How to Effectively Fight the "Fairness Doctrine."

It has come to my attention that some people are all agitated over the chance that the "Fairness Doctrine" may be restored, and media companies, particularly right wing talk radio outlets, might have to adjust to some forced changes like being forced to really be really fair and balanced.

Ok. Now those of you who are afraid of this possibility listen to me. Don't Panic. Here is your solution.

Starting immediately, every right wing radio show will broadcast a disclaimer, let's say at least 6 times a broadcast. That disclaimer should say something like the following:

"This broadcast is for entertainment purposes only. Do not trust anything the host says. The host is nothing more than a paid performer who helps us get paid much more by the advertisers. Enjoy the host's performance but do not take the host for an authority on anything but the host's own opinion."


Yes my cure, my fix is to seperate the two halfs of that thing called infotainment, and leave only the side show freak as the component that shall remain as talk radio.

Hey, if those media outlets make it clear that all they are providing is the radio equavalent of Midget Wrestling or Dwarf Tossing, then they don't have to even try to be fair. That means they can do all Dwarf Tossing all the time, and someone else can do the Mexican Masked Wrestlers all the time, if that is their thing.

Oh. One other thing. While we are at it, Fox News Channel must change it's name. How about Fox ZANEY Comedy Channel. Then they can give up that "Fair and Balanced" bullshit slogan.

No they don't have to give it up. But they do have to add a punch line:

Fox . . . Fair and Balanced . . . awww, we just keeding! (*rimshot*)

Ok that is the fix.

Do I understand this correctly?

I am meaning and talking about the (hurts my brain very very much) SCOTUS ruling on the school desegragation/integration case??

CJ Roberts is saying YES, you can try to (racially) integrate schools but you can't do it, on account and on the basis of the students race?

Ok?

Does that make the slightest bit of sense.?

Hell no, it does not and let me explain how, by transfering Robert's (lack of) reasoning to other problem solving contexts.


"Dr. Dr. I want you to make my boobs bigger without increasing their size."

"Mr. Plumber man. I want you to put in a new bathroom, in another part of the house, without using new pipes or fixtures."

"Mr. Carpenter man. I want you to nail some boards together for me, with out using nails or boards."

"Ms. Mechanic. I wan't you to fix my car, but you can't touch it with a tool or a diagnostic machine, or even your hands."

Ms. Master Chef. I want you to make me some Beef Wellington, but ya can't use beef, or a pastry shell, and ya can't cook it."


Have I made my point yet?

Did I call it, or not?

(Ok I am getting a little tired of the douchebag theme, but hey . . . did I call it, or what?)

Let's go back to the definition; my definition:

"A douchebag is an incredibly annoying and emotionally imbalanced person, who may be of average or even above average intelligence on paper, but who's emotional instability can make them appear to be no smarter than a bucket full of hair."

Now let us consider the latest psychopathological rant by Ann Coulter:


Ann Coulter loses it.

(Sorry, can't embed it, and there is a commercial up front.)


Ok. Let me put this rant in context.

AC is "Sick and tired," of people criticizing her over the words she uses.


Now a sane and rational person would come to a conclusion that in sum would sound/read sorta like the following:

"People are criticzing me for the words I have been using. Maybe I should stop using those sort of words?"

Not Ann. She blames the people who (strangely, oddly, and to her warped little mind, oppressively) criticize her for her tasteless and hateful remarks, instead.

And before I end this, I will say that is there anyone left in the world (save her) who knows about her and DOES NOT belive her to be a douchebag, or psychopath (depending on which word one prefers?)


Ok. One last remark. She is sick and tired of the fact that AFTER she does things like tell (*cough* I mean to say bullshit *cough*) "jokes" about killing people over and over and over and over, that people call her a Nazi.

Shit. I can't even compose a punchline there. The irony and psychopathology is just so telling, am I right? I can only restate it, this time in the form of a headline:


Ann Coulter repeatedly makes sick jokes about killing people and repeatedly gets called a Nazi. Only one who can't see the connection is Ann Coulter."

Follow-Up to the Follow-Up

I know what you all are expecting. You are expecting me to follow up my reporting of Ann Coulter's psychopathological, and tasteless beyond belief (well not beyond belief for her, at least) wishing of John Edward being killed by terrorists, with the report about how Mrs. Edwards politely asked her to stop with the personal attacks. And naturally such request was bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated by Coulter into some delusionary request she stop writing books. I will stop there with the context, as I have given enough if not too much. I am NOT going to say more about that. I will go off on a completely different tangent here.

