Terrible Editorials, Opinion Pieces and Letters to the Editor

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Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Zeroisanumber posted:

Foley got boned pretty hard when Phil Hartman was murdered. Until then News Radio was one of the top-rated comedies on television.

I loved NewsRadio, even the season after Hartman left, but it was never even close to being highly rated in the Neilsons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsRadio#Season_ratings

In fact, they actually briefly cancelled it after the fourth season, then renewed it a few days before Hartman was killed.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2011 13:14

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 04:39

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

You'd miss the point that badly, too, if you were older than the Highlander.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2011 06:41

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

That's different. If you do every drug you can name at once and one of them happens to be poppers, you're a drug addict, not a gay. Totally different kind of degenerate.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2012 13:57

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Bruce Leroy posted:

That's the funny thing about "socialism" for conservatives, they really don't know what it means, it's just a general pejorative for them.

It's not hard to understand the confusion. That word has meant a lot of things in the mainstream public consciousness, even over just the last few decades. 40 years ago, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. called the Soviet Union a socialist country. Nowadays, the more common usage refers to mild social democracies like Norway, and sometimes even France and England. And then you have the libertarians who think that making people pay any taxes at all automatically equates to socialism. Which makes it all one big mess in the mind of someone not inclined to educate themselves with what amounts to some pretty dry reading when you live on a diet of attention-grabbing television.

And of course the media isn't interested in clearing up the confusion, only adding to it. A propagandist who can link any kind of progressive social policy with Joseph Stalin in the minds of his audience is never going to give up that golden goose.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2012 15:09

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

How did you manage to pull quotes off Wikipedia two hours after they shut down their site for SOPA?

# ¿ Jan 18, 2012 10:35

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

quote:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

Newt 2012: Because Three Women In America Could Look Past His Repellant Personality and Looks Long Enough To See the Money and Power.

Can you imagine this shrink trying to coach his own life, let alone getting paid to coach yours?

# ¿ Jan 23, 2012 06:18

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Bruce Leroy posted:

Also, who the gently caress is "intimidated" by glitter?

Well, lots of people are intimidated by Gary Glitter.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2012 10:00

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Chunk posted:

2/3rds of all companies pay an effective rate of zero, so again, I agree it isn't fair it's so low.

Got a source for this? It sounds pretty unbelieveable on its face. The closest I can find is this study where 2/3rds of 12 (i.e. 8) large companies paid no tax. But the companies weren't selected randomly and the study was conducted by an organization called Citizens for Tax Justice, which doesn't exactly scream impartiality.

However, effective corporate tax rates are at a 40-year low of 12.1%:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/03/418171/corporate-taxes-40-year-low/

No need to go for misleading stuff when the truth is damning enough.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 06:32

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

If there's one complaint I have about my car, it's that it's entirely too fuel efficient. As an American, I demand the freedom to have to fill up my tank twice as often. It will go nicely with my freedom to be fired from my job for any reason, my freedom to be homeless, and my freedom to die of preventable illness due to lack of insurance.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2012 12:47

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Here's a terrible and terribly pointless thing Yahoo News decided to throw in right alongside the regular news stories.

quote:

At this point in an election season, a campaign's every utterance shimmers with significance. At the same time, this time around, the campaigns have embraced social media. And the social networks, like whiskey, promote disinhibition. (Just ask Anthony Weiner.) Services like Twitter, Facebook and, more recently, the photo-sharing site Pinterest require that we let our guard down. They also mercilessly sideline participants who seem too repressed or officious.

Perhaps none of that crossed Ann Romney's mind when, on joining Pinterest last week, she added the gorgeous Anna Karenina�a heart-shattering Russian work from the 1870s that both Dostoevsky and Nabokov believed was flawless�to her two-entry list of "Books Worth Reading." (The other entry is The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton.) Yet in the kind of book-club circles that also use Pinterest, a passion for Anna Karenina usually signals a romantic disposition. It sometimes make you seem like you're open to an extramarital affair.

To illustrate her choice, Romney posted an image of the makeshift gold-and-crimson digital cover of the public-domain edition of the novel. "One of my favorites," she wrote.

"She does a lot of it herself," Zac Moffatt, the digital director of the Romney campaign told me, explaining Ann's Pinterest choices. "She'll send us stuff like 'Here's a recipe.' We might post things. But those are her recipes. It's all her choices."

I asked about Anna Karenina. "That I can't speak to," Moffatt said.

