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Comment What do you think False Equivalence means? (Score 1) 269

Also, Fox News is *not* a news channel. They do not do journalism.

But then...

MSNBC has people like Rachel Maddow who actually report **news** in a professional journalistic presentation

If you're making this comparison, you clearly have no idea what the hell you are talking about. As you acknowledge later in your post, Maddow is "slanted to a progressive... standpoint." That's because Rachel Maddow is not a journalist, and her show isn't journalism. Her show is the moral equivalent of MSNBC's editorial page, where news organizations traditionally tell people what the news organization thinks. Maddow was hired because she reliably agrees with the MSNBC decision makers, and so is a good choice to tell people the editorial viewpoint of MSNBC.

Compare this to Fox News. At 9:00 PM, opposite Maddow's show, Fox News runs "The Kelly File," where Megyn Kelly presents the editorial viewpoint of Fox News. (Kelly is a relative newcomer to this time slot; Sean Hannity's show (also an editorial show) ran there for almost a decade.) Kelly's show is the moral equivalent of the Fox News editorial page. Like it or not, 24 hour news stations, including both Fox News and MSNBC, tend to put editorial shows on between 8:00 and 10:00 PM ET.

If you want to compare straight news coverage to straight news coverage, we can do that. If you want to compare the amount MSNBC editorial hosts lie to the amount Fox News editorial hosts lie, we can do that too. But those are comparisons of two wildly different things.

Saying Fox News is slanted because they don't have good people like Rachel Maddow (whose job it is to be slanted) is like saying a pickup truck is a bad vehicle to haul lumber because it doesn't have the acceleration of a sports car.

Comment Re:Throw money at it! (Score 2) 351

Funny story about that. The IRS planned to implement the sequester cuts by furloughing, without pay, for five days during 2013. (Each of the 5 days would have been immediately preceding or immediately following a holiday weekend.) By mid July, the IRS "came up with some emergency funding" that they could use to offset the sequester cuts, meaning IRS staff only had to take 3 days without pay.

The sequester cuts were long over by the time you submitted your form in October. The government shutdown is also long over. The IRS is not "being forced to cut service" by the sequester or anything else.

Comment Re:You keep using that word... (Score 2) 117

It's worse than that. The largest of the "subsidies" that you have to include to get to the $1.3T figure they throw around is "negative externalities." Essentially, the environmentalists are making the argument that they want to create a "carbon tax" that they charge to energy companies, which the guy quoted in the article says would collect a total of $550 billion per year.

The carbon tax he's talking about isn't a law that's on the books. It's a proposal for a law that he wants the government to pass. And he's counting the failure of the government to pass that law as a subsidy.

Comment Re:"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style" (Score 4, Informative) 117

Why be surprised at it, after all it's the same network that has or had Maddow, Mathews, and Olbermann on it and they've always had their faces stuck to the ass of the democratic party.

60 Minutes is a CBS thing. Maddow and Mathews work for NBC, and Olbermann used to work there as well. (He currently hosts a sports show on Disney/ABC-owned ESPN.)

Your larger point (about how all the networks openly support the Democrats) is spot on, but a better example of CBS's malpractice was Rather using forged documents to claim that George W. Bush didn't really serve in the National Guard.

Comment Re:The way they play the "copyright" card (Score 1) 211

The reason the NFL is in on this is because they have an exclusive deal with DirectTV; DirectTV is the only company allowed to broadcast non-nationally televised games outside the local broadcast area. DirectTV's deal costs $300, and you need to have satellite service. In exchange, you get EVERY out of market game. There's no option to just get a specific team's games.

I went to school in Rochester NY, where the local team is the Buffalo Bills. I grew up in New Jersey as a fan of the New York Jets. In order to legally get every Jets game, I would have had to get DirectTV service for $300 a year, and pay for 12 games a week I wasn't going to watch. Had Aereo been around, I would have subscribed to Aereo from my legal address (NJ) and watched the games in "my market" at a savings of $200.

The NFL doesn't want this, because it makes the deal they have with DirectTV less valuable. (Note that the other three American sports leagues have deals where you can pay the league directly to watch every one of your team's games over the Internet, so this IS technically feasible.) It doesn't make it right, but that's why they do it.

