Obama seen through a Fox News spin doctor eyes (satire)

A little bit of fun today. I found this hilarious article on Glossynews and couldn’t help to share it with you. The story of a typical day  in the life of President Obama as seen by a normal person and as seen by the agents of FOX News:

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA:
7 AM- The President wakes up.

THE SAME EVENT AS SEEN BY FOX NEWS:
7 AM- OBAMA WAKES UP LATE! WHAT SORT OF PRESIDENT IS THAT?

7:30- Eats muesli for breakfast.
7:30- OBAMA EATS SPECIAL EUROPEAN FOOD FOR BREAKFAST. ISN’T AMERICAN FOOD GOOD ENOUGH FOR HIM?

7:45- Obama children escorted to school by secret service.
7:45- TAXPAYERS FOOT ‘SPECIAL’ BABYSITTERS FOR OBAMA’S KIDS!

8:00- The President goes jogging.
8:00- OBAMA RUNS AWAY FROM HIS WORK!

8:30- Pets dog on way to office.
8:30- OBAMA STROKES DOG AGAINST HIS FUR! DOES HE HATE ANIMALS TOO?

8:45- Signs bill updating school books across the country.
8:45- THE PRESIDENT EVEN WANTS TO CONTROL WHAT OUR KIDS READ!

9:00- Michelle suggests everyone could eat better as she does from the organic White House garden.
9:00- MICHELLE OBAMA NOW WANTS TO CONTROL WHAT WE EAT!

9:20- President meets with Saudi princes in Oval Office.
9:20- OBAMA PALING AROUND WITH THE TERRORISTS AGAIN!

10:10 Obama holds open press conference.
10:10- OBAMA INDOCTRINATES LIBERAL MEDIA WITH HIS DICTATORIAL WAYS.

11:30- President goes swimming in White House pool-dives in.
11:30- OBAMA IN OVER HIS HEAD AGAIN!

12:00- Obamas have soup for lunch together.
12:00- THE PRESIDENT IS PART OF SILVER SPOON ELITE!

12.20- President has headache, takes aspirin from expired bottle.
12:20 OBAMA ABUSES HEALTH CARE!

12:50- Obama turns left down a hallway.
12:50- OBAMA MOVING FURTHER TO THE LEFT!

1:15 PM- The President signs a bill aiding ceramic workers with the stimulus bill.
1:15 PM- OBAMA USING FEDERAL MONEY TO SUPPORT POT INDUSTRY!

2:00- Obama announces final troop withdrawal from Iraq.
2:00- OBAMA TAKING JOBS AWAY FROM TROOPS! DOES HE HATE OUR SOLDIERS TOO?

2:30- The President blows his nose.
2:30- THE PRESIDENT IS BLOWING IT FOR US ALL!!

3:00- Obama asks Dems to forget Bush/Gore recount tally scandal, to let the past go.
3:00- OBAMA SUPPORTS TALLYBAN!

4:10- Obama vows to quit smoking.
4:10- THE PRESIDENT IS A QUITTER!

5:30- The President seeks to negotiate a peace settlement between Israel and Palestine.
5:30- OBAMA ATTEMPTS TO PLAY BOTH SIDES FOR GAIN!

7:00- Obama signs pact to sell wheat to Russia because of drought.
7:00- OBAMA SELLS US OUT TO COMMUNISTS!!

10:00- Obama goes to bed.
10:00- THE PRESIDENT GIVES UP!

Sun TV: Canada launches a pro-PM TV channel

Why getting a spin doctor when you can afford a TV channel? Canada PM Stephen Harper seems to be (discreetly) trying this way with the creation of Sun TV, a center-right News channel.

But Canada ain’t the States and Harper won’t be able to get his own Fox News so easily. The channel was supposed to be headed by his former spin doctor Kory Teneycke but the move was aborted…

Despite a sudden change at the top, plans are going ahead without missing a beat for the launch of Sun TV, the right-of-centre news channel sponsored by Pierre Karl Péladeau and his Quebecor media empire.

The headline has been the replacement of former Stephen Harper spin doctor Kory Teneycke by Luc Lavoie at the top of the channel’s management structure.

The controversy and speculation over the sudden Teneycke departure have obscured an important point. His replacement by Lavoie adds a certain credibility to the operation, as Sun TV gets ready to appear before the CRTC at a hearing on its licence request in November.

