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Advertisers just say no to Glenn Beck

 It is nice to see that some large corporations still respond to the wishes of the consumer.

 Several sponsors of the Fox News show “Glenn Beck” have announced they are pulling their advertisements in the wake of the host’s remarks that President Obama is racist.

 Beck, not to be confused with the one-named singer Beck, said on another Fox show that Obama is a “racist” and has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Obama, not be confused with an Irish bartender, replied that Beck was a “horrible basketball player” and “can’t dance for diddly.”  

  The advertisers which include Geico, Sargento, Proctor and Gamble, the Phizer pharmaceutical company, Kraft Foods and Progressive Insurance did not remove their commercials from the Fox News network. Thus the Rupert Murdoch Republican Party’s Right Wing Hate Machine network as it is also known stands to lose no money from sponsors.

 A black political coalition, ColorofChange.org, launched the drive for sponsors yanking their ads from Beck’s show. The linked “The New York Times” article describes Beck also as a “conservative radio host and comedian.” That description is itself funny because Beck has all the humor of Heinrich Himmler on a bad day.

 Speaking of concentration camps, Beck said in recent months that FEMA was building concentration camps for Republicans and other Obama opponents. The rumor was later debunked on his own show. Too bad the same can’t be done for Sarah Palin’s “Death Panels.”

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Cell or no cell?

 Perhaps because we move kind of slow down here in Texas is the reason why trends which have taken place elsewhere don’t always get to the Lone Star State posthaste. Take, for instance, bans on using cell phones while driving.

 A new law will take effect on Sept. 1 in Texas — on a local-option basis — which bans the use of cell phones in school zones. By local-option, I mean that the governing jurisdiction of where the school is located has to first approve it. If it is in a city, the city must approve it and county commissioners must give their approval if it is in an unincorporated area.

 I suppose the Texas Legislature and Gov. Good Hair Perry, in their infinite wisdom, decided they didn’t want to get get stuck as being the ones who outlawed using a cell altogether while driving. That is, no matter how many people get killed because of people yakking on their phones and not watching what they are doing.

 One thought has piqued my curiosity. Since Mothers Against Drunk Driving is largely responsible for one no longer even feeling they can drink one beer and drive without worrying about a DUI charge, I wonder their thoughts on cell use and driving?

 Admittedly, I have not had a chance to do extensive research but in a quick search of the MADD Web page all I could find was a resolution supporting the use of cell phones in vehicles for reporting drunk drivers. I wonder where they really stand?

 Although the federal highway safety agency tried to sit on studies showing even hands-free use of cell phones is deadly, other studies show those talking on the phone are four times as likely to crash and are as likely to wreck as drivers with a blood-alcohol content of .08.

 I admit that I sometimes use my phone while driving. It is a habit that I am trying to break just as seeing — when I was as a firefighter — numerous folks dead who didn’t wear seatbelts got me in the habit of wearing one. Sad to admit, I once used to drink and drive. Hell, just about every Texan who both drank and who drived cherished the long stretch when the state had no open container law or at least one that had no teeth. Times have changed now. You can get ticketed for an open container and can be arrested for DUI for almost having alcohol on your breath. Don’t get me started on those who can serve and die for their country unable to get a drink because they aren’t 21!

 And so it goes. My libertarian friends don’t like the idea of government playing nanny, and I don’t like it a whole lot either. But safety aside, a lot of practical utility comes from laws like mandating seat belts, DUI and banning cell phones. This includes money spent on insurance premiums, taxes we pay to support hospitals, worker productivity (having your worker show up instead of he or she being in jail, the hospital or the morgue), to list a few.

 So, I imagine one day completely giving up talking on a cell and driving. Unlike many people I see every day, I don’t stay on the phone from the time I get in my auto until I disembark, and then some.

 I can live without driving and cell chatting; perhaps even live because I am not driving and talking on the phone.

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I forgot to write a header; Something storm

 It’s hard to think about cyclones hitting elsewhere on the globe when you’ve lived your life generally hurricane-free, then all of a sudden the place where you live becomes a hurricane magnet during the past four years (Rita, Humberto, Ike).

 Now little areas of disturbed weather — most of which are between the West Africa coast and the West Indies — are being watched for possible hurricane development. Until these storms, including Tropical Depression 2, get closer to the U.S. we will play a waiting game to see if the unwelcomed trend will continue.

 But in the meantime, folks like my friend Paul and his family are having to deal both with heavy rain and thunderstorms from a typhoon as well as earthquakes.Paul, a friend from college and a de facto consultant on the quirks of Word Press which powers this blog, lives in Tokyo where he reports the worst seemed to have past from earthquakes even though the shaking there was pretty substantial — enough for his kids to get under the kitchen table.

 At least hurricanes develop and move relatively slow — Humberto being an exception — so one can see them coming. But earthquakes are something else. Thankfully, we don’t have many earthquakes where I live on the upper Texas coast. I’m not going to say they don’t happen. There have been small ‘quakes detected within a 100-mile radiius of the area, but not those high up on the Richter scale.

 I don’t know if any place on Earth is without the threat of some kind of natural disaster: tornadoes, sandstorms, droughts, cyclones, earthquakes, avalanches, forest fires, floods. And of course, no one is really safe from some kind of cosmic debris like a meteor. Nature has many ways to get ya!

 But that’s life in the big Universe. There is nothing anyone can do about it so just sit back and enjoy the show. Be sure to board up your windows, stock up on Vienna sausages or do whatever you need to do to prepare — if you can prepare — first.

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Media melodrama: Push this back

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah “Caribou Barbie” Palin continues her reign of stupidity in American culture by her remarks over the weekend that the president’s health care reform would result in “death panels” to decide who lives or dies.

The ex-leader and failed Republican vice presidential candidate later backed off and asked for “restraint,” perhaps because folks in her own party were calling her contentions “nuts.”

Perhaps what is worse than the moronic expressions and downright silliness coming from those who are basically shills for big corporations who oppose health reform is that national media coverage of it all has received so much play.

If it could be proven that the anger we see each day on TV at townhalls is genuine as opposed to manufactured, or Astroturf, then the overwhelming media coverage would be warranted. But I think enough doubt and enough evidence has been raised that these shouting matches that pass for civic discourse is largely a tactic by big business and the Republican establishment to scare and whip opposition for health reform into a frenzy.

It would seem after being used to gain public support for an unnecessary war in Iraq that the media would get it.

So much of what one sees today in, at least the national media, is political conflict. That seems all that matters to news producers and editors in these national newsrooms. It is like Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz observed in a WP online chat yesterday when he said that the media likes to “keep stirring the pot and reducing everything to melodrama.”

Is the media in such coverage these days reflecting what the public wants to hear or are they molding the message to keep stirring the pot and turning the news into soap opera fodder?

That’s what it all seems like sometimes to me and I wish the media would stop it. And stop it right now! Cover the news, damn it. If I want soap operas I will watch “One Life to Live” or read about the Palin family.

And while you are at it, will you all in the national media and on cable channels quit using the gratuitous use of the word “pushback.” Yes, it is a real word and in most cases the meaning is being used somewhat in a correct fashion. But it is a buzzword and buzzwords get old in a hurry, especially if they aren’t funny.

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More to Mike Vick story than football

Lately, the local sport talk radio station has been one of my more frequent stops on the FM dial.

It is a good time for sports talk. Football season is on the horizon and major league baseball is winding down with the playoffs in the not-too distant future. Besides, one has little to pick from when it comes to music on FM in the Beaumont-Houston area. And on AM, of course, it’s practically all right-wing radio unless you get in just the right geographical spot and can get the Cajun station out of South Louisiana.

A lot of the radio sports guys have recently spent a lot of air time on the fate of Michael Vick, the one-time Atlanta quarterback who was recently reinstated into the NFL after serving federal prison time for organizing dog fights.

As a story — be it sports or just news — Michael Vick’s is a compelling one given the standard for news stories these days. It is a story tinged with race as well as that of animal cruelty. If gay abortionists were somehow involved in the story you would touch just about every hot-button out there.

The sports talkers are, not to a man, mostly missing the boat when it comes to the fate of Michael Vick. Many of these talk show folks I have heard want Vick back on the field where he belongs (their sentiment). There also seems to be a good-sized element of the African-American community who feel Vick is being, pardon the pun, black-balled from playing football. After all, Vick was one of the top NFL quarterbacks before his trouble with the law began.

I can’t speak for the sports guys and certainly not for blacks. I do believe though that the former are swimming against the tide in a great cultural gulf. Some of the sports talkers can’t understand why, if the NFL commissioner has reinstated Vick, that he has not been automatically snapped up by the league’s teams. Some have even gone so far to say the team executives must be worried about PETA showing up on their 50-yard lines.

But my guess is that the concerns go way beyond PETA. Some of the same folks who abhor animal cruelty show up on Sunday’s in the seats and skyboxes of the NFL’s stadiums. Countless others are chomping down on hot wings and drinking Bud Light at home while the games televised into their living rooms feature young guys knocking the bejesus out of each other. Yet many of these same fans go ballistic when they see abandoned or abused puppies on the evening news.

During my career as a, full-time, journalist I covered double homicides, wrecks killing or maiming handfuls and other miscellaneous mayhem. But never, ever, did I get as many phone calls and e-mails than the next day after a story I did involving stray dogs and cats.

This guy had become a one-man animal rescue and he kept taking in dogs and cats until animals had occupied one house and mostly took over another. I was out at this guy’s house when sheriff’s deputies came to take the animals away because this otherwise Good Samaritan couldn’t properly feed or otherwise care for these strays. It was as sad as it was vile, if you can imagine nothing but dogs and cats everywhere and doing pretty much as they do when not housebroken.

I notice that the local television news reporters lately also jump on animal abuse stories like a duck on a June bug. These stories run at the top of the newscasts, ahead of fatal car wrecks, Saturday-night stabbings and armed robberies. That’s because they know such stories play on the basest of human emotions. That is, at least for those who have the compassion to understand what is taking place.

I won’t dwell on the racial aspect of it because that is something which I personally know little about. However, there is also the “gangsta” element in the dogfighting cult that ticks off people of more than one race. Some people just can’t abide by crack-smoking, drive-by shooting, thugs for some reason.

NFL owners know the tightrope they are walking. Should they give Michael Vick another chance? And then that one little nagging thing: What if he lost some of his umpph while he was in the joint?

I have thought that perhaps Vick deserves a chance at some point in time but only after he has shown sincere remorse for his actions. I thought perhaps his talk in Atlanta to some kids over the weekend might have been a start. Although, some folks see it more as self-serving.

In the end, neither the sports talk guys nor Jesse Jackson nor PETA nor I, will have the say as to whether Vick suits up again for the NFL. Whether that is the case, ultimately, is another story.