I don't know if you care to know but this from the streets of Tehran

...pick it up from a NYT column by ROGER COHEN
Here is part of the story if you are interested in more click this link

“Here is my country,” a young woman said to me, voice breaking. “This is a coup. I could have worked in Europe but I came back for my people.” And she, too, sobbed.

“Don’t cry, be brave,” a man admonished her.

He was from the Interior Ministry. He showed his ID card. He said he’d worked there 30 years. He said he hadn’t been allowed in; nor had most other employees. He said the votes never got counted. He said numbers just got affixed to each candidate.

Another response to a question from The Wire HBO group moderator! SO MUCH FUN.

Jim King asked this in one of his posts and I answered his question or I hope I did.



Why does everyone else think they have to explain everything?

In short, management colliding with the fear of not making substantial enough Profit.
Lots of media based industries have been moving more and more towards the "sure" thing as opposed to getting back to the basics of Write a good song, Write a good story, put on a powerful show etc..

Those basics have been eschewed and power has been consolidated to the managers who are responsible for growing profit. As if, a modest gain in profits was a bad thing, but these people answer to a higher power. Jackass shareholders who know nothing about music, newspapers, TV or whatever. (just think of Gus Haynes asking the higher ups about why there were cuts to the newsroom when the company was still profitable...because they wanted more profit...honestly not always the case but many times it is the case)

I'm not saying they shouldn't be concerned about profits but taking all the risk out of writing a piece whether it be a song, a newspaper piece, a movie or a TV show means that good and great writers have to battle not only the demons of writing but also the guys in the room who don't get it. Artistic vision be damned.

The challenge should be telling the story and not fighting with the suits whose sole concern is the bottom line. That ironically turns them into instant experts and gets their brains going and pretty soon they're the ones in charge and we get NCIS, Britney Spears, an expanded section in the paper in showcasing anything but actual news. Its a brave new world or not.

It is as if they got into this type of business without regard that their "product" was more than just a basic necessity in life. We need good reporting to be informed in our democracy so that we can make decisions at the polls. Music is necessary to people in that said democracy in order to be entertained, comforted, released or whatever people get, either indivually or communally, by listening. TV can be entertainment on some basic level and that is pretty much what it has become lately, but it also can be educating. However, I'm guessing I'm not going to learn much about crime and life in Miami by watching CSI Miami.

There is the other way in which artists have the tools and resources/money to tell their story. KUDOS to HBO, who with the exception of Episode 1 Season 1 of The Wire, have allowed writers, actors and producers to tell intriguing stories that educate. (David Simon knows what scene I'm referring to...aka flashback to witness on the stand while witness lies dead in the courtyard).

Maybe I have no clue. Either way.

jo nathan dudley

Newspapers and Such.

HBO is awesome.

HELLO KITTIES!
This is my response to Jim King who runs The Wire HBO group @ Yahoo.

Doesn't anyone have an opinion about David Simon's recent TV appearances and speeches? Seems like his "Wire" street cred is taking him into the realm of national spokesperson about the war on drugs and the decline of journalism.

Jim

Jim,
Great observation about David Simon. This is exactly what is needed at this time. I have watched every single speech. However, I don't believe there are that many people out there (as opposed to those who agree with Simon) that actually understand what he is trying to say in regard to content. Sure, as a consumer it is great that Huffingtonpost.com is a clearing house for some good reporting. However, what happens when that free content dries up all of sudden because those providing the content (aka newspapers), go out of business or try to do "more with less". Which as Simon puts it, is really "less with less".

Another claim that Simon makes is that bloggers really don't cover the details and "game" of city hall even if they were to show up at the municipal meetings. Even if they were there for the "Kabuki Dance", what will that tell the so called Blogger-Citizen journalist if that person did not know the what was happening behind the curtain? A paid professional reporter learns his or her beat, makes contacts and works with his or her editor to pull together good pieces of journalism. Some days, as Simon points out, this means working 14 or 15 hours and during those long days some of the best information is gathered while sharing a beer with a municipal worker i.e. a cop, a middle manager or a low rung bureaucrat.

Being a reporter is actually one of the most important roles in a democracy. People should be trained for this job in a 4 year institution or through a equally long term working under the tutelage of a veteran reporter or possibly both. Either way, without pay and resources, no one is going to cover city hall as good as WE need them too cover in order for our democracy to function and for us to be thoroughly informed.

Good topic Jim. Thanks for bringing it up.

In TheWireHBO@yahoogroups.com

Jon Ziegler is a fucking moron. Here is proof. However, Contessa needs to answer his ridiculous charges which are not an example of conservative thought but rather conservative ignorance. Yes Virginia, there are people with thoughts who are conservative just not this guy.

FUCK WALMART!

MSNBC's Contessa Brewer on Wednesday hosted John Ziegler, documentary filmmaker and professional Sarah Palin-supporter, for another one of those vertiginous interviews that have become Ziegler's stock in trade. Serving as the news peg for this one was a comedy bit from David Letterman that made fun of Sarah Palin, at times rather viciously. Of course, the problem with interviewing John Ziegler about anything, is that pretty soon, the subject of conversation becomes John Ziegler.

And this interview was no different. Basically, it's five minutes of Contessa Brewer attempting to ask questions and Ziegler responding with tangentially-related anti-MSNBC agitprop. Ziegler led off the interview by referring to MSNBC as "Barack Obama's official network," grousing about how the topic of the interview wasn't Keith Olbermann, answering questions glancingly and with subtle digs, and, OF COURSE, making sure to plug his website and movie. Brewer played her part by being miffed and appalled right up until the moment where she calls a halt to the discussion and asks for Ziegler's mike to be cut.

