Where can i download paris hilton sex tape? …

If you believe it is fine journalism to report week after week that the Bush administration is a nothing more than a bunch of bumbling idiots (just like those darn democrats) then you must be smoking crack.

You think that these people don’t know what they’re doing? they have taken away all of your rights (they can peak at your email, medical records, reading habits, tap your phones and rendition your ass to some god forsaken country) but according to Ian and Suzi it’s nothing to get upset about, they’re just nothing more than a few drooling fools.

come on. can’t you see that a guy who has cia spook after cia spook on his show might not be the real deal? since when do you believe the cia?! oh i get it, they’re all better now right?. nowadays the’yre fighting for our safety. gimme a break.

you can pick on the “tin foil” programmers at the k all you want. but i know that if i want bologna i can tune into CNN or FOX or ABC or IAN for that matter.

I guess you also believe that JFK was shot by one damn bullet and that the murders of MLK, RFK and Malcolm were just crazy coincidences. Nothing here to see folks, just go back to sleep.

Wait let me guess, you also believe that cointelpro was a good thing right? maybe you also believe that the school of americas is just a misunderstood boys club.

wake up people - the democrats and the republicans have been hijacked for years now and they have had a different agenda than what we the people want. they are not bumbling idiots - they know exactly what they are doing.

“I believe, contrary to Marc, that the answer is not to simply have more Ian Masters and Suzi Weismanns. (although these programs are often insightful). The station needs an infusion of young, people of color who active in their communities to shake the place.”

While this might be true, it is no true fix. Clare Spark was far closer to prescribing the necessary remedy when she wrote:

“Had Pacifica made its mission to seek the truth amid the key controversies of the postwar period, nothing could have stopped it. But no, it became a prize in the struggles of partisans. I think that, at bottom, namely the allergy to following objective evidence wherever it leads, and no matter who it offends, accounts for its descent into irrelevance and mismanagement.”

All that Pacifica had every really needed to achieve both relevance and success is known to all who work there, yet somehow forgotten. Here’s a reminder.

The purposes of the Foundation, as stated in Article II of the Articles of Incorporation, are as follows:

To establish a Foundation organized and operated exclusively for educational purposes no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any member of the Foundation.

To establish and operate for educational purposes, in such manner that the facilities involved shall be as nearly self-sustaining as possible, one or more radio broadcasting stations licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (”Commission”) and subject in their operation to the regulatory actions of the Commission under the Federal Communications Act of 1934, as amended.

In radio broadcasting operations to encourage and provide outlets for the creative skills and energies of the community; to conduct classes and workshops in the writing and producing of drama; to establish awards and scholarships for creative writing; to offer performance facilities to amateur instrumentalists, choral groups, orchestral groups and music students; and to promote and aid other creative activities which will serve the cultural welfare of the community.

In radio broadcasting operations to engage in any activity that shall contribute to a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors; to gather and disseminate information on the causes of conflict between any and all of such groups; and through any and all means compatible with the purposes of this Foundation to promote the study of political and economic problems and of the causes of religious, philosophical and racial antagonisms.

In radio broadcasting operations to promote the full distribution of public information; to obtain access to sources of news not commonly brought together in the same medium; and to employ such varied sources in the public presentation of accurate, objective, comprehensive news on all matters vitally affecting the community.

But the other criticism comes off like cheap pot shots. Like mean spirited comments about people’s IQ. I think it undercuts some of his legitimate criticisms. I understand that he is bitter about being pushed out but that was nearly six years ago. I guess those wounds still sting.

From what I understand, the 9/11 material and the new age programming may offend or repel more politically inclined listeners, but it very popular during fund drive. This anyway is the rationale I have heard.

There are two overlapping problems/issues: 1. Management of the station 2. Programming

1. Although the station staff and volunteers have grown to either despise or ridicule the management, other powerful interests point to “positive”changes in programming made by said management. They argument goes, “How can you criticize these folks, when the station sounds so great.”

Now this argument has lost some of its weight as listenership declines and questionable programming emerges.

Morale is low but there is true passion for meaningful radio and to make a difference in our troubled world. The K just reflects the outside world with the leadership crisis and confusion amongst progressives and radicals.

2. Programming. I personally think its fine if the K is a little rough around the edges. That’s what makes is unique. You are hearing raw, hard to find info and voice often of the community people like me who were once listeners or supporters

This is not to say that there should be broadcast standards but that this should not be what is most important.

