Archive for the 'Media' Category

…and that’s a damn shame. It seems Thomas is the only member of the White House press corps who cares about the truth and holding the administration’s feet to the fire.

Have a look at Thomas’ interaction with Dana Perino at yesterday’s press briefing:

Thomas: The President has said publicly several times, in two consecutive news conferences a few months ago, and you have said over and over again, we do not torture. Now he has admitted that he did sign off on torture, he did know about it. So how do you reconcile this credibility gap?

Perino: Helen, you’re taking liberties with the what the President said. The United States has not, is not torturing any detainees in the global war on terror. And General Hayden, amongst others, have spoken on Capitol Hill fully in this regard, and it is — I’ll leave it where it is. The President is accurate in saying what he said.

Thomas: That’s not my question. My question is, why did he state publicly, we do not torture –

Perino: Because we do not.

Thomas: when he really did know that we do?

Perino: No, that’s what I mean, Helen. We’ve talked about the legal authorities –

Thomas: Are you saying that we did not?

Perino: I am saying we did not, yes.

Thomas: How can you when you have photographs and everything else? I mean, how can you say that when he admits that he knew about it?

Perino: Helen, I think that you’re — again, I think you’re conflating some issues and you’re misconstruing what the President said.

Thomas: I’m asking for the credibility of this country, not just this administration.

Perino: And what I’m telling you is we have — torture has not occurred. And you can go back through all the public record. Just make sure — I would just respectfully ask you not to misconstrue what the President said.

Thomas: You’re denying, in this room, that we torture and we have tortured?

Perino: Yes, I am denying that.

Elaine, did you have one?

[other reporter]: I have one on Zimbabwe, actually.

Thomas: Where is everybody?

The best video I could find doesn’t include Thomas’ last line, but you can see how she feels about the situation:

It’s a sad situation when you not only have the administration simply lying about its crimes, and only a single journalist is willing to challenge them on it. I’m sure Thomas knows she’s right, but I wonder if she knows how much she’s appreciated.

Some of the folks at reddit have come up with the right idea: let’s all send her flowers.

Here’s her office address:
Helen Thomas
c/o Hearst Newspapers, Washington Bureau
700 12th St. NW Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20005

If enough people do this, I think that we’ll not only demonstrate our appreciation, but it might even become a story in and of itself, which will give Thomas the opportunity to tell the rest of the media the background of the story — that the administration continues to lie about torture in spite of the irrefutable evidence that it has happened.

I’ve written about this weasel before. I guess I find it amusingly ironic that someone with the name “Kristol” would see it as his duty to muddy issues — to make them anything but crystal clear.

Let’s look at the weasel’s latest spray of piss in the Times. Billy boy writes…

Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter…” Does that clause seem a little odd to you? What’s the “then” for? Ah, of course. Rule #1 in the mudslinger’s handbook: if you’re going to quote your target, be sure to take it out of context. So maybe we should look at the full quote:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

There’s your “then.” Whether you agree with the statement or not, at least you understand the history that Obama is blaming for the situation. I can see why his opponents and their supporters would jump all over this. It’s incredibly easy to grab that last sentence and claim it’s equivalent to something like, “I need to find a way to tell these simple-minded rednecks that I can help them.”

But you need to think about the source. If I had said this (if I were stupid enough to try to run for elective office), it would be pretty safe to conclude that I meant it the way people are describing it. But that’s because I’m an atheist, I would support an effort to rewrite the second amendment to make it clear that it’s not about private ownership of guns, I feel thoroughly alienated when I’m in the Midwest (and I felt that way for the year and a half that I lived there), and frankly, I’m not particularly patriotic. I don’t personally think of myself as an elitist, but that’s just my opinion. But if I were a politician and I said something like that, I think it’s fair to say that my opponents would be justified in saying about me what they’re saying about Obama.

I’m not Obama. I didn’t lose my father when I was a baby. I didn’t lose my mother when I was a teenager. I wasn’t raised by my grandparents. I didn’t go to school on scholarships. For the most part, my parents paid my way. And I’m not a Christian. He is.

When the weasel compares Obama to Marx, he knows that it’s not applicable.

…[I]t’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of economic frustration.

And it’s a particularly odd claim for Barack Obama to make. After all, in his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too, “worship an awesome God.”

What’s more, he’s written eloquently in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” of his own religious awakening upon hearing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “Audacity of Hope” sermon, and of the complexity of his religious commitment. You’d think he’d do other believers the courtesy of assuming they’ve also thought about their religious beliefs.

I agree. It doesn’t make sense. If I’d said it, no problem, because you’re not going to find a record of me saying the opposite. If Obama says it, considering his history, you can conclude that either his apparent respect for religion for the past twenty years has been an attempt to fool people, you can conclude that, for some reason, he wasn’t being honest to the people he was speaking with that day, or you can conclude that what Obama’s quoted as saying in California has some meaning other than the easily attacked “elitist” interpretation. See, weasel? More than one easy conclusion, and the one that you, your pals at Fox, McCain and Clinton have chosen, it seems to me, is the one that makes the least sense. Why would a religious person believe that religion is the opiate of the masses?

But whatever you choose to believe, don’t you have to wonder what Obama’s point was in making the statement in question? What does it mean that these people who didn’t experience much if any of the growth of the national economy during good times, and who’ve borne the brunt of bad economic periods more than most others happen to put a lot of reliance in (that is, “cling to”) the elements of their lives about which they feel most secure?

It’s pretty simple, if you ask me. They’re the Reagan Democrats. They’re a big part of the people who’ve been targeted for decades by operatives like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. And what strategy was used on those people? Take the aspects of their lives that these people rely on, and scare them into thinking that your political opponents plan to take them away. Make them believe they’re going to lose their guns, that there’s a plot to seriously weaken their religious freedoms, or that their bitterness is the fault of someone other than the government that’s ignored them and the corporations that used them and then threw them away. In other words, they’re the people who receive nothing more than pandering and lip service from most politicians, who play on their fears to turn them into single-issue voters.

With that in mind, look at how Obama’s opponents and detractors have responded to what he said: they’ve denied that there’s any truth in his statement, and they’ve told the people he spoke of that they’re not bitter at all; that they’re proud, godly people with strong traditions. That is to say, they’ve pandered to them and blamed their troubles on someone else. Clinton in particular has tried to get their votes (most of which she already had) by pretending to be one of them and convincing them that people like Obama (the “elite”) are the enemy. She’s giving them one issue to override any other issue they may have been considering, hoping it will scare them enough to get them to vote for the alternative to the enemy she’s pointed out to them. And who is that alternative?

Atwater would be proud.

So, Bill O’Reilly has concluded that, because Arianna Huffington doesn’t premoderate comments on her site, she’s the same as the Nazis and the KKK.

One of Bill’s viewers wrote in, suggesting that the analogy doesn’t really hold up, but O’Reilly explained to him why he feels the way he does.

A lot of people are pretty upset about this. Some are pointing out that Billo’s comment area isn’t always free of ugliness. Others are quoting O’Reilly himself, pointing out that he’s said some rather unpleasant things about people.

Honestly, I don’t see the point in arguing about this. If I asserted to you that your house was made of mutton, how far would you go to prove me wrong? Would you slice off a slab of a wall and point out to me that it’s plaster and not meat? Would you offer me a bite? Would you try to appeal to logic, pointing out that if the house were made of mutton, it would smell awful, be covered by insects, and fall apart?

Of course not. You’d quickly conclude that I was batshit crazy, and that would be the end of the discussion.

Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig created the video below to explain why he supports Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Even if you’re not familiar with Lessig’s work on Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I still recommend you listen to what he has to say here. It’s about 22 minutes long, but it’s well worth it.

With apologies to François Truffaut.

I’d like to point out a couple of things I’ve noticed recently about the Sci Fi Channel, that great bastion of geekery on the eye of hell.

Ghost Hunters

I can’t say I’ve seen this program, or its spin-off, Ghost Hunters International, but I’ve certainly seen my share of promos for both shows. The shows document the adventures and investigations of The Atlantic Paranormal Society, or TAPS. Here’s how the TAPS people describe themselves and their mission:

Taps promises to bring professionalism, personality, and confidentiality to each case we investigate. We understand that it is tough to call someone like us, and we respect your right to privacy.

We bring recording devices to your home to capture evidence of paranormal activity, but they are only used with the homeowner’s permission. We will not share or publish any of the media or any details of the case outside of the close-knit TAPS group. More sensitive cases will be dealt with by the founders and be held under the most strict confidence.

We are not amateurs. We have had extensive experience. Part of what we have learned is the psychology of making someone feel comfortable during these times of fear and uncertainty. We will bring a levelheaded and comfortable atmosphere into your home, in essence, taking care of the most important thing, your discomfort. We will then help you to understand some of the nature of the problem supplying you with the information to understand why this is happening and how little danger is actually involved. We will listen to your experiences and concerns. Then we will set up equipment and begin trying to recreate and debunk personal experiences in an attempt to find good evidence either for or against paranormal activity. We will then share our findings with you and come to a conclusion.

Pretty serious stuff, it would seem. But if that’s the case, why is it that every clip I’ve seen in promos for the show consist of people completely freaking out every time the floor creaks or a door closes? If they’re serious about this, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me that they would wet their pants at the slightest hint of finding what they’re supposedly looking for. How many CPAs do you know who cry for mommy every time they see a W-2?

The Friday Prime Time Schedule

This is the channel’s current schedule for Friday evenings from 7:00 to 11:00 eastern time:

And what do they call this four-hour block of programming? “The All New Sci Fi Friday,” of all things. If you’re a regular reader here, you probably know that I take issue with the marketing term “all new”. I’ve pointed it out quite a few times. Quite a few. Come on, Sci Fi. How can it be all new if 75% of it simply isn’t? Honestly, what the fuck?

Jonah Goldberg, author of that book that was the subject of a recent googlebomb, was the interviewee tonight on The A Daily Show. Before the interview was shown, our intrepid host, Jon Stewart (Mellencamp) warned the audience that the interview we were about to see had taken some 18 minutes, but since they had to cut it down to six minutes to fit into the show, it was going to be somewhat choppy.

He wasn’t kidding. It jumped all over the place. But what we managed to see in the mess included Stewart asking a few simple questions that simply tore Goldberg down. Way down. Why is organic produce fascist, he asked. Goldberg replied that the Fascists stressed the importance of the organic — the pure. Stewart then asked if men with mustaches were Fascists, since Hitler had one.

I’m hoping they stick the uncut interview up on the website tomorrow. I simply have to see it all the way through.

Update

If you read the comments about the interview, you’ll see that I’m far from alone in wanting to see the whole thing. Sadly, that’s not what we got, but the interview is still certainly worth watching:

Dear freecreditreport.com,

First of all, I have to respect your chutzpah. The free credit report mentioned in your domain name isn’t actually your product, but a little bonus that comes with membership in Triple Advantage, but you bravely branded the whole deal as if the little freebie was the real product, singing the praises of the free credit report and then quickly mumbling that the “offer applies with enrollment to Triple Advantage” right at the end. You could have set up a site at tripleadvantage.com, branded the product as Triple Advantage and mentioned the free credit report that comes with a trial membership, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun.

And it’s not as if you’re ashamed of Triple Advantage. If I want to, I can go to your parent company’s site and use its internal search to get to its official page, or I can read about it on the FAQ page at freecreditreport.com. And while I’m at the FAQ, I can even read about how any US resident has the right to a free credit report each year, without joining Triple Advantage. Clearly, you’re not hiding a thing.

Apart from that, I was hoping we could discuss the ads you’re currently running on the eye of hell — the ones featuring that ironically cheerful troubadour with bad credit, singing to us about his financial difficulties.

Well, I married my dream girl
I married my dream girl
But she didn’t tell me her credit was bad
So now instead of living in a pleasant suburb
We’re living in the basement at her mom and dad’s

Great stuff. I find myself singing that one in the shower all the time.

I’ve got a problem with the other one, though. I believe it’s called “Pirate“. In it, our friend is dressed as a pirate, working in a seafood restaurant, because some hacker stole his identity (and now he’s in there every evening serving chowder and iced tea).

What confuses me is this couplet:

Should have gone with freecreditreport.com
I could have seen this coming at me like an atom bomb

Does that make sense? I mean, is an atom bomb really an exemplar of something one can easily see coming? I don’t think anyone’s ever seen an atom bomb coming at them, actually. For one thing, atom bombs have only come at people a couple of times in history, and both times they fell out of the sky. If anyone had noticed them coming at all, it wouldn’t have been for more than a second before they were incinerated, and since those people were among the first to have an atom bomb coming at them, I don’t suppose that second would have involved them thinking, “Say, that’s an atom bomb coming at me.”

I get that you needed a rhyme for “com,” but why couldn’t you go with something like

• I could have gotten a big loan just like my buddy Tom
• Then I’d complete my collection of the films of Herbert Lom
• I wouldn’t have to borrow money from my dear old mom

Just trying to be helpful.

Remember this?

At about 2:05 into the video, Cronkite says,

From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 PM Central Standard Time — 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.

