I am returning to Party Builder for a number of reasons. First because it is an election year and we need to fire up the base. Second I am tired of trying to debate poitics on Facebook because too many of my classmates think that someone has taken their country away. A few examples of this I will provide partly for the laugh - some are really out there and partly so we all understand what we are up against.

One classmate posted that the amendment that allowed income taxes was the evil doing of the Democrats and in fact unconstitutional. When I tried to point out if not for consitutional amendments blacks would still be slaves and women would still not be able to vote I was called uneducated because I said "you're fucking kidding me." The argument slipped into whether the modern day Republican Party would have supported Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. To wit I got the usual it is Democrats who are racists even though I pointed out that the racist Dems of the South are now the Christian Right of the Republican Party. Of Teddy Roosevelt they wrote that he violated the constitution when he created the Federal Parks. Furthermore they think the states are going to rise up and take those lands back.   Read More »

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is just the latest prophecy fulfilled. Environmentalist warned before the first oil well was drilled offshore that this would happen. Every senator and congressman since owns this disaster. You were warned but instead you made excuses. Now we are all reaping what you have sown.

I remember that first Earth Day forty years ago. Every president since then President Nixon has recognized the need for a new energy strategy. And every Congress since has sloughed off their responsibility to make it happen. Worse some of those congresses have seen fit to weaken our effort rather than passing legislation to insure America isn’t held hostage by our desire for cheap oil.   Read More »

On the road today, I saw a Yellow Ribbon “Support Our Troops” bumper sticker plastered to the back of a zeppelin-sized SUV. As an Army veteran, it pissed me off, because I couldn’t help but wonder, as I tailgated the dude (he was driving like five miles below the posted speed limit), how exactly did this well-meaning lemming suppose he was supporting our troops by applying that sticker to his suburban panzer?

Based on the conspicuously expensive make of his vehicle and the fact that he lives in Missouri, I’m betting Dude voted for the redneck reprobate who sent thousands of lower-middle-class boys and men—guys he’d probably never even talk to or let his daughter date—to their deaths, while his king-sized car was burning the very oil they sacrificed their blood for in the first place. I’m also betting that whatever Republican-sanctioned news source he gets his football scores from didn’t run a report about how American oil companies scored at the oilfield auction in Iraq last month.

Yeah, it took a few years, thousands of American casualties, tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and billions of US tax dollars, but, Deeeeaaaammmmnnn! GWB came thru 4 his homies! He drank your milkshake, bitches!

Below the Yellow Ribbon sticker was an American Flag. The five-inch vinyl Stars and Stripes were rendered to appear as if unfurled and blowing in the wind.

Now, I love The United States (except for Texas), warts and all, and unlike her most blustering, clannish jingoists, I’ve actually lived in other countries and know how good we have it here. And I’ve come to accept the fact that since September 11, 2001, it’s been the 4th of July every day, and will continue to be for years to come, until some new tragedy replaces that date in our national memory, or until time reduces it to a paragraph in the history books.

We Americans inherently presume that we’re exempt from the injustices and terrors that the majority of the earth’s inhabitants are subjected to, and when bad things happen to us, we tend to react to them extravagantly. We simmer in our tragedies, reliving them ad infinitum, reviewing them from all angles, building monuments to them and making movies and mini-series about them. We wear ribbons to designate the diseases we suffer from or have survived.

We also lack the capacity for confronting reality: We aren’t drunks; we suffer from the disease of alcoholism. Criminally insubordinate children aren’t bad; they’re troubled.
The American zeitgeist of this decade is that of the victor turned victim; the burly schoolyard bully kicked in the balls by the little exchange student with a funny-sounding name.

I can, however reluctantly, appreciate the unifying power the symbol of our Flag possesses. If handed Old Glory, I could be counted on to hoist her high, if only to ensure that the ground around me would not be sullied.

What I loathe most about this nationalist trend is that it’s so blatantly representative of America’s dumbed-down, reality TV-saturated mentality, which believes that being patriotic means slapping played-out platitudes on the back of your car, or wearing the ubiquitous American Flag pin that has become the uniform for American politicians. (President Obama held out as long as he could, but he had to get elected, after all. Stupid people’s votes, unfortunately, count too.)

Any observer with the most rudimentary understanding of human nature understands that if you have to prove your love for anything by wearing a token of it on your exterior, you most likely don’t feel it on the inside. Wearing a crucifix doesn’t make you a devout Christian. Wearing a yamaka doesn’t make you a devout Jew. Strapping on a few sticks of dynamite doesn’t make you a devout Muslim.

Well, okay, maybe it does.

Fox News Lies and is Just Plain Sloppy

The final problem of the Fox News Channel, which could possibly have very dire consequences on America if enough people get ensnared by it, is that its reporting is dangerously sloppy and slanted, by any journalistic standards.

For instance, the Fox News Channel (FNC) has the least coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of any news channel. In the beginning days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Fox folks were Bush’s fawning cheerleaders, making war look as fun as Top Gun. The coverage was constant, saturating the news day. But when the grim reality of the situation became apparent, and more and more American kids were coming home in flag-draped coffins (not that Fox would ever show that spectacle), they began a veritable press blackout on Iraq. If they ever did report a story about Iraq, it was always spun in a positive way. Take, for instance, Hume’s opening comments about the news that the 277th soldier had died in Iraq: “277 have now died in Iraq, which means that statistically speaking, American soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California, which is roughly the same geographical size.”

Montel Williams, host of Fox’s Montel Williams Show, was a guest on Fox Friends on January 23, 2008, the day after Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription anti-depressants. The hosts asked him what he thought about the actor’s untimely death. Williams, a veteran who spent 22 years in the Marines, asked why they were talking about a dead actor, and not about the 28 soldiers who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan that month. The hosts were visibly stunned, and tried to change the subject, but Williams kept the conversation on the wars. After the commercial break, Williams was gone, and four days later, his show, which had been running successfully for seventeen years, was canceled by Fox.

