Category: government

Atheist in the FOXhole

On By Rick McIn books, government, humour1 Comment

With glee I instantly bought the new FOX News expose (as an audio book) by Joe Mudo.

… Then made the trip to Manhattan to confront the biggest FOX star himself, Papa Bear.

Papa Bear Rick

Like Colbert, I’m a HUGE fan of mocking Bill O’Reilly.

Release date: June 4, 2013 – An Atheist in the FOXhole:

The “Fox Mole”—whose dispatches for Gawker made headlines in Businessweek, The Hollywood Reporter, and even on The New York Times website—delivers a funny, opinionated memoir of his eight years at the unfair, unbalanced Fox News Channel working as an associate producer for Bill O’Reilly.

Imagine needing to hide your true beliefs just to keep a job you hated. Now imagine your job was producing the biggest show on the biggest cable news channel in America, and you’ll get a sense of what life was like for Joe Muto. As a self-professed bleeding-heart, godless liberal, Joe’s viewpoints clearly didn’t mesh with his employer—especially his direct supervisor, Bill O’Reilly. …

FOXholes

An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

Sadly, I didn’t learn much from the book.

FOX News is no villain, merely a highly successful, insanely profitable business.

Boss hog Rupert Murdoch is just as happy with FOX News dollars, as he is with profits from The Simpsons and Modern Family, both FOX business products.

Joe Mudo concludes the book predictably …

If FOX News would only concede that they mainly take a right wing point-of-view, we’d have nothing to complain about.

EVERYONE — EVERYONE — knows that “Fair and Balanced” is a motto that can only be taken ironically by any thinking human being.

Only the blind take that motto literally.

Joe confirms that O’Reilly is more about high ratings than Conservative “idiocracy“. 🙂

Bill went rogue in 2008, backing President Bush’s massive Bank bailout.

More recently …

Bill O’Reilly marched into the mother of all battles against the forces of intolerance, and it hasn’t nearly ended. He said that gays are winning the battle over marriage because they have “the compelling argument,” and that those opposed to gay marriage need to come up with an actual argument rather than just “thump the Bible.”

This erupted into in a made-for-YouTube shouting match with Laura Ingraham, which O’Reilly happily hosted on his Fox show …

HuffPo

Dr. Laura is worst of the worst. Still.

Even the truly mentally ill FOX host Glenn Beck is back-pedalling on Gay marriage.

Astonishingly, it turns out that Ann Coulter is no she demon, but — in real life — a likeable and charming woman.

O’Reilly impressed me, overall, in the book. Sarah Palin comes off worst.

You can skip this book. Any episode of Jon Stewart or Colbert will tell you as much as you need to know about FOX National News.

The local news affiliates are quite good, so far as I can tell.

America’s idiotic War on Drugs

On By Rick McIn economics, government, moviesLeave a comment

The House I Live In, directed by Eugene Jarecki, is a 2012 documentary film about the War on Drugs in the United States.

The documentary has been well received. Among the review aggregators, Rotten Tomatoes gave it 95% based on 55 reviews …

Click PLAY or watch the trailer on YouTube.

official website

In the USA you can watch it on YouTube for free.

Here are some other places you can get it.

The Wire on HBO really got me thinking about this issue again. I’m wondering if there are any more expensive, less effective strategies than that used by the U.S. government.

Must be … But I can’t think how.

my favourite moron – Donald Trump

On By Rick McIn government, product complaintsLeave a comment

Making fun of him online is one of life’s pleasures. 🙂

Danny Zucker is best known for his Emmy Award winning work as an executive producer of ABC’s Modern Family.

Ireland – please return MY land

On By Rick McIn ethics, government, humour, McCharles familyLeave a comment

Finally.

It seems the University of Saskatchewan is — bit-by-bit — returning land to the rightful owners. Descendants of Aboriginal peoples. 🙂

U Sask

The Department of Native Studies was celebrating June 12th. I enjoyed a free drink (Diet Coke) and traditional food (bacon wrapped asparagus and Samosas).

I’m celebrating too.

With this precedent, I’m planning to claim 4 farms in Ireland.

All 4 of my Grandparents are from Ireland. All were wrongly displaced, forced into economic migration to the Prison Colony of southern Alberta.

Their former properties are rightfully MINE.

… I’d like to also claim my Grandparent’s descendent’s properties, some of it in Scotland. But that would be silly. Why would anyone think I’d have any rights to claim property from so long ago?

Republicans lie 3 times more than Democrats

On By Rick McIn ethics, governmentLeave a comment

This study sounds about right to me.

Republicans and supporters of Republicans are more calculating, deliberate and astonishingly blatant in their lying.

A leading media fact-checking organization rates Republicans as less trustworthy than Democrats, according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University.

The study finds that PolitiFact.com has rated Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims during President Obama’s second term. Republicans continue to get worse marks in recent weeks, despite controversies over Obama administration statements on Benghazi, the IRS and the AP.

