The government controls our water supplies , food supplies , medical supplies , the media , our education system , the police and military and the most horrifying weapons on earth … this in the “Land Of Liberty” … See anything wrong ?
The Founders would be appalled …
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When Media Mergers Limit More Than Competition
” The much-admired Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black may be rolling in his grave at the prospect of a merger between 21st Century Fox and Time Warner Inc., which would reduce control of the major Hollywood studios to five owners, from six, and major television producers to four, from five.
“ The widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public,” he wrote in the majority opinion that decided a 1945 antitrust case involving major newspaper publishers and The Associated Press. “The First Amendment affords not the slightest support for the contention that a combination to restrain trade in news and views has any constitutional immunity.”
Fox and Time Warner may no longer publish old-media newspapers or magazines, but they certainly disseminate information and opinions that may be even more vital to the “welfare of the public” today than the newspapers of Justice Black’s era. HBO alone, one of Time Warner’s cable channels, produces “Real Time With Bill Maher,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” and acclaimed documentaries like “The Case Against 8,” about the struggle for marriage equality, and the “Paradise Lost” series, which examined the murder convictions of the group of white teenagers known as the West Memphis Three.”
” But this ignores the fact that in 1983, 50 companies owned 90 percent of the media consumed by Americans. By 2012, just six companies — including Fox (then part of News Corporation) and Time Warner — controlled that 90 percent, according to testimony before the House Judiciary Committee examining Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal.”
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“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.”
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Majority Of Americans Don’t Trust Newspapers And Television News
” The percentage of Americans saying they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers dropped to 23 percent this year from 25 percent last year, according to a report on the poll, which was released Monday.
American confidence in newspapers reached its peak at 51 percent in 1979, and a low of 22 percent in 2008.
But newspapers don’t stand alone. Confidence in television news has also been slipping — it’s tied with newspapers this year at 23 percent, which is slightly up from last year’s all-time low of 21 percent. Newspapers and television news rank near the bottom of a list of 16 “societal institutions,” according to the report. The only institutions television news and newspapers beat out this year are big business, organized labor, health maintenance organizations and Congress. Americans expressed the most confidence in the military, at 76 percent, and small businesses, at 65 percent.“
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” The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for this White House.
Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to begin with, are starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.
Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.
This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system. “It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,” a former senior Obama administration official said. “When there’s no narrative, stuff like this consumes you.” “
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If Koch Brothers Buy LA Times, Half Of Staff May Quit (VIDEO)
” At a Los Angeles Times in-house awards ceremony a week ago, columnist Steve Lopez addressed the elephant in the room.
Speaking to the entire staff, he said, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Austin Beutner’s group.” No one raised their hands.
“Raise you hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Rupert Murdoch.” A few people raised their hands.
Facing the elephant trunk-on, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by the Koch brothers.” About half the staff raised their hands.
Recent owner of the LA Times, Sam Zell, has been painted as the devil incarnate for slashing the editorial staff and for his vulgar demeanor.”
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” “The breaking point for me was Lindsay Lohan,” Brokaw told Politico. “She became a big star at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Give me a break.”
Brokaw had first publicly raised his concerns on Meet the Press last year before the event.
“[W]e were at a point in Washington where the country had just kind of shut down on what was going on within the Beltway,” Brokaw told Politico. “They were making their own decisions in their own states, in their own communities, and the congressional ratings were plummeting.”
“The press corps wasn’t doing very well, either,” he added. “I thought, ‘This is one of the issues that we have to address. What kind of image do we present to the rest of the country? Are we doing their business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles?’ And what comes through the screen on C-SPAN that night is the latter, and not the former.”
“But I think any organization,” Brokaw continued, “… has to have a kind of self-policing instinct and what we’re doing with that dinner, as it has been constituted for the past several years, is saying, ‘We’re Versailles. The rest of you eat cake.’ “
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Could CNBC Be Depriving Viewers Of Vital Information?
” Further, why does CNBC think so much of itself that it imagines it has the power to keep newsmakers from getting on as many outlets as they can to sell the points they are trying to push? The days of some reporter, newspaper, or other media outlet asking, “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” are long over, after all!
