WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.
In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated covert propaganda in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.
Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education.
The auditors declared: We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds.
The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.
When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.
But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. Williams, saying his commentaries were no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public.
The G.A.O. said the Education Department had no money or authority to procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition in federal law.
The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.
In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the declining science literacy of students, was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education.
The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a video news release narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush's program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children gets an A-plus.
Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting.
The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The G.A.O. did not say how many stations carried the reports.
The public relations efforts came to light weeks before Margaret Spellings became education secretary in January. Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the secretary, said on Friday that Ms. Spellings regarded the efforts as stupid, wrong and ill-advised. She said Ms. Spellings had taken steps to ensure these types of missteps don't happen again.
The investigation by the accountability office was requested by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats. Mr. Lautenberg expressed concern about a section of the report in which investigators said they could not find records to confirm that Mr. Williams had performed all the activities for which he billed the government.
The Education Department said it had paid Ketchum $186,000 for services performed by Mr. Williams's company. But it could not provide transcripts of speeches, articles or records of other services invoiced by Mr. Williams, the report said.
They don't want to buy any more of our debt, as our $ is almost worthless. They've been buying up homes in southern CA big-time. They already know that this most liberal "plan" will make the US self-destruct.
Those who voted for this man and refused to listen to many of us who said h'ed do this, don't cry to me. This is merely the beginning.
due to the upcoming election.
link, which I already explained, and when you click on the red "require" link, it takes you directly to OBAMA'S PLAN, which does NOT SAY THAT. The original link IS A LIE.
It was cleverly worded, intended to promote the propaganda that's attractive to predisposed Obama haters, who apparently are known to NOT click on the "supporting" link which, in this case, DOES NOT support their assertion. I agree it worked with some, and that's sad.
Right down to the music that is being played in the background. Anyone can take bits and pieces of articles and flash them on the screen. Those aren't facts.
The democrates did not cause the financial crisis. Here are some real facts:
Since 1960 the nation's deficit has risen during every republican administration and dropped during every democratic administration.
The standard of living and income has improved for everyone in the country during every democratic administration since 1960, EVEN for the top 1% of the country. It has gotten worse for everyone in the country during every republican adminstration EXCEPT the top 1%.
While Nixon and Ford were in office interest rates for mortgages had ballooned to 11%-13% and many people in this country could not afford to buy a home. Carter brought those rates down so that more people in this country could afford to buy homes.
What caused this mess is not the people who were extended credit. Here is part of what caused it: Banks issued subprime mortgages to people at a rate they could initially afford but which would increase to an inflated rate after a period of time. Those banks then immediately sold those mortgages at the inflated rates to other banks. First-time home buyers were especially targeted. A lot of them didn't understand what they were getting into because it was misrepresented to them. They didn't know, for example, they could not refinance for a period of time without huge penalities. Then the market started to decline and many of those homeowners found themselves upside down on their loans and they were unable to refinance. Their interest rates had ballooned to rates they could no longer afford. As homeowners lost their homes the banks who were sold the loans at inflated prices were no longer able to collect on those loans. But the banks (and the CEOs) that initated those loans walked away with a great deal of money.
It was because of greed. And the deregulation that the republicans passed allowed it to happen.
If you had been alive or old enough to remember, things like this were not that uncommon. The hippie cult was rampant, especially in California and most of them were drug crazed, LSD I believe was the drug of choice, haven't heard of that in years.. The Viet Nam War was even more controversial than the Iraq War. Soldiers came home from Viet Nam and were spit on by these kinds of radicals. It was on the news daily. Anyone else remember? These people now have grandsons and granddaughters in Iraq and I can tell you first hand that at least some of them regret what they did and said in the 60s.
Now, considering this was back in the 60s and there is absolutely no proof that Obama was best buds with Ayers in the first place, why not let it go? Apparently Ayers is a respected professor today. How many of you who are of a ripe old age like myself would like to be judged on what you did when you were in your 20s? I wouldn't.
Today's Republicans are thumbing through Newt Gingrich's worn playbook of 1993 looking for tips on how to blunt President Barack Obama's political momentum and flip it to their advantage. In doing so, they also appear to have dug in to what might be called the secret appendix.
The official history of what happened during Bill Clinton's difficult first two years - which ended in a sweeping Republican congressional victory in 1994 - focuses on the GOP's united resistance to his economic plan and Hillary Clinton's failed health care reform. But there was a darker side to the political damage inflicted on the early Clinton administration.
Republicans and their right-wing allies disseminated what - in a covert operation - would be called "black propaganda." Some exaggerated minor scandals, like the Travel Office firings and Clinton's Whitewater real-estate deal, while other key figures on the Right, such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, spread ugly conspiracy rumors linking Clinton to "mysterious deaths" and cocaine smuggling.
