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Today marks a sad milestone, one for which I'm sure Yankee fan Amato is wearing black (with pinstripes, natch) in mourning.  Today is the final game at the famed Yankee Stadium, the House that Ruth Built.   And in this transition from tradition over generations (even I speak in awe of my first trip to see a game at Yankee Stadium) to a taxpayer-funded corporate behemoth, Bill Moyers finds parallels to our current financial crisis.

But when it came to paying for the new, $1.3 billion pleasure dome, the millionaires on the field and King Midas in his skybox came up with some razzle-dazzle plays to finance their new wealth machine - tax-free bonds, requiring ordinary citizens to subsidize the construction, and hundreds of millions more for new parking garages, a train station and parks that supposedly will replace the ones seized by the city to make room for the new stadium. The Little League games that used to flourish on sandlots just outside the old ballpark have been moved miles away, sent down to the minors on a long road trip.[..]

Meanwhile there will be more luxury suites and party rooms where fat cats can gather, safely removed from the sweaty masses. Corporations and wealthy individuals will be able to rent the luxury suites for anywhere from $600,000-$850,000 a year - tax deductible - assuming they haven't filed for bankruptcy this week.

Why aren't the fans and taxpayers giving the Yankees a Bronx cheer? They did, but city officials rolled over them while making sure local politicians stay in the lineup. The pols are getting their own luxury suite at the new stadium for free - and first shot at buying the best available seats.

(Guest Blogged by Heather)

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Bill Moyers Journal, which unfortunately is probably not on the top of most Americans TIVO list for Friday nights, dove head on into some of our country's darker days.  Days that many in the South would probably prefer to forget, when slavery was no longer legal, but still practiced by an economy addicted to slavery, and unwilling to let it go. Bill Moyers interviewed Douglas Blackmon, author of the book, Slavery by Another Name, and it is truly worth your time to watch the entire interview.

With a Presidential election that has brought the issue of race front and center and forced us to confront the reasons for racial divides, understanding the past and how it relates to the racial tensions that still exist in this country is an important discussion for anyone who would like to finally heal those wounds.  Hopefully, one day we may move to a place where race is no longer an issue, or a way to keep a segment of the population from ever achieving equality.

Douglas Blackmon delves into a time that has helped to shape the views of African Americans towards our judicial system, our law enforcement, and our legislators. Open dialogue about what happened during those dark days, and how we move forward to make sure that it does not continue today is a discussion I hope more Americans have as we ponder whether we may have our first black President and what that will mean for our country and the future of race relations.

I think this is my favorite piece of video footage since Jon Stewart told off Tucker Carlson on Crossfire.  Seriously, watch it again and again, it just gets better. 

At the National Conference for Media Reform, Bill O'Reilly producer Porter Barry ambushes journalist Bill Moyers and asks him why he won't appear on The O'Reilly Factor.  Moyers, a class act to the last, makes Barry look like the small and petty man he is.  But the joke is on Barry, because other journalists, including Uptake correspondent Noah Kunin, who got this raw footage, turned tables on ol' Porter and gave him a little taste of the FOX News-style ambush journalism.  I don't think he liked it much.

By the way, Moyers gave an absolutely inspirational keynote address at NCMR2008.  You can view it on YouTube.

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Bill Moyers looks at the parallels between the rhetoric ramping up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the aggressive posturing of the White House and their minions against Iran today.

BILL MOYERS: A final update. Last month Victor Navasky of the COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW told us about how all the talk about military strikes against Iran reminds him of the arguments made for invading Iraq five years ago

VICTOR NAVASKY: If you read Norman Podhoretz's account...where he says that we have a carrier right off the coast of Iran, and all the President has to do is say "go". And that the non-military solutions have not worked. You can't not take it seriously.

BILL MOYERS: Since then, the talk about bombing Iran has only increased. And the biggest talker of all is the Connecticut hawk, Senator Joe Lieberman. The Democratic candidate for vice president eight years ago has now endorsed Republican senator John McCain for president and become his alter ego on the Middle East. Wherever McCain goes, Lieberman is sure to show up.

Transcripts below the fold.  The full Bill Moyers Journal episode is available online.

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Bill Moyers provides an update to the segment offered last week on torture and detainees in the War on Terror™.  Mohammed al-Qahtani--long held up as the 20th hijacker on 9/11--was released from Guantanamo without prejudice after more than six years of imprisonment and torture. 

"Mr al-Qahtani never made a single statement that was not extracted through torture or the threat of torture," the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represented al-Qahtani, said.

Mohammed al-Qahtani was one of the six terrorism suspects for whom the Defense Department had famously sought the death penalty in an attempt to look tough (or at least, competent) in prosecuting terrorists.  However, it appears that since the government's case rested largely on "confessions" achieved through torture, and thankfully, justice has not been perverted by this administration enough to convict them solely on those extracted confessions. 

This is an excellent time to let you know that next week, I'll be participating in a week-long symposium focusing on torture with other bloggers to celebrate the relaunch of the ACLU Blog of Rights.

