Posts Tagged ‘iran’
How is this not a major news story across every news outlet in America???
Even Sen. Menendez himself is amazed at the lack of coverage.
The FBI late Tuesday night raided the office of a South Florida eye doctor who allegedly was involved in providing young prostitutes to Sen. Bob Menendez — a claim the senator’s office has denied.
source: FoxNews
The thing that’s absolutely astonishing about this is not the fact that a senator (allegedly) has an addiction to sex, hookers and drinking parties, but that outside UPI and a couple local news blogs, you can only find this story via right-wing channels: FoxNews, Drudge, Twitchy, the Daily Caller . . .
If you have any question in your mind whether journalism is dead in America and as to whether the Non-Fox News is as shameless in its partisanship as any news you’d be served in Iran or North Korea, just ask yourself two questions:
- If Senator Menendez was a Republican and the office of the same doctor who was allegedly hooking the senator up with prostitutes was just been raided by the FBI, would this not be the top story of the day across every news outlet?
- How is it that senate candidate Akin’s idiotic comment was easily a top five story during the presidential election, but now in a lighter news cycle, a man actually serving in the senate who is under increasing suspicion for having sex with underage prostitutes doesn’t even merit a mention?
Finally, I’m just curious on this one, the NFN did everything it could to rally America against a so-called “War on Women” during their campaign for Barack Obama, so when a sitting senator is engaging in and supporting human sex trafficking (allegedly) which is it: does the War on Women no longer matter, or does the War on Women only matter when it can be used as a narrative against the GOP? Oh wait, it’s both? Okay, thanks.
We’re three days in on the new year, but nothing much of note has really happened so far, so still not too late to unload my psychic powers on the world . . .
Spun Honey’s Predictions for 2012
1. Coming off the 9-6 LSU victory in the regular season, in the LSU – Alabama rematch for the BCS Championship, someone finally manages to score a touchdown. The way those defenses are playing, forget picking a winner, that’s a bold enough prediction right there.
2. Drew Brees manages to outgun Aaron Rodgers at Lambeau Field in the NFC Championship, taking his Saints to the Super Bowl. The Ravens, who had a regular season record of 6-0 against playoff teams, beat both the Bengals and Patriots, but end up losing in the big one. They never need an excuse to party down on Bourbon Street, but it’s Super Bowl number two for the Saints and the people of New Orleans.
3. The day before the vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act, Google, Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook launch a black page protest, shutting down service and asking their loyal users to tell Congress to get their cotton-pickin’ hands off the Internet. Congressional phone lines are flooded beyond anything the Capitol has ever seen, and in a stunning reversal, SOPA bites the dust.
4. Hollywood will earn $500 billion less in domestic box-office sales from the previous year, just as they did in 2011, and the movie studios still remain completely in denial, crying about piracy when the real problems Hollywood faces are a dearth of new ideas (nothing but remakes, sequels and comic book adaptations) a public that prefers their own home theater experience to over-priced movie tickets and the fact that video games are drawing more and more people’s disposable income.
5. Video game sales will break records again, hitting $20 billion and doubling Hollywood’s take for the first time ever. While video games are just as easy to pirate as movies, you hear very few calls from the video game industry for the government to have an Internet kill switch.
6. London Olympics are smashing, baby! Security is tight, no terrorist attacks, and the only incident is when a bunch of hooligans get out of hand with the celebrations as Great Britain pulls off the upset Gold Medal in football.
7. The Israelis will not and cannot allow the Mullah Hitlers to have nukes in Iran and the much anticipated airstrike is launched. Thankfully, predictions of oil at $250 a barrel are exaggerated, with oil maxing out at $198 a barrel. Gasoline rises to an earth-loving $8 a gallon, and the Obama administration couldn’t be happier.
8. Documents come to light proving what everyone already knew, that Attorney General Eric Holder was guilty of perjury when he denied having knowledge of Operation Fast and Furious. Fortunately for the Obama administration, all the news channels outside of FNC decide the story is not as newsworthy as the reports on Katy Perry’s second divorce and whether Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, so the story is never even mentioned.
9. On a personal note, I’m able to stay on the straight and narrow with no cigarettes and I get back down to my target weight of 200 pounds this year, but it doesn’t matter because . . .
10. December 21, 2012 lands most conveniently on a Friday, and Mayan apocalypse parties are going off all across America. When everyone else wakes up hungover on December 22, they realize there is no Mayan apocalypse, we survived to suffer a fate far worse, because just a month previous, Barack Obama was given another four years.
