Liberation News Service

Paul Krugman, NY Times: Let's face it: whatever
happens in Thursday's debate, cable news will proclaim
President Bush the winner. This will reflect the
political bias so evident during the party
conventions. It will also reflect the undoubted fact
that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood
imitation.
But what will the print media do? Let's hope they
don't do what they did four years ago.
Interviews with focus groups just after the first 2000
debate showed Al Gore with a slight edge. Post-debate
analysis should have widened that edge. After all,
during the debate, Mr. Bush told one whopper after
another - about his budget plans, about his
prescription drug proposal and more. The fact-checking
in the next day's papers should have been devastating.
But as Adam Clymer pointed out yesterday on the Op-Ed
page of The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000
debates emphasized not what the candidates said but
their "body language." After the debate, the lead
stories said a lot about Mr. Gore's sighs, but nothing
about Mr. Bush's lies. And even the fact-checking
pieces "buried inside the newspaper" were, as Mr.
Clymer delicately puts it, "constrained by an effort
to balance one candidate's big mistakes" - that is,
Mr. Bush's lies - "against the other's minor errors."
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Washington Monthly: The
strangest thing about states is that they actually
have characteristics...And people who move to Virginia
from neighboring North Carolina or West Virginia
believe that they have traded up in the world, to a
state that's more prosperous and classy, the heart of
the Southern establishment.
It is this cultural difference that explains one of
the mysteries of the current presidential race: John
Kerry, the Massachusetts Yankee, is doing rather well
here. He launched his campaign at Norfolk Naval base
with an aircraft carrier in the background, and went
on to crush Sen. John Edwards, a native from North
Carolina, in the state's March primary. Most observers
had thought that if Kerry stood any chance in the
South, it would be in Tennessee, Arkansas, and
Louisiana – the states which Clinton won and Gore came
closest to taking. But soon after he became his
party's presumptive nominee, a strange pattern kept
popping up in the polls: In Virginia, not considered a
swing-state, Kerry stayed close behind President Bush.

Stranger, www.takebackthemedia.com: Well, here we are. We're a little less than two months out from Election Day, and the corporate media is filling people's heads with misinformation and worthless, trivial matters that aren't worth the time spent thinking about them. Rather than talking about the fact that Bush plans to cut funding for Homeland Security if he's returned to office or talking about how Iraq is circling the drain at this very moment as a result of the Bush administration's utter incompetence, CNN and the rest give 5 hurricane reports an hour, when they're not (still!) talking about Laci Peterson or Martha Stewart.
The Republican party and corporate media have snuggled in together for the duration of the campaign. You could see it in the saturation coverage that the cable nets gave to the fatally flawed polls that Time and Newsweek reported in the days after the RNC convention in New York, which gave Bush an 11-point lead that was simply never there. You could see it in the wall-to-wall coverage they gave to the Swift Boat Liars for Bush - nearly two weeks' worth of repeating charges that were shaky to begin with and stood up to about five minutes of scrutiny.
That the cable news nets have taken leave from the facts in order to prop up the Bush administration is, in the 3 years after the September 11 attacks, a given. Every utterance by Bush is given equal weight and treated like the Sermon on the Mount, while Kerry's blistering attacks on Bush and Cheney get mere seconds of coverage. The shrieking-head programs on Fox and MSNBC now don't even bother with the true liberal viewpoint, content with instead having a conservative and a certified right-wing loon provide the 'debate' - which in most instances consists of debating whether George W. Bush is great or really, really great.
This web site is edging up on being two years old, and we've always advocated taking back the media through action alerts and other ways of letting corporate media know we're watching them. Well, the realization has dawned that the media may just be too far gone to get a handle on at tis point, and the only thing that will reverse the media's slide into terminal mediocrity is putting John Kerry into the White House and hoping like hell that he installs a bulldog as chairman of the FCC. It's going to take a lot of legislation and maybe even prosecution to return the media to a form which will guarantee even minimal levels of fairness and balance. The Fairness Doctrine must be brought back in order to afford a public platform that disseminates more than GOP talking points, and the Justice Department may have to 'Ma Bell' the media conglomerates in order to return media outlets back to local, community-oriented programming. It's going to take a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of subpoenas, maybe some invocation of RICO statutes. There is the distinct possibility that only a part of what needs to be done will be accomplished in John Kerry's first term, and it may even take longer than two terms to get the media's house in order. And that means that there's only one short-term course of action that will make any difference.
Turn it off. Turn it all off.

