Year: 2008
I absolutely love this clip:
Here’s a transcript of the last bit of the clip:
Colbert: When you see or hear things that are bad are going on in your church, you get up and you walk out! That’s what Catholics like me, and Papa Bear [his nickname for Bill O’Reilly] and Sean Hannity understand. You leave that church!
Unless it’s, you know, widespread decades-long rumours of sexual abuse. In that case, you gotta give it time. The church has its own processes; we don’t understand it!
The point is, all any Catholic pundits and Catholic politicans who may be criticizing Obama are saying is: “Do as we say, not as we didn’t”.
Categories
If We Hired Like We Vote
Update, May 13, 2008: The original video got yanked, but I’ve posted another copy in its place.
Here’s a great video that’s making the internet rounds: right-wing attack dog Bill O’Reilly, losing his cool and turning into an eight-year-old upon encountering the phrase “play us out”, a term that anyone who’s been in a TV studio at least a couple of times has encountered. Be warned, he bursts into a potty-mouthed temper tantrum and lets fly with the f-word:
This is from his days on the television news tabloid program Inside Edition, which he hosted from 1989 to 1995. I remember thinking that Inside Edition was about as trashy as television got, but that was well before The O’Reilly Factor.
Photo by Pete Forde
Dutch blogger George Maschke reminds us that although our gas prices may seem high here in North America (it’s about CDN$1.23 / litre in Accordion City) — high enough that Republican presidential candidate John McCain has suggested a gas tax holiday — they’d be considered a king-sized bargain in the Netherlands. He took this photo of the price sign at his neighbourhood gas station in The Hague on Saturday, May 10th; note that they’re in Euro per litre:
Photo by George Maschke.
George did a little math and converted the Dutch prices so that they’d be expressed in U.S. dollars per gallon; I simply did the Euro-to-Canadian dollar conversions to get the prices in terms of Canadian dollars per litre. The results of our calculations appear in the table below:
| Gasoline grade | Dutch price | Dutch price in Canadian dollars per litre | Dutch price in American dollars per gallon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regular | €1.559 / litre | CDN$2.43 / litre | US$9.14 / gallon |
| Premium | €1.673 / litre | CDN$2.60 / litre | US$9.81 / gallon |
| Diesel | €1.359 / litre | CDN$2.11 / litre | US$7.96 / gallon |
No wonder there’s such a strong bicycle culture in the Netherlands! (Yes, their urban geography helps too.)
Keep these Dutch prices in mind should the predictions of gas hitting CDN$1.50 per litre this summer come true.
The Director of Communications corrects me, and I apologize: the TTC used their safety poster design (shown below with NYC’s MTA safety poster) with the MTA’s permission.
The question remains: did they have to mimic it so closely? You might as well put up a sign that says: “Toronto: We’re too dumb to come up with our own identity, so we’ll settle for being the dollar store version of New York City.”