Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want keep from the public eye.
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Salon:

"In May, 2008, Dick Cheney caused an uproar when he told ABC News' Martha Raddatz that public opposition to the war in Iraq was, in essence, irrelevant:

RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ:  So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Today, New York Times Editorial Page -- which has become one of the most vehement supporters of the war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) -- echoed Cheney's sentiment when demanding that European leaders escalate their commitments to the war despite overwhelming and growing opposition among their citizenry:

'Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, and France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, have repeatedly stated that their countries have a stake in the future of Afghanistan and the future of NATO.  But both are wary of pushing their voters too far, too fast. (Both have essentially postponed their decisions on further troop contributions until late next month.) Democratically elected leaders cannot ignore public skepticism, but they should not surrender to it when they know better.""

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/14-0

-->The NY Times stressing the Pentagon point of view over the opinions of Americans? At any escalation of war, the Grey Lady always takes off her gloves and leads the cheer for more US military aggression.

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OpEdNews.com

"In what passes for corporate journalism in American, this concept has taken the form of, 'If we don't report on it, it didn't happen.'

That certainly was the case for the emergency protest organized by a coalition of anti-war organizations under the banner EndUSWars.org, which saw over 1000 people gather on short notice in the bitter cold on Lafayette Park opposite the White House to protest President Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan on Saturday, Dec. 12.

Not a word about this impromptu protest, which included many people who had supported the election of President Obama only a year ago, appeared in the New York Times. Nor did the Washington Post bother to mention the protest in its own back yard, not even in its Metro section pages. The other arguably national newspaper, USA Today, likewise blacked out news of the protest."

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Protest-What-Protest-Ame-by-Dave-Lindorff-091214-754.html

-->The NY Times, not given to cover protest rallies (unless they occur in Iran), is playing another of its usual wartime roles, that of omitting any mention of the US peace movement. News fashioned by the Pentagon.

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Salon.com

"The more difficult question to answer is why...so many liberals found the speech (in Oslow) so inspiring and agreeable?  Is that what liberals were hoping for when they elected Obama:  someone who would march right into Oslo and proudly announce to the world that we have a unilateral right to wage war when we want and to sing the virtues of war as a key instrument for peace?...

Yesterday's speech and the odd, extremely bipartisan reaction to it underscored one of the real dangers of the Obama presidency:  taking what had been ideas previously discredited as Republican or right-wing dogma and transforming them into bipartisan consensus.  It's not just Republicans but Democrats that are now vested in -- and eager to justify -- the virtues of war, claims of Grave Danger posed by Islamic radicals and the need to use massive military force to combat them, indefinite detention, military commissions, extreme secrecy, full-scale immunity for government lawbreaking, and so many other doctrines once purportedly despised by Democrats but now defended by them because their leader has embraced them.

That's exactly the process that led former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith to giddily explain that Obama has actually done more to legitimize Bush/Cheney 'counter-terrorism' policies than Bush and Cheney themselves -- because he made them bipartisan..."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/11-9

-->The NY Times always assumes there is a basic difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to committing war crimes. Our newspaper of record would never explore the similarities between the Bush and Obama doctrines on preemptive war.

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want keep from the public eye.
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The San Francisco Chronicle:

"White House Wants Torture Suit against Yoo Dismissed. The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise the president on national security issues.

Such lawsuits ask courts to second-guess presidential decisions and pose 'the risk of deterring full and frank advice regarding the military's detention and treatment of those determined to be enemies during an armed conflict,' Justice Department lawyers said Thursday in arguments to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/08-4

-->Is our current President covering up war crimes of the past, or is he making sure he can get away with them himself. The NY Times doesn't pose this interesting question because it didn't cover the story.

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Common Dreams:

President Barack Obama recently called Rep. John Conyers Jr. to express his frustrations with the Judiciary Committee chairman's criticism.

In an interview with The Hill, Conyers said his opinions of Obama's policies on healthcare reform and the war in Afghanistan have not sat well with the president. According to the lawmaker, the president picked up the phone several weeks ago to find out why Conyers was 'demeaning" him.'

