McCarthyism Comes Back to Wisconsin, Dem Primary Race for Governor Goes Rancid

Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy (R) led a national descent 
into madness as the infamous 'Red Scare' champ lied and
 defamed his way into the leading anti-communist, ruining 
lives and families along the way. McCarthy-lite is the 
order now-a-days, as anti-Semitism charges are thrown
about like fireworks and confetti by inheritors of this 
putrid man who stood for nihilism and lies as values.

Democrat-launched Slurs Do 'Gunner Joe' Proud, to Wisconsin's Shame

Commentary

Madison, Wisconsin—Wisconsin's political class has been clamoring for a split among Wisconsinites in the race for the Democratic Party nomination for governor.  

They got their wish.

 Zionist liberals in the Wisconsin media and allied candidates share a desperation to keep Wisconsin State Rep. Francesca Hong from running away with the Democratic Primary.

War, genocide and a shaky economy see an emergence of pro-working class, anti-war candidates across the nation whom corporatist liberals are working to stop.

Corporate and establishment Democrats falsely accuse candidates such as Francesca Hong of virtually everything, as Party establishments continues to alienate the working class, right as progressive strategists point to new data showing workers overwhelmingly support progressive economic policies—including raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicare, and higher taxes on corporations.

Faux Scandal

Now, corporatists have discovered what they believe is a campaign sandal involving Francesca Hong: Nothing Hong has said or done, rather Hong's public appearance with a social media streamer/content creator named Hasan Piker on social media sites, Twitch, and Youtube, is is the asserted scandal.

Nothing Hong has said or done on Piker's show either. Just hostility towards the mere fact of Hong's appearance with Hasan Piker is presented as scandalous, because bad-faith effort to silence legitimate anti-Zionist dissent and progressive policy advocacy for working class Americans.

The issue is Piker is a critic of Genocide, torture, slaughter of children and rape by israel in the occupied territories, among Piker's other moral condemnation of atrocities, such as war; bombing girls' schools, so on, therefor Francesca Hong must be held to account for each and every statement, formulation of statement and others' intentional misrepresentations of statements Hasan Piker has ever made on social media, including all slurs and lies that 'critics' have hurled towards Piker for appearing on a live-stream show with a Piker.

Piker has also mads statements echoing U.S. intelligence on the danger of blow-back when various geniuses in the White House decide to start a war or three.

Who is running for Wisconsin governor: Piker or Hong? 

It's the way it is now. Hong even appeared on another social media show in late June. 

The Wisconsin State Journal republished the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's absurd hit piece on Hong, (authored by Hope Karnopp and Molly Beck) though most of the piece is about Piker who is defamed, and then falsely presented as having relevancy to Wisconsin's gubernatorial campaign, in a display of third-rate McCarthyism by Wisconsin's two largest dailies. 

Hong's social media appearance is presented by Journal-Sentinel's Karnopp and Beck as somehow defining Hong, and uses the polemical device, 'critics call,' 'critics have called,' (references to Piker), as a method to portray this dishonest hit piece on Piker and Hong as objective reporting.

Hope Karnopp, Molly Beck and most corporate 'journalists,' including Wisconsin State Journal editors, are just shoveling slop, lies and misrepresentations. 

And Karnopp and Beck know fully well what they're doing.

Karnopp's colleague, Molly Beck, at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran an even more absurd piece on the governor's race in the Spring featuring a Trump flunky, Tom Tiffany claiming Francesca Hong is a Satanist who wore a hat bearing the mark of the devil—three sixes. Sincerely.

Molly Beck ran the absurdity as a he-said, she-said piece, not bothering to report the lack of evidence of satanism, the falsity of what Republicans said, the utter ridiculousness of the charge, or the fact that the Republican attack is not true. 

This is what passes for modern journalism. 

If you subscribe to Wisconsin State Journal and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, dump the trash.

Hong campaign opponents, David Crowley and Kelda Roys, facing little pathway to the nomination on Aug 11, issued critical statements that this writer will not bother posting here because of the pure inanity of the comment; see Heartland Post.

Ann Jacobs, Political Mania

Meanwhile, the unhinged Ann Jacobs, former Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Commissioner, and a supporter of David Crowley, blasted Francesca Hong in a fit of Hypomania and falsehoods, calling for banning of speech and speakers such as Piker whom Jacobs views as hateful for opposing Genocide. 

Reports Urban Milwaukee on Jacobs' incoherent and defamatory rant:

[Jacobs] tweeted that Hong was "willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin for a few bucks."

"Why are those people you want to be in conversation with? Is it just for the money? You’re willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin so that you can raise money? That’s disturbing," said Jacobs, who also co-chairs the Jewish Caucus of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio.

"I don’t think we should tolerate all forms of opinions," Jacobs added. "I don’t think that we should tolerate antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all these other hate groups that are rampant right now on social media."

Jacobs reposted on X, posts by David Crowley and Molly Beck.

In the political atmosphere today, anyone objecting to israel-committed Genocide, slaughter of children and rape are asserted to be per force anti-Semites.

Absurd, but the McCarthyite defamation helps the Democrat Party to smash candidates who stand with working class families, always a frightening prospect for the Democratic Party establishment.

History repeats.
 
McCarthyism

In the 1940-50s, Truman, Democrats and Joe McCarthy ushered in an era of suppression, working to squash labor-led effort to help out working class folk, as McCarthyism ruined lives to counter the "energizing effect of the war and the depression in mobilizing the population, and causing them to challenge the- to reveal the mysteries of government, and do all these bad things," noted Noam Chomsky, (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Delivered at University of Wisconsin – Madison, March 15, 1989). ... "Wars, depressions, and such things, they have a way of arousing people from apathy, and making them think, and sometimes even organize."

Progressives and working-class advocates thinking, organizing and running for office have caused Democrats to veer into political hysterics.

