Friday News Roundup - Hour 1
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-09-23/friday-news-roundup-hour-1
Rick Perry and Mitt Romney attack each other’s conservative credentials in the third Republican debate. The Fed moves to lower interest rates by purchasing long-term bonds. A possible government shutdown looms as the House of Representatives passes a funding bill that Senate Democrats vow to reject. Home sales go up but remain weak. Gays can now serve openly in the military as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” officially ends. The controversial execution of Troy Davis in Georgia despite worldwide appeals for clemency puts capital punishment back in the spotlight. And Twitter starts selling political ads. A panel of journalists joins guest host Steve Roberts for analysis of the week's top national news stories.
Guests
Ron Elving
Washington editor for NPR.
Karen Tumulty
national political reporter, The Washington Post.
Michael Hirsh
chief correspondent, National Journal magazine; author of "Capital Offense: How Washington's Wise Men Turned America's Future Over to Wall Street."
Comments
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Diane Rehm is great format for deeper explorations of the ideologies moving the current political discourse.
Though the program has skirted the issue on several occasions. I suggest a panel of Notre Dame's Mark Noll--see his June 6 TNR review of God's On Party--and Barnard of Columbia's Randall Balmer to explore the fundamentalist underpinnings of Rick Perry's run and how it plays in the bellwether Southern Baptist Convention.
Believe me, it matters in the South Carolina Primary which pretty makes GOP Presidential candidates.
I didn't see Bennett's entire Stern appearance, I've only seen clips on YouTube. Are you certain he is a 911 conspiracy theorist? In the clips I saw, he appeared to explicitly reject Truther theories, and said the US invited 911 through its behavior on the world stage, which nobody in a honest, reasonable intellectual environment could deny. Now I understand that the government and its minion in the media, etc have to push the line that this isn't so - aggressors will always wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood, and go out and commit even greater crimes against humanity. But as citizens, it isn't our job to support our government's criminal behavior, it's our job to try somehow to reign it in, and compell it to become an institution that works for us, again. Easier said than done, but that is the great challenge that faces us.
The mortgage crisis is not solved because it is difficult to assign blame. The first reaction is to blame banks and wall street. However, many borrowers knew that they were lying on their application and they went into the transaction highly leveraged and financially stretched. They were counting on housing prices to cover their over exuberance. They lost the bet.
There were other borrowers who put significant equity into the the transaction and kept their payment at reasonable levels. They were innocent victims of the housing bubble caused by sub prime lending, which was brought about an over supply of housing. These are the citizens who have the clearest case against the banks, wall street, un-spurious mortgage and real estate brokers. These are the citizens most justified in demanding some kind of retribution from the culprits. http://freeourfree markets.org
After I heard the echo chamber, I had no doubts about DRShow's EXTREME conservative bias!
mattlove1 wrote:
"I didn't see Bennett's entire Stern appearance, I've only seen clips on YouTube. Are you certain he is a 911 conspiracy theorist? In the clips I saw, he appeared to explicitly reject Truther theories, and said the US invited 911 through its behavior on the world stage, which nobody in a honest, reasonable intellectual environment could deny. "
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Bennett is not only a LIHOPer (a moonbat who believes the U.S. Government let 911 happen on purpose), he wants to make all weapons illegal and melt them down. Granted senility is getting the better of Tony, but why is he also making up stories about his WWII service?
Here is the exchange:
Stern: “They’re the ones who started with that plane flying into the World Trade Center. What do you do?”
Bennett: “I don’t know about that. That’s another story,”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/legendary-singer-tony-bennett-tells-howa...
mattlove1 wrote:
"After I heard the echo chamber, I had no doubts about DRShow's EXTREME conservative bias!"
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You are being facetious, yes? Never mind NPR, but Rehm and her sub hosts, Roberts, Susan Paige, Katy Kay, etc, are also incapable of even feigning conservative bias.
So very sad to read these comments and see the majority of them make absolutely NO SENSE!
On the other hand, it makes a great deal of sense that the comments here make no sense due to the fact that the subject matter is comments on a whole bunch of nonsense our country is wading through right now.
Republicans make no sense - times are good, cut taxes and deregulate; times are bad, cut taxes and deregulate.
