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Saturday Afternoon Chess thread 01-16-2021
Ace of Spades Pet Thread Saturday Gardening and Puttering Thread, January 16 [KT] Thread before the Gardening Thread, January 16 [KT] Saturday Morning Coffee Break EMT 1/16/21 Sing For Your ONT! Quarantine Cafe: The Grifties Edition Matt Gaetz Reads Insurrectionist Democrats the Riot Act As Fox News' Ratings Fall Below Those of Disney's "Pedophile Picnic" and Bravo's "AIDS Roadshow," It Leaks Word That It Might Fire Its CEO Cutting The Cord And Email Security
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April 01, 2014
Power Steering: Government Motors Recalling Six Million Plus Vehicles Due to Potentially-Dangerous Defects; No One In Media Asks Where GM's Top CEO, Barack Obama, Was During All ThisIn addition to the 4.8 million vehicles recalled for various problems ranging from dodgy ignition switches to non-deploying airbags, an additional 1.3 million are now being recalled due to a problem with the power steering that could cause an accident. "If power steering assist is lost, a message displays on the Driver Information Center and a chime sounds to inform the driver. Steering control can be maintained because the vehicle will revert to manual steering, but greater driver effort would be required at low vehicle speeds, which could increase the risk of a crash”, says the carmaker in its official press release. An economist at the Guardian recounts GM's recent recalls: Overall, GM has recalled 6.3m cars over the past couple of months – so far. The range of makes and model years present an impressively sprawling display of incompetence:* 1.6m Chevy Cobalts had faulty ignition switches that would turn off the car’s engine if bumped by the driver’s knee and which may have caused 12 deaths. Jim Geraghty notes the very underplayed angle here -- that the government knew about some of the problems at Government Motors and did nothing, if you can believe such a thing. Seven years ago, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration manager recommended investigating the reason for the non-deploying airbags in General Motors’ 2003-2006 Chevrolet Cobalt and Saturn Ion cars. This was revealed in a memo issued by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The chief of NHTSA’s Defects Assessment Division e-mailed other officials in the Office of Defects Investigation in September 2007, saying owner complaints from 2005 and “early warning” data about warranty repairs and injuries justified an investigation. According to an interview between current NHTSA officials and the House committee’s staff, the agency reconsidered after reviewing the data thus deciding not to open a formal investigation. Geraghty asks: Where the hell is the press? This is not just a GM story; this is a government story. So where the hell are the stories? Possibly prodded by Geraghty, the useless Howie Kurtz shows why people call him "One of the six thousand best media critics in the business." The General Motors safety debacle is about everything that’s wrong with Washington. Howard Kurtz' main role in the media is identifying a situation of media bias and then explaining to you why it's not bias. So, after identifying the problem -- the media is embargoing an important story about Washington -- he then says it's just a structural problem with the media. My theory is that in a television culture that thrives on heroes and villains, it’s hard to know who to blame. Really? Geraghty's not so sure of that. In another example of the phenomenon discussed in this piece, a wide variety of voices who are quick to lambaste “corporate greed” and “evil businessmen” – be it Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, health insurance companies, or any one of many others – are strangely quiet about a car company that manufactured and sold cars with a fatal defect. Why? Because progressives don’t begin from the principle, “a company must make safe products to be a good company.” They begin with “Barack Obama is the good guy.” Barack Obama supported and enacted the bailout of GM, thus that bailout must be a good thing. Thus, GM must be a company worth helping. Acknowledging that GM made dangerous cars, lied about it to the public, and then had the audacity to ask the taxpayers for money while keeping the danger of the cars secret would disrupt the “GM is worth helping, and Obama was right to help them” narrative, so it must be ignored, shoved aside, eyes averted, and so on. That said, even Howie Kurtz' explanation -- he always wants to find non-ideological reasons to explain away ideological bias -- itself reveals ideological bias. He says the press needs "someone to blame" in a story. Apparently, if it's not clear who to blame, they just have no interest. Why should "Someone To Blame" be required to generate press interest? Even if you don't know who to blame in the Government Motors recall, the story is still worth