Pacifica Radio

Naturally, most liberal Democrats are stifling their disappointment with President Obama in order to preserve any electability he still holds. That's not true of Rev. Jesse Jackson, who absolutely denounced Barack Obama's America on Friday on radical (yet taxpayer-supported) Pacifica Radio. This is a little ironic, since Pacifica griped a bit to Jackson in 2008 that he was being sidelined by Obama to preserve his electability.

The show "Democracy Now" offered a segment Friday on the new monument in Washington to Martin Luther King, which offered the opportunity for leftists to decry how King's dreams of the late Sixties for socialist revolution and an end to all American war-making were now being ignored:

What happens when the Left likes Stephen Colbert more than Jon Stewart? In a Tuesday interview on taxpayer-funded Pacifica Radio program Democracy Now, radical lefty Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com loved Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive," but did not like the centrist-against-extremists pose of Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity," since all the extremism is on the Right, and there's only tiny fringes of that on the Left. First, Colbert:  

Well, that, I think, is actually something that I found incredibly encouraging, because the rally there is “to keep fear alive.” And, of course, the American right is dependent, more than anything else, on fear. And as we talked about earlier, Democrats use fear, as well, to motive their base. And so, the role that fear plays in our political culture and the way in which politicians exploit that, I think, is one of the most central issues. And to the extent this rally is designed to mock that, I think that’s a good thing.

It turns out that Colbert's fake-conservative bashing of "Fear" is a more authentic liberal pose than Stewart's phony centrism, but Greenwald resents Stewart's "Million Moderates March" pose precisely because of his "very influential voice" in the media and on the Left:

It might seem impossible, but the radical-left taxpayer-funded Pacifica Radio network is in negotiations to get even more anti-American in its orientation. It's negotiating with Al-Jazeera for its five stations to broadcast audio from the Al-Jazeera English cable TV channel, which is only marginally available in the United States.

Those five stations (KPFA/Los Angeles, KPFK/Berkley, KPFT/Houston, WBAI/New York, and WPFW/Washington, DC) together received more than $1.6 million in annual grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to their 2008 annual report (p. 57). Al-Jazeera is most notorious for its repeated broadcast of unedited Osama bin Laden tapes after 9/11, offering al-Qaeda a global media platform.

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post reported Thursday that "If an agreement is reached, Pacifica would become the biggest American broadcaster to air Al-Jazeera." Pacifica executive director Arlene Eckhardt declined to comment on negotiations, but spoke favorably of the Arab network: "I appreciate the viewpoints they bring and see them as offering an international perspective that our news media doesn't always offer."

Support the Orlando Magic, support war in Iraq? That's what MSNBC's favorite leftist sports guru, Dave Zirin of The Nation magazine, argued on taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now on Friday. Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is the brother-in-law of Magic owner (and conservative funder) Dick DeVos. So Zirin thought NBA fans ought to think twice:   

I mean, I don’t think a majority of sports fans, when they go see an Orlando Magic game and cheer for players like Dwight Howard or Jameer Nelson, are saying, "I’m also buying a ticket to support Blackwater’s efforts in Iraq!" No, that—and effectively, though, that’s what they have us doing. It’s coercive, and I’m against it.

Zirin doesn't say Erik Prince actually owns the Magic, he just draws a Crayola line to him. Zirin also argued it was "money laundering" for sports owners to accept public money for stadiums and then hold political fundraisers in them. His villain was Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick, who supports the SB-1070 immigration law:

Pacifica Radio, funded in part by federal grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has a habit of ruining the patriotic holidays with their programming. On Memorial Day, their show "Democracy Now" hosted radical leftist Noam Chomsky railing against the "grand criminal" Ronald Reagan. On July 5, while many were still warmly recalling the Independence Day fireworks displays, "Democracy Now" aired a special interview with leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, who concluded by suggesting taxpaying Americans (even anti-war taxpaying Americans) aren't getting into Heaven due to their government's warmongering.

Moore said he would tell President Obama to withdraw all U.S. troops now from Iraq and Afghanistan, because the wars there were immoral:

I just wonder sometimes, who do we think we are as Americans, that we’re not going to have to answer for this someday? You know, whether we answer for it here or there, or if you’re a religious person and you think there’s a life after this, you know, what do you think is going to happen up at the Pearly Gates when they check your citizenship and go, "Oh, you were an American? Ha, well, here’s your list of crimes”?

