May 2008

I just heard a headline on Fox News that said “See how the left wing blogs are treating Jenna Bush and Ted Kennedy differently” - that shit makes me laugh. I would hope they treat a man in his 70’s with diagnosed brain cancer and the daughter of one of the most corrupt and failing presidents in this country’s history differently.

I’m sure everyone is getting as sick as I am to even turn on the TV and see anything related to the primaries. Just like we somehow believe our Baseball Tournaments are “World” Series although the World isn’t competing, the media somehow thinks that perpetual coverage of the campaign will benefit anyone.

I think what many people that are forgetting currently, is that while are the talkign heads are debating every miniscule issue to death, the people of this land mostly just see snapshots. Very few people take the time to actually get educated on the situation and moreover the candidates. A lot of people I’m sure have also completely tuned out by now because the amount of pulp that is being spewed, stories of no value whatsoever, are filling the prime time TV slots.

Everyone is pointing fingers towards each other when it comes to taking the blame on why people are so uninterested by what’s going on. The bigger danger that many Democrats somehow seem to take very lightly, is the fact that althought politically they should be able to win this election easily, it’s John McCain who’s been doing the likeablity campaign. It’s these type of continued publica appearances that at some point make him seem like the likeable guy. Let’s not forget the main reason why George Bush II got elected because many people thought he was the kind of person they wanted to have a beer with. Of course there’s no connection there whatsoever when it comeso the qualitifications of being president, but irrelevant at this point since he’s already served a full 8 years.

While Hillary and Barack are hitting the campaign trail hard, John McCain is making one TV appearance after another, keeping him in the positive limelight, no matter what he says. Also people forget that if you’re not specifcally into politics or pay attention to what’s going on a permanent basis, then it’s very easy to get an image of a person that’s very different from reality. Imagine you’re a brick layer, you go to work every day and your main concerns are the weather, whether the boss is pulling in enough new jobs, etc. When you come home at night after a long hard day on the job site, you mentally tune out, shift into low gear and enjoy the rest of the evening, before it’s time to do the same thing again in the morning. Now I’m putting myself in just that position and if I were changing around the channels, why would I want to whitness more of the infighting of the Democrats, where John McCain is on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart cracking jokes about his own age.

Where many of McCain’s appearences may seem lame to certain people, I’m sure that many people give him credit for the fact that he’s trying to so hard to be likeable and even if he comes across goofy at times, it’s still not against his favor.

All in all what I’m getting at here is the fact that people have A.D.D. and don’t pay as much attention as most of us, so maybe it’s time to really get this damn show over in terms of the primaries and start socking it to McCain as he deserves.

It’s 3:03 am. I’m doing the graveyard shift again and I’m watching PBS Frontline’s “Bad Voodoo’s War”. I’ve done my share of hard work in my life. In my 20’s I was an iron worker in Germany and I know to some extent how it is to share a shitty situation with others. It of course doesn’t compare to the bond soldiers form, but I do emphasize very strongly with the men. I know how it is to be working in extreme conditions, whether it’s the extreme hot or cold - please don’t think I’m comparing myself to soldiers, I’m just saying I can feel for them - I know iron work doesn’t compare to the fear of being blown up daily. The headline of this article is a direct quote from one of the soldiers, SFC Jason Shaw. He had joined the army at age 18 and four years later he was on his third deployment. The crazy part is that he could have opted to stay home, but he volunteered to go back, to accompany his friends in the platoon.

Misery likes company they say, but I think this goes a bit deeper than that. These soldiers on a daily basis go through more crisis, fear and danger to their lives than most of us will ever experience in a life time. The soldier don’t want to go on the missions because they know that every day they leave their camp, death can be near. I can see in the look of the guys that they’re just hanging in there. Toby Nunn, the platoon leader shares his personal feelings and it’s saddening to see that we’re wasting men like him and others. Most of the documentary deals with this platoon doing security details for transport convoys. At some point Nunn describes the convoy and they called it “the lettuce and tomato” convoy. He finished his comment by saying “yeah these supplies are probably going to some private contractor” - that’s something you don’t even want to think about it. While these men are leaving families at home, seeing relationships fall apart, loosing friends in battle and of course getting killed and injured themselves, the men in Washington are saying the surge is working. Ask the soldiers that are on their third, fourth or fifth tour of duty whether they think it’s working. It doesn’t make any difference to them - I’m sure of that.

An argument many republicans will bring up is that “they signed up for this” - let’s be serious here. Nobody in the army currently wants to be at war. Yes of course you have certain people that joined beause they were gung ho for action - however most soldiers don’t see action. They’re in a situation where every one of their move requires careful thought, as to not cause any conflicts with the Iraqi security personell. This reason and others, make it very hard for soldiers to protect each other. I’m an extremely anti-military person but I’ve never had anything against soldiers. Soldiers are guys and gals just like you and I trying to make it in life and not a single one of them wants to be at war for several years at a time.

