DNC ‘08: 1.1

Stoopid Network Tricks and Dallying Dems

As I sit here listening to CSPAN pre-convention inanities and old speeches in the background while waiting for the kickoff (and a Teddy Kennedy cry-fest), I figured I’d go ahead and report the first Odd-News story of the ‘08DNC. It certainly gave me a giggle.

The DNC pool coverage this year is being provided by… of all possible sources… Fox News. Just about 12 hours exactly from the opening, the sprinkler system in a Fox skybox was set off, flooding the downstairs concourse and club areas so badly the fire department had to suck it up with shop-vacs. The massive amounts of lighting and broadcasting equipment - and attendant wiring - had to be hastily removed to prevent electrical fire. The link is from KSUA-TV 9 in Denver:

Part of Pepsi Center flooded by sprinkler system

Some immediate pointed asides occurred to me, so of course I perused the bored-as-me blogosphere to see what kind of speculations might be floating around. The best I’ve found so far for satirical or just plain humorous value are:

• Since it’s the Pepsi Center, was it Aquafina?
• Their pants were on fire.
• Pundit hairspray meets Limbaugh’s cigar.
• Hot air from Sean Hannity.
• Methane. Too much bullshit too close to hot lights.

On the fact that some fundamentalists were out front praying for rain…

• Proof positive prayer works.
• Proof that one needs to word prayers carefully.

Hahaha!!! Whew! Presuming Fox’s lighting crew figured out they can’t put those hot spots within a foot of the heat sensors for the sprinkler system, I’ve also been idly watching the interactions between people and groups of people wandering through the convention center. If you thought the YKos and NetrootsNation conventions were regular hotbeds of rampant pair-bonding (mostly temporary), the DNC has to take the cake!

I’m sure there’s an equivalent amount of close encounters that take place during the RNC, so I’m not saying only one side of the aisle is sexier. It’s just that at the RNC it’s mostly chemically-enhanced and happening in the men’s rest rooms. [rim shot]

Hehehe!!! Okay, I think I’m prepared to spend the next four days glued to all-day platform committee hammering, all-evening speechifying and all-night partying - on CSPAN, sans commercials. Should be fun!

Posts to the DNC Series:

Stoopid Network Tricks and Dallying Dems
Assassination Plot Busted, Teddy’s Speech
Hard-Hearted Hillary Made Me Cry

You’ve Just Gotta Be Proud…

Wow. That’s a real photograph of our dear President representing America at the Olympic Summer Games in Bejing. Pay particular attention to the look on daughter Barbara next to him… Even as Chinese police are slaughtering protesters north of the city and censoring internet access for people from all over the world. Some athletes and journalists covering the games can’t even get their own blogs…

Just for coming-in-January nostalgia’s sake, check out the rest of these fun photos over at Gawker. At the very least it’ll make you not feel so bad about those debate drinking games where you have to chug every time John McCain mentions being a tortured Vietnam veteran or Obama says “we can.”

Link:

Gawker: Bush Looking Drunk at the Olympics

Oh John, You Handsome Cad!

Well folks, it’s 8-8-08, which of course means it’s the End of the World. Right on cue, it’s revealed that John Edwards, best-looking Presidential Wannabe in this nation’s history, was revealed today to have enjoyed an extramarital affair. Might even have fathered one of America’s many (a majority these days) “fatherless” bastards. Wow. I’m so not frothing.

No, we don’t use the word “bastard” anymore to talk about REAL fatherless children. We call him or her our “Love Child.” It’s been that way since the 1960s, becomes more popular every year. Yet the leftist Democratic blogosphere goes absolutely ballistic over this non-news, as if the socialist-leaning, populist, progressive population is this country isn’t the exclusive enclave of Hippies who managed to live through those glorious ’60s (and their children, and their grandchildren, many/most of them fatherless or on step-father #4 by now).

Suddenly they’re all strict Old Testament moralists of the Pharisee variety, buying fake beards and arming themselves with stones. It’s just enough hard core, disgusting hypocrisy to make me sick to my stomach. Get a life, people!

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Anthrax Terrorist: Take 3… Um… 4

…Nobody believes the gub’ment anymore

Sure, there have been tin-foil hat conspiracy theories aplenty for as long as anyone alive can remember. The Jewish bankers got together with the German Illuminati and plotted the ‘New World Order’, getting its first nail in the coffin in 1913 with the Federal Reserve, going straight from there to instigating WW-I with a well-planned assassination in Sarajevo, culling the first wave of accumulated wealth in 1929 to start the Great Depression, which could only be alleviated in the end by WW-II.