Associated Press: A group of 600 Democrats crowded the 4H Auditorium at the State Fairgrounds Friday hoping to see for themselves whether presidential candidate John Kerry's wife was as outspoken and sharp-tongued as some have described her.
Teresa Heinz Kerry delivered for her supporters when she talked back to a heckler who implied her husband's a flip-flopper.
During a question and answer session, a young man demanded to know why Kerry voted to give Bush authority to attack Iraq but voted against an $87 billion appropriation bill to support the war effort there.
"Is that the kind of thing he would do as president?," the man asked.
Heinz Kerry sharply asked the man whether he had read the legislation that was voted on.
When he said no, she told him that Kerry had supported $60 billion in military appropriations for Iraq, but would not vote for the full $87 billion because he considered it a "blank check." Kerry was one of 11 Democrats to vote against the bill.
"And we knew they'd already given Haliburton millions in no-bid contracts," she snapped, referring to the company formerly led by Vice President Dick Cheney.
"If you want to say (Kerry) flip-flopped, just say so, don't try to hide," Heinz Kerry scolded.
The young man responsed with chanting "Four more years!" as he walked out of the auditorium. The partisan crowd's cheer of "Six more weeks!" quickly drowned him out.

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/opinion/28krugman.html

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Swagger vs. Substance
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 28, 2004

Let's face it: whatever happens in Thursday's debate,
cable news will proclaim President Bush the winner.
This will reflect the political bias so evident during
the party conventions. It will also reflect the
undoubted fact that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint
Eastwood imitation.

But what will the print media do? Let's hope they
don't do what they did four years ago.

Interviews with focus groups just after the first 2000
debate showed Al Gore with a slight edge. Post-debate
analysis should have widened that edge. After all,
during the debate, Mr. Bush told one whopper after
another - about his budget plans, about his
prescription drug proposal and more. The fact-checking
in the next day's papers should have been devastating.

But as Adam Clymer pointed out yesterday on the Op-Ed
page of The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000
debates emphasized not what the candidates said but
their "body language." After the debate, the lead
stories said a lot about Mr. Gore's sighs, but nothing
about Mr. Bush's lies. And even the fact-checking
pieces "buried inside the newspaper" were, as Mr.
Clymer delicately puts it, "constrained by an effort
to balance one candidate's big mistakes" - that is,
Mr. Bush's lies - "against the other's minor errors."

The result of this emphasis on the candidates' acting
skills rather than their substance was that after a
few days, Mr. Bush's defeat in the debate had been
spun into a victory.

This time, the first debate will be about foreign
policy, an area where Mr. Bush ought to be extremely
vulnerable. After all, his grandiose promises to rid
the world of evildoers have all come to naught.

Exhibit A is, of course, Osama bin Laden, whom Mr.
Bush promised to get "dead or alive," then dropped
from his speeches after a botched operation at Tora
Bora let him get away. And it's not just bin Laden:
most analysts believe that Al Qaeda, which might have
been crushed if Mr. Bush hadn't diverted resources and
attention to the war in Iraq, is as dangerous as ever.

There's also North Korea, which Mr. Bush declared part
of the "axis of evil," then ignored when its regime
started building nuclear weapons. Recently, when a
reporter asked Mr. Bush about reports that North Korea
has half a dozen bombs, he simply shrugged.

Most important, of course, is Iraq, an unnecessary
war, which - after initial boasts of victory - has
turned into an even worse disaster than the war's
opponents expected.

The Kerry campaign is making hay over Mr. Bush's
famous flight-suit stunt, but for me, Mr. Bush's worst
moment came two months later, when he declared: "There
are some who feel like the conditions are such that
they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on."
When they really did come on, he blinked: U.S. forces
- obviously under instructions to hold down casualties
at least until November - have ceded much of Iraq to
the insurgents.

During the debate, Mr. Bush will try to cover for this
dismal record with swagger, and with attacks on his
opponent. Will the press play Karl Rove's game by, as
Mr. Clymer puts it, confusing political coverage with
drama criticism, or will it do its job and check the
candidates' facts?

There have been some encouraging signs lately. There
was a disturbing interlude in which many news
organizations seemed to accept false claims that Iraq
had calmed down after the transfer of sovereignty. But
now, as the violence escalates, they seem willing to
ask hard questions about Mr. Bush's fantasy version of
the situation in Iraq. For example, a recent Reuters
analysis pointed out that independent sources
contradict his assertions about everything "from
police training and reconstruction to preparations for
January elections."

Mr. Bush is also getting less of a free ride than he
used to when he smears his opponent. Last week, after
Mr. Bush declared that Mr. Kerry "would prefer the
dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in
Iraq today," The Associated Press pointed out that
this "twisted his rival's words" - and then quoted
what John Kerry actually said.

Nonetheless, on Thursday night there will be a
temptation to revert to drama criticism - to emphasize
how the candidates looked and acted, and push analysis
of what they said, and whether it was true, to the
inside pages. With so much at stake, the public
deserves better.

http://www.alternet.org/election04/19993/

Why Virginia Is Tilting Toward Kerry
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Washington Monthly
Posted on September 27, 2004, Printed on September 28,
2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/19993/
The strangest thing about states is that they actually
have characteristics. Start on the bank of a river,
sweep down over thousands of square miles of American
turf, farms, suburbs, and cities, and stop at a line
of longitude; it's not exactly a likely method for
creating a unique culture. And yet somehow, again and
again, it does. Vermont is only split from New
Hampshire by a skinny river and a line slapped on a
map, but its culture is completely distinct, organic
spinach versus the Old Man of the Mountain. Residents
of Massachusetts think Rhode Islanders are parochial,
and Iowans think Kansans are hopeless hicks. And
people who move to Virginia from neighboring North
Carolina or West Virginia believe that they have
traded up in the world, to a state that's more
prosperous and classy, the heart of the Southern
establishment.

It is this cultural difference that explains one of
the mysteries of the current presidential race: John
Kerry, the Massachusetts Yankee, is doing rather well
here. He launched his campaign at Norfolk Naval base
with an aircraft carrier in the background, and went
on to crush Sen. John Edwards, a native from North
Carolina, in the state's March primary. Most observers
had thought that if Kerry stood any chance in the
South, it would be in Tennessee, Arkansas, and
Louisiana – the states which Clinton won and Gore came
closest to taking. But soon after he became his
party's presumptive nominee, a strange pattern kept
popping up in the polls: In Virginia, not considered a
swing-state, Kerry stayed close behind President Bush.
State Republicans called it a mere blip, complained
that the race was still young, and grumbled when local
papers called them up to ask whether Bush might lose
the state come November. Political scientists and
pollsters mostly agreed that a Virginia win would be a
long-shot for the man from Massachusetts. But by the
eve of the Democratic convention in late July, Kerry
and Bush were in a statistical dead-heat, and while
Kerry's campaign chose to pull its Television
advertising from Louisiana and Arkansas, it kept
buying ads in Virginia. Six months ago, Larry Sabato,
the esteemed University of Virginia political
scientist, told reporters that Kerry was a dead duck
in the state. Now, he tells me, Virginia is still
Bush's to lose – but Bush may very well lose it.

A win for Kerry in Virginia, or even a competitive
finish here, would qualify as fairly stunning
political news. Virginia is commonly thought of as the
seat of the South, a place of countless shrines to
Confederate warriors, the home of Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson, and the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign
headquarters. Virginia did not go for either Clinton
or Carter, both Southern Dems. In fact, it hasn't
voted for any Democratic presidential candidate since
1964 and has long been the most reliably Republican
state in the South.

