Democracy Now! is finally airing in Oklahoma, though many residents will not be in a area where they can pick up the signal on a radio. For them, there is a live stream on KCCU’s site.

KCCU is a non-profit station run out of Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma, and is broadcast in/at:

Lawton-Ft. Sill 89.3 & 102.9
Wichita Falls 88.7
Ardmore 90.3
Altus 90.1
Duncan 89.3
Weatherford-Clinton-Elk City 89.1
Chickasha 100.1

Oklahoma progressive activists have been seeking to have the program picked up by stations in the state, but have been rejected by stations who deem the show, which features news of events and interviews of people on the progressive end of the political spectrum. The show comes out of New York City and is hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.

From the station’s announcement:

KCCU is excited to announce new programs for the new year!

“Democracy Now” and “Swingin’ Down the Lane” will join the lineup in the first week of January.

“Democracy Now” is an independent daily journalism program that airs on 750 radio and TV stations nationwide. KCCU is the first Oklahoma radio station to air the program.

Hosted by award-winning journalist Amy Goodwin [sic], “Democracy Now” does not accept corporate sponsorships, and is funded entirely by listener and viewer donations.

“Democracy Now” will air weekdays at noon, taking the place of NPR’s “Day to Day”. Due to budget cuts at the network, NPR is cancelling “Day to Day”. …

x-posted at OKIMC

I learn from Sinister that Tulsa World covered the Join the Impact! event there with a pretty decent article. No shocker: it was a not insignificant news event in the city (300 in attendance) and the city’s NEWSpaper did a little writeup about it.

But the 300 that attended the corresponding rally in Oklahoma City (not to mention the thousands across the country) were ignored by the city’s paper — I no longer will incorrectly call it a “newspaper” but it is printed on paper, so at least that part’s true. Again, no surprise, because the Oklahoman habitually refuses to cover the news and events that come from the liberal or progressive end of the political spectrum. “Habitually refuses” is a nice way of saying they have conspired and are conspiring to erase our existence from their pages. It is the largest paper in the state (though shrinking rapidly! Yay!) and it still has a lot of influence in political and cultural arenas (again, less and less so thanks to the internet) so the conspiracy is not piddling, even as their overall status is being reduced.

The OKC event did get covered by a couple of local TV news teams, which is great, but that doesn’t lessen the harm done by being erased from history time and again by the Oklahoman.

Frankly, I’m fed up with it and am resolved to do something about it. I’m exploring several options — including boycotts, petitions, demonstrations. A meeting with the paper’s management is a good place to start, but without some kind of threat to their revenue, I wouldn’t expect such a meeting to have any effect — those people are ideological and have to be moved by other forces than an appeal to simple fairness.

I lived in Waco, Texas, for a while, and I guarantee you that that area is politically and culturally more conservative overall than Central Oklahoma, yet the newspaper there covered peace and justice events — and not just during the nearby Camp Casey action in August 2005, but before that and well after. We might have liked more expansive and positive coverage, and they didn’t cover every single thing we did — no one expects that. But we regularly got a photo of an action — even if only four or five people participated. But they didn’t ignore our press releases, or refuse to send a camera person and/or reporter when they had one available, or keep the fact of our existence and work hidden from their readers. They covered the fucking news that was happening in their community!

Thankfully, the Web gives citizens the opportunity to participate in a new kind of journalism that is rising from the grassroots. Old media is losing this battle because they don’t or can’t adjust to new realities. They are making attempts to use the Internet, but struggling to find a successful method to make it profitable.

So if the Oklahoman wants to continue their march to obsolecence, they can continue to alienate a significant portion of their community by being ideological and reactionary beyond all reason. I’ll dance on their grave, but in the meantime, I expect them to function as the newspaper they purport to be and once in a while cover events their owners and editorial board don’t necessarily endorse.

Oh, and the effing letters to the editor situation is also now on the table. Enough! We’re not going to take it anymore!

I know that we all complain about the Oklahoman and that those who’ve lived here a lot longer than I have maybe just become resigned to the status quo. I hope that we can all band together at this vulnerable moment for the Oklahoman’s bottom line, and make the changes we need happen. Yes, we can!

Stay tuned, I will elaborate about some action steps on this in the near future.

This is destined to be a classic: Mika Brzezenski defending Sarah Palin, Lawrence O’Donnell telling Pat Buchanan, who can’t stop fawning over Sarah Palin and lying about her impact on the ticket, that “yours is the party that celebrates ignorance” then asking if he believes in evolution. Then Pat’s head explodes. Monkeys! And Mika babbles in disbelief (okay, that last part happens all the time).

TV worth watching, I’m telling you!

Thanks to the comedians in the Oklahoman’s editorial board, their “Scissortails” collection is becoming my Saturday morning laugh track.

Today it was this gem:

If you click on the image you’ll get a larger version, where the joke will be more obvious — if you are at all familiar with Oklahoma City’s lovely Union Station. Because you won’t recognize the place.

That’s because the drawing is of Kansas City’s “Union Station” — another lovely building, to be sure. New York City also has a nice place they call Union Station — as do dozens if not hundreds of other American cities. See, there used to be this train company called … ah, never mind, let’s get back to the comedy.

Here’s a close up of the big fat stupid error from the brain trust at OPubCo:
Finally, here’s a photo of the actual Union Station in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which sits just blocks from the building housing the Oklahoma Publishing Company.

 

And a close up of the building’s historic site plaque.

 

Thanks to Tom Elmore for providing the location of the station in the Oklahoman’s drawing.

Willie Geist Campaigns For McCain On The Upper West Side, Rejected By New Yorkers (VIDEO).

One of the snotty a-holes on the Morning Joe show went into Manhattan in McCain gear and got the business from the residents, thus proving, of course, that liberals are intolerant elitists who just don’t appreciate real Americans.

Have you ever seen that show? I don’t think any of them would have to be wearing or promoting anything in particular to get rejected by decent people anywhere.

I just sent them an email:

I DARE Willie (and the rest of you) to come to rural Oklahoma where I live and wear an Obama t-shirt. C’mon, Willie, Joe, Mika, hop on a plane this weekend and really prove your point. After all, it’s only Eastern liberals who are “closed-minded” and “hostile”. Right?

The shame of western Oklahoma, The Oklahoman newspaper, has a semi-regular feature called "Monday Morning Quarterbacks," which mostly just reviews conservative voices. The only time they quote liberals or progressives is to mock or refute them. Like today:

CURDLE YOUR YERDLE
The Left Wing is playing for keeps this election cycle. The king of liberal/progressive blogging, Markos Moulitsas rallies the troops at dailykos.com with his own adaptation of Knute Rockne. Libs must "do everything necessary allowable under the law to win because elections have consequences," he writes. "This isn’t about who is most pure, but about taking the fight to the enemy ... and fighting fire with fire." Later Kos writes about having the "killer instinct," rubbing salt in conservatives’ wounds and forcing them to go into debt. What’s next, burning their villages?

Umm...project much?

In a wider discussion of the media’s long-time idolization of John McCain, Glenn Greenwald made this very important point about the militarization of our culture.

If I could be granted one small wish about our political discourse, it would be that reporters and pundits would accept — as disappointing and unglorious as it is — that, under our Constitution and basic government design, people who aren’t in the military don’t have a “Commander-in-Chief.” The President isn’t your “commander,” and the “Commander-in-Chief” power, now synonymous in our political culture with “President,” is actually extremely limited (Art. II, Sec. 2: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”).

This endless festishization of “President as Our Commander-in-Chief” is one of those small but pernicious reflections of how militarized we’ve become, of how we are a society in a state of perpetual and endless war. And — though I don’t think there’s a strong complaint to be made that the media generally has been unfair to Barack Obama — this “Commander-in-Chief” fetish is also one of the principal causes of the ongoing media reverence for John S. McCain.

Colin Powell, former Sec. of State for George W. Bush, is scheduled to be the guest on Meet the Press this Sunday, and buzz is that he will announce his endorsement of Obama for president.

While this prospect is supposedly a good thing for us Obama supporters, in that it will sway a few people who still hold out some reservations about Obama in terms of the much over-hyped “foreign policy experience” thing, because they view Powell as an fine American warrior, and really, isn’t foreign policy all about war after all?

