Radio Bolo

Suspension Of This Blog For The Time Being

2009-03-09T17:00:00.003-04:00

I started this blog because I wanted to see what it was like to do one. What I found was, that it was a lot of work.

If this were the only thing I did, then I could put all my energies towards it, but because I also have a radio program and a monthly column in Hustler, the time I could devote to such a product was limited. I also found that my "Facebook" page was giving me the most fun and support and served some of the same purposes.

So for the time being I am suspending work on this blog. It will continue to exist. I will from time to time when the mood strikes me write something and post old Hustler columns here. I am not against people like yourself contributing to this page and if you send me a piece to alexbennett@alexbennett.com , I will publish it.

Thanks for your interest.

Alex Bennett

The Sunday Funnies 3/8/2009

2009-03-08T00:01:00.001-05:00

This sunday, we once again look back at my old friend Bill Hicks who I consider to be the best standup comedian of all time. That's one hell of a boast but it's true. I didn't say alive because Bill died of pancreatic cancer in 1994. A while back David Letterman righted a horrible wrong and played a standup routine that was done for his show and then dropped because Dave was afraid at the time to play it. I'll write more about Bill and Dave later on, but for now here are two shots of Bill Hicks, the first is the banned standup from Letterman and the second is from his club act.

Confessions Of A TV Pundit

2009-03-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

Here's another column from Hustler by Alex Bennett and edited by the esteemed Bruce David

In this multimedia world, finding the truth can be a tricky thing. Everyone claims to be offering up the truth, from the right to the left and from the news sources. The big question is who is right and who is wrong.

To believe that people on the left tell the truth all the time and the right is lying is a liberal conceit. To feel the opposite is a conservative one. The truth be said neither left or right has a franchise on the truth and both probably distort as much as the other. Yet both sides believe they are correct and honest in their presentation of what they perceive as fact.

So who do you believe? Truth is subjective and is in the eye of the beholder. I’m a leftist and because of those beliefs George W. Bush was a foul, immoral, international criminal. To a right-winger George was just doing his job of protecting America and fighting for democracy and capitalism in a world beset by terrorist. By the way the reason according to them that the world hates us is because they are jealous. Of just what I haven’t figured out.

The worst example of this can be found on cable TV where we are beset on all sides by pundits. This is an entirely new profession created out of the laziness of the news networks who have to fill their airwaves with a little something called journalism and haven’t quite gotten the hang of it. This in case you didn’t know, in most cases is a paid position. Paul Begala, Bill Bennett, Ed Schultz and Donna Brazile are just some of the mouths for hire. They don’t do this out of a passion for truth, they are grabbed from the pool of radio talk show hosts, journalists and former political advisors all chasing TV Careers.

The pundit is expected to be provocative first and accurate second. You see them all the time in little square boxes surrounding the host, sometimes as many as four at a time, looking like a bizarre version of “The Brady Bunch”. They fight with each other and present their arguments as fact. The host, loving a good fight, just lets it go on without challenging the fucked up conceptions or errors in accuracy of either side.

Then there is what cable feels is diversity. Liberals and Neo-cons in equal numbers. Never a lefty or true conservative, they might say something that in bad taste (read “something you don’t want to hear”), they are much too boring and God help us, they might have some accurate facts to contribute. It really is lazy television. Just start these guys talking and then sit back and watch the minutes fly by.

I admit that I too have on occasion been one of those pundits. For about 10 weeks in a row I pretended to know what I was talking about on “Tucker” over at MSNBC. First let me say that my experience with Carlson was very pleasant and no matter what you say about the guy, he treated me well. I was always paired up with a guy from Florida who had an opinion 180 degrees from mine and about 90 degrees from Tucker’s. It was fun but disconcerting. I was in New York in a bathroom-sized studio with a robot camera and a earpiece so I could hear everybody else. I couldn’t see anything but had to pretend like I did. I was in the “Big Apple”, my opponent was in Florida , Tucker was in Washington and the control room for all of this was in New Jersey. The art was to make it look easy and to look good under such disconnection. I suppose the other downside was that, even though they gave you the topics in advance, you had to have an opinion on everything they threw at you.

Fox News believe it or not has always been civil to me in spite of my “lefty” leanings. Oh sure one time the makeup woman jokingly remarked “Gee a liberal, we don’t see them a lot around here”. I was doing the Neil Cavuto show and the subject was the wearing of Flag pins. Cavuto thought that as a leftie I would be against them. When I told him that I wasn’t, he tried to push me into his preconceived notion that did. He wanted a confrontation and even though I kept telling him that liberals in general don’t look down on people who wore them, he kept trying. In the end he didn’t get his pound of flesh. I don’t know, it just may be paranoia on my part, but I’ve never been asked back by Cavuto again.

Pundits are a dime a dozen, but a few of them make real good money at it. The really smart people rarely make to these forums, either because they aren’t into putting on “The Big Show” or they just don’t want to be seen in the company of fools at any price. Until they do, the circus will continue.

Entertainment Report For This Weekend

2009-02-27T00:01:00.006-05:00

I have some reviews for your weekend entertainment:

Television:

Battlestar Galactica: Finally the long wait is over and the "Toasters" and "Skin Jobs" are back for a final go round with the colonialists. No longer are they looking for Earth.... they've found it and it's a mess, completely decimated. They don't see the opportunity as a "fixer-upper" so they set out to find another planet to call home. In the meantime depression is setting in and the humans and they are fighting each other and committing suicide. Now there is an insurrection and people who were there from the beginning are getting killed off. Hate is the order of the day at this halfway point towards the end of the series. Quite frankly I can't figure out where this thing is going. Maybe that's a good thing, then again maybe not. And now we are finally getting to the real history of the Cylons. Only four more episodes so they better move this ting along. SCI-FI Channel on Fridays at 10 pm and then rerun throughout the week. Grade: B+ (so far)

Flight Of The Conchords: You just have to say this is the most adorable if not funniest show on the air. I love this show and so will you unless you don't have a central nervous system. HBO on Sunday at 10:00 pm Grade: A

Big Love: Back for third season this hour long drama about the Hedricksons' that is a polygamist family got off with a bang and presented us with a whole new set of problems as well as some of the old. The series is finally revealing what is the motivation behind their group marriage and as always their family secret is in peril. Sunday at 9pm on HBO. Grade B+

Movies:

The International: I wish I had stayed awake long enough to tell you what it was about. I think it's about a bad bank that kills people. Clive Owen wins in the end. Anything in between was a blur; Grade: F+(the + is for a good two hours sleep)

Coraline: More 3-D, this time animated puppets. Years ago George Pal pioneered the use of stop action shorts which had only been done earlier by Willis O'brien in order to bring life to "King Kong". Pal called his shorts "Puppetoons" which utilized the laborious technique of moving puppets one frame at a time to animate them. The work was amazing then and even more amazing now as Henry Selick ("James and the Giant Peach" and "Nightmare Before Christmas") takes this art further and more artfully than it has ever gone. At times you wonder how he accomplished all that he does in this superbly crafted story about a little girl who finds an alternate world on the other side of hers. At first the world is warm and accepting but soon turns into a horror. I know this is a family picture but be warned, some younger kids may be traumatized. The 3D is spectacular. Grade: A

My Bloody Valentine 3-D: The last time 3D was in fashion was in the '50's. It was short lived be because most of the pictures they applied it to were B-movies that without the process would have failed to get an audience. Only towards the end of the fad with the musical "Kiss Me Kate" and Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M For Murder" was the gimmick taken seriously, but by then it was too late. I love the process and have seen almost every 3D movie made and collected a shit load of 3D comic books. Cut to the present where 3D has been used by some pretty good films. Up until now they have mostly been animated since computer generated cartoons are in fact 3-D in their creation but shown flat. The notable exception was "Journey To The Center Of The Earth" which was live action and a fairly good kids picture. Now with this picture in live action, 3-D is transmogrified (one of my favorite words) into the horror genre. Blood spatters, young healthy kids scream and then run as fast as they can only to be caught up with by a guy loaded down with a gas mask and pick axe. That's almost as real as when people run faster than fire. A remake of the 1981 film of the same name, this is your typical slasher fare. The 3D used today is less profound the the '50's version in order to minimize eye strain as a result the effects are just so-so. Nothing comes out past the proscenium of the screen. The best thing about this movie, lots of full frontal female nudity in one scene. If they keep doing 3-D like this much more, the medium will be dead just as fast as it was the last time. Grade:D+

Valkyrie: If what you want is accuracy then that is what you will get in this true story about the attempt towards the end of the war to assassinate Hitler. Trouble is that the accuracy is at the expensive of a dramatic narrative. Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg who attempted to blow up Hitler as he planned maneuvers with his Generals. Cruise is fine if a little low key. The picture is stuffed with fine British actors like Tom Wilkenson and Kenneth Branagh. But it just doesn't get up to speed. I was really hoping for more because I love the subject matter. You would be better served just watching many of the fine documentaries on the subject. Grade: C+

Doubt: ......and the Oscar for best actress goes to Meryl Streep. I can't think of a better female performance this year than that of Streep's in this compelling motion picture about a nun who accuses a priest (Phillip Seymore Hoffman) of child molestation. Hoffman is great but the spotlight falls on Streep who runs away with this film. Taken from the play by John Patrick Shanley and written for the screen and directed by him, this film seems to come off as pretty much a stage play done on the screen. He does very little to open it up, but that doesn't minimize it's impact nor its greatness. Amy Adams is also marvelous as the younger nun who uncovers the possible misdeeds. But this film is all about doubt and there in lies the core of it's soul. A good film made great by the performances of two of our best actors. See it! Grade: A-

Defiance: Jews fleeing the Nazis is always good Oscar fodder right? Well not this time, it's really just one long dull trek of misery, bullets and typhoid. Daniel Craig and Liev Shrieber play two Jewish brothers on the run from the Germans who have invaded Russia and are killing every Jew in sight. They wind up in the forest where they just can't say no to every escapee that comes their way. Soon they are fighting for their lives and trying to keep their army of wards safe. To say this is dull is perhaps to harsh, but you can see dull from here. You might want to save this for a DVD rental which by the looks of this one is about a month away. Otherwise go see something else unless you have a hemorrhoid and need to numb your butt. Grade: C-

The Reader: This is one of those pictures that begs "Please give me an Oscar". Somber, depressing and overwritten, this opus just tries too hard. That's not to say that Kate Winslett (in her second depressing picture of the season) doesn't do her usual yeoman job and Ralph Fiennes is never bad playing the boy in the picture as a grown man, it's just the material is overwrought about a German boy (David Kross) who loses his cherry an older woman. She then disappears only to resurface in a courtroom on trial for concentration camp atrocities. The picture is all a bit much, plus it's just downright depressing and if you're going to depress me make it worth my time. If you are out to see all this seasons Nazi pictures then this is a must see, but if you aren't, in the words of my girlfriend it's a "must miss". The only positive is lots of nudity by Winslett. Grade: C

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button: This is a hard one to call. It's a big budget picture with big budget stars that succeeds in a big budget way. It is fully entertaining with a craftsmanship performance by Brad Pitt as Button a man born old as a baby who gets younger as the years go along. Peter Abrahamson and the entire makeup staff for this saga deserve an Oscar and the actors which includes Cate Blanchett, much credit for playing the various ages they go through subtilely. The screenplay by Eric Roth seems to follow the same formula as his earlier work "Forrest Gump". David Fincher directs with a deft hand at a much bigger picture than anything he has done before. Hey I liked it, but after it is over there are a lot of empty calories. Go see it but not before the better pictures on this list. Grade: B

Revolutionary Road: The big deal as they flack it is that Leonardo DeCapprio and Kate Wnslet are back together for the first time since "Titanic" 11 years ago. The really big deal is that this is a crackerjack of a motion picture. Directed by Sam Medes ("American Beauty" and "Road to Perdition"), this is the tale of the Wheelers, a couple who move to the suburbs when that big move by the population was made in the early '50's. April takes care of the home and Frank heads off everyday to a dead end job in New York City. Then April hatches a scheme that they should move to France where she can work and he can pursue whatever his life's dream is. It is the futility of suburban life that weaves the tapestry of this story. To tell you any more would be to ruin the journey. But beware, this is not a happy tale, but one which will keep you thinking for days to come. The film has an aftertaste. We just have to mention a standout secondary performance by Kathy Bates as their realtor with an equally sad tale to tell. This almost becomes a feature version of the territory staked out by TV's "Mad Men". Based on the award winning book by Richard Yates, this might be a picture you hadn't planned on seeing, but don't be deceived, this is good stuff! Grade: A-

Last Chance Harvey: Simple. Older man (Dustin Hoffman) has his last chance at love (Emma Thompson). Hoffman likeable. Thompson charming. Movie good but forgettable. Grade: B

The Wrestler: Next to "Slumdog Millionaire" this may well be the best picture of the year. Darren Aronovsky ("Requiem For A Dream") has created a compelling tale of a beaten up professional wrestler 20 years after his great fame. He is living on one night exhibition bouts from town to town and in his spare time sells what memorabilia and autographs he can. Mickey Rourke makes a great comeback as "Randy the Ram" Robinson. At first you wonder if it is Rourke playing himself, but after a while you realize he is giving a bravura performance. Marisa Tomei is stunning as a lap dancer fighting within herself not to love this wreck of a human being. She always brings greatness to any part but this time she hits a career high. By the way, not that it matters, but she is topless at least a third of the time in the film (thanks Darren). Both should get Oscar nods. In the end though, it is the story that is the most compelling not only for it's simplicity but it's understanding of the lives these people live. Grade: A+

Gran Torino: I wish I could say this was a great picture with a lifetime crowning performance by Clint Eastwood, but I can't. This a good movie, a very good movie but falls short of great. It's a simple movie about a man of great prejudices (name a race, he has something bad to say about them) who has just buried his lifelong wife and befriends, much to his resistance, an Asian family next door. Problem is that Eastwood is way over the top. He seems to be channeling "Dirty Harry Callahan" as an old man much as he did with "No-Name" in "Unforgiven" and then giving these old characters resolution. He growls (that put me off the most) and chews up the scant scenery. I'll buy what he did with the part, just don't tell me it's an award winning performance. The picture is engrossing but you could wait for the DVD. Grade: B

Frost/Nixon: You might be turned off by the subject matter either because the subject doesn't appeal to you or you are afraid you are just going to see a movie of a play. Forget your fears. This is as gripping and involving a film as you can get. Based on the famous interview that British TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) arranged and paid for with the then resigned Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). Both have something to gain, Frost a failing career and Nixon, his reputation in history and the ability to appear in public without scorn. Only one can come out a winner. Peter Morgan ("The Queen" and "The Last King Of Scotland") wrote the screenplay which he opened up from his Broadway play. It crackles and Ron Howard who I usually don't like as a director plays it just right. This film has opened in New York and Los Angeles and opens wide on Christmas Day Grade: A-

Milk: The story of Harvey Milk a San Francisco gay businessman who became the city's first openly gay supervisor falls a bit short but is close enough to the mark that it should warrant your attention. Milk is played by Sean Penn who does his usual professional job. Most people are overwhelmed by how well he plays full gay (as opposed to full retard), but I would have rather seen a gay actor play the role as it becomes at times a form of sexual blackface. Besides in the true spirit of the truly great Milk, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to give the part to a deserving gay actor? In any event, the film is fine and Penn will surely be nominated for an Oscar. James Brolin as Milk's nemesis Dan White is superb. It falls short of great but is a good watch. Grade: B+

Bolt: Do You like 3-D? Do you like dogs? Do you hate cats? Do you find pigeons funny? Then this a Disney film for you and your family. I have seen almost every 3-D film ever made. I love the process and the current technology has taken a lot of the kinks out of the it. While the 3-D isn't as profound as in the '50"s, the eye strain is less and the glasses vanish esthetically with use. I really liked this film. It's no masterpiece but it is fully entertaining. It's really the first animated film completed at Disney since they took over Pixar and is overseen by Pixar's John Lassiter after he took over Disney animation. The Pixar touch is all over it. A movie star dog runs away and is thrust into the real world but he still believes he's superhero. It's fun and if you are a parent taking your kid to this thing you won't feel trapped. Grade: B

Slumdog Millionaire: Everyone asks what is the best movie so far this year? The almost universal answer by anyone who has seen this amazing gem agrees that this is it. I usually hate happy slurpy endings, but this one is the best. Directed by Danny Boyle, it's not exactly what you would expect from the guy who did "Trainspotting". Then again Boyle always surprises you with his range with "28 Days Later" a zombie film and "Millionaires" a kid's picture. A poor boy, brought up in the most depraved and dismal surroundings ever, our hero winds up on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". Against this background his life story is told and we eventually find out his true motive for being on the show. Dev Patel who turns out is a british actor plays the boy. The stunner here is Freida Pinto who may just be the most beautiful actress I have ever seen on film. This is her first film and like everyone else in this masterpiece is up to the task. If you miss this picture, you're just cheating yourself. Grade: A+

Face it, terrestrial radio is on life support

2009-02-25T00:01:00.002-05:00

This is a rerun.

This another one of my columns from Hustler Magazine and was edited by Bruce David

Did you know that radio has gone HD? Better sound and many new channels all on one signal. You didn't? That's probably because you, like so many people, don't listen to radio anymore. Listenership is down 14% in the last 10 years. Today you listen to your I-pod, programming on the internet, a CD or perhaps commercial free music on one of the Satellite systems. There are so many better options, especially since your local radio station has done nothing to maintain your interest.

How did this chasm come about? Back in the mid 90's, Bill Clinton, in one of his more stupid moments, signed a Telecommunications act that deregulated broadcasting. In doing so he changed the way broadcast companies operate.

Until that time, these companies were limited in the number of outlets they could own. The rule was 7-7-7: seven TV, seven AM and seven FM in total with no more than one each in a market. If you owned all three and a newspaper in the same market, you had to get rid of either the newspaper or one of the broadcast outlets. Deregulation opened the floodgates; all of a sudden you could own as many outlets as you wanted. The newspaper rule still held, sort of, but Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. (Fox) is trying to get that waived too.

The rush was on. Broadcast groups gobbled up broadcast stations faster than you could count. When the dust settled the winner was Clear Channel Communications with 1250 radio stations. Burp!

That's where everything unraveled. In the past, if you owned a station, you competed against all the other stations in your market. They were your sworn enemy. Now they became your compatriots. With some outfits owning as many as 8 stations in a market, sales departments were combined as were marketing, accounting and the like. Even programming was consolidated with, in some cases, a single program director in charge of more than one station. It goes without saying that tens of thousands of broadcast professionals across the country found themselves out of work. All "redundancies" were eliminated.

What about the radio personality? You can't replace them right? Enter a nefarious practice known as "voice tracking." For years radio owners had wet dreams over the possibility of automation, but nothing seemed to work...until voice tracking. With this technology the personality comes in to record just his voice. A computer adds the music later. Not only does he do the voice for the shift on his station but also for stations in maybe 3 or 4 other markets. Now one employee has replaced as many as three others. The station saves even more by paying the jock only for the time he spent working.

Previously, a live 4 hour shift paid for 4 hours. That same time block now pays talent only for the hour he worked recording the show. Remember: music is added later. Did you know that the personality on your local station isn't even there? Usually the only live shows are in the morning where a certain immediacy is required.

What if a company owns two stations with the same format in the same market? Before degregulations those stations would compete, each trying to out do the other. Now, owned by one master, the lesser of the two is told to hold itself back in deference to the one considered a "cash cow." Cost saving and conglomeration dragged down a medium that once thrived on competition.

Talk shows remained the only live programming but even they replaced hundreds of people because most talk is syndicated by satellite. In the process, localism was killed; talk shows now speak to the nation, not your home town. Diversity was another casualty: Clear Channel was politically conservative, even contributing money to George W's campaign. Not surprisingly the only hosts allowed on Clear Channel stations were of a right wing bent.

