1. Mark at Going Like Sixty gets top billing because he posted about how the now-classic Peace Symbol came to be. Today happens to be the 50th anniversary of the creation of that symbol, which was meant to represent the semaphore codes for the letters N and D for "Nuclear Disarmament". These days, people tend to confuse the peace symbol with the Mercedes Benz logo, since owning a Merc has superseded working for peace in the minds of a lot of Americans. By the same token, Winston Churchill’s "V for Victory" hand gesture was also appropriated by the ’60s youth culture to mean "peace". Churchill originally used the gesture with his fingers turned inward like this:
He turned his hand around after someone worked up the guts to tell him what that gesture actually means (HINT: it ain’t pretty). I imagine more than one American traveling Europe has gotten punched in the snoot by some local misunderstanding this little gesture over the last 40 years.
2. Hollywood has wasted no time since the conclusion of the WGA strike to make sure that quality scripts are being hurried into production. The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Hasbro has signed a movie deal with Universal to make a series of movies based on the classic games "Monopoly", "Battleship", "Candy Land" and "Ouija". What, no Yahtzee?
3. The new five dollar bill is about to be launched. The fiver was one of the first bills to be re-designed back in the 1990s, but this re-design incorporates the various anti-counterfeiting measures that have been instituted in subsequent bill designs including colored ink, microprinting, and watermarking. That should keep the counterfeiters at bay for at least a week.
4. Apparently MSNBC isn’t the only news network engaging in various acts of douchebaggery against Barack Obama. Crooks and Liars reports that the closed-captioning of Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN included a statement that Al Quaeda had called Obama to congratulate him on his primary win in Wisconsin. Cooper himself did not say this, it was just in the captioning, but a lot of public places with televisions turn on the closed-captioning so that patrons can follow a program even if crowd noise drowns out the audio.
5. It’s Official: George W. Bush is the WORST.PRESIDENT.EVAR.
Too Much Of A Good Thing
For the last couple of years now, MSNBC anchor and commentator Keith Olbermann has opted to deliberately imitate the editorial style of Edward R. Murrow in delivering what has turned into a regular series of editorial jeremiads against the Bush Administration. Many of us, myself included, cheered loudly when he decided to say what no one else in American journalism would say — that the President and his cronies are liars and criminals on a par with the worst usurpers in human history.
But it was clear to me from the outset that he needed to use his rhetoric and his soapbox very sparingly. Such charged language, such inflammatory accusations, no matter how true they might be, lose their power and meaning when they are too often repeated. It is, in fact, the opposite side of the coin of Hitler’s “Big Lie”. No matter how big the lie, if you keep telling it and treating it as plain fact, it will become so, and the bigger the lie, the more readily it will be believed. In this case, the truth is being told, but in its ready repetition it ceases to be seen as the truth and become just another bit of empty rhetoric, easily dismissed. The Republicans have demonstrated their full and complete understanding of both sides of this coin, telling the most egregious lies and turning them into accepted facts, while discounting and undermining any and all counter-arguments as “liberal bias”.
Blogging for Time Magazine, political writer James Poniewozik called out Olbermann’s over-the-top response to the now-infamous Hillary Clinton “RFK remark”, and has come to the conclusion that Olbermann has begun to stretch into the real of self-parody. At TV Newser, associate editor Steve Krakauer pulled together a handful of links about MSNBC’s decision to let Olbermann rant on, including one blogger who openly wonders if Olbermann has “jumped the shark”.
I have to say I believe that he has, and that he should take advantage of the relative lull in political news now that Barack Obama has become the presumptive Democratic nominee and Bush is on his “Farewell Tour” to give it a rest until the last month or so of the presidential campaign. Regardless of which candidate wins in November, there will continue to be a genuine need for an honest voice speaking truth to power, and it needs to be one that cannot be ignored.
Related Posts: