KGB Report

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A high probability of stupidity
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Published Monday, November 18, 2013 @ 12:22 PM EST

Nov 18 2013

I was watching a report on the Weather Channel this morning. The anchor was displaying the front pages of newspapers in communities hit by yesterday's storms. One banner headline read, "Storm Strafes City." The anchor said, "I looked up the word 'strafe,' because I didn't know what it meant. It means to attack something with machine guns or cannons from low-flying airplanes."

I guess that it goes without saying that if you don't know the definition of "strafe," you probably don't know what "metaphor" means, either.

How can someone attend college for four years, obtain a degree in atmospheric science or meteorology, and not know what strafe means?

Categories: News Media, The Weather Channel, WTF?

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Oh, New York Daily News, I love you...
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Published Tuesday, October 01, 2013 @ 9:20 AM EDT

Oct 01 2013

Categories: Congress, News Media, Politics

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Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the NTSB, said the intern was a student volunteering his time who answered phones but was supposed to pass on questions to official media representatives at the agency. She declined to say if the intern was fired, but the NTSB said in its statement that "appropriate actions will be taken to ensure that such a serious error is not repeated."

Journamalism
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Published Saturday, July 13, 2013 @ 6:59 AM EDT

Jul 13 2013

I'm sorry, but you can't blame this on the NTSB. My guess is someone at the station called the intern, read the names, and the intern rolled his or her eyes, said "yeah, right," and hung up.

Categories: News Media, WTF?

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Precedent
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Published Friday, July 12, 2013 @ 7:20 AM EDT

Jul 12 2013

It would appear the concept of pizzaria-client privilege is merely a legal fiction.

Categories: Fourth Amendment, News Media

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Trick question
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Published Tuesday, July 02, 2013 @ 7:10 AM EDT

Jul 02 2013

Uh... the one you can't use on basic cable?

Categories: CNN, First Amendment, News Media

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Signs of the Apocalypse, #909
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Published Wednesday, June 26, 2013 @ 4:28 AM EDT

Jun 26 2013

In case you missed it- which you probably did, since no broadcast or cable "news" organization carried it- a real-life episode of The West Wing took place in Austin, Texas yesterday and early this morning.

Texas Governor Rick Perry (R-No Kidding) had unexpectedly added to a special session of the state legislature a major anti-abortion bill that called for- among other misogynistic actions- closing all but five of the huge state's 42 clinics.

Texas state senator Wendy Davis responded with a 13-hour filibuster, a wondrous effort that simultaneously demonstrated the inherent virtue of American government and the hideous manner in which it can be distorted and abused.

When it appeared the Republicans had managed to silence her by citing a series of disingenuous "rules" violations, the legislature was stopped dead in its tracks when enraged citizens in the gallery howled, sang, and shouted the proceedings to a halt. It was sheer pandemonium. And a thing of beauty.

You can find the sordid details in assorted places- here, for one- but unless you were following on Twitter or a live stream on YouTube or some other site, you wouldn't have known the senate of one of the largest states in the union was violating its own constitution and doing so while hundreds of enraged citizens in the gallery screamed in protest.

For while the very principles of a sovereign constitutional republic were being mocked and circumvented by scheming, reprehensible ideologues, CNN- The Network For News, mind you- was airing this:

To quote my sainted grandfather, "I shit you not."
Pardon my French.

I didn't expect Fox News to carry anything, of course- and they didn't. But even liberal-tilted MSNBC was airing reruns of the evening's earlier commentary shows.

In the meantime, things got even more bizarre in Texas. Their constitution requires votes on bills to be completed before special sessions expire. The Texas senate's website originally noted the bill was passed on 6/26/2013, after the midnight deadline.

No problem. They just changed the date of the vote on the website back to 6/25/2013. Texas not only strictly controls female bodies, they also can warp the space-time continuum.

And the print media? With datelines up to an hour before the actual vote took place, USA Today and others reported the filibuster failed and the legislation passed.

Note I used the past tense. So did they.

The conspiracy-minded will probably claim the conservative-leaning owners of mainstream media outlets knew the outcome well in advance, and just got sloppy. I like to take the more optimistic view that journalists today are lazy, intellectually dishonest hacks whose irredeemable cynicism and proximity to power have reduced their usefulness to nil.

It may require more effort on my part for vetting and verification, but I think from now on my primary sources of information will be live feeds and social media.

