From The Baltimore Sun
By Frank Schaeffer

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as “not one of us,” I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, “Kill him!” At one of your rallies, someone called out, “Terrorist!” Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee - an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.

Shame!

John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.

You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.

John McCain, you are no fool, and you understand the depths of hatred that surround the issue of race in this country. You also know that, post-9/11, to call someone a friend of a terrorist is a very serious matter. You also know we are a bitterly divided country on many other issues. You know that, sadly, in America, violence is always just a moment away. You know that there are plenty of crazy people out there.

Read more McCain Attacks

From TruthDig
By Amy Goodman

The reviews are in, and the latest U.S. presidential debate, the “town hall” from Nashville, Tenn., was a snore. One problem is that in a debate it is important for the debaters to actually disagree. Yet Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain substantively agree on many issues. That is one major reason that the debates should be open, and that major third-party or independent candidates should be included.

Take the global financial meltdown. Both senators voted for the controversial bailout bill that first failed in the U.S. House of Representatives. It passed resoundingly in the Senate and, larded with financial favors to woo uncooperative House members, finally passed the House. The news each day suggests that the bailout hasn’t solved the problem. Rather, the economic contagion is going global, with European and Asian banks teetering on the brink of collapse. Iceland—not just its banks, but the country—faces financial ruin.

Earlier Tuesday, before the debate, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it would for the first time ever begin buying up the debt of private companies to help them meet short-term cash needs for things like payroll. Shortly after the debate ended, major central banks around the world, again for the first time ever, cut their prime lending rates in unison. Yet on the debate floor, there was no sense that the global financial system needed more than a tax cut here, a voucher there. The major thing lacking from the debate was, well, debate.

Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, reacted to the debate, writing: “Sen. McCain, Sen. Barack Obama and the other members of Congress who have supported one bailout after another have turned fiscal responsibility into a sucker’s game. … There’s no meaningful difference between the two major parties.” The independent campaign of Ralph Nader put out a debate-watching e-mail, asking supporters to listen for key words and phrases, among them: “working class,” “Taft-Hartley Act,” “labor unions,” “military-industrial complex,” “single-payer health care,” “impeachment,” “carbon tax” and “corporate power.” None of these was mentioned.

Obama supporters noted that McCain did not mention “middle class” once. Yet neither candidate mentioned poverty.

Obama and McCain fought to prove who was more sympathetic to the nuclear-power industry. They each bowed to the coal industry, with its controversial “clean coal” gambit. They split hairs over who would more cagily bomb Pakistan.

Read more Open Debates

From Editor and Publisher
By Greg Mitchell

We’ve come to lower our expectations for real debates in the “debate” process, but this one, Tuesday night, was a terrible disappointment.

Who picked the questions from among the — we were told — six million sent in online plus the dozens from the people in the hall? The first half was fine but then why go into the same foreign policy questions raised two weeks ago — knowing they were certain to draw the very same, almost word for word responses? After kicking off the debate by saying we were in the worst economic crisis in 80 years?

The transcript for the last half hour could have been typed up in advance.

Remember, this was supposed to be the “domestic policy” debate. Yet there we were once again talking about raids on Pakistan and defending Israel. Brokaw and the debate organizers (and whoever picked the final questions) let down the American public.

Brokaw kept complaining that the candidates were not staying within their time limits–and then did nothing to stop them beyond pleading with them to, maybe, keep an eye on the flashing lights, pretty please, huh?

And his “follow up” questions were weak.

I thought I’d never say this but — maybe they should let the blogosphere handle the next one.

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

For the third debate in a row, actual polling data last night (as well as uncommitted focus groups) revealed that most Americans believe that the Democratic candidate (Obama/Biden) won decisively. In stark contrast, this is what the poll of Fox News viewers found:

In the real world among Americans, Obama won the debate by 15-30 points, but in Fox News World, McCain won the debate by 86-12%. That’s what Fox News is and who their viewers are: a right-wing propaganda outlet with an almost entirely unpersuadable viewership. For that reason, I don’t understand why the Obama campaign helps legitimize them as a real news network by appearing on Fox programs. But the Obama campaign obviously disagrees and regularly does so.

