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Wednesday, March 9, 2005 |
Aaron Swartz: "Frank Luntz is a chief Republican strategist. His company, the Luntz Research Corporation, advises major companies and top Republican politicians on how to talk. Luntz's methods - which he has been happy to describe in numerous interviews - are simple: take a topic, think up a number of ways to lie about it, record someone saying them, play the recording for an audience, and ask the audience which lie was most convincing. (Luntz then, of course, tells the person hiring him to use that convincing lie.)
Every so often, Luntz packages up the combined results of all this 'research' into a strategy book which is then distributed to all the Republican operatives so that they can use the most effective terminology. Well, this year, we managed to get a copy of the briefing book. The liberal weblog Daily Kos has posted a scan of the book (8MB ZIP of two PDFs) and by reading it we can see precisely how the Republicans won.
Luntz begins (literally - this is the very first line) with a question most Democrats must be asking themselves:
So how does a President with a national job approval rating hovering at 50%, an economy that lost more than a million jobs over his four years in office, a war that has cost more than a thousand American lives and counting, $50 a barrel for oil, and a national mood that is downright sour still secure more than enough votes to win re-election?
The answer, Luntz explains, is simple: fear and lies. Now Luntz isn't completely stupid, he calls these credibility and hope, but it's clear from the definitions what he really means. (In the same way, Luntz says his focus groups are about learning how to understand Americans, not lie to them, but it's clear from the videotapes that have been made of the sessions exactly what's going on.)"
But there is one more indication that also the last election was fraudulous:
BradBlog: "The case of the mysterious suicide of Raymond Lemme of the Florida Inspector General's office was reopened by Valdosta, Georgia police last December shortly after we broke the story of computer programmer Clint Curtis' sworn affidavit charging that he had built a 'vote-rigging software prototype' at the request of Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)!
Furthermore, graphic and disturbing photos from the crime scene - said in the original police report to have not existed due to a failure in the camera's 'flash memory cards' - have recently been published on the web!"
The silence of the media in both cases again speaks volumes.
And this is another thing the networks do not want you to see:
Paolo's: "A U.N. commercial depicts American girls playing in a soccer match. A girl steps on a landmine and there's a big explosion. Kids get blown apart. CNN and other networks don't want to air the ad."
3:56:53 PM 
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WorldTribune: "The U.S. military lost its dominance in Iraq shortly after its invasion in 2003, a study concluded.
A report by the U.S. Army official historian said the military was hampered by the failure to occupy and stabilize Iraq in 2003. As a result, the military lost its dominance by July 2003 and has yet to regain that position."
USAToday: "Counter-recruiters formed a national network at meetings in Philadelphia in the summers of 2003 and 2004. They range from Vietnam War veterans, such as Murphy, to high school students trained to talk to their peers about enlistment."
Xinhua: "An aggression against Venezuela by the United States could lead to an increase in the petroleum market to up to 100 dollars per barrel, warned Energy and Petroleum Minister Rafael Ramirez."
Yahoo: "The Senate defeated dueling proposals Monday to raise the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage - one backed by organized labor, the other salted with pro-business provisions.
'I believe that anyone who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year should not live in poverty in the richest country in the world.' said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy."
KyKernel: "America has unjustly detained more than 5,000 foreign nationalists since December 2001, without charging any of them with a terroristic crime, said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University."
The carnage in Iraq continues.
"The director of the slippery slope to totalitarianism has beckoned his citizens, and they are responding with enthusiasm to his encouragement. War crimes are being committed by US troops and spooks on an extraordinary scale all round the world, but the biggest war crime is taking place in Washington: it is the twisting of the minds of the American people."
2:19:28 PM
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© Copyright 2008.
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