The Journal Of E. A. Kolb

Forbes: Fox News Prepares a Conservative's News Satire Program

Passage of note: "The way I look at it, almost every comedy show or satire show I see uses the same talking points against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney," Surnow said. "The other side hasn't been skewered in a fair and balanced way."

Apparently, you've never watched the show. Jon Stewart skewers anyone and everyone worth skewering. He can't be faulted that your idiots have been in power over our idiots for the last six years. As for Colbert, you are his shtick, genius. Self-righteous, head-in-the-sand pundits are asinine, and inversely in-character satire as one is funny. What would you do on the other side of the fence that wouldn't be so indicative of conservative faults as to defeat the purpose of satirizing the other guy to begin with?

I rephrase my boggle: how would anyone make a satirical joke about the energy consumption of hybrid, for instance, that doesn't point out the inherent absurdities of the opposing point of view? I'm genuinely curious if this can be done in such a way that is not immediately abhorrent to a moderate audience. I mean, if the basis of your satire in this particular case is that Americans are indeed entitled to burn copious amounts of oil with reckless abandon then I can't qualify your answer as legit...

Bottom line, this is a rather backwards way of looking at satire. It's not that the Daily Show or the Colbert Report are dramatically left-leaning. It's that the conservatives in office are much bigger fools than the liberals in office whatever percentage of the time.

CNN: Lebanese Christian politician killed

The passage of note: State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the United States was "shocked by this assassination," calling the attack "an act of terrorism." [Emphasis added.]

You may consider this line of thinking largely semantic if you wish, but I beg to differ. The raison d'être of terrorism is to illustrate to one's enemy that no one is safe. No man, no woman, no child. No one, anywhere. Terrorists pick targets that are heavily populated, bare minimum, and frequently symbolic. Consider: WTC, OK Federal Building, Tokyo subways, Pan Am flight 103, etc. With that in mind, the assassination of a noted Lebanese politician with an agenda does not, in actuality, constitute terrorism. He was one man - one man who, due to the nature and the context of his work, wore a target every day of his career.

In general, I'm a fan of the nobody-kills-anyone-and-we-all-get-along-fine stratagem for existence, but the distinction is very important. This spokesperson from the State Department just declared a political murder an act of terrorism. Fallacious though this logic may be, consider the extension: does the murder of anyone with a political agenda constitute terrorism? This is pretty crucial, given that, in the past five years, the government has empowered itself to suspend habeas corpus and a number of other rights of the accused (even the right for the accused to know what he or she is accused of) when it comes to terrorism. To spell it all out, at the bottom of the slippery slope, when the definition of The T Word is so ambiguous, so nebulous that we can freely apply it to essentially any crime we choose and thereunder suspend freedom itself, we have effectively become a police state of the willing.

Hope your laundry's clean.

The Good: Bredesen was re-elected as governor of Tennessee. Of all the races I voted in, his re-election should have the most direct impact on my own life. Our small company is looking forward to the statewide medical benefits program he's working on. In the national scene, Santorum (R-PA) is gone and Webb won in Virginia (pending entirely patriotic and not at all hypocritical recounts).

The Bad: Ford, Jr., a proven Washington veteran, lost to Corker, a white ex-mayor of Chatanooga (with a slightly fishy smell about him) by 3%. This was one of the key senate races for the Democrats. I still don't like Lieberman.

The Ugly: If you're gay, just leave Tennessee. In fact, you may as well move to Canada. I'm sorry. We tried and got shouted down 4:1 in this state. Not sure on the other states with similar referendums.

That's the longest I've ever waited in line to vote, but that's what you get when you move from a town like Urbana to a city like Knoxville. An important election today -- one of the key senate races in the country (Ford v. Corker) and a state constitution amendment on gay marriage (or one might rather put, on straight-only marriage). I fully expect Bredesen will be reelected for governor by a landslide. The support I've seen to date for the Republican challenger, Jim Bryson, could be summarized as token at best.

P.S. I'm thrilled as hell that the electronic machines we used today were not Diebold fraud factories*. The logo on them was something like hi or hj or something I don't recognize. But, compared to the alternative, that's a good thing I suppose. I'd like to look more into this company.

_{* How's that for rhetoric?}

MSNBC's Olbermann ending the 'editorial silence' on Katrina.

Actually a very good television editorial on the federal government's response to the disaster scenario - a response that was faster to shift blame than it was to react to those in need.

_{Thanks to zelle for the link.}

New Orleans as we know it is gone forever. The city is underwater, and still sinking. Of course, I do not believe it will no longer be on the map of the United States when my future children start learning basic US geography, but what it was is forever changed.