Agree or disagree with that tactical choice, any Democrat preparing to go on Fox News should study how Obama communications director Robert Gibbs mauled Sean Hannity last night and copy and learn from it as though it is Scripture (video below). First, a bit of background: in the 1980s and 1990s, Anthony Martin-Trigona was well-known to New York litigators as a source of warped entertainment, wonderment and universal disgust.

For years, Martin-Trigona ran around continuously suing so many random people on a pro se basis — and when he would lose, he would then sue the lawyers who represented the parties he sued and the judges who ruled against him — that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals actually barred him from commencing any further judicial process without prior authorization, an unprecedented and truly extraordinary order. Some of that history is set forth here. Martin-Trigona would file so many new, rambling lawsuits and motions on a virtually daily basis that, as the Second Circuit pointed out, it actually became impossible for courts even to process: “Martin-Trigona’s voluminous filings have ‘inundated’ the District of Connecticut and his activities have burdened judicial operations to the point of impairing the administration of justice.”

Read more Hannity

From The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson

Let’s see: The financial system is still in grave peril, despite Congress’s approval of an unprecedented $700 billion bailout. Unemployment is rising, the economy is slowing, and the question isn’t whether we’re in for a recession but how long and how deep the recession will be. Meanwhile, U.S. troops are still fighting in two places — Iraq and Afghanistan — where, as a rule, foreign occupations end badly. The terrorists who struck us on Sept. 11, 2001, have been allowed to regroup within the borders of nuclear-armed Pakistan and are busy plotting new attacks. Rarely have there been bigger or more urgent issues to talk about in a presidential campaign.

But John McCain wants us to talk about Barack Obama’s acquaintances. He and Sarah Palin are going to try their best to make us talk about anything but the big issues facing our country, because most Americans think Obama’s solutions are better than McCain’s.

Knowing that, are we in the media going to aid and abet the McCain campaign’s obvious ploy?

We journalists like to think we’re too smart to be used by one side or the other in a political campaign. In a sense, we’re followers of Adam Smith: We believe in an omniscient free marketplace of news in which myriad individual decisions by reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, commentators and media barons — decisions about what to cover and how to cover it — somehow miraculously end up maximizing the truth. We claim not to be ideological, but this is our ideology.

Read more Flimflam

From The Seattle PI
By Rupert Cornwell

If you want to understand why U.S. presidential politics can be such a dirty business, and how John McCain could yet turn around a White House race in which he is now the clear underdog, I have a suggestion. Go and see a documentary that opened here last weekend, called “Boogie Man: the Lee Atwater Story.”

It’s the best part of 20 years now since Atwater died of a brain tumor at the age of 40. But during his few years as a top White House political operative, for Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, he was the monster that haunted Democrats’ dreams, the mastermind of campaigns in which no blow was too low, no rumor too scurrilous, if it helped you win.

Cinema-verite style, without adornment, Boogie Man traces Atwater’s career, from the devious strategist of Republican college politics to protégé of Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from his home state, South Carolina, to the lowly job in the Reagan White House from which Atwater rose to become boss of George Bush Sr.’s successful bid for the White House (and in the process a close friend and mentor of George Bush Jr.).

The presidential campaign of 1988 has been called the dirtiest in a century.

Mercifully, the current one, for all its nasty aspects, hasn’t yet come close. That year the Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, came out of his convention with a wide lead over Bush, a lackluster campaigner struggling to shake off the Iran-Contra scandal. But that was to reckon without Lee Atwater.

Read more Boogie Man

From The Seattle PI
By Marianne Means

After a half-century of writing for the Hearst Newspapers and appearing in various other media outlets, I’m going off to a much-delayed retirement. The newspaper business as I knew it has changed, and so have I. Shucks, it happens.

But the memories of the way it was, and the giant figures who populated it, are irreplaceable. President Harry Truman once warned me he would “spank” me if I didn’t write nice things about the “madam” (Bess). At my first presidential press conference, in December 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower failed to recognize my wildly flaying arm and call on me, although I was the only woman in the press contingent (or maybe because I was). If I had worn a red dress, it probably wouldn’t have helped. I tried out fruitlessly for radio jobs and was repeatedly told: “Nobody will take a woman’s voice seriously.”

Luckily, I was assigned by Hearst to cover the 1960 presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kennedy — the bureau was very short-staffed at the time, and my salary was peanuts. Coincidence plays a good part in professional careers as in the rest of life.

