Today is election day in the US and in his latest investigative report John Oliver points out that while all attention is focused on elections to Congress and the governors races, the real action takes place below the radar in elections for state legislatures where much of the legislation that impacts our daily lives is enacted.
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I had never heard of the app Yik Yak. It is a Twitter-like app that uses GPS location sensors to allow people to post their views (“yaks”) anonymously within a highly limited geographical area of 1.5 miles, thus making it a hyper-local social network. This enables people to comment anonymously on matters of purely local interest. You can read how it works here. The app is particularly popular on college campuses where people can share their opinions on what’s going on in and outside of class.
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Al Madrigal of The Daily Show goes deep undercover to discover the threats they pose to America and find out what they are really up to.
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The most abused word in political discourse is democracy. In his classic 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell said that in much political speech, words are separated from any meaning and used to convey an attitude.
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For some reason, the businesses run by the Koch brothers started advertising on The Daily Show and this gave Jon Stewart the opportunity to launch an attack on them and the way they are using their money to buy politicians. That is an interesting thing to see. Usually broadcasters tend to give the sponsors of their show kid glove treatment, something that businesses know and take advantage of to buy the silence of news organizations, as media watcher Jeff Cohen noted some time ago.
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To the categories of Driving While Black and Flying While Muslim and similar ones that highlight the way some groups are targeted for engaging in activities that would pass unnoticed if done by others, we now need to add Walking While Woman. The secretly recorded video of a woman dressed in ordinary street clothes walking through the streets of New York for 10 hours in one day, and the various types of unwanted attention she received has garnered much notice providing evidence, if anyone still needed it, that the world inhabited by women can quite different from that inhabited by men, as is the case with people of color versus white and rich versus poor.
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Stephen Colbert gave his take on the Gamergate controversy and also interviewed Anita Sarkeesian, the woman who had to cancel her talk at Utah State University because of the death threats she received for speaking out against the objectification of women in video games.
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Roger Hoeppner, a 75-year old resident of a rural Wisconsin county, has had a long-standing dispute with local authorities. He was challenging the zoning rules that they said required him to move some wooden pallets in his front yard. As he continued to defy them, the local authorities did what any small community when confronted with an elderly resident who was being difficult.
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Stephen Colbert makes the case for congressman Louie Gohmert who wins it even in the face of stiff competition from the likes of Michele Bachmann. I sometimes wonder whether he could be as stupid as he really seems to be and whether he is really quite savvy and has figured out that by saying deliberately stupid things, he gets a lot of media attention. But that would require him to be a really good actor, worthy of an award.
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Robert Parry marvels at how the US media quickly picks up and follows the official narrative of the US government when it comes to geopolitics. The latest is how Russia’s actions in the world are described when compared with US actions, and how Russian president Vladimir Putin is portrayed as a lunatic. He uses a recent New York Times article as an example.
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