On the occasion of Memorial Day, the radical-left Pacifica radio network devoted their hour of "Democracy Now" programming to the soft-spoken radical leftist whack-a-demic Noam Chomsky, who ripped into Ronald Reagan as a singular criminal:

Another stunning illustration of the success of propaganda, which has considerable import for the future, is the cult of the great killer and torturer Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era, who also—he also had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal terrorists and murderers around the world, from Zia-ul-Haq and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in what’s now called AfPak to the most dedicated killers in Central America to the South African racists who killed an estimated 1.5 million people in the Reagan years and had to be supported because they were under attack by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world, the Reaganites determined in 1988. And on and on, with remarkable consistency.

Now, his grisly record was quickly expunged in favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il-sung. Among other feats, he was anointed as the apostle of free markets, while raising protectionist barriers more than probably all other postwar presidents combined and implementing massive government intervention in the economy. He was a great exponent of law and order, while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be enforced, so that illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His hatred of working people was exceeded perhaps only by his contempt for the rich black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.

Appearing on the radical-left public radio network Pacifica on Tuesday to promote his DVD of Capitalism: A Love Story, filmmaker Michael Moore called the passage of ObamaCare a victory...for capitalism:

Well, I mean, to me, it all comes back to this issue of an economic system that is truly evil. And the healthcare bill that was passed ultimately will be seen as a victory for capitalism, because it protected the capitalist model of providing healthcare for people. In other words, we’re not to help people unless there’s money to be made from it. That is so patently disgusting and immoral, but that’s the system. That’s where we live.

Moore wanted the leftists to get right back to pushing a "single payer" option that outlaws insurance companies:

Former "Crossfire" host Bill Press apparently cannot distinguish between news and opinion. He is furious that his application for press credentials with the congressional press corps was denied due to content on his website urging readers to tell Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., to vote for health care legislation in the Senate. He cites numerous examples of CPC members that host opinion content, but neglects to differentiate between their commentary and their news coverage.

"Senator Joe Lieberman said he will vote against Harry Reid's proposed health reform bill that includes a public plan option. Call Senator Lieberman's office and tell him he's wrong to do so, and should vote FOR it," wrote Press on his site, billpressshow.com. The CPC forbids its correspondants from being "engaged in the prosecution of claims or the promotion of legislation pending before Congress."

Press was puzzled, however, that news outlets such as the Washington Times, the Huffington Post, Fox News, Al Jazeera, Venezuela TV, and Pacifica Radio were granted CPC membership, given the presence of opinion content in each of their outlets. "Irony? No, that's sheer hypocrisy," he wrote for the Huffington Post today.

On Friday’s edition of "Democracy Now" on (taxpayer-funded) radical Pacifica Radio, leftist writer Max Blumenthal promoted his new book "Republican Gomorrah," complete with the bizarre theory that the Grand Old Party is a movement based on sadomasochism, that James Dobson’s book "Dare to Discipline" was essential: "By creating a belt-wielding army of milllions, Dobson created the next generation of Republican shock troops, who are more radical than before."

Under this theory, Dobson found in Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay men who were viciously abused boys who were ready for his message: "Dobson has been able to get close to and work with in the Republican Congress and in American culture who have been viciously abused as children. And he understood that by advocating violence against children, deliberate violence, he was creating this sensibility, which would produce a radical generation of political followers."

Blumenthal was interviewed by Pacifica co-host Juan Gonzalez, a columnist for the New York Daily News.

Here's breakfast reading for you: "Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction"? Left-wing journalist Arun Gupta unspooled that theory on the taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network. McDonald's is apparently making us bacon addicts:

McDonald’s pumps this with all sorts of umami. This is something I’ve been looking at. A lot of our foods are pumped with all sorts of umami, everything from savory foods to ice cream, because it elicits an actual neurochemical, physiological response.

Naturally, abortion apostle Bonnie Erbe at U.S. News also jumped on the anti-bacon bandwagon:

Humans won't listen. But I have a saying: Animals bite back. You eat them, they kill you. The more we learn about nutrition and factory farming, the truer this becomes.

National Public Radio’s website has a section called "Books We Like," and NPR is unafraid to declare it likes books that please the hard left. NPR book critic Simon Maxwell Apter lauded a book on white supremacists called Blood and Politics by the author Leonard Zeskind, a man who recently declared on Pacifica Radio that Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan offer "a rational sense of justification" to hardened racists. Apter revealed that he liked not only the book, but the election of Barack Obama:

The recent murder of a security guard at D.C.'s Holocaust museum reminds us that racial and religious fanaticism live on in the U.S. But thankfully, while a handful of bigots are still grumbling on about the South's loss of the Civil War, the tyranny of "ZOG" (the "Zionist Occupied Government" currently reigning in Washington) and the "eight Jewish families" who "own" the Federal Reserve, some 70 million others have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.