And what about the single station owner? They just couldn't compete with the evil empire. They had to sell. Before degregulation it was these stations that served the small towns with local news and needs.

In time all things become obsolete. Just try and find a pay phone these days. The record store is all but gone. Terrestrial radio survived the onslaught of TV by adapting. This time, however, it may just be the end. Technologically, radio is a wireless medium with higher quality than the internet or MP3's. But the medium that survived TV may just have been undone by its biggest foe, greed.

Felix The Cat’s Plot To Bankrupt General Motors

2009-02-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

By Tom Yamaguchi

The following story was told to me by a witness to some strange events in the 1960s and 1970s who prefers to remain anonymous:

The first political demand for General Motors to go into bankruptcy was issued sometime in late 1970 or early 1971. The bankruptcy for General Motors political demand was included as part of a marketing campaign for GrassMasters, the brand of marijuana cigarettes marketed by Felix The Cat, who proclaimed GrassMasters had the “GM Mark of Excellence.”

Felix The Cat, also known in the media as Mr. Felix, was one of the public pseudonyms used by an anarchist marijuana dealer known to certain residents in Berkeley, Calif. Someone made a mistake in early 1970 by raving some Abbie Hoffman-style rhetoric to Felix The Cat about the fun of manipulating the media. For some strange reason Felix took media manipulation jokes seriously.

Mr. Felix first decided to manipulate the media by buying advertising to sell marijuana. He placed a one-half page ad in the Berkeley Tribe underground newspaper for Park Lane brand cigarettes. The alleged “barter” ad was placed by Felix The Cat as both a political campaign contribution supporting the Tribe and as an act of conceptual art. Felix claimed he was the first person to advertise the commercial sale of marijuana in a newspaper.

Park Lane was a brand of cigarettes not normally sold in this country. During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese peddlers sold packages of Park Lane where the tobacco had been emptied out and replaced with marijuana. Park Lanes were “high test” even with filters. The cigarettes were smuggled into the United States by homeward bound servicemen who stuffed them inside of stereo speakers. During the summer of 1970, the supply of Park Lane marijuana cigarettes dried up. Rumor had it that the mastermind of the smuggling operation had been shipped home by the Army, as the United States started its years' long withdrawal from Vietnam.

After the Park Lane ad, Felix The Cat's love for media manipulation continued. He decided to create a media scam, and see how far he could carry it out. Felix decided to market GrassMasters cigarettes, which came complete with the “GM Mark of Excellence.” GrassMasters were made from a short-lived brand of cigarettes at that time called Laredo.

Laredo cigarettes came as a package of loose tobacco, a set of cigarette filters, and a set of cigarette papers shaped into tubes. The Laredo starter pack included a hand-operated machine which shoved the loose tobacco and filter into the paper tube. Felix The Cat had some of his girlfriends go out and buy all the Laredo starter packs they could find. He put them to work stuffing the Laredo papers with marijuana to produce GrassMasters. The Laredo system included boxes to hold the handmade cigarettes. Felix sold his cigarettes in packs made with the Laredo boxes. He replaced the Laredo logo with his own GrassMasters labels that he had printed on bumpersticker stock. Felix The Cat stuck other labels to the packs with messages such as “Caution: Cigarette Smoking Will Get You High!” and “GrassMasters use the GM Mark of Excellence!”

Once he had a supply of sample GrassMasters ready to go, Felix The Cat went out on his mission to manipulate the media into publicizing the GrassMasters marketing launch. Felix got a radio scriptwriter to create a half dozen 30-second radio spots. He visited the top rock station in San Francisco and waved around $300, trying to buy airtime for his commercials. The station didn’t take his money, but it did give GrassMasters a half-hour of airtime on a public affairs show. A very stoned Felix was interviewed by the radio station’s News Director.

GrassMasters managed to get a story on the coveted front-page, middle-column of the Wall Street Journal. GrassMasters got half-page articles in Rolling Stone and Playboy. GrassMasters and Felix The Cat ended up getting a wide variety of other media coverage that seemed to be mostly cribbed from those three reports.

The College Press Service wrote that Felix The Cat, "told a radio station interviewer that 320 dealers in the Bay area are handling his first consignment of 5,000 cartons. A packet of 18 joints now sells at $7.50, but he hopes to pass on savings to the smoker as the business grows. By early spring they plan to have an automated rolling factory in Mexico and two more, underground in San Francisco and Berkeley, with distribution centers coast to coast." CPS furthered quoted Mr. Felix who was referred to in the article as a spokesman for a consortium of pot dealers known collectively as Felix the Cat, "We turn about a ton of grass a month in the San Francisco ares (sic). That's worth $250,000." The article expressed optimism on the possible legalization of cannabis. "Mr. Felix claims to have a bail fund reserve of $125,000 and is prepared for two supreme court appeals in the next couple of years. 'Then we'll be out in the clear.'"

The Wall Street Journal story recited a series of allegations that Felix The Cat had made to their reporter. Felix claimed GrassMasters cigarettes were created from a blend of four different types of exotic marijuana. He boasted that fleets of aircraft were used to import many tons of the raw material to GrassMasters' warehouses and an assembly line of Hippies worked in these warehouses to produce massive quantities of the finished product. The Wall Street Journal reporter noted that, if his financial allegations were correct, then Felix The Cat was making over one thousand percent profit. He poked fun at Felix's other improbable assertions. The Felix The Cat cartoon copyright holder was quoted, complaining about the betrayal of children’s trust. The Wall Street Journal article lamented that other media received GrassMasters packages from Felix, while denying the Journal had received the product itself.

The Journal quoted police sources, stating that Felix The Cat was a fraud. The police agencies had apparently expended a considerable amount of effort in unsuccessful attempts to buy GrassMasters or find out anything about the GrassMasters brand. The Journal reporter had contacted General Motors for a comment about Felix The Cat’s use of the “GM Mark of Excellence” marketing slogan. The reporter apparently baffled the General Motors spokesperson who later called back to announce the company was beginning an investigation into the misuse of its trademark. Somewhere in his attempts to continue use of the “GM Mark of Excellence” slogan, Felix The Cat publicly demanded the bankruptcy of General Motors. No one took him seriously at that time.

Media stories about GrassMasters would continue to trickle out for months. By the time the last story had come out, Felix The Cat had left Berkeley, not to return for several years. He did return for a short time in 1976, insisting to everyone who knew him that he never be addressed by them as Felix The Cat and that he should never be identified to anyone else by that name ever again. After a few months of engaging in alienating behavior, that person fled Berkeley.

There are no reports of anyone seeing or hearing from Felix The Cat ever since. It was a matter of intermittent discussion for years among those who knew Felix as to whether it was more likely that he would end up getting murdered or catching some fatal disease. None who knew him consider it likely he could have managed to stay alive for long. No one would have ever guessed he was ahead of his time in his call for the bankruptcy of General Motors.

My source has informed me of another piece of San Francisco marijuana mythology. During the late 1960s through mid 1970s, it was a commonly held belief that pot smoking was responsible for the continued integrity of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Smoking a joint while crossing the bridge prevented the structure from collapsing into the water below. That the bridge continued to stay intact was proof that, at any time of the day or night, someone was smoking a joint while driving across it. Performing the duty of holding the bridge up was made easier by the knowledge that the police are very reluctant to stop vehicles mid-span. The corollary of this theory was that individual drivers did not feel obligated to smoke a joint during every bridge crossing as someone else was always on the bridge smoking one for them.

My source has documented that since the mid-1970s this myth has been largely forgotten. It only seems to be known to those of the counter culture who lived in Bay Area during that time and not to those who lived there before or after. It may have been forgotten to the bridge's detriment. In 1989, part of the eastern span collapsed during an earthquake. Timing may have also been a factor, the collapse having occurred at the beginning of the World Series. Bridge traffic was relatively light, and commuters may have rushed home early to roll joints in anticipation of the baseball game.

The old structure is now being replaced with a new eastern span linking Treasure Island and Oakland. My source suspects that changes in demographics and commute patterns may have reduced the number of marijuana users crossing the span. This could be counteracted by a public service campaign to bring awareness of the need to secure the new bridge's structural integrity. For example, a message could be flashed on the toll plaza's electronic sign that reads "Smoke 'em if you got 'em."

Sunday Funnies: Seth MacFarlane

2009-02-22T00:01:00.000-05:00

Here's a Sunday treat albeit a week late but hilarious from the creator of family guy Seth MacFarlane on the "Spike Feresten" Talk Show on Fox. Fill in the bleeps.

Seth MacFarlane - Valentine's in Hollywood - watch more funny videos

Fuck G.M.!

2009-02-19T00:01:00.001-05:00

Is that plain enough? Those are my feelings about the whole sorry mess. Let them rot in hell and go out of business!

Hey Alex why so pissed off? Because dear reader they came begging for more money, $16.6 billion to be exact and maybe more in the future. They are coming hat in hand to dig more money out of your pockets but this time they promise to clean up. What do they say is cleaning up? They want to close down plants and fire 47,000 workers and congress will probably give it to them.

Aren't we trying to save jobs not obliterate them? What we should say is "here's the money but you can only use it to save jobs", but do you think any of those morons on Capitol Hill will have the balls to say that?

Look, G.M. has been running a bad business for a long time and on top that they kept putting out shitty cars. The only thing that has saved them in the past were give backs by the unions and now they are out to screw them in this deal by letting 47, 000 of their number go.

Enough with the myth that if they go out of business subsidiary business' will be hurt by not supplying G.M. with parts and so on. The cars will still be built just by the other car companies who will absorb the gap. By the way if G.M. is selling and producing less cars as they say, then I suppose those business' have been impacted already.

So let G.M. die and give the $16.6 Billion dollars to those who will be out of work as a result. The money will be better spent.

Talk, Talk, Talk

2009-02-17T00:01:00.001-05:00

Here is yet another reprint of one of Alex Bennett's monthly columns from Hustler Magazine and as always edited by Bruce David.

I’m a talk show host. I like to think of it as the lowest wrung on the show business food chain. We’re paid to act like we know what we are talking about, but truth be known, the only reason we are experts is because someone gave us a microphone. Take that microphone away from us and we are nothing more or less than anyone else, just another asshole with an opinion.

For years my peers have really been bothered by my inclination to demystify the talk show host mystique, but I’d be dishonest if I didn’t.

One night I was on the Alan Colmes radio show on Fox debating Sean Hannity about the California Governors race. He was going crazy at one point and I said “Sean, calm down, we’re just tap dancers, you know just entertainers at best”. He went Ballistic “I’m no tap dancer” he yelled at me and during a break he told Alan never to put him on with me again. I suppose I should be proud of that. But what amazed me was how seriously he took himself.

I suppose that the most well known and most popular of the political talk show hosts is Rush Limbaugh. Among the lefties he is the most vilified of the right-wingers. In many ways it is unjustified. Not that his opinions aren’t a piece of shit, but that right wing radio isn’t really his fault.

Talk hosts with strong opinions were nothing new when Rush hit the scene in Sacramento, California in 1984. The difference was that there had to be balance because of a rule called the “fairness doctrine” which meant that when Rush editorialized an opposing position had to be given airtime. But in 1987 President Ronald Reagan ended that rule and to Rush’s credit he saw an opening to go where no other talk show host had gone before. You’re going to wince when I say this, but as one radio guy looking at another, Rush is a talented, entertaining and savvy radio professional. Best of all, I never thought for a moment that Rush took himself seriously. At his best he is self-mocking and funny. The bad part is that he is an asshole right-winger. I say all this to distinguish him from the “wannabees” that capitalized on his success.

Those that came after him and tried to copy his formula were the real jerks. As an example I like to cite Stepin Fetchit. He was a black comedian in the early 1930’s who invented a shuffling, slow-witted, bug eyed black man that became a negative stereotype. But it wasn’t his fault. He was only doing an original comedic character. It was the literally dozens of actors that copied him that created the stereotype. Everybody blamed Rush for the copycats like Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and the lot rather than the copycats themselves.

Sean Hannity is number 2 and basically a man who takes himself way to seriously. One gets the idea that he feels he can use his “bully pulpit” to change the world. Hannity would be harmless if it weren’t for the fact that crazed neo-cons listen to him in the millions to have their cockeyed anti-social opinions validated by this egotistical megalomaniac on a daily basis. Added to all of this is the rumor that he has political ambitions for the next decade. I honestly believe there should be a law prohibiting a person in show business from running for political office before taking a 5 year hiatus from the world of fame so as to not trade in one notoriety for another. By the way, that includes yours truly.

The final talk show on the hit list is number three in the ratings, Michael Savage. By the way this is the only one of the weasels I have actually met and to call him a weasel is probably a slight to weasels everywhere. This guy is a truly nuts. Yes he’s entertaining but only because of his Brooklyn accent and because he is so off the wall that you pay attention to him as you would a car wreck. He’s anti-immigrant, a misogynist, psychiatry (which he sorely needs), puts down autistic kids and really has a hard-on for the left.

What makes Savage particularly onerous is that is that he is syndicated by a right wing cult out of Grants Pass, Oregon called “The Foundation of Human Understanding” founded by radio apostle Roy Masters who for years preached the same kind of garbage that Savage seemed to adopt. The FHU was listed as a cult by “Cult Awareness” after he started urging people to move with him to Grants Pass because America was coming to an end. Masters then created “Talk Radio Network” to syndicate himself and later turned it over to his son Mark who hired Savage and runs it to this very day. Among the others they syndicate are Laura Ingraham, Monica Crowley and Others.

In the end today’s talk show constitute nothing more than a place where people can come to have their half-assed feelings in life validated by some host who is always willing to accommodate them instead of challenging their pre-conceived ideas with new ones. So take us down off a pedestal and put us in the toilet where we justly belong.

Sunday Funnies: A Friday Night Art Show

2009-02-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

My friends the Grubergs invited me to join them at an art show, so I tagged along with my pocket Flip HD camera and here was the result. Afterwards we hit Chinatown.

What's Real About Reality TV?

2009-02-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

This is a reprint of one of Alex Bennett's columns for Hustler Magazine. As usual it is edited by Bruce David.

by Alex Bennett

Will somebody please sue the TV networks. What television passes off as “reality” isn’t reality at all and the way it alters our perception of reality is dangerous to the national mental health. I remember the movie “The Running Man” with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a criminal who was made to fight for his life on National TV. I laughed at the preposterousness of it all. But I’m not laughing anymore.

The first reality show as we now know them wasn’t by any of the major networks but on PBS. In 1973, the network covered the day to day life of the Loud family titled “An American Family”. The idea was to follow an American family and catch their real life and travails. It was successful in catching an audience, but real life was a bit more elusive. The presence of crew people no matter how unassuming, didn’t keep the family from acting to them. As a result the wife announced to her husband that she was getting a divorce. Years later she said she might not have gone for the divorce if the cameras weren’t there. The frosting on the cake was their son Lance announcing to the family that he was gay. He later tried to monopolize on his fleeting fame by trying a show business career that failed. He died in 2001 of Hepatitis C and AIDS. There were a number of send-ups of the show the most notable being the first film by Albert Books called “Real Life”.

It took 19 years before the next reality show to hit TV. “The Real World” was the concoction of MTV in which put a bunch of young people in a house together for several weeks. The new twist was that the participants were cast rather than trying to mirror reality and the producers would create conflict by doing things like cutting off their power or water. The more conflict the better. Much like “An American Family” the participants in “The Real World” created conflict on their own in the belief that the more outrageous their personalities the more famous they would become, so their actions became anything but natural.

The next entry into the reality sweepstakes came in 2000 when a TV producer named Mark Burnett convinced CBS to take a program based on a Swedish hit “Expedition: Robinson”. He changed the name to “Survivor” and the rest is history. Castaways on a deserted island fight each other to win a million dollars. It was on “Survivor” that one of TV’s low moments was reached. Contestant Michael Skupin stood out by being so hungry that he killed a wild boar with his bare hands, but those hands became famous in their own right when he got woozy one night and fell into a fire burning them so badly that he had to be airlifted to a hospital and out of the show. What made this whole situation so disgusting was that a cameraman kept filming him rather than help or prevent the problem altogether because the producer admonished them previously to keep rolling no matter what happens and not to interfere. Remember “Network” anyone? In the end modern medicine saved his hands but “Survivor” aired the grizzly footage of the skin peeling from them while he gave out with agonizing screams.

Reality has become a favorite fare of the networks due to their low cost and big ratings potential as opposed to the scripted shows. There are some things that are not as well known. If you wonder why these people allow their lives to be bared on television, the answer is simple, they get paid. The more episodes of the “Survivor” you do the more you get paid in talent fees. It’s even been rumored that one of the Nanny shows pay as much as $50,000 and episode for the parents and $25,000 a child.

The there are the personality reality shows like “The Osbournes” with Ozzie the musician and his wife and two kids. Reality my ass! You never saw the other Osbourne child, that’s because she refused to be on the show and was treated as if she didn’t exist. Once and again she did show up in a shot.

The problem is some people think that what they are seeing really exists and then compare there lives to it. Society becomes what the mirror reflects back at them. These days, that mirror is TV.

Suddenly all those programs we saw as a parody of TV in futurist movies are coming to pass. I suppose we are only a few years away from “The Running Man” or better yet, “You Bet Your Life” for real.

Let Aquaman Smoke His Dope

2009-02-10T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Alex Bennett

Leave Michael Phelps the fuck alone. Allow the poor guy to lead the life of a 23 year old. Hell, I wish I was 23 again and allowed to learn life by living it in every way possible and find out where I fit in it. What is 23 good for if you can't make mistakes. There's enough time for that later.

I'd like to know who the low life was that released the picture of Phelps sucking away on a bong, but he or she is the real criminal here. Doesn't Phelps have the right to a private life? We need laws to protect victims of this sort of thing. It seems that privacy just isn't protected. Just because he swam faster than anybody else, does that deny him privacy? He should be allowed to sue the people who took and then released the pictures along with all the asshole publications that published them.

Which brings us around to pot itself. There isn't a single informed human being in America who doesn't know what a benign drug it is. Sure it gets you high, but that's really all it does. It doesn't make you aggressive and commit hostile actions it only makes you hungry. But you know all that.

What really pisses me off is the public face on this thing. The news people all acting astonished and calling him reckless when in all probability if they are under 70, they have tried pot or been around it. It's hard to believe that after all these years we still pretend that it is some loathsome drug habit and still accept it's illegality.

Years ago in New York City, P.J. O'Rourke and I were passing a joint between us when P.J. commented "You know when we get older and get the power this shit's going to be legal". What happened? Not only to pot but to P.J? Oh well I suppose knowing P.J. he still thinks pot should be legal because he's of libertarian bent.

When are we going to stop this charade? As far back as the Indian Hemp Commission report in 1906 the drug was deemed benign. The argument always goes "we need more studies". Aren't 103 years of studies enough.

It's time to make it legal, especially in California where they could use the tax revenue that pot would create.

Time to Whig Out! The Glorious Rants of the U. S. Whig Party!

2009-02-09T00:01:00.004-05:00

by Tom Yamaguchi

Happy 236th birthday to William Henry Harrison, our country's greatest President! Harrison was born on February 9, 1773 on Berkeley Plantation, VA and elected in 1840 as the ninth President, the oldest elected to that office until Ronald Reagan. After three hours of sitting on his horse during his inaugural parade, Harrison gave an hour and forty-five minute long inaugural address while standing in a cold wind and not wearing a hat or coat. Later that night, he made appearances at three inaugural balls. He ended up catching a cold, which later turned to pneumonia.

