Fox Fucktardery
Fox decided to cut ~2 seconds off The Family Guy tonight where Peter offers Lois a “Cleveland Steamer.”
WTF? Don’t wanna offend the precious Clevelandites? Doesn’t bode well for the new episodes coming in March.
‘The Poor Lost’
David Korn via Kos. God these people are disgusting:
Though there was no official poem for the occasion, impressionist Rich Little, emceeing the Constitution Ball at the Hilton Washington, did provide a bit of inaugural doggerel.
The gist of it was: “Let’s get together, let bitterness pass, I’ll hug your elephant, you kiss my ass!” And the crowd went crazy.
Little said he missed and adored the late President Ronald Reagan and “I wish he was here tonight, but as a matter of fact he is,” and he proceeded to impersonate Reagan, saying, “You know, somebody asked me, ‘Do you think the war on poverty is over?’ I said, ‘Yes, the poor lost.’ ” The crowd went wild.
In the same piece, Korn exposes Newt for the scumbag that he is. Not like anyone needed to draw you a picture, but he’s such a bottom feeder.
Morally Bankrupt HDTV
Comcast picked up Fox in HDTV today in SF — channel 702.
Sweet Jesus, that dream of inspecting Paula Abdul’s pores in minute detail can finally be satisfied!
Master Control Center
$2 billion for new Iraqi embassy. That’s one fancy-schmancy embassy.
Just one gem in the $80B request from the Bush admin. today for “military operations.”
Something tells me we could get a lot more “freedom” by giving each and every one of those 40 million Iraqis $50 each and scraping the Baghdad “gleaming tower of democracy*.”
Compare and contrast: that mammoth Freedom Penis we’re erecting at ground zero costs a mere $1.5B.
Bush hearts Iraq.
* Americans only. No furiners.
iTunes 4.7.1
After installing the latest iTunes, I found it didn’t want to play all my de-DRM’d music I had purchased through the iTMS. Granted, without FairPlay, the music industry would of never played with Apple in the first place, and I’d imagine what cropped up in 4.7.1 is just more knee-bending to the industry.
Anyway, long story short, the situation is easily fixable. Check out the JHymn page.
Frickin’ Laser Beams
Good gravy, here we go again. Now we have Norm Mineta (token asian conservative! quick, give him something to do!) trotting out all sorts of dire warnings about laser beams being aimed at airplanes. Ohhhhh. Scary.
Not. Patrick Smith (“Ask The Pilot”) in Salon 12/17/2004:
Owing to our nation’s everlasting fixation with terrorism — real or perceived — I’m forced to begin this column by talking about something that doesn’t deserve half a minute of our time: laser beams. If you caught the news over the past week or so, you heard the bizarre warning: Terrorists may attempt to blind airline crews by aiming high-intensity lasers through the cockpit windows during approach and landing.
I almost can’t believe I typed that sentence, but the paranoiacrats at the Department of Homeland Security, along with the FBI, passed along a memo claiming that terrorists — though it never admitted which ones, where, or how the agencies knew — have explored the viability of using laser devices as weapons. Lasers are able to cause temporary blindness and serious eye injury, the ramifications of which are obvious if involving an aircrew during a critical phase of flight.
[…]
For the record, even a well-aimed laser would be highly unlikely to cause a crash. Hitting both pilots cleanly in the face, through a refractive wraparound windshield, would require a great deal of luck, and even a temporarily blinded crew would still have the means to avoid disaster. Do not equate the results of a laser strike with, for example, having to drive sightless through a busy intersection. Maintaining a jet’s stability would be challenging under the circumstances, but not impossible.
The idea of terrorists bothering with such a plan is tough to accept. Say there’s a 10 percent chance of a laser causing an accident. With limited resources and personnel, it’s doubtful terrorists are going to risk exposure on an operation with a 90 percent likelihood of failure. (From a technical standpoint, one thing I find interesting is the presumption that approach and landing are the implicitly apropos time for such an attack. In fact, takeoff would be the more dangerous moment.)
