The Seductive Media Fantasy That We're All Rich

Virtually everything in politics today, in terms of “appeals”, as well as the media and advertizing products - - are basically aimed at the top twenty percent of incomes in America.  The rest of us don’t matter, and we look at that twenty percent, and we think we’re not normal because we aren’t like them.  It was pointed out that the top twenty percent begins at $103,000 – which is a lot lower than they would have us believe it is.  Today there is also an age gap where if you’re over fifty, you have trouble with the complicated exotic electronic devices on today’s new cars.  It’s like piloting some alien craft.  Even turning on the car radio is a challenge. This top twenty percent are the ones who give the Federal Reserve the highest marks.  So in reality Obama’s support of current Federal Reserve policies serve the rich, as we demonstrated on our last post.  The rest of us are either apathetic or don’t trust the Federal Reserve at all to do right by us.  But these Olympics are a joke.   They are a mockery of what the Olympics have been historically as a Spartan event (in a generic sense) where the best armature athletes competed for the purest motive of personally excellence.  Today the whole thing is just another media production event with product endorsements and placement where it can bee seen on TV.  Gone are the days of no business involvement.  Over the air media is clinging to the last bastion of Control they have over the American Public.  There are certain events they will not relinquish control over.  We may not see the opening ceremonies LIVE in real time as they actually happened.  Of course in Russia they can’t do that either because one of the Olympic rings didn’t light.  But they must have been using tape delay because they spliced old footage into the torch lighting ceremony.  So it’s not live coverage of unfolding events;  it’s show business.  The Super Bowl is the same say.  This is another thing the Media is guarding jealously from letting coverage out on the Internet.   If everybody else is like me this year- - this Olympics should be one of the least watched events by Americans in many decades.

Let’s talk about Chris Matthews, who is like a dog with a bone on this Governor Christie affair, that most people have already forgotten about- - such is our rodent length attention span.  Developments are continuing to occur.  First of all that Slovic name mayor of Fort Lee, was given various perks and influxes of money from the state to six pot holes and do a lot of other needed work.  So clearly when the Mayor spurned Christie but not endorsing him, Matthews says “Maybe it was a fee for services type of thing”.  It certainly makes a liar out of Christie in saying that he didn’t even know who the mayor of Ft Lee was, and didn’t care who endorsed him and who didn’t in last year’s race.  But also now the word came down “from the governor’s office” that Christie is NOT the one who dished up all that dirt about Wildstine as far as his high school activities was concerned.  But Chris Matthews hits the nail on the head saying “He lets this whole trash job on Wildstine story fester in the public media for a week but finally the story has become so pungent it’s begging to reflect back on Christie, therefore he puts out the word that it wasn’t his doing.  Mind you Christie did not say this HIMSELF so he can’t be accused of lying.  But that’s what this governor does.  He has others do his dirty work and then when the damage is done comes back and expresses shock and says he had nothing to do with it.  But now we have the threat of what Wildstine and others will say to get immunity.  On Thursday’s episode the topic was raised how Christie is politically toxic.  Fund raising affairs like with Rick Scott are done on the QT and photographs are not taken because the Republicans months from now want to safeguard themselves and not having these photos surface when Christie may well have become a political embarrassment.   Port Authority guy Wildstine called himself “Wally the edge” when he was giving and getting all this inside information on high officials in the Christie government.  He was almost bragging how much he knew about everybody.  All of these people are, or used to be, part of a close-knit “family” if you will - - all working for the same goals.  I believe a lot of Americans will take personal pleasure in the complete downfall of Governor Christie.  He's just one of those "jerks' you can no longer stand the sight of any more.

It continues to puzzle me why President Obama ever ran for President.  Clearly his political resume was thread bare with only two years in the US Senate.  Randy Rhodes pronounced him as the nominee in late February before Hillary had that major popular vote tide of support, winning all the major states and beating Obama in any face to face debate.   And the other question is “If President Obama knew his second term had such a dismal future- - why not just decide not to run in 2012?”   After all if he can’t get the job done, why not turn it over to someone else, who can?  And the thing is constitutionally he would still be able to run for one more Presidential term, when he was ready.  But now his political carrier is over, and he only in his mid fifties!  So like - uh - what is he going to DO for the next thirty years, after he presided over perhaps the least successful two term Presidency in 120 years?  I guess the question is- - what is the big Payoff that the President is expecting will happen in his second term?  Clearly it isn’t with congress.  Because it seems to be a widely held opinion now that the Democratic Party organization has given up on taking back the House of Representatives.  Which condemns the President to forever making one “wish list’ speech after another and being completely politically irrelivent for the next four years.  (Selah) 

  And the Democrats are so dispirited - as is - virtually every left wing protest group - now are hoping to just hang on to the US Senate and even hope against hope of unseating Mitch Mc Connell of Kentucky.  That would be a real coup if they could pull that off.  This lady running against him Allicen Grimes or whatever- - is calling out the Cavelry - - Bill Clinton as a fund raiser.  But Rand Paul wants to “hobble” the Clinton effort by bringing up Monica Luinsky, even though Monica was a full grown woman, 22, when she began working for Clinton.  Chris says that women will resent this attempt at “infantalizing’ Monica and women in general.  Women can see through these pathetic motives of Rand Paul.  As far as Hillary is concerned - - Chris Matthews – going Randy Rhodes one better- - wants to coronate Hillary Clinton as the nominee designate right now and skip the primaries and convention all together.  Chris was giving Joe Byden a hard time- and questioning his motives in daring to run against Hillary- - and questioning how serious he is about really wanting to be President.  My stance on this is that of Joe Byden runs, he’s got my vote.  Because I think he’d make a better President than Hillary.  I’ve always liked Byden.  I think he has a certain “basic connection” to the common people that Hillary can’t touch.  Everybody always wants to know the future.  People like me muse “If I just knew the results of the next elections- - a lot of other trends would be easier to get a handle on”.  But history has shown that trying to extrapolate out- - even eight months, let alone two and a half years, is a fool’s errand.  You can’t bet the farm on the fact that “unforeseen events’ will over-take us and suddenly become the hot issues that everybody is talking about then.  (Selah) 

 
I have no particular "beef" against Ron Paul over and above any of the others.  Clearly the politician I have the most personal animosity for is Chris Christie.  The others such as Rick Perry or Rand Paul or Santaurum, don't bother me- - at last personally.  I'm sure they're all nice people.  But here's some stuff about Rand Paul's father, Ron Paul, which you may wish to consider before you vote.  Chris Matthews said on his show last night that Rand Paul "is a pretty smart guy" and "is odds on to be the nominee at this point".

Starting in 1984, Ron Paul published a series of related newsletters, called the Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul Freedom Report, Ron Paul Survival Report, etc.
He had over 100,000 subscribers at one point and is said to have made over a million dollars a year. (Subscriptions cost $100 a year for a magazine usually 8 pages long.)
Over nearly 20 years, the newsletters published a bunch of hateful and inflammatory racist, anti-gay and conspiratorial columns. You can read 50 of the originals on this website. Warning -- it's pretty raw stuff.
One article said Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced underage girls and boys” and “replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.” Another offers this strategy against "urban youth":
"If you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).”  Speaking of AIDS, one article said homosexuals “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick,” and another said “I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.” -- A June, 1990 article  In 2001, as Paul moved to the mainstream and rejoined the Republican party, he disavowed these comments and blamed them on an unnamed ghostwriter. He said he didn't know about them until ten years later -- a statement easily proved false -- and that he had lied in 1996 when he didn't say he didn't write them.  You see, when Paul ran for Congress in 1996, as a Libertarian, his opponent brought these newsletters up to show that Paul had fringe ideas. At that time, they were still being published, and Paul didn't deny writing them. He said that the inflammatory quotes his opponent gave were taken out of context, and that his commentaries about blacks came in the context of "current events and statistical reports of the time." (You can check the context of the inflammatory quotes yourself on the link above, but they look pretty representative to me.)   In fact, Dr. Paul defended some of these racist statements in an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1996. One newsletter said that young Black men are "unbelievably fleet of foot." Dr. Paul confirmed this opinion by telling the newspaper "If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them." Another article in the newsletter (from 1992, just 4 years before this controversy first erupted) said:  "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."   When the Dallas reporter asked Ron Paul about that quote, he said "These aren't my figures. That is the assumption you can gather from" the report.  Paul and his supporters claim that he moved to Texas, the newsletters stayed in Washington, and he was too busy to even look at the 8 page newsletter that earned him a million dollars a years. (So much for Texas straight talk.) We have direct evidence that he's lying. Renae Hathaway, Paul's former secretary who still supports him, says that Paul was a very hands-on owner of the newsletters: "He always got to see the final product. He would proof it." (Another longtimeemployee, Eric Rittberg, confirms that he saw Ron Paul proofing, editing and signing off on the newsletters.) Hathaway said the newsletter company had an office in Houston and another one in Clute, very near Paul's house, and that he came to Houston -- 50 miles from his home -- at least weekly.  Ed Crane, the longtime head of the Cato Institute, recalls meeting Paul in the 1980s and discussing mail solicitation lists for the newsletters. Paul agreed that “people who have extreme views” responded best, and said he got his best response from the mailing list for the conspiratorial, anti-Semitic newspaper "The Spotlight." Rittberg says that Paul put the racist material in the newsletters simply to make money -- "the real big money came from some of that racially tinged stuff -- and it seems to have worked very well.  The President manages millions of people. Even if you take Ron Paul at his word, he couldn't manage a staff of 10 without them suddenly printing extreme racist progaganda FOR TEN YEARS. I just don't believe him, but if you do, he's a piss-poor manager. More likely he happily trafficked in the racist material to make money. And it worked. In 1984, Paul reported dept of up to $765,000; by 1995, most of the debt was gone and his net worth was up to $3.3 million. The question remains, does he believe any of this stuff himself?  The thing is, Ron Paul has published a lot of similar (but milder) material since then, and much of it is still on his congressional website, under his name. (Read any of his "Texas Straight Talk" columns from 2005 or 2006, and you'll see what I mean.) He rails against "anchor babies," warns of conspiracies to impose a "North American United Nations," complains about secret cartels of international bankers -- all big parts of the racist right-wing's world-view. (See quotes, above.) So far he hasn't claimed that someone else wrote these "Texas Straight Talk" columns, but I haven't seen any reporters ask him about them, either.  But there's plenty more. Ron Paul defenders claim Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero of his, but Paul voted against the Martin Luther King Day holiday -- both times - and it fell 5 votes short the first time. (It passed the second time despite his opposition.)  He said on MSNBC that the Civil War was not necessary, and gave a rave review to a pro-Confederacy revisionist book called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" by Thomas E. Woods. Ron Paul said Wood's book "heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole.” Woods, who founded the secessionist group "League of the South," and Ron Paul both teach at the Ludwig Van Mises Institute in Alabama, which was founded by Lew Rockwell -- Ron Paul's former chief of staff. In fact, many Paul supporters claim Lew Rockwell wrote the racist newsletter columns under Ron Paul's name, but Rockwell denies that.