Yet another triumph of manipulation and heavy handedness for the "Dirty Digger" and Roger Ailes. Come to think of it Britt Hume probably had a hand in this as well.
Consider it. The supposedly conservative Fox News organization did not invite to their debate, Dr. Paul, a true blue Libertarian Conservative who is rising steadily in funding and in the polls.
Why would they do that? Easy. Paul really IS a conservative as opposed to the brand of neocon, Jacobin rightist so dear to the hearts of people like Murdoch.
Giuliani is on his way to the discard pile of history, weighed down with his foreign policy advisors (refugees from the first Bush ’41 term), Bernie Kerik, other friends, and a cell phone that rang too often. Nevertheless, HE had a seat at the table at the Faux News extravaganza. Remember. Paul beat him in Iowa.
How many media outlets does this man Murdoch own in this country? pl
http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/paul_fox_debate/2008/01/06/62102.html?s=sp&promo_code=426E-1
How many media outlets does this man Murdoch own in this country? pl
Far more than he should!
Murdoch’s media empire has been the most blatant “news” organization for a quite some time. Note that in countries like China he quite happily plays the role of “Pravda” sucking up to the Commies to make his bucks. Whereas here at home his big thing is directly manipulating our political process. Of course he is an equal opportunity financier of politicians with the neocons, Blair and Hillary in his nice thoroughbred stable.
Our experiment with media cartelization has been a failure. Its not the “free market” as the cartel lords and their politician acolytes keep saying. Its overt manipulation! They stopped the pretense of “fair & balanced” a long time ago.
I saw that debate last night, McCain and Giuliani got nothing but soft-balls while Romney and Huckabee faced nothing but curves and fastballs.
Amazing that Fox can claim to be a news channels when it’s really a political machine run by Ailes and Murdoch.
Don’t worry Dr. Paul, you will get my vote in the Florida primary.
Sounds like the NH GOP wasn’t too happy with Fox News, either.
On Saturday the New Hampshire Republican party expressed its disappointment with the decision to exclude Mr. Paul and Representative Duncan Hunter of California by severing its partnership with Fox.
“We believe that it is inconsistent with the first in the nation primary tradition to be excluding candidates in a pre-primary setting,” said Fergus Cullen, chair of the state G.O.P. party. “All candidates regardless of how well known they are or how much money they’ve raised should be treated equally here.”
NY Times Article
More importantly, isn’t “GOP party” redundant, like PIN number and FM modulation? My blood pressure is boiling!
I am a registered Democrat who actually lives in New Hampshire. None of the dems will need my vote tomorrow so I plan to vote (write-in or otherwise) for Ron Paul if for no other reason than to stick my finger in eyes of those corporate pricks – especially Murdoch – who are trying to control this nation’s agenda.
In the first paragaph of his now-famous article “Without a Doubt” (New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004), WSJ reporter Ron Suskind quoted Bruce Bartlett saying that “if Bush wins [on Nov. 2, 2004], there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” Judging by the current tempest-in-a-taapot Republican Party primary, Bartlett’s predicted civil war has erupted with a vengeance — and with not a lot of civility, as well.
The Republicans have self-destructed, according to Suskind’s article, not just because of their Orwellian dismissal of “the reality based community” or their bigoted dislike of fellow citizens who live on the coasts and can read newpapers, but because they’ve joined up with “essentially, the same [conflict] as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.”
As much as I understand and respect this insider-Republican analysis, I find it a bit lacking because it fails to identify anyone in the Republican Party who represents modernity, pragmatism, or reason. Former preacher/governor Mike Huckabee has the true-believer religious fundamentalists all sowed up and Mad Dog John McCain has the extremist “stay in Iraq for a hundred years” militarists behind him, so it looks to me like the Republicans have had their little civil war and a weird sort of feudal fascism has won for lack of any modern, reasoned, pragmatic opposition.
The longed-for (by Republicans) Republican-lite “Clinton Restoration” has apparently gone off the tracks over on the Democratic Party side, so the shade of James Madison can rest in peace. “An elected monarchy is not what we fought for,” he said; and it looks like the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party has chosen to fight rather than accept one. Senator Barak Obama puts a nice, articulate face on the John Edwards populism that has resurfaced in America as a counter-reaction to Nixon-Reagan-Bush imperial fascism enabled by the accomodating fetal-position “triangulation” of the Bawl and Pillory Horror Picture Show. Good for the emerging Liberal Democratic Party and good for America.
