Sunday, January 07, 2007

EL RATO

Welcome to Disneyland! Children under 12 half price! All we want is their minds!
I've had problems with Disney for quite a while...In the early 70's there was a Comic book series put out by the Cartoonist, Dan O'Neill who was the author of the Odd Bodkins strips that were syndicated for years in your local paper. He put out a comic called Air Pirates that was pretty subversive and he hijacked Mickey and Minnie Mouse and created a subversive fantasy existence for them that was very radically political. The art was very good and the stories were great, but it only existed for 3 issuues before Disney slapped a copyright infringment on him and forced him to cease publication. Not content with stopping Dan, they took him to court and were able to get an insanely huge monetary award against him, even after he apologized. They made his life hell for years and he could not work under his own name and went into hiding. They wanted to destroy him. Dan is still alive and kicking, drawing Odd Bodkins, you can find him on line at danoneillcomics.com/index.htm
That was in the 70's, today the Disney organization has a blogger in their sights named Spocko in California. Spockos' big crime? He decided to blog about the ABC/Disney owned radio station, KSFO in San Francisco, a die hard right wing talk radio specializing in pure hate. The rabid hosts have endorsed, if not revelled in, torture and engaged in hate speech of all stripes. The station is sold to its' advertisers as a family friendly Disney Station.
Spocko decided to expose their acions and engaged in a campaign to have readers write letters to sponsors and he put up transcripts and sound clips of actual hate speech that listeners taped on his site. All this falls under the Fair Use Statutes.
This is simply free speech and citizen action. All of us who blog and are politically active engage in this kind of activity once ina while. We pat ourselves on the back, write a letter and usually nothing happens. Spocko reported that in July, because of the tapes and transcripts and letters to sponsors, VISA pulled its ads from some of the shows on KSFO. Soon, they were losing major accounts with Kaiser, Fed Ex and Master Card. A conservative blogger published information about Spocko and his campaign and informed him that he would be prosecuted for using the clips. He was threatened with lawsuits and violence.
On December 22, Disney succeeded in shutting down the blog Spockos Brain by sending his blog server a cease and desist letter from ABC radio claimiing that the audio tapes violated Disneys copyright.
This is where it stands now. What is it with Disney? We all know Walt was a warm and fuzzy fascist at heart and now his legacy is growing. Disney just rammed the Path to 9/11 Television disinformation docu-drama down our throats. Now they are trying to stifle criticism of their hate radio stations by trampling on our free speech.
How can we stop this mouse eared fascism?
1)The blog clips are still available at Online Blog Integrity. A veritable cornocopia of hate speech. Listen at your own risk!
2)Go here and scroll down to "what can you do?" and follow instructions. Spocko has provided us with a step by step plan to alert the blogging world, the MSM and KSFOs current advertisers to the situation.
We can't let the mouse win again, can we?

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