Dead Afghan Kids Still Not Newsworthy - Peter Hart

We've been conditioned simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise: Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

The full article is available here

Fox News Spins Pepper Spraying Cops: ‘It’s a Food Product, Essentially’ - Gawker

Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly got to talking about a UC Davis police officer's appalling use of pepper spray on nonviolent protesters. Guess what direction the conversation took!

If you guessed "needlessly deferential to authority and dismissive to the suffering of protesters," you guessed correctly!  (What pepper spray does to your body)

"I don't think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police," O'Reilly says, "particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus."

God forbid! We'd never want to question Lt. John Pike's decision to generously and indifferently dust peacefully sitting protesters with pepper spray from only a few feet away. Especially given that Davis is, you know, a liberal campus!

And, gosh, even if we were going to Monday-morning quarterback the police, shouldn't we remember, as Megyn Kelly tells O'Reilly, that pepper spray is "a food product, essentially"?

The full article is available here

Memo Reveals How Seriously Powerful Interests Take Occupy Wall Street - George Zornick

Television show Up With Chris Hayes unveiled a major scoop: the show obtained a written pitch to the American Bankers Association from a prominent Washington lobbying firm, proposing a $850,000 smear campaign against Occupy Wall Street.

The memo, issued by Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford, described the danger presented by the burgeoning movement, saying that if Democrats embraced Occupy, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street.… It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.” Furthermore, it notes that “the bigger concern…should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

We’ve seen similar efforts already. Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS has blanketed Massachusetts airwaves with commercials depicting Occupy protestors as crazed radicals, and hitting Elizabeth Warren for embracing them.

These episodes belie any conservative claims that Occupy Wall Street (1) doesn’t have a clear purpose, or (2) won’t be effective. Rove has wondered in the past “what are these people for? To the degree that they’re for anything it’s left wing nuttiness.” Grover Norquist tweeted the other day that he hopes Occupy DC “keep(s) this up” because “Hippies elected Nixon. OWS will beat Obama.” Fox News is full of similar dismissals of Occupiers as dangerous, confused folks.

But if Rove thinks Occupy doesn’t present a clear message, why is he spending millions of dollars to attack them? Similarly, CLGC staffers are political professionals with many Wall Street clients, and the memo shows how seriously they consider the threat presented to powerful financial firms by the Occupy protests.

The full article is available here

Fox Falsely Dubs Alleged White House Attacker As "'Occupy' Shooter" - Media Matters

An official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said the motive for the gunfire might have been simple anger. 

During the November 17 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson asked Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin: "It looks like this White House shooting suspect may have tried to blend in with the Occupy protesters in D.C. when he came from out West. So I pose this question to you this morning: What would have happened if a tea party person had tried to do that?"

Malkin responded that "there is now conflicting testimony or evidence of whether he was in the Occupy D.C. camp, but apparently, reportedly, allegedly there is somebody within that movement who has confirmed that he was there at the camps."

Malkin later noted that "the guy was just completely off his rocker and had nothing to do with any coherent sense of political ideology." But during the segment, onscreen text continued to tie Ortega-Hernandez to the Occupy D.C. movement.

In trying to determine why he recently traveled to the nation's capital from the western part of the country, investigators searched the Occupy D.C. campground near the White House but have found no connection between him and the Occupy protesters, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case.

One of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said the motive for the gunfire might have been simple anger: Ortega-Hernandez "hates the president, he hates Washington, he hates society," the official said.

The full article is available here

Surprise! Right Wing Anti-Solyndra/Anti-Obama Ad Is ‘Mostly False’ - Chris Mims

An anti-Solyndra ad put out by Americans For Prosperity has been viewed 1 million times on YouTube alone, not to mention millions more on television.  Which just goes to show you that if you give the people what they want, they will eat it up like delicious candied bacon, because who doesn't like having their completely ridiculous prejudices reinforced at the expense of truth and our country's future economic prosperity?

One problem though; it is wrong.  Here are just a few of its by-now-canonical-on-Fox-News lies:

• The ad says that "friends of Obama" benefited from the loan, but it references a Daily Caller article about George Kaiser, who, according to Politifact, "is neither a shareholder nor an executive of Solyndra."
  
