Fox Sports gets into the lying business...you know, just like its' parent company...

I posted an article on Farcebook last week briefly dealing with this topic, but I wanted to discuss it further here.

In case you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about here's a quick refresher...In this season's NFL home opener, Fox Sports broadcast the Bears game. During the game they made reference to several local newspaper headlines that had slammed Jay Cutler's pathetic performance in last year's NFC Championship game. The only problem was that the headlines flashed on the tv screen were all complete and total fabrications. None of the Chicago local papers had published any of the headlines that Fox said they did.

In other words, they lied.

Now we fast forward a couple of weeks, and Fox Sports has issued an apology on National Telly, only when you read it, it's not really an apology at all. You see, an apology would have included owning up to what they had done by saying something like "we're really sorry we totally made this shit up, Jay Cutler, please don't sue us", but, being a Fox subsidiary, they offered a "we didn't mean to offend anyone/sorry for the mistake/silly us, we promise not to do it again" statement that sounds like an apology without actually being one...

Let's take a closer look at what they said shall we? The Fox "apology" says that they displayed an "incorrect graphic". Hmmm. Are they suggesting that the person, or persons that created those graphics, meant to fabricate something else instead? Did they use the wrong font? Did they mean to use graphics with other, made up lies instead? I call bullshit. I think those graphics were 100% correct. They wanted them to look like newspaper headlines, and that's exactly what they looked like. What they said was 100% completely and totally fucking made-up bullshit, yes, but they weren't incorrect in the slightest.

Then, as the "apology" continues, they go on to say that when the graphics were displayed on screen, they told the announcer that they were from real headlines, so that when he said that they were from local newspapers, he was merely repeating what he was told by his production team, over the air. They said that was a mistake, and they were sorry. You see that? They were sorry for telling their on-air announcer that the bullshit headlines were true when in fact they weren't, but they weren't sorry that they'd made up the bullshit headlines in the first place. Clever, huh?

But the coup de gras in this sorry affair is the semi-apology offered earlier in the week by a person with the hysterically inappropriately titled position of  Fox Sports VP of Communication. This rocket scientist suggested that they were just "trying to capture the sentiment of the game (the NFC Championship game) and used the wrong word." I'm sorry, but what? They used the wrong word? Which one was wrong? I call bullshit on this one too. Here's the deal, they didn't use the wrong word, they were ALL the wrong words because Fox Sports made them all up.

Here's the bottom line, everyone expects to be lied to on their "news" network mothership, but if Fux Sports starts treating their sports viewers with the same level of sneering condescension and disdain that they have for their brain-dead "news" viewers, they could be in for a very rough ride indeed.

Further proof the rethuglicans don't give a f*ck about you...

The republican leadership in Congress just proved to us all that they are amoral assholes with no conscience or ethical boundaries. In their desire to mortally wound the President's re-election bid, the party of 'No' has thrown up obstacle after obstacle to the economic policies presented designed specifically to help re-fire the sagging American economy. Time after time the hypocritical bastards would get up on their hind legs after voting down the President's proposals and belch their talking points into the nearest microphone suggesting that what they were really doing was "protecting the American people". Protecting them from what no-one bothered to ask, although it was clear to most that the people they were actually protecting was the corporations that owns them lock, stock and rancid barrel.

The really frustrating thing was that there was never any real proof that they wanted to hurt the economy in order to achieve their goal. Until now, that is. With this single letter to the chairman of the Fed, the leadership of the gop has just shown themselves, in clear and concise terms, that they are nothing more than partisan political whores who are more than willing to see the economy go down in flames if it means the President might not get re-elected.

And these stupid inbred fuckers wonder why their collective approval ratings is only slightly higher then genital warts.

More republican hypocrisy anon...

An honest republican....yes there is such a thing...

A texass congessman want off-script recently and admitted that all of the women-hating legislation they've been busy introducing from coast to coast, rather than jobs bills which they said was their number one priority, IS in fact, a war on woman's reproductive rights. Whilst the accidental honesty is refreshing, it is quickly overcome by the fact that the smiling moron that issued it simply doesn't understand the depths of his party's hypocrisy. You see, there's another bunch of religious fundamentalists that like to control what women do...but we bomb them because they're evil, they worship the wrong imaginary sky-wizard, have brown-skins, and they supposedly hate us for our freedoms...

And that, in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen, is today's GOP....a bunch of science-denying, faith-healing, creationist whack-jobs whose idea of getting government out of people's lives is by telling half of the population what they may, and may not do, with their own bodies....

