A private feeling aired gets Juan Williams, a National Public Radio journalist/analyst, fired.
Juan Williams, in response to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, made an impolitic remark—well, stereotype. He said the comment was taken out of context. The facts: he said that while flying, if he sees a man wearing Muslim garb professing alliance to Islam first, he gets worried.…
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76 - Ruvy
Being the Brooklyn boy that I am, having worked at Nathans, remembering the stink of the BMT, IND and IRT subway trains and the boardwalk at Brighton Beach where the Liberal Party old farts used to play chess and pinochle, and kids would pee on the floor - hitting the lovers having sex Under The Boardwalk, it is such a pleasure to see folks talking up my old home so nicely. And yes, newspapers are barely worth wrapping fish in anymore.
But I have other concerns.
Lately, Bishop Ratzinger, presently of Rome, has been showing the world just what Jew-haters the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ (Vatican for short) really are.
Lets have a look, shall we?
Catholic Cleric: Jesus Cancelled Biblical ‘Chosen People’. uh huh....
US Jews Enraged by Catholic Document Urging Missionizing of Jews. The lie has been put to all the interfaith dialogue bullshit.
And finally, Vatican Synod features some good old-fashioned Catholic Jew Hatred. We see the Bishop of Rome and his flunkies at their Jew-hating best. So nice to see the mask of compassion come off to reveal the inner Nazi at last.
I'll let you chew on why I view the goyisher world with contempt. In the meantime, I'm gonna fix myself a good old fashioned egg-cream.
77 - STM
Mate, was that what I had, Ruve ... a chocolate egg-cream????
It rings a bell. Someone took me there specially to go to this place. It's a long time ago, but whatever it was, it was good.
And please don't put me off Nathan's hotdogs ... I love American hotdogs (yes, they ARE different), and these were among the best I had in the US.
Like I say, I'd go back to Brooklyn just to have those two things if I were to travel back to New York again.
The party was pretty damn good too, although what happened afterwards in Chelsea is still somwething I can dine out on.
No sex or anything sordid involved in case anyone's wondering ... but a near who-knows- what, with me only saved from who-knows-what by the fact that as an Aussie, I really do know my cricket.
Hope Samaria is OK. Cheers Ruvy!
78 - Ruvy
Stan, this video comes close, real close, to the way it was made in the hole-in-wall New Yorkers called a "candy staw" when I was a kid growing up in Williamsburg and Midwood a half century ago.
You should use U-Bet Syrup, not Bosco, but who knows what is you have available to you in Oz? Where this goes off in on the seltzer. This video uses club soda fresh UNOPENED out of the fridgidaire. That's as good as this poor guy could get. You use seltzer - the kind you spray out of those seltzer bottles manufactured in Czechoslovakia in the 1920's. It's highly carbonated water - unlike club soda, which is less highly carbonated. And you spray it on the spoon to create the head on egg-cream.
The reality is that you cannot get a real egg-cream outside of a restaurant that has carbonated water separate from the syrup lines. This soda is what is highly carbonated, and always pressurized.
Thank you for the kind wishes. It is hot here. Wednesday is supposed to be a Hamsín - hot weather for late October, highly unseasonably so.
79 - Ruvy
Finally, Stan, I just wanted to tell you that when I was a kid, nagging my father or mother for the money to buy these delicious egg-creams (we didn't have then with hot-dogs- that would be mixing dairy with meat), I lived in the richest, the best, most powerful and most wonderful land on earth - better than Australia was THEN. Today hakol hafukh - it is the opposite. Be nice to the American refugees when they come to your shores from the disaster that will become America. Americans are decent folk, with good work ethics, and good senses of humor. Just keep out the asshole élites that will inevitably try to sneak in with the refugees.
80 - Boeke
Juan Williams shouldn't have been fired for his injudicious statement, but he should have been fired years ago for his poor reporting.
Contrary to what radical rightists proclaim as doctrine, NPR is NOT leftist, and could better be described as rightist, or at least super-sensitive to rightist sensibilities.
For example, here's an anecdote from FAIR on Howard Zinns obituary compared to obits for several conservatives:
FAIR
NPR Puts Right-Wing Hate in Howard Zinn’s Obit
A double standard for deaths on left and right
By Jim Naureckas
When progressive historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, NPR’s All Things Considered (1/28/10) marked his passing with a declaration that his life’s work was worthless.
After quoting positive assessments from Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, NPR’s Allison Keyes turned to far-right activist David Horowitz, a practitioner of what the Nation (11/12/07) calls the New McCarthyism, for a ritual denunciation. “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect,” Horowitz proclaimed. “Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.”
Horowitz’s substance-free attack contributed nothing to an understanding of Zinn’s life or work, other than conveying that he’s disliked by cranky right-wingers. (Horowitz has been best known in recent years for his race-baiting and Muslim-bashing"Extra!, 5"6/02; FAIR report, 10/1/08.) He seems to have been included merely to demonstrate that NPR will not allow praise for a leftist to go unaccompanied by conservative contempt.
