Clear Channel gets caught

ANY company that tries to pull a fast one on an increasingly media-savvy populace should first consider the power of blogs.

Clear Channel, thought by its critics to be the best representative of the creeping corporate weaseldom that has brought on the ruination of commercial radio, tried to dupe radio listeners in Akron, Ohio, by posing as an anticorporate pirate radio station.

Via some audio trickery, Clear Channel made it sound as though pirate signals from "Radio Free Ohio" were bleeding into several of the other stations it owns. The "pirate" signals, and a Web site set up to promote the new station, lashed out at corporate radio.

Suspicious, someone using the handle "Turbo Ninja" looked up the Web site registration for radiofreeohio.org, discovered it was owned by Clear Channel, and posted the findings to the message boards on the Web site of the independent station WOXY.

"They're ripping corporate radio as a means of encouraging people to listen to a slightly different kind of corporate radio," Turbo Ninja wrote.

The posting was picked up by several blogs, and in turn by The New York Times, which quoted a Clear Channel executive saying, "There's a hole in the market here and we're going to fill it."

Go Ohio! Stay vigilant.

Let them eat cake!

BBC: The UK Chancellor Gordon Brown has put forward a bold plan to tackle poverty in Africa ahead of the G8 Summit of rich countries in Scotland next month.

But the plan is facing opposition in the US - and particularly from President George W Bush.

The UK is one of six European nations who have pledged to increase their aid target to 0.7% of GDP by that year, a figure which only five countries have managed to reach so far.

However the US has said that the target is not a realistic one for it to work towards.

The gops are outraged when a vegetable is taken off a feeding tube, but when a whole continent is starving, who cares?

I'm not quite sure what the logic is behind their lack of support for debt relief. I mean, if you put it in their terms, if a government has more to invest, the country will develop. A whole new cheap labor force for outsourcers and a fresh market for foreign direct investment appears. The countries right now are paying out more money for loans than they are taking in revenue. It's pretty difficult to collect taxes from people who live on less than a dollar a day. I guess it's that whole gop aversion to helping people. I mean, it's not like we need the money, right? We can just borrow theoretical money and plunge the US further into debt.

It is interesting that the world democracy movement seemingly going on right now may actually come to backfire on the Bush administration. Strangely enough, calls for democracy in the Middle East have woken people who are already living in democracies. The no votes against the EU Constitution are one example. The rise of grassroots politics in the US is another. Despite my criticism of the rise of the religious right in this country, I am still fascinated by that rise. The left, too, has seen a drastic increase in grassroots participation, epecially in the form of Meetup.

The world's people have grown tired of the elites. (Well, some of them.) Despite the fact that a bunch of coddling rock stars are putting on a concert, the feeling is not one of those Don-Henley-plants-a-tree-at-a-school moments. With the exception of a select few, rock stars are normal people, only wealthier. The fact that they are putting together a concert to raise awareness rather than money is a huge development in rock star causes. Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaigns will have a different effect on the cause, meaning they will have an effect. The first Live Aid raised $200 million, not even enough to pay off a day's debt payment in Africa.

The voice of the people has shaken the political structures of Europe. The US is still behind the times because its citizens have the false belief that American democracy is not suffering serious problems, but they are waking up, especially since oil prices continue to climb. The last few months of American politics have shown that Bush is not infallible, and the power-at-all-costs attitude of the gops is vulnerable. Americans are not a stingy people. If you explain to them the basics of the problem, they will jump on board to help, and with people like Brad Pitt as a spokesman, there has already been a lot of curiousity and interest. Fox and ABC have agreed to play the commercials for free, oddly enough.

If the US wants to continue to be a world leader, it needs to lead. Bush would be wise to take this opportunity to do it.

American Theocracy

Do you believe God belongs in government?
Do you believe President Bush is doing The Lord's Work?
If so, then show your love for God, the President, and the USA!

Get your Jesus Bush fish here.

America is a scary place.

The Bible was written by aliens

The Bible UFO Connection

I think they have it wrong. I think the Evangelical crackheads are the aliens who've come to take over the world. They have strategically targeted science as the first step... without the reason and logic of science, we can't discover their plan.

Obviously a Bush voter

Woman, 86, arrested in pizza row

An 86-year-old woman has been arrested for calling emergency services because she couldn't get a pizza delivered.

Dorothy Densmore, of Charlotte, North Carolina, spent two nights behind bars after dialling '911' 20 times in 38 minutes.

Angry she could not get the meal delivered to her home, she demanded police arrest the pizza proprietors, reports the BBC.

She told police that she had been called a "crazy old coot" by someone at the pizza shop.

Mrs Densmore, who is 5ft tall and weighs seven stone, has also been charged with resisting arrest.

A police spokeswoman said the octogenarian scratched, kicked and bit the hand of the officer.

She has now been released from jail, pending a court appearance in July, after a judge ordered a medical evaluation.

But... only Muslims do this type of thing!

