BY TOM TOMORROW
Somewhere recently I saw some idiot rightwinger embarass himself by arguing that Fox News is actually not biased in the least, because they have so many liberals on their various programs.
This should go without saying, but Fox invites liberals on for the same reason that the Harlem Globetrotters used to play the Washington Generals: you look pretty silly out there on the court by yourself.
Remember Enron? Little company run by George Bush’s close pal, “Kenny Boy” Lay?
Well, it’s back in the news:
A Washington state utility released audiotapes Thursday that it said revealed bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. plotted to take a power plant off-line in 2001 to jack up electric prices in Western states.
That same day, shortages of power forced rolling blackouts in northern California that affected about 2 million customers.
Snohomish Public Utility District in Everett, Washington, released the tapes as part of its effort to void a $122 million lawsuit Enron has filed against it seeking payment for electricity it was contracted to provide.
The utility says an Enron employee and a worker at a power plant in Las Vegas, Nevada, made up phony repairs, taking the plant off-line January 17, 2001.
“We want you guys to get a little creative … and come up with a reason to go down,” the Enron worker tells the plant employee on one of the tapes.
The fundamental problem with blogging is the underlying assumption that ideas are best expressed quickly rather than thoughtfully. Frank Lynch illustrates:
If I blogged about every alarm, then a few weeks ago I’d have been raving about the NYC subway fire that knocked out an entire local line and struck an express line down to one-third its normal capacity, and how it was going to take 3-5 years to restore it, and the impact it was going to have not just on New Yorkers but on New Jersey commuters who come in on a bus over the George Washington Bridge. But I didn’t, I was too busy. But then a few days later when the original timeline was brought back to a matter of months, I said, you know, I should write about how quickly things change and how sometimes it makes sense to hold your opinion back. But I didn’t, I was too busy. And so now, today, that local line that was supposed to take years, then months, is actually working as of today.
The moral of the story remains: don’t blog everything.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about a fellow named Ward Churchill, a native American college professor from Colorado, who some simplistic propagandists are insisting speaks for the likes of me. Well, I’d never heard of the guy before the current kerfluffle, but if the excerpts I’ve seen from his essay about 9/11 victims are accurate, and not taken wildly out of context — i.e., stripped of a concluding Wayne’s World-style negative modifier (“…NOT!”), then I can say pretty confidently that he doesn’t actually speak for me in any way whatsoever. Nonetheless, he apparently became the right wing cause-du-jour after word got around that he was going to give a talk at a tiny college in upstate New York (hey, when you control three branches of government and have most of the media wrapped around your little finger, you have to take your enemies where you can find them). To give this a little context:
Hamilton, a campus of 1,750 students, has always had a reputation for accepting divergent voices. In November, the same program that invited this speaker – the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture – hired Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground, after her release from prison on explosives charges. She later withdrew in the face of protest.
On another end of the political spectrum, the scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese equated abortion to murder during her talk to a packed, polite campus auditorium last Thursday. According to The Spectator, the weekly student newspaper, she also said that empowering humans to choose who lives and who dies “opens the road to the Holocaust.”
So a school that brings in a lot of controversial people invited Churchill to give a lecture (on native American activism, incidentally, not 9/11), and somehow all hell broke loose. I’m not sure who initially instigated the witch hunt, whether this came out of the blogs or started with O’Reilly, but the latter has definitely been a driving force. I was watching his show a couple of nights ago and at the end of his outraged report, he put the school’s phone number and email address up on screen.
And, gosh, it’s not hard to guess what happened next:
Over the last five days, tiny Hamilton College in upstate New York has been barraged with more than 6,000 e-mail messages full of fury, some threatening violence. Some donors have canceled pledges to an ambitious capital campaign. And prospective students have withdrawn applications or refused to enroll.
Then, on Monday night, a caller to the college threatened to bring a gun to campus.
Admittedly, O’Reilly also emphasized the need to be polite when contacting the university, though I guess the guy with the gun missed that part. Look, on the one hand, it’s dangerous to suggest that a commentator is responsible for the actions of every single member of his audience — I wouldn’t want to be held to that standard myself. On the other, it’s not beyond the pale to assume that O’Reilly has some familiarity with Fox News viewers, and how at least a certain percentage of them will respond when red meat is tossed in their direction. Either that, or he’s so naive that he still bears the bruises from his unfortunate tumble off the turnip truck.
(CNN) — A photograph posted on an Islamist Web site appears to be that of an action figure and not a U.S. soldier being held hostage.
Liam Cusack, the marketing coordinator for Dragon Models USA, said the figure pictured on the Web site is believed to be “Special Ops Cody,” a military action figure the company manufactured in late 2003.
“It pretty much looks exactly like the same person,” he said.
Cusack said he was contacted Tuesday morning by one of his retailers, who informed him that the alleged hostage appeared to be one of the company’s action figures.
“I thought it was a joke at first,” he said.
But after reading a report on a news Web site about a U.S. soldier allegedly being captured, “I looked at it and said, ‘It does look like one of our action figures.'”