Outrage

I just watched the documentary film, "Outrage"—not all because the Netflix DVD was damaged and wouldn't play past 1:17—but enough to get the point.

It's so interesting! Reading Wikipedia's entry on the film talks about NPR's censorship of critic Nathan Lee's review of the film, here:

In a review for NPR, film critic Nathan Lee mentioned that Outrage's primary subjects were Larry Craig and Charlie Crist. NPR altered Lee's review by removing these references to Craig and Crist [14][15]. Lee responded in a comment on NPR's website:

“I personally disagree with NPR’s policy - there is no other area of ‘privacy’ that elicits such extreme tact. [I] also feel that it is a professional affront to my responsibility as a critic to discuss the content of a work of art, and an impingement of my first amendment right to free speech and the press.”[14]

NPR deleted this comment as well [14]. An NPR editor later explained these actions, noting that, “NPR has a long-held policy of trying to respect the privacy of public figures and of not airing or publishing rumors, allegations and reports about their private lives unless there is a compelling reason to do so.” [16]. This statement drew immediate criticism, as NPR had previously speculated on the sexual orientation of public figures such as Adam Lambert and Queen Latifah [16][17]. This led to questions about why closeted entertainers presented a “compelling reason” for reporting while politicians did not [18].

I have never considered this situation. But it's this. . . closeted gay politicians and their support teams are sabotaging advancement of gay issues as evidenced by the politicians' voting records. And the media is complicit in squelching related coverage—both political and personal.

It's a thready subject. The ramifications of transparency have many tentacles in our belief systems, moral, religious, political.

As I read more about GLBT issues and history, I have a very much increased respect and honor for the people who have and are speaking out, speaking up, writing, filming, producing and showing what this is about.

Transparency can help bring about change. Beliefs ARE mutable. Many situations in our past have proven that true. Then we forget. That once there were whole races of people here in our United States who were enslaved, oppressed and relegated to lower eschelons of human-hood. And there may be more, operating now, in our midst.

I like transparency. I'm looking forward to watching and doing what I can to support some really courageous people whose names I just learned.

I have had the great pleasure of spending some time talking with Jon Rappoport, of nomorefakenews.com, and have been reading his writings ongoing.

I am reproducing below copy from one of Jon's recent newsletters that I thought particularly poignant. You can subscribe to his nomorefakenews.com newsletters here.

OBAMA HITS THE WALL

FEBRUARY 11, 2010. Since his inauguration, I’ve written two articles warning that Obama was veering off in a disastrous direction. Now he’s crashed, and he has no one to blame. Of course, that doesn’t stop him from trying.

He’s engaged in planning the economy, always a bad sign. He’s doing it with health and jobs and climate, and fewer and fewer people are responding with enthusiasm.

Think of it as a principle: When you keep increasing the size of the ruling bureaucracy and then assign that bureaucracy the task of fixing things, you’re asking for a debacle. You’re begging for one.

Add the fact that the things which are supposed to be fixed are incredibly complex, and you’ve got a real problem. A problem on the order of an oil tanker two miles from shore springing leaks, and the captain decides the ship can sprout wings and fly.

Obama came out swinging last year with health insurance reform. The American people, already reeling from the economic smash-up, would pay for this new program. Taxes would rise. Penalties would be assessed for failure to join the party.

The hardest piece of legislation to pass in this country was Obama’s first point of attack. One hidden factor: millions of invisible Americans want to take care of themselves through alternative methods. Not thousands, millions. These people are, by and large, independent voters. They don’t stick to Demo or Repub paths. So the president lost those folks in the blink of an eye.

Cap and trade and tax and the worldwide decimation of industrial economies—the supposed answer to manmade global warming—was stacked up against science that was shaky, at best. In fact, on closer examination, it wasn’t real science at all. It was a political power play with a greedy goofball posing as Jesus Christ at the head of the parade: Algore.

When thousands of emails were leaked out of the CRU at East Anglia University, the game was up. The venomous crazies were exposed. Key scientists were illegally stonewalling FOIA requests for vital data, scheming to cut dissident viewpoints out of the debate, and hiding a decline in warming.

Obama ignores all this. He’s still planning to push cap and tax legislation.
And, most importantly, he has no idea how to create jobs. Now that the health bill is stalled, he’s coming back to jobs, which is where he should have started. However, the one action that would stimulate the economy, tax relief, isn’t on his agenda. It’s against his philosophy.

The wet dream of liberals is that everyone will work for the government. That solves all issues. That shuts all mouths, because when you work for the Man, you must love the Man. He signs your checks.

Obama has never run a small business, and he doesn’t have a clue about what works and doesn’t work. He wants to put more pressure on entrepreneurs, in form of taxes and health insurance payments. He’s talking from a tower beyond the fray.

I don’t know about the audacity of hope, but Obama displayed a considerable amount of audacity (chutzpah, actually), when he claimed Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts was an expression of the same basic outrage that swept him into the presidency—and therefore it wasn’t really a problem for the Democrats. Scott Brown actually won on the coattails of Obama’s failed first year in office.

The president’s supporters point out that the current state of the Union has a history that goes back into GW Bush’s eight years in office. Well, yes. That history goes back into the Clinton years, too, and into the reign of Bush the Elder, and then there was Reagan, and Carter and Ford and Nixon. Under every president, the size of government grows. It’s a self-generating fungus.

But when there is a great and immediate crisis, such as the one Obama inherited a year ago, the president has to take effective action right out of the blocks. He can’t, for example, try to impose a super-structured health program linked to a lie that it will shrink the federal deficit. Even if that were true, it’s too abstract. Jobs was his mandate, and he ignored it. He looked away. It says something about the man. It says he is more interested in his philosophy and overriding agenda than in the horrendous situations people are facing, from one end of the country to the other.

Everything Obama could have misread and ignored, he did.

He can’t run away from that now. People know. The trust is disintegrating on all fronts.

Government has been too big for a very, very long time. Government has taken on power and control and privilege it was never meant to have. The ground-level expression of that power is taxes—the fuel that allows government to grow. So who is going to reverse the trend? Who is going to stand up and say, “I want to legislate myself out of a job.”

The answer is stark and simple. People who are temporaries. Men and women who want to serve in office for a short time and leave. People who have no intention of making a lifelong career out of government. The Founders never meant to have young people grow old working in Washington.

I don’t accuse Obama of inventing collectivism. It is the natural consequence, politically, of inflating the size of government. But in this crisis, with his ideology, we have exactly the wrong man at the wrong time. What may have looked like high majestic passion during the campaign has turned out to be free-floating detachment. The man simply does not understand what works, and he doesn’t want to understand.

Meanwhile, the American economy, where it is recovering, is the result of the work of people who have nothing to do with government, and never will. That is called a clue.

February...a Juicy Month!