Sep 20 2012
Weekly Digest – 09/21/12
Our weekly edition is a nationally syndicated one-hour digest of the best of our daily coverage.
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This week on Uprising:
* What Mitt Romney Thinks of Ordinary Americans (and Palestinians) in Private
* Obama’s America: 2016 – a Debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Chris Hedges
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What Mitt Romney Thinks of Ordinary Americans (and Palestinians) in Private
It has been a tough week for Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney with secret videos revealing what he really thinks when addressing sections of his base in private. In response to Mother Jones’ explosive undercover video revealing Romney’s contempt for 47% of Americans who he says are dependent on government and will vote for Obama no matter what, President Obama shot back this morning saying “you have to work for everyone, not just for some.”
Also from the same fundraiser in May, Mother Jones published video taped comments Romney made about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that revealed his opinion of Palestinians as having “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace.”
As if to make matters worse, both videos were taken at a private fundraiser for Mitt Romney in May of this year hosted by a hedge fund manager named Mark Leder known as much for his failures in the private equity industry as for his penchant for so-called “sex parties.”
Mitt Romney responded to the section of the secret video concerning his 47% remark saying that his words were not “elegantly stated.” At a recent forum organized by the Spanish-language network Univision, he countered “My campaign is about the 100 percent of America.”
GUEST: Amanda Terkel, Senior Politics Reporter at Huffington Post
Read Amanda Terkel’s work at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amanda-terkel
Obama’s America: 2016 – a Debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Chris Hedges
Timed for release in the thick of the 2012 presidential campaign season, a new film called 2016: Obama’s America has hit 2000 theater screens nationwide and earned an estimated $30 million to become a box-office success. The film is based on the best-selling book by conservative commentator, Dinesh D’Souza, called The Roots of Obama’s Rage, and produced by Gerald R. Molen, who has been a producer for such Academy award winning films as Schindler’s List and Rain Man. The Hollywood Reporter called it “perhaps the most popular conservative doc of all time.” 2016: Obama’s America questions President Obama’s allegiance to the United States and makes inferences from Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
Since it first screened at a theater in Houston in July, the low-budget documentary was heavily promoted by Houston-based conservative talk show host, Michael Berry after which it spread by word of mouth and opened in even more theaters locally and then nationally. 2016: Obama’s America has since been endorsed by Glenn Beck, Rupert Murdoch and others. In fact Murdoch tweeted the following after watching the film: “Truly scary if no answer. Every voter should see and decide for self what future they want for America.”
But Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman has called the film “an outrageously unsubstantiated act of character assassination,” which espouses “the standard right-wing argument that Obama has always been out to hide what a radical he is,” and the “underlying message is that Obama is a stranger, a man you “don’t know,” a refugee from another land, another culture,” and that “[d]eep down, he’s an angry Third World upstart just like his father.”
President Obama’s reelection campaign has also responded, calling the film “nothing more than an insidious attempt to dishonestly smear the President by giving intellectual cover to the worst in subterranean conspiracy theories and false, partisan attacks.”
GUESTS:
Dinesh D’Souza was born and raised in Mumbai, India, and worked as a policy analyst in Ronald Reagan’s White House. He is currently president of The King’s College in New York, and has worked at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has written a number of books: What is So Great About America (2002) , What is So Great About Christianity (2008), The End of Racism (1995), Letter to a Young Conservative (2003), and The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010). His latest book, God Forsaken was released this April. He is also the writer and director of 2016: Obama’s America
Chris Hedges is an award winning veteran journalist, foreign correspondent and best-selling author. He won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on global terrorism at the New York Times in 2002. He served as a war correspondent for nearly 20 years and is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a columnist at Truthdig.com. He has written many books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), Losing Moses on the Freeway (2005), American Fascists (2007), I Don’t Believe in Atheists (2008), Empire of Illusion (2009), and Death of the Liberal Class (2010). His most recent book with Joe Sacco is entitled, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.
Special thanks to Peter Fretwell at WWFM and Stan Misraje at KPFK for their technical help.
Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:
“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.” — Abraham Lincoln
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