Obama's decision to challenge Conyers highlights a sensitivity to criticism the president has taken on the left. Conyers's critical remarks, many of which have been reported on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post, appear to have irritated the president, known for his calm demeanor."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/08-0

-->The NY Times does not like to run stories of Obama selling out to corporate interests on the war and on healthcare. It didn't report this story. Nor has it devoted much coverage to Obama's loss of progressive support. Our newspaper of record only does stories that support the myth of two opposing parties.

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Common Dreams:

"Over 1,000 delegates from 42 countries have signed up to participate in the December 31 Gaza Freedom March that will mark the one-year anniversary of the Israeli invasion and call for an end to the siege that has brought 1.5 million people to the edge of disaster.

Organizers cut off registration on November 30 to give the Egyptian officials enough time to clear the group for entry into Gaza, but also because the numbers were becoming unwieldy. 'No one has ever taken a group this size into Gaza,' said coordinator Ann Wright, whose skills as a retired U.S. army colonel are coming in handy organizing the logistics for such a massive group.

Since the registration closed on November 30, organizers have been besieged every day with people begging to be added to the list. 'I have to turn down 15-20 people every day,' said Emily Siegel. 'It has been an insane few weeks, with emails pouring in from people all over the world who want to join. I feel terrible turning them away but we started out thinking we would take 300 people and now we have over 1,000.'"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/06-7

-->So far, the NY Times has not touched this story of 1,000 Americans going to Gaza to break the Israeli siege. The NY Times does its best to protect Israel when it commits war crimes in the Middle East.

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

News fashioned by the people in charge, the corporations and your government. Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine.

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Antiwar.com:

"The fiscal year 2010 Federal government budget included $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or somewhat more than $10 billion per month. The White House estimates that it will cost one billion dollars per year to deploy an additional 1,000 troops to Afghanistan...

It also does not address the six hundred pound gorilla in the room, which is the legacy issue that comes from fighting a war with borrowed money.  As the Obama White House is so deep in the red that even George W. Bush appears in hindsight to have been a model of frugality, it should be assumed that Obama’s 'war of necessity' will not be fully funded by Congress.  That means either borrowing from the Asians or just printing the money while watching the dollar slide down the toilet. It has to be assumed that the US Treasury will do a bit of both."

-Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and a fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance.

http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2009/11/25/the-cost-of-war/

-->Stark financial warnings about the cost of American empire are rarely covered by the NY Times. 

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Commondreams:

"WASHINGTON - The National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), organizations that receive funding from the U.S. State Department, are planning on sending delegations to observe the November 29 elections in Honduras, according to a statement issued by Republican Senator Richard Lugar.

The IRI is a group that has supported the ouster of democratically elected presidents in Haiti and Venezuela in recent years. Both groups are apparently planning to assist with observation of the elections, despite the fact that the electoral process will be effectively controlled by thousands of military troops and police officers - the same forces who have committed innumerable human rights violations, including killings, rapes, beatings and thousands of detentions, since the June 28 coup d'etat.

'I am surprised to see NDI joining the International Republican Institute in its efforts to legitimize another coup,' Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said. 'NDI has generally been less willing to support coups and anti-democratic regimes than has its Republican counterpart.'"

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/11/23-11

-->The NY Times does not like to report on the National Endowment for Democracy, a state funded NGO that has often been used as a CIA front. Moreover, the NY Times coverage of the Honduran military coup doesn't even attempt to separate Pentagon propaganda from actual news. All the news that's fit for empire.

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Common Dreams:

"NEW YORK - With the health care debate preoccupying the mainstream media, it has gone virtually unreported that the Barack Obama administration is quietly supporting renewal of provisions of the George W. Bush-era USA Patriot Act that civil libertarians say infringe on basic freedoms. And it is reportedly doing so over the objections of some prominent Democrats.

