Editorilize behind the desk

I am a contrarian, I do not want to see CBS news pixie Katie Couric's legs, never did and never will. I am a notorious breast man. We need more buxom anchors! I actually wonder why we need to actually SEE these folks at all, their suits, jewelery and haircuts just get in the way of reporting facts.
I am particularly upset at the apparent negation of the long-standing tradition of a network news anchor taking the last minute or so to speak their mind and give a short and concise editorial on some subject worthy of mention in the zeitgeist. Out-sourcing and off-loading the editorial function of a newscast is a way to have ones cake and eat it too. It is a way to avoid shooting the messenger, of being accused of bias or slant. Having a smarmy segemnt labeled "freeSpeech" is actually disingenuous. Morgan Spurlock bracketed by Rush Limbaugh allows for quite a range of opinion to be expressed on the boob tube without any possible sanction, unlike Dan "Whats the frequency Kenneth?" Rather, Katie can appear to be merely a reader of words on a tele-prompter instead of a real journalist capable of differentiating fact from fiction, and on occasion ripping into the "powers that be".

The Hollywood Reporter review.

I also objected to their artificial constructs geared toward being "interactive", as in, go to our webpage and email me what I should say when I close the show! Of the over 20k suggestions, I hope more than half are unprintable in any format other than the wall of a rest stop bathroom!

Without commercial interruption...?

The ABC TV mess, "The Path to 9/11" is being shown "without commercial interruption" mostly because one would wonder who woudl want to have their commercial enterprise associated with such a tawdry pseudo-docu-edu-tainment drama, BUT the truth is that the entire program IS one long ethos numbing commercial for the Republican Party!
The Path to 9/11.
I was very much on board with the idea of seeing the exposure of the collective irresponsibility that went on here before the attacks, whether done by Dems or Repubs or even the Green-Rainbow Party types lurking deep in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Go see "United 93" instead! Seeing the utterly sad overload of an already stressed system is instructive, where the wants and needs of commercial airlines clashes with sane and rational regulation is a wake up call. Maybe one state run airline like El Al is where we should be - instead of having slack-jawed high school drop outs working for Argenbright Security at Logan Airport, we should have had something better... instead of a civil aviation system a slave to greedy and stupid commercial interests, we could have one dedicated to having real security? In the movie when an FAA official calls for the grounding of all planes in the air, someone says "That'll cost billions!" Oy vey!

Armitage vs. Perot

Now that Richard "The Butcher" Armitage has fessed up he is a leaking ideologue, we can take another look at this brute... good old 3rd party presidential candidate H. Ross Perot had this guys number awhile back and I even sent a letter to the editor of a big city's newspaper critiqueing him when he was named to be Colin Powell's #2 man in the State Dept.

First were the allegations he was running interference for a Vietnamese woman "convicted of running a gambling operation in Virginia..."
Perot's Private Probes.

...and, lest we forget, it is SO refreshing to see a Right Winger turn against their father figures... this time it was Bo Gritz and his tirade against "Poppy" Bush and CIA drug smuggling in the Golden Triangle, etc...
Richard Armitage -- Drugs and POWs

It seems Armitage is falling on one of his many swords to clear the air before the mid-term election, to negate the power of the continuing suspicion the White House was mainly responsible for the blowing of Valerie Plame Wilson's cover as a simple exec at the CIA front, Brewster Jennings & Associates.

Meanwhile back at the ranch... some silly person registered the domain for BJ&A and created an online game to "protect America"!
The global spy hunt game!

Logo fracas?

While a whole army of foreign terrorists and domestic whack jobs plot their next attack, easily offended types have taken up the Starbucks Coffee logo as their next target in the so-called "Culture Wars"... as if that was not abd enough, these Puritans don't seem to know how good they have it! The old logo would probably make them faint and put a smile on a salty sailor!

Original "melusine" logo.

Even dopey school officials can't seem to stay focused on teaching children and remain focused on cartoonish coffee cup breasts! The same kind of rampant censoring is more akin to what the Taliban or the FLDS would indulge in, so... we have nothing to fear but fear itself? Or We have seen the Enemy, and He is Us!

Old Logo Creates Stir.

The World is NOT our Themepark!

The idea that we can jet over to some country and vacation like normal tourists is over. When David Rockefeller went missing and presumed eaten and head shrunk we should have known better, but we were sold a bill of goods. We were told over and over that TWA would give us a pillow and a blanket then we'd alight on some foreign runway, disembark and get a taxi to a luxury hotel. See the sights and the sites, get a souvenir, a few drinks, take some photos or purchase picture postcards with the cute local currency... HA!

When terrorists struck at Luxor in 1997 or when Nancy Holloway got ganked in Aruba - a message is sent and hopefully received. When news that a child perv possibly linked to the death of a pageant contestant, with an odd stage marm of a mother, was caught in Thailand, are we simply shocked or underwhelmed by the awful truth about ourselves? As long as tourists are mugged and raped here in America, we should not be surprised when it happens anywhere else? The world is not our themepark. Kicking an underpaid college dropout in a Goofy outfit might be funny in Orlando, but halfway across the globe, it could be the last act of a selfish and stupid American tourist.

UPDATE: The "Hostel" movies prove out this idea that we should stop treating foreign lands like our playground.

Croc Hunter RIP

When a guy tries to ride a stingray he dies of stupidity. If you don't think such things happened at the Great Barrier Reef, consult the last Douglas Adams' last posthumous book,The Salmon of a Doubt.