Megyn Kelly Crosses the Line - Again

Josh Orton has an article on The Huffington Post today dealing with the ongoing effort by rational, intelligent people to finally expose the Fox News Network as the horribly biased mouthpiece for right-wing extremism that it has become. It focuses on an "interview" - if you could call it that - conducted by the poster child for conservative intolerance, Megyn Kelly with Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

I'm still at a loss as to what Kelly's job is with the network. I was under the impression she wants to be considered a journalist, but that would require an unbiased approach to the major issues of the day in an attempt to get to the truth. Kelly has no desire to find truth other than her own warped take on it. And her interview with Burton demonstrates that she is more interested in becoming the female Bill O'Reilly. It is so obvious that her purpose here is to blindly support the bias put forth by Fox and her "style" is to talk louder than the guest. Like most of the pompous morons given airtime on Fox (Sean Hannity foremost among them), her technique is to not let the subject of the interview get a word in edgewise. She is quick to jump all over Burton if he tries to respond to her next falsehood, but let him try to make a point and she interrupts him repeatedly in her screechy, horribly bitchy tone that tends to make one's ears bleed.

I'm still convinced this woman's career is based upon the sexual favors she must provide the degenerates who run Fox, because there is absolutely no reason for her annoying, ignorant opinions to be expressed in any public forum.

Here's the video of this one-sided interview in which she desperately tries to defend her employer, and fails miserably.

Desperate Marketing Morons - Sears Edition

As much as I hate to admit it, I was poking around Yahoo Answers today. They run a whole bunch of advertisements on the site that most people totally ignore. In fact, I'm sure if you asked 100 people - 99 of them wouldn't even know there are ads there - much less what any of them might say.

Well I happened to notice one that is just about the lamest, desperate attempt at marketing that I have ever seen. It's for Craftsman Tools, which is the in-house brand for Sears.

It starts with some animation in which people's faces appear. One guy has something odd on his nose and another is of a woman with a couple of red devil horns. It ends up with the ad on the right called "Share a Scare." It offers you the opportunity to "customize your very own Craftsman Halloween character to email friends and family." HUH?

Let's go back to the advertising boardroom at Sears for a moment. Someone has an idea. We'll let people upload a picture of someone's face and put in onto a body made up of Craftsman tools. We'll make it really, really spooky and then let them email the finished creature to everyone in the world! Of course this will make them want to run out immediately and buy a whole bunch of Craftsman tools.

Someone actually approved this idea and then authorized spending a lot of money to make it happen. Of course it self destructs on October 31st, but more importantly, how in the world is this going to help sell tools? Are the kids who might (highly unlikely) find this appealing in their demographic of quality tool buyers and users?

Good grief! This is not only a lame idea in and of itself, but it is so off the mark that it should have been laughed out of existence instead of actually seeing the light of day. I can only assume the marketers at Sears and the Craftsman division are so desperate that they are willing to try anything.

I'd be real interested to see how many people actually went to the site and spent the time to construct a "Craftsman character" to email to family and friends. If there are more than 10 I'd be very surprised. So sad. Just so you know, this is the what the really cool finished product looks like. It even speaks and says, "There's a little Craftsman in all of us." Impressed?

Marketers Are Morons - Cox Communications Edition

TV advertising just keeps getting worse and worse. My current nominee for populating their marketing department with total morons is Cox Communications.

Like every other cable company, they are pushing their bundle of services. In the commercial that is currently running there is some lug who tells us it's his anniversary and he bought his wife new phone service. OK, this is totally lame and the people at Cox know it. So he addresses the stupidity of doing such a thing and says he knows it's outlandish and makes him look like a cold-hearted bastard.

Now if they had stayed here and played this with a tongue-in-cheek irony, it might have been OK. Play up the fact that they are fully aware they are suggesting something that no one in their right mind would really do. But they don't. He completely defends his "gift" because it makes so much sense. At this point the commercial becomes totally sexist and sets back the women's movement 40 years.

First of all, he says he "pays all the bills" so he knows how much they are saving. Obviously his moronic wife - who does nothing in the commercial but talk on the phone - isn't capable of handling any of the family's finances. When they finally do allow her to speak, she excitedly tells us that she has been spending her day calling all her friends to let them know about her wonderful anniversary gift.

What a horrible cliche is being perpetrated here. The husband handles the finances and makes all the important decisions; the woman fritters away her time talking on the phone.

This just completely sucks and the people at Cox Communications should be ashamed of themselves. Any woman who watches this commercial should immediately cancel any services she buys from Cox - or as Cox would portray it, have her husband cancel them because she's probably not capable of doing it herself.

Clueless.

Sharapova - 20 Bucks for Charity

I happen to like Maria Sharapova. She's not only gorgeous, she's tall, talented and an incredible athlete. Plus you never hear about her doing stupid stuff and making an idiot of herself like so many sports stars and celebrities do. Maybe that's faint praise, but today it's a pretty good measure of the quality of famous people.

Sharapova was in the news today because she auctioned off a "date" with herself to benefit charity. Cool, huh? A date with this incredible sports babe! Some guy (not her boyfriend, by the way) won it for $10,000. Wow - 10,000 bucks for a date with Maria. Probably going to be worth every penny. Seems low actually. Don't we all wish we had that kind of money?

Then I did a little math. As good-intentioned as this is, it is also rather sad that people with this kind of money are so greedy. Sharapova earns about $26 million a year from tennis and all her many product endorsements. She is the highest paid female athlete in the world. The $10,000 that she raised is equivalent to $19.23 for someone who earns a more typical $50,000 a year. Like I said, good intentions aside, this is rather pathetic.

Now maybe Sharapova makes all sorts of donations to worthwhile causes that we simply don't know about. I hope so. But the publicity that this stunt has been receiving has some huge negative, unintentional consequences. Especially when you consider that she didn't actually donate the money - or match it. All she's doing is spending an hour or two with some rich guy having a talk and a meal.

This has made me miss the generosity and humanity of Paul Newman ever more.

Jay Busbee has written a short article for Yahoo Sports about this. Read it here.