Time for a drink I think....have a great weekend!

Why state-sanctioned murder is wrong....and right...

Tonight, two different men are going to be murdered. One will be murdered in Texas, the other in Georgia. One did the crime, said he did it, said he'd do it again if he had the chance, the other one was convicted without any physical evidence whatsoever, no murder weapon, no DNA, just nine eye-witness statements, of which seven have been either fully or partially recanted.

As an admitted screaming-pinko-liberal this should place me in quite the quandry. Liberals, almost by definition, should be against the death penalty in both cases, regardless of the nature of the crime. Well, not this Liberal.

In the case of the vicious animal being put down in Texas tonight (the one and only time I am EVER likely to agree with anything pRick Perry does) there is no doubt as to his guilt. He, and a bunch of his racist pals chained a black man (James Byrd) to the back of a pick-up truck and dragged him to death. The coroner has surmised that Byrd was alive for a good portion of the event, including when various limbs were torn from his body, and only died after he was decapitated. This happened in this country, in this century. I not only think this piece of filth should be executed, I think it should be televised so that all of his white supremacist buddies can see what justice looks like.

In the Troy Davis case in Georgia, we have the opposite scenario. A man that has protested his innocence from the very beginning was convicted as I said above, with the most marginal of cases presented against him. Seven of the nine eye-witnesses have now backed away from their original stories, and there is no physical evidence that links him to the crime, but the state will murder him tonight anyway. And in case you think this is just some sort of "let's take pity on the poor black man" cause celebre bullshit, know this; one of the most important opponents to this execution is the former director of the FBI, William Sessions, a person not best known for his "liberal" views. None of this reasonable doubt matters to the Georgia Pardons board though, who yesterday basically said 'tough shit' and denied a last-minute appeal for clemency.

So what happens tonight? Well, barring any last minute reprieves, the state of Georgia will murder a man that could very well be 100% innocent, and the state of texas will murder a man that is 100% guilty.

And this particular Liberal thinks that is wrong. And right.

Outrage-fatigue...wherein the author suffers from a case of the 'meh's....

Since returning from my holiday in Hawaii (why everyone in the world doesn't live there I have no clue) I have been suffering quite badly with the 'blahs'....most especially with getting back into the groove of writing for the least read blog in the universe (now two years running - Yay!!)...

I realize that almost no-one reads the bloody thing, and although I do see rankings for the articles (thank you), i'm not generating alot of comments. I appreciate that it might be a bit of a pain in the arse to post a comment, but I would genuinely appreciate the feedback, both positive and negative, to help me figure out what works and what doesn't.

There is no lack of stuff to write about to be sure, but I think I may be suffering from outrage-fatigue as I try and figure out which of the myriad of choices I have to actually focus my ire on....

....F'rinstance, the gop continues to shamelessly whore for the wealthy by calling President Obama's latest call to tax the uber-wealthy as "class warfare". It's stupid fucking phrases like that which make teh baby jeebus cry. No, you facile, orange-coloured twat, it's only "class warfare" when we starting fighting BACK....

....Or the faux-outrage that the reich-wing is currently trying to gin up about a Solar company that went bankrupt even after receiving Gummint Loans, but they continue to authorize paying a million dollars a second in Afghaniraq without batting an eye....

....Or the gop congressman that is whining that after paying taxes and wages at his various businesses he only has $400,000.00 left to feed his family. That congressman's "problem" equates to $7600 a week after taxes....for a wage-slave like myself, that seems to be a very high-end problem...such a mind-blowingly disconnected sort of statement is in the realm of "Let them eat cake" in my opinion in it's heartless ignorance, and anytime that clueless ingrate wants to swap paychecks with me I'm all in favour....

....Or the outright incitement to "kill liberals" issued by (proven) serial liar Andrew Breitbart this past weekend...I realize that this stupid fucktard has to say more and more radical things in order to get quoted in the M$M anymore, especially after he was found out to be a complete and utter fraud when he tried to smear Shirley Sherrod, but his idiot followers are the ones that take this shit to heart, and people could get hurt...or does the name Gabby Giffords not ring a bell? Bottom line, what he said was dangerous, irresponsible and quite possibly, illegal...

Can you understand now after coming back from seven days in Paradise how I am just filled with 'meh'....?

For all of my reader I will try and pull my shit together this week and continue to write stuff that nobody reads, in the meantime, I hope that all four of you that actually may read this have a great week..

Cheers!