But drive around Virginia, like I did early last
month, and you realize pretty quickly that those same
qualities that distinguish the Old Dominion from the
rest of the South also help explain the surprising
buoyancy of Kerry's candidacy. Put simply, Virginia is
the Massachusetts of the South. Both states pride
themselves on the lead roles they played in the
nation's founding. Colonial Williamsburg, Mount
Vernon, and Monticello are as revered locally as are
Plymouth Rock, Old North Church, and Bunker Hill. Both
states have long maritime traditions and booming
high-tech suburbs. Both have cultures that admire good
government, revere brave public service, trust leading
families to run things, and generally eschew
ideological zealotry and radicalism.

All these attributes can be seen in the kind of
individuals who win statewide office in both places.
Virginia's senior U.S. senator, John Warner, is a GOP
version of Kerry: well-born, courtly, hardworking, a
party man but with an independent streak, and a
decorated Navy veteran. Warner refused to endorse
Oliver North, the Republican candidate for the state's
other Senate seat in 1994 because North was too
radically conservative. And Virginia's current
governor Mark Warner, is a Democratic version of
Massachusetts' GOP governor Mitt Romney: competent,
ideologically moderate, and a successful business
entrepreneur. This centrist Chamber of Commerce
sensibility, which helped make Virginia reliably
Republican long before the less genteel parts of the
South, is what's now helping shift the state towards
Kerry's column this fall.

Giraffes & Presbyterians

If there is a center of the establishment in this
establishmentarian commonwealth, it very well may be
the Second Presbyterian Church in downtown Richmond,
the state capitol. On a recent furnace-hot Sunday
morning, the church looked like I imagine it must have
during the 1950s: pinched, wealthy white faces in
seersucker and bright, flowered dresses, an earnest,
well-meaning sermon about the Rich Fool, the little
blond kids scampering around, frequently censored. The
whole thing looked like a Ralph Lauren catalogue.

After services in the church's dainty library, I met
Hugh Gouldthorpe, an energetic, red-faced man in his
50s with a fringe of curly, mildly eccentric hair, a
senior vice president at Owens & Minor, the nation's
largest medical supply company. "Whatever the
equivalent of a yellow-dog Democrat is, where you vote
for the Republican Party just every time, that's what
I am," he told me. He laughs a lot. Hugh has published
a pair of management books, I've Always Looked up to
Giraffes and How to Feed Giraffes, about how to
develop talented managers "who rise above the crowd,"
and he is wearing an orange silk tie with giraffe
patterns on it and a giraffe pin in his lapel. (You
imagine the church's missionaries in Malawi, stopping
off at the game preserve's gift-shop, catching sight
of some giraffe tchotchkes and thinking, "Oh my, this
would be perfect for Hugh!"). Hugh hasn't made up his
mind yet about who to vote for in November, but, he
says, this is the first time ever that he might go
either way.

The problem, for this man who describes himself as an
"all-around civic leader," is Kerry seems the more
leaderly candidate.

"When Bush came in, the business community thought
they could trust him, they thought it would be like
Reagan, a real leader," Hugh said. "But this hasn't
been that kind of leadership." Everywhere you go in
Richmond, and elsewhere in Virginia, you hear hints of
similar, parallel shifts. Don Owens, a tax attorney,
is voting for the Democratic presidential candidate
for the first time in his life because Bush has been
"untrustworthy," and because of the deficits. Ken
Powell, an investment banker, says his whole firm,
ever-Republican, is wavering, a change he calls
monumental: "They look at the deficits and health care
and education problems and, for the first time,
they're not sure the Republicans are going to hand
over a better country to their children."

