Shut up with the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ scary monsters already
You know, I don’t like it when our side talks shit any more than when the other side does it. The ‘Fairness Doctrine’ is a busted flush, and everybody playing Scary Monsters with it should just shut up already.
You want the whole history of the Fairness Doctrine, go to Wikipedia. The Cliff’s Notes version: the Fairness Doctrine was a law that forced broadcasters to air both sides of any controversial issue. The effect was, broadcasters wouldn’t go anywhere near controversial issues. Reagan, in a series of maneuvers and vetoes, killed the Fairness Doctrine and the result (so the story goes) was Rush Limbaugh. Bring it back (so the other, bullshit story goes) and Rush Limbaugh goes away again.
The was law was ruled not to violate the First Amendment because it only applied to broadcast media. See, there are only so many broadcast frequencies, so it seemed okay to exercise a little government control over what they could say.
Pff! Broadcast media! Remember them? The rabbit ear dealie on the back of the tv with the aluminum foil enhancement? The coathanger jammed in where your car aerial ought to be? Broadcast TV and radio only. Oh, and teletext (ZOMG, they’re trying to take away our beloved teletext!)
Cable, satellite and the Internet? Untouchable.
Okay, okay…most of us still rely on broadcast media at least a little — particularly radio in the car. So let’s call the new Fairness Doctrine the Finally Making Satellite Radio An Imporant Accessory Doctrine. Or the More Political Podcasts Available on iTunes Law.
The last guy on earth this would affect is Rush Limbaugh, who signed a contract for a sum sufficient to bail out Fannie Mae. Broadcasters’ll damn sure find a way to protect their investment and keep that bad boy on the air, you betcha. The small fry will just have to blaze a path to new media a little faster.
What the hell? Go for it!
October 21, 2008 — 9:36 am
Comments: 111
Can one of you fiscal sooper geniuses explain something to me, please?
Twenty six years ago, before I was a corporate little Eichmann, I worked part time, minimum-wage-type jobs while I tried to establish myself as a freelance illustrator. My total income, including illustration work, was under $8,000 each of those years (yeah, wow, did I suck, or what?).
I got a little money back at tax time, but certainly not everything that had been withheld. In other words, I paid income taxes. Teeny, tiny taxes in proportion to my teeny, tiny income, but it still hurt.
So, ummm…what gives? Does almost half the population really not pay taxes at all now? Or are they counting benefits against taxes and calling it a wash? Or has everything changed since I were a lass?
Money make weasel doesn’t understand good.
October 20, 2008 — 4:40 pm
Comments: 38
…stand by…
In other words, you might not hear from me again.
If my machine survives this operation — what the hell? — I might just
upgrade to the latest WordPress and try breaking the blog. Because
what I haven’t got enough of at the moment is stress.
October 14, 2008 — 4:45 pm
Comments: 15
It will be interesting to see where this goes
Went to see An American Carol this afternoon. That, for the benefit of people 500 years from now who somehow encounter a stray data backup from sweasel.com accidentally beamed into space, is an explicitly conservative comedy from the man who made Airplane!, the Naked Gun series and the Scary Movie series.
I don’t actually like Zucker-style comedies (okay, I liked Airplane! But, really, I think liking that one is some kind of federal law, if only because June Cleaver speaks jive). I went today because I wanted this thing to get way better first-weekend box office than Bill Maher’s Jesus-thumping douche-fest (dude, I’m an atheist, and your ignorance embarrasses me).
It was a solid Zucker movie. It was not at all mean-spirited (the Michael Moore character comes off as a likeable boob, as do two out of three terrorists), the tear-jerking corny bits were few, effective and superceded by low slapstick in nanoseconds. Leslie Neilson is lookin’ damn good for a hundred and twenty.
It lacked a certain je ne sais quoi to be a great film. But then, I really disliked Team America the first time I saw it. Then it became my favoritest film evarrrrrr. An American Carol should do at least as well as any other Zucker film. So go see it, if only to help those guys who put their toosticles on the line stay in work.
Weasel gives it two….waaaaait a second! Weasels don’t have thumbs!
October 4, 2008 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 35
Fasten your seatbelts; here we go!
Right! It’s on. I’ve got a whole fuckwad* of things to do in the next eight weeks if I’m going to pull this off. I’ll be totally boring and self-absorbed — when I bother to show up at all. That’s my promise to you.
Still, the process by which an American woman and her cat legally emigrate to another country might prove instructive. Think of my journey as a public service. Like Katie Couric’s on-air colonoscopy.
And fifty-eight days from today, if all goes according to plan (ha, ha) we’ll all sit down together (metaphorically) for champers and spotted dick before a roaring coal fire.
Toodle pip, and other gay British stuff!
*Fuckwad: a unit of measurement equivalent to three or more shitloads.
September 29, 2008 — 11:15 am
Comments: 85
Blaming Wall Street operators for the current financial crisis is like discovering a fly-blown corpse and arresting the maggots for murder
Pithy obthervation from a sthmall brown muthtelid. More later.
September 23, 2008 — 9:25 am
Comments: 36
The paper towels, they tell me things. Unspeakable things.
I don’t know how Rembrandt did it without paper towels. They’re the perfect studio companion — a mix of tough, absorbant and inexpensive. They daub excellent textures into wet paint, leach just the right amount of excess medium off an overladen brush, protect delicate surfaces from greasy human fingers and they’re totally the quicker picker upper. You can quote me on that.
When I have used a paper towel, if it isn’t thoroughly gefukt, I carefully fold it into a square and set it aside — a habit I picked up from an old art school friend (though I think she picked it up in her years of food service jobs). There’s always a big, tottery pile of gently used paper towel squares next to my left hand. When it’s panic stations, I’m on it. I’m a blottin’ fool.
I buy the best quality paper towels I can find, with a “good” randomized texture and always — always — in plain white. So how a roll of these vapid, preachy fuckers got in my cart, I will never know. I must’ve been in a hurry.
The paper towels picked a bad time to mock me. I was thinking blearily about the whole mortgage and financial meltdown while I made coffee and paper-toweled things this morning. Generally speaking, Washington is no more than a peripheral malignancy; a sort of slow sapping around the edges of the national vitality. But at this moment, those strutting retards are directly responsible for what’s wrong with my life. Their greed and incompetence is the only reason I am sitting at a desk today facing another eight hours of PowerPoint instead of bustling about the kitchen in my English country house making pickles.
Yes I’m going to make pickles. I’m going to make the hell out of pickles. I’ll probably wear an apron while I make them, too.
But right now, I have PowerPointin’ to do…
September 18, 2008 — 8:29 am
Comments: 50
Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan
Door to door Barbra Streisand concerts.
Ba-dum-bump.
Knock-knock-knock. Good afternoon, madam. Peeeeepoooool…peeepoool who need peeeeepooool. And then $28,500 appears, as if by magic.
What does that even MEAN, anyway? It’s always bothered me. Who the hell doesn’t need people, and what’s so damned lucky about it?
Eh.
Tomorrow afternoon, they’re dryrunning the PowerPoint presentation I’ve been working on this week. Problem is, I haven’t really been working on it. So please enjoy this small sample of gratuitous snark while I, you know, do my damn job for a day.
September 17, 2008 — 5:46 am
Comments: 56
Things that make you go OMGWTF?!
When I recently asked one of Sullivan’s colleagues at the Atlantic why it abides Sullivan’s disgrace of the magazine, he simply referred to the traffic Sullivan generates for the Atlantic online.
A Drudge link. Rule of thumb, it’s worth a quarter of a million hits. I didn’t realize a permalink on his page is worth about the same, each and every day. Sheeee-it, as they say at Harvard.
I didn’t even realize Sullivan had a Drudge link until Ace mentioned it. So I took a look at Drudge’s static links for the first time in, like, a decade. What an assortment of mixed nuts! Most of them make sense, but…well…Helen Thomas? Does she actually write stuff? I thought she existed simply to rasp impertinent questions at White House press secretaries. And frighten small children. And annihilate erections.
I dug around Google for a while to see if anyone knows how Drudge chooses his links, but I didn’t find anything good. You can imagine how much pointless crap a search of “Drudge” and “links” turns up. I remember Free Republic lost their Drudge link for a long time, back in the days of their lawsuit with the Washington Post. They worked that out somehow; they’re back on the front page.
I wonder what a quarter million hits looks like, in plain monetary terms. I’m fuzzy on the concept (I couldn’t monetize this blog; it would ruin my color scheme). He could sell linkage, for all I know. He would be well within his rights to do so. Drudge has become such an institution, it’s easy to forget it’s just dude’s personal website and he can haul coal in it if he wants to.
This I do know: AndrewSullivan.com and his 280K hits a day goes directly to The Atlantic. Per the American Digest article I linked yesterday, The Atlantic is currently losing $5M a year. Ergo, Sullivan can be as balls-out, bug-fuck crazy as he likes, and the Atlantic will put up with it.
And don’t even think about trying to get Sullivan de-linked from Drudge. That much I did learn: Sullivan has crawled so far up Matt Drudge’s ass, Lemmiwinks couldn’t reach him.
September 16, 2008 — 9:47 am
Comments: 59
In the market for a nice, long walk
It’s supposed to rain intermittently all weekend, but I’m not sure I care. Have you ever done that? Laced on your hiking boots and thought, “so what? If I get wet, I get wet.” It makes you feel all tingly and hardcore.
Which is important when you’re a pasty city woman of late middle age.
September 13, 2008 — 5:39 am
Comments: 11