Archive for December, 2009
Happy New Year!
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential.
– Ellen Goodman
Fox News and Vevo Make Moves to Drive Up Cost of Cable & Internet Content?
I’m heading out the door but thought I’d put up these two late-day headlines. I have a bad feeling about what these two seem to be trying to do to the cost of cable “news” and to free content such as YouTube. Are more to follow? Surely. Especially, if Fox and Sony get what they want, i.e, higher fees for their content, which means higher fees for you and me.
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Corporations running wild.
Break Time — “Fashion”
Got $2,100 sitting around that’s burning a hole in your pocket and you just, for the life of you, can’t think of anything in the whole wide world to spend it on? How about this little number?
Good luck.
Has Fox “News” Dropped the Tagline, “Fair and Balanced”?
As of today I guess (I saw it for the first time this morning), Fox “News” is airing a new promo claiming that it delivers, “Hard News. Real Reporting.”
The Joshua Blog has a post up claiming that the “fair and balanced” slogan is out. If so, that would be a very good thing. Fox as “fair and balanced” is/was one of the biggest lies the world has ever known. But “Hard News. Real Reporting”? God. That’s just as bad.
And We Wonder Why They Hate Us?
I’ll say it again. We wonder why they hate us? Afghans Burn Obama Effigy Over Civilian Deaths:
JALALABAD, Afghanistan – Protestors took to the streets in Afghanistan on Wednesday, burning an effigy of the US president and shouting “death to Obama” to slam civilian deaths during Western military operations.
Hundreds of university students blocked main roads in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangahar province, to protest the alleged deaths of 10 civilians, mostly school children, in a Western military operation on Saturday.
I Just Took Some of Those Dangerous Drugs Made in Canada
For the past week I’ve been fighting a terrible cold. You know, the works: sore throat, phlegm-filled lungs, a hideous cough, watery eyes, a nose like a faucet, sinus pressure and, at times, a fever. In sum, I’m miserable.
I don’t like to take medication but, desperate to feel even just a little bit better, I picked up some “Coricidin HBP – Chest Congestion & Cough” yesterday, along with two boxes of lotion Kleenex (what a great invention).
First thing this morning I took two of the Coricidin. While standing at the kitchen sink drinking a glass of water trying to get them down, I killed time looking at the box the pills came in. To my horror — the pills were at that moment dissolving in my stomach — I saw that they were “Made in Canada.” Aaaaaahhhh!
Yes, they’re “distributed” by “Schering-Plough HealthCare Products, Inc.” which is based in Memphis, but they’re made in Canada!
OMG. The next few hours will tell whether I live or die. After all, drugs made in Canada aren’t safe. They can’t be trusted. Who knows what the hell’s in them. I mean, other countries don’t care about their people like the U.S. does. They put all kinds of crap in their pills without a care in the world. Their stuff isn’t good enough for us.
Now I’m sweating.
Pray for me.
(Moral of the story: The argument against the reimportation of drugs from Canada is bullshit. It’s already being done.)
Harry Reid Belatedly Grows Some Balls (For Now)
After four months and a brush with a catastrophic terror attack, Harry Reid Will Force Confirmation of TSA Administrator Errol Southers Back Into Motion.
Will Reid still have big balls when the Senate returns from its holiday break? Just askin’. They tend to expand and contract at the slightest in temperature.
Break Time
Check out this awesome video of a flash mob celebrating Christmas at the Lisbon airport on December 23. It’ll make you want to get up out of your seat and dance!
Perspective on “Terror in the Skies”
Given that Fox, CNN and MSNBC have been all-terror-all-the-time since Christmas Day, you’d never know that the risk of dying due to a lack of health insurance is about 45,000 times higher than dying from a terror attack.
Having a Hard Time Wrapping My Mind Around This
Taco Bell’s new “Drive-Thru Diet.“ Per the website, it’s a diet but “not a weight-loss program.” Whatever.
What Should the 2010 Tea Party Slogan Be?
Check out this thread on Twitter where people are making suggestions as to what the tea party slogan should be for 2010. Some of the suggestions are hilarious.