I hope to see both maimedstram media candidates, Guiliani and Clinton, gone after tomorrow’s primary here in NH, that WILL be victory. Two votes from this home to Ron Paul in the morning, bright and early!!
It’s worth mentioning that Paul is the top fundraiser of the group.
The debates as a whole this year have been depressingly unfair. Even when all are invited, not all get the same time, or even close to it. CNN and MSNBC are just as guilty as this tactic as Fox.
<"How many media outlets does this man Murdoch own in this country">
And who financed the Australian Murdoch’s rise? The Rothschilds or…?
Some data:
“LONDON (AFP) — News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch has admitted that he has editorial control over which political party The Sun backs in a general election.
Murdoch added that the same applies for News of the World, The Sun’s sister weekly tabloid, and on which political line the newspapers take over Britain’s role in Europe, according to minutes of a cross-party interrogation of the media tycoon published late Friday….”
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g_xv81gwtgRkvB1d_4hynx9P0dyg
“News Corp.’s assets in the U.S. include the Fox cable business, the 20th Century Fox film studio and the New York Post. It also owns the MySpace social networking site and has agreed to acquire Dow Jones & Co. (DJ), owner of The Wall Street Journal, for about $5 billion…..”
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003677268
For some grins:
“In New Hampshire Sean Hannity flees from Ron Paul supporters after being chased out of a resturant because Congressman Paul was banned from the FOX New Hampshire Debate.” VIDEO CLIP, “Fox sucks”, AT
http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=425
Biographic on Rupert:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch
Biographic on his father, Keith Murdoch:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Murdoch
So just where does the financing come from?
Col. Lang,
Didn’t you get the memo? Ron Paul has not been anointed a “tier one” candidate by the media priesthood! After all, we’re already in the second primary, so the race is practically over!
I think Paul may have the last laugh though – If he goes independent, as I bet he will, he’ll end up siphoning off GoP support in a race the GoP will already have difficulty winning.
I’m not sure about Michael Murray’s thesis with regard to elected officials, but I think there is real and substantive division with the GoP rank-and-file. With Paul and Bloomberg in the race as independents, those divisions and Rove’s legacy of pandering to “the base” will come home to roost.
“How many media outlets does this man Murdoch own in this country?”
Television
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Television Stations
WNYW – New York City
WWOR – New York City
KTTV – Los Angeles
KCOP – Los Angeles
WFLD – Chicago
WPWR – Chicago
KMSP – Minneapolis
WFTC – Minneapolis
WTXF – Philadelphia
WFXT – Boston
WTTG – Washington D.C.
WDCA – Washington D.C.
KDFW – Dallas
KDFI – Dallas
WJBK – Detroit
KUTP – Phoenix
KSAZ – Phoenix
WUTB – Baltimore
WRBW – Orlando
WOFL – Orlando
WOGX – Ocala
WAGA – Atlanta
KRIV – Houston
KTXH – Houston
WJW – Cleveland
WTVT – Tampa
KDVR – Denver
KTVI – St. Louis
WITI – Milwaukee
WDAF – Kansas City
KSTU – Salt Lake City
WHBQ – Memphis
WGHP – Greensboro
WBRC – Birmingham
KTBC – Austin
DBS & Cable
FOXTEL
BSkyB
Star
DirecTV
Sky Italia
Fox News Channel
Fox Movie Channel
FX
FUEL
National Geographic Channel
SPEED Channel
Fox Sports Net
FSN New England (50%)
FSN Ohio
FSN Florida
National Advertising Partners
Fox College Sports
Fox Soccer Channel
Stats, Inc.
