televisions

Leave it to Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit idiocy to even screw up a lie! Here's what Hoft is posting about the earthquake:

When you clickthe link above the image it takes you to the White House's President's schedule, which of course shows no public events today. Clicking the Yahoo link takes you to the source of the image, where we are presented with this caption:

President Barack Obama, left, and his daughter Malia Obama, right, ride bicycles in Manuel F. Correllus State Forest, in West Tisbury, Mass., on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011.

The most interesting thing is that the photo was published a little 1:11 pm est. and Obama had already left. The earthquake happened at 1:51 pm est. 

So what was the President really doing? Well another thing the right loves to attack - he was golfing! If Hoft would have waited a little bit longer he could have published a factual story with the same impact to the wingnuts out there instead of some fake one. 

So yesterday was the big day to switch to digital television. Estimates have it at over 2 million who were left without television following the switch. I just wonder how many are left with television, but much less television.

Let me explain.

I live in the country between Dayton and Cincinnati. I am right on the line of being considered the Cincinnati area, with people a couple miles north of me being considered Dayton. With old analog television I was able to get about a dozen channels with the old rabbit ears. Now I get four, and that’s after buying a nice set top antenna for digital television. And when it was raining? Drop those channels to one.

Luckily I do have DirectTV also, so its not that big of a lose for me, but this is farm land and a lot of people are struggling, so they can’t afford cable or satellite. Now I am wondering what those people are going to have to do. I guess we will go back to the age of huge antennas on top of houses.

But to me the biggest victims of this switch are the seniors. A lot of them were here when television was born. They had to go through the switches from black and white to color, from turning a knob to pushing a button, and now they go from tuning in a channel to having to search for a signal and hoping they can find one.

That is a technological hurdle, and people on fixed incomes can’t afford $50 a month for cable. That is the bare basic package for Time Warner in this area.

It seems like this whole plan wasn’t put together that well. Certain things that would have helped is banning the sale of analog televisions about five years ago. Instead manufacturers were still selling them (and probably still are).

CNN has a very amusing story up. It seems that WaPo's Jim VandeHei finally called the White House on the fact that the TVs are always on FOX News:

During a briefing led by White House spokesman Scott McClellan as President Bush was traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana, the Washington Post's Jim VandeHei asked why the White House televisions always seemed to be tuned to Fox News and if it was possible to have them tuned instead to CNN.

"It's come to my attention that there's been requests -- this is a serious question -- to turn these TVs onto a station other than Fox, and that those have been denied," VandeHei told McClellan, who is soon to be replaced by former Fox anchor and self-described conservative Tony Snow.

"My question would be, is there a White House policy that all government TVs have to be tuned to Fox?" VandeHei asked.

"Never heard of any such thing," McClellan responded. "My TVs are on four different channels at all times."

VandeHei noted that McClellan has four televisions in his office, and clarified that he was referring to the ones that reporters can see.

"They're always turned to Fox, which a lot of people consider a Republican-leaning network."

VandeHei noted that the televisions are paid for with taxpayer dollars.

"And my understanding is that you guys have to watch Fox on Air Force One. Is that true?"

The transcript of the change continues here. It ends with the televisions on Air Force One finally being changed to CNN at the request of a majority of the Press Corps.