Democrats are pushing that case in Loudoun County, the
seat of Virginia's 10th congressional district, on the
expanding western edge of the Washington suburbs. It
is a jaw-dropping wealthy territory, horse country
that has long been overwhelmingly Republican, but the
outward push of migrants from the city and the vast,
high-tech campuses that have grown up around Dulles
airport have changed the cultural composition: The
district gave Gore 46 percent of the vote in 2000,
more than those given a Democrat in recent memory. The
slow erosion of GOP support in exurban neighborhoods
is happening all over the country, including south of
the Mason-Dixon line. But nowhere else in the South is
this phenomenon more likely to have electoral
consequences than in Virginia.

The Wrong Blue Blood

This year, for the first time in four election cycles,
the long-serving Republican incumbent, Frank Wolf, has
a Democratic challenger, a Harvard-trained,
37-year-old former investment banker named James
Socas. The candidate has a laid-back, boosterish,
youth-soccer-coach demeanor and a snapshot-ready,
three-children family; his wife is named Devereux.
It's not that Socas looks as if he's stepped out of a
Norman Rockwell painting; rather, he's updated it for
the 21st-century suburbs. He speaks with passion about
religion and deficits, his eyebrows curving darkly
downward whenever he mentions budget imbalances; had
he run 15 years ago, he would have been a solid Main
Street Republican. But that breed barely exists
anymore, and Socas is trying to woo people like him –
Christian-inflected, deficit-hawk businessmen – over
to the Democrats. His campaign headquarters are in the
basement of his gorgeous, sprawling, must-be-$3
million home, and so in order to get to the phone
bank, the volunteers who show up early on Saturday
morning have got to step over a wheelbarrow-sized
basket teeming with dozens of shoes belonging to
Socas's kids.

When we met in his living room, Socas had just
returned from the national Democratic convention where
he spoke at 4:13 p.m. on Wednesday: not that big an
audience, but "my kids got to watch me on C-Span,
which was nice." The case he made in Boston, and is
repeating on the trail, Socas says, is a fairly simple
one: "I don't have to ask voters to abandon the
Republicans, I just have to explain how the
Republicans have abandoned them, how they've decided
to run to the right and their squandering the legacy
we leave for our children."

The same poor-stewardship case plays remarkably well
in less tony parts of the state, such as the gritty
strip-malled districts of Virginia Beach. This is Navy
country, and the man organizing it is Michael Steven
Myers, who grew up here as a barracks brat son of a
Naval officer. Myers (who joined the Marines) is the
kind of red-state manly-man Vietnam vet who shows up
in Country-and-Western songs; speaking with a
stranger, he moves without warning from macho talk to
an almost uncomfortable emotional intimacy, telling me
vividly how two weeks ago in a park, he started
weeping for his platoon sergeant who died in Vietnam.
Once, half a generation ago, Myers ran for Congress as
a libertarian-tinged independent in Idaho,
black-helicopter country, he got precisely 18 votes.
After his wife died two years ago, he moved back to
his home state of Virginia and, after his first-ever
registration as a Democrat, has now, improbably,
immersed himself in the Kerry campaign. Late nights,
he corners drunk old vets at fried-chicken joints and
harangues them about what Bush has done to their
benefits. He said he's converted a few: "There's a lot
of guys who have told me, Mike, there's no way I'm
going for your guy, but I can't vote for Bush." Then
Myers is off on a long spiel about a play he's written
about the horrors of combat. You quickly learn to
tolerate these spells, wait for him to wind his way
back to the wavering Republican voters. Eventually he
does. "It's leadership," he told me. "That's the
reason everyone here voted for Bush in 2000. Even the
Republicans, they tell me they know they ain't getting
it now."

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights
reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/19993/

http://web.takebackthemedia.com/geeklog/public_html/article.php?story=20040916070023934

Cable news is useless. TURN IT OFF.
Thursday, September 16 2004 @ 07:00 AM GMT
Contributed by: Stranger Well, here we are. We're a
little less than two months out from Election Day, and
the corporate media is filling people's heads with
misinformation and worthless, trivial matters that
aren't worth the time spent thinking about them.
Rather than talking about the fact that Bush plans to
cut funding for Homeland Security if he's returned to
office or talking about how Iraq is circling the drain
at this very moment as a result of the Bush
administration's utter incompetence, CNN and the rest
give 5 hurricane reports an hour, when they're not
(still!) talking about Laci Peterson or Martha
Stewart.

