“The media,” as it’s referred to, is not a monolith. We don’t just have one channel, one paper or one site with one nefarious dude pulling levers. “The media” consists of books, newspapers, magazines, television, billboards, radio, blogs, vlogs, ebooks, webcasts, podcasts and movies etc. The media is a vast and (kind of) diverse way of communicating information.

Let’s talk news. And where the majority of Americans – as in over 50 percent (by most estimates) – still get their news – from their local nightly news show. Any discussion about how unaware Americans are when it comes to news needs to have its finger pointed at the proper culprit: Your local broadcast.

Yes, everyone hates Congress but loves their Congressman. Everyone thinks “the media” is biased, wrong and awful – but tunes in to their local anchor with admiration and trust. A pox on them all, except our guy…

Last week a PublicMind FDU poll went viral with the line, “Fox News [viewers] are five-points more likely than those who watch no news at all, to incorrectly say it’s the U.S. that is bailing out European countries.” The under-reported story (buried lede as we call it in “the media”) was of those polled 67 percent said they watched their local news. And that could explain why 36 percent said they didn’t know who was bailing out Europe and only 30 percent gave the correct answer (Germany).

Did you know that Iceland is having a revolution as a direct result of the economic meltdown centered in the U.S. housing market? How about Syria being sanctioned by the Arab League? Vladamir Putin has gotten himself back on the ballot in Russia?

And it’s not just the “reading off BBC headlines” news the local news misses – it’s the actual local news: Investigative news in the public interest. News about the economy, politics and local issues.

Your local news opts to put a camera in the face of a crime victim and be a staple of “fear porn” rather than ever tackle difficult segments holding the school board/city council/mayor/state legislature/governor accountable for anything.

Why can I assume without sitting down and watching a week of your local newscast that they’re more than likely gleefully doing a recap of what happened on Dancing With the Stars/American Idol/Survivor tonight? Because your local broadcast news is more than likely ratings driven. And because of the last couple of decades of ratings driven local news our Edward R. Murrows have all become Harvey Levins.

Why are Americans not even rising to the level of ill informed and topping out at totally clueless? Because as Homo sapiens, we are effectively distracted by shiny objects and Kardashians. Plus our monkey brains got a chance to evolve this long by being on hyper-alert for danger, so we eat up any story telling us about “the hidden dangers lurking in our homes!” So of course we tune-in as told and in that way reward our local yokels for their reportage. And local yokels as Homo sapiens … also like rewards. It’s a vicious circle.

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In Europe, the politicians seem to pay at least a little attention to the voters. So who knows? Maybe this will work. But there's so much invested in nuclear energy, I don't know how they can bring it to a complete halt anytime soon:

More than 100,000 demonstrators took to the streets in 20 cities across Germany on Saturday to call for a rapid end to nuclear power, even as a government-sponsored national commission is expected to recommend that Berlin abolish nuclear energy within a decade.

The Ethics Commission is set to announce the results of its final report on Germany's energy future, calling for nuclear power to be phased out by 2021.

Chancellor Angela Merkel had tasked the commission with forging a national consensus on how to replace nuclear power with renewable energy in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan last March.

The political opposition praised the commission's recommendation while expressing doubt about how Chancellor Merkel's center-right coalition would receive the report.

"I have doubts whether Merkel can successfully implement this position within her coalition," said Thomas Oppermann of the center-left Social Democrats' parliamentary group.

In Berlin, at least 20,000 protesters marched from city hall to the headquarters of Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, where they called for an immediate end to nuclear power.

Demonstration organizer Uwe Hiksch said an exit from nuclear power within a decade was not acceptable. The environmental organization Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) also called for a quicker shutdown of the country's nuclear plants.

The Philadelphia Unemployment Project demonstrating to save AdultBasic, the State of Pennsylvania insurance program to cover the unemployed. The Blues have refused to extend the contract.

Why did the insurance industry try so hard to destroy the credibility of Michael Moore's "Sicko"? Because once Americans saw what other countries had, they would begin to see what was possible -- and that would be bad for health insurers.

