Guest editorial by D.R. Tucker

As a disillusioned conservative, what I wouldn't give to have someone who could make logical, fact-based arguments from the right. How interesting would it be to have someone just as intellectually skilled as MSNBC's Chris Hayes, just as sharp as him, just as devoted to sound logic as him-but coming from the opposite perspective?

Where the hell are the public intellectuals on the right, anyway? It used to bug me that Fox "News" Channel would promote Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity as the main faces of their network. I never had the sense that O'Reilly was actually a conservative, merely someone who knew that repeating conservative memes over and over again would be lucrative. As for Hannity, he lost me back in 2001 when I tuned into his radio show and heard him declare that he would condemn his kid if he decided to get an earring. What is this, I thought to myself, 1978?

One can debate when the right stopped investing in its intellectual infrastructure, but one cannot debate the reality of this phenomenon. Oh, wait --- the right debates the reality of certain phenomena all the time. Look at global warming, for just a start...

Sean Hannity makes a living dishing it out --- perhaps I should say shoveling it --- but he seems to have trouble taking it in return.

If you missed his "EXCLUSIVE!" Fox "News" interview last night with two young Breitbart rubes, featuring the shocking, unedited version of the video of Barack Obama in his 1991 Harvard days that the late Andrew Breitbart had long promised would help destroy the President, well, you didn't miss much. Not much more than a "smoking hug" and the latest embarrassing moment from the Rightwing's current collective nervous breakdown, anyway.

I happened to catch it though. And I enjoyed it so much, I tweeted mercifully about it while watching. For example, as it ended, I observed...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: The sun also rises --- two days earlier?!?! (in Greenland); Carbon capture project may be failing in Canada; Obama orders overhaul of regulations to help U.S. businesses ... PLUS: Eisenhower's other prescient warning, 50 years ago this week ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Scientists warn of a future "superstorm" in CA; Obama to discuss clean energy with Chinese premier's visit?; "Managed retreat" for California coastal town; ABC Reports On Fossil-Fueled Climate Catastrophes; Arch Coal refused plan to reduce mining impact; Canada bans toxic BPA in kids' toys; Experts warn of looming global food crisis; Toxic parking lots! ... PLUS: Surprise! Opponents of 'fracking' disclosure take big money from industry ....

As you may have noticed (or expected), I've been doing a lot of radio lately, discussing the AZ Shooting and related issues, such as the RW media and Democratic Party culpability and what needs to be done about it.

A discussion I had earlier this week with the non-partisan Allen Handelman on North Carolina's powerful 100k watt "Super Station," FM Talk 101.1 WZTK was particularly enlightening, I think. Most interesting was that the bulk of the callers --- even though I had been hoping for folks to call in disagreeing with my take --- seemed to generally agree with me. That, even on this station in supposedly "red" NC which features both non-RW talkers as well as far RW misinformants and miscreants such as Michael Savage and Neal Boortz who use our publicly owned airwaves to skew the nation with damnable lies and propaganda.

Happily, NC's FM Talk 101.1 is the exception to the national rule, as it uses its licensed airwaves to serve the public interest, as they are supposed to by law, by offering a variety of political viewpoints. In the bargain, they are the area's #1 talk station (yes, even beating the stations which carry Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc.). That, of course, would go against a lot of the "conventional wisdom" (propagated, naturally, by RWingers) which says that NC is "red," that RWingers only want to listen to RW talk, and that folks like Limbaugh and Hannity are so "good" and so many people agree with their "point of view" that they can't be beat. Of course, having the biggest 100k watt blowtorch in town never hurts either, as is the case in most places where the most powerful signal also seems to receive the most listeners for some odd reason.

So where RW stations are placed on 50,000 watt clear channel transmitters, they tend to handily beat the 1k and 5k and 10k stations where one may be able to hear progressive talk --- if you are in a town lucky enough to have such a station and live close enough to its transmitter to actually hear it.

If you'd like to listen to my two "hours" (with commercials already removed, they're really about 40 mins each) with Allen, they can be downloaded or listened to online below. My thanks to Allen for both having me and for sharing the audio files. He also informs me that he'll be re-playing these two hours on his nationally syndicated show as well this weekend...

Guest Blogged by Sue Wilson

In the October issue of O magazine, Democratic consultant and commentator Donna Brazile did the unthinkable: she used the "F" word --- in Oprah Winfrey's publication, no less! Eyebrows are being raised across the political spectrum.

Okay, not that "F" word, a different one which is, apparently, far more controversial these days: Brazile says that if she "were in charge" her first priority would be to bring back the Fairness Doctrine." She says that that would require "holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance in an honest, equitable, and balanced fashion."

