THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 91, VOLUME 116
THE GREAT UNRAVELING
by Malik Isasis



Histrionic personalities Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Rielly, and Sean Hannity--basically all of Fox News have lost their minds since President Obama's inauguration. It seems they have dedicated the next four years of their lives to destroy his presidency, or the democracy in their attempts.

Glenn Beck is standing firm in the bullshit running out of his lower intestines, despite losing 36 advertisers for incendiary comments about Obama being a racist, who hates white people. It appears a black man has stolen his country, and he wants it back.







With the United States long history of political assassinations, Fox News is priming the pump for someone to assassinate President Obama.

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THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 90, VOLUME 116
THE PHILISTINE KING
WORDSMITHING OUR DEMOCRACY INTO AN IDIOTACRACY
by Malik Isasis



Take a look at that face, forgetting the bad taupe for a minute. This is the face of Dr. Frank Luntz, Ph.D, a Republican pollster and lexicon guru. Mr. Luntz brought us such hits as "Contract with America", "Ownership Society","War on Terror", and many, many more Republican slogans, which I'll get into later. Luntz has help usher the Republican Party and their political operatives into an age of neo-nationalism, and political nihilism.

The best gift that President Richard Nixon left to his party, was the dumbing down of American politics. Republicans have sustained themselves by keeping the people ignorant, scared and paranoid, this is only possible because of the intellectual atrophy of the American citizenry. We are a nation of uninformed people for which a third are true-believers, that is, willing to believe anything the Republican machine will push down their throats.

Frank Luntz has made his bread and butter off the backs of the ignorant by NOT addressing issues that effect the working class, but by tactics that will make sure the Republicans win on any issue, no matter how absurd. It is why the Republicans ALWAYS win, even when it is clear that they have contempt for the people they govern. Let's take a look at the health care debate. A recent NBC News Poll showed only 43% percent of people polled supported a public option, and 46% were against a public option, where the government would run a non-for-profit alternative to the health care industrial complex.

50% believed that their would be death panels.
55% believed that health care would extend to illegal immigrants
50% believed that federal tax dollars would go for use of abortions
54% believed that there would be a complete government take over.

None of those policies are included in any of the proposed health care bills, but the lies persists. Here is where Frank Luntz reared his head. Back in May he released a MEMO titled, "The Language of Healthcare 2009". In the memo, there are four, familiar words that Republicans are using to kill healthcare: Rationing, Doctor-patient, takeover, and Bureaucrats. The Sunlight Foundation tracked the word usage over the summer.


“Rationing” goes from 18 uses in May to 90 uses in June. This marks the highest level of use for the word “rationing” in the Capitol Words database.

“Doctor-patient” goes from 6 uses in May to 20 in June. This marks the highest level of use for the word “doctor-patient” in the Capitol Words database.

“Takeover” goes from 13 uses in May to 106 in June. This marks the highest level of use for the word “takeover” in the Capitol Words database.

“Bureaucrats” goes from 53 uses in May to 78 uses in June. This marks the highest level of use for the word “bureaucrats” in the Capitol Words database.

And here is video by Think Progress, showing Republican meat puppets reciting Luntz' ideas to drive debate.



The corporate media has allowed Republicans to get away with the disinformation, and talking points even as Luntz' memo is public, because there is a collusion of corporate interests.

Republicans and their operatives are great and efficient at destroying things, but are miserable at building. They have attempted to disassemble Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal-- social welfare programs like social security, unemployment benefits etc., by bankrupting the treasury with over-spending, corporate tax cuts, and uncontrolled spending on the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. They have nothing but contempt for the government and for the people whom they govern. This is why they continue to lie even when the lie is pointed out to them. They sell themselves as the tonic for the Democratic Party’s moral decay, however, it’s a reflection of their incompetence in governance and moral decay. The Republican's rule of thumb: project your weakness and short-comings onto your political opponent to destroy him, but in the end, it will destroy us all.

