(YouTube) Hey look, Fox News muckraking and ludicrously biased reporting!
Topic: Politics and Law
7:30 am EDT, Jul 28, 2006
If you ever had the slightest doubt that Fox News was reporting a load of biased sensationalism, well, let's just go ahead and remove that.
Someone put together a very nice bit showing just how far they went to take something from the Colbert Report not only out of context, but also re-cut it so as to omit key parts of what they were essentially quoting.
You know, in print it's kind of required to sprinkle a lot of "[...]" in text when you edit quotes but apparently no such requirement or even ethical consideration exists with television news. They might as well have printed "Senator Wexler was quoted as saying 'I [...] like to [...] have sex [...] with [...] my own sister'", but without the ellipses.
For the bonus points, here's also the link of Colbert firing a salvo back at the idiot morning programs for reporting incorrectly on the issue, using part of Fox's misbegotten video.
To be perfectly honest with you, as stupid as the COPE Act is, this video clip actually explains it quite well, symbolically speaking.
If you didn't know what the "net neutrality" business was about, hit the link while your ISP still allows you to visit web sites that didn't pay them money.
Well, well, well. Amidst all the posturing and fist-shaking about who dared to leak the career information about CIA employee Valerie Plame, and the resulting witch hunt, it looks like we've actually found that Bush indeed did happen to "accidentally" release that information to disgrace his political enemies. Libby has now apparently testified that Bush OK'd the release of the oh-so-career-destroying information.
Whodathunkit!
I wonder if perhaps we'll get lucky and Bush will actually follow through with firing the person who leaked this information like he swore he would at a press conference shortly after this witch hunt began, and fire himself and Cheney?
McKinney prepares to waste Supreme Court time to argue her specialness
Topic: Politics and Law
3:45 am EDT, Apr 6, 2006
I really didn't know quite where to begin on this one. Perhaps this time justice will be done and they'll put this woman in jail for a few days. Goodness knows, if you or I hit an officer of the law, not only would we still be in jail for it, we'd have gotten a solid beating (...which, in all honesty probably wouldn't be so terrible as long as no permanent damage was done. Don't hit cops!) before any cuffs were slapped on.
In any case, Mrs McKinney is a US rep who decided she was going to simply waltz past one of the security checkpoints in the capitol building, one of the checkpoints that are there just to protect people like her I'll add, when one of the police officers who was on duty tried to stop her because he didn't know who she was. She promptly turned around and struck the officer in the chest with her cell phone. Note that at the time, she'd just gotten a new hairstyle (which is something McKinney has been trying to turn into a play on words) so she might have been hard to recognize, but more importantly she wasn't wearing the mandatory badge or less formal legislator's pin. Basically, she might as well have barged in in street clothes and demanded to be treated like she owned the place.
Now, this would have been a relatively simple thing to just hush up and let blow over, but apparently just getting special treatment (in that she wasn't immediately arrested for assaulting an officer, which can only be due to the fact that she's a rep) wasn't enough for her. Even though the officer was only doing his job in stopping her, McKinney and her lawyer held a press conference where they made threats of hauling the officer up on criminal and civil charges, in addition McKinney referring to the incident as "inappropriate touching" of her "black, female person". What's sad is that McKinney had already been given an apology that there was even any confusion in the first place. ...and for those who missed it, let me reaffirm... McKinney is claiming she was stopped because she's black, and that this is "racial profiling".
Some people just don't know when to quit.
Clearly the officer's superior is a stand-up guy, because this kind of challenge basically means that they must investigate, and right at the top of the list is why was this woman not arrested in the first place for assaulting the officer.
If you want to see how far into "complete bullshit" this has gotten, click on the video links about halfway down the page, where McKinney's white lawyer (until then we'd only been shown her black lawyer, she has two) while sitting right next to her states repeatedly that "no one knows what actually happened" although I'm thinking that quite possibly his client was probably somewhere nearby. By the way, the police aren't really going to discuss it all that much until their investigation is complete because that's the normal way they work--which has been leaving McKinney and her lawyers plenty of time to run all over talking to, or actually not talking to reporters.
I dearly hope they throw the book at her, both for assaulting an officer whose sole reason for being there was to protect her, as well as for daring to pull this race card bullshit to the media. I'm not sure if the latter is actually a prosecuteable offense, but at least I'm willing to let judges sort it out instead of hauling off and hitting McKinney.
Things like this are supposed to be funny, and then you realize it hits too close to home against a man who is ordering our people to go kill other people in order to protect his oil wells.
Well, if this isn't an example of fascism, I don't really know what one requires to qualify... Perhaps a swastika and golden eagle medallion on the jackbooted thugs.
A 100% legal, permitted, and well-administrated rave was shut down in Utah, and rather extreme violence was visited on the heads of those involved. ...with basically no justification whatsoever other than some asshats wanted it shut down.
The URL has embedded footage showing exactly what kind of force was brought to bear on the least violent sub-culture our country has.
Houston's police chief apparently missed the seminar on the things you don't ever suggest if you hate bad press and has actually been caught mentioning he'd like security cameras up in shopping centers, downtown streets, and apartment complexes to keep an eye on those darn criminals.
Well, if you had any doubts left as to whether or not Bush had any respect at all for Freedom of Speech, this CNN article should clear that right up for ya'.
She wore a t-shirt with an anti-war slogan on it. They asked her to cover it up, she refused, they arrested her for "unlawful conduct".
I'd like to know exactly when fashion went from being a matter of personal taste, to carrying the force of law.
Finally, it has started. People have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush--not in hushed whispers but openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress.
An article by Elizabeth Holtzman discussing in plain terms the possibility of impeaching the President for soundly failing to respect the laws of the United States.
