Well, we just went from the worst debate ever to, I think, a full-fledged PR disaster for ABC generally, and for Stephanopoulos personally. I mean, conspiring with Sean Hannity on the best way to do an "I gotcha" on Obama, and then doing exactly what he told you to do? From ThinkProgress (they have the audio too):
HANNITY: There are two questions that I don’t think anybody has asked Barack Obama, and I don’t know if this is going to be on your list tomorrow. One is – the only time he’s ever been asked about his association with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist from the Weather Underground who on 9/11 of all days in the New York Times was saying “I don’t regret setting bombs. I don’t think we did enough.” When asked about it by the Politico, David Axelrod said that they have a friendly relationship, and that they had done a number of speeches together and that they sat on a board together. Is that a question you might ask?
Last month, AMERICAblog exposed yet another act of hypocrisy from Bill O'Reilly. We also showed he's a wimp who is afraid of his own boss:
Earlier this year, arm chair terrorism fighter Bill O'Reilly blasted the chair of General Electric for doing business with terrorist countries like Iran. Bill was in rare form when he took on this issue. But, Bill needs to have on another guest and blast him for cavorting with Iranians and Syrians, possibly even aiding in the recruitment of terrorists and certainly facilitating the spewing of hatred against Israel.
That guest would be Rupert Murdoch, the head of FOX News.
Murdoch owns FOX, for whom O'Reilly works. Murdoch also owns MySpace.com. Therein lies the problem. An astute observer pointed us to some of the users of Mr. Murdoch's site. There are numerous users of MySpace.com in states that sponsor terrorism, like Iran, Syria and Sudan. That alone should warrant intervention from O'Reilly using his own standards for doing business with terrorist nations. But, that's not the biggest problem. It's the Web sites honoring terrorist organizations that give us pause. There is the self-described "Offical Hezbollah MySpace" page.
That post includes links to several of the other terror sites hosted by Murdoch's company. You'd think that would set off Bill O'Reilly. You'd be wrong. Last night, O'Reilly again went after companies doing business with Iran. Again, he failed to mention Murdoch. This is a link to the video, which includes the following exchange:
Millions of Americans hold GE stock in good faith, but this is a bad company. Doing business with people killing American soldiers and Marines is simply unacceptable, and paying a guy $20 million to run a company into the ground is simply breathtaking.
There are more than a few villain CEOs in this country, but Jeffrey Immelt could well be the worst. And that's the memo.
Now, General Electric isn't the only concern doing business with Iran. The government of Switzerland and the French company Total, the oil company, are among other big offenders.
Actually, Bill, Rupert Murdoch is another big offender. Really big offender. Big tough Bill O'Reilly doesn't dare to go after Murdoch.
Well, how 'bout this for refreshing? Chris Wallace takes his own colleagues to task for twisting Obama's comments and harping on a fabricated interpretation of a sliver of a thought.
A radio interviewer in Philly yesterday asked Obama what he meant when he spoke of his grandmother's race and prejudice in Tuesday's speech:
In the speech, the Democratic candidate spoke of his white grandmother "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
On WIP, Obama said: "The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away, and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society.
Apparently, Fox took the ball and ran with it in a ridiculous-yet-totally-Fox direction. Here's Wallace chastising the team:
Earlier this year, arm chair terrorism fighter Bill O'Reilly blasted the chair of General Electric for doing business with terrorist countries like Iran. Bill was in rare form when he took on this issue. But, Bill needs to have on another guest and blast him for cavorting with Iranians and Syrians, possibly even aiding in the recruitment of terrorists and certainly facilitating the spewing of hatred against Israel.
That guest would be Rupert Murdoch, the head of FOX News.
Murdoch owns FOX, for whom O'Reilly works. Murdoch also owns MySpace.com. Therein lies the problem. An astute observer pointed us to some of the users of Mr. Murdoch's site. There are numerous users of MySpace.com in states that sponsor terrorism, like Iran, Syria and Sudan. That alone should warrant intervention from O'Reilly using his own standards for doing business with terrorist nations. But, that's not the biggest problem. It's the Web sites honoring terrorist organizations that give us pause:
There are many other similar sites on MySpace, like this one that honors Ayatollah Khomeini and contains a number of other troubling-looking videos. Granted, there is no way for me to verify whether that site above is the official Hezbollah site on MySpace. But, given the grave nature of the threat, figuring that out seems like a perfect task for Bill O'Reilly and his crack team of terror fighters over at Fox News.
