http://mediamatters.org/items/200807020002?f=h_top
Category Archives: Politics
Hannity Flipflops in Less Than 30 Seconds
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/07/03/hannity-flip-flops-with-bolton-on-north-koreas-nuke-plan/
Global Warming or Climate Change?
I’ve heard it been said that “Global Warming” was changed to “Climate Change” because liberals wanted to prepare to keep up the Global Warming scare even after temperatures start getting colder. But the funny thing is, the reason the Bush Administration started using the term “Climate Change” was because Frank Luntz advised them to:
“Luntz advises use of the term “climate change” rather than “global warming,” which he says is more frightening.”
http://www.desmogblog.com/bushs-chief-climate-spinmaster-tells-harper-how-its-done
“In a 2002 memo to President George W. Bush titled “The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America”, obtained by the Environmental Working Group, Luntz wrote: “The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science…Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz
Another email from 2004 says: “From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation’s waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment – Republicans can’t stress enough that extremists are screaming “Doomsday!” when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day.'”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2004/apr/04/usnews.theobserver
So, even though Luntz knew the science was “closing” in on them in 2002, he continued to suggest that Republicans act as if the global warming position was “extremist” in 2004. Yet, he seems to have become an “exteremist” himself in 2006:
Luntz: “It’s now 2006. I think most people would conclude that there is global warming taking place and that the behavior of humans are (sic) affecting the climate.”
BBC: “But the administration has continued taking your advice. They’re still questioning the science.”
Luntz: “That’s up to the administration. I’m not the administration. What they want to do is their business. It has nothing to do with what I write. It has nothing to do with what I believe.”
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/06/frank_luntz_acc.php
“Although Luntz later tried to distance himself from the Bush administration policy, it was his idea to discredit the idea of global warming science to keep the issue from influencing voters in the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections. Luntz has since said that he is not responsible for what the administration has done since that time. Though he now believes humans have contributed to global warming, he maintains that the science was in fact incomplete, and his recommendation sound, at the time he made it.[5]”
Rush Limbaugh Criticizes Katrina Victims
You know, I still can’t wrap my head around how conservatives latch onto 9/11 that it’s the end-all-be-all of human events and yet have the cujones to make light of similar devastations. Even after the massive fuckups with Iraq, conservatives are still gunning to attack Iran and Syria, but when a storm causes a similar amount of damage and loss of human life, Bush didn’t even change his schedule! The deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center wasn’t even informed that the levees were breached once the White House found out about it!
http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2008/06/06/rove_katrina/index.html
Wright Comes Out
I noticed the mainstream media was shocked — SHOCKED — to learn that Wright was going on a book tour to try and defend himself after 4 weeks of being completely lambasted by them. Chris Matthews took special offense to Wright saying that the media was attacking not Obama but the “black church.” Of course it’s not really an attack on black churches. It’s the media using the shock value of what goes on in a lot of black churches in order to get ratings and pawn it off as a campaign issue. Obama supporters are interviewed to get the message out that he needs to just shut up and go away, because, as is continuously repeated, the story was suppossedly JUST NOW starting to “die off” (har har har). It almost makes me think the media doesn’t want people to find out that there is more substance to Wright’s message than his crazy conspiracy theory about AIDS. Personally, I don’t care what he says; at least now the lazy media will have to pick off new statements to take out of context instead of re-looping the same two phrases (“God damn America” and “chickens coming home to roost”) over and over again. Of course, this isn’t an attack on the “black church.”
Here’s the FULL quote from Wright about “chickens coming home to roost”:
“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday did anybody else see or hear him? He was on FOX News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the FOX News commentators to no end, he pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, he said Americas chickens, are coming home to roost.”
“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.
“We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.
“We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.
“We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.
“We bombed Qaddafi’s home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against the rock.
“We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they’d never get back home.
“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.
“Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.
“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”
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Compare this to the comments recently made by Rush Limbaugh:
“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country.
Limbaugh cited Al Sharpton, saying the Barack Obama supporter threatened to superdelegates that “there’s going to be trouble” if the presidency is taken from Obama.
Several callers called in to the radio show to denounce Limbaugh’s comments, when he later stated, “I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver.”
Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.
“There won’t be riots at our convention,” Limbaugh said of the Republican National Convention. “We don’t riot. We don’t burn our cars. We don’t burn down our houses. We don’t kill our children. We don’t do half the things the American left does.”
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Limbaugh and Hagee are a lot alike. Both are fat, racist bigots who call for (or “dream of”) violence in order to achieve their political ends (although for Hagee, that end is the Apocalypse). Both believe that God blesses the rich and the poor only have themselves to blame (the opposite of the gospel message). And both make a lot more money off their messages and affect real world politics than their scary, black “hate-filled” counterparts.
I’ve also heard people like Buchanan say there’s no comparison between Wright and Hagee because Obama knew Wright for 20 years and McCain doesn’t know Hagee personally. But why is that better? Obama didn’t *want* Wright to become an issue yet until recently refused to disown him even though it would cost him votes. McCain *sought out* Hagee, despite the fact he had previously condemned people like him, and *asked* for his support in order to get more votes from anti-Catholic, anti-Islamic Evangelicals.