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Jim Hightower
"The less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag." -- Kin Hubbard
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Hightower Lowdown:
Big biz wants to own the information superhighway while We the People bump along the backroads
In the 1970s, Lily Tomlin developed an iconic comic character she named Ernestine--a telephone clerk who took perverse pleasure from hectoring customers. Her character was a perfect portrayal of the arrogance of AT&T, the monopolistic telephone giant of that day. In one skit on on the TV show, Laugh-In, Tomlin had Ernestine delivering a TV pitch for the corporation:
"A gracious hello," she cheerfully began, speaking directly into the camera. "Here at the Phone Company, we handle 84 billion calls a year. So, we realize that every so often, you can't get an operator, or for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care!"
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The General Store
There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos
"I make a lot of money these days speaking to corporations, so I'd really prefer not to admit how...
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Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush
It's time to make politics fun again! With uncommon insight, political fearlessness and laugh-out...
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Thieves in High Places - Hardback
America is at an historic divide between rulers and rulees and the rulees are restless. Hightower...
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Have a gander at the whole store here...
O'REILLY'S INSIGHTFUL BRAIN SPASM
Thank you, Bill O'Reilly, for sharing your insights with us! Not insights into any of the great issues of the day – but into your thinking.
Well... “thinking” might be too strong of a verb for the recent brain spasm we got from this liberal-hating, right-wing cable-TV talk-show host. What set him off was a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that O’Reilly’s network, Fox News, has been devoting twice as much time as other cable networks to the Anna Nicole Smith celebrity story, while spending much less time than other networks on Iraq, a story of real importance.
This caused O’Reilly to have a double-barreled brain jerk. First, he blasted the other networks for covering the violence in Iraq, saying that they’re only doing it to embarrass the Bushites. “All their reporting consists of is here’s another explosion,” O’Reilly declared. “Bang. Here’s more people dead. Bang.”
He then went loopy, asserting “CNN and MSNBC are actually helping the terrorists by reporting useless explosions. Do you care if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Well, actually, Bill, I don’t think terrorists are setting off bombs just to get on CNN. I think they’re setting off bombs to kill people, including U.S. troops. That’s what we call “news.” It certainly does mean something to the families of the dead, to the soldiers who served with the dead, and to the progress (or lack thereof) of Bush’s war policy. It means something every freaking time it happens.
Still, Bill dismissed it as beneath him. “We bring you stuff that is new, that is relevant to your life, “ he sniffed. “I’m not going to cover every bomb that goes off in Tikrit.”
So, Anna Nicole Smith’s death is more “relevant” to our lives than the deaths of our troops in Bush’s misguided war. Now there’s a real insight – into O’Reilly’s head.