reporting. You might not know who to blame for the 2005 Thailand tsunami, but the story is still certainly worth reporting. Let me modify Kurtz' proposed explanation for something closer to the truth: When something awful has happened, and it's not clear that you can blame a Republican for it, or, even worse, that a Democrat may ultimately be to blame, the press cannot find any interest in reporting the story or asking questions. The press likes asking questions whose answers they already know. They like asking "Are Republicans to blame?" when they think Republicans are to blame. But in a case like this, where Republican blame seems unlikely, and where it could actually turn out to be the case that Barack Obama may share in the blame, the press just finds the whole situation rather "abstract," as Kurtz terms it. Compare the media's vim in reporting on Bridgegate -- going so far as to speculate that maybe a ten-minute slowdown in an ambulance transport might put Chris Christie on the hook for involuntary homicide -- with its lack of anything resembling basic curiosity in the case of Government Motors. | Recent Comments
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Saturday Afternoon Chess thread 01-16-2021
Ace of Spades Pet Thread Saturday Gardening and Puttering Thread, January 16 [KT] Thread before the Gardening Thread, January 16 [KT] Saturday Morning Coffee Break EMT 1/16/21 Sing For Your ONT! Quarantine Cafe: The Grifties Edition Matt Gaetz Reads Insurrectionist Democrats the Riot Act As Fox News' Ratings Fall Below Those of Disney's "Pedophile Picnic" and Bravo's "AIDS Roadshow," It Leaks Word That It Might Fire Its CEO Search
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The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick
Primary Document: The Audio
Paul Anka Haiku Contest Announcement Integrity SAT's: Entrance Exam for Paul Anka's Band AllahPundit's Paul Anka 45's Collection AnkaPundit: Paul Anka Takes Over the Site for a Weekend (Continues through to Monday's postings) George Bush Slices Don Rumsfeld Like an F*ckin' Hammer Top Top Tens
Democratic Forays into Erotica New Shows On Gore's DNC/MTV Network Nicknames for Potatoes, By People Who Really Hate Potatoes Star Wars Euphemisms for Self-Abuse Signs You're at an Iraqi "Wedding Party" Signs Your Clown Has Gone Bad Signs That You, Geroge Michael, Should Probably Just Give It Up Signs of Hip-Hop Influence on John Kerry NYT Headlines Spinning Bush's Jobs Boom Things People Are More Likely to Say Than "Did You Hear What Al Franken Said Yesterday?" Signs that Paul Krugman Has Lost His Frickin' Mind All-Time Best NBA Players, According to Senator Robert Byrd Other Bad Things About the Jews, According to the Koran Signs That David Letterman Just Doesn't Care Anymore Examples of Bob Kerrey's Insufferable Racial Jackassery Signs Andy Rooney Is Going Senile Other Judgments Dick Clarke Made About Condi Rice Based on Her Appearance Collective Names for Groups of People John Kerry's Other Vietnam Super-Pets Cool Things About the XM8 Assault Rifle Media-Approved Facts About the Democrat Spy Changes to Make Christianity More "Inclusive" Secret John Kerry Senatorial Accomplishments John Edwards Campaign Excuses John Kerry Pick-Up Lines Changes Liberal Senator George Michell Will Make at Disney Torments in Dog-Hell Greatest Hitjobs
The Ace of Spades HQ Sex-for-Money Skankathon A D&D Guide to the Democratic Candidates Margaret Cho: Just Not Funny More Margaret Cho Abuse Margaret Cho: Still Not Funny Iraqi Prisoner Claims He Was Raped... By Woman Wonkette Announces "Morning Zoo" Format John Kerry's "Plan" Causes Surrender of Moqtada al-Sadr's Militia World Muslim Leaders Apologize for Nick Berg's Beheading Michael Moore Goes on Lunchtime Manhattan Death-Spree Milestone: Oliver Willis Posts 400th "Fake News Article" Referencing Britney Spears Liberal Economists Rue a "New Decade of Greed" Artificial Insouciance: Maureen Dowd's Word Processor Revolts Against Her Numbing Imbecility Intelligence Officials Eye Blogs for Tips They Done Found Us Out, Cletus: Intrepid Internet Detective Figures Out Our Master Plan Shock: Josh Marshall Almost Mentions Sarin Discovery in Iraq Leather-Clad Biker Freaks Terrorize Australian Town When Clinton Was President, Torture Was Cool What Wonkette Means When She Explains What Tina Brown Means Wonkette's Stand-Up Act Wankette HQ Gay-Rumors Du Jour Here's What's Bugging Me: Goose and Slider My Own Micah Wright Style Confession of Dishonesty Outraged "Conservatives" React to the FMA An On-Line Impression of Dennis Miller Having Sex with a Kodiak Bear The Story the Rightwing Media Refuses to Report! Our Lunch with David "Glengarry Glen Ross" Mamet The House of Love: Paul Krugman A Michael Moore Mystery (TM) The Dowd-O-Matic! Liberal Consistency and Other Myths Kepler's Laws of Liberal Media Bias John Kerry-- The Splunge! Candidate "Divisive" Politics & "Attacks on Patriotism" (very long) The Donkey ("The Raven" parody) |