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Volume 1-2019

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JOIN THE LIST

Use this link to add your email address to the RARWRITER Publishing Group mailing list for updates on activities associated with the Creative Culture and Revolution Culture journals, and other RARWRITER Publishing Group interests.

NEWS FEEDS

The RCJ provides RSS feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving our readers a convenient portal through which to stay abreast of world events and issues. Use the links provided. The following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage (scroll both columns to the right).

The New York Times

The Huffington Post

The Economist

 

These are provided on other pages within this site:

Politico

Politics Daily

Wall Street Journal

Ezra Klein's WonkBlog - Washington Post

Nuclear Threat Initiative

cnet

Wired

Variety

Rolling Stone

 

Other sites worth visiting:

Cracked.com
Political Punch (ABC News Blog)
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LIBRARY OF ARTICLES

9-11 Liberals and Salman Rushdie

Police Force "Bombing" in Iraq

Anatomy of a Screwing

Fix America Now

Iceberg Economy: How the Supply Siders are Sinking the Ship of State

Bloomberg Illustrates Dodd-Frank Regulations for Investors

DAVOS WEF Points Out Single Points of Failure in the New Global Economy

Soulless Possession of Santo Nińo

What Keeps NBC's Chuck Todd Up at Night?

"King of Bain" - Documentary on Mitt Romney's Private Equity Firm Bain Capital

Robert Smigel's Lost Ode to the Evil of General Electric

Riddle This: Do Our Governmental Systems Hinder Mitigation of Harmful Influences to Our System of Government?

The Achievement Metric - Time for a New Way of Determining Public Policy and Positioning Revenue Spending

Hide Your Brains! Matthews from the Left! Gingrich from the Right! Blowhard Attack! Or, more to the point...book reviews of "JFK Elusive Hero" and "Valley Forge"

Art Sampler - An RCJ Review of Art in the Modern Period

Benicia, California Case Study in Traffic Engineering and Growth Management

Everyday Heroism - The Penn State Debacle

How to Keep Things Lousy in the USA

How Being a Socialist Became a Negative

Are You A Slave? A Brief History of the Subject Suggests "Probably"

Moses, Wall Street, Human Nature and Grover Norquist

Concepts of Resistance - The RCJ Provides a Road Map for the OWS Movement

Lance Henriksen - World's Greatest Actor in Reflective Mode

Conspiracy - A Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the New World Order

Elections 2012

What Does it Take to be President?

Rating the U.S. News Readers

The Antidote to Michelle Bachman

Ship of Fools - Why Won't We Save Ourselves?

White House Solar Bomb

What Is Happening to Us?

The Cloud - What It Is

Background on Afghanistan

Economics 101

Global Economic Risks

Islamic Definition

Middle East

Second Amendment Remedies

Sam Broussard - Republicans

Treason

Why All the Zombies?

Gun Rights

Leadership Chronicles

 

Rick Alan Rice (RAR) Literature Page

ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance" -AVAILABLE NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM AMAZON.COM. Use this link.

CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects the building of America in a trilogy of novels collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores the development of the American West through the lens of public policy, land planning, municipal development, and governance as it played out in one of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious and cultural traditions that imbued the American Midwest with a special character that continues to have a profound effect on American politics to this day. Book One creates an understanding about America's cultural foundations that is further explored in books two and three that further trace the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as an icon in the development of a certain brand of American character. That's the serious stuff viewed from high altitude. The story itself gets down and dirty with the supernatural, which in ATWOOD - A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the monumental to the sublime. The book features the epic poem "The Toiler" as well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard Padilla.

Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry

Western Crime Novel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal property of individuals whose assets have been inventoried in advance and distributed through a vast system of illegal commerce.

It is a ripping good yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of creative works being produced in 1950, when the story is set. Richard Padilla has done his usually brilliant work in capturing the look and feel of a certain type of crime fiction being produced in that era. The whole thing has the feel of those black & white films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard, whose earliest works were westerns. Use this link.

 

EXPLORE THE KINDLE BOOK LIBRARY

If you have not explored the books available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You will find classic literature there, as well as tons of privately published books of every kind. A lot of it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published books are awful, but some are truly classics. You can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works for two bucks.

You do not need to buy a Kindle to take advantage of this low-cost library. Use this link to go to an Amazon.com page from which you can download for free a Kindle App for your computer, tablet, or phone.

Amazon is the largest, but far from the only digital publisher. You can find similar treasure troves at NOOK Press (the Barnes & Noble site), Lulu, and others.

 

 

MEDIA

 

MEDIA: The Trump-Maher Romance

LITTLE PEOPLE ON THE LITTLE SCREEN

Donald Trump was born to be a joke. Bill Maher has had to work at it, but through his association with Trump, he is getting there.

 

By RAR

I Used to Like Bill Maher.

It seems impossible to me now, but I used to really enjoy Friday nights watching HBO. Me and my mistress-concubine-owner and mother of my children, to whom I have long been married but cannot call my wife, still start Friday evenings with Maher, before continuing into a night of Fear.net slash and gore. Don’t ask me why, we find this entertaining. Or at least we used to.

The woman whose name may never be mentioned still finds Maher amusing, but I have found him less so over time. He has become a hater, specifically a hater of Muslims, as if that is a monolithic group, and in becoming openly so he has revealed his true self.

One of my personal deficits is an inability to forgive a person of their shortcomings, once they have been revealed. I live with this perception that people are who they are, and they don’t change from that. You are cooked, and once recognized will never be seen any other way again.

As people mature, from say fifteen to thirty years of age, they may get better at hiding who they really are, but by around age sixty the gloves come off and people begin to feel like they may as well let it all hang out. Old people lose the will or the ability to govern their biases, or their willingness to voice them aloud.

Bill Maher is old. Like the now cloying thumpety-thump theme of his HBO show, “Real Time with Bill Maher”, the erstwhile Mort Sahl of his own imagination has become soggy in the shorts.

(Continued here from the front page)

It has only been recently, in my perception, that anyone has ever taken the former standup comedian turned B-movie actor seriously.  People didn’t take him seriously as a political commentator – and some, including Maher himself, now think of him as that – nor as a standup comedian turned B-movie actor.

I have no idea how Maher went from a role in the jaw-droppingly awful Sandra Locke vehicle Rat Boy, which was a divorce settlement project done from Clint Eastwood’s account, to landing Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central in 1993. He was probably loitering in the halls at the advent of the new cable channel and just got lucky. He hosted a low-cost entertainment product that presented celebrity types to discuss policy issues, a concept which at the time seemed ludicrous and just for laughs, though now has become the television norm.

Though I share many of Maher’s liberal views, and like to laugh as much as the next guy, I never watched Politically Incorrect, which went to ABC in 1997. I just never found Maher nor his cast of Ann Coulters and Ben Afflecks interesting enough to sacrifice the time to watch.

Maher’s story started to become more intriguing after his show was dropped by ABC when sponsors began shying away from Maher’s statements on the 9-11 debacle. He reacted to President George W. Bush’s accusations that the 9-11 bombers had been “cowards”, with Maher saying -  "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. "

Were there ever to be a biopic made of Maher’s career – and the only thing that would encourage such a venture would be some truly cataclysmic event at the end of his life to give it a third act anyone would care to see – it would be one of those 9-11 stories. Maher was apparently changed by 9-11, which from this viewer’s perspective precipitated his steady decline into darkness. Like a Paddy Chayefsky character, no one would care, but he is on television.

Exhibits to support this thesis:

  •       The 2011-2013 HBO seasons of his show have featured a repeated theme that we should use whatever it takes, including illegal drone attacks, to kill our Muslim enemies everywhere in the world. Maher is paranoid about container traffic into the Port of Los Angeles, which is relatively near to where he lives. The Libertarian Maher carries a handgun, because he openly admits to being scared, apparently of people in general.