On Thursday’s edition of Democracy Now on the radical-left Pacifica Radio network, co-hosts Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman discussed the Holocaust Museum shooting with Leonard Zeskind, author of the book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. But Gonzalez wanted Zeskind to connect dots from the racist fringe to Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you talk about the mainstream part of the movement, the mainstreamers, what role does television, shows like Sean Hannity and the impact of Pat Buchanan and other right-wing populists who are always on a lot of the cable shows and on radio, the Limbaughs of the world—how does this affect the ability of the right wing, of this most extreme right-wing movement, to win sympathizers and supporters?

On Wednesday’s Democracy Now program on the taxpayer-subsidized radical-left Pacifica Radio network, host Amy Goodman devoted the whole show to lionizing late-term abortionist George Tiller, gunned down on Sunday in his church in Kansas. Tiller’s colleague Dr. Susan Robinson vehemently denounced pro-lifers for breaking all kinds of city ordinances for their use of city property, and she even compared their crosses to the Ku Klux Klan’s:

So, these anti-abortion protesters—and let’s not call them "pro-life." You know, they’re not pro-life; they’re anti-abortion. These anti-abortion protesters would come every morning. They had little kind of holder locations drilled in the grass in the easement between the sidewalk and the street, which is city property. And I don’t know how many, over a hundred, 150 or so, I would guess, and these are little receptacles where they would put crosses. And so, as the patients would drive up to the clinic, they’d be faced with this forest of crosses....

In case you were hungry for really, really bad news from Iraq, one set of stations is still pumping it out: radical Pacifica Radio, subsidized by millions from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

On April 9, the sixth anniversary of liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, their flagship program "Democracy Now!" renounced its own name by decrying the imperialistic American transformation from a dictatorship into a parliamentary democracy. The headline was "We Didn't Create a Paradise In Iraq; We Created a Hell." The guest was Nir Rosen of the New America Foundation (Neuter America Foundation?), whose hatred of all American intervention sounded like it veered into tall-tale territory, like this:

I saw in southern Baghdad, on basically a vast pile of mud and sewage, a man had built a home entirely out of air conditioners. He piled air conditioners three high and built walls and threw on a tarp over it, and that was his home. It’s almost impossible to breathe when you visit many of these people, because the stench of the sewage and garbage is so strong.

There is one famous journalist who’s unafraid to denounce Barack Obama’s agenda. Legendary left-wing journalist Helen Thomas appeared on Tuesday’s Democracy Now on radical Pacifica Radio, and denounced Obama’s acceptance of pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy: "I think that Obama, during the campaign, made many promises, as every president, potential president does to Israel, that they seem somehow bounded by their promises, promises to uphold all Israeli goals. I don't see how the U.S. can provide F-16s, gunships, Apache gunships, phosphorus, possibly phosphorus, and cluster bombs and so forth to kill helpless people, children who are starving to death."

Thomas also denounced the White House press corps for bowing to Bush yesterday at his final press conference, offering a "platform of self-defense and self-delusion," and then compared the Israelis to the Nazis: "I remember the rabbi who spoke at the Martin Luther King march on Washington. [Rabbi Abraham] Heschel had a cameo appearance, and he said, ‘The greatest sin of all in the Nazi era was silence.’ When you remain silent to the suffering and the incredible aggression against a people, then you are culpable."

Anyone who doesn't think Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are currently radical should pay attention to the second half of their interview that aired on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! program on Monday. Listen to Dohrn wail about all the disasters the U.S. military is allegedly causing, and how we need to get "off the necks and the backs" of the world:  

Evidence of how much softer the ABC interview with Bill Ayers could have gone on Friday was displayed by the radical-left (and yet taxpayer-funded) Pacifica Radio network, as Ayers and his wife and fellow Weather Underground bomber Bernadine Dohrn appeared on the talk show "Democracy Now!" Co-host Juan Gonzalez asked: "As you say, in 1968, you were expecting that the war would be ended, because a majority of the population opposed it.