Also, don't forget, O'Reilly spent a lot of time attacking DailyKos and other blogs for content that he viewed as objectionable, even though it was written by kooky anonymous visitors to our sites (and even though O'Reilly's own kooky commenters made some rather troubling threats about Hillary). O'Reilly has a very strict standard for accountability from others, even when they're not really responsible for the hate that may appear on their Web sites. Let's see if Bill O'Reilly and FOX News hold Murdoch's MySpace to that same standard of accountability.
As John noted below, Mark Halperin from TIME Magazine thinks McCain's surrogates should "Allow some supporters to risk being accused of using the race card when criticizing Obama." What better group of supporters to risk racism than McCain's friends at Fox News. If you've ever read Halperin or seen any of his ubiquitous t.v. appearances, it's pretty clear the guy thinks he single-handedly determines the political conventional wisdom in American politics. So his "analysis" (as he calls it) seeming to condone the idea that a racist strategy can be part of McCain's strategy is especially insidious. But maybe he should be concerned that Geraldo was a step ahead of him -- or maybe Halperin is taking direction Geraldo. Eugene Robinson has the story:
On "Fox and Friends" last week, the mustachioed infotainer gave his take on Barack Obama's borrowing of his campaign chairman's words: "When I saw that they were the same words that Deval Patrick, the black guy who won as Massachusetts mayor -- as Massachusetts governor -- had used, I said to myself, it seems so premeditated. It's almost as if they went to a camp where these black geniuses got together and figured out how to beat the political system. . . . What's the other formula that they're going to use?"
Ridiculous? Of course -- this is Geraldo, remember.
Ridiculous, of course. But, it's the play book proffered by Time Magazine's political guru, Mark Halperin.
And, of course, we all know that anyone who knows Mark Halperin will tell us he's not a racist. Okay, fine. But he has a very powerful voice and he basically said that one of the "things McCain can do" is have supporters play the "race card."
Of course the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, which co-sponsored the debate with Faux, doesn't acknowledge the major complaints arising from the blogosphere for the CBCI's role in lending legitimacy to a biased, racist GOP propaganda newschannel. It's due to scheduling conflicts. Of course Clinton, Edwards and Obama said long ago that they wouldn't participate. (Raw Story):
Fox News has canceled a debate of Democratic presidential candidates next month after several candidates dropped out because they said the cable news network would not provide a fair forum, the Associated Press reports. Organizers hope to reschedule the debate.
The top three Democrats seeking the nomination -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards -- already indicated they would not participate in the debate, which is being cosponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus.
A statement from the CBC cites scheduling conflicts and does not mention complaints that had been raised about Fox News serving as host.
How on earth coud the CBCI support a partnership with a network that has allowed patently racist statements to be broadcast unchallenged --
Many bloggers, including James Rucker and Color of Change, gave voice to the opposition to this debate, and let the CBC Institute know that this partnership was not only unacceptable, but embarrassing. This is the network that ran the bogus "Madrassa/terrorist" story about Barack Obama, a "newschannel" where Mary Matalin called black civil rights leaders attending Coretta Scott King's funeral racist, a channel where Faux News host John Gibson called for the birth of more white babies because he's afraid of the country being overrun with minorities.
You can hang your coat on the Pinocchio schnozz of Bill O'Reilly, who made Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" (yet again), this time for asserting mythical Pew Research poll results O'Reilly claimed showed "most Americans won't vote for you if you get an endorsement by a gay rights group."
A Media Matters for America search turned up no Pew Research Center poll on the topic nor any poll asking a nationwide sample whether respondents would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by a gay rights organization. However, as the News Hounds blog noted in response to O'Reilly's claim, an August 6-8 Quinnipiac Poll of voters in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania found that a majority of voters in each state responded that support for a presidential candidate by "gay rights groups" "doesn't ... make a difference" in their level of support for the candidate.
The Faux News Factor 'bot, when called on his lack of any documentation of polling statistics, tried to cloud the issue, but never admitted his "mistake."
