When You’re Sick of Surrogates

…making a total ass of their candidate…

Time Magazine informs us that the Debate Monitors for the upcoming (and never too soon) Presidential debates have been announced. Now we can look forward to more one-on-one between Barack Obama and John McCain without having to roll our eyes on campaign surrogate gaffes enough to go blind.

For the first debate on Friday, September 26 at the University of Mississippi in Oxford the moderator will be Jim Lehrer, executive editor and anchor of the PBS NewsHour. Always a delightful presence, calming influence and rational analyst.

The second debate will be between Vice-Presidential candidates - whoever those turn out to be - on Thursday, October 2 at Washington University in St. Louis. Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent for the NewsHour and managing editor of PBS’s Washington Week will preside. Another excellent choice.

The second debate between Obama and McCain is a Town Meeting format on Tuesday, October 7 at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Our fave Tom Brokaw of NBC News will officiate. Should be fun!

The third and last Presidential debate (and you thought McCain was serious when he offered to do Town Meetings every week back in the day, didn’t you?) will be held on Wednesday, October 15 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York with Bob Sheiffer presiding. Sheiffer, CBS News chief Washington correspondent and host of the weekly Face the Nation broadcast, is a bit more partisan than the others, but should turn in a good performance at that very late stage of the campaign.

Anybody want to offer odds on what the point spread will be by October 15th?

Filed under Debates, John McCain, Barack Obama, Campaigns, Talking Heads, Media, Presidential Candidates | Comment (0)

Can the Fox-Bots Be Cured?

Before my beloved Father-in-Law died, my ‘challenging’ Mother-in-Law was one of my more inspiring (and intimidating) role models. She’d occasionally vote Republican (which Dad ALWAYS did), but more often went Democratic for reasons of weighed value to more inclusive values and concerns for all citizens, even if the system’s not perfect. She became an ombudsman fighting for the rights of nursing home patients, she sat on the local zoning board, and she was never afraid to give elected officials - any denomination - a piece of her ample mind whenever they deserved it.

But then the love of her life died, and she’s been lonely ever since. In clinging to something of him and his views of life, she became addicted to Fox News, which - it has been noted many times - is the most successful mass propaganda/mind-control experiment ever deployed by partisan human beings against members of their own species. It has turned her into a regular O’Reilly puppet, victim of subliminal programming, a hater of all who are different or disagree. She was someone who never had a hateful bone in her body in all her years before reaching her late 70s and falling to this addiction.

She’ll be 86 this year. We’ve got to go visit and do what we can to get her some help around the house or live-in care, since she’s too stubborn to do it herself, too independent to go to “The Home,” and still in possession of most of her mental faculties Fox hasn’t yet stolen from her. It’s very sad to see this wonderfully smart, able, strong and loving person become a grim, insulated hater. She hates gays, immigrants, blacks, Muslims, Democrats, the French… anybody Bill O’Reilly tells her to hate. Which - even more sadly - now includes her own children. My husband and I (confirmed liberals) as well as his younger brother, who is a conservative Baptist preacher with his own SBC church! Very strange.

She’s alienated her family, her friends… people she’s known for decades or for their entire lives. I believe it’s a crime to prey on people like Fox does. It does real harm to real people, and they’re doing it purely for the profit. They should be stopped, a treatment for the mind-disease they’ve caused should be high on the list of urgent NIH projects.

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Filed under Slime Machine, Hate Speech, Politics of Hate, Media, Talking Heads, Corruption, Propaganda, Republicans | Comment (0)

Another SCHIP Update:

Republican Slime Machine Targets Injured 12-Year Old

Graeme Frost speaking to reporters after delivering the Democratic radio response to Bush’s SCHIP veto.

Just when you thought Mister 22% and his Brownshirts couldn’t go any lower in their efforts to prevent millions of children from accessing health care through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program [SCHIP], they managed to find yet another sub-basement cesspool from which to spew slime.

When Bush vetoed the SCHIP legislation passed by both the House and Senate, the Democratic response was delivered by courageous 12-year old Graeme Frost of Baltimore, Maryland. Graeme and his parents, who earn ~$45,000 a year but get no employer-provided health care and with 4 children cannot afford $1,200 a month for private coverage, went public with how the SCHIP program helped them after a 2004 auto accident left Graeme and his younger sister seriously injured and hospitalized for five months.

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Filed under Talking Heads, Slime Machine, Veto, SCHIP, Bush, Republicans, Health Care | Comments (2)

Limbaugh’s Dittoheads vs. U.S. War Veterans

My goodness! The war between Rush Limbaugh’s chickenhawk dittoheads and veterans of the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has certainly lit up the airwaves and internet for the past couple of weeks! It’s getting so heated that it just might be time to buy some popcorn futures (or take up dealing OxyContin…).

In case you’re one of the few who missed it when the fireworks started, right wing hate pundit Limbaugh (who got out of military service during the VietNam draft due to boils on his fat ass) created quite a stir when he libeled some Iraq war veterans on his daily radio show [date] by calling them “phony soldiers” and likening them to “suicide bombers.”

His beef wasn’t that they hadn’t volunteered to serve, or didn’t serve at the front for more time than they’d bargained for, or that some of them were badly injured. It was that they started speaking out against the war once they got home.

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Filed under Media, Veterans, Anti-War, Talking Heads, Propaganda | Comment (0)