In Case You Weren’t Totally Sure That ALEC, FOX, And The GOP Aren’t Best Buds…

Sally Jo Sorensen once again does the establishment press one better in a story that will be found nowhere else — especially now, as I’ve made a point of making sure that her name is indelibly linked to it — by deeply tracing the ALEC connections of a prominent MNGOP officer and NewsCorp bigwig:

In Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Is an ALEC Member, PR Watch’s Rebekah Wilce reports that News Corps’ Senior Vice President, Bill Guidera,  “attended ALEC’s April 2010 Spring Task Force Summit in St. Louis, Missouri, as a member of what was then called the Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force.”

The presence of Guidera at the 2010 meeting creates a “discrepancy” between ALEC statements that News Corp., which owns Fox News Network, joined the corporate front group in 2012, Wilce reports.

As long time ALEC watchers, Bluestem can walk the Guidera-ALEC association back to 2007. In ALEC’s Regional Field Teams: Connecting with Members Face-to-Face, on page 2 of the December 2007 “Inside ALEC” newsletter, there’s this:

“At times a bill is seen as the easy solution to a tough problem, yet that bill may create even more problems. Todd (Kruse) and his team cut through the puffery to reach the core issues with clear, conservative policy solutions,” said Bill Guidera of News Corp, an ALEC member based in Minnesota.

Go read the whole thing. It’s definitely worth your time.

Violence Higher In Unequal Rich Countries (Like The USA)

This chart kinda says it all:

See here for more information.

Just read Eric Rauchway/updated with actual link

It’s been too long since I visited The Edge of the American West. Fortunately Paul Krugman steered me there. I learned the phrase, “at a level that could get you fired as a blogger.”

Yes. A lot of things that pass as serious articles could get you fired as a blogger. David Brooks. Tom Friedman. Half the guests on Charlie Rose. Charles Murray. And now the California Association of Scholars. They have produced a document whose errors can only be ascribed to overwhelming political bias and the desperate unwillingness to check the facts to which overwhelming political bias leads.

The report is signed by John M. Ellis (Professor Emeritus of German Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz.), Charles L. Geshekter (Professor of African History, California State University, Chico), Peter W. Wood (Anthropology Department at Boston University), and Stephen H. Balch (ex-Department of Government and Public Administration of John Jay College of Criminal Justice).

And in short order, political connections pop up. Balch is easy: In 2009 he was the recipient of the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award from the American Conservative Union Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Same for Peter W. Wood (linkibid): Dr. Wood has published several hundred articles in print and online journals, such as Partisan Review and National Review Online”. Geshekter has published one article for NRO. Ellis likes to complain about “political correctness”

The funding for NAS? Here:

Sarah Scaife Foundation
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc
Castle Rock Foundation
John M. Olin Foundation

This report was bought and paid for.

Dan Riehl And Restraining-Order Target George Tierney, Jr.: Kindred Misogynists With An Oral Sex Obsession

It seems that Dan Riehl and George Tierney Jr. of Greenville, South Carolina are kindred spirits:

Actually, this comparison is may be unfair to George Tierney, Jr. as unlike Dan Riehl, alleged member of the allegedly respectable wing of conservatism and Republicanism, he’s actually apologized for his Tweet somebody claiming but not proven to be him apologized for his Tweet, something Riehl refuses to do. Indeed, he just keeps digging his hole deeper.

Oh, and lookiee here: The devotees of Andrew “Stop Raping People!!!!!” Breitbart are enabling Riehl’s idiocy.

Good men/women served. Good men/women stayed at home.

Please honor those who have served… and those who tried to prevent wars.

On Monday, May 28th, Memorial Day, IAVA asks for a moment of silence at 12:01 PM to honor those who have died in the service of this country.

A minute is not enough. Veterans need to be honored with jobs, healthcare, and the opportunity to make their lives whole again. I recommend IAVA as an organization that is trying to make that happen.

On BookTV: Bayard Rustin

On BookTV

“I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters”

Michael Long

About the Program

Michael Long presents a collection of over 150 letters from Civil Rights leader, Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and an openly gay man. Mr. Rustin’s letters cover over forty years of his life and the correspondents include the likes of Roy Wilkins, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Michael Long speaks with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the Schomburg Center in New York City.

The Quebec uprising and Occupy sues NYC

Elizabeth Leier, truthout:

On May 22, [angered by tuition hikes] nearly half a million people marched in the streets of Montreal in defiance of a recently adopted law denying protester’s civil liberties, namely the right to protest, freedom of association and of expression. A crowd made up of students, professors, children and citizens from every walk of life marched peacefully throughout the city, ignoring provisions prohibiting any deviation from the planned itinerary and disrupting the commercial and banking district. The crowd openly defied articles of Bill 78, which make any gathering of over 50 protesters illegal, and chanted for the resignation of Premier Jean Charest, who has systematically refused to meet with the students personally. Many consider that the government’s refusal to find a solution and, indeed, its increasingly repressive position have given the movement a second wind.

On Wednesday, May 23, more than 3,000 people assembled in Montreal, in Emilie-Gamelin Square for the 30th nightly protest, while throughout the city, citizens spontaneously took to the streets (in some neighborhoods, over 2,000 people) banging on pots and pans and blocking busy roads, in a situation reminiscent of the Argentinian protests of 2001. No longer just a student strike, the Maple Spring is fast becoming a widespread citizens’ revolt.