I'm pretty sure Americans would feel the same way if they saw the kind of safety net available to citizens in other countries -- Germany, for instance. Via Democrats Ramshield, an American expat, writing for Alternet:

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media.

[...] The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.

Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)

Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.

In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.

[...] It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media.

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Oracle Paul the Psychic Octopus predicts a win for Spain. However, having been in Amsterdam during Holland's amazing win over Brazil last week, I'll be going against cephalopod wisdom and rooting for the Big Orange.

Ruth Marcus writes a pretty good article in the Washington Post about the crack pot conservatives running as teabaggers in the upcoming midterm elections like Rick Barber. After watching Barber's insane political ads she concludes her article with this:

As to the video, Barber was unapologetic. "We can't be so naive to think that just because we live in America that can't happen to us," he said. "We are being fed a socialist agenda spoon by spoon, and we don't see it coming. In Germany, when Hitler was first elected under the Socialist Party, no one would have thought in a million years it would have gone where it did."

I would not have thought in a million years that this kind of thinking would be inside the conservative mainstream. If it is not, it is time for rational conservatives to speak up.

I would not have thought in a million years that a Washington Post writer would have no clue about the history of the conservative movement. Does she not realize that there was a fight for the soul of that movement between William Buckley of the NRO and Robert Welch of the Birchers? Barry Goldwater refused to dismiss the Birchers as wackos entirely because they were useful like the teabaggers, but he did attack Welch.

Rick Perlstein's: 'Beyond The Storm:'

The attendees fell into two camps. Buckley and Kirk said they were ready to write the Birchers out of the conservative movement altogether. Goldwater and others canceled accommodation. He thought there were a lot of 'nice guys' in the Society and not just 'kooks' and that it wasn't time to precipitate breaks in the conservatives' fragile movement.

They settled on a compromise. National Review would attack Robert Welch, not the John Birch Society. Goldwater would take the line that Welch was a crazy extremist, but that the Society itself was full of 'fine, upstanding citizens' working hard and well for the cause of Americanism.

Haven't we heard the same thing from Newtie and Rove about the teabaggers? Sure, they have racist signs and say racist things, but it's only a few people.The rest are great Americans. Right wing extremists have populated the conservative movement since it began. It's only when a Democrat is elected president that they freak out and expose themselves to public view. That's why I came up with the idea of writing our new book. I thought what was happening should be documented. The 'Whiplash politics' practiced by the conservative movement as soon as Obama was elected, (The Tea Party folks) which is really the GOP now was just another chapter in their checkered history. Ruth Marcus should know that. I often wonder if the MSM is just too scared to write about the tea party people or conservatives because they were traumatized during the HCR town hall meetings last summer. They were shocked by the vitriolic insanity that was splashed across the nation. Here's another tip for Ruth. Conservatives rarely abandon their wingnuts. They may attack a Michael Steele once in a while, but they will never forsake a conservative transmitter like Coulter, no matter how far out they get.

Anyway, please support liberal authors and buy this book.

Oh, and Dean Baker takes her down because she doesn't know jack about Social Security either.

Over 20,000 Seriously Wounded

Unbelievable news blogged by Raed In The Middle .

There is absolutely nothing this administration will not lie about. But we are not surprised by now. Raed cites an article in today's Stars and Stripes which reports that 20,802 wounded soldiers have been treated at Landstuhl, Germany alone from injuries received in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

The official number of US soldiers wounded in Iraq that was announced by the US DOD (Department of Defense) is 8458 in Iraq and 423 in Afghanistan.

So the number treated in Germany is over twice what the official reports claim. The injuries have to be severe for the soldiers to be flown to Germany.

These numbers are just for the US soldiers that were moved to Germany. There are other thousands that were injured inside Iraq and Afghanistan and treated in small local military clinics and hospitals, or moved to other US military hospitals.

The official number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan is 1375 and 144. I wonder what the real numbers are

[Script reads: "We Are Creating the New Germany! Remember the victims -- Vote the National Socialist List". Larger image here.]

