Trayvon Martin trial goes for boring

A few days ago the United States Supreme Court came down with two landmark rulings in regard to marriage equality.  I first saw this on one of my news feeds, so when I got home I turned on MSNBC to see what the national news media was saying.  To my surprise, they were televising the Trayvon Martin murder trial.  My first thought was that this was just an update since the Supreme Court rulings, while making a lot of people happy, were definitely going to piss off a lot of people.  I was wrong.  Someone high up at MSNBC had decided the trial was the more earth shattering, the more groundbreaking, of the two stories.  Someone decided listening to a supposedly star witness bumble her way through an incoherent testimony was the be all and end all of breaking news stories. How could anybody make such a stupid decision?

 

"Mumble, mumble" she said, "mumble mumble."

 

There is a reason Court TV exists:  courtroom drama is a medium best served by fiction.  In the real world courtroom testimony gets boring very, very fast because it is not regulated by either a plot line or the need for commercial breaks.  When a star witness has difficulty comprehending simple questions things slide into a slowly spinning whirlpool where words and phrases get repeated again, and again, and again.  I endured for about 7 minutes and then I went out into the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher.  News networks are meant to provide you with news, some nearly fatal barbiturate overdose served up in a soupy mess of irrelevance.  Is this trial important?  Yes.  Did that testimony need to be broadcast live?  Hell no!

 

 

This morning I saw a question on one of my news feeds regarding that day's testimony.  "Star Witness or Train Wreck?"  Holy shit, I thought, did that question even need to be asked.  

I'll be honest, I like reading about health, and exercise and weight loss.  The things people either write or publish can be either be enlightening, uninformed or simply ludicrous.  I enjoy the enlightened ones, scoff at the uniformed and shriek with derision at those so obviously ludicrous.  I read one of the latter ones on the MSNBC website under health.  Going back to find the link I was amazed to find that it seems to have disappeared.  The subject was on lifting weights and weight loss.  Now most people who are overweight want to lose a couple of pounds.  You know, with this economy it's less expensive to slip into last summer's duds then have to go out and buy knew ones, and the five or six pounds you put on thanks to Thanksgiving and Christmas and simply being too lazy is going to make them a snug fit.

Oops, some one's been dipping into the ice cream a little too much

The ludicrousness became apparent in the second sentence, after the authoress complained that Cardio was not helping her lose weight after having a baby.  Then she said, "and then I noticed people at the gym lifting weights."  It must never have occurred to her that a number of people go to gyms for strength training.  Maybe she thought body builders just do it in their basements, or garages.  Her reasoning to use weights to lose weight was because "after a work out your muscles burn calories for a long time."  This makes me wonder if maybe her Cardio was only cardio.  You know what I mean.  We've all seen those boneheads bouncing away on an elliptical because they're not using any resistance, or those who get off a stationary bike after windmilling their legs for a good thirty minutes without so much as a grimace.  Let me tell you, when I get off my bike my legs usually feel like rubber because I've worked those suckers.  Maybe she didn't lose weight because she didn't really watch her diet, you know those four bowls of pasta you eat after a workout help keep the thunder in your thighs.  I'm serious, because the emphasis was so overboard on weight training the article became nearly bizarre.  A smart work out incorporates both weight training and Cardio, don't rely on just one.  But as my friend Shaun said a long time ago, "your legs are the engines of your body."  

Fox News is killing the Republican Party

Democrats are ecstatic and Republicans are devastated.  What else can you say about the recent election?  I'll also go so far as to say most Republicans now find themselves in a quandary; how to regroup and proceed when statistically they alienate women and minorities.  I actually work with an associate who was claiming in the break room that Obama won "because the Democrats were loading people into vans, registering them, and taking them to vote."  When I started listing voter polling results he claimed "that's all from the liberal media, who lie," though I'd actually seen the information on number of websites from the Washington Post, and Bloomberg, to MSNBC.  Oh, wait, I'm wrong, there is a bastion of Conservative Honesty on the airwaves and it's called Fox News.  As soon as this associate said that I knew Fox News would kill the Republican Party.  Why?  Ratings!

I'd first read, a number of years ago, the Republican Party playbook was based on the ancient television show Leave it to Beaver and that the family values represented by that fictional family were those they wanted all Americans to aspire to; it doesn't work.  There was a time when the Republican Party was, like the Democratic Party, more centrist.  This is where the majority of Americans sit, leaning a little right here, veering a little left there, but never really straying too far to either side.  The Democrats get this, the Republicans don't.  Fox News doesn't either.  They mistakenly believe, based on high television ratings, that the American People accept Fox as an authority.  While some, like the associate I work with, might, most Americans vote their gut instincts, not the way some news organization wants them to vote.  We are not sheep, well, most of us aren't.

As for the Republican Party?  They've sutured themselves to Fox and as a result are in a terrible dilemma.      They have shut out most Women, Black, and Latino voters because they did not fit in with their Leave it to Beaver playbook.  And, things are only going to get worse for them.  During this past election Puerto Rico voted to apply for statehood.  When this gets ratified there will be even more Hispanics the Republicans will need worry about.