It now appears that the case between Wal-Mart and Jim and Debbie Shank will finally be settled, but Keith Olbermann still gives them the bronze award for good measure on his Worst Person in the World segment on Monday’s Countdown. As of today, the Shanks should finally have control over Debbie’s estate so that her husband can pay for her 24/7 care.
The silver goes to Doug Goodyear, John McCain’s pick to run the RNC National Convention — until it was revealed that Goodyear’s lobbying firm netted several hundred thousand dollars for lobbying on behalf of the military dictatorship of Myanmar, which has been blocking cyclone relief aid from it’s own citizens.
The gold went to…BillO. Mr. Orally went overboard about a Seattle newspaper for refusing to post photos of two men who were seen “acting suspiciously” on a local ferry, even sending his flying monkey-boy producer to the home of the paper’s publisher to pressure him into publishing the photos. As it turns out, the two men turned up at a U.S. embassy a couple of weeks ago and identified themselves as European business consultants who were sight seeing while they had some time off for work. They even turned over copies of the pictures they took that day.
Bill Moyers, host of PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal, is one of the few remaining REAL journalists left in American media. We’ve covered many of his PBS segments and it was a great pleasure to cover his appearance with Keith Olbermann on Monday’s Countdown.
Moyers and Olbermann touch on the corporate media, their biases and the way they are shaping, and in many cases, damaging our country and its politics by ignoring critical issues and grinding information into sound bytes and bumper sticker-type messages:
Olbermann: “…Clearly the tendency is towards truncating everything, condensing everything into that eventual black hole of information where nothing escapes. How does it apply as you look ahead towards this general election campaign? How does it apply to each of the candidates, in turn?”
Moyers: “I think it means for all of them that they won’t really get to the deep, profound structural problems that we face as a country. We’re not going to have a discourse in this campaign over the fact that the great American wealth machine is benefiting only those at the top. We’re not going to get to the fact that 10% of the people own 60% of the wealth and 70% of the people have no net worth. We’re not going to get to the issues of how do we rebuild the infrastructure, the sewer, the water, the highways, all that. We’re just going to be constantly in this battle of bumper stickers.”
So many creeps, so little time. The bronze goes to the owners of the Phillips 66 station in Marion, Kansas, who fired their employee who was robbed at gunpoint, because at the time of the robbery there was more than $150 in the till. The problem was that the employee was in the process of transferring $100 to the safe at the time the robber entered the building to rob it. Those guys are really strict, aren’t they? I bet they charged their employees for the little plastic creamer tubs for their coffee too.
The silver goes to perennial nominee Bill O’Reilly, whose ego is incapable of understanding that this little feud that he has going with Keith Olbermann is only increasing Olbermann’s ratings share. Billo knows better than to point to Olbermann by name, so his has been a campaign of slurs against the parent company of MSNBC, GE. On this program, he tried to tie GE to sales to Iran via a German company that sold software developed by a GE subsidiary. Of course, Bill has neither the integrity or the intellectual honesty to admit that the German company, Draeger, admitted wrongdoing and had nothing at all to do with GE.
Wait, Rog, you guys fired a P.A. for publicly endorsing the Republican presidential nominee while in front of your own Fox cameras?I’m missing something. Does this mean you’re now going to fire everyone there?
And not to get all tin-foil hattish on you, but McCain’s response: “You’re not supposed to reveal that,” struck me as oddly phrased, in light of what Locke said. I would have expected “Thank you for your support” or “Well, we’re trying…” but “You’re not supposed to reveal that”? Reveal what? Her support or her knowledge that he is going to win?
While others in the media have played snippets of Rev. Wright’s sermons over and over to call into question Barack Obama for his association with his pastor, they’ve remained conspicuously silent on the statements of conservative Christian leaders John Hagee, Jerry Falwell and Rod Parsley. As I’ve blogged many times before, the snippets of Wright’s words have been taken out of context to twist and make malevolent his intent. But Keith Olbermann allows the full statements of Hagee, Falwell and Parsley to air, revealing their hatred, ignorance and intolerance.
John Hagee: I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are, were recipients of the judgment of God for that.The newspaper carried the story, in our local area, that was not carried nationally, that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the…Katrina came, and the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades.So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing.
I’m not sure how I feel about exhorting believers to follow a God so willing to callously end the lives of more than 4,000 Gulf Coast residents, most of whom, I think it’s safe to say, were not planning on attending the Gay Pride parade in New Orleans.
Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy’s son Peter took the bronze on Monday’s Worst Person in the World segment on Countdown for his pathetic hit job on Senator Barack Obama during a live shot from his school.
William “The Bloody” Kristol won the silver for accusing Senators Obama and Clinton for not condemning MoveOn’s General Betrayus ad, when in fact, they both signed on to the Senate amendment condemning the ad.
Bigoted pill popper, Rush Limbaugh, took top honors for his insulting and racist remarks made on FOXNews, in which he accused Bill Clinton of hitting on his date, and referred to Los Angels Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa as the Shoeshine Boy, or a Secret Service Agent. Said Olbermann of Doocy Jr:
“Wow, I wonder which emotion impacts dad more at this moment? Pride that at twenty years old, the boy is already a completely replaceable cog in the vast Rupert Murdoch media manipulation machine, or buyer’s remorse when he gets the bill for college and realizes the kid’s mind has already been nailed shut.”
