Political leanings of network anchors

[lookout123]

Originally Posted by Troubleshooter

Don't forget that all, all of the channels are owned by conservative corporations whose job is to make the most money, not necessarily to tell the truth.

i don't know about that... didn't the big dog over at Fox throw his support behind Kerry?

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by lookout123

i don't know about that... didn't the big dog over at Fox throw his support behind Kerry?

Show me a serious difference between Bush and Kerry and we'll see if that point is moot or not.

To borrow a whole article from Reason Magazine

Ten Reasons to Fire George W. Bush
And nine reasons why Kerry won't be much better
Jesse Walker



If you're looking for reasons to be disgusted with George W. Bush, here are the top 10:

1. The war in Iraq. Over a thousand soldiers and counting have died to subdue a country that was never a threat to the United States. Now we're trapped in an open-ended conflict against a hydra-headed enemy, while terrorism around the world actually increases.

One of the silliest arguments for the invasion held that our presence in Iraq was a "flypaper" attracting the world's terrorists to one distant spot. At this point, it's pretty clear that if there's a flypaper in Baghdad, the biggest bug that's stuck to it is the U.S.A.

2. Abu Ghraib. And by "Abu Ghraib" I mean all the places where Americans have tortured detainees, not just the prison that gave the scandal its name. While there are still people who claim that this was merely a matter of seven poorly supervised soldiers "abusing" (not torturing!) some terrorists, it's clear now that the abuse was much more widespread; that it included rape, beatings, and killings; that the prison population consisted overwhelmingly of innocents and petty crooks, not terrorists; and that the torture very likely emerged not from the unsupervised behavior of some low-level soldiers, but from policies set at the top levels of the Bush administration. Along the way, we discovered that the administration's lawyers believe the president has the power to unilaterally suspend the nation's laws—a policy that, if taken seriously, would roll back the central principle of the Glorious Revolution.

Two years ago, when Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was running for governor of Maryland, I noted her poor oversight of a boot camp program for drug offenders where the juvenile charges had been beaten and abused. "It's bad enough," I wrote, "to let something like institutionalized torture slip by on your watch. It's worse still to put your political career ahead of your job, and to brag about the program that's employing the torturers instead of giving it the oversight that might have uncovered their crimes earlier. There are mistakes that should simply disqualify a politician from future positions of authority." Every word of that applies at least as strongly to Donald Rumsfeld and to the man who has not seen fit to rebuke him publicly for the torture scandal, George Bush.

3. Indefinite detentions. Since 9/11, the U.S. government has imprisoned over a thousand people for minor violations of immigration law and held them indefinitely, sometimes without allowing them to consult a lawyer, even after concluding that they have no connections to terrorist activities. (Sirak Gebremichael of Ethiopia, to give a recently infamous example, was arrested for overstaying his visa—and then jailed for three years while awaiting deportation.) It has also claimed the right to detain anyone designated an "enemy combatant" in a legal no-man's land for as long as it pleases. Last month the Supreme Court finally put some restrictions on the latter practice, but that shouldn't stop us from remembering that the administration argued strenuously for keeping it.

4. The culture of secrecy. The Bush administration has nearly doubled the number of classified documents. It has urged agencies, in effect, to refuse as many Freedom of Information Act requests as possible, has invoked executive privilege whenever it can, and has been very free with the redactor's black marker when it does release some information. Obviously, it's impossible to tell how often the data being concealed is genuinely relevant to national security and how often it has more to do with covering a bureaucrat's behind. But there's obviously a lot of ass-covering going on.

And even when security is a real issue, all this secrecy doesn't make sense. Earlier this year, the Transportation Security Administration tried to retroactively restrict two pages of public congressional testimony that had revealed how its undercover agents managed to smuggle some guns past screeners. Presumably they were afraid a terrorist would read about it and try the method himself—but it would have made a lot more sense to seek some outsiders' input on how to resolve the putative problem than to try to hide it from our prying eyes. Especially when the information had already been sitting in the public record.

The administration has been quick to enforce its code of silence, regularly retaliating against those within its ranks who try to offer an independent perspective on its policies. While the most infamous examples of this involve international affairs, the purest episode may be the case of chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster, who apparently was threatened with dismissal if he told Congress the real projected cost of Bush's Medicare bill. Even if the White House didn't know about the threat—and I strongly suspect that it did—it created the organizational culture that allows such bullying to thrive.

5. Patriot and its progeny. The Patriot Act sometimes serves as a stand-in for everything wrong with the administration's record on civil liberties, and at times is blamed for policies it didn't create—those detentions, for example. Nonetheless, there's plenty of reasons to despise a law that allows warrantless searches of phone and Internet records; that gives police the right to see what books you've bought or checked out of the library while prohibiting the library or bookstore from telling you about the inquiry; that requires retailers to report "suspicious" transactions and, again, prevents them from telling you that they've done so. And there are plenty of reasons to despise an administration that rammed this bill through at the eleventh hour—and still wants to extend its reach.