In 2003, The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, conducted a poll to find a correlation between public misconceptions about foreign policy, including the war in Iraq, and what news sources the people consumed. The research revealed a high correlation between people watching Fox News and having a very confused perception of the world. It also showed Fox viewers were far more supportive of the government in power at that time. Out of Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Print Media, and PBS-NPR, Fox viewers had the highest frequency of misconceptions, including the beliefs that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were working closely with Al-Qaeda to organize the 9/11 attacks, that the United States had actually found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, and that the world’s public opinion was favorable about the US invasion of Iraq. Those who got their news from PBS-NPR had the lowest frequency of misconceptions at 23%, while Fox viewers had the highest at 80% (PIPA). Bob McChesney, founder of Free Press, an organization promoting decentralization in broadcasting, and author of The Problem of the Media, said of the findings of this study, “… this is an extraordinarily disturbing trend for the media. I mean, for any self-respecting journalist, if you’re told the more people consume your media, the less they’ll know about the subject and the more they’ll support government policy, that’s exactly the worst thing any journalist would ever want to hear, or should want to hear.” Bearing all that in mind, ponder the fact that the only news channel allowed at the Pentagon during the Bush administration was Fox News. I was in the army at this time, stationed in Korea and Germany, and that rule went for the unit level as well.

Okay, so I’ve taken up a lot of time for the buildup, but that’s because I had to make the point. In the next segment I’ll lay out my idea for the solution.

Fox News is Religiously Exclusive

George W. Bush duped the Christian Right into thinking a vote for him was a vote for God, mostly by playing the Pro-life card. The Republican concept of pro-life is a creepy, convoluted thing. According to their philosophy, one unborn fetus or fertilized stem-cell research sample has more intrinsic worth than the 4,300 Iraqi civilians who were blown to pieces by our “surgical” “shock and awe” bombing in the first days of the Iraq War, a war based on lies generated by the Bush Administration. Apparently, Muslim lives don’t really count. More black men were put to death in Texas prisons during Bush’s tenure as Governor than in any other time in its history, so I guess they don’t matter much, either. Fox News Channel has somehow fooled these same evangelical lemmings into believing that it is the only news channel a real Christian can watch.

American Christians are a peculiar breed. (I am one, so I feel I have some insight into this topic.) In China, Christians get kidnapped by cops, thrown in prison and tortured until they renounce Christ or die. Indonesian schoolgirls who belong to Christian families routinely get grabbed by Muslim soldiers on their way home from school. As punishment for their beliefs, they are gang-raped, have nails hammered into their arms, legs and bellies, and are finally beheaded. In Africa, Christians are massacred with Machetes by Muslim militants. And let’s not even go into what happens to them in the Middle East.

For American Christians, however, Satan seems to manifest himself in such insidious forms as Harry Potter, hip-hop music, and Britney Spears’ big booty. American Christians have lost almost all their credibility in the world, and justifiably so. In ancient Rome, Christians sang songs of worship while lions devoured them in the arenas. Nero crucified Christians, poured oil over them and set them on fire to serve as lanterns for his garden orgies. Now, American Christians cower at the mention of Marilyn Manson’s name, and fear that a stupid book like “The Golden Compass” will turn their kids into Atheists. A few months ago, when I heard a group of Christians seriously arguing about whether Oprah Winfrey or Barack Obama was the antichrist, suddenly Scientology just didn’t sound that kooky to me anymore.

The Sunday after Obama won the presidency, I attended a prayer service at my church. You could feel the anger and depression filling the sanctuary as an almost palpable force. Two young couples greeted each other and sat down behind me. “Well,” said one of the wives, “at least those freaks out in California can’t marry each other.” It was enough to make me want to lock myself in my room and listen to my Morrissey records all night.
Fox News Channel (FNC) has become the Evangelical Christian’s channel, which is kind of odd, considering its preponderance of Irish Catholics. Here’s just a few of ‘em: Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Martha MacCallum, Neil Cavuto, Bret Baier, Bill Hemmer, Steve Doocy, and John Gibson. The fact that it airs more commentary by Catholic Priests and Bishops than by Protestant religious leaders doesn’t seem to bother Evangelicals, either. I guess as long as you hate fags, feminists, artists and that uppity colored fella in the White House, you’re alright with them.

Maybe if God’s chosen ones at FNC actually read the Bible, (I know, reading’s boring…) they’d realize how far from God they actually are.

In the next segment I’ll talk about FNC’s final fatal flaw, the fact that they lie and have no journalistic integrity.

Fox News Smears

There is a strange disparity at the Fox News Channel: while its male anchors look like angry dweebs who spent their college years sequestered in their dorm rooms, jerking off to Mein Kampf and The Reagan Diaries, the Fox females radiate the gaudy hotness of suburban MILF amateur porn starlets. And apparently, for a woman to be considered for employment by Fox News Channel (FNC), one has to have been a former beauty queen or underwear model, with the obvious exception of former CNN Legal Analyst Greta Van Susteran, who, though having to get a face-job before FNC would air her, still looks like a man.

Here are some sample resumes from the Fox bunny ranch: Gretchen Carlson of Fox Friends (think The Today Show, produced by the American Nazi Party, with no real news) was Miss Minnesota, USA in 1989. Kimberly Guilfoyle, anchor of The Lineup, Fox’s weekend crime news show, was a former model. Jill Dobson, an entertainment correspondent, was Miss Minnesota, USA in 2000. Shibani Sona Joshi, reporter for Fox Business Network, was a former model. Traffic reporter Melissa Mandak was Miss Connecticut, USA in 2005.

What does the Foxy team have to say about a real female journalist like Katie Couric, host of CBS Evening News, who was never a beauty queen, but is America’s first female prime time anchor? What all mean girls do when they’re outclassed: they rip her to shreds. They called her a “bad mom” for wanting to go to Iraq to cover the war. On Your World With Neil Cavuto, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America called Couric's trip “a clear act of desperation” by a single mother whose “priorities [are] so determined by her ambition rather than her children's welfare.”

Fox folks also have a disdain for homosexuals. Ann Coulter called Senator John Edwards a “faggot” and Senator Al Gore a “total fag.” Fox Friends guest Tim Graham (of Media Research Center) called Liberal commentator Rachel Maddow “this lesbian Air America radio host”, which inspired much laughter among the hateful hosts. When actor Heath Ledger overdosed on anti-depressants and died, John Gibson reported it by playing a clip from Brokeback Mountain, in which Ledger played a gay cowboy: “I can’t quit you.” Then Gibson said, with obvious glee, “Well, you can now. He’s dead.” He then went on to say that Ledger was suicidal and a drug abuser, basically smearing a guy who’d just died the night before. Classy.

