My "Countdown" of today's top stories.

In homage to Keith Olbermann, who has filed a lawsuit against Current TV for wrongful termination, I present to you my "Countdown" of the top stories.  So I suppose I ought to begin with the immortal words...

...Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?

5: George Zimmerman's lawyers and a forensic audio expert, both claim that Zimmerman used the word "punks" on that now infamous cellphone call.  CNN aired the "cleaned-up" audio, which if I'm honest, as an audio man myself, didn't sound that different to the original, but on listening back to it myself, I can't hear the word punk.  What I do distinctly detect is an "ooo" sound, that might come from a particular racial slur, and that "ooo" sound definitely is not present when you pronounce the word "punk".  Listen to it yourself, and see if you agree.



4: Sky News has become the latest part of the NewsCorp clan to have been caught up in hacking.  Now we know why James Murdoch resigned this week.  Sky News today confirmed that two email accounts, one belonging to a suspected paedophile,and one belonging to 'canoe man' John Darwin were hacked.  Both resulted in information that was passed onto the police.  Sky News claimed the hacking was done in the public interest, but hacking emails is a crime under the Computer Misuse Act, and that act does NOT have a public interest defence attached to it.

With Ofcom investigating British Sky Broadcasting, there is a number of possibilities now rearing their heads, and I'll talk about them in a future post.

3: Rick Santorum obviously doesn't know when to quit, or indeed how to lose with good grace.  The Republican Party establishment has been telling him to leave the race, but Santorum, much like Newt Gingrich, has stuck two fingers up to the establishment.  And he met with supporters to discuss the way forward. 

Mathematically, it's getting beyond the realms of possibility, especially given that the only remaining state with a winner takes all race, California, looks like a certainty for Mitt Romney.  But it does appear right now that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are both in line for a fairly major Republican Party smackdown, before we get to Tampa, maybe even before we get to the end of the primary process. 

2: Is it ethical for a journalist to express their own political viewpoints through signing a petition?  Apparently, some TV stations in Milwaukee don't think it is.  WTMJ, WISN and WITI have confirmed that journalists on their payrolls have signed the recall petition against controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  WTMJ went as far as to say that they took this matter seriously and would be dealing with it internally.  Apparently, one of the people who signed the petition was an on-air anchor at WTMJ.

One thing is for certain, Scott Walker has done incredible damage to Wisconsin.  Any attempt by these stations to censure their staff for signing the petition would be a direct contravention of the First Amendment.  And no news station, no matter how good their checks and balances are, could ever claim to be totally unbiased.

1: Current maybe now being sued by Keith Olbermann, but they may soon have bigger problems.  A report from Reuters indicates that Current needs to hit ratings benchmarks every quarter.  Should they miss those benchmarks two quarters in a row, they could be dropped by Time Warner Cable.  So far they have not missed those benchmarks, thanks to Keith Olbermann, but with his sudden departure last week, Current's ability to hit those benchmarks consitently maybe in doubt.

Ron Paul on Face The Nation

Strange to hear a Republican admit that 9/11 was the fault of the US Government.

Viewpoint - NY 23: Conservatism's first big election breakthrough?

In New York, a special election for the House of Representatives has garnered a lot of attention.  Ian Beaumont analyses developments.

Viewpoint – Republican sour grapes

A Republican I can agree with… almost!

The video you see below is Republican Congressman Peter King on New York, and he’s talking about the way the media has treated the Michael Jackson story.  Now, I can agree with almost every word he says, but there just a few I can’t agree with.  Look at the video and can you guess which ones I can’t agree with?

 

So, any guesses?

 

The words are “low-life”, “pervert”, “child molester”, “paedophile”. 

Michael Jackson was NEVER convicted of child molestation or paedophilia.  Now, if Peter King had used words such as “celebrity”, “singer” or “superstar”, then I could have agreed with him 100%.  Being the TruthSeeker isn’t something I am for show, it is something that pervades every ounce of my being.  Factual accuracy has to be at 100%, 100% of the time.  It may well be that Peter King believes Jackson was guilty, like many others believe OJ Simpson was guilty of murder, but like OJ, he wasn’t convicted, so he should have tempered his opinions with words like “I think”, “I believe”, “in my opinion”, you get the picture.  But no, Peter King used those words as though they were fact, recorded history, truth, undeniable.  So, Peter King gets +50% on the TruthSeekerMeter, which rates a “partially true”

Newsbusters highlights “ultra secret website”!!! Nice story, shame about the facts.

Newsbusters, the Media Research Center blog that constantly busts news, that the rest of us would like to see unbusted and unbiased, spins another one out of control, by highlighting a story on politico.com about a website where journalists meet to discuss things off the record.  Newsbusters however, manages to make it sound like some secret, left-wing plotting cabal, ultra secret, website that is so hush hush you’re not supposed to even know it exists.

So, if that were the case, why did anybody even agree to talk about it???

Jeffrey Toobin of the New York Times has the quote of the article here saying that the list is probably in “…general agreement about the stupidity of today’s GOP…”  Yeah, I think that’s something everybody, except current GOP members it seems, can agree on, and with proof like this Newsbusters article, I wonder how the GOP can even possibly argue their way out of this one.

