Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

As usual with Fox, all the news that doesn’t fit their agenda, they suppress. It is sort of heartening, though: Apparently they don’t feel able to give him token coverage and count on his staying marginalized. Instead, people like what he says and want to hear more - and the danger is that other candidates will start saying the same things, and then what will happen?

This from http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_anthony__071229_fox_news_fascism__96_r.htm

Fox News Fascism – Ron Paul Excluded From Debates

by Anthony Wade

December 29, 2007

Fox News has made its bones off of being a fake news agency. Everyone knows it. While it worked for several years the shine has begun to diminish and the people are waking up to the real damage it can do to mainstream media. Granted, most mainstream media is really no better than Fox News, as they are all corporately controlled by companies that are in bed with the war machine. MSNBC is learning the lessons now as such obviously biased hosts such as Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson have failed miserably next to the more honest Keith Olbermann. America is slowly coming around to the notion that news should actually be fundamentally fair. Fox of course has been notoriously unfair and imbalanced for years now. Thus it should come as no surprise that Fox News has decided to once again try to subvert the democratic process by excluding Dr. Ron Paul from their upcoming GOP debate in New Hampshire.

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From Forbes.com: http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/12/28/apple-movie-rental-tech-media-cx_bc_1228apple.html

Will The iPod Kill Blockbuster?
Brian Caulfield

Burlingame, Calif. -

Forget the cavernous big box stores that laid waste to the retail landscape a decade ago. Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs’ tiny iPod has turned his company into a category killer for the digital era–first wiping out music stores and now, potentially, the corner video store.

Starting in mid-January, the Cupertino, Calif., computer and gadget maker will take on Blockbuster (nyse: BBI - news - people ) and Netflix (nasdaq: NFLX - news - people ) by renting movies from Fox on its iTunes digital media store, according to a report first published in the Financial Times earlier this week.

While older models of the iPod–and its low-end iPod Shuffle–can’t play digital video, the gadgets now have a proven record of disruption, with customers bypassing record stores to tap into illegal distribution networks, along with Apple’s (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) iTunes music store, to fill the up their devices.

The result: Sales of CDs fell more than 30% to 614.9 million units last year from a peak of 881.9 million in 2000, according to the Recording Industry Association. Once sprawling chains, such as Tower Records, have shuttered.

Apple, however, isn’t the first major tech company to offer digital video rentals. Amazon rents movies to users of PCs and TiVos via its Unbox service. Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) is even offering digital movie rentals on its XBox 360 game console. Neither company, however, poses the same threat to DVD rental companies as Apple, which has an installed base of more than 100 million digital media devices that consumers carry in their pockets.

Since Apple first began offering video content in its store two years ago, Jobs has expanded the company’s video offerings. The weak link: the AppleTV set-top box effort. Some industry observers estimate that the device has sold fewer than 1 million units since it went on sale earlier this year, so video rentals could surely revive the effort.

Despite Apple’s movie rental push, Blockbuster and Netflix won’t disappear tomorrow. They likely will continue to slug it out in the business of renting digital video discs. Blockbuster has moved to counter the threat from Netflix, which mails movies to customers who queue up their orders online, with a Web-based service of its own. Netflix, meanwhile, allows customers to rent digital movies for their PCs.

Still, their days might be numbered: The iPod has killed before. It will kill again.

Shares of Netflix sagged 2.19% to $26.85 in Friday trading. Shares of Blockbuster fell 1.03% to $3.86. Apple rose 0.40% to $199.37.

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Mellen-Thomas Benedict’s - Near Death Experience

Mellen-Thomas Benedict Writes:

In 1982 I died from terminal cancer. The condition I had was inoperable,and any kind of chemotherapy they could give me would just have made me more of a vegetable. I was given six to eight months to live. I had been an information freak in the1970’s, and I had become increasingly despondent over the nuclear crisis, the ecology crisis, and so forth. So, since I did not have a spiritual basis, I began to believe that nature had made a mistake, and that we were probably a cancerous organism on the planet. I saw no way that we could get out from all the problems we had created for ourselves and the planet. I perceived all humans as cancer, and that is what I got. That is what killed me. Be careful what your world view is. It can feed back on you, especially if it is a negative world view. I had a seriously negative one. That is what led me into my death. I tried all sorts of alternative healing methods, but nothing helped.

So I determined that this was really just between me and God. I had never really faced God before, or even dealt with God. I was not into any kind of spirituality at the time, but I began a journey into learning about spirituality and alterna¬tive healing. I set out to do all the reading I could and bone up on the subject, because I did not want to be surprised on the other side. So I started reading on various religions and philosophies. They were all very interesting, and gave hope that there was something on the other side. I ended up in hospice care.

