In an apparent attempt to censor the President as he engaged in an informative and conciliatory question and answer session with GOP members, FOX News decided to cut off transmission and divert the discussion. This does not inspire trust in news, but represents yet another example of how FOX News manipulates the truth and engages in lies and deception to further their political agenda.

Appearing for the first time on ABC’s “This Week,” Ailes said that Beck’s often over-the-top rhetoric was politically legitimate, even if it ruffled a few feathers.

Reminded by Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington that Beck has warned of “slaughter” and a “killing spree” for those not on board with the Obama administration’s agenda, Ailes insisted that the reference wasn’t to this president but rather to murderous dictators.

“Well, he was talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people, so I think he was probably accurate,” he said. “I think he speaks English, I don’t know. But I don’t misinterpret any of his words. He did say one unfortunate thing that he apologized for. But that happens in live television.”

Ailes was wrong. Beck’s reference was, indeed, to Obama.

UPDATE:

Here is Beck warning of a possible impending “slaughter” in November 2009:

I told you yesterday, buckle up your seatbelt, America. Find the exit — there’s one here, here, and here. Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing. Because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees!

Most likely, it’ll happen sometime after Christmas. You’re gonna see this economy come up — we’re already seeing it, and now it’s gonna start coming back down again. And when you see the effects of what they’re doing to the economy, remember these words: We will survive. No — we’ll do better than survive, we will thrive. As long as these people are not in control. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered!

The Obama Administration just unveiled a huge Defense Department budget for next year shaped by the Afghanistan war. War spending is exempt from the president’s proposed spending freeze, despite President Obama’s statement at West Point that, “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

According to AFP:

The Obama administration plans to unveil a defense budget on Monday that pours billions into drones, helicopters and special forces, reflecting a focus on fighting Islamist extremists rather than conventional armies.

The Pentagon’s spending priorities as well as its strategic vision — which is also due to be unveiled this week — are a product of the counter-insurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan that have severely stretched the military.

The proposed 2011 defense budget comes to more than 700 billion dollars, a modest two percent increase, and unlike last year avoids sweeping cuts to major weapons programs, according to Pentagon officials and draft documents.

Politico also reports that the administration’s war funding estimates for the next 2 years far exceed last year’s estimates:

President Barack Obama’s new budget, to be released Monday, forecasts two consecutive years of near $160 billion in war funding, far more than he hoped when elected and only modestly less than the last years of the Bush Administration.

In 2011 alone, the revised numbers are triple what the president included in his spending plan a year ago. And the strain shows itself in new deficit projections, already hobbled by lagging revenues due to the weak economy.

We can’t afford to keep spending huge amounts of blood and treasure on a war that’s causing massive human suffering and that’s not making us any safer.

In other news, Bloomberg reports that, “Defense Stocks May Rise With Government Budget Increase.” Note especially the giggling about the profitability of drones. Mass murder from above is good for business!

Next Wednesday, President Obama will give his first State of the Union address. It’s a safe bet he’ll discuss the Afghanistan war. You probably recall that the President recently committed to start drawing down troops in Afghanistan in July 2011.

Setting a target date for the start of a withdrawal is a good step, but if we are going to make the president’s commitment into a reality, we need a concrete exit strategy.

Please take a moment to sign our petition to tell the President that you want him to describe a real exit strategy for Afghanistan during his State of the Union speech. Here’s the text:

In your State of the Union address on January 27, 2009, I want you to provide a concrete exit strategy for our troops in Afghanistan that begins no later than July 2011 and which completes a withdrawal of combat troops no later than July 1, 2012.

A concrete exit plan will lay the groundwork that will help make President Obama’s commitment to a draw-down a reality. Our country cannot afford to keep spending billions of dollars on a war that’s not making us safer. Staunching the flow of American blood and treasure into the Afghanistan war will be essential to the success of the Obama presidency and to getting our economy back on track. We need more than a date. We need a plan.

Please sign the petition today. If we get 10,000 signatures, we’ll deliver them to the White House on Monday. Your signature will help put us on a defined path to the end of the war in Afghanistan.

Re-posted from Derrick Crowe, originally on Rethink Afghanistan.

The Democrats didn’t lose the Massachusetts Senate race this Tuesday. They lost it over twelve long and agonizing months ago, well before anyone even knew there would be a Massachusetts Senate race in January of 2010.