Dick Cheney shows up the failure of Conservative-Republicanism.

The Republican Party as of late seems to resemble a circular firing squad.  Even when they're aiming at the opposition, they do a "Dick Cheney" and hit their own men.  But now, the original has decided to add his bullets into the mix, and despite being aimed at US President Barack Obama, he manages to only shoot the Republicans collectively in the foot.

He appeared on CNN's State of the Union with John King, and proceeded to demonstrate yet again why the Republican Party not only lost both in 2006, and 2008, and why it will continue to lose until it disengages itself from rabid right wing conservatives like Rush "Limburger" Limbaugh.

"Limburger" and his fellow right wing talk show hosts, such as Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, are the public face of the GOP right now.  And Ugh!!! What a revolting face it is.  And the likes of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, John McCain and Lindsay Graham, do nothing to improve the public face of Republicanism.  In fact, if anything, they've actually managed to make it look worse now, than at election time back in November 2008.  Add into that mix, the new, and perhaps soon to be evicted, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, and former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt "Gingrinch" Gingrich, and a few others, and you have the political equivalent of a mass of bird poop!

The "circular firing squad" description that has become prevalent over the last couple of weeks, is very apt, but in some ways, doesn't do the situation real justice.  On top of this, you have moderate republicans, and rabid conservatives fighting for what is left, of the soul of the party, after "Emperor" Cheney and "Darth" Bush basically tore it out.  It's not just random shots being fired, it's an ideological battle, between unmoveable, unshakeable, unfathomable conservatism, which believes it is right, and everybody else is wrong, even the majority, and the more moderate republicans who have read the tea leaves correctly and realise that the centre ground NEEDS to be retaken in order to make the party electable again, and believe that conservatism will ultimately destroy the party.

Perhaps the conservative movement should get behind their own parties.  They have two of them after all.  The American Conservative Party, and the Conservative Party of the United States of America.  Why tack themselves onto the Republican Party?

The answer of course is simple.  The conservative movement, knows full well that it cannot run and win under its own banner.  Therefore, they tack themselves onto the more moderate Republican banner to become winners.  They think that by doing that, the public won't notice that Conservatism, and Republicanism, aren't necessarily the same thing.  The only time they go against that meme is a time like now when by linking the two, they've brought the Republican Party down badly, so they try to highlight the fact that Republicanism and Conservatism are different agendas.  Sorry guys, but you can't have it both ways!

At this point in time, it's difficult to see how the Republican Party can come back into electability, because right now, it looks like it's heading further and further out towards the extremities, and as the UK's Conservative Party proved from 1997 until recently, heading back to your base is a sure fire way to make yourself unelectable.

One of the benefits of the Internet.

One of the great things that I find about the internet these days is that it allows you to look back in time to a degree and see just how right or wrong we have been.

Back on December 17th 2006, at the end of another edition of Face The Nation on CBS, Bob Schieffer talked about Evan Bayh, a senator from Indiana. Unfortunately, there's no video, but we do have a complete transcript.

Evan Bayh is a well-regarded, two-term Senator from Indiana but he is not exactly a household name. So when he announced two weeks ago that he was thinking about running for the Democratic presidential nomination, even he knew it was a long shot.

He acknowledged it was a David-versus-Goliath kind of thing, but he remembered that David did pretty well.

True enough, but yesterday Bayh realized why the smart money is usually on the giants — because they are giants — and he quit the race as quickly as he had entered.

"Whether there were too many Goliaths or whether I'm just not the right David, I concluded the odds were longer than I felt I could possibly pursue," he said.

In other words, he took a look, realized he had no chance and decided not to waste his time or the country's.

How refreshing! None of this "I decided I wanted to spend more time with my family," or the catalogue of excuses we've come to expect from usual wanna-bes — or even worse, one of those ego trip campaigns that all involved know is headed nowhere except to get some TV time for the candidate.

Bayh just concluded it wasn't to be and said so.

The one downside is, that is just the kind of straight talk we need more of in politics.

A man so candid about himself and his chances might have had some interesting thoughts on other subjects. In a way, I'm sorry we won't get to hear them.

In a way, what Bob wanted to happen has happened, because Barack Obama has been refreshingly straight when it comes to politics during this 2008 campaign. Now as we approach the time of his inauguration as President, we as citizens of the world, would like to see more politicians be this refeshingly honest and candid.

We haven't seen too much of it from the Republican Party, and something tells me we won't see much honesty from them.

Big Surprise! Another Republican under investigation.

ABC News is reporting that Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska is under investigation by both the FBI and IRS.

Another story of Republican political corruption that Fox News will probably gloss over. But you can guarantee that they wouldn't do that if it was a Democrat being investigated. It would be all over every programme they could.

Fox News = Al Qaeda!!!

Daily Kos and Crooks and Liars both have this story, but Daily Kos has the funnier angle!

Since, Fox News is the official Republican party/Bush administration news channel, and since Fox News = Al Qaeda, does that mean the Bush administration is fighting itself???