Apparently, some kind of Worldwide Wave Of Action started last week, billed as a rekindling of the Occupy movement. Having covered at least half a dozen previous “international days of action”, my well-honed cynicism kicked into gear as I remembered how all the previous “worldwide” action days drew hundreds of thousands in cities outside the US — while inside the US, the turnouts could be generously described as pathetic.

The current “worldwide” Wave Of Action was no different, judging from what I was seeing on my Twitter feed. Cities in the UK and Europe turned out healthy numbers while in the meantime, in the US, I saw the usual sad smattering of thin, weak protests, with small veterans’ contingents and others gathering in places like the NYC Vietnam War Memorial and Zucotti Park, only to be chased off or arrested by police.

I was also somewhat less than inspired by the vagueness of their rhetoric and sloganeering. On Twitter I saw pronouncements like “movement of movements” and “bring your own goals”, with no mention of any specific issues, such as war and militarization, unemployment, state-enforced economic austerity, the destruction of civil liberties, or the US-instigated “revolution” in the Ukraine — just lots of lofty faux revolutionary hype and empty poetic slogans.

I won’t speak for the rest of the world, but in the US, the “Wave Of Action” was more like a “ripple of action”.

Oh, yeah — and, cupcakes.

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For the record, I own a smartphone; I have a grand total of one third-party app — Twitter — don’t let Facebook anywhere near my phone, and I sure as hell don’t waste time playing Angry Birds. So, I wasn’t exactly surprised to discover that the NSA was slurping smartphone users’ private information by taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of “leaky” apps, and that Angry Birds was apparently the worst offender of the lot.

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It’s time once again for the latest headlines of the day on MSNBC… and here with the headlines is Barbie Anchorbabe…

It’s not as if there hasn’t been a metric shit-ton of important news happening in the past week or so. You’ve got the Mexican “autodefensas” battling the drug cartels, the Fullerton, California cops who beat and tasered a homeless man to death, Obama’s worthless tap-dancing NSA speech — but probably the biggest story of the week has to be the massive chemical spill in Elk River, West Virginia, which left 300,000 people in nine counties without fresh water.

Of course, you wouldn’t know that from watching the Democratic Party noise machine in action at MSNBC, which has spent almost all of its available air time this week on the trumped-up “Bridgegate” scandal in New Jersey involving Governor Chris Christie, who’s also considered a major hopeful for the 2016 GOP Presidential nomination. Coincidence? Naahhhh.

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News channels? Noise channels, more like.

Cast your memory back, for a moment, to the Bush Years — oh, sure you can, c’mon. Fox News was cheerleading for war and a burgeoning police state, calling dissenters “traitors”, yelling for every dissident’s and whistleblower’s head on a plate, and spewing GOP talking points all over us. MSNBC, in the meantime, was hollering for an end to imperialist wars, the protection of civil liberties, and all that other speaking-truth-to-power horseshit.

Fast-forward to the Obama Years. Fox News is suddenly hollering about dissent and civil liberties and Obama’s adventurism overseas. MSNBC, in the meantime, is cheerleading for war, softpedaling Obama’s use of drones to murder civilians, calling dissenters “traitors”, yelling for every dissident’s and whistleblower’s head on a plate, and spewing Democratic Party talking points all over us.

Anybody detecting a pattern here?

These three sticker designs depict the real reason for being of both of these hypocritical partisan “news” channels. The MSDNC logo may be something new to most of you, but why the Fox News parody logo, you might ask? Granted, everybody and their cat may have figured out that Fox News was a GOP mouthpiece from day one, but I thought it might be a good idea to include it, because Fair And Balanced.

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