To put a rough date on it, this race was lost for the Democrats sometime between the 2008 election and the inauguration, whenever it was that the Obama administration made the fateful decision not to challenge Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, AIG and the rest of the white collar criminals that drove the U.S. economy into the ground, and chose instead to appoint Wall Street’s most prominent boosters and apologists to his economic advisory team. It was compounded when the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership spearheaded a healthcare reform strategy rooted in the false notions that the opponents of reform are operating in good faith, that legislation directly challenging the profit motives of one of the biggest industries in America can be achieved by consensus, and that the era of political partisanship is over. And as the Afghanistan war grows ever more disastrous, the political swamp the Democrats find themselves in today will become an inescapable quagmire, in the 2010 midterms and beyond.

When voters look at the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats today, they see little of the ‘change’ they cast their ballots for last November. On healthcare, the White House has been outmaneuvered, out-organized, and outmatched by the health insurance industry from the very beginning, while the Democratic leaders in Congress have allowed the will of the caucus’ majority to be flouted and marginalized by a handful of industry-bought pretenders like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman.

Failure over healthcare reform has been a shortcoming of political competence. Worse for the perception of voters in Massachusetts and elsewhere are the cases of the foreclosure crisis and re-regulation of the financial industry. In these cases, the administration has taken a timid stance, abdicating responsibility and even defending the status quo. These were failures not of competence, but of moral leadership. The upshot of this state of affairs in the minds of voters is the continuation of business as usual in Washington DC.

Ted Kennedy’s seat was lost this Tuesday not because voters abandoned Obama’s call for change, but because they continue to embrace it. The truth is that the mainstream of the Democratic leadership has forfeited its claims to that mantle. Voters continue to seek change, but they have found that the solution is not so facile as simply electing Democratic majorities to the House and Senate.

Obama famously instructed us that we are the change we are seeking. That message resonates now more strongly than ever, but only because we have discovered, to our dismay, that it is not to be found in Congress or the White House. This is the lesson coming out of Massachusetts this week: change will come, but its catalyst will not be found in Washington DC. It will have to come from us.

Read the full story as reported by The New York Times’ Dexter Filkins.

The Afghanistan war is a breeding ground for corruption, and today McClatchy Newspapers reports that it’s not just the corrupt Afghan government that’s feeding at the trough. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) says about three-quarters of its active corruption investigations involved Westerners.

The Associated Press breaks down the numbers:

The U.S. agency overseeing the multibillion dollar Afghanistan reconstruction effort is investigating 38 criminal cases ranging from contract fraud to theft – most involving non-Afghans, officials said Tuesday…Just 10 of the criminal cases under the microscope involve Afghans only, while the rest involve U.S. and other foreigners, according to Raymond DiNunzio, the agency’s assistant inspector general for inspections.

As Ahmed Rashid points out in Brave New Foundation’s Rethink Afghanistan documentary, U.S. and allied-nation official and private corruption helped set the stage for the venality of the Kabul government:

[A]fter 9/11, American and western aid actually perpetrated this kind of corruption. Because this kind of subcontracting that went on, the wastage of aid, the fact that there was this concentration on the security sector rather than on winning hearts and minds in the social sector, all this created a climate of corruption which people in the Afghan govt. immediately latched onto and were the beneficiaries of. And they then perpetuated their own corruption. So you can’t just blame the corruption in Pakistan or Afghanistan on local people and local issues. A lot of it is to do with the very corrupt aid system that provided money and corrupted the local people on the ground.

Learn more about the Afghanistan war.

Join the fast-paced team at the helm of Brave New Foundation’s Cuentame’ , the exciting, innovative bilingual Facebook project at the cutting edge of the Latino community! Cuentame’ frames what’s going on in culture, history, arts and news, activism and more from our collective past, present and future. Jobs include:

Basic online research: organizations, news clips, archival video and photos, logging video footage, transcribing interviews, and translating interviews.

Skills Required

• Bilingual (Spanish English).
• VERY Facebook literate.
• Strong sense of the Latino community’s interests, concerns.
• Excellent written verbal skills.
• Attention to detail.
• Positive, can-do, fast-paced team member.
• Working knowledge of Final Cut Pro a plus.
• We will train if other skills are needed.

Administrative

A fast-paced film production / distribution nonprofit with its eye on public affairs / politics / civic engagement, Brave New Foundation has immediate opportunities for volunteer interns to help out in various departments including Administrative / Operations and Production.