As Trump, delving into lunacy extreme even for him. declares prominent politicians opposing him as a 'communist' and 'anti-Semitic' and 'terrorist,' those who either have lived through McCarthyism or are students of the political mania, see history repeated in many Democrats and media propaganda led by the Wisconsin State Journal and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

 

McCarthyism is alive and well in Wisconsin, though the conventional slur today is anti-Semite, not communist, unless you're the president.
---
Top candidates for the 2026 Democratic Party nominee for Wisconsin governor include: Mandela Barnes (the top Zionist), Francesca Hong, Sara Rodriguez, David Crowley, and Kelda Roys.

Election Day is August 11.
#

Francesca Hong Could Change Socialism in Wisconsin and America
See video below:

We Need COVID 19-Origins Hearings, ala Kastenmeier Vietnam War Hearings

Madison, Wisconsin — March 8, 2023, a House Committee held an anticipated hearing on investigating the COVID-19 origins.

But House Democrats performed shamefully, exemplified by Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Maryland), a lightweight non-entity, who launched pathetic ad homium attacks again science writer and hearing witness, Nicholas Wade. 

Wade penned a brilliant piece on COVID-19 origins, reason and thought control, The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?, at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists some two years earlier.

But Wade's COVID-19 origins work never came up under questioning by Mfume.

Instead, Mfume spent his time trying to vilify Wade for writing A Troublesome Inheritance
Genes, Race and Human History (Penguin Random House, 2015) that has absolutely nothing to do with COVID-19 origins, the mission behind the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Mfume's ad homium offered no clarity beyond the fact Mfume did not read and is not equipped to understand Wade's thoughtful work.

Mfume and congressional Democrats wanted to subvert the hearing, and clearly millions dead did not weigh on this Party of liars and sheep.

Mfume does exemplify Democrat refusal among Congress and Joe Biden to probe what is almost certainly a lab leak origin of COVID 19 as the world is over three years into one of the most spectacular mass gas-lighting projects in U.S. history after the most deadly Pandemic in modern history.

In the face of U.S. government lying led by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (NIAID), U.S. intelligence, censorship across the media,  (see Cleveland. Washburne. Leon. Hibbett and Grim. Taibbi. Greenwald,), it is time for citizens to bypass the media, Congress, Democrats and Biden and hold grassroots hearings on COVID-19 origin.

Robert W. Kastenmeier Vietnam War hearings

This COVID-19 origins hearing can be modeled on the Robert W. Kastenmeier Vietnam War hearings in 1966 when citizens replaced so-called leaders who refused to face facts in the midst of lies and death, and massive government duplicity.

Today, congressional Democrats and @POTUS will never accede to honest probes of #COVID19 origins. This is why we need the #COVID19 origins akin to Kastenmeier's.

Honest scientists, intellectuals and victims could testify. Citizens can offer statements on what lying about Covid 19 means to them.

Concerned folks such as @Ayjchan @JamieMetzl , Nicholas Wade, DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19), among those burdened only by a commitment to truth, can offer candid summaries of evidence, reason and facts.

Kweisi Mfume and his dependable Party of liars need not attend.

Even as Biden promises to release Covid 19 origins information, these is absolutely no reason to trust this president and his party to begin telling the truth now.

We citizens of the United States and world must lead against Democrats.

Biden, Democrats Surpass Orwell's Imagination; Proclaim Power to Discern and Delete Harmful Speech

Facing political disaster in the mid-term elections this Nov, the Biden administration and its media acolytes want the American people to know something: Fear Elon Musk.

That's right, Elon Musk's buying Twitter is a dire threat, and we ought not worry about inflation, looming recession, supply chains, student loans, healthcare costs, household debt and corporate takeover of elected government.

Because you the American people have never had it so good, and you need to trust your betters, and stay away from disinformation.

Now, Musk 'threatens' to open up Twitter to dissident voices who are popular with the American people, but the wrong kind of people who voice the wrong kind of speech and think the wrong kind of thought.

It's obvious Democrats and liberal allies fear the mid-terms because they fear the American people. And when information and thought are presented that threatens Democrat rule, the medium that conveys this information must be policed, and the thought must be purged.

Notes Glenn Greenwald this morning: "The worst, most egregious and most nefarious official US disinformation campaign in years was the pre-election CIA lie that the authentic Biden emails were 'Russian disinformation.' It was led by liberal outlets: CNN, Politico/Natasha Bertrand, HuffPost, Mother Jones, Intercept."

The worst, most egregious and most nefarious official US disinformation campaign in years was the pre-election CIA lie that the authentic Biden emails were "Russian disinformation."

It was led by liberal outlets: CNN, Politico/Natasha Bertrand, HuffPost, Mother Jones, Intercept. pic.twitter.com/h3Exzd8YLJ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 2, 2022

Liberals have long besmirched social media because, they say, they fear platforms in which accredited "lies have unfettered access to the American electorate," in the words of corporatist Democrat, Aaron Sorkin, writing in the New York Times in 2019 in favor of censorship of Facebook.

Sorkin well represents the liberal mindset that reasons liberals and content managers are able to sift and winnow social media writing without being corrupted and misled, but most Americans are not equipped with liberals' powers of discernment.

I read about about Sorkin's call for heavy censorship in 2019, but now his narcissism and silly condescension have become Democrat orthodoxy, terrified of the American population.

Time again for a refresher on free speech.

Free speech need not be defended on grounds that consequences of liberty make for a healthy classical liberal society, ala New York Times v Sullivan (1964), an inspiring statement for liberty against those advocating for authoritative selection of published views.

However, the words of Justice William Brennan and other 20-century jurists speak forever to those who believe only they are immune from corruption of unorthodox thought, and their politcal rule must be protected against the vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks.

Writes Brennan in Sullivan:

The First Amendment, said Judge Learned Hand,

presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many, this is, and always will be, folly, but we have staked upon it our all. United States v. Associated Press, 52 F.Supp. 362, 372 (D.C.S.D.N.Y. 1943).

Mr. Justice Brandeis, in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375-376, gave the principle its classic formulation:

Those who won our independence believed . . . that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. ... Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law -- the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.

Thus, we consider this case [New York Times v. Sullivan] against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials. (New York Times v. Sullivan).