One month later, Harrison died without having done much of anything as President. Since he didn’t have much of a presidential record for us to complain about, our reformed Whig Party decided that he was our Greatest President. This discovery inspired us to commemorate the 203rd birthday of Harrison with a party in Berkeley, CA in February 1976. Notices were sent out to the media of this important event that coincided with the year of the U.S. bicentennial. One notice was sent to Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen pioneered what has become known as "three dot journalism." Getting mentioned in his column was the noble pursuit of many would be activists, performers, artists, writers, and others who clamored for their well-deserved 15 minutes of fame. The birthday party was not mentioned in Caen's column, at least not directly. Several days after, Caen mentioned Millard Fillmore who has a street named for him in San Francisco. "Fillmore was a Whig," wrote Caen, "and what a party that was." That was probably the best publicity we received.

After spending almost 25 years praising William Henry Harrison’s presidential record, we decided to actually investigate the official records of his administration. In 1897, the government Printing Office issued a multi-volume set of books entitled “Messages and Papers of the American Presidents,” and we found a cheap, used copy of the volume we wanted in a bookstore. William Henry Harrison’s administration was covered in the 1841-1849 volume, which published his Special Message withdrawing all pending nominations from the Senate on March 5, 1841. It also printed his March 17 Proclamation calling for Congress to come into an extraordinary session on May 31 to address the nation’s debts. Congress did come into session on that date, although Harrison had been dead for almost two months at that point. The book also reprints his lengthy inaugural address and provides a listing of the participants in the funeral procession.

Our research revealed that Harrison had actually directed the greatest and most honorable order ever issued by an American President. This order has been covered up for over 100 years. Harrison had directed Secretary of State Daniel Webster to issue a circular letter to all the departments of the federal government to request that all Federal Government employees be informed that the President would consider it as ground for dismissal from office the giving or receiving of any campaign contribution by any Federal Government employee. In short, give or receive a campaign donation and you lose your government job. Can you imagine President Obama issuing such an order?

The Whig Party revives the values of Old Tippecanoe, the Hard Cider and Log Cabin candidate. During Harrison's time, the Whigs were composed of individuals who had very little in common. In fact, there was only one position they could agree on. They all hated Andrew Jackson. In keeping with that tradition, our Whig Party hates Andrew Jackson, too. We are incensed by the sight of the Evil Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. If you want to rid yourself of Jackson's corrupting influence on your wallet, you may send all those disgusting pictures of Jackson to the U.S. Whig Party, and we will recycle them for you.

Whig Party Demands Re-Affirmative Action

After the election of Millard Fillmore, the original Whig Party fell apart and was replaced by the secret Know Nothings. We maintain the Know Nothing tradition by being a secret political party and promoting our “top secret” political demands. One of our foremost demands is to have broadcast licenses be non-saleable and non-renewable. The licenses have to be awarded by randomly selected juries. This demand alone guarantees we will receive no coverage by the broadcast media and ensures our status as a secret political party. Our next demand is that those awarded licenses must perform one month of “Re-Affirmative Action!” for every year they hold their licenses. What is “Re-Affirmative Action!” you may ask?

We believe that every Judge, every elected official, every holder of a television or radio broadcasting license, and a sundry list of other officials who enjoy certain rewards as a result of their position should be required to serve one month in a randomly selected jail or prison for every year they hold their position. The Constitution of the United States uses the term “Good Behavior” as the criteria that specifies the length for judicial terms, with the term “Good Behavior” being otherwise undefined. We want Congress to pass a law that requires the yearly performance of “Re-Affirmative Action!” to be a necessary component of “Good Behavior.” Courts and trials would be unnecessary because the performance of one’s “Re-Affirmative Action!” duties would merely be yet another administrative requirement necessary for holding the office, position, or license. We also think all lawyers should be required to perform “Re-Affirmative Action!” for two weeks for each year they are licensed to be lawyers.

Whigs contend that our leaders are junkies, strung out on campaign contributions. They often perform amazing acts of political prostitution in order to obtain more contributions. Since our laws have traditionally dealt with social problems by throwing junkies and prostitutes in jail, we believe that throwing political junkies and prostitutes in jail through the performance of “Re-Affirmative Action!” would be a social improvement.

Let us then celebrate the presidency of William Henry Harrison. If not for a fatal case of pneumonia, he would have gone down in history as just another militaristic, Indian-killing, asshole, son-of-a-bitch. Join us in a toast of hard cider and a round of stirring campaign songs.

Rock-a-bye Baby,

Daddy's a Whig.

Before he comes home, hard cider he'll swig.

And then become tipsy and over he'll fall.

And down will come Daddy, Tip, Tyler, and all.

Send a stamped, self-addressed #10 envelope to P.O. Box 4210, Berkeley, CA 94704 if you want to receive a leaflet. The Whig Party cheerfully embezzles all contributions. Since we are a secretive political party, we usually don't respond to e-mail sent to uswhigparty@yahoo.com, but you can try anyway. In fact, we are quite suspicious of all communications. They don't call us Know Nothings for nothing.

Sunday Funnies Redux

2009-02-08T00:01:00.002-05:00

Here is a tribute to one of the funniest comedians that I have ever known, the late Warren Thomas. He possessed one of the fastest comedy minds in the business and this Sunday lets honor him with this video. Had he lived he would have become a major player. We miss him.

You Must Watch This!

2009-02-05T00:01:00.001-05:00

My dear friend Karin Babbitt sent me the link to this video of a plea from her mother who is and prison camp survivor. Not only is it impassioned but an unbelievable story. If you feel compelled to action you can go to this site for further information. http://FreeDinasArt.wordpress.com

18 BILLION DOLLARS IN BONUSES? REALLY?

2009-02-04T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Bruce David
Editorial Director
Hustler

It's an outrage. The very people responsible for destroying our economy -- the crooks on Wall Street -- saw no problem in giving out 18 billion dollars in bonuses despite the fact that their institutions are broke. Aren't bonuses supposed to be based on a percentage of the profits a business -- in this case a bank or investment house or brokerage house -- makes? They didn't have any profits in 2008! In fact, they asked the American people to bail them out. Had we failed to do so most -- if not all -- of the great banking and investment institutions would have failed. So it was your money and mine that they gave out in bonuses -- the tax money we gave the government which then went to the TARP.

Even more outrageous was the response of Wall Street when President Obama called them out on their actions. Ali Velshi, CNN's Chief Business Correspondent -- a regular Wall Street cheerleader -- actually had the nerve to defend the bonuses, saying they are considered a normal part of the salary on Wall Street. Sans bonuses, a lot of the lower echelon employees might only take home a mere $100,000 for the year. I say they're damned lucky if they take home anything. And I'm sure most Americans would be quite happy to make $100,000 or even $50,000 a year.

Meanwhile, FOX News was busy defending Wall Street by saying the bonuses were paid as a percentage of sales made by individual brokers. In other words, somehow the individual who made money for the company should be separated from the company itself which is broke. That almost makes sense except for one thing: The company is broke! They’re unable to fulfill their obligations to these employees. And I can’t afford to help them do so.

So here's the deal: I want our money back! All eighteen billion -- or twenty billion (the latest number I'm hearing) -- of the 700 billion that was part of the bailout. President Obama should immediately tell those criminal elitists on Wall Street he's taking that 18 billion out of the unpaid remainder of the TARP. If they want it back, Merrill Lynch and those other Wall Street creeps will have to recover it from the people they gave bonuses to.

And one other thing: CNN should fire Ali Velshi. He's a moron. As for FOX, who cares what they say? No one with half a brain believes them anyhow.

Tag! You're it!

2009-02-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

by Tom Yamaguchi

Last week, Alex tagged me on Facebook with a challenge called "25 Random Things About Me. Here are the rules:

"Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you."

Always willing to accept a writing challenge, I made my list, posted it as instructed, and tagged 25 more Facebook friends who I wanted to know more about.

This is my list:
1. I have lived in the same house in West Berkeley for almost 28 years.
2. I generally can't cook, but I love to make pesto.
3. I love watching animated cartoons, especially Tex Avery and Chuck Jones.
4. Once, when I saw the Kinks at the Concord Pavilion, I was one of the fans who got to shake Ray Davies' hand.
5. One thing I miss about San Diego is OB People's Food.
6. I came out as a gay man at age 40.
7. I was adopted at age 19.
8. One of my favorite places to visit as a kid was the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
9. I wish society had a more positive attitude about homosexuality when I was a teenager.
10. I was trained to write functional resumes and have assisted several hundred homeless people looking for jobs.
11. I am disappointed that I have not been able to maintain a close friendship with my ex-wife.
12. I have ridden my bicycle several times up Mount Madonna.
13. Though I am not a strict vegetarian, I am not really into steak or hot dogs.
14. I used to help run a food buying club and am now a member of the CoG coop grocery.
15. I regularly contribute to the Radio Bolo blog.
16. My first bicycle commute was from Ocean Beach to Kearny Mesa in San Diego during the seventies.
17. My first full time job as a political activist was gathering signatures to get Bill Press' Tax Big Oil initiative on the ballot in 1980.
18. I edit the monthly newsletter for Strawberry Creek Friends Meeting and help update the website.
19. I have one thing in common with Barack Obama. I'm left-handed.
20. I spent the first 13 years of my life in South Jersey.
21. i was originally named after my father, Thomas Francis Campbell.
22. I am really concerned for the environment and the future for my two daughters.
23. I wish I had done more traveling when I was younger, but now I feel guilty about airplane travel.
24. I do love riding trains, even though I get frustrated when they are delayed.
25. I wish they had Macintosh computers when I was in elementary school.

After posting, I realized I wanted to add another thing to the list. There is a picture of me on the streets views of Google Maps. Last summer, a friend reminded me of a previous encounter we had near his Emeryville office. Larry, who is an architect, was walking to the corner with one of his co-workers when I came by on my bicycle. I stopped, and we talked for a couple minutes. Then I went on my way. Later, Larry was looking at Google maps in order give a client driving directions. Our previous encounter was now completely recorded in photos, and none of us were aware our pictures were being taken.

So why stop at 26? Here are 25 more random (an not so random) things about me.

26. I am viewable on Google Maps with my bicycle at the southwest corner of 59th and Doyle in Emeryville, CA.
27. My first personal computer was a Commodore 128.
28. My first word processor was SpeedScript, which I typed in Machine Language line by line from a book of Commodore programs and games.
29. My first email account was with QuantumLink, a predecessor to America Online.
30. My first Internet email accounts were with the Well and Peacenet.
31. My previous jobs include dishwasher, janitor, receptionist, personal care attendant, canvasser, signature gatherer, assembly worker, and literacy tutor.
32. During my time as an assembly worker, I was also a failed union organizer.
33. For much of my adult life, I had long hair. When I decide to get it cut, I donated my ponytail to Locks of Love, an organization that makes wigs for cancer patients.
34. As an opponent of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, I was arrested for trespassing.
35. The anti-nuclear activists I stayed in jail with included Jackson Browne, Wavy Gravy, and Robert Blake.
36. Listening to Dr. Steven Chu helped me change my position on nuclear power, along with the help of a friend who teaches high school science.
37. I attended the 1988 Democratic Party convention as an attendant for a delegate who uses a wheelchair.
38. During the Democratic Convention, I stayed with the California delegation at the Atlanta Hilton where the infamous Rob Lowe video was made.
39. I called the Alex Bennett program on a pay phone in the lobby of the Atlanta Hilton. (Who knows, maybe while Rob Lowe was up in his room, making that video.)
40.One of the first things I do each day on the web is read the comics, including Dilbert and Zippy the Pinhead.
41. The most fun I had in San Francisco was visiting Alex Bennett's show and hanging out with some very talented comedians.
42. My favorite drugs are coffee and chocolate.
43. I used to be a part of the nude beach scene at Black's Beach in La Jolla, CA.
44. Every February 9, I celebrate William Henry Harrison's birthday.
45. I am in favor of touch screen voting because I believe people with disabilities have the right to cast a secret ballot.
46. Alex Bennett used many of the letters I sent him for his Letters segment.
47. I did not learn how to drive and get my license until I was 20, which is not typical of young males in Southern California.
48. Although I tend to be a skeptic, I believe in a world where peace is possible.
49. The best quality I find in any person is a sense of humor.
50. I am continually amazed that I meet so many interesting people.

Now, dear reader, consider yourself tagged. Create you own list of 25 random things about you. Share them if you like.

You may join the Great American Broadcast Group on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?id=1663960847#/group.php?gid=48937007494

Where Are The Jobs?

2009-01-28T00:01:00.003-05:00

Slowly but surely the American people are being strangled to death. Is it because there is no money out there? Not really but it's all being squirreled away by greedy companies who just want to keep making a high profit. The real reason why so many people are being let go is not that keeping them would drive the company under, but that they want to keep profits high in down times. The stupidity is that by letting people go they are only exacerbating the situation more and may be sealing their doom in the future.

On monday a record a record 75,000 job cuts were announced. How many of them were needed because there was no work for those people and how many were because those companies wanted to maximize profits in bad times.

Caterpillar who makes farm and construction equipment announced that 20,000 people would be laid off. If nobody is buying tractors then there is no sense in building them, but is 20,000 realistic or is that number unreasonably high in order to make a bigger profit in bad times?

Clear Channel an outfit that owns the most broadcast stations in America totaling over 1200 and a nationwide billboard business, let go 1,850 people. It is interesting that last year their revenues fell 9%, but they made a profit and that current number laid off is 9% of the company's total staffing. The question is are they afraid of going into the red or just wanting to keep profits the same as in better years?

We are living in times when people are expendable. In fact most companies look at the employee as a a liability where in the past they were an asset. Company loyalty to their staff is almost negligible and yet the company demands loyalty from them. It's a bad deal all around.

So what can the government do. First of all quit bailing out companies who will take the money and let people go. Earmark that money for job security and nothing else. But if its a chance to help a corporation or help the people, guess who's taking a walk? The only reason the government wants to get money in the hands of the people is so they will turn around and spend it on the corporation, not to put food in their mouth but when they do, they dole out the food in a manner that makes people grovel at the cost of their self esteem.

I wish I could come up with a rosy end to this blog, but there isn't one. Maybe it's just that capitalism is a miserable failure and nobody is ready to admit it.

Lefty Obamanation

2009-01-27T00:01:00.000-05:00

By Tom Tamaguchi

Barack Hussein Obama did not waste any time before publicly flaunting his perverse, degenerate lifestyle. Sitting down to sign the first proclamation of his presidency, witnesses stood in horror as Obama grabbed his pen with his left hand. Then, with the audacity that has become his trademark, Obama glared at the shocked onlookers and blurted out, "I'm a lefty. Get used to it." With that act, the rumors that had circulated during the campaign were finally confirmed. Our newly elected President has chosen the left-handed lifestyle.

Religious leaders have pointed to the tendency of Americans to elect left-handed leaders as a sign our nation is headed to moral oblivion. Past presidents such have Bill Clinton have tried to keep their sinister tendencies quiet. Ronald Reagan successfully converted to the proper hand, though it took years of therapy. It is said, that while governor of California, several interventions were performed at a secret location near Lake Tahoe. For Barack Obama, it may already be too late.

"It's shameful, " says the Reverend Gilbert Procturn. "All major religions reject the left-handed lifestyle as morally repugnant. The left hand is the unclean hand. You use your left hand to wipe yourself after using the toilet. When I see our President touching a legal document with his unclean hand, it is like he is wiping himself with the United States Constitution."

There is no doubt in Rev. Procturn's mind that sinisterism is against all that Christianity stands for. "Ask our good Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. If they tried to grab a pencil with the wrong hand in Catholic School, there would be a nun with a ruler on top of them ready to inflict serious damage. If they didn't comply, you better believe those left hands would end up in no condition to hold anything."

This approach may seem a bit severe to some in the psychological community. Richard Coma of the Brain Healing Institute has developed a cure for what he calls Opposite Brain Disorder or OBD. "Lefties are thinking in the wrong side of their brains, and we need to reach out with God's love to help them with their problem." Coma developed his methods through interventions similar to Reagan's treatments in a secret Lake Tahoe condominium. Coma admits that he once chose the sinister lifestyle. "My therapist was a big man. He was very powerful and firm. After one weekend session, I found I could use my right hand and enjoy it."

Now it is Coma who is administering the treatments. "If I have a relapse, I can even perform the treatments on myself." He admits that not all of his peers approve of his method. "They took away my license to practice psychotherapy. It was all very political. They just don't want their patients to know the truth."

Coma cites statistics and provides evidence the left-handed die younger and live completely miserable lives. "Nobody really wants to be left-handed. Doesn't everybody want to be normal, I mean, like everybody else?"

Coma supports himself by selling books and conducting trainings at the Brain Healing Institute. His book for parents, Growing up Right, shows how OBD can be caught and reversed at a very young age. "Restraining the left hand behind your child's back is one way you can heal OBD. It may sound harsh, but think of it as tough love. Have faith and remember that OBD can be cured."

The Reverend Procturn is more pessimistic. "Showing Obama with his left hand hooked around his pen and smiling like that sends the wrong message to our nation's youth. If we don't condemn this shameful public performance, kids will think there is nothing wrong with it. Obama is recruiting them to his perverted, sinister lifestyle. Obama and all of them are headed straight to hell. We have to take a moral stand for this country. "

Would we have been better off if Obama had not been elected? "No," admitted the Reverend. "There is no hope. McCain is left-handed, too."

Digital Exam

2009-01-26T00:01:00.002-05:00

With the February "drop dead" date for the digital conversion of television moved to June 12th, I figured it was time to run one of my Hustler columns that dealt with this mess. It was edited as always by Bruce David.

OK. Here’s the exam. What does the date February 17, 2009 mean to you? Sure you know you’ve seen it somewhere but can remember. How about the lower third of your favorite TV show. Now you’ve got it. That’s the day TV goes completely digital and your old reliable standby analog TV will disappear forever. Have I lost you yet? Well if I have here’s a little primer.

In May 1941 the FCC adopted what we now have as our television standard of 525 scan lines. An electron beam sketched the picture in small lines across the face of the television tube. The total number of those lines amounted to 525. We weren’t the first with TV , Germany and Great Britain were doing it in the ’30 and their scan lines were more at 625 and 725. Why we adopted an inferior system is beyond me, but I bet it had something to do with politics and payoffs. The more lines the better the definition of the picture. That’s why if you’ve ever watched TV in Europe, the picture always seemed so much better. To add to all this confusion every country had a different system. Ours was called “NTSC”. Europe had “PAL” while even other countries had “SECAM”. There was no worldwide standard. What a mess.

TV here began to make its commercial debut in 1946. It would have been earlier but the world war held off our launch. It was black and white and it was fuzzy, but people would sit around happily watching the old Indian head test pattern just because it was there.

Color didn’t come along that much later. The first system to be approved by the FCC was from CBS who started broadcasting color in 1951. It involved a large whirling color wheel and was incompatible with black and white. RCA ‘s system wasn’t approved because it really wasn’t ready for primetime. In spite of it all RCA persevered by among other things, coming up with a compatible system, improving on the original set and by starting rumors that the color wheel of the CBS sets could come loose and decapitate its viewers. The fight was a prolonged affair, but CBS gave up due to production problems. The eventual winner was RCA. RCA’s TV network NBC started colorcasts in 1953.

Since that time 55 years ago nothing has really changed with the possible exception of the addition of stereo sound.

In the meantime other countries, notably Japan, had been working on new systems meant to create a picture of High Definition. Most of them were analog as opposed to digital.

I suppose another explanation is due. Analog is a variable continuous signal. Digital is a series of 0’s and 1’s basically representing on and off. Digital is said to be more flexible and efficient than analog and uses less bandwidth. Still scratching your head? Never mind it’s not important to know how it works as much as that it exists and that everyone’s going to get rich from it.

The FCC then mandated that there should be a cut off date for analog television and after many tries finally came up with February 17, 2009. Yes it’s a Tuesday which makes no sense at all.

So is all this better for you? Well the old system was ancient, but who this is really great for are the people who make TV equipment. There’s just no way they will lose on this deal.

If you have an old fashioned tube set, you must have a converter, which can be had for around $50 and less if you get a coupon from the government. However don’t buy that converter or throw out your TV set just yet. If you have cable or satellite you are ready good to go since that’s all you will need. If you don’t it’s time to get that converter or just buy a new fangled digital picture box.

The cost of the flat screen digital TV’s are coming down to what tube prices once were. If you look around you can get into a 32” for around $500.

All that said, what happens to people who need food first and rely on over the air signals as their only source of entertainment and information? Hasn’t anybody heard that there’s a recession on? Gas costs a bundle and “Mac and Cheese” is a major staple.

There might have been a better way. Those old channels could have been kept on the air but the telecommunication boys have been drooling to get their hands on them for years. Think of the Trillions being spent by everyone to do the conversion. it’s good for business.

Here’s how this is this good for you? Remember all those crappy shows on your old TV? Now they will all be in Hi-Def.

All this still confusing? Then let me tell you about the two digital systems 1080i and 720p not to mention the 1080p they can’t broadcast but is on Blu-ray……..

Aww fuck it! It’s all a big mess.

The Sunday Funnies

2009-01-25T00:01:00.002-05:00

So there we were in California for my induction into the "San Francisco Bay Area Radio Hall Of Fame" and we had just come back from visiting an old high school buddy. While at his place we talked about old times and he let it slip that I used to use "Jerry Bennett" as my show business nom de plume. Well this set "Girlfriend" into hysterics and by the time we got back to my business manager's place in Larkspur she couldn't stop laughing. Here she tries to profess her undying love for me but just can't. Jerry???? I was young and unimaginative.

W's Farewell-More Great Moments in Disappointment

2009-01-21T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Tom Yamaguchi

Breaking news-Bush now admits he has made some mistakes during his presidency. We understand, George. We've made a couple, too: 2000 and 2004. But that is another story.

It may be too early to judge if Bush is the worst President in history. He is clearly the most disappointing in my lifetime, even more disappointing than Jimmy Carter. I voted for Jimmy Carter. What was I thinking? Oh that's right; I was getting my news from Rolling Stone and taking advice from Hunter S. Thompson. What was I thinking?

Can we say anything positive about the presidency of George W. Bush? He did raise money to fight the AIDS epidemic in Africa. I am glad Bush and the Republicans are taking the AIDS epidemic seriously. Too bad they weren't so motivated when the epidemic started while Reagan was president in the 1980's. We could have saved a lot of money and lot of lives. Reagan did not say the word AIDS in public until the middle of his second term.

Bush may be right about keeping us safe from more terrorist attacks, but we have no way of verifying that. He says he was not afraid to make the tough decisions, but what about making tough decisions on climate change? The impact of global warming is a greater threat to our safety than Al Qaida. Failure to ratify the Kyoto Treaty is on Bush's list accomplishments. "I guess I could have been popular by accepting Kyoto, which I felt was a flawed treaty," he said at his final press conference, "and proposed something different and more constructive." Instead, the Senate ended up not ratifying any treaty. Frustrated cities and states have committed themselves to achieving the goals set by Kyoto while the federal government has done nothing. Bush's EPA was more interested in fighting states from using clean air laws to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Bush was elected in 2000 with the high hopes of being a compassionate conservative. He acknowledged that half the country had voted against him. He promised to reach across the aisle as he had done as Texas Governor. One thing I didn't hear him say during the 2000 campaign was "Oh, and if elected, I will go to war with Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein." If he did, I missed that speech. He may want us to believe the war was a reaction to 9/11. All the evidence, including the Downing Street Memo, show the Bush people were setting us up for the war as soon as they got into office. Lyndon Johnson's vision of a Great Society was derailed by the Vietnam War. To his defense, Johnson got stuck with a war he inherited from Eisenhower and Kennedy. Bush was derailed by a war he started.

All presidents disappoint us, and Obama will be no exception. So far, the disappointments have been nothing to get too worked up about. Rick Warren is a bad choice, but he will be out of the picture soon enough. The nominee for Treasury Secretary has to explain why he didn't pay his income taxes. Bush's Defense Secretary is keeping his job after being responsible for keeping our troops in Iraq and preventing detainees in Guantanamo Bay from getting due process. The nominee for Surgeon General is not a supporter of universal health care and seems to be in bed with the major drug companies. We are sure to see bigger disappointments.

According to the St. Petersburg Times, creator of the Truth-O-Meter, Obama made 510 promises in his campaign. The Truth-O-Meter evaluated the accuracy of the candidates' campaign advertising. Now the paper will be evaluating Obama's campaign promises with the Obameter. The Obameter will track how many of those promises the new president will keep and how many he will break. The web site, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises, notes that Obama asks us to hold him accountable and replies, "OK, we will."

When we do find ourselves getting really upset with Obama, we can try saying this: "President John McCain." That should help ease the pain a bit.

Welcome To The Inhoguration

2009-01-20T00:01:00.008-05:00

Finally our long national nightmare is over. Here's hoping that we don't have a new one, but things don't look good.

First of all the new president has fucked up a lot. Come on, Rick Warren for christ sake! What a slap in the face to gays everywhere who campaigned for Obama to have this future Jerry Falwell give the invocation. To appease the gays a few days ago he asked an Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson who is gay to give the invocation, but not at the inhoguration but at the Sunday kickoff event. Obama just doesn't get it. He says he wants to be inclusive. Then why not invite the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi Party? Warren is an immoral fuck who shouldn't be allowed within 10 miles of this event let alone on the dias. As for being inclusive, for 8 goddamn years they didn't include us. Fuck 'em, it's our turn. Obama wants to compromise. Nothing good ever comes out of compromise except watered down ideas.

Then there is the Bill Richardson gaffe. He had to step down from being Commerce Secretary due to an investigation that is going on about possible improprieties on his part. Then there was his Treasury Secretary to be Timothy Geithner who it seems forgot to pay some $30,000 in taxes and has an undocumented alien working for him. All this from a guy who will oversee the IRS. How about Julius Genachowski his choice for FCC Commisioner who was an old pal from law school who was once an FCC attorney. Smell like cronyism doesn't it? If these actions were made by a Republican the liberals would have a "hissy fit".

Now comes the biggest oversight of all. I believe we are in a recession if not a downright depression that is effecting everyone. Then why the fuck are we spending over $150 million dollars on the inhoguration? Sure $45 million is in private funds, but still, what kind of example of austerity does this send? Obama says he wants recognize these financial times so he asked that no flowers be bought for the 10...count 'em 10 inhogural balls. Wow does that ever send a message of modest behavior and change.

If he really wanted to send a message of change and make a point that these are tough times, he could have just done the whole swearing in thing inside The White House and televised it. His hero Franklin D. Roosevelt did that in 1942 when there was a war on and said it would be in bad taste to lavish any extravagance on the event. The speech was short and the event small.

So tonight inside people in their tux and gowns will be feting on wine an pheasant in our nation's capitol while outside Americans go hungry and wonder how they will survive this financial Apocalypse. It is sad to say that this man, who so many are putting their faith in, is kicking off his presidency in such an elitist way.

The sad part is that he doesn't even see it.

Kicking A Man When He's Dead

2009-01-19T00:01:00.000-05:00

It's a holiday so here is a rerun of one of my favorites

This article appeared as one of my columns for Hustler Magazine and was edited by Bruce David. Of all the columns I have done so far, this one is my favorite and I thought I would share it with you.

A few months ago an article of mine appeared in Hustler magazine called “The Political Cage Match” in which I discussed the appalling coverage by the news networks of the campaign for the presidency. I especially picked on NBC whose coverage was so terrible that I was compelled to rip each and everyone of their sleazy news team a new asshole. But I saved my biggest salvo for Tim Russert a man who embodied everything that has been egregious about this year’s election coverage. As luck would have it old Tim died just about day and date with that issue coming out. Did I feel bad? Did I try and buy up all the known copies of that issue? No! In fact I felt no remorse about my critique. The coverage of his death that followed only made me more resolute in my feelings as it went into overkill.

Constantly for seven straight days they hammered away at his passing. Look, I’m not so hard hearted as to not understand that the passing of a close associate, especially one that came so suddenly did warrant some on the air tributes but this went on for a week.

It was as though NBC News was sitting Shiva for a gentile. Sitting Shiva for all you non-Jews out there is ritual in which the immediate family goes back to the home and (if you’re really orthodox) sit on hard benches for seven days while friends come by and bring food and drink for them. I work about a block away from their New York News Center and was almost compelled to walk over there with a box of knishes it was getting so morbid. It’s a toss up as to which is in worse taste, what I am writing now or the way they handled the whole thing.

All the tributes told us what a great guy he was. There were remembrances about what a great father he was. Proof of that was his son Luke who seemed like a well mannered and decent individual of great bearing, but who wound up spending more screen time that week than any NBC newsman. After a while it seemed like he was auditioning for his father’s job. Don’t worry if you liked him, I’m sure this won’t be the last we’ll see of him.

There were constant mentions of what a “workaholic” he was, sometimes working as much as 14 hours or more a day. My question is, when did he have enough time to be a great husband and father? Didn’t he realize the besides depriving his family he was setting himself up for the heart event that removed him from their lives completely?

By the way, I should note that a few weeks later Tony Snow, the former press secretary and host on Fox news died. In many ways he was more important than Tim, but the media played this one out after just a weekend and that was it. Maybe Fox does have some taste after all.

Sure it was sad that Tim had to go at the age of 58. It is far too young for anyone to die. But so is 18 or 21 or even 34 and those are ages that our men and women are being slaughtered at in the war in Iraq. So many soldiers died so young and all because of the likes of Tim Russert.

It was “Timid Tim” after all who was part of the press helping George Bush beat the drums for war by believing every press handout from the White House without question. As Washington bureau chief for NBC he made major editorial decisions and allowed the “Bushies” to get away with wholesale murder not by action but by inaction. He blithely allowed the run up to the war to be reported without asking questions.

The press should be our ombudsmen. We don’t have access to power and the truth but they do and we invest in them the responsibility to do what we cannot. The value of a strong and vigilant press is that they do the snooping for us and attempt to sort fact from fiction.

So whom am I supposed to feel sorry for? Tim at 58 who dropped dead while recording the opening for “Meet The Press” at the air-conditioned NBC studios in Washington DC or the soldier who died younger than he should have lying in a ditch somewhere in the blazing heat of the Middle East. It’s got to be the soldier who found himself in a hellhole because Tim didn’t do his job.

Mind you, I’m not callous. I feel sorry for Tim’s family who never again will have the fleeting glance of seeing him in a blur going out the door to work at dawn and then a quick peek when he arrived home at 10:00 at night exhausted. Most of all I feel sad for Tim Russert who left this “mortal coil” with blood on his conscience because he failed in his duty as a journalist to ferret out the truth.

Some Sunday Fun Video

2009-01-18T00:01:00.000-05:00

Girlfriend and I go to brunch with Michael Billy and his significant other Matt.

"Mosaic" On LinkTV Is The Worlds Most Interesting Newscast

2009-01-15T12:30:00.006-05:00

For the longest time I have been checking in on this program from LinkTV. To truly understand the issues, you have to look at all perspectives of the issues. This is one of the best examples of that mantra. If you come and check this everyday, it will change as the episodes do.

Just Something to Amuse You On A Frozen Thursday

2009-01-15T12:26:00.001-05:00

Ann Coulter Visits "The View"

2009-01-14T00:02:00.003-05:00

By Alex Bennett

On Tuesday Ann Coulter visited "The View" and its requisite "hen party". What bothered me is that is that it turned out to be a gang hit of 5 on 1. I intensely dislike Coulter, but this encounter was really quite unfair. It seemed as though they were ready to pounce on her the minute she came out. I think it is wrong to invite someone to be on a show and then do what they did. Yes it's Coulter, but fairness would dictate that one person should have been selected to argue with her.

Coulter talked about single motherhood especially among blacks being corrosive to the children and our society. Interestingly she was simply making in her abrasive, PR getting way, the same things that Bill Cosby and President-Elect Obama has been saying.

These women made the case for everything that Coulter has said about what she feels is liberal bias and unfairness. All they did was play into her game while she sold a few more books. Boy these women are morons!

I Got Screwed And So Did You!

2009-01-14T00:01:00.002-05:00

Barack Obama is engaging in croneyism. Reprinted is this item from Broadcast Television from yesterday. Oh well there goes my future career because "Mr. Change" is doing what every other pol would do and give friend a cushy job.

Genachowski Expected to Head FCC Broadcast agenda likely to include DTV public interest obligations...

The word in Washington is that Julius Genachowski will be named FCC chairman. The 46-year-old is a former law school chum of the President-elect and a member of his transition team. Genachowski also served as media advisor for Reed Hundt, chairman of the FCC from 1993-97. Hundt gives Genachowski props in his 1997 book, “So You Say You Want a Revolution.”

“During the summer of 1994, my broadcast team, including a brilliant former Supreme Court law clerk, Julius Genchowski, assembled our network-friendly broadcast policy. In an effort to find compromise between the networks and the public interest advocates, the team proposed to require three hours of educational television per week.”

Genachowski clerked for Justices Souter and Brennan, and for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Abner Mikva. He also worked for Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the Iran-Contra joint committee.

Aside from helping craft the current public interest obligations for broadcasters, little is known about Genachowski’s view of the industry. He is expected to push the establishment public interest rules for digital TV, which have not been set, and to oppose the relaxation of media ownership limits.

Genachowski will likely push broadband initiatives, having worked in Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp for eight years. He’s not expected to be the bane to the cable industry that is current Chairman Kevin Martin, who’s called for a la carte pricing over the last two years.

Genachowski’s regulatory orientation will likely be influenced by his entrepreneurial experience. He’s a co-founder of Rock Creek, a venture capital firm, and founding partner of LaunchBox Digital, a Washington, D.C. incubator for online startups.

Political veterans on Capitol Hill describe Genachowski as “highly qualified” and “smart.” One former colleague said, “Extremely intelligent, fair and generous with his time.”

Once appointed, Genachowski will have to be confirmed by the Senate, which could take several weeks. President-elect Obama is expected to name one of the two democratic FCC commissioners--Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps--interim chairman some time next week.

Blood on the Tracks

2009-01-13T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Tom Yamaguchi

Like many cities, Oakland has a street named for Martin Luther King Jr. The former Grove Street runs north from downtown Oakland and through the city of Berkeley. At the border of the two cities is a sculpture called Here/There. The two words appear in eight-foot steel letters, a reference to Gertrude Stein's famous line, "There is no there there." The "There" part is on the Oakland side. The art piece sits on a plaza next to the tracks of Bay Area Rapid Transit where the tracks descend into a tunnel beneath Berkeley after traveling elevated along MLK Jr. Way in North Oakland. Trains speed commuters along the elevated tracks, past the old Merritt College campus where the Black Panther Party was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966.

But it was on a different set of BART tracks that Oscar Grant was riding on early in the morning on New Year's Day. That section emerges from a tunnel from downtown Oakland to another elevated track through East Oakland. The track roughly parallels International Blvd., which has much in common with MLK Jr. Way. If you are looking for what is wrong with America's big cities, you can find it along either of those two Oakland streets.

Oscar Grant was riding BART that morning after joining the crowds in San Francisco celebrating the arrival of 2009 with fireworks. The train stopped at Fruitvale station with reports that a fight had broken out between two groups of young people. BART has its own police force, and a group of BART police officers were dispatched to the station platform, pulling suspects off the train as other riders watched the spectacle. Before it was over, Oscar Grant was dead. At Grant's funeral one week later, no one could still answer the question "Why?"

BART first reported that there was no recording from the surveillance cameras on the station platform. It soon retracted that statement and reported a recording was made but did not show the incident. Then Karina Vargas stepped forward. She recorded the event on the new camera she received for Christmas. Vargas turned her footage to KPIX-TV in San Francisco, determined to make her evidence public. She was able to get away from police who wanted to confiscate her camera. Other cameras were confiscated by the police that morning, but fortunately not all of them. More videos have since been given to the local media.

As BART stumbled in its effort to conduct its investigation, the public was left with only the raw video footage to judge what happened. They do show the officer Johannes Mehserle shooting Oscar Grant in the back as Grant lay on his stomach on the floor. Mehserle resigned his position before he could be forced to submit to an interview for the internal investigation. We can only guess what caused Mehserle to shoot Grant. One theory is he had reached for his taser but had pulled his service revolver instead.

The video evidence itself is inconclusive. There is a lot of screaming and very little coherent audio. Many of the shots by Vargas' camera were blurred or blocked by the crowds. Fortunately, Vargas was able to see what she was unable to record on video. She described the scene in detail for KPIX, and what she saw was Grant and the other detainees cooperating with police and not resisting arrest. If what Vargas saw is true, then there was no reason for Mehserle to pull a gun or a taser. People can speculate about the cause of the fight that morning or Grant's previous brushes with the law. None of that changes that Oscar Grant appeared to do nothing that morning to deserve being shot.

On the day of Oscar Grant's funeral, a demonstration was held at the Fruitvale BART station. Though intended to be a peaceful gathering, a group broke off and started marching west on International Blvd. They ended up in downtown Oakland where they started smashing windows, setting fires, and throwing anything they could find at police. Mayor Ron Dellums, who started his political career as an anti-Vietnam War activist, was shouted down as he tried to calm the crowd. He quickly retreated into City Hall. Grant's family pleaded for calm, as well, to no avail. Later, the organizer of the demonstration Evan Shamar broke down in tears as he spoke to the press. "I was devastated by it," Shamar told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I worked diligently for the past 72 hours, and for it to be destroyed by a group of anarchists was extremely upsetting. I felt like my integrity had been compromised."

It is easy to feel hopeless for the future of Oakland, but for a number of residents the coming MLK Jr. holiday represents a new opportunity. This year, it happens the day before the inauguration. Barack Obama is asking the nation to celebrate his inauguration by joining the National Day of Service. Many do not know that the MLK Jr. holiday was originally intended to be a day where people volunteer to the benefit of their communities. The call went out via email to Obama's list of supporters. Participants were invited to register their events or volunteer for events already registered by going to www.usaservice.org. In Oakland, one group will be cleaning up trash along International Blvd. and planting seeds and plants along tree wells. Another group will be planting trees on the median beneath the BART tracks along MLK Jr. Way. One tree will be dedicated to those who died as a result of violence during the past year.

A token effort, you might say, and you might be right. If the job stops there, nothing will change. Or it could be the first step in a new direction, one where people can learn how to be community organizers. The Obama campaign has discovered some very powerful organizing tools through email, the web, and social networking. These tools are energizing young people like nothing we have seen since the 1960's. They helped elect our first African American President. Will those tools work to bring peace to Oakland? Who knows? At least it is worth the try.

I have volunteered in elementary school classrooms during past King holidays. The students sing Stevie Wonder's birthday song and hang King's portrait on the bulletin board. If asked, they can only tell you two things they know about Martin Luther King: he had a dream, and he got shot. They have been taught about a mythical King who seems to have no connection to what is going on today. They have not been taught what King understood about nonviolent organizing.

"Now I cannot say that violence never wins any victories," said King in a speech made over fifty years ago. "It occasionally wins victories. Nations often receive their independence through the use of violence. But I can say this, that that is all it does. Violence only achieves temporary victory; it never can achieve the ultimate peace. It creates many more social problems than it solves."

The people who rioted on the streets of Oakland may have won some small victory. They may have embarrassed the BART board to speed up its investigation of Grant's killing. But at what price? Minority-owned businesses were trashed, and the owners wonder why they were targeted. There is greater distrust between the police and the public, making it more difficult to find the cooperation needed to solve violent crimes. Blame will be assigned, and people will be vilified. People who felt temporarily empowered by trashing police cars will return to feeling alone and powerless.

We can vilify and abandon Evan Shamar for his inability to organize a peaceful demonstration. Or we can provide him and the other peacemakers of Oakland the tools they need to do the job. This will not be easy work, but it can be achieved. We do not have King here to teach us, but we do have his writings and speeches, as well as the people who knew and worked with him. Obama knows the troubles of our major cities and has committed to invest in their revival. Success can only be achieved by investing heavily in our peacemakers. Step one, as Harvey Milk well understood, is "You gotta give 'em hope."

Since When Did Fairness Become A Dirty Word?

2009-01-12T00:01:00.005-05:00

Here is an item from the Radio and Records website that appeared last Thursday:

It didn’t take the new 111th Congress but a day or two to introduce partisan legislation in both the Senate and House that would block the re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine. On Tuesday (Jan. 6), a pair of Republican senators, Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and John Thune (S.C.) introduced their bill to "prevent the Federal Communications Commission from repromulgating the fairness doctrine (S.34)." The companion measure was introduced the next day, Wednesday (Jan. 7), in the House (H.R. 226) by Republicans Mike Pence, of Indiana, and Greg Walden, of Oregon.

In 1987 at the close of the Reagan White House, the "Fairness Doctrine" which mandated that broadcast outlets present contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues was vacated. It was claimed that the statute had a chilling effect on freedom of speech. That of course was bullshit. We soon found out that without it, freedom of speech was curtailed even more. In the past a talk show host like Rush Limbaugh couldn't just spew his distortion without someone to counter them. When the doctrine was removed Rush seized on the opportunity. The result was a flood of conservative talk shows that permeated the airwaves after that.

I would agree that we might be best served without such a doctrine if the right wing licensees had played fair, but they didn't and for over two decades, left to their own honesty, it was hard hear anything else on the radio but the neo-con palaver. It would be nice to believe that given the freedom to do what was right they would have done so, but they didn't and if the doctrine comes back in some form, then they have no one to blame but themselves and their flagrant disrespect for balance.

Now these assholes are trying to prevent us from instituting any measures that would reign them back in. In fact Mike Pence one of the sponsors of the house bill was a conservative talk show host and station owner. Not exactly the kind of upstanding individual to talk about free speech when he was a perfect representation of that has been wrong without the doctrine.

The article goes on to state:

NAB Executive VP Dennis Wharton this morning (Jan. 8) said, "Since the Fairness Doctrine's elimination in 1987, America has witnessed an absolute explosion in alternative media outlets, providing a rich diversity of viewpoints from all sides of the political spectrum.

What absolute crap! The explosion in alternative media was not the result of the suspension of the "Fairness Doctrine" but with the creation of new uncensored media technologies, paramount among them being the internet. But mass terrestrial broadcasting represented by the NAB which offers more access for more people has failed to show any of this alternative diversity. In fact they have tried to prevent alternative voices as was seen with their war against satellite radio.

Back in 1991 when I was out of work, I had a meeting with the program director at WABC in New York. She had heard of me and positively so. In our talk she asked "What's your political bias?". When I told her I was a lefty, she blanched and said "oh my general manager would never want that!" This of course was the home of Rush Limbaugh and other right wing talk show hosts. That's what the doctrine's suspension created.

This doesn't mean that a host would have to present both views if the station presented a host with an alternative perspective. This means that those stations that ran Rush would also run Tom Hartmann. Currently liberal thought is relegated to a gulag of low power stations with numbers on the lower end of the dial, while the neo-con's are on the powerful stations higher up. To this day, the impact of the liberal programs is diminutive compared to the right wing shows and it's not because they aren't entertaining. It is because they are ghettoized.

For now let's not bring back the "Fairness Doctrine", but let's not make it's implementation impossible by passing a law. This way, the omnipresent fear that we could bring the "Fairness Doctrine back might just might force them to play fair.

The Sunday Funnies 1/11/09

2009-01-11T00:01:00.001-05:00

Here is a very young Dana Gould as he appeared on "The Alex Bennett Comedy Hour". Another funny for you to enjoy on this day of rest.

Why I Should Head the FCC

2009-01-08T00:01:00.010-05:00

by Alex Bennett

With the new administration comes new people to lead just about everything. Come on, Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General? Give me a break! This is the guy that liberal hero Michael Moore eviscerated when he was publicizing "Sicko". He's a Goddamed TV Doc for heaven's sake. Why not nominate "House", he has bigger ratings? So if "Goopy" can get the job, why not me for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission?

This is not a joke. To begin with, I am more than qualified. I know most of the business side and am eminently qualified to deal with the electronic side as well. Hell I can't think of many more people who have the qualifications that I do.

Here are 10 things I'd do to improve communications in this country and the commission as well:

I'd get the FCC back to what its original purpose was, to monitor signals by making sure they were up to snuff and to act as an ombudsman for the public when they have complaints about the licensees.
Take the FCC out of the business of being a censor, a role it was never meant to play.
Make stations get back to the prime tenant of the FCC Telecommunication Act and serve in the "public interest, convenience and necessity" and live out the creed it mandated that "the airwaves belong to the people".
Allow any language and topics at any hour. Most broadcasters wouldn't suddenly go crazy with dirty words or seedy topics because they do have the public and advertisers to deal with. There is currently a chill that exists in all over the air broadcasting that something might go wrong and they would be fined massive amounts of money. Let the marketplace determine what the taste should be.
Reasonable nudity at a reasonable hour. Let's leave the porn to the internet and cable where people can get their fill.
Repeal all the fines given stations for things like the Janet Jackson breast exposure debacle and if they already paid a fine, give them their money back. Broadcasters just should be held liable for the acts of others over which they had no control.
Take all those vacant analog TV channels and convert them to free, uncensored Wi-Fi for the public.
Better wireless phone service that doesn't go dead on you.
While there is some question as to weather the "Fairness Doctrine" should be brought back, I do believe that licensees should be held accountable for a reasonable balance in political and social opinions aired by them.
Finally, channels should be set aside on radio, TV and cable for public access to the airwaves free of charge on a first come first serve basis which would serve the needs of minority opinions and niche needs. By the way, no censorship.

That's petty good for starters. There's a lot more that needs to be done.

If this all sounds good to you go to http://change.gov and under contact send them a note suggesting me. They won't listen, but let's give it a shot.

Am I serious? Enough to quit my job, divest myself of my broadcast stock and move to that hell hole Washington D.C.

To Seat Or Not To Seat

2009-01-07T00:01:00.005-05:00

Roland Burris has a major distinction he is the only black Senator in the US Congress and the first black Senator not to be seated. Seeing Burris being turned away at the doors of the Senate almost looked like something out of 40 years ago in places like Selma Alabama. I suppose the most imortant thing is that there is more at stake this time than a seat at a diner.

It seems that embattled and alleged crook Governor Rob Blagojavich of Illinois appointed him to fill the vacant spot left by Barak Obama's senate seat. It is rumored that Blagojavich attempted to get people to pay for the privilege. This is all alleged. He has yet to be indicted or impeached and yet assholes like Senator Harry Reid worked to block Burris from being seated on the opening day of the senate. In other words Reid has become the judge, jury and executioner of Blagojavich. Hey look, old Rob is probably everything they say he is, but until he is tried somewhere he has the right to appoint Burris.

Of course you have to ask why Burris would want to be put in such a spot. It's because he is an idiot. Others have turned down the offer, but at 71 I suppose Burris figured this was his last chance to be anything but a state functionary. He probably felt that destiny had chosen him for this moment when in fact it was Rob who did and everybody hates Rob and so to, by association, Mr. Burris.

So what to do. Far be it for Reid to yell at Blagojavich for being corrupt because he's had a few problems of his own in the past. I suppose they should seat the guy because Illinois desperately needs full representation since for the past three years that Obama was running for president, they had only one Senator working for them.

Who really needs to be taken to task is the Illinois Secretary of State who refused to sign the papers which is why Burris was turned away. I don't think it's his job to determine what is legal and just sign the paper. He should be dumped.

The other unseated Senator was Al Franken (the former....aww if you don't know by now it doesn't matter) who lost to Norm Coleman in Minnesota on election night by 215 votes. In the mandatory recount Franken pulled ahead by 225. It's a mess and now the Repubs are moaning, so this one isn't exactly in the bank. Franken shows up declaring himself the winner. The Senate officials said "wait a minute" and sent him walking.

I don't like Franken. Not as a TV comic, an author and especially as a talk show host. He's an asshole and I don't like him. For a socialistic minded person he is completely bourgeois to those around him. But he went against Norm Coleman an even bigger asshole so I guess I'll have to go with the lesser of two jerks.

Boy are these two scenarios with no heros!

The Political Cage Match

2009-01-06T00:01:00.003-05:00

Here is an article that Alex Bennett did for Hustler Magazine. Although it pertains to the recent presidential election, it all still holds true. It was edited by Bruce David who always makes Alex look good.

Once upon a time broadcast news was nothing more than rewritten copy from the newspapers. Most newscasts ended with the admonishment “for up to the minute details, consult your local newspapers.” Sure there were a few news commentators, but actual proactive coverage was scarce.

It wasn't until World War II that radio news came into its own, thanks to a renegade reporter named Edward R. Murrow. His vivid reports from London rooftops during air raids put radio reporting on the map. Murrow and his team of CBS reporters defined what we now call “Broadcast Journalism.”

When the war was over the “Murrow Boys” helped define television news, giving CBS its “Tiffany Network” reputation. Broadcast news was finally being taken seriously by everyone except the network “bean counters” who couldn't understand why their bosses allowed it to run at a loss. The bosses simply wanted something positive to point to when people complained about the “Beverly Hillbillies”. But that was then and this is now.

The downfall of broadcast news can be traced to the creation of CNN. Not that CNN wasn't a great concept. Ted Turner, disturbed by what he saw as the bias of Dan Rather (letting his views intrude on the newscast), decided to create a non-biased 24/7 news service. Now, for the first time, the news had to be profitable. Too bad money and good journalism don't mix...unless you compromise your product.

For 11 years CNN just barely kept afloat. Then, in 1991, their coverage of the Gulf War changed everything. CNN was the only news organization with a live feed during the bombing of Baghdad. Their subsequent war coverage not only gave cable news credibility but large numbers. With numbers, came profit.

Broadcast news had become big money just as the grizzled and aging old guard reporters were falling by the wayside. They were replaced by “journalists” who had a new agenda: fame, glory, big money and perfect hair. Journalistic credibility quickly eroded. By the time we got to the second Iraq war, the bar had been significantly lowered.

Smelling profits, other organizations entered the cable news frey. With their right wing bias, Fox gave CNN a run for its money, eventually knocking them into second place. In response, CNN became more conservative in its reporting. Just as bad, GE, a major war contractor, seized ownership of NBC and its cable news outlets.

During the second Gulf War a Bush administration genius came up with the idea of embedding journalists in with the military. Under the guise of freedom of the press, “embedding” reporters became a way to keep them in line. When you're out covering a war with the troops, the last thing you want is to piss them off. The fear of being cut from access, or worse, getting yourself killed, made the press more compliant and, ultimately, a willing tool of the Bush machine. They became a cheering squad for the war, presenting coverage that was little more than a squalid reality show. Reliable access to war information was cut off. Sometimes facts were even falsified.

As the disinformation grew, so did support for the war. At one point 75% of the American public believed Iraq helped perpetrate the events of 9/11. The news also pushed the notion of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” despite the lack of evidence. Bush and his boys played the press like a finely tuned violin.

A few alternative news sources protested but they were not widely accessible. It wasn't that the public was stupid -- just too trusting of their mainstream sources. Mainstream news had betrayed them.

Rather than do real investigative work, broadcast news got lazy, accepting press handouts from the “Bushies” without question. America was sold a bill of goods and the salesmen were the press. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the way they’ve handled this national election is even worse:

“Hold that thought right there Senator Clinton, but as you know we have to go to a commercial break.” Who do you think made that statement? David Letterman? Larry King? It was NBC news anchor Brian “my eyes blink so much it looks like I'm sending a coded message” Williams. And he said it during a democratic presidential debate! Imagine interrupting a possible leader of the free world -- in mid sentence, no less -- to break for a commercial. Since when did debates of this kind even have commercials? Since broadcast news went into the dumper, that's when!

What's wrong with running commercials, you might ask? On commercial programs, ad costs are based on the size of the audience. How do you get a large audience? You create drama. So if your political debates are part of your commercial programming you cast them as you would a reality show.

“Let's promote the good looking black guy against the white woman.”

That had to be going through their heads. “Forget Edwards. There's no tension there. Besides he hates corporations and we are one.”

The candidates that didn’t fit their scenario were cast as losers, making it impossible for them to get traction. The networks weren't promoting a debate as much as they were a “cage match.” Not only did they pick the players, they created the tension as well.

The worst of them is Tim Russert, the pudgy, annoying chief of NBC's Washington bureau and moderator of “Meet The Press.” (The show should be renamed “Meet The Russert” since he monopolizes every discussion.) At one point during a debate he shouted at Hillary Clinton, then argued with her. Hey Tim, please look up the definition of moderator!

Russet also trotted out endless poll numbers that pitted black voters against white voters. On one occasion he even made the blanket statement that Hispanic people don't like black people. What is the point of setting one group against another if not to jazz up the “cage match.” Thanks, Tim, for a hot heaping pile of race relations.

On the sillier side, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell (who’s married to Allan Greenspan) was swooning over Sen. Barack Obama. Then she went off the tracks entirely when she said “He has a lot of young supporters like Maria Shriver.” Maria Shiver? Young? Maybe to Mrs. Greenspan whose husband must be pushing a hundred and who herself is just a facelift away from looking like Norman Bates mother.

Then there is CNN. When he was running for the presidential nomination, Senator Christopher Dodd, would publish (on his website) the amount of debate time the candidates would get to state their various positions. Obama and Clinton usually got the lion's share. However, old Wolf spoke more than either of them. Shut up Wolf!!!!

The Democratic debate in Cleveland, Ohio, was the biggest draw ever. Eight million people watched it and NBC cleaned up in advertising revenue. Creating this newest reality show by choosing the cast and selling it to America, had made the “cage match” a major hit.

Am I suggesting that news people be censored? No! I’m saying they should get back to the moral principals that guided broadcast journalism in its golden age. The networks should treat news as if were a wildlife sanctuary. Just sit in the brush, film the action and let nature take its course. Don't disturb the order of things. If you don't make money, run it as a loss and figure that’s your penance for running “Deal Or No Deal”.

If you ever watched “Star Trek” you know there was “The Prime Directive.” It was the only crime -- interfering in the natural evolution of a civilization -- that carried the death penalty. Am I suggesting that these news creeps be executed for trying to meddle with the natural course of our lives? Of course not!

Well, maybe.

2008-Great Moments in Disappointment

2009-01-05T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Tom Yamaguchi

Wow, it's January 2009 already. I'm still trying to catch up with all the year end newsletters I received from my family and friends in December. Here is one from my conservative Republican Uncle Forrest.

Dear Folks,

Our family has been truly blessed this past 2008. Our daughter Cindy was fifth in the state spelling bee, and her sister Suzie was a semifinalist in the National Trampoline Championship. Their brother Bobby spent all of football season on the bench, but, as he tells us, "It's better than getting my neck broken out there!" Bobby, he's such an optimist.

After the election, I decided to step down as the chairman of the county Republican Party. Things did not go the way we hoped this year. It started with a lackluster lineup of candidates in the primaries. I had almost given up hope last January when a friend told me about Fred Thompson. Yeah, he'll save us. He's an actor like Ronald Reagan. He's a real conservative like Reagan. Excited, I sat down to watch Fred announce his candidacy on live TV. Before it was over, I don't know who fell asleep first, Fred or me. When I did wake up I was looking at John McCain. After, a nice nap, McCain didn't look so bad. After a couple of beers, he looked even better.

We all welcomed Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee. She weathered the onslaught of the liberal media who tried to embarrass her by asking her questions about stuff she doesn't know. What is this, Jeopardy? How many people on the street could tell you what the Bush Doctrine is? And those of us who do know, including Bush, are trying to forget what it is.

The scum media shamefully dragged Sarah's family problems into the public. Those reporters thought they had some kind of license just because Palin brought her unwed, pregnant daughter on stage, holding her baby brother so we wouldn't see her tummy. Hey, they were trying to keep it a secret until after the election. Don't talk about it! At least all that attention showed the world how Republicans can be pro-choice. We're all for it when the choice is being made by parents who are opposed to their daughters getting abortions.

So John McCain ended up looking like a crazy old guy wandering around the stage, and Sarah Palin had trouble convincing us she had relevant experience. Ok, so living close to Russia and signing a gas treaty with Canada isn't really conducting foreign policy. In my business, its called padding your resume. Hey, everyone does it. And Joe the Plumber! Where did they find him? We should have ditched him under somebody's sink in Ohio or some other state like that where he'd never be heard from again. I am sure then we would have had a chance.

Yes, we made some big mistakes in 2008, but the biggest one was letting Barack Hussein Obama become our next President. Yeah, that one! We were sure he would turn this country into an Islamic, Communist dictatorship if we let him anywhere near the White House. But after the election, what has he been doing? He has been acting like the moderate he said he was during the campaign! Nobody is supposed to tell the truth during the campaign! That's not fair! It's un-American! How can we hate a guy who, it turns out, doesn't pal around with terrorists? Obama fooled everyone in both parties. On the bright side, the liberal Democrats will end up hating him more than we Republicans do.

Leaving my post at the GOP is just one of the many changes that are in store for 2009. A few days before Christmas, I received this email from my boss Ebenezer.

"Dear Staff:

"First, let me take this time to wish you all a Very Merry Christmas. Let's not forget there is still a War on Christmas, and I'm not going to let those politically correct, atheistic Commies destroy this joyous occasion.

"Second, let me inform you that your services are no longer needed as the company is now bankrupt and you are all being laid off. I want to thank you for all those years of pitching in to keep our struggling ship stay afloat in these perilous times. Thanks for rejecting the opportunity to unionize and for those wage and benefit givebacks. Your sacrifice has saved us some big bucks. Thanks for training the employees of our independent contractor Greywater Corp so that they could staff their new offices in India. This has helped us maintain our high level of customer service since the last round of layoffs in our domestic divisions. Unfortunately these efforts were not enough, but please do not feel too discouraged, especially when you see out CEO at his news conference tomorrow blaming the company's downfall on excessive payroll and fringe benefits. He is only trying to easy the pain being felt by our stockholders who have seen their shares drop from a high of $89 to yesterday's close of 17 cents. And even though he is leaving with a $12 million golden parachute, believe me, he feels as bad about this as I do.

"One more thing. Since the company is bankrupt, there is no Christmas bonus or severance pay, but I hope we can still be friends on MySpace. You can write when I take my new position with Greywater in India. Kind regards, Ebenezer."

I will remember that email the rest of my life, and I hope you all have a memorable 2009. Love, Forrest

A Sunday Something

2009-01-04T00:01:00.006-05:00

Here's a day at the Alex Bennett Program. This was shot on a Flip HD Video camera about the size of a box of matches. Only problem is that Albert our producer had the day off. But Michael and Scott are there Have fun.

The Ineveitable Year End List Part Deux

2008-12-31T00:01:00.006-05:00

Here are some more for the year end list:

Person Of The Year: Of course it's Barak Obama. You don't really get a bigger and better story than a black man making it to the house black men built. Add this to the fact that prior to this he did absolutely nothing and it makes for quite a saga. Now let's pray that the crap shoot works.

Worst Person Of The Year: It's just gotta be the "Grinch" Bernard Madoff. He broke the bank, in fact several banks. 50 billion dollars gone and one person has already blown his brains out over the loses.

People Who Got The Biggest Bum Rap This Year: Bill Ayers who used to be a memeber of the "Weather Underground" and was a suspected bomber but never convicted and who now is an older expert on education in the Chicago area. In order to lower people's opinion of Obama, Ayers past and links to Obama were dragged through the mud. To Ayers credit he said nothing. The other person who got caught in the whirlwind of besmerching Obama was the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a firey Chicago preacher who married the Obama's. He was assailed for sermons that he gave. The only problem way, he was dead right on in everything he said.

