Wisconsin update: Rethugs strip fiscal dimensions, pass union-busting bill

... so they could do an end run around the procedural rules requiring quorum for the enactment of fiscal legislation.

Keith Olbermann out at MSNBC

And here I was thinking that broadcasting in the United States couldn't get any dumber.

As long as we're asking quis custodiet ipsos custodes ...

I know, I know, it's Sunday night and people just want to wind down the weekend and fall asleep in front of the Golden Globes and for chrissakes, can't you just give it a rest already?

Yeah, well. Michael Geist flagged this last week, and pogge and Jymn have picked up on it, but it bears more than a little emphasis. The Star and the Globe seem to think it's important too.

Broadcasting, media and internet policy: the confluence of the absurd

This is where we juxtapose:

Is the Ottawa Citizen undermining the authority of the court?

Note the wording of the lead sentence here:

Ontario's Special Investigations Unit is probing what a judge has called the unlawful 2008 arrest and strip search of a 27-year-old woman by Ottawa police officers.

Olbermann to return?

Over at Unrepentant Old Hippie, JJ's got the only possible reaction to this news. I'll believe it when I see it, but ...

Oh, what the hey. I'm steal – er, reproducing it here.



Update: Seems KO's not the only MSNBC host to make political contributions.

Maddow, Maher and the trap of false equivalence

Crazy weekend, but Maher's got it bang on. It's long past time to stop pretending that the left and the right, at least in the context of modern American political discourse, are mirror images of one another. If we buy into that, we're fighting on the Evil Ones' turf by letting them frame the debate – and once we let them do it, the fight's over before it's even begun.

Crazed terrorist threatens to down aircraft in suicide attack

Gosh darn those dirty brown people with funny names!

Terrified passengers on a London-bound flight froze in their seats as a crazed man ran through the aisle of the Qantas jet screaming: 'You will all die!' 

Praying and yelling in a foreign language, the man threatened to kill himself and the passengers on the fully-laden jet several hours after it took off from Melbourne to fly to London via Hong Kong. 

Flight attendants managed to jump on the man and restrain him as he threatened to open an emergency exit door, shouting: 'It is God's will'.

From the Daily Mail.

Wow. So why isn't the media going apeshit over this? This is Fox News / Sun Media / National Putz whacking material, for Chrissakes.

Oh. Apparently he was an Israeli, and the foreign language was Hebrew.

Never mind.

What's that you're saying? Bias? In the lamestream media? Facts inconveniently deviating from the approved narrative? 

Sorry, I'm just not understanding you. Your lips are moving, but I can't hear what you're saying.

(Big h/t to Dr. Dawg, Cathie from Canada and ootpoot.)

The Harpokons and Insite

I won't try to summarize Paul Wells' argument here. It's succinct enough on its own. The money graf:

This is not mere disregard for reliable data. It is an attempt by the state to put falsehood in the place of reliable data. George Orwell wrote books about this sort of thing.

Read it here.

Really, what more is there to say? I wrote recently about the damage that results from turning ignorance into a civic virtue, and here's a prime example.

And looky here: it seems some of Harper's fans don't like what Paul has to say. And they don't like what the peer-reviewed facts and evidence about Insite and harm-reduction strategies suggest. And, of course, they think that name-calling and sticking their fingers in their ears and going "la la la, I can't hear you" are the same thing as reasoned argument.

A couple of weeks ago Bob Herbert wrote about America's continuing abandonment of education as a public good. If what we're witnessing is the decline and fall of Imperium Americana, that's got to be a big part of the reason.

This is the road the modern right wants to take: knowledge, experience and expertise are no longer qualities to be valued, but indicia of condescending, out-of-touch elitists, to be reviled, disdained and demonized. How much hope is there for a political strategy (or a society, for that matter) based on the deliberate cultivation of stupidity?

(Update: Chet has some further thoughts on the matter.)

Always amenable to correction, from the proper perspective

An "ahem" from Antonia is worth a grad-level course from anyone else.

