Things were pushed back a few days, so I am back at home until Saturday or Sunday. Went with my bags packed and ready to go, and there were complications beyond my control, so I went home. And man, it sucked. I was totally mentally prepared to surrender and just let it all go, and got basically cock-blocked by bureaucracy. I’ll just get myself stoked up again in a day or two. At this point, I’m so pissed off that I am beginning to take it personally- “FUCK THE MACHINE, I WILL GET SOBER AND YOU WILL HELP ME YOU MOTHERFUCKERS.” Also, the pleasant bonus for the craptacular day was 2 and 1/2 hours of sitting in Pittsburgh traffic listening to Shawn bitch, because he hates sitting in traffic. More than most people. More than even me, and I never pass up an opportunity to get pissed off about something.
Glad to see TBOGG and Zaid posting, and I hope you like their contributions. I honestly have no idea if Betty, Sooner, and Mistermix seriously were raptured, but I do have another guest poster who will be showing up soon. I’ll let her introduce herself, but I think you will like her work.
The news of the day has been rather catastrophic. Apparently Ukrainian separatists shot down a civilian jetliner, killing close to 300 people, using Soviet weaponry. They then allegedly bragged about it on twitter, then, like an American politician busted sending a dick pic, thought they could delete it and no one would notice. There are also alleged recordings between separatist rebels and Russian advisors discussing the attack after the fact. Make of it what you will (cough, cough, Gulf of Tonkin, etc.).
At any rate, from my understanding, these are the folks that Putin whipped up during his blunderous (new word?) Crimean takeover and then essentially bailed on when he was kicked in the dick with financial sanctions. I have no idea what will happen next, but hopefully Europe, dependent on Russian gas and oil, will finally be motivated to do something about the chaos in their backyard.
Meanwhile, on my tv, John McCain is getting his war on, and talking about repercussions and stringent responses. The same John McCain who wanted to arm unknown rebels in Syria. Kinda like Putin armed untrained and unknown separatists in Ukraine. Why is this geriatric fool still on tv and treated as if he knows anything?
In other news, Bibi has launched another invasion into Gaza, meaning that three dead Jewish children will end up in misery and death for untold thousands of Palestinians. Meanwhile, our compliant media is hitting new lows:
Ayman Mohyeldin, the NBC News correspondent who personally witnessed yesterday’s killing by Israel of four Palestinian boys on a Gazan beach and who has received widespread praise for his brave and innovative coverage of the conflict, has been told by NBC executives to leave Gaza immediately. According to an NBC source upset at his treatment, the executives claimed the decision was motivated by “security concerns” as Israel prepares a ground invasion, a claim repeated to me by an NBC executive. But late yesterday, NBC sent another correspondent, Richard Engel, along with an American producer who has never been to Gaza and speaks no Arabic, into Gaza to cover the ongoing Israeli assault (both Mohyeldin and Engel speak Arabic).
Mohyeldin is an Egyptian-American with extensive experience reporting on that region. He has covered dozens of major Middle East events in the last decade for CNN, NBC and Al Jazeera English, where his reporting on the 2008 Israeli assault on Gaza made him a star of the network. NBC aggressively pursued him to leave Al Jazeera, paying him far more than the standard salary for its on-air correspondents.
Yesterday, Mohyeldin witnessed and then reported on the brutal killing by Israeli gunboats of four young boys as they played soccer on a beach in Gaza City. He was instrumental, both in social media and on the air, in conveying to the world the visceral horror of the attack.
Mohyeldin recounted how, moments before their death, he was kicking a soccer ball with the four boys, who were between the ages of 9 and 11 and all from the same family. He posted numerous chilling details on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, including the victims’ names and ages, photographs he took of their anguished parents, and video of one of their mothers as she learned about the death of her young son. He interviewed one of the wounded boys at the hospital shortly before being operated on. He then appeared on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, where he dramatically recounted what he saw.
Despite this powerful first-hand reporting – or perhaps because of it – Mohyeldin was nowhere to be seen on last night’s NBC Nightly News broadcast with Brian Williams. Instead, as Media Bistro’s Jordan Chariton noted, NBC curiously had Richard Engel – who was in Tel Aviv, and had just arrived there an hour or so earlier – “report” on the attack. Charlton wrote that “the decision to have Engel report the story for ‘Nightly’ instead of Mohyeldin angered some NBC News staffers.”
Indeed, numerous NBC employees, including some of the network’s highest-profile stars, were at first confused and then indignant over the use of Engel rather than Mohyeldin to report the story. But what they did not know, and what has not been reported until now, is that Mohyeldin was removed completely from reporting on Gaza by a top NBC executive, David Verdi, who ordered Mohyeldin to leave Gaza immediately.
Also, in Israel, here’s some video of Israeli’s standing on a hill watching missiles rain down on civilians in Gaza, cheering and hooting and hollering:
The reporter that was there was accosted by the Israelis in the area and told if she said anything wrong, they would wreck her car, and she tweeted as much and said they were scum for threatening her, so, of course, she is now America’s #1 anti-Semite to the right-wing blogosphere. Someone threatens to wreck my car, scum seems kind of mild for what I would call them. But I guess when you are caught on film cheering on the deaths of others, you get kind of sensitive and being called scum might hit a little close to home and make you think about what the fuck you are actually doing. So I guess there is that.
Might check in tomorrow. Might not. Today was a really shitty day all around. I was ready.