Hysteria Watch
Needless to say we love nothing more than the hysteria from the uppity. In all fairness, ivy-educated and self-styled feminists are not the only ones who feel ‘insulted’. Some middle-brow state school ‘progressives’, males and females, are no less sanctimonious, if not more outspoken with their contempt for Governor Palin.
Alas, the splendid irony completely escapes them. As one of our friends points out, in his trademark deadpan tone, “It’s kinda odd that an attractive, relatively devout mother of 5 who by all all accounts is basically together if not Harvard material gets people so bent out of shape.”
Self-serving “News”
In case you’re mired in the financial meltdown, Yahoo News got some timely distraction for you. One of today’s headlines reads, Poll: Obama tops McCain as football-watching buddy.
Eye-catching as it is, however, if you drill down, the devil is in the details.
The AP-Yahoo poll finds that by a margin of whopping (given its margin of error is 2.3 percent) 3 percentage points, Sen. Obama leads Sen. McCain as the choice of football buddy. Of course, people’s preference vary by race, age, whatnot. Well, that’s pronunced, is it not? To say that the AP-Yahoo News’ political coverage is as ‘fair and balanced’ as Fox News is nothing short of a compliment.
Stop the Press: LEH Gone
We could be forgiven for sounding a bit elegiac but this just came in over the wire: NYSE suspends trading in Lehman Brothers share.
NEW YORK, Sept 17 (Reuters) – The New York Stock Exchange’s regulatory arm said on Wednesday that trading in shares of Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc has been suspended, effective immediately.
The exchange said that a listing was no longer considered suitable after the investment bank filed for bankruptcy on Monday.
Political Nexus of the Fallen
If anything, the glee of a sewing circle over the paroxysms underway in the financial market presents a splendid bit of irony in an otherwise tumultuous week.
On the heels of de facto nationalization of Fannie and Freddie, venerable Lehman Brothers fell on its sword, dying an ignominious death, followed by an eleventh-hour rescue of AIG that “brings on bloodbath”, as investors fear more shoes may drop.
Mind you, this is an election year. The “bewildered” candidates offered standard boilerplate responses. While partisans are parsing whether the economy is “fundamentally strong”, political junkies dig the piles and uncover some interesting factoids.
Tedious Nitpicking (of the Beijing Olympics)
It looks the media coverage (read: China bashing) of the Beijing Olympics shows little sign of easing. However, a glimmer of hope can be found in the comment section. Money quote,
“It is getting tedious how western media is finding faults with practically everything in this Chinese Olympics.”
Still, one can’t help asking the question: why the seemingly non-stop nitpicking? Looks like Americans are in good company when it comes to whiners.
Making An Olympian Mountain out of Lip-synching Molehill
You could be forgiven for thinking that the media are competing for gold in China bashing, as if spurred by Michael Phelps‘ epic success. What else can explain they’re abuzz with ‘fake’ footprints of firework and ‘miming’ child singer?
UK’s Telegraph scooped the computer generated fireworks but it pales in comparison to the human interest story, as every newspaper worth its salt has duly reported the “sleight of voice“. Some even go so far as to connect the 9-year-old girl’s lip-syncing (to another girl’s voice) to the fabricated fake dumpling fillings of cardboard, surfaced last summer in the height of another bout of China bashing.
Perhaps they’re too caught up in the Olympic fever, reflexively making a mountain out of a molehill. But what they fail to highlight is the fact that both controversies came to light in the Chinese media. The main reason given by the producers of the opening ceremonies, it seems, was aesthetic in nature. Then there’s such a thing as reading too much into the Chinese psyche – obsessiveness with perfection, control freaks, and worse yet, paranoia.
Let the Games Begin
On BBC’s website, under a catchy caption, “Beijing Games open with a bang”, is this stern warning: “Cannot play media. Sorry, this media is not available in your territory.”
The territory in question is, of course, the US, where the 29th Olympiad is in the firm grip of NBC. Despite the pre-Games ad blitz, you won’t catch a glimpse of the opening ceremonies until almost 12 hours later, unlike the rest of the world.
And holding viewers hostage is not the only offense. According to FT’s Matthew Engel, should athletes, especially those in endurance races such as cycling and marathon, find Beijing’s heat, humidity and haze intolerable, they’ll take NBC to task. Money quote,
The Chinese wanted to hold the Olympics in September, when the Beijing air was clearer, cooler and drier. They lost the argument to what in Olympic terms is a far more powerful force: the American TV network NBC.
Chase Credit Card Woes
Last week Bob Garfield hung up his boots after an 11-long months of crusading against Comcast. In the interim, many thousands “angry, mistreated” customers have visited the site to voice their grievances. Now their efforts appear to bear fruit: Griping Online? Comcast Hears and Talks Back.
Besides cable providers, credit card companies also deserve a place in the pantheon of abusive customer service. And we’ve had our fair share of woes with Chase credit card, part of JP Morgan Chase.
If you google “complaints about Chase credit card”, you’ll get hundreds of thousands of results, with the most recent ones dated yesterday. Which makes you wonder: Is Chase listening at all to those complaints or is it business as usual? If our experience today is any guide, the answer might be the latter.
Read the rest of this entry »
Summer Breeze That Disperses the Cobwebs of Reason
Summer is in full swing here – Fannie and Freddie plummeted as investors fear “socialism at our doorstep”, Fake Steve Jobs decided to hang up his boots, and stuffwhitepeoplelike hit the bookstores.
In the meantime, some intrepid souls “summered” in our backyard, a/k/a blog, and removed a June 10 post on “Deranged Hillary Hatred“. Summer must be going swimmingly for those into somersaults, we wonder?
Deranged Hillary-Hatred
This is also crossposted at the old blog.
Perhaps the specter of credit crunch has got into the heads of political pundits in the media, otherwise how can you explain the popularity of CDS, aka Clinton Derangement Syndrome? The US editor of UK’s New Statesman, Andrew Stephen, eviscerates media’s hideous Hillary coverage in the Dems primaries.
Hillary Clinton (along with her husband) is being universally depicted as a loathsome racist and negative campaigner, not so much because of anything she has said or done, but because the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media – consciously or unconsciously – are following the agenda of Senator Barack Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to tear to pieces the first serious female US presidential candidate in history.
Not to mention maniacal Obama supporters who seem nonchalant at best, happy at worst, with the way Hillary was treated. Her any action, no matter how innocuous, was “proof of evil intent”. Paul Krugman, NYT columnist, believes that most of the “venom” in the campaign “is coming from supporters of Obama”.
Stephen also pins down Sen. Obama in his complicity in the attacks: “But Obama himself prepared the ground by making the first gratuitous personal attack of the campaign during the televised Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate in South Carolina on 21 January”, contrary to media allegation that it was Hillary who started the negative campaign. Money quote, Read the rest of this entry »
