the American people with constant fear of death, disease, Arabs, Mexicans and black people. Fear is how the corporate raiders build consent. Most Americans don’t know better because they are bombarded with misinformation. For instance the corporate media giant NBC according to Corporate Watch was rewarded with 2.2 billion dollars in defense contracts in 2005. Before the Iraq war and subsequent occupation, NBC and MSNBC all but saluted Bush and his build up to war and promoting it without question. Now we know the silence was worth 2.2 billion dollars.

As media critic Ben Bagdikian noted in his book The Media Monopoly, "At issue is the possession of power to surround almost every man, woman and child in the country with controlled images and words, to socialize each new generation of Americans, to alter the political agenda of the country" (Bagdikian, IX).

Under this new imperial paradigm, corporate expansionism, and acquisition and ownership of mass media by industrial corporations such as newspapers, book publishing, magazines, broadcast and cable news has allowed these corporations to exercise unprecedented influence over national legislation and government agencies. Uninformed Americans are clay to be molded as the corporate raiders see fit.

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THE WAR EDITION: ISSUE 64, VOLUME 94
IDF IN GAZA: Killing Civilians, Vandalism, and Lax Rules of Engagement
by Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent




During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive.


The soldiers are graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Some of their statements made on Feb. 13 will appear Thursday and Friday in Haaretz. Dozens of graduates of the course who took part in the discussion fought in the Gaza operation.

The speakers included combat pilots and infantry soldiers. Their testimony runs counter to the Israel Defense Forces' claims that Israeli troops observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation. The session's transcript was published this week in the newsletter for the course's graduates.

The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children. "There was a house with a family inside .... We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof," the soldier said.

"The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."

According to the squad leader: "The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.

"I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way," he said.

Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered.

The squad leader said he argued with his commander over the permissive rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, the squad leader's soldiers complained that "we should kill everyone there [in the center of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist."

The squad leader said: "You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most."

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THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 63, VOLUME 93
WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!
by Malik Isasis

















Ever since the Reagan Revolution, during the early eighties when the neocons first came to power with President Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party had one mission: to destroy Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ushered in after the first Great Depression and World War II, which created many social welfare policies such as social security, unemployment, and Medicaid and Medicare. To a lesser extent, the Republicans are also after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which expanded the government’s role in social welfare programs from education to healthcare.

How do the Republicans destroy these social programs without causing a revolution? Deficits. Run up the federal deficits so high that when a Democrat administration comes into power, the Republicans can argue spending freezes, and program cutbacks. In Republican philosophical circles this is call, Starving the Beast, which means, a fiscal-political strategy of some American conservatives to use budget deficits via tax cuts to force future reductions in the size of government. The past three Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush have run up incredible deficits and tax cuts to ensure that social programs will die from attrition.

The starve-the-beast doctrine is now firmly within the conservative mainstream. George W. Bush himself seemed to endorse the doctrine as the budget surplus evaporated: in August 2001 he called the disappearing surplus "incredibly positive news" because it would put Congress in a "fiscal straitjacket."

Here's how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There's a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don't pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these "lucky duckies." (Yes, that's what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as The Journal said, to get their "blood boiling with tax rage."

See Chart for increase in Modern Republican Deficit Spending:


Enter President Barack Obama

President Barack Obama is pushing some progressive policies with his budget. His budget for instance takes student loans out of the hands of private banks. The money now will be going straight to the learning institutions. He is aiming for a continuation of the Democratic philosophy of using the government as a tool to help the people gain access to health care, and education, rather than oppressing them by having them voting against their own interests.

As predicted the Republicans who’ve run up federal deficits in the trillions for 30 years—based on their own philosophy are now saying that Obama’s deficits spending will—I’ll let them speak for themselves:




Republican deficit-spending is never challenged by media. The corporate media allows this toxic waste to spew from Republicans' mouths and pollute the masses. And it never gets challenged by the mainstream media.

“What about the children!” they cry. But for 8 years, under Bush, our children were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to be killed and to kill other people’s children, while running up major deficits because of illegal wars and occupations. What about our children in New Orleans who drowned and lost everything? It was the Republican philosophy of Starving the Beast which collapsed the government, remember you pieces of shit?

These people don’t stand only for power for the sake of power. They resist President Obama’s budget because it is being spent on the people, rather than tax cuts to the wealthy and illegal wars. So it’s not deficit spending the Republicans worry about, they worry about the working, underclass, and middle class people becoming conscious about Republican evilness, their true intent. Did I tell you how much I hate these people?

The corporate media, the Republican’s echo chamber, carries the toxic waste, which is the Republican talking points—ever notice that President George W. Bush has completely disappeared from the newsreader’s mouths on the cable news?

The corporate media’s agenda is clear, they don’t like Obama’s budget no more than the Republicans—it’s why they say that Obama's taking on too much…"he should just focus on one thing," they say, "the economy should be his priority," they say…"health care and education can wait," they say, knowing that if he did, health care won't happen.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Republicans are crying about “future generations” but they don’t give a shit about any generation but their own. This party needs to be put to a political death. They are completely worthless, septic. I hate them and everything they stand for--
you pieces of excrement. If your party died, it would be the best thing for the children.

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THE MEDIA EDITION: ISSUE 62, VOLUME 92
YELLOW JOURNALISM
The Alice In Wonderland Effect
by Malik Isasis


The investor class and the underclass are maybe the only two economic classes that really know the tic-toc. Poor people have always said, “Why vote, it doesn’t matter anyway.” The investor class already knows that no matter whom you vote for, they’re in charge because they actually own the politicians and write the policies. The Middle Class, the dopes of the economic classes, only gets stroked without a happy ending every election cycle from politicians using hackneyed, ubiquitous phrases like “Tax Cuts for the Middle Class” and they fall for it every time.

We’ve seen in high definition and stereo sound over the past eight years, a former president, George Bush invade and occupy two countries, murder and displace millions of people, destabilize the Middle East, and bankrupt a superpower, and get away with it. Recently, we’ve witness Wall Street self-cannibalize causing the entire banking system to fail.

Where is the accountability? It’s as if the Bush years never happened, and all of this shit we’re wading through just appeared on our doorsteps 60 days ago.

The corporate media creates parallel universes, rabbit holes of absurdity to keep American citizens misinformed and shallow.



Meanwhile…Bush and his cabal have gotten away with it.

The Problem with Wall Street

Democratic Representative Sherman of California takes on the investors' porn station, CNBC over bailouts. Host Mark Haines is representative of the sleaze that oozes from the open wound that is our economy.

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THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 61, VOLUME 91
THE PARADOXICAL DRIFT
The Rise of the False Idols
by Malik Isasis

















The investment class in America has been elevated to the level of deities, Masters of the Universe and for the past 30 years, have been given unfettered access to writing public policies—think health care, energy and war, making profits hand over fist in the billions. These so-called gods sponsor our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, like NASCAR drivers. In affect, our politicians have become agents of the investment class, passing policy on behalf of corporate interests. Forget Madoff, the CEOs of these multi-conglomerate corporations have managed the largest Ponzi-scheme ever created by man, the bankruptcy and the fall of the United States government.

The false idols must know something we don’t because they are taking money as if the house is burning down. During the Bush Era, $9 billion dollars completely disappeared into thin air. During that same time period the corporate news used this opportunity to exploit another kind of looting, that of poor blacks during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.



After Hurricane Katrina Congress immediately, appropriated $85 billion dollars for relief. The Bush administration immediately gave no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its subsidiaries, New Orleans currently still lay in waste. Read Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast, by Rita King. Disaster after manmade disaster, there has been profiteering from chaos and utter misery.

Bush After Effects and False Idols

Bush, Republicans and their supporters have ushered in an era that should be known as The Paradoxical Drift, whereby failure is actually seen as success. This country elected a man who’d failed at every career he attempted from an oil tycoon to a baseball team owner, to a Texas governor and yet his failure was rewarded with the presidency, where he went onto to become the biggest failure as a president in the history of the United States.

Bush who once bragged about the investment class being his base has led the way in failing upwards. He and his cabal have found away to capitalize off of destruction. Naomi Klein referred to it as Disaster Capitalism.

Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time," each lasting "five to seven years… Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and then drawing up ad hoc plans to pick up the pieces. "

Novelist Daniel Quinn in his novel, Ismael explored the conflict between the Leavers those whom modern culture sees as primitive (hunters and gatherers) and the Takers, the industrialists who see themselves as the pinnacle of evolution (or creation), that the world was made for man, and that man is here to conquer and rule the world. It is within this self-indulgent narrative, that Takers, the investment class, have laid waste to animal cultures, the environment and threaten our very existence.

