Politics

Medialoper Bebop Episode 2: Buried in a Sea of Coverage

May 4, 2011 by Jim Connelly

Welcome, once again, to the Medialoper Bebop podcast. This, right here, is Episode 2: Buried in a Sea of Coverage.

As always, your hosts are Jim Connelly, Tim Gaskill & Kirk Biglione, holding forth on a wide variety of topics.

There are 8 million podcasts on the naked internet, and we can guarantee you that no other podcast this week will focus on both Osama Bin Laden and Coco Crisp. Which is weird, because when we originally conceived the podcast over the weekend, we weren’t going to focus on either one.

But then, head-related things happened to each man, and we were compelled to discuss them.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:46 — 28.3MB)

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For those of you keeping score at home, here is today’s starting lineup:

Medialoper’s 2008 Ducking The Shoe Awards

December 17, 2008 by Jim Connelly

“Ducking the Shoe” is a phrase coined by Daniel Fienberg a couple of days ago on Twitter to mean “escaping even the most minor of punishments for extended errors or misdeeds.”

Well, yeah.

So in the spirit of George W. Bush’s ninja-like ability to duck a shoe thrown at him from point blank range, the following people and things spent 2008 getting away with shit that they really should have been busted on.

What Will I Obsess About Tomorrow?

November 4, 2008 by Jim Connelly

Finally, Election Day!! I’m tossing that out as a public service, just in case you didn– . . . no, I can’t even make that joke.

How is it possible that after two nonstop years of this — 20 full months after I first wondered if this election was going to be the best reality series ever — that anybody who would possibly be reading this wouldn’t know the election was today?

And man, am I glad that — gods willing — it will all be over tomorrow. And yet, I gotta wonder, then what?

Next Year on FOX: The Joe The Plumber Reality Series

October 29, 2008 by Jim Connelly

Well, it’s now official: Joe The Plumber — thrust in the spotlight by his newfound close personal friend John McCain — has officially endorsed Senator McCain for President. This should be a surprise to absolutely nobody. While Mr. The Plumber has heretofore demurred as to whom he was supporting, he continually undermined those demurrals by saying how much worse his life would be if Senator Obama became President Obama.

However, Medialoper has it on good authority that Mr. The Plumber — real name Samuel J. Wurzelbacher — should actually be rooting for Senator Obama. Because the FOX network is going to put his beliefs to the test!!

That’s right, if Obama wins, look for The Joe The Plumber’s Real America Show reality series on FOX next year! According to our sources, it will be “in the tradition of The Hills,” as we follow Wurzelbacher’s attempt to actually earn more than $250,000 in 2009, and thereby qualify to have his taxes raised by Obama.

If he makes that much money and has his taxes raised, then he wins!

In Praise of Asynchronous Voting

October 28, 2008 by Jim Connelly

My name is Jim Connelly, and I am an Asynchronous Voter. And by that I mean that instead of voting on Election Day itself, I’ve always requested an absentee ballot and voted by mail. I’ve been an Asynchronous Voter for several years now, ever since I realized that the State of California would let me mail in my ballot instead of waiting in line either prior to or after work.

I’ve always figured that it didn’t matter how or when I cast my vote, as long as I cast it. For the longest time, this made me an anomaly — voting absentee every election was weird for a young(er), healthy, non-traveling person.

However, this year, I’ve become a trend! Loads of people are voting asynchronously. I should have known something was up when the State of California asked Rox and I if we wanted to become “Permanent Vote by Mail Voters”. Hell yes!

Who Will Get Joe Strummer’s Vote?

October 16, 2008 by Jim Connelly

Is it just me, or is this election making us all a bit crazy? I know that, for my part, I’m obsessively checking RealClearPolitics several times every day (thanks a hell of a lot for that, Tom!!), memorizing their Electoral College counts, not to mention that on my commute home last night, I actually listened to the third debate instead of the Dodgers game.

Of course, that commute was made much longer by the residual traffic created by the Dodgers game, which is never fun.

It has been like this forever. In fact, I’m not actually sure that I can remember a time before this campaign started. Way back in March 2007, (over a year and a half before Entertainment Weekly said the same thing on their cover) I asked if this campaign was going to be the best reality TV show ever, and I think that it has ended up that way.

One small problem: I hate reality TV.

New Study Reveals Parents Television Council is Totally Into Sex and Violence

August 5, 2008 by Jim Connelly

I want a new job. I want to go work for the Parents Television Council, and spend my time watching and cataloging sex & violence on prime-time television. This is what they do. They watch TV, looking for sex and violence, and when they find it, they tell the world. It’s awesome.

They’ve just released a study with this alarming headline:

Happily Never After: How Hollywood Favors Adultery and Promiscuity Over Marital Intimacy on Prime Time Broadcast Television

Here’s the deal: at the beginning of this TV season, they watched 207 hours of prime-time network television, painstakingly waiting for some kind of sexual reference by a character, and then thinking long, deep and hard about what kind of sexual reference it was.

Why Heidi & Spencer Are The Final Proof We Should Get Out of Iraq

July 23, 2008 by Jim Connelly

So here’s the deal: apparently Hills twits Spencer Pratt & Heidi Montag are planning a trip to entertain the U.S. troops in Iraq. Normally, a story like this would immediately be tossed into my “who gives a rats ass” pile and I’d go back to obsessing over the new Paul Westerberg & Hold Steady albums and wondering why more people aren’t watching The Middleman.

However, it struck me that Heidi & Spencer being allowed to go over and entertain the troops is actually the most compelling reason yet to immediately bring our boys back home from Iraq.

If Heidi & Spencer are going to Iraq, it means that we’ve been there for so long we’ve run out of actual, real entertainers for our troops.

Who Cares if Saturday Night Live is Pro-Hillary?

March 13, 2008 by Jim Connelly

Apparently, Lorne Michaels is worried that — because of a couple of cold opens spoofing the media’s kowtowing to Obama, Tina Fey’s funny but heartfelt “bitch is the new black” endorsement, and of course, an actual appearance by Mrs. Clinton her own self — people are perceiving Saturday Night Live as pro-Hillary.

This, naturally, brings up two related questions: 1) who still watches Saturday Night Live? 2) Are pro-Obama SNL viewers up in arms over the pro-Hillary bias?

My answers are: 1) me. 2) Not this one.

For Mike Huckabee, Is It More Than A Feeling No More?

February 15, 2008 by Jim Connelly

All of the pundits are pretty much saying that it looks like curtains for the Presidential Campaign of Mike Huckabee, the bass-playing, Bible-quoting Stephen Colbert-homeboy who is wayyyy behind John McCain in the delegate count.

So it pretty much seems to be a weird time to get insult added to injury, but that insult is coming in the form of Tom Scholz, an Obama supporter (like me!) who wrote the classic Boston song that Huckabee has been using on his campaign trail: “More Than A Feeling.” Scholz is pissed, and he wants it to stop.

To me, this is like that time Elvis sent the widely quoted “open email” to Bill Clinton after Clinton played “Heartbreak Hotel” on Arsenio Hall which ended with “didn’t you see me shaking hands with Nixon, stop playing my song.”

This, of course, is the place for the obligatory “Tom Scholz is still alive?” joke, but instead I’m going to do something perhaps even funnier: defend Mike Huckabee.