The Nation | Blog | The Daily Outrage | Republican Broadcasting Corporation | Ari Berman

A conservative coup is underway at PBS.

The new head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the gatekeeper between lawmakers and public broadcasters), Ken Ferree, is a staunch Republican proponent of media deregulation and a former top adviser to FCC Chairman Michael Powell. Three top CPB officials, all with Democratic affiliations, departed or were dismissed in recent months. For the first time in its 38-year history, the CPB ordered a comprehensive review of public TV and radio programming for “evidence of bias.” The CPB even tried to condition all new PBS funding agreements upon the network following “objectivity and balance” requirements for each of its programs.

Last January, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings denounced the cartoon rabbit Buster, of “Postcards from Buster” fame, for visiting a lesbian family in Vermont. The decision to slash in half the popular investigative show NOW after Bill Moyers’ departure, and the addition of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Tucker Carlson (who has since left for MSNBC) to the programming line-up proves just how far right PBS has moved in an attempt to appear fair and balanced. “This is the first time in my thirty-two years in public broadcasting that CPB has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons,” Moyers told The New Yorker last year.

A majority of the CPB’s eight-member board–chaired by Ken Tomlinson, a good friend of Karl Rove–are now Republican appointees. Two of the newest, Gay Hart Gaines and Cheryl Halpern, have donated more than $800,000 to the Republican Party since 1995. Gaines once ran a political action committee for Newt Gingrich, who as speaker of the House pushed to “zero out” all of PBS’s federal funding. In 2003, PBS President Pat Mitchell offered Gingrich a town-hall style show. It would’ve happened if Gingrich wasn’t already under contract with Fox News.

Ironically, the CPB was created to shield PBS from political pressure, just as PBS was intended to address the “needs of unserved and underserved audiences.” One can hardly argue that the WSJ edit page or Tucker Carlson fit into that category. “To find the same combination of conviction, partisanship and ideological extremism on the far left,” wrote my colleague Eric Alterman, “A network would need to convene a ’roundtable’ featuring Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Fidel Castro.”

These days, PBS is more likely to give James Dobson his own special on religion.

U.S. SENATOR BARBARA BOXER | Issues

In 1981, three counties in Texas–Galveston, Matagorda, and Brazoria–decided to opt out of Social Security and instead provide their public employees with a system of privatized accounts.

While the privatization proposal advocated by President Bush is not an exact replication of the Texas plan, the concept is similar enough to warrant an examination of the Texas plan to see the impact of plans to privatize Social Security. …

Under the Texas plan, a married couple that has earned the median income would receive a monthly annuity benefit of $1568. Under Social Security, that married couple would receive $1818 at retirement–$3000 more over the course of the first year of retirement. Because Social Security beneficiaries receive an annual cost-of-living adjustment, at age 80, that gap increases to $13,440 more per year under Social Security than under the Texas plan.

Minor children are clearly better off with Social Security’s survivor benefits. If a worker who earned the median income dies at the age of 40, after working 20 years, the surviving spouse and two minor children would receive Social Security survivor benefits more than two and half times greater than they would receive under the Texas Alternate Plans.

“So you can make a case that, gee, if the level’s about the same, then the insurgency must be down because we’re paying less attention to it….” — Donald Rumsfeld
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frontline: rumsfeld’s war: paths to power: nixon administration | PBS

Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld might have been a moderate compared to Barry Goldwater, but over the years, his political profile moved to the right….

ABC News: Conservatives See Win in Rise of New Pope By RICHARD N. OSTLING, The Associated Press

“Faithful Christians ought to be thrilled,” declared Charles Colson, the prison evangelist who’s among the best-known members of America’s largest Protestant group, the Southern Baptist Convention.

Colson is especially pleased because, as he sees it, America’s cultural elite is alarmed by the cardinals’ choice. He praised Ratzinger’s recent sermon against moral relativism, which amounted to a papal campaign platform. He also agreed with the pope that Western civilization is doomed if secular trends persist.

It’s significant that Colson is scheduled to appear Sunday night in Louisville, Ky., for a “Justice Sunday” rally where conservative Protestants will denounce what they call “out-of-control courts” and Democratic filibusters to block U.S. Senate votes on nominees to be federal appeals judges. …

[Sidebar on the honorable Charles Colson

Known as President Nixon’s hatchet man, Colson could be counted on to break the china – do whatever was necessary – to achieve the desired political ends of his boss. The saying at the time was that he would be willing to run over his own grandmother if the President ordered it to be done. (Colson never did so.) Such a reputation showed him as an administration loyalist.