Oh, and this bit of wisdom, of which I couldn’t agree more:
(I’ve said it before and will say it again: Every American owes it to himself to rent a copy of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film “Brazil,” with its depiction of a cracked totalitarian state brought to hilarious madness in the name of security and control.)
Octiv Volume Logic
Shameless plug:
I’ve been using Octiv’s Volume Logic for about a year now, and while I admit it’s a CPU hog, it’s a miracle addition to iTunes.
In short, it gives concert-hall quality to iTunes, despite your speakers or headphones. Well worth the money.
USS San Francisco
Had no idea we had a nuclear submarine named after our city, that is, until it ran aground today 350 miles off the coast of Guam. Charming.
And the USS San Francisco is a “Los Angeles-class” sub. Makes a lot of fucking sense to me.
Interesting bit of trivia about subs: last bastion of all-male personal in the military, cuz of the close quarters and all, and you can not wear deodorant of any kind as it interferes with the CO2 filters. I’m sure there’s a lovely bouquet once you pop the top on a recently surfaced sub. *shudder*
Fox “bored” with Tsunami
Whereas rival CNN has torn up its regular programming and dispatched an army of staffers to the ravaged region, Fox News appears to be going through the motions on the colossal story. Rather than breaking news, Fox feeds off partisan sparks. And it’s hard to get angry about a natural disaster because empathy does not lend itself to outrage — although that hasn’t stopped the high-priced talking heads at Fox from trying to turn the tsunami into a contentious issue.
If the Republican National Committee doesn’t have an angle on the story, then neither, apparently, does Fox News. And the last time we checked, there were no GOP talking points on natural disasters of biblical proportions. The best Fox News could do in terms of political spin was to bolster claims by the Department of Defense that the Bush administration was not slow to react to the crisis. Fox also routinely referred to the White House’s “initial” aid package as being worth $35 million, not the more accurate and paltry sum of $15 million. At one point during the Dec. 31 telecast, a picture of George Bush appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the Fox News screen with the words “Stop the Bush Bashing,” according to News Hounds, a Fox News watchdog site.
[…]
Mostly, though, the coverage has been nasty. Fox News host John Gibson bemoaned the fact that U.S. relief — getting water, food and shelter to millions of destitute people — might be part of an insurance scam to simply pay for the cost of rebuilding a resort community. “This is the travel industry, major big hotel companies,” he said last week. “How is it that United States taxpayers are going to be convinced you have to build hotels in Phuket?” He worried aloud that “Thailand, Indonesia, India, the countries that got hit [will] say, ‘We need dough and we need buckets of it to fix all this so Swedes can go on vacation in Phuket again.'”
O’Reilly blamed the “liberal press, which hates Bush” for criticizing his early response to the disaster, noting the initial $15 million pledge gave “secularists” an opening to go after Bush. (Secularists?) Belittling a Democratic strategist on his show, O’Reilly bellowed, “Nothing in your liberal world is going to be good enough. You guys — you’ve got to get off your contempt, your hatred.” Yet the only ones surrounding the tsunami coverage with hatred were the team at Fox News, which apparently feels naked without it.
O’Reilly also mocked Germany for only donating $27 million: “They’re America’s biggest critics, France, Germany. And they’re just pounding us day in and day out. And they — and when it comes down to crunch time, they don’t have anything to give.” Germany has since upped its pledge to nearly $700 million, dwarfing the U.S.’s aid package.
Meanwhile, Hannity decided that the wake of the killer tsunami was the perfect time to attack the United Nations: “The U.N. has proven themselves incapable, not trustworthy enough, to handle this or any other humanitarian effort.” Hannity dismissed the suggestion of his guest, Bill Orme of the U.N. Development Program, that, “This is a time to concentrate on the victims of this troubled disaster and what we can do together to help them out first.”