And they needed an excuse to overrule America’s strong isolationism at the time, so they didn’t bother to do anything about the incoming Japanese fleet as it sailed en masse toward Pearl Harbor. Not exactly a “false flag” operation, but certainly despicable. REAL false flag operations got famous when the wholly fictional Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ allowed the US military to ensconce itself in perpetuity in South Vietnam, admittedly (by several ‘memoirs’ since, by people who could know) for the purpose of testing the nifty new armaments and chemical warfare agents amassed when they ‘forgot’ to cut the wartime military budget after Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.

Then there was 9-11. A textbook case made for tin-foil speculation, undoubtedly. Huge skyscrapers imploding perfectly from jet fuel in the upper stories, a whole different, un-damaged skyscraper that mysteriously collapsed in the same fashion late that afternoon for no apparent reason, a hole in the danged Pentagon but zero signs of anything that might have caused it, etc., etc., etc. I doubt anybody’s unaware of the grand conspiracy theories for that dreadful day.

Then, just a week later, some journalists and a congresscritters received letters in the mail containing weaponized anthrax spores and badly printed notes from what we were told was just another Arab terrorist. Only that wasn’t true either, as quickly became known. Why, it turns out that the weaponized anthrax spores came from the US Army’s own bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

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When You’re Sick of Surrogates

…making a total ass of their candidate…

Getty

Time Magazine informs us that the Debate Monitors for the upcoming (and never too soon) Presidential debates have been announced. Now we can look forward to more one-on-one between Barack Obama and John McCain without having to roll our eyes on campaign surrogate gaffes enough to go blind.

For the first debate on Friday, September 26 at the University of Mississippi in Oxford the moderator will be Jim Lehrer, executive editor and anchor of the PBS NewsHour. Always a delightful presence, calming influence and rational analyst.

The second debate will be between Vice-Presidential candidates - whoever those turn out to be - on Thursday, October 2 at Washington University in St. Louis. Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent for the NewsHour and managing editor of PBS’s Washington Week will preside. Another excellent choice.

The second debate between Obama and McCain is a Town Meeting format on Tuesday, October 7 at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Our fave Tom Brokaw of NBC News will officiate. Should be fun!

The third and last Presidential debate (and you thought McCain was serious when he offered to do Town Meetings every week back in the day, didn’t you?) will be held on Wednesday, October 15 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York with Bob Sheiffer presiding. Sheiffer, CBS News chief Washington correspondent and host of the weekly Face the Nation broadcast, is a bit more partisan than the others, but should turn in a good performance at that very late stage of the campaign.

Anybody want to offer odds on what the point spread will be by October 15th?

Can the Fox-Bots Be Cured?

Before my beloved Father-in-Law died, my ‘challenging’ Mother-in-Law was one of my more inspiring (and intimidating) role models. She’d occasionally vote Republican (which Dad ALWAYS did), but more often went Democratic for reasons of weighed value to more inclusive values and concerns for all citizens, even if the system’s not perfect. She became an ombudsman fighting for the rights of nursing home patients, she sat on the local zoning board, and she was never afraid to give elected officials - any denomination - a piece of her ample mind whenever they deserved it.

But then the love of her life died, and she’s been lonely ever since. In clinging to something of him and his views of life, she became addicted to Fox News, which - it has been noted many times - is the most successful mass propaganda/mind-control experiment ever deployed by partisan human beings against members of their own species. It has turned her into a regular O’Reilly puppet, victim of subliminal programming, a hater of all who are different or disagree. She was someone who never had a hateful bone in her body in all her years before reaching her late 70s and falling to this addiction.

She’ll be 86 this year. We’ve got to go visit and do what we can to get her some help around the house or live-in care, since she’s too stubborn to do it herself, too independent to go to “The Home,” and still in possession of most of her mental faculties Fox hasn’t yet stolen from her. It’s very sad to see this wonderfully smart, able, strong and loving person become a grim, insulated hater. She hates gays, immigrants, blacks, Muslims, Democrats, the French… anybody Bill O’Reilly tells her to hate. Which - even more sadly - now includes her own children. My husband and I (confirmed liberals) as well as his younger brother, who is a conservative Baptist preacher with his own SBC church! Very strange.

She’s alienated her family, her friends… people she’s known for decades or for their entire lives. I believe it’s a crime to prey on people like Fox does. It does real harm to real people, and they’re doing it purely for the profit. They should be stopped, a treatment for the mind-disease they’ve caused should be high on the list of urgent NIH projects.

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Same Old McSame: Health Care

As the New York Times reports that the nation’s largest health insurer claims that the Economy Has Dented Its Prospects, some highlights of McCain’s This Week appearance with George Stephanolpoulos this past weekend are worthy of a look-see. The subject of health insurance came up with a clip from Elizabeth Edwards, who said:

The truth is, a health care policy that covers everything but cancer doesn’t exactly do me a lot of good. And John McCain and I have something in common - neither one of us would be covered by his health care policy.

