Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Does Hezbollah have the right to be in Lebanon?

host · 08-08-2006, 09:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

There is more than just one mindset here, host. Of course, members of one of those mindsets believe trash from the guardian is "evidence." While others believe it is just trash.

Here's some evidence of my own I'd like to put out there. Since, you know, we're all posting "evidence" and all. but unlike many articles posted, this one actually has to do with the issue at hand. Does hezbollah have the right to be in lebanon? Not if hezbollah is what this article says...but then again tcsdaily might not be a reputable enough source for some, probably because it goes against their "feelings."

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=080806B

If you read nothing else in this post, please read the contents of the first two quote boxes. (Below...) If you disagree with the Wiki descriptions of the Guardian or of tcsdaily.com , consider going to the Wiki site and editing the articles to fit your well documented POV, to improve the accuracy of the descriptions.

stevo, I find that maintaining a POV as far to the opposite of the influences and agendas of the largest international corporations, works best for me, since I know that, even with such intent, there is a high risk that they will shape my opinion where they intend it to be, and fool me into thinking that it is my own idea, that I am advocating for......

I noticed that "tcsdaily" has been linked on these threads previously. What process do you "go through" to satisfy yourself that the source that you cite (I assume that...if you cite it....your thinking or feelings have been influenced by the information provided by a given source....) won't end up looking like this, in a side by side comparison:

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian
The Guardian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

....It has been awarded the National Newspaper of the Year in 1999 and 2006 by the British Press Awards. The Guardian Unlimited web site won the Best Newspaper category two years running in the 2005 and 2006 Webby Awards, beating (in 2005) the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Variety[4]. It has been the winner for six years in a row of the British Newspaper Awards for Best Electronic Daily Newspaper.[5] The site won an Eppy award from the US-based magazine Editor & Publisher in 2000 for the best-designed newspaper online service [6]. The website is well-known and recognised for its commentary on sporting events, particularly its over-by-over cricket commentary....

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Central_Station

Tech Central Station
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Tech Central Station (TCS) describes itself as a website "where free markets meet technology". Since late 2005, the website has appeared under the title of TCS Daily, a publication of Tech Central Station.

TCS is published by DCI Group, a lobbying and PR firm based in Washington, DC, using TCS to raise doubts about global warming and the film An Inconvenient Truth[1]. It is hosted by James K. Glassman, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. He also writes a monthly financial column for Kiplinger's Personal Finance. TCS is primarily funded by sponsors that currently or previously have included AT&T, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, General Motors Corporation, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, Nasdaq, and PhRMA.....

stevo, you indicate that your opinion is that the award winning Guardian news source that roachboy cited is inferior to a "news piece" that is featured on a website that is owned by a lobbying firm that has as it's mission, dissemination of a PR message inline with the views of major multinational corporations. The 'host" of the website, James K. Glassman, is a fellow at AEI

Quote:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/002217.php
(November 19, 2003 -- 09:51 AM EDT)
For years -- literally years -- I've been writing about Astroturf organizing and that trendsetting operation in the trade, DCI -- home of that Johny Appleseed of the plastic and the green, Tom Synhorst.

Simply put, Astroturf organizers are in the business of creating phony grassroots support, or rather the appearance of grassroots support, for this or that cause.

You got the money and the cause? They'll bring the front groups, the push-polls, the oped payola, you name it.....

.....For years, the trendsetter in Astroturf has been DCI. And a couple days ago, if you were watching really closely, a tiny sentence changed on an <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20031008190838/http://www.techcentralstation.com/about.html">out-of-the-way page</a> on the TechCentralStation website.

The sentence that read ..
"Tech Central Station is published by Tech Central Station, L.L.C."

now reads ...
"Tech Central Station is published by DCI Group, L.L.C."

It wasn't an accident. It was because this article -- <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.confessore.html">'Meet the Press'</a> by Nick Confessore -- was about to be published by The Washington Monthly.
-- Josh Marshall

Quote:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea...onfessore.html
Meet the Press
How James Glassman reinvented journalism--as lobbying.
By Nicholas Confessore

......But the real secret of his success is that the market Glassman writes about is very different from the one in which he thrives: the burgeoning world of Washington influence-peddling. As a writer and public figure, Glassman has, over time, aligned his views with those of the business interests that dominate K Street and support the Republican Party; he has also increasingly taken aggressive positions on one side or another of intra-industry debates, rather like a corporate lobbyist. Nowhere is this more apparent than on TCS, where Glassman and his colleagues have weighed in on everything from which telecommunications technologies should be the most heavily regulated to whether Microsoft is a threat to other software companies.

But TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also "sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.

James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. <h3>The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups.</h3> But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence--until now........

AEI or "American Enterprise Institute", is just that....an "Enterprise Institute".
It is founded and funded by very wealthy and influential folks who "win" when they can influence you to think like they want you to, How is that "good": for you, and more importantly, how is it good for America????

I'll use the spectacle of the AEI "embracing" Chalabi, last november, long after he was finally discredited, as an example:

Quote:

http://www.aei.org/events/type.upcom...ent_detail.asp
An Insider's View: Democratic Politics at Work in Iraq

A Foreign Policy Briefing from Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi
Start: Wednesday, November 9, 2005 2:30 PM
End: Wednesday, November 9, 2005 3:45 PM
Location: Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
Directions to AEI

Registration for this event is now closed due to an overwhleming response. Members of the media may contact Andrew Pappas at 202.862.4870 or apappas@aei.org. Walk-in registrations may not be accepted.

Quote:

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001080.php
Peering Into Ahmad Chalabi's Cesspool & What About New Jersey, Virginia and New York City?

......Remarks by Colin Powell, 12 June 2003:

I can't substantiate [Chalabis] claims. He makes new ones every year..........
<img src="http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/chabi%20newsweek.bmp>"

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true
Columnist
The CIA And the Coup That Wasn't

By David Ignatius
Friday, May 16, 2003; Page A29

....... Complicating the CIA's coup planning was a similar effort in northern Iraq by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. A CIA officer named Bob Baer was dispatched in January 1995 to coordinate the various covert efforts, but they only got more tangled. Chalabi launched his unsuccessful coup in March 1995, and Baer was suddenly summoned home to Washington.

The 1995 fiasco only reinforced the CIA's belief in the traditional military coup approach of DBACHILLES. But an Iraqi source argues that by late 1995, some of Shawani's and Alawi's operatives were already controlled by Iraqi intelligence.

Chalabi was so convinced that the military-coup plan had been compromised that he traveled to Washington in March 1996 to see the new CIA director, John Deutch, and his deputy, George Tenet. He told them the Iraqis had captured an Egyptian courier who was carrying an Inmarsat satellite phone to Shawani's sons in Baghdad.

When the CIA officials seemed unconvinced, Chalabi went to his friend Richard Perle, a prominent neoconservative. Perle is said to have called Tenet and urged that an outside committee review the Iraq situation. But the coup planning went ahead. .........

stevo, consider the names on this list.....is it any wonder that James Glassman is the host of the corporate PR site, "tech station" that you cited?
American Enterprise Institute Personnel:

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...edit&section=2

== Personnel ==
*[[Lynne Cheney]], the wife of U.S. Vice President [[Dick Cheney]], and an AEI senior fellow......
.......*[[David Frum]], an author and former speechwriter for [[George W. Bush|Bush]], is a resident fellow.
*[[Reuel Marc Gerecht]] is a resident fellow. He is the director of the [[Project for the New American Century]]'s Middle East Initiative and a former [[Middle East]] specialist at the [[CIA]].
*[[Newt Gingrich]], member of the [[United States Republican Party|Republican Party]] and Speaker of the [[United States House of Representatives]] between 1995 and 1999, is a senior fellow at AEI focusing on health care (he has founded the Center for Health Transformation), information technology, the military, and politics.
*Author [[James K. Glassman]] is a resident fellow.....
.....*[[Michael Ledeen]] was previously involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the [[Iran-Contra]] affair -- an adventure that he documented in his book, ''Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair.''
....*[[Richard Perle]] serves on the [[United States Defense Policy Board]] and the former deputy [[United States Secretary of Defense|Secretary of Defense]].
*[[Lee Raymond]], CEO of [[ExxonMobil]], is the vice chair of AEI's board of trustees.....
.....*[[Fred Thompson]], the current D.A. on ''[[Law & Order]]'' and former U.S. Senator from Tennessee, researches "National Security & Intelligence (China, North Korea, and Russia)" for the AEI.....
......*[[John Yoo]], formerly of the [[Office of Legal Counsel]], and a professor at [[Boalt Hall]], is a visiting scholar.
* [[Karl Zinsmeister]], editor in chief of the ''American Enterprise Magazine'' 1994-2006, as of 2006 Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.