Aaron Sorkin and Democrats ought consider the foundations of Sullivan today, because free speech protections may not be around forever.

Facebook and other social media well serve our national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited.

Consider the thoughts of Glenn Greenwald this morning, and don't worry, you won't be corrupted.

In fact, some of the most sanctimonious leftist writers have been on the dole of Silicon Valley billionaires while attacking others for impure funding. That Musk's purchase of Twitter is some novel development - except for its potential to restore free speech - is laughable. pic.twitter.com/4y7E9LB4kF

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 2, 2022

Collecting my checks from the Sulzberger dynasty (NYT). Laurene Powell-Jobs (Atlantic), MacKenzie Scott (countless left-liberal NGOs), Jeff Bezos (WP), Comcast Corp. (NBC/MSNBC), Warner Bros. Discovery Corp. (CNN), to write about the dangers of a billionaire's control of Twitter.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 2, 2022

Ok so why is it better for Musk to run Twitter than Dorsey and co? Is it better in any way? Or just better because it’s closer to your worldview of social media operation?

— Xavier Koenig (@xavkoenig) May 2, 2022

Because the current scheme is a censorship regime imposed on major social media platforms. Musk is promising to uproot that and instead allow free speech.

If he's sincere and follows through, it will be important. If he isn't and doesn't, nothing will change.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 2, 2022

Anthony Fauci Lied about COVID 19 Orgins, U.S. House E-mails Reveal

"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed," wrote the great journalist, I.F. Stone.

I first encountered I.F. Stone's admonition on a large wall poster in a hall some feet away from Erwin Knoll's office at The Progressive Magazine in 1985.

Stone's statement seemed both inspiring and obvious.

This week, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (NIAID), is revealed as having self-consciously lied about how the Pandemic began. 

Emails released by members of a U.S. House committee reveal Anthony Fauci worked with virologists  and U.S. government officials in early 2020, musing on formulating strategy to examine COVID 19 origins, and the efficacy of ways of countering "voices of conspiracy" asserting the possibility of an accidental Chinese lab leak of the COVID 19 virus.

"Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum," read a Feb. 4, 2020 email from former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins to Fauci and other NIH officials.

The conspiracy theory is the contention that Chinese government scientists secretly bio-engineered a Coronavirus that subsequently was unintentionally released into the world to catastrophic consequences.

Help put down is the not the same as explain what the science says.

Currently, there are 312,173,462 confirmed cases and 5,501,000 deaths and climbing, according to the World Health Organization.

This is not to assert that public health advice and measures advocated by United States public health officials are not valid. We should, roughly: Get vaccinated and boosted, wear a mask, and get tested.

The emails do reveal Fauci and public health officials disregarding the fact the Chinese government is a hyper-secret State that routinely acts destructively, brokering no dissent as it veers into totalitarianism, emitting routine lies. 

Further, the obvious plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis was acknowledged in the same emails in which Fauci and his colleagues decided to publicly dismiss what likely occurred in China.

Reports Maia Hibbett and Ryan Grim in The Intercept:

The [U.S. House Members] letter, signed by James Comer, R-Ky., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, was followed by pages of notes on emails that were first obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, but were heavily redacted when published in June 2021. The redacted emails included the agenda for a February 1, 2020, telephone conference between National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci; his then-boss, former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins; and several of the world’s leading virologists. The communications contained extensive notes summarizing what was said during the call, but their substance was hidden at the time.

Oversight Committee staff were able to view the full emails 'in camera,' which means they could physically look at them and take notes but couldn’t take copies with them. The information released Tuesday for the first time reveals the content of notes taken on the February 1 call.

On that call, virologists Michael Farzan and Robert Garry told Fauci and Collins the virus might have leaked from the Wuhan lab. It might have been genetically engineered, the transcription of Garry’s notes suggests, but this now seems unlikely. Another possibility, put forward by Farzan, was that it could have been evolved in the lab through a process known as serial passage.

Work since Feb. 2020 by independent intellectuals and scientists around the globe on COIVD 19 origins devastates the Chinese-American government public consensus that natural, non-man-made explanations must account for the emergence of the Pandemic. (Vanity Fair; Origins of SARS-CoV-2; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

To disagree with the consensus is to engage in "conspiracy" talk, an elite U.S. research community now led by Fauci assures us in well-publicized statements in The Lancet (Feb 2020) and Nature (March 2020), an effort referenced in the emails released this week.

A May 5, 2021 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists feature, The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade, suggests looking closer and considering the evidence, without apology to the moment's consensus, and Fauci's dismissal.

Writes Wade:

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

Now, even Fauci tacitly admits publicly that dismissal and dishonest ridicule of the lab leak hypothesis is no longer a sustainable position, as Jack Brewster details in a chronology of Fauci statement in Forbes, published June 16, 2021.

See also Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti in Breaking Points below:

---
The work of DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19), an independent group of itinerant intellectuals and scientists, instructs as an example of promoting rational examination of hypotheses on the origins of COIVD 19.

An outline follows.
---

SARS-COV-2 Laboratory Leak Hypothesis

Laboratory Hypothesis Leak Overview

Guest Post by Andrew Tuntable, Ph. D. atuntable@gmail.com @atuntable

DRASTIC and other groups have uncovered substantial evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by the leak of the virus from a laboratory in Wuhan.  This evidence together with many references is described in this paper:

SARS-COV-2 Laboratory Leak Hypothesis

In summary, the evidence is:-

    The bat coronavirus outbreak occurred in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the world’s leading bat coronaviruses laboratory.  (Not proof, but certainly of interest.)
    Wuhan is over 1000 km from the relevant bats.  The bats were not traded in the Wuhan wet markets.
    The virus arose suddenly, fully functional, with no known human or animal precursors.  This is unlike SARS-1 and MERS.
    The virus is a chimera (a mixture) of two different viruses.  Chimera’s can arise naturally, but are also often engineered in laboratories.
    The virus also contains two different powerful adaptations at the same time, an effective spike protein and a furin cleavage site.  This is why it is the most infectious coronavirus in 100 years.
    The WIV and the Eco Health Alliance proudly published their earlier results on genetically engineering chimeras based on coronaviruses.  They have also submitted grant proposals to add furin cleavage sites to coronaviruses.
    It was discovered that in 2013 six bat guano miners became ill with a SARS-like virus, samples of which were sent to the WIV.  This could have been the precursor to SARS-COV-2.  The WIV had said the miners had a fungal infection.
    The WIV conducted coronavirus research at biosecurity levels 2 and 3, not high security BSL-4.  A US government report had raised concerns about their biosecurity practices in 2017.
    Lab leaks are not uncommon and have happened in many laboratories around the world.
    There is some evidence that workers at the WIV became ill in late 2019.
    More importantly, the Chinese government has removed data and has angrily thwarted any proper investigation.  They refuse to disclose whether the WIV was studying a SARS-COV-2 like virus.
    There does not appear to have been any attempt to trace the contacts of the earliest cases by looking for long lived antibodies.
    The Chinese government has still not found any natural precursor after an extensive search testing over 80,000 samples.
    There are no credible rebuttals.

The weight of this evidence shows that the virus escaped from the WIV beyond reasonable doubt.

This is important because this technology has become much more accessible to laboratories around the world, often with minimal oversight.  Advances in technology could enable future genetically engineered viruses to be far more infectious and virulent than SARS-COV-2.

(Permission to use this cartoon is granted with attribution.)

This is what must not be allowed to happen.  Students from existing laboratories setting up their own laboratories around the world and conducting dangerous Gain of Function research with inadequate safety precautions.

The next engineered virus could be even more infectious, have a longer incubation period, a higher mortality rate and, like HIV, attack the immune system.  It could be far more dangerous than SARS-COV-2.

Full Paper here.

Time to Ditch DNC-MSNBC Corruption — Boycott Propaganda System Now

Bernie Sanders continues to lead Trump.

Madison, Wisconsin — The 2019 campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination appears at a tipping point as major candidates call out the corrupt DNC-media system for its marginalization of progressive candidates and character assassinations spewed at a rate that makes Fox News blush.

"I don't know who the Democratic Party is. I just don't know who they are anymore," Terrance Warthen, co-chair of Our Wisconsin Revolution, (MSNBC), lamented in 2017.

It's worse now.

Progressive candidates — Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders — are alternately maligned and minimized in the corporate coverage though the three lead the field in championing the concerns of a solid majority of Americans.

Combat veteran Tulsi Gabbard v Chickhawk Hillary Clinton

It's almost funny to watch corporate democrats — led by Hillary Clinton, CNN and MSNBC's prime-time line-up — emit hysterics and abuse against Gabbard, Yang and Sanders

For example, Rep. Gabbard (D-Hawia), an Army combat veteran and sitting congresswoman, is continually defamed as a Russian agent or foreign dictator's supporter by Hillary Clinton and the corporate media because of Gabbard's opposition to catastrophic wars.

Gabbard has perhaps the most compelling personal story. She enlisted in the Army after 911 and was deployed downrange, (Iraq 2004-05; Kuwait, 2008-09), "serving in a base in the Sunni Triangle at the height of the war[.] Tulsi had the heart-wrenching daily responsibility of going through the list of every injury and casualty in the entire theatre of operations, looking to see if any soldiers in her unit were on the list, so she could ensure they received the care they needed and their families were notified."

The Democratic National Committee and corporate media has become so brazen in their enmity towards progressive candidates that Tusli Gabbard preemptively boycotted the next DNC debate to be held on Dec 19.

For a number of reasons, I have decided not to attend the December 19th "debate" — regardless of whether or not there are qualifying polls. I instead choose to spend that precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South Carolina.

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) December 10, 2019

Several major candidates have already hit the DNC and its allied news network for their machinations in secretly choosing which polls decide who gets the free national air-time in the debates, and who gets blacked-out in continuing news coverage.

The DNC-media campaign against Andrew Yang is equally vicious and petty. See YouTube.

Drop MSNBC

As Andrew Yang has pointed out, the progressive candidates don't need the corporate news networks, if disaffected voters are sufficiently mobilized.

The #YangGang has taken the lead in dropping MSNBC, allied in effect with Tulsi and Bernie supporters.

There are brilliant political news, analyses and commentary available for continuing campaign coverage to replace the evening and prime-time line-up.

A partial list of news shows available on YouTube follows, (pls add more in comments):

• Rising, The Hill with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti
• Jimmy Dore Show
• Secular Talk with Kyle Kulinski
• Rational National with David Doel
• The Young Turks
• The Grey Zone with Max Blumenthal
• The Humanist Report
• Joe Rogan Experience
• Useful Idiots with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper
• Moderate Rebels
• Graham Elwood
• The Intercept
• Democracy Now
• Rebel HQ

Bernie Sanders Still Towering over Pack in Democratic Pres Campaign

Bernie Sanders won the debate, opine the Wall Street Journal and the progressive The Nation.

It's an assessment secretly shared by the liberal establishment media, and Democratic Party mucks who loathe Bernie, such as CNN. Bernie is setting the agenda and politcal message in 2020.

"Nothing will change unless we have the guts to take on Wall Street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial complex, and the fossil fuel industry," said Bernie Sanders at the debate.

The nerve.

Of course that a few huge interests control Congress and are looking out for themselves has been the overwhelming sentiment of the American people for a long time.

Even the lunatic in the White House knew how to tap into this sentiment, a capacity that eluded Hillary Clinton and her party that can't shoot straight.

No matter that Hillary Clinton screwed up the slam dunk known as the 2016 presidential election that installed Republican Party acolytes for years to come on the Supreme Court, no matter how many times Rachel Maddow whores herself out to the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders is head and shoulders above the rest of the pack.

Polls still show Bernie would crush Trump in an general election match-up, a fact that must be erased from the political culture, (RealClear Politics).