  •       In 2007, Maher ejected a group of “9-11 Truthers” from the audience of his show for their disruptive attempts to bring attention to the probability that the destruction of the World Trade Centers and attack on the Pentagon were part of an elaborate conspiracy to create exactly the anti-Muslim sentiment Maher is now peddling, big time.

  •       Maher produced a mean-spirited, if correct, comic documentary called Religulous, which was a take-down of religion. Even those such as myself that agreed with the premise, that religious beliefs are at the root of many of our societal problems, found the execution of the film too shoddy to endorse. It tended to reveal Maher’s disregard for the spiritual comfort of his fellow man, however misguided.

  •       Along those lines, Maher has two memberships that call his character into question: 1) he is on the board of directors of the animal-rights group PETA, which is a “terrorist organization” internal to the U.S.; and, 2) he is a 57-year old bachelor, never married, and without children. I say this on the basis that people who choose not to have children probably don’t like people, or don’t like themselves, which may be the same thing. Those same people usually explode at such an accusation, but then balanced people who are okay with people don’t usually have any reason to explode. In fact, people who don’t love other people love their pets, and so of course you have the misanthrope Maher and PETA. PETA, which got its start defending research monkeys, takes in stray pets, but as they “oppose the no-kill rule” (and who knew there was one of those) they euthanize 85 percent of the animals they take in. Otherwise, they are the Humane Society with an aggressive marketing strategy that includes public displays of nudity and aggressive attacks against purchasers of animal skins. The organization’s many detractors would wonder what it is they are raising funds for beyond the enrichment of their administrative body, led by the innately abrasive Ingrid Newkirk. The transference of affection one senses in these peoples’ attachments to their pets would be striking, but I would need to see some photographs of Newkirk wrestling with puppies to believe it. I’ll accept that Maher has no human contact, particularly after the records of the 2005 lawsuit filed against him by live-in lover and Playboy Cyber Girl Coco Johnsen. Her claim that Maher had promised to support her was dismissed by the courts, but along the way revealed Maher to be remorselessly self-absorbed and superficial. “I'm just into women who are real, and they happen to be black,” Maher has said. Otherwise put, not like any human beings he otherwise knows.

People who are truly engaged with life, including the people encountered within it, tend to grow with age. One sees those people become more kind, and to see that become a key part of their strength. I can’t cite famous examples, but we all have the aunts and uncles and grandparents that typify this mode. They are the flip-side of the stinkers described above, who become the Archie Bunker’s of our days. At the extreme end of that resides those people who have the incomes and the platforms, which always go together, to exploit their capacity for malevolent behavior. In that vein, Bill Maher has become a thug.

People who don't like people seem an unlikely source for solutions to the problems of people, not that this is Maher's job. Still, neither is it the responsibility of anyone to create new problems for people, which is the usual unfortunate output of people who don't like people. Those folks don't want to help, a philosophical position that fractures community purpose through elimination of potential alternative solutions. Problems grow in that environment, and in there may be no greater betrayal to humankind than the decision to see yourself as other, not a part of the rest.

Thugs like Maher and his mirror image Donald Trump get away with being what they are because they make money for themselves and others through the fluke exposures they offer. This is why you get this weird list of sub-celebrities now showing up on Real Time with Bill Maher, mixed with “serious” news journalists and opinion leaders. And this is another of the reasons Maher has begun to vex.

Maher’s producers have never differentiated between substantial and non-substantial guests, which over time have blurred in distinction. The viewer is charged with making the call, but broadcasting has this odd way of re-generating its own signals and viewers have seemed to grow less nuanced with exposure to the modern media age. And then there is Gestapo of it all, with Maher bringing on guests from the right of the political spectrum so that he can use the "F-word" against them, which is always his summation judgment, i.e., you are fucking wrong! This is often unsupported by any cogent argument or proof to the effect, but it is the red meat Maher's audiences wait to howl for. One wonders if they aren’t checked at the door for their political allegiances and their abilities to clap on cue and then shut the fuck up!