Democrats make no sense either as they work on knee-jerk reactions to each new event without providing any sort of solutions.
Since Obama was elected the republicans refuse to work with anything the democrats put out there - even if it is exactly what the republicans previously supported - of course the leaders told us to expect this when they said they would make sure Obama is a one term president - they are only holding to their word by opposing anything and everything that comes down the pike.
Now we are in another government shutdown event - does anyone believe this is what we elected officials to represent us to do for us?
It would be nice to see the elected officials be denied their paychecks first - take away the golden benefit package and require them to participate in the Social Security program and live with the regular type of medical insurance system we all have to deal with - including rising premiums, drop in coverage, increase in co-pays and the entire batch of crap we have to live with.
Elected officials are so insulated from living in the real world where we have to live they have no clue what what the American people want or need.
Why has the podcast been updating updating so much later, or not even the same day, the last couple of weeks. I don't get this show on my local station and enjoy downloading it and listening to it on my ipod everyday.
It is exactly at that point that Bennett is saying he is not a conspiracy theorist, but he has an understanding that when the US bullies other countries, there will be blowback - an acknowledgement of reality. That's something that doesn't happen very often in this country, its laudible when somebody does it, and of course it's no surprise that even a beloved icon like Tony Bennett (who's frontline service was surely no match for yours) gets attacked by the termites for it. It's clear from the context that he was saying "I don't know .... They're the ones who started [the conflict]" not "I don't know...They're the ones who flew the planes." A moment later he said "they flew the planes." but we started the conflict by bombing them. By bombing them, by overthrowing their governments, by supporting governments that stole from them and tortured them, etc etc. I have not detected them doing that to us. As for his call for the destruction of all weapons - it's impractical, but not insane. The call to create more weapons is insane, but commonplace.
NPR's bias reflects the coverage their patrons want. It's pro-corporate, pro-status quo, and pro-conservative. The current government is center-right at best (and continues to move steadily to the right as it has for the last 30 years or so), and NPR to watch out to not offend the people that might be in charge after the next election (The lessons of Gingrich learned). Since the left never calls for their defunding, only the right, they realize they can ignore the left, and they do.
The Wall Street protests are populist and leftist, and it's no surprise that NPR would ignore them, as have the rest of the conservative media. This is FAIR's take on it, and I believe its correct:
What if the Tea Party Occupied Wall Street?
Corporate media skip anti-corporate protests
9/23/11
In an action called Occupy Wall Street, thousands of activists took to the streets of Lower Manhattan on September 17.
The protests are continuing, with demonstrators camped out on the Financial District's Liberty Street in support of U.S. democratization and against corporate domination of politics.
But you wouldn't know much about any of this from the corporate media--outlets that seem much more interested in protests of the Tea Party variety.
The anti-corporate protests have been lightly covered in the hometown New York Times: One piece largely about how the police blocked access to Wall Street, and one photo with the caption "Wall Street Protest Whirls On."
The protests have been treated with brief mentions on CNN, like this one from host Wolf Blitzer (9/19/11): "Protests here in New York on Wall Street entering a third day. Should New Yorkers be worried at all about what's going on?"
From the ABC, CBS and NBC network news, we could find nothing at all in the Nexis news database. On the PBS NewsHour, the protests got a brief reference, tacked on to the end of the stock market report..
I've used up my 2000 characters. Read the rest at:
http://www.fair.org/blog/#post-19351
"mattlove1 wrote:
"It is exactly at that point that Bennett is saying he is not a conspiracy theorist, but he has an understanding that when the US bullies other countries, there will be blowback - an acknowledgement of reality. "
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The U.S. has "bullied" Saudi Arabia? That's where the 911 terrorists came from. You really have no understanding about the term "blowback."
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mattlove1 wrote:
That's something that doesn't happen very often in this country, its laudible when somebody does it, and of course it's no surprise that even a beloved icon like Tony Bennett (who's frontline service was surely no match for yours) gets attacked by the termites for it.