9/11 - Ten Years After - My thoughts

I decided to write this and post it after the tenth anniversary of 9/11 for two reasons. One was that I didn't want my thoughts to be construed in any way possible as being disrespectful to those that died on that horrible day, and the second was that I didn't want anyone to think I was just being a cold-hearted bastard.

Well, here we are, a few days after the 10th anniversary and we've seen all of the flag-waving, we've heard 'God Bless America' eight million times and we've heard the 'USA' chants at various and sundry sporting events, and the net impact of what we've apparently learned since the towers came down is actually pretty close to zero.

Let me be very, VERY clear about something from the start: what happened that day was a terrible crime against humanity. Thousands of innocent people died that day for reasons they didn't understand, and hundreds of thousands more would similarly die in the months and years afterwards, equally uninformed as to what it was they had done personally to deserve a premature death.

The men and women that died trying to help their fellow humans that day were, and always will be, true heroes and heroines. I have never understood what makes people want to run into a burning buildings to save complete and total strangers, but I am grateful that there are so many that do. On that day those people demonstrated the kind of selfless humanity that was so utterly lacking in those that planned and carried out their cowardly mission.

And then there are the politicians.

Whenever I think of a politician I normally envision a slimy, toad-like, fork-tongued creature. Someone that is capable of talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time, with no qualms that they are the walking embodiment of human refuse, and completely and totally devoid of a moral compass.

The days after 9/11 were to show the world just how despicable the genus 'politicus americanus' could be.

On both sides of the aisle.

The republicans, led by their cheer-leading simpleton in the Oval Office, became the prime examples of why Americans are hated abroad more than any other variety of tourist, with their braying and loutish proclamations of  'we're gonna get 'em dead or alive', and 'you're either with us, or against us'. They became the zenith of dumbed down 'Cowboy Diplomats', thumping their chests in impotent rage, knuckle-dragging morons to a man.

The Democrats on the other hand, simply laid down and died. None of them, separately or together, could muster the spinal or intestinal fortitude necessary to suggest that it was possible to both honour those that had died and sacrificed on that terrible morning, and question how it had come to pass that 19 men (15 of whom were from Saudi Arabia) armed with nothing more dangerous than box-cutters and radical religion, had managed to bring the self-proclaimed most powerful country in the world to its knees, all in the space of a few hours.

Here's the part some of you aren't going to like. I am not going to go into all of the various and sundry conspiracy theories that have sprung up since that day, but I will tell you this: in my opinion, the official story of what happened that day is precisely that, a story. The 9/11 commission report would be almost complete fiction if it hadn't used real people's names. Face it, the republicans spent over $40 million investigating Bill Clinton's blow-job, but less than $14 million on the worst terrorist attack on US soil in American history. None of the key-players were placed under oath, none of their testimony was recorded, and they were not allowed to subpoena people, or follow promising leads. In other words, the narrative had already been written before the first commissioner had been picked.

What we DO know about events after that day was that a 342-page bill that was written pre-tragedy, just waiting for the right moment, that would dramatically alter the Constitution of the United States, and radically increase the powers of the Presidency and his spying agencies, was passed entirely unread and almost unanimously by the sheep in Congress in the dead of night. If that bill were to have been entered under any other circumstances, by any other administration, it would have been ridiculed as the unconstitutional power-grab that it is, and the person that presented it would have been laughed out of office. As it is, the person that presented it was "re-elected" (again, only if you believe the narrative), and his subsequent predecessor, an alleged Constitutional scholar, requested that it be re-authorized, wholly as is. Much to our chagrin it was.

What we also know about what happened after 9/11 is that the memories of those that died was cynically used by a war-hungry administration to justify starting a war against a sovereign country that had nothing to do with the attacks at all. It did have everything to do with furthering an oil-grabbing agenda that had been in place before those planes had even left Logan International Airport. Are you really surprised that two Texan oilmen would have grabbed the chance that 9/11 offered to them, especially the pea-brained younger one with Daddy-issues? Of course not.

But what angers me most about the last ten years as that the united feeling we all had immediately following 9/11 was cynically twisted by a powerful few to drive a stake deep into the heart of the framework of this great Republic, and perhaps forever alter its destiny.

