Charles Krauthammer: Just making shit up.

Charles Krauthammer is not afraid to just make shit up if it serves his political purpose. Take this from today's opinion piece found here. [Krauthammer - Land Without Peace]

Israel, 2008. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert makes the ultimate capitulation to Palestinian demands -- 100 percent of the West Bank (with land swaps), Palestinian statehood, the division of Jerusalem with the Muslim parts becoming the capital of the new Palestine. And incredibly, he offers to turn over the city's holy places, including the Western Wall -- Judaism's most sacred site, its Kaaba -- to an international body on which sit Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Here are details of the proposal from the Israeli new organization, Haaretz, article of 2008, headlined as [PA rejects Olmert's offer to withdraw from 93% of West Bank]

"Under the proposal, Israel would return to the Palestinians 93 percent of the West Bank,"

and

"In exchange for West Bank land that Israel would keep, Olmert proposed a 5.5 percent land swap giving the Palestinians a desert territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip"

and

"Olmert has agreed with Abbas that the negotiations over Jerusalem will be postponed."

and

The security proposal includes a demand that the Palestinian state be demilitarized and without an army.

Krauthammer's paragraph sounds as if the Israelis had offered the moon to the Palestinians, including 100% of the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem but the article from the time shows that is not true. First of all,......Its clear the offer was not 100% percent but 93%. Though by giving the Palestinians some "desert land near Gaza" that total Palestinian land was bumped closer to 98%. Still that's only 93% of the West bank. Charles also misleads on Jerusalem as negotiations over it were still on the table, the 2008 article stating that, "negotiations over Jerusalem will be postponed".

The Krauthammer version of history sounds as if the Israelis had been giving ground since the Camp David offer of 2000, concluding with the Olmert's "Ultimate capitulation" (Charles words) offer of 2008 but Haaretz paint a different picture.

"Compared to previous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the Olmert proposal falls between the one then prime minister Barak presented to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July 2000 and the one he offered at Taba in January 2001

The offer also demands that the Palestine state be demilitarized? What would our founding fathers have told the British if they had agreed to American Independence if the US would remain demilitarized without an army?

Then, this from the Haaretz article, makes it seem as if Olmert's proposal was less than legitimate and that the Israeli's didn't take it seriously.

"But another Israeli official said Olmert was merely trying to establish his legacy. "There is going to be no agreement, period," he said on condition of anonymity."

Krauthammer is just making shit up to support Israel's view. He's an Israeli propagandist dressed up as a US opinion leader.

tnb

The US Media is Terrible

The Propaganda Network just keeps making stuff up to suit their agenda [Fox News: We make it up] and the non-propaganda networks are inept [Digby] or don't want to offend anyone. [ginandtacos.com » DELICATE SENSIBILITIES]. We the people,......... are fucked.

tnb

Government Takeover

of five Indiana schools

[indiana-schools-takeove]

Imagine the outrage at Fox news if this had been in Obama's Chicago... "now the government is taking over our schools" would've be plastered all over Fox for about a week but it's in republican Mitch Daniels state so its OK.

tnb

Fairness Doctrine

Off the Books: FCC to Delete ‘Fairness Doctrine’ - Washington Wire - WSJ:

Federal regulators will propose removing the “Fairness Doctrine,” a controversial, if little used, regulation on political speech from the books this week, the Federal Communications Commission said Monday.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told lawmakers in June that the agency planned to dump the rule as part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to eliminate outdated and unneeded regulations. The agency’s media bureau said Monday that it will eliminate 83 rules including the Fairness Doctrine

The Fairness Doctrine has been one of the rights favorite propaganda tools to whip-up the wing-nut rage, It'll be fun to see how The Propaganda Network spins this one.

tnb

WSJ = Propaganda ?

David Frum taking apart this WSJ article, [Perry's Public Service Behold, a hard-money Texas politician.] here [Part 1] and [Part 2]

Fighting the Propaganda

Political Irony doing it's part to set the record straight.

