reflectivepundit

Blog Newspaper The Issue: A Jewel in the Blogosphere

By Brigitte L. Nacos
If you are tired of surfing the blogosphere and look for more than your favorite blogs, there is a wonderful option: The non-partisan blog newspaper The Issue . This site resembles a quality print newspaper in a welcome departure from the noisy tabloid look that seems on the rise in the vastly expanding blogosphere. While the sophisticated lay-out is a bonus, it is the content and its presentation that stand out here. Most importantly, the editors present in literally each issue a marketplace of ideas consisting of pertinent posts chosen from a multitude of blogs—most of them not among the most popular sites.

The selected posts address a wide array of important questions and issues of our time and are organized along the line of broadsheets. Under “Featured Stories,” each issue of the blog newspaper presents contributions addressing current and/or generally important events, developments, problems, and the like. Today, for example, there are four featured stories, among them, “How much fiscal stimulus? Dollar amounts versus Efficacy.” The showcase section is the “Issue of the Day” with important topics discussed in posts from various blogs. “The Future of NATO,” “The Science of Aging,” “The Media’s Political Influence,” and “The Future of the GOP” were among recent topics with typically three different contributions and a short introduction by the editors.

Finally, the “Best of the Blogosphere” selections are presented in six sections: U.S., World, Business, Science & Health, Art & Culture, and Musings. There are cartoons, a book review section, and several other interesting features.

I need to disclose here that the The Issue has featured several of my reflectivepundit posts in the “Issue of the Day” and “Best of the Blogosphere” sections, but this is certainly not the reason why I visit this exceptional site regularly and why I recommend it. 

Rudy Giuliani, Bernard Kerik and 9/11 “Heroism”

By Brigitte L. Nacos
After his indictment for multiple counts of corruption, Bernard Kerik told the press, “My life has been marked by challenge. Whether it was growing up, being a cop, Rikers Island, the New York City Police Department, or the worst challenge, until this time, my challenges during and after 9/11…”  Like his long-time benefactor Rudy Giuliani, New York’s former Correction and Police Commissioner invoked the terrorist attacks in an obvious effort to win the sympathies of people who can be fooled by these self-proclaimed heroes. Since tough cop Kerik drove Rudy Giuliani during his 1993 mayoral campaign, his career blossomed under Rudy’s tutelage. No wonder that they both used 9/11 as spring board to join forces in a lucrative consulting business that was built on their carefully cultivated 9/11 hero status. What was lost in all of this was, of course, that any mayor and any police commissioner of a large city would be expected to manage major crises competently. 

Like his patron Rudy, Kerik sells himself and is sold as a hero and distinguished public servant. On the Kerik Legal Defense Trust web site one of the pages lists all his accomplishments under the header “Heroism & Distinguished Service.” The defense trust was established to “allow Mr. Kerik’s friends and supporters to assist him in defending himself against possible charges that may be brought against him by the United States Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.” The site continues to show Kerik and Giuliani in one of the pictures (see below excerpt from web site).

                                         

The Bush Administration's Rich History of Fake News

By Brigitte L. Nacos
At the heights of the California wildfires last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staged a news conference with Vice Admiral Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, presiding. But instead of facing real reporters’ real questions, FEMA staged a fake news conference during which FEMA bureaucrats masqueraded as reporters and threw softball questions at Mr. Johnson so that he could praise the agency that failed so terribly before, during, and after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. FEMA invited news organizations just 15 minutes before the fake news briefing began and thus made sure that no real reporter was present during the bogus event. Some cable networks, among them MSNBC and Fox News carried part of “news conference” as breaking news live from FEMA. The visuals were of Mr. Johnson only, while the fake reporters were heard and not seen--for obvious reasons. Neither newsroom personnel at the all news networks nor their audiences had reason to suspect that this was a sham event staged in order to resurrect the agency’s damaged reputation.

When the truth came out, the White House seemed not at all disturbed. Press secretary Dana Perino assured in her mild response that "it is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House. We certainly don't condone it. We didn't know about it beforehand. . . . They, I'm sure, will not do it again."

Not do it again? Perhaps not in the same agency and in the same form. But this is not the first instance in which the Bush administration has done more than put its spin on the news. Indeed, as the New York Times reported in early 2005, 
“Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.”

