Readers' Comments

Editor and Publisher also has a couple of stories about the Bandow scandal, titled "[http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001699832 Bandow, Syndicated Columnist, Admits Taking Money from Abramoff]" and "[http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001700011 Cal Thomas and Connie Schultz Weigh in on Bandow Payola Scandal]."

Thomas, a conservative columnist himself, says what Bandow did was "a big no-no" that "damages the credibility of everybody ... I'm getting tired of this." Other conservative columnists, including [[Armstrong Williams]], have also gotten caught recently in similar payola scandals.

Schultz, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, says she is "outraged" and "appalled" that Bandow describes his actions as a "lapse in judgment." She noted that "a lapse suggests a temporary or accidental stumble, while he admits to taking money from Abramoff '12 to 24 times' at $2,000 or so a pop. At that rate, it had become a second income."

She noted that although the payola scandals have all involved conservative pundits, the scandal hurts columnists of all ideologies. "I don't think most readers, when faced with yet another story about yet another corrupt columnist, distinguish between conservative writers and those who are moderate or liberal," she said. "I wish they did, because the pattern is clear, but I don't think that's what happens. We're all tainted by the stain."

Well I give you guys credit for at least not showing a headless torso of a chubby child the way the popular press does. Bad enough they have to dehumanize adults that way. The tacky way the mainstream media handles this issue is more damaging to these kids that their own bodies. And if society is really serious about looking at all causes of obesity, they better start looking into endocrine disrupters, growth hormones in the food, and the mothers' dieting habits. They should also stop singling out fat kids and broader the issue to child nutrition. And they should find experts versed in the behaviorial sciences who aren't scared to death of fat, because the hysteria they create is counterproductive. Not that I am against banning junk food ads for kids, or any ads for that matter. I am just sick of obesity being the exclusive boogyman when the issue is much more complex.

I second the motion.

In my opinion, no matter who started the war in Iraq, it was up to the American people and Congress to have had more discussion and done more research before we gave Bush the okay to invade Iraq.

Knowing this administration is so deeply entrenched in the pockets
of polluters and despoilers I'm not the least surprised at this news.
All the more reason for alertness and action to keep it from happening.

I offer the future of American politics in a couple of quotes make of them what you will I know what they mean.

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/activit/marketsoc/index_e.html#12

Social Marketing is "the application of marketing technologies developed in the commercial sector to the solution of social problems where the bottom line is behaviour change." It involves: "the analysis, planning, execution and evaluation of programs designed to influence the voluntary behaviour of target audiences to improve their personal welfare and that of society."

http://www.who.int/hia/en/

HIA provides decision makers with information about how any policy, programme or project may affect the health of people. HIA seeks to influence decision makers to improve the proposal. WHO supports the use of HIA because of its ability to influence policies, programmes and/or projects. This provides a foundation for improved health and wellbeing of people likely to be affected by such proposals

"Fascism is on the march today in America. Millionaires are marching to the tune. It will come in this country unless a strong defense is set up by all liberal and progressive forces... A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government, and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. Aboard ship a prominent executive of one of America's largest financial corporations told me point blank that if the progressive trend of the Roosevelt administration continued, he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism to America."
former ambassador to Germany
William Dodd, 1938

"The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets."
Lawrence Grossman - longtime head of PBS and NBC News

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security ...
To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted.
Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) ... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. "
German professor after World War II describing the rise of Nazism to a journalist

Regards; fxr

Sounds like you've read David Ray Griffin's books too. They certainly raise a lot of questions that MUST be answered. One thing's for sure-the 9/11 Commission Report was pure hogwash. Maybe the tide is turning and we're getting closer to learning the truth.

Rozen [http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/003180.html notices the following passage] in a [http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13295806.htm Knight Ridder story]:

Under military rules, information operations are restricted to influencing the attitudes and behavior of foreign governments and people. One form of information operations - psychological warfare - can use doctored or false information to deceive or damage the enemy or to bolster support for American efforts.

Many military officials, however, said they were concerned that the payments to Iraqi journalists and other covert information operations in Iraq had become so extensive that they were corroding the effort to build democracy and undermining U.S. credibility in Iraq. They also worry that information in the Iraqi press that's been planted or paid for by the U.S. military could "blow back" to the American public. ...

On at least one occasion, psychological warfare specialists have taken a group of international journalists on a tour of Iraq's border with Syria, a route used by Islamic terrorists and arms smugglers, one of the officials said. ...