Let me find something else to talk about, then, ok?

And it is time for a confession. Firstly, it took some time to settle on something as I had no clue to a theme, to start. After that, I was pulled toward the petty and snarky purpose of tying-in some post about psychopathology so I can say something like:

"Hmm Guess it is Related to yesterday's post, afterall?"

But I sorta got lost in Youtube and found something wholly-unrelated to Ann Coulter, psychopathology, and politics:

Some hottie Senorita,


sacudariendo lo que le dio el Dios, como la fruta en un árbol, en una brisa fuerte.





Oh and this might be considered HAWT, but it's from a prime time TV show; "My Name is Earl." I found it as at one point I was looking for the video of that song, "Happy Happy, Joy Joy," from the "Ren & Stimpy Show," but got hits for Earl, not because this character is named Joy (actually, it is Catalina), but because the character of Earl's Ex Wife is named Joy. If you have ever searched in You Tube, you know how the search function can throw up some weird returns, and if you have not ever done that, same goes for any search engine, seems to me.

Anyway, at least I got far away from bad nasty politics, here.

Ok. I can't resist the follow-up here.

Ya'll remember what I said a few posts back about how a certain kind of supermalicious, mentally-unstable and socially inept person deserves to be called a certain word?






Take special note of the way she smiles after wishing death on Edwards.

Now is that being a douchebag, or what?


Edite to Adde:

Before I get to that part, I almost added a remark about Dick Cheney, who could very well be the poster boy for the Senior Division of Douchebaggery. Honestly, if I am not the FIRST to predict this on the internet, I want to be counted among the first, at least. Now think about it. Would it suprise you if Dick Cheney manages to refuse to leave his office, and barricade himself in his undisclosed location, pulling some crazy old man version of a psycho gun nut last stand?

Remember. This is the guy who SHOT his friend in the face.

And that leads into the real reason for this edit.

Thanks to the remark by the hero in this book I am reading, about how the bad guy is a pure psychopath, I am reminded of the near-similarity between douchebags and psychopaths.

You can say it the one way or the other way.

Way one:

A psychopath would be a douchebag, but for the fact they have just enough personality and charm not to be too offensive to others, too much of the time. In short, they have an effective disguise.

Way two:

A douchebag is an undisguised psychopath. The douchebag wishes they were as "smooth" as the psychopath, and/or may sometimes operate under the delusion they are smooth and passing, but to the rest of us, they are as obvious as the stink from a backed up septic tank.

Thanks for the Link. Now LISTEN to the Man (fool!)

Ok. I confess. Not only am I still rubbernecking on that damn message board, but I have been paying more attention to the "America At War" forum. That can get my blood boiling faster than the other forums, but mercifully, it works out to be more cathartic for me these days. Those folk who particularly boil my blood are those dangerous fools who comprise what I think of, as of now at least (as I am about to create a new way of saying it) "Go Down With the Ship War Mongers." I say it that way as these fools are willing to follow the road of POLITICAL failure in Iraq to it's most absurd and disastrous end.


And before I finish the original thought I will declare the following:

I am against the war. I have been since before day one. And that means that if things had gone my way that not only would all those who have been killed and wounded not be killed or wounded, not only would the billions and billions of dollars not be lost in that sink hole, but

GWB would not likely be the least popular president, ever, with not only the whole country, but his own party.

(Ya, I am an America Hater and a Bush Hater, because I am not in favor of this disastrous, from the political pov., and unnecessary foreign intervention. Anyway . . .)


One of those critters who I think of as a "Go Down With The Ship War Monger," posted this vid on some thread to bolster his continued support of the war in Iraq, and the original need for it.

Irony is, this lecturer seems to understand that we did not have the necessary political resources lined up to deal with the consequences of speedy military success. He sees that there was no plan.

Basically, this guy understands the thing that people like me were saying, way back, and that is, we do not want the guys we have trained to be the best, most professional, most awesome "Trigger Pullers," to be handing out aid, after. We want other people who are not by experience and profession "Trigger Pullers" doing that stuff.


http://blip.tv/file/268384

Although he did not say it particularly, I will. This is one of my favorite "usually true" truisms:

Now you can make a flying car, but you are likely to make something that not only does not fly all that well, or is all that great of a car. You wanna fly in a good airplane? Get a good airplane. You wanna drive in a good car? Get a good car. Avoid the hybrid.

And even if the good Doctor does not say it that exact way, he makes the argument in detail.