Turkey, the PKK, Iraq, and President Bush’s War on Terrorism

By Brigitte L. Nacos
"The Turkish parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly authorized cross-border military attacks in northern Iraq against Kurdish separatist rebels, as world leaders pleaded for restraint. As the votes were tallied in Turkey's modernistic legislative chamber here, President Bush told reporters at a White House news conference that 'we are making it very clear to Turkey that we don't think it is in their interest to send troops into Iraq.' "
Washington Post, Oct. 18, 2007 

After 9/11, when President George W. Bush launched the “war on terrorism,” he pledged to fight and eradicate terrorism everywhere. But he obviously meant to go after terrorists and terrorism that affect the United States directly or indirectly. Otherwise, he could not tell the Turkish government to refrain from aggressively fighting an organization that has committed violence against Turks in Turkey and elsewhere for a long time. While the end of brutal oppression of the Kurds in Northern Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s regime is one of the good consequences of the Iraq War, the fact that the PKK has been able to operate freely in the jurisdiction of the Kurdish regional government and launch attacks from there on Turkey, is a very bad result. As the New York Times reports today, “More than two dozen Turks, some of them civilians, have been killed in cross-border rebel [emphasis added] attacks in the past several weeks…” (Note, that the term used in the above quote is “rebel” not “terrorist” with respect to PKK attacks in contrast to the common use of the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” in the context of such strikes on U.S. and Iraqi targets inside Iraq). In view of the strengthened PKK and its violence, it seems disingenuous for this president to urge the Ankara government to exercise restraint although he and his administration have aggressively fought the war on terrorism abroad and on foreign soil without listening to appeals for moderation and more time for diplomacy to work things out.

Bush: Ready to Kill Health Insurance Expansion for Children

By Brigitte L. Nacos
It is shocking enough to learn of a delay in the cancer treatment of an insufficiently insured young woman, as I did this morning, but it is even more incomprehensible to hear the President of the United States threaten to veto a congressional initiative to expand a children’s health insurance program for families whose income is too high to qualify for Medicaid and too low to buy their own health insurance. Bush told the American people, "Members of Congress are risking health coverage for poor children purely to make a political point." To call his statement merely spin, would be an understatement. According to the Washington Post, “A bipartisan group of lawmakers announced a proposal Friday that would add $35 billion over five years to the program, adding 4 million people to the 6.6 million already participating. It would be financed by raising the federal cigarette tax by 61 cents to $1 per pack.” In his response to Mr. Bush’s remarks, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, said that without the funding fifteen states would run out of money for this program by the end of September. So, who is risking health coverage for poor children? Democrats and Republicans in Congress who want to finance the program or the President who says he will veto such funds. 

President Bush and his supporters, including the viable contenders for his party’s presidential nomination, remain gung-ho when it comes to the Iraq War and the astronomical funds it requires. The National Priorities Project tracks the costs of the Iraq War and the ticker on the organization’s web site shows right now $453,8 billion since the beginning of the invasion—by the time you read this blog probably more than $454 billion. Take a look at the National Priorities Project’s web site to get an idea how many health insurances for children these hundreds of billions could buy!

The good news is that the Democratic contenders for their party’s presidential nomination agree to tackle the intolerable fact that more than 45 million Americans do not have health insurance, if they become president. Reason enough for opponents to once again play their propaganda game and throw around the nonsensical term “socialized medicine” to kill universal health insurance.

P.S. Tonight, the New York Times reports on its web site, "The Bush administration plans to increase its 2008 financing  request for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere by almost $50 billion, with about a quarter of the additional money going toward armored trucks built to withstand roadside bombs, Pentagon officials said Saturday. The increase would bring the amount the administration is seeking to finance the war effort through 2008 to almost $200 billion."

But $35 billion cannot be found to provide health insurance and adequate health care to American children for the next five years!? 

Manufacturing the News: Michael Deaver and Karl Rove

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The death of Michael Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan’s premier image maker, and the departure of Karl Rove from the Bush White House highlight the centrality of public relations, propaganda, and manufactured news in modern White Houses and administrations. Power-holders and power-seekers have always tried and often succeeded in manipulating public views about themselves, their politics, and policies, but Michael Deaver opened a new chapter of public relations stagecraft during the Reagan years. While major factors during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and his associates proved the most aggressive and ruthless yet in marketing a president, branding their party, and manufacturing news to sell their policies—most notably the Iraq War. Calling Deaver rightly “the media maestro who shaped President Ronald Reagan’s public image,” the Washington Post’s Patricia Sullivan writes. “As the White House deputy chief of staff during the first term of the Reagan presidency, Deaver orchestrated Reagan's every public appearance, staging announcements with an eye for television and news cameras. From a West Wing office adjacent to the Oval Office, Deaver did more than anyone before him to package and control the presidential image.”

Commenting on Karl Rove’s sudden retirement from his White House job, Frank Rich takes his readers back to the summer of 2002, when “Andrew Card, then the president’s chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn't yet arrived. ‘You don't introduce new products in August,’ he said sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.” While Card offered a glimpse of the behind-the-scene marketing tricks in selling the war on terrorism--in Iraq, Karl Rove was, no doubt, the brain behind such political maneuvers.

