Prominent Rabbis to Place Ad Against Beck, Ailes, in Murdoch-Owned WSJ

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 From Alternet comes signs that the Jewish community is tiring of the bigotry at Fox. I'd say they are about a year or two too late.

A group of hundreds of rabbis, from all the major denominations of religious Judaism, have had enough of the constant cry of "Nazis" from creepy Glenn Beck, whose recent programs have veered dangerously close to Anti-Semitism. Recently, he made particularly disgusting comments about George Soros, who survived the Holocaust as a child by hiding with a non-Jewish family. They're also none too pleased with Fox News chief Roger Ailes for his dismissive dig at "left-wing rabbis" who objected to Beck.

So they're going straight to the boss, Rupert Murdoch, by placing a massive full-page ad criticizing Beck's words in the Murdoch-owned WSJ. The ad will run on Thursday, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The ad, signed by prominent members of the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements, will also run in the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper. 

"We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News,"

"... It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year-old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps...It is not appropriate to call executives of another news agency 'Nazis.'  And it is not appropriate to make literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom you disagree."

"...We respectfully request that Glenn Beck be sanctioned by Fox News for his completely unacceptable attacks on a survivor of the Holocaust and that Roger Ailes apologize for his dismissive remarks about rabbis' sensitivity to how the Holocaust is used on the air."

Related articles

• Jewish Funds for Justice open letter to Rupert Murdoch (guardian.co.uk)
• 400 Rabbis Demand Sanction of Glenn Beck (lezgetreal.com)

Shields on Obama's Tucson Speech, Calls for Political Civility

Image via WikipediaOnly a few times have I seen TV news programs provide something truly inspirational. Mark Shields on PBS News Hour did that Friday.

There was one observation that was made this week I just have to pass on to you by a friend of mine, Allen Ginsberg, who is an historian up in Maine. And he said, this week, we saw a white, Catholic, Republican federal judge murdered on his way to greet a Democratic woman, member of Congress, who was his friend and was Jewish. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year-old Mexican-American college student, who saved her, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon.

The Shameful Attack on Public Employees

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Class warfare has been an expertise of the Republican Party for a long time. Since the 60s, Republicans have singled out African Americans with vote suppression,  by requiring photo IDs of all voters knowing that large numbers of blacks born in the rural south have no birth certificate so can't get an ID.
Then Ronald Reagan singled out poor mothers as the "unworthy poor".

Drug laws have been tailored to focus on the minority communities which disproportionately use the cheaper crack, not the suburban power cocaine user.

Now the attack is on public employees, disproportionately women and minority in large urban centers.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work - sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees – to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

Above all, Republicans don’t want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.

But the right’s argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions.

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That’s untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

...It’s only average workers – both in the public and the private sectors – who are being called upon to sacrifice.

This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They’d rather set average working people against one another – comparing one group’s modest incomes and benefits with another group’s modest incomes and benefits – than have Americans see that the top 1 percent is now raking in a bigger share of national income than at any time since 1928, and paying at a lower tax rate. And Republicans would rather you didn’t know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.

Related articles

• The Problem Is That America's Richest 1% Are Raking It in -- Not Public Employee Pensions (alternet.org)
• The shameful attack on public employees (salon.com)
• The Shameful Attack on Public Employees (businessinsider.com)
• There Is a Global Aristocracy in the Making -- and the Greedy Super-Rich Think They've Earned It (alternet.org)
• Dave Johnson: Understanding The Attacks On Public Employees (huffingtonpost.com)
• Weekly Audit: We Welcome Our New Plutocratic Overlords (mydd.com)
• The Media Consortium: Weekly Audit: We Welcome Our New Plutocratic Overlords (huffingtonpost.com)