Bosnian Execution Video Shakes Families

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - The Serb paramilitaries prodded the six skinny young Bosnian Muslims — their hands tied behind their backs — through the tall green grass, and then shot them one by one. Gruesome video of the July 1995 killings near Srebrenica was shown this week in Serbia, forcing Serb leaders to finally acknowledge their country's role in the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.

The video, apparently made by Serb troops, shows men in camouflage uniforms wearing red berets emblazoned with the Serbian flag taking the six prisoners — some still in their teens — from a truck, hands tied behind their backs. The troops shouted "Yalla, yalla" — or "Go, go" in Arabic — mocking the victims' Muslim religion.

Four were then shot one by one in the back. They slumped into the tall grass, and the two others were ordered to carry the bodies into a barn where they, too, were killed. At times, the paramilitary troops cursed and sneered at the prisoners.

And to think Tom DeLay took money from Russian agents so the Serbs could continue this brutality. These people are no better than Zarqawi.

The big, fat idiot is a big, fat idiot

From the June 2 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: The two to three big opportunities so far mentioned by Howard Dean -- pension portability and changes to election laws. ... So portability of pensions. What's the second one? Oh, yeah, Election Day a holiday. And well, you know -- I don't know why they need to do that. Most of their voters don't work anyway, so I don't know how that's going to help them that much. At least in a percentage basis.

This is fascinating to learn. I would have never known, since all of my friends, most of whom are dems, actually DO work.

Last time I checked, all the rednecks who sit on their porches all day in the midwest voted for bush.

Rock can save the world, and Bush can do nothing to stop it

One of the coolest parts of the Verigo tour is when Bono commands the audience to take out their cell phones and text to the One campaign. 10,000 cell phones come out and light up the darkness. WaPo adds:

The Bush folk are pretty much surrounded. Even though they have already launched two major Africa initiatives -- the Millennium Challenge Account aid effort and the president's initiative on HIV -- it's a pretty sure bet that, in the run-up to the G-8 summit and the September U.N. gathering, the Bush administration will have to do another something. The White House has gotten the message that Britain and other rich countries will be announcing bold pro-Africa initiatives. If the United States aspires to lead the world, it cannot stand there empty-handed.

But the real test for the administration -- and for the One campaign and its allies -- will be the initiative's content. If the announcement is mainly smoke and mirrors -- for instance, a debt-relief proposal that's paid for out of the financial reserves of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- that won't be much of a triumph. If on the other hand the administration makes a strong announcement involving real new money, the question is going to be whether Congress will fund it.

That's the ultimate One challenge. The campaign wants to boost U.S. development spending by 1 percent of the budget, a sum equivalent to around $25 billion a year -- enough to bring the American contribution up to European levels as a share of GDP. But when the administration recently proposed a modest $3.3 billion extra for all foreign operations, the House leadership cut the proposal by nearly 80 percent, preferring to protect programs such as ludicrous domestic farm subsidies.

Even Pat Robertson is in on this. I am surprised he took away from his precious gay-bashing time to make the commercial.

AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls

It's too bad we are using guns and bombs to force "democracy" on people rather than doing something about a whole continent that is starving or dying of AIDS.

Books are terrorists!

Huffington Post pointed out Human Events Online's Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.

The list is rather amusing. It's as if they went down the list of things they say are on the "liberal agenda" and then picked the most prominent book about it.

Here is my list of the top ten most damaging books of the 19th and 20th centuries:

1. (tie) Der Judenstaat

This book was the beginning of the current Israeli-Palestinian War. It advocated taking over the Palestinian land and establishing a Jewish state with no concern for the Palestinians living on it. The Middle East has been unstable ever since.

1. (tie) Protocols of the Elders of Zion

This book was a forgery that was used to strengthen Czar Nicholas II's position by exposing his opponents as allies with those who were part of a massive conspiracy to take over the world. Illiterate Arabs still use it as evidence of a worldwide global Zionist conspiracy to take over the world.

3. Capitalism by Ayn Rand

Promoted unbridled capitalism as the only moral economic system. A god of the libertarians and friend of Alan Greenspan, who was also an objectivist. Led to the creation of the Corporate States of America.

4. The Yellow Kid

This was the first comic book ever published, which started the demise of intellect and a decreased interest in books.

5. Those Who Trespass

Bill O'Reilly writes a smut novel.

6. Death of the West

Immigrants cease to be welcomed in America, nation of immigrants. By Bat Pukanan.

7. End of History and the Last Man

Fukuyama proclaims the fall of Communism signals the end of history. Last time I checked, militant Islam forced us into a new period of history.

8. Slander

Lying to the masses becomes an acceptable form of entertainment.

9. Left Behind

The best seller books that have brought us such things as the Rapture Index and an NBC miniseries. Led to mass panic and increase in number of bornagains who see gays as a sign the world is ending.

10. The Koran in the toilet
(Not pictured, has been flushed.) Led to World War III and the Rapture, according to Scott McClellan.

Shallow Throat