(cont.)

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by lookout123

i don't know about that... didn't the big dog over at Fox throw his support behind Kerry?

6. The war on speech. Not all of the White House's assaults on our freedoms are linked to the war on terror. In March 2002, Bush signed the McCain-Feingold "campaign finance reform" bill, whose restrictions on political speech in the months approaching an election—i.e., at the time when political speech is most important—are so broad that they've forced a filmmaker, David T. Hardy, to delay the release of his documentary The Rights of the People until after November because it mentions several candidates. Bush approved this bill fully aware that it was a First Amendment nightmare; it's generally believed that he did so assuming that the Supreme Court would strike down its unconstitutional elements. Surprise: The Court weeded out a few measures but left most of them in place.

That's not to say the government hasn't done anything to increase the amount of political speech. Its ham-handed crackdown on "indecent" broadcasts—an effort that is to the cultural realm what McCain-Feingold is to the political sector—has turned Howard Stern into Amy Goodman.

7. The drunken sailor factor. Fine, you say: We all expect a Republican president to molest our civil liberties. But this one has poached the Democrats' turf as well, increasing federal spending by over $400 billion—its fastest rate of growth in three decades. Even if you set aside the Pentagon budget, Washington is doling out dollars like crazy: Under Bush, domestic discretionary spending has already gone up 25 percent. (Clinton only increased it 10 percent, and it took him eight years to do that.) "In 2003," the conservative Heritage Foundation notes, "inflation-adjusted federal spending topped $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II."

Of all those spending projects, Bush's Medicare bill deserves special attention. It will cost at least $534 billion over the next decade, and probably more. And it doesn't even deliver on its liberal promises: It does much more to distribute new subsidies and tax breaks to doctors, HMOs, and the pharmaceutical industry than it does to help seniors. The Medicare bill is to Bush's domestic policy what the Iraq war is to its foreign policy: an enormous expense of dubious merit that's come under fire from both the left and the right.

8. Cozying up to the theocrats. There are those who believe the White House is being run by religious fanatics, and there are those who believe it's mostly paying lip service to Bush's Christian base. I lean toward the second view. But whether he's cynical or sincere, there's nothing good to be said for the president's willingness to demagogue the gay marriage issue (and throw federalism out the window in the process), or—worse yet—to restrict potentially life-saving research on therapeutic cloning because it offends that constituency's religious views.

9. Protectionism in all its flavors. Bush has repeatedly sacrificed the interests of consumers to help politically significant industries, giving us tariffs on products from steel to shrimp. This doesn't just make a mockery of his free-trade rhetoric—it's also bad policy.

10. He's making me root for John Kerry. I haven't voted for a major party's presidential candidate since 1988, and I have no plans to revert to the habit this year. The Democrats have nominated a senator who—just sticking to the points listed above—voted for the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, McCain-Feingold, and the TSA; who endorses the assault on "indecency"; who thinks the government should be spending even more than it is now. I didn't have room in my top ten for the terrible No Child Left Behind Act, which further centralized control of the country's public schools—but for the record, Kerry voted for that one too. It's far from clear that he'd be any less protectionist than Bush is, and he's also got problems that Bush doesn't have, like his support for stricter gun controls. True, Kerry doesn't owe anything to the religious right, and you can't blame him for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Other than that, he's not much of an improvement.

Yet I find myself hoping the guy wins. Not because I'm sure he'll be better than the current executive, but because the incumbent so richly deserves to be punished at the polls. Making me root for a sanctimonious statist blowhard like Kerry isn't the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it's the offense that I take most personally.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).

[lookout123]

Originally Posted by Troubleshooter

Show me a serious difference between Bush and Kerry and we'll see if that point is moot or not.

huh-uh - you're asking the wrong person for that. that has been one of my points all along. i don't think they are really all that different. the only real difference i see is that:
1) Bush picks a philosophy or belief that makes sense to him and holds onto it like a pit bull. nothing can make him let go of it, even when he should.

2) Kerry changes his beliefs based on his audience, what the polls say, or what the popular movement in the democrat party is at the time.

i've said all along that neither of these individuals are the best choice for president. i firmly believe that the best thing that could happen for the future of our country would be if 98% of those currently in high level government service disappeared without a trace.

barring that we should change the laws so that an individual can only be elected to national office(house,senate,president) once - for a 6 year term. there should be an election every year for a portion of the positions. the beauty is that the people would have only 1 term to create their legacy and wouldn't have time to worry about pandering to the lobbiests for money to get elected again.

Whoa! i must have dozed off there for a minute because a government that is working for the good of the people instead of for themselves is just a dream.

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by lookout123

Whoa! i must have dozed off there for a minute because a government that is working for the good of the people instead of for themselves is just a dream.

It used to be more than a dream. When this all started, they actually believed it could work.

So we agree then that my initial assertion is correct or am I delusional? No, wait, let's just ask if I'm right or not.

[lookout123]

if your assertion is that the candidates are not much different and that the country is in a general state of decline... yes we agree.