During the August 15 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly read an email from Cindi Creager of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation that criticized him for "erroneously report[ing] that a poll found most Americans would not vote for a presidential candidate endorsed by a gay rights organization."
...While O'Reilly noted that the [Quinnipiac] poll was taken "in a few states," not nationally as he had earlier suggested, he did not acknowledge that his original assertion that the result applied to a "majority" of respondents was false. Rather, he simply cited the Quinnipiac poll results from Florida -- which found that 28 percent of respondents would be "less likely" to support a candidate endorsed by a gay rights group, while 60 percent said it "would make no difference," and 10 percent said it would make them "more likely" to support such a candidate -- and added, "That's what I was referring to."
Perhaps Mr. O'Reilly needs a better research assistant. Falafel boo-yah!
After six years of George Bush, right-wing control of Congress, neoconservative dominance, endless liberty-infringement and lawbreaking at home, and the Iraq War, what is the most disliked institution in America? According to the new Pew Poll:
Notably, there is an erosion in the favorability of virtually every political and media institution in the United States, but the Republican Party is at the very bottom -- lower than the press, the judges, the liberals, the Congress and all of its other Evil bogeymen. Yet the Democrats continue to give them whatever they want, dreadfully fearful of their great power and popularity.
The Pew report is primarily about the public's view of news organizations. It included these nuggets.
Fully 63% of Americans who count Fox as their main news source say news stories are often inaccurate – a view held by fewer than half of those who cite CNN (46%) or network news (41%) as their main source.
...Further analysis of the data shows that being a Republican and a Fox viewer are related to negative opinions of the mainstream media. The overlapping impact of these two factors can most clearly be seen in the favorability ratings of network TV news, major national newspapers, and the daily newspapers that respondents are most familiar with. For all three, Republicans who count Fox as their main news source are considerably more critical than Republicans who rely on other sources.
The shameless sleazathon at Faux News continues. After the blowback about the remarks of "Angry Rich" on John Gibson's radio program about John Edwards, all they can squeak out is an acknowledgment that it was a "poor choice of words." No apology was forthcoming. (Media Matters):
After Gibson asked him to "be specific about what [he] meant," Angry Rich read from an April 5 New York Post article that stated, "Democrat White House hopeful John Edwards' team has been collecting email addresses from supporters who've sent his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, notes -- and using them for fundraising requests, aides acknowledged yesterday." Gibson said that Angry Rich's comment was "unfortunate," but then asserted that Angry Rich was nonetheless "on high ground" because his remark had come in response to the Post report.
During the discussion, Gibson never quoted Angry Rich's original "choice of words" -- that Edwards had "whored his wife's cancer as a fundraising gimmick." Rather, he said that Angry Rich had "made some offhand comment about Edwards and the way Edwards has, shall we say, employed his wife in the campaign," and later described the remark as follows: "[Y]ou said that Edwards was using his wife in the campaign in a certain way."
NOTE FROM JOHN: Someone needs to make a list of which companies advertise this week on John Gibson's show on FOX and then contact them all and ask them why they're sponsoring this kind of hate. And big deal if it was his radio show - it's the same guy they're sponsoring. Would they sponsor David Duke so long as he were only hateful on his radio show?
This is bottom-feeder disgusting stuff. Look at this exchange between Fox News shill John Gibson and his exec producer "Angry Rich". What class. (Media Matters):
GIBSON: Our John Gibson program fraud alert today focuses on the biggest fraud running for president, and that takes some doing. We're talking about the Breck Girl, Silky, the former senator from North Carolina, the baron of a 28,000-square-foot manse, the protector of the poor while ensconced on a pillow of 100 million dollars.
ANGRY RICH: A man who whored his wife's cancer as a fundraising gimmick.
This is how they appeal to the Base. The right wing cannot sell its ideas (and certainly not its values, given the endless string of sexual hypocrites), so they just get in the gutter and fling excrement like this on the air.
The larger issue here is the misogyny of the Right -- the continual attacks on John Edwards, the whole feminizing-as-an-insult routine says a lot about their utter contempt toward women. They want to control their wombs, their sexuality, and their independence. In their book the best way to demean a political opponent is to feminize male candidates or gay-bait them (as they do with Hillary Clinton, since clearly the right is fixated on lesbian-baiting her).
