All that and brains too...
-Headline of the day-
"CBS foreign correspondent: Watching US news would 'drive me nuts'"
Chief CBS News foreign correspondent Lara Logan -- who's also a bona fide hot tomato -- told John Stewart of The Daily Show that she can't watch American news.
"If I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I’d just blow my brains out, because it would drive me nuts," she said.
According to the report, "The outspoken Logan — who has stated in the past that Americans have no idea how badly the war is going because of the suppression of pictures of American casualties — made no attempt to hide her contempt for American coverage of the Iraq and Afghan Wars."
See? I told you so. American news media sucks. (Raw Story, with video)
-It's all about the Benjamins-
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama announced today that he'd forgo public financing for his campaign. Politico's Ken Vogel tells us Obama "will be the first modern presidential candidate to decline public financing in a general election."
Why turn down free money? Because it comes with restrictions. If he accepted $84 million from the government, he'd be forced to limit his spending to $84 million. He doesn't want to do that. See, he's raising stupid huge figures. Where John McCain had raised $93 million by the end of April, Obama had $266 million. And that cash comes "primarily from smaller donors over the internet" -- in other words, folks like you and me.
On hearing that Obama was forgoing public financing, John McCain reportedly shat. (Politico)
-Glenn Beck is still a dick-
In talking about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, CNN's Glenn Beck surprised no one by taking the position that we ought to drill it dry. TV ranters like Beck don't actually have minds, they have a cable jack in the back of their heads where the GOP can upload talking points.
Someone must've screwed up the data, though, since Beck got his facts a little wrong. "Even with all of that, domestic drilling is still stalled by Congress. It's like these people don't even -- they don't even live on the same planet," Glenn said. "And this is really too bad, since drilling in ANWR alone would yield 100 million barrels a day."
Yeah, that number's slightly high. Just a little tiny bit shy of actual truth. How off is Beck here? About 7,000%. At absolute peak production (which wouldn't happen for years, by the way) ANWR would produce 1.45 million barrels a day. See, this is why everyone's so against it -- there isn't enough oil up there to bother with, let alone screw up a wildlife refuge over.
But that's Beck -- and Limbaugh and O'Reilly and Hannity. They're really all the same guy, since they all say the same thing about 100% of the time.
I think I know what Lara Logan was talking about. (Media Matters)
-Station note-
There wasn't a roundup yesterday because of connectivity issues on my end. We've had flooding all around the city and it seems to be messing with the infrastructure. It's a lot better now than it has been though and I think everything's pretty much cleared up. (Me)