The radical-left Pacifica Radio network, enriched by subsidies from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, attempted to have a Third Party Day on its Democracy Now! program on Thursday. Only other radical leftist presidential candidates – Ralph Nader and Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney – were present. They claimed Libertarian Bob Barr and Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin bowed out. Host Amy Goodman played clips of the final debate, and asked the lefties to chime in on Bob Schieffer's questions. When it came to the Ayers part of the debate, Nader raged that Ayers is a small-time saboteur next to those "clinically verifiable mass terrorists," George Bush and Dick Cheney. First he praised the public-spirited activists of ACORN:

Second, on the Bill Ayers thing, who is a lapsed small-time saboteur with the Weather Underground many years ago, what should have been said was the big-time terrorists, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, these are clinically verifiable mass terrorists who have killed innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in their criminal wars of aggression. These are criminal wars of aggression. These are war crimes. These are war criminals.

The absence of liberal outrage over Barack Obama’s decision to reject public financing for his presidential campaign took a jaw-dropping turn on the hard-left Pacifica Radio network and its show "Democracy Now!" Host Amy Goodman, who regularly welcomes long screeds from Bill Moyers and his fervor about our bought-and-sold elections, welcomed two campaign "reformers" on Monday, and both failed to criticize Obama or his decision. Goodman proclaimed: "I have to say, it’s interesting to hear campaign finance groups be so uncritical of this decision when this is the very issue that, for example, you, John Rauh, have set up your organization around, Americans for Campaign Reform, and particularly around the issue of clean money and elections and cutting down the role money plays in elections."

This raises the question: have liberals been touting campaign finance "reform" out of genuine socialist conviction, or has it all just been a cynical pose that only lasts as long as they perceive conservatives and Republicans will have a campaign fundraising advantage? Where is Bill Moyers on this? He skipped the fire-and-brimstone sermonizing about it on his Bill Moyers Journal last Friday, a day after Obama’s announcement.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers was interviewed on the radical taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network's Democracy Now program on Wednesday, and declared that Hillary Clinton wishes the worst on Barack Obama -- "she keeps hoping for every day, is that lightning will strike him" and insisted "She can only win in a way that would leave the Democratic Party in shambles." Even so, Moyers complained that all three candidates are failing to correct a "dysfunctional" capitalist system.

Moyers also made excuses for Jeremiah Wright's wild sermons about 9/11 and AIDS, and brushed off suggestions that his interview could have been tougher. "I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist," he claimed. "I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media." He decried the ABC debate questions to Obama as "a great exercise in irrelevance."

So much for the alleged conservative conglomerate media. Broadcasting & Cable magazine reports leftist actor Tim Robbins drew a standing ovation last week before the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas for attacking the corporate media for distracting the country from real (liberal) issues with Britney and Hasselhoff stories. But Robbins also sneered that "talk radio geniuses" like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly called him a "traitor" for opposing the Iraq war, and now he "stands chastened" as everything in Iraq is a utopia of democracy and prosperity. The magazine did not note that in April 2003, ABC touted Robbins claiming a McCarthyesque "chill wind" of censorship was blowing across America.

Broadcasting & Cable critic David Bianculli was supposed to host Robbins for a Q&A at the convention, but when Robbins said he brought a speech that he was told was too preachy and negative to give, broadcasters yelled that he should give the speech, so he did. Far from being miffed at having his moderator’s role snuffed, Bianculli glowingly recounted the highlights:

Pacifica Radio’s "Democracy Now" program hit Barack Obama from the left on Wednesday after he lost in New Hampshire, so far from the left that Professor Michael Eric Dyson, a leftist favored by NBC anchor Brian Williams, was almost the conservative in a debate with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report. Ford thought Obama was "relentlessly sending out signals to white people that a vote for Barack Obama, an Obama presidency, would signal the beginning of the end of black-specific agitation, that it would take race discourse off of the table."

An end to racial agitation like Jesse Jackson’s and Al Sharpton’s? Has Obama specifically promised that anywhere? But "Democracy Now" host Amy Goodman added her two pennies to that, airing an interview segment where Jesse Jackson confirmed that Obama wants "distance" for "strategic purposes," and will not campaign with Jackson:

How left-wing is taxpayer-supported radio? WBAI-FM, the New York City home of the radical Pacifica Radio network that gets roughly $1 million each year in federal funds, is asking for contributions and offering a premium for $100 donors: a President Bush trash can that says "White Trash" on it.

For a short time only, WBAI offers a signed and numbered limited edition replica of New York artist, Robert Cenedella's "Basket Sculpture." This round metal construction is functional as a waste basket. Each measures 12" x 10".

For $100, which includes both shipping and a donation to WBAI, you can have the pleasure of trashing the President every day just as he has trashed the United States Constitution.