I was going to post an open thread, which is Joe's tradition at this hour, but then I figured you all could really use a pick-me-up first thing in the morning. This video is it. Once you click through, you have to then click the video on the right hand side to view it.
You really have to watch this video. It's wonderful. Senator Dodd (D-CT), who is running for president, goes on O'Reilly to talk about DailyKos and O'Reilly's own hate speech. Dodd was simply amazing. I really like the guy. Always have. Like him even more now.
Best part: O'Reilly denying that he welcomed al Qaeda blowing up San Francisco. Dodd called him on it, and O'Reilly, as always, denied saying exactly what he actually said. Here is what O'Reilly actually said about al Qaeda and San Francisco:
And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.
You want to blow up the Coit Tower, go ahead? Imagine had any Democrat said such a thing. BMW and jetBlue would pull their relationships pronto. Yet BMW and jetBlue have no problem associating themselves with those who would welcome al Qaeda terrorism.
BillOReilly.com says that American Muslims are "freakin idiots," and that you should "never trust a Muslim!!!!!" Does BMW agree with the hate that BMW is sponsoring? Ask them. Then ask them why Lowes and Home Depot have dumped this hate, but BMW hasn't.
BillOReilly.com says Islam is a cult. Does BMW agree with the hate that BMW is sponsoring? Ask them. Then ask them why Lowes and Home Depot dumped this hate, but BMW hasn't.
No? Then what do they have to say about BillOReilly.com, and their sponsorship of Bill O'Reilly's TV show? BMW can't have it both ways - either they agree with the hateful, bigoted views on BillOReilly.com or not. Does BMW agree that we need to load our weapons to take on Hillary, that maybe its time to launch a terrorist attack against the US Capitol, that Rosie O'Donnell should be dead, and that Islam is a cult, or they don't.
So which one is it, BMW? Do you think Hillary needs to be shot or not? Lowes and Home Depot have pulled their advertising because of this hate - why haven't you?
During the segment, O'Reilly stated: "What is significant is that this website [DailyKos] and the others mentioned have intimidated the entire Democratic presidential field, with the exception of [Sen.] Joseph Biden [DE], who will not go to that convention [YearlyKos]. And we respect the senator for that." In response, Biden's campaign posted a diary entry on Daily Kos describing O'Reilly's comments as "reckless" and "a total misrepresentation." Biden's campaign further stated:
The simple truth is Joe Biden would be at YearlyKos if he could, but adding a book tour to all the demands of a campaign meant some things had to change. But we won't stand by and let Bill O'Reilly try to drive a wedge between the progressive online community and us to make a false point on behalf of his half-baked theories.
While not always agreeing with all members of the DailyKos community, Joe Biden respects what the YearlyKos convention -- a diverse assembly of activists and organizations -- represents as a vehicle for progressives to organize and advocate on behalf of democratic ideals and the Democratic Party.
The "big scoop" that FOX News' Bill O'Reilly was going to reveal last night, the photo that he found on the DailyKos blog that was going to "destroy" Markos utterly and totally? It's a doctored photo of Joe Lieberman fixing George Bush's zipper. I've seen this photo before, it's mildly amusing. But for O'Reilly to bill this as a shocker that the audience isn't going to believe, something so outrageous that it is going to "destroy" Daily Kos, is the kind of totally unmerited bluster that you'd expect from a desperate first year journalism student, not from a wannabe-major network. To say that there is no "there, there" is an understatement.
I'm posting this to show you, to show the real journalists who read our site, the kind of thing that passes for "news" on FOX. Not that it would shock anyone that FOX is simply yellow journalism at its worst, but still it's useful to be reminded in glaring detail just how silly and pathetic FOX's standards truly are.
Let me remind you again. O'Reilly's own Web site contained death threats against Hillary Clinton, suggestions that someone ought to launch a terror strike against the US Capitol, a death wish against Rosie O'Donnell, slurs against Muslims (including calling Islam a cult), and more. But that's okay. What's REALLY hateful isn't all of that, it's a picture of Joe Lieberman fixing George Bush's zipper.
