Friday, October 15, 2004
They Got It
Fox 17 of Nashville has received a reply. The mail (see below) will be forwarded to their station manager.
Maybe it will be shredded, maybe it will be tallied in a for/against manner, but yep, they can't say they didn't get the e-mail.
posted by Green Voicemail 10/15/2004 11:21:00 AM
Left Wing Offense
Well, we're a grand total of 20-8 for the year. Let's see if we can keep our heads over .500:
NFL Predictions
PHILADELPHIA over Carolina (the "suicide pick" -- the NY Jets and New England have already
been chosen to prevail in previous weeks)
DETROIT over Green Bay
KANSAS CITY over Jacksonville
SAN DIEGO over Atlanta
NY JETS over San Francisco
DENVER over Oakland
MINNESOTA over New Orleans
CLEVELAND over Cincinnati
TENNESSEE over Houston
BUFFALO over Miami
NEW ENGLAND over Seattle
CHICAGO over Washington (sorry, Andante)
DALLAS over Pittsburgh (my "What the F---?" pick)
ST. LOUIS over Tampa Bay
posted by Green Voicemail 10/15/2004 10:34:00 AM
And Speaking of the Local Fox News/Sinclair Affiliate in Nashville....
From Fox 17 News, Nashville:
Early Voting Sets Nashville Record
10-14-2004
FOX 17 News----- It's almost as busy at the early voting precincts as it is on election day. In fact, Nashville set a record. More than 8,000 Davidson County residents cast their ballots in the first day of early voting. That's more than double the number who voted early in 2000. Early voting runs through October 28th. Check your county election commission for times and locations.
Big turnout equals bad news for the incumbent. More good news from the front.
posted by Green Voicemail 10/15/2004 10:18:00 AM
Kick 'Em in the Tummy!!
To the Sales Staff at (one of two Sinclair Nashville Stations):
It has come to my attention that your station is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting. I would find it hard to believe that no one at your station has been following the news, particularly the plan to air the film "Stolen Honor" between now and the presidential election. (Sinclair has ordered its member stations to air the broadcast.)
Sinclair wishes to pretend that the film is a neutral documentary, when in fact that film is an extended political attack advertisement against John Kerry. This is nothing short of astounding. Sinclair has been asked to provide balance, but it has ignored those pleas.
Sinclair's newest plan is to run the show without advertising, in hopes that this will make it harder for protesters to put any pressure on advertisers. Those of us who are concerned are aware of this tactic.
I will state that any company that advertises on your station during the local evening news that day will be facing a boycott from me for at least the next four years. I intend to write those companies and explain why I chose this course of action.
Perhaps you could forward this message to those in charge at your station. When I write the advertisers -- and I will, and it will not be an e-mail -- I'll let them know that I did try to reach you.
Yours,
tinheart
Nashville, TN
You should be sending a letter like this one. What are you waiting for? Go to Boycott Sinclair and get on the Justice Train!! Hey, cut and paste mine if you don't want to compose a letter! I'm not proud!
And my two VCRs will be fired up and ready to roll!
posted by Green Voicemail 10/15/2004 10:09:00 AM
Cee-RASH!!!, Part II
I don't know about you, but Boy George looks a little NOT HEALTHY to me right now.
posted by Green Voicemail 10/15/2004 01:42:00 AM
Cee-RASH!!!
From our friends at Tradesports. I can explain the bump in the middle (the Saddam Capture), and the dip at the three-quarters mark (911 commission/Fallujah/Kerry nomination) and the sudden rise (the Swift Boat ads).
Do you know when that immediate plunge at the end started?
With Debate #1.
And it hasn't stopped yet!
posted by Green Voicemail 10/15/2004 01:18:00 AM
Thursday, October 14, 2004
My Comment on Lynne Cheney's Outrage
From Lynne Cheney's hot and steamy lesbian novel, "Sisters". Methinks the woman doth protest too much.
posted by Green Voicemail 10/14/2004 09:35:00 PM
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Bush Like Me
Steve Gilliard linked to this article on his website, and of course, I steal from the best.
