Archive
John Byrne – Ex-Newsweek editor: Is right-wing living in ‘a mental institution?’
From The Raw Story:
Ex-Newsweek editor: Is right-wing living in ‘a mental institution?’
By John Byrne
Monday, November 8th, 2010Correction: Fahreed Zakaria recently left Newsweek and is now with Time.
A rumor that a trip by President Barack Obama to India would cost as much per day as US war in Afghanistan recently exploded across the blogosphere, catching the attention of the liberal host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
“I saw this all over the right wing news-o-sphere yesterday, that Obama’s trip to India is costing $200 million a day, that 10 percent of the Navy is going with them,” Maher quipped on his program Friday. “It did come out of one blogger in India. It’s amazing to me now that people in politics, [Rep.] Michele Bachmann said this. Sharron Angle said Sharia law was taking hold in Texas. And when asked why, they say, oh, I read it somewhere.”
The rumor actually originated in the Press Trust of India, a large national news site, and was based on a single anonymous source: “a top official of the Maharashtra government privy to the arrangements for the high-profile visit.” It was then picked up by conservative news sites like The Drudge Report, without consideration of the fact that the figure — $200 million a day — is about as much as the US spends on the entire Afghan war, per day.
Rachel Maddow Explores Right Wing Lying Echo Chamber
Michael Moore – A Boot to the Head
From Truthout:
A Boot to the Head … From Michael Moore
Thursday 28 October 2010by: Michael Moore | MichaelMoore.com | Op-Ed
There she was, thrown to the pavement by a Republican in a checkered shirt. Another Republican thrusts his foot in between her legs and presses down with all his weight to pin her to the curb. Then a Republican leader comes over and viciously stomps on her head with his foot. You hear her glasses crunch under the pressure. Holding her head down with his foot, he applies more force so she can’t move. Her skull and brain are now suffering a concussion.
The young woman’s name is Lauren Valle, but she is really all of us. For come this Tuesday, the right wing — and the wealthy who back them — plan to take their collective boot and bring it down hard on not just the head of Barack Obama but on the heads of everyone they simply don’t like.
Randy Shaw – Media Falsely Brands Corporate Plutocrats as “Libertarians”
From California Progress Report:
Media Falsely Brands Corporate Plutocrats as “Libertarians”
Posted on 26 October 2010
By Randy Shaw
A striking feature of the past two years has been the media’s eagerness to brand 1930’s era right-wing policies as the Next New Thing in U.S. politics. Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan is deemed a visionary for joining New Deal era opponents of Social Security, and it took nearly a year for the media to identify Tea Party backers as solidly Republican. Even the notorious Koch Industries – run by the type of corporate plutocrats who battled FDR – are described in the October 19 New York Times not as selfish profiteers but as “longtime underwriter of libertarian causes.”
Hedge fund manager Paul Singer, another large right-wing donor, is also described as “active in promoting libertarian causes.” But neither Singer, the Koch’s or any other of these right-wing plutocrats are supporting any candidate that supports abortion rights, gay and lesbian rights, and the legalization of marijuana – three core libertarian principles. Nor do their candidates oppose overseas wars, another longstanding libertarian view. The media has long sugarcoated agendas that will damage the finances and health of most Americans, and has now gone into overdrive re-branding and legitimizing the extreme right-wing.
Crooks and Liars – Meet the New Elites: The Tea Parties
From Crooks and Liars:
Meet the New Elites: The Tea Parties
By John Amato
That right wing kook, Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, is at it again and this time the Washington Post provides the platform. He revives the age-old notion that the right has been pumping into their bloodstream for decades — that “Elites” are dangerous to America’s welfare and need to be exposed.
[…]
Matt Yglesias explains the folly of these analogies.
Actually, what we’re seeing is a new elite class emerge like never before. They are emerging with the help of a right-wing propaganda machine that has never existed in this country — and as things stand, their infrastructure will only increase. And they are known this time in our history as The Tea Party. Their elitism follows these lines.
Tea Party elitism means that it’s cool to…
Believe that tax cuts for Big Business are the best answer for any troubled economy even if their own cities are wiped out because CEOs decided to take their business to China.
Believe that you receive just as good an education if you get a college degree from Pat Robertson’s Regent University as it is graduate Stanford.
Adele M. Stan – Tea Party Inc.: The Big Money and Powerful Elites Behind the Right Wing’s Latest Uprising
From AlterNet:
Tea Party Inc.: The Big Money and Powerful Elites Behind the Right Wing’s Latest Uprising
The Tea Parties are billed as a people’s movement. But they wouldn’t exist without the help of deep-pocketed billionaires.
October 24, 2010
Click here for an Illustrated Guide to Tea Party, Inc.
Photo Credit: YieldMedia.org/The Nation Institute
This article was reported in collaboration with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
Win or lose, the Tea Party movement will come away from next week’s elections triumphant, having injected into the Republican Party a group of candidates pledged to the dismantling of government and wed to the religious right. Of the movement’s dozen favored candidates for U.S. Senate, all are anti-abortion, and five oppose it even in cases of rape and incest. Among their number are Colorado’s Ken Buck, who has compared homosexuality to alcoholism, and Nevada’s Sharron Angle, who wants to demolish both the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. Major GOP players, from political strategist Karl Rove to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, have fretted publicly over Tea Party extremism, with Frum complaining of the movement’s “paranoid delusions.”
Media Matters – Déjà vu: Right-wing media absurdly claim “Bush was right” about Iraq’s WMDs
From Media Matters:
Déjà vu: Right-wing media absurdly claim “Bush was right” about Iraq’s WMDs
http://mediamatters.org/research/201010250022
Right-wing media figures have seized on a Wired article about the classified Iraq war documents recently released by WikiLeaks.com to desperately claim “Bush was right” that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). In fact, the Wired article reported the documents did not “reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime,” but rather remnants of the stockpiles largely destroyed during the Golf War.
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