Don't look for MSNBC to report this fact in the coming months, even when Bernie overtakes Biden in general election match-ups.

The liberal media knows all about Bernie's ascendancy, indicated at RealClear Politics.

To the extent, the Democratic Party continues to feed at the trough of the insurance, pharmaceutical, fossil-fuel, and the military industries' money, expect the stop-Bernie movement to become more hysterical, defamatory and desperate.

And Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd and Sean Hannity can be counted on to do their worst.

Opposition to King Holiday in 1983 Led by Wisconsin, Rep. Sensenbrenner and Deep South

Dr. King is still reviled in Republican
circles, and other white supremacists.

Madison, Wisconsin—President Reagan signed the Rev. King Holiday bill, (H.R. 3706 (1983)), into law on November 2, 1983.

But getting King's birthday through congress as a legal national holiday was a difficult legislative project.

Lots of hate and lots of opposition from white racists, many of whom reside in small Wisconsin municipalities.

Worth recalling this weekend is who led the opposition to King's message of peace, equality and social justice.

Six members of Congress serving today—Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa); Richard Shelby (R-Alabama); John McCain (R-Arizona); Orrin Hatch (R-Utah); and United States Reps Hal Rogers (R-Kentucky) and James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin)—remain what is left of the congressional opposition who worked against Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, (Mal Contends), (Washington Post).

All six were reelected in 2016, and all six represent very white and safe Republican jurisdictions today.

From the 1983 vote establishing King's holiday, the Congressional record reveals familiar Republican names who were loyal members of the opposition to King: Reps Tom Petri, (R-Fond du Lac), Toby Roth, (R-Green Bay), and James Sensenbrenner (R-Whitefish Bay), (Gov Track).

Racism is the legacy of cowardly souls like Petri, Roth and Sensenbrenner.

Change in America comes from the people.

Unfortunately for us in Wisconsin, Reps. like Tom Petri, Toby Roth, and James Sensenbrenner work for hateful, white people, a pursuit taken up by Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Sean Duffy, and Ron Johnson today.

What do these people really have against King? See the photo above-right and check the color of King's hair and skin.

Black as midnight.

DNR Story Shows Wisconsin State Journal at Deceitful Worst

Wisconsin DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp is featured in a propaganda piece this morning on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal.

The writer is Steven Verburg; the writing (and presumably the editing) highlights a major reason our household no longer subscribes to Wisconsin's second largest daily.

The 2,500-word piece is the worst type of trash the State Journal puts out, illustrating how badly the Republican propaganda sheet misleads readers and shills for their favored political interests.


Online the headline reads: As DNR woes grow, former critic says she's its best protector.

That's a misleading headline.

The headline cites "woes" (caused by what or whom?) as though the DNR has passively experienced some unknown malady caused by unknown agents. In reality, Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans have worked to change the mission and operation of the DNR with Stepp on the front lines.

The headline shields Stepp in the cloak of DNR "critic" and "protector."

In the lede paragraph Verburg recites a story explaining Stepp's reluctant steps before being appointed by Scott Walker to the DNR secretary position in 2011.

The fact-based world is something different.

Scott Walker, Attorney General Bard Schimel, legislative Republicans and Stepp have devastated the resource protection and planning objectives of the agency, (most of what the DNR does is planning and soliciting input from stakeholders), and rebuilt the DNR as a tool for polluters.

Here's Verberg on Stepp:

She fought to streamline environmental regulations, earned a 'zero' rating from conservationists, gathered testimony about overzealous DNR employees, and authored a bill to criminalize state worker 'retaliation' against companies seeking pollution permits.

Frustrated by the slow pace of change, Stepp left the Senate when her four-year term ended. She worked for Republican causes until 2011 when the party took control of state government, and Gov. Scott Walker appointed her as the DNR’s top administrator.

Here I was thinking Republicans like Stepp were fronting for polluters like Menard's and other heavy donors to Walker and other Republicans.

No, Verburg assures, Stepp fought for streamlining, against the overzealous and the retaliatory.

Wow, Stepp is good.

Elsewhere, Verburg presents the DNR's Stepp as merely a passive regulator working to find common ground against Republican legislators:

'We have made terrific inroads with some the toughest critics in the Legislature against this agency who have a very skewed perception of who makes up this agency,' Stepp said.

The agency must be apolitical publicly, deferring to elected officials, Stepp said. As DNR secretary she said she has no opinion on whether environmental regulations are excessive or inadequate. The DNR’s job is to put the law into practice, she said.

Stepp is just an objective good-heated public servant; she said so herself.

Of course Stepp's opinions are easy to find. Notes Kewaunee Cares (Facebook):

She doesn't have an opinion? Stepp offered her commentary on our health and water crisis in the [heavily polluted] Kewaunee [County] through an Op-Ed piece in the Green Bay Gazette, marginalizing our problems.

Stepp writes, "The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has been working for more than a year with multiple stakeholder groups to address water quality issues in and around Kewaunee County. That work is not over but based on our discussions so far, we have been able to take action on several fronts."

"The department believes in making decisions and finding solutions based on sound science and so we commissioned scientific research to gather data about the quality of wells in Kewaunee County."

That's a lot of rhetoric to begin a piece on an issue about which Stepp has no opinion.

Of course, pointing this out would require the State Journal's Verburg to dig all the way back to ... May 2016. That kind of in-depth journalism apparently is beyond the means of the WSJ.

Hey Bernie Sanders, Keep Up the Fight

Update: California was in fact rigged for Clinton. Few saw this coming, Bill Clinton apparently knew. See How California Is Being Stolen for Sanders, (Palest), and  'It was just chaos': Broken machines, incomplete voter rolls leave some wondering whether their ballots will count, (Pearce, Los Angeles Times).
 ---
Many inducements will be offered to Bernie Sanders to give up the fight for social justice today.

No cause to allow Hillary Clinton and the corporate media to substitute neo-liberalism for social justice.

Clinton and her allies would not be so desperate to induce Bernie Sanders to abandon ship, were not Clinton's fragile candidacy manifest.

Fight on to Philly.