Skills Required:

• Basic office skills
• Internet savvy
• Microsoft Office Suite (especially Excel, MS Word)

Post Production

The Post-Production Department seeks career-track interns to assist in digitizing footage, outputting to tape, DVD authoring, basic Final Cut Pro editing, as well as compiling research and presenting reports.

Reports to: Lead AE / Post Supervisor

Technical Requirements:

• Basic hands-on knowledge of Final Cut Pro
• Familiar with the process of posting videos to YouTube and other online websites
• Familiar with DVD Studio Pro & Soundtrack Pro
• Familiar with multiple video formats & codecs
• Familiar with operating DVR / Tivo decks
• Recommended: Basic knowledge of Adobe Photoshop

Other Requirements:

• Detail-oriented and organized
• Self-starter, proactive, and uses time efficiently
• Excellent research / report writing skills
• Strong knowledge of Microsoft Excel; FileMaker is a plus
• Tech-savvy: able to learn new programs quickly

Documentary Production

Documentary production team is seeking an enthusiastic intern to assist with various aspects of production, including: Online Research (e.g. archival photos, video, etc.) and fact checking, logging footage and transcribing interviews

Reports to: Producer

Required skills

• Excellent online research
• Good writing / typing
• Good organization
• Generalist with good disposition
• Applicants familiar with Final Cut Pro Plus

“Rethink Afghanistan” National Screenings Coordinator

The National Screenings Coordinator will connect and work with volunteers across the country who are organizing local screenings of this hard-hitting documentary in community centers, homes, churches / temples, theatres, political headquarters, schools, offices, etc. It’s a great gig for someone who loves the excitement (and details!) of grass roots community organizing and wants to get involved on a cutting-edge national project that’s making impact from Congress to living rooms across America. Tasks include tracking Congressional impact.

Commitment

10 hours / week minimum, weekdays (Monday – Friday, 10 am – 7pm), in our Culver City offices / studios. (After initial training, possible to work remotely off-site)

Required Skills

• Basic computer skills (MS Office: Word, Excel, e-mail, internet research)
• Smart public relations skills, including phone and written communications

Unless noted, all internships / volunteer commitments are 2 – 3 days / week, Monday – Friday, during office hours (10 am – 7pm) in our Culver City studios / offices. (Half days and off-site work may be arranged depending on the project.)

Need college internship credit? We will work with you and your academic advisor.

To Apply: Please send a resume (noting highest degree of technical skills if required) and cover letter to: volunteers@bravenewfoundation.org

Progressive journalist Robert Greenwald has produced strong documentaries about everything from big box stores (“Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”) to the excesses of Fox News (“Outfoxed”).

Through his Brave New Productions company, Greenwald has created a new template for up-to-the-minute, ever-evolving non-fiction filmmaking that combines traditional edited material on DVD with links to brand new interviews on his website and Facebook.

Greenwald’s latest project, “Rethink Afghanistan,” is a sobering and timely look at the chaos in that country just as President Obama has committed tens of thousands of troops for what he says will be a strictly limited military action.

The documentary deals both with the continuing breakdown of order in Afghanistan and the fact that Obama may be setting the stage for his own political demise in a quagmire strikingly similar to the one in Vietnam that ended Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

The U.S. populace is so caught up in its own economic chaos that it is has given Obama a pass on Afghanistan for the time being, the film asserts. When the huge financial and physical cost of the war begins to be felt, the public could turn on the president as quickly as it did on Johnson.

Progressives are so thrilled by Obama’s sophistication and intelligence that they seem to be looking the other way when it comes to Afghanistan. There is pretty strong evidence that things have gotten worse in the country with American involvement — suicide bombings were unknown before we arrived and they are now escalating.

Greenwald shows how U.S. policy in Afghanistan may be as misguided as our terrible venture in Iraq. Support for Muslim extremism is increasing around the world as a result of our military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the latter country we seem to be lumping the Taliban (above) and al Qaeda together (even though they have little use for each other).

Apparently, our Iraq fatigue and euphoria over the end of the Bush II era have set the stage for another military/political disaster.

In “Rethink Afghanistan” Greenwald (below right with journalist Anand Gopal) has assembled an impressive array of intelligence experts, journalists and people in Afghanistan who point out that U.S. military occupation is destined to make things worse in an intensely nationalistic culture (one politician asks what we would do if a foreign army was stationed in the U.S. to “restore order”).