from corbett report: Comedy outlets like The Onion provide timely, insightful political satire. But does this brand of comedy help to legitimize a corrupt system, or merely normalize it? We explore these issues with James Evan Pilato of MediaMonarchy.com, sample some of the funniest clips from modern news satire, and premiere James Corbett’s latest satire video on this week’s edition of The Corbett Report.
from afp: The Simpsons, the long-running US television animated comedy show, reached its landmark 500th episode Sunday, with an appearance from controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. America's most famous dysfunctional cartoon family have played out their lives before a worldwide audience for over two decades since the distinctive yellow characters Homer, Maggie and children Bart, Lisa and baby Maggie first burst onto American TV in 1989. The series has become the longest-running comedy in US television history and in its 23rd season is currently the longest-running primetime scripted show. In the 500th show, Homer and Marge discover Springfield residents are holding a secret meeting to kick them out of town, for all the trouble they've caused over the years. After being sent into exile, the Simpsons arrange to meet with Assange in a bid to clear their names. The show's executive producer Al Jean acknowledged last month that Assange, who leaked massive amounts of sensitive diplomatic and military documents, was a controversial figure.
emp dominoes: first throes of soft war*
from washington post: President Obama’s decision to launch his 2012 reelection campaign Monday is about much more than money. It is an acknowledgment by the president’s team that the grass-roots army that helped propel Obama to the White House needs repair and rejuvenation.
video: like rudowski on 9/11 truth & pentagon gunman*
video: afghanistan looks increasingly like vietnam for US*
obama vows to allow open gays into military service*
from gothamist: Word has leaked that in an episode for the upcoming season of the FX firefighter drama Rescue Me, the womanizing fireman Franco—one of the show's main characters—espouses theories that 9/11 was an inside job, carried out as part of a neoconservative plot to change the definition of "preemptive attack" and control the world's oil. The Times says that it marks "the first fictional presentation of 9/11 conspiracy theories by a mainstream media company." Star of the show Denis Leary says that the scene is not far off from scenes in actual fire houses "where some of the younger members don’t even have to completely buy into the theory of 9/11 being an inside job, but want to discuss it." What is more striking than the fictional plot line is that the show is using the real-life conspiracy beliefs of the actor who plays Franco, Daniel Sunjata, to promote the storyline. In a press tour, Sunjata said that he “absolutely, 100 percent” supports the assertion that “9/11 was an inside job.”
from wikinews: Nancy Cartwright, 51, who is a long time member of the Church of Scientology, has created a recording using her voice of Bart Simpson as part of a robocall promotion. The message surfaced early Wednesday morning on YouTube. During the message, Cartwright states that "This is a special message" and announces a Scientology conference this coming weekend at the grand ballroom of the Hollywood & Highland Center in Los Angeles where she has a speaking engagement. The message ends with a toll free number to call to RSVP... The Simpsons executives did not authorize this usage of intellectual property in this manner. Executive producer Al Jean told The Hollywood Reporter, "This is not authorized by us. The Simpsons does not, and never has, endorsed any religion, philosophy or system of beliefs any more profound than Butterfinger bars," referencing the advertisements featuring the Simpsons for the Butterfinger candy bar.
from global research: Here we build a prima facae case supporting the idea that Hollywood continues to be a target for infiltration and subversion by a variety of state agencies, in particular the CIA. Academic debates on cinematic propaganda are almost entirely retrospective, and whilst a number of commentators have drawn attention to Hollywood’s longstanding and open relationship with the Pentagon, little of substance has been written about the more clandestine influences working through Hollywood in the post-9/11 world. As such, our work delves into the field of what Peter Dale Scott calls "deep politics"; namely, activities which cannot currently be fully understood due to the covert influence of shadowy power players... Many would recoil at the thought of modern Hollywood cinema being used as a propagandist tool, but the facts seem to speak for themselves. Do agencies such as the CIA have the power, like the Pentagon, to affect movie content by providing much-sought-after expertise, locations and other benefits? Or are they able to affect script changes through simple persuasion, or even coercion? Do they continue to carry out covert actions in Hollywood as they did so extensively in the 1950s, and, beyond cinema, might covert government influence play some part in the creation of national security messages in TV series such as 24 and Alias (the star of the latter, Jennifer Garner, even made an unpaid recruitment video for the CIA)? The notion that covert agencies aspire to be more open is hard to take seriously when they provide such scant information about their role within the media, even regarding activities from decades past. The spy may have come in from the cold, but he continues to shelter in the shadows of the movie theatre.
from editor & publisher: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu's $250 million loan to The New York Times Co. is "an ominous move" by a "capitalist with loyalties to a foreign state," The Seattle Times said in an unsigned editorial Tuesday. "Major media companies should not be in the hands of a capitalist with loyalties to a foreign state," the editorial declared... Tuesday's editorial states the paper's principle right in the headline: "Newspaper ownership matters in American democracy." Slim has said he has no intention of using the loan - and an earlier purchase of a 6.4% stake in Times Co. - to influence the paper's coverage or editorializing.
from usa today: Two weeks from today, an estimated 7 million households that rely on analog television sets - ones that work off antennas - could see their screens go blank. The temptation is to say, too bad. People had plenty of warning about the impending nationwide switch to digital TV, and an opportunity to apply for $40 coupons toward the cost of converter boxes. Unfortunately, the federal government has so fouled up the changeover that a delay in the Feb. 17 deadline is the least bad alternative.
from thinkprogress: Today, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reveals that Fox News has hired former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who will be an on-air analyst and write stories for Fox’s website:“She has a very impressive résumé,” says Senior Vice President John Moody. “We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped. It’s certainly something she’s going to be associated with for all time, and there’s not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. … She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for.“Miller, however, had more problems than her stories not turning out “exactly” as she had “hoped.” Miller has been a willing participant in the Bush administration’s quest to peddle lies to the American public. She was a key player in pushing false intelligence that led the public into the Iraq war, and was central to the Valerie Plame leak scandal.
from michel chossudovsky: Obama's "American Promise" is War. Barack Obama has embraced the "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT). The Obama-Biden campaign has endorsed the very foundations of the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda: "Go after Osama bin Laden, take him out". The rhetoric is softer but the substance is almost identical:
from global research: The “special convention issue” of the Nation magazine features a lengthy article entitled “Progressives in the Obama Moment,” which seeks to make the case for those opposed to war and the reactionary policies of the Bush administration to rally behind the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The authors of the article engage in verbal contortions in an attempt to square the notion that Obama represents a progressive, anti-war impulse of far-reaching dimensions (“The Obama nomination sets the stage for a sea-change election”) with the plain fact that his actual policies are of a thoroughly conventional character and are well within the confines of the right-wing consensus of American bourgeois politics.
from lew rockwell: Politics brings out the worst in everyone, which is one good reason to completely depoliticize society. This way we can all busy ourselves in productive work or leisure, instead of wasting vast time watching these clowns on television promise the impossible to us. What we are being offered on television is two flavors of dictatorship. One party imagines Athens, with fairness and justice for all, international brotherhood and sisterhood, a world free of hate and discrimination in which all wealth is shared and no wealth is made at the expense of nature... Now to the Republicans, who imagine themselves creating a modern form of Sparta, with military strength and a disciplined citizenry unified in the drive to national greatness, courage, and heroism. Along with this comes support for national service (the draft) and a demand that Congress stop meddling in executive-branch matters.
from guardian: Rupert Murdoch helped broker a "tentative truce" between Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and key News Corporation lieutenant Roger Ailes, the boss of Fox News Channel, earlier this year, according to the media mogul's biographer. Murdoch, the News Corp chairman and chief executive, was forced to court Obama after the rising star of US politics rebuffed his initial approaches, it is believed because of what he saw as the derogatory coverage of him and his wife, Michelle, on Fox News, according to Michael Wolff.