My criticism of Obama has been the criticism I have charged the whole of the Democratic Party with, and that is accepting Republican talking points as a baseline for debating policy; accepting that Republicans are better with the economy; accepting that Republicans are better on national defense. Just because they say so doesn’t make it true. Reality is my witness. Democrats have internalized Republican hatred of them and over compromised, but when they compromise, the corporate media and Republicans call them “flip-floppers” or weak with no core values. When the Democrats understand that Republicans are out to destroy them, maybe—who the hell am I kidding? Democrats will eventually wither away because of their inability to stand up to the corporate pirates who pay their election bills, and the Republicans who approval they constantly seek.

The corporate media understands that when Republicans are in power, they benefit. So don't be surprised that Obama and the Democratic congress take the fall for 8 years of Republican failure in governance--e.g. the banking system, and two occupations. After 60 days in office the media has already begun trying to raise the Republicans from their political graves by making them seem like the Greek prophetess Cassandra, on bailouts, and fiscal responsibility--only in Bush world, does failure equals success and that any of this would make any sense.

Notice how Corporate Media advances Republican talking points:

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THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 61, VOLUME 91
WHEN REPUBLICANS ATTACK
by Margaret Kimberley, The Black Agenda Report

















The right wing’s “insidious” attacks on President Obama make the claim “that a president in office for less than two months is more responsible for unemployment, a crashing stock market and the demise of major banks, than the president who served for the previous eight years.” The corporate media, ever in search of sensationalism, megaphone the Republicans’ hair-brained assaults. What the public should really be upset about is that the worsening economic situation is exacerbated by the Obama administration’s failure to drastically reduced U.S. military spending, which “is larger than that of every other country on earth combined” and unsustainable.

The Republican party is always the party of the evil doers. When they aren’t stealing from the public trough to enrich the already rich, they are stealing elections or subverting the Constitution in order to steal our civil liberties. They always lie. They will lie about the rationale for war or about the nature of the worldwide financial crisis. It is absurd to claim as they do, that a president in office for less than two months is more responsible for unemployment, a crashing stock market and the demise of major banks, than the president who served for the previous eight years.

It is tempting to defend the president and congressional Democrats when Republicans set out to destroy and make illegitimate their electoral victory. Republican legislators in Missouri and Tennessee have publicly questioned Barrack Obama’s American citizenship, joining up with the right wing “birthers” who continue to make hay out of an issue that is dead to everyone else. When CNBC attacks the Obama stimulus plan while neglecting to mention that it served as a lying mouthpiece for failing financial services companies, it is easy to want to take the Obama side.

The attacks are insidious, and are meant to weaken Democrats’ ability to pass legislation that has already been eviscerated by a misguided desire for bipartisan comity and the Democrats’ usual propensity to be spineless. Yet for all the storm and fury playing out on cable news networks, it is important to know that none of this drama really matters. The corporate media always prefer sensationalism and distraction over substantive news reporting. Democrats should be less upset about Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh rants and more upset because the economic crisis is showing the tip of a very deep iceberg and because Obama doesn’t want them to look below the water line.

The economic meltdown will continually worsen and it will do so in large part because the Obama administration will not do what it needs to do in order to stop it. The financial system could be saved if the nation’s military budget were to be drastically reduced. The only things that America produces in abundance are guns and bombs. The result is a country with a military budget that is larger than that of every other country on earth combined, but with an almost non-existent manufacturing capacity. Americans cheer because Obama proposes the type of high speed rail system that has existed in Japan and Europe for decades. There are no resources left for innovation when defense spending eats up the budget. It is truly pathetic to celebrate when “the greatest country in the world” finally catches up to the 1970s.

The mortgage relief proposed by the Obama administration is woefully inadequate. It will help only a small fraction of homeowners in danger of foreclosure. That fact is of greater significance than CNBC’s attempts to discredit the plan.

In short, why defend Obama if he won’t defend us? He wouldn’t even defend his own attorney general, Eric Holder. Holder recently made a statement that Americans were “cowards” because of their unwillingness to discuss race. “I think it’s fair to say that if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language.” Keep the boss from hell smack down in mind when tempted to fight for Obama’s honor.

