Author: Tom Tomorrow

David Corn on Jerry Falwell:

Falwell is free to be foolish, and CNN is free to exploit his foolishness to achieve that much-sought-after image of fair-and-balanced. But Falwell went further. He claimed, “global warming is a myth.” Sider tried to rebut him, saying, “Our best scientists tell us that, in fact, global warming…” But Falwell interrupted to counter, “No, our best scientists don’t tell us.” He explained: “It was global cooling 30 years ago … and it’s global warming now. And neither of us will be here 100 years from now to know what it is. But I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We’ll be cooler by then, if the Lord hasn’t returned…. The fact is that there is no global warming.”

Falwell was lying. The consensus of the climate-science community is indeed that human-induced global warming is real and that it poses serious dangers. Last year, after much foot-dragging, President Bush acknowledged this. His acceptance came begrudgingly when the National Academy of Sciences released a report that Bush had commissioned. The study decisively noted, “Greenhouse gasses are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise…. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities…. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.”

Does Falwell not consider the NAS to be “our best scientists”? Does he know better ones? Does he know better himself?

Falwell then shifted from deceit to delusion: “The whole [global warming] thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.” That must be why so many radical anti-American individuals and outfits such as the NAS, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, British Petroleum, William Clay Ford Jr., Kenneth Lay and Enron (yes, indeed!), Colin Powell, and Christine Todd Whitman have acknowledged the threat of global warming. Falwell is a paranoid loon to believe some devilish force cooked up global warming to annihilate America. And he ignores all the other costs of an oil-obsessed economy: air pollution, oil spills (see Spain), a dependence on imports.

* * *

Falwell’s appearance on this segment illustrates a fundamental problem with shouting-head journalism. Cable news networks, adopting the bedrock principal of the adversarial judicial system, often act as if the best way to present information is to serve the viewer two opposing advocates battling it out. But in many instances, this ends up confusing rather than illuminating. Not every fact is debatable, not every opinion equal — or worth equal time. What was the journalistic responsibility of Judy Woodruff, who moderated the Sider-Falwell exchange? Shouldn’t she have informed the audience that there was absolutely no factual basis to what Falwell was saying? Is it her job to provide a platform to someone who can be proven to be a liar?

More.

My friend Steve Perry has some somber thoughts on the Democratic Party:

You could say that times changed and the party changed with them, and you would be right so far as it goes. But it had nothing to do with the sentiments of the people. The party’s right turn was a move conceived from within and designed to make the Democrats a more appealing vehicle for major private and corporate donors. This past election notwithstanding, the strategy has been an enormous success. Cash receipts have grown mightily. The business wing of the party has generated a president who became the first Democrat since FDR to win re-election to the White House, and missed electing his successor by a handful of votes (one vote, really, in the Supreme Court). The business Democrats’ hold on the national party apparatus is complete.

The Reagan/Bush/Clinton years worked many changes in the political culture, and none was more profound than the market revolution. Over the past generation the American public has been relentlessly conditioned to believe that whatever is dictated by the market — in more guileless days, it was simply called the money power — is sensible, reasonable, necessary. Our values and aspirations as a society are now routinely subjected to the flummery of cost/benefit analyses in which it’s understood that the only thing that really matters is cost. Democrats, under cover of “realism,” are every bit as complicit in this shift as Republicans.

And where does it leave us? More than ever, the business of America is business (and its stepchild, war) and the business of Democrats is betrayal.

More.

First he calls for universal health coverage, and now he’s turning into a perceptive, if partisan, media critic:

“Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, The Washington Times and the others. And then they’ll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they’ll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they’ve pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these R.N.C. talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist.”

And during a lengthy discourse on the history of political journalism in America, Mr. Gore said he believed that evolving technologies and market forces have combined to lower the media’s standards of objectivity. “The introduction of cable-television news and Internet news made news a commodity, available from an unlimited number of sellers at a steadily decreasing cost, so the established news organizations became the high-cost producers of a low-cost commodity,” said Mr. Gore. “They’re selling a hybrid product now that’s news plus news-helper; whether it’s entertainment or attitude or news that’s marbled with opinion, it’s different. Now, especially in the cable-TV market, it has become good economics once again to go back to a party-oriented approach to attract a hard-core following that appreciates the predictability of a right-wing point of view, but then to make aggressive and constant efforts to deny that’s what they’re doing in order to avoid offending the broader audience that mass advertisers want. Thus the Fox slogan ‘We Report, You Decide,’ or whatever the current version of their ritual denial is.”

It’s about time Democrats started acknowledging the 900-pound elephant in the control booth.

Still getting the returned email which suggests that someone is spoofing my address at some point in the delivery system. These things appear to have .exe attachments, which are always a bad news for those of you on PC’s. So, consider this a public service warning: if you get something with the subject line “The current version of the Outlook Express Read”, or something similar, delete it immediately, regardless of the return address (it may appear to be coming from Microsoft).

From a 1997 article entitled “Keep Big Brother’s Hands off the Internet.”

The Clinton administration would like the Federal government to have the capability to read any international or domestic computer communications. The FBI wants access to decode, digest, and discuss financial transactions, personal e-mail, and proprietary information sent abroad — all in the name of national security. To accomplish this, President Clinton would like government agencies to have the keys for decoding all exported U.S. software and Internet communications.

This proposed policy raises obvious concerns about Americans’ privacy, in addition to tampering with the competitive advantage that our U.S. software companies currently enjoy in the field of encryption technology. Not only would Big Brother be looming over the shoulders of international cyber-surfers, but the administration threatens to render our state-of-the-art computer software engineers obsolete and unemployed.

There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state’s interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens’ Bill of Rights.

So who is this crusading author, this champion of privacy rights and individual liberties?

Why, John Ashcroft , of course.