"What is white culture?" is the ultimate softball question---that is, if you are not a white supremacist.

In grade school, most of the history, social studies, and humanities courses I took dealt with this question. Any american elementary school graduate is qualified to answer this question. Yet a grown man, who purports to be a big time social critic can't.

"What's that behind your back?" is a hard question if your intent is loutish.

^Oh, I don't know . . . isn't Katie Couric a journalist? And didn't she win a Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism for an interview she did with Sarah Palin?

She's called a journalist, and this is called journalism, but I'm reminded that on my bookshelf is a rock that looks like a potato.

It's not a softball question. It's the question.

Noone said it's journalism. It's an interview that Beck agreed to, for his own publicity. And he can't even answer a softball question. Perhaps he has never taken a humanities course, visited an art museum, or tuned into a classical music radio station.

I agree with you that this fool should not be given the time of day, much less revered by the toothless set.

It's seriously like Dinesh is lobbing softballs on a lot of his responses; sadly, I've seen dozens of these debates, the only ones that I felt were even were with his brother, and another with Galloway (which was brutal and loud, and occasionally too politically obscure to be interesting).

lies? They had 2 people on either side of the issue, and he didn't let either one take any softballs.

"So, let me get this straight.. You wake up, you're tired because you're halfway through your sleep cycle, so instead of a melee weapon where you can see what you'll be swinging at, you instead grab a gun? Yeah, have fun shooting a loved one."

No, you identify the person first in either case. It's easier to shoot someone while tired than it is to get involved in a melee. You're more likely to win in other words. You can id someone within seconds of waking up, but only sleep will give you the alertness needed to fight a brawl.

"It doesn't matter if they bring a friend, the first thing you SHOULD be doing when you hear people in your house is calling the cops (hey look, that statement wasn't actually irrelevant after all!)."

Yes, that is the first thing you do if you aren't armed. If you are armed, you arm yourself, then you call the cops and hide.

The reason it wasn't relevant is because the police will take enough time to arrive that you may very well be dead by the time they get there.

"The only time you should be engaging them anyway is if they come after you."

Yes. And if they come after you, they are most likely to win, provided you don't have a gun. If you do, the odds are about 50/50 or better in your favor.

"And saner people realise that they'll be breaking into the house and getting the jump on you, hmm? So..What the fuck good does it do you then? Neither the bat OR the gun is any use because you're now either dead, or locked in a closet. Oh, and if they continue to search after that's happened, they get to steal your gun. yay."

Except as a matter of fact, break-ins do occur when the owner has a firearm, and when the owner is not expecting it, and even though the break in itself was a surprise, it's almost always the firearm toting homeowner that wins. Your hypothetical scenario logically supports your conclusion, but it is not representative of reality.

"Strength in combat is usually not a deciding factor, if you're not as strong as some, pick a lighter bat. You don't need to be sleeping beside a 32 oz. home run machine, a 24-26 ounce metal softball bat is less then 2 pounds and longer then a knife."

No seriously, how much experience do you have fighting with a baseball bat vs someone with a knife?

I contend that
A) A knife, even a short one is much more dangerous than a baseball bat (getting hit with a bat is painful and can break bones, but being stabbed is much worse).
B) Even a short knife has a longer reach than a baseball bat (because of the thrusting motion with arm vs swing motion).

The above isn't to invite discussion on what people should arm themselves with, it's to demonstrate that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

"He brings friends, you're probably SOL in the first place, but seriously.. "

If he brings friends you can easily bring them down if you're armed with a gun and they aren't, they will be the people who are SOL. If they are armed with guns (which is very rare), then you are much better off armed yourself.

"do you think that no burglars can be stopped without a gun? I'm genuinely curious now, because if the answer is yes, then what do you think they do in..say..Canada?"

I do think burglars can be stopped without a gun. It's just that keeping guns legal helps you a lot more than it helps them. As for Canada, I believe guns are legal there. As for what they do in any given place where it is not legal to own a firearm, for the most part they deal with whatever the perps want to do with them and then file a police report after the fact. Sometimes letting the police deal with it is the correct state of affairs (robbery), and sometimes barring citizens to the means of self defense is a terribly unjust state of affairs (rape, murder).

"a decent mugger/rapist/murder/gang, which again will have the advantage of surprise."
..so, how exactly do you draw and fire a gun if you've been taken by surprise? a "decent" any one of those would have a weapon pointed at you, and have your arms either up, or somewhere away from where a concealed weapon could be. And you call my logic flawed.

Your logic is perfect. If it were true that muggings worked like that, then a concealed weapon would do you no good.

Your facts however, are wrong.

