FOX and Enemies

Here's the thing about the whole "Is FOX News biased" thing: There are two aspects of the bias.

The first one is choice of coverage. I once read a newsman state that all journalism is biased because you can only cover so much with limited resources (so many pages of newsprint, so many hours of broadcast time). A choice must be made what to cover based on the public interest and what the journalists themselves think is a worthy story. Obviously, by those two criteria, FOX News is doing no wrong when their morning show "FOX and Friends" mentions ACORN 23 times in a single broadcast but mentions a historic growth in the GDP twice. The journalists think it's right and the audience think it's right; Therefore, it is right ("Right" being the operative word here).

The other aspect is more clear (and more icky), and that is the expression of individual opinions on issues by the journalists themselves. To take the example of the aforementioned "FOX and Friends", this is the network's morning show, which means that it is supposed to be in the league of the Today show or Good Morning America. That is, it's a fairly pleasant mix of fluff and news stories by friendly people sitting on couches and comfy chairs. Well, ideally that's what "FOX and Friends" is supposed to be, but every time I have caught footage of that show and their hosts, I have always been repulsed by their transparent tone of smugness and acrimony.

Yet even having seen this in action doesn't prepare you for when they have a good laugh over someone yelling about Nancy Pelosi burning in Hell. I don't have a ready archive of broadcasts at hand, but I feel relatively safe is saying that nowhere in their history of any network morning show do you have Matt Lauer of Charles Gibson laughing about a politician's eternal torment. This is the key, FOX: Of all the programming on your channel, this is supposed to be the lighter stuff. You can go on and on about O'Reilly and Beck being opinion shows and not reflective of the network as a whole, but when you have stuff like this going on in your morning show, then it's not longer a debate about choice of coverage. It's about pure bile.

A guide for your Halloween night

Wondermark's comic today is all sorts of awesome:

Whack-a-mole

Ever since Mrs. Mosley and I got back Sunday from a trip to the mountains, my laptop has been infected with popups. Even with repeated security scans and the popup blocker placed on the highest setting, they continue to appear. The final straw for me was this morning when, as Mrs. Mosely and C.C. were sleeping, a popup with audio appeared while I was in the kitchen and blared out it's loud and irritating spiel for a good fifteen seconds before I could silence it.

Fortunately, they weren't awoken by "Kevin Hoeffer", who is the make believe schmuck who appears in the ads. Actually, he's one of many make believe schmucks that are used, but the ads are virtually the same.

There are two things that I have found more irritating than the popups themselves. First, when Googling about these ads, I find all sorts of message board and blog postings talking about how these things are a scam, but absolutely none of them address how to get rid of the popups themselves. Sorry, maybe I'm a bit jaded, but if you have to be told these things are scams, you might be a little too gullible to be on the Internets in the first place.

The second thing was how the ad had a comments field like in a blog post in order to provide "testimonials" from every day folk who made big money through this process. When you scroll down to the place where a text box should be for more comments, this is what you find:


In case you can't read that, it says "Comments disabled due to spam". Yes, Kevin, ain't spam just awful?!?!?!

So what's the solution? Well, it may be what my wife decided to do earlier this year with her laptop: Uninstall Internet Explorer. I've never been of the anti-IE mindset that a lot of other people have been. It's always worked just fine for me. But after this, I may have to move to Firefox (which has not been experiencing these popups).

Boy, saying goodbye to both Internet Explorer and Geocities in the same week? The Nineties really are over.

As if the title wasn't long enough.

Oh, enough already!

Please put a moratorium on these cutesy names for special edition DVD releases, because it's gotten ridiculous. When they're short, they're more palatable (such as the Clueless "Whatever" edition), But when you start using entire quotes, it begins to be ungainly.

Worse, it might just reek of desperation. Although I know Planes, Trains and Automobiles has lots of fans (I don't happen to be one of them), could the use of the most famous quote be a way to remind people of what movie this is? Hey you thirtysomethings out there: Remember that scene with John Candy and Steve Martin in bed together? Yeah, it's from this movie right here, so don't forget to buy the right one!

And on one final note: It's my considered opinion that Edie McClurg gets the best line in the movie. But as short and concise as it is, It probably wasn't a likely contender for the name of this edition.

Give him a survival knife and some MRE's and lets see how he does.

I saw this headline on the First Coast News website this morning:

As much as I love Obama, I must respectfully disagree. I think it's an excellent decision to send Rush Limbaugh to Afghanistan.

Does exactly what it says on the tin... er... box.

Found via Neatorama: