The same Rupert Murdoch Fox team headed by network boss Roger Ailes not only helped fan the flames for the invasion of Iraq.  It was necessary first to install the right trusted neoconservative team in the White House and this was accomplished through stealing the election for George W. Bush.

With Florida regarded as the crucial state that would provide the election winner and keys to the White House in 2000, the Republican team had a trump card in place with Bush's younger brother Jeb serving as Florida's governor.  By scrubbing numerous minorities legitimately qualified to vote from voters' lists on grounds that they were felons, the Bush clan felt it was in good shape where the Sunshine State was concerned.

As the Bush brothers and father sat in their hotel suite election night, shock waves emerged when it was announced that Florida had been projected into  Gore's column.  Shortly thereafter a first in presidential election politics occurred.  The three Bushes were shown in their suite.  An obviously pre-arranged script was followed and it was simple enough that even George W. was able to follow it.

The snippet began with candidate George W. warning that their best evidence, meaning the calculations of brother Jeb, revealed that they would win Florida.  

The spying activities being currently revealed about Rupert Murdoch's operations should be anything but surprising to anyone taking the trouble to analyze what has been happening.

There was the same rush to war in Iraq as there would be to instill George W. Bush in office and keep him there by hook or crook, using such unsubtle means in 2004 as to have commentators that Bill O'Reilly assured us operated objectively count down the number of days to Bush's re-election.  

To use the term re-election was a falsehood since it has been fully documented that Bush was never actually elected in 2000.

Murdoch's Fox News operation received a break.  It came when New York Times reporter Judith Miller's revealed in print and in a PBS series that Iraq's ruthless dictator Saddam Hussein, who was brought to power with ample CIA assistance, possessed weapons of mass destruction including deadly chemical weapons.  

Here is a lesson from the neocons at Fox and elsewhere.  If you cover up a war rather than covering it and refuse to show the direct results of conflict then you are a patriot.

Let us say that someone chooses to cover that same war and shows the bloodshed that resulted.  To do so is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  In fact, such coverage should be immediately shut down.

This is precisely the scenario that occurred in the Iraq War.  This was Donald Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" war that was supposed to inflict casualties only on the troops of dictator Saddam Hussein, the same figure that Rumsfeld visited, shook hands with, and provided weapons with which he killed his own Kurdish population.

Now the neocons of the New World Order decided that it was time to rid Iraq of former ally Saddam so that profits would not have to be shared and Halliburton, Bechtel and Monsanto would have unrestrained pickings.  In fact, the division of spoils was decided in advance through secret meetings in former Halliburton head man and then Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

ABC commentator Sam Donaldson on "This Week" in 1994 bemoaned the "dumbing down of America" and cited entertainment trends such as the popular film "Forest Gump" and the television comedy hit "Beavis and Butthead."

Now 16 years later an examination of what is happening in television reveals a far more dangerous pattern than the kind of programmed dumbness that Donaldson denounced.  The dumbing down of that period involved mainly comedy while today circumstances exist to be taken as far more serious and ultimately dangerous.

How many of you have undergone the depressing experience of attempting to reason with individuals who regularly watch Fox News?  If so can you understand why Keith Olbermann refers to Rupert Murdoch's network as "Fixed News"?

Analyzing the Fox News phenomenon once more sends us back to George Orwell's prescient masterpiece "1984" with the realization of why so many of us regard that work as the textbook for Propaganda 1.  Orwell's work superbly depicted a national television apparatus where the docile citizenry received messages from Big Brother without ever generating a spark of curiosity generating question asking.  

Glenn Beck has always been desperate for two things -- attention and ratings.  And he learned early in his career that nothing works as quickly nor as well with the media as personal insults, public humiliation and character assassination.

At long last I can agree with a comment from Fox News, creators of fiction posing as informational television.

Sean Hannity in an interview of former MSNBC program host and longtime actor Charles Grodin April 22 has said in response to the latter's question that he would agree to be waterboarded with proceeds going to families of those who served in the Iraq War.

Keith Olbermann has agreed to pay $1,000 for every second that Hannity endures of a procedure that has been defined as torture under international law and the United States military for years.

In the case of the U.S. military court martial activity occurred as far back as 1898 and the Spanish-American War according to comments made by Olbermann in his April 23 broadcast.

They fear that the handwriting was on the wall with the heavy Democratic Party registration coupled with gigantic voter turnouts.

The response by the perpetual deniers of the Republican Right is in current evidence as the future scripts of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are being written.

Fox News is devoting huge attention to allegations that Black Panther members are standing with nightsticks at one Philadelphia voting precinct and seeking to intimidate white voters they find suspicious.  In the clip I viewed there was not one shred of video evidence revealing anyone standing outside the precinct intimidating anyone.

Meanwhile World Net Daily and Free Republic are joining the mounting chorus of shrieks that fraud is in the air.  One report exists of two voters being "challenged" in North Dakota.

After the triumphal glow of a dynamic Democratic National Convention speech by Hillary Clinton reminiscent of such great past oratorical efforts by Alben Barkley, Frank Clements, Eugene McCarthy and Barbara Jordan, it was significant that a trip to Fox News revealed not analysis of a great political stem winder but gloom and doom.

The gloom and doom naturally centered around Democrats with Hillary Clinton playing a role, but certainly not in a unifying stellar speech tradition on behalf of Barack Obama.  

