UPDATE: Attention: CNN looking for “The Good Side of the Oil Spill”
June 02, 2010 1:59 pm ET by Karl Frisch
CNN sent Media Matters the following statement regarding this post:
Gary Hewing is not a CNN employee - and never has been. He is not working on CNN’s behalf and should not be identified as such.
CNN has taken action in regards to a radio station that brands itself “CNN 650 Houston” however we do not know if Gary Hewing is affiliated with that radio station.
CNN Spokesperson
Original Post
This is not a joke.
Under the headline “When the Search for ‘Balance’ Goes Too Far,” Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen notes:
Gawker ran a copy of an email sent by CNN's Gary Hewing yesterday, looking for ideas about covering the "good side" of the BP oil spill disaster. In fact, the summary line of the CNN message specifically said, "The Good Side of the Oil Spill."
Summary: The Good Side of the Oil Spill
Name: Gary Hewing (CNN)
Category: Biotech and Healthcare
Media Outlet: CNN
Deadline: 04:00 PM EST - 2 June
Query: Looking for pitches: The Good Side of the Oil Spill - if there is any.
So, if you can think of a "good side" to one of the worst environmental disasters on record, make sure you let CNN know.
How about that?
:-)
I agree that it looks that way, afriend, and that a better (scientific) translation would render the final phrase "... and also the bat." I suspect that if Moses actually thought that bats were birds, then bats would just as easily have ended up earlier in the list.
In short, I won't throw the Bible overboard because of English translations that I wish were clearer. My guess is that no one reading the original Hebrew that was led astray by this passage.
Also, regarding shellfish (addressing nerzog)--you're right, but God gave different people different rules at different times (this is summarized in the term "dispensationalism"). No one today is under any compulsion to avoid shellfish; personally, I like few things as much as a platter of fried shrimp.
1) Obama likely couldn't have gotten Congress to agree to giving the federal gov't more time to review environmental impacts of oil drilling - they currently only have 30 days, and so they routinely just approved the plans and didn't do the research since 30 days isn't enough.
2) More people now understand that we might should think about drilling more before we do it, instead of believing that drilling is good.
3) When those on the right say "Drill, Baby, Drill" or claim that drilling is safe, we now have prima facie evidence that it's NOT safe.
4) We now can likely force through rules that demand that redundant safety measures get used, like the $500,000 acoustic remote-control shut-off valve. We can ALSO get them to re-design these things so that if we have a catastrophic collapse of a drilling rig, it doesn't destroy the outlet at the bottom of the ocean.
5) We can now get regulations passed that DEMAND that oil drilling companies STOP and re-evaluate when they find specific red flags.
6) We can accelerate the remediation that was already underway in the Minerals Management Service!
7) We can USE the need for the fixes in the MMS to expose the corruption and lax regulation that the Bush Adminstration left us.
That's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure there are more.
These ARE the good sides of the oil spill.
I mean, health care sounded like a "gimme", didn't it? As did financial reform.
Translation: Instead of being proactive, we find ourselves once again being reactive, but the good news is we now have an awesome opportunity to prove that we can at least be retroactively proactive. [Waves tiny American flag.] Yay. Go us. (And 'A' for effort, Dell.)
Hey there must be some kind of Auschwitz-related anniversary coming up. Where's the feel good angle?