DOWNLOADS: (173)

PLAYS: (1086)

Embed

From this Monday evening's Viewpoint on Current TV, Phil Donahue discusses his 2007 documentary, Body of War, which told the story of paralyzed Iraq vet Tomas Young, who recently penned this heartbreaking letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Phil Donahue on the Iraq War: After Vietnam, ‘I thought we’d learned our lesson’ :

Phil Donahue, former TV talk show host and co-director and executive producer of “Body of War,” sits down with Current TV’s John Fugelsang to discuss the 2007 documentary and the impact of the Iraq War. “Body of War” profiles Tomas Young, a veteran who was shot and paralyzed while serving in Iraq in 2004. Nine years later, Young has decided to go on hospice care and is now dying at home.

Donahue describes the “spiritual experience” of telling Young’s story: “None of us had ever been this close to a catastrophic injury — an injury that turns the whole family upside down — and it’s happening behind the closed doors of thousands of homes in this country and nobody sees it.”

Fugelsang asks Donahue whether it will be “harder for the American people to get fooled again the next time they try and run a war like this on us?”

“I thought that would happen after Vietnam,” Donahue says. “I thought we’d learned our lesson.”

For more from Donahue, check out the Web exclusive outtakes from his one-on-one interview with John Fugelsang, in which he shares what it was like being a first-time filmmaker and how he feels about the fact that his MSNBC show was canceled because of his opposition to the Iraq War.

DOWNLOADS: (239)

PLAYS: (2052)

Embed

Rep. Alan Grayson joined the set of Current TV's Viewpoint this Tuesday evening and was asked about former vice presidential nominee and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan's widely panned budget proposal just released this week, and as we've come to expect from Congressman Grayson, he didn't mince words with his criticism of just who Ryan is looking out for with his proposals.

Rep. Alan Grayson: Paul Ryan wants sick poor people to die:

While discussing the Republican congressman’s latest budget proposal on Current TV, Grayson accused Ryan of wishing a large swath of Americans would die.

“In one case after another, you look at his principles, you look at his vision, and they’re a nightmare for America,” he said. “He wants Americans to work until they die, he wants poor people who get sick not be able to see a doctor, not to get the care they need, not to get better, he wants them to die, and he wants an America that consists of nothing but cheap labor for his corporate patrons.”

Ryan’s budget would repeal most of Obamacare, partially privatize Medicare, and cut discretionary spending on food stamps and other programs, while lowering the corporate tax rate. Grayson claimed that Ryan also wanted to cut Social Security, citing Ryan’s self-professed admiration for the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand.

“Paul Ryan believes that Social Security is unconstitutional,” Grayson explained. “Just like anyone who follows the writings of Ayn Rand would believe. If you read the Fountianhead, if you read similar fiction — although they don’t regard it as fiction — you come to the conclusion that these are people who believe government itself, anything that does anything for people other than defend the borders, is fundamentally immoral and unconstitutional.”

Grayson didn't mince words as well when it came to President Obama and whether he might be willing to make a deal with Republicans which cuts our social safety nets: Rep. Alan Grayson: ‘There is no fiscal crisis’ and ‘Republicans are crisis junkies’ :

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (99)

PLAYS: (511)

Embed

This Friday, Current TV's Eliot Spitzer and comedian John Fugelsang took a humorous look back at the week that was, since we could all use a few laughs during a week like this one.

DOWNLOADS: (322)

PLAYS: (2548)

Embed

Comedian and Stephanie Miller regular John Fugelsang has been filling in for Current TV's Eliot Spitzer this week, and he did a nice job during this short segment of reminding us of the struggles we've seen with attempts to get some sort of universal health care coverage passed and how far we still have to go after yesterday' s Supreme Court ruling.

As long as we've still got overpaid CEOs extrecting wealth from the system which is supposed to make sure our medical and health care needs are provided for, the system is still badly broken.

FUGELSANG: It's the year the Titanic sank, Woody Guthrie was born and Theodore Roosevelt quit the Republican Party and ran for president as a third party progressive, calling for universal health care. It's also our number of the day, 1912.