Maher is big on rules. In fact, for a brief, early moment his “New Rules” segment was the best part of his show, though now it falls as flat as the proverbial coal mine canary. The writers of the segment surrendered several seasons back with an apparent inability to maintain the premise with funny material, so they gave up trying even as Maher continues to do the routine. The “new rules” are often not rules at all, but rather just lead-in to a Bill Maher bullylogue, which is the minute or two at the end of his show where this protected wimp of a man snarks into the camera a bunch of indefensible and un-rebutted crap about whatever he wants to get off his chest this week – and to say where he’ll be performing the next couple weeks.

That the celebrity world is full of marginal types, recently including Martin Beshear of MSNBC and Tina Brown of magazine publishing fame, who will drop in to promote their brands is probably to be expected. One wishes they would leave with a stain that would tell the world that they are media whores, for why else would they go on Maher’s badly listing vessel.

One senses that when this fish boat finally sinks, there won’t be anyone present who cares about saving Bill Maher, unless some scurvy rat survives and connives to turn the saucy old comedian into a fresh meal. Save that, Maher guy is bound to grow even more gamey, and even less pleasant to watch on HBO. 021112

 

What Keeps NBC's Chuck Todd Up at Night?

IS STEPHEN COLBERT DAMAGING OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM?

Satirists need to be held accountable when their political agenda seeps into the real

 

 

Media Wasteland

Study Correlates Media to Doltishness 

The media studiers at Farleigh Dickenson were back at it recently, updating their annual media report that measures the paucity of correct information Americans have on domestic and international news and political issues, and identifying the sources of our lack of knowledge...at least sort of.

Survey readers from the left of the political spectrum have loved the Farleigh Dickenson research for the light it shines on FOX News, whose viewers always rank the lowest among study participants. They are able to answer roughly 1 in 4 questions correctly, which to media critics puts FOX in a bad light, but viewers of MSNBC - the Left's analog to what FOX News is to the political Right - are not appreciably better informed. In fact, Americans generally perform abysmally on these surveys, with the brightest bulbs in the TV room - National Public Radio (NPR) devotees - able to answer domestic and international questions correctly less than half of the time.

The study itself seems questionable in its content and approach, but accepting the results at face value one wonders if the more valuable information doesn't relate to the limitations of broadcast journalism in general, and of a system that leaves citizens precious little time to absorb information any other way.

The switchover from being a people who read - the standard up until about 1980, after which the behaviors of news consumers rapidly began to change - to being a people who watch and listen has been enormous in its impacts. It has given rise to an age of information chunking, elevating a strategy for managing the limitations of electronic journalism to a lifestyle, in which we pick and choose what we want or have time to take in. This has been further promoted by the explosion of cable channels, which provide a cornucopia of alternatives for viewers to choose from, and in recent years the explosion of Internet-based media, such as YouTube, have added to the range of alternatives. The vast majority of all of these offerings are entertainment rather than information oriented. This would include most of the offerings specified in the Farleigh Dickenson study, for in that media list in those graphics shown above only the Sunday morning political talk shows (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, etc.) and the NPR News Hour with Jim Lehrer could be considered primarily informational in nature. Everything else on that list is opinion and entertainment, and that too casts this study in an odd light.

Media observers today like to point out that young people get most of their information on political and international news issues from John Stewart, Steven Colbert, and the late night comedians. While that may be true, it would be incorrect to assume that means that they are well informed through these exposures. It may be where they get their information, but it isn't sufficient to score better than a low "F" on these civics and issues tests.

This change in the way we get the information that is crucial to the responsible operation of a democracy has been driven by technological developments, which have in part been spurred by environmental pressures. We decided sometime back to become a paperless society, because cutting down forests to produce disposable paper products has all kinds of downsides. We are nowhere near to achieving that goal in the big problem places, like offices, but the newspaper industry has been devastated.