I believe, contrary to Marc, that the answer is not to simply have more Ian Masters and Suzi Weismanns. (although these programs are often insightful). The station needs an infusion of young, people of color who active in their communities to shake the place.

The Chicano, Asian American, and African American communities have an abudance of young artists and activists that would infuse new blood to the K, if there were only an systematic way to recruit and train these people.

One last bit, I think Marc really unfairly hissed at Roy of Hollywood. Old Roy has been churning out some brilliant radio for 30+ years.

Now Dave Emory and Gary Null may not be for everyone, but for come on, give Roy a little latitude is broadcasting at midnight to 6AM for christsake. Its the hour for some fringe stuff.

This is not to say that Roy only plays loony stuff. His Alan Watts and spirituality program has touched many lives, including my own. And he still plays Chomsky and investigative news often way before other programmers.

I fondly remember finding KPFK when I was 16 late at night listening to a Roy of Hollywood show about the nefarious role of the CIA in central America. It was mind blowing stuff and I was hooked.

“A network whose market value nears a half-billion dollars has been left to slowly rot away because the Left has not shown the courage to stand up to the zealots who have rendered these radio stations pretty much useless and marginal.”

I think this pretty much hits it on the head, but also assumes a level of coherence on the part of “The Left” that doesn’t really exist. I think a lot of Pacifica’s slide–the conspiracy-mongering, the dwindling role of debate in its programming, etc.–reflects a larger pathology of the American Left. There is little ideological coherence in today’s left, and too many of the people who identify themselves as part of the left have abandoned critical thinking and fact-based politics.

In a time like this, sadly, I think the most one can hope for from an institution like Pacifica is not that it will reform itself into a coherent national network, but that it might respect the professionalism and editorial autonomy of its programmers enough to maintain space for moments of brilliance (like Ian Masters) alongside the mediocre and downright kooky. Sadly, all the members of new, “democratic” pacifica boards seem interested in doing is meddling in programming, rather than hiring managers with the professional competence to build up the next generation of high-quality programs.

Woody says, in a stupendous moment of self-reflection/definition: “There is nothing you can tell me that I don’t already know.”

Indeed, for Woody and a wide slice of American “conservatives” not knowing what you don’t know is an ideological cornerstone. A lot of rightwingers tell themselves this is “common sense”–something they know instinctively, exclusive of factual substance. When factual news reports challenge their “common sense,” as they define it, they feel under attack by “the mainstream media.”

They find little outlet for responding to these constant, growing affronts to their self-reinforced ignorance, because when they try to argue their point of view with people they come across at work, school, etc, they’re made to feel stupid.

Thus the resentment of academic achievement, the indignant references to the mainstream media as “elite,”–as if there is something inherently wrong with achieving elite status in your chosen profession–and the recurring theme that “liberals think they’re so smart.”

Rightwing commentary-driven news media are the only salve for what ails the Woodies of the world. Limbaugh et al are heroes because they alone make the contemporary American right wingnut feel smart.

Note that much of the commercial success of rightwing talkradio turns on commercials narraged by the host. Limbaugh, Medved and so on personally vouch for products.

If you’re in the business of selling washing machines, you have to know that Rush’s “dittoheads” are easy marks for just about whatever he’s willing to personally sell.

Again, the left has it’s own faction of resentment-driven “know-nothings” who look to the media to salve their sense of aggreivement. But it’s a lot smaller faction and overlaps far, far less with “mainstream” liberalism than is the case with wingnuts and mainstream American conservatism.

Meanwhile, the right has people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh and Bill OReilly who spin emotional wingnut rhetoric into 10s of millions of viewers/listeners.

Sure, there is a fringe faction of left wingnuts who behave much like their rightwing counterparts and have the same insatiable appetite for edification.

But that faction this is much smaller on the left and has never and will never be big enough to support the kind of talkradio and noise machine we see on the right in America.

How many failed liberal media projects will there have to be before we can accept that?

Even as liberal ideas and liberal candidates win, liberal media that’s conceived as a counterpart to rightwing noise fails. That’s the point.