This vid is not short but it is worth it, particularly at the end, where he divides up available "forces and resources" between the Trigger Pullers, and the Aid Givers.

Shit on a shingle. To show you how AWFUL the Bush Administration is, they had this guy there, on Pentagon retainer (I don't think he was technically an employee) and he had all these idea and plans and had been telling the brass these things for years.

And we well know too well, that he was ignored. And that is why things are the way they are. The man with the plan was ignored by the White House crew, and by Rumsfeld and his crew.

I will skip (even if I originally posted them) the unflattering adjectives, but I have remembered a word that to my mind truly expresses the depth of the Political Failure of the Bush Administration, in Iraq:

Abomination.

I will RESIST the strong urge to call Michelle Malkin . . .

the word that is the focus of my previous post here. Instead I will say that even considering she is one of the professional pundits (rot all pundits) she is not only merely one of the robots repeating the same witless garbage here, but also engaging in the same old tired and witless rhetorical tricks favored by the Right Wing Noise Machine.

Sorry, that sentence got a bit out of control, and I have yet to specify what I am talking about. What I am talking about is the mock and faux outrage (as published by organs and affilliates of said mentioned noisemachine) about that report about journalists and political contributions.

The artificial (and yes deranged) histronics over this story is deflated with these two points.

Point One:

Bad (and witless) Rhetorical Tricks.

Certain Pundits like to make unequal comparisons in a cheap and dirty attempt to make a point. Now such cheap tricks never work on people who know the difference, however the cheap and dirty trick is still used as there are so many "in the choir" who will ignore the lack of logic and reason in these statements . . . . as long as a lib is getting slammed on the end of it.

Did I say witless yet? Maybe pathetic is a better way of saying it.

Moving on, let's look at how Malkin used the cheap and dirty trick here. Taken from her rant, the following:

"Get the picture now? Wearing an American flag: Not OK. Donating to a White-Flag Democrat: A-OK!"

Um, what does wearing a lapel pin have to do with political contributions?

NOTHING!


Whenever you see someone making a comparison on the order of, say, that apples and bagels are the same, you, dear reader, should know that someone is not only trying to bullshit you, but doing it badly.

Point Two:


Ok; let's break down this particular instance of bullshit. For a journalist to wear a flag pin while one the air is not, I agree, that big a deal, BUT it is too close to being a cheerleader while one is allegedly and ideally supposed to be engaged in the delivery of the news of the day (here comes the pay off):

in as OBJECTIVELY and UNPERSONALLY BIASED a manner as is POSSIBLE.

It may not be the job of journalism to tear down the government and the rest of society, merely for the sake of tearing it down. However, it is not the job of journalism to be a cheerleader for either the government, a certain political POV, or certain individuals. We have a name for people or institutions who do that job: PUNDITS. Also, we call people with that job flacks, PR, spokesmen/women, representatives, and at worst, hos.

And while I am at it, I will say that the job of the journalists is to tell us the news of the day, with the least amt. of bullshit, bias, or spin, as is possible.

Ok?


Now any given American has a right as an American to make political contributions (within the lawful limits.)


So, I don't get the freak out here, kids. We are talking about two things that have little to do with each other, leave alone being on anything like a par.

Guess some people just got tired of whining about the Immigration bill or whatever??

Douchebags

This is a slang term (descriptive/insult hybrid variety) with out clear definition.

Some say it is a weak person. Some say it describes people who are "incredibly annoying" and/or "stupid, intellectually challenged or mentally deranged but less than clinically insane. Someone who is unintelligently lying or scamming. Someone who is arrogant, elitist or snobby. Someone whom you don't like. Someone who is socially inept. Someone who you think is mentally challenged ."


http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/7558


My classification and quantification?


I say that the parts above that I bolded are the core of the idea, with the addition of the following (I will make a synthesized declaration, for clarity's sake.)


A douchebag is an incredibly annoying and emotionally imbalanced person, who may be of average or even above average intelligence on paper, but who's emotional instability can make them appear to be no smarter than a bucket full of hair. Their emotional dysfunction is usually so acute, that they can at best be considered only sub-marginally socially functional. It is very likely that any douchebag suffers from a psychiatric dysfunction, particulary ADD/ADHD, any of several of the Axis II Personality Disorders, or Bi-polar Disorder. If they have been diagnosed, it is likely that they are either (a) off their meds, or (b) never actually started taking their meds.


What seperates a douchebag from a garden variety asshole? Most assholes are not 24/7 assholes. Everyone can have an "asshole moment," or even an "asshole day." But a douchebag is the kind of grotesque excuse for a human who not only is fairly, at least, if not well aware of their anti-social, annoying and emotionally-toxic behaviour, but embraces the reality of their grotesque-ness (somewhat, at least).