In the midst of financial failure and high unemployment, there is no one in Washington willing to fight for and defend American workers. It isn’t clear how much public money AIG will need to stave off collapse. The $160 billion it has already received is apparently insufficient and countless billions more will go into that black hole before the average working person gets any consideration from their government.

When Republicans attack the Obama administration remember that Democrats could have done the same thing to George W. Bush. Even in the minority, Senate Democrats had enough votes to hamper any and all Bush administration initiatives. They refused to do it and now the Republican minority has no qualms about showing them the art of political war.

Bush foisted a radical agenda on the American people, an agenda that destroyed their country and the world’s economy too. Single payer health care would be a radical departure for this country, but it is what most people want, it would provide an efficient stimulus to individuals and business and it is what the rest of the world already has. Obama and the Democrats won’t propose a sensible and profitable change that the country needs because they are beholden to corporate interests and 300 million people continue suffering as a result.

Don’t worry about Fox news, or Limbaugh or crazed wing nuts. When saving crooked banks is the first priority, and saving homes and health care don’t even make it onto the agenda, then Obama and his oh so brilliant team are on their own. If the issues that would truly help this nation’s citizens are taken off the table there is nothing and no one who is worthy of being defended.

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BLACK FRIEND FINDER
When you need a black friend, Black Friend Finder is there
by Funny or Die

Black Friend Finder - watch more funny videos

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THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 61, VOLUME 91
TOP DOG, UNDER DOG
by Malik Isasis






















Back during the Red Scare between 1917-1920 and again between 1947-1957, at the height of United States hysteria about communism, the government initiated a co-intel program where FBI agents or informants went deep cover as communists organizers or members to subvert groups that were thought to be communists, or supporting communists activities. By the mid fifties, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been so effective at infiltrating so-called communist groups that there were more FBI agents posing as communists than actual communists.

The hysteria about communism parallels the Republican Party’s hysteria over unions. The Republican Party has been so effective at destroying unions over the past 30 years that they still parade the carcass of the movement around, scaring working people out of unionizing and voting against their own interest. Today, the percentage of the workforce that is unionized is 12.4%. In 1983 that figure was 20.1%. If working people haven’t figured it out yet, the Republican Party does not like working people.

The Democratic Party has introduced a pro-union bill that will make it easier for working people to unionize, and the Republicans of course pulled out their pickled carcass to frighten folks again with false choices, and false arguments about unionization.

"Not only will this legislation invite harassment and intimidation into the workplace, it could also cost America even more jobs," Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said.

This tired act has played itself out.

PETER PRINCIPLE

In spite of their virtues being compromised by hubristic corruption, Republicans deflect fault and refuse to take responsibility for their wrongdoing, instead they play six degrees of Bill Clinton; the Republicans can connect Bill Clinton to any scandal. However, they can’t think of one when it comes to Bush. Since the Republicans’ leadership paradigm is top-down, it is very interesting to see them implode. They lash out like cornered cats, wanting to take everyone down with them; and because the Republican Party works from the top-down, that is, they lead from the top-down, lock-step, when one falls, many more of them will fall, like dominoes.

The Republican implosion is not new. Throughout the 20th century, there are examples of Republicans reaching the pinnacle of power and then collapsing from the weight of their incompetence and lack of compassion. It’s the Peter Principle, which theorizes that a person will be promoted to the highest level of his/or her competence and eventually advance to a level of incompetence. The modern Republican Party implodes every other generation under its own ineptitude and rises like the Phoenix, only to repeat the same mistakes. They run campaigns well, but are failures at governance.

The 1920s was an era of Republican dominance. During the 1920s there were three consecutive Republican Presidencies: Warren Harding (1920-1923), Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) and Herbert Hoover (1929-1933). Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, like President Bush, favored tax cuts and a hands-off approach toward corporate power. “Taxes and regulation [sic] were slashed dramatically, monopolies were allowed to form, and inequality of wealth and income reached record levels. The country was on the conservative's preferred gold standard, and the Federal Reserve was not allowed to significantly change the money supply (Kangas). The Laissez faire doctrine of unfettered capitalism “was most strictly applied during the Republican presidencies of Warren Harding (1920-1923) and Calvin Coolidge (1923-1928) (Kangas). President Bush's Administration and policies most resembled that of President Warren Harding’s Administration and polices.