It hasn't just been concern for the trees and the environment, but also a long, downward arc in the overall economics of the nation, which has dried up ad revenues and made it impossible for big daily print operations to survive, particularly when sharing ad revenues with the broadcast media.

All of those pressures have given us a news gathering formula that works something like:

  INTERESTS - TIME = CHOICE

What we are finding to be interesting and how we are using our time seems currently to be adding up to choices not particularly conducive to the effective maintenance of a democratic society. - RAR                      (052412)

 

RATING THE NEWS READERS

The RCJ takes a critical look at the panorama of news readers and reporters, rating them with regard to the weight their opinion and reporting carries with decision makers, how bright they appear to be, and how informed. The last two categories take into account the reporters' personal appeal - we do tend to place greater stock in the information we gain from people we admire - and the extent to which their personal biases seem to be reflected in their interpretation of the news. See the legend below for information on the ratings icons. (Compiled September 11, 2011)

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NAME WITH RATING WEIGHT SMART INFORMED APPEAL BIAS PTS DESCRIPTION
Brian Williams NBC ęęę 1 1 1.2 1 1 4.2 Host
Suzanne Malveaux CNN ęę 1 1.1 1.3 1.1 0.1 3.6 Host - National News
John King CNN ęę 1 1.2 1.3 0.9 0.2 3.6 Host - Politics
Dr. Sanjay Gupta CNN ęę 1 1.3 1.2 1.2 -0.1 3.6 Host - Medical
Ann Curry Today ę 1 1 1 0.9 0.5 3.4 News Anchor
Natalie Morales Today ę 1 1 1 0.8 0.5 3.3 National Correspondent
Amy Robach Today ę 0.9 1 1 0.5 0.5 3.2 National Correspondent
Candy Crowley CNN ę 1 1.1 1.3 0.7 0 3.1 Host
Thomas Roberts MSNBC ę 1 1 1 1 0.1 3.1 Anchor
David Gregory NBC ę 0.9 1.2 1.2 0.9 0.1 3.1 Host - Meet the Press
Charles Hodson CNN ę 1 1 1 1 0 3.0 Host - Business News
Robin Roberts ABC ę 1 1 1 1 0 3.0 Host - Good Morning America
Chris Matthews MSNBC ę 0.9 1 1.3 0.8 0.2 3.0 Host
Diane Sawyer ABC ę 0.9 1 1 1 0.3 3.0 Host - ABC Nightly News
Andrea Mitchell MSNBC u 1 1 1 0.9 0 2.9 Host - Reporter   
Wolf Blitzer CNN u 0.9 1 1.2 1 0 2.9 Host
George Stephanopolous ABC u 1 1 1 0.9 -0.1 2.8 Host - Good Morning America
Savannah Guthrie NBC u 0.8 1 1 1 0.3 2.6 Host - Reporter - Politics
Andrew Stevens CNN u 1 1 1 0.6 0 2.6 Host - Business News
Josh Elliott ABC u 0.9 0.9 0.9 1 0 2.5 Host - Good Morning America
Chuck Todd NBC 0.8 0.9 1.3 0.7 0.1 2.4 Host - Reporter - Politics
Anderson Cooper CNN 0.8 0.8 1 1 0.1 2.3 Host
Bret Baier FOX 1 0.8 0.8 0.8 -0.3 2.1 Host
Fareed Zakaria CNN 1 1.1 1.2 0.3 -0.5 2.1 Host - International Issues
Bill O'Reilly FOX 1.3 0.9 0.7 0.6 -0.7 2.0 Host
Joe Scarborough MSNBC K 0.5 0.9 0.9 1 1 1.9 Host
Meredith Viera Today K 0.7 1 0.8 0.4 0.2 1.9 Co-Anchor
Matt Lauer Today K 0.8 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.1 1.8 Co-Anchor
Scott Pelley CBS K 0.6 0.8 1 0.8 0 1.6 Host - CBS Evening News
Sean Hannity FOX K 1.1 0.8 0.6 0.8 -0.8 1.5 Host
Rachel Maddow MSNBC K 0.7 1.1 1.4 0.4 -0.7 1.5 Host
Lawrence O'Donnell MSNBC K 0.5 1.2 1.3 0.8 -0.4 1.5 Host
Ali Velshi CNN K 0.5 1 1 0.5 0 1.3 Host
Piers Morgan CNN K 0.5 0.8 0.7 0.8 0 1.2 Host
Ed Schultz MSNBC K 0.7 0.8 1.1 0.4 -0.8 1.1 Host
Mika Brzezinski MSNBC M 0.3 0.7 0.7 0.7 1 0.9 Host
Christine Romans CNN M 0.3 1 1 0.8 0 0.8 Host
Lisa Napoli MSNBC M 0.3 0.5 1 0.7 0.1 0.7 Correspondent
Jeannie Ohm MSNBC M 0.3 0.5 1 0.7 0.1 0.7 Anchor
Bill Hemmer FOX M 0.3 0.9 0.7 0.8 -0.1 0.7 Host
Greta Van Susteren FOX M 0.3 1 1 0.2 0 0.7 Host
Brooke Baldwin CNN M 0.3 0.6 0.5 0.8 0 0.6 Host
Al Sharpton MSNBC M 0.4 0.7 1.1 0.3 -0.8 0.5 Host
Willie Geist MSNBC M 0.2 1 0.8 0.7 0 0.5 Host
Neil Cavuto FOX M 0.5 0.7 0.6 0.3 -0.7 0.5 Host
Shepard Smith FOX M 0.3 0.3 0.5 0.5 -0.2 0.3 Host
Megyn Kelly FOX M 0.4 0.3 0.3 1 -1 0.2 Host
Kyra Phillilps CNN M 0.1 0.5 0.5 0.8 -0.3 0.2 Host
Jenna Lee FOX M 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.8 -1 0.2 Host
Gretchen Carlson FOX MM 0.4 0.3 0.3 0.6 -1 0.1 Host
Steve Doocy FOX MM 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.5 -1 0.1 Host
Brian Kilmeade FOX MM 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.5 -1 0.1 Host
Jon Scott FOX MM 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.5 -1 0.1 Host
                   
