Friday, February 28, 2014

Cheap shots and big spenders

They're baaaaack!

(1) Jason Greenslate, the San Diego scrap-metal guitarist (his band is called Rattlife) whom we last met in August being interviewed by Fox's John Roberts, apparently living high off the lobster on food stamps that he clearly didn't need, unless as seemed likely to me at [jump]
the time he wasn't, but was merely trying to polish a naughty-bro image in the hope of encouraging sales of the band's album (sample lyric: "I don't want no motherfuckin job, I'd rather be broke and steal and rob"). This time he showed up being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly's shame-porn pimp Jesse Watters, with the same story,  but with no reference to his previous Fox experience, as if he'd never been there before.

(2) Betsy Tadder, the Illinois dental assistant we saw with Fox's Martha McCallum in November, complaining about how she liked her insurance but didn't get to keep it, though a little googling showed that since her husband worked for Lowes over in Janesville, which offers excellent benefits, she shouldn't have been paying for the family health insurance at all, let alone some crappy high-deductible plan with no out-of-pocket maximum that would have landed them all in bankruptcy one of these days—and it would be illegal for her to be paying for it now, through the Obamacare exchange. She's back with McCallum again, calling Senate Majority Reid a liar for publicly doubting all the Obamacare horror stories ("Who doesn't know somebody who lost their insurance?" asks Martha rhetorically, more than once, evidently having it down in her official talking points; I doubt anybody in Martha's social circle is having trouble), and shopping her story with even less detail than she put into it in the first time. And like young Jason, Betsy's presented out of the blue and context-free, with no reference to her having been on the show before.

Which leads me to wonder: do you think these characters might be althogether on the Fox payroll, showing up like Sarah Palin from time to time to present their shtik and then laying low until such a time as the sleepy elderly audience may have forgotten them, when they can come out again and do it afresh?

Fox says it never pays news sources, but not everybody believes them (like David Brock, here), and then their cousins in the Murdoch stable over in England certainly do or did, and we all know where they ended up a couple of springs ago:
Combine the culture of checkbook journalism with the culture of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and you get one of the biggest media scandals of all time. Paying for news is at the root of News Corp.’s hacking and bribery scandals, and the reaction by tabloid hacks to the revelations about The Sun is revealing about the journalistic environment that gave rise to them.
And Fox could say, you know, strictly speaking it's not paying for news, because these stories aren't new, and for that matter aren't true either. It's paying for acting, or perhaps you might call it performance art, and not paying them would be very wrong.


Via Roy Edroso, the Republican imaginary politician and aspiring bed-and-breakfast host (I'm just making that up, but look at the rosy-cheeked orange-pecan muffin face in the picture) "Quin Hillyer" spoke to The Blaze on the subject of sports commentator Johnny Weir and his distasteful outfits:
“I think figure skating battles a perception that it’s not a manly sport,” he said. “Because it’s all about grace and style. And I think if I were a figure skater, I would want the focus to be on my athleticism. And if you’ve got somebody– I mean, who cares if he’s homosexual? The question is, by dressing as a woman and bringing that image of femininity to the sport, does that feed the image of it as somehow less than a fete of athleticism?”
As the bridegroom said to the wedding planner, "My fête is in your hands."

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