Postscript- at 4:15 am, when the websites for CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC and Reuters were still saying the outcome of the vote was in doubt, a live stream available through Twitter- nearly an hour earlier- showed Senator Davis announcing that the lieutenant governor of Texas had reversed his previous ruling and declared the vote invalid. The AP story broke at 4:01 am.

Categories: News Media, Signs of the Apocalypse, Twitter

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(Original article on the GlobalPost.)

An intellectual exercise
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Published Sunday, June 09, 2013 @ 12:24 PM EDT

Jun 09 2013

The GlobalPost asks, "What if journalists covered the United States like they covered other countries?"

This is satire. Although the news is real, very little actual reporting was done for this story and the quotes are imagined. It is the first installment of an ongoing series that examines the language journalists use to cover foreign countries. What if we wrote that way about the United States?

BOSTON, Mass. — Human rights activists say revelations that the US regime has expanded its domestic surveillance program to private phone carriers is more evidence of the North American country’s pivot toward authoritarianism.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported this week that a wing of the country’s feared intelligence and security apparatus ordered major telecommunications companies to hand over data on phone calls made by private citizens.

“The US leadership in Washington continues to erode basic human rights,” said one activist, who asked to remain anonymous, fearing that speaking out publicly could endanger his organization. “If the US government is unwilling to change course, it’s time the international community considered economic sanctions.”

Over the last decade, the United States has passed a series of emergency laws that give security forces sweeping powers to combat “terrorism.” But foreign observers say the authorities abuse those laws, using them instead to monitor ordinary Americans.

While the so-called Patriot Act passed in 2001 is perhaps the most dramatic legislation to date curbing freedoms here, numerous lesser-known laws have expanded monitoring of news outlets, email, social media platforms and even opposition groups — like the Occupy and Tea Party movements — that are critical of the regime.

US leader Barack Obama, a former liberal community organizer and the country's first black president who attracted a wave of support from young voters, rose to power in 2008 promising reform. He was greeted in the United States — a country of about 300 million people — with optimism. But he has since disappointed those supporters, ruling with a sometimes iron fist and continuing, if not expanding, the policies of the country’s former ruler, George W. Bush.

On a recent visit to the United States by GlobalPost, signs of the increased security apparatus could be found everywhere.

At all national airports, passengers are now forced to undergo full-body scans before boarding any flights. Small cameras are perched on many street corners, recording the movements and actions of the public. And incessant warnings on public transportation systems encourage citizens to report any “suspicious activity” to authorities.

Several American villagers interviewed for this story said the ubiquitous government marketing campaign called, “If you see something, say something,” does little to make them feel safer and, in fact, only contributes to a growing mistrust among the general population.

“I’ve deleted my Facebook account, stopped using email, r visiting websites that might be considered anti-regime,” a resident of the northern city of Boston, a tough-as-nails town synonymous with rebellion, told GlobalPost. It was in Boston that an American militia first rose up against the British empire. “But my phone? How can I stop using my phone? This has gone too far.”

American dissidents interviewed by GlobalPost inside the United States say surveillance by domestic intelligence agencies is just one part of a seemingly larger effort by the Obama administration to centralize power.

The American leader, for example, has in recent years personally approved the jailing — and in some cases execution — of American citizens suspected of involvement in what the regime calls “terrorist activity.”

“What exactly is terrorism? The term is used so loosely these days it could include just about anyone,” said one anti- government protester, who was tear-gassed and then arrested in 2011 for participating in a peaceful demonstration in New York, America’s largest city and its economic capital.

Obama has also overseen a crackdown on whistleblowers, most famously jailing Bradley Manning, a US soldier, for leaking documents that called into question US military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The government quietly imprisoned Manning for three years before finally trying him in a military court this week. He spent the first nine months of that in solitary confinement, where prison officials forced him to sleep naked without pillowsor sheets and prevented him from reading newspapers, watching television or even exercising.

Activists also criticize the US regime for imprisoning without trial foreigners it deems threatening to national security in an offshore prison camp called Guantanamo Bay. This week an investigation revealed that the US regime force-fed Guantanamo inmates participating in a hunger strike. Force-feeding is illegal under international law.

Meanwhile, whispering in the streets about what the regime might do next has reached a dull roar. But after a national uprising in 2011 by the leftist Occupy movement ended in evictions, arrests and tear gas, Americans appear hesitant to take their anger into the streets.

