Category: Media

I have been threatening to write this for some time and finally got around to it.  The hard core conservative pundits have no compunction about calling their political opponents different names (“Rahm, Rahmbo, Dead Fish”, for example) and sometime the progressive pundits do the same.

However, the more progressive pundits have better manners than the conservative ones.  Since I have no manners at all, I have no compunction for making up names.  Ed Schultz does quite a few, like Slant Head and The Drugster, but I find them sort of weak.  Olbermann did better with Lonesome Rhodes, but that still does not have as much punch as I would like.

To make this more fun, I shall list some names and give sort of riddle as a hint, and then ask readers to guess the identity of the person in a comment.  If you have better ones, or if I leave out a favorite target of yours, please comment as well.

Third-wave Feminist thinker, political consultant, and author Naomi Wolf published a recent column in Harper’s Bazaar regarding the subject of female rivalry.  I assume this was drafted in response to Susan Faludi’s inflammatory piece about intergenerational conflict within the movement itself.  The underlying issue here is how the mainstream media gets lazy, referring to the same few designated “experts”, who are believed to represent any minority or identity group in totality.  It’s insulting, but also far too commonplace.  No single voice can speak for everyone and closer examination would reveal that no movement needs or desires a designated spokesperson.  

Most of you know that I try to keep in touch with popular culture.  Also, many of you know that I appreciate a good advert.  I also really dislike what I perceive to be bad ones, that this week there were a lot of them.

Now, I recognize that adverts are essential to keep the cost of mass communication low, so I welcome any and all of them.  Welcoming them does not mean that I have to LIKE all of them.  Tonight we shall take a look of some of the worst that are currently circulating.

Note:  I would have covered the brilliant King Crimson tonight, but as I researched that band, it became obvious that more time would be required.  I think that I can be ready to do it next time.

I’m starting a regular Sunday sunset thing at Progressive Blue and I was wondering if your interested. There is plenty of text as a sunset appetizer.

Of course the number one news item today was the greatest pass interference call I’ve ever seen in regular season football. But a few other things happened today besides the Jets Mile High win!

Below have a Sunday couch potato review and a sundown. What do you hear? What do you see?    

Talk about journalists being stenographers to powerful, banking interests. Banks which are foreclosing home mortgages are getting a walk in the traditional press because the press insists on reporting that the banks “didn’t read the documents” filed in court, rather than that the banks swore to documents that were palpably false and filed in courts, all in the service of taking title to homes in foreclosure so they could be re-sold and their present occupants could be evicted.

Join me in the fine print.

Originally posted at Citizen Orange.

If you haven’t been on facebook, twitter, or following the news, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced yesterday that he would be introducing the DREAM Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.  Univision anchor Jorge Ramos tweeted last week that Reid wanted to move the DREAM Act before November.  Now we know how Reid wants to move it.  The DREAM Act could come up for a vote as early as Tuesday of next week.

How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular

Michael Scherer, Sept. 02, 2010, Time.com

A couple of weeks back and a dozen miles west of Elkhart, hundreds gathered in another school gym – except this time it was for a job fair. With the local unemployment rate above 12% and rising again this summer, about a third of the employer display tables stood empty. Julie Griffin, who voted for Obama in ’08, sat down at the room’s edge, well dressed and discouraged. After 23 years as a payroll administrator at a local RV plant, she got laid off 18 months ago. “Really, what has he been doing?” she said when I asked about Obama’s efforts to help people like her. “I guess I don’t know what he is doing.”

…

This shift in perception – from Obama as political savior to Obama as creature of Washington – can be seen elsewhere. When Obama arrived in office in January ’09, his Gallup approval rating stood at 68%, a high for a newly elected leader not seen since John Kennedy in 1961. Today Obama’s job approval has been hovering in the mid-40s, which means that at least 1 in 4 Americans has changed his or her mind. The plunge has been particularly dramatic among independents, whites and those under age 30. With midterm elections just nine weeks off, instead of the generational transformation some Democrats predicted after 2008, the President’s party teeters on the brink of a broad setback in November, including the possible loss of both houses of Congress. By a 10-point margin, people say they will vote for Republicans over Democrats in Congress, the largest such gap ever recorded by Gallup.

Over at FireDogLake.com, you’d better not post anything too critical of Israel.  Moderator and abuser of power Rayne will probably step in to disrupt the thread, issue threats, and order people to cease asking questions she doesn’t like.

Rayne’s latest round of abuse began when truthexcavator posted an entry on what turned out to be a five-year-old news article about an israeli soldier acquitted of murdering a 13-year-old Palestinian by filling her body with enough bullets to drop a charging rhinoceros.  Truth made the horrendous mistake of comparing what Israel is doing to palestinians to what the Nazis did to Jews during the Holocaust.

I was shocked when I heard about this story, but I am less shock of the verdict by the Israeli Army. I’m passed the point of getting mad at Israel. I don’t even think of it as a country anymore. I wish it was a country because the Jewish people deserve better. But it’s not a country, just as Nazi Germany wasn’t a country.

BAT. SHIT. FUCKING. CRAZY!!!!!!!!

!!!!!

Verizon has a new ad out apparently for their product Droid X …. Article at intomobile says:

We’ve seen some pretty wild phone advertisements in our time, but this latest from Verizon seems to be a bit odd. The Motorola Droid X ad itself doesn’t seem to make much sense, but what’s worse is that it bears some similarity to the Abu Ghraib torture images we saw a few years ago. Is this just some slip up on Verizon’s part, or did the carrier’s marketing and advertising team decide to stir up a little controversy? Or did they just go through with the ad and watch the final product and say, “This looks so familiar, but why?”

hat tip to CommonDreams.org

Here Paul Jay of the Real News talks in November 2008 at The Krahl Academy about US foreign policies, blowback, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the concurrent crises of capitalism, of media, of economies, of terrorism, of fascism, of corporatism, of corruption in US political parties, about the shit hitting the fan, and about one part of the solution for it all.

I originally posted this at Antemedius as one part of the solution, shortly after the video was released, in October 2009.

Jay’s talk is about 40 minutes. Watch the video. It’s worth your time, and beats TV all to hell. I guarantee it.

“If I’m not doing the thing I feel is most significant, then I feel empty inside.”

–Paul Jay

Our founders were brilliant people.  Really.  They were.  One of the very best things about the first amendment is the idea that we get to hold each other accountable for those things we say and do.  This isn’t civil or criminal accounting, but social accounting.

Before we showed the world what the value of expression is for society, people were limited in what they could say, “because it might disturb the powers that be”, or maybe they valued their head being attached to the rest of their body.

Free speech and tolerance are linked together in a most powerful way.  If we tolerate bigots, for example, we will live in a world filled with bigots.

Not everybody does the work to properly socialize, and they won’t do that, unless they feel some need, or pressure to do it, which is the core of what the First Amendment is all about.

Imagine if you were talking on the phone and Verizon or ATT decided they didn’t like where your conversation was going. You’d be in the middle of a sentence and suddenly disconnected. Or maybe they didn’t like the person you were talking to, or the subject. You’d be unable to connect or your conversation would become so slow and poor quality you’d give up and call someone else. Or maybe you lived in an area of the country where they didn’t want to give you telephone service. So you’d be unable to call at all. The telecom companies would justify all this by explaining that the fiber optic lines or wireless frequencies were simply their private property. They had a right, they’d say, to do whatever they wanted with them.