1. Thank goodness:
“Islam-Baiting Doesn’t Work
But as the 2012 campaign ramps up along with the anti-Muslim rhetoric machine, a look back at 2010 turns out to offer quite an unexpected story about the American electorate. In fact, with rare exceptions, “Islam-bashing” proved a strikingly poor campaign tactic. In state after state, candidates who focused on illusory Muslim “threats,” tied ordinary American Muslims to terrorists and radicals, or characterized mosques as halls of triumph (and prayer in them as indoctrination) went down to defeat.
Far from winning votes, it could be argued that “Muslim-bashing” alienated large swaths of the electorate — even as it hardened an already hard core on the right.”
http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2011/07/17/islam-baiting-doesnt-work/
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/07/nobel-prize-winning-economist-paul.html
3. “Lastly, here’s a blurb from another article in The Nation titled “Sky Falls on Rupert Murdoch”:
“…widening revelations of the phone-hacking scandal show, News Corporation is not an ordinary commercial enterprise. Through his journalists and gossip columnists and the network of former and current police officers and law enforcement officials on his payroll, Rupert Murdoch has been operating what amounts to a private intelligence service. And the threat of personal exposure—on the front page of the Sun or Page Six in the Post—gives News Corporation a kind of leverage over inquisitive regulators or troublesome politicians wielded by no other company on earth.
English already has the expression “para-state” to describe the kind of shadowy forces that operate beneath and behind legitimate authority. Is it really unreasonable to suggest that in News Corporation, Fox, News International, Sky and the rest of Murdoch’s empire, we are witnessing the exposure of the para-corporation?” (“Sky Falls on Rupert Murdoch”, D.D. Guttenplan, The Nation)
Repeat: “Rupert Murdoch has been operating what amounts to a private intelligence service.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28609.htm