Most major media outlets, which in the United States are largely controlled by politically-connected corporations — many of them, in fact, finanncially supported Obama’s election — have been relatively quiet on such issues.

Foreign observers, however, say the recent news about domestic surveillance is spreading wildly in other ways — on Twitter and around the dinner table. They say the news has the potential to spark an uprising — at least among urban, educated elites in the country’s major cities — mirroring those happening now in Turkey and that earlier swept parts of the Arab world.

One foreign businessman who works closely with the US government on issues of security said he thought Obama was too well-established and had too strong a security force for any challenge to its authority to take hold.

“This isn’t Tunisia,” he said. “This is more like China, where a massive security presence could easily put down any organized opposition movement.”

The businessman added that Obama was democratically elected twice, which he believes gives the leader enough credibility to weather any serious opposition to his rule.

In a small, unassuming house near Boston’s bustling seaport, though, supporters of the opposition disagreed, saying the leader had lost “all credibility.” The group said the opposition continued to organize and grow, and that it was just a matter of time before the rest of the American population joined them.

Indeed, different political factions are beginning to unite over the issue of domestic surveillance, despite their strong differences.

“We meet in person these days to talk about strategy, phones and email are no longer safe for us,” one of them said. “Our goal now is to just get out the message to the world about what is going on here. That’s the first step. We need to educate not only Americans but the world about the extent the US regime is controlling the lives of its citizens.”

Categories: News Media, Politics

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Journalism: not what it used to be.
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Published Friday, April 19, 2013 @ 12:07 PM EDT

Apr 19 2013

"Something is happening. I don't know what. But I smell smoke. And dogs are barking."
-Live report on CNN

Categories: CNN, News Media, WTF?

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"I reject your reality, and substitute my own."
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Published Thursday, November 08, 2012 @ 3:00 AM EST

Nov 08 2012

That famous quote by Mythbuster Adam Savage is, simply, the reason why the Republicans were handed their lunch on Tuesday.

Here are two essays which address the issue in a sane, rational manner. The videos that follow, from last night's Daily Show, are a bit more... bombastic.

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Ohio really did go to President Obama last night, and he really did win. And really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States. Again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to over sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us. It was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction. And the moon landing was real, and FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in the country are not the same things as Communism.

Listen. Last night was a good night for Democrats and liberals for very obvious reasons. But it was also possibly a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country we have a two party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing this country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican party and the conservative movement and the conservative media are stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate between competing feasible ideas about real problems.

Last night the Republicans got shellacked. And they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they've been so happy living inside... if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, I'm sure, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican party and the conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we'll all be better off as a nation.

And in that spirit, congratulations everybody.

- Rachel Maddow

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If You're Surprised By The Election Results, You're The Reason You Lost, Or: A Plea for Useful Republicans.

Dear Republicans:

I know the despair you feel this morning, and sympathize, because I've been there. In 2004 my stiff, robotic millionaire lost to a President he should have soundly thumped, and I was so hurt I took a week off from the Internet afterwards. I am completely sympathetic with that slow terror that the country is now in the hands of an incompetent, and the voters don't even know it.

But I noticed a weird difference between the way Republicans and Democrats reacted to a losing candidate. In 2004, when the polls turned against Kerry and it was obvious he was going to lose, the Democrats asked "How can we fix that?" Oh, they asked in their glum, incompetent way, but when I personally talked to other Democrats both in real life and online, we were all pretty cognizant of the fact that Kerry was the underdog.

The Republicans of 2012, however, became increasingly convinced that Romney was going to win.

Everywhere I looked on Twitter and Facebook, I saw my Republican friends- not straw men, but actual people- talking about how terrible Nate Silver's methods were, how these Rasmussen polls showed Romney's real strength, and eventually you got the travesty of UnSkewedPolls.com, which cherry-picked the data and even today has their prediction of not just a Romney win but a landslide, Romney 311 to Obama 227. (Actual result: Obama 332, Romney 206.)

It all crystallized for me when my friend Brad Torgerson said, "Liberals and Democrats have Nate Silver and his 538 blog. Conservatives and Republicans have the U of CO guys. It's an epic cage match of predictive numbers geekery!"

Look there. Right at that post- one not too dissimilar from a thousand other dismissals of Nate Silver and the other aggregated polls. See what Brad did there? The way the guy bringing you news he didn't like was automatically assigned a partisan bias, and the only rational solution was to get a guy on your side with better numbers? As if reality was merely a function of getting enough guys on your side?