The Republican party and corporate media have snuggled
in together for the duration of the campaign. You
could see it in the saturation coverage that the cable
nets gave to the fatally flawed polls that Time and
Newsweek reported in the days after the RNC convention
in New York, which gave Bush an 11-point lead that was
simply never there. You could see it in the
wall-to-wall coverage they gave to the Swift Boat
Liars for Bush - nearly two weeks' worth of repeating
charges that were shaky to begin with and stood up to
about five minutes of scrutiny.

You can see it in the debacle surrounding CBS' 60
Minutes II report on Bush's desertion from the Texas
Air National Guard. Somehow, after claims of forgery
were made, the story for the cable nets became the
forged documents rather than the legitimiate and
explosive story they contained. To this day, rumors
run rampant and charges are hurled that somehow the
Democrats and the Kerry campaign are behind the memos,
and nary a word is whispered about the fact that Bush
disobeyed a direct order from a superior officer, was
busted down to flying trainer aircraft, and ultimately
grounded from pilot duties. Nothing is said about the
numerous gaps in Bush's record, which move him past
AWOL status and firmly into deserter territory. These
are facts - but for some reason, the cable news
networks are more interested in talking about IBM
Selectric typewriters and proportional spacing.

That the cable news nets have taken leave from the
facts in order to prop up the Bush administration is,
in the 3 years after the September 11 attacks, a
given. Every utterance by Bush is given equal weight
and treated like the Sermon on the Mount, while
Kerry's blistering attacks on Bush and Cheney get mere
seconds of coverage. The shrieking-head programs on
Fox and MSNBC now don't even bother with the true
liberal viewpoint, content with instead having a
conservative and a certified right-wing loon provide
the 'debate' - which in most instances consists of
debating whether George W. Bush is great or really,
really great.

This web site is edging up on being two years old, and
we've always advocated taking back the media through
action alerts and other ways of letting corporate
media know we're watching them. Well, the realization
has dawned that the media may just be too far gone to
get a handle on at tis point, and the only thing that
will reverse the media's slide into terminal
mediocrity is putting John Kerry into the White House
and hoping like hell that he installs a bulldog as
chairman of the FCC. It's going to take a lot of
legislation and maybe even prosecution to return the
media to a form which will guarantee even minimal
levels of fairness and balance. The Fairness Doctrine
must be brought back in order to afford a public
platform that disseminates more than GOP talking
points, and the Justice Department may have to 'Ma
Bell' the media conglomerates in order to return media
outlets back to local, community-oriented programming.
It's going to take a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of
subpoenas, maybe some invocation of RICO statutes.
There is the distinct possibility that only a part of
what needs to be done will be accomplished in John
Kerry's first term, and it may even take longer than
two terms to get the media's house in order. And that
means that there's only one short-term course of
action that will make any difference.

Turn it off. Turn it all off.

Let's face facts here. Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity
are not going to change the formula which has given
them whatever success they have on TV (and even their
'success' must be measured carefully - on O'Reilly's
best day, he still gets his ass kicked by reruns of
cop shows on the commercial networks). They will
continue their incessant liberal-bashing, because it's
a formula that works. And CNN will continue trying to
peel off some of Fox' audience, blissfully ignorant of
the fact that Fox viewers still call them the 'Clinton
News Network.' And MSNBC will present White House
shills all day long (with the notable exception of
Keith Olbermann's excellent 'Countdown'), and they'll
accept their puny audiences and toe the Bush line.

So let them. Kerry/Edwards have all but shut out the
cable news reporters, instead giving press
availability to local media outlets. They're adapting
a strategy that was cooked up by the White House when
they 'moved past the filter' to take their spin on the
Iraq war to regional and local media outlets (they've
abandoned the concept, probably realizing that there's
no way to spin Iraq positively at this point). The
result is that they're building their constituency
from the ground up, without the help of the cable
networks.