Study: Media Fact-Checker Says Republicans Lie More

LiarsThe

related – Eric Ostermeier on February 10, 2011 – PolitiFact Rates Republican Statements as False at 3 Times the Rate of Democrats

Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, John Boehner, Mike Pence, and the National Republican Congressional Committee were the worst offenders in that study.

Republicans lie plenty.

Got it.

Unfortunately the less dishonest Democrats aren’t able to do much for the average American. Obama looks far more like a Republican than a Democrat to me.

Off the Charts: Under Obama, Stocks Do Better

on self-deportation …

On By Rick McIn government, humourLeave a comment

I laughed out loud the first time I heard Romney mention self-deportation.

Self-deportation is an approach to dealing with illegal immigrants in the United States that involves the creation of legal structures which will make life in the US so difficult as to encourage illegal immigrants to voluntarily return to their home countries …

The 2012 Republican Party platform included self-deportation as a response to Illegal immigration to the United States. …

Later it started to make some sense.

Of many possible anti-illegal immigrant policies, I quite like self-deportation. Non violent.

Lalo Alcaraz is a Mexican-American cartoonist.

… the creator of the figure “Daniel D. Portado“, a satirical Hispanic character who in the 1994 called on Mexican immigrants to return south–“”reverse immigration” …

Click PLAY or watch him on YouTube.

He was born in San Diego, by the way.

Like Gay marriage, the anti-Hispanic policies of the Republican Party are a long term losing issue.

Something like the DREAM Act is needed.

Best case scenario, the Mexican economy continues to improve faster than the American. Illegal immigrants decide to go home.

related – Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs is crusading for the Dream Act

gundamentalist propoganda

On By Rick McIn bad news, Facebook, firearms, government, product complaints, things getting worseLeave a comment

The right wing in the USA has many channels by which they push their agenda.

prop·a·gan·da

Noun

Information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

The dissemination of such information as a political strategy.

I see this stuff every day, especially on Facebook.

For example:

Woman shoots intruder after she is raped in front of her children

Screen Shot 2013-04-05 at 1.33.33 PM

Kristy Sage, a young mother living in Lemon Grove, California survived a nightmare and wants her story to be told. Her husband was deployed in the Persian Gulf and although her mom lived with her, her mom worked nights, so Kristy was left home alone at night with her two toddler-aged boys.

Knowing that he was to be deployed, Kristy’s husband made sure that she could adequately protect herself while he was away. He bought a 9mm pistol and made sure she knew how to use it. …

What a story!

It’s perfect for the NRA. Almost as if somebody had invented it. 🙂

Jennifer Cruz did invent it. None of that happened.

But it’s posted on a gundamentalist website. And people are obliviously sharing it with friends and family.

Was Jennifer Cruz paid to write that story?

Is she part of a funded network of believers volunteering to write propoganda?

It hasn’t hit Snopes yet, by the way.

I happen to believe that gun owners have some very good arguments. People like Jennifer Cruz undermine the cause. Make them look like extremist wingnuts.

The NRA should be calling out the liars like Cruz. Debunking propagandists.  They’re not.

The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians

On By Rick McIn ethics, governmentLeave a comment

From a 2011 article by Rolling Stone:

… after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger. …

read more

It’s horrific.

At the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival here’s the trailer for Best Documentary Feature.

I mention this because the USA is just now considering entering into two more wars. Syria and Iran.

So far even John (“maybe 100” years in Iraq) McCain has not called for boots on the ground.

Keep it that way.

The Wire – season 2

On By Rick McIn ethics, government, TVLeave a comment

The second season, along with its ongoing examination of the drug problem and its effect on the urban poor, examines the plight of the blue-collar urban working class as exemplified by stevedores in the city port, as some of them get caught up in smuggling drugs and other contraband inside the containers that their port receives. …

The Wire (season 2)

Click PLAY or watch the opening on YouTube.

I’d never thought much about ports or stevedores before watching this series. Fascinating subculture.

On to season 3.

Though that season was 10yrs ago, the issues are still very contemporary.

What measures should law enforcement be allowed to catch and deter crime?

Boston Globe – Surveillance cameras a tool for deterrence:

GOOD CAMERA work played a key role in the identification of the suspects in Monday’s bombings. But the reliance on store-mounted cameras and cellphone video from the public suggests that Boston Police could benefit from updating their approach to surveillance cameras — particularly by placing cameras more systematically at sporting events and other locations where large numbers of people gather. …

more security, less privacy

On By Rick McIn ethics, government, happiness, health & fitness, things getting worseLeave a comment

Like pretty much everyone, I’m pissed off.

Pissed off that two yahoos had the freedom to maim and kill innocents.

Martin

I, for one, am willing to have less freedom in exchange for more security.

Yes I know that authorities will abuse that power. I’m willing to chance it.

More cameras. More intercept of communication.

Drones I’m less certain about. But probably yes to drone surveillance, as well.

Martin Richard’s Family ‘Applauds’ Boston’s Heroes