Biggest Bummer Of The Year: The death of '50's pin-up icon Bettie Page and the death of Paul Newman who has been in movies for most of my life. Both of them left this world in great shape having left us with only great memories.

Biggest Story Of The Year: It would have been the election, but then the ecomomy went into the dumper and pushed it to the side. This had an effect on all of us. The bad part is that this may be an even bigger story next year.

The Best Non-American Non-story : Brit comedian Russell Brand invites Brit Tv presenter Jonathan Ross onto his BBC Radio Show. They then called Andrew Sachs whose only major claim to fame was that he played Manuel, the waiter on "Fawlty Towers". Ross then let loose to Sach's machine that Brand had fucked his grandaughter. Courtesy of the Guardian here is the transcript of what went on:

Russell Brand: Hello Andrew Sachs, this is Russell Brand … you are meant to be on my show now mate … I am here with Jonathan Ross. I could still do the interview to your answerphone.

Jonathan Ross: Let's do it …

Brand: Man … er, Andrew Sachs.

Ross: Don't call him Manuel, that's really bad manners. I apologise for Russell - he's an idiot.

Brand: I said Andrew Sachs! Look Andrew Sachs I have got respect for you and your lineage and your progeny, never let that be questioned.

Ross: Don't hint …

Brand: I weren't hinting! Why did that come across as a hint?

Ross: Because you know what you did…

Brand: That wasn't a hint …

Ross: He fucked your granddaughter!

[laughter in the studio]

Brand: That's his answerphone!

Ross: I'm sorry … I apologise Andrew, I apologise, I can't help it, you were talking about it and it was in my head, I apologise.

Brand: Jonathan!

Ross: I got excited, what can I say, it just came out.

Brand: Right. you wait till I come on your show. Andrew Sachs I did not do nothing with Georgina … oh no, I revealed I know her name! Oh no, it's a disaster! Abort, abort! Put the phone down, put the phone down, code red, code red! I'm sorry Mr Fawlty, I'm sorry. You're a waste of space! Oh no, Jonathan …

Ross: Why did you tell me? I forgot. You mentioned her and then it was in my head and then it came out.

Brand: I know you can't be blamed for this … It's too much for you …

Ross: He is the poor man at home sobbing over his answer machine.

Brand: What's going to happen? I will get a call now from the satanic sluts.

Ross: If he is like most people of a certain age he has probably got a picture of his grandchildren when they were young and innocent right by the phone. So while he is listening to the message he is looking at a picture of her when she was about nine on a swing …

Brand: She was on a swing when I met her … let's ring back Andrew Sachs.

[They call for a second time]

Ross: Hello! Manuel here!

Sachs: [his answer machine message] Sorry I can't answer at the moment …

Brand: [interrupting] … I am too busy thinking about killing myself … Andrew, this is Russell Brand. I am so sorry about the last message - it was part of the radio show, it was a mistake … The truth is I am phoning you to ask if I can marry - that's right, marry - Georgina the granddaughter.

Ross: And I would like to be a page boy.

Brand: He wants to be a page boy, we are going to have a Fawlty Towers-themed wedding.

Ross: Now you've spoilt it!

Brand: No! I made it better. I'm sorry, I'll do anything. I wore a condom. Put the phone down! Oh what's going to happen. Look I've got a mental illness. Do you think that made it better?

Ross: You will never become king rat in the Variety Club now.

Brand: Oh no, that's over for me now … Jonathan I think we've made the situation worse ... We've got to stop upsetting Manuel. This time Jonathan I'm convinced we can make it better.

Ross: Let's just sing to him.

Brand: I'll make up something as I go along…

[Third message]

Brand: [singing…] I'd like to apologise for the terrible attacks, Andrew Sachs, I would like to show contrition to the max, Andrew Sachs. I would like to create world peace, between the yellow, white and blacks, Andrew Sachs, Andrew Sachs. I said something I didn't have oughta, like I had sex with your granddaughter. But it was consensual and she wasn't menstrual, it was consensual lovely sex. It was full of respect I sent her a text, I've asked her to marry me, Andrew Sachs …

Ross: This has made it worse, you have trivialised the whole incident.

Brand: Hang up, hang up! It's trivialised it!

Ross: You know there is one way we could possibly make it better …

Brand: We can keep ringing, and even after the show's finished, kick his front door in and scream apologies into his bottom.

Ross: Hello, Manuel is not in right now. Please leave a message after the tone…

[Fourth message]

Brand: I am sorry, I am so sorry … that I had a difficult life, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry Andrew. Let's just take some time together, we can meet up.

Ross: You're making it worse, just say sorry.

Brand: Jonathan Ross is sorry as well, it was his idea … Sorry about everything that's ever happened …

[Later]

Brand: No one could have been offended by anything that went on in that show.

Ross: Who could possibly be offended by anything there? If they were they are crazy people.

Brand: If Andrew Sachs listens to his answerphone message when he gets it …

Ross: The saving grace is you didn't have anything to do with his granddaughter did you?

Brand: Oh actually I did, I slept with her, but it was ultimately undermined, not undermined, underlined with love.

On the day after the incident only a handful of people called the "Beeb" to complain. Three weeks later due to excessive tabloid coverage that blew it way out of proportion over 30,000 called in their disgust even though most of them never heard the broadcast. It had reached critical mass and resulted in Brand quiting his radio show to pursue a movie career and the BBC putting Ross on unpaid suspension from his TV shows. The world economy including Britain's was in turmoil, but this was the big story. And we thought we were the only ones who could get trivial.

Having said all of this there is only one thing left and that is to wish all of you,

Happy New Year!!!!!!

The Inevitable Year End List

2008-12-30T00:01:00.002-05:00

Time now for the first annual "Bennies".

Entertainment:

Best Movie: I've got to give it to "Slumdog Millionaire". It accomplishes something that very hard to do, have a happy ending that doesn't make you want to vomit. It also does what a good film does best and that is immerse you into a world you could never be in. Danny Boyle is an amazing director who can turn out such an ugly world as the one he presented in "Trainspotting" that was devoid of any beauty and then to be able to turn out such an uplifting film as this. He is one of the best directors out there and never does the same movie twice. If there is a film that comes closest to matching this work it has to be "The Wrestler", which brings us to our next category.......

Best Actor (male or female): Mickey Rourke is the best actor in year of great performances. At first you wonder if he is just being himself and soon come to realize that he is showing you some amazing acting chops. This kind of movie has been done a thousand times but Rourke makes it feel brand new. If there was honorable mention in this category it would have to go to Michael Sheen in "Frost/Nixon" who has the more difficult of the two roles and the one that doesn't chew up the scenery.

Best Animated Film: It's a toss up between "Wall-E" because as always it is a gorgeously computer animated Pixar film and "Bolt" which via John Lassiter has the Pixar tock and is just plain fun. The worst has to be the dull and uninspired "Madagascar 2".

Best Supporting Actor (male or female): OK so I'm blinded by the fact that I have adored this actress of years, but the fact is that even in mediocre pictures she raises them up. Marisa Tomei's performance in "The Wrestler" is an example of just that. Sure she goes topless and that's enough to give her any award without asking questions, but in a film with Rourke's bravura performance, she still makes the level rise even higher. Runner-up and certainly the male Oscar contender would have to be Heath Ledger for "The Dark Knight. Each time I watch it his performance gets better and better.

Best Director: Simple Danny Boyle for "Slumdog Millionaire". Runner-up in my mind is Sam Mendes for "Revolutionary Road" another really fine film which deserves your attention.

Best Documentary: My favorite category and the winner is "Man On Wire". This one will have you on the edge of your seat. In 1972 tightrope walker Phillipe Petite did the impossible by stretching a cable across the then standing towers of the World Trade Center and continued with the impossible by walking across it. This is a film you just can't dislike. It's hard to take your eyes off the screen in this masterpiece. Believe it is the best of the year.

Best DVD: It is definitely the Blu-Ray edition of "How The West Was Won". This Cinerama gem from the past has been restored to a pristine picture and most of those pesky seam lines in this 3 camera process have been removed. It is also presented in a format called "Smile-Box" which approximates the curve of the "Cinerama" screen, thus truly presenting it in its original format. There is a letterbox version as well and a 90 minute documentary on the process with scenes from many of the "Cinerama" travelogue style films including the iconic rollercoaster ride. The packaging is great as well feeling more like a book than a DVD. All these things come together to make one of the best DVD's ever. Runnerup is the Blu-Ray of "The Dark Knight" with it's mix of letterbox and IMAX footage

Best TV Drama: No question here. I first saw "Life On Mars" when it was a hit BBC series. I liked it but had a hard time wrapping my head around it because it was about British police and my frame of reference just wasn't there. When I heard that they were making an American version I balked. Most American attempts at retooling British shows have been abysmal. Shows like "Viva Blackpool" changed to Laughlin here were a disaster and "Worst Week" while successful I don't feel fared much better. So it was with great trepidation that I watched ABC's version of "Life On Mars" and much to my surprise it wasn't just good, it was great! After a bad start of producer and cast changes, that would doom other shows, this one flourished. The plot sounds stupid, but it works. Sam Tyler, a New York City detective in 2008 is hit by a car and when he gains consciousness to find himself in 1973 working in the same precinct. A fish out of water he finds it hard to deal with the vigilante style of his peers. Sam is played by Irish actor Jason O'Mara and his boss by Harvey Keitel who really puts this thing over the top. Add to them Gretchen Moll and Michael Imperioli who manages to exorcise his "Sopranos" rep. Great cast, great writing all add up to the best show of the year. The runner-up (and very close) "Mad Men" which never disappoints.

Best Comedy Series: OK, kill me, but I love "Big Bang Theory". There is nothing funnier than nerds and genius nerds are even funnier. I'm sorry, I always get big laughs from this show about science geeks. What I especially like is that producer/creator Chuck Lorre doesn't make the sexy girl next door stupid. She's not up to them IQ wise but she is better grounded and finds them amusing and is an anchor to their skewed reality. No cheap sitcom shots here, just smart and funny writing. My Runner-up is a hilarious but stupid show "Testees". No, it's not about balls, it's about two guys who work as test subjects for a testing lab. It makes me laugh, so shoot me. I have to mention "30 Rock" and that while it has come up a little short this year is still very funny.

Best News Program: "Frontline" on PBS. You learn more from this program that a;most any other source in any other medium. The worst has to be "Meet The Press" which always gets accolades although I can't figure out why. Question? Where the fuck is the press?

Next we'll check out our best and worst of other stuff.

A Protest of Another Kind

2008-12-29T00:01:00.006-05:00

By Tom Yamaguchi

I must admit to feeling conflicted about Barack Obama's decision to have Rick Warren give the invocation at the inauguration. I have finally decided protest is appropriate, but not because of his stand on gay marriage. Let me explain.

Like many, my initial reaction was disbelief. Why invite him when there are other ministers who do good work without carrying Rick Warren's baggage? But is it worth going through all the effort to force him off the program? After all, it's only an invocation. He is not being nominated to a cabinet post or, worse, to the Supreme Court. It is mostly a ceremonial position, similar to being named an honorary chairperson of the Inauguration Committee that currently includes openly lesbian House Representative Tammy Baldwin.

Let's face it. Warren is not going to be uninvited no matter what we think. Obama obviously sees political advantage to having him there. Warren is an ally in the fight against global warming. That sets him apart from a lot of fundamentalists who are climate change deniers. Considering the current gridlock in Washington on enacting laws to reduce greenhouse gases, having Warren as access to faith-based communities makes a lot of sense.

So wouldn't inviting Warren be like inviting the Nazis and KKK? I have trouble with equating Warren and the Saddleback Church with those who have committed terrorism and genocide. I don't believe Warren hates LGBT people, and I have yet to read any statements by Warren that could incite acts of violence against us. Yes, the statements on marriage equality are ignorant, but I don't find them hateful. Besides, why should I care if Rick Warren believes I am going to hell? I am a person of faith, but I don't believe in the hell that Warren imagines. I don't believe in a god or goddess that would punish two people for being in love.

I support marriage equality, but I can't paint those who oppose it with the broad brush of homophobia. Believe it or not, there are people who are not homophobic but have trouble with the concept of gay marriage. They can accept domestic partnerships. They are with us when it comes to ending job discrimination, increasing penalties on hate crimes, and repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Why can't we work with these people on the issues where we agree? Why does marriage have to be the litmus test for deciding who are friends are? Do we have to adopt George Bush's "my way or the highway" mentality?

I'm not saying we should just shut up and give Obama a free pass. Warren's religious views are ridiculous and need to be ridiculed. The questions are how to protest and why we are protesting. It would be a mistake to boycott the inauguration as leaders of some LGBT organizations have suggested. If we don't show up, others will he happy to take our places, especially those who think Rick Warren is a great idea. We could show up and just turn our backs when Warren speaks, but how uncreative. Hey, we're gay people! We need a protest that is more, well, gay!

This is my protest idea. If you are going to the inauguration, take a toy dinosaur and a Barbie doll. If you don't have a Barbie you could bring a GI Joe or other human-type doll. You can choose any kind of dinosaur, even Barney, if you like. When Warren launches into his invocation, take your dinosaur and doll in each hand and wave them in front of you. Have them interact, just the way the folks at Saddleback believe real humans and dinosaurs interacted at the beginning of time. That was 5,000 years ago, right? If you're like me and will not be freezing your buns off in Washington, you and your friends can protest in front of the TV.

Wave your dolls and dinosaurs to show Obama how this choice sends the wrong message. This is the same Obama who has committed himself to restoring science to its proper place for policymaking in government. Obama has nominated Nobel winning scientists to important positions in his administration. He assures us his science team won't be afraid to confront inconvenient truths when it comes to solving our energy and environmental crises. Then he contradicts that message by promoting a man who believes the Bible is literally true. Warren does believe that God created Earth within a period of days and put dinosaurs and humans here at the same time. His extinction theory is that dinosaurs failed to survive Noah's great flood.

It's no wonder his ideas on homosexuality are screwed up. All of his ideas on biology are screwed up. It's a miracle he understands global warming. At least he doesn't agree with Evangelicals who see no reason to clean up the environment because Jesus is coming back and the world will be ending soon anyway.

We can let Rick Warren give his invocation, but let us not lose the opportunity for a teaching moment. Our protest can be that teaching moment. It wasn't Adam and Steve. It wasn't Adam and Eve. And it sure wasn't Fred Flintstone and Dino.

The Sunday Funnies 12/28/2008

2008-12-28T00:01:00.004-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing the craziest fuck I have ever known. Bob Rubin for years has been one of the most inventive comics to come along. I think you'll agree there is no one quite like him.

THE RAPE OF AMERICA

2008-12-24T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Bruce David

Editorial Director Hustler

They are destroying our country. Who, you ask? Wall Street, the multi-national corporations, the oligarchs. We’re watching it happen right before our eyes and yet we barely comprehend what we are seeing. Our country is being looted. The Wall Street bailout is a perfect example. Seven hundred billion dollars of our tax money is going to pay the very people who caused our financial crisis while their corporate CEOs and CFOs continue to get their huge bonus’s and their share holders continue to collect their dividends. But it’s even worse than that.

Did you know that Goldman Sachs, which got ten billion dollars in debt guarantees from our government in October, made 2.3 billion in profit this past year, according to Bloomberg.com? Shouldn’t all that profit go back to the American people? Apparently our government is only getting back 1 percent of it, since the rest of that money is hidden in off shore accounts and countries with lower taxes. Wouldn't you love to be taxed on only 1 percent of your income? But, of course, only the fat cats — i.e., the crooks who run this country — get away with that kind of bullshit.

Then there’s Senator Robert Corker (R-TN), the guy who torpedoed the Detroit auto loans. He blamed the unions for the auto manufacturers mess, arguing that Detroit’s unions should give back some of the gains they’ve made over the last sixty years. Of course, the unions have already made concession after concession. We’re only a few more give backs away from seeing the destruction of all unions in this country. (When Reagan took office, approximately 25 percent of America's jobs were unionized, today it's 7 percent.) And that’s exactly what the GOP wants; a corporate America unconstrained by organized labor, able to pay as little as they want, no matter what conditions laborers are forced to endure.

The real corker -- if you will -- about the Senator’s position is that he supported the $250,000 per job (of taxpayer money) Nissan received to build a plant in Tennessee yet he voted against the Detroit bailout knowing it would only amount to $5000 per job. The latter would (hopefully) save America’s manufacturing base while the Nissan bonanza rewards Japan. In essence, Corker's position is un-American.

Now, as that piece of shit George W. Bush leaves office, he is issuing a bunch of “rules” which include granting immunity to drug companies (so you can’t sue them when your child dies because of their negligence) and railroad companies (should a train carrying toxic waste tip over onto your house). Bush has even been so bold as to issue a rule saying it’s okay if a Wall Street broker sells you something without disclosing a conflict of interest. He is, in effect, legalizing corporate crime.

The net result of all this: You and I have less money, our corporate masters have more. Or, pretty soon, the way things are going, they will have it all.

Stand up America! If you don’t fight now -- if you count on Obama to save us while you sit on the couch watching American Idol -- you deserve what you get. Unfortunately, you’ll take me down with you.

PS: For more on Bush’s rule changes go to: http://oklahomacity.injuryboard.com/fda-and-prescription-drugs/wall-street-journal-bush-rule-changes-could-block-productsafety-suits.aspx?googleid=249438

PPS: Fuck Albert Reinoso

More Nostalgia for Richard Nixon

2008-12-23T00:02:00.000-05:00

Here a contribution from long time fan and friend Tom Yamaguchi

Paul Krassner has said that the presidency of George W. Bush has made him nostalgic for the Nixon years. Remember those Good Old Days of Watergate with Nixon on tape talking about hush money for the Watergate burglars? "We could do that," Nixon said, "but it would be wrong." That shows the difference between Nixon and Bush, according to Krassner. At least Nixon knew what he was doing was wrong.

As this election year of 2008 draws to a close, let us celebrate more reasons to be nostalgic for Nixon. For instance, remember how John McCain and the Republicans called Obama a socialist for wanting to end Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy? Obama wants to redistribute the wealth, they said. Historians have noticed the irony of McCain calling our progressive income tax a socialistic system while gushing that Teddy Roosevelt was the President he admires the most. TR is largely responsible for the creation of our modern income tax. Yes, Teddy the Republican wanted to tax the rich. He called himself a progressive and would later seek the presidency as a nominee of the Progressive Party. But even as a socialist, Nixon has Teddy beat. When he ran for President in 1968, Nixon had a plan he called the New Federalism. A part of that plan was a negative income tax or Guaranteed Annual Income. Those who failed to earn the minimum amount that kept them out of poverty would be paid the difference by the government. Everyone would be guaranteed an income. Or, as the Republicans today would say, Nixon wanted to redistribute the wealth.

So Nixon was a socialist? How about Communist? Nixon did go to Communist China and opened up trade with the Communist Chinese government. But don't feel too bad Republicans. By going to China, Nixon may have ended the Cold War. At least that is the way Al Haig sees it. Haig was Nixon's Chief of Staff and Reagan's Secretary of State. In a recent interview with the conservative new magazine Newsmax, Haig says that Nixon had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War than anything Reagan did. In fact, Haig admits that Reagan did little during his presidency, having never fully recovered from the assassination attempt. Haig goes on to admit that the Soviet system was doomed to failure anyway. The collapse was only a matter of time. But he credits Nixon, not Reagan, for the hastening of that collapse, telling Newsmax, “I happen to think China and that initiative is the most important foreign policy event of the century, and has proven to be so."

Haig blames the neocons for the mess we are in today, including our deteriorating relations with Russia and the disastrous handling of the Iraq War. Nixon was definitely not a neocon. That's probably the best reason to be nostalgic.