“The News” According to The Weather Channel
This morning just before 7:00 a.m. ET, I turned on The Weather Channel. At the top of the hour, the anchors introduced themselves and then went to a “news break.” The “news” consisted of three stories:
1) Photos of the underwear worn by the guy who tried to blow up the airplane on Christmas Day,
2) Bristol Palin trying to gain sole custody of her son Tripp, and
3) A cow that was “raised” by dogs.
In all the world, those three stories were deemed the most important by the folks at The Weather Channel.
It boggles the mind.
Fox Hides Fact of Bush Administration’s Role in Christmas Terror Attempt
As I posted earlier, two of the “masterminds” behind the Christmas Day “terror attempt” in Detroit were released from Guantanamo Bay by the Bush administration in 2007. I repeat: They were released by the Bush administration in 2007.
Not exactly the stuff of “breaking news” on right wing sites. Here’s how Fox is spinning it:
Nothing about the Bushies.
Can you imagine if the two guys had been released by the Obama administration? The headline would have consumed Fox’s entire home page.
Oh, and here’s the article you go to if you click on the picture. I took a screen shot because chances are Fox will dress it up as the Bush administration’s involvement becomes undeniable:
A mention of the Bush administration yes, but nothing specifically about the two guys behind the Christmas Day plot.
This is no big surprise to those of us who know that Fox “News” is a propaganda arm of the GOP (or does the GOP work for Fox?). I just thought it’d be a good idea to document it in case somebody, sometime, cares to look into whether Fox’s use of the slogan “fair and balanced” might just be a bit of a stretch. As in, oh, false advertising?
Two Al Qaeda Leaders Behind Flight 253 Plot Were Released from Gitmo in 2007
From ABC News:
Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.
This will add fuel to many fires but that’s another post. First, I want to make a quick point: Bear in mind that these two men were released from Gitmo during the Bush administration. I’m willing to bet that when the righties talk about this they’ll leave that fact out of the discussion so their followers will believe Obama released them.
“Best of the Year” Stuff
I’m seeing a lot of articles and videos, of course, about “the best of 2009,” or “the worst of 2009″ or, “2009 in review.” Honestly, imho, 2009 was such a crappy year, I don’t really want to take a look back.
Break Time – Advertising
Big of them: Best Buy puts out an ad offering a TweetDeck social app for free with the purchase of a CD, but the thing is, the app is free to begin with.
This Should be Interesting
The Tea Partiers are going to demand that Republicans call for a repeal of the health care bill (assuming it passes) as a litmus test for who they’ll support in the 2010 election:
It’s now becoming clear that this could be a major issue for Republicans in 2010: the Tea Party movement, as well as high-profile conservatives, are going to demand that candidates call for a full repeal of the Dem healthcare reform bill, presuming it passes.
Multiple figures on the right are beginning to make this demand explicit.
In an interview with me just now, Max Pappas, the Vice President for Public Policy of Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, said that if the bill passes, politicians should call for a full repeal.
There are so many exciting things to look forward to next year.
Reminder
In my opinion, the big news of the weekend and of today is not the foiled terror attack in Detroit, but the fact that people in Iran are trying to bring down their dictatorial government.
I have tremendous respect for the demonstrators there. They have amazing strength and conviction if they’re willing to take to the streets and literally risk death to fight for what they believe in. I’m following it all at The Daily Dish, fyi, — the best place I’ve found for news from Iran — in case you’re interested too.
Good-bye 2009!
Here’s a good article by Robert Reich about, The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted:
The real locus of the problem was never the financial economy to begin with, and the bailout of Wall Street was a sideshow. The real problem was on Main Street, in the real economy. Before the crash, much of America had fallen deeply into unsustainable debt because it had no other way to maintain its standard of living. That’s because for so many years almost all the gains of economic growth had been going to a relatively small number of people at the top.
[...]
In truth, most Americans did not spend too much in recent years, relative to the increasing size of the overall American economy. They spent too much only in relation to their declining portion of its gains. Had their portion kept up — had the people at the top of corporate America, Wall Street banks and hedge funds not taken a disproportionate share — most Americans would not have felt the necessity to borrow so much.
Max Baucus, Drunk?
UPDATED below.
Several conservative blogs have posted this video of Max Baucus debating health care reform, claiming that Baucus is drunk. What do you think? As for me, he does sound drunk at times, but at times he doesn’t. I can’t say I’m familiar enough with his speaking style to know what is “normal” for him (or not).