Of course, McCain sees no reason to change how health coverage is [not]done in this country because he says government health care is terrible. He should know, since he has enjoyed taxpayer-sponsored government health care all his life, never had to buy a policy and never got turned down for getting or being sick. Here’s the video…

Links:

Transcript: “This Week”
NYT: Before Medicare, Sticker Shock and Rejection
Politico

The Abysmal State of US Politics

The ABC Democratic Debate in Philly on Wednesday night (April 16) was by all accounts a travesty of petty distractions and blatant pandering. Who’s not so bright idea was it to have George Stephanopolis as a moderator for a Clinton? Gag me…

Luckily, the event was blocked out here in North Carolina, where early voting opened today and the crowds are already considerable. I checked my sites today on the state BoE website, where the banner now displays a running total of registrations. Democrats are running nearly 2 to 1 over Republicans, with a million and a quarter Independents.

Now, North Carolina likes to split its tickets. We consistently go for Democratic state government and my locality is solidly Dem. But for as long as I’ve lived here - yes, I’m ashamed to say I lived through the last throes of the Jesse Helms empire - NC has gong solidly Republican for President and Senate. Except when John Edwards finally took the pig farmer down, but he didn’t stay long and we ended up with Liz Dole. But from what I’ve seen, this year our millions of bitter small town and rural people just might go Dem well beyond the margin of error that allows elections to be stolen. And the Dem who will make that happen is Barack Obama. He’s going to sweep our primary, then he’s going to take the state.

Anyway, here’s a video of what Barack Obama said today in Raleigh, where he proved that Pennsylvania isn’t the only state that counts right now. Hillary and ABC have given him a significant talking point he can hammer from now ’til November - what’s wrong with American Political Discourse (and the mainstream media) in this country. Just more reasons for change!

Hate: When is Enough Enough?

On the last day of November, 2007, a tense standoff in Rochester, New Hampshire occurred when a man walked into Hillary Clinton’s local campaign headquarters, claimed he had a bomb strapped to himself with duct tape, and took two campaign volunteers hostage. It lasted for hours before he finally allowed the hostages to leave and walked out to unstrap the “bomb” to turn himself in.

There has been quite a lot of talk in the political blogosphere about how hate speech in the ‘normal’ course of politics as usual can incite unstable people to commit terrible crimes. And as people living near the economic edge begin to fall off, we aren’t seeing any slowdown of bizarre acts and mass murders. But in politics, the hate is just getting warmed up.

On the right (RedState and FreeRepublic) the denizens were hoarding popcorn and speculating that Clinton had arranged for this attention-grab herself, liberally (ha!) salted with the usual right-wingnut hate speech we’re so used to from that corner. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly has of course embraced “The Politics of Hate” as his theme for the election season.

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US Press: Still Silent as the Grave

On January 10 I wrote about British press coverage of former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ shocking revelations of high-level nuclear spying. Nearly 2 weeks later Edmonds’ charges have still not seen the light of day in the Corporate Owned Media [COM] in this country. Even after the Sunday Times scooped them all again on January 20.

On Monday (Jan. 21) Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame wrote about the lack of US coverage in an op-ed at Brad Blog and hosted at Huffington Post on Tuesday. Another strong diary at Daily Kos appeared Tuesday, UK media slams US media on Sibel Edmonds case.

[Ellsberg] For the second time in two weeks, the entire US press has let itself be scooped by Rupert Murdoch’s London Sunday Times on a dynamite story of criminal activities by corrupt US officials promoting nuclear proliferation. But there is a worse journalistic sin than being scooped, and that is participating in a cover-up of information that demands urgent attention from the public, the US Congress and the courts.

Ellsberg notes that some American journalists have reportedly received calls from “intelligence sources” hinting that what Edmonds happened upon is not a ‘real’ spy ring, but a very sensitive covert operation with highest authorization. Yet if her allegations are true, we have this insane operation to thank for the Pakistani bomb and A.Q. Khan selling nuclear technology to places like Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea!

[Ellsberg] …if there is any truth to that, we clearly have another prize candidate …in the category of “worst covert operation in US history,” rivaling such contenders as the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra, and the secret CIA torture camps abroad.

Knowledge of the charges, the backup, the evidence and the players is widespread in D.C. on both sides of the aisle. Complicity in the cover-up is just as widespread and includes the US mainstream media. But the cat’s out of the bag now - the whole world knows about it, except Americans who get their news from newspapers and television. There’s no good reason why the American people should be the last to know about the traitorous deeds of their government.

Links:

US National Security for Sale

US journalists ignore Sunday Times scoop

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft

Daniel Ellsberg: Covering Up the Coverage

UK media slams US media on Sibel Edmonds case