But for me, it just brings up a lot of anger and bad memories, and I was going to blog about how disappointing I find the idea that the media pundits and other lobotomized groups in American society will give Powell’s imprimatur any kind of validity.

But David Sirota has already made the case at Open Left:

Let’s just remember: Colin Powell is one of the major reasons we went to war in Iraq. In his 2003 United Nations speech, he perpetrated one of the biggest frauds in the history of international diplomacy - a fraud that, in terms of its blood-and-guts ramifications, dwarfs major scandals like Watergate.

The idea that being endorsed by someone like that is a good thing - well, that logic may fly in the television studios of New York and D.C., but it shouldn’t fly anywhere else. A person whose most important legacy is destroying America’s international credibility shouldn’t be seen as a Serious or Respectable person, nor an asset to any campaign, no matter how many apologists - liberal or conservative - claim that “behind the scenes” Powell was really a good guy. He wasn’t a good guy - he was one of the handful of people who quite literally lied us into a war. That the elite media imparts even an ounce of credibility to this dishonest yes-man is not a commentary on Powell’s alleged positive attributes. It is a reflection of the elite media’s deep disdain for the facts and truth it purports to respect.

Of course, Tom Brokow, or whoever the MTP host is this weekend, will treat Powell and his (expected) pronouncement with great reverence and respect. A member of a true oppositional press would instead ask: “Well you squandered your reputation being a good soldier for George Bush; why should anyone follow your advice now?”

So, welcome to the reality-based community, Gen. Powell, and if an 11th hour nod to Obama gets him closer to landslide territory, and Sarah Palin sent to permanent exile in Wasilla, thanks a lot. But please don’t think this in any way cleanses your soul. You’re still a war criminal.

This is precious. Today, in “Scissortails” a hodge-podge board editorial — usually good for a laugh anyway — the Oklahoman takes issue with something that happened on MSNBC during the Democratic Convention in Denver. (Now you know none of them were watching MSNBC, I’m sure they got this news of the on-air dustup between Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough from Little Green Footballs or something.)

Get the shovel!
When MSNBC host/commentator Joe Scarborough was discussing positive developments in the John McCain campaign, fellow commentator Keith Olbermann was heard to say, “Jesus, Joe, why don’t you get a shovel?” When Olbermann opens his mouth, more than a shovel is needed — a backhoe, perhaps, or a front-end loader. Executives at NBC News/MSNBC finally came to their senses and yanked Olbermann and Chris Matthews as co-anchors of political coverage. The commentators were posing as newsmen on election nights and during the national political conventions. Fox News Network, which Olbermann frequently blasts, never used Bill O’Reilly in that capacity. In our view, Olbermann, Matthews and O’Reilly are all Cat 3 blowhards. They have their own shows and they shouldn’t be anchoring the news alongside Tom Brokaw or Brit Hume. With Olbermann on stage, NBC had become the “Nasty Broadcasting Network.” What took the execs so long to figure out it wasn’t appropriate for him to be an anchor?

Now, notice they didn’t mention exactly what it was that Joe was saying when Keith called him on it (inadvertently on mic or not). So let me help them, and you, out with this little video.

As usual, Joe Scarborough was reeling off the GOP talking points, which I guess is why the Oklahoman’s editorial board felt so at home with his commentary.

May I also point out again, that Joe Scarborough admitted to being a Republican tool with rare candor just the other day, which I diaried here.

MATTHEWS: [...] Two days from now — I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?
SCARBOROUGH: Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive. [...]

I’m sure we won’t be reading about that MSNBC dustup in the Oklahoman, ever.

And as for calling MSNBC the “Nasty Broadcasting Network” because of Keith. (Catchy phrase, no?) Though they were careful to lump Fox’s O’Reilly in their list of “Cat 3 blowhards,” they never called Fox “nasty” or anything approximate, despite years of dispicable behavior. No, the name calling is reserved for all things liberal — that’s the one constant from all Republicans ever since Nixon got pardoned and (Fox News owner) Rupert Murdoch dumped journalism in the toilet.