[Troubleshooter]

I meant the part about the leanings of the newscasters being irrelevant due to the fact that the people that own them are in the business of making money not telling the truth and thusly say only what they are told.

[lookout123]

i'm still not sure about that one. i think it does matter what their leanings are because somewhere in the last decade (or so) they have forgotten that they aren't supposed to show bias.
i've actually seen an improvement recently among most of them, but in the buildup before the war the geniouses at Fox were... well we know where they stand, Peter Jennings couldn't even say Bush, US, or American without sneering and the others each have taken pot shots. for individuals, such as most cellarites, it is no big deal because they are smart enough to listen to the story being read from a teleprompter and form their own opinions. unfortunately there are many who get their view of the world from the talking heads and don't realize that they may not be getting the whole story. sometimes what isn't reported or even a few words left out of a story are more important that what iis said.

that is why i've decided to only get my news from the water cooler, blog sites, and most importantly the cellar. if it wasn't true - it wouldn't be posted, right? right? RIGHT???

[dar512]

Originally Posted by lookout123

barring that we should change the laws so that an individual can only be elected to national office(house,senate,president) once - for a 6 year term. there should be an election every year for a portion of the positions. the beauty is that the people would have only 1 term to create their legacy and wouldn't have time to worry about pandering to the lobbiests for money to get elected again.

I'm all for this.

[lookout123]

Originally Posted by dar512

I'm all for this.

all right then - let's start a new party and this is the central plank in our platform. let's open the floor to other cellarites who want to join - what suggested issues does our party stand for?

[TheSnake]

So, since many of the people in this thread seem to agree that Bush and Kerry aren't that different (as do I), why didn't more people respond to my Libertarian Party thread?

That question was both a joke and a serious statement.

Also, I applaud everyone for drifting in this thread, that made me happy. Because, remember what sycamore said, "If a thread doesn't drift, then it's crap."

[tw]

Originally Posted by TheSnake

So, since many of the people in this thread seem to agree that Bush and Kerry aren't that different (as do I), why didn't more people respond to my Libertarian Party thread?

1) Why not vote for Ralph Nader. It accomplishes the same thing.

2a) Returning to the original question and adding to what others have said. Many also accused Walter Cronkite of being a liberal even though an analysis by a conservative think tank concludes he was rather conservative. But Walter told the truth about VietNam when Paley finally let him do that famous news special. At report's end, Walter said what insiders had been saying all along and what history proved. We could send in the entire US military and we still could never win that war. It was this Walter Cronkite report that finally forced Johnson to concede the war was indeed lost. But for telling something that was contrary to a right wing politcal agenda, Walter was then labeled a liberal.

2b) Brit Hume was an ABC and Nightline correspondent for many years. Because ABC is also a responsible news bureau, then many speculated that Brit Hume was a liberal. Now that Brit is on Fox, did they change his brain or political affliation? It only demonstrates that there is no liberal or conservative on the mainstream (responsible) news services. There are the facts presented first no matter what the correspondent's political affliation may be.

3) Is there no difference between Kerry and George Jr? Would Kerry (or most any other politican for that matter) sit on his ass waiting for someone to tell him what to do while America was being attacked? Remember George Jr did not enter politics because he was good, knowledgeable, seasoned, business saavy, or experienced. He was literally carried into the presidency, it part, because he speaks a right wing religious agenda - which dominates the Republican party back rooms. He was selected and then indoctrinated by the Vulcans. George Jr can speak the right phrases that enthral conservative religious factions. Unlike Kerry, George Jr never really made hard decisions - even failing to drill a successful oil well.

No minimally responsible leader - even a school principal - would have sat in that school room without at least asking a few questions. But unlike most all other politicans and business leaders, the mental midget president just sat their knowing full well the country was under attack. He did nothing. He inspired no confidence. He asked not one question. He did not immediately phone the White House situation room to discover who was in charge - if anyone. He just sat there and waited. That makes George Jr as mentally deficient as any leader could be.

There is no politican so mentally reactive as to only sit there for seven minutes and wait; knowing full well the United States of America is under attack. And as we now know, the greatest weakness to America's 11 September response were inaction and indecision by the George Jr administration. Virtually the entire administration did nothing to deter any attacks. They did not one thing. They did not even authorize fighters to go 'weapons free'. Four more planes could have been coming and the administration had done nothing to stop any of them. Thank goodness we have the little poeple who stepped in while George Jr sat in that classroom doing nothing. My god man. This is the most damning part. Look at those press clips. Not once did he ever even ask a single question. No responsible politician would have done that. Virtually every politican would have been more responsible than George Jr. He did absolutely nothing. How could anyone say Kerry is that dispicable?

[TheSnake]

Vote for what you believe in.

[Griff]

I believe in the the small of woman's back, the hanging curveball, high fiber, good scotch...

[lookout123]

Originally Posted by Griff

I believe in the the small of woman's back, the hanging curveball, high fiber, good scotch...