Category: Media

I am not sure what I would do without Amy Goodman. Check out this interview she did with Bill Clinton in 2000. Clinton was just trying to call in to get out the vote, but Goodman actually asked tough questions. I thought Clinton did very well in the interview, except for when he briefly lost his cool, that is.

Update 27: Kucinich says he doesn’t believe in assasination, even with Osama bin Laden. Obama says he doesn’t believe in assasination, but would take out bin Laden. And my train has arrived in San Francisco…I am cutting out of the debate about a half an hour early.

Update 26: Clinton was asked what she would do if diplomacy with Iran failed. She said “I am not going to get into hypotheticals.” That isn’t very reassuring. John Edwards said that he “wouldn’t take any option off the table.” Joe Biden much more realistic about this question, saying that Iran is a decade away from getting a nuke and that nukes are the only thing keeping us from attacking them. But at the end of the day, if they stuck a nuke on a pad, he would take it out. No one mentioned anything about our own nuclear arsenal in response to that question.

Update 25: So far, there has not been a single mention of the number of dead Iraqis. There have been approximately 400,000 to 940,000 Iraqis killed as a result of the Iraq War, as of one year ago.

Update 24: Dodd says that the principal responsibility of the United States president is to keep the American people safe and secure.

Update 23: Obama has been asked about his desire to increase the size of the military. I didn’t hear from him why he wants to do this.

Update 22: Kucinich is advocating cutting military spending.

Update 21: Christopher Dodd took the subject of rising gas prices and turned it around to a question of global warming. I like that. Mike Gravel “There is nothing I would do as president to lower the price of gasoline.” Even better.

Update 20: Bill Richardson thinks Bill Clinton would make a good Middle East “peace envoy.”

Update 19: Clinton says we should allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Joe Biden agrees, and is pissed. All of the Democrats now agree.

Update 18: Kucinich is putting forth the best health care plan; completely not for profit, health care for all. Applause from the audience (rare so far in the debate).

Update 17: Edwards is really sucking up to Obama. Is there going to be some Obama/Edwards ticket or something?

Update 16: Obama is letting Blitzer have it for asking the question about “Should English be the official language of the United States?”

Update 15: Again with the “If I had known then what I know now…” from Clinton. I am getting sick of that line.

Update 14: John Edwards is criticizing Hillary Clinton for not apologizing for her original vote to authorize the war. Obama isn’t criticizing her at all.

Update 13: Wolf is getting on Hillary Clinton for authorizing the war without reading the NIE report. She says she knew all the issues and was “briefed.” She didn’t say she regrets not reading the report. And she is blaming the Iraqis for their situation, not what we’re doing over there.

Update 12: Joe Biden is pissed off at Kucinich. He is saying the Democrat’s need 67 votes in the senate so long

Update 11: Kucinich is saying we should end the war by ending the funding.

Update 10: Mike Gravel is speaking. Already letting them have it. He says it is a Democrat’s war as well.

Update 9: They haven’t let Mike Gravel speak yet, 17 minutes in. They have given Kucinich about 15 seconds.

Update 8: Clinton is calling this “George Bush’s war.” I think it is just as much her’s.

Update 7: John Edwards is calling Clinton and Obama out on not speaking out on the Iraq War.

Update 6: Hillary Clinton says that all of the Republican candidates support the Iraq War. Is she not familiar with Ron Paul?

Update 5: Joe Biden says that if he funds the troops, he is protecting them.

Update 4: Kucinich says the PATRIOT Act needs to be overturned as unconstitutional. Wolf Blitzer is giving the candidates about 15 seconds per answer.

Update 3: John Edwards is calling the war on terrorism a bumper sticker. Right on, Edwards.

Update 2: Obama offering strong words on Iraq. Saying that the war there has only hurt our country’s security. He says we need to focus on Afghanistan. Question from me: Is Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan?

Update 1: According to this page, only two candidates, Democrat or Republican, supports same sex marriage.

The next Democratic debates are coming up. They are airing at 4pm PDT. I’ll be liveblogging them, in this post. You can watch the debates live on CNN.com. Hopefully my Verizon card won’t crap out on Caltrain.

Democracy Now rocks. I regularly watch their podcast.

Cultural Historian Morris Berman, who has just written a new book “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire.” was on KQED Forum yesterday talking about the downfall of the American empire.

One of his biggest arguments of why the American empire is coming to an end is because, evidently, Americans are idiots. He used the standard statistics about x% of Americans don’t know this, and x% of Americans can’t even locate [location] on a map. Despite these standard arguments, I still get the impression that Americans aren’t generally idiots. I think that we may be particularly strange, good or bad, in certain ways, but one thing we are not is stupid.

And a question that I always thought would be great to ask these people that make the American idiot argument is – “Well what of other countries? How do they stack up in these same surveys that have been asked of Americans?” Well, one caller asked just that question, in his own words of course:

Mr. Berman is wrong if he thinks Americans are ignorant and the rest of the world is informed. As someone who has lived in Europe, Mr. Berman should know that people in those countries are just as ignorant about the outside world and their countries as we are. These surveys are taken often, and the results are just as depressing as our own…

What was Mr. Berman’s response (to the above caller and other “detractors”)? Mr. Berman: “Read the book.”

Of course Michael Krasny, the host, wouldn’t let him stand with this response alone. He pressed for more, which Mr. Berman responded to as follows:

Oh, it’s so untrue, so untrue. The, the uh, surveys that have been taken, you know, I don’t know, of course this would be politically too sensitive, to do, that the UN or UNESCO would do a comparitive IQ study, but I’m, I’m guessing that Danes, uh, there was one study that indicated that Indians, as in Bombay, that Indians had a higher IQ than Americans by about five percentage points. I, I thought, “Don’t you mean twenty-five?” Umm, I would say the same of Danes or Swedes and so on. I remember, um, Patricia Williams did an uh, she’s an attorney that does a column in the Nation, and she was, uh, in the provinces in France talking to a 12-year-old boy in the nineties who knew, she said, more the in and out, ins and outs, of Clinton’s US foreign policy than the typical anchor person on TV in the United States – that you couldn’t have the same level of discussion. That’s been my experience of Europe as well. These people read, and if you read European newspapers, whether its The Guardian or Le Monde, and so on, what you see is that there’s a level of discussion that we can’t even come close to, that the New York Times turns into largely mythology, when you come down to it now, as opposed to something like, um, (couldn’t understand) in Europe, it’s a…(Berman cut off)

So, the best argument of the American people’s stupidity as compared to other countries is using the following evidence:
– Indians have a five percent higher IQ.
– Some 12-year old boy has a better understanding of Clinton’s foreign policy than the typical US news anchor.
– Newspapers from other countries have a higher level of discussion than US newspapers.

Wow. I mean, if he really had some solid things to say in response to that caller’s comments, he could have started to convince me that Americans are idiots. But when he resorted to a comparison of our mass medias when asked about the ignorance of the general population, it was obvious that his thesis is baseless.

Opinions like this, which I think are rampant in the liberal elite community, are what I think is wrong with the liberal movement.

The past couple of days has given us headlines like “White House Takes Heat Over Shooting Disclosure” (ABC News). But I see that headline and read “White House has Cheney Shoot a Guy to Take the Heat off of Them for the Whole Orwell Thing”.

Yeah, call me paranoid, but would that not be good strategy? The wiretapping story is now at #12 on Google News’ US news section. Another interesting note – four of the top twelve stories on the US news section are about the White House getting in trouble.