That's why you lost.

Stop confusing hard reality for partisan opposition.

It's time to step out of the bubble, dear Republicans, because we fucking need you. I don't trust the Democratic party to run the country single-handedly. I want a Republican party I can rely on for real solutions- and you've become lazy, voodoo-like, dismissing any data you don't like as partisan opposition.

Jay Lake is fond of saying, "Reality has a liberal bias." That's not because reality inevitably verifies liberal thinking, but because the Republican response to anything that challenges them is now to write off the data.

And let me repeat: we need you. I want a counterweight to Democratic power, not a deadweight that refuses to acknowledge the issues. I want a Republican party that will look at the numbers for climate change and not go, "I don't like what those scientists are saying, so I'll call it a silly liberal bias!" but say, "We're business experts, we know how to motivate rich people to do what we want, how do we fix this?" I want a Republican party that will realize while yes, we're spending far too much and should cut down, the results of thirty years of trickle-down theory and tax cuts won't actually provide enough revenue, because we are at the lowest effective tax rates we've had in thirty years.

And yes, you can argue all my statements here. But in that, smart person, you're like a driver with an SUV in Alaska. A person with a car in Alaska is going to get stuck in the snow eventually; that's a fact. But if you have an SUV, you're gonna get stuck way the heck out in the woods where no one can get at you, because you have the strength to do it and won't stop when common sense tells you to. I had a ton of Very Smart friends dissecting all the reasons why Nate Silver was wrong, why his methodology sucked, why these pollsters who said what they liked over here had better ways of slicing the data- and all that flurry of so-called "facts" amounted to was an elaborate justification of personal biases that had no basis in reality.

It's time to stop fighting the obvious. It's time to stop assuming that anyone who presents contradictory data is out to get you.

You should have won, guys. You had a President with an economy in the doldrums, a guy who'd lost a lot of his electoral mojo in the realities of politics. But instead of rising from the grave, you chose a candidate who never actually gave us firm numbers on what expenses he'd cut to fix the economy. You chose a candidate who said he'd get rid of Obamacare, but never actually named the parts he'd destroy. You chose someone who, though all politicians lie, lied a lot more than almost any modern Presidential candidate.

You had a guy who should have sliced Obama to ribbons- and he lost, in large part, because he said, "Trust me" instead of giving us a plan. And you let him get away with it.

You let him get away with it because you're indulging in a great deal of magical thinking. You let him get away with it because facts have ceased to matter; as long as someone tells you something you want to hear, you'll find a way to justify it with pseudo-science and trust and spit and baling wire. You don't like to hear how bad a candidate Mitt was, because you came so close this year, but it's true; the problem is that so much of the country has abandoned listening to reality that you can get massive votes and never touch a fact.

If you can't be honest today, in the aftermath of this great defeat, then you're never going to see the truth.

If you seriously thought that Romney had a good chance of winning, then you're part of the problem. Wake up. I implore you: learn from this. Look at your deepest beliefs, and see whether the numbers support them. Start thinking, maybe those people with data I don't like are right.

If you think the lesson to be learned is "We weren't conservative enough," then you're handing me a great victory in 2016. I want to have a real choice then.

Love,
T.F. (The Ferret)

---

Megyn Kelly teaches Karl Rove the power of scientific gobbledygook.

"If only President Bush could have been so lucky as to have a massive hurricane on his watch, then... oh, right..."

It's just arithmetic.

Categories: Barack Obama, Bill O'Reilly, Chick-fil-A, Daily Show, Elections, Fox News, Hypocrisy, Jon Stewart, Karl Rove, Megyn Kelly, Mitt Romney, Nate Silver, News Media, Politics, Rachel Maddow, Sarah Palin, The Ferret, YouTube

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Have a nice day
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Published Saturday, October 06, 2012 @ 2:17 PM EDT

Oct 06 2012

(From The Park News, October 5, 2012)

Categories: News Media, WTF?

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A baffling, willfully blind cognitive dissonance...
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Published Thursday, September 20, 2012 @ 7:51 AM EDT

Sep 20 2012

"...For there are even more on the government dole than even his 49% accounts for. Like those welfare queens at ExxonMobil, AT&T, GE, et al... 250 corporations that from 2008 to 2010 got nearly a quarter trillion in tax subsidies. Although to be fair, at least ExxonMobil and AT&T give us back cheap gas and reliable cell phone service..."