Link to Newmax.com interview with Alexander Haig:
http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/haig_obama/2008/12/14/161751.html?s=al&promo_code=749A-1

The Blame Game

2008-12-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

By Rick Snay

The reports are NOT good: the U.S. economy lost more jobs in 2008 than it has since 1974 (after 6 years of Republican leadership). Of course, no one on the Republican side is blaming George W. Bush or his supply-side economic policies (which add up to "supply the top one percent of wealth-holders with more and more wealth"). No, as usual, they're casting around for places to put the blame other than on the people who have been in charge for eight years.

Just before the election, I spoke with a Republican who told me we were in trouble if Obama won. What we needed, she told me, was for John McCain to get in there and continue the policies of the Bush administration because, after all, our current economic problems all started under Bill Clinton.

Now, those who know me best will tell you I have major issues with a LOT of what Clinton did while in office, but there is NOTHING he could have done that could have taken eight years to wreck the economy this bad. True, he did some things that contributed to the atmosphere under which the economy collapsed, but Bush continued and enhanced those errors and added many, MANY of his own.

Blaming someone else for everything is a standard Republican tactic, though. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he implimented "trickle-down" economics on America. He managed to give the appearance of a healthy economy by what amounted to writing bad checks. He ran up a HUGE deficit, bigger than all other presidents COMBINED. When a recession hit two years into his presidency, the Republicans said it was due to Jimmy Carter's policies. Thus was born the idea that anything that happened during a presidency had to be attributed to the four years prior.

What followed the Reagan years was a deep recession under George the first. So that was Reagan's fault, right? Don't we have to blame that on the guy who was in office four years before it happened? No, the Republicans said...it was the Democrats in Congress.

Following Bush, Clinton took office. He managed to repair the economy and get America back to work. Of course, that old rule of "the guy before" suddenly applied again, as the Republicans said it was really the policies of George H. W. Bush that were just then starting to work. When George W. Bush followed Clinton and the economy tanked, they called it "the Clinton recession".

Now, after eight years, the economy is worse than it ever was. Since Bush was in office four years ago, we have to blame him, right? Nope. It's still Clinton. OR, in some Republican circles, it's due to the "flawed leadership" of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid, who took over only last year. This is especially ridiculous considering the fact that very little of what the Democrats have tried to do since gaining the majority in both houses of Congress has gotten through. The constant filibuster threats from Republicans have effectively obstructed any kind of agenda the Dems might have had.

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office in January, he will face the largest deficit in the history of the planet. He'll face an economy in meltdown and a jobless rate that is downright frightening. It will take time to right the wrongs. But how much do you want to bet that within months Republicans will be blaming Obama for the poor economy? And how much more would you like to bet that by the end of his first term, when (as always happens) the Democrat has repaired the Republican damage and the nation is again on a healthy path, those same Republicans will be saying the credit should go to Bush?

Obama Blows It!

2008-12-22T00:01:00.001-05:00

Rick Warren is a religious hustler. He runs a mega-church out in Lake Forest, California called The Saddleback Church from which he preaches his self indulgent Gospel. Having written a 30 million copy best seller "The Purpose Driven Life" that is second in sales only to the Bible, he was thrust into the national limelight. From there he has been on a quest to be the next Billy Graham. The only problem is that he really has the potential to be the next Jerry Falwell with whom he shares an uncanny likeness.

What makes the guy so creepy, besides the fact that he is a religious hustler, is that his right wing opinions are of the sort that if there was a God he would be struck down on the spot. First of all he is against gay marriage. Compounding this, in a recent interview he said "you wouldn't want an older man marrying a child or a man marrying a horse". Imagine that, equating being gay with pedophilia and bestiality. That's good 'ol Rick for you. Add to this his allegiance to creationism which amounts to scientific stupidity and his stand against a woman's right to choose. In short, he's a fuckin' sleezebag to anyone who feels that he and his beliefs are totally immoral.

If Rick Warren did his thing and kept to himself and his flocked sheep, then I suppose that is something between them. But he is now inflicting himself on Americans like you and me. During the election he hosted and moderated an evening with Barack Obama and John McCain.

It wasn't a debate. Each candidate sat with Warren individually. How he got this coup is beyond me as I have always believed that there is supposed to be a separation between church and state.

Now this whole scenario has taken an ugly turn. President-Elect Obama on December 17th asked him to give the invocation at the inauguration. What the hell was Obama thinking? Is he nuts? It's bad enough that religion has a place at a federal function but to invite a homophobe-creationist to give the invocation makes you begin to wonder if Obama is really this other person than the one we voted for.

Obama claims that he always said he wanted to be the President of all Americans and to seek inclusion of everyone. Does this then include the KKK or the American Nazi Party? Of course not because they are intolerant of others just like Rick Warren.

Gay groups feel betrayed and justly so. People like myself are having second thoughts about the guy and he hasn't even taken office.

In California Proposition 8, the anti gay marriage measure, went down to defeat. Many feel the reason it did was the black vote which was higher than usual due to Obama's candidacy. It was said that 69% of the black voters voted against gay marriage thus putting the measure over the top. The reason given was the high church going among blacks, couple this with a general prejudice by black males against gay men.

I'm not saying that all this is necessarily true. But if so, then Obama comes into this category of a church going black male who by the way has said he's against gay marriage. That is probably the reason why he sees nothing wrong with Rick Warren.

Obama should really rethink this thing. He's getting off to a bad start with the very people who cared about him. This was a disastrous decision on his part and if he can make such a bone-headed move like this so early on, what's going to happen when he has the power.

I'd hate to think that we've been fooled again!

Happy Evicted From The Vagina Day

2008-12-18T00:01:00.003-05:00

Gee can it be? Yet another birthday is here or as I like to think of it, a little closer to "the grave ever yawning" as John Cleese once described it to me.

I have always had a great fear of death, so the prospect that with every year that goes by the cataclysm gets to be more of a possibility doesn't rest well. I suppose that the thing that scares me most about death is not knowing you are dead. Non existence isn't something I could ever wrap my brain around. My father used to tell me that I had been there and pointed out that I was non-existent before I was born. After that I had trouble going to sleep pondering that one.

I suppose if you believe in God then what happens after we have shuffled off this mortal coil is an easy one to live with. You die, God says "hello" in a cheery voice and it's off to the Elysian Fields. It's all happy and warm and wax lips abound in the happy land of death.

Wait a minute, hold on! Does this mean I'm going to be with all my relatives, you know, the ones I could barely wait to get away from at family occasions? Does that mean I have to put up with church music all the time? Which way to hell? Flames may lick your ass, but at least you'll be with the fun people. You can always find a good hooker or a joint to light with the eternal flames of hell. I could never get with the whole God thing. It just made no real sense, but I'm sure if there is a God he will admire my honesty and forgive me.

Bettie Davis summed it up best when she said "old age ain't for sissies". Everything starts to fall apart. Your eyes start to go, the prostate has it's way with you, you fart more and getting up out of a chair is always accompanied by a guttural "Uhh". The worst part I feel is agility. Gone are the days of hopping over anything. I get envious of people who can stand on a chair to change a light bulb without having to hold onto something,

"Girlfriend" wants to cremate me. I'll wind up in an urn in her storage locker in Pennsylvania next to her parents. Then when she dies and the fee for the unit goes unpaid they will empty out the locker and throw the stuff away. My whole existence will have ended up in a dumpster near an outlet mall in Pennsylvania.

So I guess I'll just have to go on living forever.

A Very funny perspective from Tim ORourke

2008-12-17T14:50:00.004-05:00

Tim ORourke who is a friend on "Facebook" did this and I just had to share.

CORPORATE LOGOS VS. FREE SPEECH

2008-12-17T00:01:00.002-05:00

by Bruce David

Editorial Director Hustler Magazine

If you noticed it while watching TV you must have wondered why it was happening. I’m talking about shows such as Inside Edition, Survivor and The Hills (to name a few) where a poster on a wall or an image on some one’s T shirt is blurred out so you can’t see it. The reason this happens is because of concerns about copyright infringement. About 10 or 15 years ago, the big corporations and their lawyers began to complain that a TV show, or even a magazine, was guilty of exploiting copyrighted material if they showed someone wearing, say a Nike logo on their T shirt. The image, they argued, was proprietary, belonging to the corporation and therefore could not be featured without the corporation’s permission. Lawyers actually get paid to think up this kind of crap.

Consider the following: A person is in public, walking down the street wearing a Nike T-shirt where everyone can see them. Since it's in public you might think it's fair game, no? But if you photograph them for your magazine or you video tape them for a TV show, you’re supposedly exploiting the corporation’s copyright or diminishing the value of their brand. How are you diminishing it? Well, one way you are diminishing it is simply by showing it, the lawyers would argue. “If we let everyone feature our logo,” they might say, “where will it end?” Of course, the counter and more reasonable argument would be that as long as you are not trying to expropriate the logo, no harm is done.

Here’s another scenario that might concern them: Maybe it’s Brittany Spears wearing the T-shirt and she’s just dropped her baby on its head. Lawyers would argue that your statement in publishing the pix is that Nike customers are poor parents, a dubious argument. However, one can imagine a more extreme scenario where their argument might be strengthened; Say a guy wears the T-shirt while robbing a liquor store.

But wait! Now we’re talking about a real news story! Something that qualifies for a spot on the six o’ clock news. Do you blur that logo out too? It would certainly help identify the culprit. And if you don’t censor it for a hard news story why blur it out for a soft (gossip) style news story? In fact, why censor at all as long as you aren’t staging a scenario where the logo appears.

It’s time that TV executives and magazine publisher’s stood up to this corporate tyranny. They should join forces in a legal battle, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, if they have to. If something happens in public — anything at all — it should be fair game for the media, T shirts and all. Otherwise -- to turn the lawyers argument around -- where will it end?

PS: Fuck Albert Reinoso

THE BIRTH, DEATH, REBIRTH AND ULTIMATE LINGERING DOOM OF AIR AMERICA

2008-12-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

This is an article Alex Bennett wrote for Hustler Magazine in 2006. While few things have changed most of it still holds up. At the end there is an update. The piece was edited by Bruce David.

David Bernstein is that rare breed in the radio business, the kind of person no one speaks bad of.

I got to know him when I was looking for work several years back. He was one of the many radio program directors I hit up for a job. A friendship developed between us.

He had been the program director for seven years at WOR, one of the country's top talk stations. When they let him go, we commiserated about being unemployed. I finally found work at Sirius Satellite Radio and David eventually found work at Air America, the floundering liberal talk network. Those who knew him couldn't have been happier. Who better to save Air America than David?

Every month or so we'd have lunch. It was in this setting that he looked across the table at me one day to say “It's all over. They're going to pull the plug!”

Could this be the end of the “great liberal hope”?

The history of Air America Radio is one of the biggest roller coaster rides in the modern radio history.

The story begins in 2000 with the firing of one of the few liberal talk show hosts in the country, Mike Malloy, from WLS in Chicago. It turned out Malloy had some great fans, including Sheldon and Anita Drobny, Chicago millionaires who wanted to see him syndicated.

There was a problem though. One reason for the proliferation of conservative talk shows was the prevailing theory of “format purity,” a dogma pushed by the top talk radio chain in the country, Clear Channel. Gabe Hobbs, their director of talk programming declared that a talk station had to be either all conservative or all progressive. “you wouldn't put a soul record on a country station,” he’s quoted as saying, “so why put a liberal talk show on a conservative talk station?”

He was dead wrong about format purity. For years the two points of view mixed it up on talk radio everywhere, to great success. This worked in part because liberals, with their open minds, would listen to a conservative, but the reverse wasn't true. Hence, larger audience numbers for the Limbaughs of the world. Some suspected that Hobb’s philosophy was really just an excuse to keep liberal thought off airwaves controlled by conservative companies.

The Drobney’s were sold the notion of 24/7 liberal radio format by Jon Sinton, whom they hired as CEO of the newly formed AnShell Media. Then they enlisted Dave Logan, a good veteran programmer. Cash poor, the enterprise was eventually sold to millionaire Evan Cohen an established (or so it seemed) money raiser and Rex Sorenson a broadcaster from Hawaii. Sinton and Logan went along and Air America was born with Progress Media as the new parent company. That was probably their first mistake; giving their new network the same name as a famous CIA owned covert airline in Southeast Asia during and after the Vietnam War.

Radio is like no other medium. It is long form (usually three hours), adlib, live, five days a week and audio only. The immediacy of the medium is unlike any other in show business. That's why you hire people who know how to do it. Air America, however, did not do that. It was their next big mistake.

Look at the lineup they first went on the air with. Their morning show was anchored by a rather mediocre stand-up comic, Marc Maron. Sam Kinison so despised Maron that he peed all over the guy’s bed at the Comedy Store digs in Hollywood. Maron’s only radio credential: he was a regular guest on my program in San Francisco for several years.

Mid mornings featured Chuck D, a politically savvy hip-hop artist. Radio experience zero. Teamed with him was a good comedian, Liz Winstead, who had created the “Daily Show,” leaving it when Jon Stewart came on board. Aside from co-hosting with Chuck D, she was named AA's VP of entertainment programming. A nice person but again, no radio cred.

Then there was Janeane Garafalo, actress, comedian, activist… no radio experience. Windstead wisely teamed Garafalo with Sam Seder who was a radio guy. Too bad they didn't get along.

The only real broadcast veteran with a proven track record was Randi Rhodes. She was a solid performer and ratings getter but, it is said, a terror to work with.

The big get, or so they thought, was Al Franken. Yes, the guy on Saturday Night Live who wrote those books bashing talk show hosts. He was OK performing for a 5-minute sketch once a week or taking a year to write a book, but this was radio. He brought a staff of producers and support people that were hated by the rest of AA’s employees because they insisted on calling themselves “Team Franken.” He took away a reported 2 million dollars a year plus the cost of his staff.

Oh, yeah. There was also the ten comedy writers who wrote for all the other shows. No radio station has done that since the 40's. The seeds for disaster had been planted. All that was left was to thrust this concoction on the American liberal public.

I know of no other radio operation getting the send-off AA did. Publicity abounded, the crown jewel being a New York Times Magazine cover with Franken's larger than life face plastered on it.

Air American launched March 31, 2004 with 6 stations. They had leased station WLIB in New York, WNTD in Chicago, WMNN in Minneapolis, KTLA in Los Angeles and KCLA in California’s Inland Empire.

Just two weeks after the debut, the first glitch appeared. The Chicago and Los Angeles stations were paid with a check for a cool million that bounced. Chicago and Los Angeles pulled the AA programming off the air. AA claimed it was a mix up. Not impressed, a judge ordered them to pay the owner $250,000. Even worse they remained off the air in both cities. AA never paid the court ordered sum.

Four weeks into this folly CEO Mark Walsh and VP for programming Dave Logan were dumped. Five weeks in, Evan Cohen and partner Rex Sorenson were forced out. Among other things Cohen claimed on launch they had raised 30 million when they’d only raised six. At this point a new company, Piquant LLC, was formed with new head, Rob Glaser, the mastermind behind Real Networks, the Internet streaming people. In little more than a year Air America had changed hands 3 times.

The biggest AA scandal involved the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club of Co-Op City in the Bronx. They gave an $875,000 loan to Progress Media, Air America’s owner at the time. This would have raised eyebrows even if the Director of Development for Gloria Wise hadn’t been none other than the aforementioned Evan Cohen.

As a result of the expose, the city of New York severed it’s association with The Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The new AA owners disclaimed any liability in the matter but Glaser said it was only right to pay back the loan. You can imagine how this all played in the press. It made AA look like crooks who stole from little kids.

Things were not all doom and gloom. Out on the west coast VP Ed Krampf at Clear Channel (remember them, the right wing company?) decided he would try the format on a moribund station they had in Portland, Oregon. The station zoomed to the top of the talk show market.

This inspired Clear Channel. Many of their markets had “dog signals,” stations that were low power or at a bad spot on the dial. Throw AA on those stations; get the programming free while at the same time deflecting criticism about a perceived political bias. It was a win-win formula repeated in market after market.

Before they knew it, AA was heard on over 100 stations. Hopes were high until someone realized they weren't getting good ratings anywhere and even Portland was going limp. The reason? Dull programming that had, with the exception of Randi Rhodes, a total lack of entertainment value. Wait a minute -- isn't Franken an entertainer? Maybe, but he sure wasn't entertaining at AA. His dull, droning voice didn't lend itself to radio. Garafalo had similar problems; her style didn't cut across the airwaves. Plus, there was the contentious relationship with her co-host. I'll say it again…. They weren't radio people.

A year passed before the next big mistake, the appointment of Danny Goldberg as CEO. Goldberg was a left thinking former music business executive. What did he know about radio? Do you have a thimble? He lasted little more than a year, just long enough to further drag down the operation with firings that imposed his taste and pissed off the staff.

Eventually several other execs left including Jon Sinton who was with the project since the Drobny days. This was a company in turmoil.

In July 2006, Garafalo threw in the towel. Eventually Al Franken left to run for the U.S. Senate seat from Minnesota. Franken was replaced by a liberal stalwart, Thom Hartmann who had been syndicated by AA but not on the network itself. He, at least, had a track record in radio.

You may recall the whole idea of a liberal network started with a desire to find a home for Mike Malloy, one of the most outspoken left wing commentators. Although brought into the AA fold, at the end of August 2006, he was fired among much dissent from the staff and listeners who signed a petition with 17,000 signatures. To this day no reason has been given.

October 15th, 2006, AA filed for Bankruptcy. They owed over 20 million dollars.

Enter Stephen L. Green, a multi billionaire real estate magnate and his brother Mark Green, a political activist, author and lawyer who ran for Mayor of New York in 2001. (He lost the nomination to Michael Bloomberg.) Mark, the liberal, begged brother Stephen, rumored to be a conservative, to buy out the assets of Air America including its already tarnished name. In March of 2007, the deal was completed. The Green's announced the beginning of Air America 2.0.

The lineup was revamped. Since September of 2006, mornings have been filled with a program called “The Young Turks” hosted by Cenk Uygur who created the program (prior to it being on AA) with Ben Mankiewicz. Ben left before the AA move, going to TMZ, a gossip website. This was too bad for the show because Ben was the only good thing about the Turks. The one time I worked with Uygur I wasn't able to get a word in edgewise; he wouldn't shut up for 5 seconds. No wonder Ben left. The AA show, an ego vehicle for Uygur, is terrible.

A good hire at this point was Thom Hartmann. He had been doing this sort of radio for years, the last few for Air America Syndication but not the actual network. Thom is a very knowledgeable guy. His only problem is a some what professorial delivery. Not exciting radio, but smart and intelligent.

One of the few who impressed from the first sign-on was Randi Rhodes. She has the greatest possibility of success in syndication. She is, however, an 800-pound gorilla, throwing her weight around, forcing management to put out one fire after another. One big example was a recent incident outside a New York City bar where she fell to the ground, broke two teeth and bruised her face. At first it was reported that she had been assaulted while walking her dog. Then a misguided host at AA, Jon Elliot, irresponsibly reported the assailants were right-wingers. When the dust cleared, Randi had a different story: she had been in the bar, walked outside and, the next thing she knew, she was on the pavement. “Maybe I was pushed,” she added. With three days to flesh out the story, that was all she could come up with. Most people feel she got really shit faced and collapsed.

Another holdover from the early days is Rachel Maddow. Rachel is supposedly a very nice, intelligent woman, a Rhodes scholar in fact. Her biggest problem, I am told, is that she scripts her entire 2-hour show. This is unheard of in a live medium that thrives on spontaneity. She belongs on a non-commercial NPR type station.

Shortly after the Green's took over, they hired my friend David Bernstein. He brought in an old hire from WOR in New York City. The singularly named host Lionel is a funny, sharp radio guy. He is probably the most commercially viable of the AA hosts. There is just one problem; he's not a liberal. He is a middle of the road type, sometimes leaning left, sometimes right. Not exactly a good fit for Air America.

So where do you sell this bouillabaisse of a broadcast day? At its height AA had over 100 affiliates. Today there are around 60. It's hard to get an exact count because stations are dropping them all the time while others are taking just the shows they want.

