John Mortell’s blog

Fucking hell, I love how she assumes everyone is a complete idiot…

Man, I hadn’t heard this before but it’s great… A remix of the Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’ …

Cian’s already talked about this, but Obama does it funnier (sorry Cian) (Also, I apologise for the fact that ‘funnier’ isn’t correct English)

It’s kind of creepy the way that ‘fake’ news like The Daily Show, the Onion and the Colbert Report are actually more realistic than most of the ‘real’ coverage of this election:

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

While I’m somewhat dubious about the source (my own personal opinion of Alternet is that they let too much of their opinion creep into their articles rather than let the facts speak for themselves) these paragraphs in the middle of a piece attacking John McCain caught my attention

The “surge is working” narrative’s not reality-based, and when it comes to Iraq, we’ve seen the spin give way to the ugly facts time and time again.

That the troop escalation has been anything but a success is not an ideological claim, as supporters of the occupation charge, but numerical and chronological. The surge began last February, and there was something approaching a consensus at the time that the addition of about 20,000 combat troops — the rest were support personnel — would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 25 million people. Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey said at the time: “I personally think the surge of five U.S. Army brigades and a few Marine battalions dribbled out over five months is a fool’s errand.” But the troop build-up continued in March, April and May.

The period that followed was a bloodbath — last June and July were the most violent summer months of any year of the occupation. August was one of the bloodiest months, period. Then, that month, the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army to stand down. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths fell by about 50 percent the next month and decreased again in October and November. The militia is estimated to be 100,000 strong and is arguably the most powerful ground force in Iraq after the U.S. military. While the change can’t be wholly ascribed to any single factor — the violence has also decreased as a result of communities that have been fully “cleansed” of one or another ethnic or sectarian group — it’s clear that al-Sadr’s order, not Bush’s “surge,” was responsible for most of whatever “success” there may have been.

Finally, there is the masterpiece of propaganda known as the “Sunni Awakening.” Spun as a sign of success, the reality is that the U.S. military turned over some of the areas where they’d encountered the most violent resistance to local Sunni authorities — many of whom they had condemned as “terrorists” previously — and started paying their fighters to stop shooting at U.S. troops. In other words, the U.S. was defeated and surrendered territory to the “enemy,” effectively paying reparations to local populations and suffering fewer casualties as a result. There are many ways to define success, but defeat and surrender are not among them. Yet, in perfectly Orwellian fashion, after four years of saying that Iraq was mostly stable aside from a few local areas and the Sunni “Triangle of Death,” the administration simply stopped using the phrase and replaced it with talk of a “Sunni Awakening.” We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

In summary – is the ‘Surge’s’ success based on the U.S claiming success while it’s retreating? It’d be rather like ‘Tricky Dicky’s’ way of dealing with Vietnam where the aim was eventually not to win, but rather to stop the South Vietnamese falling immediately after the U.S pulled. Food for thought anyway…

This is hilarious:

Excerpt from “Mackris v. O’Reilly”, a baroque oratorio composed by Igor Keller. Libretto uses verbatim transcript of sexual harassment complaint brought against Bill O’Reilly in 2004

Already talked about this here but this here is another clip of ‘Fox News Porn’:

Interesting article and video regarding Fox News and it’s campaign for ‘morality’ compared to.. well, the complete lack of morality on Fox TV as say this wonderful image shows. However there’s a slightly more serious grouping to this:

From News Hounds:

Bill O’Reilly is sort of FOX’s preacher, or the father figure who scolds and punishes the wayward, appealing to the viewers who yearn for the “Father Knows Best” days of yore when minorities knew their place, women stayed home in servitude, kids were seen and not heard, and a man’s home was his castle. Yes, those were the days – if you weren’t a minority, a woman, or a kid. Hence O’Reilly’s popularity among older white males who blame their lost stature on teevee even as they’re glued to it.

O’Reilly has a habit of lecturing about the decline of moral values, although he phrases it in the context of his book “Culture Warrior” and targets the “secular progressive” faction of society, who are allegedly out to abolish “traditional values.” He routinely blasts Hollywood, television, the Internet, and the music industry for producing and selling media he considers harmful to the nation’s moral fabric, scrupulously avoiding his owner’s part in all these productions. (FOX Television retains high honors year after year for unsuitable programming, according to Brent Bozell’s Family Television Council.)

He even asserted in “The State of the Union According to the Folks” that ” Sixty-three percent believe the moral and ethical climate in America is declining. And it is. The Internet and an irresponsible media have hit traditional values hard.”

Like the O’Reilly Factor?

O’Reilly has recently addressed such important topics as PETA using nude female images in ads promoting a healthy vegetarian diet, “Girls Gone Wild” participants suing the producer after the fact, and dating websites that only allow “hot” people to sign up – all so he could show related videos of scantily clad young women to the dirty old men who watch. Under the guise of reporting on Internet porn sites who publish pictures of the youngest girls allowed (18), the moral decadence exhibited at beaches during Spring break, and American Idol stars who take it all off for magazines, O’Reilly played videos and showed screenshots in the interest of letting his audience see what he’s talking about, raising their, um, outrage.

The Times biography book of ‘Great Lives of the 20th Century’ from 2005 features Pope John Paul the second on page 666. I’m not joking – look it up.

Wasn’t it Rudi who’s daughter put on her facebook that she supports Obama? Anyway regardless I don’t really like the man and am generally inclined to believe that he has simply piggybacked off the mythology of 9/11 to give himself a shot at the presidency. The writer of this (addmittedly rather long, but good) article feels the same. Have a look here.