Conan (and Fox) v. the Nurses

Posted by Evan on February 4, 2005 @ 8:16AM

I hope Maria Shriver is a hell of a caretaker because if Arnie gets sick he may have trouble finding a nurse. A short timeline: Arnie campaigns for governor as the half-man/half-machine who won't be beholden to "special interests." When elected he names just which special interests will not be permitted to cramp his style: the nurses. Later, he said they were mad because: "I kick their butt."

Finally, someone who will stand up to those loathsome nurses! Those wretched creatures, whose tyranny of caretaking and lifesaving has seldom made it to the mainstream media, are toast.

After putting a hold on the lowering of patient-to-staff ratios, simultaneously ensuring that Californians would receive less care and that more nurses would be out of work, the nurses decided to strike back.

Robert "Outfoxed" Greenwald produced a 60-second TV ad, gratis, which shows that Arnie is nothing, if not beholden to "special interests." It features a veteran nurse, Melita Dionosio-Temple, warning: "The one thing the public should know, is that one day you will be in that bed and realize that because of the number of patients one nurse has to take care of, you may be calling, and there's nobody there."

And speaking of special interests, here's the opening paragraph from the San Jose Mercury on the subject:

"Fueled by six- and seven-figure special-interest donations, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger raised a record-breaking $26 million last year to fund his political campaigns, according to campaign-finance reports released Monday..."

And who should be one of his larger donors? Fox. To the tune of $450,000. That's right, forget about the tedious work of paying columnists one by one, just form solid working relationships with entire media corporations. That's ingenuity. Resourcefulness. Maybe when Fox was told that the role of journalists was to be the government's watchdog, they heard "lapdog." Innocent mistake.

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