Uh, is this intended to help or hurt?
Liberal radio talker and MSNBC rodeo clown Ed Schultz, ever prepared to join a left-wing lollapalooza regardless of merit, is promising he'll provide plenty of unpaid ads for Occupy Wall Street. (audio clips after page break)
Here's Schultz vowing to do this on his radio show Friday --
And I got news for you -- these folks, they ain't going away. They are not going away. 'Cause this is what the working folks are talking about. This is what the cabbies in New York are talking about, this is what the cabbies in Washington are talking about, this is what the truck drivers are listening to, you know, this is what the construction workers are doing over a lunch break.
They're hearing this stuff and they're seeing it on TV. And I'm going to put it on TV every night. I'm going to put it on TV every night until the last protester goes home and, you know what, this is going to be a story until the next election. And these folks are not going to disengage. They will be there.
How curious indeed that for all his bloviating about Occupy Wall Street, Schultz has broadcast "The Ed Show" from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan only once since the protest began a month ago, and his radio show not at all.
Perhaps significantly, "The Ed Show" that aired from Occupy Wall Street on Oct. 5 did not go well at all, with Schultz being jeered as a "corporatist" for much of the hour by protesters behind him.
These people were attacking Ed Schultz for being a corporatist. Give me a freakin' break! This is the only show that talks about union issues every single day. This is the show that spent a year and a half fighting for health care in this country. This is the show that talks about school teachers and firefighters and policemen. And these punks -- and I'm going to use that word again -- they're punks, have the audacity to sit there and call us corporate media, you can go straight to hell! And if I, if you happen to have seen me on TV last night, we were in, on the verge of a riot. And I wasn't mad because they're attacking Ed. What I'm mad about is they're hurting their own movement.
Ah, when lefties disagree. Not a pretty sight.
Nice to see that Schultz plans to be with the Wall Street protesters in spirit, seeing how it didn't go so well when he joined them in person.
Clearly it hasn't occurred to Holm that Schultz might well have been jeered as a corporatist because he works for MSNBC, whose parent company, NBC Universal, is nearly half-owned by GE -- which paid no federal income taxes last year. Here's how this was reported by the New York Times on March 24 --
General Electric, the nation's largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
In other words, GE falls squarely within that wealthiest one percent that the so-called 99 percent find so repugnant.
The flea party squatters in Occupy Wall Street are proving helpful for Schultz and other MSNBC hosts in distracting attention from GE's tax dodge, Obama's failed presidency and genuine news such as the Solyndra debacle, in favor of a made-for-media, flash-in-the-pan distraction.
(h/t, Brian Maloney at The Radio Equalizer)