Ann's presence on the female-dominated site, which she also used to feature family photos and down-home recipes, was probably an attempt simply to humanize and feminize her husband's campaign. She also was positioned as the tech-savvy member of the couple. On February 21, Mitt Romney tweeted, "Ann's way ahead of me on this one � check out her Pinterest page here pinterest/annromney/."

But the way Romney's private literary canon then richocheted around the Internet is an object lesson in the anarchy that characterizes online communication. It's now virtually impossible for a campaign to follow the imperative to use social media while also staying�as the hopeful phrase used to go�"on message."

Off-off-message is more like it.

Posting stuff on Pinterest�or on Twitter or Instagram�is less like issuing a carefully crafted statement and more like doing a spontaneous Lana del Rey impression at a White House reception. It feels expressive and modern, but it's going to be judged and interpreted in ways no handler can anticipate or control.

Launched in beta one year ago by Ben Silbermann of West Des Moines, Iowa, Pinterest is a hypertrophic photo-sharing site that maintains intimate ties with Twitter and Facebook. Now with some 11 million active users, Pinterest has been boasting that it acquired 10 million users faster than any social site in Interest history.

Pinterest users create collages of digital artifacts from the Internet or from their private collections. The collages are called boards. Early jokes about Pinterest called it corny, and imagined all the posts to include bunnies and sunbeams. But venture capital of the kind Pinterest attracted doesn't follow mere corniness. From the start, Pinterest boards have disproportionately shown images of coveted consumer goods, and they drive lanes and lanes of lucrative traffic to ecommerce sites. This phenomenon (strongly encouraged by Pinterest) is a large part of what won the company an eye-popping valuation of $200 million from Andreesen Horowitz last fall.

People joining Pinterest often get drawn into the excitement of quick and florid self-expression followed by instant feedback. Still, Ann Romney's move was a little stunning. Mitt Romney's devoted wife�Mormon convert, mother of five, would-be first lady of the United States�champions a chronicle of � an open marriage?

quote:
The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another. Aleksey Aleksandrovich made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Aleksey Aleksandrovich's house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it.

Let's just say the medium made her do it. Pinterest has been described as "crack for women" (although isn't crack crack for women?). Keeping scrapbooks, chocked with mementoes and photos and locks of Ringo Starr's hair, has long been condescended to as a pastime of moms and grandmas, who paste and caption to wile away their waning years on breaks from Sudoku.

But making scrapbooks�or "pinboards," as they're called on Pinterest, since they're on public view�is not always so pathetic. Instead, scrapbooks are a form of highly impressionistic, multimedia autobiography that come with a point-of-view that can be tart, critical, nostalgic and highly biased. People who make scrapbooks are known to snip black sheep out of family photos; to select only the scraps that bolster their version of life's dramas; to smuggle in allusions to secret animosities and secret romances. These scrapbooks survive, and are used to tell family stories. That's no small victory for the authors. Just as history belongs to the victors, family history may belong to the scrapbookers.

In short, women on crack of any kind may not be on their most selfless behavior. They may be emotional. They may be grandiose.

And because Pinterest encourages impressionism and allusiveness and nonverbal womanly connectivity, Romney ended up dipping into meanings she couldn't have intended.

Shouldn't, for one, a political wife--who this very week said maybe she should "do all the talking" for her husband's campaign--be naming American novels as her favorites? With wholesome themes like "stay married to that government tool Karenin, even if he makes you feel dead inside"? It's just an idea.

Anna Karenina did, however, win Ann Romney some admirers. Among the Facebook comments on Romney's "Anna Karenina" endorsement came this one, by Aparna Mukherjee. "There *is* something pleasingly surprising (subversive?) about a would-be first lady choosing a book that centers on a dissatisfied aristocratic wife committing adultery, leaving her high-ranking govt official husband before inevitable tragic end."

Surprising indeed! Of course, we could all be overthinking this. As Mukherjee concluded, "Or maybe she hasn't read it."

Virginia Heffernan is the national correspondent for Yahoo News. Her column, "Machine Politics," explores the intersection of technology and the 2012 election.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/why-did-ann-romney-put-anna-karenina-her-185714306.html

# ¿ Mar 1, 2012 21:07

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Bruce Leroy posted:

Maybe I'm a bit of a snob, but a for-profit online university seems pretty lovely to me.

The other college this company owns is called American Public University, and together they form the American Public University System, owned by a company called American Public Education, Inc.

When even your name is a lie, that's a bad sign.

Shasta Orange Soda fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Mar 15, 2012

# ¿ Mar 15, 2012 13:16

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Borneo Jimmy posted:

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/letters/144989015.html

If you die in horrible agony from a treatable disease or injury, you sir are an American patriot

Jesus Christ, I just can't get over how ghoulish this is.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2012 06:08

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Saint Sputnik posted:

quote:
Recently, a volunteer neighborhood watch member was involved in a shooting of a person of a protected class. All of a sudden it became a race issue across the country thanks to our half-arse corporate press.

Fact, Mr. Zimmerman falls under the same category as the black individual, i.e. his mother was of the �non-white Hispanic� identification. The father is of the Jew community and an upper middle-class person involved with the judicial system. Both qualify by law as minorities as does their son Mr. Zimmerman. So by law it is not a race issue.

Do you notice the majority of photos of the deceased are from his grade school period and not his face book pictures of a tough football playing person flashing gang hand signals?

If the facts are that Zimmerman�s nose was broken and was bleeding on the ground with a pretty large and athletic man on top of him with his head being bounced on the sidewalk, the law has been for decades that if you are in fear of great bodily harm you have the legal privilege of using whatever force you see as necessary to terminate the attack. This is why with the investigation even including the FBI there has been no arrest. In fact, with one minority killing another minority under present law it cannot be a so-called hate crime. Is this case being used to discourage citizens from protecting their neighborhoods?

Could be, but one last question. If the deceased would have been white with blue eyes and blond hair, what do you think the story would might be like. Or more likely the story would have remained local and ended up in the local newspaper back in the used car section.

What kind of self-respecting American racist says "arse"?

# ¿ Apr 6, 2012 05:38

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Terror Sweat posted:

What the gently caress is your problem? Every thing he said is true. We should stop focusing on tertiary care and focus on primary care. It saves money and lives.

We need to find cures to diseases. Diseases that kill. Why isn't anyone trying to cure diseases? I mean, if we just cured Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's wouldn't be nearly so expensive! Why hasn't anyone thought of this?

This is what people like Cal Thomas say on the subject of health care when they're trying as hard as they can to avoid writing about the fact that maybe poor people deserve a little bit of health care, too.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2012 04:44

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Terror Sweat posted:

He wants to spend less on tertiary care. Tertiary care is literally the most expensive way to treat patients. Primary care saves money for everybody involved.

Yes, that's blindingly obvious and everyone knows it. Nobody is objecting to that part. But people like Cal Thomas will never, ever talk about how we're supposed to pay for that primary care when it comes to lower-income people, and we know he's against UHC, so the unspoken conclusion is that those people aren't even worth caring about. Except when they're bleeding our emergency rooms dry. But hey, 38% of their so-called "illnesses" are their own fault anyway, right?

Some of the dumbest things in this article are the things left purposefully and perpetually unsaid by writers like this, and yours is a seriously charitable interpretation of that article which really only works if you don't know who Cal Thomas is.

Besides, if you can read this this paragraph and tell me that these are the words of a serious person worth listening to, I don't even know what to tell you:

quote:

Take Alzheimer's disease. Because of medical advances, more people are living longer, and more will likely contract this slow-progressing, eventually fatal disease. According to the Alzheimer's Association (http://www.alz.org), "Medicare and Medicaid will spend an estimated $140 billion in 2012 on people with Alzheimer's and other dementias." Worse, it says, "Caring for people with Alzheimer's disease will cost all payers � Medicare, Medicaid, individuals, private insurance and HMOs � $20 trillion (in today's dollars) over the next 40 years. The overwhelming majority of that will be spending by Medicare and Medicaid." It would cost far less if we found a cure for Alzheimer's.

DISEASES WOULD COST LESS TO TREAT IF WE CURED THEM. That is literally his argument. Cal Thomas got paid American currency to come up with that.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2012 06:57

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

Does Boeing have double coupon day? If so, we should only buy F-22 Raptors on Tuesdays.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2012 08:20

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 04:39

Shasta Orange Soda: Apr 25, 2007

I like that his evidence for that was basically that people sometimes complained about their jobs, much like anyone who's ever held any job. And that they didn't like how assembly line work was "boring and repetitive." Is the implication here that auto workers of the '70s would have gladly given up their good pay and benefits for a shot at the glamorous and never repetitive world of hamburger preparation at a 2012 McDonald's?

# ¿ Apr 24, 2012 19:50

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Terrible Editorials, Opinion Pieces and Letters to the Editor