Okay. Today is gripe time for me. I opened my cable bill from Charter Communications, and was a bit alarmed, because once again it appears that they have raised their rates for basic cable. I am now paying sixty dollars a month for basic cable. For this sixty dollars, I get this. About twenty watchable channels, about twenty channels that are in languages other than English, and about twenty channels that just flat out suck.
First of all, I don’t speak Korean. I don’t speak Japanese. I don’t speak Mandarin Chinese or Tagolog. I don’t speak Spanish either. Why then would these channels be costing me money in the first place. The Asian stations are comical to watch, and the Spanish stations are like going to a strip joint, with all the half naked women parading around what appear to be children’s shows in a sort of sick ripoff of Wonderama and Romper Room.
Then virtually every morning when I wake up, all I see on almost every channel is infomercials. This goes on every morning on almost every channel until 9 AM. I don’t pay for infomercials. In fact, infomercials pay the cable companies to put that crap on in the first place. I am sick of waking up and seeing that Australian guy yelling and screaming about the greatness of some dopey product that you get in the mail and breaks the first time you use it. I am probably the only guy on earth that was happy that Billy Mays died! (Just kidding)
Then you watch any movie or program, and they not only accellerate the credits, but they put them in a little box off to the side so you can’t even read them. Why do they do this? So they can run more commercials in between programming. Some people do like to see the credits, and I am one of them.
They also have “Bugs” that pop up throughout the shows and movies to promote original programming that turns out to be shows that are really stupid. I have friends that work for some of the major networks, and they call them bugs because they bug the shit out of people. Some networks make the bugs so big that they blotto out the show that you are trying to watch in the first place.
I am expected to pay sixty dollars a month for this nonsense. It sucks! So it comes down to this. Either pay these exorbitant rates to watch TV, or cut the cord and go back to local channels. Decisions decisions. I have about had it with this crap. JD
Fox News Channel and CNN relayed the bulletin this afternoon: Tiger Woods, 33, was seriously injured in a car crash at 2:25 a.m. this morning at his Isleworth home.
The extent of his injuries wasn’t clear, news channels explained. But he had been released from the hospital after being treated for facial injuries, Windermere Mayor Gary Bruhn told CNN.
“It seems like a very strange accident that occurred,” Bruhn said. “Basically it was facial lacerations, and as I’m understanding it, nothing that serious.”
CNN reported preceded the story with the “Breaking News” banner and kept using that device through the afternoon.
The world’s best golfer pulled out of his driveway in a 2009 Cadillac SUV, hit a fire hydrant and later a tree, CNN said, quoting the Florida Highway Patrol. No alcohol is related to the accident, although charges are pending, CNN said, again quoting the patrol. Orange County Fire Rescue reached the scene at 2:28 a.m., and Woods was taken to Health Central hospital in Ocoee.
Fox News Channel had the story first. CNN followed. Then MSNBC broke in about 2:50 p.m.
MSNBC reported that the airbags did not deploy because the vehicle was traveling slower than 33 miles per hour. MSNBC said the patrol did not report accident until after 2 p.m. today.
The story led the Fox News at 3 p.m.
WESH-Channel 2 broke into its regular schedule at 3 p.m. to announce the news and to show aerial footage of Woods’ home. During Ellen DeGeneres’ show, WESH ran a “Breaking News” crawl about the accident.
CNN noted that Woods was the highest-paid athlete in the world last year, earning roughly $110 million. CNN showed aerial footage of Woods’ home from WFTV-Channel 9 and WESH.
Geez. President Barack O’Blunder strikes again. It was leaked to the media late last night after two days of reporting, that the party crashing couple that managed to get into were cleared by the White House to be there in the first place. A White House official confirmed to FoxNews.com on Friday that Michaele and Tareq Salahi were not invited to Tuesday’s star-studded event.
Now correct me if I am wrong, but just yesterday, the white house had said that there was “a lapse in security by the Secret Service.” Now just a few short hours later when the White House realized that the jig was up, they have to admit to FoxNews, who is clearly the only news outlet that will ask President Obama questions that weren’t written by Obama himself, that they were the ones that screwed up.
We here at Brokencountry.com have secured the super secret list of party goers that have been approved by Obama himself to attend the New Years Eve party being thrown by the Obama’s at the white house.
