Saturday, October 1, 2011

Fox-News contributor Sarah Palin slams Fox News and Megyn Kelly for spreading "misinformation" - PLUS: Explosive new report about the Koch Brothers

By Patrick

Sarah Palin will be the flavour of yesterday soon, but until then, the mean girl from Wasilla continues to prove that she is one of the biggest jokes in American political history, and that her thin skin is virtually unmatched. In one of the best segments I have ever seen, Lawrence O'Donnell, the one MSNBC host who is not afraid to tell his viewers the blunt truth about Sarah Palin, yesterday delivered an epic slam on the Quitter from Wasilla:



We have observed over and over again that the one thing that really gets Sarah going is perceived criticism and perceived enemies. Even the smallest criticism sets her off like a bomb. Now she is the "Inhouse-IED" of Fox News.

You don't criticise Queen Esther! Why doesn't Fox News understand this simple fact? How could they? They are liars as well, bloody liars, like all the rest of them. Just Greta and Hannity still belong to the good guys. The last ditch effort, so to speak.

We have already seen in the past in Alaska that it doesn't matter for Sarah whether somebody is right-wing or left-wing. All that matters for her is: Are you for Sarah or against Sarah? Now Fox News is learning it the hard way. Roger Ailes will not be pleased.

It's almost a surprise that Palin's pathologic nature always manages to shine through. It's simply impossible for her to deliver any reasonable, balanced commentary. There are only good guys or bad guys. Either the liars or the people who tell the truth. Sarah Palin always has been the perfect cult leader, and it would not surprise me if the Palin-cult persists in lingering on in obscurity (and on right-wing websites) for years to come.

The right-wing commentators have also not been kind to Sarah Palin lately. For example, right-wing pundit "S.E. Cupp", who also works as a writer and commentator for Glenn Beck's company "Mercury Radio Arts", yesterday wrote in a commentary at CNN:

And now, the will-they-or-won't-they game has flipped from fun and energizing to damaging to the party. Christie and Palin now do conservatives more harm than good.

With the question marks still lingering in the ether, and pundits on both sides of the aisle still performing their daily trapeze act -- swinging back and forth between "yes, he's running" and "no, she isn't" -- the focus on Christie and Palin has taken valuable resources and attention away from the rest of the field.

Because of those question marks, conservatives haven't been able to invest fully in the candidates who are running. They haven't been able to imagine one of them as president. They've held back support, money and endorsements, because they still don't know that the field is settled.

And Christie and Palin are not entirely without fault.

On another note:

Why do extreme right-wing commentators like S.E. Cupp write political commentaries at a mainstream news website like CNN in the first place, one might ask?

The fact that S.E. Cupp primarily works for Glenn Beck isn't even revealed to the readers at CNN. There, she is introduced in the following manner:

S.E. Cupp is author of "Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity" and co-author of "Why You're Wrong About the Right." She is a columnist at the New York Daily News, senior writer at the Daily Caller, and a political commentator.

CNN apparently isn't bothered by what S.E.Cupp wrote in her book about the "Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity." From the description of the book on the website of "Simon & Schuster":

Starting at the top, she exposes the unwitting courtship of President Obama and the liberal press, which consistently misreports or downplays Obama's clear discomfort with, or blatant disregard for, religious America—from covering up religious imagery in the backdrop of his Georgetown University speech to his absence from events surrounding the National Day of Prayer, to identifying America in his inaugural address as, among other things, "a nation of non-believers." She likens the calculated attacks of the liberal media to a class war, a revolution with a singular purpose: to overthrow God and silence Christian America for good. And she sends out an urgent call for all Americans to push back the leftist propaganda blitz striking on the Internet, radio, television, in films, publishing, and print journalism—or invite the tyrannies of a "mainstream" media set on mocking our beliefs, controlling our decisions, and extinguishing our freedoms.

Does the audience of CNN have to accept it as a fact that there don't seem to be any moderate Republican voices in the USA left? Does CNN really have such a hard time to find right-wing commentators who are not simply nuts? Would for example the BBC in the UK even remotely consider inviting "pundits" from extreme right-wing parties?

In the current political climate in the USA, nothing seems to be a surprise any more. What would have been an almost outrageous suggestion in previous times now passes as routine business.

Moving on: Erick Erickson from "Red State", another extreme right-wing CNN-commentator, is not Sarah Palin's friend any more. He published several mocking post over the last days, picking up on the fact that Sarah Palin missed her own deadline for declaring her candidacy, and he writes today:

It is now October even in Alaska and Sarah Palin has not announced by her own deadline.

I guess she could still do it this month. But if she can’t even keep to her own deadline and hasn’t really had a job for two years and could have made up her mind, why keep stringing us along.

This hasn’t just become a joke, but a bad joke.

Sarah Palin has of course always been a bad joke. In a longer comment at the Red-State post, a reader expressed his/her disappointment:

But, as we discovered, Mrs. Palin chose to lead not the movement, but her own personality cult. She was “considering” a run. Okay, good. I hoped that if she ran, she would have solid policies to run on, and be able to mount a serious presidential campaign based on issues. She was unpopular in general, but still popular with the base. If she won the nomination, she could overcome her unpopularity. So, I still had faith.

