Tag Archives: Freedom Communications

Gazette not only blocks story of local fracking protest, but assigns goon to disrupt it

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City Hall, December 11, 2012
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.- This past Tuesday saw the largest demonstration yet against oil and gas drilling in Colorado Springs and the ugly practice of hydraulic fracturing. Several dozen fractivists allied with Colorado Springs Citizens for Community Rights (CSCCR) and Occupy were joined on the steps of City Hall by Colorado College students who’d marched from their campus with banners and posters denouncing fracking. You didn’t hear about it did you? After the rally everyone filled the council chamber to give 3-minute personal testimonials that ran for two hours. That too went unreported, in particular by the Gazette, who had two reporters in the room, one who’d conducted interviews, and both who took notes during the presentations. But neither produced a story — an odd dereliction of responsibility you might say. Even more odd was the role played by Gazette editorial page writer Wayne Laugesen who ultimately opined on the city council’s decision to postpone their vote, as “caving to anti-energy activists”, offering no details. Laugesen actually interjected himself into the rally outside as a lone counter-protester, interrupting interviews being filmed for TV stations KRDO and KKTV. When they asked Laugesen to let them do their job, the goon replied that he was doing his. So the Gazette was not satisfied to blackout reports of the community rally, but aimed to sabotage it as well.

Whose job was Wayne Laugesen doing exactly? Was he confusing his publisher for the overseers who hold his tether: the pro-industry PR mill Americans For Prosperity? It could be. But the Gazette is now hardly distinguishable from contract stink-tank corporate profiteering advocacy. When conservative mummies Freedom Communications supervised the Gazette, the pretense was tax-cutting, tax-dodging libertarianism. The Gazette’s new owner made his billions in corrupt oil, real estate and privatization schemes, so prospects are looking dim for the region’s daily paper to offer authentic news. Having their editorial hit-man on the ground as a pretend grass root weed killer is a disturbing development that must not go unchallenged.

Contrast the Gazette blackout and the relatively tepid coverage by the weekly Independent, with the monthly African American Voice which gave the previous anti-fracking rally a front-page, full color, two-page article, whose theme accurately accused the city council of being “out of touch with the community.” AAV publisher James Tucker has participated in several of the rallies and understands whose interest he represents.

On the other hand, Tuesday was the umpteenth time the Gazette has ignored the rising community effort to oppose the oil and gas lobby. For many months of city council meetings, Gazette correspondent Daniel Chacon has dutifully sat at his stenographer’s seat and witnessed testimony after testimony from community voices without reporting a single one. On one particularly contentious council meeting in November, Chacon summarized the council’s decision without mentioning the overwhelming community presence.

This Tueday’s voices were joined by EPA-whistleblower Wes Wilson and environmental activist Phil Doe, who’d come from Denver to testify before the Colorado Springs council. Phil Doe made an earnest plea for council to support the people of Longmont, who had just succeeded in voting in a ban against facking. It seemed an improbable request, to ask the Springs city council to back the people of Longmont, while council opposed supporting their own. But Doe’s request highlighted the incongruity of our council’s stand. Would they take the side of the oil industry against the electorally established will of the people of Longmont? How utterly undemocratically corrupt of them if they do not.

But that’s council, and there is still time for their constituents to pin their ears if they continue to pretend their only masters are the oil players. With his gentle logic, Phil Doe offered city council a redemption it can’t refuse. Unless of course, his act and their response goes unreported.

It’s time the Gazette is called out for what it is, not just a propaganda arm for regional kleptocrats, but a corporate mercenary spoiler, willing to stoop to unprecedented lows to fowl public well-being.

DUI gone postal

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News 5 is trying metaphorically to crucify the Postal Service and especially the Postal Workers union because a mail-carrier wasn’t fired for being convicted of DUI. So I thought to myself (as I often do) “Self, I bet Freedom Communications has literally hundreds of people working for them who have DUI convictions”.

Their piss-and-moan about it is (allegedly) that the Postal Service is losing money. This from minions of a Corporation that’s in bankruptcy. And one of their subsidiaries, the Colorado Springs Gazette, has just laid off half their employees.

But whenever a person takes the stand in court, either as a witness or a defendant, he has to state where and for whom he works. So, fair being fair, posting a partial list of the employees of their Corporate Masters who have criminal convictions would perhaps be in order. I thought of doing it myself, look up the transcripts and report thereof…

Leaving out the names of those who work labor jobs for them, drivers, warehouse, the temps who stuff the circulars into the Sunday and Wednesday papers and assemble the mailings… cut those guys a lot of slack. They already are in wage bondage to a hostile employer anyway. Edit to add… they were the first to go in the layoffs.

On the other hand, there’s a TV reporter from Dallas and who I believe works for one of the Denver stations now, Leeza Gibbons., who was convicted of joyriding on I 30 from Grand Prairie to the west side of Ft Worth at 110 miles an hour and leading the po-pos from 8 different municipalities, 2 counties and the State Department of Public Safety on a high speed chase. And this kind of event isn’t really all that rare. That would be the type to publish. Also any who would fit into a suit and tie on a regular basis.

The ones who slither in and out of their corporate boardroom. The ones who are serving up the Union-bashing and the ones who ordered it done.

It’s also convenient that the Union Bashing is done at a time when two of their Loyal Corporate Partners are demanding that the Grocery Workers Union accept a really arrogant “Last and Best Offer” contract.

The Colorado Springs Gazette favorably headlines local Communist Party activity in our fair city!