While Fox News Channel’s smears seem pitifully clumsy and ham-fisted to those who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid, Fox viewers take these goofy whoppers as gospel. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Fox News Channel (FNC) claimed Barack Obama was endorsed by the Black Panthers. It turned out he wasn’t; an imposter claiming to be a member of the Black Panthers had friended Obama’s MySpace account and left a bogus sanction on his message board. It was removed as soon as it was read, but somehow in the brief minutes it was posted, FNC managed to make a big deal out of it, which led to speculation among media watchdog groups that somebody at FNC had actually posted the message.

FNC also claimed that Obama had attended a radical Muslim school called a madrassa while living in Indonesia. They simultaneously attacked both Obama’s and New York Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton’s campaign camps with this fiction, by claiming that somebody in the Clinton camp had alerted FNC to the “fact”. When it was proven that the story was a lie, and that the existence of the source was a lie, as is usual with FNC, there were no retractions or apologies. In fact, Hannity’s website kept posting the story. FNC regurgitated McCain’s claims (actually, Republican king of smear Karl Rove’s claims) that Obama was a compadre of Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers because he sat on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a fund that awarded grants to groups implementing new programs to improve Chicago inner city education. Any real journalist would have done some digging and discovered that other members on that board included founder Walter Annenberg, a lifelong Republican and former ambassador who was appointed by Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson. But many Fox viewers still think their President is a friend of terrorists. It is telling that FNC never brought up a real case of friends in low places: Senator John McCain’s involvement in 1987’s Keating Five Scandal. I’d wager most Fox viewers have never even heard of it.

Dick Morris is a frequent FNC political correspondent. He is a recovering sex-addict who lost his job as President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign manager after letting a hooker listen to his conversations with the President and read speeches written for Gore and Rodham Clinton before they’d been spoken. On April 6, 2009, Morris came on Hannity’s show (producers splashed “Dangerous Age of Obama” across the screen to set the mood) to discus Obama’s European trip. He said Obama had “basically thrown away the Bill of Rights.”

Vice President Joe Biden has also gotten his share of smear from FNC: It aired a quote from Biden, “the fundamentals of the economy are sound,” and applied it to the current financial crisis. The thing was, the quote was actually six months old, and was Biden quoting what McCain had said about the economy, and vigorously disagreeing with it.” No apology, no retraction. Fox business as usual.

FNC claimed Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi made “unprecedented demands” for a military jet, making her out to be some kind of spoiled Marie Antoinette. The fact was, she didn’t request it; the Defense Department assigned it to her, like they do with all Majority Leaders. In fact, she has used the jet less frequently than her predecessor Republican Dennis Hastert.

Also in the line of Foxfire are journalists from other media sources who actually report the news. Fox Friends called New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and Editor Steven Reddicliffe “attack dogs,” then featured digitally altered photos of them that made them look crazy and cadaverous.

Bill O’Reilly is the king of smear; he has it down to a science. He commands a platoon of journalistic shock troops that he deploys against his enemies: liberal bloggers, journalists, Democratic politicians, and a Catholic priest who’s crime against America was suggesting that just because Obama had attended Jeremy Wright’s church didn’t necessarily mean he was a racist. (For Fox viewers, the fact that Obama’s mother was white doesn’t mean he don’t hate whitey.) In an interview with The New York Times, O’Reilly Factor producer Jesse Waters said that he finds the homes of the targets of O’Reilly’s ire using Google Earth. Using the bird’s-eye views of their neighborhoods, he plots the best points of attack. He often camps out in hotels near a target’s abode, or sleeps in a car on their street, learning their daily schedules and habits so he can assault them in a public place where they’ll be at their most vulnerable. He and his team then shove a microphone and a camera in the victim’s face, barraging them with questions while they are in a surprised state. They invariably look pissed-off or stupid because of the shock. Either way, O’Reilly wins.

FNC is the only news network that regularly cuts guest’s microphones when they start to win an argument. Two other cowardly techniques they frequently employ are shutting off the lights over a guest, or killing the cameras aimed at them. Anything goes at Fox, but O’Reilly does it with gusto. If there was a drinking game where you watched O’Reilly and took a shot every time he said “Shut up!” well, then his show might actually be palatable to people who aren’t complete assholes.

O’Reilly indulges in the hatred many conservatives share for actors, musicians, artists, free thinkers and creative people. It’s the conservative’s conundrum: they don’t have the capacity in their dogmatic, narrow ideologies to create anything of themselves; they can only regurgitate, doing what’s been done before, whether it works or not (like tax cuts, for instance). Nevertheless, they succumb to the human yearning for escape through entertainment, which forces them to consume, against their will, the products created by the liberal Hollywood freaks and perverts they loathe so much. O’Reilly despises all celebrities except for Mel Gibson, who apparently hates all Jews except for Jesus Christ. (The reason for his man-crush might – just might – be the fact that Gibson optioned the rights for O’Reilly’s seedy murder mystery novel, “Those Who Trespass.”)

One of O’Reilly’s most disgusting smears was against Jeremy Glick, the son of a port authority worker who died in the 9/11 attacks. Glick had signed a petition against the Iraq War, which set him up to be a prime candidate to be a recipient of O’Reilly’s self-righteous rage. At first Glick had reservations about going on The O’Reilly Factor, but under persistent pressure from its producers he agreed to. To prepare, he taped a few episodes of the show, and used a stopwatch to find the average amount of time O’Reilly would let a guest disagree with him before he’d cut his mike or tell him to shut up. Sure enough, when Glick appeared on The Factor and presented his argument, O’Reilly’s temper quickly rose to a boiling point and he screamed his trademark “Shut up! Shut up!”, and told the producers to cut Glick’s mike. After they segued to a commercial, O’Reilly told him, “Get out of my studio before I fucking tear you to pieces.” The producers rushed Glick out of the building, fearing O’Reilly might assault him. The next day, the smear began. O’Reilly said, “Glick was out of control and spewing hatred for this program and his country using vile propaganda.” Absolutely not true. All the kid said was that he didn’t agree with the war in Iraq, and the policies in Washington (also of the Clinton administration) that had caused it. Six months later, O’Reilly was still at it: “Glick was saying without a shred of evidence that President Bush and Bush the elder were directly responsible for 9/11. Now, that kind of stuff is not only loony, it’s defamation.” You’ve got to hand it to O’Reilly, it takes a certain kind of hutzpuh to accuse someone of defamation while in the act of defaming them. But wait, there’s more: eleven months later, see how his charges escalate: “He came on this program and accused President Bush of knowing about 9/11 and murdering his own father.”