UPDATE: Here’s more on “The ‘Drunk’ Smear.“
CNN Fail. Or, Thank God for Terror Attacks
CNN spent roughly three hours freaking out today — and terrorizing us — on pure speculation regarding what was going on with a second “terror attack” on a plane bound from Amsterdam to Detroit.
Turns out the terrorist poor passenger, who spent “more than an hour” in the bathroom, had “stomach problems” which I think we can safely translate into diarrhea.
What would you do if someone dragged you from a bathroom when you were suffering from diarrhea, on an airplane no less?
(P.S. My sense is that CNN couldn’t be happier for both of the events in Detroit. It was looking at a very long and dry weekend repeating the story about how the woman pulled the Pope to the floor during midnight mass in Rome on Christmas Eve.)
Terror in the Air on Christmas?
The initial reports were of some guy setting off firecrackers on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit:
Seven hours later, “some” are reporting that Obama has raised the terror threat level. Fox so-called “News” has been on the story for hours. CNN is making a night of it, prefacing most everything with alleged, alleged, alleged, and “we still don’t know.”
If I’ve learned anything since 9/11, it is that these things take a long time to unfold.
The corporate media is desperate for cheap, sensational “breaking news” (think: rating$) going into the weekend. So let’s calm down and bear that in mind. Chances are that this will turn out to be nothing, or far less than the media’s making it out to be right now.
A Sad Farewell to My Friend, Deborah Yesner
In January of 2004 I sent an email to Robert Greenwald, then an independent film producer, now the head of Brave New Films. That email changed my life; it resulted in me becoming one of eight researchers on Robert’s film, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.
From there, we eight — outraged at what we learned during the making of Outfoxed — established the blog, News Hounds in June of that year.
Among us we watched thousands of hours of Fox “News.” During the summer and fall of 2004 we watched in horror as Fox lead the charge in the Swift Boating of John Kerry and Kerry’s refusal (or inability, or whatever it was) to fight back. After the election, we were exhausted.
It was hard to get back on the horse but we all essentially committed to keep going; to keep exposing Fox for what is was — anything but “fair and balanced.” We hoped Democrats — particularly Democrats who had a say in things — were noticing what an amazing and well-oiled propaganda machine Fox was. Still don’t know if they were or are.
Deborah Yesner was one of us; one of the original eight. She taught special needs kids in her real life. She worked all day — five days a week — at that thankless job. Exhausted, frustrated, underpaid, she’d come home and — how she found the energy I don’t know other than to say that it was a testament to how much she believed in what she was doing — she’d monitor Bill O’Reilly; The Factor. (Can you imagine doing that after a hard day’s work?) She’d spend an hour watching the show and then an hour or three posting about it — for four years — for no pay mind you, other than the pittance in donations we’d split among us every quarter. (ChrisBG, another member of our group, figured it out at one point: we were bringing in roughly 6¢ and hour for the hours we worked.)
Then, in October of 2008, after suffering from very bad headaches for several days, Deborah — Deb as we called her — suffered a ruptured aneurysm in her brain. For the past year+ her husband and daughter have cared for her as she suffered infection after infection; was moved in and out of the hospital, back home and then to a nursing home and back to the hospital. On and on. The hospital took care of her physical needs, but the nursing home that her husband’s insurance would pay for was unequipped to care for her medical needs as well as provide the physical therapy required to give her a fighting chance to recover to the fullest extent. A facility like that was a step or ten above what his insurance would pay for and he couldn’t afford the out-of-pocket expense. (One can only imagine — $10,000 per week?)
On Tuesday I learned that Deb had contracted a very serious infection. The doctors said there was nothing more they could do. Her husband and daughter decided to put her on a morphine drip and make her as comfortable as possible. Today her devastated and heartbroken family had the strength to inform us that Deb died later that day.
Deborah Yesner was a fierce believer in freedom of the press and in the freedom of speech. But she did not think it was right that a “news” network that claimed it was “fair and balanced,” but in reality was the primary propaganda outlet for the Republican party, should be allowed to use that slogan.
Deb was a jewel. She loved her husband and daughter with all her heart and soul. She was a wonderful person and a cherished friend. Her death is an indescribable loss to me and to the world.
Good-bye Deb. Love you (but I can’t believe I’m writing these words).
Melanie
