The Appeal was a book I published. It was always a novel. It’s completely fiction and it’s completely true. It's the story of the purchasing of a Supreme Court seat in Mississippi. ~ John Grisham

Judge Oliver Diaz from "Hot Coffee"

America's independent and impartial judiciary is under threat from a rightwing attempt to pack courts with partisan placemen

Diane Roberts
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 October 2012 17.11 EDT

...The Republicans' biggest target this year is the Florida supreme court – specifically, Justices Peggy Quince, R Fred Lewis and Barbara Pariente, who must win a majority of votes to keep their seats. Lewis and Pariente were appointed by Lawton Chiles, Florida's last Democratic governor; Quince, one of two African Americans on the seven-member court, was chosen jointly by Chiles and incoming Republican Governor Jeb Bush. She and Pariente are the court's only women.

For the first time ever, the Republican party of Florida (RPOF), aided by their Tea Party shock troops, is mounting a concerted campaign against specific justices. RPOF pretends this is some grassroots effort, an outburst of populist anger at a bunch of out-of-touch liberal judges. But the power (and the money) behind the effort comes from an outfit called Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch brothers.

The play here is to create three shiny new vacancies on Florida's highest court, which would be filled by Tea Party poster boy Governor Rick Scott. This is a rightwing wet dream: a forelock-tugging, corporation-loving, quiescent court, which would ignore inconveniences such as the Clean Water Act and the 14th Amendment, and never get in the way of the free market.

"Merit retention" of judges is supposed to be a mechanism for citizens to rid the courts of the incompetent and the unethical. No one accuses Quince, Lewis and Pariente of incompetence or unethical practices. The best Republicans can do is call them "judicial activists", a meaningless phrase they throw at any jurist who rules against them. The great Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, the one which declared segregation unconstitutional – that's judicial activism. Handing the presidency to George W Bush on the dodgiest of legal theories in Bush v Gore is high-minded and statesman-like...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/08/republicans-judicial-activism-supreme-courts

There was a movie called “Air Strike” by a guy named Cy Roth. Now, Ed Wood is often credited as being the worst director in Hollywood history, but Cy Roth would really give him a run for his money. Roth decided around 1953 that he’d made a Western, he’d made a space movie, now he wanted to make a war movie. This movie was set on a World War II aircraft carrier, and the lead characters were a young Jewish flyer and a young black flyer who are constantly being subjected to anti-Semitism and racism on the ship.

The military said, “No, we don’t want to show any kind of racism or anti-Semitism in this picture, you’ve got to change that.” They also said, “We don’t want a World War II-era picture, we want a movie set in the modern jet age.” And Roth went nuts. He called his congressman, he wrote a letter to President Eisenhower -- and the day after the White House got his letter of complaint, they sicced the FBI on him to see whether he was a Communist or not. Well, he finally caved in; he made the picture the way they wanted. So it was no blacks, no Jews, no propellers. If you look at this film, it’s so bad, it looks like a home movie shot on an aircraft carrier. So this film was completely changed...

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/operation-hollywood

Operation Hollywood
How the Pentagon bullies movie producers into showing the U.S. military in the best possible light.

—By Jeff Fleischer
| Mon Sep. 20, 2004 12:00 AM PDT

“The only thing Hollywood likes more than a good movie is a good deal,” David Robb explains, and that’s why the producers of films like “Top Gun,” “Stripes” and “The Great Santini” have altered their scripts to accommodate Pentagon requests. In exchange, they get inexpensive access to the military locations, vehicles, troops and gear they need to make their movies.

During his years as a journalist for Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, Robb heard about a quid-pro-quo agreement between the Pentagon and Hollywood studios, and decided to investigate. He combed through thousands of Pentagon documents, and interviewed dozens of screenwriters, producers and military officials. The result is his new book, "Operation Hollywood." ...

...They also say it has to reasonably depict military operations. And if it’s based on history, they say it has to be historically accurate, which is really a code. They’re much less interested in reality and accuracy than they are in positive images. They often try to change historical facts that are negative. Like with the movie “Thirteen Days,” which was very accurate but very negative toward the military during the Cuban missile crisis, showing that they would have taken us down the path toward World War III. During the negotiations with the producers, Peter Almond and Kevin Costner, the military tried to get them to tone down the bellicose nature of Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Gen. Curtis LeMay -- who the record is very clear on, because before Nixon was taping in the White House, Kennedy was taping in the White House, and all the conversations from October 1962 are on tape. When Kennedy rejected LeMay’s insistence that we attack Cuba -- when Kennedy said let’s put up a naval blockade, we don’t want to get into war -- you can hear Curtis LeMay say, “This is the worst sellout since Munich.” He actually said that, when he didn’t think anybody was listening. Well, the military wanted to change it anyway, saying he was too bellicose and they had to tone it down. To their credit, Kevin Costner and Peter Almond stood up to the military, refused to buckle under, and made their film without military assistance...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/operation-hollywood

Gaeton Fonzi, like Jim Garrison, and Richard Sprague et al., did some excellent work on that case. In spite of some extraordinary lengths that some went to in an effort to derail their efforts. Fortunately these guys were able to emerge from this relatively unscathed. Others were not so lucky...