One of FNC’s newest and most potent smears is that our President is a Communist, and that he has a socialist agenda for our country. The only reason this argument works with Republicans is that they apparently have no concept of what constitutes socialism. They also focused on “earmarks” in his Economic Stimulus Package, even though they all constituted less than one-percent of the total package, and 40% of the earmarks were for Republicans. They even blamed Obama that the Republicans got these earmarks, complaining that Obama promised he’d clean up government greed when he took office.

So apparently, even when the Republicans do something wrong, it’s Obama’s fault.
Even FNC’s “economics” shows are thinly-veiled Obama-bashing sprees, allowing them to smear him through another viewing block. Fox Business asked if the Obama administration is a bigger scammer than Bernard Maddoff. “Experts” on the show claimed Obama was, by far, and added that he would destroy capitalism.

These are only a few instances. To completely catalogue all of FNC’s well-documented smears would take up volumes of encyclopedic size.

In the next segment I’ll show how FNC is religiously biased and exclusive.

My Saturn station wagon goes down more often than an altar boy in the Vatican. As I write this, the lemon’s in the shop once again, tended to by the bittersweet touch of soon-to-be unemployed Saturn employees. In the meantime, my mom graciously lent me her car, a Saturn sedan, to drive. And I’m totally grateful; don’t get me wrong.

It’s just that I wish it didn’t have a Sarah Palin sticker on its back bumper.

The sticker originally read “John McCain/Sarah Palin 08”, but when it recently became apparent to my mom that John McCain just doesn’t have enough hatred in his heart to qualify as a real Republican, she cut off his name, as well as the “08.”

I’m very thankful for the car loaner. Without it, I couldn’t get to my place of manual labor or visit my girlfriend. But man, it’s embarrassing to drive down the street looking like one of those Tea-bagger assholes.

I’ve been parking like fifty yards from my apartment so none of my neighbors will see me get out of that car and think there’s an elitist prick living in their midst.

But today it struck me: Dude, how pathetic am I? Why do I care so much what other people think of me? I’m an American, damn it! We have the inherent right to be as ignorant as we wanna be. Why not, while the car is still in my possession, affix little swastika flags onto both sides of the hood, rolling like Der Führer through Paris every time I pull in to my parking spot at work? While I’m at it, why not fill up the rest of the bumper with stickers representative of the Party of No: Rebel Flags, the N.R.A., the Yellow Ribbon, “Support Our Troops”, “God Bless America”, and NASCAR Racing?

In fact, I can almost guarantee that if my neighbor with the “Obama/Biden 08” sticker on his Caddy actually confronted me about the “Sarah Palin” sticker, I’d automatically turn 180-degrees and go on the offensive.

I’d be like, “Hey, Jim. Sarah Palin has been totally misunderstood. She’s being crucified by the liberal media elite, those assholes at CNN and ABC and CBS and NBC and MSNBC and The New York Times, and, well, basically every news source besides FOX. You know how they are. She’s got a good soul, dude. She’s a Christian. That means she can say or do whatever she wants and it’s okay, because this is a Christian nation, or at least it used to be, back before those liberals took over and started teaching evolution in schools, and taking the prayer out. Things were so much better in the old days, when our nation was young. Yeah, it wasn’t so good for the black people, I guess, with that whole slavery thing. And sure, it wasn’t so cool to be a woman, seeing as they couldn’t vote, and it was legal for a guy to beat his wife. But we were a nation under GOD.” At that point I’d start fake-crying like Glenn Beck and whimper, “I’m sorry, Jim. I just love this country so much.”

Part Three: Fox News is Racist

American racism has taken on a rather genteel aspect in the last few decades. It is manifested in statements such as, “I’m not a racist, but…” or, “I’ve got lots of black friends.” Such clichés are a tell of the innocuous, unarticulated bigotry that has been flowing through Caucasian consciousness like a secret handshake since the Civil Rights Movement, after which we could no longer lynch black boys for whistling at our wives, and had to hide our hatred behind a gregarious grin. Fox News Channel has perfected the art of American racism, and it isn’t just evidenced in the fact that there are more blue-eyed blondes in the Fox News corps than in a Hitler Youth brigade. It’s not just in the stories they choose or the way they talk like a bunch of pampered WASP housewives at a suburban church potluck. It’s much more insidious than that.

FNC Senior Vice President John Moody wrote a story on the Fox Forum website entitled “Moment of Truth.” Here’s a segment:

“It had to happen. Less than two weeks before we vote for a new president, a white woman says a black man attacked her, then scarred her face, and says there was a political motive for it. Ashley Todd, a 20-year-old white volunteer for John McCain’s presidential campaign, says she was mugged at an ATM machine in Pittsburgh (my hometown) by a big black man. She further says he threw her down, then disfigured her by carving the letter “B” into her face with a sharp implement when he saw that she supported McCain, not Barack Obama. This incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election… some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists… but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.”

The fact that the story was proven to be a completely fabricated hoax didn’t prompt anyone to remove it from Fox’s website. It’s still there to this day, which for Fox Fans means it’s fact. And the racism trickles down from the top: When then-Illinois Senator Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama, made the gaffe about being proud of her country for the first time, it was a Fox favorite, looped and discussed ad-nauseum for weeks, and is still an occasional topic of conversation. In truth, all Democrat/liberal faux pas and bloopers have the half-life of Radium-226 with Fox Fans. Right-wing bloggers still bring up the instance in late 2008 where a campaign-weary Obama accidentally said there were 52 states in the Union. FNC would never play a complete speech by Obama – rarely would play a complete sentence – but every time he made such a blunder they would broadcast it for a full news cycle, as if this somehow feasibly implied that this Harvard graduate, one of the youngest members of the Harvard Law Review in history, was stupider than a white person who takes his lessons in what constitutes a Socialist state from Joe the Plumber.

But Mrs. Obama’s gaffe was a goldmine for FNC, which strives to portray blacks as dangerous and argumentative. They milked it for all it was worth. This is what O’Reilly had to say about it: “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts that say this is how the woman really feels [emphasis entirely O’Reilly’s].”

E.D. Hill, former host of FNC’s America’s Pulse, mused whether a loving fist-tap between Barack and Michelle Obama was “a terrorist fist jab.” Fox producers labeled Mrs. Obama “Barack’s Baby-mama,” a ghetto term meaning the unwed mother of a black man’s illegitimate child, on one of their banners. Cal Thomas, host of After Hours with Cal Thomas, called Mrs. Obama an “angry black woman.”