• Accusations that internal administration emails point to a special relationship with Solyndra are also false -- it’s sort of the opposite. An email from Steve Mitchell, who did get a meeting at the White House and who was connected to Solyndra, said, "I think the company is hoping that we have some unnatural relationship [with administration officials] that can open bigger doors -- I've cautioned them that no one really has those relationships anymore."
  
• Solyndra's loan guarantee was commenced under Bush Jr., not Obama. In the words of Politifact, " … the money wasn't Obama's to give. Solyndra's request predated his administration, and career Energy Department officials handled the deal."

The full article is available here

Dining out with Thomas and Scalia - Laura Conaway

The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to health reform this spring.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is married to a paid advocate against the health reform law, which raises the question of whether he'll recuse himself now that the Supreme Court says it will hear the case.

The day the Supreme Court gathered behind closed doors to consider the politically divisive question of whether it would hear a challenge to President Obama’s healthcare law, two of its justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, were feted at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that will argue the case before the high court.

All of this might be slightly less disconcerting were it not for the even larger context, including Scalia and Thomas having attended a conservative strategy session hosted by Koch Industries last year.

Can anyone have confidence in the objectivity of Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas, knowing their connections to electoral politics?

The full article is available here

Obama’s Offshore Oil-Drilling Expansion Doesn’t Wash - Tyson Slocum

It's clear that the Obama administration is willing to override the serious safety concerns raised by its own oil spill commission.

The Department of the Interior's new five-year offshore oil-drilling plan is bad news for the environment, oil workers and taxpayers.

Environmentalists and workplace safety advocates who reasonably anticipated regulatory reform of the oil industry in advance of any new offshore oil-drilling policy are deeply disappointed.

This plan was made in the absence of new safety rules designed to protect workers and the environment. We haven’t updated offshore drilling laws since 1978 – well before we had a deepwater or robust arctic drilling industry. We already know what happens when the oil industry is inadequately regulated.

With DOI’s announcement, it is clear that the administration is willing to override the serious safety concerns raised by its own oil spill commission formed in response to the BP oil disaster. It is unconscionable that new offshore oil drilling will be undertaken without any congressional reform of drilling rules and safety regulation.

The full article is available here

Time To Disband The Supercommittee - The Nation

The economy is in serious trouble. There are 25 million people in need of full-time work, wages are declining and one in four mortgages is underwater. People want Congress to focus on jobs and the economy. So how is it that after a few weeks of inching toward talk about unemployment, Congress has turned its attention back to austerity measures guaranteed to destroy jobs, not create them?

We’re approaching the deadline of the supercommittee, the despicable offspring of last summer’s debt-ceiling deal, in which a “gang of twelve” legislators was given extraordinary powers to meet in secret and decide the economic fate of the nation—a terrible precedent for our democracy. It must forge a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion by Thanksgiving, and if nothing is passed by Christmas, deep cuts in discretionary spending begin automatically in 2013.

In a foolish concession to GOP extremism, the majority of Democrats on the supercommittee suggested $3 trillion in deficit reduction, with the ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes at a regressive six to one. A large chunk of those cuts would come from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. These Democrats have thus given up on the core legacy of their party—and a core obligation of the nation. Even so, House Speaker John Boehner scorned their pre-emptive concessions while supercommittee Republicans suggested even harsher measures that would fall most heavily on the neediest.

The full article is available here

Meet Your 7 Billion Neighbors - Lisa Hymas

Yeah, yeah, you know -- the world population is hitting 7 billion this year. Here are some facts about the world's people that you might not already be familiar with.

• 60 -- percentage of key ecosystem services (freshwater, air and water purification, etc.) degraded or used unsustainably by humans over the last 50 years
• 215 million -- number of women in the world who want to prevent or delay pregnancy but don't have access to modern contraception
• $16.9 billion -- estimated annual cost of providing family-planning services to all women in developing countries
• $20.8 billion -- amount Wall Street firms paid out in bonuses in 2010

The full article is available here