By the way, the NFL is a trade organization who promotes the interests of its members, the 32 teams. The teams pay dues to the league, which is where "the NFL" makes its money. This is a cost that teams pay out of their revenue. Another cost that teams pay out of their revenue is taxes. You have to tax where the money is, and the teams are the ones who have the money.

Comment Re:The way they play the "copyright" card (Score 1) 211

I think their business model relies on a loose definition of "live in the same metro area." If you're out of the area where you live for an extended period of time (e.g. on an extended business trip), you can watch the stations which would be local to you at home rather than the stations which are local to your current location.

In practice, on American network television, this pretty much affects two categories of programming, local news and football.

Comment Re:The US is undermining the Laws of war. (Score 1) 317

So the Germans wiped an entire city off the map withe their bombing too? Maybe because their bombs weren't accurate to hit anything larger than a city?

Keep in mind, when I wrote my comment, I was thinking of the bombing of London, which is about 100 miles away from Coventry. London, of course, is another city full of civilians that the Germans bombed.

Which brings up my point. The GGP called the British bombing of Dredsden "particularly bad" because the British were bombing cities rather than picking out specific targets. Obviously it wasn't "particularly bad" because nobody ELSE in the European theater could hit anything more accurately either. It seems like reason someone would call the British campaigns worse that the German campaigns from the same time period is as a criticism of the modern day British government (which is still around, unlike the German government from that era.) Think about why someone would make that comparison.

Comment Re:The US is undermining the Laws of war. (Score 3, Informative) 317

Then the invention of the bomber allowed civilian murder to be taken to new extremes in WW2. The British bombing campaign was particularly bad, based as it was on the premise that the smallest target that could reliably be hit by night bombers was a city.

How accurate was German bombing during the Battle of Britain?

Comment Re:Slavery mentality in the USA still very strong (Score 3, Informative) 224

All it takes is 1% of surviving owners placed within state or federal structures. And you don't have too look very far. Just look at prominent politicians from South Carolina and their beliefs. Somehow slavery legacy still lives on.

Well, you don't get much more prominent as a politician than US Senator, so let's look* at Senator Tim Scott, R-SC. He certainly looks like he's descended from slaveowners rather than slaves, right?

Also, Senator Scott took office after his predecessor resigned to take a different job; in South Carolina the Governor appoints a new Senator in this instance. Governor Nikki Haley, R-SC, who appointed Scott, is also a fairly prominent South Carolina politician. (After all, she's the governor.) Haley's parents immigrated from India; she isn't descended from slaveowners either.

You're talking out you ass about descendants of slaveowners. It's an easy rhetorical trick, but it's very clearly false.

*For those that aren't going to click the link, it goes to a Google Image Search showing pictures of Senator Scott, who is an African American.

Comment Re:Why not call it its actual name? (Score 2) 199

Also, Reagan EMBRACED the term "Star Wars" (which was originally a slur) and the term was popular among the public.

Just like when the Obama administration embraced the phrase Obamacare.

Of course, the Obama administration and its allies in the media have been going back and forth between embracing the term Obamacare and calling anyone who uses it a racist.

Comment Re:Why not call it its actual name? (Score 3, Insightful) 199

It's a Republican plan but it's his signature bill.

It's not a Republican plan. ABSOLUTELY ZERO Republicans voted for this monstrosity in the House, and ABSOLUTELY ZERO voted for it in the Senate.

The fact that two guys who worked at the Heritage Foundation 20 years ago wrote a white paper saying "Hillarycare won't work without an individual mandate" doesn't make Obamacare a Republican plan. You guys screwed this up on your own.

Comment Re:Hmm. (Score -1, Troll) 653

We don't know but I do know one thing that 'girlintraining' does not sound like any girl (or trans) person I know.

YEAH! girlintraining is a traitor to her sex/gender! Everyone knows that REAL Women and REAL Transgendered People HAVE TO BE radical leftists. Only radical leftists are allowed to speak for Women and the Transgendered. Everyone else, even women/transgender people who disagree with the radical left, hate women and hate the transgendered.

Fucking idiot.

Comment Re:Documentation is King (Score 2, Informative) 225

Intel isn't providing the optimizations for free to their competitors.* Intel provides the compiler, along with all its optimizations, to its customers in exchange for payment.

*Except the academic, evaluation and Linux-only non-commercial use versions, which could theoretically be downloaded by AMD employees, I guess.

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