LEGEND:                  
ę Star Journalist - Opinion Leader Worth Watching          
u Quality Journalist - Worth Watching            
Second Tier Journalist - Brings Value            
K Also On - Marginal Value              
M Waste of Viewing Time              

 

Bad Journalism

Did Ron Paul Suggest that the Uninsured Should Die?

 


 

ELECTION 2012: For the second time in the past week there was an audience response at a Republican debate that raised the hackles of progressives everywhere. Even Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti Davis was on MSNBC talking about "it", and stating "I don't like those people" referring to "it's" adherents.

"It" is a perceived spirit of viciousness on the political right, which was emphasized in the MSNBC-sponsored debate earlier in the week when the audience applauded Texas Gov. Rick Perry's record of executions in his state under his leadership. Rather like the preceding Texas Governor, former President George W. Bush, Perry doesn't pardon anybody regardless of any lingering questions about their actual guilt. Two hundred and thirty people have been put to death under Perry's 10-year watch, the most under any Governor. He is unconcerned about his record to the point of being boastful, which is what the debate audience responded to.

The leftie press has jumped all over this perception of blood lust, and last night's Tea Party-sponsored debate, hosted by CNN, provided another gauge of audience reaction when a question came up about how those who decline to pay for health coverage should be treated should they find themselves in sudden need of emergency care.

The Huffington Post headline read "Let Him Die: Tea Party Audience Cheers".

It was Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) who fielded the question, and as you can see from the video above that Huffington Post headline was a little misleading. But judge for yourself.