While discussing the controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor, on the April 30 edition of his nationally syndicated Fox News radio show, host John Gibson aired an audio clip of MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow in which she asked, “What else has to happen in the news to push Jeremiah Wright out of the headlines?” Following her comments, Gibson aired an unidentified audio clip of a man saying, ” Ooh, lesbians. Yummy.” Later in the segment, Gibson’s producer, known on-air as “Angry Rich” said, “That Maddow’s become bathtub boy’s pit bull, hasn’t she?” — an apparent reference to MSNBC’s Countdown host, Keith Olbermann. Gibson replied, “Ooohhh. … Well, I don’t know, you know? She may have one of those — I shouldn’t say anything more, should I?” “Angry Rich” said, “No,” and Gibson said, apparently referring to his associate producer, “Christine’s shaking her head back and forth,” and went on to air an audio clip in which an unidentified woman said, “I would like to thank my wife.” Gibson later said, “Did I tell you about the people … on the island of Lesbos?”Read on…
Senator James Inhofe took the Bronze in Thursday’s Worst Person in the World segment on Countdown, for cutting and running on Senator Jim Webb’s GI Bill after initially having the guts to co-sponsor it.
The Silver went to Senator John McCain for dumping a Dearborn Michigan man from his Michigan campaign after a right wing blogger informed his campaign that the man was a Hezbollah supporter, and the Gold went to …BillO.
Mr. Orally wins the honor this time for sounding like an angry gym teacher during his interview with Senator Hillary Clinton which aired last night. BillO slammed his usual targets, Kos, George Soros, yadda yadda yadda, and then proclaimed the interview was a World Exclusive! — except for Keith’s World Exclusive! interview with the Senator some ten days earlier and others that preceded it.
John McCain takes home the silver after getting called out by Senator Webb for dragging his feet on the bipartisan GI bill and claiming Webb hasn’t reached out to him. And after five years of admitting the United States “invaded” Iraq, Bill O’Reilly takes home the gold for changing his mind by now saying we didn’t. Oh, Bill.
The continuing sagas that make up the life under the Bush administration…
First up is Marc Halcon, owner of American Shooting Range in San Diego, California, who has divested himself of his interest in a vocational training school being developed by front companies for Blackwater, because of Blackwater’s growing notoreity.
Davis didn’t just say the Hamdan argument wasn’t right, since it permits the use of evidence obtained by coercion or torture, to say nothing of hearsay, he also quoted the former general counsel of the Defense Department who he says told him “We can’t have acquittals.We’ve been holding these guys for years.How can we explain acquittals?We have to have convictions.”Col. Davis put it simply: he was under pressure to hurry through cases and get those convictions, so President Bush could use them politically before the 2006 mid-terms (elections).And there it all is in a nutshell.The military co-opting the Constitution and the sacred freedoms for which the heroes of that military fought and died as part of some kind of crazed worship of or fear of a cheap political hack and his gang. And as distant as it all seems, just plug yourself into that equation.You somehow wind up in Gitmo, in Salim Hamdan’s place. And you say, “but I’m an American citizen!” and the guard and the torturers standing behind the guard says to you, “Oh yeah? Prove it. Without a lawyer. Without the right to trial. Prove it.And until then, you want some water?Poured up your nose?”
On Countdown Tuesday, Keith and Rachel dissected two of McCain’s major potential liabilities: his own “radical” pastors and the many examples that threaten his image as the Honorable Campaign Finance Reform Champion.
“He’s such a maverick he not only doesn’t play by other people’s rules, he doesn’t even play by his own rules.”
Despite his horrendous showing at the ABC debate, I’m grateful Stephanopoulos finally broke the media silence and confronted McCain on his Hagee problem last weekend. When will the rest of the mainstream press wake up and realize that religious leaders on the right have been saying controversial stuff for years?
Are there any defining attributes John McCain won’t sacrifice to appease the lunatic fringe and become President? More importantly, is there any way to get the press to cover this?
And then we have the story Steve brought you yesterday, that is Evidence #2,846 that the country wants us as dumbed down as possible and doesn’t mind if kids get pregnant to do that. At the news (which is not new–just a confirmation of what we’ve known for decades) that the studies show abstinence-only sex education program the federal government has been pouring money into is not working. But don’t tell that to Rep. John Duncan (R-TN), who found trusting a scientific study by academics with those high-falutin’ degrees “elitist.”
And finally, the sad story recounted by Dana Milbank at the Washington Post. When Lt. Col. Billy Hall lost his life in Iraq, his grieving family gave permission for the media to cover his funeral at Arlington Cemetary. But the Pentagon had other ideas and cordoned off the media so that they could get no usable audio and only a few, distant photos with yellow ropes blocking the face of his loved ones.
Whatever this war does and does not mean to the history of this country nothing could have more greatly impacted the family of Lt. Col. Billy Hall.And if his story, and the story of other American heroes are kept from the American public, it is not the doing of the American media that somehow dishonors the troops.The blame lies clearly and completely at the foot of the Bush administration.IT does not want our heroes honored.It wants itself honored.And all else — Lt. Col. Hall, his family and their wishes – they can all, Mr. Bush is saying, go to hell.
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Download | Play (h/t Silent Patriot)
John McCain takes home the silver after getting called out by Senator Webb for dragging his feet on the bipartisan GI bill and claiming Webb hasn’t reached out to him. And after five years of admitting the United States “invaded” Iraq, Bill O’Reilly takes home the gold for changing his mind by now saying we didn’t. Oh, Bill.
On Countdown Tuesday, Keith and Rachel dissected two of McCain’s major potential liabilities: his own “radical” pastors and the many examples that threaten his image as the Honorable Campaign Finance Reform Champion. 