Film
20th Century Fox
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Fox Television Studios
Blue Sky Studios
Newspapers
United States
New York Post
United Kingdom
News International
News of the World
The Sun
The Sunday Times
The Times
Australia
Daily Telegraph
Fiji Times
Gold Coast Bulletin
Herald Sun
Newsphotos
Newspix
Newstext
NT News
Post-Courier
Sunday Herald Sun
Sunday Mail
Sunday Tasmanian
Sunday Territorian
Sunday Times
The Advertiser
The Australian
The Courier-Mail
The Mercury
The Sunday Telegraph
Weekly Times
Magazines
InsideOut
donna hay
SmartSource
The Weekly Standard
TV Guide (partial)
Books
HarperMorrow Publishers
HarperMorrow
General Books Group
Access
Amistad
Caedmon
Avon
Ecco
Eos
Fourth Estate
HarperAudio
HarperBusiness
HarperCollins
Harper Design International
HarperEntertainment
HarperLargePrint
HarperResource
HarperSanFrancisco
HarperTorch
Perennial
PerfectBound
Quill
Rayo
ReganBooks
William Morrow
William Morrow Cookbooks
Children’s Books Group
Avon
Greenwillow Books
Joanna Cotler Books
Eos
Laura Geringer Books
HarperAudio
HarperCollins Children’s Books
HarperFestival
HarperTempest
Katherine Tegen Books
Trophy
Zondervan
HarperCollins UK
HarperCollins Canada
HarperCollins Australia
Other
Los Angeles Kings (NHL, 40% option)
Los Angeles Lakers (NBA, 9.8% option)
Staples Center (40% owned by Fox/Liberty)
News Interactive
Fox Sports Radio Network
Sky Radio Denmark
Sky Radio Germany
Broadsystem
Classic FM
Festival Records
Fox Interactive
IGN Entertainment
Mushroom Records
MySpace.com
National Rugby League
NDS
News Outdoor
Nursery World
Scout Media
http://www.cjr.org/resources/
Col,
thanks for sticking up for Ron Paul, the only true conservative in the running. He’s also the only true candidate running for “change”. The rest of ’em on both sides are all just status quo and mad for power at any cost.
Ah yes, the phony mask of “media objectivity” has slipped a bit more, revealing some of the ugly, autocratic face it conceals.
This has been real desperation by Fox Nuze and the folks in and out of government it assists. It is like the attitude of the Bush jr administration: you just go ahead and do it, figuring you will get away with it and there will be no consequence that matters to you.
Fox News knew it would be criticized for excluding Ron Paul from the January 6 debate, but what is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) going to do? Revoke the network’s license? No chance of that, with three of the five FCC commissioners voting your way and allowing you further to consolidate media ownership.
But the old trick of cutting political candidates off at the knees by giving them little or no air time, categorizing them as “second tier” candidates, telling us that the candidate is just presenting “provocative” issues for discussion, putting them at the bottom of “political opinion polls”, none of which are truly scientific, and asking them loaded, pointed questions while lobbing beach-ball questions to the “favored” candidates has not yet decided this election in advance.
Because so much is at stake, mainly the gangster foreign policy and the further concentration of authority and legal coercion in the federal government for domestic matters, the true role of mass media in the U.S. is becoming a little more obvious.
The presidential candidates favored by the state associated media are John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Yes, I’m sorry to have to say that Obama is a “safe” candidate for the policies that so afflict us and a growing number of people in other countries. Don’t believe a word of that “Ch-Ch-Change” mantra. We have not heard any specifics from him and we will not. He was a media creation and still is.
John Edwards was another “safe” candidate, but the rope tying him to the dock has come loose and he is now drifting away a little. He was not on the favored list because of his position on domestic legal and labor issues, but he toed the line on the wars and foreign policy. However, he is now speaking out against the Iraq War, but whether that is just for political expediency, who knows. Although he portrays himself as a “fighter”, I don’t think he will be able to say “no” very much, but he might significantly reduce, though unfortunately not end, the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Quite intriguing is the status and treatment of Mitt Romney, who is, as the Colonel has said, “the poster boy for political ambition”.
Yet, Romney, seemingly supportive of the wars, is not getting the free ride like McCain, Guiliani, Thompson, Clinton, and Obama. Why not? I think the reason is that Romney, though a wealthy man and a graduate of the Harvard law and business schools, is not an “insider” with the Washington D.C. — New York — Los Angeles — Houston network. And even though he was part of the money manipulation business through the insidious leveraged buyout game, he has often demonstrated a practical business approach, and navigated the political mine field of the 2002 Winter Olympics while putting on a successful and financially sound show.
