The Obama campaign is running two new ads throughout Pennsylvania today. The first ad notes Clinton’s negative campaign and then accuses her of "not telling" that her plan forces individuals to purchase insurance "even if they can’t afford it."
The ad then presents a quote from an AP article, which states, [Clinton is] "willing to have workers’ wages garnished if they refuse to buy health insurance." The announcer then says "Barack Obama believes that it’s not that people are not willing to buy health care, it’s that they can’t afford it."
Three bullet points on Obama’s plan are then displayed emphasizing "health care to all" and that his plan is less costly than Hillary’s plan.
The second ad highlights newspaper endorsements Obama has received throughout Pennsylvania and presents several graphics of the newspapers. The announcer says "There’s a reason every major newspaper has endorsed Barack Obama" and then rolls graphics of the endorsements.
Turning to Clinton and quoting from the articles, the ad highlights Hillary’s "negative attacks" and "cynical…old politics."
Not sure where it all leads to yet, but just these grafs alone are enough to attract serious attention.
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantanamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.
The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantanamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
The Huffington Post released an audio yesterday of Hillary Clinton slamming the "activist base of the Democratic Party" (millions of core voters). But one year ago at MoveOn’s Virtual Town Hall meeting on Iraq, Hillary praised party activists.
