Eating Crow

The Wedding of Time Warner and AT&T

The United States Department of Justice said that Time Warner and AT&T can go ahead with their merger plans but only if they dump - the word they used was "divest" - CNN as part of the deal.

Time Warner (meaning, Ted Turner) flipped the judge the bird and the two are reportedly on their way to Vegas to get hitched by Elvis.

The two giant companies don't have a registry set up, however, in lieu of gifts, you can send cash. Mounds and mounds of cash.

Road Runner Politics 2017

Banned Commercial: Debt and China

The following race-baiting commercial reminds me of the classic "You better learn Japanese, they own us now..." And the "Russians Are Coming!" and the Germans and the Japanese, and the Mexicans... and well, I guess this is about what we should expect out of American culture?

Americans are very bi-polar. They celebrate diversity and the globalization of the planet, but are racists and protectionists on the same face. Which one wins? Whomever it's talking to.

The Heat Wave

The Office as a 90's Sitcom

The Office, re-cut as an early-’90s sitcom, complete with laugh track and way-too-long opening credits, bad music and, of course, a laugh track.

Photojournalism

It's a common code of photojournalism not to intervene in the events. They try to change the world with words and pictures - not actions. In some situations this can be deemed immoral and unethical. Relevantly, here's some info on a 1994 Pulitzer winning photo of a Sudanese starving child by Kevin Carter: Kevin killed himself by suicide not long afterward. No one knows what happened to the child.

All of it reminds me of this Banksy print:

Libyan March Madness!

Does anyone else find it MILDLY ironic that the French are spear-heading the no-fly zone effort?

Live Blogs: BBC; Guardian; CNN; Al Jazeera

International military action begins as French warplanes take to the skies above Benghazi to enforce UNSC-approved no-fly zone; French Defense Official: French jets fire on Libyan military vehicles (AJE report: 4 tanks destroyed); Canadians sending fighter-bombers, instituting naval blockade.

Obama: Libyans must be protected, “our coalition is prepared to act with urgency“; Clinton: Libyan gov’t “has lost all legitimacy.”

Much-lauded Libyan Citizen journalist Mohammed “Mo” Al-Nabbous, operator of Alhurra TV livestream, reportedly killed in firefight.

FAIL to WIN

Okay! Okay! I'll take the Thin Mints!

Media's Plaything Broken

Ted Williams, the homeless man turned America's Media's One Minute Sweetheart / Plaything, with a face for radio - not to be confused with the ball player who's head is frozen in a block of ice - has left rehab.

According to sources - Ted vowed to television's Dr. Phil to get clean, get off the bottle for good and not take this second life opportunity for granted.

Dr. Phil put the Media's New Plaything into a rehab facility in Texas and he was supposed to stay there a few months to deal with his addictions to booze and the self destructive lifestyle he's maintained, well, his whole life.

The fairy tale of good intentions and tons of money being thrown at a problem to make it go away is not going as intended. Not surprising, as it seems this philosophy is the entire foundation of liberal society. So now that the fairy tale is over, what's happened to poor old Ted?

What reality is, Ted has left the rehab unit and checked out of there after only two weeks. He's pointing a finger at all the people who were using him. And I don't think that's his pointer finger.

On the bright side, he's back to doing what he loves most: Crack and Thunderbird.

Silencing Joe Buck And Tim McCarver

Silencing Joe Buck And Tim McCarver: Some Simple Tech Solutions To Our Crappy World Series Announcers...

Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, Fox's World Series broadcast team, will begin inflicting themselves on a national television audience tonight.

Thankfully, technology offers recourse that doesn't involve throwing something heavy at the TV: just synch up the broadcast with radio commentary. [via Deadspin]

140 Million Dollars to the wind

Watch carefully, with one sentence - you can actually see 140 million dollars blow away.

Sure, Governor Moonbeam helped pass the collective bargaining bill that created public employee unions that have contributed to the bankrupting of the State of California... but this is about positive advertising, and how nice it was to be in California 30 years ago... before Meg Whitman lived there.