When a panicky Congress passed the act 45 days after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, three contentious parts of the law were scheduled to expire at the end of next month, and opponents of these sections have been pushing Congress to substitute new provisions with substantially strengthened civil liberties protections.

But with the apparent approval of the Obama White House and a number of Republicans – and over the objections of liberal Senate Democrats including Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Dick Durbin of Illinois – the Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to extend the three provisions with only minor changes.

Those provisions would leave unaltered the power of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to seize records and to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail in the course of counterterrorism investigations."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/23-6

-->Maybe there are so many sellouts by the Obama administration that the further erosion of civil liberties is not worth reporting on. The NY Times thought so anyway; it didn't cover this story.

Fantasyland Media:

Fantasyland Media:
http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

News fashioned by the people in charge, the corporations and your government. Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine.

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Guardian UK
"America's leading human rights organization has accused Israel and its supporters of an 'organized campaign' of false allegations and misinformation, including "extremely personal attacks" on its staff, in an attempt to discredit the group over its reports of war crimes in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) ties the campaign – which has included accusations that the group's reports on the Jewish state are written by 'anti-Israel ideologues' and that it has sought funds from Saudi Arabia – to a statement by a senior official in the Israeli prime minister's office in June pledging to 'dedicate time and manpower to combating' human rights organizations...'

Iain Levine, HRW's program director, said that while the organization had long attracted criticism, in recent months there had been significant attempts to intimidate and discredit it.

'I really hesitate to use words like conspiracy, but there is a feeling that there is an organized campaign, and we're seeing from different places what would appear to be co-ordinated attacks ... We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation.'

Spearheading some of the criticism is NGO Monitor in Jerusalem, an Israeli group funded by wealthy US donors which includes (Elie) Wiesel on its advisory board. It has accused HRW staff of having a 'political agenda' to attack Israel."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/israel-human-rights-watch-gaza

-->The NY Times, didn't cover this possible conspiracy against America's leading human rights organization. Our newspaper of record is more interested in protecting Zionist lobby.

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Guardian UK:
"A United Nations special investigator who was blocked from visiting the US by the Bush administration has accused the American government of pouring billions of dollars into rescuing banks and big business while treating as 'invisible' a deepening homeless crisis.

Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing, who has just completed a seven-city tour of America, said it was shameful that a country as wealthy as the US was not spending more money on lifting its citizens out of homelessness and substandard, overcrowded housing.

'The housing crisis is invisible for many in the US,' she said. 'I learned through this visit that real affordable housing and poverty is something that hasn't been dealt with as an issue. Even if we talk about the financial crisis and government stepping in in order to promote economic recovery, there is no such help for the homeless.'

She added: 'I think those who are suffering the most in this whole situation are the very poor, the low-income population. The burden is disproportionately on them and it's of course disproportionately on African-Americans, on Latinos and immigrant communities, and on Native Americans.'"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/12/un-investigator-us-neglect-homeless

-->The NY Times reported on her visit to the US, but somehow managed to omit what Ms. Rolnik had to say about greedy banks and the homeless. The NY Times doesn't report on shame when it comes to the wealthy elite.

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The Onion:
"KABUL, AFGHANISTAN— According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week, as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, death tolls continued to rise, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever.

In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan.

'We've spent a lot of time and money fostering the turmoil and despair necessary to make this a sustaining quagmire, and we're not going to stop now,' President Barack Obama said in a national address Monday night. 'It won't be easy, but with enough tactical errors on the ground, shortsighted political strategies, and continued ignorance of our vast cultural differences, we could have a horrific, full-fledged quagmire by 2012.'"
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_continues_quagmire_building

-->The NY Times would never bring itself to admit the insanity of US empire building. So factual news comes through comedy rather than through the mainstream media.

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

News fashioned by the people in charge, the corporations and your government. Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine.

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BBC World Service:
"Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.

In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.  Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary...

More than 29,000 people in 27 countries were questioned. In only two countries, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands.

Almost a quarter - 23% of those who responded - feel it is fatally flawed. That is the view of 43% in France, 38% in Mexico and 35% in Brazil.

