Friday, April 2, 2004

Damage Control Ad Nauseam FEATURED ARTICLES - Al Gets Gore-TV, The NY Observer, - Liberal Voices Get New Home on Radio Dial, NY Times, - To the Moon, George, to the Moon, by Al Franken - Bush White House on the Defensive, by Helen Thomas - Frists of Fury, by John Nichols, The Nation, QUOTE OF THE DAY "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" - - Barbara Bush (On 'Good Morning America' the day before the Iraq war started, NY Times, 01-13-03) KNOW YOUR HISTORY - MARCH 1942 -- England: Joyce Allen is the first woman to appear before a CO (Conscientious Objector) Tribunal. 1963 -- Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King began his first non-violent campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. 1970 -- Massachusetts enacts a law which exempts its citizens from having to fight in an undeclared war. RHINO HERE: Long awaited & much needed developments in the world media, Al Gore is near to closing the deal to purchase an existing cable news network & turn it into what he's calling a "youth-oriented public-affairs channel." Al Gets Gore-TV by Joe Hagan, The NY Observer, April 2, 2004 The Observer has learned that former Vice President Al Gore and business partner Joel Hyatt, an entrepreneur and Democratic fund-raiser, will close the deal to pay around $70 million to French-owned Vivendi Universal this week, making them the owners of the tiny digital-cable channel Newsworld International (NWI), moving Mr. Gore from politics to mini-media-moguldom. Mr. Gore's group plans to transform the sleepy foreign-news outlet into a youth-oriented public-affairs channel, a jump-cut news network for the iPod set. Despite vociferous claims that the network isn't attempting to be the liberal antidote to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, it's difficult to ignore the obvious: It may be fair, it may be balanced, but it's going to be owned by Al Gore... MORE: http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage5.asp Al Franken has been making the rounds on TV & print promoting his new progressive radio show, "The O'Franken Factor", along with the network that will carry him, "Air America." http://www.airamericaradio.com Liberal Voices Get New Home on Radio Dial By JACQUES STEINBERG, NY Times, March 31, 2004 Air America Radio is to be broadcast beginning at noon today on these stations: WLIB-AM (1190), New York WNTD-AM (950) , Chicago KBLA-AM (1580) , Los Angeles KCAA-AM (1050) , Riverside and San Bernadino, Calif. KPOJ-AM (620) , Portland, Ore. Channel 167 on XM Satellite Radio Lady Olivia was on the phone from Washington. And Sam Seder, a nighttime host on Air America Radio, the fledgling liberal talk-radio network, had a question about the clientele of his guest, who identified herself as a dominatrix. "More Republicans or more Democrats?" Mr. Seder asked.  "Seventy-30," Lady Olivia said. MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/arts/31AIR.html To the Moon, George, to the Moon by Al Franken, LA Times, March 31, 2004  ...Republicans are accusing us liberals of being angry. Yeah, we're angry. It's one thing for a president to lie about sex. It's another thing for a president to lie about why we are sending our young men and women into harm's way. And to dismantle our environmental protections. And to expose a CIA agent as an act of political retaliation. And to shift taxes from the children of the very rich to the children of the middle class. And … oh, there's so many other reasons to be mad. Listen to my show for a more complete accounting of them. Plus jokes. Yes, we're angry. And yes, we're fighting back. But we're not going to do it like they do. We will be a flaming sword of justice, cutting through the turgid cacophony of right-wing talk with a blade of burnished truth. And celebrity interviews. All on a crisp, clear AM signal... MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0331-07.htm Meanwhile, the shrub gang  continues in damage control mode over the 9-11 Commission, both in response to Richard Clark's courageous & effective testimony, and on the pressure for gang members Bush, Cheney & Rice to testify.  Work has it the only way they'll let the shrub go before the Commission is with his hand being held by his Uncle Dick Cheney. (More on that in the weekend blog).  If  you haven't been keeping track of the hearings, here's a brief summary by veteran White House reporter, Helen Thomas. Bush White House on the Defensive by Helen Thomas, Seattle Post-Intelligencer , April 1, 2004 ...Because of his highly publicized charges, Clarke has reaped the whirlwind. The Bush administration rolled out the big guns to discredit him but Clarke has calmly held his ground against the onslaught. Clarke's report that Bush was obsessed with Iraq -- not al-Qaida -- raises questions about Bush's core claim that he should be re-elected because of his role as commander-in-chief in the war on terrorism. The administration still hasn't succeeded -- despite huge efforts -- in making a connection between the war against terrorism and our military conquest of Iraq. MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0401-03.htm The  number of Republicans busy trying to trash Richard Clark has been astounding, and the level of discourse has been nothing short of pathetic. One example was Robert Novak on Crossfire, implying that Clark's motives for saying Condi Rice had screwed up & lied about it was that Clark was a racist. Given that Novak was the reporter who outed CIA operative Valerie Plume, Rhino thinks instead of making accusations against a true American Hero, Novak oughtta be in jail with whichever shrub gang member told him about Ms. Plume. Another pathetic example is Tennessee Senator Bill Frist. BOTTOM LINE today is a Nation magazine reporting on Frist's lame attempts to discredit Clark. For more on Doctor/Senator Bill Frist from a Rhino's Blog of January 2003, check out: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103207/2003/01/02.html 8:18:01 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - Frists of Fury Frists of Fury by John Nichols, The Nation, April 1, 2004 Poor Bill Frist, he can't be proud of what he has become. He ran for the Senate with a simple mission: prevent health care reforms that might pose a threat to his family's $800-million stake in Columbia/HCA, the nation's leading owner of hospitals. There was never going to be anything honorable about his service, but nothing all that embarrassing in a Washington that welcomes self-serving senators with open arms. Frist was a comfortably forgettable legislator -- good hair, good suit, bad politics -- until former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, went all segregationist at States Rights Party presidential candidate Strom Thurmond's going-away party. The Bush administration needed another prissy southerner to ride herd on the Senate. Frist fit the bill, moved into the nice office and became a comfortably forgettable Senate Majority Leader. With the Republican-controlled Congress rendered irrelevant by its complete subservience to the Bush administration's political agenda, Frist quietly went back to the business of protecting the family business. Then the Bush administration got in trouble. The ex-Secretary of the Treasury, the former Senior Director for Combating Terrorism on the National Security Council Staff and, now, the former counterterrorism chief in the Bush and Clinton White Houses had all come forward to suggest that the Bush administration really had missed the point of the war of terrorism -- badly. Suddenly, Americans were waking up to the fact that the rest of the world already knew: Iraq was not tied to al-Qaeda, had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no serious threat to the United States or its neighbors. The administration had few credible defenders left. They couldn't send Bush out in his "Mission Accomplished" flight suit. Vice President Dick Cheney was still trying to explain that Halliburton really hadn't set new standards for war profiteering. And National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was having a very hard time explaining that she really, really, really did know what al-Qaeda was before counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke explained it to her. The administration needed a Spiro Agnew to go out and start calling people names. And Bill Frist was ready to mumble... http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0401-01.htm "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 6:40:17 AM    comment

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