Saturday, January 14th, 2017
Thom Hartmann, Social Commentator and Media Host - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: Thom Hartmann is dead on. He sees what is happening to the media clearly, and I have chosen this essay because I am very much in accord with what it says.
The Media Trend is a very big deal, and not discussed nearly enough. Six corporations control 90% of the media in America, and they have profit as their first priority, constrained to varying degrees by cultural norms of fairness. And yet at the same time with the internet more and more people are posting public information. One effect of this is the rise of the power of false news. Credibility can no longer be be taken for granted.
I think we are going through a change equivalent to the Gutenberg Bible printing in 1455, which demonstrated movable type printing. A paradigm change is coming.
Television control room
Credit: henryehooper.wordpress.com
The media are engaged in an orgy of navel-gazing about the Trump presidency, but they’re totally, utterly, absolutely, no-way-in-hell willing to gaze at their own navel.
Did Russian hackers revealing that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile had put their thumb on the scale over at the DNC against Bernie cause Trump to win? Did he win because working white men are “angry”? Did he win because Hillary failed to campaign in the critical Rustbelt swing states? Did he win because of the Russians’ media operations? Is he going to be president because so many people are so upset with “gummint”?
These (among others) are the memes that you’ll find virtually every hour on TV news. But have you ever, anywhere (other than Free Speech TV), seen a TV conversation about the role the media itself played in getting Trump elected, and why they did it?
The numbers are easy to find online Trump got between $2 and $3 billion in free media coverage, while Hillary struggled to break into the evening news, and Bernie was largely ignored until the final […]
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Friday, January 13th, 2017
, - Reuters/The Raw Story
Stephan: Get ready folks. It's starting.
Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy House Majority Leader
Republican lawmakers will begin voiding dozens of new U.S. regulations at the end of the month to fulfill their promise to undo Democratic President Barack Obama’s legacy, focusing on environmental and labor rules, the House of Representatives’ second most powerful Republican said on Thursday.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the Republicans who will shortly control both Congress and the White House for the first time in 10 years have made reforming federal regulation a top priority alongside repealing the Obamacare healthcare program and rewriting the tax code.
Republicans are on a blitz to radically reform the vast federal bureaucracy, where they say appointed officials create costly, burdensome red tape that stifles economic growth. Once Republican President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20, they will have a like-minded ally in the Oval Office to sign their measures into law.
On the chopping block are dozens of new rules that the outgoing Obama administration has finalized since the end of May on energy, the environment, transportation, banking, finance, education and media ownership.
Republicans will ax them using the Congressional Review Act, which […]
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Friday, January 13th, 2017
Stephan: I listened to the hearings today, including the very weird never before occurring event, which no one has explained, when C-Span's Congressional hearing coverage went dark and was replaced with RT (Russian) TV.
My takeaway from the hearings this week is that in place of men and women who may have been flawed but who basically meant well for the country, we find nominated corrupt trolls with all manner of ideological, theological, and kleptological hidden agendas. And to this executive branch cabal we must add a Congress under the control of men and women stoned on the toxic fantasies of the theocratic racist right. And we are all going to see it play out beginning with killing Obamacare.
Do you feel a little like Dante in the Inferno when he lost his path? Me too.
U.S. Budget in 1 Day $10,460,188,800
After an all-night vote-a-rama on Wednesday, the Senate today took its first real legislative tugs at unraveling the Affordable Care Act—the healthcare law that currently provides insurance to more than 20 million people who didn’t have it before. Passing early this morning with a vote of 51 to 48, the budget resolution is the opening move in a three-part process to repeal and replace Obamacare. It is not, as some congressional Republicans would lead you to believe, now a done deal. A full-blown repeal is still far from over, with many opportunities to fizzle out or get derailed in the process.
But with Republicans using a budgetary loophole to finally get the repeal they’ve always wanted, it can be hard to know exactly where things stand. So here’s a quick guide to how the repeal process is going to go down. Probably.
Step 1: Budget Resolution
This is what the Senate voted on today. It’s not a special piece of legislation: Congress passes a budget resolution every year. Because it’s not a law, it’s not something the President has to sign; it’s just a road map for how much the federal government […]
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Friday, January 13th, 2017
Stephan: We are witnessing the most extraordinary assault on the First Amendment by Trump and his administration as they disconnect from the truth that I have ever witnessed. This is straight out of the Fascist playbook; I mean really like a cookbook. Here is a good story showing what I mean.
Did Trump mock a disabled reporter, or did your eyes, and the Hollywood elite make you think he did?
Did he convince Ford not to move a car plant to Mexico, saving American jobs, or was it all a
fabrication for publicity? Did he win the election with a historically
narrow victory, or did he score a
“landslide”? The questions are endless, and the answers, unless you’re paying very close attention — all the time — can require significant effort to ascertain. Reality is becoming hazy in the era of Trump. And that’s no accident.
The fact is Trump has become America’s gaslighter in chief.
If you’ve never heard the term, prepare to learn it and live with it every day. Unless Trump starts behaving in […]
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Friday, January 13th, 2017
Jeff Manning, - The Oregonian
Stephan: Here is another illustration of why I believe GMO industrial agriculture is the wrong path. It represents a dominionist worldvview, and is not productive of wellbeing.
And just at the technical level by analogy it is like giving a toddler a gun.
Another day dawns in Linn County, grass seed capital of the world. Some players in the industry fear a genetically modified grass on the loose in Oregon could hurt their business.
Credit: jeff Manning
After more than a decade of unsuccessful efforts to eradicate the genetically modified grass it created and allowed to escape, lawn and garden giant Scotts Miracle-Gro now wants to step back and shift the burden to Oregonians.
The federal government is poised to allow that to happen by relinquishing its oversight, even as an unlikely coalition of farmers, seed dealers, environmentalists, scientists and regulators cry foul.
The altered grass has taken root in Oregon, of all places, the self-professed grass seed capital of the world with a billion-dollar-a-year industry at stake. The grass has proven hard to kill because it’s been modified to be resistant to Roundup, the ubiquitous, all-purpose herbicide.
The situation is particularly tense in Malheur County, where Scotts’ altered grass has taken root after somehow jumping the Snake River from test beds in Idaho.
“Imagine I had a big, sloppy, nasty Rottweiler, and you lived next door in your […]
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Is Donald Trump really a “