from danger room: Blackwater Worldwide's plans for West Coast expansion have hit another roadblock. After already backing away from one possible site in Potrero, Blackwater is now faced with a legal challenge to its plans to open a training facility in leased warehouse space in San Diego. "The company has leased a 61,600-square-foot warehouse in a business park three blocks from the U.S.-Mexico border near Brown Field," notes the San Diego Union Tribune. "It is installing a shooting range, a simulated Navy ship and classrooms, and hopes to begin operating in June."
from thinkprogress: Today, the Associated Press announced at its annual meeting that Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp., is joining its board of directors. Three other media moguls are also joining the board, including Sam Zell, who recently “took control of Tribune Co. after leading a buyout that resulted in the publicly traded company becoming private.”
from miami herald: For two decades, attorney Prescott Prince was a solo practitioner with a small family and criminal law practice in eastern Virginia, and a reserve Navy career on the side... Tuesday, the soft-spoken 53-year-old with a mustache and thinning hair found himself with what well could be the case of a lifetime, if not the century: The Pentagon assigned him to defend Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the reputed al Qaeda kingpin and alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks...
from raw story: The vice chair of the prominent 9/11 Commission is denying Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claim that the US received a warning before the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, Salon reports. "I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence," said former Rep. Lee Hamilton in a statement received by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, who has closely followed the Mukasey revelation.
from usa today: Relatives of the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93 are stepping up pressure on Congress to decide whether the people who died fighting their attackers on Sept. 11, 2001, deserve the nation's highest civilian award... Debra Burlingame is the sister of Capt. Charles "Chic" Burlingame, a pilot who died when his American Airlines flight crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. She agrees that the people on Flight 93 deserve an honor beyond what others receive. "They were magnificent. And that story should be told," she said. "When you acknowledge them with these kind of historic gestures you make sure that those stories never die."
from paul joseph watson: Astounding newly released FBI documents 
(3.98mb PDF) obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act show that alleged 9/11 hijacker Hamza Al-Ghamdi had booked future flights to San Francisco and Riyadh, suggesting that he was unaware of his eventual fate aboard United Airlines Flight 175, the plane that hit the World Trade Center's south tower.
from abc: Thousands of foreign student pilots have been able to enroll and obtain pilot licenses from U.S. flight schools, despite tough laws passed in the wake of the 9/ll attacks, according to internal government documents obtained by ABC News. "Some of the very same conditions that allowed the 9-11 tragedy to happen in the first place are still very much in existence today," wrote (519kb PDF) one regional security official to his boss at the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration.
from news blaze: The rewriting of 9/11 started almost before the fires stopped smoldering in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania. It hasn't stopped. And nowhere is it more offensive than in the effort to build memorials to the victims of that horrific terrorist attack. The New York City memorial almost became not a tribute to heroes, but a "Freedom Center," tasked with showing how the United States brought 9/11 on itself, and how peace, love, and the hug-a-terrorist philosophy could avoid other such attacks in the future.
from ny daily news: Chanting "$25 million isn't enough!" dozens of sick 9/11 first responders stood in the rain on Capitol Hill Tuesday and urged President Bush to restore funding to help pay their medical bills. Joseph Zadroga, whose son James died of lung disease after working 100 hours at the site for the NYPD, said the government needs to help those who helped the city get back on its feet after the towers fell. 
from unique pakistan: In a significant observation many time UN contributor & international observer Professor Hans Koechler said “9/11 may have been an insider’s job” in response to a question from one of the delegates attending his lecture The 'Global War on Terror - Contradictions of an Imperial Strategy' last night at the Trades Hall in Auckland. “I am not a boy - I am 59. There are many inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the official version of events. Those who could not handle a Cessna pulled off 9/11,” he said.