Melissa Gira Grant, truthout:

the city [of New York] has offered no explanation as to why the tools of the occupation itself were targeted in the raid [of November 15th]. Along with occupiers’ personal belongings, custom-built Wi-Fi transmitters and the thousands of books in the People’s Library were seized and, in some cases, deliberately destroyed, fed into “crusher” trucks that rolled up to the park while, inside, police pepper-sprayed and arrested those who remained. Throughout, police held the media off blocks away, preventing them from entering the scene.
…
The seizure of their books immediately called to mind, as Siegel described them yesterday morning in the cold and rain, “the conduct of some of the worst regimes imaginable.” As such, though the suit seeks damages in the amount of $47,000 – accounting for $43,000 for the books and $4,000 for other destroyed library equipment – Siegel explained that “it is more important for us to get into the historic record that the city cannot destroy books.”

Next steps in the suit, said attorney Herbert Teitelbaum, include a discovery process that could turn up records of the raid plan. Depositions of Mayor Bloomberg or Commissioner Kelly could also reveal the extent to which the destruction of the occupation was planned or ordered

Honestly, I don’t know why the entire population isn’t in the streets. The elected leaders are behaving with complete impunity, demonstrating complete contempt for citizens and the principles of democracy as they loot the economy. I guess things will have to crash before people wake up.

In the toljaso what justain’tso column… [Bush AWOL story]

(Thanks to Norwegianity-in-exile for providing the link to this story)

So, we all know the facts. Dan Rather, working with information provided by Lt. Col. Bill Burkett through 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes, aired a sensational story that there was definitive proof that George W Bush had at best been casual about his National Guard service. But brilliant and courageous right-wing bloggers quickly (like, so quickly that they had to have been supplied some assistance from the Bush White House) unraveled the truth: the documents were forgeries, proven by the fact that no typewriter of that era could possibly have typed them and that they could be reproduced by Microsoft Word.

The Washington Post in particular rushed the bloggers’ conclusions into print. Amid all the breathless talk about kerning, fonts, and proportional spacing, and cries of “Rathergate” from the right, official harrumphing about journalistic standards gave way to a commission which promptly found… well, not exactly anything except that Mapes and Rather had to go. There wasn’t any arguing from any quarter that they had rushed the story onto the air without properly vetting the documents, relying instead on the reputation of Lt. Col. Burkett. Alas, Burkett had not verified their provenance. Mapes and Rather were left to (metaphorically) swing.

But, of course, everything other than the fact that the source of the documents had not been established wasn’t true. The documents, if they were forgeries, were much better forgeries than the right-wing gave credit for. They could indeed have been produced by a typewriter of that vintage. That, in fact, was a more likely explanation than what the right-wing claimed.

read more

Friday Cat Blogging

“Agenda 21″: GOP’s Ongoing Demagoguing Of UN, Green Issues Draws Some Belated Attention

Minnpost’s Marlys Harris, whose CV includes such stunning pieces of hard-hitting journalism as “How to Marry a Billionaire” and “Millionaires-in-Chief”, must have thought she had the scoop of the year when she was lit-dropped on the way to the loo:

Turns out, some people don’t see sustainability as a good thing. To them it is an evil conspiracy whose tenets are embodied in a 20-year-old United Nations resolution ominously called Agenda 21. I only learned about it last weekend at the state GOP convention in St. Cloud when a man in a dark blue sports jacket thrust a paper about it into my hands as I was entering the powder room and rudely suggested I read it on the potty.

[...]

The pamphlet may be the first shot across the bow in Minnesota on behalf of a movement sweeping the country. Anti-Agenda 21 and anti- sustainability, it has its roots in the Tea Party and other libertarian groups who oppose any kind of smart growth, urban planning, density, mass transit and environmental regulation.

“First shot”? No, just the first one that Ms. Harris happened to notice. As Sally Jo Sorensen points out:

Sadly no. This isn’t the first shot by nearly a decade.

Allen Quist, who led the balloting at the end of the epic 23-round Thrilla in Vanilla at the Republican CD1 convention at the historic Kato Ballroom, lately has been touring Minnesota’s Tea Party circuit for months, warning about the terrors of Agenda 21, as well as lecturing about it from the bully pulpit of his congressional campaign website, after being one of the founding fathers of the Blue Helmet Fear Club, Agenda 21 Chapter.

Warnings about Agenda 21 have been standard fare among Minnesota’s Tea Party gatherings, have been for months.

And then Ms. Sorensen goes on to list a whole bunch of efforts over the past year by various Tea Party Republicans, particularly Allen Quist, to demagogue Agenda 21. (Furthermore, just to show that crazed, fact-challenged balderdash about Agenda 21 isn’t just the purview of Allen Quist and his sizeable following, Sorensen does a followup post to point out that Mike Parry, Quist’s GOP primary opponent for the right to lose to Tim Walz this November, is a co-author of a bill introduced in February to demagogue Agenda 21.)

Once again, Sally Jo Sorensen shows herself to be the hardest working journalist in Minnesota. She also happens to be a journalist whose stories and scoops are often lifted without credit by many establishment media outfits.