Bernie Sanders Vows to Fight, Clinton Toes Corporate Line

Bernie Sanders fights on, having denied Hillary Clinton
the requisite pledged delegates to clinch the
pre-convention nomination

The life-long social justice worker, Bernie Sanders and millions of Americans stopped the corporate media and the Democratic Party from installing Hillary Clinton as the presidential nominee before the Democratic Convention.

That Clinton was halted from winning the requisite number of pledged delegates to clinch the nomination, (including the total from D.C. next week Clinton will have won less than 2,300 of the needed 2,382 pledged delegates), is a fact the corporate media avoids reporting.

That would be all of the corporate media and don't believe what you read, or hear on The Rachel Meadow Show, for example

Bernie Sanders and Clinton will vow for the votes of superdelegates at the Democratic National Convention the week of July 25. This is another fact you won't read or hear from the corporate media.

Some seven weeks is a long time in American politics, hence the desperate Clinton effort to be anointed as the presumptive nominee, while the FBI is investigating Clinton's Scott Walker-esque secret computer server, router and computers on which Clinton conducted official business while serving as Secretary of State, (2009-2013). A negative law enforcement report is difficult after the media confers presumptive nominee status.

The corporate media decided that although superdelegates are unpledged and can only cast their preference at the Convention, superdelegates will be polled and counted by the corporate media in anonymous journalistic conventions through secret contacts.

The corporate media is now the authority of establishing the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, not the Democratic National Committee, a practice this goes unchallenged and unquestioned in the corporate media.

"The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media organization – incredibly – conceals. The decisive edifice of superdelegates is itself anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices that the party establishment dislikes," notes Glenn Greenwald reporting facts that will also not be repeated by the corporate media, (The Intercept).

Sanders has vowed to fight on, as he should. "[W]e are going to take the fight for social, economic and racial justice to Philadelphia. We will continue to fight for every vote and every delegate," Sanders told 1,000s in Santa Monica last night.

Clinton, the Democratic Party's corporate establishment and the corporate media don't get it.

For Hillary Clinton, her lust for the nomination has been animated by a quest for power and ego which drove Clinton to support the segregationist Barry Goldwater, among other unsavory pursuits.

For Sanders, the nomination is simply a means to achieve the promise of social justice.

From the Sanders campaign:

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – To chants of “Bernie or Bust,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders told a roaring crowd of supporters on Tuesday that he will carry his White House campaign and their fight for a political revolution to this summer’s Democratic National Convention.

“The struggle continues,” he declared to the loudest cheers of the night in the climax of the speech.

He said he would campaign in next Tuesday’s final primary in Washington, D.C., the last contest in the nationwide series of primaries and caucuses that began last winter in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“Then we are going to take the fight for social, economic and racial justice to Philadelphia,” he told the 3,300 people packed inside an airplane hangar. “We will continue to fight for every vote and every delegate.”

The late-night crowd was dominated by young people who have been a major key to the success of Sanders’ campaign. “I am enormously optimistic about the future of our country when so many young people have come on board and understand that our vision of social justice, economic justice, racial justice and environmental justice must be the future of America,” the senator from Vermont told the rally.

He spoke about the upcoming general election and defeating Donald Trump. “Our campaign from day one has understand that we will not allow right-wing Republicans to control our government. And that is especially true with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate,” Sanders said. “The American people in my view will never support a candidate whose major theme is bigotry who insults Mexicans, who insults Muslims and women and African Americans. We will not allow Donald Trump to become president of the United States.”

But he said the grassroots campaign that gave him victories in 22 states has another goal.

“Our mission is more than just defeating Trump it is transforming our country,” Sanders said. That mission includes ending wealth and income inequality and junking the corrupt campaign finance system that props up a rigged economy. “Democracy is not about billionaires buying elections.” He said it includes reforming the criminal justice system, breaking up big bans, providing health care as a right to all citizens, reforming our broken immigration system and making the billionaires and profitable corporations pay their fair share in taxes.

“What this is about is millions of people from coast to coast knowing that we can do much, much better as a nation,” Sanders said. “Our fight is to transform this country and to understand that we are in this together, understand that all of what we believe is what the majority of American people believe and to understand that the struggle continues.”

Support Bernie Sanders, Hope Insider Dems Come to Their Senses

Hillary Clinton is hopelessly corrupt and out-of-touch

Now is the time to support Bernie Sanders and work up to the Democratic Convention, the week of July 25, to help super-delegates come to their senses. Super-delegates are unbound and cannot vote until the Convention.

The media has anointed Hillary Clinton after the corporate media conducted secret phone calls with Clinton super-delegates yesterday, which both the media and the super-delegates will not disclose in detail. Notes Gleen Greenwald:

Perfect End to Democratic Primary: Anonymous Superdelegates Declare Winner Through Media
Last night, Associated Press – on a day when nobody voted – surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of 'superdelegates': the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this.

...

This is the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary: The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media organization – incredibly – conceals. The decisive edifice of superdelegates is itself anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices that the party establishment dislikes. But for a party run by insiders and funded by corporate interests, it’s only fitting that their nomination process ends with such an ignominious, awkward and undemocratic sputter.

Clinton accepted the latest attempt to impose a corporate-owned subsidiary onto the United States, after feigning surprise. Typical deceitful Hillary Clinton. You don't have to settle for a Clinton.

From the Bernie Sanders campaign:

Tuesday marks the largest set of primaries and caucuses in the Democratic nomination process with six states voting for president and 694 pledged delegates up for grabs.

Pundits and the political press want to call this race early before every last person votes. That threatens to suppress voter turnout in New Jersey, California, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and New Mexico. But we’re not going to let that happen. On Tuesday, we’re going to defy the pundits once more and reach for the kind of high voter turnout that will again shock the establishment.

We won’t settle for the status quo. We won’t settle for a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance. We won’t settle for a fossil fuel industry hell-bent on harming our planet to pad their profits. We won’t settle for a health system that doesn’t cover everyone. In California, a high voter turnout won’t just mean a victory for our movement.

