television

Why is Ann Coulter even on the air, anyway?

DEUTSCH: ... but you said I should not -- we should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians, then, or --

COULTER: Yeah.

DEUTSCH: Really?

COULTER: Well, it's a lot easier. It's kind of a fast track.

DEUTSCH: Really?

COULTER: Yeah. You have to obey.

DEUTSCH: You can't possibly believe that.

COULTER: Yes.

DEUTSCH: You can't possibly -- you're too educated, you can't -- you're like my friend in --

COULTER: Do you know what Christianity is? We believe your religion, but you have to obey.

DEUTSCH: No, no, no, but I mean --

COULTER: We have the fast-track program.

DEUTSCH: Why don't I put you with the head of Iran? I mean, come on. You can't believe that.

COULTER: The head of Iran is not a Christian.

DEUTSCH: No, but in fact, "Let's wipe Israel" --

COULTER: I don't know if you've been paying attention.

DEUTSCH: "Let's wipe Israel off the earth." I mean, what, no Jews?

COULTER: No, we think -- we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.

DEUTSCH: Wow, you didn't really say that, did you?

COULTER: Yes. That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws. We know we're all sinners --

Why is religious bigotry being invited onto television shows over and over, anyway? What is the purpose?

Via TechCrunch, we see that:

Al Jazeera signed a commercial agreement with Google last week to share advertising revenue on their YouTube channel....

Since many of the wingutteria consider Al Jazeera the voice of the enemy, one just might have to laugh at the irony. After all, You Tube is very much an American phenomenon that has captured the world's imagination and interest. And yet the Republican candidates for president were afraid to go to You Tube.

Afraid, or simply just too clueless.

Now we can anticipate seeing wise thought leaders like Bill O'Reilly call You Tube an Al Jazeera front, or use rhetoric of that ilk. Nothing like the tail wagging the dog. The way Republicans keep cowering from the realities of this world, is it any wonder they're excusing themselves from any realistic consideration for leading this world?

While Viacom is suing everyone in sight over copyright infringement, Viacom offers its own emulation of the YouTube widget:

And here Chris Matthews thought he was selling his book. Instead he was demonstrating his numbskull sensibility to the entire blog-reading public. Funny how funny mainstream media thinking seems to non-mainstream media folk.

Contextual video:

Contextual blog post: http://mashable.com/2007/03/23/youtube-viacom-daily-show/

More context: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070323/161758.shtml

Oh, and this. Such is the business logic of lawyers.

After all, shouldn't a decent red-blooded conservative be allowed to use violence to prove just how not-gay he is?

Carlson said, "Having sex in a public men's room is outrageous. It's also really common. I've been bothered in men's rooms." Carlson continued, "I've been bothered in Georgetown Park," in Washington, D.C., "when I was in high school." When Abrams asked how Carlson responded to being "bothered," as Abrams and Scarborough laughed, Carlson asserted, "I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and ... hit him against the stall with his head, actually." The laughter continued.

Carlson's comments, coupled with laughter from Abrams and Scarborough, suggested to viewers that physical violence is an appropriate response to an unwelcome overture. This is dangerous and wrong.

MSNBC has yet to acknowledge Carlson's comments or address why Abrams and Scarborough laughed while Carlson recounted his actions. Instead, MSNBC has treated Carlson's comments as a laughing matter, re-airing the portion in which Carlson claimed to have been "bothered," but omitting the portion in which he seemed to boast of physical assault.

Typical liberal media bias -- er, liberal blog bias, trying to oppress decent homophobes! Don't the violently-not-gay people in this world have the right to express themselves, too?

After all, it must be so hard for all these conservatives who had to choose not to be gay in the first place.

Really some things in the news are just ridiculous.

Prince's acclaimed performance included a guitar solo during the
"Purple Rain" segment of his medley in which his shadow was projected
onto a large, flowing beige sheet. As the 48-year-old rock star let
rip, the silhouette cast by his figure and his guitar (shaped like the
singer's symbol) had phallic connotations for some.

A number of bloggers have decried "Malfunction!" — including Sam
Anderson at New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer. Daily News
television critic David Bianculli called it "a rude-looking shadow
show" that "looked embarrassingly rude, crude and unfortunately placed."

You know, I noticed that. In fact, it was pretty obvious, when he changed guitars to use this wacky axe shaped like is Prince symbol, complete with an arrow point at the head--

Oh dear! A phallic symbol!

It's funny how there's all this fuss about this when the Super Bowl broadcast was littered with ads for violent television shows, violent movies -- and ads that were just violent.

The AP story by Jake Coyle tries to make the claim that the phallic imagery was accidental. Ha! He also claims:

Always eccentric, he famously changed his name to The Artist Formerly
Known as Prince, then to simply a symbol and finally back to Prince.