NPR has not taken a consistent position that all its obituaries be thus “balanced.” Take its coverage of the death of William F. Buckley, a figure as admired by the right as Zinn was by the left. Upon his death in February 2008, NPR aired six segments commemorating him, none of which included a less than laudatory guest.
In two segments, All Things Considered (2/27/08) presented the remembrances of Rich Lowry (Buckley’s successor at National Review), Buckley’s son Christopher and his reverential biographer Sam Tanenhaus. One of the segments did include a soundbite of Noam Chomsky debating with Buckley in 1969: “No, I don’t believe that.… In fact, I think that....” But what Chomsky did not believe was unclear, let alone what he actually thought.
Talk of the Nation (2/27/08) featured admirer William Kristol, while Day to Day (2/27/08) had an extended interview with protegee David Brooks. Morning Edition (2/28/08) just quoted Buckley himself. The celebration of Buckley culminated with Weekend Edition host Scott Simon (2/29/08), who turned Buckley’s cause of death itself into a eulogy: “Emphysema, such an unseemly thing for a man who was so often a breath of fresh air.”
During his life, Buckley was an intensely controversial figure who supported, among other things, white supremacism in the U.S. South and South Africa, McCarthyism, nuclear war against China and the tattooing of AIDS patients (Extra!, 5"6/08). Reporting his death, however, NPR didn’t think it was worth bringing on a critic who would take a negative view. Why would the same outlet take such a different approach when reporting the death of a public intellectual on the right rather than the left? That’s something hundreds of media activists, some of them responding to a FAIR Action Alert (1/29/10), wrote to NPR ombud Alicia Shepard to find out"without getting a straight answer.
In an online response (2/4/10), Shepard admitted that Horowitz’s “harsh comments” were “not appropriate.” But at the same time, she insisted:
Obituaries are news stories that place a person in time and history"not tributes. For this reason, Zinn’s obituary did need to mention that he was controversial and that some historians were dismissive of his work.
“It would have been better to wait a day and find a more nuanced critic,” she concluded.
It’s true that an ad hominem attack from an ideologue fails to meet any responsible standard of journalism. At the same time, one could justify a rule that obituaries should always include balancing views. But as FAIR and many of NPR’s listeners pointed out, NPR does not consistently follow such a standard"a point Shepard’s response conspicuously ducked.
She did acknowledge that “NPR was complimentary and respectful in memorializing Buckley”"and added that “the network was equally nuanced in remembering pioneering televangelist Oral Roberts [12/15/09]...and Robert Novak [8/18/09].... NPR’s obituaries of these men did not contain mean-spirited, Horowitz-like comments.” Shepard, strangely enough, appeared to be using the word “nuanced” here as though it were synonymous with “complimentary and respectful.”
In any case, her statement did not suggest that those obituaries of right-wing figures should have been handled differently"or that future obits of conservatives would get the “warts and all” treatment that she says is mandatory...for Howard Zinn.
81 - STM
Thanks Ruve.
Mate, actually, quite a lot of Americans ARE moving here. Not exactly a tidal wave, but it's noticeable (perhaps now legally being able to have dual US-Aussie citizenship is the clue).
It's not unusual to hear an American accent these days in the suburbs. I don't know what the figures are for immigrants from North America, and I suspect some of them might be Canadian, but I can usually tell who's who.
The thing is, despite it being more of a cross between Britain and America, Australia is the country most like America, but it's just a hair different - so Americans find that a problem sometimes.
There is an American lady who used to write a blog and at first complained about the things she couldn't get, and how her kids were speaking with Aussie accents and eating Vegemite. Tongue in cheek mostly, but not always.
Then one day, she writes something like: "What am I doing complaining. I'm living in the most beautiful city on Earth, maybe I should just embrace it". Voila, after 18 months, not-quite-instant Aussie.
Americans complain about the high cost of living and the prices in the supermarkets, though, but then Aussies earn a bit more than Americans so if you've got a job here, you are in the same boat as everyone else and it doesn't equate to being anything that different to the US once you get your head around it. Cars and houses are pricey though: the average family sedan made in Oz will cost close to $A30,000 (about $US29,000). You can't buy a decent house in Sydney any longer for under $600,000.
I guess the trick is just to bite the bullet and accept it, rather than constantly doing calculations in your head all the time about what the cost is here vs there.
One of my mates is an American lawyer; he had to go back to university for a short time to switch over for practice but at the level of common law and criminal law, it is virtually identical as it comes from the same place. He will never go back, not because he doesn't like the US but because he likes it better here.
He's been here for 20 years; another of my mates is from California and has been here for nearly 30 years (although he does go back occasionally for six months to a year or so).
I stayed with his mum last time I was in the US. She reminded me of my own mother, but with a strange accent :)
Cheers Ruve, I'm off to check the egg-cream video. Thanks.
82 - STM
Yep, just looked at the video; that's what I had in Brooklyn Ruvy ... egg cream. Just forgot the name. I remember the head on it. A chocolate milk that looked like a beer. The place was supposed to be famous for them.
Cheers mate!