Folks this is a sad day for music. And a sadder day for this country.…
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Linda Ronstadt Ejected For Supporting Michael Moore - Comments Page 3
Folks this is a sad day for music. And a sadder day for this country.…
Article comments
76 - Jim Carruthers
First off, have any of you actually read the Las Vegas dailies? I have, and had to read the LA Times to get something approaching a newspaper.
The fact that this was a one-off gig, and Ronstadt said to the LV Review-Journal that she didn't like playing Vegas because the management and audiences don't respect the performers, and that she has been dedicating "Desperado" to Moore the whole tour, and she hoped she wouldn't be asked back to Vegas.
In an interview with the LV Review Journal, Ronstadt said it was a one-off gig, and she didn't like playing Vegas because the audiences have no respect for the performer. In this case a bunch of yahoos went nutzoid and trashed the lobby.
Sorry to spoil the rant-fest with some actual facts.
77 - Joe
I see Planet Hollywood's stock spiked on the news.
78 - boomcrashbaby
Vegas. What happens here, stays here. Usually.
I reported 3 days ago, (comment 24) that she wanted out of her vegas gig.
Neither side here heard it.
79 - Rick
Censoring entertainers is nothing new, but the supporters of this bunch of assholes has taken it so far right-wing that they are bumping asses with the left. As someone else posted IF you are praising our nazi leaders you can sound off anywhere, anytime. They own most media outlets, controling the news, TV,and radio, forums that were once diversified enough that everyone could be fairly heard.
If you think there is no Nazi connection, just look up the history of the Bush and Walker families. The son of a Nazi was just appointed the Governor of California. I say appointed because the free campaign news media blitz in his favor allowed no one else to be heard. Why the hell can't all Americans see this?
Research any name in the Republican leadership and see what these assholes are really up to. That said, the Democrats aren't a lot cleaner, but they are representing American rights.
The bullshit that we are being fed through television news and the fucked-up right wing talk radio Nazis is killing America. If any of you think America can't be destroyed from within by these assholes, take a look at history. The Roman Empire fell from within. The Soviet Union collapsed. Hitler nearly destroyed all of Europe. These were all Super powers in their time, yet all destroyed by their fucked-up leaders.
These bastards have America more divided than during our civil war. Isn't it curious that the political power of this country remains based in the only area of the country to have actually commited treason by seceeding from the Union and declaring war on the rest of America? Don't think for a minute they would not do it again.
Bush's fake election was not the first time an American election was rigged to be decided by the electoral college reversing the popular vote. It has happened four times. One other time in Florida, by the Republican Party. However this was the first time it was done with the help of the appointee's brother running a laughable fake election, then having the phony decision made along party lines by those appointed to the Supreme Court by the appointee's father.
Be patriotic! Go along with this shit! Ask no questions. What difference will it make if all you ever want to be is a non-speaking, non-thinking follower? You will never be a listener of truth, because truth has become the first victim of their cause.
Just a take a look at the Carlyle Group,Batelle International, The International Republican Institute, The National Democratic Institute, Cheney and his years at Haliburton. Check out every name in the president's cabinet and his advisors. You can see what they were up to while trying to prove Clinton got a blow job, or Gary Condit might have been banging Chandra Levy.
They were setting into motion the events that led to America being attacked by people who are as afraid of these people as we all should be.
Look at the eighties when Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin-laden were our fucking allies, and Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush were selling them weapons at the same time they were running drugs for the Contras and selling weapons to Iran. I didn't make this shit up folks. This is the history of these bastards. They built up these bad guys to have the excuse to invade in the name of defending the same America they have so endangered in their quest for world supremacy.
80 - Mike Kole
Dirtgrain: "This illustrates the problem with your call to give carte blanche to self-determination, to the individual. It does not recognize the many, the majority."
The rule of the majority isn't perfect, either. Jim Crow was the rule of the majority in the south. Was it right? I say *NO*. You could have taken a vote on it then, and maybe even now, and you would have had a fair and just election.
Be careful what you ask for...
81 - In Your Face
Man you are weird. You motherfuckers are big time extremist. Linda Ronstadt is a chubby washed up old hag. Not a lot unlike your moms double chin. If the damn patrons want the bitch to shut her fucking cake-hole then so be it.