And there is very strong support around the world for governments to distribute wealth more evenly. That is backed by majorities in 22 of the 27 countries..."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/09-1

-->Needless to say, the NY Times was not interested in a poll that questioned world capitalism or favored a more equitable distribution of wealth.

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"Hezbollah is rapidly rearming in preparation for a new conflict with Israel, fearing that Benjamin Netanyahu's government will attack Lebanon again prior to any assault on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Last week, Israeli commandos seized a ship in the Mediterranean loaded with almost 400 tonnes of rockets and small arms – which Israel claimed was being sent from Iran to its Hezbollah allies. In dramatic further evidence of growing tensions, the Observer has learned that Hezbollah fighters have been busy reinforcing fixed defence positions north of the Litani river.
Having lost many of its bunkers in the south, Hezbollah is preparing a new strategy to defend villages there."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/08/hezbollah-rearms-against-israel

-->The NY Times does its best to hide Israeli war crimes. Indications of another Israeli assault against Lebanon never made it into print.

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CNN World:
"The United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution endorsing a U.N. report calling for both Israel and Palestine to carry out independent investigations of possible war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip during last winter's conflict...

It calls on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to report to the General Assembly within three months 'with a view to considering further action, if necessary, by the relevant United Nations organs and bodies, including the Security Council.'

Passage was expected, given the widespread support for the Palestinians and the strong criticism of Israel that resonated in the speeches by 45 nations during the two-day debate. The resolution, brought forward by approximately 20 Arab League members, passed by a vote of 114-18 by the 192-member body."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/11/05/un.gaza/

-->The NY Times covered the Goldstone report in the UN General Assembly. It gave one sentence to the Palestinian Ambassador, three paragraphs to the Israeli Ambassador, and two paragraphs to the official US position condemning the UN action.

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

News fashioned by the people in charge, the corporations and your government. Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine.

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Guardian:

"International negotiators lost one of the key elements to a successful deal on global warming today after Democratic leaders in the US Congress ruled out passing a climate change law before 2010. In the latest obstacle on the road to the UN summit in Copenhagen next month, Senate leaders ordered a five-week pause to review the costs of the legislation.

The delay, which would push a Senate vote on a climate change bill into next year, frustrates a last-minute push by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to get America to commit itself at home to cut greenhouse gas emissions before the Copenhagen meeting. World leaders – and US officials – have repeatedly said US legislation is crucial to a deal on global warming.

Merkel used a historic address to a joint session of Congress today to urge America to act on climate change, stating that success at Copenhagen rested on the willingness of all countries to accept binding reductions in carbon emissions."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/03/merkel-senate-delay-climate-debate

-->Congress and the president failing the world on climate change? The story was on the NY Times Blog, but didn't make it into print.

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"The US House of Representatives has rejected as 'irredeemably biased' the findings of a UN-sponsored report which says Israel committed war crimes during its military assault on the Gaza Strip.

The house on Tuesday voted 344 to 36 in favour of a non-binding resolution calling on Barack Obama, the US president, to maintain his opposition to the report, which was written by a panel led by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge.

The report accused Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group, which has de facto control of Gaza, of war crimes during the 22-day conflict in December and January.

But most of its criticism was directed towards Israel's conduct during the offensive, in which human rights organisations say about 1,400 Palestinians - many of them women and children - were killed."

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/11/200911320434191455.html

-->This is, of course, the dirty business the US Congress covering up Israeli war crimes. Our own John Hall was one of the co-sponsors of the resolution. Shameful really. By hiding Israeli's massacre of civilian populations, the US government insures that these crimes will continue. The NY Times would rather not report on all this, continuing its policy of aiding and abetting Israeli murder in Gaza.

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Poughkeepsie Journal

"RHINEBECK - With an election looming, a talk on the electoral process appears to have turned political in a Rhinebeck High School class.

Students said Dutchess County Legislator Joel Tyner, D-Clinton, tried to persuade them to vote for him during a talk he gave to their economics class..."