Colson was involved in the Watergate Scandal, and in 1974 voluntarily agreed to a plea of nolo contendere (no contest) to obstruction of justice in the Watergate affair. Some months before this plea, Colson became an evangelical Christian.]

While the pope is no Protestant, conservative evangelicals see him as a powerful ally in such matters and Benedict’s track record suggests they’re correct. …

While Catholic liberals believe it would be both wise and just for the church to loosen up on doctrinal demands, Benedict might draw the opposite conclusion from U.S. Protestant trends.

Since the mid-1960s, liberal denominations like Thomas’ United Church of Christ have suffered a steady slide in membership, while conservative groups like the Southern Baptists have continued to expand. And in the past generation, Southern Baptist agencies have actually moved from moderate conservatism to stricter conservatism.

Penn State historian Philip Jenkins noted in his book “The Next Christendom” that the same trend is true globally.

While flexible, modernized churches stagnate, evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity are growing in the developing world as is Islam. These groups have been dogged in preserving doctrinal and moral tradition.

If Benedict plays to conservative Christians in the United States, he’ll be working with the growth sector of the religious world today.

Thin Line By Tim McGivern

Several weeks ago, President George W. Bush, jackass that he is, stood next to a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, W. Va., that was filled with $1.7 trillion in U.S. Treasury bills belonging to the Social Security trust fund. The staged event went off flawlessly with no tough questions asked, and Bush, following the script, described the cabinet’s contents as “a worthless stack of IOUs.”

With our president making these kinds of boneheaded statements, is it any wonder the U.S. dollar continues to collapse overseas? And if that isn’t bad enough, a lawyer friend e-mailed me suggesting Bush’s photo-op might actually be an impeachable offense. According to U.S. Constitution amendment XIV(4): “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The amendment intended to punish any elected official who disparaged the credit of the United States. And the president swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, didn’t he?

The Nation | Blog | The Daily Outrage | Ari Berman

Kristin Breitweiser found herself widowed at age thirty when her husband Ron died at Tower Two of the World Trade Center on September 11. Along with four other widows (nicknamed the “Jersey Girls”), Breitweiser fought tirelessly for the 9/11 Commission, in spite of initial opposition from President Bush, whom she voted for in 2000. Below is a transcript of her remarks on April 19, 2005, a clear-headed, compelling and scathing indictment of how the Bush Administration has changed our post-9/11 world for the worse.
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“I am honored to accept the Ridenhour Truth Award and I accept it on behalf of all men, women and children who have sought Truth in their lives, including the four women—Mindy Kleinberg, Lorie Van Auken, Patty Casazza, and Monica Gabrielle–who fought along with me to seek the truth about 9/11. I am humbled by the ceremony of this award, and I accept it also in honor of my late husband, Ron Breitweiser.

In the past three years I have spent a lot of time talking about being a 9/11 widow and a victim’s advocate for intelligence community reforms. I appeared frequently in the print and televised media discussing my transformation from a stay-at-home mom whose specialty it was to design children’s gardens to a victim’s rights advocate whose specialty has become national security. My transformation was urgent, drastic and not chosen by me. But, I no longer want to talk about my transformation. Instead, I want to talk about my country’s post-9/11 transformation. A transformation unlike mine in that it was systematically and deliberately chosen.

Where are we today? Are the democratic principles that Osama Bin Laden tried to destroy on 9/11 still safely intact? Do nations around the world still respect and admire Americans? Are we still ‘all Americans’ like we were in the immediate wake of September 11th when almost every country in the world declared their solidarity with us? Or have we squandered that worldwide good will, faith and common purpose to fight terrorism? Have we learned any lessons since 9/11? And, most importantly, have our country’s choices made us any safer than we were pre-9/11?

Isn’t it true that instead of fixing airline security, port security, mass transportation, local response, and securing loose nukes and biological components, we spent billions on starting a war with Iraq—a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11? And, instead of capturing Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, we captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq with no weapons of mass destruction? Isn’t it true that because of our invasion of Iraq terrorist recruitment for Al Qaeda has soared, making us even less safe than we were before the Iraq war? Remember that we were supposed to go to war in Iraq to eliminate a real threat. Isn’t it true that now because of our foreign policy in Iraq, we have only created a real threat to the world’s security and ours? Isn’t it true that instead of successfully prosecuting Al Qaeda terrorists and bringing them to justice, all we hear about is torturing ‘enemy combatants’ and detaining them indefinitely–a concept far removed from the American ideal of justice? Isn’t it true that instead of opening up government to restore trust and faith, we created the Patriot Act? And, isn’t it true that instead of pursuing alternative energy resources to decrease our dependency on foreign oil, we invaded oil-rich countries and passed no alternative energy legislation in the meantime?