We all know of the disaster that has taken place. It is one of the two greatest plausible nightmare scenarios here in the US that has made scientists cringe for years - a category five hurricane hitting New Orleans pretty much dead on. We've known about it, and we've known there was nothing we could do about it. All we could do is pray that it would never happen. Some people wonder why I'm not a man of prayer.

Contribute!Now that it has happened, it should be a time for action, for unity of purpose. There are some things, I believe, that are worse than death. Our kind has thousands of years of learning how to deal with death. Capitalism and material accumulation, however, are relatively new concepts. We invest so much of ourselves into our things and when those are stripped from us we become truly naked, truly vulnerable. The sad truth I'm suggesting, then, is that we are better at coping with the loss of life than we are at coping with the destruction of ourselves.

New Orleans is more than a beautiful, historic place. There are approximately 1.3 million people who call the greater New Orleans area their home, and let's not even get into the areas of Mississippi and elsewhere that have been utterly decimated by Hurricane Katrina. That's 1.3 million lives that have been touched in a profound way even I'm not fully able to comprehend. I don't even think 'touched' is the right word for it. 'Visciously maimed' might be more apt.

From where most of us sit, which is the comfortable armchair-land of Far Far Away, there isn't a lot we can do. We can't drive down there ourselves and help. Even if we were within distance to do that, we couldn't get in - for valid safety reasons, New Orleans is a forbidden Atlantis to all but emergency personnel. There is something we can do, however. Donate to the Red Cross. It's needed. Even if it's a small donation, it's help. Be patient and persistent, though. As you might imagine, the Red Cross website is getting lots of traffic, so their servers are straining under the excess traffic.

I wanted to get that out of the way and say it first, because the rest of what I have to talk about is angry stuff. As I said above, this should be a time for unity and oneness of cause. And yet some of the worst faults of our kind have reared their ugly heads through this disaster in very large ways. Please note that a lot of this has been discussed in other journals already and my contribution here is to further awareness of these issues.

Black People Loot, White People FindAh, the semantics of covert racism. Euphemism and dysphemism. The little things that belie a big, fat prejudice...

I'm sure many of you have been made aware of the looting and salvaging that's been going on since the hurricane passed. I'll draw the distinction between the two. Salvaging is people breaking into stores that sell foodstuffs in order to acquire needed foodstuffs. The store owners can't open the store for business, nor will they be able to recover the goods before they go bad anyway. The people doing this are generally doing it to feed their families because they weren't able to get out of the city. Looting is people stealing goods without any kind of mitigating circumstance. For instance, just about any electronic goods. No one needs those to survive, so stealing them is criminal through and through. Likewise, the people who have been making off with sacks of cash from the floating casinos that have washed ashore are looters.

Having made that distinction, look at how the Associated Press and the AFP are portraying this in their image captions: ( Images )

In the first image, we see a white person "looking through his shopping bag" while the black person is jumping through the broken window. In reality, both of them did the same amount of "shopping" in that store, yet the white person is being portrayed as though he's just a bystander. More telling are the next two images. You can imagine these photos were taken about 30 feet apart from each other. The white people "found" food in a grocery store, but the black guy "looted" it?

The Art of Fact is supposed to be as unbiased as possible. In its purest form, it tells us things none of us want to acknowledge. It does this not by how it portrays reality, but by the reality it portrays. The goal is to call a spade a spade.

What we're seeing here is unequal treatment of fact. This salvaging is an ugly reality of the situation. If I were unable to get out of the city before this thing, you'd damn well better believe I wouldn't be too proud to steal from a closed store to keep my family alive. But the people who have been brought to this are all the same. The press working to separate the white folks from the black folks through the measured use of words is not only deplorable, it's cowardly.

The Associated Press and the AFP both need to be called on this blunder. Contact information for the AP is either by email or found online. The AFP contact info is found online.
Further insight on this matter: LJ: zarfmouse, LJ Community: blackfolk, Boing Boing.

President PaperweightIt takes the practical annihiliation of a major US city to get President Bush home from vacation. So sorry to be a bother. Anyhow, in case you were wondering what he's been doing in light of this massive disaster, here's a little insight for you. Now, as much as I don't like President Bush (and, indeed, never have), I've never been one to draw parallels between him and people like Hitler or Nero. In generally, I find that kind of rhetoric trite. But this guy's got a fair point. Not even the bodies of Americans floating through the streets of one of its cities will get in the way of the smilingh, charismatic delivery of the almighty political agenda!