Of course, this being Fox News, it’s not surprising that partisan pundits bungled the facts. Hannity blasted U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland for having “the unmitigated gall and audacity to lecture North America and America and the world about being stingy.” Egeland did no such thing. And Fox-friendly pundit Ann Coulter accused former President Bill Clinton of attacking Bush in public for being too slow to respond to the disaster, which is patently false.
Leave it to Fox News to make the tsunami story about Clinton. And leave it to Fox to grow bored with the biggest natural disaster news story in nearly half a century.
Look, I’m not saying CNN is great, and its no big secret that Fox is the media wing of the GOP. Nor is it shocking their coverage of the biggest natural disaster in memory was turned into a despicable partisan hackfest.
But when it comes to TV news in the US, CNN’s one of last places where even basic lip-service is paid to journalistic ethics AND it has at least enough viewership to have a pulse. Sure, they get it wrong — a lot — but CNN has a semi-reputable foundation and 20 year history which they seem unwilling to throw away. And that should be encouraged. I suppose.
Electoral College
The normally perfunctory ceremony of counting and certifying Electoral College votes was delayed for about four hours as Democrats unsuccessfully challenged Ohio’s votes for Bush.
Bush received 286 electoral votes, 16 more than the 270 he needed to win re-election. Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, received 251 votes. One Democratic elector cast a vote not for Kerry but for former Sen. John Edwards, his vice presidential running mate.
In the vice presidential race, Vice President Dick Cheney received 286 electoral votes and Edwards received 252.
Alleging widespread “irregularities” on Election Day, a group of Democrats in Congress objected earlier Thursday to the counting of Ohio’s 20 electoral votes.
The challenge was defeated 267-31 by the House and 74-1 by the Senate, clearing the way for the joint session to count the votes from the remaining states.
The move was not designed to overturn Bush’s re-election, said Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones and California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who filed the objection.
The objecting Democrats, all of whom are House members except Boxer, said they wanted to draw attention to the need for aggressive election reform in the wake of what they said were widespread voter problems.
In a letter to congressional leaders Wednesday, members of the group said they would take the action because a new report by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found “numerous, serious election irregularities,” particularly in Ohio, that led to “a significant disenfranchisement of voters.”
“How can we possibly tell millions of Americans who registered to vote, who came to the polls in record numbers, particularly our young people … to simply get over it and move on?” Tubbs Jones said at a press conference with Boxer.
Thursday’s joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate to count electoral votes is specified in the U.S. Constitution. Cheney, in his role as president of the Senate, presided over the session.
The results from each state, read in alphabetical order, were ticked through quickly until Ohio was called, and a clerk read the objection filed by Boxer and Tubbs Jones.
Then, as required by congressional rules in the event that at least one member of each house objects to the vote, Cheney ordered the lawmakers back to their respective chambers for two hours of debate on the merits of the challenge and to vote on it.
It was only the second such challenge since the current rules for counting electoral votes were established in 1877. The last was in 1969 and concerned a so-called “faithless elector,” according to congressional researchers.
Four years ago, after the disputed election results in Florida, members of the Congressional Black Caucus attempted to block Florida’s electoral votes from being counted.
In a scene recalled in Michael Moore’s movie “Fahrenheit 9/11,” lawmaker after lawmaker was gaveled down by Vice President Al Gore because no senator would support the objections, as the rules require.
House Democrats involved in this year’s protest worked for weeks to enlist the support of a senator in their party, and Boxer agreed to join the effort Wednesday.
“This is my opening shot to be able to focus the light of truth on these terrible problems in the electoral system,” Boxer told the joint press conference with Tubbs Jones.
“While we have men and women dying to bring democracy abroad, we’ve got to make it the best it can be here at home, and that’s why I’m doing this.”
[…]
Look, the point here is it’s a improvement over 2000.
Did fraud exist in the general election of 2004? In Ohio? With it’s 20 electoral votes, which would of tipped the election? Yes and yes, to name a small few — but damning — examples.
Democracy was fun, wasn’t it?
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