Comedy Gold: The Clumsy Attempt at Discrediting 9/11 Truth in Portland

Standard Fare Replacing
Substantive Discourse

Once Portland 9/11 Meetup or the Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance finish discrediting themselves, along comes a blog with anonymous posters aimed at discrediting all the 9/11 Truth groups in the Portland area.  I first thought our efforts were a mere drop in the bucket, so I see this site as a back-handed compliment.

As I said before, there are people in the Portland area who are scared to death of an effective 9/11 Truth movement.

True to the standard motif of dismissing the 9/11 Truth movement as a bunch of Anti-Semites, most Portlanders who demand a new investigation of 9/11 are accused of having contact with members of a group branded as infamously anti-Semitic, the Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance.

It's important to note how much time went into so many queries, searches, cuts and pastes for over 50 different pages.   I can attest to their obsession with a look at the hit piece on yours truly.  An individual or group (as expected, anonymously) sent me a link to my hit page because they really wanted me to see it:

http://pdx911truthalliancedramatica.blogspot.com/2012/03/jack-jt-waldron.html

Personally, my goal has been to bask in the spittle of Bill O'Reilly's beet red temper tantrum, but this will have to be the next best thing.

Still, it gets a bit sad when the page that is supposed be so devastating gets giddy over the fact that I am on STRATFOR's email list.  There's also mention that, since I moved from Tucson to Portland a while ago, I had "Portland Based" in the blog description.  But it gets worse.  Somehow I mysteriously changed the verbiage of my blogger header description and removed the 'Portland based' reference.  Ah ha!  Got me!  Curses, Waybackmachine!  I had four short newsclips and 3-4 stories posted that were about Portland over the last year, but most of the posts are national or international news.  Still, there are people apparently 'high-fiving' each other over unearthing my "shell game".   I imagine by now you are starting to get the picture.

FOX News Has Lost 21% Of Its Audience This Year

Business Insider

Fox News has the top 12 most-watched shows so far this year.

Which is perhaps not totally surprising since this marks the network's ninth straight year as the number one channel in cable.

That is not to say it's all rainbows and unicorns. (Or cupcakes and caliphates.) All of Fox's top shows posted double digit losses year over year.

Glenn Beck suffered the biggest drop, losing 30% of his audience compared to the first quarter last year. But he wasn't alone. Top ranking O'Reilly lost 14% of his audience, Sean Hannity, up a spot from 2010, lost 19%, and Bret Baier, who pushed Beck out of the top three, lost 13%.

Greta Van Susteren, who has been bleeding viewers to Anderson Cooper this month, is down 22.86%.

All in all Fox News actually lost 21% of its primetime audience during the quarter.

Compare this to CNN which is up 28% in primetime and MSNBC which is up 9% (Rachel Maddow increased by 16.65% and Anderson Cooper by 18%) and then take into consideration all the breaking news there's been since Christmas, and one might begin to draw the conclusion that people are beginning to turn elsewhere for news news coverage.

Another explanation, of course, is that this time period last year was dominated by the health care debate and for much of that period Fox operated as an extension of the opposition. Now that the nation's focus is international it's harder to figure out an angle where Obama is bad and...nuclear meltdowns and Qadaffi are good.

Editor's note, sources better, but not listed in the article:
www.link.tv
www.rt.com
www.press.tv
http://english.aljazeera.net
www.democracynow.org
www.whatreallyhappened.com

Fox News Airs Random Protest Video To Make Wisconsin Demonstrations Appear Violent

ThinkProgress

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly isn’t happy that protesters in Wisconsin have been calling out his network for its shoddy journalism practices. Last week, O’Reilly sent his ambush goon Jesse Watters out to badger people protesting Fox outside their studios in New York. On Monday during an interview with Fox News’ Mike Tobin, who is reporting from Wisconsin, O’Reilly was at it again, calling chants that “Fox lies” from pro-union demonstrators “some kind of organized deal.” But during the interview, Fox aired b-roll of some unknown protest that contained physical confrontations among demonstrators and simply labeled it “union protests,” as if it was coming out of Wisconsin. Watch it:



Digby asked of the video, “What’s wrong with this picture?” adding, “If you guessed the snowless ground and palm trees in Wisconsin you win a big prize. Your sanity.”

Bashing the Messenger: Al Jazeera Blamed by American Press for Egyptian Uprising

LA Times

EGYPT: As protests continue, Al Jazeera's role debated

 

Security was deteriorating across Egypt late Sunday as protesters mounted fresh marches and rallies in a number of cities.

In Alexandria, protesters marched around barricades meant to keep the streets clear, Al Jazeera reported.

"This protest, this march, has been going on for seven hours now. Clearly, no sign that it's going to abate any time soon," an unnamed Al Jazeera correspondent said.

"We have to remember that Egyptians broke a massive fear barrier on Jan. 25 when they took to the streets ... there's probably not a single main street in Alexandria — no exaggeration — that this march has not passed through."

Meanwhile, pundits and bloggers debated what role the Arab satellite news network has played in the political uprising.

On CNN's Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz spoke with Al Jazeera’s Washington Bureau Chief Abderrahim Foukara about Bill O’Reilly’s recent comment that Al Jazeera is "spurring on this revolt and encouraging uprisings all over the Muslim world." Foukara disagreed.

"The viewership, the people who are directly involved in these events, they come to Al Jazeera because that's who they feel they can trust with their grievances and their aspirations," Foukara said.
Many academics, bloggers and other outside observers agree, saying Al Jazeera, which has English as well as Arabic-language channels, has evolved to play a similar role in this conflict as CNN did during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

"Al Jazeera saw the gravity of the situation," Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute in Doha told Reuters, referring to Egypt and Tunisia. "They saw it was going to be big before other people did and that it would stand as one of the historic moments in Arab history."

But so did bloggers and those with Twitter feeds such as "Sandmonkey," who sent dispatches Sunday as he arrived in Tahrir Square ("in tahrir now, everyone here, ppl of ALL classes, army letting us in, v peaceful") protestst grew tense ("word is army has permission to shoot live ammunition at protesters") and he left for Zamalek ("zamalek is a ghost town, inadequate protection even by volunteer committees").

But Marc Lynch, an associate professor at George Washington University, credited Al Jazeera — more than Twitter and other social media— with fostering recent uprisings in Tunisia and other countries.
"Without the new social media, the amazing images of Tunisian protestors might never have escaped the blanket repression of the Ben Ali regime — but it was the airing of these videos on Al Jazeera, even after its office had been shuttered, which brought those images to the mass Arab public and even to many Tunisians who might otherwise not have realized what was happening around their country," Lynch wrote. "This is similar to how the new media empowered Egyptian "Kifaya" protesters in the early 2000s and Lebanese protestors in 2005, but in a significantly changed media space."