After Cleveland’s Success Tech Academy shooting in 2007, John Gibson, host of FNC’s creatively titled The John Gibson Show, said, “I knew the shooter was white. I knew he would have shot himself. Hip-hoppers don’t do that. They shoot and move on to shoot again. And I could tell right away because he killed himself. Black shooters don’t do that.”
But all that is child’s play. For the occasions when Fox ofays really want to attack prominent African-Americans, but don’t want to appear racist, they have a stable of Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas at their disposal, whom they produce every time they want to make black people look stupid or militant. Here are the professional sellouts:
Juan Williams, a black news analyst with National Public Radio, is O’Reilly’s obsequious lapdog, constantly referring to him as “Mr. O’Reilly”, while the object of his affections merely calls him “Juan.” Williams is mostly brought on to defend racist comments by his masters and to attack real black people who speak up about these comments. He once called our First Lady “Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress,” to the laughing delight of his owners.

Larry Elder, a black libertarian radio talk show host, defended conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s Republican theme song, “Barack the Magic Negro”, saying black people weren’t being “fair” to him. Bear in mind that Limbaugh once said, “I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.” He also said that James Earl Ray, the confessed killer of Martin Luther King, should be awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.

Black conservative columnist and author Erik Rush boasts on his website (which features a logo superimposing Obama’s face over a red flag with the communist hammer and sickle) that he was “… the first to break the story of President (then Senator) Barack Obama’s ties to militant Chicago preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright on a national level in February of 2007.” He urged Republicans to play the race card on Obama in 2008, and called the President “a scary guy.”

Angela McGlowan, an attractive, well-dressed, conservative black lady FNC utilizes to trash strong black women, compared Mrs. Obama to gangster rappers on The O’Reilly Factor.
But Sean Hannity regular Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson is Fox’s house negro extraordinaire. He is the founder and president of a religious group called Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), which is kind of like the black man’s Promise Keepers. (RED FLAG: Hannity is on the organization’s advisory board.) Peterson is a perfect embodiment of a Klansman’s image of a black man: he’s functionally illiterate, has stoned-out, lazy eyes and talks like Mushmouth from The Fat Albert Show. He is constantly brought on by Hannity and O’Reilly to make blacks look stupid, and yo, homey, does he deliver. He has said that 95% of blacks are racist; in fact, he claimed that Obama was only elected because of racist blacks and white guilt. He thanks whites for bringing blacks to America as slaves, because they have it much better here than they would have if they’d been left in Africa. He said that the trip over here on the slave ships wasn’t easy, “kind of like flying coach,” but it was worth the trip.

Just for the record, blacks aren’t the only people of color discriminated against on FNC. Gibson had this advice for White America:

“Do your duty. Make more babies... half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, the Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably the ones Hispanics call gabachos, white people, are having fewer… We have to have more white babies.”

Besides people of color, the fair and balanced network has a similarly low esteem for the fairer sex, and that’s the third problem with Fox: it’s sexist. I’ll cover that in the next segment.

Why Fox News Must be Taken Off the Air, And How it Can Be Done

Part Two: The Pundits

Now for a brief look at Fox News Channel’s “commentary” folks: pundits and pontificators that make Foxies salivate and decent people vomit. Please bear in mind that at Fox News Channel (FNC), “news” and “commentary” are interchangeable terms, since they ultimately mirror each other exactly.

To give the illusion of being “fair and balanced”, FNC pays a couple pseudo-liberals to fill out its panels. Take Special Report with Brit Hume, for instance. (Hume, by the way, is a kind of hybrid that truly embodies the single-purpose soul of FNC: he’s a “news anchor” during the week and a curmudgeonly rightwing “commentator” on the weekend. Do you think he ever slips out of character?) He used to regularly have a threesome on his show (no, not that kind… you can see that on Fox Primetime): Fred Barnes, a trickledown economics proponent, played the role of the conservative that he is. The role of the moderate was played by Mort Kondracke, a Democrat who hates the Democratic Party, and has said the only reason he doesn’t defect to the Republican Party is because they aren’t true enough to their conservative beliefs. Mara Liasson, National Political Correspondent for National Public Radio, played the part of the liberal, even though she sat on the board of the conservative human rights group Freedom House, and assured Ailes that she was a Republican before he gave her the job. (Barnes and Kondracke went on to have their own show together, The Beltway Boys, kind of like a political-themed Will and Grace, sans the sexy fag hag, in which they basically agree with each other about how the Obama administration is destroying America.)

To help project FNC’s fake image of balance, their bloviating cash cow, Bill O’Reilly, the host of The O’Reilly Factor, claimed for years that he was an Independent. The façade held until someone finally dug up his voter’s registration card with the “Republican” box checked. In fact, Ailes headhunted O’Reilly while he was studying politics at Harvard, planning on segueing from journalism into Republican congressional politics. O’Reilly is so sociopathic that even Rupert Murdoch has said he finds him repulsive.

Glenn Beck, FNC’s lightning rod, is a fearmongering freakshow, an aberration, even for FNC. He punctuates his apocalyptic rantings with fits of forced fake-crying. “I’m sorry…” he whimpers, wiping away a tear. “I just love my country so much.” He won CNN a lot of viewers when they noticed that to compete with FNC they’d have to sacrifice news timeslots to opinionated pricks. But in what passes for his heart, Beck knew he belonged at Fox. (They pay more.)

Frequent guest Ann Coulter is a Republican guy’s wet dream: she’s tall, blonde, and utterly consumed by hate. Her solution to dealing with most of her ideological opponents is to kill them. Young conservatives jizz in their slacks watching this skeletal harpy compulsively flip her long hair like a reanimated corpse, flashing her fangs as she blames paraplegic veterans for losing the war in Vietnam, or says the 9/11 widows are “self-obsessed” and “enjoying their husbands’ deaths.” It’s train-wreck TV at its most soul-shattering every time this harpy gets airtime. This is the gal who suggested that the discussion of President Clinton’s sex scandal should be limited to whether to “assassinate or impeach” him. Coulter is Sean Hannity’s Eva Braun, a regular guest on his show. She is also under investigation for two counts of voter fraud: though she’s registered in New York, she voted in Florida in the 2000 election, and in Connecticut in 2004. Considering the story FNC was flogging for months about ACORN helping Obama get elected by using voter fraud – which was, incidentally, fabricated from the beginning – FNC doesn’t seem to mind at all when its own pundits actually do commit voter fraud: Coulter is still a guest, just as regular as a German cattle car.