Jeff Reeves of the website InvestorPlace on his page called The Slant also makes a good point in his recent discussion of this tale.
” Every modern media consumer uses multiple sources, and that’s ultimately a good thing for public discourse. Secondly, every modern media organization should know that it’s willfully naive to act like they have any old-school gatekeeper power now that there are so many options and the Internet responds instantaneously.” “
” Houston said Griego told police that after killing his family at their Albuquerque home on Saturday, he reloaded and planned to go to a nearby Wal-Mart store. “He contemplated ending this with mass destruction,” Houston said.
Instead, the 15-year-old spent time with his girlfriend, and the pair later went to a church where his father once worked as a pastor. A staff member called police, Houston said.
The teenager told police he shot his mother, the first victim in his rampage, because he was “frustrated” with her, Houston said.
Police said that after shooting his brother and two sisters, Griego then waited five hours for his father to return from work and ambushed him …
Police said that after the killings, Griego sent his 12-year-old girlfriend a picture of his mother’s body and the two then spent the day together, possibly planning to kill her parents. Charges may also be brought against the girlfriend, Houston said.”
” Gallup released a poll this month stating that the NRA stands at 54 percent approval.
Fifty-four percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the National Rifle Association, while 38% have an unfavorable opinion. The public’s ratings of the NRA have fluctuated since first measured by Gallup in 1993 — from a low of 42% favorable in 1995 to a high of 60% in 2005.
On the other hand, the same polling firm shows that the media is distrusted by 60 percent of the population: approval rates for the media are below 30 percent.
And Congress? Their approval rate was last measured by Gallup at 21 percent. ”
Fined $535 For Nursing A Woodpecker Back To Health
” This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”
Free As A Bird After Breaking DC “High Capacity” Magazine Ban
So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about do-able. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And, in this case, NBC was informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it, anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI and the ATF take out NBC News, and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in “White Heat”: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.
$50,000 Bail For Wearing A $20 Punker’s Ammo Belt
To Howard Kurtz & Co, it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties – and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, 11-year-old Schylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth-grader? Because he’s got a TV show, and she hasn’t?
The Offending Fashion-Ware
Three days after scofflaw Gregory committed his crime, a bail hearing was held in Massachusetts for Andrew Despres, 20, who’s charged with trespassing and possession of ammunition without a firearms license. Mr. Despres was recently expelled from Fitchburg State University and was returning to campus to pick up his stuff. Hence the trespassing charge. At the time of his arrest, he was wearing a “military-style ammunition belt.” Hence, the firearms charge.
His mom told WBZ that her son purchased the belt for $20 from a punk website and had worn it to class every day for two years as a “fashion statement.” He had no gun with which to fire the bullets. Nevertheless, Fitchburg Police proudly displayed the $20 punk-website ammo belt as if they’d just raided the Fitchburg mafia’s armory, and an obliging judge ordered Mr. Despres held on $50,000 bail. Why should there be one law for “Meet The Press” and another for “Meet Andrew Despres”? Because David Gregory throws better cocktail parties? ”
” The Old Media establishment has done a disservice to an American public heartbroken over the murders at a Connecticut grade school by reporting untrue “facts” over and over again and by using emotionally tinged phrases that do not relay fact but instead push an agenda.
Here are just a few of the badly garbled “facts” in this story that the media rushed to “report” before any truth was put to them.
Of course, the very first major mix up was the shooter’s name.
Also from the beginning, the murderer was reported as having strode through the school with a .223-caliber rifle, often referred to by the media here as an “assault weapon.”
Lanza is also being said to have been wearing “combat gear.” What does this even mean?
Some reporters are calling the killer’s mother an “avid gun collector.” There is no basis for this label.
There’s Lot’s More At The Link . Read It All .