If you’ve ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, at the turn of the last century, when businesses were left to their own devices, the state of the meat packing industry was absolutely horrific. In the wake of the public outcry over the conditions portrayed in Mr. Sinclair’s book, the government regulation that ensued was well needed, so you won’t get any argument from me that there’s never a time when the government needs to be involved in certain industries to ensure that cutting costs and maximizing profits doesn’t result in endangering the public.
When we’re speaking of government regulation, however, there’s a gargantuan difference between government regulation of something as cut and dried as, “is the food safe?” or “is the building safe?” and putting the Internet as we know it under government control. The FCC now seems poised to do just that in appointing themselves as the Overlords of the Internet.
When it comes to this impending government control of the Internet, the first thing you have to ask yourself is, why do people feel compelled for the government to come in and control the Internet when there’s nothing broken that needs to be fixed in the first place? Why this left-wing compulsion towards placing the government in charge of everything?
When speaking of business and government, many liberals will always see business as the greater of two evils or perhaps the one and only evil out of the two, but for my liberal friends with so much distrust for business and so much faith in government, do you not remember your left-wing pride in protesting an American government at war in Southeast Asia, holding the Nixon White House to account for the abuses of Watergate, or calling for an even more recent administration to stand charges for war crimes? This is the same government you would allow to place itself in charge of the Internet?
If you judge it from the perspective of history, it makes no sense at all to always place all your faith in governments over business. All you have to do is look at the last hundred years to see that for every food safety horror and BP oil spill in this world you can find horrors a million times greater, and I mean that literally – horrors a million times greater – that have been perpetrated by governments on humanity.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Overlord of the Internet
It’s kind of scary to think that every single totalitarian government in the world has taken control of their people’s access to the Internet, and now our government plans to do the same. Even scarier to see our own government using the exact same rationale as the totalitarian governments, arguing that government control of the Internet is in “the public’s best interest”. Do you seriously doubt we could end up on the slippery slope to Chinese-style control of the Internet, simply becuase it’s OUR government? That OUR government is nothing like the government of the Chinese and how dare anyone question the noble motives of OUR benevolent leaders?
Perhaps it’s best we remind ourselves that this great nation of ours, this shining city upon a hill whose beacon of light guides freedom-loving people everywhere is also the very same country where our second president, John Adams, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws which were used to impose fines and jail time on people critical of the Adams Administration. Completley unconstitutional and yet it was the law of the land until it expired at the end of Adam’s term.
Perhaps we should also remember that this is the same America where our most beloved president of all presidents, Abraham Licoln, closed newspapers and jailed editors who sympathized with the South.
We’d be well served to also recall that this is also the same America that was home to the authoritarian rule of President Woodrow Wilson and his Sedition Act of 1918 which forbade the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government. With a definition like that, you can nail pretty much anyone you want, can’t you?
Or for more recent history, simply look back on the 2008 campaign where we saw an American news media that was “90% in the tank for Barack Obama.” Those aren’t my words, by the way, those are the words of the former Chairman of the Democrat National Committee, Terry McAullife. The media was so head over heels in love that “the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing. It was an embarrassment.” Again, those aren’t my words, those are the words of former Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, one of the greatest stalwarts of the entire Democrat party. So with 90% of the media in their back pocket, surely you’d think the Obama Administration would be nothing but thankful. Far from it – if you look at all the sniping, griping and complaining the Obama Administration has aimed at Fox News, you’ll see that for this administration, even one questioning voice is one voice too many.
So don’t ever imagine that things would be completely different here with OUR government in control of Internet vs. the reality of every other country where the government controls the Internet. Don’t think it’s laughable to suggest we could end up like China, that it couldn’t happen simply because… well, we’re Americans!
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the governments of countries like Venezuela, Iran and China putting the clamps on their people’s use of the Internet is something totally different and that government control of the Internet could never end up like that in OUR country, because we’ve already seen the kind of authoritarian intolerance for public dissent from our own government many times in 230 short years of history.
Why even put our government in a position where it can be seduced by its own authoritarian temptations in the first place? It’s like driving a crack addict all around the neighborhood where he used to score and then dropping him off at the corner. Net Neutrality is a recipe for an Orwellian Nightmare, pure and simple, and we, as citizens, should do everything humanly possible to keep this great government of ours far, far away from the seductive idea of putting itself in control of the Internet.