Political Irony › Actual government spending has gone down

A good fun site.

tnb

More Propaganda

I'll bet we'll be seeing more of this chart [Super-Economy: The Obama Hockey Stick] on various right-wing websites/news/spam but the chart is not accurate. It's supposed to show how Obama has increased Government spending but it includes SS and Medicare which Obama hasn't changed. There are some comments that point to the errors but a better, more accurate view is here: [John At Risk]

Also, More liars...Dear Limbaugh, Critics Accused You Of "Lying" With Good Reason | Media Matters for America

tnb

Propaganda

This post tries to make a family income of $250,000 appear "not-rich" so that you'll feel bad about increasing taxes on these poor families.[Fiscal Times - down and out on $250,000]

A few comments.

A family income of $250,000 puts them in the top 2% of US households. 98% of families make less than this.

These families make about 5 to 6 times the median household income in the US which is about $50,000 [Wikipedia]

Look over the expenses shown and think about how your family compares. A few stand out.

Saving $33,000 for retirement and $8,000 a year for college? That's 16% of pretax income. Is  your family saving that much? That $41,000 a year that this family is putting in the bank is what about half of the families in this country make in a year.

A 4,000$ vacation, $235 a month for eating out + $1,000 a month for food and household supplies. Over $300 a month for entertainment (out and at home), $300 a month for clothes. Over $400 a month for maintenance on the house plus another $400 a month for cleaning the house? $1,000 a month for baby sitting. 9000$ a year out of pocket medical expenses. Sure, these people are spending everything they make but they're living damn good.

But the thing that really pisses me off about this is,....

If we raised taxes on incomes over $250,000 a year by another 3%, it wouldn't affect these "poor" families one god-damned bit. They wouldn't pay any more taxes, not a penny more. The increase would only be on income over 250,000. Someone looked up all these numbers, wrote this article about these poor folk and forgot to mention that the tax increase that the President is calling for wouldn't even apply to these people. odd, eh?

Sure, if they made $300,000, the increase would cost them a little more,.. about $1,500 more. The poor bastards would have to get rid of their dog.

tnb

The Power of Propaganda?

[Nate Silver] talks about a shift toward Libertarianism.

I'd say the dramatic increase starting in 2009 shows less about a change in views but more about the power of The Propaganda Network.

More on Fox's influence here: [TNB - Fox news]

tnb

Obama and Oppression

Al Jazeera: Life Sentences for Bahrain Activists

If the Obama administration was really as oppressive and evil as Glenn beck and some of his Tea-Bagger followers claim, many of them would be setting in jail right now. Truely oppressive regimes lock their enemies up.

tnb

Tea Party Peak?

Economist: Has the tea party peaked

All the crap in this post sounds good and the Tea party probably has peaked but I think the post underestimates, even ignores the effect of the right wing propaganda machine.

I'd say that the turning point, as shown in the chart, was when the financial crisis hit and it suddenly looked like a liberal black man could win the election. At that point, Fox news and the conservative media went on a full-on, attack against government and even remotely liberal ideas, a propagand push of lies, rumors and scare tactics this country hadn't seen in my lifetime, and basically scared a bunch of retired old white people to death. Without Fox news there wouldn't be a Tea Party.

I think the reason the Tea-party seems to have cooled is that the conservative leaders and their propaganda wings know they can't win the presidency with a wacked-out Tea-bagger so now conservative media is pulling back the propaganda push in an attempt to attrack some of the middle ground voters that the crazy propaganda pushes away.

tnb

Disinformation

Brad Delong and Mark Thoma round up some of the disinformation circulating around the country.

[Delong Disinformation 1] [Delong Disinformation 2] [Mark Thoma Disinformation Discussion]

My take,... There's a lot of it around and a lot of it (most?) has the Propaganda Network's fingerprints all over it.

tnb

The Propaganda Network

On Fox News...

Reporgramming

I watched a little Glenn Beck a couple of days ago. That dudes pretty crazy. He's not afraid to just make shit up. Lots of TV preacher/religious-show antics. Lots of scare tactics. Lots of borderline scam advertisers. Very little reality.

tnb

GroupThink

The Irish Economy » Blog Archive » Stephen Collins and Groupthink

Groupthink occurs when people adapt to the beliefs and views of others without real intellectual conviction. A consensus forms without serious consideration of consequences or alternatives, often under overt or imaginary social pressure.