We have had to give up our freedoms from random invasive and blatantly unconstitutional body-searches at airports, we have had the right to privacy in our verbal, electronic and written communications stripped from us, and when we ask if we are on someone's watch list, we run the risk of being put on that list. The President now has the authority to strip an American of their citizenship, or their life, without any review or recourse. Right to a speedy trail? Gone. Fourth amendment protections in your home or of your person? Gone. We are told we are "un-American" if we question what happened that day, we were told that if we didn't support the President (at least the republican one, apparently it is okay to question the legitimacy of the President if he is a Democrat) we were being "un-Patriotic". People that voiced their dissent loudly were attacked, sometimes physically. Some were black-listed. The USA didn't come together, it fell apart, and worse still, it moved backwards, back to the 1950's. People became afraid to speak out, people that had been friends for years, suddenly became raging, screaming enemies. And where was the supposed "liberal media" as all of this was going on? Why, the presstitutes were out front and centre of course, leading the cheers with flag-waving banners on their screens, and blaring headlines touting our brave commander-in-chief as he declared war on a noun and attacked the wrong country entirely.

So here we are 10 years later, picking the scab off that horrendous wound once more in raucous displays of fervent patriotism at football and baseball games, whilst still waging war against a noun, fighting two and a half wars half a world away, and with the citizenry at home more polarized than before the attacks. I'm not suggesting for a single second that the goat-fucking sonofabitch that dreamt this attack up and who is currently enjoying a dirt-nap at the bottom of the Indian Ocean won anything that day, but I can tell you this, it sure feels like we haven't either.

And that makes me sad, ten years later on.

Oh I say! ....or why the younger Williams brother needs to be thrown out of tennis...permanently...

..besides the fact that she has the physique of a double-decker bus, the cooth and manners of a drunken Essex Chav on a Friday night, and the grace and poise of a pregnant walrus, it's her over-active mouth and her latest outburst in a grand-slam tournament match that should result in her being banned from the game forever.

I grew up in an era where a long icy stare at the chair umpire with your hands on your hips was thought to be skirting the edge of protocol, so when John McEnroe came along, the tennis world was literally thrown on its ear. In major tournaments around the globe, young tennis fans received vocabulary lessons that would normally only have been learned by sneaking a listen to Billy Connolly or Richard Pryor records, you know, the ones your parents hid behind the 'Abba - Greatest Hit Compilation' LP, thinking you wouldn't know where to look. McEnroe used heretofore un-uttered nouns and verbs on a tennis court in a myriad of interesting hues and conjugations (mostly deep blue) that shocked the tennis establishment to it's very core. Sure he used some colourful language, sure he said some nasty things, and sure he paid a price for it, but not once did he threaten an umpire or line judge with physical violence.

In Serena William's temper-tantrum in 2009 however, she did just that. She threatened a line judge with physical violence after disagreeing with a line call. Not only did she do it in a public place where people could hear her, it was captured in full colour and surround-sound for all to digest. So what did Serena do? Did she publicly apologize for her disgraceful behaviour and commit to acting more professionally in the future? Fuck no. She denied she said anything wrong and tried to laugh it off saying she 'couldn't remember what she may or may not have said in the heat of the moment'. Flash forward to last night, and once again Serena Williams publicly lost her fucking mind and went all 'Gangsta-Bitch' on the Chair Ump who had the audicity to penalize her for her verbal abuse of her opponent. Again, what she said was recorded in glorious colour and sound, for all to see and play again and again, and yet once more, Serena played the 'I don't remember what I said' game as though we were all just a bunch of stupid children that could be fooled over and over again with her simplistic ruse.

Well sorry Hon, but in your vernacular,  Homey don't play dat...

You see, what we have now is a clear pattern, a series of events that all look remarkably alike. You play in a high-profile event, you get a call you don't like, you lose your rag, you hurl verbal abuse at the people you deem to have wronged you, and then when shown incontrovertable evidence of your wrong-doing you claim ignorance due to some sort of 'athletic-amnesia' known only to you. You know what us non-athletes call that? We call it "bullshit". If we behaved that way, either publicly or at our workplaces we would be in some serious shit, and if you aren't thrown out of the game and/or fined heavily enough for it to actually be a punishment for this latest petulant, unprofessioanl and borderline criminal outburst, then that will be an even bigger pile of bullshit.


*UPDATE. The U.S. Open fined Serena $2000 whole dollars for her outburst. I am sure that will put a massive dent in the $1.4 million she earned at the tournament and that she will bear that in mind in the future....

Friday Follies: The 'Plus ca change' edition....

Two things apparently haven't changed in the 10 days since I last posted...no-one read this fucking thing, and President Obama caved in again to the republicans...twice...

More next week...maybe...