Hightower Lowdown
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. -M.Twain
In This Issue
What the media won't tell you about globaloney
December's Lowdown
The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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The pentagon-media complex
One would think that multibillion-dollar media giants (from CBS to CNN, The New York Times to the Washington Post) would bring at least a smidgen of journalistic skepticism to the military's claims about its technological prowess.
The Pentagon's latest whopper, swallowed whole by the media, was about a ballyhooed test of the razzle-dazzle Star Wars missile-defense scheme. The Bush team is determined to dump $160 billion of our tax dollars into it, even though it's so technologically flawed that military experts think it's silly.
Bush and his corporate partners scheduled a test in July in which a "bad guy" missile was fired at the U.S. and a "good guy" missile was launched to shoot it down in mid-air. Sure enough, the Pentagon claimed that this impossibility happened, asserting the "bad guy" was blasted out of the sky. The media widely proclaimed it a success.
Only now have we learned that the test was rigged—our "good guy" missile was programmed with information about the time and location of the "bad guy" launch, and the "bad guy" even had a beacon on board to guide the "good guy" to it.
It's hard to take the media seriously as long as it continues to act as a straight man for the jokesters of the military-industrial complex.