Abraham Bolden, Mort Sahl, John Barbour, and Roger Feinman were not so lucky. They were among those that lost careers for attempting to pursue the case...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1274427

General Curtis LeMay: You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President.

President Kennedy: What did you say?

General Curtis LeMay: You're in a pretty bad fix.

President Kennedy: Well, maybe you haven't noticed: You're in it with me.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146309/quotes

On The Media: Missile Crisis Memories (August 27, 2010)

FRED KAPLAN: Word of the tapes first came out in 1982, 20 years after the crisis, when several of Kennedy's advisors — McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, a few others — wrote a little article in Time Magazine in which they admitted that the myth of the Cuban missile crisis was false. When I interviewed Ted Sorensen about this five years ago, he admitted that basically Kennedy, after that last ex-con meeting, he took seven people into his office and he told them that look, I'm sending my brother over to the Soviet Embassy and I'm going to accept this deal, but you can't tell anybody, and that after Kennedy was assassinated they all got together and pledged that nobody would ever reveal this. The first tape was revealed in 1987, and it was of the last day of the crisis where Khrushchev comes out with a deal and Kennedy says hey, this is a pretty good deal, and everybody in the room is shouting him down, saying this will wreck NATO, we can't do this, it'll, it'll ruin our credibility. Kennedy lets them talk on and at one point he says look, to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man it will look like a very fair trade. I'm reading from the transcript here. And later he also says, and this I think is the - is the telling point, he says, well I'm just thinking about what we're going to have to do in a day or so, which is 500 sorties. The Air Strike Plan called for 500 air sorties against the Cuban missile sites every day for seven days:

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: I’ve been thinking about what, what we're going to have to do in a day or so, which is 500 sorties in seven days and possibly an invasion, all because we wouldn't take missiles out of Turkey. And I – we all know how –

FRED KAPLAN: Kennedy goes on: “All because we wouldn't take missiles out of Turkey. We all know how quickly everybody's courage goes when the blood starts to flow, and that's what is going to happen to NATO. When they start these things and they grab Berlin, everybody's going to say well, that was a pretty good proposition.”

BOB GARFIELD: Memoirists! Once these revelations came out in McGeorge Bundy's own memoir, how did journalism react, having been unwitting accomplices in a historical lie? Did newspapers jump on this story to kind of set the record straight, and do you think it had any effect?

FRED KAPLAN: I have to say, both among journalists and historians, this chapter of the Cuban missile crisis has not yet been fully incorporated into the dominant narrative, as academics might call it today, and to the degree that people do know there was a trade, it is as yet not generally well accepted how alone Kennedy was.

BOB GARFIELD: I'm curious about how much the truth of the Cuban missile crisis has found its way into the public consciousness. If it has, I suppose you can credit the film 13 Days from two years ago. Hollywood took another look at the history books and did substantially incorporate our current understanding in that film. Let's hear a little bit of that:

MAN: We've got time for one more round of diplomacy, and that's it. The first air strikes start in 28 hours. MAN: But we have to make them agree to it!

MAN: Right.

MAN: So how do we do that?

BRUCE GREENWOOD AS JOHN F. KENNEDY: Well we give them something. We tell them we're going to remove the missiles from Turkey — Hang on! But we do that six months from now, so it appears there's no linkage.

KEVIN COSTNER AS KENNY O'DONNELL: We also tell them if they go public about it, we'll deny it.

BRUCE GREENWOOD/JOHN F. KENNEDY: Right we deny, the deal's off.

KEVIN COSTNER/KENNY O'DONNELL: And we do it under the table so we can disavow any knowledge of it.

MAN: It's transparent, Kenny. The press'll be all over it.

KEVIN COSTNER/KENNY O'DONNELL: Six months from now we're not going to care, are we?

BOB GARFIELD: In your review of that film, 13 Days, you made another point about learning from history. It was about the supposition that a president, surrounded by a circle of trusted advisors, can be depended on to make the right decision. And you made a, a connection to the George W. Bush White House. Make it again.