I suppose you wouldn't expect the Associated Press to point out that he did this because his record contract forbade him from using the name "Prince" when recording with a different label.

Maybe I'm just not enough of a Super Bowl watcher, but here I hear all this about the first time an African American head coach leads an NFL team into the Super Bowl -- not once, but two times over -- and yet as I watch this game, I wonder where the camera shots of the coaches are.

You'd think these players were just going on their own.

I can remember games of yore, seeing Landry and Ditka and Parcells and all those other coaches running teams at Super Bowls.

So where are Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith?

Is CBS afraid of showing America the coaches of this game? What's up, CBS?

2nd Quarter Update: Okay, so they finally mentioned Dungy and Smith. They even gave them each about a second of screen time. No talk about game plans, though. Or game strategy.

I haven't watched the Super Bowl in a few years, except for occasional check-ins on the commercials. But has the game changed so much that coaches just don't matter any more?

Still watching....

4th Quarter update: The coaches have arrived. Or at least Tony Dungy has arrived.

Wow, even a little bio close-up!

The fantasy comes in many forms. There's the notion that 9/11 was planned by Saddam Hussein, that popular non-fact suggested as true by the Bush Administration and held as gospel by many Americans even today.

There's the fantasy that terrorism is best fought by bombing civilian neighborhoods rather than international police work.

There's the fantasy that terrorist without industry, without nations, without centralized control are "fascists" while nations that suspend civil liberties and quash dissent and torture prisoners and kill civilians in bloody occupations somehow could never be "fascist."

There's the fantasy that patriotism can be measured by winning a political argument, like, say, sticking it out in Iraq, rather than winning this war on terror, whose goal is in conflict with the Iraq occupation.

There's the fantasy that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and don't apply to America.

There's the fantasy that being "strong" can make up for being stupid.

And there's even the fantasy that, while thousands are dying in a bloody, smoky, burning hell, nobody uses four-letter words.

"This is example No. 1," said Martin Franks, executive vice president of CBS Corp., of the decision by two dozen CBS affiliates to replace or delay "9/11" — which has already aired twice without controversy — over concerns about some of the language used by the firefighters in it.

"We don't think it's appropriate to sanitize the reality of the hell of Sept. 11th," Franks said. "It shows the incredible stress that these heroes were under. To sanitize it in some way robs it of the horror they faced."

The stations, including Fox Television Stations Inc. and Sinclair, cite the FCC's large and arbitrarily enforced censorship laws. However, the political views of Fox and Sinclair are not exactly secret.

Still it's hard to argue with a bunch of FCC boobs who got all upset over Janet Jackson's boob -- or the boobs in Congress who facilitated such overreaction.

Congress recently boosted the maximum fines the FCC can impose for indecency from $32,500 to $325,000.

So far, about a dozen CBS affiliates have indicated they won't show the documentary, another dozen say they will delay it until later at night and two dozen others are considering what to do.

So on this upcoming 5-year anniversary of 9/11, we can reflect on how tough the US government has gotten on the terror of four-letter words uttered by true American heroes.

...we share this recent classic.

Note: I browsed through all the YouTube offerings of this clip, and the sound quality ranges from the marginal here to the downright awful on some others. Still, please, click on Play and watch. These are six minutes and 41 seconds you won't regret.

The Reclusive Leftist points to yet another example of how sexist chauvinism is accepted in ways that would never be tolerated by decent folks when it comes to racism.

Imagine if the host of a popular TV show on dog training had made the following remarks:

“Black people are the only species that is wired different from the rest. They always apply affection before discipline. White people apply discipline then affection, so we’re more psychological than emotional. All animals follow dominant leaders; they don’t follow lovable leaders.”

Of course, if we were to ask sometimes-funny but always-self-important culture critic Bill Maher about this, Diane Dees points out that he'd dismiss us for not focusing on the important shit.

Tonight on Real Time, Maher said something about what the Bush administration had done to "the working man." Mary Frances Berry, one of the panelists, said "The working woman, too. You said just 'the working man.'"

Then he said it: "There are so many more important issues. Don't hang me up here."

No wonder we're seeing self-labeled "progressives" willing to advocate forced pregnancy pragmatism in pursuit of power. Self-autonomy and equal rights don't pass the hill-of-beans test.

Just shut up, girls, and go make us some sandwiches. You know we're on your side, right?

Uh huh.

Now isn't this fall's election just so full of promise?

I'd heard about this but never bothered to go look. I was browsing YouTube this morning and saw the video, and thought that maybe I'm not the only one who hasn't seen it yet.

So here ya go.