connecting*the*dots

From Media Matters:

Melanie Morgan, Lee Rodgers, Rush Limbaugh, and John Gibson all forwarded the accusation made by a website controlled by Rev. Sun Myung Moon that Sen. Hillary Clinton was responsible for spreading information linking Sen. Barack Obama to a madrassa, or Muslim school. None of the four cited any evidence, other than the article, that Clinton was responsible for promoting the madrassa story, and the article cited no one by name.

Below is a clip from The Big Story with John “War on Christmas” Gibson, where Gibson reports on Hillary Clinton “playing the Muslim-phobia card” and holds a conversation with the “level-headed” Republican strategist, Terry Holt.

These guys couldn’t hide a fart in a Trojan Horse.

Here’s my play-by-play breakdown of the clip:

• Charge Hillary Clinton with dirty tactics (from a non-sourced article, published on a right-wing nut job’s website)
• “Expose” Obama being a “Muslim” and being educated at a “madrasa” (after he talked about going to a Muslim school as a child and being a Christian in his book, The Audacity of Hope, which was released earlier this year)
• “Innocently” provide context that a madrasa wasn’t radical 40 years ago (while the rest of Fox News runs with the story as if it were exposing something relevant for American voters to chew on)
• Completely forget to include the fact that Obama was barely out of diapers at the time of his schooling
• Repeat that Clinton is playing political hardball because the American public “knows what a madrasa means” (again, while the rest of Fox hard-sells the ties to terrorists)
• Refuse to explain that The Washington Times is not the same as the “left-leaning” Washington Post (classifications in this culture war that most Americans might confuse rather easily)
• Cry innocent by stating that exposing a cigarette smoker is nothing like this form of political dirty work (while the rest of the network piles on the significance of this insignificant fact)

What’s the result?

An uniformed American public swallowing this story hook, line and sinker, creating doubt with Barak Obama and more venom directed at Hillary Clinton, adding to her baggage — perceived or otherwise.

Until sources are named outside of Insight.com’s word, I’ll file this under Republican Noise Machine.

Fox News isn’t biased; they’re a major part of the spin cycle.

UPDATE: CNN completely debunks the charges — both that Hillary Clinton outed Obama and that Barak Obama attended a “radical madrasa.” They even sent a reporter to Jakarta to show the normalcy of the school on tape. The best line out of Wolf Blitzer’s mouth following the ridiculous clips from Fox News?:

CNN did what any serious news organization is supposed to do in this kind of a situation. We actually conducted an exclusive, first-hand investigation, inside Indonesia, to check out the kind of school Barack Obama attended as a little six year-old boy.

Guess what happened next? Fox News swallowed their story. Lying bastards.

(illustration by Serifcan Özcan)

Good Magazine
Political NASCAR
by Morgan Clendaniel

In the 2006 midterms, Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Rick Santorum (R-PA), both running for re-election, have raised the most money of any candidate in their respective parties. Here are the NASCAR-style uniforms they would wear if companies were proud of their political donations, and if running for senate required a flame-retardant suit.

HILLARY CLINTON
Hillary Clinton’s top contributions by sector
Finance, Insurance, Real Estate $4,650,601
Lawyers & Lobbyists $3,533,740
Other $3,258,584
Miscellaneous Business $2,332,809
Communications/Electronics $1,808,119
Health $1,122,341
Construction $521,796
Ideology/Single-Issue $432,270
Labor $340,545
Agribusiness $211,565
Energy/Natural Resource $206,462
Transportation $118,210
Defense $86,050

TOTAL (as of June 30th): $33,180,949

RICK SANTORUM
Rick Santorum’s top contributors by sector
Finance, Insurance, Real Estate $2,812,841
Miscellaneous Business $1,373,537
Lawyers & Lobbyists $1,357,125
Health $1,258,021
Other $1,243,951
Construction $666,015
Energy/Natural Resource $651,541
Ideology/Single-Issue $563,073
Communications/Electronics $474,990
Agribusiness $399,237
Transportation $299,574
Defense $76,000
Labor $56,706

TOTAL (as of June 30th): $17,252,473

Like many people, I often think about the chasm in the relationship between our state representatives and us, the constituents; how in so many cases, our elected representatives tend to not represent the desires of the people that put them in office, instead succumbing to the efforts of lobbyists and special interest groups.

