By Dave Lindorff

The people who pose as journalists in today’s corporate media are
in awe and in love with the rich. How else to explain their fatuous
praise for the likes of Warren Buffett, who on one hand bets $5 billion
on Goldman Sachs shares, and on the other, posing as a disinterested
wise man and patriot, publicly advises Congress to go along with
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s
$700-$1-trillion bailout of Goldman and the rest of Wall Street?

Buffett, whatever else he is, is no fool. He looks at Goldman
Sachs, its shares knocked for a loop by the current crisis, but about
to become a merged entity—bank and investment bank combined—with
government backing to unload its bad credit risks—and he buys $5
billion worth of it, and then turns around and tells Congress to step
up and vote for a bailout which would double his money almost instantly.

What a guy! A true hero.

By Dave Lindorff

With the government now having spent over $800 billion in less than
a year shoring up tottering financial companies that had become little
more than casinos (and rigged ones at that), America is looking
increasingly like China, a country where the state has been gradually
getting out of the business of directly owning companies.

At this point, with the US government owning 80 percent of the
world’s largest insurance company, AIG, and essentially owning mortgage
firms Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as well as bankrupt Lehman Brothers,
and with the nation’s two largest automakers in line asking for $25
billion in government loans, one would be hard-pressed to spot the
difference between the two systems.

By Dave Lindorff

I got an urgent email from an uncle of mine yesterday evening. A
sweet man, retired career military and very religious, he was genuinely
worried about an email he had received purporting to convey an article
said to have been written by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and
published on June 29, 2008 alleging that much of the Obama campaign's
"small donations" over the Internet had actually come from several Arab
sources overseas.

By Dave Lindorff

Back in the early days of the seemingly interminable Afghan
conflict, a young American, trapped in Afghanistan by the US invasion
of that country, was captured along with Taliban fighters and, after a
bit of captivity and “enhanced interrogation” at the tender mercies of
US troops, was transported back for trial in the US, where then
Attorney General John Ashcroft excitedly labeled him the “American
Taliban.”

But John Walker Lindh, railroaded into a 20-year jail sentence and
slapped with a gag order that bars him from talking about how he was
tortured for the entire length of his incarceration in Afghanistan, is
not the real American Taliban. That title surely belongs to our new
Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.

I am taking the lead here. I hope to get informed support. Here's the theme: Thought create. Words enable. Ideas can often be catagoized as creative or destructive. We have no time for destructive thoughts, words, or arguements.  Guiding the conversation based on 6 degrees of separation, each of us has equal influence on our collective direction.

Consider that great leaders are idenified and empowered when they see where the people are going and lead them in that direction. That is why Barak Obama is welcomed now!  Let's start a conversation that replaces the negative campaigning, from both sides, with accurate, creative habit forming creativity and optimism.  

 John Amato speaks for me:

Right wing TV Pundits destroy every segment on Democratic Convention 

Every time I turn on the TV and watch CNN and FOX (my hotel doesn’t get MSNBC) every Republican operative controls the dialog and direction of the panel discussion and it’s disgusting. Just one example—Hillary Clinton gave a brilliant speech last night, but every Amy Holmes-type talking head throws as much cold water on the speech as he or she can. The result is that the Dem talkers spend the rest of the time disputing the outrageous claims made and thus the GOP controls the entire framing and the entire segment. It’s shameful that the networks are allowing this to happen. I saw Jeffrey Toobin tell Amy that she was out of her mind with some of her comments and the discussion continues to that end. Soledad O’Brien comes back and says “well, that was a lively discussion.” Oh, no it was not. It’s a calculated ratf&@k. This is going on all day and all night.

Why is the Democratic Convention being ruined by these creeps? And why do all the networks allow it to happen? Why do we need them on in force to counter what is supposed to be our event?

I’m in Denver and it’s a completely different atmosphere. Party unison abounds, but you’d never know it from watching TV. Karl Rove acts like the biggest troll known to man—making sure to point out every little detail he dislikes. Well, his mission is to get McCain in the White House. But he’s the expert that Chris Wallace goes to for his “unbiased” take.

Will the Democratic talkers be allowed to do the same to the Republican Convention? I think not. It will be viewed as being an incredible event.

Update 1: After Bill Clinton spoke, it took Chuck Todd exactly 1 minute to attack Obama using a bulls**t Republican talking point that Obama is "borrowing" Biden's experience.

Our friends at Media Matters have launched an excellent new media watch blog called County Fair:

Why "County Fair"?

Longtime Springsteen fans may have caught onto our new blogs's name; it's copped from the relatively obscure, Nebraska-era song of his. (Here's a nice analysis of the tune; here are the lyrics.) After running out of "media"-based name possibilities for the blog (we're pretty sure they've all been taken by now), we just liked the idea the song conveyed of a meeting place for folks to gather.

By Dave Lindorff

We Americans got a graphic illustration of the demise of any
independent American corporate news media these past few days as the
coverage on TV and in print was saturated with reports about John
Edwards’ infidelity and, equally important, Russia’s invasion of
Georgia.

If I say "proportional-spaced font" and "superscript" and "Little Green Footballs," what comes to mind? Ah yes, the forged memo about George Bush's National Guard service that cost Dan Rather his job at CBS.

With that in mind, I invite you to read the following description of a different forged memo - the one Ron Suskind says was drafted at the White House on creamy stationery and given to George Tenet to have his people give to their asset (and former Iraqi intelligence chief) Tahir Jalil Habbush and then leak to the press. This is how the memo was described by the ultimate recipient of the leak, the U.K. Telegraph's neocon propagandist Con Coughlin: