Judy Woodruff and the Betrayal of America by the Main Stream and Liberal Media

A brief five second statement, really almost an side comment in the midst of a larger discussion, illustrated the nearly complete bankruptcy of our Main Stream Media and our beloved Liberal Media in the face of major scandal in the Obama Administration.

The side comment was made by Judy Woodruff, the co-anchor of Public Broadcasting's PBS Newshour.  She is one of the leading luminaries at PBS and a highly respected journalist.  Her candid comment tells us everything that is going wrong in main stream Journalism today.

The discussion took place today on Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday.  The complete transcript of the hour long program is available here: Kevin McCarthy talks Iraq, future of the GOP; latest on IRS scandal.  

As Wallace's panel on pundits discussed the stunning disappearance of two years of Lois Lerner's emails and the highly improbable instantaneous failure of not just one but six individual computer hard drives (on six different computers) all happening exactly ten days after Congress began questioning the IRS about the targeting of Conservative Groups.  Any (and I do mean ANY) computer expert or engineer will tell you this is simply impossible.

Worse, the hard drives were not repaired of reclaimed, but destroyed.  Destroyed, ten days after Congress began asking questions.  Stunning, in fact it's frightening.

This scandal is much worse than Watergate in both the facts and implications.  Now I doubt the President is involved, but this is a conspiracy of huge proportions. We need a Special Prosecutor.

But what was upsetting this morning was not any of that.  What's upsetting was Woodruff's candid admission:   Well, what I can say, Chris, is I haven't reported this story. I haven't -- I don't know what happened inside the IRS.

What's tragic here is that PBS has willfully ignored the story and has spent not one second investigating or even exploring the implications of a massive, coordinated government cover-up.

Had this exact same situation occurred with a Republican President, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I or Bush II, PBS would be tearing the very walls of the IRS down the ground.  And they should be doing it now.  We only survive as a free democracy with the aid and protection of a vibrant, active press.

FOX NEWS has few resources and limited access.  They cannot carry the ball alone.  Plus they might distort the story.  We need ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS on the case.

We cannot survive as a free nation if the main stream media only does it's job when a Republican is President. The press is either going to have to start doing their damned job or we can simply never elect a Democrat President again.

The Disposable First Amendment

It seems that it's easy to dispense with the Bill of Rights when it doesn't fit with your personal agenda.  Certainly the mayors of two of our largest and most important cities have no problem tossing the First Amendment to the Constitution aside.

You might remember the First Amendment.  It's the one that guarantees Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion.  Those rights no longer apply in Boston or in Chicago.

It was easy for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to dispense with the Constitution since they were simultaneously discarding their oath of office and the virtually all city, state and Federal laws at the same time.

Both Mayor's personally promised that Chick-fil-A, the popular, successful and well managed fast food chain would never open a store within their respective cities.  The reason is that Chick-fil-A's CEO Dan Cathy is a Christian who made the mistake of actually professing his faith in an interview.  Cathy committed other sins in the mayor's eyes.  He personally gave donations to his church and supported many of their charities.  Some of these well known charities oppose gay marriage or, at least, favor traditional marriage.


But Emanuel and Menino have both decided they alone are the arbiters of religious dogma.  And Freedom of Religion no longer exists.  If you do not believe EXACTLY as they believe, you will be legally prevented from doing business is their cities.


This abuse of power is precisely what the framers of our Constitution feared.  Our government is prevented from establishing any single religion for precisely this reason.  Our country was originally settled by people trying to escape the Church of England and have religious freedom.  


The Boston Herald Editorial Board has rightly condemned Mayor Menoni.  In their editorial Mayor Plays Chicken they write:

We’re trying to imagine a big-city mayor telling the world that he refuses to grant government permits to a restaurant business whose CEO happens to support gay marriage. The condemnation of such an abuse of government power would be swift, overwhelming and appropriate. 

But Boston Mayor Tom Menino apparently doesn’t see any problem using the power of his government office to issue threats to a private company whose CEO does not happen to share the mayor’s own personal or political views.

UPDATE 7/27/2012: Boston Mayor Menino has backed away from his promise to prevent Chick-fil-A from opening in his city or even along The Freedom Trail.  While maintaining his strong support for Gay Marriage, he insists he spoke incorrectly, exaggerating both his ability and intent to block the fast food chain. "I'm just the mayor," Menino sheepishly admitted.

Blackout

Tragically, SOPA and PIPA are not characters from Grimm's Fairly Tales, although their potential to harm rivals the most evil characters the Grimm Brothers ever imagined.  


In reality SOPA and PIPA are the acronyms for the two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate designed in Machiavellian fashion by panicked Hollywood moguls to protect their stranglehold on the creative arts.  Their highly paid minions in Congress will claim that SOPA (short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act") and PIPA (short for "Protect Intellectual Property Act") are merely modest efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites.  However, it's not about protecting copyrights at all, it's actually about control, protecting profits and, ultimately, censorship.


SOPA and PIPA are designed in a way that infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Both acts criminalize the act of providing links, the very backbone of the Internet.  Hence, if I link, however innocently, to a site that host stolen copyrighted content (like YouTube, for example), my blog site might be closed down.


Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia. 


GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. 


The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

Am I Kidding? ....errr, No

The World Celebrates

The above photograph, taken by flickr member NCinDC at the Inauguration, is one of thousands of photographs flowing in to flickr's Inauguration Photostream from all around the world. Below is a another photo by NCinDC taken at the World War II Memorial. I want to thank NCinDC for allowing others to republish his work under the Common Creative License.



Photos are flowing into flickr almost faster than it's possible to keep up. Some are simply television screen shots taken by home viewers. Others are impressive creative works. Still others are celebrations around the world.

And many, like NCinDC's above, are just citizen photo-journalism by some of the two million people in Washington DC to celebrate the greatest of all American Democratic Events, the peaceful change in leadership of the world's most powerful nation.

Today the entire world is proud of the United States!