Fox fights back

Yeah, Iraq is devolving into a bloody civil war. Trust Fox to sort it out for you:

Get ready for another terror alert

The one thing Bush has always kept in his back pocket is that the American people see him as tough on terror and able to protect the US. Mostly because he has an expert packager and dresses like a cowboy when he's not at the White House.

However, letting a company from the United Arab Emirites has finally taken THAT from him according to this poll. That bodes badly for the White House, but worse for the country. Bush and his people have never been adverse to stirring up fear when they are in trouble (just remember how there was a new terror alert whenever Kerry got some traction in the press). What will they scare us with now? They tried the "Terrorists tried to take out LA", but even Republicans slapped that down...when John McLaughlin calls you a liar, you've lost your Republican base.

So.

In other words.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Shit, meet fan

The news out of Iraq has been getting worse on a near daily basis, which is probably why the Cable News Whores aren't covering it. There were hints that the conflict was shifting from "Iraqis vs US" to "Iraqis havinbg a civil war" since the election (and maybe a bit before), but things took a horrible turn today.

The BBC (a real news organization) is reporting 'Sunni militants' killed in Basra. It also reports that Sunni shrines, Sunni party headquarters and bodies of tortured Sunni have been discovered.

It's almost as if the projections made by the military over the last couple of years are coming true, despite Donald Rumsfeld dismissing and mocking them.

Just my opinion

I am not upset about the US outsourcing our port security to a company from the United Arab Emirates. Sure, it's more complicated than the news is making it (it's a British company that is selling the business to the UAE), but that doesn't make it bad. Sure, they kidnap young boys and sell them into servitude (some as young as 6 months, read about it here ). Sure, they are listed as one of the countries "whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so," and that's from that horridly liberal organization The State Department under hideous liberal Condi Rice.

Let's think about it for a minute. We only search 2% - 4% of the containers anyway, so who cares who does it? Why not Cuba, Iran or The Great Lakes Avengers?

Besides, Godly Bush says it's fine, so we should just shut the fuck up and accept it. I mean, we re-elected him, so we deserve it. And besides, if we question it, we might get attacked by terrorists.

Finally, someone agrees with me

Not a lot of time, but I read this post and it clarified a bunch of things in my mind. When Dark Knight Strikes Again came out, people HATED it and I thought it was great. I thought I just must have been blinded by my love for Frank Miller, one of my favorite blogs, Comics should be good, gives a great review.

More tonight. And I am planning on blogging daily just to annoy people who seem to be unable to tell the difference between a writer's personna and the person doing the writing.

John Byrne loves comics fans

Every so often, as a comic book fan, I check in on John Byrne's forum just to see how nuts he is.

DC just did a story that undid the Doom Patrol series he did, where he started it by saying, NO one else's version of these characters will factor into DC continuity. It all starts with ME!" Never midn that the characters have HUGE ties to other books. Never mind that the characters have a 40 year history.

It failed, like all of his books do now, due to low sales, LIKE ALL OF HIS BOOKS DO NOW, and DC decided to fix the problem he created. So, he throws another tanturm to his worshippers.

Money line?

"Because SOME FANS ARE DUMBER THAN DIRT -- and they are the ones TPTB had taken to listening to!!"

Yeah. But I bet if you could move more than 19,000 comics off a shelf, someone would listen to you and the fans would be smart again, right?

Musings

The Cheney story is mutating from the easiest news story to make jokes about since Monica Lewinski to a story that kind of shows just how fucked up the White House is and the utter entitlement that the people who current live there feel.

-The press conference today where Underbear Scotty didn't mention that the man Cheney shot had a heart attack from some of the buckshot lodging in his heart is typical. The White House didn't announce when the shooting at taken place and Scotty said he didn't have information on it...and when Letterman et al weighed in on it, Bush and his people started making fun of what had happened.

-Cheney didn't have a hunting permit and while most people who get caught by a game warden like that in Texas have to be taken into custody and charged with a crime, he got a citiation and the local prosecutor said that they may not go after him.

-They may have had 'a couple of beers' on the hunt. My father was a hunter, and I know people in Texas. 'A couple of beers' = utterly shitfaced.

-Cheney's people waited an hour before notifying the local authorities that someone had been shot.

-The sherrif's deputy who came to interview Cheney about the incident was turned away by the Secret Service.

-The White House's official opinion was that the person who was shot was at fault.

It all fits the pattern. Deny, claim ignorance, play to the late night comedians, coverup and minimize and then, when all else fails, blame the victims.

Creepy. Just creepy.

How big is it?

Over 27 million blogs?

And I wonder if they are lumping Livejournal and MySpace into that, because if they are, I would bet that 26 million of them are by Teenage girls who are seeing how many sparkling icons they an create.

Podfading

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, mostly about comic books and other geeky stuff, but Wired has an article about how some people are dropping out of it.

I don't blame them. It's going to be like any other inkernet technology where there is a HUGE rush pf people who do it and get into it, a very few who make money at it, and the rest will try it for a while, not get enough return (either finacial or emotional) and give it up after a while. Just look at how many abandoned webpages, webstrips, blogs and the like clog up the internet's arteries. And yeah, mine seems like it to some of th etime because it's more of a hobby than a job now.

So, I guess it's like watching a TV show...don't get too attached to it, because it probably won't last.

Just some cable TV observations.

Keith Obermann kicking the crap out of Bill O'Reilly.

Oddly enough, for all of O'Reilly's bluster and bullshit about how his show is #1, I follow the cable ratings, and last week, his show wasn't in the top 15.

1. "WWE Raw" (Monday, 9 p.m.), USA, 4.07 million homes, 5.61 million viewers.
2. "WWE Raw" (Monday, 10 p.m.), USA, 4.07 million homes, 5.64 million viewers.
3. "Monk" (Friday, 10 p.m.), USA, 3.79 million homes, 5.35 million viewers.
4. "SpongeBob SquarePants" (Saturday, 9:30 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 3.47 million homes, 4.83 million viewers.
5. "Fairly Odd Parents" (Saturday, 10 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 3.14 million homes, 4.21 million viewers.
6. "Fairly Odd Parents" (Saturday, 10:30 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 3.08 million homes, 4.25 million viewers.
7. Movie: "Forrest Gump" (Sunday, 5 p.m.), TNT, 2.99 million homes, 4.23 million viewers.
8. "Fairly Odd Parents" (Sunday, 10 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.98 million homes, 3.86 million viewers.
9. "SpongeBob SquarePants" (Sunday, 9:30 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.96 million homes, 4.09 million viewers.
10. "Fun Without Football" (Sunday, 4 p.m.), TBS, 2.92 million homes, 3.77 million viewers.
11. Movie: "High School Musical" (Wednesday, 8 p.m.), Disney, 2.92 million homes, 3.69 million viewers.
12. "SpongeBob SquarePants" (Saturday, 9 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.91 million homes, 4.03 million viewers.
13. Movie: "The Princess Diaries" (Friday, 8 p.m.), Disney, 2.86 million homes, 4.44 million viewers.
14. "Zoey 101" (Sunday, 8 p.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.78 million homes, 3.7 million viewers.
15. "Drake & Josh" (Friday, 5:30 p.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.73 million homes, 3.84 million viewers.

In fact, I don't see ANY Fox News shows there. But I must be wrong, there's no way someone on a News channel would simply blatantly lie about something so easy to check.

Would they?