THE BLACKBURN REPORT

News and Opinion Based on Facts

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Truth About George Soros

Soros is a Hungarian-born Jew whose family split up during the Second World War to avoid extermination by the Nazis when they occupied Hungary.

Soros was sent to live with a gentile family and the family reunited at the end of the war only to find itself now under the yoke of the Communists.
Soros was sent to England to live with an Uncle and eventually graduated from the London School of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States from England and began a career on Wall Street, starting his own firm in 1970.
In 1992, he made approximately $1 billion dollars betting on the British pound. His overall wealth is not exactly clear, but is substantial enough for him to have given away approximately $7 billion since 1984, primarily to the development of free democratic societies but in a list of charitable or humanitarian enterprises that seem almost endless.
In the United States, Soros has drawn fire from Right Wing, Corporatist-Fascist organizations for his work with anti-reactionary political forces and with free-press advocates.
He has given hundreds of millions to organizations that point out lies in news reports and television, newspaper and Internet commentary.
He has made numerous comments and speeches on the inadvisability of the Iraq war and the problems of American Imperialists, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and other in their group.
His primary focus is on an open society, where ideas are discussed and debated, seeking the best solutions for the greatest number of citizens.
This is anathema to the republicon "leadership".
Naturally, as an altruistic seeker of better and more democratic societies, Soros has been attacked and vilified by every Corporate-Fascist organization in the country, of which there are now quite a large number.
We now have one media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, an immigrant himself who was not welcome elsewhere in the world because of his extraordinarily disgusting media properties.
He became half-respectable through the purchase of the Republican Party whose every member bows down to the propaganda-spewing Australian-American.
He sloughs Right Wing propaganda from peroxided blondes in short skirts and nondescript second-tier news anchors to the unlettered and highly racist.
These commentators, who think, like Murdoch, that money buys respectability, seem also to think that telling lies that cause serious repercussions, like instigating the murder of doctors, have no real punishable outcome in the Christian after life.
Christianity is merely a series of slogans to them and to their leader, Murdoch. And good taste? The more disgusting the better for those in the Murdoch empire. Murdoch finds his respect among the cretins in the Republican Party who work to send jobs overseas while complaining that Obama does nothing here…while their Senators block anything that he tries to do. 
Ain’t Republican politics grand?
The most recent attacks on Soros are for not spending enough during this Mid-term campaign.
Soros has given money to Democrats but in smaller numbers this year because the mood whipped up by the Right Wing reactionary force, begun as early as mid-Summer 2009 has worked.
Tea Bagger candidates, including those who want to do away with Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, educational benefits, clean air and water and food regulations, add more tax cuts for the top 1%…all this has made the mid-term elections a free-for-all.
Billionaires, like the Koch family quietly spent hundreds of millions of dollars to influence less-educated members of society and to inflame racist sentiments.
In many cases in many electoral districts of the country, irrationality is the predominant mood.
Media Matters, a wonderful resource to those who want to know the truth and the facts about what is being said on television, was largely a Soros backed group.
They spend a great deal of time simply pointing out the hundreds of lies told daily by the Fox News Channel about Democrats and Independents. Fox News Channel spends most of its time trying to support legislators who are toeing the mark for their corporate friends.
It shows up most clearly in the Glenn Beck program, which has ignored the requests from advertisers for a saner, more rational approach to its commentary.
Since the Right Wing Rupert Murdoch has decided to pay the bill and more Right Wing nuts and Tea Bagger racists are listening, the program has refused to tell the truth about anything.
The obstinate attitude of Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch has cost them over 290 national advertisers, but they still will not listen, even though Beck has been canned and Murdoch may well be arrested, (for crimes he has committed in Europe) thinking perhaps that they will break the resolve of national advertisers. 
The idea perhaps is that they can continue to spew propaganda for the Republican Party and get the vast number of unsuspecting consumers to pay for it at the supermarket checkout counter. 
It doesn’t seem to be working.
They attack George Soros with impunity. A man who has given away ten-fold more money to causes that nurture freedom and free enterprise and democratic principles than the crackpot Glenn Beck will ever earn for himself or for Murdoch.
Does Murdoch donate? Yes…$1 million to the Republican Party, and zero to the Democratic Party. And another $1 million to the Republican Governors campaign committee. The bought-and-paid-for media mogul, the Sultan of Sleaze outdoes himself in scum-baggery. He takes with one hand and gives back with the other.
And always, always works against the interests of the Middle Class.
These Fox people are so completely up for sale to the BP Oil and Exxon/Mobil and United Healthcare and Koch Industries and Home Depots of the country…the corporations with the most radical Right Wing extremists…that they simply cannot say a single honest word about a man whose efforts have surpassed all but a handful in his compassion for humanity.
For example, this September Soros announced a $100 million grant to Human Rights Watch, an organization that Fox New Channel hates with a passion…as do all other Murdoch enterprises. Why? Because Human Rights Watch is an organization that shines a very public light on human rights abuses in places like Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia.
Murdoch doesn’t want that.
These are his friends.
 Murdoch doesn’t kill or maim people.
He helps others do it.
Soros is trying to stop it.
That is precisely the difference between those two billionaires.
Soros is no saint.
He doesn’t pretend to be or even seek recognition for what he does. He has explained many times why he does what he does.
He lived through one terrorist regime only to be followed by another. He understands oppression and how mortally dangerous the denial of human rights can be,
Murdoch only understands money and greed.
And the value of nothing.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Casey Anthony Received a Fair Trial, Sadly Most defendants Do Not

