norman kelley's Open Salon Blog

The Charlie Project Needs Your Help!

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:03:02 -0400

Using Kickstarter crowdsource fundraising, The Charlie Project's goal is a 30-minute documentary film about Charles Peters, the founding editor of The Washington Monthly. "How Really Works: The Life and Times of Charlie Peter" is a story about a man, a magazine, and the media.

The Charlie Project needs your support.

The story principally focuses on Peters, a native of West Virginia, who served in the Kennedy administration's Peace Corps as its first director of evaluation, as the Art Blakey of modern political journalism.

Just as Blakey, via his group the Jazz Messengers, created a school of incredible musicians, Peters did likewise via the Washington Monthly that schooled an outstanding number of journalists who have reported for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the Atlantic, Harper's, Politico, Slate, the Texas Monthly, etc. Monthly alumni have become columnists for the Times and Post, and two of them have won Pulitzers.

Peters believed in the basic democratic value of improving the lot of all Americans by having an efficient and competent government that was open to its citizens, who are just as responsible for the condition of the republic as its political leaders. He also believed that the government should be accountable and trained a generation of journalists to ask questions and even challenge the basic precepts of liberalism.

Since last May the project has produced a 9-minute work-in-progress video, featuring Peters, Jay Rockefeller, David Ignatius, Joe Nocera, and Nicholas Lemann; available for viewing on YouTube and Vimeo.

The project has, since February 2012, filmed and interviewed 15 former Monthly writer/editors and employees, and contemporary Washington Monthly staff members, and has finished its principal shooting.

It is now in the nuts-and-bolts stage of transcribing interviewee footage, developing an editing script, and fundraising.

The project's goal is $15,000, which will be used for rough-cut editing phase, which hope to begin in May or June, in order to have finished rough cut by September 2012.

We have 45 days to reach this goal. Please help.

While we offer rewards as incentives, please indicate if an incentive is not needed ("INN" : incentive not needed)

We need your help. While money is helpful, so is spreadwing the word about the procject. Please note and clip this link to people who may consider supporting this project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1248094839/how-wasington-really-works-the-charlie-peters-stor

All funds donated are tax deductible are tax deductible since the Charlie Project's fiscal sponsor, Understanding Government, is a 501 (c) (3) non-for-profit organization.

Thank you.

Norman Kelley

Obama doesn't Care About Christians? Sez Graham

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:02:10 -0500

According to Franklin Graham, Obama is more concerned about Muslims than Christians.

"All I know is under Obama, President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries," he said.

Wel, I do not exactly how many Christians are being mudered by Muslims, but the Obama administration, arguably, is evening the score by the number of drone attacks in Muslim countries: Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

Oh, did I leave out the number of Iraqi civilians killed by the United States military from 2003 to 2011?

Of course, the president would argue, as he did in a NY Times article, that the number of civilians killed in such attacks is not high.

Franklin Graham is a well known Islamophobe and it doesn't surprise me that he'd make some casual and vicious remarks about Obama.

You would think, however, that as a Christian he would be more concerned about trying to get Muslims and Christians to reconcile there differences and bring peace in the world.

But, after all, it is a political year and Graham is throwing out his redmeat.

Romney Fires Aide Who Brought Him Back From Death

Sat, 4 Feb 2012 23:02:30 -0500

Never let a good deed go unpunished. Romney, according to the Politico, canned a guy who assisted him in besting Newt Gingrich in the Florida debate.

Well, he did say that he liked to fire people. However, one would have thought he'd dispense with those whom provided him with bad service.

The Little Girls Understand: Your Daughters & Porn

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 22:02:28 -0500

That's right, Mr and Ms. America, your female child may have a budding sexuality (we all know what insatiable beasts boys are) and they may be picking up bad habits from that $13 billion American industry: pornography.

What was once thought the provnance of the male libido is now being picked up by their female counterparts: gal teens porn lovers. Imagine that.

As in the case of Frank Sinatra, The Beatles and Justin Bieber, young American womanhood has found its teen idol: James Deen, who is actually twenty-five.

Watch this ABC News Nightline segment and note how the reporter, concerned about the young innocents, asks the pornster if he is -- Get this! -- “...[E]ncouraging them in any way to watch your films or read your blog?”

Ironically ignoring, mind you, that she and ABC News probably have gal young'uns, by the millions, reaching for their cellphones to tweet this clean-cut dickthrob, who probably under the radar until Nightline pulled back the sheets.

And that piece was piggy-backing off of an earlier profile of James Dick, I mean, Deen.

This will soon be a congressional investigtion or the latest witch hunt by the American Taliban.

Stay tuned, and stay hard -- or moist.

NBC's Chuck Todd vs. MSNBC's Morning Joe

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:01:22 -0500

Contrast and compare NBC's Chuck Todd complaining about Stephen Colbert while MSNBC's "Morning Joe" team hosted him in South Carolina.

It's interesting how reporters like Todd, NBC's White House correspondent, allow politicians to get away with a bounty of lies and half truths, and then take Colbert to task for actually exposing the corruption and cronyism in American politics via satire.

What seems to irk Todd is that mainstream journalism isn't taken very seriously by his colleagues or the public.

Question: Is he upset about how Fox News makes a mockery of truth, reality, and journalism?

I don't take "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report" seriously as journalism: it's a fake news show. It's where I get my chuckles, not my news.

But increasingly I've noticed how the media feels, as in the case of Todd, that it has to respond to a fake news show. Why?

In reality, the American political process has done more to damage itself than a fake news show.

It really underscores how thin skinned American journalists, particularly the TVvariant.