I apparently went Galt this week without even knowing it, and I’ve been struggling to find things interesting enough to talk about. This, however, made me laugh:
Sad, but true.
by John Cole| 45 Comments
This post is in: Fucked-up-edness, Our Failed Media Experiment
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Villago Delenda Est
It’s funny because it’s true.
And it’s an incisive comment on what passes for “news” on the Ferengi controlled infotainment networks.
DBrown
No, its ANY WHITE, Attractive (Not fat!, Blonde and blue eyes is a winner), FEMALE under the age of thirty. Get your facts straight!
Benjamin Cisco
@Villago Delenda Est: Nicely done.
C. Gallagher
An obvious gag — Holiday safety tip: In the event a loved one goes missing it really helps to have a pole dancing video.
Cacti
@DBrown:
Close, but still no cigar…
It’s any white, attractive, thin, fair-haired, middle to upper middle class female under age 30.
Nobody gives a crap if a poor person goes missing.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
There are two shows in syndication on the ION channel that I refer to as “Missing White Woman” (Without A Trace) and “Crazy White Man” (Criminal Minds). I’m always excited when the missing person / psycho killer turns out to be someone other than the demo of my joke.
Punchy
How do polish people dance?
Violet
Do you think it would help to have Tunch and/or Rosie make a pole dancing video to have ready for the next time one of them escapes?
Nellcote
Pat Buchanan Predicts Palin Will Get the ‘Pole Position’ in the Republican Presidential Primaries
linky
Emma
DBrown: One of my acquaintances is a policeman who hates, hates, hates that sort of coverage. He says he has a desk full of missing girls and women files and can’t get anyone interested because they are the wrong demographic. What he calls the boys and girls of the press is unprintable.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Punchy:
They polka.
Dennis SGMM
In 2009, 719,558 records (Approximately 1971 per day) were entered into the National Crime Information Center’s Missing Person File. It’s obvious that we must focus on young, attractive, white females who’ve gone missing in order to deal with this scourge.
funluvn
What an outstanding idea! This would be the lede story on Faux every 20 minutes!
El Cid
@Villago Delenda Est: I thought I was the only one who saw our media and also Republican Party / ‘free’ market ‘libertarians’ especially as Ferengi.
burnspbesq
Want something interesting to talk about? How about this?
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-vine/80520/the-epa-really-ignoring-congress
themann1086
I think I’m missing something here… pole dancing video? Is there a new Missing White Woman story taking up time on the cable “news” channels?
Shade Tail
@themann1086:
Look here.
gene108
@El Cid:
Are you talking about Star Trek TNG or the fact Fox News was started by a foreigner? Or the fact right-wing “journalism” is foreign to factual reporting?
SenyorDave
Pat Buchanan Predicts Palin Will Get the ‘Pole Position’ in the Republican Presidential Primaries
Since a large part of the Republican base is made up of reactionary, racist bigots, I assume a reactionary, racist bigot like Buchanan knows best.
I like to think that one day Buchanan will join Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol and other right wing trash in the fires of hell, but I’m guessing that even Satan wouldn’t want them.
PS
@Nellcote: Definitely mildly amusing. Nice find.
PS
@SenyorDave: Satan gets my rejects; he has no choice. — G*d.
Suffern ACE
It also helps if your daughter goes missing in a place with lots of resorts. Pole dancing aside, the press does not want to camp out at the police station in Midland Texas. They much prefer Aspen or Aruba at this time of year.
drkrick
I hereby nominate this as a Balloon Juice tag, and FCIN needs to be in the glossary.
Ash Can
I hope Buchanan’s right, but if I’m forced to be sensible about it, I can easily see the 2012 GOP primaries turning out like they did in 2008, with the vote split in many different directions and one of the more “moderate” candidates (yeah, I know, not saying much) turning out to be the default nominee.
Nom de Plume
I remember a couple of years back, somebody shamed CNN into covering the disappearance of a young black girl in (I think) Philadelphia, which they proceeded to do half-heartedly for a day or so. The whole thing was just awkward as hell: CNN pretending to give a shit, and then just as quickly giving up and dropping the whole thing. Really, I’m not sure why they even bothered.
catclub
@SenyorDave: Actual correct usage of ‘pole’. For pole position.
I enjoyed a comment about Palin falling in public opinion polls that was transmogrified into ‘Palin slid down the pole.’ I never could decide if the commenter did that on purpose.
Suck It Up!
NYers and the media need to give the city and bloomberg a break. They’ve been on point in previous snowstorms so we should forgive some problems PLUS it was very windy during that storm and just made it much worse. PLUS it seems a lot of people did not listen to the warnings.
Watching a press conference with bloomie right now and while I appreciate his attempts to be inclusive his Spanish is incredibly painful to hear.
Southern Beale
CNN had “The Richard Heene Family: Where Are They Now?” on this morning.
Major cable news FAIL.
j low
@Cacti:
Not entirely true. If she is really, really, really hot they care. And they are sad because she was struck down before a rich man came along to rescue her.
cmorenc
The most prominent, and disgusting example of the “missing white girl” genre is the Nancy Grace program on “Headline News Network”. Literally a couple of HOURS every night picking apart every conceivable petty aspect of some white female youth/teen’s disappearance (whether purported kidnapping, murder, or runaway), leaving no possible avenue of lurid speculation unturned.
