Bill O continues his veiled racist attacks on a dead man.



There's an old saying: You can't choose your family. And it's true. The family of Michael Jackson honored his memory Tuesday in Los Angeles, and I do not wish to intrude on that. They are entitled to grieve any way they want.

But Michael Jackson's place in America is a legitimate topic of discussion, and "Talking Points" [and by Talking Points I mean me, Bill O'Reilly] is just about fed up with all the adulation. It's basically grandstanding and pathetic in the extreme. Yes, the man was an all-star entertainer. That's it. So enough with the phony platitudes, OK?

The truth is that Jackson's interactions with children were unacceptable for any adult. His incredible selfishness, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on himself while singing "We Are the World" should make any clear-thinking American nauseous [except for the fact that he co-wrote the song We are the World, which raised over $63 million for famine relief and donated and raised more than 300 million dollars for beneficial causes through his Heal the World Foundation, charity singles, and support of 39 charities].

And why are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton making this a racial deal? Jackson bleached his own skin [actually, he suffered from vitiligo and avoided the sun. I guess that makes it bleaching] and then chose white men to provide existence for his in vitro children [ok. Now who is make this a racial issue? Do you know if the doctors were white, black, hispanic or otherwise?]. I mean, give me a break with all this. To hear Sharpton speak on Tuesday, you'd think Mr. Jackson was Martin Luther King Jr.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REV. AL SHARPTON, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: Those young kids grew up from being teenage comfortable fans of Michael to being 40 years old and being comfortable to vote for a person of color to be the president of the United States of America. Michael did that. Michael made us love each other. Michael taught us to stand with each other.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

And if you disagree with honoring Jackson the man, watch out. Congressman Peter King called Jackson a pedophile [which would be slander if Michael Jackson was still alive, because he was tried and acquitted by a jury], an assessment [actually more of a very biased opinion] not uncommon, and was immediately branded a racist. NAACP official Hazel Dukes and Congressman Bobby Rush both said vile things about Mr. King.

The message is very clear: If you criticize Michael Jackson, you hate black people. Nonsense, un-American and unacceptable.

If you like Jackson, fine. No problem. That's your right. If you do not respect him, that is fine as well. Dukes and Rush are playing the race card pure and simple [kettle calling pot black. No pun intended]. They should be ashamed.

The crowd outside the service was much smaller than predicted. The service itself was very well done, but the media coverage was a bit bizarre. I mean, there's something surreal about watching Katie Couric analyze things with Kenny "Babyface" Edmunds [Bill's biased opinion]. And Charles Gibson didn't exactly look relaxed doing play by play [Bill's biased opinion].

The whole deal illustrates just how crazy the USA is becoming. A cowardly media will exploit any event for ratings. Remember, the same people extolling Jackson today were the ones giving his child molestation trial gavel-to-gavel attention [Yeah. It's called reporting the news. It is an unbiased observation and presentation of the facts]. And after Michael Jackson was found not guilty, the American media did not exactly elevate him to hero status, did it?

But now that he's dead, most likely from an accidental drug overdose [like Elvis Presley Heath Ledger and Hank Williams], he is a hero. How does that work? How does that happen? Just another day in media world.

North Korean Cyber Attack on US

North Korea promised to attack the United States on the 4th of July this year. Its a little gift they seem to want to offer us every year on our Independence Day. The United States, South Korea, Japan and Australia watch and prepared as North Korea conducted missile tests and sent ships out to see, suspected of carrying weapons in violation of U.N. resolutions. On July 4th, the North Koreans launched seven missiles over the Atlantic Ocean in our general direction. None reached our shores, but it was an obvious threat and signal of disrespect.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team reported to federal agencies that multiple US government agencies were hit with a widespread computer attack that began on the 4th of July. The attacks have been ongoing and particularly resilient. Its referred to as a denial of service attack. Various federal systems have been down periodically for periods of time since the July 4th holiday. In addition, South Korean government websites were hit with the cyber attacks. The attacks on the two countries seem to come from the same sources and to be related.

Affected American agencies included the US Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, Stock Exchange, the White House and Transportation Department. The South Koreans presidential Blue House and Defense Ministry and National Assembly were affected. It is being described as a ‘massive outage’. The attack cause computers to slow down and some to completely shut for hours at a time. As of Wednesday, July 8, 2009, some systems have come back online, but many remain unstable or inaccessible.

South Korean intelligence is reporting that 12,000 computers in South Korea and 8,000 in other countries are being used for the attacks. They are also reporting that the infected computers are still attacking and their numbers are not decreasing.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency is reporting that The National Security Intelligence Service (NIS) believes that North Korea may be behind the cyber attack. U.S. officials have confirmed that there has been ‘malicious Web activity’ but would not elaborate and are not releasing any specifics about the attack.