Seems to be working: Brown Opens Up Lead in California.

RNC: Hicks

Republican campaign operatives are taking down an ad against West Virginia Democratic Senate candidate Joe Manchin following a report that the ad's casting call asked for actors who could look "hicky."

The casting call urged actors to bring clothing like flannel shirts, "beat up" John Deere hats and down-filled vests -- "so think coal miner/trucker looks." And they were shot in Philadelphia. So they were outsourced hicks.

Now we're down to the 'Casting Call' of a political ad. Not the ad itself, which is called "Stop Obama."

Yes, Hicky is technically a derogatory term, but some people don't mind being called hick. Some even openly embrace the term. Now, how the RNC didn't see the ad for the actors or oversee the process, after sending the company money seems to be out of whack. Any spot I've ever heard of, there are over 18 Smithers putting in their 2 cents, as if their two cents carried any water. The fact there weren't so many overseers probably speaks more to the apathy of the RNC, towards the process... It's like they "out-sourced" to another state, and didn't care about the product, quality, message - they just threw cash at it. Doubtful they'll be repeating that mistake again.

And note to the casting agent and director - yes, you're racists.

To anyone else who thinks this matters - it doesn't. Discuss how you're going to end the wars and stop spending 5 dollars for every 1 you bring in.

Huh huh huh. Beavis and Butthead Return

They’re back! Beavis and Butt-head is Restarting!

‘Beavis and Butt-head” — the show that celebrated morons and helped make MTV into a network that did more than just play music videos (that's not a good thing) — is coming back.

The move to resurrect the hugely popular 1990s animated anti-heroes has been rumored for several days. But yesterday, sources at MTV confirmed that a new batch of “Beavis and Butt-head” episodes are in the works.

The new series would keep Beavis and Butt-head in their perpetual high-school state, but it would be updated so that the pals — who obsessively watch music videos on a battered TV set — could lob their snarky comments at more current targets like Lady Gaga.

I would suggest just having Mike make comments on all the live action crap that MTV's been producing since B&B left. Jersey Shore? Oh, well, B&B would probably be better and smarter than Snookie?

I'm also guessing that Mike Judge is having trouble finding work if he's going backward... which is a real shame. What are your thoughts on this?

You're Going To Die In A Fire!

An ominous theme has emerged from the wreckage of a deadly pipeline explosion in California... There are thousands of pipes just waiting to EXPLODE under YOUR house... RIGHT NOW!!! AHH! We're all going to DIE! We're going to DIE IN A FIRE!?!! OH NOOSS!!!

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

And now, we can blame the corporations that are supposed to be maintaining these things - and they obviously haven't and have been giving all those fat profits to their share holders - the capitalist pigdogs -- now we've all got pipe BOMBS under OUR NEIGHBORHOODS! Just waiting to go off - who knows when!? WE NEED MORE GOVERNMENT TO REGULATE and INSPECT these un-funded pipe bombs... or we're going to DIE!!! AAahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

At least the minor oil spills in Illinois and Michigan aren't getting any coverage.

TV Reporter Krushes Kid

Ah the incompetence of local news reporters. Watch as this voluptuous correspondent from Tampa attempts to get an interview via an inadvertent game of "Human Frogger," and fails miserably.

Should have taken pointers from George Costanza.

The Week In Review - Sunday Comics

See you next week folks

Doctored Image, No Bias?

On the right, Larry Downing/Reuters President Obama on the magazine cover and in the original photograph with Charlotte Randolph, president of a Louisiana parish, and Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard.

A metaphor for a politically troubled president? Fun with Photoshop?

There was President Obama on the cover of the June 19 issue of The Economist, standing alone on a Louisiana beach, head down, looking forlornly at the ground, presumably at a pile of garbage, perhaps the flag.