Sometimes, these multiplying "Clinton scandals" built on themselves with the help of their constant repetition in both the right-wing and mainstream news media. For instance, overheated accusations about some personnel changes at the White House Travel Office pushed deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster into a deep depression.
Then, on July 30, 1993, a distraught Foster went to Fort Marcy Park along the Potomac River and shot himself. The Right quickly transformed the tragedy into a new front in the anti-Clinton psychological warfare, with Foster's death giving rise to a cottage industry for conspiracy theorists and a new way to raise doubts about Clinton.
Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, among others, popularized the notion that Foster may have been killed elsewhere, with his body then transported to Fort Marcy Park. Repeated official investigations confirmed the obvious facts of Foster's suicide but could not quell the conspiracy rumors. [For the fullest account of the Foster case, see Dan Moldea's A Washington Tragedy.]
The "mystery" around Foster's death also bolstered the "mysterious deaths" list, which mostly contained names of people who had only tangential connections to Clinton. The effectiveness of the list was the sheer volume of the names, creating the illusion that Clinton must be a murderer even though there was no real evidence implicating Clinton in any of the deaths.
As the list was blast-faxed far and wide, one of my right-wing sources called me up about the list and said, "even if only a few of these are real, that's one helluva story." I responded that if the President of the United States had murdered just one person that would be "one helluva story," but that there was no evidence that Clinton was behind any of the deaths.
Other dark Clinton "mysteries" were spread through videos, like "The Clinton Chronicles" that Falwell hawked on his "Old-Time Gospel Hour" television show. Plus, salacious tales about the personal lives of the Clintons were popularized via right-wing magazines, such as The American Spectator, and the rapidly expanding world of right-wing talk radio.
The Right also generated broader conspiracy theories about "black helicopters" threatening patriotic Americans with a United Nations takeover. The paranoia fed the rise of a "militia movement" of angry white men who dressed up in fatigues and went into the woods for paramilitary training.
By fall 1994, Clinton's stumbling performance in office and the public doubts created by the black propaganda opened the way for a stunning Republican victory. Recognizing the influence of talk radio in spreading the Clinton smears, House Republicans made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of the GOP caucus.
However, the forces that the anti-Clinton psy-war campaign set in motion had unintended consequences. In the months after the Republicans gained control of Congress, one pro-militia extremist, Timothy McVeigh, took the madness to the next step and blew up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Clinton Coup d'Etat?"]
Reprising the Smears
Now, 16 years since the start of Clinton's presidency, the Republicans and their right-wing allies are again on the outside of Washington power and are back studying the lessons of 1993-94. Only a month into Obama's presidency, there are some striking similarities in the two historical moments.
In both cases, the Democrats inherited recessions and huge budget deficits from Republican presidents named Bush. In both cases, congressional Republicans rallied against the economic package of the new President hoping to strangle the young Democratic administrations in their cradles.
And, as congressional Republicans worked on a more overt political level, their media allies and other operatives were getting busy at subterranean depths, reviving attack lines from the campaigns to sow doubts about the two Democratic presidents - and trying to whip up the right-wing base into a near revolutionary fervor.
So far at least, the Republicans are experiencing less success against Barack Obama than they did against Bill Clinton. According to opinion polls, Obama remains widely popular with an American public that favors his more activist agenda for reviving the American economy and confronting systemic problems like energy, health care and education.
Though Republicans scored points inside the Beltway with their opposition to Obama's $787 billion stimulus bill - and their complaints that Obama "failed" in his bipartisan outreach to them - the GOP tactics appear to have backfired with the American people.
Gauging public opinion one month into Obama's presidency, polls found that most Americans faulted the Republicans for rebuffing Obama's gestures of bipartisanship, and a New York Times/CBS News poll discovered that a majority said Obama "should pursue the priorities he campaigned on … rather than seek middle ground with Republicans." [NYT, Feb. 24, 2009]
But the Republicans seem incapable of coming up with any other strategy than to seek Obama's destruction, much as they torpedoed Clinton. The three moderate Republican senators who supported the stimulus package - Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter - were widely denounced by the right-wing media as "traitors."
Indeed, the Republican Party arguably has become captive to the angry right-wing media that the GOP conservatives did so much to help create in the late 1970s, after the Vietnam War defeat and Richard Nixon's Watergate debacle.
This Right-Wing Machine proved useful in protecting Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal; undermining Clinton in the 1990s; dirtying up AL Gore in 2000; and wrapping George W. Bush in the protective garb of a full-scale cult of personality after 9/11.
But the machine wore down in its defense of Bush's multitude of disasters and ultimately could not generate enough suspicions about Obama to elect John McCain. Still, it remains a potent force in the country and particularly among the Republican "base."
It is also a machine that can run only on the high-octane fuel of anger and hate. If it tried to down-shift to a more responsible approach to politics, it would stall out, losing its core audience of angry white men who feel deeply aggrieved by their loss of status.