To the uninitiated, bringing Fairness to the public airwaves --- broadcast radio and TV --- is a no-brainer. But to Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and an army of 550,000 amassed to keep the nation's radio airwaves under "conservative" control, Brazile's declaration of priorities could be a call to arms. Is it possible that the Democratic establishment is finally ready for a fight to take control of their message? While no longer with the DNC, Brazile is still closely aligned with the Democratic power establishment after all.

Okay, time for a bit of history.

Our elders will remember a time when radio was America's number one source of news and information. And they remember being horrified at how Tokyo Rose and our enemies used the radio airwaves to promote hate and propaganda against the U.S.

So they watched as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and radio station owners worked together to prevent propaganda from ever being broadcast over the public airwaves in these United States of America. This coalition of government and business put the "Fairness Doctrine" in place to ensure a healthy, reasoned discourse so critical to our democracy.

The thing is --- and a point important for those who believe much more information is now available on cable and the Internet --- radio is still America's number one source of news and information. More people listen to radio than watch television, read newspapers, or go online. Nearly fifty million people in the U.S. listen to talk radio.

But Fairness? Equal Time? Reasoned discourse? Those went out the window in 1987 with - drumroll, please - President Ronald Reagan...

Earlier this week, the Brooklyn D.A. concluded a five-month investigation of the Brooklyn ACORN videos, finding "no criminality." Following the release of the findings, Rupert Murdoch's own New York Post, of all places, reported it this way:

Using similar language, the New York Daily News reported a law enforcement source as noting: "They edited the tape to meet their agenda."

The New York Times, the so-called "paper of record," while reporting that the DA found no criminality, offered no such coverage of the DA's office explaining that the videos were deceptively and misleading edited and promoted as if they revealed something they actually didn't. The language used by Times reporter Andy Newman even appears to defy the paper's own Public Editor Clark Hoyt's recommendation --- as he shared it with me via email personally --- to "avoid language that says or suggests that O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp when he captured the ACORN employees on camera." (More specific details on that in my post from yesterday.)

In the meantime, as the Times continues to fail, last night Stephen Colbert mocked the entire ACORN "pimp" hoax as we've been revealing it over the last several weeks and, along with it, James O'Keefe, Andrew Breitbart, Fox "News" --- and, yes, indirectly, the New York Times --- by sharing his own "exclusive," damning, and heavily-edited video interview...

Related: Yesterday ACORN launched a campaign to fight back and "Demand Accountability" from the Times and the other media outlets that have grotesquely misreported this story and have still failed to correct their damagingly inaccurate coverage. More on that campaign and how you can add your voice to it, right here...

Just last week Sean Hannity of Fox "News" was forced to offer an apology of sorts for "inadvertently" using falsified footage to make a recent tea bagger protest look larger than it was. The admission came only after Comedy Central's The Daily Show called Fox out for the scam. Though Hannity suggested he was sorry for the "mistake" where two-month-old footage apparently edited itself into a report on a D.C. rally held earlier that day, nobody has been held accountable for what appears to have been a not-"inadvertent"-at-all attempt at deceiving viewers.

As we noted at the time, had Keith Olbermann done the same thing, we can only imagine the organized wingnut campaign that would still be howling for his firing, boycotts of MSNBC and GE, CBS/Dan Rather-styled witch-hunt "internal investigations," and more. But, since Hannity's a "conservative" Republican, it's okay, and no sense of accountability or personal responsibility is necessary for such folks.

Well, that's good, because yesterday Fox did it again when "news" reporter Gregg Jarrett noted that Sarah Palin is "continuing to draw huge crowds while she’s promoting her brand new book."

"Take a look at --- these are some of the pictures just coming in to us," Jarrett told viewers as they rolled footage of Palin speaking at campaign rallies from last year's 2008 Presidential race. (See video above right.)

Fox has since issued a statement calling it all "a production error" and promising "an on-air explanation" during Thursday's broadcast of Jarrett's ironically named Happening Now "news" program on which the footage aired yesterday. Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp" blog reports that "serious disciplinary action will be taken for those responsible."

Sure it will. And how about for that whole Hannity thing? "Serious disciplinary action" there as well? How about for these "errors"? Don't hold your breath.

(Related Note: On Monday, the UK Guardian ran my opinion piece on the propaganda outlet that is Fox "News" and the Obama Administration's correct and long-overdue decision to call them out as such. The article certainly brought out the tea baggers on both sides of the pond, bringing in some 261 comments in reply.)

