Saturday Stuff

Tough luck there, Scotland (here) - I'm sure you'll try again; all the best...



...at least most of those voting in that election knew what they were voting for or against, as opposed to this country...



...and I know that President Obama is carrying a heavy load with zero assistance from those majority clowns in the U.S. House in particular and not a lot from the Senate either (there's the legislative branch of government as well as the executive, after all), but he still needs to answer the question posed in this video...



...and I really need to go off a bit here.

In these parts (Bucks County, PA, in particular the Neshaminy School District), there's a controversy brewing over the fact that Gillian McGoldrick, editor-in-chief of Neshaminy HS’s student newspaper The Playwickian, as well as faculty adviser Tara Huber, were both suspended by Neshaminy School District Superintendent Robert Copeland because McGoldrick and Huber were apparently the ones behind a decision not to publish the word “Redskin” in a Letter to the Editor after the two quite rightly IMHO had decided that the term was an “offensive racial slur” and it would no longer appear in the paper.

Well, the oh-so-august-in-their-imaginations editorial board of the Bucks County Courier Times basically came down on the side of Copeland and the school administration yesterday, in part because the Courier Times believes that “it's just plain silly to expect people to debate an issue without mentioning the issue by name” (kind of mirrors this attitude as far as I'm concerned).

I honestly don't know what there is to “debate” here. The paper decided that the term was offensive and wouldn't appear in the paper (of course, leave it to the Courier Times to side with the powers that be, apparently believing that it's more important for McGoldrick to be punished than rewarded for exercising a responsible journalistic instinct). The “issue” is that the term wouldn't appear any more – as noted in the Huffington Post link above, similar protests are going on elsewhere over that term...or don't the “news professionals” of the Courier Times editorial board realize that?

Besides, I don't want to hear any high-minded claptrap from the Courier Times about how important it is not to favor one opinion on an issue over another (the “pro” and “anti” Redskin camps, if you will). On the same page that the Courier Times ran this editorial yesterday, they published one of their typically wingnutty letters with the title of “The 'Shameocrat Party'.” And believe me when I tell you that they would NEVER run a comparable headline against a Republican politician or talking point. They would NEVER condone anything like the language they allow against Democrats on a routine basis if that language were pointed at someone or something having to do with Not Your Father's Republican Party (there was an Op-Ed referring to Republicans as "godless," but that language barely appears at all on the Op-Ed page, nowhere near in proportion to anti-Democratic pejoratives).

(Here's another example: a story appeared in the paper a couple of years ago about how “Mikey the Beloved” Fitzpatrick pre-screens his “Town Hall” questions and how they end up usually being “softball” self-flattering stuff. Faster than you can say Karl Rove, someone from the Fitzpatrick camp complained to the Courier Times and that story – shockingly, some sound journalism from the usually wretched Gary Weckselblatt – COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED online subsequent to publication.)

So no, Courier Times, I don't want to hear any of your self-serving BS about supposedly sound journalistic ethics while you continues to slavishly kow tow to elderly white conservatives who never heard an anti-Obama talking point from the Roger Ailes BS Factory that they didn't wholeheartedly endorse (sorry I don't have links to the Courier Times Op-Ed stuff, but it's all behind their stupid pay wall by now anyway, which is a whole other rant).

And since, again, we're talking about the Bucks County Courier Times, that means that it's time for this tune (tongue in cheek, of course).