A New Freakin’ Issue!

1. Horray!!!!

   I do have a comment. I read the Skinny and enjoyed the update on party fundraising. I would like to say a bit more about the impact of what this means for the state GOP vs. state Dems. Link the fundraising report on the party with that of the poor fundraising of Tim Bee and you get:

   1) The GOP has an open seat (Renzi’s) to protect, a strong challenger with funding to Shaddegg, and they are trying to both get back CD 8 (Giffords) and CD 5 (Mitchell). That is a LOT of ground to cover and with very few funds. Look closely at the http://www.fec.gov. Search Arizona house races. You will see that Mitchell has over a million and leads his closest challengers by quite a lot (and they both gave themselves a big loan). Renzi’s seat is being dominated by an outstanding fundraising performance by Anne Kirkpatrick. Bob Lord, who is running against Shaddegg, apparently scared the bejesus out of him and got him to get some big money contributors to get him to the million mark…but Lord has a lot of money too and is catching up. Bee didn’t even catch up to Giffords…he fell behind…spin spin spin, but this past year included major efforts by people like Jim Click to raise funds for him….they were trying to get blood from a turnip.

   My point…why in the heck are they thinking that they can both run an open seat race, protect Shaddegg and get back 5 and 8 with so little money? This is good news for the Dems…very good news. The GOP’s only hope is that McCain will draw out a ton of people and that they will vote R down the line…its possible…but you have to have your A game or better to turn out an incumbent in America.

   Another question:

   The local party brought Karl Rove and boasted a big big haul of something like $200k. Did anyone ask yet how much they had to pay Rove to come? He is in the private sector now and people like him command massive amounts of money in speaking fees. I would be he goes for something like $100K…any idea anyone?

2. Always one of my favorite issues for the year. I’m excited to read it later tonight.

3. RE the article by Rall. I agree with his premise that McCain will take a tough stand initially and then fold (as he did on immigration and the Iraq debacle), but I certainly don’t see his time as a POW as evidence of that. There’s plenty of evidence of his double speak-a quick trip on You Tube will show you that. Rall didn’t mention that he was offered an early out a year after he was captured (the North Vietnamese found out his father was the Pacific Fleet commanding officer) but declined and spent over 4 years more in captivity. Not a sign of weakness…unless I’m missing something. But then Rall thought McCain’s failure to kill himself was a sign of weakness. In any event, I thought using his POW service as the main premise of his article was not only weak but kinda mean spirited.

4. John Schuster’s Media Watch this week explains exactly why I switched away from Rock 107.5 – they cut out the Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. At least there’s KFMA and their Revenge lunch hour…

5. Re: IPH’s Comment: Commercial radio is so – stale, especially in this one-trick-pony town, yet I don’t want to pay for radio. Why has it sucked so badly for so long??

6. A hunch: It’s gone downhill because it is quite commercially driven, and because of competition from MP3 discs that let people select their own playlist, the radio companies are forced to go with what the masses want to most likely hear and make less risky moves in their selections. The competition is even more of a threat compared to just ten years ago when a cassette or CD usually only offered one band or album.
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   Now you can stick a whole bunch of your faves on an MP3 disc and get 600mb of the variety you want.
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   If you think radio is hurting, let me ask: When was the last time you played a regular CD in your car with just one band playing 15 tracks at the most?
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   The last vestige for terrestrial radio may well be the morning radio show with unique, if only so-so, content. To reiterate: It’s not like commercial radio playlists are the bees knees for anybody, so they homogenize to the most common denominator.
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   For more, here’s an interesting look: How Did Terrestrial Radio Lose its Audience ?
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   As an aside, I figured I would also share this interesting and relevant piece from Rolling Stone: The Death of High Fidelity

7. A note about ‘s column:

   Is there some new 2-for-1 formula at work with Tucson Weekly columnists? Both O’Sullivan and Danehy seem to be fond of doing the following:

   (1) Writing a dumb column that inspires loads of letters
   (2) Writing an even dumber follow-up column that defends against the more extreme of those letters
   (3) Repeat until the letters stop

   For Danehy, lately it’s been vegetarianism. Danehy has used this subject in at least 4 of his columns in the past month. Last week’s column demonstrated that the guy still barely even knows what vegetarianism means, let alone why people find him idiotic when he questions claims that a healthy diet may, in fact, lead to better health.

   Now O’Sullivan is trying to top Danehy with her “I’m going to leave dog shit laying around because the plastic bags I use to pick it up are bad for the environment” article. That was the most amateurish, bogus and otherwise moronic article I’ve read in an alternative weekly since….well, since the Wickieup Weekly ran that piece about how “a cactus is like a pincushion getting revenge.”

   O’Sullivan never answers the basic criticism that even if plastic bags are bio-degradable, it does not follow that you just leave dog crap wherever you like. Instead, you find an alternative method for picking up the poops.

   That’s a simple, third-grade-level rebuttal to O’Sullivan’s entire argument. It’s so embarrassingly easy to knock down her whole lame-ass argument that it’s no wonder she avoids addressing it for 800 words here.

   Instead, O’Sullivan tries to divide all critics into two camps: Those who want her to buy biodegradable plastic bags, and those who are alarmed by the bacteria content in dog crap.

   She knocks down the first group by simply stating she’s too lazy to buy plastic bags, it’s impractical, and so on.

   Then she addresses the 2nd group by launching into a treatise on crap, the environment, crap in the environment, and environmental crapping crap that’s environmentally craptacular.

   What the crap?

   O’Sullivan’s paroxysm of tangential non-sequiturial meaning deflection ends with a pointless anecdote about a man who carries a rock in his plastic bag to deceive everybody around him into thinking he’s a respectable poop picker-upper.

   O’Sullivan’s column is shit. It should be bagged.

8. I’m actually going to go against tradition and not pick on Tom Danehy’s column this week.

   He sums up the writer’s strike in a generally evenhanded and readable way, and even sums up with a reference to one of the best-written media-based movies of all time, “Broadcast News.”

   Danehy mentions that internet TV broadcasts are in their infancy, and this is true. But that is one fast-growing baby. You can watch almost any network program on your computer. And I’m getting more and more amazed at how many movies are now available for instant viewing on Netflix.

   Netflix, along with many competitors, are quickly trying to make a merge between computers and TV sets a reality by offering streaming programs that people can watch on their big, wide, flat-screen living-room TV sets. No more watching internet shows in your computer cubbyhole over by the kitchen.

   Let’s see — TV screens are getting bigger and cheaper. A massive amount of material will be available at a moment’s notice for competitive prices…. It’s not quite the death knell for movie theaters, but it will definitely make them scrounge much, much harder for profit than ever.

   In any case — writers are right to take a stand and try to get their cut of the emerging media markets. It seems some pretty big players are intent on union-busting though, so….when we’re done watching the 2399052 hours of TV and movies already out there, we might have to go find something else to do.

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