Even the topical guests on FNC are not balanced. In 2003, Steve Rendall, Senior Analyst for the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), conducted a study of 25 weeks of the guests who appeared on Special Report with Brit Hume. He found that Republicans were interviewed five times as often as Democrats, making up 83% of the partisan guests. The study also concluded that the few Democrats who were interviewed tended to be conservative or centrist, and were often used to endorse Bush administration policies. FNC viewers reflect this ratio: in the 2004 elections, 88% of them voted Republican.

Whenever you challenge a Fox viewer to prove that their channel is fair and balanced, they’ll invariably bring up Alan Colmes, one-half of the now-defunct Hannity and Colmes. Watching that show was kind of like watching Iron Chef, where you knew who was going to ultimately win. And Colmes seemed cool with that; he was getting paid, and obviously knew how it was stacked, even if the viewers somehow never did: Hannity, a protégé of Newt Gingrich, was a well-known conservative radio host long before he joined FNC. Colmes, on the other hand, was a stand-up comic with absolutely no former political experience or interest. He’s even said of himself that he was quite moderate. Hannity is clean cut, and relatively handsome when he’s not talking, while Colmes looks like someone with dysplasia lionitis who might be seen shuffling out of a porn store at three in the morning. Unspoken message to viewers: Liberals are ugly and creepy.

In the next segment I’ll take a look at the racism that saturates FNC’s reporting.

Why Fox News Must be Taken Off the Air, And How it Can Be Done

Part One: The Problem

In the midst of America’s Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus to shut down newspapers that were fueling insurrection by printing what he considered to be seditious material. He stated his rationale for such seemingly draconian measures by asking, “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” Today, another President from Illinois (kind of), Barack Obama, is the Commander-in-Chief of a nation at war on two fronts, Iraq and Afghanistan. He might also, one might argue, be presiding over a nascent civil war at home. Granted, this civil war is now only a war of words, but in history, words have often been the genesis of real battles.

Although Obama had grand hopes of unifying a country so endemically fractured by its ideological, religious, racial and sexual differences once he took office, we are now arguably more divided than ever before. Loud, toxic voices are stirring up winds of anger, hatred and fear. The most overbearing of these voices is that of the media leviathan Fox News Channel. In America, a land where pride and greed are tacitly considered virtues, he who speaks with the loudest voice is often considered the most righteous, which might be why Fox News Channel (FNC) garners more viewers than any other news provider.

For eight long years, FNC played the cheerleader to President George W. Bush and his administration, lauding his every action as heroic and unconditionally omitting all of his mistakes and crimes. But after Fox-endorsed Senator John McCain lost the 2008 election, FNC turned 180-degrees and became a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Obama-bashing marathon. Mere minutes after FNC aired the Presidential Inauguration on January 20, 2009, Glenn Beck, apocalyptic fear-monger and host of FNC’s Glenn Beck Program, came on the air and started to verbally tear the new President to shreds, invoking the name of the Christian God to do it. There was no grace period; the crucifixion began before the First Couple’s first dance, and it hasn’t stopped since.

From its humble beginnings in 1985 until now, FNC has promulgated a gospel of hatred and fear, degrading the level of mainstream American journalism to a nadir so abysmal and vile that it has made tabloid fluff like CNN look like a real news channel by comparison. You can usually spot a hardcore FNC viewer (and really, is there any other kind?) by their harried, distracted appearance and their almost palpable aura of barely suppressed hysteria. They have the demeanor of the doomed, as if America is on the brink of collapse. Out of nowhere, they’ll make bizarre statements with the conviction of a street preacher; stuff like: “Barack Obama said if he gets elected he’s going to throw out the Constitution.” (I actually heard that, more than twice.) Or, “Did you hear that Barack Obama promised all the black people that if they got him elected he’d give them $500 each?” And they usually have something bad to say about Oscar-winning actors and any musicians that don’t sing country or gospel.

This proposal isn’t for those people; they’re already lost. They wouldn’t read it anyway, even if they are semi-literate; they’d think it was a product of the “liberal media elite”. Fox Fans like their information disseminated with a fist and condensed to the simplest of sound bites; they don’t want to read something with a lot of big words in it. I used to have a modicum of pity for FNC viewers, akin to that which I hold for those simple folk who offed themselves back in 1938 because they believed Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio drama was an actual, live news broadcast. But now the hateful bile and deception spewed daily by their oracle into the national consciousness has reached a critical mass, and it’s time for those of us whose love for America isn’t limited to its straight, white, conservative, and evangelical citizens to start taking the future of our country a little more seriously. I know this is a case of preaching to the choir, but everyone else in the church seems to have fallen asleep.

FNC’s proponents vehemently deny that it is a conservative network, claiming their programming is “Fair and Balanced” (FNC’s trademark), that they show all sides of an issue, unlike all the other “media elite,” which have a hidden liberal agenda. But the fact is, FNC is the American version of Al Jazeera: a tool used by the conservative party to control the miniscule minds of the ignorant masses. The only substantive difference is that FNC isn’t motivated by religious fanaticism, but rather by greed: the more people it gets to watch its product, the more advertisers pay it to air their commercials. Rupert Murdoch, FNC’s owner, knows something about making money. He is a conservative Australian media tycoon with a Ronald Reagan infatuation and, apparently, a desire to own all media in the world. In 2004, he owned nine satellite television networks, 100 cable channels, 175 newspapers, 40 book imprints, 40 television stations, and a movie studio. His U.S. television network reached 180-million viewers, while his Asian satellite network reached 300-million. His cable channels reached 300-million homes. His magazines reached 28-milion readers. His total audience was 4.7 billion people, which is three-fourths of Earth’s population, and that was five years ago. He went on to buy MySpace in 2005.