This is an article in Rolling Stone. It discusses the case of Matt Tiabbi, a far leftist who decided that the best way to learn about Republicans...was to become one, temporarily. He went to Orlando, Florida and worked as a volunteer in the Bush campaign. Some excerpts from his article:
During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office -- Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don -- were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.
....
...The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.
Once you grasp this fact, you're a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.
Very interesting analysis. I wonder how much progressives are like that themselves. Do we look for boogeymen to prop ourselves up? Bush the evil man/Bush the moron, the evil media, whatever? If this is what the less moderate Republicans are like, we must be careful not to take that same path ourselves.
posted by Green Voicemail 10/12/2004 11:42:00 AM
A Work By E. L. Doctorow
Title: "The Unfeeling President"
A quote:
" How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice."
A must-read.
posted by Green Voicemail 10/12/2004 11:16:00 AM
October 31, 2004, Green Bay Packers at Washington Redskins, 1 PM EST
Very nice news in my Left Wing Offense Picks. Went 9-5 for the week, giving me a record of 20-8 after only two weeks of NFL games. I also won the suicide pick, and my "what the f--k?" pick also worked out nicely as the Rams downed the Seahawks.
But even if you despise football, the Packers/Redskins game on October 31st is one you should pay attention to. Why? Because it might predict the presidential election! No kidding! According to this link at snopes.com, since 1936 the outcome of a particular Washington Redskins game played during a presidential year has been the accurate predictor of the election.
Here's how it goes. You always look at Washington's last home game before election day....
...if Washington wins, then the incumbent party in the White House will be returned to power.
...if Washington loses, then the incumbent party will suffer a defeat and the challenging party will take power.
This means that if Washington beats Green Bay on October 31, 2004, then Bush will beat Kerry.
However, a Green Bay victory means that Kerry will beat Bush. It looks like I'll be shouting "Go Pack!" at the screen in only a few weeks.
posted by Green Voicemail 10/12/2004 10:35:00 AM
Welcome Back
Island Dave returns. Go visit his blog!! (I put him back on the blogroll -- just look at the links on the side of the screen!)
posted by Green Voicemail 10/12/2004 10:26:00 AM
Sunday, October 10, 2004
The Vanillazation of Radio
The big news in our home is the fact that Howard Stern is going to come to Sirius Satellite Radio.
From now on, there will be two types of radio, "terrestrial radio" (the type of radio that for years was the only radio) and "satellite radio".
I suspect that in ten years, the word "radio" will mean "satellite radio" by default.
This is from the Marksfriggin.com site, which does a summary of every Howard Stern (terrestrial) Radio Show:
Right now there is a bill sitting on the President's desk that will allow the government to fine individuals for indecent broadcasts. This has made Howard think about what he wants to do with his career when his contract is up in 15 months. He believes that his career in radio is pretty much done but he's made his mark. Viacom has supported him through all of this stuff while Clear Channel backed down and caved into the pressure. He said that Leslie Moonves has been good to him since Mel Karmazin left the company and they're good people there. He said he's felt weird about what's been going on with the government and Michael Powell. The stuff they're doing on radio now is not risky because they have delay's on all of his affiliate stations.
Also, from the same site:
Howard said he believes that he will be known as one of the creators of satellite radio once he moves over there. He said that he will be able to say things over there that he could never say on this current show of his. The FCC has kept him from growing with Viacom so this is kind of a direct result of that. Howard said that the religious kooks out there think they've won. They haven't. Now people will be able to pay for a service to hear the radio show they've wanted to hear. Howard's main motivation in all of this has to do a lot with Clear Channel. He says that he will bury them and make their radio stations worthless. He said he's not going to sit still and let Clear Channel destroy radio. This is very personal and he's on a mission. Gary said he knows there are Clear Channel executives sitting there laughing right now but he knows what Howard is capable of and it's not going to be pretty.
Frankly, radio has been dead for a long time. When I went to college -- the years 1983-1987 -- radio, particularly college radio, was still a big thing. Now, we don't even have that any more with Clear Channel's domination of the airwaves. The big move that clinched things was that these college-radio stations were bought out by big conglomerates. The idea was that you could control the access point where the content of alternative music was filtered and sell advertising.
Unfortunately, this led to the effort to control the content as well.
Since then, the effort to play "the right kind" of music on Clear Channel stations has led to the homogenization of radio -- every modern radio sounds the same. The same songs are played at each franchise. There are no songs which are regional or local hits anyomre. It's sort of like the homogenization of American cities, where every where you go has a McDonald's and a Pizza Hit and a Taco Bell and there's no appreciable difference between Nashville, Tennessee and San Diego, California except for the weather and a few distinct local attractions.
Two things drove the final nail into radio: that nebulous thing called "market research" and Clear Channel's efforts to curry favor with the conservatives in Republican Big Government. If a song doesn't have a "hook", it doesn't get played. They actually break songs down into a segment of a few seconds and play these disembodied snippets to test audiences to evaluate. If your few seconds rate big, your song gets on. Else, it doesn't. As a result, this has changed how songs are actually written. Every song has to have a hook. The Europeans are good at this, and you'll note that as radio is dominated by a few big chains, music is dominated by fewer and fewer big performers, none of which I see has any talent beyond coming up with that hook.
Yes, I can sing, "Oops, I did it again!", the catchy little jingle of Britney's chorus. The problem is, the rest of the song sucks. We've gone back to the late 1950s, with a set of "manufactured groups" vying for airtime. Hey, American Idol works. You win, you get on radio. Your songs have been tested, 40 million 15-year olds have voted for them and none of them are any good.
Can you sit here, and honestly tell me that the face of music has been transformed by Kelly, Clay, Ruben or Fantasia?
About two months ago, my wife got a Sirius Satellite Radio. I wanted Sirius to break the chokehold that conservative radio jocks have on radio (it doesn't matter how liberal the audience may be, big money tends to be conservative and they're going to bring us conservative radio 24 hours a day). If I wanted to listen to progressive radio in Nashville, well, fuck me. But I could listen to all the Rush and G. Gordon Liddy and Hannity I could stomach! And of course, I could listen to their local imitators, who are only distinguished by being more rabid and insane.
I knew that Sirius would be carrying Air America Radio. That's why I wanted it. I would have to pay for it, but not much. And I could finally listen to my radio, the way I wanted it. I finally got my Sirius on my 39th birthday. It's $120/year. That might sound like a lot of money, until you realize how much you're in the car every day. Why listen to what someone else has decided you'll be allowed -- nay, permitted -- to listen to?
So now, I have Air America and in about 14 months, I'll have Howard Stern. Uncensored. Or I can listen to Sirius's standard liberal network. (There is also a standard conservative network on Sirius, which aims to please.)
Sirius believes that if a million of Stern's fans come over to Sirius, the contract was worth it. I think it's the nail in radio, the same way that cable became the nail in broadcast TV. My wife said, why in the world would advertisers buy ads on a radio anymore? It's an old model. Everyone who can reasonably afford the fee (which will probably get lower the more people subscribe, the same way the cost of the personal computer came down) will get satellite, and the only thing you'll find on radio will be niche programming (the all-Led Zeppelin radio) and religious channels.
Since I've gotten satellite radio, I haven't heard any local radio. At all. I get to listen to "First Wave" (80's college rock), Hip-Hop from the 70s and 80s, ESPN radio and Air America. And of course, NFL radio as well. As far as I'm concerned, when I'm in my truck, Nashville radio doesn't exist.
So goodbye terrestrial radio. You gave me a lot of good times! And it was nice knowing you! But after listening to you for the last 10 years...trust me, you won't be missed that much.
posted by Green Voicemail 10/10/2004 02:03:00 PM
Tardive Dyskinesia
I'm sure a lot of you out there don't know what "tardive dyskinesia" is. To steal from
the NAMI site:
Tardive Dyskinesia (TD), a term coined in 1964, describes a set of abnormal, involuntary movements of the orofacial area or extremities. TD is thought to result from prolonged treatment with the neuroleptic (antipsychotic) medications that help to control symptoms of severe mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. Tardive means "late" and "dyskinesia" means "movement disorder."