By Jami Floyd : It's A Free Country blogger

Casey Anthony was acquitted  of all but the least serious charges against her. Had she been convicted of the first-degree murder of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, she faced a possible death sentence in Florida.
Millions of Americans followed the Casey Anthony trial. Many millions more say it was a complete waste of time and criticize the media for the attention and expense given to coverage of the case. One poster to the Casey Anthony Twitter feed sarcastically quipped: "So glad the media is covering this #CaseyAnthony case because the problems of the middle class are just too boring to care about." Still, I suspect a large portion of the population, claims it hasn’t been following the case, but secretly has, logging into the Twitter feed late at night, or watching Nancy Grace when no one else is watching them.
The truth is, trials have always been a source of entertainment in this country. From colonial times to the present, trials have provided the public with a source for ritual and drama. Before the dawn of mass communication, the courthouse provided one of the few diversions available.
In 1770, John Adams defended eight British soldiers and their captain, charged with killing five Massachusetts men, in what was quickly dubbed the Boston Massacre Case. The year was 1770 and no one else would take the case. Adams knew he was out of step with the popular outrage and feared for his family’s safety. Still he did not hesitate, firm in the belief that no man in a free country should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial. Adams had to cut through the popular sentiment – to win a verdict of Not Guilty for six of the men (two were convicted of manslaughter).
Neither the U.S. Constitution nor contemporaneous documents indicate that the Founders anticipated a conflict between the right to a fair trial and the guarantee of the freedom of the press to cover a case. At the same time, they were clearly aware of the dilemma. And that is why, as riveting as they may be as theater, in our system, trials are the constitutional means for preserving public order when one citizen violates the rights of others citizens or the public at large.
Criminal trials, in particular, provide protection for the rights of the criminal defendant. Our constitution balances the tension between the public’s desire for retribution against the greater societal goal of justice. The trial is the defendant shield against the societal sword of revenge.
So, the fair trial/free press debate, which was highlighted again by the Casey Anthony trial, is as old as the republic and the dilemma has long history: The robbery and murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti (1920), the so-called Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping Trial” (1935), the trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife (1954), which inspired the television series and movie The Fugitive, the McMartin Preschool Abuse Trials (1987-1990) and of course, the OJ Simpson murder trial (1995).
In modern America, we continue, through the news media, and now Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, to converge on the courthouse for information, enlightenment, and entertainment. Lawyers and judges have so often excoriated the “circus-like” environment at highly publicized trials that the expression has become a common catchphrase for trial reporters.
After the verdict in yesterday, defense attorney Cheney Mason (whom I have interviewed in connection with other cases), stepped to the microphone:
"I hope that this is a lesson to those of you who indulged in media assassination for three years," he said. "Bias and prejudice and incompetent 'talking heads' saying what would be … Here he took a dramatic pause and then continued: "I'm disgusted by [what] some of the lawyers that have done this. I can tell you that my colleagues from coast to coast and border to border have condemned this whole process of lawyers getting on television and talking about cases they don't know a damn thing about."
In a free country, the right of press access to a trial and our right to cover that trial, as we see fit, has been firmly established by the U.S. Supreme Court. It falls within the right of freedom of the press. But we in the media have an awesome responsibility, with every word we speak, to get it right, to honor the process – not to corrupt it. In my view, this burden falls especially hard on those of us who are lawyers but who have chose to make a career in journalism; presumably we have a greater understanding of the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof, and the delicate balance at play inside a criminal courtroom.
As for the verdicts in the Casey Anthony trial, the OJ Simpson trial or any other case in which the public may be dissatisfied, I commend you the greatest line from John Adam’s closing argument in the Boston Massacre case:
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
The “dictates of our passion” should never determine the outcome of a criminal case - not in a free country, and certainly not under our constitutional system of justice.

