No News is TV News

I had been planning to write about the horrid state of television programming. I'll warn everyone that television is both a reflection and a catalyst of our doom, I thought. Naturally, I had to research a bit. Bear in mind, I co-founded the Couch Potato Lodge at Glassboro State College in 1984, and I have some history of TV viewing under my belt. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that television programming is meaningful. As I inferred, I am a recovering TV addict. Part of my treatment involved sacrificing cable more than ten years ago. Today, I receive eleven channels through the assistance of rabbit ears dangling over the side of the set.

Here is a sample of all eleven channels. I typed what I heard, then moved on:

1. There was no assault.
2. It was a beautiful block. Anderson just did a complete obliteration.
3. ‘Cause she had a grisly time when she was sixteen.
4. This ingenious construction is not fixed in any way to the rock.
5. But despite strong sales on Friday, Saturday was disappointing.
6. Sandy, you’ve got to marry me and you’ve got to come to Canada with me.
7. How does the modern mom cut down on all that holiday stress?
8. Well I think it’s disgusting, pretending they don’t know each other. It’s a con!
9. Is this your girlfriend? Oh, it’s your wife.
10. And because I postponed the wedding, I came home one day to find her and her parents moving all my belongings out of our home.
11. The most common side effects of Nexium are headache and diarrhea.
12. And somebody got killed in the process.

KEY
1. CSI: Miami
2. Monday Night Football
3. Dateline NBC: Princess Diana
4. Niagara Falls: A Naked Planet Special
5. News
6. As Time Goes By
7. News (promo)
8. Lovejoy
9. Paid Programming
10. Judge Mathis
11. Commercial
12. CSI: Miami

Failure is an option

and they’ve done it again...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress on Saturday failed in its attempt to get legislation addressing the Sept. 11 Commission's terror-fighting recommendations to President Bush, but Republican leaders said they would try to press the effort later this year.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said "Our members want us to continue, the speaker wants us to continue to negotiate and so does the Senate, so we're going to continue to negotiate and see if we can get a bill in December."

However, chances are unlikely if the House and Senate both leave Washington and end their post-election session.

News of which we dare not speak…

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Republicans approved a party rules change Wednesday that could allow Majority leader Tom DeLay to retain his leadership post if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury on state political corruption charges.

Apparently, Democracy means having a majority of elected officials looking out for you, as long as you're one of them.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday prepared to raise the nation's debt ceiling by $800 billion, taking the new limit to $8.184 trillion. The Senate approved the rise, the third in three years, on Wednesday. The House is expected to pass it as well so it can be sent to President Bush for signing into law.

Definition: national debt ceiling - a limit set by Congress beyond which the national debt cannot rise; periodically raised by Congress...until it reaches $Infinity...which, if you do the math, will probably happen during the next four years.

(NYTimes) - The top hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States decided yesterday to join the broadest alliance of Christian churches in the country so far, a new ecumenical group that would bring the church to the same table as conservative evangelicals and liberal Protestants.

Gathering forces for the final battle in the Crusades? No wonder nobody cares about the national debt ceiling.

Paranoia Reflux

Yesterday, an old friend called to reconnect. After a while, his cell phone connection gave up the ghost. By the time I was able to call him back, it seemed to me that his mood had taken a turn for the worse. Either he'd had a chance to assess whatever I'd said during our conversation (my addled brain does not allow for much in the way of recall) or, somehow, THEY'd gotten to him. Now, just bear with my paranoia for a second. If the answer is A: that I'd said something stupid and didn't realize it, then I have no way of knowing what I'd said and whether or not I should apologize or explain further. If the answer is B: then THEY, and by THEY I mean the dead chicken we're going to be wearing around our necks for four more years, had made their case and won him over, which means we've lost another one. Either way, it's bad. Either way, it's a symptom of the new order. I thought I was seeing conspiracies at every turn before! What's going to happen now? I can feel it bubbling up into my esophagus. For your sake, and yours, and yours, I hope it's just me. If something doesn't come along to save the world soon...oh wait. How about this:

According to Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael: hunter/gatherer/pastoralist cultures had it right for three million years. Then, ten thousand years ago, some minds were changed in that fertile crescent, and totalitarian agriculture was born. Our modern day culture grew out of this mind-change. Instead of the orderly interaction with the community of life, we're now out to conquer the planet, the world that we believe was created for humanity. If you ask, "So what're you saying, we're supposed to go back to being hunter/gatherers?" you'll get a big, telepathic gorilla shaking his head, putting the following thought in yours: "No. You're inventive people. Figure out a way to make it work."

Like that's ever going to happen. I mean the making it work part. We're more likely to stumble upon a telepathic gorilla.

For a minute, I thought I was onto something....

Oil for Life

Here we are once again, freshly hoodwinked by evil genius Karl Rove and the hate puppets of the airwaves. I'm so angry at those Mississippi River red states. I'm never going to speak to them again, whoever they are (and would they even understand me if I did?). It's been suggested that they turned out in droves to ban gay marriage, and then went home to marry their cousins and their cows. I doubt that's true. Then again, it is another country out there....

Hey, I just read that, according to an eight-nation report compiled by 250 scientists, the Arctic is warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the planet due to a buildup of heat-trapping gases. And the trend is set to continue. But the good news is that, once all that useless snow and ice has melted, oil and gas deposits will be easier to reach. Yippee!

Sinking Feeling

Well, at least today is the first day of the rest of the end of the world.

Last call

It's not difficult to understand, even for the misguided. In his column last week, author Matt Miller spelled out three big reasons to fire the Bush administration.

His first reason doesn't even address the fact that neocons / vulcans falsified intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion. We were dragged into their Crusade at a time of their choosing, which further illustrates the inept handling of the aftermath of the war.

We are not safer at home. We just aren't. Three years later...why haven't we found a way to inspect a greater percentage of cargo containers at our ports? Why did our Republican-controlled Senate kill, 48-47, a bid to shift $70 million from a Department of Homeland Security administrative account to grants for securing chemical plants from terrorism. Join me in sounding the call to shore up our chemical plants!

Finally, Miller's third reason for ousting Bush is that he turned a record surplus into a record deficit. Yes, it's tough to pin all the blame on him for that one. But when Bush said, in that first post 9/11 speech, that we'd have to make sacrifices, besides the obvious (lives on the battlefield), didn't you think maybe he meant something we could all contribute to that would make a difference, for example, say, a gasoline tax? Instead, he threw us a tax cut bone. The amount we're spending in Iraq should have been used to pay for the war in Afghanistan and for shoring up our defenses.

Please vote tomorrow.