Like your previous example, you constructed a hypothetical scenario, then force it to work out like you want it to, rather than looking at what actually happens in reality.

This is the typical (real) case: someone carrying a (concealed) firearm is mugged or otherwise held up while doing something else (so as a matter of course, they were taken by surprise). The usual result of this scenario is the perpetrator running away, rarely being shot, rarer still winning a confrontation. On the other hand, if you are not armed and the perpetrator wants more than your money, then all you can do is file a police report afterward, assuming he has no interest in killing you.

P.S. My last post wasn't meant to be laughed at. Neither is this one.

@Lowen: Long comment trying to be funny is long...and really not funny.

So, let me get this straight.. You wake up, you're tired because you're halfway through your sleep cycle, so instead of a melee weapon where you can see what you'll be swinging at, you instead grab a gun? Yeah, have fun shooting a loved one.

It doesn't matter if they bring a friend, the first thing you SHOULD be doing when you hear people in your house is calling the cops (hey look, that statement wasn't actually irrelevant after all!). The only time you should be engaging them anyway is if they come after you.

And saner people realise that they'll be breaking into the house and getting the jump on you, hmm? So..What the fuck good does it do you then? Neither the bat OR the gun is any use because you're now either dead, or locked in a closet. Oh, and if they continue to search after that's happened, they get to steal your gun. yay.

Strength in combat is usually not a deciding factor, if you're not as strong as some, pick a lighter bat. You don't need to be sleeping beside a 32 oz. home run machine, a 24-26 ounce metal softball bat is less then 2 pounds and longer then a knife.

He brings friends, you're probably SOL in the first place, but seriously.. do you think that no burglars can be stopped without a gun? I'm genuinely curious now, because if the answer is yes, then what do you think they do in..say..Canada?

"a decent mugger/rapist/murder/gang, which again will have the advantage of surprise."

..so, how exactly do you draw and fire a gun if you've been taken by surprise? a "decent" any one of those would have a weapon pointed at you, and have your arms either up, or somewhere away from where a concealed weapon could be. And you call my logic flawed.

That's an awfully softball question from a skeptic.

Just sayin'.

Pretty softball for a roast, but still pretty funny. Set Colbert loose on him next year and hopefully he'll chew the guy up like he did with Bush a few years back.

hehehe, i admit i haven't followed this 'controversy' very much...

but when i saw the tags and descriptions, i just had to see if my immediate suspicion was true

it was... brook lee (miss hawaii > miss usa > miss universe) appears in the psa

the background of that suspicion is that i went to school with brook and once caught her making out... with the butch catcher for the girls' softball team

yeah, big deal - so what... but my inkling that she'd be in this video spot was, well, spot on

While Tucker Carleson was thrown softball after softball questions he still reverted to referring to a country of over 30 million people within degrading and generalizational terms. He has such a condescending and ignorant attitude. I find it strange that he's been able to be given the amount of exposure he has.

I'd guess that he'll probably wind up in a very low security white collar prison. My brother in law got five years for transporting drugs over the border from Canada. His prison didn't even have a fence. It had a white line painted around the perimiter that nobody was allowed to cross.

Bernie will spend the rest of his life playing softball and covorting with other white-collar criminals, coming up with better ways to increase their gaurd's stock profiles and smuggle in sashimi.

I could be wrong ...

I wonder what the hell is going through these people's minds sometimes.

Seriously, what the Daily show has been attacking as of late is softball journalism. The comedians, by making social commentary and making good points along the way, have in essence become the watchdog for the media since the media has failed so miserably in the past few years.

Just to fact check Rove, since he lies like a dog, Bush increased the debt by $5 trillion, not $2.9 trillion.

Also, the claims that the Republican plan created more jobs using Christina Romer's own model is also false, and even her own staff have directly responded to this claim, indicating that it is inaccurate.

Otherwise, it's just kind've shocking to see the This Week panel turned into such chaos, it's normally one of my favorite panels since they often find smart people to represent different ideological views who aren't overly argumentative.

It was entertaining though, and amusing to see Rove be a jackass. Normally he has Chris Wallace in his lap whispering softball questions in his ear these days.

A 'bravery' tag? Are you kidding me? Did I miss the sift where Tony Benn fought through arm guards into the studio and demanded to be interviewed on live TV? There was me thinking that they just phoned him up and asked him to come on national TV for a softball interview knowing full well what his views are and that he had already done exactly the same thing earlier.

I guess I also missed the bit where the BBC is somehow trying to suppress the details of this charity rather than just wanting to distance themselves editorially from it. Having this story on the front page of their news site for 2 days must have confused me.

And bonus points for the Global Zionist Conspiracy popup text. Nice.