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Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Nancy Grace Is an Idiot





By Bernie on 05 Jul 2011


Nancy Grace is a full blown idiot and a dangerous idiot as well. Here's a stupid remark of hers this evening after the Casey Anthony verdict: "The jury found no crime was committed." No, you moron, the jury found Casey Anthony not guilty of the three major charges against her because the evidence was not compelling enough beyond a reasonable doubt. There very well may have been a crime committed but that was not the jury's mission.
Those who have been watching this case and viewing Nancy Grace's show have been viewing staged and fraudulent material.
Consider the image above. It is a snapshot of a video clip aired on the Nancy Grace show. See the breaking news headline: WHERE'S CAYLEE: TOT MOM ALLEGEDLY PARTIES IN LINGERIE!
A careless observer may think that while everyone is looking for CAYLEE, her mom is out partying almost naked. That may have been true but not in this case. The photos Nancy Grace is discussing were taken in 2006, way before Caylee went missing. Here, let blogger Hannah tell you what's really going on:
down the rabbit hole, Nancy Grace is an IDIOT
For those unable to view, I’ll summarize. The “tot mom” in question is Casey Anthony, the Florida woman whose toddler daughter Caylee went missing last year – her remains were found in December - and who’s currently on trial for causing the child’s death. The “party pics” referred to are photographs taken at a Halloween party Casey attended with some girlfriends in 2006. They were dressed in lingerie, fantasy type stuff like French maid and casino waitress (though I know no man who fantasizes about banging a casino waitress), and the party involved some girl on girl makeout, a little bump and grind - pretty wild stuff by Nancy Grace’s standards, apparently.
It’s worth watching the video just to see how appalled and self righteous Nancy gets when the gentleman she’s discussing these photos with refers to them as depicting “a good time”. However, the entertainment factor fades quickly in the face of the cheap tabloid journalism Her Graceness is peddling.
Let me be clear on one thing: I do not think Casey Anthony was a good mother – on that point Ms. Grace and I concur. Little Caylee had been missing for a full month before she was reported as such by her maternal grandmother, and even if Casey didn’t kill the little girl herself, she’s likely at least indirectly responsible for whatever DID happen to the child through neglect. BUT…to vilify her as a bad mother and a murderer because she was kissing girls at a party, “drinking beer” and “gittin’ all down on the floor” is a hideous miscarriage of justice.
“I find them (the pictures) highly probative”, says Ms. Grace in the video, “that is to say they prove a lot as to how the tot mom felt about rearing her child.”
Actually, they don’t. What they actually PROVE, what they’re PROBATIVE to (and thank you SO much Nancy for schooling us on what “probative” means) is that she was at a party in a skimpy outfit where she kissed another girl.
That’s it. That’s all they prove. They don’t prove she was a bad mother, they don’t prove she resented having to raise her child, and they don’t prove that she killed her child.
I do not watch Nancy Grace and neither do my daughters-in-law but they did for the last few days when the summations were taking place. I could not help hearing this idiot spout such dangerous nonsense that I'm surprised someone hasn't already slapped this silly woman in the face in public.
 Here was a woman facing a possible death sentence and Ms Grace is fabricating lies and distortions about her.








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