Of course the people in Washington don’t think about it - I know Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t and never looses any sleep over the fact how many men he will personally have ruined with so very little so show for. Accordnig to recent reports we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of returning service men that are injured physically and mentally. The republican don’t give two cents about you - that’s the sad part. They don’t care about your families, they don’t care how your quarters look like, and they could care less that you’re ill equipped. While our heroes are risking their lives protecting assets for private contractors, those same private contractors don’t adhere to any laws, they get paid 10x times more than our soldiers do and they don’t have to answer to anyone. You can’t even blame ex military men for joining companies such as Blackwater because after all you can make more money and you don’t have anyone to answer to.

What this government has done, is completely demoralize our service men. Just like after Vietnam we’re seeing case after case where veterans are being denied proper care. To top it all off, John McCain the republican presidential hopeful rejects the new G.I. Bill. How do these people sleep at night?

You can check out SFC Toby Nunn’s Website Here: http://tobynunn.net/

Watch the PBS Frontline Documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/badvoodoo/

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I know it’s probably just me but I’m getting sick of the current theme so I’m trying around with some different ways of displaying things. This new themes offers some very flexible ways of displaying articles and categories, if anyone hates it - let me know.

It doesn’t get anymore clear than this.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=YK0d8ENS__c[/youtube]

Just when you thought Chris Matthews had completely lost relevance (not that he’s been very relevant in my life), Mediamatters even has a spot on their page called the Matthews Monitor and I think there are even websites dedicated to how much they hate him. I understand that one can easily get extremely annoyed at him and the things he says, however he really hit one out of the park last week when he had on “conservative” radio talk show host on and the topic was Bush’s speech in the Knesset.

First of all I have to say the Matthews showed what a good debate is. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, shut up and mainly, stop making a fool out of yourself. Surprisingly enough, there are actually people (websites, bloggers, etc) that think that this was low brow. I was just trying to find some informative links to include into this post where I came across this article where they’re actually saying that what Matthews engaged was a cheap shot.

Here’s a neat trick for a sleazy MSNBC huckster: invite a low- rated conservative talk show host from a bottom- feeder radio outfit and “win” the debate with gutter- level debate tricks, the very sort one’s high school debate teacher would have banned as too lowbrow.

This great post can be found here: radioequalizer.blogspot.com

Excuse me, but if you think that questioning the opponents knowledge on the very topic they’re speaking of is low brow I guess I’m missing the point. You’re seriously trying to tell me that your school teacher would have banned this debate tactic? That’s just ludicrous unless of course your school teacher was Karl Rove.

Here’s what I learned about depating: listen to your opponent, think about your answer carefully - just like on Fox NEWS (hahahaha). What crack are people smoking to spew such bullshit? How do people get by with this I wonder. I’m glad people like Kevin James are finally exposed for the ignorant uneducated idiots that they are - what’s of course more frightening is the fact that these people have careers and actually get paid for this. Geez…

It’s really taken me a while to truly appreciate how it works and I’ve come to the conclusion that it can almost be compared to keyword research. First of all the headlines of the day are usually announced by pretty looking people that in most case don’t really possess any journalistic skills - at least none that I would consider being necessary to be labeled a true investigative journalist.

Instead what we have is something that I believe is controlled mostly by keywords and how many hits these will receive. It’s very much like blogging if you think about it. I’ve written over a 100 blog posts and I think and I’ve experimented with this myself. Recently I was on my night shift job and I was watching Fox News and I noticed that the host of the “Red Eye” show looked like he had lost a knife fight. So as an experiment I posted this information on my blog immediately. Guess what - to this day it’s the highest ranking post on my blog in terms of page views it has received. Another post where I picked a headline that I was guessing would do well is the article where I criticized Dunkin Donuts for their ignorant approach towards beverage names. Not surprisingly that’s also one of the post I got the most comments on. The point I’m getting it is the fact that everyone, even the journalists and bloggers are somewhere trying to make money and if you want to have a blog for example that gets a few hundred thousands hit just pick topics you know everyone is talking about, items that are in the news.

What it boils down to is that the media just picks up any garbage that they can find and know people will watch. Even big sites such as the Huffington Post can be accused of this. Even on their site you will find the trash boulevard garbage, but of course with more meaningful commentary on the journalistic side of things. I don’t really blame businesses for trying to make money, it’s just the fact that they are the main propagating factor when it comes to all the media bullshit we have to whitness. With all the trash that’s out there one would think that “normal” might even have a market share. I know I’ve written about this time and time again but until I see some serious change I can’t help but to write on it again. I even called into a local radion show because I wanted to know why they were reporting garbage and taking calls on Rev. Right instead of focusing more on the fact that we’re in a War, have hundreds of thousands of Veterans that aren’t getting the care they deserve and the radio talk show host told me that they tried it. By tried I mean they tried covering the issues that should be important to the local community and on a national level and I was told that nobody calls, the show is pretty much dead. Obviously that’s not good for advertisers so it all comes down to one thing again - until profits are taken out of the news business, all we will get our regurgitated headlines, as real investigative journalism costs to much and doesn’t bring back enough money in terms of viewership.

Do we need anymore proof that Bill O’Reilly is a jack ass? Not really. Is it entertaining to watch what a true imbecile he is? Definitely. Enjoy the video below.