And Now, a Break for the News -- And You Thought Vegas Was Crazy!

On a non-Vegas note, I saw Out-Foxed last week and then had the glaring truth of the scary conservative omissions in the media shown to me on an innocent BART ride to work. It was painful. A couple of days ago, the SF Chronicle had a front-page story about how the recent terror alert is based on data that was collected before 9/11, and that the last time that they added to this data was in January. It seems quite obvious to me that the alert was purposefully enacted in order to draw attention away from the Democratic party's nomination of Kerry as their running candidate. It seems frightfully obvious to me that the Bush Administration is once again using fear tactics to sway the vote, without basis in fact.

The story was the headliner on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. I was laughing with the disgusting helplessness that I felt when I looked down at the cover of the paper a man in a business suit was reading on the BART train. It was the Contra Costa Times, a paper that I generally avoid, no matter how bored I am on the train, and no matter how many copies of it may be strewn on the seats around me, because it never covers any stories that don't seem like propagandist fluff. Well, the headline on the CCT was about Bush's new plan for a chief of intelligence, and the entire front page said ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the fact that people have been duped into a false sense of insecurity by the Bush Administration yet again. No wonder people who watch the falsely self-proclaimed "Fair and Balanced" Fox News affiliates have such utterly skewed ideas about what is going on.

If you can't get around to watching the film, then at least read the article on it in the SF Chron today; http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/06/DDGOQ82NDU1.DTL
it covers some of the bigger points covered by the documentary, including a little about how Fox gets away with being biased and pretending not to be, and a little bit about the PIPA polls showing the extreme contrast in numbers of misperceptions that Fox News watcher have vs. other news channel viewers. You can check out the PIPA study at:
http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf
My favorite graph is on page 21. It shows the differences in percentages of people who had the misperception that Iraq was linked to Al-Queda, contrasting Democrats and Republicans who watched either Fox or PBS/NPR.
Of the Bush supporters who watched Fox, 78% of them believed that those links had been found. Of the Bush supporters who watched PBS-NPR, 50% of them had that misperception.
Of the Democratic nominee supporters who watch Fox, 48% of them believed that links had been found between Iraq and Al-Queda. Of the PBS-NPR watchers, 0% believed that the links had been found.

Makes you think, eh?

In other news today, one of a couple of things which caught my notice was the sweet love story of Cifford Garrison, who almost got to honeymoon with would-be wife number 10. Apparently he swindles the ladies out of their money, and marries them. One woman caught on just fast enough to avoid wedding bells, although he had already bought her a car with his own money, and a necklace for his "daughter," A.K.A. the other dumb broad he was trying to marry in Vegas. He had told fiance number 10 that his wife and son were killed in a car crash... even that would cause me to be suspicious of a new paramour. She must be a Fox News viewer... and he should run for President.

My other favorite story of the day was of ... well, I was going to tell you about the schools in LA that are being shut down for having a curriculum that taught (mostly immigrant students) that the United States has 53 states, and two branches of Congress (one for the Democrats and one for the Republicans.) The school offers a cheap (if you consider $500-$1500 for what you could get for nearly free at an adult school cheap,) and fast high school diploma, which is obviously a way to get people to fail on their citizenship test.... but then I found this article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/archive/2004/07/28/semendentist.DTL
It's about a dentist in North Carolina who was making his female patients swallow his sperm during their visits. He had dozens of syringes filled with sperm all over his office and in his lab coats. When a woman complained, saying, "That smells like sperm!" he told her that she was crazy. So remember, kids: when your dentist tells you to lay back and swallow, he might really be asking that you just open up and say 'aaaah'...

And that, my darlings, is the news for the day....