True, he, too, was a prime minister’s spin doctor, for Brian Mulroney, in the late 1980s. Lavoie then ventured into a career in public relations, joined Quebecor as a senior executive, recently left the company but stayed connected for the TV project he is now heading.

His added value comes from his experience in those jobs and his career before working for the Mulroney government.

No character assassinations

Obviously with a resume that long, Lavoie is a grown-up. He can be direct, angry, profane. But when he is, it is for effect. No ad hominem, slagging character assassinations on people or rival organizations from him just because it feels good to do it.

The other benefit is that Lavoie has actually worked in television news. In the 1980s, he was an Ottawa correspondent for the TVA network in Ottawa before being recruited by Mulroney.

I enjoyed having an office across the hall from him in the National Press Building in Ottawa. He was a good neighbour. And we worked together when I succeeded him as president of the parliamentary press gallery in 1987.

Lavoie will be a presence at the CRTC hearings this November, just as he was as a witness at the parliamentary committee and the Oliphant inquiry into the Schreiber-Mulroney affair in recent years. He was called to appear because he had been Mulroney’s spokesman at the time Schreiber began making his damaging allegations.

He will no doubt carry on about choice and diversity and different opinions being heard, all the while fudging on the real reason for the Sun TV bid.

Lavoie knows that as a news gathering organization, Sun TV is no threat to either of the news channels operated by the CBC and CTV.

Those networks have long-established news operations with professional correspondents and state-of-the-art facilities across Canada and in key foreign locations.

Instead, the Sun Network is designed to enlarge and energize the Conservative voting base, and make money while doing it, just like Fox News in the United States.

Remember, Harper and Teneycke met with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes on March 30, 2009, during a trip to New York. A longtime Republican communications guru, Ailes is the president of Fox News Channel, which is owned by Murdoch’s News Corp.

And no doubt when it is on the air, one of the first Sun TV headline events will be an “exclusive” interview with the prime minister. I’d expect the interview will seem more like a back rub for Harper than an inquiry.

The prime minister and the Conservative establishment are keen to have Sun TV on the air. But perhaps they should be careful what they wish for.

In the U.S., to keep its conservative Republican Party viewers tuning in and its ratings and its ad revenues up, Fox News has been lavishing coverage on the extreme Tea Party movement and the opinions of right-wing heroine Sarah Palin.

Saddled with extreme candidates

The result for the Republicans has been that in the nomination process for the congressional elections in November, extreme candidates backed by the Tea Party and Palin have become official party candidates.

In fact, in some states like Delaware and West Virginia, the Republicans have been saddled with candidates so extreme that Senate seats they seemed sure to win are now going to fall to the Democrats.

What could this mean in the Canadian context?

Well, in his road to making the Conservatives electorally respectable to many skeptical voters, Harper did a good job of stifling most of the extreme — even radical — voices in his party caucus and beyond. And it worked.

But those actions could come back to haunt the prime minister. If Sun TV gets up and running, some of those voices he was successful in stifling may be coming to a television channel near you.

Coffee Party USA: a liberal response to the Tea Party movement

Look out, Tea Party. The Coffee Party USA movement is percolating. A liberal attempt to face the conservative wave across USA. 

The Coffee Party, which describes itself as a nonpartisan, all-volunteer, grassroots group that advocates government cooperation and respectful civil engagement, will stage its first-ever national convention Sept. 24-26 in Louisville, Ky.

Guests at the convention will include Mark McKinnon, a former political adviser to George W. Bush and John McCain; gay rights activist Lt. Dan Choi; political activist Larry Lessig; former Howard Dean organizer Zephyr Teachout; and Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé.

McKinnon and Lessig are co-chairs of the convention.

“We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans,” the Coffee Party says on its website.

“As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.”

The Coffee Party, born on Facebook in January, says it has attracted nearly 300,000 followers on Facebook, built an email list of more than 65,000, drawn about 275,000 viewers to its YouTube channel and posted nearly 2,000 photos on its Flickr page. The group held its first National Coffee Party Day in March.

“When a movement is truly of, for, and by the People, billionaire sponsorship is not required. All of our methods of communication are free, or almost free, on the Internet,” the Coffee Party says in a dig at the Tea Party, whose major financial backer has been identified as billionaire David Koch. The organization says it focuses on being “solution-oriented” rather than “blame-oriented.”