"Once in office, Harding admitted to his close friends that the job was beyond him. The capable men that Harding appointed to his cabinet included Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State, Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury, and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. But he also surrounded himself with dishonest cheats, who came to be known as "the Ohio gang." Many of them were later charged with defrauding the government, and some of them went to jail. Though Harding knew of the limitations of men like Harry Dougherty, the slick friend he appointed attorney general, he liked to play poker with them, drink whiskey, smoke, tell jokes, play golf, and keep late hours."…
…Most historians regard Harding as the worst President in the nation's history. In the end, it was not his corrupt friends, but rather, Harding's own lack of vision that was most responsible for the tarnished legacy"
( Americanpresident.org).

President Warren Harding'’s hands-off approach of the investment class helped exacerbate and deepen the class divide. The richer were richer, and the poor were poorer and the small middle-class was on life support. Workers could not afford the products that they were manufacturing. In effect, America was an oligarchy. Eventually, this corporate governance caused the Great Depression.

Eight years of Republican governance has caused the economic meltdown under George W. Bush, but the Republicans will blame their malfeasance on Obama, and the media will collude in scripting a Lazarus rise of the Republicans to save the country from their 12 years of governance that collapsed the economy in the first place.

Republicans really don’t have to do much governing; all they need to do is keep throwing shit at passerbyers like monkeys at the zoo and the corporate media will put them back in power.

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THE Nth DEGREE: THE STRAIGHT DOPE
BABY
by N, The Love Correspondent




















I recently got an email from an old friend. It was wonderful. It contained lots of information about her family, her job, her new husband and even beautiful photos of her toddler, and then she did IT, “When-are-you-going-to-have-a-baby?”

I cringed.

See having a baby was never a When question for me but an If question. It was a choice that I could make When and or If I was ever ready. Lately though, especially with the rapidly approaching thirties, it seems as if society has chosen for me. The If that I always knew as choice, in a sense, now comes with a stigma. People either assume one of two things:

1. You can’t have children do to some medical concern. Poor you. You should adopt immediately.
OR
2. You are egotistical, selfish, and down right “disrespectful” bitch towards womankind and their eventual role. You choose to put work, money, travel, love or anything and everything else in front of the “joys of motherhood.” In the words of my mother, “It is a waste of your womanly parts! That is what they’re there for! You only care about you!”

I do care about me. I care about the sense of disillusionment and doubt when thinking about motherhood and childbirth. I care about the fact that I can’t manage money properly and could make bad financial decisions that could affect my child. I am egotistical enough to know that my work is important, the job I do there makes a difference and keeps me mentally fed. I also know I have an opinion. I have choice.

So when I went to reply to my friends email, I simply stated,

“Your son is beautiful and truly a gift. I am so happy for you.”

“P.S. If I choose to have a baby, then I will let you know. It’s just me right now and I’m okay with that choice.”

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THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 61, VOLUME 91
KILL THEM BEFORE THEY GROW
The Republican’s Fear Itself Strategy
by Malik Isasis






















Republicans have been hyperventilating since election night. They’ve lost power, but still have hold on the echo chamber that is the corporate media who gives them unfettered access to spread bile and infect the populace. Republicans have absolutely no credibility, however, like the zombie banks that continue to get billions from the government to squander, the corporate media keeps extending credibility they haven’t earned.

The cable news has been satiated with Rush Limbaugh, a right-wing talk radio host, and apparent leader of the Republican Party for wishing that Obama fails. This of course is a straw man argument; the media are bored and want to construct a villain for Obama because the Republican Party is rudderless. Just as Clinton had Newt Gringrinch in the 90s, the corporate media like Don King, want to erect this false idol known as Rush Limbaugh, who pulls shit from his ass and throws it against the wall to see what sticks. It all sticks because the corporate media gives him the light every time he barks. Limbaugh and the Republican’s false outrage over the budget is interesting since it was President Bush who bankrupted the country, but it just goes to show that these people flip positions when it suits their needs.

Republicans are out of power, but haunt the media echo chamber halls like the ghosts of Christmas past. When they were in power the corporate media carried their water, now out of power, the media carries their water—giving their absurd trickle-down economic theory breath, even though it was trickle-down economics that created the “super capitalism” that corrupted the failed, unregulated banking system.

