Guerrillero

Leahy after Laura!

UPDATE: Think Progress has video of Leahy questioning a Justice Dept. flunky, who responds with a standard BushCo. mind-boggle.
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Laura Ingraham is on the ropes. From an e-mail to Crooks and Liars:

Pat Leahy [D-VT] at a hearing on voter fraud all but demanded that the Justice Department investigate and even prosecute Laura Ingraham for her election-day call to her listeners to jam the phone lines Democrats set up for reporting voter machine problems and the like.

Hurrah for Pat! E-mail the senator, thank him, and ask him to keep up the pressure. Write your own senators and tell them to support Leahy's quest to rid the public airwaves of the Ingraham blight.

And bring pressure to bear yourself by registering a complaint with your local Ingraham affiliate and the FCC.

Complainin's a Bitch

More on how to effectively register a complaint against Laura Ingraham from ipsos at Daily Kos (rendering most of our previous directions inoperative).

Short version: Angry complaints to TRN and Laura Ingraham might feel good, but accomplish little. "[Y]ou will only get results," says ipsos, "if you make [your complaint] against the STATION you heard carrying the show. That's something the FCC can sink its teeth into, at least in theory."

Find the station's carrying the Laura Ingraham Show here.

Rather than e-mail, as we've been recommending, ipsos recommends hard copy via certified mail to local affiliate "cc'd to the FCC."

All of ipsos' sage advice after the flip.

(I Can't Take Any) More Laura UPDATE

UPDATE: More advice on best way to register complaint here.

There’s a lively (and long) discussion taking place over at Daily Kos on the Fairness Doctrine. I posted a Laura Ingraham action alert on that thread and was advised to include in my FCC complaint a request that the complaint be placed in the network’s licensing file.

The letter, which can be cut-and-pasted into an e-mail to fccinfo@fcc.gov,  has been revised accordingly and follows after the jump.

What Could be Worser?

Keith Olbermann jumped on board the Laura Ingraham bandwagon last night, designating our gal the “Worser Person in the World” for her election-day prank."

 
What, you might ask, could be worser than using public airwaves to sabotage a voter hotline? How about the old Fox himself, Rupert Murdoch, quantifying U.S. losses in Iraq as “minute.”

Whack-a-Wingnut

UPDATE II, 11/15/06: Read this first.

UPDATE, 11/10/06: Includes revised cut-and-paste FCC letter.

We’re all euphoric over the Dem victory (and Rummy’s departure), but let’s not forget some of the voter-suppression outrages committed on election day.

One of the most egregious was right-wing lunatic radio host Laura Ingraham inciting her listeners to sabotage a Dem hotline for reporting incidents of voter-suppression. Ingraham used public airwaves to orchestrate a crank-call attack on a legitimate effort to insure that citizens could exercise their basic right to vote. I know it’s not curse words or boobs, but the FCC should be notified, conduct an investigation, and punish Ingraham.

I encourage everyone to complain to the FCC about Ingraham’s outrageous and likely illegal behavior. My complaint, e-mailed as per FCC instructions to fccinfo@fcc.gov ,  after the flip. Feel free to copy and paste, or compose your own.

Stupid or Lying?

Tom Tomorrow asked the question last November.

And I asked the same question yesterday during Michael Medved’s right-wing radio luna-fest. After an hour “debating” the Senate's cynical marriage amendment with a gay man (In America, Medved argued, a gay man is free to marry any woman he wants, just like a straight man) Medved took up another topic of distraction currently in favor by the right-wing: Global warming and Al Gore’s new movie,  An Inconvenient Truth.

Not surprisingly, Medved trashed warming “alarmists,” Gore’s movie, and Roger Ebert’s favorable review. Then he took his last call of the day:

Stupid or Lying? (1:23 mp3, 1.3 MB)

Noise Machine Says Dozier No Hero; Hero Disagrees

May 29 was a bloody day in Iraq. Bomb blasts killed dozens and wounded scores more. In Baghdad, a car bomb killed two CBS News crew members, seriously wounded correspondent Kimberly Dozier, and claimed the lives of a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi interpreter.

The three journalists were embedded with a U.S. unit and “doing a Memorial Day story about what life is like for the troops in Baghdad.”

This story, like coverage of the bomb blast that seriously wounded ABC’s Bob Woodruff and his cameraman in January, really, really upset the right-wing noise machine. No, they don’t feel sympathy for the victims; they’re upset because the story interferes with their fictitious war narrative that Iraq is improving; that we’re winning; that Bush-hating, agenda-driven reporters deliberately ignore “good” news. (Oh, yeah, and reporters are cowards, too.)

Noise Machine Goes Both Ways

The right-wing Noise Machine is in full froth over allegations that Marines murdered civilians last November in Haditha, Iraq. Time magazine broke the news in March, but the story faded away, just another bloody episode in the recurring bad dream of Iraq.

But the story exploded again in mid-May when Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA), himself a decorated Marine Vietnam veteran, declared, “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” We’ve since learned that the Pentagon still is investigating the incident and possible cover-up. We also learned that President Bush, the commander-in-chief and “decider”, learned of Haditha about the same time we did – from Time.

The Noise Machine has launched it’s usual shotgun counterattack, branding Murtha, who first supported the war but now calls for a staged withdrawal  U.S. forces., as a traitor, and attacking the “left-wing, anti-war, Bush-hating” press.

Here’s an example of the counterattack from Dennis Prager, a second-string right-wing noisemaker from Salem Radio Network. To “make” his “point,” Prager reads from a excellent first-hand account of the Haditha Marine unit by CNN’s Arwa Damon.

”Both Ways” Prager (mp3, 3:10)