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WTF?
by Dana Gould, Real Time w/ Bill Maher

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THE CULTURAL EDITION: ISSUE 89, VOLUME 115
Taking on Sexual Harassment, a Social Phenomenon in Egypt
by Mohammed Ali Atassi, Al Jadid



Sexual harassment of women in Egypt is one of many social problems that politicians and the media have tended to treat as an instance of individual, abnormal behavior. Because they treat it as an isolated aberration from proper social norms – falling outside the path, principles and traditions of a sanctioned way of life – Egyptian society as a whole does not need to confront it.

It took the courage of a few Egyptian women who exposed their own suffering to reveal the treatment many women routinely experience on the streets of Cairo. Simultaneously, a few civil society organizations, aided by alternative media outlets (blogs foremost among them), launched awareness campaigns aimed at transforming both the understanding and method of dealing with the issue, so that Egyptions would cease to view future incidents as isolated acts of perversion, and instead see them as components of a pressing social problem. As such, perceptions of sexual harassment have changed to now frame it as an important issue – one that demands political, educational and judicial measures, though many of these have yet to be implemented.

The problem of sexual harassment in Egypt comes to sharp focus in the case of the young film director Nouha Rushdi Saleh, who won a legal case against a truck driver who harassed her in a Cairo street. The court handed down a three-year jail sentence to the perpetrator – and the case blew the cover off the issue in Egypt, where official silence has reigned for years.

Most tourist guidebooks on Egypt, particularly those published abroad, warning foreign women regarding sexual harassment in the street, and offer advice on how they should act and react. This could easily suggest that this phenomenon is on the rise. The aggression is hardly confined to foreign women; its victims include Egyptian women from all social and religious classes, veiled and unveiled.

Still, most public authorities and influential social forces ignored the issue until the outbreak of the 2006 riots. During the downtown celebrations of the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, a crowd of hundreds of sexually frenzied young men participated in violent attacks on dozens of women, surrounding them in the streets, groping and even trying to undress them. As police stood by and watched the scene ambivalently, no one, not mothers nor veiled women, were safe from the mob.

Supported by the state media, mainly newspapers, some political figures tried to minimize the impact of the incident by accusing the opposition of exploiting the social and political dimensions of the riot for their own benefit. But if the state authority was ready for a cover-up, the Egyptian blogosphere was ready for a fight. Bloggers published testimonies and played video clips of the scenes in Talat Harb square and the surrounding streets where women were assaulted.

And while Egyptian authorities took action and installed security cameras in the center of the city – the site of the 2006 riot – to alleviate the phenomenon, the effort did nothing to prevent similar attacks from being perpetrated in other parts of the city. Incidents spread and in fact intensified in other areas, including Al Haram Street and Al Mohandesseen district, where many girls were assaulted on Eid al-Fitr last year. This time, however, police successfully arrested many of the attackers.

Unfortunately, many dominant beliefs still place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the victims of sexual harassment. Society makes an implicit assumption that women dress provocatively, or otherwise behave suspiciously to excite men into violently attacking them – or blame women simply because they are unveiled or don’t conform to conservative Islamic dress codes.

If there was one positive result of the 2006 attacks – which claimed many veiled victims – it opened the door for public debate about the phenomenon of sexual harassment in Egypt. Civil society organizations and women’s groups touched on the fresh social wound, launching a legion of awareness campaigns while the issue was still on citizens’ minds.

These campaigns sought to educate women about their own rights and warn both men and women about the severity of these practices and the pressing need to face the problem as a society. Presenting it as a social issue that affects everyone, the campaigns linked the phenomenon of sexual harassment to youth unemployment and marginalization, as well as to the fact that a growing number of young people are marrying at an older age. They also cited the upsurge in sexual repression amidst an increasingly male chauvinist culture, in addition to the breakdown of the family and moral codes, as factors.

The magazine Kalimatina (“Our Word”) published the campaign “Respect Yourself,” and the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights presented “Safe Streets for Everyone.” In cooperation with various media outlets, both print and visual, websites and blogs, these campaigns worked to enlighten Egyptian youth on the danger of such practices and demand the development of laws that deter them. Campaigns also prepared police stations and trained officers for handling sexual harassment incidents.