-->We usually do national and international stories. But this local one is so bad that we are going to make an exception. This story came out days before the county election. The student names were fed to the newspaper by the Republican Party. There was no attempt to question other students, or to gather any information that would have revealed: most students thought the presentation was excellent, a number of Republican officials had done similar presentations this fall, Joel Tyner was a Rhinebeck graduate who has made over ten presentations at the school, the teacher had invited him to speak at a Participation in Government class.

This is just swift boating journalism Poughkeepsie style. In the process, both the local Republicans and the Poughkeepsie Journal have proven themselves to be much less than Dutchess County deserves. And Joel Tyner won anyway!

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

News fashioned by the people in charge, the corporations and your government. Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine.

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Huffington Post

"Leaderless: Senate Pushes For Public Option Without Obama's Support...

President Barack Obama is actively discouraging Senate Democrats in their effort to include a public insurance option with a state opt-out clause as part of health care reform. In its place, say multiple Democratic sources, Obama has indicated a preference for an alternative policy, favored by the insurance industry, which would see a public plan 'triggered' into effect in the future by a failure of the industry to meet certain benchmarks.

The administration retreat runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Obama's presidential campaign. The man who ran on the 'Audacity of Hope' has now taken a more conservative stand than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), leaving progressives with a mix of confusion and outrage."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/24/leaderless-senate-pushes_n_332844.html

-->According to the NY Times story: "Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, told President Obama on Thursday that he would try to press for a government-run insurance program." No word of Obama's undermining of the public option, or his sellout to the insurance companies.

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Common Dreams

"KABUL, Afghanistan - Flipping a switch on one of Afghanistan's long-awaited electrical power plants in August, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry urged Afghans to think of U.S. taxpayers' support when they turn their lights on at night.

President Hamid Karzai opened the first 35MW block of a 100 MW diesel power plant in Kabul August 5, 2009, significantly expanding power to the capital and surrounding area. Only about 6 percent of Afghans are estimated to have electricity, and in his appearance with President Hamid Karzai east of Kabul, Eikenberry hailed the project as part of the country's emergence out of the 'darkness' of oppression and isolation.

To some U.S. experts, however, the project is the latest example of exaggerated political expectations and wasted American taxpayers' dollars in the effort to rebuild Afghanistan.

Plagued by delays and rising costs, the project reveals how the U.S. government continues to ignore the hard lessons of Iraq, critics say, where contractors received billions of dollars with little oversight and inspectors have found rampant waste, fraud and abuse."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/10/25

-->The NY Times has no stomach for reporting waste, fraud and abuse by government contractors operating in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. Our newspaper of record would prefer to keep its readers in "darkness" when it comes to billions in Pentagon waste.

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Guardian.co.uk

"What kind of a public debate can we have on the most vital issues of the day in the United States? A lot depends on the media, which determines how these issues are framed for most people.

Take the war in Afghanistan, which has been subject to major debate here lately, as Barack Obama has to decide whether to take the advice of his commanding officer in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and send tens of thousands more troops there, or heed public opinion, which actually favors an end to the war. This month, one of America's most important and most-watched TV news programmes, NBC's Meet the Press, took up the issue. The lineup:

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, former army general...(who has) earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defence industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.' McCaffrey has appeared on NBC more than 1000 times since 11 September 2001.

Retired General Richard Myers, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under George Bush. He is currently on the board of directors of Northrop Grumman Corporation...

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina, a pro-war spokesperson that is one of the most regular guests on the Sunday talkshows.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, was apparently intended to represent the 'other side' of the debate. Here is what he said: 'Clearly we should keep the number of forces that we have. No one's talking about removing forces.'"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/23/obama-media-afghanistan-healthcare

-->Even when a majority of citizens are in favor of something like withdrawing from Afghanistan, the media is there to support the opinion of the elite. A huge majority of Americans are in favor of raising taxes on corporations. When is the last time you read or listened to that opinion in the corporate media?