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"Beloved?" By whom? There were 16 million Americans in uniform during WWII. Military service was a common thing at the time. Since Bennett did serve in a combat unit fighting on the Siegfried Line and that crossed the Rhine, why does he find it necessary to now make-up a story about participating in the Battle of The Bulge?
mattlove1 wrote:
" It's clear from the context that he was saying "I don't know .... They're the ones who started [the conflict]" not "I don't know...They're the ones who flew the planes." A moment later he said "they flew the planes." but we started the conflict by bombing them. By bombing them, by overthrowing their governments, by supporting governments that stole from them and tortured them, etc etc. I have not detected them doing that to us.'
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We overthrew the Saudi Government? When did this happen? Since the terrorists were not Persian, they did not come from Iran, whose government did have coups sponsored by the U.S. We bombed Iraq after they invaded Kuwait. You and Tony seem to think that if you allow aggression from countries to go unchallenged then there wouldn't be any wars, just wholesale oppression.
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mattlove1 wrote:
"As for his call for the destruction of all weapons - it's impractical, but not insane. The call to create more weapons is insane, but commonplace."
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"Impractical?" More like nonsensical. The man is not even talking about WOMD's, but small arms as well. Tony's copy of the U.S. Constitution does not contain the 2nd Amendment.
mattlove1 wrote:
"NPR's bias reflects the coverage their patrons want. It's pro-corporate, pro-status quo, and pro-conservative. The current government is center-right at best (and continues to move steadily to the right as it has for the last 30 years or so), and NPR to watch out to not offend the people that might be in charge after the next election (The lessons of Gingrich learned). Since the left never calls for their defunding, only the right, they realize they can ignore the left, and they do.
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Huh? The right wants to defund a "pro-conservative" media outlet?
Obamacare is a "center-right" concept? OK. Do you right for The Onion?
"thefairtaxman wrote:
I have asked in a previous message that one should calculate how much would it cost a private entity to provide the services that the government provides and how it would levy funds from its customers (Consider, for example, a super-duper Blackwater that would provide all the services the military provides. Would that cost less to the average person than the operation run by the Defense Dept?)."
Like I stated to you last week KB which is now an independant company and at once was part of Halliburton was proficient in these services due to their previous work with rough necks in the Oil Patch both domestically and internationally.
Blackwater fYI was for security not feeding and doing landry. On another point we had a Major here in Ft Sam Houston who ran procurement and was based in Kuwate ran a scan into the millions of dollars. Not just contractors but other officers and inlisted men and women were involved. The investigation is still continuing.
So to say that the Federal Government could run a more efficient program is nonsense.
A very disappointing panel this morning. As is getting too common with the Friday News Roundup, the callers were more perceptive than the panel.
Karen Tumulty was caught aback by the caller who observed that politicians who don't believe in government are doing their best to make sure it doesn’t work, then sheepishly conceded that the caller may have a point. It’s a point that’s glaringly obvious to many of us.
Then the panel studiously avoided responding to the caller who wondered why the media had totally ignored the Wall Street demonstrations and instead answered a question that hadn’t been asked. If it had been a handful of tea party demonstrators, they would have been outnumbered by reporters and featured in all the mainstream news coverage.
In short, the panel was very defensive about performance of the media, as they had every reason to be. Each one of them is part of the problem.
Michael Hirsh is spewing Amnesty International 's erroneous information about witnesses recanting their testimony regarding Troy Davis. None of them have "recanted." If there were serious doubts, neither the jury, the judge, or the U.S. Supreme Court could find any of them.
Steve Roberts calls Southern states with the death penalty as "aggressive executions." What? It took 20 years for Davis to be executed after exhausting any and all appeals. That's "aggressive?"
I think they did a good job on debate analysis. At this point it is all about the horse race and there are plenty of other places to hear what we want to hear on specific issues, after all isn't that what it's pretty much about, hearing what we want too. We have plenty of lefty views on the issues from N.P.R. can there never be a break from it?
I heard some of Tony's rant as well, old senile liberal getting close to checking out, we can cut him some slack.
MarcusTullius wrote:
"mattlove1 wrote:
"It is exactly at that point that Bennett is saying he is not a conspiracy theorist, but he has an understanding that when the US bullies other countries, there will be blowback - an acknowledgement of reality. "
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The U.S. has "bullied" Saudi Arabia? That's where the 911 terrorists came from. You really have no understanding about the term "blowback."