Larry Duggan, former chief of the State Department’s Latin American division, a charming, smart, and warm-hearted Ivy Leaguer who strived to bring about world peace, had a lot in common with Hiss. Murrow, justifiably angry that America’s loudest counter-subversive was trying to intimidate him and sully his friend’s memory, did not know that that friend was, like Hiss, a dedicated communist who passed sensitive information to Stalin’s agents in the United States. The FBI interviewed Duggan in connection with the Hiss prosecution in December 1948. His shocking death days later at the age of 43 preserved his secret, for the media and his friends and family made him into a martyr — a liberal destroyed by right-wingers who enjoyed impugning respectable citizens without due process. For decades afterward, those interested in the history of this period generally viewed the Duggan affair in the same way as the literary lion Archibald MacLeish, who wrote a poem upon Duggan’s death that began:

“God help that country where informers thrive! Where slander flourishes and lies contrive.”

It was not Senator McCarthy who had pursued Duggan as an underground communist but those active in the Hiss case: Representative Richard Nixon of California, the ex-communist Whittaker Chambers, and the ex-communist Isaac Don Levine. These were the people accused of symbolic manslaughter by university presidents, diplomats, newspaper columnists, and other worthies when Duggan died. The tragedy received front page coverage in the New York Times. Prominent people attended Duggan’s memorial service. In Washington, a group of his friends put out a statement deploring the congressional panel on which Nixon sat, the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC’s investigations, they charged, dragged the names of good Americans through the mud. Some Duggan supporters even suspected foul play.

Foul play there had actually been, but not what MacLeish, Nicholas Murray Butler, Sumner Welles, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the other grieving friends of Duggan might have thought. According to the account of Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (1999), when in 1937 a man named Ignatz Reiss broke from Stalin’s secret service, a pair of KGB assassins hunted down the defector in Switzerland and killed him to stop him from blowing the cover of Laurence Duggan and another American official who secretly assisted the KGB out of devotion to world communism and the Soviet Union, Noel Field.

In 1948, the furor over Duggan knocked the counter-subversives back on their heels. Nixon dove for political cover. Pressed for comment by reporters, his fellow anticommunists awkwardly tried to say nice things about the deceased, a sensitive family man and pillar of the community, even as they stuck by their conclusion that he was in league with Moscow’s agents. Chambers, cornered by a New York Times reporter in the corridor of the federal court house where the Hiss grand jury was meeting, said that he’d testified to Duggan’s being one of the covert communists he’d heard about, but he was not personally acquainted with the man nor had he used him as a source in the pre-war spy ring that he, Chambers, managed for Soviet military intelligence.

Chambers sounded defensive, but his testimony was borne out later, when archival documents and decrypted cable traffic between Moscow, New York, and Washington came to light after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet cables and documents showed that Duggan’s deliveries to the KGB (known in those years by other acronyms) included a confidential cable from the U.S. ambassador in Moscow back to the State Department, U.S. diplomatic dispatches from Europe offering U.S. perspectives on the civil war going on in Spain, and a State Department personnel list. Two of his code names were “Frank” and “Prince.” His handler was Norman Borodin, whose boss was KGB station chief Izhak Akhmerov.

Murrow and the rest had been unable or unwilling, in the heat of the communist controversy, to distinguish between McCarthy’s theatrics and the more considered charges leveled by people who actually knew a lot about communism. Murrow, according to his biographer, wanted to follow up his television broadcast on McCarthy with one on the untimely demise of Laurence Duggan. This, he believed, would drive home the moral point about the evils of anticommunism. He never got to make that show.

What if he had? Or better yet, what if he knew then what we know today? Would it have affected his airy indifference — well conveyed by actor David Straithairn as the movie’s Edward R. Murrow — to whether a targeted individual was a communist or not?

“Good Night and Good Luck” is a missed chance in this regard. For Laurence Duggan was one of several “romantic radicals” in the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s, to borrow a phrase from The Haunted Wood’s chapter on Duggan.

Like this!
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/31/2874/print/
Will Bush Cancel The 2008 Election?

by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis

It is time to think about the “unthinkable.”

The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.

KPFK is no more representative of liberal, left-leaning radio than Charlie and Nellie Babbs’ KTTL-FM in Dodge City, KS was of right-wing radio in the early 1980’s .

He takes shots at everyone, from Clinton to Gore, Al Franken, Garrison Keillor and Dan Rather–along with the usual suspects like Cheney and Bush. Nine times out of 10, his slings and arrows hit the bullseye.

This is what liberals want. Not the kind of party line harangues you hear on conservative talkradio. There will never, ever be a liberal counterpart to Rush Limbaugh’s success. It just won’t happen.

Anyone listening in vain to KPFK longing for that–a leftwing parallel to Rush et al–is doomed to remain indignantly dissastified.

As for KPFK’s demise, it’s beyond obvious that the riddance is good.