Sunday, February 07, 2010
“Fox News used to be all about: ‘You don’t criticize a president during war time. It’s unacceptable. It’s treasonous. It’s giving aid and comfort to the enemy.’ All of a sudden, for some reason, you can run out there and say Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country.” – Jon Stewart (to Bill O’Reilly) More below
Economic Recovery- of Wealthy Shoppers Wall Street bonuses and similar monies going for the Usuals.
More prosperous American shoppers seem to be defying continuing high unemployment levels and economic uncertainty to renew their spending on luxuries such as jewellery, fashion and cosmetics.
That is the picture emerging from the current round of US earnings and sales reports.
Tracey Travis, chief financial officer of Polo Ralph Lauren, said last week that the fashion brand and retail company had “slowly begun to see the gradual return of our core luxury customer”, including buyers of couture dresses that sell for more than $4,000.
Fabrizio Freda, chief executive of Estée Lauder, has said that sales of its beauty products at “prestige” stores – such as traditional department stores – had grown faster than at “mass” drugstores and discounters during November and December, reversing the trend seen earlier in the year.
“We view this as a return of the aspirational consumer,” he said.
Sales of cognac in the US had jumped 19 per cent by volume during the fourth quarter compared with the same period last year, according to BNIC, France’s trade association of cognac makers. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0cfbe50c-1420-11df-8847-00144feab49a.html
Condemning What Once Supported: Security It’s already been demonstrated with deficits- the Republicans condemn Obama’a deficits, yet were silent engineers of the vast percentage of our national debt when in power. Now, security is receiving the same treatment. Dahlia Lithwick calls the ‘terrorist derangement syndrome’
Each time Republicans go to their terrorism crazy-place, they go just a little bit farther than they did the last time, so that things that made us feel safe last year make us feel vulnerable today.
Policies and practices that were perfectly acceptable just after 9/11, or when deployed by the Bush administration, are now decried as dangerous and reckless. The same prominent Republicans who once celebrated open civilian trials for Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe bomber," now claim that open civilian trials endanger Americans (some Republicans have now even gone so far as to try to defund such trials). Republicans who once supported closing Guantanamo are now fighting to keep it open. And one GOP senator, who like all members of Congress must take an oath to uphold the Constitution, has voiced his concern that the Christmas bomber really needed to be "properly interrogated" instead of being allowed to ask for a lawyer.
In short, what was once tough on terror is now soft on terror. http://www.slate.com/id/2243429/
Tea Party Convention: Opened by Tom Tancredo who noted, "People who could not spell the word 'vote' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House -- name is Barack Hussein Obama."
America's disparate army of angry conservatives assembled under one roof yesterday at the first national tea party convention in Nashville, amid controversy over an opening speech which preached bigotry bordering on racism.
Up to 600 delegates from all over the US descended on the cavernous Gaylord hotel to plot a strategy on how to take back the country from the perceived threat of the Obama administration. Sporting a shirt made from the Stars and Stripes, Tim Peak from Arizona said he had travelled so far because it was "time for the silent majority to stand up and start speaking".
…amid talk about fiscal conservatism and the "subversive threat" of the green movement, there was also a strong undercurrent of a cultural bigotry which previously had been kept to the margins of the tea party phenomenon.
Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman from Denver in Colorado who ran for president in 2008, devoted most of his opening speech on Thursday night to illegal immigration. He said the fabric of US society had been eroded by the "cult of multiculturalism", "Islamification", and large numbers of immigrants who did not want to be Americans.
In his most incendiary comment, he invoked the segregationist methods of the southern states, saying that Obama had been elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country". Southern segregationist states used to prevent black people having the vote by setting them restrictively difficult qualification tests, a historical allusion lost on few of the delegates present.
Tancredo went on to call on delegates to launch a "counter-revolution" that would "pass on our culture based on Judeo-Christian principles. Whether people like it or not, that's who we are."
That remark received a standing ovation from the audience. http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/69-politics/941-prejudice-and-principle-brew-at-tea-party-meet
And, their keynote speaker, our national embarrassment, Sarah Palin. You would think she’s been thoroughly exposed as an ignorant poseur, but… She urged Republican lawmakers' priorities be to (1) cut federal spending, though she didn't say where, (2) adopt a conservative energy policy, and (3) turn to "our creator." http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201002060026
Whatever her intentions in terms of 2012, it is undeniable that she is building a political presence that can be matched by very few others on either side of US politics. Almost 3 million copies of her memoirs, Going Rogue, have been printed. In her home town of Wasilla, Fox News is converting a room in her house into a TV studio.
Most importantly, Palin appears to have the ability to draw conservatives from disparate political traditions to her side, from evangelical rightwingers of whom she is one to fiscal conservatives, global-warming deniers and libertarians. The skill was much in evidence in Nashville, where adoration of Palin was one of the common denominators among the attendants.
Lisa Mai, a former staff sergeant in the US airforce turned country singer, performed a homage to Palin called Change You Won't Regret: "She's a pitbull with lipstick, And a real beauty queen, The shining light on the right, The left just doesn't get."
Debi Keatts, a delegate from Danville, Virginia, who belongs to a group called Team Sarah – a support network with 76,000 members – said: "We believe in her values and what she stands for and how she is a true conservative because that's what we are."
Jack Smith, from Ellijay, Georgia, said he had doubts about Obama's legitimacy to be president because he believed he was not a natural-born US citizen, and held Palin up as a positive contrast. "At least she is an American," Smith said.
Palin has been clearly working at the perceived weaknesses that damaged her reputation during the vice-presidential race, particularly her lack of depth in foreign policy. She has taken on a former international affairs adviser to John McCain to steer her, and felt sufficiently confident in this area to lambast Obama for having devoted only 9% of his state of the union address on national security and foreign policy.
In the coming weeks there will be plenty more Palin on display as her brand continues to grow. In March she will attend the start of the next bus tour from the Tea Party Express that will kick off in Harry Reid's home town of Searchlight, Nevada.
She also announced in Nashville that she would begin to openly endorse candidates she thinks are sufficiently conservative – a threat that should send a chill down the spines of many moderate Republicans. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/07/sarah-palin-tea-party-speech1
Jon Stewart on FOX A protracted conversation with Bill O’Reilly; the latter was clearly out-maneuvered, out-smarted. Full video link, below
Mr. Stewart said Fox had been able to “mainstream conservative talk radio.” On television on Wednesday night, the exchange ended there. But in the studio, Mr. Stewart swung harder, saying Fox had mixed the “media arm of a political party” with “a little bit” of objectivity, something that White House officials have also asserted in recent months.
Fox News said the interview was edited only for time. A video of the unedited interview was posted on BillOReilly.com and on foxnews.com on Thursday night.
In the interview and in a subsequent segment, Mr. O’Reilly said Mr. Stewart was basing his complaints “primarily on two guys, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.” But Mr. Stewart insisted that the conservative bent permeated the network and cited “Fox & Friends,” the network’s entertainment-oriented morning show, as evidence:
“They’ll go through, ‘These children in second grade are singing the praises of Obama! Do you know they sing the praises of their leader in North Korea?’ And then, when the hard news comes on, they say, ‘Some people are concerned that they are indoctrinating children.’ ”
Fox News, far and away the most-watched cable news channel, has stoked controversy (and higher ratings) in the first year of the Obama administration by appearing, at times, to be the network of the opposition. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/arts/television/06fox.html?sq=In%20Visit%20To%20Fox%20News,%20Jon%20Stewart%20Faults%20Fox&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
Unedited Video: http://video.foxnews.com/v/video-embed.html?video_id=4003531&w=400&h=249
-R
