katrina, katrina: monday oddems at the nadir of the bush regime

--The remarks of one of John Carlson's callers last week typifies the dittohead mentality of the crowd loyal to the right-wing talk station. The guy blamed the National Education Association (the teacher's union!) for the crime and anarchy in New Orleans and suggested the Nat'l Guard start "gut shooting" the looters.
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--What is it with Michael Medved and his weird pronunciations? It was bad enough he tried to be a native Loozeanna speaker with that "N'Awlin's" business. He had the words but not the tune, because let's face it, he's an Ivy League elite, not a good ol' boy, though he tries to play one on the radio. He also drove us nuts saying "HAIRicane Katrina." It was like when he says, "Kew (rhymes with pew) Klux Klan." There's something wrong over there at Medved Central, it may be just a neocon thing, but we're beginning to suspect it's neurological.
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Here are a couple of topics you won't hear discussed on rightwing radio:

--A must-read for conservatives who always write us spouting the boilerplate you hear from Rush and Sean (you know who you are) is Thumbing Nervously Through the Conservative Rulebook by New York Times' Robin Toner. It's about how the conservatives in power have had their principles "challenged, again and again, by the messy realities of governing."
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--is the war really a lost? Has the civil war already started in Iraq despite the US? Is the best we can do is to get the hell out?
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--Jeff Reifman over at Evergreen Politics has published a list of advertisers on the rightwing station KTTH and suggests we boycott them. It's a formidable list--and though we know there's good intentions over there at one of our favorite websites, we gotta say it, boycotts like this never work. While we'd never set foot in a Walmart unless there was a disaster and we needed to do a little creative looting, (to provide for our family, of course) we give boycotts little credence as a political action. They're effective when they're focused narrowly, putting direct pressure on a specific entity who can really feel the pressure. We remember a few years ago when evangelicals called for a Disney boycott (you know how sinful they are, playing up to the fags the way they do; letting Minnie and Mickey cohabitate and letting those ducks run around with no pants). It fell on its face. As Rev. Ken Hutcherson proved, a threat by a group or the right person can be more effective than an actual boycott. Though most corporate entities aren't as timid as Microsoft is about such matters--Disney's Michael Eisner ignored the empty threats of Christian reprisal and carried on.
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--a reader writes that KIRO's Dave Ross, Allen Prell, Erin Hart and Mike Webb have been doing a great job reporting and calling bullshit on the Bush administration's incompetence. We'd say: here, here!
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--Right-wing talkers are in denial of the Bush administration meltdown. As always, they're changing the subject. Tonight Danny "Rabbit" Lapin, (KTTH Sundays, 7-10p) the religious right's "show rabbi," led an in-depth discussion on whether married women should wear make up. (his answer: a resounding Yea!) We listen to the rabbi faithfully and we've yet to hear him deal with the scandal that's indicted his friend and benefactor Jack Abramoff, and came closer last week to another of the rebbi's buddies, House Minority Leader, Tom Delay. Read our file on Lapin, here  Our friend, the apolitically correct and  media critic, Edgar "Choch" Manana, commented recently: "I'd just like shake Danny Lapin, and say, 'Dude--don't you know these are the people who made lampshades out of people like you?
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--KPTK media flack Heather Rosendahl made a special point of writing to tell us absolutely nothing. At least she responded for once. She did say there's a "surprise" coming up today on the Seattle liberal talk station. We already knew that and reported last week that the station was rearranging its syndicated talkers, ho-hum. We were hoping they'd leak us some inside dope to blog if there was anything actually exciting going on. We also whined bitterly--as we always do--about how stupid and cheap they are for not hiring any local talent. Maybe that's why they treat us like a ugly girlfriend after a so-so booty call--as everyone else in the explaining industry does, hoping we'll just go away. Everybody reads our drivel, but rarely do we get a mention or any respect for the wonderful work we do. Maybe there'll be an announcement of something exciting going on over at 1090AM today, and if there is, it'll be another example of them not knowing how to promote their way out of a paper bag...or out of the bottom percentiles in the market. Nobody listens to the station--which is the problem. So why don't they put an ounce of effort to otherwise promote it? We suggest running some ads on KVI...or NPR...or KIRO even.
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--Faith-based charlatan Pat Robertson is as welcome in the Bush White House as he was in the fortified mansions of such staunch Christian leaders as former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor, and the confiscatory Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, both partners in Robertson's African faith-based gold and diamond mines. As Max Blumenthal reports in The Nation, Robertson is really cleaning up after the Katrina disaster. His $66 million relief organization, Operation Blessing is prominently featured on FEMA's list of charitable groups accepting donations for hurricane relief. Blumenthal writes: " His Regent University gave John Ashcroft a cushy professorship to cool his heels after his contentious tenure as US Attorney General. And Robertson's legal foundation, the American Center for Law and Justice, is spearheading the effort to rally right-wing Christian support for Judge John G. Roberts Jr.'s confirmation as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court."
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--IS THIS NEWS? DEP'T: Reuters reports that "At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast. One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton. Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corp.

