We have two videos here, the first is Olbermann’s special comment, which is good, but, as I said last night, not as good as he has been, and then we have Maddow’s clear and convincing demonstration about how the right wing media in general, and Fox in particular, play the game of, “find the big scary black man,” for political advantage.
I prefer Rachel’s approach and delivery.
That being said, they are both good segments, and well worth spending the 10-15 minutes each segment runs.
I think that invoking L’Affaire Dreyfus was a bit over the top.
His refrain on Obama is that his administration is ill serving him, which IMNSHO, is profoundly is wrong.
As I am wont to say, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
Still, Keith’s advice to stop making nice is the right one, and his invoking the line from The American President, you know, the one that goes, “I was so busy keeping my job I forgot to do my job,” was a good bit.
But it doesn’t get my blood pumping like the older stuff, and I’m not sure if he’s changed, or I have, or maybe the times have changed. I don’t know which.
Olbermann is taking time off from his vacation tonight to do a special comment on the Breitbart/Sherrod affair.
It’s lost some of his stuff lately, but we’ll see how he handles this.
*Or Tivo, but I am a Luddite.
Anyone know of good sites out there for getting the networks (including cable)?
In particular, I want to find a better source for MSNBC, since Justin.tv seems to be erratic on the best days, and I want my dose of Olbermann and Maddow.
While I believe that the Supreme Court’s ruling that the “theft of services” statute was unconstitutionally vague, I am bumming right now that this decision has gotten right wing newspaper publisher and con-man Conrad Black out on bail.
It’s a real mixed emotions situation.
Preach it Dylan Ratigan!
This is righteous, and anyone who loves this country needs to listen to it, and then repeat it from the rooftops whenever the Republicans mindlessly spout their talking points.
H/t Digby.
A panel of the 2dd circuit court of appeals has ruled that the FCC’s indecency rules, calling the vague and a violation of 1st amendment rights:
In a sharp rebuke of the Bush-era crackdown on foul language on broadcast television and radio, a federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down the government’s near-zero-tolerance indecency policy as a violation of the 1st Amendment protection of free speech.
………
The case was triggered by unscripted expletives uttered by Bono, Cher and Nicole Richie on awards shows earlier in the decade, and the court’s decision calls into question the FCC’s regulation of foul language and other indecent content on the public airwaves.
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A three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals did not have the power to strike down the 1978 Supreme Court decision that affirmed the FCC’s right to police the airwaves for objectionable content. But it reversed the aggressive stance the agency took starting in 2004 that found even a slip of the tongue that got by network censors was a violation subject to fines for the stations that aired it.
The court said that policy on so-called fleeting expletives was “unconstitutionally vague” and created a “chilling effect” on the programming that broadcasters chose to air. The court echoed complaints from network executives that the FCC’s standards were nearly impossible to gauge, noting that the agency allowed the airing of the f-word and s-word in broadcasts of the World War II movie “Saving Private Ryan” but not in the PBS miniseries “The Blues.”
Word up.
Now a special master has to be appointed, because when stations appeal fines, because there is always the implicit threat that the FCC will “lose” license renewal applications when the fines are appealed.
I’m this far from putting him on my “They Who Must Not Be Named” list over the media frenzy.
The Toy Story franchise is not exempt from rule 34.
This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.
For those of you whodon’t know, the preceedings was written by Dave Weigel on the private (and now shuttered) JournOlist listserv, and was subsequently leaked to right wing bloggers, leading to his resignation from his position at the Washington Post as their blogger covering the right wing movement.
It should be noted that a number of prominent conservatives have come to his defense.
I cannot speak to the ethics of leaking information from a private listserv, after all we see a lot of leaked private emails when the media covers other industries, but I think that whoever did this was a dick, though they might be an ethical dick.*
Needless to say, it all that the Washington, DC professional blogosphere is talking about right now, to which my response is to go back to covering the damn news.