Murdoch gave birth to Fox News when he bought Washington D.C.’s Metromedia News Channel WTTG in 1985. The man he chose to be FNC’s President, Roger Ailes, was a Republican media strategist employed by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. His game plan for Bush Sr.’s campaign featured a preincarnation of the smear tactics of Karl Rove: he used the image of William Horton, a black convict serving a life sentence in Massachusetts for murder. While released from prison on a weekend furlough program – which Bush’s opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, had supported – Horton raped a woman, pistol-whipped, stabbed and tied up her fiancé, and stole their car. Ailes used this tragic incident as the centerpiece of Bush’s campaign, painting Dukakis as a bleeding heart liberator of black rapist murderers. He said of his own strategy, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”

John Moody, FNC Senior Vice President, is a stout conservative with a long career in journalism. Moody is the actual ideological force behind FNC; all of its shows and reports are basically a mouthpiece for his arch-conservative views. He controls the daily talking points that every FNC host, anchor, commentator and reporter will follow by disseminating daily memos. These memos are usually taken directly from the daily press releases of the Republican National Committee. These talking points are echoed, often verbatim, through every show in the course of a news day, beginning with the morning show, Fox Friends, and continuing through the news, punditry and business segments. There is a unity of purpose and message at FNC that exists nowhere else in American journalism, and it is a message that parallels, without the slightest deviance, that of the Republican Party. Like the Biblical demon that Jesus exorcised in The Gospel of Mark, one can almost imagine Moody intoning, “My name is Legion… for we are many.”

Tony Snow, who died of colon cancer in 2005, was the host of Fox News Sunday. Before that, he was a speechwriter for the first Bush administration. He actually left FNC to replace Scott McClellan as the Press Secretary for the second Bush administration. Brit Hume, Fox’s managing editor and anchor of Special Report, used to contribute to the conservative magazines American Spectator and the The Weekly Standard. Catherine Crier, anchor of Crier Report, used to be a Republican judge.

As the years passed, FNC gradually become more flagrant in their partisanship. In 2000, for instance, Carl Cameron was FNC’s Senior Political Correspondent, covering the presidential election. Meanwhile, his wife Pauline was working for then-Texas Governor Bush’s presidential campaign. FNC didn’t even blanch at this blatant conflict of interest, though even CNN had the journalistic integrity to pull one of its top reporters from the campaign trail when it was discovered her husband was one of Al Gore’s lawyers. In a videotaped interview he conducted on June 19, 2000, Cameron blushed like a ten-year-old girl with a backstage pass to a Hannah Montana concert as he told Bush that his wife was “hanging out” with Bush’s sister, and overcoming her fear of talking before crowds. “She’s a good soul,” said Bush, nodding sagely. “She’s a really good soul.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it got even worse five months later. In a diabolically cynical, blatantly political move that permanently obliterated any arguments FNC might ever raise about being a non-partisan news channel, the man FNC put in charge of its Election Analysis Division, stationed in Florida, on election night, was George W. Bush’s cousin, John Ellis. It was him who made the call to FNC headquarters reporting that Bush was the next President of the United States, even though the data from the exit polls hadn’t yet been crunched. (As is now public record, when the exit polls were finally counted, Al Gore had won, but who cares now, right?) Mere minutes after FNC joyfully and “officially” announced that their man had won, ABC, CBS and NBC, not wanting to appear sluggish at getting the news out, followed suit and echoed the same faulty information. The falsehood became fact in the public’s perception.

To put into perspective just how inconceivable this farce was: in 2000, there were roughly 281-million people living in America. Is it numerically possible that out of all those souls, the man who made the call that essentially elevated Bush to the office of the most powerful man on the planet was his cousin, and the governor of the state that helped him do it was his brother? If former Vice President Al Gore, Bush’s opponent, had pulled those kind of shenanigans, FNC would have torn him a new asshole. (Actually, FNC’s goons do, still, mostly because he believes in global warming, but perhaps also because they’re jealous of him: nobody at FNC will ever, ever win a Nobel Peace Prize.)

Since that victory, FNC’s reporting has gotten exponentially more partisan and divorced from reality. Its Vice President of News, Bill Sammon, said the 2005 Hurricane Katrina debacle wasn’t the Bush administration’s fault; rather, that it was the fault of local governments for not being able to take care of their constituents.

Scrutinizing this sampling of FNC’s leaders and “news” correspondents, one can see that there is not one liberal, or even a moderate, among them. In my next segment, some examples of FNC’s “commentary” people will be presented.

I recently wrote of my opposition to Maryland House Bill 712. I'm here to revise and amend my remarks. Last Friday afternoon February 26, 2010 in Maryland's Joint Committee Hearing Room was a sight to see. A bill that already had an impressive list of sponsors had an even more impressive list of witnesses testifying in favor of HB 712. On the house side, the bill currently has 48 sponsors so it is not an orphan by a long shot. Over one fifth of the bills sponsors are Republican in a heavily Democratic state. Of the ten Republican sponsors, three are minority whips. What really excited the proponents was when bill sponsor Del. Morhaim said in his opening remarks that he was considering revisiting the issue of personal cultivation. That was not the only high point.   Read More »

Please check out the whole new AsherHeimermann.com!

http://www.asherheimermann.com

The new AsherHeimermann.com includes: ideas to get involved, a sign up for email updates, social networks to help get the word out online, and much more. This website was designed to efficiently and effectively learn about me and my efforts to family, friends, neighbors, and strangers alike

This new website is the latest addition to our efforts, but it is by no means the culmination. Stay tuned to AsherHeimermann.com the coming days for more information. And remember, be the first to know when you follow me on Twitter.


Thanks for your support,

Asher Heimermann
http://www.asherheimermann.com
http://www.twitter.com/aheimermann

P.S. If you are able, please consider donating today to help ensure that I can keep making a difference. Go to http://donate.asherheimermann.com to make a donation of any size. Your small donations help me in a huge way. Thank you.

Matt Nisenoff will be running for Democrats Abroad JApan exec board in the next ten days. If you or someone you know would like to be a member before the vote please go to https://www.democratsabroad.org/user/register thank you and hope I can earn your vote.   Read More »

Frank Lynch hereby calls upon President Barack Obama to make it illegal to wear burkas in America.

We must immediately stop issuing drivers licenses, passports, immigration papers of any sort, or any government identification or registration instruments to any person who even partially covers their face.

Further, under the hate crime laws, it should be a felony punishable by five years imprisonment at hard labor to refuse to shake hands because a person is a woman.

It is time for our government to stop all this ridiculous political correctness of not wanting to offend muslims. We must grow a spine and stand up to extremists. All people are equal, and we cannot and must not tolerate any practices that demean women in any way.

I am disappointed in our President that European countries are taking action to recognize the sanctity of womanhood before our own President does.

President Obama, please exercise leadership in banning the burka, banning the refusal to shake hands with women, and all other extremist traditions that demean women.

Further, all non-profits must be required to ban burkas from their officers, employees, Boards of Directors or Trustees.

Eveery educational institution, from preschool through graduate school, must ban burkas from their premises.

President Nicolas Sarkozydeclared Monday that the Islamic burqa is not welcome in France, branding the face-covering, body-length gown as a symbol of subservience that suppresses women's identities and turns them into "prisoners behind a screen."

But there was a mixed message in the tough words: an admission that the country's long-held principle of ethnic assimilation -- which insists that newcomers shed their traditions and adapt to French culture -- is failing because it doesn't give immigrants and their French-born children a fair chance.

In a high-profile speech to lawmakers in the historic chateau at Versailles, Sarkozy said the head-to-toe Muslim body coverings were in disaccord with French values -- some of the strongest language against burqas from a European leader at a time when some Western officials have been seeking to ease tensions with the Muslim world.

"In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity," Sarkozy said to extended applause of the lawmakers gathered where French kings once held court.

"The burqa is not a religious sign, it's a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement -- I want to say it solemnly," he said. "It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic."

The Netherlands is about to ban burkas. The country's hardline Integration Minister, Rita Verdonk, known as the Iron Lady for her series of tough anti-immigration measures, told Parliament that she was going to investigate where and when the burka should be banned. The burka, traditional clothing in some Islamic societies, covers a woman's face and body, leaving only a strip of gauze for the eyes.

Mrs Verdonk gave warning that the "time of cosy tea-drinking" with Muslim groups had passed and that natives and immigrants should have the courage to be critical of each other.

She recently cancelled a meeting with Muslim leaders who refused to shake her hand because she was a woman. Great lady!

Although Netherlands has the same inane freedom of expression laws passed in America, she plans to make it a matter of public safety.

If you are a member of Crafting Our Message you need to go and take yourself off of the listserv. I am currently donwloading over 700 e-mails from this server. Do Not Check Your E-Mail!

Hi all - Haven't forgotten PB just busy with life. Also still working for change we can believe in.

"We the people need to create a song to show the World, America in strength that say so patriotically we will never surrender our children's dreams. I am trying in a miracle to somehow have the right people in Nashville come forward as having faith that music can unite this nation in love. I need the help of a lot of Democrats to work on a lot of Royal Republicans to get this into the airwaves.

Miracle Of America’s Reflection - Lyrics

From the shorelines to those mountain top highs,
Can you see?
The miracle of America in your reflection
From those magic spells,
Can you believe?
“We the people� can make
This miracle happen
With music blessing this world
To see us so proud
To bring Star Spangle dreams
To our children.

We are the United States of America
So let us set sail together among the heavens
With that harmony of history of being American

So let us ride the winds
That unite this blessed land
God has given us these gifts
Of divine inspiration
That we share
Generation after generation in love
We bare our
Red, white, and blue mother’s wombs
Until we march with the taps
Onto Amazing Grace.

We are the United States of America
So let us set sail together among the heavens
With that melody of heritage of being American
So can you see
That American miracle reflection glow
Spreading across your heart in vibrations
That will never be defeated.
For “We are the people�
Of this nation’s pride.

(From sea to shining sea,
Can you see our flag flying.)


David Lester Young 12/01/08©
De-Terminated poet, somewhere in America not on company time

It is so important to give our children in public schools the tools to create dreams. I think we need an Foundation, where the stars go back to school to motivate children to strive for educational goals. In a miracle could the artists of America start this foundation, where twice a tear people go to schools to show the children that we care about them. As a poet I have this illusion, but not the resources, all one can do is plant the seed. Is America worth investing in its public school children dreams.


The Franklin American Artmosphere Foundation

This is a work in progress, where in a miracle we can start this FAAF idea by Christmas as a gift to our children’s dreams. The idea for the FAAF would be to have the artists, stars, teachers, and professionals spent two days a year mentoring children’s dreams in the HeArt of creative thinking and expression. While Corporate sponsorship would be only in money spent on the American dream, not a takeover, but the FAAF would be “We the people� run, where no one person can head it as a tyrant but as a gift of human compassion. I think I am here to plant the seed as a poet that without our children’s dreams we are a lost nation. The FAAF would work with public education to motivate the educational process.

Why start with Nashville, because with music, things can change. But in the Music City is a sense that struggling artists are lost and smothered in obscurity, with the venom bile that one must be a star here to survive the onslaught of continuous attacks. How many would love to once or twice a year to go to a public school to sing among those youth, “God Bless America,� and see those eyes shine from their poverty that maybe there is a God that has no color, gender, or religion in Nashville, just a God of heavenly musical beats. Will I succeed to plant this seed to spread across America that children must have hope and a reason to learn? Only if you can dream with me.

This is insane idea and I keep wanting to walk away, only to be driven further in planting the need to motivate our children or the cancer of Gaza will spread its devastation from within disintegration and economic segregation in its worst form, the destruction of the United States of America.

Why is it a work in process? Because it has so many elements that it is like a wind chime within its structure. But, I must put the seed out there, and then go back to it and eventually return to my Poetry HeArtbeats.

From the dreams of America comes the HeArt of Children
Built on the Constitutional ground of creative mind growth,
For in our youth lives our History and Heritage future culture,
As artists, teachers, motivators; we must plant those seeds.

The survival of America comes from our educational diversity,
Where we teach them about the rainbow spectrum of the universe
Painting the HeArt of their soul with open minds of challenge
To write and ride wind’s wind spirit upon their gifted potentials.

America was born upon a dream of divine Civil Liberties,
Where its Declaration of Independence must reinvent itself.
Where “We the people� declare their birthright patriotism
That no Patriot Act can nor should censor Free Will Free Speech.

The pyre of Franklin and founding fathers words must ignite
The Phoenix of the Eagle sharp razor talons of determination
That also must have hope with the spirit of the white dove of peace
Upon a love for a nation that will never divide its children with hate.

Our Politicians Intelligence cannot “Lie� in deceit prefabrications
But the honor of “Truth� to a duty to serve with such distinction
For our President has one vote of equality of pure commitment
To “We the people� that we are never again, Katrina political victims.

From Nashville musical beats must arise the champion musical talents
To reach into public schools and teach them the notes of smiles
Where they can see the star’s shine deep inside their soul’s of hope
That maybe they can learn the music of a nation so Proud and Free.

David Lester Young 11/24/08©
De-Terminated poet, somewhere in America not on company time