In the wake of this multi-faceted campaign, a sociological study named “Clouds in the Sky of Egypt: Sexual Harassment – From Verbal Advances to Rape” examined the situation. The study took a sample of 2,500 Egyptian women and 2,020 other individuals (equally divided between men and women), as well as a survey of 109 foreign women. The results were shocking: 98 percent of the foreign women and 83 percent of the Egyptian women had been subject to sexual harassment – and nearly two-thirds of the men confessed to committing sexual harassment against women.


Counter-Campaigns

On the other hand, conservative political and religious groups attempted to exploit the worsened incidents of sexual harassment to serve their own special interests. In a manner clearly demeaning to women, these factions attacked women’s dignity by pegging the blame for the assaults on the victims. The counter-campaigns even went so far as to collude with those who committed the crimes in an obvious attempt to justify their deeds. Rather than defending the victims or protecting women’s rights, these campaigns took the opposite approach.

Two striking examples of this came in the form of posters that the groups hung in some streets and published on many Islamic blogs and websites. The first contains two juxtaposed images. The picture on the right has a green hue and features a woman wearing a veil plastered with mosque-minaret pictures. At the bottom of the picture is a piece of candy carefully wrapped in green, and under it the statement that God will forgive the sins of veiled women. The image on the left, tinted in bright red, depicts an unveiled woman and a man. The bottom shows a red candy in torn paper, with a religious injunction beneath that warns women of moral failure.

The second poster continues the theme of objectifying woman, likening her to a piece of candy ready to be eaten, by portraying her as a lollipop that cannot be protected from flies (which means men in the language of these campaigns), save with the wrapper, which translates to the veil. Under the images of two lollipops, one wrapped and the second naked with flies hovering over it, a religious statement professes that an unveiled woman will not be able to protect herself – for God, the creator, knows what is in her best interest, and thus ordered the veil.

These messages reveal a disturbing mentality and ideology that view woman as objects of pleasure and entertainment, who must cater to man’s physical needs and fantasies for religion’s sake. While enjoining women to cover themselves in public to prevent being sexually harassed by strangers, this belief system seems to limit women’s choice when it comes to their own sexuality. These messages imply that the spread of sexual harassment is linked to the absence of the veil, and thus the unveiled woman holds the responsibility for the sexual harassment she encounters.


Interference of Justice

The public discussion over sexual harassment could have been confined to the media, the campaigns and the counter campaigns were it not for the courage of the young Egyptian director, Nouha Rushdi Saleh. A driver sexually assaulted her while she returned from the airport, even though she was accompanied by a friend. The assault took place in one of the streets close to her home in the Al Karba district when the driver began swerving his car towards her, extending his hand from the window and violently pulling her towards him. He touched her breasts until she fell on the ground, then he quickly drove away, looking back mockingly at her through his window.

According to Saleh, this glance back was an important factor in her decision to turn to the court and demand her rights. Yelling and feeling great anger that cannot be expressed in words, she followed the driver and was able, thanks to the heavy traffic, to grab the front of his car, all the while shouting and calling for help. Saleh gave an account of her shock at other pedestrians’ reaction: “I couldn’t believe that some were willing to help and assist the driver to run away in the car, while others told me, ‘We will let him apologize to you.’ I asked them why I would want an apology. Had he stepped over my feet? With my refusal, they asked, ‘What do you need?’ I told them I would report him to the police station. Another bystander said, ‘I don’t understand why you stand here in the midst of men.’ There were people on their balconies looking down and watching me as if I were in a film. One woman was saying to me, ‘Enough my daughter, forgive him,’ but I refused and maintained my position.”

Nouha’s legal background empowered her to insist on her rights, and she succeeded in making a police report and taking the defendant to the criminal court. With the support of her father, she was determined to have the court session be public as a means of shaking the Egyptian populace and judicial system into confronting sexual harassment. Northern Cairo’s criminal court, presided over by Judge Shawqi al-Shalqani, issued a judgment on October 21, 2008, which sentenced the defendant Sharif Jouma Jebril to three years in jail and a payment of 5,001 Egyptian pounds as a penalty. Nouha faced the news cameras and said that the judgment had restored her self-esteem. The judicial system had done her justice, paving the way for all Egypt’s daughters to pursue the legal road to claim their rights and render the first nail into the coffin of sexual harassment.