“President Kennedy died”

I bring this up because I got up this morning, fed the cats, made myself some coffee, booted up the old ‘puter and switched on the eye of hell to see if there was anything in the news. That’s when I heard Heidi Collins, her hair done all wrong today (hey CNN hair people — it doesn’t help to make her head look like a rectangular prism) announce that “Henry Hyde has passed.”

“Henry Hyde has passed”

The moment I heard that, I remembered Cronkite from 44 years ago. Actually, as I remembered it, Cronkite had simply said, “President Kennedy is dead.” (N.B.: I was four months old when Kennedy was assassinated. Obviously, I didn’t remember it from seeing it live. In fact, my mother tells me that when the news of Kennedy’s death was announced, I was in front of our apartment building in Brooklyn, playing on a patch of grass.) But my point remains the same: he gave it to us straight.

Whether that particular phrase was in Collins’ script or she said it of her own accord, it just makes me wonder why journalists on the eye of hell have decided it’s better to feed us euphemisms. Is it their place to soften the blow when they bring us bad news? Not only does “passed” sound softer than “died,” to my ultra-sensitive atheist ears, it’s tied in with passed on to something else — that is, it’s tantamount to Collins announcing, “Henry Hyde is in Heaven, sitting at the right hand of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

Hyperbole? Well, duh. I’d like to think that an anchor on any channel other than CBN would be fired if they took things that far. But the point stands. It’s the news. Give me facts, and don’t dilute them with the kind of language you use around children to keep from upsetting them.

I wrote last year about the way Nissan was going a tad far in product placements on Heroes.

On Heroes, Hiro and his friend are renting a car and Hiro is absolutely insistent that it must be a Nissan Versa. Ostensibly, this is because that’s the car they rent in the comic book that’s predicting his future, but does it actually name the car in the comic, or is Hiro just an expert at picking out the model of any car he sees? Keep in mind that Hiro is from Japan, where if the Versa is even sold, it probably goes by a different model name. And of course, there’s an ad about the car on the show’s home page, and a commercial or two for the car during the broadcast.

They’re at it again, but this time it may be going even further. In the season’s premiere episode, Claire’s father gives her a Nissan Rogue (the fabulous new crossover the commercials for which whore out the Clash). That episode was presented with “limited commercial interruption” by Nissan, which included three Rogue commercials in a row. One of the features they push about the Rogue is its “intelligent key that never has to leave your pocket.”

In episode two, Claire’s car gets stolen. She goes to the copy shop where her father is working and admits what’s happened, taking the blame by indicating that she forgot to lock it. She forgot to lock it? But it has an intelligent key that never has to leave your pocket. I know it does, because the nice people at Nissan told me so. Three times.

I’m predicting that in next week’s episode, we’re going to find out that the car was taken by someone with special abilities. Maybe Sylar’s already found Claire and he took the car for a joyride before slicing her head open. I don’t know. But it can’t simply be that some normal human just opened the door and drove off. They couldn’t. The Rogue has an intelligent key that never has to leave your pocket.

Have you seen this yet? Skip to about 2:30 (around 3:55 on the countdown timer) for the relevant part.

Maher makes some great points, one of which I pointed out early this year when Mitt Romney responded to someone saying he’d never vote for a Mormon.

One of the great things about this great land is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions, and I’m convinced that the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.

Translation: you may not like my religion, but at least I’m not an atheist.

A few of Maher’s points don’t quite work for me, however. I don’t know where he got his data, but I don’t think nonbelievers (atheists and agnostics combined) make up 20% of the voting public in the US — or to be more precise, I don’t think enough nonbelievers would admit they are to bring our numbers up to 20%.

But the main problem is that, if as he points out 70% of Americans believe it’s important to have a president with strong religious beliefs, then you simply can’t compare nonbelievers (or “rationalists,” as he prefers to call us) to other minority groups. If a politician makes a point of telling the African American community that s/he’s on their side, that does not automatically equate to not being on the side of white people. You can support women without losing the male vote. There are enough straights who support gay rights that you can come out in favor of at least some semblance of equal rights for the GLBT community without losing the support of everyone else.

But about as close as you can come to supporting nonbelievers is one of those namby pamby statements about how the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion includes the freedom not to have one. You can’t say that there’s nothing wrong with the idea of an atheist president, although we’ve undoubtedly had some. If a candidate dared say they weren’t religious they’d be dead. It was only this year that a single member of the House, Pete Stark of California came out as a nontheist, and that’s after being in office for some 34 years.

Sorry Bill, but supporting us means losing support from the majority. That’s just the way it is.