7 Responses to It’s Chinatown, Jake

1. Hugh February 28th, 2009 at 8:18 am «

   It’s always class warfare when social justice is the issue. When the rich steal from everyone else as they have for the last 30 year, the media call that economic progress.
• bluebutterfly February 28th, 2009 at 8:54 am «

  Well, of course, they get their share of economic progress by doing that..’g’. Here is Gregg’s defense.
  *********

  ” Gregg told the AP that he violated no laws or Senate rules. In the statement, he also said at least $66 million in earmarks he secured for the area in and around the former Air Force base were supported by the National Guard, the mayor of Portsmouth, or “other public officials,” and did not “involve my initiative but only my support of the requests.”

  Gregg also stressed that he served as a “passive investor” in several limited liability partnerships managed by his brother and plays “no active role in business decisions related to these investments at Pease.”

  An AP spokesman said the wire service stands by the story. “

  http://thehill.com/leading-the…..02-27.html
• Prairie Sunshine February 28th, 2009 at 9:12 am «

  One of many defenses from the scoundrels’ playbook: They made me do it…

  Kinda like that Northern Trust bank in Chicago. They forced us to take the money.

  Yeah, right.

  Reply to hugh @ 1
  My hope: someday soon somebody will come up with a succinct, effective rebuttal for the class warfare nonsense. Meanwhile…pity the po’ po’ pitiful rich….
2. nonplussed February 28th, 2009 at 12:31 pm «

   As Warren Buffet said in an interview in November, 2006;

   “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

   Jameson Foser of Media Matters sums it rather succinctly, saying;

   “One reason they’re winning is that the news media do not use the loaded phrases “class warfare” and “redistribution of wealth” to describe things like the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, or the home mortgage deduction (which favors those who are wealthy enough to buy homes over those who are not) or countless other policies that benefit wealthier Americans at the expense of those who are less fortunate. Instead, the media pretend this is a one-sided war — as though the wealthy are being unfairly assaulted by an army of bullying waitresses and janitors and farmers and teachers.”

   Another reason is articles like today’s Washington Post front-pager. The Post tells us in paragraph one that Obama plans to raise taxes on the wealthy and waits until paragraph 18 to reveal that he plans to make permanent a tax credit for low- and middle-income workers…

   And like this Los Angeles Times article, which announces near the beginning that Obama’s budget “would raise taxes, redistribute income, spend more on social programs than on defense”…

   They’re winning, in large part, because they have the media on their side.
• Prairie Sunshine February 28th, 2009 at 1:37 pm «

  Exactly. Too many in the media eat up the Republican talking points and never bother to consider the bias. Incompetence? Sloth? Self-interest? Whatever the reason, it happens too often to be happenstance. And the Republican propaganda playbook keeps being used…because it works.

  And it doesn’t have to work on the people. It just has to work on the media. They’re the marks.

  More fact-checking needed from the media, please.

  C&L notes the LA Times also, pointing out it’s a matter of fairness, not class…
3. nonplussed February 28th, 2009 at 4:29 pm «

   Robert Parry blasts them today over at his place. It’s good stuff!
• Prairie Sunshine February 28th, 2009 at 5:18 pm «

  Thanks for sharing that link–a worthy read, indeed.

  This stood out:

  Look for example at the lead stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post on Saturday. Both describe the stomach-turning 6.2 percent drop in the gross domestic product during the last quarter of 2008. Though that was the last economic quarter of the Bush administration, the stories instead were framed around Obama’s failures.