Rating Burns Like a FOXX

This week we saw an unexpectedly dramatic remake of our bitter and belittled junior Senator, one that is sure to arouse envy in the heart of every untreated manic depressive in a three state area. It is all jobs and cotton candy clouds in a reign of unbridled self congratulatory optimism now.

Incredibly, it is as if those East Coast Liberals and their voodoo magic mind control rays never sought to use him to punish our poor defenseless little President after all.

I have this overwhelming urge to swipe the work of Rick Foote of Butte Weekly "Media Watch" here because it is old news (published on September 7, 2005) and he can just sue me if my parroting his work is an inappropriate thing to do. So here goes

Say it ain't so Conrad.
Not much hope of that.
News Corp., which is a Rupert Murdoch organization and the juice behind the ever-Right Wing Fox News, wants to jimmy the television ratings to force the Nielson Ratings, the arbiter of the numbers of people watching any particular television program or network at any particular time.

To foster this, News Corp., according to the New York Daily News- rival of Murdoch's New York Post, has begun pouring huge money into the coffers of Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

The first choice of News Corp.- our very own Conrad Burns.

As a matter of fact, Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, found that a lobbyist for Murdoch wrote an early draft of the Murdoch backed legislation for Burns.

The reason News Corp. doesn't want honest, independant ratings is because a slip in ratings means the exodus of millions of dollars of television advertising.

With Fox News barely tipping the ratings barely tipping the ratings at about 450,000 viewers, but claiming at least one million viewers, it is no wonder that News Corp. wants to eliminate the Nielson concept of independent ratings.

In actuality, Murdoch and News Corp. believe the bill would give a private broadcast industry panel the power to bar any new ratings system. The bill, the Daily News says, would strip the Nielson of it's independence. The television industry depends on that independence for analysis and for the use of advertisers.

The entire idea was fostered when Nielson had long used its system nationally, local numbers showed that the viewers were switching from broadcast to cable in larger numbers than forseen.

Life must be sweet for the man who never misses a trick.

Sam Gardner On My Mind

Digby resurrects the file of phoney stories.

Rumsfeld Serves At The Pleasure of The President

Translation:

He's out-- probably to spend time with the family

Indiana Sells Road To Foreign Company

I hope this does not beome a trend

They Say CAFTA We Say CRAP

This David Sirota column about the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party's announcement it would be beginning its new war in earnest on the grassroots elements of the party should serve as a warning to those of us who slave away to bring some element of social justice into our own back yards.

Something To Think About

Elections and Poverty

Routine Calls To The White House

Is it really "routine" for parties in state elections to call the White House eight times a day?

This makes me feel very sick

Peruse this page if you dare.

Federal Government Opposing Montana's Clean Water

The Energy Department wants us to believe that the energy companies are charitable institutions that cannot possibly take any action whatsoever to mitigate the environmental damages they cause because they will immediately go bankrupt and we will freeze to death in our homes and have to manually push our SUV's to the beauty parlor and back.

Big Bad Brian Schweitzer is engaging in wild speculation that water loaded with salinity and sodium can damage soil, crops and wildlife. Doesn't Brian Schweitzer Know or care that all farmers and ranchers are sneaky villans who steal agribusinesses God given profits and spread their evil propoganda earning a living just because they go out in sub zero temperatures to pull lambs and calves out of animal vaginas or drive their broken down tractors around in circles from dawn to dusk all summer long.

Montanan's don't want or need clean water, they can buy those little bottles of tapwater while they wait for Halliburton to clean it up for us.

I'm sure it is just a coincidence that the DOE wants to eliminate the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, but if dirty water is good enough for our troops, it should be good for us as well.

Oh Boy! The FOXX News pundits are spinning this faster and twistier than Cokie Roberts and George Will on Stephanopolis this morning.

My question is why has the White House allowed the Plame investigation to go on month after month when they could have solved the whole issue the day after Novak outed an undercover CIA operative.

Why on earth didn't the administration bother to tell everybody that it was not a leak because President Bush had already declassified the information to combat a political critic?