Don’s Random Thoughts

I’m not really a Democrat but I am anti Republican. I believe in Democracy and in our Constitution. I wish we could rid ourselves of this two party system, or at least these two parties. It would be nice if there were more of a difference on the honesty and doing the peoples work side. The main reason I am anti elephants is because in addition to doing neither of those, they don’t believe in democracy at all.

I changed from Independent 10-15 years ago when it was apparent we needed to rid ourselves of the Republican infestation and its threat to any remaining freedom in this country.

The choice of parties isn’t great because I haven’t found a party that uses reason as their core policy. I’m a realist and have to remain a “registered’ Democrat for now. Damn!

While this is for an apparently different reason, here is a report of the loss of some real TV journalists. In this case apparently to save money at the expense of longtime, more experienced and more expensive staff. At least it may not be just to provide the Wrong Wing views since this blogger was just hired at the same place and apparently still says her mind.

Why the rush to approve Barack, the republican choice of an opponent to McCain? Why not let the primary voters complete their vote. Even last night, the evening before the final primary voting, the republican media is manipulating their corporate news media saying Hillary had conceded when it wasn’t true and had no basis in fact.

But, it looks like Barack will probably get the nomination. Too bad, he has much less a chance to win than does Hillary. My guess is a 5% difference. Assuming a probable 60% vote if Hillary were the nominee and my belief that the Republicans still have control of possibly 5% of the vote through fraud and manipulation of voting machines that makes the results too close to call and we may easily end up with another unwanted, unelected Republican as our president I’m a bit worried. I do hope that if Barack is chosen that he is smart enough to recognize this danger and select Hillary as his running mate.

I hope that we never have another primary like this one and finally do the primary vote correctly and have all states vote at the same time and date. It’s the only honest way to do it. If this were a normal year, California would have been having their primary vote today, as well, meaning that their vote, the most populous state in the nation had nothing to say about the selection of our president. That is extremely wrong!

I have to wonder why Barack did best in the red states, open primary states and caucus states all more easily manipulated by those damn  Republicans.

Leslie Griffith, was a local real journalist. Leslie was an award winning anchor woman on Channel 2, the now local FOX affiliate. She worked there for 20 years, the last 10 years as an anchor. She started there back before the days of the FOX network and back when Channel 2 had the best news department and team in the San Francisco Bay Area. When they became a FOX affiliate I started to watch another station’s news, Channel 4. In the beginning, the news on Channel 2 seemed the same but the FOX influence then moved in. I was recently wondering why Leslie was suddenly gone a year or two ago and Goggled her and learned a little more about what happened. As it turns out she was fired. As far back as 2003 when Bush twisted events such that Osama became Saddam and Afghanistan became Iraq she was acting like a journalist, looking at what happened, asking questions and reporting. Evidently she recognized the problem with Bush on the day of his 2003 State Of The Nation speech and wanted to discuss it on the newscast. For fear of being fired, nobody else there was interested. Evidently she had a long term contract because she didn’t leave until mid 2006 and either won a law suit against the station or they bought out here contract but she never returned. In reading about the events as she describes them on her website, it is a perfect description of what is wrong with the media now that it is corporate based rather than locally owned. Hopefully, some day, we’ll pass some realistic laws to protect the Fourth Estate and not allow multiple ownership nor network control of stations and other local news media. If not, we’re in very serious trouble and the future of our freedom is in extreme danger. We’re living in the days of the chain store media and need to move back toward the farmers market media.

Now as to the station I changed to, Channel 4. They had a good independent news group. They evidently were not responding appropriately to the Wrong Wing News according to NBC. NBC dropped their affiliation and bought a station in San Jose, a supposedly different TV market. NBC bought some votes at the FCC, as well and moved San Jose to San Francisco and Channel 11 became the local NBC affiliate with a bunch of newly hired talking faces as the reporting staff. Too bad. Channel 4 remained mostly independent but the big bucks were gone and the news quality has been slipping because of staff reductions. Too bad!

Another example. Last week, all three major network news anchors, Brian Williams (NBC), Katie Couric (CBS) and Charles Gibson (ABC) were on the Today show. They were asked how they thought the news media did covering the Iraq war. Williams and Gibson thought they did well. Only Couric was bold enough to say that the news media did a terrible job and failed to ask any questions. When Couric came to CBS when Dan Rather was fired, I thought it was the end of real journalism at CBS. While they still did not ask the questions, at least she recognizes that they didn’t. I wonder how much longer Couric will be with CBS?

Finding honest news and real journalists has become very difficult.