A guy like Romney, who has a strong personality, knows the money game, budgeting, and how to read a financial statement, and can tell people “no”, is a dangerous man to the hucksters slurping the gravy from the multi-trillion dollar federal budget and who are used to conning the many easy marks in Congress.
Huckabee, with his Baptist preacher background and as a more genuine Son of the South than Bill Clinton, is another dangerous character to the inside political operators. As we say in Texas, he has a “gift of gab”, and his voice, unlike that of Hillary, Obama, Giuliani, and Romney, sounds natural and conversational, even when giving his stump speech on auto-pilot. And there he was in New Hampshire, playing electric bass at a rally with a little local rock band (and not looking out of place), whose female singer, dressed in black and with rocker hair, had a good voice (she should move to Austin where her career would probabaly take off). A guy like that is a little too unpredictable.
Although the media has successfully kneecapped Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, who clearly oppose the present policies, it is having trouble with the most “dangerous” candidate of all — Ron Paul.
Dr. Paul is exposing the fraudulent underpinnings of all three policy areas — foreign, domestic, and economic. And raising money and attracting self-organizing supporters while doing so. Even C-Span ignored him over the weekend.
As these rays of hope remain visible, let us not forget the one thing more insidious than the mass media in this election — the electronic voting machines.
That is the trump card. Undetectable vote rigging with no recount possible.
just picked this up from my nifty time-travel future history reader gizmo…
“the revolution that swept across America in the early 21st Century was triggered by roving packs of Ron Paul supporters hounding Sean Hannity with the imortal chant, “Fox News Sux”.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMrHorlOB0k
The strident belief in no rules or regulations when it comes to the market by the “libertarian” Free Marketeers is amusing:
A large military contractor and a foreign entity controlling the majority of American news? Not a problem, let the market decide.
These same entities will be the first demanding a government bailout or tax breaks to “save the economy” from their misfeasance and greed, when the first breeze threatens their house of cards.
Socialist safety-nets for the Corporatists, capitalism for the peons.
Rupert Murdoch is shameless in his use of a nominal news organization to promote his personal agenda in his adopted country and Britain. I can’t stand to watch it for over a minute or so. The rest of the media must be terrified of him, he can afford to buy many of their employers and in the age media consolidation it is perfectly legal.
The Chinese lady he took up with since leaving the mother of his children gives me an uneasy feeling.
She is extremely friendly with the PRC government and
his close aide in business dealings with the mainland. I hope a defector shows up in Taiwan someday who can tell us what her relationship with Beijing really is. Given Rupert Murdoch’s power and connections I expect she may enjoy de facto immunity from the HSA and FBI.
I think we can pretty well write off the Tory, I mean, Republican Party, as a force for anything good in the United States. That’s a shame because many of its traditional principles—none of which it follows—are valuable. This party has reached its expiration date. Consign it to the dustbin of history.
This wouldn’t be news to SST readers, but I was just talking to an old friend in NYC whose late husband was a captain in the Marines in Vietnam from 1963 to (I think) 1967. Yale to the Marines, he was. Died in ’96 of that lung cancer you get from Agent Orange – with about 3 weeks notice. I consider him a very delayed Vietnam casualty.
Anyway, my friend reports that every Republican she knows personally, including all of her husband’s Marine buddies who are now rich Wall Streeters living on the Upper East Side- every one is an ex-Republican. One of the Marine buddies is close to Senator Webb and campaigned heavily for him in Va.
OK New York is not the rest of the world, but my friend’s Republican friends are the old Republican party, the last stand of the WASP elite in this country. Half of them are voting for — Obama.
I agree with above verc, that Ron Paul is the only one talking about real change. And as ironic as it is, his notion of change is a change back to constitutional principals – an idea so radical, that it should be throttled by the likes of murdoch and the republican parties own soporific defense. For me its either an enforced return to principals – America’s exceptionalist 3’rd way, or an open embrace of European socialism. I’m having no part of the current drift into corporatized soft fascism run by oligarchy.It’s either Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, the blackballed twins or nothing.
