I dunno what it is about CNN, but they’ve been veering more and more into the realm of the trivial and embarrassing lately. This headline on their homepage is the kind of that would make US Weekly blush :
Is CNN still a news organization or is it now just a forum run by gossipy soccer moms? If it’s the latter, it would definitely explain this poll question that they posted on CNN.com last month :
This cartoon ran last March, a few months before the subprime crisis really began to hit critical mass. At the time, most of the feedback I got from readers suggested that I did not know what I was talking about, or that I was making too much out of a minor trend.
When I picked up a ringing phone Monday morning, the next thing I knew a producer was inviting me to appear on Glenn Beck’s TV show.
Beck has become a national phenom with his nightly hour of polemics on CNN Headline News — urging war on Iran, denouncing “political correctness” at home, trashing immigrants who don’t speak English, mocking environmentalists as repressive zealots, and generally trying to denigrate progressive outlooks.
Our segment, the producer said, would focus on a recent NBC news report praising the virtues of energy-efficient LED light bulbs without acknowledging that the network’s parent company, General Electric, sells them. I figured it was a safe bet that Beck’s enthusiasm for full disclosure from media would be selective.
A few hours later, I was staring into a camera lens at the CNN bureau in San Francisco while Beck launched into his opening. What had occurred on the “NBC Nightly News,” he explained, “was at best a major breach of journalistic integrity.” And he pointed out: “The problem isn’t what NBC is promoting. It’s what they’re not disclosing.”
A minute later, Beck asked his first question: “Norman, you agree with me that they should have disclosed this?” The unedited transcript tells what happened next.
90,000 Sign Onto Wexler Call for Impeachment Hearings
Wexler Wants Hearings, where Judiciary Committee members Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) call for impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney, has almost 90,000 signatures as of Monday afternoon. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to sign it—the more people who do, the more likely it is big online groups will jump in and make it a cause of their own. Then we could be talking about 500,000 signatories…which in turn would make room for all kinds of good things.
The Secret Library of Hope 12 Books to Stiffen Your Resolve By Rebecca Solnit
Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks — or building ladders — rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It’s a worldview, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.
Dissent in this country has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as “the secret library of hope.” None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.
Here, then, are some of the regulars in my secret political library of hope, along with some new candidates:
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the website Wexler Wants Hearings, where Judiciary Committee members Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) call for impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney. If you’re the kind of weirdo who thinks the rule of law is a good thing, I strongly encourage you to sign the petition supporting them and then tell everyone you know about it. They have 56,000 people already in just two days, and the more clamor they hear from us here in Lilliput, the more willing they’ll be to go further.
Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), all members of the House Judiciary Committee, have created a website calling for impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney:
This is particularly significant because Wexler isn’t a member of the progressive caucus, which indicates the center of gravity on the issue is shifting. The site has additional information, including their new op-ed and ways to support them.
From Stop Big Media and the talented Matt Thompson. (See some of Thompson’s previous work here.) You may notice how both videos make use of the work of a certain progressive cartoonist.
I think this tops anything we secularists could do to Christmas. (Painful as it is, I do recommend watching it all the way through — it’s bad on so many levels, it approaches an Ed Wood level of unintentional genius.)
… seems to be the GOP version of Howard Dean for this caucus season — the candidate who becomes popular with the base in direct contradiction to the wishes of the party bosses. I don’t know if a memo literally goes out or if people just understand these things intuitively, but the piling on from the loyal party soldiers is pretty blatant. Sean Hannity insists he’s just “vetting” charges to “help” the candidate when he talks at great length about how Huckabee released a convicted rapist who went out and raped and killed another woman (the Wayne DuMond case was a cause celebre among the Clinton haters — i.e., Hannity’s core audience, ironically enough — who believed that Bill Clinton had framed an innocent man). Oddly, I have not heard Sean Hannity “vetting” charges against the other Republican candidates in such excruciating detail.
In other right wing crazy news: Bill O’Reilly has apparently realized that the War on Christmas has become his Vietnam, because he has declared victory and withdrawn. Apparently we secularists are crushed by this devastating defeat. I’d write more about this but I have to get my Christmas presents off to the Post Office before I am socked in by the imminent snowstorm …