BTW, if you read the Washington Post Ombudsman’s article on this, which is basically a plea to conservatives to like them, you will understand why you should not subscribe to the paper.
*Come to think of it, “Ethical Dick” is a should be a synonym for “good reporter.”
Listening now, he’s big on the “don’t accept the resignation,” crap.
In Prescott, Arizona, the administrators at commissioned a mural depicting current students at the school:
Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the “Mural Mice.”
Unfortunately, since some of these actual students at the school were black and Hispanic, Steve Blair, a City Councilman and right wing talk show host on KYCA-AM, threw a hissy fit over the description of darkly complected students.
The weasels school administrators responded to this by ordering the artists to lighten the children’s faces:
A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.
The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity. But the school’s principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.
It’s gotten a lot of coverage, and as a result, Steve Blair has been fired by the radio station, so apparently there are limits to racism in Arizona.
Here’s hoping that the voters will do so in the next election, but my guess is that they will elect him mayor.
Rupert Murdoch has decided that Times of London and the Sunday Times will go behind a pay-wall.
I generally think that this is a bad idea since:
That being said, I think that Murdoch’s plans go way beyond a simple pay-wall, and straight into crazy town, because, as the New York Post, a Murdoch publication that I would like to see vanish into pay-wall obscurity notes, observes, the Times of London won’t just be going behind a pay-wall, they will also lock out the search engines almost completely:
The UK’s Times and Sunday Times are putting up search walls in addition to pay walls.
The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories.
Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google’s Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.
The papers are betting that loyal readers will covet access to scarce content. Critics say the move will make it tougher to attract new readers who discover content by searching the Web.
This isn’t just a misbegotten business plan, it’s an attempt to force payment for links, and it ain’t gonna work, at least not unless Murdoch can convince various legislatures to make linking illegal, a course of action that I find profoundly unlikely, since it essentially bans the web.
Because he finds things like this.
Brilliant.
My wife is watching the last episode of 24 as I type this.
I consider it to be poorly written torture and espionage porn, though it is well directed, its pacing reminds me of the first Taking of Pelham 123 movie with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, which is high praise from me.
Still, I don’t watch it, after about 5 minutes, I find myself numb.
I never watched, nor was interested in watching, the television show Lost.
I don’t know what happened, but I have read that some fanboi (and fangrrl) have been profoundly disappointed.
I feel some schadenfreude at all the fans who were disappointed by the series finale.
I guess that makes me a bad person.
D.C. Douglas, who got fired from his Geico gig for making a snarky call to freedom works, responds.
He has a future as a director.
It appears that Rush Limbaugh is having problems selling his New York City penthouse apartment, so he has cut his asking price by $1 million.
I guess his little tantrum about New York raising taxes by a few pennies on rich pigs is costing him some change.
I noted this real estate transaction about 2 months ago, (Yes, the pictures are at the link, and yes, they are hideous) when I commented on the fact that his taste in decorating was less than refined.
Here he notes that the big banks made their obscene profits, which justified their obscene bonuses, made their profits by taking their TARP money by lending it back to the government.
They borrowed at an interest rate lower than that of US treasurys, and then bought treasuries, and pocketed the difference.
Why do I have to listen to a comedian to get real financial news.
I love me that Jon Stewart, particularly his comment that, “Our government is the worst loan shark in history,” but I am really pissed off that he is the only one out in cable teevee land who is explaining this in the mass media.
This is an interesting take on the Star Wars story.
Of note, the changes that George Lucas has made since the original has come out have had the effect of dehumanizing the troops of the Empire, in the original cut of Episode IV, you had Stormtroopers screaming as the fell, but now they are just a bunch of clone automatons.
I think that his idea was to make it more family friendly,* but what it has really done is to remove any element of the basic costs and immorality of war from the story.
Now all the damage is done to robots and clones, who, after all, aren’t people.
This is why dumbed down child friendly pap is frequently not only, not child friendly, but actually immoral.
</Rant>
*Much like he did in the infamous Christmas special.