With reference to the subheading of this web-site’s title page: “the ‘muffled zone’ that media management has made of our country,” I would like to add an additional reference to the New York Times Magazine article I mentioned above by Ron Suskind, namely: “Without a Doubt.” In my opinion, it contains the key insights necessary to make sense of this point in time and its implications for America’s future.
Written in October of 2004, the article says nothing about Senator Barack Obama, naturally, since it deals with Republicans and their unraveling grip on the religious fundamentalism and corporate-crypto-fascism that they’ve successfully exploited in America for at least the past three decades. The article does, though, speak to the Obama phenomenon indirectly in that it dispassionately dissects not the hope and national transcendence that Senator Obama embodies but the fear and loathing of corporate, oligarchic fascism that his candidacy promises to end.
The key — and often overlooked — quote in Suskind’s article comes not from Karl Rove boasting of imperial invincibility while sneering at “the reality based community” but from Deputy Dubya’s media advisor Mark McKinnon who aggressively revels in the classic-fascist, Seizure Class methodology of dividing one working-class citizen from another on the basis of phony differences in regional residence, speech accent, educational level, ancestral origin (especially as reflected in skin color), sexual preferences, et cetera. To wit, as Suskind writes, [quote]:
And for those who don’t get [the faith-based Presidency]? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. “You think he’s an idiot, don’t you?” I said, no, I didn’t. “No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” In this instance, the final “you,” of course, meant the entire reality-based community. [end quote]
At first reading, I couldn’t quite get the part about an AWOL Texas Air National Guardsman “walking” and “pointing” in some mysterious, non-linguistic manner that “exuded confidence” and inspired “faith.” As a victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) I, of course, found Deputy Dubya’s goofy choreographed gesticulations more reminiscent of a randy barnyard rooster engaged in some strutting avian mating ritual.
Then I remembered the juvenile “top gun,” “mission accomplished” aircraft-carrier-landing stunt of the previous year during which Washington Post columnist David Broder lapsed into a senile swoon, exulting: “This president has just learned to move in ways that inspire confidence!” It then occurred to me that the President of my country and his political party — in league with the reviled Washington Post and Wall Street that they owned — had consciously conspired to make my fellow citizens in “flyover country” (or the “despised rural South”) not like me because I lived on the West Coast and could read between the lines of conservatively-co-opted newspapers written at the level of 10th-grade (if that) high-school English.
America’s Republican Party crypto-fascists consciously inculcated and nurtured this festering, inferiority-complex resentment of me and other bi-coastal, publicly educated Americans VISUALLY, without actually using coherent spoken or written language at all. Quite obviously, Sheriff Dick Cheney and Deputy Dubya Bush (his sock-puppet propaganda catapult) have assiduously targeted an American demographic entirely dependent on subliminal visual symbolism broadcast at them from out of a glowing picture screen.
Unfortunately for the monolithic, corporate media management of the successfully crypto-fascist Repubican Party, the visual image coming out of glowing television screens in America these days increasingly shows a tall, relaxed, confident, articulate, hopeful, and DIGNIFIED man of color who assiduously — and advisedly — avoids uttering any of the canned, co-opted buzz-words — or “lizard language” — that the Republican Party’s media management consortium has invested so much in creating. Senator Barack Obama appears to think before he speaks, while he speaks, and after he speaks. This relative poise and reflective stillness inspires hope and confidence in those who witness it precisely because it contrasts so jarringly with the “old,” “experienced” inarticulate-manic-movement-and-mind-numbing-sound-byte-repetition so characteristic of President George W. Bush and all those of his Republicrat claque who seek to succeed him in office by doing just what he did — and in exactly the same way that he did it.
Too bad for the incumbent status quo that its discredited representatives now find the glowing television imagery working against them. Even worse from their point of view, now that they (1) need to formulate a critique in coherent language and (2) require an educated audience capable of processing analytical thoughts, they find that they’ve destroyed both language and thought across huge swaths of relatively uninhabited America and can’t rebuild minimal literacy there fast enough to make any difference.