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This is, as all presidential election years are, a circus year of American comedy at its best! I mean, we got a gift from John McCain of his female Dan Quail, Sarah Pale In town even! Still, imagine my surprise to see today’s edition of our Far Right Wing daily paper (The Gagzette) with a prominent headline for our city’s only active Communist Party member, gus hall Vivian! She’s been the deliverer of the Communist Party’s national newspaper around town for years now (and a reporter for that paper, too!), but apparently our Gazette ‘reporters’, ‘editors’, and ‘newsmen’ are unaware of that!????? Go figure?

They probably are aware though, that Barack Obama is a Big Bad American Communist? I mean, we are dealing with world class geniuses over that at Freedom Communications, Inc… lol. I hope that they do not now inform the national crowd about Barack Obama’s connections to Colorado Spring’s Communist Movement, now that they are getting the real scoop about my friend Vivian, the CP reporter and paper deliverer?

OK, here’s the link to the Gazette’s pro- Communist Party activity, though you have to buy the paper’s hard copy to get the full effect, as their website really doesn’t give a good idea of how much they actually headlined their pro-CP coverage. I’ll be laughing through the next year over this one, you can bet on that! Campaigners on different sides, but have same passion

Go Vivian! I love you even if you are an evil commie! Give me a call so we can get together some! I’m not surprised that you are pushing for Obama.

Could it be that the Colorado Springs Gazette’s editors are Lenin’s useful idiots? For more about the American Communist Party, go to The Gus Hall Fan Club website …I know that our local paper would want you to do that! Go useful idiot team at our local Gagzette! Good work! I’m still not voting for Barack Obama though.

Colorado Springs future looking brighter

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Mark Lewis took this photo of Gazette editor and hillbilly blowhard Sean Paige holding court recently in Poor Richards restaurant to discuss his leaving the city daily
Colorado Springs has several attributes which make it a pleasant place to live. Our dry sunny climate of course, and Garden of the Gods, Manitou, The Broadmoor, Colorado College, the Smokebrush Foundation, to leave out quite a bit. Pikes Peak, the Olympic Training Center and NORAD separate us from other provincial backwaters only by giving us a sense that we are on the map.

Since Amendment 2 Colorado Springs has been on the map for our unpleasant demographic. The sagging mental acuity of the Pikes Peak area is something of legend, and lo, increasingly deserved. We owe this to the abundance of military employers, to the continuing influx of fundy revivalists and of course the standard American low expectations for education. But no entity has played a more detrimental role in shaping our pinheads than our city newspaper, the “libertarian” Freedom Communications Gazette. Since the demise/absorption of its competitor the COS Sun, the Gazette Telegraph has warped our city news with impunity.

And none have done it with more mean-spirit and Rush Limbaugh alacrity than Gazette Editorialist Sean Paige. Our own top-tier asshole.

And he’s leaving! Hurray! I wish it had been with tar and feathers. And it’s a rather selfish joy, because doubtless he’s moving somewhere. Wouldn’t it be more noble to know to where, so that instead of passing him off, we could give them a shout and prevent Paige from wreaking his cynical damage in their unsuspecting community?

‘Freedom Communications’ tap dances for wiretaps

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The Gazette rag today took time out from its campaigning to increase global warming and campaigning to kill off more species of life to laud El Paso County for using wiretaps. See page A3 of Sept 17 ‘DA defends wiretapping’.

The county had 11 times the # of wiretaps of Denver in 2005, but only 3 times that county’s amount this year. There just seems to be a great need to listen in on people by the police here according to the District Attorney and Gazette police whore (oh, I”m sorry, I meant reporter), Kim Nguyen. Why the big need, Kim? Terrorism?

Meth is terrorizing the community, so civil liberties needed to be shedded from the citizenry, so says the great freedom communicators at The Gazette. I wonder if they got cops over tapping their foots out at the airport, too? Meth, homos, pedos, and Muslims. We need them wiretaps, foot taps, and loads of baloney from the police and press. Otherwise we won’t feel secure, now would we?

And we need those wiretaps, too, so that elderly ‘ St Pat’s Day parade participants can be stopped in their tracks and then charged with blocking the parade!

Global Warming leaves The Gazette in dense fog

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Funnier than the poor selection of comics that The Gazette carries, are the poor selection of opinion pieces on their editorial page. And on no issue do these Neanderthals post more comedy than on environmental issues. For example, they must be the last people on the entire planet still poo-pooing the idea that global climate has actually been changed by human activity and the overuse of fossil fuels!

Today, right above their pompous “Principles of Freedom’ nonsense ‘We believe that freedom is a gift from God… blah, blah, blah) is media whore Thomas Sowell’s trashpiece titled, “Global-warming gasbags launching an eco-inquisition’. Can’t you just imagine it? Exxon-Mobil execs being burned at the stake, Cheney with his nuts in a vice, and Bush’s rear end lit up as the natural gas is burnt off secondary to oil production? All victims of eco-inquisitors!

Also on the same page, was their editorial piece against ‘social engineering’. What is that in their minds? Well, they call trying to promote less environmentally destructive vehicles ‘social engineering’ by ‘wackos behind the wheel putting the pedal to the meddle.’!
What a group of total nincompoops. Who paved over their brains with such nonsense?

And a week ago, they were saying that endangered wolves in the state were nothing but rats. The extermination of earth species to them is part of a natural process where real estate developers rule over other forms of life, by the survival of the fittest. That type of ‘social engineering’ they totally adore and love. Engineering towards extermination of other life forms on the planet, no problemo.

What a bunch of social retards they seem to favor and collect at Freedom Communications, publisher of The Gazette and other local brands of demented toilet paper!