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{{{We stationed Troops in Saudi Arabia which infuriated the Saudis and when that wasn't enough, used Female Troops to taunt them in every way they could devise. And the source of that bullying was the Jews deciding they didn't what those awful Madrasas were teaching, although what the Jews teach their kids is certainly no better than what the Saudis teach theirs.}}}
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mattlove1 wrote:
That's something that doesn't happen very often in this country, its laudible when somebody does it, and of course it's no surprise that even a beloved icon like Tony Bennett (who's frontline service was surely no match for yours) gets attacked by the termites for it.
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"Beloved?" By whom? There were 16 million Americans in uniform during WWII. Military service was a common thing at the time. Since Bennett did serve in a combat unit fighting on the Siegfried Line and that crossed the Rhine, why does he find it necessary to now make-up a story about participating in the Battle of The Bulge?
September 23, 2011 - 1:39 pm"
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{{{
1) How do you know that?
2) Who gives a Sh_t?
3) What does that have to do with 9/11?
Reminds me of the attacks on Kerry.
Every one of you GD Rats, except for Dole, is a Coward, Liar, Traitor and when forced to fight are Back Shooters and Baby Killers.}}}
Monte Haun mchaun@hotmail.com
Amazing. The whole panel, including Mr. Roberts, hasn't figured out that the housing crisis can't be sorted out without Federal & state investigations and/or prosecutions of mortgage fraud by banks and others. Without those investigation no true picture of the wrongdoing can come out.
And they compound it by not acknowledging that the documentation and registrations that verify real property must be straightened out. MERS transfers that are not legal in some states and don't meet legal registration laws and the continuing of robo-signing of foreclosure documents by the banksters are a continuing blot on the housing market. Many can no longer trust their deeds or the condition of the home
As a market, it's absurd to hope for many to buy homes when current planned layoffs haven't taken effect and whose effect will be magnified by the decreased consumer demand which will cause even more layoffs.
Without jobs that pay enough to support a family & pay for a mortgage, the only buyers are speculators on & off Wall St.
MarcusTullius wrote:
"mattlove1 wrote:
"It is exactly at that point that Bennett is saying he is not a conspiracy theorist, but he has an understanding that when the US bullies other countries, there will be blowback - an acknowledgement of reality. "
-------------------------------------------------------
The U.S. has "bullied" Saudi Arabia? That's where the 911 terrorists came from. You really have no understanding about the term "blowback"
September 23, 2011 - 1:39 pm"
I'd say you are the one that doesn't understand blowback.
Would you consider the Marine Barracks Bombing blowback?
Remember, that was the one your WWII Hero Reagan cut and ran after he promised not to cut and run?
Monte Haun mchaun@hotmail.com
Mountainwoman wrote:
"It would be nice to see the elected officials be denied their paychecks first - take away the golden benefit package and require them to participate in the Social Security program and live with the regular type of medical insurance system we all have to deal with - including rising premiums, drop in coverage, increase in co-pays and the entire batch of crap we have to live with.
Elected officials are so insulated from living in the real world where we have to live they have no clue what what the American people want or need."
Not to ignore the rest of your thoughtful comment, but this portion I thought deserved mention.....
Our elected officials are so out of touch with us because they (many of them) are millionaires. 240 members of congress have incomes in excess of a million dollars a year.
This alone should disqualify them from representing us.
Without knowing the pain, and hardships that their constituents have to endure, how can they make any kind of rational or fair decisions? Is it any wonder then that our elected officials are beholden to the big money interests that pass themselves off as special interests?
Follow the money, it is always about the money.
Great point Michael about the horse race! So much opinion and so little information.
mchaun wrote:
"We stationed Troops in Saudi Arabia which infuriated the Saudis and when that wasn't enough, used Female Troops to taunt them in every way they could devise. And the source of that bullying was the Jews deciding they didn't what those awful Madrasas were teaching, although what the Jews teach their kids is certainly no better than what the Saudis teach theirs."
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Ah, the U.S. was invited by the Saudis. Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 Saudi Arabia joined the anti-Iraq Coalition and King Fahd, fearing an attack from Iraq, invited American and Coalition soldiers to be stationed in Saudi Arabia. Where did you get this female troop taunting nonsense? But Tony Bennett said we bombed the terrorist resonsible for 911 first. When did we bomb Saudi Arabia?
