I'm over my obsession with the Presidential election, but the media just won't let it go. It took Sarah Palin to make me care.Go figure. On a personal level, her voice came out at a pitch that jangled my blackboard-scratch aural pain center. How much did I dislike her as a candidate? Let me count the ways.
That's all irrelevant; she's got my sympathy. It's not surprising that the worst of the post-election attacks came out on FOX news. Sleazy comments about her thinking Africa was a country* and not knowing the countries in the NAFTA treaty. Anonymous attacks.
That's my problem with FOX: not the political views, but the tabloidy rumors and innuendo it deals in to sell them. I've read conservative commentators for years, even added a cable company mainly to watch Rush Limbaugh at happy hour. That was years ago, before he took himself seriously and, scarily, others began taking him seriously.
It sells. They know that, and so do their competitors. Though they pretend to loathe that proud part of American journalism, they'll pick it up in a heartbeat if they're losing market share.
Who's your Uncle? Sam or Tom
For a moment, Shepherd Smith seemed to be auditioning for a job at another network with his "Joe The Plumber" interview on a Death to Israel remark. I guess not, it's the soundbite, stupid. He followed by highlighting Ralph Nader's loony remark about Barack Obama being an Uncle Tom. Ralph says he's just asking the question. Right, and why should we take you seriously? Did you ask yourself that question, Shepherd?
Mo' maps
The link to the graphic above was emailed by my brother. Yes, I'm tired of this stuff, but it caught me again. What if we map votes with a cartogram weighting population into the election results? From Mark Newman, he's got the same stuff by county and with other interesting manipulations.
* As a group, Americans are abysmally ignorant of geography. There have been dozens of studies proving this obvious fact. Just to pick a group, I'd like to see how many of the 435 U.S. Congressmen could pick out a country in an unlabeled map. How would they do identifying the majority of states? Finding Saipan or the Northern Marianas?
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