Fox News - Nuclear Egg edition

Media Matters appears to be the first to pick this up...

Below is a map of Japan that appeared in Fox News - "Your World With Neil Cavuto" from March 14th to be exact.


You will note with no little astonishment that Fox have discovered a nuclear reactor in central Tokyo, in the district called Shibuya, one of my favourite areas. It is called Shibuyaeggman on this map.

Shibuya Eggman is a music venue, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Their site, in its tribute to the victims of the quake now notes - in English - "Shibuya Eggman has no nuclear plant. Our electricity's powered only by music."

By the way, the Sendai represented in this map is not Sendai the city in northern Honshu that was badly hit by the quake. For a moment I thought that too was a mistake but it is not. It is Sendai Nuclear Power Plant (the two Sendai are written with different characters). Not a mistake per se, but... would it not have been more helpful to show the Sendai that was affected rather than the power station that was not?

The Right feeds on violence again

Some days ago the reporter Lara Logan, whose interview with Jon Stewart I seem to remember posting somewhere, was beaten in a sexual assault while working in Egypt. She was rescued by some women and elements of the Egyptian army.

On reading about that I felt a bit sick and went about my day. Then the irrational Right started popping up like noxious weeds with opinions about it all.

I thought "What? It's a sickening act of violence perpetrated against someone who was doing her job - what other possible view could there be?"

But they seem to have been titillated into a piranha-like frenzy about it all.

Let's start with Jim Hoft:

CBS Reporter Logan Learns That Political Correctness Is a Killer. Lara Logan is lucky she's alive. Her liberal belief system almost got her killed on Friday. This talented reporter will never be the same.

Won't she Jim? Did you personally talk to her? You have an exact idea of her state of mind, do you? And I wasn't aware that professional journalism was a "liberal belief system"... though I guess it is when considering that crass and baseless pseudo-journalism is usually the province of the Right.

Why did this attractive blonde female reporter wander into Tahrir Square last Friday? Why would she think this was a good idea?

Oh... it's her fault is it? My... and when have we ever heard THAT before when talking about rape?
Another question... what exactly does "attractive blonde" have to do with anything?

Robert Stacy McCain - of "You buy the ticket. You take the ride" fame - shot his mouth off about it:

Please tell me what I am permitted to say when a gang of Egyptian men celebrates the end of the Mubarak regime by sexually assaulting an American TV news reporter.

I see... you're the victim here are you Robert? Should have known I guess - the loopy Right is always the victim as far as they're concerned. I'll let you know the next time I spill my coffee, because you'll surely be the victim then too.

By the way, Robert, I think Logan is South African.

Pamela Geller:

Lara Logan was repeatedly sexually assaulted by thugs yelling, "Jew! Jew!"...

Ah... now we come to the pseudo-journalism... and it gets worse

Worse still, CBS tried to keep the whole thing quiet and was forced to get in front of the story only when it became widely known that other media outlets were on to it. Who are they covering for?

Oh I don't know... maybe they are being sensitive to the needs of an employee who has been raped? No?

And why? Because the false narrative the media is painting of what is going on in Egypt is patently false, and this brutal sex attack points to something else entirely... Obama should make a statement addressing this horror and condemning the vile Islamic anti-semitism at the heart of Islam.

Because they wouldn't be rapists if only they weren't so horribly anti-semitic?

You're a total moron, Pam.

Nir Rosen apologized and lost his job, though he never blamed Logan for what happened to her. And mainstream media were content to focus on him... for some reason... and not so much on people like...

Debbie Schlussel, who FOX News use as their expert on Islam apparently because she's a film-critic - gee who could knock qualifications like that?

Schlussel is probably the worst of the bunch here. Read what she wrote and I won't have to tell you why:

As I’ve noted before, it bothers me not a lick when mainstream media reporters who keep telling us Muslims and Islam are peaceful get a taste of how "peaceful" Muslims and Islam really are. In fact, it kinda warms my heart. Still, it’s also a great reminder of just how "civilized" these "people" (or, as I like to call them in Arabic, "Bahai'm (Animals) are...

...Now you know what it’s like, Lara....

"There will be no further comment from CBS News and Correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time."

I just love it when the people of the profession of “the public’s right to know” suddenly want “privacy.” Tell it to your next interview subject, Lara. Of course CBS has no further comment. Wouldn’t wanna impugn the “peacefulness” of “Religion of Peace” animals, would we? Now, if they were Christians or Jews, well, then there would be comments galore.

So sad, too bad, Lara. No one told her to go there. She knew the risks. And she should have known what Islam is all about. Now she knows. Or so we’d hope. But in the case of the media vis-a-vis Islam, that’s a hope that’s generally unanswered.

This never happened to her or any other mainstream media reporter when Mubarak was allowed to treat his country of savages in the only way they can be controlled.

Now that’s all gone. How fitting that Lara Logan was “liberated” by Muslims in Liberation Square while she was gushing over the other part of the “liberation.”

Hope you’re enjoying the revolution, Lara! Alhamdilllullah (oraise Allah)

The Internet... isn't quite big enough... for me to write about everything that is hideous in that tirade.

Context for Tucson

"Gabrielle Giffords was targeted by the Tea Party Right on the basis that she supported the Obama health care plan – a plan that Beck and others like him have regularly explained to millions of Americans as representing totalitarian communism. Indeed, Sarah Palin’s notorious gun site map was only part of the eliminationist rhetoric unleashed against Giffords. For instance, her local Republican opponents held a fundraising event for his campaign that included the following message: ‘Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.’"

