Presidential candidate pledges to cut military budget by 50% and spend $ on inner-city development!

[IndyOp]

And, for this, he was denied any/all national news coverage during the 1992 Presidential race. :(

The League of Women Voters excluded him from the debate on "urban issues" - even though dozens of Mayors at the U.S. Conference of Mayors named Agran the candidate who best understood urban issues - because he had not garnered media attention. The Democratic Party had him arrested when he interrupted during that debate to ask to participate. His court date was the first day of the Democratic Party convention.

Larry Agran: "I've challenged my own party for it's continuing complicity in Cold War thinking, Cold War rhetoric, and Cold War budgets."

We are still in the same place in 2007 that we were in 1992 - no candidate will challenge the Democratic Party or the military-industrial-congressional complex as a whole for it's War on Terrorism thinking, War on Terrorism rhetoric, and War on Terrorism budgets.


From Wikipedia: Larry Agran (born 2 February 1945 in Chicago) is a former mayor of Irvine, California, Orange County's noted planned city.

Agran graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966. He served as Legal Counsel to the California State Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, and taught legislation and public policy at the UCLA School of Law and the University of California, Irvine Graduate School of Management.

Between 1979 and 1990 he served on the city council, including 6 years as Mayor (Irvine employs a council-manager government).

In 1992, Agran unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for President. Agran was generally ignored by the media during his candidacy, a topic heavily covered in the 1995 documentary "Spin." The media did not report his polling numbers even as he met or exceeded the support of other candidates. Party officials excluded him from most debates on various grounds, even having him arrested when he interrupted to ask to participate. Even when he managed to join the other candidate in a forum, his ideas went unreported. He performed poorly in the New Hampshire primary, but did pick up modest support in later primaries as a protest candidate with appeal to those unhappy with the other candidates.


Agran's story is covering in the 1995 documentary "Spin" - it starts at about 16:30 minutes in... http://throwawayyourtv.com/2006/06/spin-documentary-brian-springer.html

[glowing]

1. I've never heard of him.. but in 1992 I was a little girl.

[IndyOp]

2. The first vote I ever cast was for Clinton in the '92 election -

And I had never heard of Agran until tonight watching "Spin" -- it caught my attention because I am still reeling from Howard Fineman's (Newsweek, NBC) admission that in the 2000 election the media was disappointed that Gore was taking a commanding lead over Bush several weeks before the election. So many "journalists" hyped negative stories about Gore that they knew to be distorted or outright lies because they wanted the race to be closer -- more exciting.

How many people have died because those journalists wanted a more exciting race to the White House?

Exactly how powerful is our media in determining who gets elected? What are their motives?

:(