I remember waking up one morning at home about 4:30 AM, and I just knew that this was it. This was the day I was going to die. So I called a few friends and said goodbye. I woke up my hospice caretaker and told her. I had a private agreement with her that she would leave my dead body alone for six hours, since I had read that all kinds of interesting things happen when you die. I went back to sleep. The next thing I remember is the beginning of a typical near death experience. Suddenly I was fully aware and I was standing up, but my body was in the bed. There was this darkness around me. Being out of my body was even more vivid than ordinary experience. It was so vivid that I could see every room in the house, I could see the top of the house, I could see around the house, I could see under the house.

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A series of reports on Ron Paul from OpEdNews http://www.opednews.com

Iowa Poll: Ron Paul in Dead Heat With Giuliani

In its latest Iowa poll, American Research Group reports that dark horse candidate Ron Paul has roared to a statistical dead heat with Rudi Giuliani, one of the front-runner GOP candidates.

Paul jumped 150% ahead from 4% to 10%, which, with a 4% margin of error for the poll, put him in a statistical dead heat with Rudi Giuliani, who pulled 14% in the poll.

Paul, technically, with that 4% margin of error was within range of John McCain, as well, who pulled 17% in the poll.

Mitt Romney pulled 21% and Mike Huckabee pulled 23%.

The GOP presidential primary in Iowa is seeing jumps and drops in polls that are all over the place. With Iowa’s unique caucus system, Ron Paul’s incredibly passionate supporters may make the difference for Paul, giving him a showing that catapults him into New Hampshire with a bump that could force the mainstream media to stop treating him like a kook and start treating him like a serious contender– exactly as they’ve done with Mike Huckabee.

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1968 was a tragic year, perhaps the culmination of the cycle of violence that had gone into high gear on November 22, 1963. We were reminded again that those who owned America were not about to cede power to the people who merely lived there.

But how well I remember sitting in my parents’ house, watching that broadcast from outer space!

Christmas from Outer Space
December 21, 2007
By John W. Whitehead

It had been a tumultuous year. The North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive, attacking garrisons and invading the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; and a rebellious decade reached its climax in 1968, as disenchanted citizens from Paris to Chicago took to the streets in revolt.

Marching in Mexico City, demonstrators were shot and many killed. Rioters turned British and West German universities into communes. They felled Italian and Belgian premieres and forced concessions from Yugoslav dictator Josip Titó. And students in Paris brought President Charles de Galle’s Fifth Republic to its knees.

In the U.S., the cataclysm came in August, when 10,000 demonstrators—most of them truculent members of the emerging Baby Boomer generation—descended upon the Democratic Party’s National Convention in Chicago. Given carte blanche by Mayor Richard Daley, Chicago’s police beat not only rock-throwing demonstrators but passersby, journalists and convention volunteers. In the fall, frightened voters narrowly elected Richard Nixon—a law and order Republican who claimed to have a “secret plan” to end the war.

The turmoil of 1968 even reached into outer space. On December 21, the Apollo 8 spaceship blasted its way through the earth’s atmosphere to begin the first U.S. mission to orbit the moon—a mission that would set the stage for the first moon landing less than a year later. On board were astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders. By Christmas Eve, the Apollo 8 had begun to orbit the moon.

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Plain truth, not exaggerated even slightly. From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/opinion/22herbert.html?ex=1198990800&en=8c59791594bbdaac&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Nightmare Before Christmas

Op-Ed Columnist

By BOB HERBERT
Published: December 22, 2007

Christmastime is bonus time on Wall Street, and the Gucci set has been blessed with another record harvest.

Forget the turbulence in the financial markets and the subprime debacle. Forget the dark clouds of a possible recession. Bloomberg News tells us that the top securities firms are handing out nearly $38 billion in seasonal bonuses, the highest total ever.

But there’s a reason to temper the celebration, if only out of respect for an old friend who’s not doing too well. Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar, the American dream is on life-support.

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An amazingly insightful quote from Vladimir Putin, passed on by a friend. Can anyone in D.C., the heart of the Empire, understand that what Putin is saying here is merely straight description, that is, fact?????

“I’ll be frank with you. In the past decade or so, maybe in the last
50 years, the idea that the United States is a unique nation seems to
have taken root in the U.S. public psyche. It’s perhaps not an
absolutely groundless notion. It’s a historical phenomenon that in
250 years, a nation could move from a colony into the most prosperous
nation of the world and the leader of the world. However, as a rule,
leaders do not have rights; they mostly have commitments and
obligations. When they come to think that they have rights, they tend
to lose their position and authority.”