"If they have success, they built it. If they failed, the government ruined it for them. If they get a break, they deserve it. If you get a break, it'a a handout and an entitlement.

It's a baffling, willfully blind cognitive dissonance...

(Watch the top of the video- you can skip the ad after a few seconds...)

Categories: Daily Show, Fox News, Jon Stewart, Mitt Romney, News Media, Politics, Video

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Really, NBC?
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Published Sunday, August 26, 2012 @ 8:18 AM EDT

Aug 26 2012

Watch for NBC's feature story on the discover of America by Christopher Cross.

Categories: Neil Armstrong, News Media, WTF?

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And so it goes...
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Published Wednesday, August 15, 2012 @ 6:46 AM EDT

Aug 15 2012

(For all you World News Now fans):

Linda Ellerbee (born August 15, 1944) is an American journalist who is most known for several jobs at NBC News, including Washington, DC correspondent, host of the Nickelodeon network's Nick News, and reporter and co-anchor of NBC News Overnight, which was recognized by the jurors of the duPont Columbia Awards as "possibly the best written and most intelligent news program ever."

Ellerbee was born Linda Jane Smith in Bryan, Texas. She attended River Oaks Elementary School, Lanier Middle School, and Lamar High School in Houston.

She also attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, although she quit in 1964 without graduating.

Ellerbee traveled around the country for some time afterward, working itinerant jobs in radio. In her own words:

"I moved around some, married some, had two babies, worked for three radio stations, one of which hired me to read the news because I sounded black- my Texas heritage- and the black woman it had hired did not... In radio, I learned about keeping logs, editing audiotape, writing copy, selling air time, announcing, and "running a board," which sounds one hell of a lot more sporting than it is. After a stint working for Terry Miller, majority leader of the Alaska Senate, she was hired by the Dallas bureau of the Associated Press to write copy. She claims to have been fired after writing a catty personal letter on the AP's word processors and accidentally sending the letter out on the wire. The letter brought her to the attention of CBS television affiliate KHOU-TV, which hired her to replace Jessica Savitch in January 1973. Within several months she was hired by New York's WCBS-TV.

At NBC, Ellerbee worked as a reporter on The Today Show. Her first anchor job was on the prime-time version of Weekend. Ellerbee joined Lloyd Dobyns as co-host of Weekend when the show moved from its late-night time slot (where it rotated with SNL on Saturday nights) into direct prime time competition with CBS's 60 Minutes. As with the late-night incarnation, they would sign-off with the phrase, "And so it goes." A couple of years later, Ellerbee was again teamed with Dobyns (and later Bill Schechner) as hosts of NBC News Overnight, where their ineffable writing stylea made the show somewhat reminiscent of their stint on Weekend. They ended each broadcast with a short, usually wry, commentary, again signing off with the catchphrase, "And so it goes," which later became the title of her first memoir.

In 1986, after the cancellation of Overnight, Ellerbee moved to rival network ABC. There she served as a reporter for the morning program Good Morning America. At ABC, Ellerbee was able to co-write and co-anchor (with Ray Gandolf) Our World, a weekly primetime historical series. She won an Emmy Award for her work on that program.

In 1987, Ellerbee and her life and business partner Rolfe Tessem left network news to start their own production company, Lucky Duck Productions. The company has produced programs for every major cable network, and has as its flagship program Nick News, a news program for children on Nickelodeon. That show has received three Peabody Awards (including one personal Peabody given to Ellerbee for her coverage of the Clinton investigation), a duPont Columbia Award and three Emmys. In 2004, Ellerbee was honored with an Emmy for her WE: Women’s Entertainment network series When I Was a Girl.

In 1989, she guest-starred as herself in an episode of the sitcom Murphy Brown. The episode, "Summer of '77," referenced that Ellerbee had auditioned for the anchor job which eventually went to the title character, played by Candice Bergen. Murphy Brown also accuses Ellerbee of stealing her catchphrase "And so it goes..." from her during a long haul flight. The two reminisce with Ellerbee saying she might like to go back to an old network job, and Brown wanting to take some time off to write a book. Both reply with "Nahh...".

Her autobiography, And So It Goes, was published in 1986. A second book of memoirs, Move on: Adventures in the Real World was published in 1992 and third, Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table in 2005. In addition, she has authored an eight-part series of Girl Reporter books for young people, as well as a syndicated newspaper column.