As a Phi Beta Kappa student at the University of Nebraska, I had met Kennedy while working on a crusade to get him to visit the campus. When he arrived at NU, I got to drive him around and meet his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, whose younger sibling was my Tri Delta sorority sister. Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, was another Nebraska native. I don’t remember many details of this historic event, except that Sorensen growled to Kennedy, “Presidential candidates don’t chew gum” as we approached the speech site. Out went the gum.

In 1960, the betting in the press corps was that the more experienced Vice President Richard Nixon would win. On the way back after their biggest debate, the press bus (including me) voted overwhelmingly that Nixon had won that encounter, although at home voters looking at the event saw a sweaty, even greenish-colored Nixon compared to a fresh, handsome rival.

Read more Farewell

From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By John Steppling

The theatrical circus of electoral politics has reached the home stretch — meaning the TV phase of the candidate popularity contest.

In an age when people more or less watch TV 24 hours a day, although often (if not almost always) in a highly passive manner, the corporate media has reacted to this fact by adjusting its product to become a constant stream of advertising, with sound bite dramatic or comedy narratives interspersed.

The excellence of a show like The Wire notwithstanding, the basic network and cable format is to just run this stream of PR, non-news and seriously dumbed-down infomercials on a 24/7 basis. Given this, the current Presidential race is approached with more cogency from the meta-narrative level.

Since the debates require zero information actually be communicated regarding the alleged topics of interest, the actual horse race is won in the realm of surface perceptions and *feelings*. This brings me to Sarah Palin, way before I get to Barry and John. Sarah Palin’s three interviews have been so mind numbingly disastrous, that one almost feels sorry for the fundamentalist beauty pageant runner up. This is a woman better suited to ok your checks at Tesco, or greet you as you enter a four star hotel on some resort island and hand you a comp ticket to the evening’s buffet dinner. She is painfully and visibly stupid. She is also an unpleasant person. Reagan always struck me as senile, as far back as 20 Mule Team Borax ads and certainly as governor of California. But he was affable. To most people, anyway. This was always a surprise to me, for such affability has always, in my experience, cloaked a mean-spirited pettiness. Beware the affable! Anyway, by the time we get to Clinton we see a deeply disingenuous narcissist, but with Bush Sr. we enter the realm of east coast mandarins………those nasty pinched WASP souls that inhabit the rich enclaves of places like Kennebunkport. I always tried to imagine the dinner table scenes of the Bush family, half drunk, nasty, and without any warmth from the turkey-necked monster of a mother for dumb George Jr.

Read more Prevailing Narratives

From True Blue Liberal
By Stephen Lendman

For 32 years, Sonoma State University’s (SSU) Project Censored has pioneered US media democracy, research, and First Amendment issues. Founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, it’s now headed by Professor Peter Phillips, currently on sabbatical leave, with Professor Mickey Huff in charge as Interim Associate Director of the program until his return.

PC works cooperatively with numerous independent media groups, primarily to train SSU students “in media research, First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States.” Since its founding, it’s trained over 1500 students in investigative research and the importance of our most fundamental right without which all others are at risk and now currently hang by a thread.

PC is a “partnership of faculty, students, and the community” to conduct research “on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media.” Each year, it ranks the top 25 and publishes them in its yearbook, “Censored: Media Democracy in Action.” The latest “Censored 2009: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007 - 2008″ may now be purchased at bookstores or online at http://www.projectcensored.org/store/.

The current edition is larger than ever. It includes the year’s honorable mention choices and additional chapters covering these topics:

– Updates on previous PC stories;

– Junk Food News and News Abuse; Read the rest of this entry »

From CQ Politics
By Jeff Stein

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days.

The FBI denied Rossini and Miller permission to participate in the book or the PBS “NOVA” documentary, which is also being written and produced by Bamford, on grounds that the FBI “doesn’t want to stir up old conflicts with the CIA,” according to multiple reliable sources.
Bamford, contacted by phone, said he could not comment because his publisher has embargoed his new book for release around Oct. 10.

The author of two other ground-breaking books on the NSA, Bamford also said his general policy is not to discuss his negotiations for interviews with intelligence agencies.

Read more 9/11 Truth