Comments

[sparky]

NOBODY listens to KPTK?
Tut-Tut Michael..you are beginning to sound like our right wingers who post here. I know MANY people who listen--of course the ratings are not where we want them to be, of course the audience is small at this point, but this is a new station and new concept. Please dont pass along the right wing hyperbolie that there is NO listnership. What have you done today to PROMOTE it?
I tell people all the time to tune in and I have converted a lot of them....
now, snap out of it!! :-)

[blathering michael]

sorry, Sparks...I resort to hyperbole listening to this lame station. No promo, no warnings about their new line-up except the cryptic msgs that something new is happening at 6am. No mention that something new will be happening at 9a, 3p, 6p 10p, 3a, etc. No mention who they're coming up with, no promotion for these folks--most of whom are pretty good. They told Bill Virgen who writes a column nobody cares about in a newspaper nobody reads. BlatherWatch picked it up, but we're read by nobody in particular. Radio fans don't mind being fucked, they just wanna be kissed a little. KPTK hasn't grokked yet that talk audiences are different than music audiences, where talent disappears one day and someone new appears the next. We form relationships with our hosts--rather intimate relationships...coitus interruptus doesn't pack it--it just pisses people off. KPTK down't need to piss anyone else off, believe me. These people flunk radio mkting kindergarten. They're making KIRO look enlightened.

[Scrilla]

I read Toner's piece. It's equally factual as well as facile.
However, your link isn't working.
(http://blatherwatch.blogs.com/talk_radio/2005/09/"http://nytimes.com/2005/09/11/weekinreview/11tone.html)

[PeakLimiter]

The Baton Rouge-based Shaw Group, CNN tells us, is a major corporate client of Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Among its Katrina-related contracts are this one valued up to $100 million from FEMA; and this one also valued up to $100 million from the Army Corps of Engineers.

But in their zeal to embarrass the Bush administration, CNN overlooks one very fat and inconvenient fact--and embarrasses only itself.

The Shaw Group, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, is headed by Jim Bernhard, the current chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Bernhard worked tirelessly for Democrat Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco's runoff campaign and served as co-chair of her transition team. Another Shaw executive was Blanco's campaign manager. Bernhard is back-scratching chums with Blanco, whom he has lent/offered the Shaw Group's corporate jets to on numerous occasions.

So, why was none of this mentioned in CNN's Bush-profiteers-are-evil narrative?

Fortunately for CNN, they weren't the only ones along with Blatherwatch guilty of this glaring omission:

UPI failed to note that the CEO of the Shaw Group also happens to be the Louisiana Democratic Party chairman and beleaguered La. Gov. Kathleen Blanco's most influential crony.

So did the London Observer.

And Reuters/MSNBC. And the CBC.

And the NYTimes (reprinted in the Minnesota Star Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the Scotsman, and scores of media outlets around the world).

Bias in the media? What liberal bias?

[Scrilla]

DOH! Run everyone! The facts are here! I think there's room in blatherwatch's herb garden!!

[Lump]

PeakLimiter sez "Bias in the media? What liberal bias?"
Nah, never happen. CNN coaches their interviewees to get mad on air? Nah, never happen. All of the great coverage from the gulf coast, not, showing the damage in Mississippi and Alabama and the difference between competant local and state officials compared to the bungling in Loosieanna? Nah, never happen. Why is there no coverage of the gulf coast?

[blathering michael]

Somebody found a Democratic cabbage in that Republican petunia patch? Anything else, boys?? This is the most cronyistic administration since Reagan--not that the Dems are so pure--but this bunch is pure ham-slapping...got the Dems beat for sure on sheer puerco poundage.

[Brian Crouch]

"I'd just like shake Danny Lapin, and say, 'Dude--don't you know these are the people who made lampshades out of people like you?' "

This directly inverts the truth. Americans went to defeat Nazi Germany, Jews alongside Christians, to defeat fascism and evil. Republicans and democrats fought and died in the war. To imply that KTTH listeners, who are the both the genetic and ideological descendants of these veterans, is disgraceful and puerile.

No one has supported Israel the way that "right-wing" evangelical Christians have: vast sums of money are donated by churches to Israel every year.
By contrast, Leftist groups side with the Palestinian al Fatah and HAMAS, and the Arabs of TransJordan (Judea region) were unmitigated allies of the Nazis. These are the ones who truly DO want to make lampshades out of Jews: as a Koranic injunction.

The far Left in America consistently showers calumny and contempt on religious Jews, Israel and "Zionists." The most stalwart defenders of these are on the "right," whatever that means. So who is the heir of the Nazi mantle? The Left.