Most of the people I know and interact with on a daily basis, many friends, have little education. Some have college experience but many don't have more than a high school education. Some never completed high school. They are normal, mid-western working class people, truck drivers, factory workers, teachers, health care workers, WalMart clerks, etc. Many are very religious, some are racist but many are just sort-of-religious, not-really-racist, dope smoking, beer drinking working class people. Most of them have never paid much attention to politics or economics in the past but in the last couple of years, it sure seems like they've all become motivated political, economic and monetary policy experts. Almost universally, their expertise is really Fox News GroupThink.

They almost all believe the basic conservative, Fox News, Tea-Bagger Views. Free markets provide the best outcomes in all cases. Government is always corrupt and inefficient. Private enterprises are always a better solution than government enterprises. The FED is inherently bad. Many (most?) believe we should go back to the gold standard.

On health care, most think our current system is the best in the world and that tort reform is the best thing we could do to lower health care costs.

On Taxes, most believe their taxes are too high while the "others" around them don't pay enough. That taxing the rich more would hurt the economy. Most believe that it's "others" who use government services and are "on the dole". Most have a favorite, alternate tax method, usually a flat tax or the fair tax.

On education, They generally think our education system is a mess and its the government's fault. They tend to question the view of academics and experts putting more faith in "common sense".

They also tend to believe that America, and everything American, is inherently better than any other nation on the planet. Europeans are leftist weenies. China uses slave labor. Israel is good. Muslims are bad. They almost universally believe the media has a liberal bias.

Many view the Constitution with an almost religious fervor and will argue that you are against it, you don't believe in it, or you are un-American if you disagree with them on any political or economic point.

Many were really scared to death at Obama's win. Some were sure he was going to destroy the country, take their guns, their property, shut down their churches. Guns sales to the group skyrocketed after the election.

Now 5 or 10 years ago these people didn't believe and often just didn't care about any of this stuff. Today they have well define beliefs and are "experts", willing to argue, with limited "facts", that they are right and any competing view is wrong. Most have never looked at any of these issues. They've never heard the the other side argument. They all just "know" they are right. They've become an army of uninformed, Fox News zombies.

The Propaganda Network has done it's job. It may have wrecked the country but its done its job.

tnb

No More Mister Nice Blog

No More Mister Nice Blog points right-wing crazy better than most. Here's an example.

Gay marriage would lead to the introduction of an aspect of Sharia Law"

It's also very good at spotting the right-wing propaganda that's coming-to-a-teabagger near you.

Palin's coming excuse

Everything is Obama's fault

You should go read some. It's good, really.

tnb

Egypt - NYT - Frank Rich

A good article here, Wallflowers at the Revolution - NYTimes.com. A couple of clips.

This provocative debate isn’t even being acknowledged in most American coverage of the Internet’s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

and

Al Jazeera English, run by a 35-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, is routinely available in Israel and Canada. It provided coverage of the 2009 Gaza war and this year’s Tunisian revolt when no other television networks would or could. Yet in America, it can be found only in Washington, D.C., and on small cable systems in Ohio and Vermont. None of the biggest American cable and satellite companies — Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner — offer it.

The noxious domestic political atmosphere fostering this near-blackout is obvious to all. It was made vivid last week when Bill O’Reilly of Fox News went on a tear about how Al Jazeera English is “anti-American.” This is the same “We report, you decide” Fox News that last week broke away from Cairo just as the confrontations turned violent so that viewers could watch Rupert Murdoch promote his new tablet news product at a publicity event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

A few of thoughts.

On the US Media.

Our media, especially television, just plain sucks, with most stories being directed at odd angles of the subject at hand for example,.. With Egypt the stories were, the social media is great, Al Jazeera is evil, it is Bushes fault, it is Obama's fault, the Muslim Brotherhood is evil, etc. With Wikileaks, the cables themselves were hardly covered at all in this country; the stories were about Assange, the "rape", his arrest, etc. TV News just dances around the story offering little real content.


On Social Networking.

