So it turns out Sotloff held dual citizenship: US, and Israeli.

Somewhere a Brit-accented IS spokesdemon is having second thoughts about buying green bananas

Going to be weird when Dems win a Kansas Senate race, but I'll take it.

The Nightman Cometh wrote:Going to be weird when Dems win a Kansas Senate race, but I'll take it.

Thought the dem dropped out?

The independent in the race has a solid shot at winning and will caucus with the Dems.

I think the upcoming Scottish independence vote, which is a huge deal by the way, how parochial and awful the American media really are. The general news sites I check regularly have almost nothing about it, and while I don't watch TV news, I would be surprised if there were any in depth coverage over there. We know more about which Presidents have worn a khaki suit than Scottish implications and its possible implications. Despite 24 hours of news, websites with no real limitations on space (c'mon Huffington Post, do we really need to read another story about how Sarah Palin is irrelevant?) And there's a problem with this--I do read The Economist weekly, and they are covering this issue. But of course, the Economist is rather biased in general, and especially biased towards "no".

Hmm. Nothing on The Guardian's front page today either.

Step aside LG, we're bringing in the experts on this topic:

please tell me that's photoshop

pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease

convert or be killed, says ISIS...er, Phil Dynasty

he has a book to sell so he's doing the rounds

TV and Pac's posts back to back...

Good job, guys.

Wow. Bob McDonnell just got whacked.

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:Wow. Bob McDonnell just got whacked.

Thanks for making me think he got taken out in a mob hit. :/

Werthless wrote:

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:Wow. Bob McDonnell just got whacked.

Thanks for making me think he got taken out in a mob hit. :/

Sometimes I forget that this is a Philly board.

pacino wrote:Step aside LG, we're bringing in the experts on this topic:

I like how it's tabbed as "exclusive"

It seems like they're both going to get in the vicinity of 10 years for this, so Bob and his wife moron but I have plenty of alone time for their broken marriage to heal. Even Bob's people, didn't believe that this whole thing was just some work that his wife dragged him on.

TenuredVulture wrote:I think the upcoming Scottish independence vote, which is a huge deal by the way, how parochial and awful the American media really are. The general news sites I check regularly have almost nothing about it, and while I don't watch TV news, I would be surprised if there were any in depth coverage over there. We know more about which Presidents have worn a khaki suit than Scottish implications and its possible implications. Despite 24 hours of news, websites with no real limitations on space (c'mon Huffington Post, do we really need to read another story about how Sarah Palin is irrelevant?) And there's a problem with this--I do read The Economist weekly, and they are covering this issue. But of course, the Economist is rather biased in general, and especially biased towards "no".

Hmm. Nothing on The Guardian's front page today either.

There's a reason. BBC Scotland didn't want to deal with the referendum for political reasons (there's a study out which suggests they were badly biased against Yes and the SNP). BBC HQ down south eventually forced a referendum unit on them, and prompltly filled it with scottish BBC journos who didnt' like the SNP and felt no need to comment on the Yes campaign because the polls told them it was a 35/65 split vs No.

There's not a single paper that has declared for yes in the UK outside of the Sunday Herald (its weekly sister paper has not committed, and indeed its political editor has, Magnus Gardham, seems to have a distinctly anti-Yes bias). On the ground reportage of the Yes campaign up until recently has been non-existent or dismissive (Libby Brooks of the Guardian has been a notable exception). So the Yes campaign has had no media backing. None.

To an extent, commentary has been filled online by the likes of Indy Podcast (featuring the very smart lawyer and writer Andrew Tickell), Newsnet Scotland (a voluntary website with some crowdfunding that usually reruns stories found elsewhere with a Yes sland), Bella Caledonia (a commentary site with a distinctly leftist stance) and the phenomenon that is Wings Over Scotland, run by Rev. Stu Campbell. He calls his site a news digest, and he tends to respond to stories in the papers and tv by questioning their facts and assertions. Campbell is good, albeit acerbic as fuck (which may have something to do with his background as a computer games journalist and a man well-used to online flame wars), but there's little actual journalism for the Yes side.