The above leftist quote is mashugana. No religious, pro-Israel Jew is safe from attack in a leftist gathering, but Jews are invited to visit to relationship with Christians all the time. Rabbis Lapin, Eckstein, Dallin, Sherer, Boteach, Feder, and many others would tell you that you've got it backwards.

Lapin is on TBN: and has quite a following. He was on KGNW, a Christian station. He is on KTTH, along with Siegel, Medved, all Jewish. Dennis Prager, on another station is another Jewish, very popular talk show host. Meanwhile, "peace" marchers wear kaffiyehs and show Magen David on a swastika. So how is it supposed to be the "right" that is anti-Semitic?????

The Left is the deluded side of the political spectrum, not conservatives. You regularly invert facts to fit your preconceived prejudices.

[chris]

Cutting Israel's subsidy would be a start, we need the money here anyway after Bushler's fuck up'd response on the gulf coast. I don't recall any protesters here who got run over by bulldozer operators with preconcieved predjudices.

[Brian Crouch]

You're ridiculous: as though Pres. Bush could have done anything to thwart the cost of a hurricane. You seem to be saying "Post hoc ergo proctor hoc." We need the money AFTER his response on the gulf coast? Non sequitur.

[sparky]

Gezundheit!

[chris]

No, his response dumb-ass, to the event as it was happening, and after. He sends trucks loaded with ice and then they are turned away. (who in the hell sends ICE when portible ice making machines can be set up, but thats our idiot son-of -an asshole for ya) Do I need to remind you that Bush "fiddled" and ate cake while New Orleans sank. It took him 5 days to get his dry-drunk ass down there. His FEMA clowns with no practical experience other than watching prize horses screw and being on his donor list were ineffective and Chertof should of been axed from the get-go. I think it's funny watching the GOP implode and Scarborough and Fucker Carlson both say are TV that Bush should be ASHAMED! Excellent tv indeed.

[Brian Crouch]

"Almost every policy advancing the cause of American nationalism is seen as grounds for using the N-word, Nazi, reminiscent of leftist race-baiters who stand ready to spring the R-word, Racist, on anyone who has an honest disagreement with their views on such issues as affirmative action."

"It has become a conditioned response, a form of "gotcha-ism," that verifies nothing but a paranoid fantasy. It is a disposition in search of facts upon which to hang its attitudinal hat. It has come to this: what is a Nazi? Anyone who disagrees with the political opinions of a New York liberal. Who is a racist? Anyone who disagrees with the latest power-grabbing, social engineering scheme of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or the NAACP.

"With real racists and real Nazis playing such a horrific role in each group's collective past, many are strangely eager to manufacture 21st century versions as an ongoing means of cementing a particular racial or ethnic identity. But because in reality there are today so few Nazis and racists here in America, the terms have been defined-down to mean: "those who disagree with our politics."

"So now George Bush, historically a friend to Israel, is what? A Nazi. Tom DeLay, the first U.S. Congressman to arrange a Passover Seder for Jews in Soviet Russia -- a Nazi. Martha Zoller, a Southern talk show host whose daughter's high school is putting on a production of "Fiddler on the Roof"? A Nazi. All because they espouse policies neither acceptable nor fashionable within the more internationalist, liberal political fraternity.

"These terms are being abused more now than ever precisely by people living a blessed life in America free of Nazism and widespread racism. Perhaps these children and grandchildren of the historic actual sufferers invoke it so repeatedly as a way of securing ownership over these terms -- as well as sustaining the solidarity and emotional gratification in continuing "The Fight Against."

"In addition to those who derive political advantage from such labeling, others bask in smug moral superiority and never-ending judgmentalism. They bestow on themselves the sainthood of "I'm-not-One-so-I'm-better-than-you." The more often and the greater the range of political issues on which to demonize others, the more often the halo of superiority appears on the accuser.

"There is a more sinister dynamic here: a desire to control the political agenda, to enforce a hegemony of political thought. Knowing the good will and fair-mindedness of the American people, the name-callers attempt to make guilt-ridden and silence the great middle as well as conservative spokesmen. After all, who wants to be called racist or a Nazi?

"Funny how the pro-Sheehan, Upper West Side "anti-Nazi" crowd is rallying around a woman who has blamed the Jews for our War On Terror and has called for the removal of Jews from Israel to make it an Arab state. What can be more Nazi-like than such a position? Evidently, Nazi-like rhetoric, when coming from the Left, is acceptable to "progressives."

"Those who abuse these terms betray the genuine suffering at the hands of real Nazis and racists experienced by their ancestors. They are themselves guilty of harboring a bigotry and prejudgment (yes, prejudice!) against those they've been taught to despise from early on. America needn't jump nor change its policies to satisfy the name-callers who long ago lost their credibility."

-----Rabbi Spero is a radio talk show host, a pulpit rabbi, and president of Caucus for America. He can be reached at www.caucusforamerica.com.