So it might not be as easy to stack the CRTC as Harper would like.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant, though, and doesn't make him any less of an autocratic scumbag. And if there are ways to get around those checks and balances, I wouldn't think he hasn't started exploring them already.

Sun Media leaves another mess on the sidewalk

I've never been fond of the news business's predilection for describing the late summer as the “silly season” It implies that there isn't any real news happening, which is patently not true. And it provides a justification for manufactured bullshit stories.

That's what we're seeing in the “controversy” surrounding Homegrown, one of the plays on the bill for the current SummerWorks theatre festival in Toronto. Apparently we're supposed to consider it objectionable because it portrays Shareef Abdelhaleem, one of the so-called Toronto 18, in a sympathetic light. And we're supposed to be even more pissed off because the festival got some money from Ottawa. Cue the braying from the Fox wannabes at Sun Media, the Levantines, the Corians, and the rest of the perpetually angry flying monkeys of the right.

As J. Kelly Nestruck points out, the festival got perhaps $35,000 from the federal government. When you do the math and consider how that was divided up among various productions, promotional costs, etc., he suggests that this particular play might have gotten around $850 or so. (Well, I can certainly understand the outrage. How many tasers and cans of pepper spray could have been had for that kind of money?)

Sun Media hack Brian Lilley has been the point man on this. He's taken issue with Nestruck's accusations of censorship in a blog post today, in which he takes the predictable tack of posing as a hard-working dogged reporter, crusading for the rights of the hard-working little guy, bristling at the sneering condescension of media elites, yada yada yada. We've heard the cliches so many times we can probably recite them in our sleep. As he puts it:

There is no right to arts funding, a point that many supporters of the performing arts just don’t understand. Just because a play is written doesn’t mean it should be funded. Just because a theatre company wishes to put it on does not mean it should receive a grant.

Nestruck, Toronto city councilor Adam Vaughan and other defenders of Homegrown would prefer it if the hoi poloi, the great unwashed would just pay the bills and shut up.

Apparently the issue is about public money being spent on things Brian Lilley and his bosses don't like. Well, boo fucking hoo. Can we talk about how tiresome and fundamentally anti-social that line of argument is? “Yargle bargle bleghh, I don't want my tax dollars spent on things I don't agree with.” Straight out of the teabaggers manual.

To anyone who still wants to dance to that music, I say tough shit. You're a citizen of a democratic society. It's not your money, it is society's money – to be allocated in accordance with publicly determined priorities. You get your say in how those determinations are made through your inherent right to participate in the political process. And if you don't get what you want through participating, you don't get to simply take your marbles and go home. I don't think the Canadian military should be in Afghanistan. I don't think public money should be spent on billion-dollar summits or paying cops to beat the shit out of peaceful citizens, but I don't get to withhold my tax dollars on that basis.

As for Brian Lilley, his argument is disingenuous bullshit. What he and his Sun Media paymasters have done is taken one play – one play, from a festival staging more than 40 plays – which may have gotten a tiny little percentage of the money allocated to this theatre festival and built a cynical and contrived narrative of “glorifying Islamic terrorism” around it for the sole purpose of working their knuckle-dragging, drooling readership into a frenzy. Another textbook demonstration of how right-wing operatives manufacture controversies.

What's worse, though, is the insult to our intelligence, with the wide-eyed, innocent “we're not advocating censorship, we're just asking questions about the funding” script. (Yeah, right. I'm not saying your sister's a whore, I'm just asking why she has sex with strangers for money.) They're not just asking. They've poisoned the debate before it's even started by framing this as a story about our hard-earned tax dollars coddling terror-symp artists who don't work for a living because they're milking our socialist government for grant money. It's faux-populist crap.

One last question: did Lilley actually talk to Nestruck, or Vaughan, before penning this load of shite? How can he presume to tell us what they would prefer?

But that's standard procedure for Fox / Sun operatives. Their object isn't to inform, it's to inflame. Just because it's late summer doesn't mean we can afford to relax our guard. The stupidity virus is a nasty one. If we're not vigilant, we could end up here.