As a pretty far to the left "progressive", I find the right-wing hatred apparent in some audience members to be a little sick making, but equally disturbing is the wedge the "liberal press" is trying to make of this aberrant political behavior. Some have likened the spirit of meanness to that of the Roman gladiatorial games, where Christian-gnawing lions were similarly appreciated.

But did Ron Paul, who says a lot of crazy stuff, say "Let him die" as the headline would seem to imply? That was a line fed to him by debate host Wolf Blitzer, who failed to get Paul to take the bait. The über-serious Paul suggested that there might be other ways to handle such a situation other than adding to the burden of government.

This example points out how difficult it is to operate a fair and just democracy when voter involvement is so closely tied to the manipulations of the media.

The RCJ has been taking an ongoing and close look at these news readers from whom we draw our information. Use this link to see our current ratings. - RAR

 

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Cenk Uyger Gets Schooled

The Young Turk learns that MSNBC is the "Establishment"

 

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USC Professor Predicts Imminent Collapse of the Music Business

Embedded Reporters Maria Bartiromo and Erin Burnett

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Posted May 12, 2010

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MEDIA:

Greedy Bastards!

 

 

 

 

 

Dylan Ratigan is the "Rick Santelli of the progressive-analyticals"

Glory unto Dylan Ratigan, the defector-reporter from CNBC's Fast Money and Closing Bell who now hosts "The Dylan Ratigan Show" on MSNBC. No matter how awful the cover design of his first book, Greedy Bastards!", he is providing a smart person's depiction (in graphics) of the mechanisms that have characterized U.S. capitalism over the past 40 years, and what it has finally produced: massive public debt, a disintegrating middle class, and an imbalance in wealth distribution far beyond that of the Roman Empire at its peak.

The former global managing editor for corporate finance at Bloomberg News, credited with developing and launching more than half-a-dozen broadcast and new media properties, has even come up with a solution for planning our way out of our economic despair: "Hot Spotting".

Ratigan's Website reports that he is "mad as hell. Infuriated by government corruption and corporate communism, incensed by banksters shaking down taxpayers, and despairing of an ailing health care system, an age-old dependency on foreign oil, and a failing educational system, Ratigan sees an America that has allowed itself to be swindled and robbed."

Ratigan's broadcast history has been fueled by angry rants, most notably this final broadcast from the floor of the NYSE upon leaving CNBC in 2009, in which he reported precisely what the world would soon know: "his guests, essentially 'perpetrated securities fraud' and an 'insurance fraud scam against AIG — and, by extension, the government and taxpayers funding that insurance company's 'bailout'". (Wikipedia)

Ratigan is the "Rick Santelli of the progressive-analyticals", voicing for the voice-less middle class what the Tea Party inspiring Santelli did for the greed-and-acquisition set.

Dylan Ratigan may be mounting a run for office, for he seems to be a guy on a crusade, taking his finance industry educated views to the public the way his MSNBC cohort Ed Schultz ("The Ed Show") speaks for blue collar workers.

Between the two, Ratigan seems the odd personality to foist himself so dramatically into the what's-wrong-with-America fray. He is cheeky while having one of the more unsettled television personas to be found anywhere; like watching Albert Brooks' sweat-flop scene from Broadcast News played out over months until finally an evolution occurs in the character. Dylan has been touring the west coast of late, doing shows from Silicon Valley and Treasure Island in San Francisco, and displaying a notable and new je ne sais quoi.

Perhaps the publication of his fascinating guidebook - see the various useful illustrated explanations at his site - has brought him a new level of comfort within his own skin. - RAR

 

Robert Smigel's 1998 Ode to General Electric - Ouch!

 

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Television Ratings

 

 

 

 

Posted May 12, 2010

Postscript: Since publication of this article, Ms. Burnett has moved on to CNN, where she hosts "Erin Burnett OutFront". (12/01/11)

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©Rick Alan Rice (RAR), September, 2019

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