Chickens, Roost?

[No Elephants]

Keller, the smarmily, snarky, Massachusetts Republican who moderated the first Warren Brown debate, had on his show this morning a representative of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.

Clearly, Keller had grasped, despite the Republican love of stereotypes and victimhood, that it is not always Valentine's Day anymore in the aging love affair between Democrats and union management. And the little turd wanted to make sure union members in Massachusetts were getting that message before election day.

Now, this guy gets a much larger megaphone than he deserves because (1) he has his own show; (2) he is considered the political commentator for his station, so he shows up as an "expert" on other shows; and (3) he seems a favorite of Emily Rooney, who has two tv shows on PBS tv and a radio show, for no apparent reason other than she is Andy Rooney's conservative offspring. So, he gets to stir pots on his own show, then amplify what he did on his own show via the many other outlets that give him air time.

So, this morning, he had on this AFl-CIO guy and he was grilling up about why unions seemed to be pulling back from their "savior," the Democratic Party. (Yes, that is how he talks.)

Sadly, but not surprisingly: The union rep pointed out that unions had been very loyal to Democrats but have been finding more and more that, when they reach out to Democrats when unions are in need, no one seems to be there for them. So, they are going more inward this election.

Rather than working for the Massachusetts Democratic Party this time, the union is educating their members on the records and positions of all candidates.

He also mentioned "working families" again and again, but without also mentionining the Working Families Party. www.workingfamiliesparty.org.

As I understand the plan of the Working Families Party, it will not be running its own candidates....yet. It will endorse candidates running on the tickets of other political parties.

Where the Working Families Party is on the ballot, it will ask its supporters to vote for, say, President Obama, but on the Working Families ticket, as opposed to the Democratic ticket. The idea is that this will bring home to politicians where their votes are coming from and, hopefully, make them more responsibe to working families, as opposed to corporations.

In any event, this show seems to me to be a continuation of Trumka's warning that the loyalty of unions belongs to the politicians who help workers and not to any one political party.

[Enthusiast]

1. Today's Democratic Party

has morphed into yesterday's Republican Party.

The President actually praises "Republican ideas". And he even boasts about embracing Republican ideas as if that makes him, somehow, reasonable and pragmatic. I guess the President missed the memo, "The Republican Party is devoid of ideas save for bad ones."

Their ideas were bad in 1980 and are even worse today. The labor movement and the New Deal are the very foundation of the Democratic Party. Any lack of loyalty toward labor can't be passed off as a little mistake or misunderstanding.

I suspect Keller and Rooney are your run of the mill right wing propagandists. Their brand of propaganda is easy to recognize. It's the smoothly packaged propaganda that we have to look out for, the kind that comes from supposedly Democratic/reasonable sources.

[No Elephants]

2. They are the more dangerous sort, cloaking as journalists, esp. Rooney.

I think--not sure because I cannot bear to listen to him very long--that Keller openly admits he is a Republican.

Rooney, however, pretends to be an old school journalist, at least on her TV shows. I have never listened to her radio show. That PBS allows her not one, but two, local TV shows is evidence to me of how much PBS was infiltrated during the Bush years, even our Boston local PBS programming.

Anyway, someone at Fox News is, IMO, much less insidious than someone who pretends to be objective.