Public radio is a left-wing preserve, but some corners of public radio are so far to the left that they treat liberals as gangsters and monsters. A brief listen to Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" program on Thursday brought me to a segment on the presidential candidates, and how they're all, from left to right, compromised by their warmongering national-security experts. Radical journalist Allan Nairn attacked Mike Huckabee, for example, for failing to treat Bill Clinton as a war criminal: 

In the musty but hallowed halls of the Old Media, the first item for target practice is often the New Media, the ones formed and made popular by the atrocious biases of their predecessors. The Old Media continue watching their numbers bleed away; continue to paint themselves as fair and balanced, despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary; and continue to smear the New Media, especially talk radio, as the divisive haters and fact-manglers ruining civil discourse in America.

Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw is on the publicity tour for his new book "Boom!" about the 1960s. On the November 26 Laura Ingraham show, when he was challenged with his soundbite broadsiding talk radio as "instantly jingoistic and savagely critical" of war protesters, Brokaw quickly put his anti-radio rant back into rotation.

He suggested incivility was a "big cancer" on America, and talk radio is the number one tumor. Front and center in Brokaw’s pathology was Limbaugh: "My problem with the whole spectrum is there is not -- you know what Rush’s, what his whole drill is. He doesn’t want to hear another point of view. Except his."

The radical-left Pacifica Foundation's radio stations -- in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, and New York -- draw about a million dollars a year in federal grants through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. What they put on the air can be some pretty strange brew.

On Friday's "Democracy Now" show -- as they led into a discussion of how viciously demagogic and racist were the opponents of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants -- a rapper blaming the 9-11 attacks as government-detonated was aired. It caught my attention because you seldom hear the words "popping and locking" followed by "Wolfowitz doctrine." The rapper is named Immortal Technique.

The song is "Underground Railroad Freestyle," and the lyrics were like this: 

Pacifica Radio defines the idea of ideological pork barrel. Every year, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting offers community-service grants in the area of about $1 million to Pacifica stations like WPFW in Washington, DC and KPFK in Los Angeles to spew their radical politics. Their flagship show "Democracy Now" celebrated the Fourth of July with an hour with Pete Seeger, the radical socialist folk singer. In this passage, they discussed how Pete's dad was a communist (Pete was a member of the CPUSA after Daddy):

But he, in those early days, linked up with the Communist movement. He and Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell and Marc Blitzstein. They had a thing they called the Composers' Collective. After all, in Russia they had collectives this and collective that. And there, they decided, as skilled musicians, they would compose the new music for the new society. Well, their attempts were laughable. Aaron Copland put music to a poem by Alfred Hayes, same man who wrote "Joe Hill" -- "Into the Streets May 1st." But only a very expert singer could sing it, tremendous range, and only a very expert pianist could accompany it properly. Of course, no proletariat ever sang him.

In an interview on Monday’s edition of “Democracy Now” on radical (and taxpayer-supported) Pacifica Radio, host Amy Goodman relayed listener questions to Cindy Sheehan on her self-pitying Withdrawal from Politics tour. We learned again that Sheehan will not run for office: “I have been asked by the Green Party to run for president, but, you know, that’s not anything that I want.” (Imagine what Hillary Clinton would try to do to a female third-party threat. Eek.) 

It was funnier when Goodman passed along a question from left wing “PR Watch” guru John Stauber: “What is your opinion of MoveOn and the role it played in the recent congressional debate over war funding?” Sheehan found it hilarious that the “corporate media” would categorize MoveOn as part of the “antiwar left.” So where the devil on the ideological spectrum is it? She said:

As part of his tour of public-broadcasting publicity spots, PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers appeared Wednesday morning on radical-left Pacifica Radio’s "Democracy Now" program with Amy Goodman, a show Moyers celebrated at a radical "media reform" conference in January by suggesting he had a private "fantasy" about Goodman, that every PBS station would put her on their air. They referred to him as "legendary." Goodman played large chunks of the Moyers PBS special "Buying the War" in advance, and Moyers uncorked a series of left-wing howlers for her.

The mainstream media were cheerleaders for Bush. "Pro-war pundits" need to be banned from TV, put in a "penalty box." Implausibly, he claimed his documentary "talks to people on all sides of the story." Jon Stewart is the "Mark Twain of our day." Dan Rather is an "honest man" but at CBS, he was a "good man caught in a rigged system," contained by corporate owners at Viacom who voted Republican. And, weirdest of all, Moyers claims he and PBS "serve a sort of centrist role," and PBS needs to break free of control from Congress. Let’s take the Moyers claims one at a time.