And we should follow their lead. CNN and MSNBC can't
draw flies, and Fox is only #1 because they attract
slightly less horrible ratings numbers. When we turn
them all off, we could starve them. Their viewership
numbers at this point are so horrible, that even
losing a couple of thousand people could wipe them off
the ratings charts altogether.

We can do this. If the cable networks will not present
the least bit of balance in their coverage, all we
have to do is shut them off and we can make them cease
to exist as far as the Neilsens are concerned.

I was going to close with a rant on just turning off
your TV, but someone already said it better back in
the day when George W. Bush was still getting smashed
and doing lines down in Texas. Paddy Chayevsky's
character Howard Beale says it all in the brilliant
Network:

We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you
people sit there day after day, night after night, all
ages, colors, creeds - we're all you know. You're
beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning
here. You're beginning to think that the tube is
reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do
whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube,
you eat like the tube, you raise your children like
the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass
madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are
the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your
television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off
right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them
off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking
to you now. Turn them off!"


link to this

Crowd cheers after Heinz Kerry rebuts heckler
posted by: Dan Viens (Web Producer)
Created: 9/25/2004 12:54 PM MDT - Updated: 9/25/2004
12:54 PM MDT


http://9news.com/acm_news.aspx?OSGNAME=KUSA&IKOBJECTID=36f146a1-0abe-421a-018e-f62f7c8edb48&TEMPLATEID=0c76dce6-ac1f-02d8-0047-c589c01ca7bf

PUEBLO, Colo. (AP) - A group of 600 Democrats crowded
the 4H Auditorium at the State Fairgrounds Friday
hoping to see for themselves whether presidential
candidate John Kerry's wife was as outspoken and
sharp-tongued as some have described her.

Teresa Heinz Kerry delivered for her supporters when
she talked back to a heckler who implied her husband's
a flip-flopper.

During a question and answer session, a young man
demanded to know why Kerry voted to give Bush
authority to attack Iraq but voted against an $87
billion appropriation bill to support the war effort
there.

"Is that the kind of thing he would do as president?,"
the man asked.

Heinz Kerry sharply asked the man whether he had read
the legislation that was voted on.

When he said no, she told him that Kerry had supported
$60 billion in military appropriations for Iraq, but
would not vote for the full $87 billion because he
considered it a "blank check." Kerry was one of 11
Democrats to vote against the bill.

"And we knew they'd already given Haliburton millions
in no-bid contracts," she snapped, referring to the
company formerly led by Vice President Dick Cheney.

"If you want to say (Kerry) flip-flopped, just say so,
don't try to hide," Heinz Kerry scolded.

The young man responsed with chanting "Four more
years!" as he walked out of the auditorium. The
partisan crowd's cheer of "Six more weeks!" quickly
drowned him out.

Roberto Costales of Canon City liked the way she dealt
with her heckler.

"Did you notice how she handled that one guy? I bet
she doesn't back down from anybody," he laughed.

In appearances here and before a crowd of 1,700 in
Fort Collins, Heinz Kerry echoed her husband's views
about terrorism, national security, crime, health care
and education.

She said the United States needs a different approach
in the world.

"The way we live in peace in a family, in a marriage,
in the world, is not by threatening people, is not by
showing off your muscles. It's by listening, by giving
a hand sometimes, by being intelligent, by being open
and by setting high standards," she said at the CSU
rally.

In Pueblo, Heinz Kerry sounded a similar theme,
criticizing the Bush administration for sending
warning signals to Iran about developing nuclear
weapons.

"There are about 50 countries in the world that have
the capability to build nuclear weapons. Are we going
to attack them all?" she said.

Gina Maggrett, of Pueblo, liked what she heard.

"(She's portrayed) as this caustic person but I
thought she was really warm and intelligent. A lovely
person," she said.

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