I'm liberal, I get picked on and bullied by conservatives. I hate Bill O'Reilly he's mean. "Mamma get my crackers and juice bottle". Damn baby assed lberal jerk off reprobate "girly men" (Thanks Arnold) Speaking of which Arnold is mean he calls homo loving Dem's girly men.
I've got my Violin out for you...
82 - In Your Face
"She wanted out of her contract". Yeah and there's monkey's flying out of my ass. She is a washed up whore who you couldn't squeeze out of the door even if she was greased.
Get over it. The people spoke, did they not. What part of booo booo and get the fuck out don't you understand.
She'll just have to find another place to go and sing for her Cheeze Whiz and Nestle Quick.
83 - In Your Face
"Dick, I mean Rick. If I didn't know any better I would think that you were just given $15,000.00 to blow your terrorist self up. If so hurry along and don't forget to stock your family with rice and beans. Bitch!
84 - Mike Kole
Dirtgrain- I stand by the notion that a multitude of viewpoints are being expressed. Blogcritics alone is proof of that. The consolidation of ownership is not the same as the restrictions of viewpoints, and certainly not a move towards conservative views.
In face, you whould one day get yourself or someone close to you face-to-face with a big corporate media outlet's manager, as two close associates of mine have done to learn how they operate and what drives them.
The manager operates a Gannett (USA Today chain) newspaper. He was adamant that serving *diversity* was job one, and if libertarians could not show him how they addressed this angle, they could not expect coverage in his paper.
How conservative is that?
At the end of the day, you did point to what aided and abetted the consolidations. Not the free market. That was aided, nay, virtually required by the FCC- the antithesis of the free market.
85 - In Your Face
Hum! Strange, my local NBC affiliate and newspaper is owned by Gannett not to mention the fact that my IP front page is sponsored by USA Today.
I guess birds of a feather flock together.
86 - Dirtgrain
More freedom usurpation: "Radio Free Silver" pulled off the air by station owner--multitude of viewpoints, F minus one and counting (where F is a metaphorical variable representing freedom).
Mike Kole:
The rule of the majority isn't perfect, either. Jim Crow was the rule of the majority in the south. Was it right? I say *NO*. You could have taken a vote on it then, and maybe even now, and you would have had a fair and just election.
Hence, my Thoreau reference (Civil Disobedience). The majority can condone/sanction/commit evil. But the majority is less susceptible to wrongness than the individual (two heads. . .). Going with the majority is the best--and I argue only--choice we have. To put the individual over the majority is always evil--it is the theft of their freedom. The people must have a voice, and they must have control over what involves and affects them.Be careful what you ask for...
I agree on the current and recent state of the FCC. It has been overrun by corporations. They get what they want from it. When they see the FCC regulating against media monopolies, they infiltrate some more and change the rules.
The concept of the FCC, a regulating, governmental body, is not the problem here. The problem is corruption--by corporations and special interests in this case. You can complain about the flaws in our governing institutions, but you must realize that they inevitably stem from corruption (not from the stupidity of a majority). An idealistic fool would pretend that we could do away with corruption. However, there are relative degrees of corruption, and certainly we can strive to minimize it.
87 - Dirtgrain
Ted Turner on media consolidation and the FCC: My Beef With Big Media:
In the late 1960s, when Turner Communications was a business of billboards and radio stations and I was spending much of my energy ocean racing, a UHF-TV station came up for sale in Atlanta. It was losing $50,000 a month and its programs were viewed by fewer than 5 percent of the market.
Corporations unrestrained and in control of our government will lead to the loss of our freedom.I acquired it.
When I moved to buy a second station in Charlotte--this one worse than the first--my accountant quit in protest, and the company's board vetoed the deal. So I mortgaged my house and bought it myself. The Atlanta purchase turned into the Superstation; the Charlotte purchase--when I sold it 10 years later--gave me the capital to launch CNN.
Both purchases played a role in revolutionizing television. Both required a streak of independence and a taste for risk. And neither could happen today. In the current climate of consolidation, independent broadcasters simply don't survive for long. That's why we haven't seen a new generation of people like me or even Rupert Murdoch--independent television upstarts who challenge the big boys and force the whole industry to compete and change.