However, the judgment did not prevent Nouha Rushdi Saleh from being the subject of a vicious campaign that impugned her credibility. Her critics accused her of distorting Egypt’s reputation and of carrying Israeli citizenship, as her grandfather was among the Palestinian refugees who came to Egypt. But her courage has left a significant mark on Egyptian society, because she insisted on seeing her judicial proceeding to the end, as well as ultimately extracting a judgment in her favor from the Egyptian court. She will be remembered for helping to spearhead the long and difficult battle towards creating a civil society that holds the dignity and rights of women as inseparable from its overall goals and aspirations.

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THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 88, VOLUME 114
THE YOKEL'S MANIFESTO
by Malik Isasis



The Ghost of former President Richard Nixon has lived comfortably within the Republican political machinery for well over a generation. And former Deputy Chief of Staff to George Bush and right wing savant, Karl Rove otherwise known as Turd Blossom, made exceptional use of the political operation known as The Southern Strategy, masterminded by the late President Richard Nixon. The thirteen southern United States, which wanted to succeed from the Union because of the taxation on slavery, lost the Civil War, and never quite got over the loss.

The Southern Strategy was designed by Nixon and the Republicans to comfort the bigotry, sexism and prejudices of Southern white men who felt disenfranchised by the Democratic Party’s tacit support of minorities and women’s challenge to the white male paradigm. The Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights and civil liberties in the 60s during the empowerment movements caused a mass exodus of disenfranchised Southern white men.

The Nixon Doctrine, or Southern Strategy was not adopted to address the misperceptions or heal the grievances of these so-called disenfranchised white men, but to build a voting block of white men by pitting their interests against those of people of color and women. Although all of the disenfranchised shared more in common than not, the Southern Strategy was a euphemism for divide and conquer. This tried and true strategy works because it fractures communities by individualizing them, if people are fighting rather than discussing their shared grief, a collective revolution is less likely. Politicians and dictators the world over understand this concept.

Steady at 33%

Republican support in the polls will always hover between 30%- 33% no matter what they do because the foundation was laid down by Nixon, and turned into fundamentalist right-wing ideology by the Turd Blossom who now, not surprisingly gives political analysis and commentary at Fox News.

During the Republican Party’s rise to absolute power, Turd Blossom used so-called “wedge issues” to introduce prejudiced, paranoia into the 2002, 2004 and 2006 election cycles. These “wedge-issues” were gay marriage, sexist propaganda such as the feminization of America, abortion and fear mongering such as the invasion of the US territory by Mexicans. The “wedge issues” were used to keep the American public asleep while the federal government was being used as a money laundering service for Bush and his corporate raiders. Note: these same issues are being used to torpedo healthcare reform, the folklore Fox News, and other Republican political operatives are putting out is that the government now will be giving out abortions.

The neocons’ propaganda machine has created a simple narrative, not simple in the pejorative sense, but simple in a brilliant way. The neocons’ fictional narrative folds neatly into America’s white supremacy values. It is in this brilliant strategy that the Republicans are able to get people to vote against their own interests.

The neocon narrative tells Southerners that their moral and religious values are superior, beyond reproach—they are the moral compass of America, the corporate media coddles this folklore by persistently referring to this voting block as “Values Voters” (see here) If they are Value Voters what does that make the rest of us?

The Disconnect

There is an interesting dichotomy with the 33% in which the corporate media glosses over, take for example, the abortion and the culture of life propaganda; some voters vote Republican on abortion alone (The Turd Blossom understood this), it is their only issue. However, these same voters supporting Bush's Occupation in Iraq, which has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions of innocent men, women and children.

The regression of Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, Rudy Guilliani, and other once social progressive Republicans are the canaries in the mine--the representation of just how despotic and puerile the political system has become. Their catering to the religiosity of the 33% right wing ideology is shameful, and they’re shameless.

The corporate media’s responsibility in all of this is that they have bought into using the “Values Voters” as a gold standard to marginalize the Democratic Party, and liberals. The neocons have been successful at getting the corporate media to portray conservatism as the ONLY value on the political spectrum. Conservatism is the new center.

The corporate media’s worship of this false idol has legitimized bigotry, xenophobia and sexism and has made it easier for the Southern voting block to operate proudly in their ignorance, completely unaware of the moral conflicts and consequences that their voting patterns have on domestic and foreign policy.

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THE MEDIA EDITION: ISSUE 87, VOLUME 113
MOB DEEP
THE RISE OF ASTRO-TURF GRASSROOTS
by Malik Isasis

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

Who knew that Republican operatives--lobbying firms, would use the techniques of Flash Mobbing in Democratic town hall meetings to give the illusion that there is a mass uprising.

One thing is for sure, Republicans, their political operatives and their allies in the corporate media are stoking the flames of white hatred. When all else fails, pull the race card out of your vest and slam it on the table. What is interesting about the Republican Party is the dept of their delusion. They have become so septic and foul that they don’t even try to hide the contempt that they have for the American people.

Republicans with the help of a weak and willful Democratic Party have successfully allowed the corporations to set up an indentured servant class. We are born into debt. If we get injured or sick we accrue more debt from the medical bills. If we go to college we graduate in debt. Since we are in debt, we get credit cards to put ourselves further into debt. Before we know it, we are owned by a corporate entity such as Master Card. We are slaves and don’t even know it.

Republicans are constantly quipping about values and the culture of life, but the Republicans have no interests in “the culture of life” it's all sloganeering, geared toward winning elections and maintaining power. They cater to the false sense of moral superiority of the ignorant racists who they’ve convinced to vote against their own interests.

They and their followers are political weevils that have bored their way into the political infrastructure and have laid waste to common sense, compassion and public service. The federal government for Republicans, serves as the jump off for their larvae to develop into full fledged corporate lobbyists.

Neocons, Republicans and the rest of the right wing cabal use white lower and underclass people and their “small-town values” like a condom, once they are done fucking the white lower, and underclass people they are tossed into an empty receptacle until the next election cycle. It is they, the Republicans who when in office, send their jobs over seas; it is they who send their children, father and mothers off to wars; it is they who stagnate their wages; it is they who destroy unions which protects wages, and healthcare.

The right wing cabal hide behind plain talk, and anti-intellectuality, but they are closeted elitists—making billions in the corridors of Washington D.C. Here is how you measure a Republican: whatever they say about the Democrats believe the inverse. When they say that Democrats believe in big government, it is they who need a bigger government to protect the assets and wealth of corporations.

It doesn’t matter to the white working class and underclass that Republicans have wrought them more poverty through policies that have moved their manufacturing jobs overseas, broken up unions, increased their cost of living by outsourcing the United States government to private contractors…oh, and sending your children, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters off to fight corporate wars of choice. I know none of that matters so as long as you’re white, you all right…right? Right on. You’ve been convinced to vote against your own interests. Keep on being white, broke and dead.

The False Prophet

Corporations pulls the strings like Geppetto and the marionettes in the political theatre dance and distract so the American people can’t see the strings.

Who stands to benefit from status quo of a failed healthcare system, the American people or the insurance/healthcare corporations? The Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats would surely sacrifice your life to please the False Prophets.

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THE MEDIA EDITION: ISSUE 86, VOLUME 113
HAMMERTIME




There is something rather pleasurable about anarchy. Flash Mobbing (a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place) has been around for a while as cell phones and social networking exploded onto the scene, disturbing the hamster-on-the-hamster wheel lives of the masses. The expressions on the faces of the worker-bees and consumer-bees are priceless as just for a moment, they realize how mundane their lives are. For a moment they are outside the matrix.

There is great value in Flash Mobbing, and I think it is a tool that can be retrofitted for political protest to shock the zombified masses into getting off their asses and fighting.

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