1. Osama Bin Laden
2. Sirhan Sirhan
3. Woody Allen
4. John Wilkes Booth
5. Ebinezer Scrooge
6. Timothy McVeigh
7. Terry Nichols
8. Randy Weaver
9. Charles Manson
10. Ted Kaczynski
11. Patty Hearst
12. Richard Ramirez
13. The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
14. T. Boone Pickens
15. Saddam Hussein
16. Abraham Lincoln
17. Elvis
18. O.J. Simpson
19. Jeffrey Dahmer
20. Jack The Ripper
21. Nelson Kerflunctenpoop
22. Alger Hiss
23. John Wayne
24. Son of Sam
25. Lizzy Borden
26. Ted Bundy
27. John Wayne Gacey
28. David Duke
29. Tom Metzger
30. Harpo Yerfniw
31. Bill Glick
32. Mahatma Gandhi
33. Yasser Arafat
34. Pol Pot
35. Ho Chi Minh
36. Adolph Hitler
37. Idi Amin
38. Hugo Chavez
39. Fidel Castro
40. Barbra Streisand
Thats the list for Obama’s New Years Bash as we have it. Sounds like a rip roaring time for all of the attendees. Of course you probably all know that this is a joke. Most of the people on this list are dead on gone. Thats the joke. I hope all is well with you and yours during this holiday season. JD
Check this out. Yves Rossy jumps out of an airplane with a wing and four jet engines on his back with the intention of flying for fifteen minutes from 4 miles across the the Strait of Gibraltar from Tangier in Morocco to Atlanterra in southern Spain, at a speed of almost 140mph. He ended up ditching into the ocean after his engines petered out. JD
I have asked this before and I shall ask again. Why is it only offensive to photoshop black people into looking like monkeys? I don’t get it. There are a a ton of GW Bush being made to look like a monkey and Google never apologized for putting them up on their images search. Here is a link to Google images where I found this photo by searching GW Bush Monkey.
Are black people saying they look like monkeys? Because crying foul and asking for apologies is the inference here. I just don’t get it. So its okay to goof on a persons appearance, providing they are white people? Its okay to ridicule and mock people because they are white politicians? Sarah Palin comes to mind here. I have seen photos where her face was photoshopped onto a porn stars body and Google didn’t apologize to her. No one seems concerned unless your black. JD
Firefighters continued to battle a wind-whipped wildfire in the hills just east of Anaheim Hills tonight as the California Highway Patrol shut down the 241 toll road near the Windy Ridge exit, according to authorities.
The fire erupted on the eastern side of the tollway, separating it from tracts of homes on the western side. Crews were hoping to keep the fire confined to the east side, fire officials said. Ground crews were trying to lay hose lines to beat back the flames on its flanks.
Lanes were also closed on the 91 Freeway, just north of the blaze.
[Updated 11:23 p.m.:The blaze has burned at least 25 acres, fire officials said. At least 15 fire engines are at the scene with additional units on the way.
Winds are blowing 15 to 25 mph, officials said. But so far, crews have been able to confine the flames to the east side of the toll road.]
“It’s got some potential to spread,” said Battalion Chief Kris Concepcion of the Orange County Fire Authority.
[Updated 11:23 p.m: "We want to keep it to the east side of the toll road because the threat is on the west side," Concepcion said.]
Flames were a couple of miles from the nearest structures, but residents were advised to have escape plans in case they have to leave, said Capt. Greg McKeown of the Orange County Fire Authority.
The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for Orange County and other regions of Southern California. Winds were expected to gust as high as 50 mph, with relative humidity in the single digits, the Weather Service said.
Water could be an issue in the area, and fire commanders were calling for water tankers to help supply engine trucks, officials said.
While JD has been getting the site back up and operating efficiently, I have been sitting back stewing as usual over things that make no sense and generally piss me off, along with remodeling the house and entertaining some house guests.
I see in the news tonight that Precedent Barack Obama is going to schedule a press conference “soon” to tell us why we are in Afghanistan and how he plans on “finishing the job” there. All this tells me is that still, as of this moment, after nine years, no one, not even his bowing highness, knows why we are there, what the job really is, or how he plans on finishing it. Seriously.
His presidentialness threw a weak stone at the former administration saying that perhaps they just didn’t understand why we were there, nor did they have a good strategy, but he promised to let everyone know all of that – soon.
The fact that no one knows is blatantly obvious. I would wager that if you asked a random ten people a) where Afghanistan is; and b) why we are fighting a war there, you would probably get ten reactions similar to speaking to a comatose patient, which is what the general American public acts like on this matter.
Here we are, in a war, American kids getting killed, wounded, and filling the impotent VA hospitals with yet more PTSD victims to deny claims to, and the public is asleep. So is Congress, but that is more normal.
Afghanistan. A Stone-Age rock pit where they have fun having their children fight in pits like dogs as they wager on the winner. Where towns in West Virginia look like paragons of dental health in comparison to. Where they have fair elections. Whoops, I felt my nose growing on that one, and you might have even noticed the problem with that statement as well.
So now the Prez has a week or two to come up with a well-scripted reason why the hell we are there to begin with and how to get out of there and convince all of you that his is an honest and sincere speech meant to inspire your support. Is anyone that stupid? Please admit it if you are.
I’m sure that there will be comments to the tune of Al-Queda using ‘Stan as a training area, and maybe even that they have (un)intelligence that Bin-Laden is lurking in some cave over there waiting to be caught.
But that song has been played and grows weary on my ears, although many still seem to be deaf to it. My guess is that he will embark on an Iraq-like diatribe about how power needs to be restored to the Afghan people so that they can manage their own affairs, just like they did before we went over there trying out new weapons, and trying to prop up a corrupt regime little different from what they had before. He will probably avoid mention of the fact that it lies on the eastern border of Iran, another country we would like to invade.
No, boys and girls, it isn’t about self-government – the U.S. certainly wouldn’t want to wish that on another country while they can continue to pull all the strings. And it’s not about power for the people – it would be nice if the government would give power to the people in the U.S., but that just ain’t going to happen, so you can bet your negative equity it won’t happen in Afghanistan any time soon.
It will be a good speech, to be sure, and you can be equally sure that the font on the teleprompter will be large enough that no mistakes will be made in reading it.
In my own self-delusions and fantasies, I picture this Nobel Prize winner getting up there and going a few sentences into the prepared speech, then pausing, throwing down his notes, and saying, “Fuck it. This is bull shit. How can I, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, sit here and blow smoke up the collective ass of the entire world, blathering on about restoring power to the people of Afghanistan when that is not what it is all about? Let me tell you, my fellow Americans, this is little more than back-room politics like they have back in Illinois, a buddy system beyond anything you have ever imagined. This is where the Afghan people get financially and socially bung-holed so that the U.S. defense contractors, the World Bank, and the natural gas companies can self-flagellate themselves to financial orgasms while the Afghan people get screwed over and the U.S. taxpayers finance it for them. I have tried for the past two weeks to imagine or even fabricate a reason to shed American blood in this godforsaken shithole, and I just can’t do it. I’m outa here. Find someone else to do your dirty work.”
But that will happen when the tooth fairy grows a beard. It will be a cautious speech, with moments that many will actually believe, but it will say little that hasn’t been said before. Because everything that can be said about Afghanistan has already been said. Except the truth.
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.
I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.
The Almighty Google. I remember using the old college bulletin board systems around the country on my old 2400 kb modem. funny now, but back then it only took about ten minutes to download a 100,000 kilobyte file. A person could get up, make a sandwich, call some friends and engage in some chit chat, and come back just as the download had finished.
Then along came the internet. It changed everything. ISP’s like Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online were all the rave. I personally liked Compuserve when it was all text based and you could hack around and have a lot of fun with the newbies of the day. There was a time and a day when the only game in town was AOL. It sucked man. To get on the internet you had to jump through hoops while juggling balls and playing spoons.
Things became a lot easier when Netscape and independent ISP’s like Earthlink entered the picture. The internet, still in its infancy, was a glorious place to spend hours online playing games, hitting new websites and meeting new people around the world. I remember at COMDEX in Las Vegas in maybe 1995, Bill Gates was telling the world why Windows 95 was not going to debut until 1996, and he was asked about the internet and whether Microsoft would produce a web browser. Gates response was to say something like “The internet is a passing fad that will never catch on” or something like that. What an idiot.
Then came Yahoo. Before yahoo you could run scripting programs like Web Ferret to search the internet, but there really was no real way to look for web content. Yahoo changed all that. It was great. You could simply type in a phrase or a word, and get a whole host of random results, and somewhere in the fray, you would find what you were looking for.
But doing a search like that was not an efficient way to make money off of the internet. If there were only a way to steer people toward specific websites, more importantly, specific websites that paid Yahoo for search page placement, well then you could generate revenue off of the search.
This was great for Yahoo and Yahoo shareholders, because this is what Yahoo turned into with regard to its search engine. Many consider this way of thinking the beginning of the end of Yahoo. But it was horrible for people like me that don’t use the web to play games, watch porn or scam innocent people out of money.
Web searching became tedious, monotonous work. One would have to go through countless pages of nonsense to simply find a part for a car door, or a gift for a friend. People often forget about the early days of personal computing, when there was no internet. But the internet was what made people want to go out and purchase a PC in the first place, and Yahoo in my opinion, had successfully helped to ruin the fun for a time.
Enter Google. I had a friend attending Cal State Berkeley. She called me one day and as we were talking about computers, she asked me if I had heard of Google. I asked her what the hell a Google was. She said its a search engine that these guy here at Berkeley made. She missed it by a few miles, it was actually Stanford, but nonetheless, I used it and I was stunned.
Suddenly, searching the internet had become a breeze. I could type in the most obscure thing I could think of, and presto, I had instant, pertinent results. I once found a lock bolt for the front door of my house on Google. The door set cost more than six hundred dollars. Surely the bolt must be available as a separate part. Google found it and it was less than five miles from my house. It cost eleven dollars. I had an RV and the refrigerator control board burned out. Camping World wanted three hundred dollars for the part and another hundred to put it in. I found it on Google for fifty six dollars and it took me twenty minutes to install.
Now here is the questions portion. Has anyone noticed any difference with their search results? Because when I search things out, I get nothing but sites that pay Google for their search results placement, and the results are not even remotely close to that which I am looking for in the first place. This is almost always the case when I am researching old news stories for articles here on brokencountry.com. I use correct syntax, sometimes I will even quote the lines in a particular story and not get the right results.
My next question would be how Google indexes its news articles. I use Google to get my news, because the visual media is so full of shit that it has become impossible to watch. Articles on Google News seem to go only to the major news outlets, which stands to reason because after all, they are news outlets. But there are many articles I find from some of the smaller news outlets around the country that are rarely displayed on Google’s front page and go widely unreported.
I’m just wondering if anyone else has noticed this trend, because this is one of the many reasons that Yahoo fell by the wayside. They decided that money was more important than accuracy. If that is the case, perhaps its time for a new search engine. Twitter comes to mind. Maybe the fine folks at twitter should create a sort of back to basics type search engine. This might work well for people like me. The schmendricks of society that ask for nothing more than accuracy on the internet. Let me know what you think. JD
I heard this on the Howard Stern Show about ten years ago and it seems applicable today, with the senate preparing to vote for health care legislation. Taxes are at an all time high, unemployment is through the roof and the economy is in shambles, but the senate is voting on health care. And whiteys on the moon. JD
A recently released music video for “Popular Demand” by the Clipsefeatured the awning of the infamous Obama Fried Chicken joint in Brownsville, Brooklyn. But in comparing versions of the video airing on MTV and elsewhere, it looks like the TV channel completely erased the restaurant’s name from the awning in the video’s opening shot.
Brokelyn, the Brooklyn blog that first reported the editing, notes it could be one of three possible reasons: copyright law, MTV advertising policy, or a more political decision that keeps MTV from dealing with the repercussions “from blaring ‘Obama Fried Chicken” across American TV screens.”
Back in April, City Councilman Charles Barron led a protest outside the location with citizens “outraged by [the] racist connection to Barack Obama and fried chicken.”
The restaurant manager fired back and said it was a tribute to the president, noting four out of five customers support the name.
I have said this for years. There is no such thing as global warming. It has been getting cooler for 11 of the last 15 years. But researchers are making billions of dollars in research grants keeping this lie alive. Thats the rub here. Its all about money and control, and the dullards that permeate the environmental movement are all a part of it. JD
LONDON — Computer hackers have broken into a server at a well-respected climate change research center in Britain and posted hundreds of private e-mails and documents online — stoking debate over whether some scientists have overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said in a statement Saturday that the hackers had entered the server and stolen data at its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change. The university said police are investigating the theft of the information, but could not confirm if all the materials posted online are genuine.