Administration’s Terrorism Fear Tactics Worked Again to Whip Democrats in Line

By Brigitte L. Nacos
After months of showcasing Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’ unwillingness to tell the truth when testifying before congressional committees or speaking in public, enough Democrats in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House were unwilling to vote against “The Protect America Act of 2007” that expands the administration surveillance power far beyond the parameters of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and expands the surveillance authorization prerogatives of the attorney-general (in tandem with the director of national intelligence) who has serious truth-telling deficiencies. As Aziz Huq writes in The Nation,
The law's most important effect is arguably not its expansion of raw surveillance power but the sloughing away of judicial or Congressional oversight. In the words of former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, the law provides "unlimited access to currently protected personal information that is already accessible through an oversight procedure."
E.J. Dionne Jr. reveals in today’s Washington Post why the Democratic majority—especially in the House—did not stand up to the president but handed him and the Republican minority a victory. According to the Post columnist,
One anxiety hovered over the debate: If a terrorist attack happened and Congress had not given Bush what he wanted, the Democrats would get blamed for a lack of vigilance. "Could something happen over August?" Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) asked in an interview. "Sure it could. What bothered me is that too many Democrats allowed that fear to turn into a demand for some atrocious legislation."

What Extreme “Experts” Want You to Believe About the Roots of Terrorism

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Want to know how out of bounce so-called American “terrorism experts” are with their explanations of the roots and causes of the very terrorism we are facing today? Take a look at Paul Krugman’s column in today’s New York Times and you’ll learn about the self-serving counter-propaganda that permeates both the extreme political strata and its like-minded media servants that make great efforts to convince their audiences that they stand for reality and truth and patriotism and American values. These are in my view the most important  sentences in Krugman’s opinion piece:

“These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming.

National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?” read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.

While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens.

I say conscience, because the health care issue is, most of all, about morality.

That’s what we learn from the overwhelming response to Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Health care reformers should, by all means, address the anxieties of middle-class Americans, their growing and justified fear of finding themselves uninsured or having their insurers deny coverage when they need it most. But reformers shouldn’t focus only on self-interest. They should also appeal to Americans’ sense of decency and humanity.”

Ah, well--do not hold your breath. I recall recent conversation with entirely nice, well-to-do physicians and successful people in other fields about what I believe is the need for fundamental reforms that make for mandatory universal health care. But the opposition always counters with scare tactics charging that  this will come down to "socialized medicine" a la Western Europe.

No “New” Cold War but still Remnants of the Old

By Brigitte L. Nacos
When Russian president Vladimir Putin and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in the Kremlin the other day, they agreed to tone down the recently hostile rhetoric. More important, Dr. Rice “dismissed talk of a new Cold War despite unease in Washington about Putin's criticism of U.S.foreign policy” according to reports from Moscow. Relations between Moscow and Washington may be at a low point, but certainly much warmer than the icy Cuban-American relationship. After all, Americans can freely travel to and do business with Russia while the 45-year old travel ban as well as trade sanctions against
Cuba remain in place. As provocative filmmaker Michael Moore learned recently, these restrictions are enforced—certainly if the violator is relentless in his attacks on President Bush and his supporters in big politics and big business. Thus, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control notified Moore that he was the target of an investigation for possibly violating the trade embargo against Cuba that also bans unauthorized travel to the island. Why did Moore travel to Cuba? According to one account, “to get treatment for ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers for a segment in his upcoming health-care expose, "Sicko." Whatever one thinks of Moore’s inflammatory work, the idea of showing movie-goers that the universal health system in Castro’s communist Cuba works far better than the proponents of the existing American system want us to believe, should be a wake up call for many Americans—especially those millions without health insurance and others who have increasingly trouble to pay for it. 

Former “Public Servants” and their Multi-Million-Dollar Book Deals

By Brigitte L. Nacos
While administration officials deflected George Tenet’s criticism of their pre-Iraq war stance over the weekend and former CIA officials outright attacked him for his version of pertinent intelligence during the build-up to the war, the former CIA director’s book “At the Center of the Storm” was already in second place on Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s bestseller list this morning. However beleaguered Tenet appeared during his appearance on the “60 Minutes” program last night, he was stuck with this interview and subsequent media appearances to market his book. After all, this book made him into a multi-millionaire before he wrote the first pages. That’s what these former “public servants” all do: they cash in once they leave office. Indeed, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in response to Tenet’s revelations: “There were some things that went right and some things that went wrong. And you know what? We will have a chance to look at that in history. And I will have a chance to reflect on that when I have a chance to write my book." Just as her predecessor Colin Powell, Dr. Rice will rake in a very hefty sum of money for her insider version.