Under David Bernstein there was a move to get away from the 24/7 concept by selling shows individually. Randi Rhodes and Thom Hartmann are quite syndicatable. Lionel, on the other hand, had to clear stations at the same time as the more popular Ed Schultz. After the takeover by the Green family, Westwood One took over distribution, but they still kept on losing stations.

The big fly in AA's ointment is that, since it’s inception, more liberal talk show hosts have come to the forefront. There's the politically funny Stephanie Miller, Washington insider Bill Press, conspiracy firebrand Mike Malloy (the man for whom the Drobney's created a talk network in the first place) and finally Ed Schultz, whose overbearing “How would Rush Limbaugh sound if he was a liberal?” style has garnered him a decent size audience, albeit smaller than he claims. There are enough entertaining liberal programs to fill a whole day without once having to tap any of AA's shows. So who needs them?

This brings me back to my lunch with David Bernstein. He was certain Stephen Green was going to pull the plug on Air America. I felt bad for David. While he’d entered into this with eyes open, there was always the hope he could turn the place around. But the powers that be resisted his ideas. Getting anything to change seemed impossible. Air America 2.0 was just a slogan. Nothing had changed but the players.

What went wrong on this strange, curious journey? Just about everything. People were put in charge who didn't know a thing about radio. People were put on the air who, for the most part, didn't know how to work the medium. The few who did were shunted into the background. And the people running the finances couldn't be trusted.

The worst mistake was taking the whole thing too seriously; they had lofty, high-minded ideals, when all they should have cared about was putting on a great, entertaining show that they could be proud of.

What pisses me off about the whole misadventure is that everyone in the radio business was looking and waiting for them to fail. When they did, it became more difficult for people like myself, a left wing talker, to prove that liberal talk can work. Everyone just points to the failure of AA.

AA also let down the liberal audience expecting a radio messiah to lead them out of the neo-con Desert. These people were thirsty and all got was salt.

It turned out David was wrong. They didn't axe the network, they axed David, citing cutbacks. This from the network that once paid Al Franken 2 million dollars a year.

When I talked to David after his firing he thought Air America only had a couple of months left at best. That means when you read this it may already be gone. If Air America isn't gone, then somebody please put a bullet in it's head to end the suffering!

Update: Air America is still in business but has changed hands yet one more time. Randi Rhodes up and left to go work with Mike Malloy over at NovaM Radio owned by Sheldon Drobney. Rachel Maddow became a success over at MSNBC, but her radio show still sucks. Thom Hartmann now remains the biggest star they have and deservedly so. I'm still amazed that they are still in business.

Greatest Moment Of Zen Ever

2008-12-15T12:29:00.003-05:00

Let's Just Call Blagojevich "Blog" And Have Done With It!

2008-12-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

Governor Ron Blagojevich's name was largely unpronounceable to the public until last week. Now only hard part left is to spell it, but do really need to learn to spell a name that might just be a number some day?

I'm not saying that he's guilty of anything since we will leave that to his day in court. But let us for the sake of argument say he's done all the things he is alleged to have done, he's not that unusual for Chicago and Illinois. This sort of thing has been business as usual in the Windy City for years now.

Remember Mayor Richard Daley the First? I certainly do. Way back in 1968 I landed a job in Chicago at WIND on the eve of the Democratic convention there. It was just coincidence and you know what happened at that event. I had come in from Minneapolis where I had been doing a talk gig and was settling into the job when our chief reporter Bernard Shaw (later of CNN) pulled me aside and told me I was being watched by the Daley secret police because I had said bad things on the air about him back where I had come from.

This was the sort of tactic that Daley felt intimidated his nay sayers. Of course it didn't apply to me because I was in no position to comment on the son-of-a-bitch because I was just playing records. This was my introduction to the wonderful world of the Chicago political machine.

Later that week I found myself in Lincoln park getting tear gassed and that event immediately radicalized me. Nothing like gas or a billy club to change you from a bystander into a full grown radical. After that I was never the same. Thank you Mayor Daley for my conversion.

So it's not surprising that nothing much has changed and the each successive politician to come to power figured that this was the way business was done. That it was a way of making lots of money and the more power you got, the more money you pocketed.

Into all of this comes Barack Obama. It makes you wonder, just how much he may or may not have been corrupted by the process. To believe that he had nothing to do with (cut and paste name) Blagojevich would be naive. But what that involvement was has a wide range. I'd like to believe it was just putting up with the asshole as a necessary part of politics. We really don't know a hell of a lot about our new president, so like a woman you start to date that you're crazy about at first, you never know what you're going to find out later.

The bottom line is that politics always seems to attract the "bottom-feeders" of our society and not people like you and me who would never want power. They take power and then feed off the public trough. How do we change it and make it less attractive the Blagojevich's of the world? I don't know that we can. It seems that to them that public confidence a shiny gem of gullibility they just have to pluck.

The biggest problem is that we get to the point where we believe no one. If a honest person does come along, we've been stung so many times that we just don't trust them.

Let's hope Obama is one of the good guys. He's all we've got!

The Sunday Funnies 12/14/2008

2008-12-14T00:01:00.003-05:00

This Sunday we thought we'd let you enjoy a person who is the best standup in America. Years ago I dubbed him "The Pit-Bull Of Comedy" and it stuck. Bobby Slayton and I actually met for the first time when he approached me outside of a famous bistro 1970's called "Max's Kansas City" in New York City. I am told by Bobby that I totally shined him off, something he has never forgiven me for. In 1980 when I moved to San Francisco to work in radio, I was turned on to local comic. It was Bobby and we have been friends ever since.

I don't get to see him much because he is in Las Vegas all the time. If you go to Vegas you should go see him at the "Hooters Hotel and Casino" where he permanently hold downs his own room there.

Bettie Page Dead At 85

2008-12-12T15:12:00.006-05:00

Earlier this week we wrote a piece about '50's pin-up icon Bettie Page which I have reposted right under this item for your reading pleasure. We are sad to announce that she died last night at 85 in a Los Angeles hospital. She will be missed.

My right hand is holding a death vigil

2008-12-12T15:09:00.002-05:00

I learned late last night that the iconic pinup and bondage model of the '50s' Bettie Page had suffered a massive heart attack on tuesday and is critically ill and in a coma in Los Angeles.

As much as any other single icon of that time, Bettie stood out as the only true representation of the sexuality of that decade. Sure there was Marilyn Monroe but she was just Hollywood hype. Bettie was the raw real stuff that you could get your fist around and rub one out.

I have to admit that when I was a kid I was drawn to some of the kinkier images and bondage held a strange fascination for my pubescent id. I was talking just the other day to my friend and Hustler editor Bruce David about those great pulp magazines of the fifties and their sexy covers that usually had something like a woman hung up, her bodice ripped revealing just enough of a large round firm breast to make you want more and a hovering nazi officer with a whip in hand menacing her. Now that was art!

Waltzing into this verboten sexuality came Bettie Page. When you see photos of her in the next few days they are sure to be like the one above but her really important work was with a long forgotten sexually creative hero named John Willy.

It was with Willy that Bettie did her great bondage stuff. In later life she would say that this was the part she most regretted and that she vastly preferred the pin-up pics. They both worked for a middle aged nebbish named Irving Klaw who with his sister Paula ran "Movie Star News" out of a store front on 14th street in New York City. It was here that Klaw became known as the "pinup king". When he first started the store sold magazines but Klaw noticed that teenage boys were coming in, looking at the pinup mags of the day and ripping out pages when no one was looking. So he said "fuck the magazines, I'll sell the photos".

But I digress. This is about Bettie and that more than perfect body and whose pageboy haircut started my lifelong passion for brunettes. I never liked blondes. They were too goody-goody. The brunette however was nasty, wanton, slightly mean and always presented an air of mystery. Most of all they always looked like they could throw a good fuck. That impression, firmly implanted in my brain stem for life was from Bettie who while projecting all these qualities also had a slight hint of innocence and fun.

It's funny, but while growing up in the '50's I didn't even know who she was, I just kept seeing her pictures and it wasn't until the '70's that I could actually put a name to her.

She retired after a few years. A woman who even through her career maintained a backwoods innocence about it all. The she got religion and disappeared. Even in professing her love of God she never recanted anything she did. To her the naked body was God's work and there was nothing wrong with putting it on display.

No one has seen Bettie since then although she has resurfaced in recent years but only in audio interviews. There is one fuzzy photo shot when she was 80 and surprisingly she looked great. But Bettie was well aware that this late in life people would be disappointed by what they would see. She wanted the Bettie image to remain intact and not to be compromised by what time does to us all.

So now the mother of my sexuality lies in a Los Angeles hospital clinging to life and brings to mind one major question. My God am I getting that fucking old?????

Jay Squawking

2008-12-11T00:01:00.007-05:00

The second biggest mistake NBC has made is to give Jay Leno five nights a week at 10 p.m. to do his little show. NBC's biggest mistake was to give the Tonight Show to that unfunny and talentless Conan O'brien. It is amazing that Jeff Zucker, who has really turned into the worst programmer of all time, is being allowed by GE to make such boneheaded mistakes.

Leno has been a success in late night. His ratings have remained high and the money has rolled into NBC's coffers. While Leno is no class act like David Letterman, he seems to appeal to the corn fed viewer and that is what makes him a winner.

So why lose him? It seems that if they didn't give Conan the "Tonight Show" by 2009 he would to be free to shop his act around. I'd say, let him go, but NBC saw him as too valuable. In what universe? That little upstart Craig Ferguson over on CBS is a much funnier and a better talent and is beating Conan in the ratings on a regular basis. What is so hot about Conan? Nothing comes to mind.

Even Zucker had to realize that getting rid of Leno was turning out to be one big mistake. Conan was bound to screw up the slot and diminish the late night profit center on a network that was in 4th place. Now Leno could go across town. There was no guarantee that he would be a sucess somewhere else, but he could knock Conan completely out of the game and probably push Letterman into number one. Not that Dave's numbers would go up, it's just that everyone elses would get chopped up.

So how to keep Leno? Enter this hair-brained scheme. Remember NBC is number 4 and not making the big bucks. By placing Leno across the board they don't have to pay for five much more expensive hour long dramas at about 3 million a week each. Leno's show will cost about 2 million a week, saving them at least 13 million dollars a week or over a cool 300 million a year. In the last several years a a lot of the hour long shows (ie:"My Worst Enemy") have done poorly for NBC. Some of dramas have done OK, and they are the shows they will most likely save and move to other time-slots. Five hours of programs will get cancelled. Maybe just 4 since "ER" is through at the end of this year. That's less jobs for people in Hollywood. I guess we are in fact seeing the first of the TV network layoffs.

Remember also that NBC a few years back decided to go with mostly reality shows in the 8 p.m. hour. While they have rolled some of that back you still have fat people losing weight and models opening briefcases. In short NBC is becoming a cable network.

It is said that in 2002 when David Letterman was contemplating a departure from CBS that NBC offered him a deal similar to Jay's but in the 8:00 time slot. Dave turned them down and stayed put at 31 million a year.....1 million more than Jay is getting for this deal.

The biggest part of this crap shoot is that Jay will be up against high rated programs on the other networks not just other talk shows like he is now. I like Jay. He's a great guy, but his "Tonight Show" has been embarrassing and it's amazing that he has done as well as he has with such a poorly executed show. Remember too that in late-night he is number one in a smaller universe with less audience to win over than that of prime-time. Will that be large enough to beat CSI?

Is this the death knell for NBC, the company that invented the network back in the days of radio? Will the Peacock be shot and served at the next Jeff Zucker executive dinner? Tune in to find out.

Where's Our Malcom X?

2008-12-10T08:26:00.008-05:00

In honor of "Day a without gay" day today, our good friend and colleque Michael Billy offered up this guest blog.

Throughout December protests were organized across the nation. Gay marriage supporters marched in front of Mormon temples and city halls with signs that read “God hates bigots!” I thought this was going to be our time. Deep down I still hope it will be.

Largely, this depends on the gays. Sorry to say, but the ball is in our court. This “Day without a Gay” thing is little and late. Our community needs to take a few notes from groups like ACT UP and PETA to really create change. Weak and half assed protests like this will only show how disorganized we truly are.

The “Day without a Gay” effort encourages gays and others who oppose the same-sex marriage ban to take off work and volunteer for an advocacy group. The concept mirrors past efforts to have immigrant workers take a day off work to show their economic importance. All of which might work…IF WE WERE ALL ON BOARD!

The idea that a significant number of gays will stay home tomorrow is just ridiculous. Can we all just take a gaze at the history books so we’re all on the same page. The road to equal rights is NOT a yellow brick one Dorothy!” At the VERY least we should be bold enough to protest every catholic church in our communities.

I’m sure “no gay day” will inspire provocative conversation around the water cooler. Hell, it might even open up a few minds when stylists and dance teachers don’t show up to work today. But the effort is weak. If we are not all on board with this protest it will only show weakness. There was a time for diplomacy and a leader like Harvey Milk. That time has passed. Where is our Malcolm X?

It’s been a month since the election and we celebrate how far we have come as a society. As many of us remain shocked at our misconceptions of our neighboring states, we must keep a watchful eye on the last acceptable prejudice. Anyone who uses their own religious “beliefs” as reason to support proposition 8 has the blood of a failed civil rights movement on their hands.

I will not be polite, silent, or cordial. This is a matter of equal civil rights. So Mormons you can take your millions and invest it in some new magic god undies. And to my fellow gays…At the rate we’re going we won’t see rights for another 10 years. Get some balls, stop being polite, and for fucks sake…STOP giving gay awards to straight people because they are nice to you.

The Mormon’s who funded this, the people of California who voted yes, the Catholic church, and ALL who blindly follow silently while disagreeing…there is no question about it, you are responsible. Show some balls.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU -- MAYBE

2008-12-10T00:01:00.005-05:00

This is a contribution by Bruce David, Editorial Director of Hustler Magazine

FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin wants to give Internet providers the ability to put filters on what you can access on the net. It's intended, we are told, to protect children from porn on the Internet. But you already have that ability on your computer, if you buy the necessary software. Why give that power to some super authority that will tell you what you can see? And what guarantee do we have that the government wont decide at some future date to block other things it doesn't want you or me to know about?

Martin has tied this proposal to plans he is drawing up which would supposedly provide free internet access to consumers. But that's another shell game: The free service would be slower than what you pay a monthly fee for. I suspect this would just be the beginning of a tiered system -- something net providers desperately want -- in which the speed of your net access will depend on how much you pay each month.

As for filters, I'm sure you wouldn't want me deciding what you or your children can view on the net. And I know I don't want you telling me what I can view. So why would I want Kevin J. Martin -- or any government authority -- to have that power over me? It's just a bad idea.

Squeezing OJ

2008-12-08T00:01:00.010-05:00

They finally got him behind bars. OJ Simpson is going to a Nevada Prison and won't get out at least until he's 70. We got the little bastard huh? Are you happy now? Hey let's face it the man got screwed big time.

Look, I don't know if he killed Nicole and her questionable pal Ron Goldman and neither do you. But in a court of law he was found not guilty and if you believe in the rule of law and our democracy, then you have to assume his innocence. You have to do it in order to preserve your own rights.

For the 13 years to the day since the Brentwood Massacre, he has lived in a world where all eyes scowled at him because as some would say "We know he was guilty!" Just how I might ask do you know? Were you there? Did you see him with the knife in his hand? If you didn't then shut the fuck up. Gut feeling has no place in a democracy.

Let's assume for moment that he did it. He was found not guilty in a court of law by 12 of his peers. Yes he had the money to skip the charge, but then there are those who don't and are innocent but haven't the funds to defend themselves against the unlimited financial resources of the state. Call it "even Steven". That's the way the system is and sure it needs to be changed but getting even with OJ isn't going to do it. He played the game fair and square and America got pissed because this time the black guy got away. You'll never hear a black person say that OJ got away with it, you only hear that from "whitey".

So OJ goes to Vegas for a wedding and comes out a felon. I do believe those sports memorabilia people were dealing in stolen goods from OJ or at least Fred Goldman who owns most of OJ and his stuff. OK he went a bit overboard but I can sympathize with his reasoning. I think most of us can. If it was anyone else, the dealers might not even have called the cops. If it were anyone else they'd be cleaning out bedpans at an old folks home for a thousand hours. If it were anyone else, they would have been found not guilty.

Let's take a small detour. How about that piece of shit Fred Goldman? When is he just going to go away? He's made a career out of OJ. He even had a short lived TV show off the fame. I understand someone being traumatized by the death of a son, but come on, this guy isn't doing this for his kid anymore, he's been so mesmerized by the harsh light of fame that he's addicted and probably doesn't even think about the Ron .

There were Fred and his daughter at the sentencing in the courtroom. How did he get in? They say a lottery. I say someone fixed the lottery. Come on, both of them? With that kind of luck they should hit the tables before leaving Vegas. There was Fred gloating on the courthouse steps to any camera that would shoot him. Isn't there something wrong about all of this? Now they are doing a victory lap, showing up this morning at the "Today" show where Meredeth Vierea threw softballs at them and assumed OJ's guilt in the deaths of Nicole and Ron.

Are you happy America? Are you glad to be a vigilante? I really don't give a shit about OJ but I do care about justice and how we conduct ourselves. The outcome and the reaction, it's a sad day for America.

And the winner of the lucky sperm contest is.......

2008-12-05T22:07:00.022-05:00

........Caroline Kennedy. That's who! Can you believe it? Caroline is New York Governor David Paterson's number one choice to be appointed Senator when Hillary steps down. Are they fucking kidding?

First of all what are her qualifications? Was it that she was the fastest sperm in Jackie's snatch? I can't think of any other reason. She has no real experience and if her father hadn't been shot in the head in Dallas nobody would even remember her.

What an insult to the people of New York. Do we have any say in the matter? We are the largest populated state in the country. We need a pro and instead they send in a rank amateur.

They had first thought of Bobby Jr. You know the guy with the funny voice. At least he's been an activist for years and has some real world credentials. He turned them down flat.

Is the Kennedy name so wonderful that even these many years after Jack's death the name still has magic. Hell he really wasn't much of a President. Had he lived he might have gone down as a rather lackluster chief of state. Come on, the guys death saved him from a scandal that was about to break that he was fucking a Russian spy. Bad enough he was sharing Judith Campbell Exner's vagina with Chicago mobster Sam Giancana.

As I said, it seems that we have no choice in the matter. They just appoint someone and have done with it. Isn't anyone better available or has this turned into the job nobody wants? What about Mario Cuomo? Hell I'd even do it. I only work 3 hours a day and I need something to do the rest of the day. Besides it doesn't seem like a full time job. If it were, wouldn't they get more stuff done?

This is a travesty. This is a payoff to her for getting on the Obama gravy train early. These are hard times. Just give her a pony and send her on her way.

My God am I blogging?

2008-12-05T13:51:00.004-05:00

I swore I would never start a blog. To me they have always been little more than a sparse version of a website which I have been doing for more years than I can remember at "Radio Freejack". But since I have been doing so much writing for magazines in recent years, I decided to give it a try. So chalk this up to another thing that I vowed to avoid that I went back on. The others would be marriage, masturbation and some ex in Cleveland.

My ex-wife Ronni has been a blogger for years now at http://timegoesby.net and has found a profession as an expert on aging. She doesn't mind getting old which is something I still have a hard time getting used to. Anyway, I used to berate her about "blogging" because I had been coding HTML and doing, as I said, a website for years and didn't want to admit how easy it had gotten to get up and running and now anybody could put their ego on the web.

My biggest problem with bloggers was the lack of oversight. Anyone can write any damn lie they want and because it hits the internet it is automatically assumed by some to be the truth. The internet has become most viral disseminator of lies ever.

So here I am posting a blog because Google sucked me in and all I had to do was click on an icon.

Now I'm just another asshole with an opinion who has a blog.