My latest piece at the Guardian today, as written under the auspices of the Commonweal Institute (where I am a Fellow),seems to have stirred up the Tea Baggery on both sides of the pond.

I always love the commenters on columns I do at the Guardian. My favorite exchange there so far this morning begins with commenter "Zounds" objecting to my points with: "Active discourse also requires a wider range of intellectual influences than all the American news channels offer."

To which "jcpenny", apparently an American, replied: "I've never seen British Tellie to provide the variety the American Tellie does. Perhaps our forebarers had a reason for leaving?"

To which "Zounds" replied hilariously in turn: "I believe the lack of variety on British TV was indeed the primary reason the Pilgrim Fathers gave."

:-) Add your own two cents and read the full column here...

[Updated twice below. Once with Hannity's "apology" and then with Stewart's response to it.]

The Daily Show still offers just about the best news coverage on cable...

UPDATE: Media Matters documents how Hannity's phony video is only "the tip of Fox News' video-doctoring iceberg"...

UPDATE, 7:48pm PT: Having no choice but to cop to it, Hannity admits getting busted, though claims it was "an inadvertent mistake". How one can inadvertently go fetch footage from two months ago, and "inadvertently" edit it into a report on an event that took place earlier on the same day is not entirely clear.

He failed to explain to his viewers the context in which the "incorrect video" actually was shown. Neither did he run Stewart's report from last night explaining clearly how Hannity had attempted to fool them. So, as usual, Hannity's viewers remain largely both in the dark and misinformed.

Here's the transcript and the video of Hannity's statement, which came at the very end of his show tonight, about an hour ago...

Michael Moore tweeted within the past hour, in response to yesterday's shooting spree at Fort Hood:

The wingnuts, of course, are out for blood following the shooting. Predictably, they're going after Muslims, under the presumption that the suspect, Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was acting out of incitement from Islam.

If that turns out to be true --- and there's no actual evidence to support that at this time, as far as I know --- I'd agree that any person or persons who would incite such violence should be held accountable. Just as those who'd incite similar violence --- for example, in the cases of the murder of Kansas obstetrician Dr. George Tiller or the hanging of Clay County, KY census worker Bill Sparkman --- should be held similarly accountable.

Yet, I heard few such calls from the Right after those incidents. In the case of Tiller, his accused murderer Scott Roeder was regarded by the Right as either a hero or a lone, crazy guy (depending on how far to the Right they happened to be). I've heard no condemnation from the Right, or calls for accountability for the constant, repeated, almost daily characterization of Tiller, to millions and millions of Americans over the air waves by folks like Bill O'Reilly (the most watched man on cable news), as a "baby killer", "executing babies", "death merchant", etc., even though Tiller was a medical doctor performing lawful services.

I heard no wingnut condemnation of Bernie Goldberg --- and certainly not of Christianity as a whole --- even after it was revealed that his book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And All Franken Is #37), was a major inspiration for Jim David Adkisson's shooting spree at a Knoxville, TN Unitarian Church in July of 2008 which killed two and injured seven others...

Michael Moore calmly, efficiently and elegantly mopped the floor up with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. Poor, sad, lost, cowardly Sean never saw it coming and never even knew what hit him. Via RAW STORY...

Via RAW STORY...

So far, it's been almost a full month since Fox "News"/ABC Radio propagandist Sean Hannity volunteered to be waterboarded for charity, claiming it was not torture. Despite MSNBC's Keith Olbermann offering $1000 for the troops, for every second Hannity lasts, the cowardly wingnut torture apologists has failed to revisit the topic since his original act of phony bravado.

See "Mancow" being waterboarded, and then commenting on it, in the two very short videos below. And remember, unlike the detainees that we tortured, he was not being waterboarded by hostile folks, and was able to call it off at any time, on his own...

On a related topic... I was on San Francisco's usually very rightwing radio station KGO last night, with the progressive Christine Craft sitting in as late-night host. Lots of similarly cowardly wingnuts called in to inform us that waterboarding isn't torture at all. Here's the audio. Enjoy.

MP3 Download, or listen online (appx 35 mins)...

Update: My VelvetRevolution.us colleague Kevin Zeese writes in to note that his coverage of the same news item at Voters For Peace, also includes a video of Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens being waterboard in February of 2008, to similar result as "Mancow's." He also lasts about 5 seconds under waterboarding by friendly torturers.

UPDATE 5/23/09: And this just in via ThinkProgress...

UPDATE 5/29/09: Olbermann interviews Mancow after his waterboarding. Video follows below. Here's a bit of the transcript...