What we must avoid at all costs

These don't even begin to scratch the surface, but they're a start.

Fox News and the right-wing wackosphere are not ridiculous. They are not harmless. They are not merely mendacious buffoons. They are an obscene perversion of everything journalism and reasoned debate are supposed to be about.  The toxic effect that the Fox approach has had on American journalism, on civil discourse, on civil society itself has been so profound and so grossly disfiguring that merely documenting it would be the work of years. Analyzing it would take years more. Fixing it? I don't even want to try and guess.

Some progressive observers to the south have recognized the danger for a long time and have tried to fight back.  The always-incisive, always-on-the-mark Shoq rallies for a counteroffensive here.  It's a worthwhile cause, but I can't help fearing that it may be too late.

Charles Kaiser's marvellous essay sets out the shameful record of mainstream U.S. media outlets, and the Obama White House, in the fallout from the Shirley Sherrod "scandal."  (Manufactured scandal, actually.)

And then there's Keith Olbermann's special comment.

Part 1:



Part 2:



Follow these links and you get an idea of where the Harpokons are getting their marching orders and where they want to take us.  And then ask yourself if we can afford to shrug off Peladeau and Teneycke's little project.

When public institutions fail us

Just finished listening to a ridiculously shallow and badly scripted interview by Robyn Brown on CBC Radio's Here and Now with Farrah Miranda (was in the car, so I may not have the names right, and I'll correct if necessary) from the Toronto Community Mobilization Network. TCMN is conducting its own investigation of the violence and brutality inflicted upon peaceful demonstrators by police during the recent G20 summit in Toronto. Not surprisingly, this grassroots initiative stems, in part, from a recognition that there isn't going to be any meaningful institutional response. No one is going to be held accountable by the Police Services Board, the city, the province, or Ottawa.

So what's Robyn Brown's approach to this, but to badger Ms. Miranda for signs of “balance?” It sounds to me like you've got your minds made up already, she said – are you going to talk to the police and get their side of the story?

Wow.

Where to begin? How many things can you find wrong with this?

Well, let's start with intellectual laziness. That's very much in evidence in Ms. Brown's attempt to impose a facile “he said / she said” framework on the story. There aren't many stories that boil down to that. Framing it as “protesters say this, but police say that” makes it possible to ignore all kinds of complexities and shoehorn the story into a simple one-size-fits-all model. That may work for an eight-minute segment before you break for the news on the half-hour, and it may mean you can file your story without any conscious effort, but it doesn't do justice to the story or serve your listeners especially well.

And the suggestion that the Network organizers have their minds made up? Or that they ought to be talking to the police to get their side of the story? Let's see now. The Network is asking people to come forward with pictures, video and first-hand accounts of their treatment at the hands of police. In other words, anyone who was:

• gassed
• beaten
• tasered
• kicked
• shot with plastic bullets
• subjected to racial or ethnic profiling
• “kettled” in the rain at Queen and Spadina
• held without charge in the gulag on Eastern Avenue
• threatened with gang rape
• degraded by sexist and / or homophobic slurs, etc.

Associated with the CBC interview, I also heard one citizen describe how the bones in her finger had been shattered by a police baton. I also heard a doctor who was treating people for trauma, broken bones and concussion describe how police confronted her and confiscated her gauze, bandages and other medical supplies.

Just an observation, but I'd say those folks have already heard the police side of things quite clearly.

And it's not as if the traditional media outlets are going to devote any further air time or newsprint to these stories. They've got their images of broken windows and burning cop cars, and their interest in revising the narrative is pretty much non-existent. (Time to move on. Didn't Mel Gibson say something rude or something?)

If anything, the TCMN's initiative is just a further demonstration of the impotence of regular institutional responses – and of how traditional media outlets fail in their responsibilities. We already know that bodies such as the Police Services Board, not to mention all three levels of government, aren't even going to pretend to care about the citizens whose rights they're supposedly charged with safeguarding.