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mchaun wrote:
" 1) How do you know that?
2) Who gives a Sh_t?
3) What does that have to do with 9/11?
Reminds me of the attacks on Kerry."
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How do I know what? Are you asking how I know that Bennett was not in the Battle of The Bulge that he now insists he was? He says so in his own 1998 autobiography written by someone else. All his WWII military service information that is reproduced on the net comes from this source. His outfit, the 255th Inf Regt, part of the 63rd Division, did not get to the front lines until March, 1945.
Ask Tony what it has to do with 911 since he felt the need to mention it in his pathetic back peddling to the comments he made on Stern.
Just because a famous person served in the military doesn't mean they get to rewrite the historical record of their service. Ask Jesse Ventura
about that.
MarcusTullius, what happened to Pa Cicero, I miss his posts.
monte wrote:
"MarcusTullius, what happened to Pa Cicero, I miss his posts"
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The DR Show wanted to miss them entirely. They told him:
"Your comment has been queued for moderation by site administrators and will be published after approval."
Except they were never approved for posting. Go figure.
To the callers who expressed frustration at the substance or omission of media coverage: It’s no secret that we’ve been losing our public airways to advertising and moneyed interests for the last thirty years (not to mention government). There was the successful push to rescind The Fairness Doctrine in the Eighties, followed by the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of ’95 (thanks, Bill); then, most recently, the court ruling (2010) against net neutrality that prevents the FCC from regulating the Internet. A friend recently complained to me that Yahoo had been blocking access to coverage on the street protests against Wall Street excesses. And, in my own experience, I found that Yahoo denied me access to one of its own news pieces about the beating death of a homeless man by police in Fullerton, CA.
I only just recently saw the movie “Inside Job,” winner of the Best Documentary of the year. It only played at five theaters in ALL of northern California, only in the Bay Area; it was not stocked by Blockbuster when it came out on DVD, and was on hold at the public library for six weeks. It must be a case of “liberal media bias” at work here, because the popularity and demand certainly seems to have been there. Once we succeed in privatizing our schools, police forces and public libraries, though, I’m sure this sort of political dissidence won’t occur again—all right-wing propaganda, everywhere, all the time. Maybe we all have something to learn from Egypt, Libya, and the Middle East in general about maintaining democratic control over our lives and institutions. Make no mistake about it, Republicans (and Blue Dog Democrats) want government here and around the world to exist only in the service of financiers, to be run by financiers, and for the profit of financiers. In a last ditch effort in the face of global economic collapse, they are hoping Americans and people everywhere will turn away from governments and continue to equate their ideology and political policies (or the absence of them) with individual freedom.
The caller who commented about the lack of media/journalists properly doing their job to report the news (and jabber on about the "horse race") and hold accountable the responses politicians give them was absolutely right. And Mr. Roberts tried a number of times to shut him down. You all need to go home this weekend, stand in front of a mirror and listen to section of the show again. The most glaring omission in the media's coverage of the Republican presidential race is the Ames Straw Poll second place finisher -- Ron Paul. What is the analysis about his near tie with the winner (Bachmann) and the nearly 2400 vote margin he had over the third-place vote getter. With this kind of analysis, the DR show needs to refresh and replace their analysts for the Friday news round-up and let the current group find their place on 24-hr cable news/talking-heads/not-saying-a-thing. They'll fit right in.
Kudos to DR Show's callers for calling attention to the domestic Roundup's almost obsessive horserace focus. Their responses to the caller's thoughtful indictment was floundering, and even Karen Tumulty's call for listeners to support real journalism became self-defeating when she pointed out that the web's biggest traffic sites also focus on the horserace. In short, she aligned the DR Show Roundup's purposes with the web's rather than aligning it with the more noble goal of actual reporting. It's a shame to hear her say that, because I think that the power of the DR Show rests with it's ability to resist the journalistic race to the bottom. It is a non-profit, after all.
MTC, hard to find a pattern for this discrimination, mg same deal. Maybe a horse with blinders on running through without commenting on other posters and interacting gets less FLAGS? I am at a total loss but must expect to be among the downtrodden sooner or later.