Bill Maher makes the case that many of the mass shooters are frustrated young men who feel that they are being excluded from all the rampant sexual activity that is going on all around them. They feel that this is totally unfair and strike out in anger and commit acts of random violence.
[Read more…]
Lincoln Chafee has announced that he will follow Jim Webb and drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination. His poll and fund-raising numbers were low and his debate performance did nothing to improve his chances, especially since the pundits were ruthless in the way they ridiculed him.
[Read more…]
There has been an intriguing post-debate debate on who ‘won’ the Democratic debate. I commented before that the professional pundits in the media seem to be overwhelmingly of the opinion that Hillary Clinton won while my opinion of it was that Bernie Sanders did much better. Of course, all these are just subjective opinions and colored by one’s own preferences. Since I am a Sanders supporter and a Clinton skeptic, my views have a high probability of being skewed.
[Read more…]
It used to be a standard joke that when anyone referred to something that had appeared in Playboy magazine, they would quickly add that they read the magazine just for the articles. This was actually plausible because the magazine did publish many serious pieces, and was known especially for its interviews with prominent people including the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Fidel Castro.
[Read more…]
The always-entertaining Matt Taibbi has a new article where he says that Donald Trump is upsetting the business model that Fox News has created and forced them to consider treating the nutty Ben Carson as their candidate. The relationship between Trump and Fox, once so cozy and full of mutual admiration, began to fall apart following the angry exchange between Megyn Kelly and Trump.
“[Fox News Chairman] Roger [Ailes] was not happy,” a Fox source told New York Magazine. “Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.”
Neither Ailes nor Murdoch are too dense to know what this means. They know they’ve spent a generation building an audience of morons. Their business model depends on morons; morons are the raw materials of their industry, the way Budweiser is in the hops business.
[Read more…]
The relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump oscillates between hot and cold with remarkable rapidity. Trump was a favorite on Fox but when he was seemingly ambushed by the moderators during the first debate, he took umbrage and attacked Megyn Kelly in particular and vowed to never appear on their shows again. Fox head Roger Ailes than quickly apologized and Trump agreed to withdraw his boycott, though he continued to occasionally lob attacks at Kelly.
[Read more…]
The curse of the American media is that the major ones refrain from calling out stupid statements by major politicians for the nonsense they are but instead treat them as one side of a debate to be counter-balanced by an opposing view, leaving the impression that the truth lies somewhere in between. But we have entered a stage in politics where Republicans are making flat-out wrong statements that are simply not even debatable.
[Read more…]
I stayed up way past my normal bedtime last night to catch Stephen Colbert’s debut as a late night talk show host. It has been many, many years, decades even, since I watched TV for any length of time and it reminded me once again of how much I positively hate watching TV.
[Read more…]
Tonight at 11:35pm is when Stephen Colbert begins his new career as a late night talk show host. From what we can see, he is not aiming to revolutionize the format but keep it broadly similar to what been done before, the new wrinkle being that his guests would cover a wider range than just celebrities from the entertainment world, also encompassing politicians, writers, scientists, and other people of interest.
[Read more…]
Jorge Ramos is the well-known news anchor on the Spanish language channels Univision and Fusion who was thrown out of a press conference with Donald Trump for asking questions about his immigration plans. Some commentators have criticized Ramos for not waiting his turn to be asked and said that he was being rude by ‘jumping the queue’, so to speak. Others have gone even further and cheered Trump’s action, seeing it as demonstrating Trump’s toughness and symbolic of how Trump would throw people out of the country.
[Read more…]