No. He's not crazy at all. Glenn Beck pours metaphorical "gasoline" on "himself," his viewers, and his imagined newly-tyrannical America, and his own, and his viewers', rapidly accelerating, self-perpetuated sense of victim-hood. When he/they eventually --- and it shouldn't be long at this rate --- actually light the match and blow themselves/us up, feel free to point back to this item, when we're told "who could have predicted it?"...

Beck's daily hour on governmentally subsidized cable TV, and three hours daily on our publicly owned radio waves, is a tremendously responsible use government welfare, and reflects brilliantly on our Founding Fathers' guarantee to one single industry --- and one single industry only (the press) --- in our U.S. Constitution.

That's a very responsible use of that singular Constitutional dispensation, Glenn. Keep up the bad work.

BTW, in case you missed it on Wednesday, Jon Stewart --- an actually responsible steward of public largess --- spoke directly and brilliantly to the crazies like Beck and Hannity and O'Reilly and Levin and Bachmann et al, by informing them (since they don't seem to know): "I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing...that's not tyranny, that's democracy"...

That video --- actually worth watching and taking notes --- follows below...

Imagine, if you will, that the situation had been reversed, and that it had been Norm Coleman who was found to have received more votes than Al Franken for the U.S. Senate seat in MN.

Imagine if Al Franken's campaign, as opposed to Norm Coleman's, had now been found to have disclosed the names and credit card numbers of their donors on their own website, where they also inappropriately stored the unencrypted three-digit security codes of contributor credit cards, violated state law by failing to notify anybody about it, and then lied about it.

Imagine if everything --- actually, if any one of the dozens of improprieties --- that Norm Coleman has pulled since the November election, had been done by Al Franken instead.

Might Sean Hannity be repeating, over and over, something akin to the following for three hours a day on the radio (over our publicly-owned airwaves), and during his hour-long solo Fox "News" freak show, five days a week??...

After all the stuff, nonsense, bullshit, lies, hoaxes, WSJ "editorials", Fox "News" Alerts, Presidential candidate lies, phony "conspiracy" claims, and-wall-to-wall cable and radio garbage that we had to endlessly suffer through, for months on end, leading up to last year's election, about supposed, massive "voter fraud" being committed --- by Democrats, naturally --- it turns out that in one of OH's largest counties, an exhaustive investigation by a Republican Special Prosecutor, appointed by his former GOP prosecutor partner (the Hamilton County Prosecutor who was also a state co-chair for the McCain/Palin campaign), looked into hundreds of "serious" allegations of such "fraud" and found exactly one such case.

One case.

No, it wasn't Ann Coulter. She commits her voter fraud in FL and in CT instead. But it was someone who had already turned himself in. His vote was never counted.

That's it. One case. Out of nearly half a million votes cast in Hamilton County, just one fraudulent vote was found. The Special Prosecutor's report is here [PDF].

After an entire season, using facts and reality-based information to fend off the insidious, America-hating forces of the evil Republican War on Democracy and their attempts to undermine the very core, the very heartbeat of our democracy, of our nation, for little more than attempted, pathetic --- and ultimately futile --- political gain, is anybody gonna apologize here? Anybody?

Rush? Sean? O'Reilly? John Fund? John McCain? John Danforth? Karl Rove? Tom Feeney? "Thor" Hearne? Todd Rokita? Jackasess at Powerline? Jackasses at Redstate? The entirety of the shameful, unpatriotic Fox "News" Channel? Anybody? Any of you liars and cowards and thieves and democracy-hating, facist-loving, Stalinesque, Saddamites have the guts, the courage, the sense of decency --- the love for your country --- to stand up and say you were wrong? That you are sorry?

Anyone? Anywhere?

Of course not. Especially not in Minnesota where not only have they found no such "voter fraud" epidemic --- as committed by Democrats or ACORN or anybody else --- but the Republicans are now trying to include actual fraudulent ballots in the results of the U.S. Senate race. Now that they need them in hopes of "winning".

No apologies, of course, because they'll all be back in two years and the same horseshit will be flowing loud and clear, once again from their democracy-hating souls, out to millions of Americans who are ready to believe --- listening over the corporately-run, though publicly-owned airwaves --- all over again and again and again. And again.

Not that they'll wait that long. Measures claimed to supposedly prevent (non-existent) "voter fraud" --- little more than measures meant to rob minorities, the elderly, students, and anyone else who tends to not vote Republican, of their Constitutional rights --- are moving forward, as John Gideon noted last night, and even as we speak, in TX, in UT, in MS and wherever else you can find depraved, soulless, Republican cretins who despise America, its history, and all that it pretends, and tries desperately, to stand for.

I am ashamed to call you people my fellow citizens.