Beyond that, however, I've heard that Bush has tapped the strategic national oil reserve. Well, that's good news. Pity it means fuck-all to anyone. Gas prices have broken the $3.00 locally. When I started driving, I was paying less than a dollar per gallon. In my lifetime of driving (which is all of 8 years) gas prices have risen more than 200%, and half of that price inflation has occured in the last 365 days! Are you still glad you elected a president who is benefitting directly from this price inflation? Because I'm sure as hell not.


The AfflictedLast but not least, I wanted to link to a journal of a New Orleans resident who is, of course, caught up in all of this. He's got some profound insight into the situation that's really worth taking note of.

ThanksThanks to everyone whose links and insight contributed to this entry. There's far too many to name, but if you're reading this, you know who you are.

This slays me.

Okay, ignoring for a minute that - like any Republican - he's looking to cut back domestic programs that, you know, help Americans, let's look at some particularly absurd snippets:

> Mr Bush has promised to halve the US's massive budget deficit within five years.

So, Christmas rolls around and, despite that you've been a bad, bad boy, you've gotten a brand new baseball bat instead of a lump of coal. However, being an impetuous turd, you manage to trashed the living room with your baseball bat with inhuman speed.

Your mom comes in and finds the mess you've made, and you're caught. Red-handed. So what do you do? You promise your mother you'll clean up half the mess before next Christmas. Wait, no, make that next February. Some promise. Lucky for you, your mother is 51% braindead and eats it right up like it was salt water taffy.

> The deficit, partly the result of massive tax cuts early in Mr Bush's presidency, has been a key factor in pushing the US dollar lower.

Well, at least I'll be able to look back later in my lifetime and say truthfully that the presidency of GWB was vastly beneficial for most people in the world other than the Americans. And, you know, everyone in the world whose quality of life disintegrated (or whose life was bluntly ended) as a result of illegitimate or simply ill-advised military excursions. But since a growing concern over the increasing reliance of might over reason doesn't comprise a winning political strategy these days, I'll try to keep the discussion to what those in charge understand - white people.

I tell you, the British* have got to be loving this. The relative wealth of the British in comparison to the average American is ballooning thanks to the fact that we've got someone in the White House who understands money about as well as a monkey comprehends calculus.

> "To sustain our economic expansion, we must continue pro-growth policies and enforce even greater spending restraint across federal government." - [GWB]

I just find this ironic that Bush is talking about pro-growth policies. You'd think he wouldn't be allowed to talk about pro-growth policies, considering he's the first president since Hoover - remember, that whole Great Depression thing? - to have presided over a net loss in the total employment level. It's just hilarious to me that we've taken such massive steps backwards from where we were at when Clinton left office and Bush is making noise like he's run a pro-growth anything.

_{* Apologies to bandersnatch_02. You're on our side of the pond now, so your lot's in with ours - just like you're one of us.}

Here in the United States of Ignorance, we absolutely support freedom of speech. Unless, of course, you're saying something that we don't want to hear.

Note that al-Manar is a television station. Though it is quite plausible that there are people inciting violence in the Middle East on that station, it is important to recognize that they no one involved with the station plays an active role in planning, executing, or even funding terrorism.

Next time Pat Robertson or any other religious-right nutjob says something dumb - particularly if it's violent - about the Middle East on TV, get it on video tape. Maybe we'll get lucky and we can get these hate-mongering hacks off the airwaves because they're terrorists.

Dear Imams of Iran,

I write today to advise you to cease all development of your "Death To America" nuclear program. As I'm sure you must have inferred from the disasterous results of the 2 November 2004 election, the American people are perfectly content to rip America to shreds brick by brick ourselves. You can see that we are already taking proactive steps to ensure the destruction of America without all the muss and fuss of nuclear holocaust. This can be evidenced in the decision of voters in eleven states to take a giant leap towards the stone age in the civil rights of their own people. Of course, there's the obvious telling fact that somehow, we managed to re-elect the president whose administration not only destroyed the largest budget surplus in American history but also turned it into the largest defecit in American history. Furthermore, we've managed to equip this maniac once again with a Congress composed primarily of members of his own party, therefore enabling the far right to effectively slip whatever ludicrous legislation they want through the system with minimal resistance.

So, for your own sakes, I urge you to halt all Iranian spending on projects aimed at the decimation of America. We've gotten quite tired of being a superpower, so we've made sure that, within twenty years time, we'll no longer have the resources to do much more than send a postcard internationally, let alone ordinance.

Best Regards and Wishes,
A Concerned American Cuckhold

P.S.: I apologize forthwith for any future invasion of your country. Obviously, killing you is the best way to to ensure a productive future for the people of Iran. Really, we mean well.

CC: Kim Jong Il, Premiere Jackass, North Korea

I voted. You should vote too. All the cool kids are doing it. And if you don't, I won't like you anymore.