Kucinich Introduces Articles of Impeachment

I bet you didn't know this happened last night. I sure didn't until just now, and I barely missed it.

I found nothing about in my daily readings of MSNBC.com, CNN.com, and other news sites. Luckily, I happened to looking at Alternet.org's video page and came across it here.

I then did a Google search on "Kucinich Introduces Articles of Impeachment" and found that CBS news devoted two whole paragraphs to it! Upon going to cbsnews.com, the only place I could find the story was under the category "most viewed stories." It's not under the main news stories and it's not under politics. So where the hell is it? (At least it's under most viewed!).

In any event - do you need more proof that our media corporations are manipulating news? Here is a story that is obviously important to a lot of people if it makes CBS news' most viewed list, yet the story is nowhere to be found on its site, let alone almost anywhere else in the mainstream media. Why? Give this some time and seriously think about this.

Why would the fact that a Congressman introduced Articles of Impeachment on the House floor NOT make headlines?

Wanna know what did make headlines?

Sleeping at work -- more of us are doing it (CNN)

$200 bird poop facial offered by spa (CNN)

Panda killed in China earthquake mourned (CBS)

Trial halted after jurors found playing Sudoku (Fox News)

Retired worker gets catfish named for him (MSNBC)



How is any of this crap news, let alone more important than Impeachment articles being brought upon a sitting president?

Don't just take my word for it. Watch and listen to Bill Moyers' speech at the National Conference for Media Reform.

Comments on the News Round Up

Thomas Jefferson quote of the day: All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.



For about a fortnight now network and cable news have gone on and on about Obama's Preacher, the Rev. Wright. Long story short, Rev. Wright wrote a powerful sermon after 9/11 where he pointed out some of the reasons he (and coincidentally, Ron Paul among others) have for believing it was payback. (The book Blowback, with its title derived from "a term coined by the CIA to denote the unintended consequences of policies that were in many cases kept secret from the American public," speaks directly to this point of contention). So, Obama has been raked over the coals about the fact that he has not only been endorsed by Rev. Wright, but was a member of his congregation...20 years ago. Every major news media have taken and run with this story for days: asking Obama to denounce the endorsement, to denounce the preacher; and they've even attacked Rev. Wright.

Yet, strangely, they are silent (crickets chirping here) about the Rev. John Hagee's endorsement of Senator John McCain. Frank Rich in today's New York Times, here, explains it all by saying that, "it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates - and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them - we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick."

Why are they silent about this; about someone who has made much more inflammatory and derogatory remarks than Rev. Wright has? Some of Rev. Hagee's beliefs are: "God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins," that the Roman Catholic Church is "the Great Whore," and that "most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews."

Are those in power and control of the media, racist? anti-black?, pro-McCain?, all of the above?





First there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, then there weren't. Then we were there to get rid of Saddam, then we weren't. Then we were there to bring democracy to Iraq, then we weren't. There were ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, then there were not. Al Qaeda was in Iraq prior to our invasion, then they were not.

Then Iran was training people to fight in Iraq, then they were not. And then Iran was making and sending weapons into Iraq...well...maybe not.





What's important is not who's starving or being oppressed. What's important is my stock price. Money, baby: gimme, gimme, gimme!

"Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry."




Guess what? I went to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and all I got was this stupid T-shirt! "As these astonishing mementoes [sic] show, the US authorities are promoting the world's most notorious prison camp as a cheap hideaway for American sunseekers – a revelation that has drawn international anger and condemnation."




I was a first-born kid and, according to this new study, it looks like we have it harder.

Where's The Balance?

In my last post, I gave a one-day sample of some major news corporations' websites top stories and compared them with other important stories published that same day.

The results from my little survey brought forth some interesting questions regarding what news corporations view as important and worthy of top-story recognition:

Worthy: Man gets out of jail with one-word blog

Not Worthy: Shops rations sales of rice as US buyers panic

Worthy: Man survives 500-foot fall into strip mine

Not Worthy: WWF warns Arctic ice melting faster than predicted


Which brings me to where I left off in the last post. With an agenda. Not mine, but the big news corporation's. What's their agenda? Why would a news company only present one side of a story?