MY OPINION: Hey Cyber-Hacker Americans! Get off your ass and do something! We cannot expect our government to endorse or condone a hacker cyber attack on rogue states and countries, but so what? Hackers! This is a call to you guys. You wanna impress the rest of us? Organize and Hack frickin' North Korea or China. Bring down their infrastructure instead of ours. Do that and we will be impressed as hell! I know Hackers totally have the ability to do it. They just need to organize and coordinate! Make it news worthy!

O'Reilly: Why Are Black Americans So Interested In Michael Jackson? His Kids And Face Were White!

Bill O'Reilly expressed shock today at a Pew study showing that African-Americans are far more interested in coverage of Michael Jackson's death than white Americans.

O'REILLY: Black Americans are much more engaged in watching this stuff than white Americans, even though Michael Jackson has white children -- and he chose to have white children -- and the face deal, don't even want to get into... So what's that racial thing all about?

Ok, first of all, Bill. You are a huge douche bag. Thats my personal opinion. On to the real stuff now. On yesterdays O'Reilly Factor, Bill said that Michael Jackson's passing was not news worthy enough for him to return from vacation. And that he is not worthy of all the media attention he is getting. The subtle racism in his tone and his despise for the man was transparent.

Content analysis of O'Reilly's rhetoric finds spin to be a 'factor'

Editors" This study, published in the academic journal Journalism Studies, was conducted and released without any involvement of any special interest group. The researchers received no grant funding for this study. Additional data, charts and the full text of the study are available online at http://journalism.indiana.edu/papers/oreilly.html.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Bill O'Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the "No Spin Zone," but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.

The IU researchers found that O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.

"It's obvious he's very big into calling people names, and he's very big into glittering generalities," said Mike Conway, assistant professor in the IU School of Journalism. "He's not very subtle. He's going to call people names, or he's going to paint something in a positive way, often without any real evidence to support that viewpoint."

Maria Elizabeth Grabe, associate professor of telecommunications, added, "If one digs further into O'Reilly's rhetoric, it becomes clear that he sets up a pretty simplistic battle between good and evil. Our analysis points to very specific groups and people presented as good and evil."

For their article in the spring issue of Journalism Studies, Conway, Grabe and Kevin Grieves, a doctoral student in journalism, studied six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" editorials using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.

A 2005 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that while 30 percent of Americans viewed Washington Post and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward as a journalist, 40 percent of respondents considered O'Reilly to be a journalist.

"We chose Bill O'Reilly because he has one of the most powerful political voices in the media today," Conway said. "But we wanted to get beyond the left versus the right finger-pointing, which seems to dominate most of the discussion of O'Reilly and other media pundits."

Grabe added, "The promo of his show as a No Spin Zone -- that's where he opened the door for us."

What the IU researchers found in their study, "Villains, Victims and Virtuous in Bill O'Reilly's 'No Spin Zone': Revisiting World War Propaganda Techniques," was that he was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes -- such as "villians" or downright "evil" -- to people and groups.

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O'Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
Glittering generalities -- the opposite of name calling;
Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths;
Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people";
Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
Testimonials -- involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.
The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

Among the findings:

Fear was used in more than half (52.4 percent) of the commentaries, and O'Reilly almost never offered a resolution to the threat. For example, in a commentary on "left-wing" media unfairly criticizing Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales for his role in the Abu Ghraib scandal, O'Reilly considered this an example of America "slowly losing freedom and core values," and added, "So what can be done? Unfortunately, not much."
The researchers identified 22 groups of people that O'Reilly referenced in his commentaries, and while all 22 were described by O'Reilly as bad at some point, the people and groups most frequently labeled bad were the political left -- Americans as a group and the media (except those media considered by O'Reilly to be on the right).
Left-leaning media (21.6 percent) made up the largest portion of bad people/groups, and media without a clear political leaning was the second largest (12.2 percent). When it came to evil people and groups, illegal aliens (26.8 percent) and terrorists (21.4 percent) were the largest groups.
O'Reilly never presented the political left, politicians/government officials not associated with a political party, left-leaning media, illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists as victims. "Thus, politicians and media, particularly of the left-leaning persuasion, are in the company of illegal aliens, criminals, terrorists -- never vulnerable to villainous forces and undeserving of empathy," the authors concluded.
According to O'Reilly, victims are those who were unfairly judged (40.5 percent), hurt physically (25.3 percent), undermined when they should be supported (20.3 percent) and hurt by moral violations of others (10.1 percent). Americans, the U.S. military and the Bush administration were the top victims in the data set, accounting for 68.3 percent of all victims.
One of O'Reilly's common responses to charges of bias is to come up with one or two examples of "proof" that he is fair to all groups. For example, in October 2005, Dallas Morning News columnist Macarena Hernandez accused O'Reilly of treating the southern border "as the birth of all American ills." O'Reilly responded by showing a video clip in which he had called Mexican workers "good people." He called for a boycott of the newspaper if it did not retract Hernandez' column.
"Our results show a consistent pattern of O'Reilly casting non-Americans in a negative light. Both illegal aliens and foreigners were constructed as physical threats to the public and never featured in the role of victim or hero," the authors concluded.

An earlier version of the study won a top faculty award from the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association.