With large numbers of young people hitting the polls, we’ll boost so many Democrats in major primaries that right-wing Republicans will be locked out of general election ballots for some of the most important House and Senate races of the fall.

Members of the media and political establishment may have anointed Secretary Clinton from day one, but we know that this race is going to carry on until the delegates cast ballots at the convention in Philadelphia.

We should let the voters decide who they want the Democratic nominee to be rather than having the media decide for them. I am asking you to continue to stand with Bernie in pushing for the political revolution.

Liars and Lunatics Define 2016 Campaign

The Big Con

Scamming Our Country

Updated: Bill Clinton called Bernie Sanders voters, "toast," this weekend, a stance Clinton offers to non-Clinton-donating Americans, (Yilek, The Hill).

The corporate media continues its Hillary Clinton-poised-to-win-[if-we-add-in-super-delegates] mantra prior to its declaration Hillary Clinton wins the nomination. In fact, super-delegates are unbound and cannot vote until the Convention.

After talking "politics" by phone with Bill Clinton last year, Donald Trump persists in his loosely staged wrestling match that Trump appears to be throwing with outrageous racial taunts against the fastest growing demographic in the electorate.

Bernie Sanders maintains defiance of the corporate-Hillary-DNC axis asking questions corporate media will not touch about American society and funneling wealth to the One Percent ... then to the Clinton Foundation.

Hillary Clinton laughs and refuses to answer queries asking
if Clinton will release transcripts of her paid talks to
Goldman Sachs. See the video of Hillary Clinton at The Intercept.

Some questions not being asked:

Why were Bill and Hillary Clinton talking politics with the leading birther, Donald Trump, last summer? Why would the Clintons even associate with a slime like Trump?

Why is the media including super-delegate totals, (since last year), in its reporting on the presidential primary? Why doesn't the media state the truism that super-delegates are unbound and cannot vote until the Convention?

What did Hillary Clinton say that compelled Goldman Sachs to pay her $Millions.

See

• Hillary Clinton Laughs When Asked if She Will Release Transcripts of Her Goldman Sachs Speeches (Fang, The Intercept)
• Hillary Clinton Again Declines to Disclose What She Told Big Banks in Her Paid Speeches (Fang, The Intercept)
• Hillary Clinton Won’t Say How Much Goldman Sachs CEO Invested With Her Son-in-Law (Fang, Moltke, The Intercept)

Why did the Clinton Foundation accept $Millions from human garbage in Saudi Arabia?

Canceling Our Wisconsin State Journal Subscription

South-central Wisconsin daily chooses ideology over facts and evidence

This household will receive its last hard copy issue of the Wisconsin State Journal this week. We are canceling our subscription. Our original subscription was for the Capital Times, and we were led to the State Journal kicking and screaming as it was the last resort of a print daily in Madison.

The State Journal has increasingly nixed local coverage like many print dailies, but the State Journal stands out in this regard especially after it axed veteran writers Doug Moe and sports writers Andy Baggot and Dennis Semrau last June, deciding profits are more interesting than people and local policymaking (Lueders, Isthmus).

Unlike other dailies, the State Journal can't blame its dispensing with community coverage on corporate media consolidation, social media, and the Internet (Peck, Editor and Publisher and George, Mediashift).

The State Journal made its decision, and chose hard-right ideology over facts, evidence and analysis; stenography over investigation and reporting. This echoes the rest of the corporate press.

The lifeblood of print dailies, local coverage, appears a quaint memory today.

There is a group of talented reporters still at the State Journal but their copy is almost always slanted toward the Republican Party of Wisconsin by copy editors (they write the headlines), and the perverse conventions of modern journalism, refusing to note as fact the duplicity of political office holders and their paymasters during this period of unprecedented corruption and lawlessness.

As an aside, we note with appreciation the tenacity and outstanding performance of our newspaper carrier.

More important than the depletion of local coverage—a hole being filled in Dane County in part by Woodward Communications, Inc.'s Unified Newspaper Group based in Verona and the weekly Isthmus—is the undeniable fact the State Journal is and has been a propaganda sheet for the rightist Republican Party in its slanted news and disingenuous editorial page.

The State Journal has followed the crazed Republican Party of Wisconsin right off the cliff, damn the consequences for the state.

Its refusal to endorse Scott Walker last year was an act of self preservation, yet even this editorial omits the myriad scandals and economic, social, and environmental disasters that Walker has inflicted onto Wisconsin.

Instead in the milquetoast endorsement of Walker's opponent, Mary Burke, the State Journal describes Walker as divisive and his tenure in chairing his signature 'jobs' agency as sloppy and disappointing.

Corrupt, vindictive, spiteful, destructive and betraying of generations of Wisconsinites would have been more appropriate language in describing Scott Walker, as the editors of the State Journal are aware.

Our household is no longer prepared to support this Republican propaganda organ and the pamphleteers producing it. We'll pick up our free print edition of the local Capital Times, (delivered to subscribers on Wednesdays with the State Journal), at the Meadowridge library.

On a final note, the subscription price of the State Journal varies widely and depends on little known and seemingly arbitrary ways to sign up. Last year we found out that we paid nearly double of what others paid for the same service. This after paying that high fee for over 18 years. There have been many times since the Capital Times became a weekly that we have considered canceling our subscription to the State Journal, but now with all these factors piling up, it seems a wiser choice to get our local news from more locally minded sources, such as WKOW and WISC television.

State Journal Backs Scott Walker in News Columns

Scott Walker received some good news today: Frontpage coverage in the Wisconsin State Journal in a long piece by Matthew DeFour who decided to double as a press aide for the Walker campaign.

DeFour covered an event in Ames, Iowa sponsored by the evangelical The Family Leader, which is partnered with the virulently misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic Focus on the Family and Family Research Council, part of "an exclusionist religious movement in this country [that] has attempted to restore what it perceives as the ruins of a Christian nation by more closely seeking to unite its version of Christianity with state power." (Foxman, ADL (2005), citing The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America (1994)).