More than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists is included in about 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents posted on Web sites following the security breach last week.
Some climate change skeptics and bloggers claim the information shows scientists have overstated the case for global warming, and allege the documents contain proof that some researchers have attempted to manipulate data.
The furor over the leaked data comes weeks before the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, when 192 nations will seek to reach a binding treaty to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases worldwide. Many officials — including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — regard the prospects of a pact being sealed at the meeting as bleak.
In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.
Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.
The scientist’s use of the word “trick” has been seized on by skeptics — who say his e-mail offers proof of collusion between scientists to distort evidence to support their assertion that human activity is influencing climate change.
“Words fail me,” Stephen McIntyre — a blogger whose climateaudit.org Web site challenges popular thinking on climate change — wrote on the site following the leak of the messages.
However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.
The University of East Anglica said that information published on the Internet had been selected deliberately to undermine “the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world’s climate in ways that are potentially dangerous.”
“The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way,” the university said in a statement.
The driver of one of Miley Cyrus’ tour buses was killed early this morning and another person was injured when the bus, one of several in a group carrying the singer’s band and crew, ran off the side of the road and overturned on Interstate 85 in Dinwiddie, Va., Access Hollywood, MTV and others report.
Cyrus, who was not hurt, was on another of the buses, according to a local news station (video above). The bus that crashed was carrying nine people.
Miley is scheduled to perform Sunday in Greensboro, N.C.
That’s the real reason that Oprah is giving up her show. Her show sucks! Lets face it. Oprah’s ratings have been falling for years, she has completely over exposed herself with all her dopey spin off shows, and she routinely gets duped into putting liars and charlatans on her show in a desperate attempt to boost ratings.
Oprah Winfrey should be ashamed of herself. She ripped off Phil Donahue for her show format. Oprah used to do a Jerry Springer type show. She did this to get ratings. Then after years of exploiting hayseeds and imbreds from middle America, Oprah decided to do a more legitimate format, where she made house wives across America cry on a daily basis.
Oprah Winfrey then made a grave miscalculation when it came to the way America thinks about politics and proved herself to be a bigot at the same time. She endorsed Barack Obama for president and would not let John McCain come on her show to rebut what Oprah was saying about the republican party and McCain himself.
When questioned as to why she supported Obama, all Winfrey would say was that Obama was “inspiring.” She never once asked Obama any hard hitting questions, and now probably has some regrets. Not because Obama turned out to be a blithering idiot, but because she lost the core of her audience. That would be middle American white women, who esssentially abandon the Oprah Winfrey Show because of Winfrey’s support of Obama.
Now Oprah is sitting back looking at the rotten cadaver that is her ratings. Where Oprah used to pull a 14 share in the afternoon ratings, which is amazingly high for daytime television, Oprah only gets about a 5 share on her best day. Its embarrassing.
So you go Oprah. Use your lame excuse of wanting to start your own network and being tired of doing the day to day grind. The truth is that Oprah shows up about an hour before showtime, her whole show is all ready to go, and she knows little or nothing about who her guest will be until she walks through the door each day. She does nothing to prepare for the show. Its over Oprah. Fade off into obscurity. JD
WASHINGTON — Political frustration over the rescue of Wall Street and high unemployment erupted in the House Thursday, with one committee threatening to impose tighter scrutiny on the Federal Reserve and another trading verbal insults with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
The House Financial Services Committee voted, 43-26, to approve a measure sponsored by Texas Republican Ron Paul, vociferously opposed by the Fed, that would direct the congressional Government Accountability Office to expand its audits of the Fed to include decisions about interest rates and lending to individual banks. The Fed says the provision threatens its ability to make monetary policy without political interference.
Treasury chief Geithner faced a House Republican who told him, ‘The public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job.’ He shot back: ‘What I can’t take responsibility is for the legacy of crises you’ve bequeathed this country.
The vote was the latest blow to the central bank, which has been become a lightning rod for politicians responding to popular anger that Wall Street was bailed out while the public wasn’t. The Fed faces a stinging backlash from legislators from both parties who argue that has too much power and too little oversight. On Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee began debating legislation that would largely remove the Fed from bank supervision over the objections of the Fed and the Obama administration.
The Fed audit provision was added to pending legislation on financial regulation that the committee’s chairman, Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, had planned to put to a vote Thursday. But he abruptly announced late in the afternoon that the bill wouldn’t move ahead until after Thanksgiving. The reason: Ten members of the Congressional Black Caucus on the committee said they would oppose the bill to protest a lack of action to address the economic pain borne by their constituents. Although the economy appears to be growing again, lawmakers face increasing pressure in their districts to do more to boost growth and address an unemployment rate now at 10.2% and expected to rise.
Glum views on the economy sparked a retreat from stocks and some commodities, as investors moved to the safety of government debt. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 93.87 points to 10332.44.
At the Joint Economic Committee, a couple of House Republicans called for the resignation of Mr. Geithner, who, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, played a major role in last fall’s moves to prevent the collapse of the financial system. “The public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job,” said Rep. Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner comes under fire from Republicans. Dow Jones’s Michael Crittenden and Barron’s Bob O’Brien discuss the fallout from today’s hearings. Plus, a look at AOL’s future as it tries to shed non-core assets, and a controversy over a World-Cup qualifier, in the News Hub.
Mr. Geithner, in an unusual public display of pique, fired back. “What I can’t take responsibility is for the legacy of crises you’ve bequeathed this country,” he told Mr. Brady.
Although several Democrats defended Mr. Geithner at the hearing, some liberal Democrats have been complaining that the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to combat unemployment. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.) called on Mr. Geithner to resign this week, and said in an interview that Mr. Geithner is too close to Wall Street.
“Quite frankly, all the gambling on Wall Street is doing nothing to put people back to work in America and rebuild our economy,” the Oregon Democrat said.
One issue that has dogged Mr. Geithner is the rescue of American International Group Inc. last fall. A government oversight report this week charged that the New York Fed caved into demands from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other big banks and paid them in full for deals they had made with the insurer. Mr. Geithner said Thursday that the government lacked powers it needed to handle the collapse of a financial company that wasn’t legally organized as a bank. “Coming into AIG we had, basically, duct tape and string,” he said. The legislation pending in Congress would give the government new powers to manage such a situation.
Mr. Geithner’s job status doesn’t appear to be in jeopardy and several Democrats leapt to his defense. “He was handed an awful deck of cards when he walked into the job, and he’s doing the best he can,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) in an interview. “I think many Democrats share my views.”
Mr. Paul, author of a new best-seller “End the Fed,” long has been a critic of the Fed. His economic views make him an outlier in Congress, but his attacks on the Fed have resonated in Congress and with the public.
The Paul provision, and the legislation to which it is attached, would have to clear the full House and Senate before becoming law. Though many lawmakers insist they won’t do anything to compromise the Fed’s independence on monetary policy, the provision’s momentum is substantial. It could be diluted before any bill reaches the president.
“Everybody would like to beat up on the Fed and make them the bad guy,” said Rep. Melvin Watt (D., N.C.), who opposed Mr. Paul’s measure. He said audits would “substantially castrate the Fed so it cannot do what it was set up to do.”
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has crisscrossed the Capitol in recent weeks, attempting to fend off legislation that would curtail the Fed’s power or independence. Lawmakers with whom he has met said he has reminded them how close the U.S. came to economic catastrophe last year and maintained that the Fed’s actions were critical to bringing the economy back to growth.
But Mr. Bernanke faced a skeptical audience. Some lawmakers told him Americans are angry and want more oversight; others said the crisis demanded a rethinking of the U.S. approach to financial regulation.
“What he says is that at that point in time, with our economy literally ready to tip over the edge, he did a series of things he thought were absolutely necessary,” said Sen. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican.
“He was trying to convey that this point in time was enormously serious, and the country was about ready to lock up from an economic standpoint. He just says, ‘Look, I did what I thought I had to to keep the country going,’” he said.
In an interview, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said it would be “a major loss to the country if the Fed were incapable of running an independent monetary policy. If you have the GAO, after the fact, offering its opinions on whether a certain monetary policy action is correct or incorrect, the active deliberations that are so critical to building a meaningful consensus at the FOMC will begin to become unhelpfully cautious.”
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