Transcript below the fold

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Bill Moyers, host of PBS' Bill Moyers Journal, is one of the few remaining REAL journalists left in American media. We've covered many of his PBS segments and it was a great pleasure to cover his appearance with Keith Olbermann on Monday's Countdown.

Moyers and Olbermann touch on the corporate media, their biases and the way they are shaping, and in many cases, damaging our country and its politics by ignoring critical issues and grinding information into sound bytes and bumper sticker-type messages:

Olbermann: "...Clearly the tendency is towards truncating everything, condensing everything into that eventual black hole of information where nothing escapes. How does it apply as you look ahead towards this general election campaign? How does it apply to each of the candidates, in turn?"

Moyers: "I think it means for all of them that they won't really get to the deep, profound structural problems that we face as a country. We're not going to have a discourse in this campaign over the fact that the great American wealth machine is benefiting only those at the top. We're not going to get to the fact that 10% of the people own 60% of the wealth and 70% of the people have no net worth. We're not going to get to the issues of how do we rebuild the infrastructure, the sewer, the water, the highways, all that. We're just going to be constantly in this battle of bumper stickers."

Since this latest round of Obama/Wright mania on the part of the mainstream media was sparked by Rev. Wright's appearance on Bill Moyers Journal (followed by his speech in front of the National Press Club), it is perhaps not surprising to hear Moyers add his perspective on the media circus.

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Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently (than John Hagee, Pat Robertson and Billy Graham). He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this--this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner--before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".

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I defy you to get through this program without crying. Even Heather's great mashup of the show had tears streaming down my face. On this week's Bill Moyers Journal, Moyers spoke with Phil Donohue and Ellen Spiro about their new documentary feature Body of War, focusing on paralyzed Iraq vet Tomas Young.

DONAHUE: My inspiration for this film was the naked child running from the napalm. Remember that Vietnam picture? I mean, terrified, this little girl is totally naked. You can see the black smoke in the back. That picture won a Pulitzer Prize. See the pain. Don't sanitize the war.

If you're gonna send young men and women to fight for this nation, tell the truth. That's one of the biggest reasons for the First Amendment. And we haven't been. And so I thought I will tell the story, the real story of the harm in harm's way.

You definitely see the pain and the truth while watching Tomas and his family cope with his injuries and try to find a way to give Tomas as much dignity and life as he can. I cannot speak highly enough of this little microcosm of tangible reality for a war made purposefully abstract so that we remain apathetic to it. You can watch the full episode at PBS.com and order the soundtrack, featuring music by Eddie Vedder here.

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It's infuriating that the Bush administration has gone so far around the Constitution without any accountability from those who are charged with oversight, yet the few journalists and whistleblowers that have tried to shine a light on the actions of the Bush administration are fighting to not go to jail. Case in point: James Risen, the reporter who broke the warrantless wiretapping story and who is now fighting to not go to jail after being subpoenaed to reveal his sources. Rick Karr looks at how the Bush administration has consistently sought to squelch journalists and whistleblowers like Risen, Sibel Edmonds, and even Talking Points Memo.

The entire episode (including an interview with Rep. Henry Waxman on government oversight) can be viewed online.

Transcripts below the fold.

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Bill Moyers interviews former Rep. Mickey Edwards, author of Reclaiming Conservatism: How A Great American Political Movement Got Lost - And How It Can Find Its Way Back, and Matt Welch,  author of McCain: The Myth Of A Maverick on what is essentially the bastardization of what the Republican Party has stood for historically.  

MICKEY EDWARDS: ...(W)hile I was in the House, Newt Gingrich sort of rose in power. And Newt decided that the purpose of the Republican in Congress was not to carry out the fundamental principles that they had originally believed in, but to defeat Democrats. That was all that mattered. And it became how do— it's always war Democrats versus Republicans, all the time. And when you look at it from that mindset, you have a Republican president — you know, he is not any more the head of a different branch of government. He's your team captain. He's your quarterback.

And so, Gingrich really created a system of nonstop warfare that went well beyond, you know, what the situation was with Nixon. And institutionalized it to an extent that today, when the Congress properly issues — tries to vote a contempt citation against two people on the White House staff, Harriet Myers and Josh Bolton, you know, who defy a Congressional subpoena, and Republicans in Congress walk out in protest, rather than engage in defending the branch of government that they're a part of. So, I put a lot of the blame right on Newt Gingrich. I think he led to a lot of this.

 And as Matt Welch points out, despite McCain's Maverick image, he's marching right along in lockstep with Gingrich: 

Ever since then, restoring the power of the executive has been a fundamental part of modern Republicanism, which went totally against their traditions. And as part of that, John McCain actually one of the only philosophies that he elucidates in his book, his five books that he's written, is to restore executive power at the expense of Congress, especially when it comes to foreign policy and the making of war. It is basically the only interest that he shows in political philosophy in his books.

But the country has seen the incredible damage done by these kind of philosophies over the last seven years. I think author Sarah Vowell once said that the only thing that surprised her was that her own deep pessimism turned out to be too rosy for reality.  