Why do we accept these choices? Why do we condone a government that uses over-classification to obfuscate such choices? We ask questions, and they give us answers and explanations that are just stylized sound bites and catch phrases (taking the fight to the enemy; tracking every terrorist down and bringing them to justice; being with us or against us)? How do such over-simplified answers adequately explain our very complex reality? None of these phrases are ever defined. We just repeat these mantras over and over again, not knowing what they really mean—not realizing that they fail to answer or justify any of our nation’s drastic actions and decisions since 9/11–chosen actions and decisions that have actually made us less safe from terrorists.

We–the American public–find ourselves adrift and overwhelmed. Pre-occupied with fear, we fail to unearth the truth or understand what choices we should or can make to effectively make our world safer. We are simply told that this is our ‘new norm.’ Our government parodies our search for truth by churning out report upon report and conclusion after conclusion—none of which ever gets acted upon.

Alarmingly, we accept all of this in the name of our ‘ongoing fight against the enemy.’ But, with a timeless, faceless, nameless and stateless enemy, when will our ‘fight’ ever end so we can return to our sensibilities and the truth? How can we ever define what success or victory might ever mean? Don’t we need the trust and cooperation of the world to effectively contain terrorism? How are we to really know if our government’s choices taken since 9/11–in the name of ‘national security’– are truly worth it and, in fact, making us any safer? Simply because our government tells us to trust them?

How can we trust a Congress that holds hearings on steroids in baseball and yet does not want to find out why our FAA received 52 warnings about hijackings in the summer of 2001? How do we trust a Congress that is so reluctant to address immigration issues that we have exasperated vigilantes on the southern border taking matters into their own hands–too frustrated to wait for Congress to do its job? How do we trust a Congress willing to work through a Sunday night on the Shiavo debate yet unwilling to hold public hearings on the ‘dead wrong’ intelligence that brought us to war in Iraq?

If we can be on a red alert for a dirty-bomb, why can’t we choose to be on a red-alert for our dire need to invest in alternative energy resources so as to become less dependent on foreign oil? Realistically, our dependence on foreign oil makes us less safe than any dirty bomb ever will.

Or why can’t we choose to be on an orange alert about the serious human rights abuses that are being carried out by our military and intelligence officials against ‘would be’ terrorists? How is it possible that in our post-9/11 world, the average American citizen thinks that it is ok to torture ‘enemy combatants’ while throwing any modicum of our rule of law out the window? How is it feasible to ‘track every terrorist down and bring them to justice’ when we have yet to define who qualifies as a terrorist or what the definition of justice really is?

How did I get here today? I got here by asking questions. I got here by being an American citizen. Not by choice, widowed at 30 and finding myself frightened and with no faith in my government, I decided to seek the truth as to why my husband died. I wanted to know that my daughter and I were safe living in this country. Along with four other widows, I played a role in our democratic process by simply asking who, what, where, how, and most importantly, why 9/11 happened.

Recently, many people are wondering what the widows will be doing next. It is simple. We will continue to do what we do best. We will continue to ask questions and demand answers about our government’s choices in the name of ‘national security.’ We will continue to work on issues that mean something to our children and to us. Issues that will make our future safer from terrorism like alternative energy resources, human rights abuses, congressional oversight and intelligence community reforms. We will continue to fight for the truth.

And, respectfully, our hope is that in future years this award might be rendered obsolete. Simply because there will be no need to bestow an award or any special status onto a truth-seeker because truth-seekers will have become our new norm.”

Domestic terrorism threats continue By Frank Davies, KNIGHT RIDDER

As the nation marks the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing today, the threat of domestic terrorism is being overshadowed by foreign terrorism, even though domestic terrorists have greater access than ever to knowledge they could use to kill large numbers of people. …

The cases of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion terrorist who pleaded guilty last week to four bombings, demonstrated that “lone wolves,” with little help and loose ties to organized groups, can wreak havoc and even inspire copycats.