Well, let's look at it this way. If I'm a researcher looking for answers to a specific question (and all I'm after is the truth), then I'm going to try and seek out all possible answers so that I may find out what the truth really is. Once I have all possible answers, I'll keep narrowing it down until I find one that fits best. I give all answers a fair shake at being the right one. It is only through testing, debate, discussion, retesting, etc., that I come to conclusions.

I don't want to favor one answer over another (unless evidence proves that's the correct one) because then I will taint my study and come to conclusions I want; not conclusions shown by independent verification.

Now, if someone has a vested interest in what is being studied, and therefore may desire a particular outcome, are they really the best person to conduct and/or report on this study?

If someone stands to make a lot of money if their product is deemed safe, and therefore to lose a lot of money if it is found unsafe, should they be the person, or have a hand in, testing or reporting the outcome of the tests? Isn't this called a conflict of interest? Bias?

Then why is it ok for the New York Times, one of our nations foremost newspapers, to show glaring evidence of bias? (After all - the were one of the biggest cheerleaders of the Iraq war, were they not?)



On Sunday, March 16, 2008, the NYT Sunday Opinion section published 9 articles on the Iraq War - five years on.

"To mark this week's fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked 9 experts on military and foreign affairs to reflect on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and to comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the prewar debate."


Who are these 9 experts and what did they have to say?

• L. Paul Bremer, III - former presidential envoy to Iraq: "Our soldiers were magnificent in liberating Iraq.

• Anne-Marie Slaughter - dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton: "Our government knew how to destroy but not how to build."

• Kenneth M. Pollack - a former director of Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council and a fellow at the Brookings Institution: "If we leave behind an Iraq more stable and less threatening to its neighbors than the one we toppled, I think the intelligence community's (and my own) mistakes about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration's exaggerations of that threat and its baseless insistence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda will all lose their edge - even though they will not, and should not, be forgotten."

• Paul D. Eaton - a retired Army major general who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004 and who is an advisor to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton: "Without hearings, the Army could not advance its case for increasing the number of troops and rearming the force."

• Richard Pearle - an assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute: "The right decision was made, and Baghdad fell in 21 days with few casualties on either side."

• Danielle Pletka - the Vice President for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute: "After all, for those of us who supported the war, rebutting arguments about weapons of mass destruction has become reflexive."

• Frederick Kagan - a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute: "I supported the 2003 invasion despite misgivings about how it would be executed, and those misgivings proved accurate."

• Anthony D. Cordesman - a fellow at the Center for Strategy and International Studies: "...I did not expect that we would discover no meaningful activity in rebuilding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and no Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda."

• Nathaniel Fick - a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the author of "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer." "We made bets not on whether it would happen, but when."

Eight out of the 9 commentaries are unarguably pro-war, with only Anne-Marie Slaughter's lone voice dissenting.

At least two of the 9 were in the Bush administration and had their hands deep in planning the war itself.

Two are from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, that " is associated with neoconservative domestic and foreign policy views" and "has emerged as one of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy" with "More than twenty AEI alumni and current visiting scholars and fellows have served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions."

One is from the Brookings Institution, a liberal centrist (though some argue it is too supportive of Bush administration policies) think tank.

One from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which includes Henry Kissinger as one of its board members one from the Center for a New American Security, which includes Richard Armitage (the "primary" source for leaking the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame).



How is this an unbiased assessment of where we were and where we are now? Where are the thoughts, then and now, of those major figures who opposed and/or seriously questioned the war from the start, like: Ron Paul, Barak Obama, Dennis Kucinich, Phil Donahue, Brent Scowcroft, Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former Ambassador Joesph Wilson, former Iraqi weapons inspector Scott Ritter...

Why were none of these people asked to write for the New York Times' Op-Ed commentary?

Unbalanced, biased, pro-Bush, pro-war - and this is what many on the right call the bastion of liberal newspapers?