Fox's legal expert Greta Van Susteren, who launched her TV career at CNN in the nineties proclaiming the prosecution's failure to prove up a murder case against O.J. Simpson, had put on her political hat and was talking to the network's Democratic Party resident expert.

That expert would be Susan Estrich, currently a University of Southern California law professor and formerly a chairperson of the dismal presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Ah, how much piety was in the air with Republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde, both of whom were marital philanderers, when they sought along with their similarly self-righteous party colleagues to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency.

The key question for these self-righteous Republicans was:  "Did Clinton lie?"  The corollary was that if President Bill Clinton lied on the subject of whether or not he had sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office then grounds for impeachment existed.  

It is doubtful that thoughts of the stains on Lewinsky's blue dress have left the "chaste conscience" of "moralist" Ann Coulter for a single waking minute since the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison occurred.  

To put the issue in perspective, the lie that Clinton ultimately acknowledged he told was in an affidavit in a civil legal case.  Virtually any domestic relations attorney or psychologist dealing with matrimonial affairs would concur that perhaps the single leading instance of lying occurs when spouses deny extra marital affairs, the type of conduct applicable in the case against Clinton for impeachment.

The Progressive Democrat Newsletter grew out of the frustration of the 2004 election. After much pressure from readers, this email newsletter is now going the blog route. I update the blog once a week focusing on both national issues and issues of interest to particular regions or states. In general, NYC, California, New Jersey, Virginia and the Midwest get special attention simply because those are the areas where I seem to have the most readers. However, these days I am too busy to give each region the attention I used to. As my readership on Daily Gotham and Culture Kitchen goes up, I have to spend more time on those sites. So this newsletter is fading a bit. I hope it is still usefull to you, though.

This week I am focusing once again on Fox News, keeping antibiotics effective and a critical election THIS YEAR in Mississippi. I also present a new feature that started with an unexpectedly recommended Daily Kos diary as well as some local actions for Michigan, NYC and Indiana.

The Progressive Democrat Newsletter grew out of the frustration of the 2004 election. After much pressure from readers, this email newsletter is now going the blog route. I update the blog once a week focusing on both national issues and issues of interest to particular regions or states. In general, NYC, California, New Jersey, Virginia and the Midwest get special attention simply because those are the areas where I seem to have the most readers. However, these days I am too busy to give each region the attention I used to. As my readership on Daily Gotham and Culture Kitchen goes up, I have to spend more time on those sites. So this newsletter is fading a bit. I hope it is still usefull to you, though.

This week I talk about corruption in government, focus on a Sierra Club action targeting Home Depot and Fox News, energy solutions and I focus on some local goings on in New York, Florida and New Jersey.

Been doing the Progressive Democrat since shortly after the 2004 election. It originally grew out of my attempt to keep people's grassroots spirits up after the 2004 election and originally it was just a handful of readers. When I spend time on it, nowadays I get around 80 hits a day. Though when I am away on vacation and not keeping it up, that drops to more like 25 hits a day. Still, since I originally had less than 100 readers period, that's growth.

Nothing prompts Karl Rove to salivate faster than the prospect of a new protégé.  It was reported that Rove waxed enthusiasm from the first time he met George W. Bush, loving his "swagger" and recognizing what he perceived as a natural and engaging charisma that he believed he could take all the way to the presidency.

Despite Rove's enthusiasm he recognized that he could not accomplish this feat independently.  The important thing about promoting an incurious and inarticulate buffoon-like figure such as Bush to the presidency was a willingness to please the neocon power structure and that he did.

To invest Bush with the kind of manufactured machismo that typified Ronald Reagan, who had earlier been fine-tuned by the corporate establishment all the way to the presidency, some early steps were taken.  

Like Reagan, Bush developed a "man's man" image by becoming an instant cowboy as arrangements were made for him to purchase his Crawford, Texas ranch, the first step toward becoming the Lone Star State's governor, an important pivotal position en route to Washington.

Amy Richards is at work on Opting-In: The Case for Motherhood and Feminism, which will be published in 2007. She is also the co-author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism. In 1992 she co-founded the Third Wave Foundation and since 1995 she has been the voice behind Ask Amy, an online advice column.  This is her first time writing on www.RHRealityCheck.org.

Bill O'Reilly doesn't scare me. I have been on his show a few times and know that his bark is a lot louder than his bite. He's a bully, in that classic playground sense - he's not nice, unless you play his game. That said, however, when his producer invited me to contribute to a segment about the then impending Supreme Court cases dealing with later-term abortions, and the medical records from two abortion providers in Kansas being turned over to that state's Attorney General after a two year escapade, I was apprehensive.

The Foley pedo scandal ate up so much bandwidth most people don't even know Baghdad is under a daytime curfew.  Therefore, it's no surprise this shocking exchange on FOX News fell completely off the table.  It's so tasty, I just had to pick it up, transcribe it, and share it around.  This is a dog bites man kind of story.

Shep Smith is a popular FOX News anchorman, yet even this avid supporter of the war, Bush, and all things conservative finally got so enraged, he stomped Bill Kristol like a grape.  Talk about making Kristol whine.   Shep started off calling this administration's policies horrifying and repulsive and it went downhill from there.  By the end of the segment, Shep was holding Bush responsible for any deaths that occur in Iraq between now and the mid-term elections!  In so many words!  On FOX NEWS!  This is Must See TV.  Transcripts and links to this "come to Jesus" talk are below the fold.