Follow the below links to two articles, one post-Tucson recent, and one from August 2009, by Jeff Sparrow, an Australian Left-wing writer:

Have We Got A Show For You!
The Social Significance of the Arizona massacre.

There's a lot to read.
If you believe gun culture is healthy and the Tea Party are just nice people... you will blow a gasket.

"The toxic milieu of the Patriots spawned Timothy McVeigh — and a wave of other domestic terrorists responsible for over 40 violent incidents between 1995 and 2000.
The militias faded after the Clinton years, partly because of the economic recovery, partly because the far right felt less visceral antipathy to George W Bush and partly, perhaps, because the "war on terror" provided an external focus for internal rage. Yet, all through the Bush administration, the conservative infrastructure pushed the same populist message: the president was a swaggering Texan man of the people; his enemies, effete and treacherous intellectuals.
That strategy reached its nadir at the last election with the McCain/Palin ticket. Sarah Palin campaigned on almost nothing other than her anti-elitism: for her supporters, Palin was an ordinary hockey mom coming to clean up Washington, her very inexperience proof of virtue. In that respect, Obama’s victory — the defeat of the oxymoronic "Team Maverick" by a black liberal — was seen as the end of the so-called "Southern strategy", with the Republicans’ preferred talking points decisively rejected by an increasingly young and increasingly multicultural electorate.
In the wake of the Obama landslide, many Republican strategists recognised a need to change course but the populist forces they unleashed now possess their own momentum..."

Krugman on toxicity

"Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.
And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will."

The toxic Glenn Beck

Christopher Hitchens on something very nasty and tragic unfolding in the United States today:

Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

Read the whole thing here. Few can say it better.

I have to quote you this bit, however...

Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault.

Look upon the far Right... and be horrified.
They are slime under the rock of human enlightenment.

Right-wing bullshit re WikiLeaks.

Cenk Uygur on the utter hypocrisy of Republicans and their voicebox Fox News regarding WikiLeaks - reminding us also of who REALLY DID endanger the life of an intelligence operative, and what justice was served.



My friends, this is a pivotal event. We are witnessing one of the terrible collisions of our times between our right to know the truth, and the people who - for their own base political purposes - would destroy those who seek to give the truth to us.

Between those who deal in facts, and those who feed us lies.

By the way... Note this post from 6 months ago.

Some other little sound bites:

One indication of the indiscriminate forces being whipped up by the affair surfaced on a website called TOPIX which this week ran the question: Should the Yanks kill Julian Assange? Mr Humbert, from Irvine in California, wrote, ''The US should say to Australia, either you hand this treasonous scum's head on a stick with his ball stuffed in his mouth or we break diplomatic relations.''
Yank Oliver, from Sudbury in Canada, went further: ''That would stand as a good warning for other Aussies not to betray their allies.'' But neither went as far as Dr Zauius from Sudbury in Canada: ''Strike team needs to be dispatched to Sweden. I am wondering why they have not handed him over. Perhaps it is time to examine the Swiss (Right-wing political geography at its best...) in serious detail.''

- Martin Flanagan, journalist (you know... people who tell us stuff) for The Age newspaper

WikiLeaks

"Shares in Bank of America, the largest US bank, tumbled more than 3 per cent on Tuesday amid speculation it would be the next target of leaked documents from WikiLeaks."

Interesting... what have they been up to...?

Sarah Palin: "Assange is not a 'journalist', any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine Inspire is a 'journalist'."

False equivalence. Palin, dumb bitch, also calls his actions treasonous, so presumably she didn't even know he was Australian.

Meghan McCain: "creepy rogue Swedish guy"

Oh the boys in Sweden will just love you for that, Meghan.

Now consider:

"In April the website (WikiLeaks) released graphic, classified video footage of an American helicopter gunship firing on and killing Iraqis in a Baghdad street in 2007, apparently in cold blood. The de-encrypted video, which WikiLeaks released on its own sites as well as on YouTube, caused an international uproar.
The Baghdad video has been WikiLeaks' biggest coup to date, although an extraordinary number of unauthorised documents - more than a million - have found their way to the website. These include a previously secret, 110-page draft report by the international investigators Kroll, revealing allegations of huge corruption in Kenya involving the family of the former president Daniel arap Moi; the US government's classified manual of standard operating procedures for Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, which revealed that it was policy to hide some prisoners from the International Committee of the Red Cross; a classified US intelligence report on how to marginalise WikiLeaks; secret Church of Scientology manuals; an internal report by the global oil trader, Trafigura, about dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast; a classified US profile of the former Icelandic ambassador to the US in which the ambassador is praised for helping quell publicity about the CIA's activities involving rendition flights; and the emails leaked from the embattled Climate Research Unit at East Anglia in Britain, last November, which triggered the so-called ''climategate'' scandal."

Note the frothing "hunt him down and clip him" cowboys were not so passionately and murderously critical of WikiLeaks when the latter gave them Climategate... hmm?

Ratigan slams Brady

Quote of the segment is probably Ratigan's where he talks about his country being raped of its money...



Meanwhile the robber barons of Wall Street continue to get away with it.

Ratigan must have known that Brady would evade his question and stick to Republican talking points, so in a sense all this was just theatre. It might have served everyone better if he'd had Brady paired with someone who is prepared to answer the question, and then people would have information along with the theatre.
But Ratigan makes his point: "What's keeping our recovery from gaining steam is the fact that the financial industry is stealing America's money, depriving this country of any investment whatsoever..."

Like I said...robber barons.