Now the past 100 years have seen a diversity of presidents attempt to promote the general welfare through universal coverage. FDR tried and ended up focusing on Social Security, which I now call FDR-care. LBJ got as far as Medicare and Medicaid. Richard Nixon did try, but things got a little complicated in his life.

Bill Clinton made a bold play and a conservative Heritage Foundation countered his play by proposing a mandate for Americans to buy insurance. Gov. Romney even used that mandate in Massachusetts, that same mandate he now so despises.

And today the Supreme Court voted to uphold the Constitutionality of the American care act. A hundred years since Teddy ran, Republicans are furious that the Republican Supreme Court appointee just upheld a Republican designed health plan which will save Republican lives.

They wanted this thing to die before it could actually help anybody. Now there are things I don't like Obamacare, but I'll take it over the alternative, Republican-can't-care-less, and it's important to remember my friends, the long, slow march for Americans taking care of their own, of having the kind of universal coverage that typically gets called Socialist.

The kind of system all of our capitalist allies have still continues and there's a lot more at stake in this struggle than one man's presidency.

One day we'll have an America where insurance companies executives can't get rich off of somebody else's disease.

DOWNLOADS: (515)

PLAYS: (2852)

Embed

John Fugelsang, filling in for Eliot Spitzer on Current TV this Thursday, had similar issues with a recent Gallup poll on those self-identifying with the term pro-life as Slate's Amanda Marcotte who wrote about that same poll in her column here: The Problem With Polling About Moral Beliefs:

Another year, another Gallup poll on abortion for anti-choicers to misleadingly represent in a bid to deceive the country into believing they're winning in the court of public opinion. Of course, Gallup shares the blame for this travesty, since it publishes its polling results with a lead about the poll that asks if people identify as pro-choice or pro-life. Inevitably, "pro-life" polls well, much better than it would if it were more accurately phrased as "anti-choice" or "anti-abortion," because it's a fuzzy-wuzzy term that deliberately distracts from the legal and sexual freedom issues at the heart of the abortion debate. This year, the poll found that 50 percent of Americans relate to the empty term "pro-life," and only 41 percent to the term "pro-choice."

But if you actually bother to read on, you'll find that Americans are still majority pro-choice, which is why the direct abortion ban in South Dakota and the personhood law in Mississippi went down when put to an actual vote. Scrolling down, you find that only 20 percent of Americans support the anti-choice movement's goal in banning abortion, with 25 percent of Americans supporting abortion rights in all cases, and 52 percent of Americans wanting abortion legal with some restrictions. (Most people imagine a legal regime that will somehow allow abortion for themselves and their friends, but disallow it for those dirty sluts they hear about so much.) This means that only two out of five people who identify as "pro-life" actually align themselves with the so-called pro-life view, demonstrating neatly how useless that term is and why it needs to be replaced with a more accurate term like "anti-abortion," or my preferred term "anti-choice," which encompasses their anti-contraception activism alongside their anti-abortion activism.

Polling Americans on vague beliefs and self-identity doesn't really tell us much in general beyond highlighting how delusional and/or hypocritical our nation is. The reality is that there's a huge gulf between what people claim to believe—even when speaking anonymously to a pollster—and what they actually believe, which is easier to measure when looking at behavior or what kind of policy choices they support. Read on...

John Fugelsang's take below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (341)

PLAYS: (1882)

Embed

Matt Taibbi sat down with Current TV's Eliot Spitzer to discuss the bipartisan debacle just passed by the Congress and signed by President Obama last week called the JOBS Act and the potential political fallout if this is made into an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign.

Our own Jon Perr has been writing about what a terrible bill this was from the time it was introduced, when Eric Cantor was first pushing it on Fox News. Sadly, as Taibbi and Spitzer pointed out in the segment above, the law is going to effectively repeal about half of the meaningful rules that were put in place to prevent another bubble and all this did was take away what competitive advantage the stock market had in the United States because investors felt they could trust they were being told the truth about the companies they were investing in and their accounting methods.

Matt has more in his recent article at Rolling Stone here -- Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse:

Continue reading »