DeFour left out these facts in his reporting of the Family Leadership Summit, the proper biblical kind of "family."

DeFour writes this religious right Christianites' event was composed of "religious conservatives." Actually, a more apt explanation would include the word, Christian Dominionist.

And DeFour quotes Scott Walker speaking about his 'faith': "It defines not just who I am and what I believe in, but how I treat others. I hope people saw that even at the height of when 100,000 protesters occupied our Capitol and I had death threats and all sorts of vicious attacks against me, against my family, against my children, against my parents and others, that we didn’t respond in kind. That in part was driven by our faith."

No knockdown is offered.

Is DeFour prepared to state he could not find a source to knock down the religious right and the governor who compared these same Wisconsin families to ISIS, four years after Walker "dropped a bomb" on these families to use Walker's metaphor in 2011?

Or how about knocking down Walker's false narrative that he suffered "vicious attacks?" DeFour couldn't find a source to knock this nonsense down? Or at least note Walker's lies are unverified?

DeFour did note the response from the some 2,700 Christianites was more subdued than Walker's previous address at other Iowa evangelical events.

Coming into the Stephens Auditorium from the July heat perhaps makes people relaxed, even subdued in the late afternoon.

Unless Brett Favre is talking, most people tend to be subdued in mid-July.

Media's Impact on Democracy Focus of Forum

Pravda told Soviet readers news of the world

Journalists from several Madison media news outlets will meet in the Anderson Auditorium (Predolin Hall) at Edgewood College to discuss the changing face of journalism and journalism ethics in a public forum October 21 at 7 PM.

A vital topic indeed.

I read the hard copy of the Wisconsin State Journal every morning and the newspaper is emblematic of the problems in conventional journalism.

Here's some ideas:

Local coverage: Do some. Do more.

Used to be local coverage was the lifeblood of newspapers, but local coverage at least in the State Journal is more likely to be found in Doug Moe's column or the local crime coverage.

Speaking of local crime coverage, don't take police statements at face value, and stop running mug shots of the accused. Cooking police reports and testilying render police statements not credible, whatever crime and allegations the accused faces.

In the Leviathan that is American society (often for the wrong shade of people) too many wrongfully imprisoned individuals get trashed in the paper, with never an apology when proven innocent.

Editors need to understand the difference between neutrality and objectivity.

Neutrality is to take the statements of a Scott Walker, Iron County District Attorney Martin Lipske or a Ted Cruz and report them, uncritically.

Objectivity is to take the statement, hypothesis or spin of our lying politicians for example, and verify their hokum against empirical reality and report the results and draw conclusions. This way news will more closely approximate reality.

One reason politicians like Walker, Lipske and Cruz feel free to lie is they know they will not be held accountable in the news columns by conventional journalism and its stunning lack of standards in using facts, evidence and the imperative to measure stated positions of subjects against reality.

The results, from the 2003 Iraq War Invasion to Scott Walker's appointment of aides embezzling from military veterans, can range from the tragic to the outlandish, with no shame from the party-press  journalists crafting propaganda sheets delivering a make-believe world to its readers who do live in a democracy.

Scott Walker Grabs Prominent Scenes in The Newsroom

Jeff Daniels stars in Aaron Sorkin's
HBO drama, "The Newsroom"

Scott Walker and his Tea Party-Koch brothers underground movement have an ongoing role in Aaron Sorkin's HBO drama, "The Newsroom."

A fascinating new television experience, Sorkin explores what would happen if the news product of a nightly cable news show were driven by facts, truth and logic as guiding journalistic principles, encouraging thought rather than controlling it.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the “engineering of consent" by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays. - Noam Chomsky in Destroying the Commons -How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta

Set in 2010-11, the dramatization takes direct aim at the Tea Party with the intelligence, insight and rigor that one would expect if Edward Murrow and Robert Jackson were alive as cable news journalists and covering a period of American history where elements of fascism, unorganized and incoherent as yet, have animated the rise of the Republican Party.

Scott Walker does not come off well in Sorkin's presentation of this news outlet reporting on the corporate-religious right coalition that has catapulted Walker to fame in GOP-Tea Party circles.

Sunday's, July 22 "Amen" episode opens with "news of unrest in Wisconsin in February 2011 in response to the governor's call for budget cuts bubbl(ing) up during coverage of the ousting of President Mubarak in Egypt."

As Walker even today still cannot appear anywhere in public in Wisconsin without protests, one of Sorkin's characters, a news producer, reports that as Walker is at a newspaper in Appleton, Wisconsin, 100s of teachers and demonstrators gathered to protest outside the newspaper, as dramatized in this March 2011 Appleton Post Crescent piece by J.E. Espino.

The coverage in the show's episode is a composite of real-life events, but the show's audience in Wisconsin recognizes the protests, if not the urgency of the protests reported by the zombie-like Wisconsin media.

Can local broadcast media in Wisconsin, and the giant media conglomerate, Gannett, which owns some 11 corporate newspapers in Wisconsin, make a news product driven by facts, truth and logic?

It doesn't today and certainly not during the Recall campaign burying coverage of the John Doe criminal probe of Walker's top aides in his 2010 campaign as well.

Rural Wisconsin which voted overwhelmingly and unusually high for Scott Walker, or perhaps not, is seen by many as Walker's base, though Walker's extremist positions are kept well-concealed by his flacks and criminal defense team.

The ideological and political effects of quasi-news broadcast media, Gannett newspapers and Party propaganda sheets like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Wisconsin State Journal are unclear.

Contra this propaganda product on the local and national media fronts, The Newsroom proposes dramatizing the product of a cable news show driven by a commitment to truth in the tradition of Murrow, Cronkite, Erwin Knoll and I.F. Stone.

I don't think Sorkin knows yet where he is going to go with the show after just five episodes but this Sunday night drama has so far stood towering over the crap that floods our airwaves.

Ep. 1: Preview

- Full disclosure by MAL: I have written in a freelance capacity for the Gannett-owned Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune and the Fond du Lac Reporter.