Here is some info on your article's authors, J. Peter Pham & Michael I. Krauss:

Quote:

http://classweb.gmu.edu/mkrauss/publications.html
Krauss Home Page > Publications

1. NON-ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS AND ACTIVITIES

* Magazine articles: FORBES, The Weekly Standard, Policy Review; Liberty; Reason; National Review; St. Croix Review; American Outlook (Hudson Institute); numerous French-language magazines. Click here for a sample mini-essay.
* National Review Online, Tech Central Station, Fox News Online, occasional online contributor. Click here for a sample op-ed.

Quote:

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache...en&lr=&strip=1
or..... http://www.jmu.edu/nelsoninstitute/I...s&%20Pham).pdf
Why Israel Is Free to Set Its Own Borders
Krauss, Michael I. & Pham, J. Peter

Neither historical nor legal barriers stand in the way of unilateral action.

....WITH RESPECT to Jewish settlement on the West Bank, the first document of any legal consequence dates from the San Remo Conference of 1920, where the victorious allied powers of World War I assigned the League of Nations mandate for Palestine to Great Britain. In doing so, they recognized, in the words of the mandate, "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and the "grounds for constituting their national home in that country." Article 6 of the document even "encouraged close settlement by Jews on the land," land very much including the modern West Bank.*....

IMO, even Krauss and Pham cannot have overlooked the following, when they wrote the "fairy tale" pro Israeli propaganda "piece" quoted above, they simply ignored the following:

Quote:

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mi...ocov.htm#art20
The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council July 1-17, 1968
Text of the Charter:
.....Article 20:

The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

stevo, the website where you linked the article that supports your POV is a corporate propaganda site, and the authors or your article wrote an article, quoted above, last month, titled, "Why Israel Is Free to Set Its Own Borders" , that seems as unrealistic, arbitrary and prejudiced towards Israel, as any that I've encountered. One author, Michael I Krauss, is a frequent contributor on fox news, national review, and sometimes on William Kristol's weekly standard.

The other author of your article, and director of JMU based "NELSON INSTITUTE" is J. Peter Pham, promoting the appearance on tcsdaily.com of the article that you cited, on the NELSON INSTITUTE website:

Quote:

http://www.jmu.edu/nelsoninstitute/toldyouso080806.htm
NELSON INSTITUTE DIRECTOR, GMU LAW PROFESSOR REAFFIRM HEZBOLLAH AS NEXUS OF MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS

August 8, 2006

HARRISONBURG—In an op-ed published today by TCS Daily, Dr. J. Peter Pham, Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University, and Professor Michael I. Krauss of George Mason University School of Law return to the thesis they expounded in a commentary published just days before the outbreak of the current war in Lebanon in which they predicted that the Iranian build-up of Hezbollah’s arsenal, abetted by Syria, would lead to the terrorist group making an incursion into Israel and that the ensuing conflict would become the front on the war on terrorism. In their new article, the two professors argue that not only have events proven them right, but that Hezbollah is now more than ever the nexus of tensions in the Middle East.

The essay by the two professors, “Hate to Say We Told You So, But…,” can be accessed online by <a href="http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=080806B">clicking here.</a>

To sum up my core point, stevo, IMO, you can do better. From your current "up is down", POV; that an award winning internationally recognized news source, "the Guardian"....known for the quality of its reporting and record of journalistic investigation, is "trash".

Shills like Krauss and Pham, confined to spouting their biased "narrow cast" on a mega-corporate site, such as tcsdaily.com (Pham was actually promoting the appearance of their recent article there, via the "Institute" that he directs,) a site that came into being and was financed to distribute disinformation about global warming that was perceived as a threat to EXXON-MOBIL's "business", are touted by you as sources of reliable commentary.

Have you considered why the Krauss and Pham article is featured on tcsdaily.com, why Glassman is the "host" of that website, and a fellow at AEI, why AEI has the list of other "Fellows", that it does, and why Krauss is welcome (confined) to comment on Fox news, NRO, and weekly standard?

Have you considered that their associations..... tcsdaily.com, AEI, and it's "Fellows", Fox news, NRO, and weekly standard....are all part of a closed loop of ideas (feelings ?) that may seem like a "universe" that is "open" and attracts new ideas, and alternative POV's.....but might not be.....might instead be a closed loop of talking points that are in synch with a lobbyists driven message that might not be what you think it is, or be from where you thought that it was coming from?