It's not that there aren't entrepreneurs eager to make their names and fortunes in broadcasting if given the chance. If nothing else, the 1990s dot-com boom showed that the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and well in America, with plenty of investors willing to put real money into new media ventures. The difference is that Washington has changed the rules of the game. When I was getting into the television business, lawmakers and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took seriously the commission's mandate to promote diversity, localism, and competition in the media marketplace. They wanted to make sure that the big, established networks--CBS, ABC, NBC--wouldn't forever dominate what the American public could watch on TV. They wanted independent producers to thrive. They wanted more people to be able to own TV stations. They believed in the value of competition.
So when the FCC received a glut of applications for new television stations after World War II, the agency set aside dozens of channels on the new UHF spectrum so independents could get a foothold in television. That helped me get my start 35 years ago. Congress also passed a law in 1962 requiring that TVs be equipped to receive both UHF and VHF channels. That's how I was able to compete as a UHF station, although it was never easy. (I used to tell potential advertisers that our UHF viewers were smarter than the rest, because you had to be a genius just to figure out how to tune us in.) And in 1972, the FCC ruled that cable TV operators could import distant signals. That's how we were able to beam our Atlanta station to homes throughout the South. Five years later, with the help of an RCA satellite, we were sending our signal across the nation, and the Superstation was born.
That was then.
Today, media companies are more concentrated than at any time over the past 40 years, thanks to a continual loosening of ownership rules by Washington. The media giants now own not only broadcast networks and local stations; they also own the cable companies that pipe in the signals of their competitors and the studios that produce most of the programming. To get a flavor of how consolidated the industry has become, consider this: In 1990, the major broadcast networks--ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox--fully or partially owned just 12.5 percent of the new series they aired. By 2000, it was 56.3 percent. Just two years later, it had surged to 77.5 percent.
In this environment, most independent media firms either get gobbled up by one of the big companies or driven out of business altogether. Yet instead of balancing the rules to give independent broadcasters a fair chance in the market, Washington continues to tilt the playing field to favor the biggest players. Last summer, the FCC passed another round of sweeping pro-consolidation rules that, among other things, further raised the cap on the number of TV stations a company can own.
In the media, as in any industry, big corporations play a vital role, but so do small, emerging ones. When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas. People who own their own businesses are their own bosses. They are independent thinkers. They know they can't compete by imitating the big guys--they have to innovate, so they're less obsessed with earnings than they are with ideas. They are quicker to seize on new technologies and new product ideas. They steal market share from the big companies, spurring them to adopt new approaches. This process promotes competition, which leads to higher product and service quality, more jobs, and greater wealth. It's called capitalism.
But without the proper rules, healthy capitalist markets turn into sluggish oligopolies, and that is what's happening in media today. Large corporations are more profit-focused and risk-averse. They often kill local programming because it's expensive, and they push national programming because it's cheap--even if their decisions run counter to local interests and community values. Their managers are more averse to innovation because they're afraid of being fired for an idea that fails. They prefer to sit on the sidelines, waiting to buy the businesses of the risk-takers who succeed.
Unless we have a climate that will allow more independent media companies to survive, a dangerously high percentage of what we see--and what we don't see--will be shaped by the profit motives and political interests of large, publicly traded conglomerates. The economy will suffer, and so will the quality of our public life. Let me be clear: As a business proposition, consolidation makes sense. The moguls behind the mergers are acting in their corporate interests and playing by the rules. We just shouldn't have those rules. They make sense for a corporation. But for a society, it's like over-fishing the oceans. When the independent businesses are gone, where will the new ideas come from? We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they're already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces.
88 - BunchOfIdeas
I've read these all several times over and I find it's time to speak out. I agree that entertainers, if that's what some of them really are, or want to remain being, should leave their political comments to themselves or take them to political rallies. I don't pay good money to go to a concert to hear ANY entertainment throw his or her personal political views. Keep political rallies and musical venues separate, final! Yeah, we're losing our freedoms, while others are gaining their's, all due to increased tolerance in issues and lifestyles that once were NOT tolerated in our society. Our Country has changed alot in the past 40 years, and while some are very happy for the very liberal lifestyles that have emerged and forced on the general public, there are others who are saddened, disgusted, and ashamed of what we've become as a society...seemingly tolerant of every thing that comes along...never mind who it offends and whose freedoms their new-found freedoms take away and destroy. Yup, where the conservatives have lost out on alot of freedoms, the liberals have made and continue to gain new freedoms daily at the expense of others. There you have it. Democracy is working, but at a rather twisted and demoralizing rate...but it is working for some.
89 - Stone Poney
Hippy!