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Tag: "president"

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By Erich Vieth on September 21st, 2009

George W. Bush has a chuckle that he was actually president.

The Onion reports that George W. Bush has been having a chuckle or two thinking that he was President for eight years:

Witnesses said the former president’s chuckling grew even stronger as it dawned on him that, for eight straight years beginning in January 2001, he had the power to nominate executive and judicial officers to the federal government, as well as grant unlimited presidential pardons and reprieves if he so desired.

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By Erich Vieth on February 06th, 2009

Religion in the White House: a history

Richard Balmer is a historian of religion. On Jon Stewart’s show, he surveyed the relationship between religion and the Presidency since John F. Kennedy:


Entertainment • Humor
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61 degrees
By Erich Vieth on February 04th, 2009

61 degrees

My family is keeping our thermostat at 61 degrees this winter. We decided to bring it down from our traditional 65 degrees in order to save energy. [Note: Late at night at my house, the temperature automatically drops down to 55]. I’ve put a thermometer in various rooms to check the accuracy of the thermostat. The actual daytime temperature ranges from 59 to 62 in the various rooms. When we are all gone for the day, we manually set the temperature down to 55.

When I mention “61 degrees” to people, most of them are surprised; some of them are aghast. Apparently, at least among Americans, 61 degrees is an usually “cold” temperature for the interior of a house in the winter. Over the past couple of weeks, I even heard from several people who keep their thermostats above 70. When you browse the Internet, you will find numerous “authorities” advising you to set the thermostat down to 65 to save energy (e.g., here). Here’s an informal survey of quite a few folks.

Apparently, even our new energy-conscious President likes it toasty indoors.

Energy • Environment
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By Erich Vieth on January 19th, 2009

The Onion described the 8 years of Bush almost perfectly in January, 2001

I caught the following on Reddit.com, and you’ll need to read this for yourself to really appreciate it. The Onion described the Bush Presidency extremely well in a satirical article published on January 17, 2001, well before Bush actually started doing most of his damage.

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By Erich Vieth on January 16th, 2009

Ten lessons we must learn from the Bush Presidency

In the Washington Post, Bob Woodward has written an excellent summary of the ten lessons we have hopefully learned from the Bush Presidency.    The article is titled “10 Take Aways From the Bush Years.” Here are the titles to these ten lessons, which Woodward carefully illustrates throughout his article:
1. Presidents set the tone. Don’t [...]

Politics • Psychology Cognition
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By Erich Vieth on November 05th, 2008

Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job

“Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”
This is the title The Onion has given to its article welcoming Barack Obama to his new job.  It’s all tongue in cheek, of course.
On a more serious note, I breathe a sigh of relief tonight.  It feels like the nightmare is over and we can now start dealing with [...]

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By Erich Vieth on October 16th, 2008

Sarah Palin as President

Someone is having quite a bit of fun at Sarah Palin’s expense.   Make sure you click around when you visit this site. Especially the red phone.
She’s got it coming, of course, since “Joe the Plumber” has already given more interviews than Palin.
Here’s another reason she has it coming:
The office of the Republican vice-presidential [...]

Humor • Politics
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By Erich Vieth on July 25th, 2008

John McCain shows the media that access comes with a price

Check out this video:  McCain is pointedly reminding the Wall Street Journal that media access isn’t free.  If you don’t write nice things about McCain, you might not get any story at all.
The accompanying article and video provide both the incident and the motive.   If reporter Elizabeth Holmes shapes up, maybe she can still get [...]

American Culture • Media • Politics
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By Erich Vieth on July 17th, 2008

The President’s Abuse of Power redux

Glenn Greenwald hits the nail on the head again:
Of all the constitutionally threatening and extremist powers the Bush administration has asserted over the last seven years, the most radical — and the most dangerous — has been its claim that the President has the power to arrest U.S. citizens and legal residents [...]

Corruption • Politics • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on July 06th, 2008

Let’s elect one of the Guantanamo prisoners as the next President of the United States

Why would we elect one of the prisoners at Guantanamo as the next President of the United States? Well, the logic is becoming quite clear to anyone who has followed the corporate news media for the past few days. Prisoners at Guantanamo have that special ingredient that John McCain has that makes him [...]

Military • Politics • Psychology Cognition • War
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By Erich Vieth on June 18th, 2008

Ralph Nader discusses Barack Obama

Amy Goodman recently interviewed Ralph Nader at DemocracyNow.  Nader was not sold on Obama:
Barack Obama really now has to be examined very carefully. He has worn out the word “change.” We now want to know what change is involved. And it’s quite clear that he is a corporate candidate from A to Z. [...]

American Culture • Politics
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By Erich Vieth on June 11th, 2008

“War Made Easy” presents us with the time-tested recipe for going to war

In 2006, Norman Solomon wrote War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. His book detailed the information tactics the American government uses to launch wars.

War Made Easy has been such an influential book that it has now been made into a movie of the same name. You can view it here or you can order a copy of the DVD here.

I was able to attend a viewing of “War Made Easy” last Saturday night at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis (NCMR2008). This crisply edited movie was narrated by Sean Penn. Much of what keeps this movie engaging are the dozens of carefully chosen news media clips generated during various American wars for the past 50 years, including large numbers of videos clips from the Vietnam war and the Iraq occupation. The magic of “War Made Easy” is that the directors carefully edited and arranged these clips to show us that nothing much has really changed: If an American president has decided that he wants to go to war, the watchdog American media is likely to become a lapdog and we will inevitably go to war.

Following the screening of “War Made Easy,” I attended a discussion of the movie led by media critic Norman Solomon and the co-director and producer of the movie, Loretta Alper. The following morning, Ms. Alper granted me the opportunity to interview her further regarding the making of “War Made Easy.”

Whenever we Americans go to war, we get there through a well-documented series of stages. As I watched “War Made Easy,” I saw better than ever that these stages are entirely predictable in the context of America’s warmongering ways.

Perhaps this characterization of America sounds too shrill, but just look around. The evidence is everywhere that war is a sport in America just as sports are warlike. Our TV shows and movies overflow with violence as a first-rate method of dealing with conflict. The toys we foist on our boys extol violence as the most obvious way of settling disputes. We challenge each other with statements like “support the troops,” no matter what those troops are doing (and see here ). We are all too ready to invoke the word “war,” because that word triggers a ready-made conceptual frame for freely and guiltlessly expressing ourselves with bullets, bombs and blood. In America, this frame of war is such an incredibly effective filter that we proceed to consider only the “benefits” of war and we ignore the massive damages inflicted on both war-zone civilians and upon millions of Americans (and see here).

American Culture • Bigotry • Iraq • Media • Military • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Technology • The Middle East • Uncategorized • Video by DI • Videos • War • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on May 15th, 2008

Now I get it! We’re all back in high school.

There has been lots of news lately that John Edwards has endorsed Barack Obama. I realize that John Edwards was a United States Senator and that he is highly accomplished, but it puzzles me why anyone should care so much about what Edwards (or any other individual) thinks regarding the presidential campaign. After [...]

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