While the concept of wearing logos on campaign duds is probably a bit too extreme for our culture, someone really needs to build a web site that displays such contributions and relationships in an easy to digest manner, across numerous data slices. I assume that the information is already available to the public; the big question is whether or not it’s being gathered, managed and distributed in the most open formats available.

I mean, can I get an RSS feed of newly submitted documentation of Clinton, Santorum and, say, Vernon Robinson campaign contributions?

If the answer is no, then why the hell not?

Maybe when the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590) is finally passed, we can start serious work on the infrastructure and interfaces that support centralized repositories for decentralized accountability. Or is this not sexy enough to fit into the social networking investment craze of Web 2.0?

(via BoingBoing)

Jonathan Hutson, Talk To Action
The Purpose Driven Life Takers

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.

[…]

This game immerses children in present-day New York City — 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).

Is this paramilitary mission simulator for children anything other than prejudice and bigotry using religion as an organizing tool to get people in a violent frame of mind? The dialogue includes people saying, “Praise the Lord,” as they blow infidels away.

The designers intend this game to become the first dominionist warrior game to break through in the popular culture due to its violent scenarios and realistic graphics, lighting, and sound effects. Its creators expect it to earn a rating of T for Teen. How violent is that? That’s the rating shared by Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory, a top selling game in which high-tech gadgets and high-powered weapons - frag grenades, shotguns, assault rifles, and submachine guns — are used to terminate enemies with extreme prejudice.

Could such a violent, dominionist Christian video game really break through to the popular culture? Well, it is based on a series of books that have already set sales records - the blockbuster Left Behind series of 14 novels by writer Jerry B. Jenkins and his visionary collaborator, retired Southern Baptist minister Tim LaHaye. “We hope teenagers like the game,” Mr. LaHaye told the Los Angeles Times. “Our real goal is to have no one left behind.”

[…]

Freedom of speech and anti-censorship laws exist in this nation to protect our ability to hold civil discourse — even when it’s in the form of twisted, violent, crusading game narratives aimed at our children and marketed through the tenticles of the mega-church.

The redeeming factor behind the development of this specific game, is that the motive of the religous right is on display for the world to see. Too often their hatred becomes cloaked in motive numbing rhetoric — placating tales of Jesus’ love for all humanity as long as humanity devotes itself to Jesus. Over the past 20 years, such rhetoric has masked their intent, allowing them to gain a strong, political foothold in America — specifically with moderate Christians.

So when the religous right’s arrogance is responsible for removing their own metaphorical hoods, we need to gaze into their hateful, soulless eyes and take detailed notes.

The “Up In Arms” Crowd

It’s interesting to note that historically, church groups have been the most active in denouncing hip-hop music and video games for their violent content, arguing that they influence kids to become violent, misogynistic, or even worse, question authority.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces is scheduled to release in October 2006, just four months away. Where are these vocal groups now? Is “bling” and “bitch” rhetoric more deserving of protest than marketing to children a programmed, interactive virtual reality for cleansing non-Christian people from the face of the earth?

Hillary Clinton railed hard against the Hot Coffee mod, a locked, sex scene found in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (a scene that only a slight percentage of geeks even knew existed) in a move that smelled of pandering to the family values crowd. Where is her outrage?

It’ll be interesting to see how long Left Behind: Eternal Forces flies under the radar of both the church and Hillary Clinton.

It’ll actually be quite telling…

Let me be very clear.

When a political party loses all form of power to the opposition party in a democratic government, one cannot equate the nuances of that situation with a plantation system.

I don’t care how many times the Dems have been shutdown, squashed or run out of the halls of Congress; for one reason or another, the Dems lost their power.

What type of power did black folk have before the plantation system? How about within the plantation system? The analogy is stupid and offensive, especially when presented in Harlem with a majority black audience on MLK day.

As for Clinton’s perspective on this Republican administration, I couldn’t agree more. I just hope the retarded aspects of her rhetoric doesn’t negatively affect the 2006 mid-term election.