FRED KAPLAN: [LAUGHS] The point was - I think George W. Bush had just been elected president, and a lot of people were wondering if he would be smart enough to deal with crises. And the common explanation at the time was well, don't worry, he has a lot of really smart people around him. And the point that you can take from the fourth draft of the history of the Cuban missile crisis is that the people around John Kennedy were really smart - I mean these were the people that David Halberstam later called, in a note of irony, "the best and the brightest," and yet John Kennedy realized that they really weren't very smart, after all. And the lesson of that is that you can have good advisors but the crucial thing is that you need a president. It's the president who makes the decisions...

http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/aug/27/missile-crisis-memories/

Iran: “We Lied!” — not really

By Cyrus Safdari | Iran Affairs | September 21, 2012

Naturally, the New York Times seized on this — the story that an official in charge of Iran’s nuclear program, Fereydoon Abbasi, has “admitted” that Iran occasionally tried to mislead on its nuclear program:

Iran’s top atomic energy official said in an article published Thursday that because of foreign espionage, his government had sometimes provided false information to protect its nuclear program.

Note the crucial bit of missing information here, left out by the NY Times in order to spin this sentence as some sort of “confession” by Iran of having hidden nukes: WHO WHOM? TO WHOM has he said Iran provided false information – to the IAEA or to Western spies?

Because that’s a real crucial bit of difference! Needless to explain: There’s generally no obligation on a country to allow foreign spying, especially when its scientists are being assassinated. However the NY Time’s simply runs with the assumption that this official is saying “We lied to the IAEA because we’re making nukes” rather than “We tried to mislead foreign intelligence agencies so they would not assassinate us”. Go back and read it again, better yet read the original Arabian news report. Or translate it. You won’t see him saying “We lied TO THE IAEA because we’re hiding nukes” Instead, he’s referring to foreign intelligence agencies. But that’s not how the NY Times spins it...

Conclusions on NPR's Liberal Bias
Friday, September 14, 2012

The final installment of our exploration into the question: Does NPR have a liberal bias? In this segment we hear from conservative listeners Sam Negus and Kevin Putt. Then FAIR's Steve Rendall provides his take on our endeavor. PEW's Tom Rosenstiel reports his findings in examining NPR's coverage for bias. And finally, Ira Glass returns to discuss what he learned from our coverage...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was Kevin Putt. Among our critics there were also a fair number of liberals who felt NPR actually leaned the other way.

Next up, Steve Rendall, senior analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, or FAIR, a liberal organization that monitors media bias. In a controversial study released in 2004, FAIR counted up the liberal and conservative sources cited in news reports on Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

STEVE RENDALL: And what we found was a very strong slant in favor of the GOP. Sixty-one percent of partisan guests who appeared on those two NPR shows in 2003 were Republicans.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was a Republican Congress, there was a Republican White House. I mean, doesn't that make sense?

STEVE RENDALL: You should see a few more Republicans on, but the number was 61% Republicans to 38% Democrats. And, we were repeating a study that we had done in 1993, when the Democrats had the White House and both houses of Congress. And in that study, we found that there was the same bias, 57% Republicans at that time and 42% Democrats. So it didn't matter who was dominating Washington. Republicans had more guests.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, I'm assuming that at least a third of our listeners, the third that identify as conservatives, and maybe a good number of the liberal listeners too are thinking you’re a liberal research organization, and you make no bones about it. Why should we trust what you say?

STEVE RENDALL: Well, our studies are replicable. You can check the numbers. Everybody comes from a point of view. But the thing is, we've had four decades of formal campaigning by the right, by groups like Accuracy in Media, the Media Research Center, the Heritage Foundation, to portray our media, corporate and public broadcasting, as being to the left of center. It’s paid off. And I think the fact that we're having this discussion here, the fact that there’s a debate in Congress, shows how much it’s paid off.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And not because there’s a kernel of truth in it.

STEVE RENDALL: Well, I would love to see the studies. I have looked at the studies, I have combed the literature, and I just haven't seen anything that really shows that to be true.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was Steve Rendall of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

And here’s another study. Tim Groseclose, a professor in the Economics and Political Science Department at UCLA, and Jeff Milyo, an economics professor at the University of Missouri, analyzed 20 mainstream news outlets, counting each time they cited a think tank or policy group in a news story. They gauged the political stripe of a think tank by how many times it was cited by a conservative or a liberal member of Congress. The Congresspeople themselves were rated based on their roll call votes...

http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/sep/14/conclusions-nprs-liberal-bias/transcript/