” Glenn Reynolds points us to this thoughtful post by The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg that takes up the sensitive issue of the mentally ill and their access to guns:
We must find a way to make it more difficult for the non-adjudicated mentally ill to come into possession of weapons. This is crucially important, but very difficult, because it would require the cooperation of the medical community — of psychiatrists, therapists, school counselors and the like — and the privacy issues (among other issues) are enormous. But: It has to be made more difficult for sociopaths, psychopaths and the otherwise violently mentally-ill (who, in total, make up a small portion of the mentally ill population) to buy weapons.
One can immediately see the problems. There are privacy issues to consider, as well as trying to define “mentally ill.” John Grohol explains:
I don’t believe Obama was talking about anyone who’s ever had a mental disorder diagnosis — that would include over 25 percent of the population.
I think he meant to say those who fall under the Gun Control Act of 1968 — specifically people who have been involuntarily committed, found by a court to be incompetent or dangerous, or those who’ve already committed a crime but were found not guilty by reason of insanity.
According to Gostin & Record (2011), recent Supreme Court rulings generally push states to “regulate dangerous persons rather than dangerous firearms” but that existing gun restrictions pertaining to individuals with mental illnesses are ineffective.”
” Where is the Big Picture? Why is it not possible for John Boehner or anyone else in this party to articulate for the dumbstruck public watching these dreadful cliff negotiations what the Republican Party stands for? Who speaks for the GOP?
No end of people keep saying of the Republicans that “they” should do this or “they” should do that. Who’s “they”? It is no one. With the Republicans, there’s no “they” there.
Barack Obama is controlling the cliff narrative now because the GOP has no one whose job is counter-narrative. Mr. Obama this week was recycling campaign speeches about the middle class at the Daimler Detroit diesel plant while the GOP has been a Babel of Beltway voices. Don’t any of these senators go to church on Sunday morning, rather than running around television punching the “entitlement crisis” card? “
Fox’s Gutfeld Scores Direct Hits on Costas Hypocrisy, Whitlock’s Bigotry, Media’s Predictability
” If, if it was a deadly flood, it would be the same saying we need to ban water. There is no law — Here is the problem — there is no law that actually could have stopped him owning a gun. So what is Costas saying? He is talking about a total gun ban, which makes him a hypocritical buffoon, because he spends most of his life wandering in and out of New York buildings where he is flanked by people who are armed. He doesn’t have to have a gun because he’s protected by people with guns.
He is a sanctimonious ghoul, because he, whenever something like this comes up, he has to come up. It’s “pay attention to me.” It really wasn’t about the tragedy. It’s about scoring points with other people in media. “
We’ll fight the war on the battlefield of new media. Sunshine disinfects. Light needs to be shined into each crevice and around each corner in Washington.
The mainstream media is supposed to shine that sunlight into those holes and under those rocks. But, by and large, the media has failed. So many times over the past several years, I’ve heard stories about how once-respected journalistic institutions – newspapers, wire services, television networks, even websites – refused to run articles because the reporters or editors were friends with the politicians they were going to write about. The establishment media has become a part of the establishment class. That means it’s against their best interests to do the right thing and expose the corruption that plagues Washington – if they did, they’d be fighting against themselves.
At Breitbart News, I plan to investigate these people. Together with Breitbart News, I’m going to expose corruption in Washington.
It’s going to be a long fight. It’ll probably take the rest of our lives – if not longer (and I’m young – I’m only 25. That’s a long, long time for me, hopefully).
I’m going to put it all on the line because we need to stop these people. And the way to do it is to expose them for what they really are – and catch them in the act. That’s why I’m enlisting in Andrew Breitbart’s army. I’m joining Breitbart News, effective immediately. I’m shipping out today. It’s time to go to war. Will you join us? “
“In 2007, with polls showing that only 22 percent of the American people trusted newspapers to tell the truth, and newspaper readership plummeting nationwide, the Tampa Bay Times doubled down on journalists’ already high self-confidence by forming the PolitiFact project, which markets itself as providing the final word on truth in politics.
Except, as the other 78 percent of the American people in 2007 might have expected, that is not what PolitiFact does. Not on gun issues, at least.”
Eric Allie’s Furious Diaper
Newsmax
YouViewed/Editorial 