The problem was, he was not actually alone in the picture. The photograph was just edited to make it look that way. So what? It's cover art. Just ask OJ and Time Magazine, right?

The unaltered image, shot on May 28 by a Reuters photographer, Larry Downing, shows Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard and Charlotte Randolph, a local parish president, standing alongside the president. But in the image that appeared on The Economist’s cover, Admiral Allen and Ms. Randolph had been scrubbed out, replaced by the blue water of the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, that's what everyone's pissed about. It wasn't tar brown.

When it comes to its own photographers, Reuters has stringent standards regarding photo editing. “Reuters has a strict policy against modifying, removing, adding to or altering any of its photographs without first obtaining the permission of Reuters and, where necessary, the third parties referred to,” Thomson Reuters said in a statement on Sunday.

Editors from The Economist had no comment when asked on Friday about the cover image.

Reuters has had a photo-editing controversy of its own in 2006 after one of its freelance photographers altered images of the Israeli military incursion into Lebanon to make the damage from Israeli warplanes appear more severe. Reuters later stopped working with the photographer and removed his images from its photo archives.

Emma Duncan, deputy editor of The Economist, said this about the cover,

"I was editing the paper the week we ran the image of President Obama with the oil rig in the background. Yes, Charlotte Randolph was edited out of the image (Admiral Allen was removed by the crop). We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers.

We often edit the photos we use on our covers, for one of two reasons. Sometimes — as with a cover we ran on March 27 on U.S. health care, with Mr. Obama with a bandage round his head — it’s an obvious joke. Sometimes — as with an image of President Chavez on May 15 on which we darkened the background, or with our “It’s time” cover endorsing Mr. Obama, from which the background was removed altogether — it is to bring out the central character. We don’t edit photos in order to mislead.

I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated. That wasn’t the point of the story. “The damage beyond the spill” referred to on the cover, and examined in the cover leader, was the damage not to Mr. Obama, but to business in America."

So settle down, ya'll. It's not political. It's just a crappy cover! Okay? It's not like they broke a story about a General who's shining light on a war that's all but forgotten about in America even though it's costing us a Trillion dollars to fight it. Rolling Stone, people! Can we get back to cat pictures now?

Nixon Moment for Facebook

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg sweated profusely as he was questioned about recent privacy failures on the same stage on which Apple chief executive Steve Jobs a day earlier was forced to deny his company's Chinese factories were "sweatshops".

During an interview at the D: All Things Digital conference, Zuckerberg, described on the NYTimes.com Bits blog as being "visibly uncomfortable and sweating profusely", defended his company against claims it was forcing users to make more and more information available publicly and to third-party websites.

Reuters noted that "Zuckerberg began visibly perspiring, to the point that All Things Digital's Kara Swisher had to ask if he was all right". MarketWatch called it his "Richard Nixon" moment.

That's all great and good - but let's review here. Facebook is a free service that's similar to Classmates.com but without the annoying fees attached to it. You freely plug in information, pictures and all kinds of personal information and then are SHOCKED to find out that he's selling it to anyone with a checkbook? I even did a special report when an HR site called Spokeo.com was culling info for your potential employers to spy on you -- using, mostly, info you have freely given up on sites like Facebook.

The company doesn't care about your privacy, and thrives when you don't know how to change the settings. And if you really did care about privacy, the last place you should be visiting and posting anything would be Facebook.

Meanwhile, the billionaire kid is sweating because it's the first time anyone ever asked him a tough question about his business plan. Everyone else who asks him about it is profiting from the flow of information he's getting out of his users. Again, Billionaire, Mark Zuckerber.

Hold on, I have to update my status.

Fiction Trumps Reality

News about a real plane crash doesn't get as much coverage as a fake plane crash...

It's not news, it's CNN.

As tired as I am news sites putting useless crap on their front page, I also am aware that they are aware of EXACTLY what people are clicking on, and tailor it to match to sell advertising.

We are the problem, not them.