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The Simpsons/There's Something About Marrying

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There's something that's been kind of weird since the airing of the Simpsons last Sunday. The relative silence. With all the hullabaloo surrounding SpongeBob, Buster the Bunny, and even Shrek 2, The lack of complaining about a primetime show that depicts gay marriage in any form from the likes of the PTC. Pat Robertson, and the TVC has been quite unusual. I haven't heard the trumpets of doom and gloom really that's usually associated to this kind of display. The only negative mention that I found after googling the episode came from the NYTimes(maybe you can find a few more):

"L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Parents Television Council, criticized “The Simpsons” for addressing the issue of gay marriage, though he said that he had not seen the episode.

“At a time when the public mood is overwhelmingly against gay marriage, any show that promotes gay marriage is deliberately bucking the public mood,” he said."

That's an erroneous statement of course, and I find it disingenuous when he said he hasn't seen it when I'm sure his denizens have watched it many times. Why the silence? Are the Simpsons too powerful a show to try and demonize? A reader sugests that because it's on FOX, the evangelicals have backed off. Silence on the Jeff/Jim senario as well.

PTC has nothing on their homepage. Focus on the Family has nothing either.

Most political observers know to stop reading when they see the phrase, “According to a poll from Zogby Interactive…” and yet, yesterday, I couldn’t believe the commotion caused by a poll that obviously didn’t make any sense.

About 24 hours ago, two polls came out -- a Zogby Interactive poll (with questionable methodology) showing Hillary Clinton struggling against the top GOP candidates, and a Gallup poll (with more reliable methodology) showing the opposite. Guess which one got too much attention?

While the Zogby poll was mentioned by multiple reporters and pundits, the only mentions the Gallup poll got on TV were from Hillary advisers who had to bring it up themselves on the air in order to inject it into the conversation.

Of course, every political reporter, editor, and producer in the country knew that Zogby Interactive results were unreliable, but they trumpeted the results anyway.

Wouldn’t responsible journalism require news outlets to a) note why professional pollsters discount Zogby Interactive data; and b) also highlight the Gallup numbers with equal enthusiasm?

AttyTood:

Look, what really happened at JFK was a hijacking. A chance for the potential next leaders of the United States to talk about a) real threats from bona fide terrorists, such as the unstable situation we've fostered in Pakistan and b) other issues that actually affect the day-to-day life of most Americans, like education, was hijacked by questions based around a local law-enforcement matter.

And, as Josh Marshall and others pointed out over the weekend, this is yet another time that implausible, half-baked and unfeasible plots have been trumpeted as high victories in the war in terror, including one plan to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch, the plot to "blow up the Sears Tower" by losers in Miami who probably couldn't find Chicago on a big roadmap, and our own inept Fort Dix crew.

Not that it will happen, but I wish the media, from CNN to Fox to the AP to everyone in between, would go to the nearest window and yell: "All 'terrorism' is not created equal."

From the Laugh Factor:

After Fox News Channel's repeated trumpeting out of John O'Neal; Bill O'Reilly left it up to his "fans" to decide if he should interview Kitty Kelly.

ABC's Tapper: Iraqi sitcom coordinator assassinated while I was there
On "Reliable Sources" Sunday morning, the discussion revolved around" if the media's coverage was fair," and Jake Tapper of ABC recounted a horrifying story that illustrates the violence that permeates Iraq.
Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

(transcript provided by CNN)

TAPPER: It's a very complicated question, obviously. What journalists, when, who, what are you talking about specifically? I think that there is a lot of violence still in Iraq, and I think that if you listen to commanders on the ground and if you go to Iraq, you'll see that that security situation is an incredibly important one. And as much as the Pentagon may not want to talk about it or may want to talk about the positive, the parliament and the elections and the things that are being achieved, which are tangible achievements, the violence makes it very difficult to get past, you know, the daily boom. Let me just -- one quick story.

We wanted to do a story about the freedom of the press in Iraq, and we went to the set of a new Iraqi sitcom that they're filming, because there's been -there's all this entertainment now, and it's one of the things that the ambassador there has trumpeted.

KURTZ: So what happened?

TAPPER: We got there, and the guy who had set it up with us- we shot-we shot for a little while, and the guy who had helped us arrange it was assassinated the very morning while we were there on the set. And so our cameras were rolling while the director and the producer and the cast and crew found out that the guy that had green-lit the show and the guy that had set up our being there was killed. So no matter how hard we try to cover the positive, the violence has a way of rearing its head.

KURTZ: Talk about changing your storyline.

When certain wingnuts are down, they have to leave out what's most important to the argument.

S. Kaus:

"We may be hearing more about a Rasmussen poll showing that "[s]ixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States." Prominent warblogger Instapundit as well as the first of what undoubtedly will be several minor wing-nut sites are already trumpeting this as showing that the public supports what Bush has done and the Democrats are barking up the wrong tree. Notice anything missing from the question? How about the part that the wiretapping is done without a warrant, although there is a court set up to consider the evidence and issue just such warrants....read on" (via Atrios)

Heres the footage of Cindy being (Updated) escorted by NYPD.

Download | play -WMP

Download | play -QT (courtesy of Third Planet Video)

Village Voice:...As the activists hustled away Sheehan and the other family members on the Bring Them Home Now tour, an enraged crowd of about 50 people stormed after the police, chanting, "Shame! Shame!" Meanwhile Iraq war veteran and now peace activist Jeff Key played "God Bless America" on his trumpet."

Wherever you fall on the Cindy Sheehan meter, it's odd to see her being escorted out for a fairly tame demonstration. I know they didn't have the permits, but couldn't they just have pulled the power? Living in New York for many years, I saw a lot worse offenses and demonstrations left alone.

Booman Tribune has more.

What is it with some right wing sites and their facination with t-shirts? Michelle Malkin, Power Line, even LGF. They are making a big deal about this MoveOn.org party. The silliness never stops.

John Cole quickly points out that: "It's just a little tough to get upset about this,: When our side is running around with shit like this on their car....

Wonkette: Far be it from us to accuse Drudge of turning a nothing story into a scandal, but we wonder if he should be trumpeting quite so loudly the big "scoop" of obtaining the "talking points" to this party.

Authenticity backed on Bush documents. After CBS News on Wednesday trumpeted newly discovered documents that referred to a 1973 effort to ''sugar coat" President Bush's service record in the Texas Air National Guard, the network almost immediately faced charges that the documents were forgeries, with typography that was not available on typewriters used at that time. But specialists interviewed by the Globe and some other news organizations say the specialized characters used in the documents, and the type format, were common to electric typewriters in wide use in the early 1970s, when Bush was a first lieutenant.