Playing up the Internet and social networking's place in the uprising may not be "implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism" but more "the latest-greatest-thing" chauvinism. Social Networking is the latest killer-app of the Internet (the last latest-and-greatest). It's on everyone mind. It seems natural for media types to look for ways to give it credit and tie it to every major news story. If our crappy media were around during the civil war there would have been "trains change warfare" stories. WW1 would have had "Airplanes change warfare stories", WWII probably "Radios or RADAR" change warfare.


On Al Jazeera and US Media

Al-Jazeera should be on all US cable outlets. Some competition in the news market couldn't hurt, could it?

I'm sure one argument of the cable providers would be that there's no market for Al Jazeera, but I think Egypt's revolution has proven this wrong. Besides, is there really a market for 37 home shopping channels?


On Censorship.

Censorship in the US, whether intentional by our government/media, the result of inept media agents or simply set by market forces is being exposed by the Internet. However, the Internet also makes it very easy to hide the true story behind floods of disinformation. Our mass media also play the disinformation game very well. Fox News is the master but the others play it at as well. I fear this censorship-thru-disinformation will get worse before it gets better.

tnb

Beck on Egypt #2

Here's a very good post on Glenn Beck from NoMoreMrNiceBlog: Beck's Poison

This....

Basically, we've allowed Beck and others to turn a bloc of U.S. citizens into exact analogues of the most paranoid Islamist anti-Semites -- you know, the people who think literally every Jew on the planet is actively involved in a global Zionist conspiracy to destroy Islam. We mock those people, but Beck's viewers are exactly like those people.

...fits nicely with an earlier tnb post repeated here.

Tuesday Night Buzz: Beck on Egypt

This quote from Beck....

BECK: I understand that, but what you're not taking into account is that that is what the average person thinks, just like the average person on the street of -- of Cairo thinks they're swept up in some freedom movement. It is not about freedom. It is being orchestrated by the Marxists, communists and primarily also the Muslim Brotherhood.

Could also be written as

BECK: I understand that, but what you're not taking into account is that that is what the average person thinks, just like the average TEA-PARTY person on the street of -- of DC thinks they're swept up in some freedom movement. It is not about freedom. It is being orchestrated by the BIG BUSINESS, CONSERVATIVES and primarily also the FOX NEWS NETWORK.

Beck on Egypt

Planet Beck nears critical mass with wingnutty theory about Egypt uprising | Crooks and Liars

This quote from Beck....

BECK: I understand that, but what you're not taking into account is that that is what the average person thinks, just like the average person on the street of -- of Cairo thinks they're swept up in some freedom movement. It is not about freedom. It is being orchestrated by the Marxists, communists and primarily also the Muslim Brotherhood.

Could also be written as

BECK: I understand that, but what you're not taking into account is that that is what the average person thinks, just like the average TEA-PARTY person on the street of -- of DC thinks they're swept up in some freedom movement. It is not about freedom. It is being orchestrated by the BIG BUSINESS, CONSERVATIVES and primarily also the FOX NEWS NETWORK.

tnb

Stiring the Pot.

The Propaganda Network stiring it up again.

The Fox Link

The Beck Link

An analysis here: Iranian Martyrs Book Found on Mexican Border as Beck Film Premieres | Crooks and Liars

I wouldn't put it past Fox to plant the book as part of a "Beck" Marketing campaign.

tnb

Fox News - More Propaganda

No-More-Mr-Nice-Blog is right on top of the Propaganda Network's crap these days. Here's another example of the Fox News version of "Fair and Balanced"

No More Mister Nice Blog

Here's the actual description of the new press secretary's career.

"CAREER: Time magazine Washington bureau chief, 2005-2008; Time assistant bureau chief in Washington, 2003-2005; Time reporter in Washington, 1993-2003; Time reporter in Moscow, 1990-1993; Time Miami bureau chief, 1989-90; Reporter for Miami Herald, 1987-1988."

Here's Fox Nation's Slanted view.

"Former TIME Mag Moscow Chief to replace Robert Gibbs"

Of course all good Teabaggers know that "Moscow Chief" means "just another communist in the Obama Administration".

Thanks NMMNB

tnb