In 1992, Ellerbee was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. Since then, Ellerbee spends much of her time speaking to groups about how she fought the cancer and how women need to fight not only the disease and for better medical treatments of it, but to laugh in the face of cancer as well. (from Wikipedia)

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Linda Ellerbee quotations:

Change is one form of hope; to risk change is to believe in tomorrow.

I have always felt that laughter in the face of reality is probably the finest sound there is and will last until the day when the game is called on account of darkness. In this world, a good time to laugh is any time you can.

If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?

If you believe in your heart that you are right, then you must fight with all your might to do it your way. Only dead fish swim with the stream all the time.

Nothing you think at twenty-five is so.

People are pretty much alike. It's only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities.

Putting people in a room and strapping wires to their wrist to find out if I make them tingle when I'm telling them about Beirut is a long way from Edward R. Murrow

Styles, like everything else, change. Style doesn't.

The two strongest messages we're sending through television are that popularity is everything, and that if it doesn't make money it's not worth anything.

Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go.

We call them Twinkies. You've seen them on television acting the news, modeling and fracturing the news while you wonder whether they've read the news- or if they've blow-dried their brains, too.

When the anchorman is wearing a colonel's uniform, it tells you something.

-----

(YouTube video: Linda Ellerbee discusses "NBC News Overnight")

From the last NBC News Overnight:

And so it goes.

Categories: ABC World News Now, Linda Ellerbee, NBC News Overnight, News Media

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You know we're in trouble...
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Published Saturday, July 21, 2012 @ 2:06 PM EDT

Jul 21 2012

...when "satire" in The Onion is about the only honest, objective view you'll get of this abysmal situation.

Sadly, Nation Knows Exactly How Colorado
Shooting's Aftermath Will Play Out

(The Onion, July 20, 2012)

WASHINGTON-Americans across the nation confirmed today that, unfortunately, due to their extreme familiarity with the type of tragedy that occurred in a Colorado movie theater last night, they sadly know exactly how the events following the horrific shooting of 12 people will unfold.

While admitting they "absolutely hate" the fact they have this knowledge, the nation's 300 million citizens told reporters they can pinpoint down to the hour when the first candlelight vigil will be held, roughly how many people will attend, how many times the county sheriff will address the media in the coming weeks, and when the town-wide memorial service will be held.

Additionally, sources nationwide took no pleasure in confirming that some sort of video recording, written material, or disturbing photographs made by the shooter will be surfacing in about an hour or two.

"I hate to say it, but we as Americans are basically experts at this kind of thing by now,” said 45-year-old market analyst Jared Gerson, adding that the number of media images of Aurora, CO citizens crying and looking shocked is “pretty much right in line with where it usually is at this point." "The calls not to politicize the tragedy should be starting in an hour, but by 1:30 p.m. tomorrow the issue will have been politicized. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the shooter's high school classmate is interviewed within 45 minutes."

"It's like clockwork," said Gerson, who sighed, shook his head, and walked away.

According to the nation's citizenry, calls for a mature, thoughtful debate about the role of guns in American society started right on time, and should persist throughout the next week or so. However, the populace noted, the debate will soon spiral out of control and ultimately lead to nothing of any substance, a fact Americans everywhere acknowledged they felt "absolutely horrible" to be aware of.

With scalpel-like precision, the American populace then went on to predict, to the minute, how long it will take for the media to swarm Aurora, CO, how long it will take for them to leave, and exactly when questions will be raised as to whether or not violence in movies and video games had something to do with the act.

The nation's citizens also confirmed that, any time now, some religious figure or cable news personality will say something unbelievably insensitive about the tragic shooting.

"Unfortunately, I've been through this a lot, and I pretty much have it down to a science when President Obama will visit Colorado, when he will meet with the families of those who lost loved ones, and when he will give his big speech that people will call 'unifying' and 'very presidential,'" Jacksonville resident Amy Brennen, 32, said, speaking for every other person in the country. "Nothing really surprises me when it comes to this kind of thing anymore. And that makes me feel terrible."

"Oh, and here's another thing I hate I know," Brennen continued, "In exactly two weeks this will all be over and it will be like it never happened."

Categories: Barack Obama, Hypocrisy, News Media, Observations, Politics, Questions for the Ages, Religion, Second Amendment, The Onion, TV, U.S. Constitution

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