As IF Times

link CNN’s Piers Morgan Vows Format And Other Changes To Beat Fox News Competition: Promises “I’m Going To Be There To Win” And “It’s Time To Kick Some Ratings Butt” – Deadline.com.

A big As if on this story.  It’s possible that skewed entertainment may find an audience somewhere, but unless there’s hard objective news, our hero Piers Morgan will be voted off after season one.  Actually, it’s an ongoing curiosity that the competing channels to Fox News offer the kind of programming that they do.  The U.S. is a conservative nation, yet the public networks are populated with liberal mouthpieces, some of whom are borderline insane.  Anyone with a rational bone in their body can see that a guy like Keith Olbermann is just an outburst away from a fitting with the long armed jacket.

It’s a miracle that Larry King still managed to hold onto his show for as long as he did.  I can only suspect that the fossils who cared to watch him had actually died and left their TV’s on during his show, leading  the Nielson people to mistakenly count them as actual live viewers. 

The record so far for CNN is not good.  Over the past year, they’ve offered shows that were intellectually dishonest, like the recently axed Rick Sanchez and the equally flaccid Christiane Amanpour, to the intellectually vapid, like the Joy Behar show.  This is what they consider to be tapping into America’s interests and sensibilities.  Americans are quite different from Europeans and even from Canadians.  They do not like to be told what to think.  Virtually every network and cable outlet except for Fox has been pushing the same tired propoganda over the past few years.  Obama is a genius, Palin is dumb.  Democrats are sympathetic, Republicans are wing nuts.  People can pretty much figure it out for themselves  and if they determine that the truth is quite the contrary, all credibility is gone.

Consider this.  Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, two of Fox’s star opinion purveyors actually have a tour in which they go around the country…just talking.   These are two pudgy, grumpy  middle aged guys.  And the shows sell out.  The message they convey is so compelling that people would pay to see them.  I cannot imagine any personality from any of the other networks who have that kind of drawing power. There’s an epiphany here  for the CNN’s, the CBS’s, the NBC”s and the ABC’s of America, people want to hear honest, positive things, not “progressive” agendas.  At the moment, Fox is the only source for objective news.  The rest may as well be part of The Colbert Report.

link  Whitman’s not the first with illegal worker woes | whitman, status, immigration – News – The Orange County Register.

Anyone who thinks that you need to watch UFC fighting for bare knuckled, unfettered violence has not been paying attention to U.S. politics.  Like most professions these days, politics is not a vocation for amateurs.  While both dominant parties have professionals advising and strategizing for maximum impact. one side in particular seems to have the most candidates who have done nothing other than  being professional politicians.  While of course people that get elected to office are expected to pass laws for the well being of citizens, the reality is, lawyers are elected to office who are experts in process but sadly lacking in real life ability.  Generations of this has created governments and laws quite out of touch with the experiences of the average voter.  In many instances, we see the sons and daughters of retiring politicians assume the seat  of their parents as if it were a passed down heirloom.

Getting to elected office these days requires more than a sense of duty and  altruism.  You need money and lots of it.  If you don’t have it, you need to make friends with those who will give it to you…usually for some quid pro quo sometime down the road.  There’s the old saying in politics, you’re either running for office or running to stay in office, the campaign never ends.  The making laws part is almost an incidental part of the gig.  Many interested parties will have big stakes in any particular candidate and will pay big money to have their guy in office.

Little wonder then, that the battle for office is so fierce and merciless.  If politics were about issues alone and the electorate were rational, that would be one thing.  In real life, that is never the case.  The battles are always about personality and pandering to discrete groups of influential, though not necessarily informed or rational voters. 

This most recent smear campaign against Meg Whitman, a candidate for California Governor shows just how nasty the process can be.  The opposing candidate is Jerry Brown; yes that Jerry Brown, perhaps better known as  Moonbeam from the 70’s.  As most know, California is ground zero for altered state liberals and proud of it.  These are the same people that would rather save a smelt than save people.  This is the state that very recently revealed that 20% of the  population  considered themselves to have mental problems.  http://www.latimes.com/news/health/boostershots/la-heb-mentalhealth-20100728,0,2495137.story  This of course is only surprising to those who think the number should be higher.   This is the state which is essentially bankrupt because the cost of social programs protected by the state are not covered by revenues collected by taxes.  Entitlements are handed around to anyone who shows up,  like a bong at a Hollywood party.

As the linked story says, Nicky Diaz, a Mexican housekeeper who worked for Ms. Whitman for over 9 years was fired when it was discovered that she was here illegally.  Under the savvy council of Gloria Allred, noted for her uncanny ability to detect passing ambulances, Ms. Diaz tearfully recounted to the media how she was mistreated at the hands of the Whitmans.  Forced to work for only $23 dollars per hour and made to live in the Whitman mansion, she endured this horror for 9 years.  It wasn’t made explicitly clear at the press conference, but it was likely she was forced to drive the Whitman kids to school in either the Mercedes or the BMW.  She was not allowed in the Bentley. 

It wasn’t made clear by the Brown camp why someone worth hundreds of millions if not billions would take the trouble to specifically hire an illegal immigrant.  Ms. Whitman’s retort was that Ms. Diaz was hired from an agency.  According to Brown, that’s a preposterous argument: Meg’s a cheapskate and a scofflaw.  Anyone running a multi billion dollar enterprise like Ebay could have paid more.  Making Ms. Diaz live in the Whitman mansion on only $44,000 a year for 9 years, depriving her of other high paying illegal immigrant labor is sure to sink Meg at the polls.  Just like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware being a witch.  Just like John Boehner in Ohio having  too dark a tan.  Just like Sharon Angle in Nevada being too extreme. How are all these weirdos expected to get into office? 

In California, we see two very accomplished businesswomen running for public office.  They are not lawyers, they are people who have run large enterprises and been responsible for large payrolls.  On the other side, we have an aging hippy and a career Senator who insists on being addressed as such, both of whom are long term career politicians entirely culpable for much of the financial mess the state is in.  Yet, faced with theses stark choices of sanity vs insanity,  the polls indicate that the races are close.  Welcome to the Altered state of California.