In short, they are not only aware of it, but are well-pleased by how offensive they are (some of the time. Other times, they just don't care one way or the other.)



Not only do they suck the very air out of a room, but they get a sick sense of satisfaction from doing so. For example, consider a person who passes a particularly noxious bit of gas. If the person in question is relatively well adjusted (normal), they will be embarassed. However the douchebag is not. Instead of thinking about how embarassed they are, the douchebag will be thinking something like,"Oh ya, they have to deal with me now. GOOD!"


That is the essense of being a douchebag:


being a selfish, obnoxious git, and loving every stinking minute of it.

Back From The Caribbean Cruise

I deleted that last post here, which looked and smelled much too much like a rant.

I don't exactly remember who I was bitching and moaning about.

Oh ya. NOW I DO.

No matter -- as I said I just got back from vay-cay and I am feeling very fine.

(Part of the Reason) I am a Liberal

NO apologies either, to the hateful, never mind mindless, folk who think liberalism is a mental disease or a threat to the American Way of Life. SHIT! The core ideas concerning the philosophy of liberalism, which will follow these opening remarks, are actually among the Core Ideals upon which our Nation was founded. If you disagree with me on that, shut your damn yap, lay off the demogogery, stop calling me and other liberals traitors, but instead, take it up with T. Jefferson, J. Madison, T. Paine, and the rest of them Real and Original Patriots.

Yes, I am sick to death of self-righteous douchebags* getting on my case, either personally or by category, because I share the same ideals, and I value Liberty in the same way as the Founding Fathers!


Anyway, here is a classic definition of liberalism:

1. Liberalism as a Political Theory

Liberty‘By definition’, Maurice Cranston rightly pointed out, ‘a liberal is a man who believes in liberty’ (Cranston, 459). In two different ways, liberals accord liberty primacy as a political value. First, liberals have typically maintained that humans are naturally in ‘a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions…as they think fit…without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man’ (Locke, 1960 [1689]: 287). Mill too argued that ‘[T]he burden of proof is supposed to ith those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition…. The a priori assumption is in favour of freedom…’(Mill, 1991 [1859]: 472). This might be called the Fundamental Liberal Principle (Gaus, 1996: 162-166): freedom is normatively basic, and so the onus of justification is on those who would limit freedom. It follows from this that political authority and law must be justified, as they limit the liberty of citizens. Consequently, a central question of liberal political theory is whether political authority can be justified, and if so, how. It is for this reason that social contract theory, as developed by Thomas Hobbes (1948 [1651]), John Locke (1960 [1689]), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1973 [1762]) and Immanuel Kant (1965 [1797]), is usually viewed as liberal even though the actual political prescriptions of, say, Hobbes and Rousseau, have distinctly illiberal features. Insofar as they take as their starting point a state of nature in which humans are free and equal, and so argue that any limitation of this freedom and equality stands in need of justification (i.e., by the social contract), the contractual tradition expresses the Fundamental Liberal Principle.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#Pol

I am not going to go long on analysis here, but to say that it was LIBERALS who fought and won the American Revolutionary War (with help from the French.) So if you are a liberal leaning person, and you have to deal with one of those douchebags -- the really grotesque ones who insist that liberals are dangers to security, or traitors, or unamerican, remind them of that fact. Then, just shut up and let them spew. And fume. And overreact. And go psycho. Remember; you can not change their minds. Regarding some of these people? If you took away their hate, and their demogogery, and their bigotry, and their ignorant mindless soundbites and slogans? They (likely) would have nothing at all to say but for:

(a) I'm hungy, and

(b) I messed myself.

Yes, that was a none too subtle way of saying that so many of the truly offensive liberal haters, the Cranks, those who behave like tiresome blustering blowhards, are acting like big babies!

Ok. I have got all that off my chest. Right. As if it is going to make any difference?

Screw it. I am going on vacation.

* Re my use of the word douchebag? My discussion of that went long, so I will save it for another day.

Now I would be brief, and just call him a Dangerous Sociopathic Meglomaniac

But here is a nice chunk (nice in the sense of a very good summary of bad traits) of Mike Taibbi's screed on Giuliani.


"Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush."


Oh, and the next sentence is so on point about what it says about the malignant and practiced intellectual feebleness of the American People, that DAMN! I wish I had thought it up:


"Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out."


Worse Than Bush