Whatever kind of President Barack Obama may or may not become, he absolutely understands why he refuses to do and say what he wisely doesn’t do and say. When I began writing my epic poem Fernando Po, U.S.A. about the isolated, culturally devolved, pre-linguistic tribal Boobies who say “let us get closer to the fire so we can see what we are saying,” I had in mind mediocre mass-media mavens like Bawl and Pillory Clinton and Deputy Dubya Bush. Now with the advent of Senator Barack Obama, I may have to end the poem for lack of a semantic paradigm suitable for skewering Bush/Clinton Orwellian Doublethink: or, protective stupidity. How ironic that the island of Fernando Po lies off the coast of Africa and that a man whose recent ancestors came from Africa has arrived in continental-island America to restore thought and language to a people who once had both but threw them away at the incessant urging of Republican Party crypto-fascists who demanded that American Boobies only look and feel without hearing, thinking, or seeing.
I don’t know what Colonel Pat Lang means by “the ‘muffled zone’ that media management has made of our country,” but when I speak of Manufactured Mendacity and Managed Mystification, I mean Fernando Po, U.S.A. (a work in progress), not so much a geographical place as a terrifying territory of the mind: unexplored, unmeasured, and unmapped. “Darkest Africa” looks like a zone of light and culture by comparison.
I believe that it’s a mistake to think of Fox News as a “conservative” media outlet — it’s actually the official mouthpiece of the Republican Party, which is a horse of a different color. And the Republican Party (the establishment, anyway) doesn’t like Ron Paul. I’m half surprised that Fox let Huckabee in, but then I heard that Brit Hume went after him with bare knuckles. When he wasn’t busy fluffing John McCain.
Watch Ron Paul here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxldrCsVByA
MM
The reference is to Solzhenitsin’s Nobel Lecture.
He said that the Soviet system had made of Russia a “muffled zone.”
Different subject – Anyone know where the phrase “dancing in chains” is in the work of Nietszche? pl
PL… Consider it. The supposedly conservative Fox News organization did not invite to their debate, Dr. Paul, a true blue Libertarian Conservative who is rising steadily in funding and in the polls.
It is becoming increaingly more difficult to affix accurate labels to politicians that approach even a semblance of descriptive precision. Ron Paul is a particularly problematic case. I know more about Dr. Paul than I ever wanted to and neither “libertarian” or “conservative” are comfortable fits. I would consider Eisenhower a true conservative but that’s from my perspective. Dr. Paul is more like an ultra-conservative or paleoconservative. The libertarian label is loose fitting as well because he doesn’t believe there is a constitutional basis for the separation between Church and State:
The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers.
Then there is his stance on the theory of evolution, which causes one to question why he didn’t raise his hand with the rest to explicitly reject it during the debate when the rest of them did. Maybe he was undecided at that moment. He did look confused or apprehensive to me. He needs to make up his mind. Some things you can be agnostic about.
Creationism vs. Evolution, probably not.
He’s got quite a few more warts than that but on the basis of those two positions alone I find it difficult to envision having to vote for him. It is good that a certain segment of the population who might still be watching Fox News begin to see it for what it is.
Different subject – Anyone know where the phrase “dancing in chains” is in the work of Nietszche? pl
Human, All Too Human.
But I had to Google.
I state the obvious, I know, but I will state it nonetheless.
The media are entirely consumed with reporting the horserace. I have no idea why “reporters” feel it’s their prerogative to handicap the winners or losers in any election.
What you will never hear on any channel is a discussion of the candidates’ policy positions, who those positions hurt or help, are they effective, etc., etc.
About Ron Paul, I find it odd that Fox (et.al.) are trying to assert that he is not a real member of the Republican Party when the Libertarian wing has been part of the Party since the 70s and is one of the reasons Reagan won. The Libertarian wing of the Republican Party is certainly older than the Religious Right wing or the Neo-Con wing.
About H.R.Clinton, before any primary or caucus she bolted out of the starting gate with a wheelbarrow load of cash and 155 dedicated super-delegates. Why yes, Bill Clinton is a super-delegate thanks for asking. I believe for many she is perceived as the anointed choice and that grates against people’s sense of democracy and fair play. As it stands, with only two states voting this is the delegate and super-delegate totals count:
Clinton: 183
Obama: 78
Edwards: 52
REF: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/scorecard/