Danehy

A few media nuggets:

• Besides, slavery probably wasn’t all that bad, anyway. Dr. Benjamin Carson is the right wing’s latest Black Guy Du Jour (think Herman Cain without the sordid past … so far). Last week, he said, “Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. And it is, in a way, it is slavery.”

After a near-universal chorus of derision rang out, Carson wrote an op-ed in The Washington Times (think Fox News in print) titled “I Didn’t Equate Obamacare With Slavery.” Carson doesn’t deny that he said what he said, but uses the entire piece to note that he thinks that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen in America since slavery. Distinction noted.

That still means that, in the mind of Ben Carson, a government-sponsored program to help lower-income people get health insurance is worse than: the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the institutionalization of segregation by the U.S. Supreme Court; the Galveston hurricane, the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake; Sept. 11 and Pearl Harbor; the Great Depression; the assassination of four U.S. presidents; and countless other tragedies and/or really bad decisions that have caused pain in this country over the past 150 years. Of course, the Japanese-American internment didn’t send medical doctors into a tizzy at the thought that it might—might!—turn them from being millionaires into several-hundred-thousandaires.

• And a 60-percent lower grade in English. Burger King has introduced Satisfries. Because they are crinkle cut and are deep-fried a bit differently, they reportedly absorb less fat and thus have a lower caloric content. The problem is that on the TV commercials, they are touted to have “30 percent less fat and 20 percent less calories.”

You assume that Burger King paid some big advertising firm millions of dollars for the campaign. Couldn’t a couple of hundred dollars have gone for someone to check the grammar? It should say, “30 percent less fat and 20 percent fewer calories.”

The rule of thumb is really pretty easy to remember. “Fewer” is used with things that are countable “Less” is used with a mass that is measurable, but not countable.

I think it’s rather lame to cut back a bit on the fat and calories in an effort to make them less bad for you. Or, as Burger King would say, “… to make them fewer bad for you.”

• Jerry Rivers would be so proud. Kudos to the people responsible for the campaign posters featuring the guy who is running against incumbent Karin Uhlich for the Tucson City Council. They basically say “Ben Buehler GARCIA.” As the funk band Parliament would say, that’s the way to get up for the down stroke.

It reminds me of the former UA frat boy named Jerry Rivers who became Geraldo Rivera when his ethnicity became an asset. Good luck with that, Ben.

• Apparently, everything is bigger in Texas. Serving as host for the Alfred E. Smith Dinner, Stephen Colbert said that the Republican Party had sacrificed their chances in 2014 for Ted Cruz’s ego.

I really, really, REALLY don’t understand how a person who represents a small minority of his state’s constituents can get to the Senate, then proceed to piss on the rules, his fellow senators and his entire political party; then convince a pack of lemmings in the other legislative body to take a stance that would lead the U.S. and world economies to the brink of disaster, and somehow come out ahead. Several media outlets (and not just Fox or Rush Limbaugh) are claiming that Cruz has emerged from the debacle that he created with a higher profile and improved image. How the hell?!

If I were a Republican, I would organize a pillowcase party and beat Cruz’s ass for what he did. But since many Republicans are either afraid of him or embrace him, they can have each other. Rats on a sinking ship.

• Overly fair and unbalanced. I hate that the so-called mainstream media went out of their way to portray the government shutdown and debt-limit/default issues as things for which both parties were equally at fault. That’s insane. The “crisis” was wholly manufactured by a handful of nuts on the political fringe—cretins who hate poor people, minorities and government—and then thrown like a stink bomb into a crowded room.

Shame on those in what the right calls the “liberal media” for using terms like “standoff” and “stalemate” when it was anything but.

This article appears in Oct 24-30, 2013.