If people watching this crap put even an appreciable fraction of the time and mental effort spent thinking about these cases, instead making some effort to actually understand the facts of important issues facing the country (rather than simply swallowing the ten minutes of second-hand regurgitated talking points a friend picked up on Fox)…this country wouldn’t be nearly so easy for the Galtian overlords to manipulate against most people’s own interests.
Cassidy
As for the “crazy white man” show, that’s just based on numbers. They profile serial killers. They don’t have much room to move around in.
dmsilev
@Southern Beale: I’m ashamed to say that I recognize that name without having to Google it. I’m sure there is something more useful that those neurons could have been storing.
dms
Suffern ACE
@dmsilev: Balloon Boy. Oh, the TV show that might have been had we been able to follow that family around.
AxelFoley
@Villago Delenda Est:
@Benjamin Cisco:
I had to laugh when this Villago’s post was answered by Benjamin Cisco, LOL!
Lee
OT:
Looks like a new meme is brewing with the wingtards:
111th Congress Added More Debt Than First 100 Congresses Combined
I’m dubious it is true given the source, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then.
AxelFoley
@Nom de Plume:
I remember that, Nom. And to top it off, the little black girl was able to free herself from her captors, while Elizabeth Smart (funny, we know her name, but no the black girl’s–thank you, media), who was, what, a mile or so away her home stayed captured until someone spotted her in a hotel lobby with her captors.
El Cid
@gene108:
No, not the foreigner part, because I don’t give a shit about that (except in the context of Murdoch particularly).
It’s the Ferengi characters on Star Trek (I don’t know of any other people or things by that name) whose entire society is based on money, nothing has a value beyond its price and exchange value.
SiubhanDuinne
@Southern Beale: @dmsilev: @Suffern ACE:
The helicopters… are… NOT… amused.
Now excuse me while I fax my credenzas to John Cole. Also, too.
themann1086
@Shade Tail: Sigh.
@Lee: This probably falls into the “True But Completely Misleading” category, since most of our debt was accumulated from FY1982-FY1993 and FY2002-FY2009, and the 100th Congress passed the budget for FY 1989. I know, wingnuts lying with statistics, shocking.
PG
I’d really like to understand the right-winger math behind the assertion regarding debt. When I Google for it, they just refer to the U.S. Treasury’s figures. But http://www.treasurydirect.gov says that on 12/31/2008, when the 110th Congress had ended but before the 111th Congress began, the Debt Held by the Public was $6.7 trillion; Intragovernmental Holdings were $4.3 trillion; which adds up to a Total Public Debt Outstanding of $10.7 trillion.
If the 111th Congress then ran up more debt than all prior Congresses combined, at least one of those figures would have to have doubled, right? But here’s what the Treasury says:
Current Date: 12/24/2010
Debt Held by the Public: $9.3 trillion
Intragovernmental Holdings: $4.5 trillion
Total Public Debt Outstanding: $12.8 trillion
I don’t see any doubling of our debt.
My best guess is that the combination of stimulus, TARP II and especially health care reform could have run up bills FOR THE FUTURE that, if the government takes in zero revenue to fund them (which would be absurd, since health care reform had several funding mechanisms), MIGHT outpace debt by all previous Congresses. This still seems unlikely if you use inflation-adjusted numbers, given that previous Congresses had to run temporary debts for all the wars we ever fought before. While insuring nearly all Americans is expensive, it’s not like “defeating King George III, Jefferson Davis, Huns, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo plus stalemating in Southeast Asia” expensive. (Gulf War I was our blood, but it was mostly Japan’s and Saudi Arabia’s treasure.)
Cassidy
@PG: Teatards don’t need math. They just need fee-fees.
de stijl
And Medicare Part D pays for itself, right?
MattR
@PG: The claim is that the 111th Congress racked up more debt than the first hundred, not the first hundred and ten. They are purposely keeping the GWB years out of it.
Benjamin Cisco
@AxelFoley: Heh.
__
(And yes, Cisco is spelled wrong – a play on words that references my work life.)
asiangrrlMN
@SiubhanDuinne: Beat me to it.
I have to sigh in general though you are all very funny because this hits close to home. We had a rather famous local case of a YAWGGM (Young, attractive white girl gone missing) that turned into a national case. It dragged on and on and on. So, OK, for the first few weeks when they had additional info, it was tolerable. But, they still kept mentioning her, even when there was no new info. This went on for months. During this time, a boy from Red Lake (Native American reservation) went missing. I read a two-paragraph clip about it in the Strib. It wasn’t even on the front page, of course. He was never mentioned again.
Then, after the first case was solved, there was another case of YAWGGM in Wisconsin that got a lot of attention. She resurfaced and told a story of being kidnapped by a black man. Turns out, she was mad at her boyfriend and concocted the whole story. Cops spent roughly a $100,000 looking for her. She got three years probation, and she had to pay $250 a month during the probation period as restitution. And, she received counseling.
I can think of two other prominent local YAWGGM off the top of my head.