FEAR ITSELF

Falsities, innuendos and lies are what the corporate media do to induce fear on behalf of the Republicans until their injured lover gets back into power. Republicans and the corporate raiders fret the growth of the middle class and will do anything to relate progressivity with socialism and communism.



The Republicans have no intention of working with Obama. They want to kill his presidency before it takes off--they want a crib death--so that nothing gets accomplished and then blame Bush and their failures passed onto the Democrats, on the Democrats, presto! these bastards are back in office spreading their brand of despotism. What a bunch of sick bastards.

If it isn’t clear to Obama and the Democrats that if they were babies in a crib, the Republicans would smother them, it should be clear now how much they loathe Democrats and everything that they stand for. Make no doubt about it; these types of attacks are designed to make us forget George Bush and Republican failure.

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A FILM REVIEW
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
by Malik Isasis






















“In 1972 in Gransberg V. Hayes this court ruled against the right of reporters to withhold the names of their sources before a grand jury, and it gave the power to the government to imprison those reporters who did. It was a 5-4 decision, close. In his descent in Gransberg, Justice Stewart said, “As the years pass, power of government becomes more and more pervasive. “Those in power,” he said, “Whatever their politics, want only to perpetuate it, and the people are the victims. Well, the years have passed, and that power is pervasive. Mrs. Armstrong could have buckled to the demands of the government—she could’ve abandoned her promise of confidentiality and she could have simply gone home to her family. But to do so, would mean that no source would ever speak to her again, and no source would never speak to her newspaper again. And then tomorrow when we lock up journalists from other newspapers…we will make those publications irrelevant as well, and thus we will make the First Amendment irrelevant. And then how will we know if a president has covered up crimes or if an army officer has condoned torture. We as a nation will no longer be able to hold those in power accountable to those they have power over—and what then is the nature of government when it has no fear of accountability? We should shutter at the thought. Imprisoning journalists—that’s for other countries, that’s for countries who fear their citizens, not countries that cherish and protect them. Some time ago, I began to feel the personal, human pressure on Rachel Armstrong and I told her that I was there to represent her and not her principle…and it was not until I met her that I realize that with great people, there’s no difference between principle and the person.”

That speech was delivered by Albert Burnside (Alan Alda, to the Supreme Court on behalf of his client, Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) in the political thriller, Nothing But the Truth. Nothing But the Truth is an austere story of a reporter Rachel Armstrong (Beckinsale) who uncovers the identity of a CIA agent (the always interesting Vera Farmiga), and reports the agent’s name in her newspaper. If this sounds familiar, the idea was pulled from the headlines of the Valerie Plame case in which she, a CIA operative, was outed by the Bush Administration for her husband’s Joe Wilson, former Ambassador, campaign to discredit the Bush Administration’s reasons for going to war.

Judith Miller, former New York Times’ reporter, and cheerleader of the Iraq War reported, was also an inspiration. Miller reported in the build up to the Iraq war, the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq. Her front-page story quoted unnamed "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed "Bush administration officials" who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.

Miller was eventually jailed for refusing to name the source that leaked Valerie Plame’s name to the media before a federal grand jury and was held in contempt of
court to which the New York Time editorialized as such:

This is a proud but awful moment for The New York Times and its employees. One of our reporters, Judith Miller, has decided to accept a jail sentence rather than testify before a grand jury about one of her confidential sources. Ms. Miller has taken a path that will be lonely and painful for her and her family and friends. We wish she did not have to choose it, but we are certain she did the right thing…

Writer/Director Rod Lurie chose not to make reporter Rachel Armstrong a Right-Wing hack; rather she is careless, but ultimately sympathetic. The film illustrates the absurdity of the high schoolish nature of the 24-hour news cycle and how it is fueled by half-truths, innuendos and lies.

Kate Beckinsale is wonderful in this film; it is an understated performance that is not overwrought with melodrama, but realism as she sees her upper middle class life style fall apart due to her uncompromising principles.

The film is somewhat relentless in how it begins with a premise and follows doggedly that concept to its conclusion, which leaves one feeling incredibly disturbed about the state of our corporate media and government. And the eloquent speech Alan Alda’s character gives to the Supreme Court, resulted again in a 5-4-decision loss. Relentless.

Nothing But the Truth was supposed to be released on December 19, 2008, the date was pushed back to February 28, 2009, now it looks like it will go straight to video sometime in March. I find this very unfortunate for such a smart political film.

Grade: B+

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