In turn, Republican leaders can't disown the right-wing media infrastructure that has advanced their interests for so long. In the first month of Obama's presidency, the congressional Republicans fell in line behind Rush Limbaugh's openly declared desire for Obama to fail.
Now, the Republicans may see little choice but to bet on the ability of their Right-Wing Machine to continue spreading doubts and hysteria about Obama.
More books and DVDs can be expected soon, recycling the 2008 campaign's rumor-mongering on Obama - that he wasn't born in the United States, that he's a secret Muslim, that he's in league with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, etc.
Rumbling Insurrection
Much like the Clinton-era militia movement's fear of "black helicopters," there already are rumblings about the need for an armed uprising to thwart Obama's alleged "communist" agenda.
Ironically, right-wingers who defended George W. Bush when he mounted a radical assault on the Constitution - seeking to establish an imperial presidency while eliminating habeas corpus and other key freedoms - are suddenly seeing threats to the Constitution from Obama.
Fox News, in particular, has been floating the idea of armed rebellion. On Feb. 20 - the one-month anniversary of Obama's inauguration - Glenn Beck hosted a special program called "War Room" that "war-gamed" various scenarios including the overthrow of an oppressive U.S. government when "bubba" militias rise up and gain the support of the American military.
The segment featured former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, retired U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong, and Gerald Celente, a prognosticator who began pitching the idea of an armed rebellion on Fox News shortly after Obama's election last November.
"This is going to be violent," said Celente, founder of Trends Research Institute. "People can't afford it [taxes] anymore. The cities are going to look like Dodge City. They're going to be uncontrollable. You're going to have gangs in control. Motorcycle marauders. You're not going to have enough police or federales - just like Mexico - to control the situation."
Beck envisioned the uprising - theoretically set in 2014 - starting "because people have been so disenfranchised" leading to a "bubba effect" touched off by federal agents from the ATF or FBI arresting some rancher in Texas or Arizona who has taken the law into his own hands in defending his property.
"That's totally possible," ex-Sgt. Strong said. "You've got people who are going to do the right thing to truly protect the interests of the United States, to include their own. … Your second and third orders of effect are going to be your bubbas hunkering down and being anti-government."
Beck, who was a longtime fixture on CNN's Headline News before moving to Fox, then expanded on the justification for the bubba uprising against a federal government that was "coming in and disenfranchising people over and over and over again - and having the people say please listen to us."
According to Beck, these oppressed Americans "know the Constitution. They know the writings of the Founders and they feel that the government - or they will in this scenario and I think we're on this road - the government has betrayed the Constitution. So they will see themselves as people who are standing up for the Constitution."
Beck then turned to ex-CIA officer Scheuer and asked, "So how do you defuse this, Michael, or how long even do we have before this becomes a crazy real scenario?"
"I don't think you'd want to defuse it, Glenn," Scheuer responded. "The Second Amendment is … at base not about hunting or about a militia, but about resisting tyranny. The Founders were very concerned about allowing individual citizens weaponry to defend themselves as a last resort against a tyrannical government."
As the discussion edged toward advocacy of violent revolution, Beck sought to reel it back in a bit.
"Don't get me wrong," the host said. "I am against the government. And I think they've just been horrible. I do think they are betraying the principles of our Founders every day they're in office. But I have to tell you this scenario scares the living daylights out of me because it is shaking nitroglycerine."
Beck then got back to the point: "Do the soldiers come in and do they round up people or do they fight with the people for the Constitution? What does the Army, what does the military do?"
Scheuer answered: "I don't think the military is ever going to shoot on the American people, sir. I think the military - of all people - read the Constitution every year, right through."
Beck then suggested that Obama's stimulus package might lead to this back-door federal tyranny.
"We just had in our stimulus package a way for if your governor says no to the money, the legislature can go around the governor and go right to the Feds," Beck said. "It's this kind of thing that would make the federal government say, ‘You know what? We can call up the National Guard. We don't need your governor to do it.'"
Such insurrectionist musings on Fox News are not likely to be taken seriously by most people. Indeed, many Americans may find it amusing that Fox has developed a heartfelt concern about disenfranchising voters after its enthusiastic embrace of Bush's undemocratic "election" in 2000 or that Fox now feels a sudden reverence for the Constitution after eight years of defendin Bush as he trampled it.
But this sort of Fox chatter runs the risk of feeding the well-nursed grievances of angry white "bubbas" and possibly inspiring a new Timothy McVeigh.
More significantly, today's Republican leaders - finding themselves with little new to offer - appear to have turned to the well-worn pages of this earlier GOP playbook to choose the same game plan that set the nation on a dangerous and destructive course 16 years ago, a course that only now, finally, may be playing out.
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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
Could those of you who label some posts as having a less than credible news source share your techniques for finding and recognizing purely factual unbiased news and also how you keep from adding your own perspective in order to relay such incredibly unalloyed information to us?
marks the location of current message within thread