The result is a "fuzzing up" of what's supposed to be a strict division between public affairs, which provides factual information about U.S. military operations, and information operations, which can use propaganda and doctored or false information to influence enemy actions, perceptions and behavior....

Rozen comments: "In plain language: Rumsfeld is using psyops specialists and information warfare specialists on US journalists, and by extension, the American public."

We, the voters of the U.S. SHOULD be able to do
the same! However, we are not seeing this
happening in our "free" country which is, through
sneaky means being methodically taken over by Big Chema, Big Agri, Big Pharma, Big Techno, and Big Business via Codex Alimentarious--international laws that will errode our health freedoms, making
our Constitution secondary to international laws
of Codex. For example the 350,000 emails sent to
Congress over a two week period did nothing to
thwart the ammendment which was sneakily added to the
2006 Agricultural Funding appropriations which
allows organic foods to be sprayed with
pesticides and then labeled ORGANIC by the USDA!

Actually what I'm suggesting and am working for is the formation of a third major political party for thinking class citizens that are fed up with being led down the garden path.

Have you (in this text "you" is stated generically) ever personally chosen a candidate to run for any political office?

In 99.999% of instances, and unless you are a local, state, or party elite insider the answer to the above queation is no.

How many times have you either heard or even said to yourself "I'm sick and tired of voting for the lesser of two evils." I know I have hundreds of times.

One of the most unrecognized or ignored issues in politics is the fact that not even half voter age citizens vote in elections period.

It is not lack of political interest or apathy that causes this. It is a loss of faith in the Democratic and republican parties to do the right and honest thing.

Far too many in the Democratic and republican parties have been, are, or will become corrupt. This is documented fact not conjecture, though admittedly there is less corruption among the Democrats than the republicans...for now at least because it depends on which party is currently in power that determines this. And as long as big lobby can wave unlimited monies around even the most honest among us has a number turning us from statemen to bought puppet and the lobbiests will keep upping their monitary offers until "that" number is found.
This too is a documented fact.

What I hope to see before I die is a party where candidates are chosen by a process of elimination by individual party member vote at large.

He or she through process of elimination then becomes the party candidate, responsible to and accountable to, by ironclad written contract to the party members.

The greatest argument I've received against my proposal is that "it would be so time consuming." I say, so what. Any time consumed getting honest governors and lawmakers compared to the governors and lawmakers in the multilevels of government we have today is gravy time and worth every second spent getting good government.

If we continue with this two party system of government we have now, where the people we must vote for are chosen for us by rich elite party insiders the problems for this nation will get worse, not better. This is factual documented history.

It has been clearly documented that politics, entrenched politicians, career bureaucrats, and government contractors have become no more than entities with legal license to steal and get away with it.

P.J. O'Rourk stated it best in his 1992 book "A Parliment of Whores":

"Any likeminded group, acting in concert, can steal anything they want and get away with it.

Apply this sentence with paraphase insertions of the words president-administration, congress, bureaucracy, and government contractor and it clearly states what we see going on in the good ole U S A today.

Especially, but not exclusively too, government contractors supplying war arms/supplies, today we taxpayers are footing the bills for airplanes, tanks, bombs, etc. etc. ad infinitim. being sold by U S government contractors at prototype costs for production line vehicles and such. And it goes on unabated without the slightest protest from all but a few John Q Citizen's whose voices are no more than whispers lost in the cacaphony of a hurricane.

With the federal government budget alone and a congress that can't even burp for less than a billion dollars anymore, our interstate highways should be paved with gold from coast to coast, national border to national border. And this too goes on unabated without the slightest protest from all but a few John Q Citizen's whose voices are no more than whispers lost in the cacaphony of another hurricane.

Many of our larger more populas states have state budgets larger than the federal budget was thirty years ago.

The "No, no, no regulations" of our union busting congress through the energy producers, insurance companies, credit card companies, pharmacutical manufacturers, all riding high on the grandest gravy train in history have all but destroyed what was once known as the working middle class American Citizens with legalized robbery by cash register.

So if you want to call what I propose "union" I'll go for it because from what I see and experienced is almost total disunity within the social and political fabric of our nation.

I appreciate your comments and will continue this discourse if you wish and expound on how a third party and winning by plurality can set this nation straight and back on its feet with the masses, not an oligarcic plutocracy, in power and control of government and politicians.

TP
Thomas_pearson46@hotmail.com

I like this train of thinking... mostly because it's oriented along class lines... what you're suggesting is what organized labor, or national popular organizations (or both), might work towards in a functioning democratic society. The US isn't, and changing that should be the primary goal of activists right now, IMHO.