Fox News shows more sexualized violence

and humiliation than probably any other network

— all in the name of condemning it

— while under-showing violence in Iraq,

all in the name of supporting it

It's not the sex that bothers me

It's the hypocrisy

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Keywords: ox, gratuitous, news, sex, hypocrisy, media

However, it is not a justification for the slightest complacency on the part of the writers and those who back their struggle.

The executives of the conglomerates are not in the business of being popular; their only concern is the financial bottom line of their companies and their share prices on Wall Street.

From this point of view, the hard line taken by the studio chiefs is only likely to boost their standing among large investors and big financial concerns, just as each massive job cut in the auto industry improves the share price of the auto giants. Imposing their demands on the writers, whatever the short-term cost in public relations, is the sole concern of the studios and networks.

Big political and social issues are involved in this conflict. Cultural life in America is at the mercy of giant conglomerates with intimate ties to both major political parties.   more »

Debt Serfdom

The odd logic of the real estate bubble has fooled us into believing that debt has come to equal wealth.

And not only wealth but freedom. An even stranger paradox.

After all, debt throughout most of history has been little more than a slight variation on slavery. Debtors were medieval peons or Indians bonded to Spanish plantations or the sharecropping children of slaves in the postbellum South.

Few Americans today would volunteer for such an arrangement, and therefore would-be lords and barons have been forced to develop more sophisticated enticements.

The solution they found is brilliant, and although it is complex, it can be reduced to a single word–rent.   more »

"Several days before his first meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee, Michael Mukasey's Justice Department handlers arranged a private meeting for him with a number of 'movement conservatives.'...

"They pushed aggressively on the torture question. They wanted Mukasey to pledge that he would toe the administration's line" by not criticizing the administration's approval of waterboarding and similar interrogation techniques.

They wanted him to "protect those who authored the [interrogation] program" by issuing opinions that would keep those responsible for the program from facing criminal prosecution.

In his Senate testimony, Mukasey made it clear that he shared this agenda. He was conciliatory on a wide range of issues, but even when it looked as though his confirmation was at risk, he refused to give an opinion on whether waterboarding constitutes torture or is legally prohibited. That was his line in the sand.   more »

Sitting with four key Taliban commanders deep in a labyrinth of lush green mountains, I could see the Sarkano district of the Kunar Valley in Afghanistan, which is the provincial hub of the American military and a base for the Afghan National Army and Afghan intelligence.

Scores of guerrilla groups, each comprising a few dozen men, hide on the fringes of the Kunar Valley and launch daily operations into Kunar and Nooristan provinces, and with each passing day they receive new recruits and their attacks grow in intensity.

A year ago, I spent two weeks with the Taliban in Helmand province (including a few days in captivity - see A 'guest' of the Taliban, Asia Times Online, November 30, 2006 ), but since then there has been a sea-change within the Taliban.

Without legends such as the slain Mullah Dadullah and Mullah Akhtar Osmani, and with an extremely ill Jalaluddin Haqqani, a neo-Taliban movement has emerged with a new leadership, new zeal and new dynamics.

The revitalized and resupplied Taliban are geared to enter a new phase of war without borders to fight coalition forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistan army.   more »