Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

Seriously busy at work. Tonight is also a mess. Probably no major bloggage till tomorrow (I barely even have time to read my daily list…).

…it’s interesting to hear that he’s probably not al-Qaeda. This boy sounds like a home-grown moron, even if he’s not the disaffected white trash I figured he probably was, and even if he is a Muslim.

If I hadn’t seen this on Fox this afternoon, I wouldn’t have even known about it. Fox has nothing on their website about it at all.
Apparently an Aeroflot 767 landed today at JFK at around 2PM EDT, and was met by FBI, Customs, and Port Authority police who boarded the plane looking for radioactive material.
Google News found articles here, here, and here. Nothing in US media at all, apparently. Wait, here’s one from WABC in New York. Searches at Fox, CNN, and PMSNBC came up negative.
Who’s trying to cover this up?

on the continuing media blackout of news from Iran.
He’s right. Faster, damn it.

This is a great read for anyone who has been suffering through national news coverage for the last couple of weeks (apropos of my rants yesterday). Further, Collins makes a trenchant point about relativity that I did not think to make:

The shrieking headlines on paper and screen tell another story, one of relativity. In the span of time in which the sniper has killed 10 people, what detectives call “traditional homicides” have killed 21 in the same metropolitan district. It is what the Washington Post calls “everyday violence”: car-jackings, knifings, drive-by shootings. Backpage stuff, even the robbery-killing of a man whose mother was killed in the crash of the American Airlines plane into the Pentagon. But “traditional homicides” are old hat. There’ve been 203 in the District of Columbia so far this year. No Chief Moose to decry their deaths. No interest in the caliber or the degree of difficulty of the shot.

Good stuff.

…hopefully with satellite tracking devices implanted in their butts, but maybe that idea’s too subtle for our intelligence people. Anyway, story over at Fox.

…that the Bondsmen didn’t have what it takes. Much as I grieve to root for an AL team, my money’s on the Angels.

Now let us dis the Democrats (Amen).
It occurred to me after I posted the note about the news media’s culpability for 9/11 and the nation’s lax attitude about national security that Democrats are equally to blame for it, and continue to be to blame for it now, by obfuscating the real issues that face the country and claiming that the President doesn’t care about the economy and domestic issues.
Frankly, it seems to me that by prosecuting a war against people who are determined to see us go down one way or the other, the President is extremely concerned about the economy and domestic issues … which won’t be issues at all if we don’t utterly defeat the terrorist threat. What kind of economy do they think we’re going to have if we let another 9/11 happen? Who will really care about homelessness and welfare and health insurance if, God forbid, a nuke pops in, say, Chicago? (Well, we’ll care, all right, but not in quite the same way. “Oh my God! The survivors are homeless and destitute and without health care! What can we do to help?” Quite a different kind of homelessness and destitution and health care crisis in my opinion.)
Anyone who votes Democratic in the next election is, on at least one level, an enemy of freedom. Democrats have proven that all they care about is power. They don’t care a whit about the things that are truly important to Americans; they just want to be in charge and lord it over the little people, whom they want to deprive of the ultimate means of defense against tyranny.
Republicans on the other hand just want everyone to get rich and be secure in their lives. Sounds good to me.

Our national news just sucks. Including FNC, although they at least aren’t slavishly devoted to liberal ideals like CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PMSNBC, et al., and they do have incredible news babes unlike the aforenamed.
Let’s review why this is (the suckage, that is). First, an inability to decide what is really of national import. (The Fox Car Chase Channel is how I often refer to FNC…one guess why. Who really gives a damn, other than people in the area affected, that some moron is leading cops on a high-speed chase down the freeway?) Second, the same inability to let go of a story as a dog has to let go of a favorite bone. Third, a complete parochial ignorance of anything international UNLESS it has specific ties or import to Americans.
The third reason is why we don’t hear about Bali, or about the financial mess in Japan that’s due to the fact that the government is unwilling to bite the bullet like we did in our savings and loan “crisis” and bail out the banks that are holding almost nothing but worthless paper. Or about what’s really going on in Russia these days, or in Canada, both places being countries where the citizenry don’t think like their governments and don’t really hate Americans like their governments do.
There is no real investigative reporting done today that is worthy of the name.
And that is perhaps the real shame. Because Americans don’t really know what is going on in the rest of the world. And it is directly the fault of our own news media — who are closing down international bureaus left and right in the name of saving money — that this is the case.
Why were Americans so shocked on 9/11? Not because the CIA or the FBI screwed the pooch, although it’s pretty clear they did. Rather, because our vaunted news media let us down and lulled us by 10 September 2001 into the same false sense of security that we had on 6 December 1941.
The infamy is that the news organizations have, ever since 9/11, scrambled to point fingers everywhere but at themselves. An informed public will not let its government go slack on national security. An uninformed public won’t even know national security is slack until a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11 happens in their face.
The whole thing is a shandeh un a charpeh. (You could look it up.)

I would like to state for the record that I think it is a sin that American media have not given the kind of attention to the nightclub bombing in Bali that they have to other things (like this idiotic Washington Sniper chatter that shouldn’t be monopolizing national news services 24/7; it would be one thing if the local stations went 24/7 with it, but there are other things going on in the rest of the country — like elections coming up in only a couple of weeks — and in the rest of the world — like Iraq and like Bali). I am friendly with a number of Australians and I mourn with them for their losses. But I’d barely know that the bombing had occurred if I got all my news from TV or radio, or even from the newspapers.
I don’t think Americans per se are self-centered to the extent that they don’t care about terrorism unless it happens on our own shores. But I do think that the major American news media aren’t interested in overseas news unless Americans are directly involved. And I find that to be a crying shame, because it makes it look like Americans don’t care, when the fact of the matter is that American news media don’t care.
Australia is one of our best and most important allies. We do them no service by ignoring their pain. Bali was very much their own 9/11 and we ought to be just as horrified today as regards their loss as they were the day the towers went down, the Pentagon burned, and Flight 93 smoldered in a farmer’s field.