Filmmaker, political activist and community volunteer Annabel Park (pictured below) founded the Coffee Party. She grew up in Houston and lives in Washington, D.C. The Coffee Party says it enlists no lobbyists, no political pundits and no “hyper-partisan” billionaires or strategists.

“Coffee Party USA is a call to action,” the group says. “Our Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us an enduring gift—democracy—and we must use it to meet the challenges that we face as a nation.”

On the Coffee Party website, Park said 9/11—this week is the ninth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks—should be a day of unity rather than a day of fear. She urged Coffee Party supporters to organize events to promote peace and understanding.

“It’s … important to keep the dialogue respectful and be willing to actively listen to the various voices,” Park said.

Al-qaeda gets a ‘B’ from a communication specialist

Bin Laden passed his communication test. Not with a strong ‘A’, but with a solid ‘B’.

Source: http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s3i81506

The use of violence as political communication by al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States, is “nothing to write home about,” says messaging expert Franklin Symms.

The rogue band of Islamic discontents muddied its message on September 11 by making a host of elementary “grammar” errors, says Symms, a communications professor at Harvard and author of a forthcoming book on the topic, Violence as Communication: A Grammatological Reader (Alfred A. Knopf).

“What al-Qaeda had was a very clear opportunity to spread its message about western interference in Muslim countries but by the standards of using violence as communication, the group would by no means get an A,” says Symms. “In fact, it would be a clear case of grade inflation to give them even a B, but they got some things right. So, all things considered, I would give them a B-, maybe a B if I were in a good mood on grading day.”

Al-Qaeda’s biggest “grammar” error was its selection of the World Trade Center, says Symms, who has provided consulting for other entities that have used violence as communication, among them Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories of Israel.

In Symms’ analysis, the Statue of Liberty would have been a far better choice from the standpoint of message clarity, because the statue was a gift from one western country to another, continues to have a link to that country (with the Jardin du Luxembourg replica in Paris), and is a cultural meme with a very clear identity about the role of political freedom in the United States.

The “communicational shorthand” of the twin towers at the time of the attack, by contrast, was never particularly clear, leaving al-Qaeda’s message open to a vast array of interpretations, Symms says.

“Was it an attack on the United States or the West? Was it aiming at international corporate influence of western companies or of global political institutions? Of course, we know what al-Qaeda’s answer is, but only because the group had to release a follow-up message that listed what it wanted from the west. Well, from a communication standpoint, having to send out a release that explains what your last communication meant is all but admitting that your previous message was poorly communicated. Imagine having to turn in an essay explaining to your professor what your essay was supposed to mean! I know I have a lot of students that would love to do that, but, as I tell them, you might as well wear a neon sign around your head that says, ‘I suck as a communicator’ if you do that. In a word, al-Qaeda sucks as a communicator.”

In its various standard (i.e., non-violent) communications, al-Qaeda has said its attack was in protest of the presence of U.S. troops in Saudia Arabia, American support of Israel, and sanctions against Iraq after the Gulf War. But some experts say the real motive was retaliation against the west in general and the U.S. in particular for humiliating the Islamic world by the measure of global cultural dominance.

Symms says al-Qaeda’s other uses of violence as communication rate no higher than the twin towers attacks. He points to the coordinated attacks in 1998 on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 264 people, as a case in point.

“Do we really have a clear message of what al-Qaeda intended with those attacks?” asks Symms. “To this day we still say ‘we believe’ they meant this or ‘we believe’ they meant that. By what standard can you call it a good use of violence as communication if a dozen years later no one is really clear what the whole point was?”

Experts on the attacks say they believe they were intended as revenge for American involvement in the extradition of members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. But these same experts also say the extradition issue might have just been a cover for al-Qaeda’s real goal, which was to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which, ultimately, it did.

“What we have in the final analysis is a group that enjoys a global platform for communication but that squanders that platform time and time again, says Symms. “It’s like an international bestselling author who, despite enjoying commercial success, can’t seem to convey what he really wants to say. Sure, readers like the sex and the action, but those aren’t the main motivations of his work. His motivations are deeper, but he’s struggling to get that message out. That’s what we have with al-Qaeda, and for that reason, they really need to go back to school and get some remedial training in their use of violence as communication.”