Tips for Mayors

MAKE IT STOP!

For the love of all that is good and holy, local news, please please please stop airing any more interviews with Big Ben Worthlessberger/footage of his victim speaking to police!

I know that Georgia's laws say that they must make the police interviews available, but that doesn't mean that you have to run them on every newscast or link to them on your front pages (I hear WPXI even interrupted programming for this as "breaking news" yesterday).

And, the interviews with Worthlessberger? If I hear him say one more time how he's come back to God, how he's been spending time at the wholesome family farm or how he has to "find Ben Roethlisberger" I will vomit.

And, it's not like I can avoid this shit by just not watching the local news because you're playing promos 24/7.

As I know that it's in your financial interests to run anything Steelers, can you please do me a favor? Can you tweet me when it's safe to watch local TV again? Until then, I'll be viewing elsewhere.

And speaking of FAIL, here's some major fail from the Trib:

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TV Ad Depicts Cartoon Nancy Pelosi Being Tortured

Scenes from Right Change's
"The Attack of the 50-Foot Pelosi" TV Ad:

Have we become so inured to all the violent imagery and talk being directed towards Democrats that we can accept seeing a cartoon depiction of the Speaker of the House being hit multiple times with laser-like beams and writhing in pain in a TV ad and simply shrug it off?

The commercial is by a group called Right Change (Pittsburgh City Paper's Chris Potter has background on them here) and it's part of an $83,000 ad buy in the Pittsburgh and Johnstown media markets.

Titled "The Attack of the 50-Foot Pelosi," it's pro Republican Tim Burns in the special election race for the late US Rep. John Murtha's seat. According to Right Change, "The ad uses new technology for political ads with humor and cutting-edge animation."

I'm so glad that "new technology" was used to depict torturing (possibly to death) an elected official. I'm guessing that "humor" is to be found because it's an animated piece that has a (straw man) monster.

Of course there's nothing really new in describing a strong woman as a "monster." It's actually pretty old hat even by South Park standards (Barbra Streisand was made into a mechanical Godzilla-like monster on the show over a decade ago).

I'm guessing that it was deemed perfectly acceptable to depict Nancy Pelosi WRITHING AND SCREAMING IN PAIN because she is a "monster" from San Francisco.

Ha ha!

But I don't accept that.

What's next?

A cartoon Pelosi being shot with cartoon bullets spilling cartoon blood?

Would that be alright?

Is it somehow more acceptable to try to kill the Speaker of the House with magical Tim Burns buttons than with guns?

Can you imagine the uproar that would be had over an ad that had similarly depicted Sarah Palin (or even George Bush or Dick Cheney)?

Now here's where I fully admit that I have not personally seen this ad on the air and that I only heard about it because my sister, Gina, saw it aired multiple times on KDKA TV and she was floored by it and kept telling me to check it out.

I called KDKA today hoping to ask someone there what standards they had for the ads they run. (Obviously they have some standards. They wouldn't run ads that, say, contain nudity or profanity. )

Someone at the station had to view the ad and approve it. (I once knew a woman who worked for NBC whose sole job was to make sure that their ads didn't conflict with their network programming content -- no diet product ads after a story on famine, for example.)

I was eventually directed to a woman who I assume is in their advertising department who said that I could not quote her and who hung up on me. Nice! (Yes, I gave my full name and identified myself as a blogger.) She seemed to think that my beef should be solely with the ad agency and the account and not the station.

Well, I've been blogging for nearly six years now and in all that time and in all my Photoshops I have managed to somehow never depict an elected official -- or anyone else for that matter -- being lasered and screaming in pain, and yet a television station has no problems broadcasting this on the public airwaves.

If you have a problem with this -- if you haven't been numbed to the outrageousness of it -- maybe you might want to consider calling KDKA and telling them that it is not acceptable to torture any politician -- even a cartoon one -- in a television commercial.

Their switchboard number is: 412-575-2200 (It rings for a very long time).

UPDATED: Heard it (was out of the room) on WTAE TV (local ABC affiliate) this morning: Main desk at 412-242-4300, Email here

Caught part of it on WPXI TV (local NBC affiliate) last night: Phone: 412-237-1100

Finally, here's the full ad in all its gory:

UPDATE: I just saw it on air on KDKA (5/14/10, 4:44 PM).

UPDATE 2: Heard it (was out of the room) on WTAE TV (local ABC affiliate) this morning: Main desk at 412-242-4300, Email here

Caught part of it on WPXI TV (local NBC affiliate) last night: Phone: 412-237-1100

Saw it three times on KDKA TV on yesterday's afternoon news.

UPDATE 3: LINKS TO THIS POST:
Shakesville "Oh My Aching Sides" (by Melissa McEwan)
A Spork in the Drawer "Not-So-Random Question" (by Spork Incident)
Crooks and Liars "Mike's Blog Roundup" (by Bluegal)
Politics Daily "Pelosi Takes the Heat: 'If I Were Not Effective They Wouldn't Care About Me'" (by Melinda Henneberger)
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CNN Update & WPXI Report On BRESMA Orphanage (Updated 5x)

UPDATE 6: BRESMA orphans arrive in Pittsburgh. Story here.

UPDATE 5: Overnight BRESMA update here (1/19/10, 3:00 AM ET)

UPDATE 4: Report from Bob Mayo's blog here. (For those coming to this blog from outside Pittsburgh, Mayo is an excellent and reliable reporter from WTAE.)

UPDATE 3: Best advice from Chris Potter (Slag Heap at Pittsburgh City Paper) here

UPDATE 2: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story here. [Completely new article, same URL]

UPDATE: KDKA is reporting on a "secret mission" (well, not so secret if they broadcast it on their noon news). They report that 60 more children will be flown to the US from the BRESMA orphanage. A plane left Pittsburgh today with Rep. Jason Altmire, and ten doctors from UPMC and McMutrie family members. See the video here.

WPXI story here.
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First, let's state from the start that the media has been mistaken in some of their reports; most notably when they claimed that all 150 children from the Brebis de Saint Michel de L'Attalaye (BRESMA) orphanage in Port-au-Prince -- run by Pittsburgh (Ben Avon) sisters Jamie and Ali McMutrie -- had received clearance to leave Haiti and come to Pittsburgh.

The children are in various states in the adoption process and many were never slated to be adopted in the US to begin with (for example, we've received numerous hits from France and the Netherlands in the last couple of days).

What's most important to know now is that the situation at BRESMA is still dire. Getting water and food into the walled-off orphanage is dangerous because there are Haitians understandably desperate for supplies surrounding it. At this point, the BRESMA orphanage probably needs security as much as supplies.

Those following the situation on Twitter at #BRESMA know that rumors abound and that people are "retweeting" old information. Virginia Montanez at her That's Church blog took the extraordinary step of removing several older blog posts so that people would not stumble upon outdated information, post rumors, or give out too much information in their comments which could possibly lead to breaches of security that could endanger the orphans. (I'm seeing GPS coordinates being tweeted publicly which I'm sure is a bad idea!)

What we all need to understand in this era of texting, IMing and tweeting is that the old saying, "A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on" is more true now than ever before.

That said, three sources -- CNN, WPXI and the KAS in Haiti blog -- are all reporting that five children from BRESMA have been evacuated to the US. These children were apparently all well along in the adoption process and had the most documentation available. Note that there is one main source for all these stories: Diana Boni. She has worked with BRESMA Orphanage directly for five years and is the Haiti Coordinator for Kentucky Adoption Services. However, CNN has actual video of children leaving Haiti on a military plane.

You can see WPXI's interview with Boni here (they've been repeating parts of it this morning). Her blog is here. She is quoted in Time Magazine here.

You can view the CNN update on BRESMA here (original CNN story here):




I would still highly recommend going to That's Church, @JanePitt on Twitter, and Ali Pace's Facebook page for McMutrie Family-verified information. It may be slower in coming, but that is because their top priority is the safety of all those concerned and because they are busy working to get all the kids out.
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Photos from MoveOn Health Care Reform Vigil

According to MoveOn, "On September 2, 2009, over 60,000 MoveOn members gathered at 350 vigils around the country with one message: We Can't Afford to Wait for health care reform that includes a real public option."

You can see photographs from these vigils here.

Here are some photos from the vigil held in Pittsburgh at Flagstaff Hill:








And, a couple of familiar faces to our blog readers: Georgia Blotzer (who was one of the speakers) and Sue from Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents.


Kudos to WPXI for covering the Pittsburgh vigil.

Also, I find it interesting that so many candidates whom I have supported in primary elections who lost their bids are now health care reform advocates (Howard Dean, Chuck Pennacchio, Georgia Berner and Georgia Blotzer). Guess I'm just drawn to the do-gooder, activist types.

Blotzer was handing out leaflets from www.WPaSinglePayer.org .
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Pittsburgh Iran Vigil: Lighting 100 Candles Against the Darkness

Approximately 100 gathered Tuesday evening in Market Square to show support for the democratic movement now underway in Iran and to honor those who have lost their lives in this struggle.

The crowd was a mix of old and young; Persian and non Persian. Many greeted each other with "salam"as the vigil grew.

A poem was read in honor of Neda Agha Soltan, the 26-year old woman shot in the heart at a protest in Iran, who has become the face of the movement when her death was broadcast on YouTube.

A woman who said she had lived through the 1979 revolution in Iran stood up and spoke. She said that she had been waiting a long time to see a new generation of Iranians seek change. She then led many in the crowd in singing an old Iranian folk song. I heard someone behind me comment that it was the old anthem -- the one that was sung "before the monsters took over."

Another vigil/rally is planned for Sunday. Details to be announced.












(Kudos to WPXI for covering the event on the 11:00 news broadcast.)
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Speaking of WPXI...

Rob Owen writes about WPXI's numerous production problems in his Post-Gazette blog here.

I'm not a regular viewer of PXI but I was watching yesterday (to catch the Ravenstahl stories: here and here) and the screen would go blank, the sound would cut out and the video often didn't match the story being reported on by the news anchors.

Now if only they had introduced a story about our mayor with the video of the giant pumpkin:


http://www.wpxi.com/news/14296376/detail.html