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US TV channels firmly in one camp or the other

IN THE United States, not only is the nation split in various directions as the presidential election approaches; the media is split as well.

The TV channels are crammed with “analysts” who are clearly either in the Democrat or Republican camp. And neither set holds back when it come to giving a view on anything.

The media is expected to use logic to decide whether one side is right or wrong. But in the US, Fox News cannot find anything wrong with the Republican contender Mitt Romney. And CNN can find nothing wrong with the president, Barack Obama.
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Dallas: home of cowboys and inefficiency

EVERYTHING in the US is said to be big. That is very true of Dallas, the first city I saw in the US of A. But big does not equal efficiency; it only looks grand, it just isn’t so.

Take the system for checking people through immigration; it’s clumsy, and there are a lot of barely educated types in uniforms who do nothing but add to the problems.

The US has a requirement that every non-citizen fill in a form from the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to the regular customs declaration. This form is not given to passengers on airliners that land in the US; only the customs form is given.
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US: lots of technology, poor implementations

AUSTRALIAN nationals do not require a visa to visit the United States as tourists. They merely have to fill in a form on a website, wait for approval and then carry a printout of the resultant permission when they travel.

But any Australian passport holder who visits the US to report on an event has to get a journalist’s visa, what is known as an I category visa.

Going through the process is illuminating because one discovers the level of incompetence in the American system, if nothing else.
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Getting blind drunk and acting stupid is the hallmark of a hero

An Australian rules football player goes on an end-of-season trip to Las Vegas with some of his teammates. He gets blind drunk, ends up at a hotel where he is not staying, tries to jump from the balcony of a room onto a palm tree and falls to the ground.

Unfortunately, the man dies as a result of this fall. He is just 22, not anywhere near the age where one thinks of death.

A local paper in Melbourne describes him as a hero.

Which means that many others should aspire to be like him. After all, we all want to be heroes don’t we?
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It’s a bitter pill to swallow: Al Qaeda has won

Today marks 11 years since Al Qaeda flew planes into the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and made the US aware that it was not safe on its own soil. Sad to say, the US has used the attacks down the years to curtail freedoms for its own residents.

All kinds of ridiculous curbs have been put in place; fear has been used time and again to restrict the lives of ordinary citizens, with the government all the while claiming to be doing so in the cause of freedom.

With the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the US has been claiming that it has emerged victorious over the attackers. But is that really the case?
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Destroying the joint?

AUSTRALIA is a a sexist country. There’s that phrase again. And with good reason.

Last Friday, one of the country’s well-known radio broadcasters, let fly a tirade against the prime minister Julia Gillard and women in general.

In the words of shock-jock Alan Jones, known for his sympathies to the conservative cause, the women he cited — he also mentioned Clover Moore, the mayor of Sydney, and a former police commissioner of Victoria, Christine Nixon — were “destroying the joint”.
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Dinosaurs should not be given oxygen

AUSTRALIA is a sexist country. This is something I’ve said before. It bears repeating in view of the behaviour of a Liberal party hanger-on this week.

Grahame Morris is a former chief of staff to John Howard, who held the office of prime minister from 1996 to 2007. For some strange reason, Morris, who is best described as a slime, is given lots of air by the radio stations and TV channels to comment on political matters.

He is a card-carrying Liberal apologist but is still championed.
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Lance Armstrong: an apology for a sportsman

ALL that Lance Armstrong had to do was to release one simple statement: “I have never taken performance-enhancing drugs.”

Instead what came forth from the seven-time Tour de France winner, when the US anti-doping agency said it was stripping him of his titles and banning him from competitive cycling for life, was, “I have never tested positive.”

He might as well have said, “I have never been caught.”

Doping in sport is a race where those who help athletes ingest performance-enhancing drugs advise them on the best blockers that prevent detection. The better the professional advising the athlete, the smaller the chance of getting caught.
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British traders being disadvantaged by pathetic mail service

BRITAIN’S Royal Mail service is royal no longer. Indeed, one could question whether it is a mail service at all, it takes so long to deliver material for which people have paid. At times deliveries do not take place at all.

This comes at an unfortunate time for a country which was once known for its efficiency. The number of people buying things across borders has soared with the development of the world-wide web and if things are not delivered in time, then traders risk losing customers.

Nobody will come back to a trader who cannot send his goods across in time. This is unlikely to be the fault of the trader but that does not bother the increasingly self-centred customer.
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Thomas Friedman, fraud supreme

WHAT does one call a writer who pretends that the life experiences of others are his own, and passes them off as such? A fraud? A poser? A plagiarist? I have not been able to find le mot juste.

Lest there is any mystery over whom one is referring to, I am talking about the diplomatic editor of the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman.

Friedman has been ridiculed by journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, and rightly so, for his ridiculous use of language and his incoherent writings which appear in what is apparently the greatest newspaper in the US. (That tells us why newspapers are closing down rapidly in that country.)

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