After the first Bush-Kerry debate, there was a lot of speculation that there was definitely something wrong with the president. Not wrong as in "bad for the country", but wrong as in "something not right clearly demanding an explanation".
Bush would wink, grimace, chew the cud. He looked like a man having some kind of fit, and he more or less tanked the performance completely, looking pitiful. All kinds of speculations came up. Maybe the president was drunk or on cocaine. Maybe the president was detoxing from alcohol or cocaine.
However, the big theory was that Bush was on some sort of psych medication. There was an article in Capital Hill Blue which alleged that Bush had been put on some sort of medication to control his erratic behavior and mood swings. Since then, that article has been "removed" by the editors and both of the staff members have been let go -- even though you can still find the original article all over the Internet.
At first, I thought that Bush was suffering from sort of minor anxiety attack, with the involuntary movements and blinking. When the theory came up that Bush might be having some psych medication side effects, then BOOM!, it all fell into place. Tardive dyskenesia.
From the University of Kansas Medical Center:
Some medications that are known to cause tardive syndromes include:
Medications for gastrointestinal problems:
- metoclopramide (Reglan)
- prochlorperazine (Compazine)
Medications for cough:
- promethazine (Phenergan)
Medications for depression:
- amoxapine (Ascendin)
- perphenazine/amitriptyline (Triavil)
Antipsychotics or Neuroleptics:
- chlorpromazine (Thorazine)
- thioridazine (Mellaril)
- trifluoperazine (Stelazine)
- perphenazine (Trilafon)
- fluphenazine (Prolixin)
- thiothixene (Navane)
- haloperidol (Haldol)
- pimozide (Orap)
If for fun, we assume that the "Bush on medication" theory is true, then you have to conclude one of the following:
a) He took a cough medicine to prepare him for the debate, and he suffered a reaction from it. No fault in that, Bush wanted to hold down a cough, but his medicine got the better of him.
b) Bush has stomach problems. Once again, no fault in that, his medicine just decided to give him side effects at a very unfortunate time.
c) Bush is on antidepressants. No fault in that, but he needs to come clean about it, particularly, how severe is his depression?
d) Bush is on powerful antipsychotics. NOW, you start to worry.
However, there's a nice way to get rid of all speculation. It would be one question that John Kerry could ask Bush during the third debate:
"Mister President, we know that you are a recovering alcoholic. Are you willing to submit to the results of a urine and blood test within the next hour? I am willing to assure the American public that I am drug-free. I can donate right now. But, Mister President, since you have been so willing to support increased drug testing, will you agree to be tested right now, the results to be read by a neutral party?"
posted by Green Voicemail 10/10/2004 09:02:00 AM
Left Wing Offense
Last week I was 11-3 in picks for the NFL. I was definitely surprised.
I'm not going to say I'm using some complicated mathematical formula that I spend hours on. Most of it is luck, and most likely, I'll "regress toward the mean" and have an 8-6 pick record, or more likely, a 6-8 record.
So here we go!
PITTSBURGH over Cleveland
NEW ENGLAND over Miami (the "suicide pick", which is the one pick you want to bet the house on)
DALLAS over NY Giants
NEW ORLEANS over Tampa Bay
JACKSONVILLE over San Diego
DENVER over Carolina
BALTIMORE over Washington
ATLANTA over Detroit
MINNESOTA over Houston
INDIANAPOLIS over Oakland
NY JETS over Buffalo
ARIZONA over San Francisco
ST. LOUIS over Seattle (this is my Gilbert Gottfried pick, where you say, "what the f---?")
TENNESSEE over Green Bay
posted by Green Voicemail 10/10/2004 08:15:00 AM