V. Putin

I posted “Pope Benedict Releases Bigoted Encyclical Vilifying Atheism” by Kelly O’Connor mainly to demonstrate the arrogant cock-sureness with which liberals dismiss religion. For a more enlightened, more knowledgeable reaction, conside this from my friend Robert Clarke. Robert is author of The Four gold Keys: Dreams, Transformation of the Soul, and the Western Mystery Tradition and An Order Outside Time: A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ.

“Dear Frank

“Thanks for the message, I hadn’t seen this. But this shows yet again the vast importance of the discoveries of Jung, yet also how little they have got across to established religion, and to mankind in general. In other words, though much of the teachings of religion may not be literally true as physical facts, including the nativity, they are nevertheless true as eternal symbolism of the spirit through the unconscious. So the birth of Christ actually symbolises the birth of the cosmic Self in the man Jesus, though from the view of God it is nevertheless His incarnation as the divine Son.

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I’m no fan of the Pope, and I recognize that the Catholic Church has serious institutional problems. That said, however, I also recognize that the attitude of many Americans, and American liberals most of all, toward Catholicism as a religion and the Catholic Church as an institution, is one of long-standing bigotry. And in recent decades it has broadened to become anti-religion.

[Gasp!] Can liberals be guilty of bigotry! You bet your life they can, and are. And it is this anti-religious bigotry that has left them defenseless against the far right wing, because the right has been able to mobilize support among Christians. All they need to do is quote liberal atheism and it tells church-goers who their enemies are. (Unfortunately it does not also tell them that they can’t necessarily trust their “friends.”)

Here’s an example from the far left OpEdNews http://www.opednews.com. Note the contemptuous and dismissive tone throughout, as though the encyclical couldn’t possibly be saying anything worth listening to. The author, BTW is described as follows:

Kelly O’Connor of the Rational Response Squad, co-creators of the infamous Blasphemy Challenge, will be writing to address theist talking heads in the media. Kelly is a psychology major, co-host of the Rational Response Squad Radio show, and has been featured on ABC’s Nightline twice, along with other media sources.

Pope Benedict Releases Bigoted Encyclical Vilifying Atheism

by Kelly O’Connor

The Catholic Church has officially ended their [sic] campaign to improve the public image of the Church with the latest papal encyclical, Spe Salvi, which means “saved by hope” for the Latin fans out there. The Catholic Church’s history is littered with crimes against humanity, and Pope Benedict XVI seems to desire the return to pre-Vatican II Catholicism. This was a concern voiced by many at the time that the former Joseph Ratzinger was canonized to this position. The former pope, John Paul II, had made great strides in the modernization of the Church, and many were reluctant to elect somebody who would reverse that trend. Despite John Paul’s dogmatic adherence to the sexual proscriptions of Catholicism, he at least officially accepted evolution, admitted Protestants into heaven, and eliminated limbo. (Where was that place anyway? I may have been there once…) Pope Benedict is turning out exactly as predicted.

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This is only a straw in the wind, but when I first saw John Edwards nearly four years ago I thought, `this is the guy who’s going to be president.’ He didn’t make it in 2004, but this time i would not be surprised in the slightest if he makes it. I can’t see either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama going the distance.

This is FWIT. I don’t do a lot of political horse-race stories, as too many of them don’t do anything more than repeat the latest received wisdom in the political-reporting echo chamber. I put this in just in case i can later say “you saw it here first.” From Southern Political Report http://www.southernpoliticalreport.com/storylink_1218_89.aspx

Edwards takes lead in InsiderAdvantage Iowa poll
By Tom Baxter
Southern Political Report

December 18, 2007 —

John Edwards has leapfrogged over his rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and leads the Democratic field in Iowa, according to the latest InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion poll. In the Republican caucus race, Mike Huckabee continues to hold a narrow lead over Mitt Romney.

The race among the three top Democrats is extremely close, with the potential for any of them to finish first – or third.

Edwards leads with 30 percent in a poll of Democratic voters who said they intend to participate in the Jan. 3 presidential caucuses, followed by Clinton with 26 percent and Obama with 24 percent. When the sample was narrowed to the most likely caucus-goers, based on several questions, Obama leads Edwards by less than a percentage point with 27 percent, with Clinton in third place at 24 percent.

Edwards holds a significant advantage, however, among a group who could be key to the first contest of the presidential year: those who say their first choice is someone other than the top three. Under Iowa Democratic Party rules, candidates who poll less than 15 percent in the first vote at each caucus around the state are eliminated, and their supporters get a second chance to vote for another candidate.

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