One of the substantive points that Brewer brings up is the fact that a new Gallup poll indicates that Palin doesn't rate among self-identified Republicans as any sort of party leader. Ziegler blamed MSNBC for that: "You find this surprising or shocking that because you and the media portray Republicans as old white men, that the public perceives Republicans as old white men?" Yes. The perception that the GOP was filled with old, white men was invented by the media, in 2009, to hurt Sarah Palin's electoral chances. Truly, a cunning bit of subterfuge.

I tend to think that public favor of Palin has diminished because every time someone says something about her that should simply be beneath her, like a late night host's Top Ten List, Palin turns it into a national opera of personal outrage. She doesn't seem to understand that she'd be better off ignoring it. Sometimes, you just have to act like the small stuff doesn't affect you. And, hey, maybe you should avoid having a guy who's trying to earn a living selling you as a documentary film subject as your chief spokesman in the press. But if Ziegler is going to step up and fight those battles for you, there's even less of a reason to become personally invested. Sarah Palin should let the small people sweat the small stuff, instead of constantly retreating behind them.

Naturally, the whole exchange sort of loses its impact when you understand that there is no way that MSNBC could have expected this interview to turn out any differently, given Ziegler's prior performances. I suppose Brewer should be commended for pretending to be surprised at Ziegler's behavior so convincingly.

[WATCH]

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

BIG THANKS TO THE WASHINGTON POST for letting me steal this from their site and post it on my blog.
READ IT ON THE POST PAGE IF YOU LIKE
This is a great read. Not too long but long on the truth. Fuck Walmart. Fuck the Communist Party of China.

Beijing's Favorite Capitalists

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Marx railed against "the idiocy of rural life," by which he meant its isolation and its lack of social differentiation, but 20 years ago, it was that very "idiocy" on which the Chinese Communist Party depended to maintain its hold on power. Once Deng Xiaoping decided to suppress the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square by force, the challenge for the Chinese leadership was to find army units that wouldn't shy from shooting unarmed Chinese students.

Deng's henchmen quickly despaired of finding such soldiers in the cities; they had been contaminated by too much contact with the very kinds of people they'd be called upon to kill. The military units that rolled into Beijing 20 years ago today came chiefly from the sticks. Isolated by geography and indoctrination from the liberalism flowing through Chinese cities and packed into Tiananmen Square, they were the perfect shock troops for Deng's murderous reassertion of authoritarian power.

Two decades later, however, the troops who pulled the triggers have reason to wonder who won and who lost in the class-and-culture war in which Tiananmen was but the bloodiest battle. Today, the Communist Party has proven itself, in all but one particular, a friend to the urbanites and professionals who now prosper in China's cities -- socioeconomically, the very kinds of people it gunned down in Tiananmen Square. All it asks of them in return is that they not actively seek democratic rights. For their part, the hundreds of millions of beneficiaries of China's new prosperity have kept up their end of that bargain. Knowing that they'd face the brute wrath of the party and state if they did, they've made an understandable decision.

In the countryside, where hundreds of millions of Chinese still reside, the benefits of the nation's economic miracle are far harder to detect. For many, the backbreaking drudgery of peasant life persists as it has for centuries. Some Sinologists believe that one reason the urban Chinese haven't demanded more rights is their fear that in a democratic China, they'd be outvoted by a peasantry that would demand a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth.

According to the nostrums of Reagan Age America, the current Chinese system -- in equal measure capitalist and authoritarian -- cannot actually exist. Capitalism spread democracy, we were told ad nauseam by a steady stream of conservative hacks, free-trade apologists, government officials and American companies doing business in China. Given enough Starbuckses and McDonald's, provided with sufficient consumer choice, China would surely become a democracy.

And yet, it hasn't. And this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has traveled there to assure its government that America won't permit China's massive investment in our government's notes to diminish in value, even if that means we have to cut back on needed public programs.

In explaining China's rise and America's decline, historians may well note that capitalism -- American capitalism, anyway -- far from spreading democracy, actually has played a key role in transforming China into an authoritarian superpower. The transfer of manufacturing from the United States to China -- driven by the rise of mega-retailers such as Wal-Mart that have been able to enforce a regime of low wages all along their global supply chains -- has diminished our middle class and expanded theirs. American companies such as Wal-Mart have not been deterred in the slightest by China's authoritarian practices; indeed, before China enacted a law that infinitesimally increased workers' rights last year, the American chambers of commerce in China joined with communist hard-liners in opposing the statute.

The attraction of authoritarian regimes to America's more authoritarian business executives is long established, if seldom noted. Henry Ford, who routinely spied on and abused his employees until the United Auto Workers came along, built and owned factories in Stalin's Soviet Union. Wal-Mart, which used to lock its night-shift stock clerks and janitors inside a number of its stores until the morning managers arrived, prefers production in Guangdong to manufacturing in the Midwest. Indeed, the director of purchasing for Wal-Mart is based in China.

As historian Nelson Lichtenstein and others have documented, Wal-Mart inspires in its managers an almost fanatical allegiance to the company's cause. In Wal-Mart world, the provincialism (if not "idiocy") of rural life is fused with a brilliance in the art of low-cost, low-wage logistics to create a company that is both authoritarian in its inner workings and a friend of authoritarian regimes abroad. The butchers of Beijing could not have found any more compatible capitalists.