EDWARDS:  But I think that he's making a serious mistake in terms of how he frames his persona for the general election. I don't think this country is ready for a continuation of Bush. And I don't think it's ready for a Hagee approved, Hagee-endorsed presidency. And why he's doing that, I don't know.

Well, if this is a losing strategy, by all means, let's hope McCain keeps it up. 

Full video and transcripts of this episode available online.

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Bill Moyers, who was Lyndon Johnson's press secretary from 1965-1967, gives his perspective on the "tempest in a teapot" of the Hillary vs. Obama media brawl over LBJ and MLK:

As the pressure intensified on each side, Johnson wanted King to wait a little longer and give him a chance to bring Congress around by hook or crook. But Martin Luther King said his people had already waited too long. He talked about the murders and lynchings, the churches set on fire, children brutalized, the law defied, men and women humiliated, their lives exhausted, their hearts broken. LBJ listened, as intently as I ever saw him listen. He listened, and then he put his hand on Martin Luther King's shoulder, and said, in effect: "OK. You go out there Dr. King and keep doing what you're doing, and make it possible for me to do the right thing." Lyndon Johnson was no racist but he had not been a civil rights hero, either. Now, as president, he came down on the side of civil disobedience, believing it might quicken America's conscience until the cry for justice became irresistible, enabling him to turn Congress. So King marched and Johnson maneuvered and Congress folded.

As another year comes to a close we're met with the familiar barrage of typically lame 'look back at the year' specials and 'Year's Best' and 'Worst' lists, most if not all of which are hardly ever worth mentioning except for when they wind up naming the absurd. That said, and Putin as Time's Person of the Year or the McLaughlin Group's Winners and Losers notwithstanding, this year just might be the exception. Perhaps the first clue something might be different was when O'Reilly's own Best of Worst of 2007 segment seemed like someone from our crew or perhaps Media Matters might have helped to put it together. In any case, there's at least two year end lists/awards this year that are definitely worth checking out.

The first of which comes to us via Josh Marshall (who incidentally was one of GQ's "Men of the Year" honorees for 2007) who has named the official nominees for this year's first annual "Golden Duke Awards," the winners of which will soon be featured on Bill Moyers Journal. And not surprisingly, several of the Golden Duke finalists also made the cut for Bill Maher's 'D*¢%heads of the Year' in this month's Rolling Stone (which is a much more appropriately titled line-up in this not-so-humble writer's opinion, but I am glad he didn't have award statues made to go with them).

So, what do you think? Were there any other crooks and liars that Josh Marshall or Bill Maher left out?

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Bill Moyers finds parallels with the degradation of rampant steroid use in baseball to how degraded our country has become by those seeking quick ways to short cut and short circuit level playing fields.

You don't get a level playing field with performance enhancing drugs, any more than you get an honest government with political action committees and bundled contributions, or a fair economy with some derivatives, hedge funds, and private equity managers taxed at rates lower than their janitors. You get a level playing field only when the fans demand it. Suppose people stopped attending games in large numbers, stopped watching on TV, stopped buying the products hyped by the icons. The leveling would happen, or baseball as a money-making business would die. It's not likely to happen. If we can't organize to stop a brutal, bloody war in Iraq, or rectify an economic system that divides us further every day, we can hardly expect collective action from baseball fans.

There was a lesson in George Mitchell's report that I'm not sure even he recognized. The day Americans don't feel strongly enough about the need for level playing fields to fight for them -- the day when cutting corners and seeking an edge become the national pastime -- is the day democracy will be lucky even to find a seat in the bleachers.

The entire transcript available here.
 

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Continuing Bill Moyers' interview last night with host of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann about the relationships between politics and journalism, fielding questions from Moyers' own staff on how Olbermann perceives his particular style of journalism.

It is-- it becomes a nation of screechers. It's never a good thing. But emergency rules do apply. I would like nothing better than to go back and do maybe a sportscast every night. But I think the stuff that I'm talking about is so obvious and will be viewed in such terms of certainty by history that this era will be looked at the way we look now at the-- at the presidents and the-- the leaders of this country who rolled back reconstruction // I think it's that obvious. And I think only under those circumstances would I go this far out on a limb and be this vociferous about it.

Transcripts below the fold; The entire interview up at YouTube

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(C&Ler Bill, sent in this video and post. Anyone can submit a video and post to me. I can't tell you how many great things the readers have sent in over the years.)

Bill Moyers takes a look at the vast differences between Bushco's Potemkin Iraq PR campaign and what is really going on in Iraq.

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As the White house launches an " Iraq War Room" to desperately try to spin the coverage of the occupation in Iraq ahead of their long awaited faux Petraeus White House report to congress next month, reality isn't coooperating. Despite the escalation which has pushed our military to its breaking point, Iraqi deaths have doubled since the surge began and US military casualties are way up too. More and more soldiers are speaking out, calling the White House's claims " surreal", yet much of the media remains content to report just what Bushco wants them to.

Didn't the traditional media learn anything from their pathetic sycophantic shilling for the White House in the lead up to the war? Apparently not.