But time kept going by. People were announcing left and right. The campaign was progressing. Palin became less and less relevant as a political figure. And she saw it. This is where she began to seriously hemorrhage support within the movement. I was one of the supporters that she lost. Instead of building up leaders within the movement, she chose to tear them down. A couple of examples from recent weeks- the bogus charge that Rick Perry engaged in “crony capitalism.” and the stupid remark that Herman Cain was the “flavor of the month.” These are two recent examples, but go back, and you’ll find these starting a few months ago.

Sorry, Mrs. Palin. You aren’t a candidate. It’s time for you to either help the movemnent forward or shut up. But she doesn’t want to. She got used to the popularity that she once had, and the personality cult that was built around her.

It therefore appears that there is only her shrinking base of cultists left who still more or less believe in her and expect that the masses will rise up for Sarah her sweep her to Washington in order to rid the nation of all evil. However, even her die-hard cultists appear to be worn out, due to the many blunders of the Palin-camp. This includes the fact that SarahPAC wasn't so far able to deliver exclusive pre-release DVD copies of "The Undefeated" to the buyers who paid $ 100 for them instead of the normal price, as recent comments at "Comnservatives4Palin" revealed.

I would also like to include an older, wonderful clip by Lawrence O'Donnell, when he in July this year slammed Newsweek for the terrible puff-piece about Sarah Palin - it's worth to be revisited:





So it seems that in the near future, we will be able to virtually forget about the Queen from Wasilla - although I am sure that the final journey of this trainwreck will still produce many fascinating stories.

But there are other stories which are even more important. I planned already for quite a while to write a large posts about the Koch Brothers and the background of their front groups like "Americans for Prosperity", groups which will possibly play a big role in the coming propaganda war of the 2012 election. The Koch Brothers themselves said that the 2012 presidential elections will be the "mother of all wars", so it surely will be a nasty and vicious fight battle.

UPDATE:

I just now created a youtube-clip with one of the most important parts of the secret recordings from the Koch 2011 Summer Seminar (Charles Koch: "Mother of all wars in the next 18 months") which had origjnally been published by Mother Jones and Brad Blog. It's much more accessible this way:



But not so fast: Regarding the Koch Brothers, explosive news arrived today. Bloomberg Markets Magazine will publish a major, damning story on the Koch Brothers, and Salon reports today that the Koch Brothers are "spooked" by the story and that anonymous sources are already trying to discredit the story.


Based on the prebuttal items appearing this week in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, and U.S. News and World Report, the Bloomberg story focuses on alleged malfeasance and/or fraud and/or bad behavior by the conglomerate Koch Industries.

One of those episodes apparently involves bribery by a Koch subsidiary in France, according to the piece by Washington Examiner editorial page editor Mark Tapscott. He reports that “Bloomberg reporters have been trolling among former Koch employees overseas in search of disaffected voices willing to talk,” but Tapscott suspects the story may be animated by bias against the Tea Party. And he notes that, “Koch USA officials say they were as surprised and angered as anybody else when they were first apprised of the bribery allegations, and moved as quickly as possible to get to the bottom of the situation and fix it.”

All three of the prebuttal stories cite an unnamed source who was interviewed for the Bloomberg story; it’s not clear if that same source spoke with all three publications. The Examiner describes the source as a former government official.

Another one of the issues addressed in the Bloomberg article will be the Kochs’ past business dealings with Iran, according to the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis, who also argues that this is not “terribly newsworthy” and the Kochs are being singled out for their politics.

Meanwhile, Paul Bedard of U.S. News reports:

One of those interviewed by Bloomberg for the upcoming article said the firm received four pages of single-spaced questions, all dealing with old trade and environmental problems and issues the company says it has fixed. None were about the firm’s politics or the Koch brother’s support for conservative causes, though the firm believes that is the focus.

Clearly, the Kochs are nervous about what Bloomberg has coming. And as it turns out, they’ve used the prebuttal strategy before. In April 2010 I got an unsolicited email from Koch Industries’ spokeswoman offering to “reiterate some important facts.” She said that Koch Industries and the Koch brothers had never funded the Tea Party, in case I was wondering. That, of course, was not true. And a few months later, Jane Mayer’s now famous expose on the Kochs and the Tea Party was published in the New Yorker.

Kathleen and I already received a full copy of the Bloomberg story about the Koch Brothers, and we plan to publish an in-depth report about it soon. The story contains some real bomshells, and at the end of the article it is revealed that no less than fifteen Bloomberg-journalists all over the globe contributed to the story. It looks like this piece will be as big as the groundbreaking article about the Koch Brothers by Jane Mayer's in the New Yorker.

While CNN pals around with extreme right-wingers and call this journalism, real investigative journalism fortunately still exists, and finds "new homes", like "Bloomberg Markets Magazine."


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UPDATE:

Following a suggestion from our reader Kasha Knish, here is the live stream from Occupy Wall Street protests:

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

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