Scotland has two principle papers (the herald and the scotsman) the latter of which is losing money hand over fist, the former which had to radically cut its staff, and so has fewer reporting resources. As Campbell is fond of noting, out of Scotland's 37 newspapers, only 5 are scottish owned, and as I said before, only 1 has declared for yes.

So traditional news content generators are thin on the ground, the national media is uninterested at best and frequently biaised. The rUK (that's rest of UK to ye) has looked on the thing with vague bemusement as if it's no great thing if scotland comes or goes. Or as in the Derek Bateman piece I noted, the rabidly anti-scottish folk down south (it was a UKIP politician who famously called the Scots 'subsidy junkies' despite scotland consistently paying more into the exchequer than is spent on it) have heaped abuse on the scots and told them to piss off or shut up. We have had the UK Government spend a lot of money on reports telling us why scotland can't survive without massive tax raises, why scotland can't use the pound. Hell, back in February the Chancellor came up to Scotland for barely an hour to tell us that every party in westminster is agreed that they will not negotiate currency union with Scotland in the event of independence, because it's too much danger to the British economy to be chained to a nation guaranteed to spend shitloads on keeping its populace healthy and happy. Heaped on top of that is the media characterisation of the Yes campaign as a load of aggrieved keyboard warriors (aka Cybernats) abusing all and sundry if they disagree. Many folk down south think it's a small number of lippy scots who can't manage by themselves led by an english-hating nationalist party run by one man who's trying on the referendum as the world's biggest vanity project.

The first time most in the UK woke up to the real world implications of what's been going on up here is when the sterling dropped in value after the YouGov poll putting it at 6 points difference. Because, you know, markets hate uncertainty and right now it's a) not clear who will win and b) if yes win it's not clear that the UK government are prepared to negotiate sensibly.

There are implications for down south. We comprise 10% of their economy. If we go, they don't have a currency backed in part by large oil reserves (although they have a little after blair redrew the coastal boundaries in 97). Back in February, as part of their 'dam-busters' strategy (we got about three weeks of NO POUND and then BP said YOUR OIL IS RUNNING OUT and oh fuck, I forget, we've been hammered with so many scare stories its beyond ridiculous), they guaranteed all payments on the national debt, thus confirming to the markets that if scotland walks away from the british national debt, the UKs debt to gdp ratio shoots up.

I still don't know whether this is the UK government trying to pretend to be dumb schmucks to rope-a-dope the Yes campaign, or whether they have been supremely arrogant. Only last week, a unnamed civil servant confirmed they had 'contingency plans about contingency plans' - 3 or four weeks previous the British government's lack of preparedness had been described as 'astonishing' by former senior civil servant Lord O'Donnell. There's more coverage of the clacton by-election between UKIP and the Tories then there is of their debt ratio increasing and them having nowhere to put their nuclear deterrent (Faslane is the only prepared deep-sea location suitable for the Trident subs). Oh, and if they want any more ships built for the royal navy and they don't have the clyde shipyards to do it, they're going to have to massively rebuild portsmouth shipyards.

Fuck only knows why they didn't want to pay attention. Empire mentality, probably. Watch and remember. In the words of Grandpa Simpson 'It'll happen to you!'

HAHAHAHA

Oh God, can Fox sink any lower?

pacino wrote:Step aside LG, we're bringing in the experts on this topic:

http://20committee.com/2014/05/17/ideol ... ca-stupid/

From earlier in the year.

As if providing an incisive summary of the shambolic media coverage of current Scottish events that puts ALL of US coverage to shame were not enough, Wiz manages to employ in that effort

Wizlah wrote:
....rope-a-dope....

....words of Grandpa Simpson....

I give it at least an 8.5

Kansas Sec of State (a guy who is backing Roberts) said that he won't allow Dem Chad Taylor to drop out of the race because he didn't ask the right way. Thing is, he asked the office prior to bowing out how he was supposed to go about doing it, then did it the way they suggested.

even The Economist blows sometimes

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... src=fol_tw