Information Terrorists Hijack our Airwaves

by Nomiki Konst

Attention Mainstream Media!  I have a challenge for you: “A Day Without the Tea Party.” I challenge cable networks and their hosts and pundits, for one day, to ignore the Tea Party movement and focus on issues that affect everyday people, also known as their audience.

Which of the following issues matter to you the most?

• The 989 billion tax dollars and 5,450 lives spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• America's growing homeless population due to the jobless rate.
• America's failing public school system.
• The OECD's recent report that shows the US has nearly doubled the average child poverty level of industrialized nations.
• Potential nuclear weapons in North Korea, Iran and Pakistan.

Inspired by Walter Shapiro's 60-hour cable newsathon diet for Politics Daily, I recently conducted a cable news experiment to find out what issues matter to the media. My roommate just purchased a fancy-schmancy television for our living room, so what better time to conduct my experiment? Full disclosure up front: I am not a scientist, nor a statistician, nor do I have a team of experts readily available for consult. But I do have DVR, timer and calculator apps on my iPhone.

My newsathon objective was to quantify the hours that the moderate and left leaning media were spending on the ever-so-hot Tea Partiers.

But no surprise, the Tea Party movement was the most popular topic of the week. Altogether, the Tea Partiers and their counterparts (like their self-appointed leader, Sarah Palin, the Birthers and the anti-government militia men) received over 25% of airtime. That's an average of 15 hours spent on an unofficial political party that has no official agenda, platform or spokesperson and is unrepresentative of most American people, let alone the audience of the cable news shows I watched.  Continued...

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Hollywood's Fix for America's Three and a Half Trillion-Dollar Lobbying Addiction

by Nomiki Konst

In 3rd century BC Rome, actors were considered equal to prostitutes. In 2010, actors and others in entertainment have evolved into a major force behind campaigns and progressive causes. Unfortunately, these efforts resulted in only token reform due to a greater problem in America.

The United States of America has a dirty little secret. We're addicted to a drug. A drug dealt everyday in the halls of Congress, on the streets of Washington and at the exclusive Georgetown soirees. That drug is corruption, pure and simple. And the dealers are lobbyists. The year 2009 was record breaking for the lobbying industry, mostly due to the health care debate, with total spending on all issues at more than $3.47 billion.

Last year, nearly $545 million was spent just on health care. It would sound fabulous if it actually went to caring for people's health. Except it was spent on health care industrylobbyists, whose expensive words and promises were thrown all around Washington. Not a penny was spent on the 56-year-old retired schoolteacher, Lorraine O'Malley's chemotherapy bill. Or 20-year-old college student John Bamberger's emergency appendectomy. Or Karen Toolin's medical costs after a terrible car accident following her layoff from a company she was loyal to for 23 years.

Recently, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the proposed health care plan will cost the United States $94 billion a year over ten years, will reduce the deficit by $138 billion over that time and extend coverage to 32 million more Americans.  

The PR agencies hired by the health care industry told conservative lawmakers that reform will put our country further into debt. Then the conservative lawmakers spewed this message to American people. Are we to presume that the same groups that spend $545 million on health care talk are concerned with the cost of this health care bill?  

Americans are so conditioned to hearing "billions and trillions of dollars" spent on "Operation This" and "Operation That" and the unfathomable amount of money we owe China, that when we hear about $545 million being wasted on words, it's easy to blink once and change the channel.  Continued...

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McCain: Lock-step and (oil) barrel

by Janet Ritz

Cross-posted on Reuters, IBS, Huffington Post

In a campaign year where John McCain is seemingly doing everything he can to publicly distance himself from George W. Bush, he's also been emulating the historically unpopular president by walking in lock-step with him along the path to Texas oil.

While Barack Obama was in Illinois shoveling sand in bags to hold back the Bush-neglected infrastructure crumbling around him -- resulting in a multi-state version of Katrina with both an oblivious Republican president and Republican presidential candidate -- John McCain just happened to be on his way to Texas to accept the whoops and cheers (and money) from oil industry insiders for his proclaimed flip-flop on offshore drilling as the answer to America's oil-supply woes.

Want something worse? Aside from the fact that he did it while Senator Obama was showing empathy to those impacted by an unstable climate and deteriorating infrastructure, it turns out that John McCain gave his oil pandering speech CONCURRENT to the release of his new ad-buy proclaiming his independence from the Bush Administration on global warming.

Hypocrisy, they name is McCain.

(Not that he's got support from every state with a governor who relies upon tourism to their oil-free beaches).

Not the first time we've seen this type of double-speak, this insult to our collective intelligence, this proof of the lock-step between all Republicans who have been bought and sold by Big Oil. Bush himself pulled this when he announced his support for the fight against global warming at the same time his administration was cutting NASA's climate monitoring satellite system.

Can't claim problems with the climate if ya can't see it, right?

Well, not exactly.

People wading through the floods in the Midwest, while that may or may not be at effect of climate change, are certainly at effect of the climate. Might have been nice if they'd had some warning.

Oh, wait. THE ENVIRONMENTALIST called that one on March 20th (U.S. Floods a sign of things to come). Too late to rebuild every levee along the Mississippi, but the information had been available for some time -- for an administration that cared to look for it.

Another lock-step. Like all that information that had been available to the Bush Administration prior to Katrina. You know, the day that George W. Bush and John McCain celebrated McCain's birthday on the tarmac in front of Air Force One?

That very same Air Force One that Bush then used shortly thereafter to fly over the devastation?

President Bush knew not to fly over this latest hundred-year flood -- (he landed this time) -- as billions of acres of Heartland crops, the loss of which is destined to add to the world food crisis amid growing inflation, wash away along with people's homes and lives and dreams.

John McCain had not yet made his obligatory visit, though he does say he's coming. But not on the day Barack Obama was filling sandbags. McCain was too busy giving his milquetoast grin with those insecure eyes that speak to his lack of surety at the podium, while he offered the oil industry even more obscene profits than they've been able to speculate through the Enron loophole that his own campaign adviser, Phil Gramm, put through to accommodate Gramm's wife's position on the Enron board (before Gramm went off to lobby for a Swiss bank with energy investments)...

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