Following up on yesterday's correction of Rush Limbaugh's historical revisionism, noting that both Blackshirts and Brownshirts made their political bones by beating up on union organizers and socialists ...

From State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda, by Steven Luckert and Susan Bachrach, pp. 48-50:

In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany was mired in a grave political and economic crisis that left the society verging on civil war. Street violence by paramilitary organizations on the Left and the Right increased sharply. In the final ten days of the July 1932 parliamentary elections, Prussian authorities reported three hundred acts of politically motivated violence that left twenty-four people dead and almost three hundred injured. In the Nazi campaigns, propaganda and terror were closely linked. In Berlin, Nazi Party leader Joseph Goebbels intentionally provoked Communist and Social Democratic actions by marching SA [Brownshirt] storm troopers into working-class neighborhoods where those parties had strongholds. Then he invoked the heroism of the Nazi "martyrs" who were injured or killed in these battles to garner greater public attention. Nazi newspapers, photographs, films, and later paintings dramatized the exploits of these fighters. The "Horst Wessel Song," bearing the name of the twenty-three-year-old storm trooper and protege of Goebbels who was killed in 1930, became the Nazi hymn. The well-publicized image of the SA-man with a bandaged head, a stirring reminder of his combat against the "Marxists" (along with other portrayals of muscular, oversized storm troopers), became standard in party propaganda. In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed that seventy "martyrs" had fallen in battle against the enemy. Such heroic depictions -- set against the grim realities of chronic unemployment and underemployment for young people during the Weimar period -- no doubt helped increase membership in the SA units, which expanded in Berlin from 450 men in 1926 to some 32,000 by January 1933.

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog had a great post the other day exposing an online sales scheme hatched at the Republican National Committee's website whereby you could search for goods on an "Obama Card" and come up with all kinds of goodies.

So Aravosis did searches for such words as "Jew," "Latino," "Bondage," "Escort" and "Anal" and got some very interesting responses. Many of them are hilarious, actually.

But the one that caught my attention most was the search for "Jew," which you can see above. Among its responses, as Aravosis notes, is "The Jews and Their Lies."

But in the second spot for this search is the video Jud Süß. This was the vicious anti-Semitic film created by the Nazis and used as propaganda to advance the Holocaust as it was occurring in Germany.

The other stuff is incredibly hypocritical, but this material is downright disturbing. Whoever was responsible for compiling the material for these searches had deeply questionable tastes.

No wonder the RNC promptly discarded the whole thing.

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Sean Hannity loves his analogies. First he opens his segment last night with an analogy comparing the Obama administration to the evil anti-Catholic plotters who are the chief villains of the new Tom Hanks movie, Angels and Demons. All this in the context of Obama's appearance at Notre Dame's commencement this weekend.

Then his guest, Randall Terry -- the man who brought us the Terri Schiavo fiasco -- comes on and tries some analogies of his own. First he compares the Obama appearance to Pope Benedict appearing before Planned Parenthood. Then, at the end of the segment, he goes one better -- Obama's like Hitler:

Can you imagine somebody saying, 'Let's have one of the leaders of Germany come in -- we don't really like what he did with that Jewish thing, but they build great roads, and they gave people hope, and they helped rebuild the economy.' It's crazy.

Yes, it's crazy indeed.

Old People's News: US residents in military brigs. Your governmnet says 'it's war.'

Gristmill: The USDA cravenly stops measuring the poisons used in US farming. Meanwhile, Germany has banned chemicals linked to honeybee devastation.

Corrente: Hillary's RFK/assassination gaffe inspired more of the molehills to mountains
reaction we've come to expect from the press - and many blogs. This seem appropriate.

Halfway There: Lots of first black presidents

Kids Prefer Cheese: Things to do in Denver when you're dead.

The Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat: For Memorial Day -- a book about America's finest hour, and a gauge of how badly America's moral standing has been soiled by the Bush administration. The man who prosecuted Charles Manson would like to do the same for King George II. And a new book argues that the problem with conservative foreign policy isn' the "foreign policy" part -- it's the "conservative" part.